Month: August 2009

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You can call me Mr. Filion.

A while back, I opined on Facebook that currently, the world’s reigning God Emperor of Coolness is William Shatner. It is my belief that while Fonzie can snap his fingers to make the jukebox start up, a snap of William Shatner’s fingers will cause all four original Beatles to materialize out of thin air, instruments in hand, to play a set.

I will now add a corollary: Shatner is God Emperor of Coolness, but the Crown Prince is Nathan Fillion.

Here’s an older appearance by Fillion on Jimmy Kimmel’s show:

All hail the future God Emperor of Coolness!

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Sentential Links #182

Linkage, politics first….

:: I got to shake his hand at the end of the night. It was a huge hand. A hand that large could pick up and carry quite a load all on its own, and in a way, it did. It carried all of us.

:: Teddy himself was a fascinating figure in liberal politics. Although I was still in elementary school when JFK and RFK were assassinated, until I was nearly 30 I just assumed that Ted Kennedy was going to be president. It was as inevitable as the tide. I don’t think I ever questioned it until the extremely trying 1980 primary campaign, when it became clear to me that the moment had probably passed. I don’t think he did either.

But once it became clear, he didn’t just turn his seat into a sinecure or retreat into cynicism, he carried on valiantly, becoming one of the few master legislators in American history, insisting on making progress by hook or crook even during the long era of conservative rule in which he served. And he took the slings and arrows from his enemies along the way with humor, dignity and class.

:: They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.

:: You do have to wonder when the honchos at Fox will realize that Glenn Beck may bring in the ratings, but he is inflicting a deep scar on their brand name that will be a long time fading.

And now the non-politics.

:: But is being the last woman standing on the cusp of the end of the world something a girl dreams of when she grows up?

:: WANKER! (Note to self: don’t “friend” my boss on Facebook. Got it.)

:: So the other day I’m in the car with Sarah, and I say, “Last night I had a dream where Nathan Fillion was teaching my dad how to use the computer.”

:: Since I am aging and becoming Totally Old, I would like a throbbing forehead vein like Clint Eastwood and various telekinetic manga characters. A throbbing forehead vein – is that too much to ask? (That’s actually the entire post, but it also has a video clip. I just thought the quip was funny.)

:: In August 1979, I took my last drink. It was about four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the hot sun streaming through the windows of my little carriage house on Dickens. I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn’t take it any more. (Roger Ebert is really turning into a remarkable blogger.)

All for this week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: OK, I’ll admit that I tend to treat this series occasionally as less a repository for weird linkage and more a repository for “quick hits” linkage, i.e., stuff I want to link but not talk much about. It’s a fair cop, but that’s how I roll.

In that spirit, here’s an interesting feature on the concept album in music. I like how the author points out that rock artists claim to have started the concept album idea when Frank Sinatra was doing it in the Fifties, but surely the proto-concept album was the song cycle, which occupied the minds of composers all through the 19th century. Heh!

(And Pink Floyd’s The Wall is a great album.)

:: It strikes me as odd that a tool exists for the aiming of your car’s washer fluid jets. You need a tool for this? When a safety pin, a thin probe, or — if you work that kind of job — the pin of a nametag can do the job?

:: Have I linked There, I fixed it yet? Probably…but this one had me wondering if we’ve just caught a glimpse into Steven Den Beste’s car.

(Actually, I’m not sure SDB even has a car — he seems to talk about walking everywhere as opposed to driving, but he doesn’t use air conditioning and claims that on very hot days, blowing a fan across some blocks of ice actually does lower his apartment’s temperature a bit, to bearable levels. The principle is certainly sound enough; it would provide some cooling, albeit not as much as an actual pressurized coolant inside a compressor-driven cooling system. But the ice will absorb heat energy from the warm air passed over it, and it’ll reduce humidity as well as moist air condenses on the ice. SDB’s method probably works longer, though, given the lower surface area of his giant blocks of ice; all those little cubes in the bag in the car will melt faster. And I know that SDB doesn’t like unsolicited advice, but it’s always seemed to me that he might save some money if he was to keep a few gallon milk jugs around and, when hot weather is in the forecast, fill them and freeze ’em for such use. It would probably be cheaper than buying large quantities of ice blocks — but this also assumes large amounts of freezer space, which he may well not have. Probably just answered my own question.)

More next week.

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“Obviously, we’d prefer for the stadium to not be consumed in a giant fireball….”

Buffalo Bills fans have been frustrated this preseason by the display put on by the starting offense. That’s putting it mildly, actually. The Bills have had four preseason games thus far, with one more to come — they had five this year instead of the usual four because they played the additional Hall of Fame Game — and in those games, the starting offense has not scored a single touchdown. Ouch.

Now, there’s all the usual remindering of how the preseason doesn’t matter and how the games don’t count and it’s about shaking off the rust and breaking in the youngsters and evaluating talent and yada yada yada. And I don’t think anyone would care if the Bills still lost all their preseason games — the 1990 Bills went 0-4 in the preseason, before going 13-3 in the regular season for the first of their four Super Bowl seasons — but fans would still like to see some evidence of improvement, of basic competence. Fans would like to see some evidence, any little scrap of it, that the team hasn’t actually managed to regress. That evidence has not been forthcoming.

I remember back during the 2001 through 2003 seasons, when Gregg Williams was the Bills’ head coach, and the offense was as inept then as it is now. (Except for ’02, when the offense was actually good for a single year but the defense was awful.) The Bills would lose a game 17-7, 13-6, 20-3, or something like that, and Williams would take the microphone at the postgame conference and, when asked for positives from the game, say things like “We punted the ball well today.” It was mindboggling to me then, and now — the one guy on your team whom you do not want to have a career day is your punter. But there was Williams, praising the guy whose job it is to kick the ball to the other team when you’ve failed to advance it. Oy.

Which brings me to last night’s preseason game against the Steelers. Now, we’re talking about the Steelers here — defending Super Bowl champions, two Super Bowl titles in four years, one of the NFL’s top three teams, and the NFL’s best defense — so it wasn’t totally shocking that the Bills couldn’t put any points on the board. But still, you’d like to see some movement, some evidence of competence, however slight. Instead, the Bills totaled 135 yards overall. Their quarterbacks combined for 96 passing yards. They converted zero out of eight third-downs. They were, simply, bad.

And now, this morning, I see that head coach Dick Jauron was looking for positives from the game, and he proceeded to opine:

“I guess I could say I thought we punted it well.”

Where oh where is Marty Schottenheimer?

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He has concluded that we are NOT orcs.


Walking Tree Man, II, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Last Friday, The Family and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Erie County Fair. We used to actually go to the Fair twice during its run, but that got to be too expensive, so now we pack everything into a single day. We arrived at 10:30 in the morning and left after 11:00 at night, after everything had closed down except the Midway and the beer tents. It was a long and tiring and happy day. County Fairs are wonderful things.

And this year, the weather was perfect on our day. The last two years, we got rained out. Two years ago the day was rainy the whole time and we finally gave up around 5:00; last year, there were sporadic showers throughout the day that we were able to work our way around, but then around 7:00 there was a good downpour that soaked everything before moving on. It cleared up right afterward, but it was also late enough that we knew that nothing would dry out because the sun was about to set.

What do we do at the Fair? Fair stuff, obviously. We look at all of the animals (this is of limited interest to me, but The Wife grew up on a farm, so she loves it, and so does The Daughter). We ride some rides. We go into the exhibit halls and see artworks by local artists (although we didn’t make it into the woodcarving building this year). We wander through the various buildings that feature shopping and sales pitches; there’s something totally infectious about the sheer hucksterism on display at the County Fair each year. And yeah, we eat. Our traditional Fair lunch is a corn dog, which are always fresh out of the fryer. We get Po’Boy sandwiches, and a giant bag of Kettle Corn; we get maple cotton candy and ribbon fries (usually — we missed the ribbon fries this year) and pizza and ice cream and we wash it all down with lots of birch beer (in addition to the water we carry in ourselves). And usually, the next day I gnaw on a head of lettuce all day to make up for the salt-and-fat laden day before.

This, and the posts that follow, are all photos I took from our day at the Fair. More are available at my Flickr photostream. This particular photo is of a new thing this year: the “Walking Tree Man”, who looks like an Ent, clearly enough. I wasn’t terribly sure what the point of this was, but it looked cool enough. I restrained myself from making a bunch of Treebeard jokes, though.

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The Carousel, after dark


Carousel, III, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

The Carousel at the Fair is one of The Daughter’s favorite rides. She’s loved carousels pretty much since the first time she ever rode one (when she was two, I think). The Fair’s carousel is a double-decker ride with lots of different things to ride: horses that go up and down, horses that remain stationary, a couple of spinning “tea cup” type seats, a couple of benches that rock back and forth, and a couple of benches that don’t move at all. Something for everyone on this thing.

I was taking random shots of the carousel at night, of which this is one. I didn’t even realize that I’d taken this young woman’s photo until I put the photos on the computer a few days later. I have no idea who she is; she just happened to be in the frame when I clicked the shutter release. But I like the way she’s sitting on the horse; I wonder who she was showing off for.

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Charlotte's Revenge


Charlotte’s Revenge, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

This diorama, also in the Fine Arts building (see below), cracked me up. It looks nice and all, and ‘A for effort’ and all that, but I just couldn’t get beyond the relative size of Charlotte compared to Orville and the rest of the gang. It’s like Charlotte has become the radioactive mutant spider that gave Peter Parker his powers. I’ll bet this Charlotte isn’t nice and sweet:

“I’m back, boys, and I’m not so happy this time! Now tell me, where’s that gluttonous bastard Templeton? He and I have business….”

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A bee


A bee, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

The Fair has a parade that winds its way through the fairgrounds every day at 5:00, so at that time we took a seat on a bench beside some bushes and waited. I glanced to my left, right at the bush, and saw this bumble bee, happily and busily going about its daily business. I took a few photos of him; this is the only one that really looked decent. It was fascinating to watch him work. He took no notice of us at all.

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The Whirling of the Swings


The Swings, II, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

While The Daughter was riding the bumper cars six or seven times consecutively, I spent some time studying this ride, just next door. It’s the usual “spinning swing” ride, but I loved the pseudo-Victorian decor of the ride — the paintings and the coloring and the ornate scrollwork and all that. Very cool. I love it when carnival rides don’t just look like a bunch of steel rods, gears, and pulleys.

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