Month: March 2009

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More answers!

Continuing to work through the queries that came in for Ask Me Anything! 2009, I figure I should handle this, from Roger:

What would fix the Buffalo Bills?

(Warning: boring football post ahead.)

OK. How to fix the Bills? Well, they have GOT to do something about their receiving corps! How many years of lackluster talent at receiver do we need to watch? How many years of Lee Evans and nobody else? WHAT does it TAKE to get an actual GOOD RECEIVER in Buffalo! Yeah, never mind that. Sorry. More on TO in a moment.

But in general, the “fix” here is simple, really, but like all simple answers, it’s apparently very hard to do, because only a handful of teams have actually managed to do it lately. (Those teams are Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New England, and the Giants.) The answer is to put in place a good football operation. What this means is (a) instituting a policy of primarily building through the draft, and (b) identifying good talent to be taken in the draft. The Bills, to their credit, over the last couple of years have done (a). They’ve been rather less successful at (b). The Bills don’t do what the Redskins do — toss money at every conceivable free agent who comes along because they’re new and shiny and boy does Daniel Snyder like the shiny — but while they focus heavily on the draft, they’re not particularly good at identifying the talent they should be picking, and in addition to picking questionable talent, they also make picks that are contrary to what they probably should be picking, and to add insult to injury, they often make bizarre decisions about the very process of picking the wrong talent in the first place.

A good example came in Marv Levy’s first draft as GM, back in 2006. The Bills had the eighth pick overall, and somehow, the draft’s biggest name, quarterback Matt Leinart, was still on the board. The Bills didn’t want Leinart, thinking at the time that they still had a good prospect in JP Losman, so they picked safety Donte Whitner instead. However, everybody under the sun knew that Whitner had originally been unlikely to be picked anywhere before the middle of the first round, so if the Bills really wanted him, they could have very likely traded down in that round with some team that wanted a shot at Leinart, grabbed an extra pick in the process, and almost certainly still have been able to get Whitner. Instead of doing that, they took Whitner at number eight, and then, instead of reaping the benefit of an extra pick to grab a couple of quality guys in the second round, they traded up to get back into the first round and grab a defensive lineman, John McCargo, who wasn’t on anybody’s list of top lineman prospects and who as yet has not come close to living up to his potential. In fact, the Bills tried trading McCargo away last year, only to have the trade nullified when McCargo failed a physical with his almost-new team.

That kind of thing happens to the Bills all the time. They are never able to identify guys who will develop into top-flight NFL playmakers, so the team is basically in a position where they’re not without talent — if they were, they wouldn’t be 7-9 every year — but where they’re not able to really produce, either. The Bills are exclusively comprised of decent guys who work hard, but nobody who can really step it up and make some really impressive things happen on the field. Now, there are some younger guys who maybe are going to become those kinds of players and just aren’t there yet — Marshawn Lynch, Trent Edwards among them. But if you’re a defensive coordinator facing the Bills, you know that all you basically need to do is double-team Lee Evans and play the other receivers as you normally would, and you’ve pretty much handcuffed the Bills’ passing game. Likewise, if you’re an offensive coordinator facing the Bills, you know you’re not facing a “paper tiger” of a defense, but there’s still nobody on defense whom you must have taken into account on every snap of the ball. All the really good teams, the ones that got good and have stayed good for a long time, have figured out how to find guys like that. The Bills haven’t.

The Pittsburghs and New Englands of the world don’t go out and sign everybody they can to big contracts; they develop new guys and plug in occasional free agents when they need to. (Now, I’m not sure that New England is doing quite as good a job at developing new talent as Pittsburgh is, which is one reason I believe New England’s days as one the NFL’s elite teams are closer to ending than most.) The Bills try to do this, but they do it wrong: instead of drafting offensive linemen every year and developing them, the Bills rarely draft OL’s, instead signing free agents who then turn out to not be that good. (Derrick Dockery? Really?) One of the most damning facts about Bills’ personnel management over the last ten years is the fact that when former GM Tom Donahoe was fired, the Bills’ starting offensive line didn’t feature a single player who had been drafted by the Bills. (At that time, Jason Peters was merely a prospect, and he’d been a free agent signee and not even drafted.) I had hoped that would end under Levy, but so far, no dice: few OLs drafted, and the one who was, Duke Preston, played center last year and has now been possibly replaced by a new free agent signee.

I have my issues with the Bills’ coaching staff, but as long as the on-field talent is picked by guys who aren’t really solid football guys, it won’t matter.

Now. Terrell Owens.

I was shocked that the Bills signed him. Stunned. But not for the normal reasons. I’ve never understood the TO hate that’s out there. Sure, he’s a prima donna and can be a pain in the arse; at times he can be a downright distraction. But the stuff he does frankly always strikes me as “small potatoes” in a world where Pacman Jones can still have an NFL career and where you know somebody’s going to give Mike Vick a training camp invite. And it can’t be denied that where TO goes, better numbers in the win column follow. The 49ers were good with him; they’ve been crap since he left. (Not that he’s the only factor there, but the correspondence can’t be denied.) The Eagles lost the NFC title game three years in a row, and then they signed TO and reached the Super Bowl, which they might well have won if not for some sloppy play by Donovan McNabb and some weird coaching decisions by Andy Reid. Dallas got quite a lot better when TO arrived, and I wouldn’t blame him for all the drama that’s happened down there; Jerry Jones is quite good at creating drama all by himself. Remember the Cowboy dynasty teams of the 1990s? That was not a happy locker room, by any means, and it was only the fact that that was probably the most talented roster in the last fifteen years that made that team what it was, and it’s been dramatic in Dallas ever since. Yes, TO brought in some extra baggage, but so what?

In terms of TO’s ego, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Bills fans think — not without justification — that this team actually could use an infusion of good old football arrogance. He’s not exactly moving into a situation where there are already a lot of high-octane personalities ready to clash with him. The Bills are a laid-back bunch — too laid back, I suspect a lot of people might say. Why would TO sign here, instead of with someone closer to winning? Who knows — but maybe he saw the atmosphere in that infamous Monday night game in 2007, when the Bills dominated the Cowboys all night only to blow the game in the final seconds in one of the most heart-breaking defeats in team history, and maybe TO said to himself at one point, “Wow, these people love their team in a way I haven’t seen too much.” Maybe. I’m no mind-reader, obviously, but I very much doubt the Bills were the only team interested in TO.

And besides, TO will help on the field. Teams won’t be able to basically have their defensive gameplan against the Bills’ passing game consist of nothing but “Double team Lee Evans”, knowing that aside from Josh Reed, the other receivers on this team aren’t going to do anything. He’ll draw some attention and open things up for other players. Hopefully, his presence here, however long it lasts, helps last year’s second-round pick, James Hardy, to learn the NFL ropes faster than he’s been already. Hopefully he helps open up the running game a bit, since teams will actually have to respect the Bills as a passing threat more. I think he is very likely a good addition to the team, and if he does turn out to be a massive pain in the arse, he’s only sitting on a one-year deal, so it’s not like the Bills are wedded to him forever. If they like what he does here, they can re-sign him to another one-year deal next year. If not, they can say, “Thanks, we’ll take it from here.” This was, as far as I can see, the first genuinely shrewd personnel move the Bills have made since they brought in Drew Bledsoe in 2002. (Just because that move didn’t work out for various reasons doesn’t mean it was a bad move. That move didn’t work out basically because the Bills made that their only move.)

What interests me is the resurgence since TO’s signing of the new favorite word in Buffalo regarding the Bills: relevance. It’s what everybody is saying: signing TO makes the Bills “relevant”. I’ve never been terribly sure what “relevant” means; it seems to mean “winning”, but it’s more than that. It’s the idea that the Bills generally aren’t taken terribly seriously in the NFL these days. You play them, and you need to play well otherwise they might beat you, but they’re not going to the playoffs anyway. You know you won’t find yourself in a bidding war against the Bills for some player or coach because the Bills won’t spend big on coaches and they will spend on players but not huge money and they won’t go after the big names either, preferring to wait a few weeks into free agency and grab some guys who have been sitting out there teamless for a bit. That’s “not being relevant”, I suppose.

But it’s more than that. It’s not the Buffalo Bills franchise that’s seen as not relevant; I think a lot of people around here fear that the NFL sees the entire Buffalo Bills fan base, the market here, as not being relevant. And if we’re not relevant, then it will be that much easier for the NFL to let the team move when Ralph Wilson dies and the team is sold. This kind of move makes the Bills relevant again. This kind of move makes Buffalo a place that should be taken seriously, when it comes to talking about football.

Bills fans crave their team being a team that is actually talked about in football circles. Well, having TO on your team will certainly get you talked about, won’t it?

More answers to follow!

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“How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong?”

I have no idea how to discuss Atonement without the extensive deployment of heavy amounts of spoilers, so be warned: I spoil the movie. Big time. You’re warned.

I remember seeing ads for Atonement last winter and thinking, “That looks up my alley.” Those ads portrayed the film as a sweeping epic romance set in the World War II era, and for at least part of the movie, it’s definitely that. But for only part. The rest of the time, it’s a psychological character study in the fairly intimate setting of an English country estate.

It’s 1935, and there are two sisters: the younger, Briony, and the elder, Cecilia. And there’s the housekeeper’s son, Robby. Robby’s in love with Cecilia, who gradually comes to love him. Problem is – and we don’t learn this until quite some way into the film, more than halfway, actually – Briony is in love with him too, in her own schoolgirl way. Various things happen that lead Briony to telling a lie about Robby, a lie which gets him thrown in prison and later offered parole on the condition that he join the British army. Of course, he’s sent to the front lines in France (it’s 1940, after all), while Cecilia works as a nurse in a London hospital. Will Robby make it back to her at war’s end?

OK, there’s the basic plot summary. After this, the spoilers. I’ll put it a few line breaks here, just in case:

OK. Here we go.

If you’ve seen the film, you know that Robby does not make it back; instead he dies in Dunkirk, before the evacuation, when his festering chest wound becomes a full-fledged infection. Cecilia too dies, in one of the London bomb raids. So where is the “atonement” of the title? In the actions of Briony. But does it? Is there any atonement at all in Atonement?

This movie uses a device that I’m generally not terribly fond of, the “unreliable narrator”. I’m not terribly fond of this device because in general I prefer to lose myself in the actual story and not think too much about metaconcerns such as whether the story is happening or not. (That’s not to say that I never like the “unreliable narrator”; it just tends to open up cans of worms that aren’t to my liking at a times.) Here, in Atonement, the POV shifts often. We see events from Briony’s point of view, and then the film will double back and show us the same events from an “Omniscient” POV, so we end up seeing that Briony has things wrong, but not maliciously so. As the film’s opening act leads up to Briony’s lie, the film carefully leads us to understand her lie, and, in fact, not even see it as a lie at all.

Here’s what happens. Briony witnesses a kind-of-erotic moment between Robby and Cecilia, in which Cecilia strips to her slip and jumps into the family estate’s giant Victorian fountain. From her vantage point, it seems that Cecilia is showing off her figure for Robby, and she’s shocked. A few minutes later the film shows us the same scene, for what really happened: Robby inadvertently causes something valuable to fall into the fountain, and Cecilia goes in to retrieve it. We know this, but Briony doesn’t. Strike one.

Later on Robby is writing a love letter to Cecilia, and after writing one very naughty version (using that one word that every woman loathes), he writes a much nicer version that’s polite and gentlemanly, just before going to join Cecilia’s family for a formal dinner. On the way he comes across Briony playing in the fields, and he asks her to deliver the letter, and only as she’s scampering away, out of earshot, does he realize that he’s put the naughty version of the letter into the envelope instead of the gentlemanly one he’d meant to give her. Of course, Briony reads the letter and is horrified. Strike two.

Still later, Briony walks into the family library and finds Robby and Briony up against the bookshelves in the throes of passion. Strike three. After talking over these matters with a visiting cousin, Briony decides that Robby is a sexual maniac, a predator against women, when in fact he’s merely in love with Cecilia.

That night, after the dinner, two younger cousins, twin boys, run away, and everyone disperses into the countryside around the estate to look for them. Briony comes across two people copulating, and the man gets up and runs away, without Briony getting a good look at him; the woman is not, as we might have expected, Cecilia but rather the cousin she’d earlier talked to about Robby being a sexual predator. The cousin appears to have been raped, and Briony tells everyone that Robby did it. He’s taken into custody by the police, and we think that Briony’s made a mistake, albeit a terrible one.

Later on, after some very emotional stuff in the war, in which we see Robby’s harrowing trek to Dunkirk contrasted with Cecilia’s life as a London nurse, our POV returns to Briony, and we eventually learn that she had a crush on Robby in her youth but he rebuffed her advances, leaving her angry; and we learn that on the night she told the police he’d been the rapist she had, in fact, seen the man’s face quite clearly, and knew perfectly well that it wasn’t Robby at all – and yet told her lie anyway. Now we know her for a liar.

Toward the end of the film, there’s a sudden cut to the present day, and an old woman is sitting for a television interview. This is Briony, and she’s just written a novel about this whole affair; but she’s written a happy ending for Robby and Cecilia, in which he comes back from the war and they have some kind of time together. She’s written this ending, sparing her own character in the book nothing of the guilt, as her act of atonement for her lie, even though the ending was false: Robby and Cecilia died in separate wartime events, never to meet again after they were parted. All Briony can give them is fictional atonement.

The revelation that Robby and Cecilia died rather than ever see each other again hit me between the eyes. I’d been prepared for some kind of sad ending, but not one like this, where we’re shown a happy ending and then had it snatched back. The initial question is, how much of an act of atonement is Briony’s creation of a fictional Robby and Cecilia who got to live the life that was denied them in real life?

But on further consideration, it’s not at all clear that Briony has given them any happy ending at all. When she goes to Robby and Cecilia to confess her wrongdoing those years before, in that scene that is soon revealed to be fiction, it’s established that Briony’s recanting of her story is unlikely to have any legal effect whatsoever as far as Robby’s status as a convict goes, and he’s not out of danger anyway, as he is going back to war in a day or two. The happy ending Briony gives the people she wronged is unreal on more than one level.

Seen in the light of learning that what we’ve seen throughout the film is Briony’s novelization of the events, everything is called into question; not only Briony’s actions and motivations, but nearly everything that happened in the movie at all. If Briony never got to speak to her sister again shortly after she told her lie, she can’t really know that the moment by the fountain was as chaste as we were shown. Likewise with Robby’s letters; Briony couldn’t have known that Robby had written any letter other than the one she delivered. Has she made up all that, in an effort to further illustrate her own faults as a narrator? Or worse, has she made all that up in an attempt to partially justify her lie, odious as it may have been? It’s possible to understand, if not condone, the poor behavior of an immature adolescent girl the object of whose affections is instead in love with her older sister.

The fact that we’ve watched not the real events that transpired but Briony’s interpretations and impressions of them also color the oddly surreal sequence that unfolds when Robby arrives at Dunkirk to find an almost incomprehensibly vast panorama of wartime suffering as the Allied armies await their evacuation. This sequence is a pretty amazing one, seemingly shot as one long take (I don’t see how it could have been), in which the camera slides past horror after horror: soldiers behaving insanely, soldiers drunk and dying, soldiers killing beautiful horses for no apparent reason, soldiers riding children’s rides. Was there really a Ferris Wheel in full operation at Dunkirk as the soldiers awaited the evacuation? The whole sequence seems to stand at some odds with the rest of the film’s intimate nature, but that’s the point, and it takes on a whole new light when we realize that we’ve seen not a depiction of Dunkirk as it was but merely Dunkirk as Briony has imagined it.

In terms of production, Atonement is very well done. At times, especially in the first act, the tone is almost like one of those staid old Masterpiece Theater dramas, but this mood is often shifted by the use of awkward closeups, odd closeups, and washed out colors. Many times the film almost feels claustrophobic, suggesting that the characters are closed in even as they stand out in the open.

The music score is impressive as well. Dario Marianelli wrote it, and it’s a score of great psychological tension; the music churns and creates nervousness with unresolved chords, snatches of melody, repeated rhythms, and the clever use of sounds from with the film, most notably Briony’s typewriter. It’s a very impressionistic score, at one point even using Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”.

I wasn’t sure, when I was done watching it, if I’d liked Atonement or not; but for a long while after, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That must mean something.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: The Buffalo Bills signed Terrell Owens.

:: OK, this is something quite odd. Last night I was flipping through the AOL.com homepage just to see what was up, and I came across this screen, whereupon I immediately said, “Wait, what?”

Here’s the relevant portion of that screen:

See it? Not the thing about the super-expensive flower arrangement. Something smaller.

“Dora the Explorer’s sexy new look”.

Read that again: DORA THE EXPLORER‘s sexy new look. Now, I figured this was something written to get me to click through, so click through I did, into an article on various retail companies changing the looks of their major brands. I figured “OK, they’re making Dora look different, but they’re not really making her ‘sexy’, right? I mean, we are still talking about kids here, yes?”

Well, Dora’s the first thing featured, and here’s the copy offered there:

Trying to hold onto preschool fans as they age, Dora the Explorer’s parent companies, Nickelodeon and Mattel, are giving her a sexy new look as a tween with a curvy body and wavy long hair. The full design won’t be unveiled until fall.

Here’s a preview of Sexy Tween Dora, in silhouette, beside her current incarnation:

Not that I’m a prude or anything, but, well…really?

:: The Buffalo Bills have added Terrell Owens to their receiving corps.

:: Perfume and cologne based on Star Trek. Does the “Red Shirt” scent smell like embalming fluid? (via Lynn, who always has fun links and who has some particularly fun ones in this post)

:: Terrell Owens is a Buffalo Bill.

:: Some horrifying tools from medical science past. The first of this made me wince in a bad way. Not work-safe, possibly. Especially if you work in the medical field. (via)

:: Opponents of the Buffalo Bills next season will have to gameplan against Terrell Owens.

:: To recap: Terrell Owens is now a member of the Buffalo Bills.

We’ll return with more weirdness next week.

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You DONKEY!!!

Oddly, thus far into this season of Hell’s Kitchen — four episodes that I’ve watched thus far, with one more waiting to be seen — Chef Ramsay has yet to call anyone by my favorite term of endearment, “You [bleep] donkey!” For some reason that always makes me laugh.

Anyway, this is an entertaining season thus far, as always. Seeing these chefs of varying culinary talent and experience nevertheless struggle equally to make Ramsay happy is always fun, as are his unending string of expletives directed at those who inspire his wrath.

One thing from an episode a couple of weeks ago struck me as odd, though. The chefs were all made to get up very early and go for a walking tour of a commercial butcher operation, which was basically a big warehouse where a number of workers are processing sides of beef. Most of the chefs reacted horribly: “It’s cold! It smells awful!” and so on. And I’m thinking, “You’re cooks, and this is meat. You should be fascinated by this, not repulsed!”

Ditto later on, when the female team lost the Gordon Ramsay version of that old Letterman chestnut, “Know Your Cuts of Meat”; as part of their punishment they were fed a lunch of various beef innards. Again, you’re cooks. At least a few of you should actually like innards, right? Aren’t lots of very famous dishes in fact made of innards? Foie gras is an innard, isn’t it? (Yeah, an innard of a goose, but it’s the same principle.) I always end up wondering just how serious some of these people are about food.

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Boldly going?

I’ve just watched the new trailer for Star Trek, and I’m still troubled. On the one hand it looks like a trailer for a kick-ass space opera action movie, which would be right up my alley, except they’re calling it Star Trek and using the names of characters I’m already deeply familiar with. Yes, it bugs me that they’re changing everything. No, I don’t know why it doesn’t bother me that the producers of the James Bond movies are doing roughly the same thing — but then, the Bond series is a different animal, which never came to grips with the fact that the world was constantly changing and yet their character was staying the same. I don’t know — but the new Trek movie looks like it might be kinda-sorta cool, but I still hate what they’re doing with Kirk and company.

To me, it’s like if the Bond people not only did a reboot of the Bond movies, but invented a completely new backstory for him — maybe make him the son of an IRA leader or something. But every single bit of new Trek promotional material that comes along makes me think one thing: this might be cool if they’d just change the names of the people involved. How about not making it a Trek movie? Just for kicks?

Anyway, here’s the trailer:

See, right off, there’s what bugs me. Kirk is apparently the delinquent doofus who gets pushed into enlisting by someone else. And the Kirk in my imagination would never utter something like “Why are you talkin’ to me, man?” Ugh.

UPDATE: Spurred on by Belladonna in comments, I came up with what I think is a better analogy: what they’re doing with Kirk strikes me as if somebody made a movie of Oliver Twist in which Oliver was not an orphan but a runaway from home. I like it when I get challenged to explain myself better!

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My “Faith” firsts

This quiz came to me on Facebook, and I’m putting it here as well….

1. Who gave you your first Bible?

No one. I bought a copy of the KJV in 1999 or 2000, for research on a writing project. It was OK, but a bare-bones Bible without much by way of extra stuff, so a few years ago I picked up a better edition of the KJV, with a stronger concordance and more maps. Then, a year or two ago I decided that I needed an actual study bible, so I bought a TNIV one, with lots of maps and extra content that, you know, explains stuff.

I also have a book called “The Other Bible”, which is a collection of pseudo-sacred texts from those times that for various reasons didn’t “make it” into the Bible — the Apocrypha and more. I also own a Koran, the Analects of Confucius, the Tao te Ching, a couple of Tibetan Books of the Dead, and a few other sacred texts from other religions.

2. When and where did you receive your first Communion?

I first took Communion on Easter of 2006, because The Daughter really wanted me to go up with her and The Wife. I’ve taken it ever since, when offered. This is at St John’s Lutheran in Orchard Park.

3. What was the first prayer you were taught?

I was never “taught” any prayers. I learned the Lord’s Prayer, I suppose, through osmosis in college.

4. What was the first church you attended?

The first church that I attended willingly and regularly? I guess that would be St. John’s. I would do the “Christmas and Easter” thing with The Wife before that.

5. What was the first Bible passage/story that became meaningful to you?

Hmmmm. The story of Christ’s birth as told by Luke, I think.

6. What was the first miracle you experienced?

Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced one.

7. Where and when were you baptized?

I haven’t the faintest idea, except that it was somewhere near Pittsburgh, because that’s where we lived when I was born.

Bonus: Is there a story of faith you would like to share that doesn’t fit into one of these categories? If so, share it.

I’m still not sure what my religious beliefs are; I’ve pretty much accepted that I’m never going to figure that out. But I do go to the church because it’s become a very meaningful place for me, after everything that happened with our son. I do feel, when I’m there, that I’m in some kind of presence, for whatever that’s worth. I started going when I was worried, after Little Quinn’s birth, that The Wife was having trouble with church; she was always the “faithful” one of us, so I went in order to help her get through it. And I’ve kept going, ever since. I’m not sold on every tenet therein, and there are still many things from other faiths that I find deeply wise and moving and even true, but I’ve come to love a lot of the rituals — the “official” ones (like Communion) and the ones peculiar to our own congregration (like Pastor’s fascination with clips from “I Love Lucy”).

Interesting, I guess, since my college friends may remember that I was once deeply hostile to the whole idea of religion, no?

I’m now a bit more open on these things, although I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable saying “I am XXX”, where XXX is some kind of religious belief (or non-belief). Maybe it’s wishy-washy, but it always seems to me that saying “I am THIS” equally implies “I am NOT THAT”, and that seems exclusionary to me.

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Give me the jelly donut OR I WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY!!!

A note on 24, which I’m watching religiously this year, although I haven’t yet watched this week’s two episodes (so no spoiling them, you bunch of lubbers!). While the various plots and schemes Jack is working to thwart are entertaining as always, it seems to me that this year’s theme deals with the nature of the kind of work Jack Bauer does.

Everyone who has watched the show knows that Jack occasionally does things that are morally questionable in the name of getting an upper hand on the bad guys. He tortures. He threatens family members. He threatens good guys at gunpoint. Jack does a lot of frankly awful things, always under the belief that the end justifies the means. There are no rules he won’t break in order to save lives. This year, the show is grappling with this aspect of Jack’s character by contrasting him with FBI Agent Renee Walker, who is his strong ally this year but constantly finds herself blanching at the things he has her do, and some things she does on her own.

Agent Walker does the same horrible things, but she feels horrible doing them, and more than that, she is increasingly appalled at Jack’s ability to not be affected by the things he does. No matter what they do, Jack is able to brush it off in his constant desire to move on to the next part of the mission, and when Agent Walker breaks down in his arms sobbing after their actions have caused the death of a young woman who one hour before had no idea what she was involved with, the only wisdom he can offer is “You learn to live with it.” The show seems to be admitting that Jack is doing things that are wrong, but is also contending that sometimes you have to do something wrong to prevent something even worse from happening. Call this what you will: Lesser of two evils. Ends justify the means. You have to break eggs to make omelettes.

While it interests me that the show is addressing this stuff, I don’t think it’s doing so completely honestly. It would be easy for them to show Jack going too far, wouldn’t it? Sometimes I wonder if they’re not suggesting that, but pulling back slightly. Take Dubaku’s girlfriend, for example. Jack and Agent Walker put that girl in a terribly dangerous position, and her position became even more perilous when something unforeseen happened to take Jack and Walker out of the equation for a moment and into a place where they couldn’t protect her. If the show really wanted to unflinchingly look at the implications of Jack’s actions, they might have had Dubaku kill the girl before attempting escape; then we’d have to wonder if Jack really did the right thing or not. Instead, they had the girl attack Dubaku’s driver while in mid-high speed chase, thus causing the crash that results in Dubaku’s capture but also results in her death. That girl died a hero.

That leads to my main complaint: all of Jack’s dark actions are portrayed as working out the way he needs them to, and that’s terribly unrealistic, isn’t it? Not that I’m expecting realism from 24, but if they really want to explore the darker nature of Jack’s work, then they need to confront the awful reality that sometimes Jack is going to go too far, and worse, that sometimes his actions aren’t going to work out. Take torture, for example: when Jack tortures, it always works! When he threatens a villain’s family, it always works! Jack’s “extreme interrogations” invariably result in him getting the information he wants. Nobody ever stonewalls him. Nobody ever feeds him a bullshit story in an attempt to buy time. Nobody ever looks at Jack as he threatens to blow up their home planet if they don’t tell him the location of the Rebel Base and tells him that they’re on Dantooine when they’re actually on Yavin IV.

How effective would that be, anyway? Wouldn’t that be an incredibly gripping tale? Wouldn’t it be amazing to see Jack’s techniques failing him and seeing the bad guys gain the upper hand on him that way? I wonder if we’ll ever see this happen? In any event, it seems to me that the producers are saying this year: “Sure, Jack does bad things, but hey, he’s got to and they always work so it’s all good.” I find that less than satisfying, morally and dramatically.

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Ask Me Anything! Answers, part one

It’s time to start answering the questions from this year’s iteration of Ask Me Anything! So here we go. (I’m not answering these in the order they were posed, by the way.)

First, Neddie Jingo throws this at me:

“‘Who is Spain?’ ‘Why is Hitler?’ ‘Hi-ho beri-beri!’ and ‘Balls!’ rang out in quick succession.”

Ummm…moving on, then.

I had to Google this, and it turns out to come from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, which I have not read. Now I obviously have to read it. Curse you, Neddie Jingo! Stumped on my very first query.

Next up, Roger (who is, every year, consistently the best asker of questions for this feature), poses this:

From your vantage point, what do you think of the new senator Gillibrand and the process that selected her?

I don’t have much opinion at all on Senator Gillibrand specifically. For those who haven’t been paying attention (and why would you), Kirsten Gillibrand is the current junior Senator from New York, having been appointed to that post from the House of Representatives by Governor David Patterson, after that Senate seat was vacated by Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State. I don’t know a whole lot about her political views; having just looked her up on Wikipedia, she seems generally around where I stand on a lot of things, and a bit far from me on others – no way I’d support George Bush’s tax cuts, for example. She’s apparently very strong on gun ownership rights; I generally don’t have strong views on guns aside from my own personal dislike of them. So, Gillibrand seems vaguely acceptable to me. I’d have to get more familiar with her as a Senator, which will probably happen now that she represents me. I’d never heard of her before her Senate appointment.

As for the process: I was baffled by the whole Caroline Kennedy thing. That whole business just seemed weird from the get-go; Kennedy has never, to my knowledge, shown a whole lot of interest in being in electoral politics herself, and maybe she was influenced for a time by the availability of a seat and the fact that her uncle, Edward M. Kennedy, is clearly nearing the end of his days. I have no problem with her running for the seat, if she wants, but the flirtation-and-withdrawal seemed strange to me. And in general, I don’t like that Governors in many states can directly appoint Senators in the event of a vacancy. Special elections should be the rule, for many reasons.

(I’m not enamored of David Patterson as governor, by the way.)

Roger also asks: who would you “go gay” for?

Ummmm…nobody. Certainly not Viggo Mortensen or Karl Urban from Lord of the Rings. And definitely not Daniel Craig as James Bond. And Ewan MacGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi? Never!!!

OK, I think that’s a weird enough note to end on for the first set of answers. Hoo boy!

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