Here’s how today feels to me:
Godspeed, Mr. President.
Preserve, protect and defend….
Nevermore
Edgar Allan Poe was born two hundred years ago today. I’ve always loved Poe, and he wrote my favorite poem of all time, “Annabel Lee”:
Way back when this blog was young, I wrote about “Annabel Lee”.
And here’s a reading of “The Raven”, by Christopher Walken:
Tonight I shall sip some cognac in honor of Edgar Allan Poe.
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Watching 24: 9 am to 10 am
I watched the first two episodes back-to-back, hence the nearly identical nature of these shots. I have a few more of these for this week, and then this will become a weekly feature, whenever I get around to watching each week’s installment of The Jack Bauer Power Hour.
Anyway, here I’m thinking, “Oh no, Tony! Please don’t crash the planes! Think of the children!!!”
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Sentential Links #155 (the Final Bush edition)
Here we are with the final Sentential Links to appear in this space during the George W. Bush administration. Thank God. Yes, these will be political. Sorry.
Ach…that’s about it for that, actually. I really don’t want to give this President any more space here than I already have. He doesn’t deserve it. George W. Bush is, by any conceivable measure and by far, the worst President of my lifetime, and I was born during Nixon’s first term. Ugh. Go away, George.
(And God help me if we ever elect Jeb.)
Anyway, some non-Bush-related links, just to clear the air here of Bushism:
:: Khan was as mysterious as he was popular, though, and we found 16 things that even Star Trek fans might not know about the lovable superhuman tyrant. (I’ve pointed this out before, but I’ve always felt that Wrath of Khan wasted an absolutely fascinating character on a simple revenge story. The results of Kirk’s depositing of Khan and company on Ceti Alpha V should have been left for the Next Generation crew to discover.)
:: Can’t forget good old Goom. (Goom? Yes, Goom. Believe it or not.)
:: I feel fun in my overalls, I feel relaxed in my overalls, I feel happy in my overalls. I dress to please myself and I love my overalls! (There you have it!)
More next week. Yes we can!
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The Trouble with Izzey
Anybody watch Grey’s Anatomy?
Anyway: I suspect that Izzey’s romance with Denny’s ghost is actually due to a tumor or some other kind of brain ailment in Izzey’s head. This will culminate in the season’s final episodes; Dr. Shepard (McDreamy) will have to operate on her to save her life. There will be a final scene, then, before the surgery, when Izzey will say her final goodbye to Denny. That’s what I think happens here.
(Although one possible hole in my theory is that the last episode specifically showed Denny sitting beside Alex, with Izzey out of the room. Now, Alex didn’t see Denny, but if Denny’s “existence” is dependent on Izzey’s brain ailment, how could he be sitting there addressing Alex?)
OK, I’m done. Carry on.
(Actually, I’m not done. I think Sara Ramirez, who plays Dr. Callie Torres, is really a very pretty woman, and I think that Chandra Wilson, who plays Dr. Miranda Bailey, consistently turns in the show’s best performances.)
OK, now I’m done.
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Watching 24: 8 am to 9 am
I’m actually watching 24 this season, after I missed the last three seasons. The reasons I missed those seasons are mainly logistical: the timeslot is tough, since that’s when The Daughter’s bed time is. And yes, I could tape it and watch it later, but it’s hard in this household to find time to watch taped shows (especially ones like 24, which aren’t terribly appropriate for children), and FOX has been launching each season with four episodes run over two nights, which puts me in a big hole anyway. I tried following Season Four this way, but I quickly fell behind and dropped out.
Now, though, I can follow along by getting the episodes online and watching them on my laptop, with the earphones on, so it’s back to following the adventures of Jack Bauer! Hooray! And now, I’ll depict my progress throughout this season by posting a snapshot of me reacting to each episode’s events. This is me reacting to the big reveal in the first hour of this season: Tony Almeida’s alive and he’s a terrorist now?!
Stay tuned!
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
This week’s oddities:
:: This has already been all over the place, but it’s completely hilarious: the story of the original Star Wars trilogy told by someone who hasn’t really seen it. The animation is great.
:: Related to the above item: in the MeFi thread where they linked it over there, somebody accuses Star Wars of having an incoherent plot, and then says this:
Give me Star Trek, a science fiction show containing science.
Wait, what?!
(And geez, can’t Fixing the Prequels ever get a little love from Geek Blogistan? Ye Gods!)
:: Letterman’s Great Moments in Presidential Speeches, the final edition.
:: For some reason, this morning I suddenly remembered that when we lived in Portland years ago, a constant source of amusement was the TV advertising for Ranier Beer. Well, wouldn’t you know it: there’s a YouTube channel with nothing but old spots for Ranier Beer. Check ’em out: Beer Crossing, Raniers in the Fog, and of course, a 1978 spot clearly based on the Star Wars cantina scene, featuring Buster Crabbe as “Fresh Gordon”!
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Once
and point it home.
We’ve still got time….”
-“Falling Slowly”, song from Once
A vacuum-cleaner repairman in Dublin works on the side as a street musician, playing his guitar and singing his songs on the streetcorners for whatever change he can get from passers-by. Occasionally he does well, other times he does less well. He has to contend with the occasional thief who tries to run off with his guitar case and the money inside it, and he has to refrain from singing his own songs for night-time when foot traffic is lower, since most people are more rewarding of a musician playing songs they know, this even though his performances of his own songs are searingly emotional. There’s something eating away at this guy, though; we can see it, although we don’t know what. He looks young but weary, idealistic and cynical at the same time; his guitar is so old that it has a second hole worn through its face and the strings are not neatly trimmed but have lengths that dangle off the ends of the frets. He wears a black overcoat and a scarf tied around his neck, even oftentimes when he is inside.
Along comes a young Czech woman who also works the streets of Dublin, selling her own wares: magazines, individual flowers. She hears one of his songs at night, and compliments him; he is trying to end the conversation when he lets slip that he’s a vacuum cleaner repairman, and her face lights up because she has a broken vacuum cleaner! She vows to bring her broken cleaner to him tomorrow, and she does. They then begin a brief friendship that deepens quickly into love as they walk the streets together, him carrying his guitar and her pulling the vacuum behind her like a dog. She seems more open, more willing to smile, more idealistic than cynical, but it soon becomes clear that she is masking her own series of hurts as well; there’s a sadness in her eye that she hides except for when she thinks no one is looking, she has a two year old daughter with no father in sight, she buys her clothes at a cheap mens’ store, and she too spends much time wearing a heavy overcoat with a scarf round her neck.
It turns out that she is a piano player too, although she keeps that part of her life carefully secret, only playing an hour a day in the studio of a music shop while the owner closes for lunch. She offers to play for him there, and he goes to hear; after she plays him some Mendelssohn, she asks him to play, and he does, to her accompaniment, teaching her one of his songs. He seems slightly skeptical of this whole thing, until she begins to sing along with the lyrics he’s placed in front of her, harmonizing his own vocals. He smiles in pleasant surprise; he’s made a connection with this woman, a musical connection, the kind that comes when we discover entirely by accident that someone we’ve just met is, on at least one level, completely in tune with ourselves.
Is that when they fall in love? I’m not sure. But it starts there, with that smile of surprise and delight. It happens early in the movie Once, about twelve minutes in, and the rest of the film follows the guitarist and the pianist through the next few days as they get to know each other and to love each other and to make music together. (The scene is helped by the fact that the song, “Falling Slowly”, is a wonderful song that would eventually win an Oscar for Best Original Song.)
The feel of Once is very similar to Before Sunrise, another great romance film about two people in similar circumstances who find each other and get to know each other over a fairly short period of time. Here it’s a few days, but it’s still fairly brief. There is a girl in his past, and a husband in hers; both lean on the other in efforts to deal with their respective pain and find their ways to their respective next steps. Those steps make sense, in the end, and if I found myself hoping for a different outcome, the one the film depicts is still moving and satisfying and right.
A movie like this can’t possibly succeed unless its performances are good, and there’s not a false note of performance in the entire movie, from the leads (who are never named; the credits list them as “Guy” and “Girl”) all the way to the jaded soundbooth operator who first thinks he’s recording a bunch of yahoos but soon realizes different once he’s heard the songs. The leads are played by Glen Hansard and Markita Irglova, who have paired as a singer-songwriting duo, penning some of the songs used in the film. And the film’s songs, by the way, are really very good, with one, “Falling Slowly”, being a truly excellent song indeed, the best movie song I’ve heard in years. This song won the Oscar last year for original song, and this was richly deserved. (And I cited it as my song of 2008.)
Once is a beautiful, beautiful movie. This is what movies are for.
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Twenty-five Cents (part one)
Here’s a lark that seems to me to be exactly why blogs were invented: I’m going to opine on all fifty of the Statehood Quarters! Now that all fifty are in circulation (or at least have had their designs released), it’s time to either praise them or rip them to shreds. The disclaimer here is that when I make fun of a quarter that I think stinks, I’m attacking the quarter. Not the state. The quarter. Just because I may think your state’s quarter is poorly designed doesn’t mean I don’t like your state, or you. (Of course, the reverse also applies, but let’s not discuss that.)
We’ll do this over a series of posts, to keep the length down. I’m indebted to the US Mint website for the images of the quarters themselves, as well as occasional bits of background info on the designs themselves. Each quarter will be ranked, logically enough since we’re dealing with quarters, on a scale of one to twenty-five cents. Let’s begin, shall we? Starting in the northeast, with New England and the Middle Atlantic states!
OK, right off the bat, we hit one of my favorite designs. I prefer the quarters that take the limited amount of space they had to work with (less than an inch in diameter) and depict an actual scene. They’ve got a masted yacht sailing out there in the Atlantic, past a lighthouse. They could have gone lazy here and just had the lighthouse, or the yacht, but what makes the quarter for me isn’t just that they got both, but they got the rocky slope from which the lighthouse rises, finely textured, right down to the large fallen rocks sitting partially submerged at the edge of the sea. I also like the sea birds in flight, the pine tree off to the side of the lighthouse lot, and the picket fence surrounding the lighthouse property. The quarter doesn’t just convey that Maine’s got lots of seashore, but the character of that seashore. This one’s well done. Bonus points for avoiding words entirely.
Maine’s quarter: $0.23
This probably seemed a better idea in a larger picture than as an actual quarter; in the actual size and in actual cold metal, the picture of the Old Man of the Mountain doesn’t come off all that well. Plus, I always found that selection of image odd, anyway: the Old Man of the Mountain didn’t really convey anything about New Hampshire, really, other than the fact that it used to have a rock feature that by pure accident of erosion looked like the profile of a geezer. It also doesn’t have much to do with the inclusion of the state’s motto, “Live Free or Die”. (And I can’t hear that motto anywhere without thinking of George Carlin, who noted, “I don’t want to live anyplace where they mention death right on their license plates.”) And it’s not New Hampshire’s fault at all, but it doesn’t really help that the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed not long after their quarter went into circulation in the first place. So I don’t like this one all that much.
New Hampshire’s quarter: $0.14
Here we have a good example of a state designing its quarter to reflect what that state’s generally known for these days: Vermont’s got a guy tapping maple trees for sap. Nothing wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned; I’m a big maple fan. I like this quarter quite a bit, actually. It’s a little quirky, kind of like Vermont itself; this quarter doesn’t take itself terribly seriously and it lays its claim to Vermont’s justifiable pride in its maple industry. I do think that the mountain in the background muddies the design a bit, drawing the eye away from the symmetrical central scene, and I don’t know why the motto “Freedom and Unity” needed to be there at all.
Vermont’s quarter: $0.20
Here’s the first of our series that doesn’t do much for me at all. It just reeks of design-by-committee, as many of the statehood quarters do. They really would have been much better served in coming up with something more evocative of the Revolutionary War theme than just having a generic Colonial soldier standing in front of a generic outline of Massachusetts itself. And the words “The Bay State” add nothing. You can hear the design committee saying, in effect, “OK, we’re the Bay State and we had the Revolution. We gotta get both of those on there.” Meh.
Massachusetts’s quarter: $0.12
This quarter works pretty well. It doesn’t excite me all that much, but it does tie the motto in with the illustration, which Massachusetts didn’t even try to do. The Ocean State shows us the ocean! And apparently Rhode Island has a really big suspension bridge somewhere. The water’s nice and choppy, but they could have thrown in some birds or something else. Anyway, this is OK.
Rhode Island’s quarter: $0.18
Maybe I should have started this series on the West and moved my way eastward, which would have put the Connecticut quarter in the final post of this series instead of the first one. I say this because Connecticut’s quarter is my favorite of the entire series. I just love this quarter, and I remember when I first saw it when it was issued, I thought something along the lines of “Wow, forty-some states are going to have a hard time topping this.” And, in my opinion, none did. Connecticut doesn’t include a state motto or anything like that; instead, they give a wonderfully rendered picture of a venerable oak tree, a picture whose circular nature beautifully fills up much of the quarter, along with the grassy field that tree stands in and the stone fence beyond it. They nicely identify this specific tree as “The Charter Oak”. And as an added bonus, I’ll bet very few people who don’t live in Connecticut know what the Charter Oak was, so this quarter invites further exploration of the state’s history. Great quarter.
Connecticut’s quarter: $0.25
Again with design-by-committee; you just know that somebody was in that room insisting that no possible New York State quarter could exist without depicting the Statue of Liberty, so there she is. Maybe there’s a point there, but leaving Lady Liberty off the quarter and just having that picture of New York State with the motto “Gateway to Freedom” would have worked nicely. I’m not, as we’ll see thoughout this exercise, a big fan of pictures of states and their outlines, but this one’s interesting on two levels: first, when you contrast this with, say, Massachusetts above, you see that New York doesn’t just show the state outline, but rather a topographical relief map of the state, which I find a fascinating choice. Second, the map ties in with the “Gateway to Freedom” motto by showing the line of the Erie Canal. Plus, this is my home state’s quarter, so I’m a bit biased on that regard as well.
New York’s quarter: $0.20
More design-by-committee afflicts this one, and it’s one of my least favorites. At least Massachusetts gave its state outline some texture; Pennsylvania just gives the outline with no features within. Boring. They stick a little keystone in there (because it’s the Keystone State), they have a statue from Philadelphia, and the motto “Virtue Liberty Independence”. It’s a design that accomplishes the fascinating feat of being (a) too busy, and (b) too lax with the space they had to work with. I really don’t like this one much at all.
Pennsylvania’s quarter: $0.08
There’s really something romantic about the notion of a crossroads, isn’t there? Several states use their quarters to pronounce themselves the “Crossroads” of something or other. New Jersey declares itself the “Crossroads of the Revolution”, whatever that means…did General Washington get there with his army and then look at the signpost and say, “OK, fellas, do we turn left and take New York, or do we swing right and head down toward Delaware? Guys? Guys! Hey, it’s not my fault the winter sucked!” But joking aside, the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware is, of course, one of the iconic images of American history, and double kudos to New Jersey for going with that image and not fouling it up with a state outline of Jersey itself. They could have ditched the motto here, but that’s a small quibble. This is an excellent quarter.
New Jersey’s quarter: $0.23
Don’t you forget it, folks: Delaware’s the First State. Until someone else came along, the United States was really the United State, and that state was Delaware. Since the quarters were issued in the order of the states’ admission to the Union, this was the first quarter to come out. I first saw it when I was doing a nightly cash count at the restaurant I was managing at the time, and since I’d heard nothing of the Statehood Quarters initiative, I didn’t even know if the coin was real or not! (This was when the Internet was not yet the repository of rock-solid, reliable information that it is now, and when 56K modems were exotic things that only rich folks had.) So I set the quarter aside and didn’t include it in our nightly deposit. Funny, that. But the quarter itself? It’s got some nice design there, I think; it conveys action by having its American Revolution figure riding (as opposed to just standing there waiting for the Redcoats to shoot him, like the guy on the Massachusetts quarter). I’m not thrilled about “The First State” being on there; doesn’t this make Delaware the “First Poster” of the statehood quarter initiative? And who is Caesar Rodney, anyway? Well, he was a delegate from Dover who rode all the way to Philadelphia to cast the deciding vote for Independence. Another quarter inspires further research!
Delaware’s quarter: $0.21
Meh. Maryland’s the Old Line State, and they’ve got an old building somewhere with a nifty looking dome. And they grow some kind of plant there, so that plant’s on the quarter, curling up the sides. Not much to say here; this is a really boring quarter. Surely the state of Chesapeake Bay and of Edgar Allan Poe could have come up with something more interesting than this. How about a crab fisherman? Or just a raven with the word “Nevermore”? That would have been cool. An old building, a motto, and a plant? Not so much.
Maryland’s quarter: $0.09
(Here I’ll note that I think that Washington, DC should be a state.)
That’s where I’ll stop now. Next time we’ll continue moving southward, toward the Gulf of Mexico.
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Huh?!
Wow, tonight’s episode of My Name Is Earl has a strange opening, doesn’t it? Instead of opening with Earl in the hotel room or in Crabman’s bar, we’ve got…some guy, sitting in an office, talking right into the camera. Who is this guy? Is he a new regular or something? Maybe they’re setting up a spin-off of the show, where this guy will go off after his job ends and try to make things up to everybody on his Karma list. I can see it now:
VOICEOVER: Boy, Karma keeps kickin’ me in the pants. I’d thought I’d done pretty well at that last job I had, but to judge by the people who keep comin’ up to me on the street and hockin’ loogies on my shoes, I guess not. So after I ran into the hundredth woman who’d seen her son go off to war in some really hot and dusty country, or after I saw the fiftieth guy who’d lost his house when a really big storm hit that city down there where they make all that gumbo, I figured I had to do something to get back on Karma’s good side. So I made myself a list, just like that guy Earl, of everything wrong I’d ever done. His list is a lot shorter than mine, though, but you can’t cheat Karma! So I’m gonna start with Number #42 on my list: “Started a war on false pretenses against a non-threat of a country.” My name is George!
I’ll bet they could get a really long-lived series out of that premise….
(Apologies for the crappy photo editing!)
