John Barry, one of the most distinctive film composers of all time, has died.
Barry could often, for me, be a “hit or miss” kind of composer, but when he hit — which in my experience was more often than not — oh man, did he hit. He’s probably best known for his work on the James Bond series, but Barry had a very long career of composing. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come up with lush, gorgeous melodies, and he had an approach to film scoring that was all his own (and which, sadly, fell out of favor in the 1990s).
I could probably come up with dozens of examples of Barry’s music, but I don’t have time this morning (I’m writing this before work, because I don’t want to go all day without acknowledging his passing), so here are just a few.
“Did you say ‘how to wire an outlet’?” “I can help you with how to wire an outlet!” “Here is info on how to wire an outlet!” “Bargain prices on how to wire an outlet!” “Guide to wiring outlets in New York, right here!”
And none of them actually know a damn thing about what you’re asking, of course — they’re just offering meaningless, valueless words that seem to form sentences until you actually try to make use of them. (Via. The search engine was Google’s reason for existing, in the beginning, but now I’m wondering, does Google even really need the search engine much anymore? Has Google’s focus on becoming Ground Zero for all this “cloud computing” stuff pushed their original product onto the back burner?)
I found this photo whilst randomly surfing around on Flickr, and I found it both lovely and somehow compelling. There’s something a little sad about that lady’s expression, almost like she’s looking for a lost lover who won’t come back.
This is really cool: what other planets would look like in our sky if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon. (Set aside the notion that Jupiter could ever orbit Earth, as opposed to the other way around.)
:: I’ve mentioned Axe Cop before, but here’s a refresher. It’s a comic that’s being drawn by a guy as a favor to his younger brother, who is writing it. The younger brother is five, so he’s come up with a killer storyline about a cop whose chief weapon is his fireman’s axe, and who precedes his attacks on criminals with the battle cry, “I’m gonna chop your heads off!”
Well, if they made Axe Cop into a movie, it would look like this:
You know what no one told me about when I was diagnosed with this cellulitis thing? As it heals and the abscess clears up and the swelling abates, the skin in the affected areas will be really loose, and begin to peel and itch. A lot. Now it feels like I’m molting and have poison ivy.
Sure would have been nice if someone had mentioned this. S’all I’m sayin’.
I’m kinda late with this, but no matter. Here are the details, and the prompt appears in bold in the story. I went ahead and did SF again. Sue me!
Agent RO-9 shone her light around the cavernous space they’d just unearthed. “What is this place?”
“A storage facility,” Agent ZX-3 replied.
“For what?” She moved a pile of rugs and found an enormous box beneath, which she opened. “Look here!” She lifted the stack of letters from the ancient chest.
“Letters?”
“All twenty-six,” RO-9 said. “Numbers too.” She held up a giant numeral 7. “Weird, eh?”
ZX-3 only shrugged. He was looking at something green he’d found in a metal trash can.
“Grouchy,” RO-9 said, and began studying something that looked like a very yellow, big bird.
A week or two back, I got home from grocery shopping to find the boys in this position, on my desk chair. It was an awkward moment for all concerned. We don’t talk about it.
Tales of right-wing political figures who rail against the evils of government on the one hand while happily accepting its benefits on the other are a dime a dozen — I especially liked the Teabagger recently elected to Congress who blew a gasket when he realized that his government-paid health insurance wouldn’t actually kick in until he was sworn in, two months after being elected — but this one is particularly satisfying.
So in addition to all of Ayn Rand’s other failings as a human being (crappy writer, sloppy thinker, philanderess, serial killer fetishist), we can add “giant hypodrite”. Who’da thunkit!
I was in ninth grade, the day the Challenger exploded. I heard the news in the hall, going from one class to the next. Some kid that I thought was kind of a dork pops up and says, “Hey, didja hear about the space shuttle? It blew up.” And he smiled, like it was funny. Or maybe not that it was funny; maybe that was just his goofy 14-year-old-kid way of expressing something along the lines of “Huh. That’s not what was supposed to happen.”
By this time in my high school career, I was well on the way to becoming a music geek and wasn’t nearly as interested in the space program as I had been in my “I’m gonna be an astronaut!” phase four or five years earlier. Therefore, I didn’t know much at all about that particular shuttle mission outside of the publicity because a civilian, a teacher, was going to be on it. What was really weird, though, about that day in my school was that the news didn’t rip through the school; few people were talking about it; none of my classes had teevee’s with the footage. I didn’t see any of the coverage until I got home from school that afternoon, at which point I planted myself in front of CBS.
It seems to me that the Challenger disaster really soured this country on space exploration, or at least it put some punctuation on a souring process that had been going on for a while. There were no goals, no real sense of purpose to the whole thing. We had once built ships to reach the Moon; now we were content to stay in low-Earth orbit. Most news items on teevee relating to shuttle missions were to show the whacky choice of music Houston had chosen for the astronauts’ wake-up call. The shuttle itself was a dull-looking vehicle. The future had arrived, and it was clunky and boring…and then, awfully dangerous as well.
What are we doing in space? I have no idea. That makes me sad. When I was a kid, my conviction was rock solid that I was living in the generation that would walk on other worlds. I didn’t realize that we were basically done walking on other worlds within a year of my birth. Alas.
To wrap this up: I was, as you can probably tell from my personal politics, never a big fan of President Ronald Reagan. But his speech to the nation after the Challenger disaster was masterful.
And then there was Richard Feynman’s tenacity in focusing on the O-ring seals in the booster rockets:
