Month: February 2010

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I hope it tingles and tangles and prangles my transistors!

Remember my post a short while ago about the goofy 1980 B-movie space western Battle Beyond the Stars? I just figured that post represented a pleasant trip down geek memory lane for me and maybe a few others who recalled that obscure film. I certainly never figured that Battle was any kind of going concern.

Well, guess what: Battle actually is a going concern. It’s being revisited, in the form of a prequel comic book!

I am so going to read this.

Details here. The world needs more space opera comic books!

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A quick FYI

If anyone out there was, like me, wondering what music Takahiko Kozuka used during his long program at the Olympics, it’s Michael Kamen’s Guitar Concerto. I know it’s been recorded, but I’m not sure where.

This is a public service provided by Byzantium’s Shores!

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A tale….

It begins with the arrival of a mysterious package. I wonder what’s in it?

There is only one thing to do, obviously. I start to undo the tape and open the envelope.

Then, having rendered the envelope fully open, I look inside…

And I find something wonderful, which gives me cause to gloat at all of you folks, because none of you has one of these!

Time to clear off the reading schedule! Under Heaven, here I come! Looks like I won’t be finishing by GGK re-read before the new book comes to my hands after all. I suppose I could stick to the schedule and only read this new one once the last two books (plus the poetry collection) are out of the way, but come on, now. That would be silly.

(This is a review copy for GMR, so my eventual review will be going there instead of here. I am also writing a review of The Sarantine Mosaic for GMR, and I’ll have the link for it when it goes live, so that a link to it will still appear under the post label for my GGK re-read.)

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Something for Thursday

A change of pace this week. Here’s one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing. The set-up is that a death row prisoner is about to be executed, and somehow (I don’t recall the particulars) it comes to pass that his only hope is a commutation from the President, who spends most of the day worrying about what to do. He asks several people for advice — his Jewish commnications director, a visiting political consultant who is a Quaker, and finally his own parish priest. Ultimately, Bartlet does…what he does here.

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Answering….

Time for a few more answers to questions poses in Ask Me Anything! 2010.

Longtime reader DavidS asks: What do you think about that guy who did the 70 minute youtube rant on Star Wars Phantom Menace do you agree or disagree?

I mentioned this in brief in a Fixing the Prequels: AOTC post, but to answer it here: I know it’s out there, and I have little intention or inclination to watch the whole thing. Why?

Well, I’ve seen this thing discussed a lot in the various haunts I frequent around Blogistan, and I’ve even seen it discussed in places I didn’t particularly expect to see it. To me, that last is the more interesting phenomenon here; there are folks out there who apparently just love it when they get a new reason to bitch about George Lucas. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about, from a post by one of my favorite political bloggers, Kevin Drum, in which he briefly decides to talk about LOST:

From Carlton Cuse, co-creator of Lost, explaining why they’re going to leave a few things still mysterious when the show ends this season:

To sort of demystify that by trying to literally explain everything down to the last little sort of midi-chlorian of it all would be a mistake in our view.

It all sounded like a cop-out until he put it that way. Now I totally approve!

Ha ha! See, it’s funny because it’s a shot at George Lucas! See, if you want to tell a good story, just do the opposite of what George Lucas would do! Heh indeed!

Of course, never mind that the Prequels actually leave tons of stuff unexplained. Things are implied, but not stated outright, and even the hated midichlorians aren’t really an explanation for anything. I’m always amazed by the tendency for people who hate the Prequel Trilogy to critique it on grounds that are simply wrong.

But back to the 70-minute review guy. As I note in the earlier post, I did watch a few minutes of it, and I found it terribly off-putting. The guy’s voice is grossly unpleasant, and he lost me as soon as he made a joke about his son having committed suicide. From the commentary I’ve seen ’round the Interweb, it seems that grim stuff like that tends to form the backbone of this guy’s sense of humor. Fine, I guess, but my understanding is that part of the video has the guy pretending to be a serial killer who keeps women prisoner in his basement? Huh?!

Also, the commentary I’ve read about the review is odd in that everyone cites as pure genius the way this guy makes criticisms that somehow they have never considered before — and yet, with every cited example, I realize that I’ve heard these criticisms many times. There are no emotional stakes in the final battle! There’s no main character! There’s no Han Solo-esque character to root for! And so on.

The Phantom Menace is nearly eleven years old. I see no reason to view a 70-minute cavalcade of all the complaints about the movie that I’ve heard before, and rejected. Especially if there are jokes about child suicide and serial murder. I realize this sounds dismissive, and in all honesty, I suppose it is.

(Plus, there’s my general jealousy and bitterness inherent in this guy’s review shooting all over the Web while my own “Fixing the Prequels” series languishes in total obscurity! Why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine!)

Dave in Rocha asks: What’s causing the noise coming from the right-side rear wheel of my car when I take a right turn?

Something is rubbing on something it shouldn’t be rubbing on; or maybe, something that is supposed to be rubbing on something else has ceased to rub, thereby causing inappropriate rubbing someplace else.

The proper course of action is, of course, to take your car out back and shoot it.

(One thing to check, if you haven’t already, is your mud flap. If it’s loose, it may be making contact with your tire in certain situations or wheel configurations, such as a right turn. I actually had this problem myself a month or so back: my driver’s side front mudflap lost all but one of its screws, so sometimes it would actually get twisted outward and stuck with its back surface against my tire. The sound this made was awful, until I just removed the flap entirely. But this probably isn’t the problem on a rear wheel, since those don’t turn. Hmmmm. Maybe a bad bearing or joint between the wheel and the drive shaft. Forget the mud flap thing and just shoot your car. It’s the humanitarian thing to do.)

More answers to come! Good questions this year. Thanks, folks!

(Hmmmm…must remember to close off comments on the Submissions post, lest new questions keep showing up….)

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Boom de yada!

OK, I need to get this all down in one place.

Here’s the great original Discovery Channel commercial:

OK. Then came the always-wondrous xkcd:

xkcd loves the discovery channel

This, of course, needed to be set to music:

And then it got even better:

And all of this leads, naturally, to:

Boom de yada!!!

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Once an islander….

Sheila O’Malley is one of my favorite bloggers, not just for the quality of her writing but for her apparent fearless willingness to dig deep within herself. She recently spent a period of time on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, and she’s written several photo-heavy posts detailing facets of her time there. It’s hauntingly beautiful stuff, so go spend some time looking.

The Theme was Hearts
Somewhere In Time
The End that is the North Light
Ice on the Sea
The Ferry Ride Out
The Ferry Ride Back

There is more of Block Island in her archives, but that’s a start. Amazing.

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The Answers!

OK, folks, it’s time to start providing answers to the questions submitted for this year’s version of Ask Me Anything! Some short and easy ones to start with.

“Quince” asks: Since the housing market is becoming very buyer friendly do you think you will buy a house anytime soon?

I don’t know. I’d like to eventually, but we live in a pricier town, real estate-wise, and I’m loathe to move somewhere we can get a cheaper house because The Daughter is going to a wonderful school district and has a lot of friends. I’m not big on the idea of uprooting her just to get a house more cheaply. We’ll see.

Mark wonders: Will the Bills’ uniforms ever look good? Not just no teal, therefore good, but cohesive, distinctive and low on eyestrain good?

They do already, twice a year at least: their current “throwback” uniforms look pretty sweet:

Now, I’ve never been as down on their current “regular” uniform as many, but I never saw any rationale for change, except for the usual one: money, as in, getting fans to buy new jerseys.

(By the way, on the topic of fans buying jerseys, it really bugs me when people get their own names put on the back of a team jersey. Especially if it’s a number long associated with a well-known player. So if you’re a Bills fan named Schmidt, you don’t get to put “Schmidt” on the back of a jersey whose number is 12. That doesn’t work at all.)

LC Scotty asks: I’ve never read any Heinlein, and you being the skiffy expert around these parts I was wondering if you had a suggested order for diving in.

Sadly…I have no idea. I haven’t read much Heinlein at all. I tried several of his novels several years ago and bounced off them all. Now, I was trying to read his more “serious”, “adult” SF, and not the “juveniles” he was known for (like Starship Troopers), so maybe those would be a good place to start. Sorry!

(I have read some Heinlein short fiction, though, and liked it well enough, although I can’t recall any titles.)

Glenn asks: If the average American family size is 3.14 people, and the average American consumes 0.73 gallons of ethanol from distilled spirituous beverages per year, and my favorite bourbon contains 45% alcohol by volume, what is is the combined cubic capacity of household freezers in any given 100 kilometer block, and should I serve it over ice?

This seems like a trick question, one of those questions my physics teacher used to put on exams that he would load up with what he called “confusion factors” — i.e., numbers tossed into the question to act as red herrings for the students. In my opinion, bourbon should always be served over ice. I think it goes down better.

I prefer my rum at room temperature if straight, although cold rum is just fine, too.

More answers to come! Good questions this time out. (And if anyone tried to sneak in another question after I’ve already declared the submission period over, well, I might not notice until after I answered it….)

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Chickens? To the Roaster, Batman!

I’ve blogged this recipe several times over the years, but it always bears revisiting, because it’s the easiest chicken recipe I know. You simply marinade the chicken in a mixture of equal parts honey, soy sauce, and sesame oil.

I made this dish a week or two back, here at Casa Jaquandor. Here’s the chicken in the marinade:

Chicken and Roasted Potatoes I

You can use any piece of chicken for this, obviously. Heck, you can do it with a whole chicken — I’ll bet that would be really good, actually — but here, I used thigh pieces. I’ve always been partial to the breast, but lately I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the thigh, which seems to stay moist more readily than the breast does.

For this meal, I also made roasted potatoes:

Chicken and Roasted Potatoes II

My method for roasted potatoes is to toss them in some oil, herbs and spices, depending on what kind of flavor I’m in the mood for. So this time I used a bottle of herbed oil that I already had on hand, plus garlic, kosher salt, black pepper, and a bit of cayenne. I spread the potatoes out on a foil-lined cookie sheet and then pop ’em in the oven.

My potatoes this time ended up a bit crunchier than I really like, because I wasn’t sure whether the potatoes would cook completely in the same time the chicken would, so I put the potatoes in first. Next time, they go in at the same time. They were still edible — quite yummy, in fact — but a little too much crunch.

Still, it was a terrific meal:

Chicken and Roasted Potatoes III

Write down that marinade recipe (equal parts honey, soy sauce, and sesame oil). It’s an always-helpful easy-as-pie recipe to have around!

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