The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’ve got to get this rant out of my system, but I’ll hide it behind the fold. I’ll even conceal it so you have to highlight it with your mouse to read it.
OH MY GOD I AM SO F***ING SICK OR REWRITING THIS STUPID CHAPTER THAT I AM CLOSE TO SAYING THIS IS THE LAST TIME I’M GOING TO TRY AND AFTER THAT I’M JUST GOING TO STOP WRITING ENTIRELY FOREVER AND EVER UNTIL THE END OF TIME.
I feel better now.
My Mets Journal is all kinds of awesome, even for a non-Mets fan (and a person whose interest in baseball is hanging by a thread). This fellow is doing a drawing to depict something about every game the Mets play this year, and he’s got some artistic chops. I love this!
Cal had a post about “hype” the other day, in which he discusses the upcoming wedding of a couple of Royals in the United Kingdom. In the post, he describes some things he’s avoided because of the hype surrounding them:
I am totally consistent in my attitudes when it comes to hype. I hate anyone telling me that I have to see something or read something or listen to something. Nine times out of ten their recommendations are correct and I may get around to them eventually but initially I just want to run screaming in the other direction.
For example:
I have never seen ‘E.T.’ nor will I ever see it. If they show it on a plane I will have to take a parachute and jump.
Now, this strikes me as odd, since the hype over E.T. happened thirty years ago, and now the movie is pretty much a classic. Some hyped things fade away, as you’d expect, but others demonstrate that they can withstand the Test of Time, as it were, so by this point, reacting against E.T. because lots of people like it seems weird. So I said so, and Cal responded:
I just don’t wanna see E.T. because I want to have ONE movie I never see and that seemed like a good one. If I never see ‘Smurfs’ then I am a discriminating movie goer. If I don’t see E.T. then I am just a freak and I can live with that.
Huh. Here again I’m confused; the very nature of time and the fact that I’ll never have enough of it pretty much guarantees that I’ll always have a movie that’s a classic that I never saw. Same thing with books. Same with music. That realization can be a bit liberating, actually; I remember, back when I was an active film music fan, that there was a particular record producer whom I thought was just a giant jerk, so I publicly stated that I wasn’t going to be buying anything from his label, ever. Someone else chimed in to say, “You’re just depriving yourself!” My response was, “I’ll never have time to hear all the music I want to hear anyway.” Which is true. (It also helped that the records the guy makes — re-recordings of campy sci-fi film scores from the 1950s — are of zero interest to me.)
So where am I going with this? Where’s the Random Wednesday Conversation Starter? I’m not trying to pick on Cal here; I was just thrown a bit by the resolute nature of his being against the hype for what is now an old movie. Scary thought: E.T. is older now than Casablanca was when I was born.
Anyway, here’s the question: What highly-regarded movie, or book, or whatever, exists that you’re pretty sure you’re never going to see, read, or hear, for whatever reason? (And thanks, Cal, for the thought-provoking post!)
That’s a memorable line of dialog — perhaps the most memorable — from any of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, and fortunately, it’s spoken in the television adaptation of A Game of Thrones, in exactly the right way. That moment, early in the book, jolted me a bit as a reader as a genuine surprise. Martin would, in my opinion, go to this type of well a few too many times over the rest of that first book and in the three that came after, so much so that I remember reading A Feast for Crows with a constant sense of impending doom for every character. After a while, I have to admit that it got to be a little much, and sometimes I think of A Song of Ice and Fire as the fat-fantasy equivalent of Funky Winkerbean.
Maybe that’s not fair; heck, it probably isn’t. But while I’ve enjoyed Martin’s books, I’ve never been as big a fan of them as many. I started to tease out the reason why when I read A Feast for Crows, and now that I’ve seen the first episode of the teevee adaptation, I’m seeing ASoIaF for what it is: it’s a fantasy soap opera.
When I was a kid, I actually became for a time a huge fan of General Hospital. This was back when each summer would have a long and sometimes “action-packed” tale involving spies and espionage and intrigue of such nature, usually featuring characters like Robert Scorpio and his former wife Anna, who were both also former agents of the WSB (World Security Bureau), when they’d square off against the nefarious agents of the enemy DVX. As these storylines wended their way through the summer months, lots of other characters would see their own lives intersect with the “main summer storyline”. This was all usually quite a bit of fun, but there were characters I didn’t really care about, and thus their bits in the storyline tended to slide beneath my radar. And not all of the show’s characters would be involved in the “main summer storyline”, so once a week — usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday — there’d be an episode of GH that served only to catch us up on the characters who had nothing to do with the fun stuff. These episodes were largely boring as hell; I was watching the show for Robert Scorpio’s heroics and whatnot, and I didn’t really care one whit about Steve Hardy’s son’s relationship problems or the various infighting of the Quartermaine clan or the trials-and-tribulations of hooker-turned-straight Bobbi Whatshername. But that was the price to pay for the good stuff.
So GRRM’s massive fantasy series is getting kind of like that. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character, with that character being named in BIG LETTERS at the top of each chapter, so as soon as one chapter ends, you know just by looking at the next page where you’re going next in the story. This is classic soap opera structure, and in the first two books it was extremely effective, but I’m finding that now as we’re into our fourth book here, it’s all starting to feel the same way it felt when I’d watch GH all those years ago. “Oh, cool! An Arya chapter! Her story’s interesting!…Oh, bugger, another chapter about Sansa. Snore.” If ASoIaF were to be filmed, I think it should be as a soap opera, titled Westeros!. And if they change actors, a voiceover guy could intone, “The part of Jaime Lannister will be played on this episode by….”
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did, mostly. But the feel of reading this series has become eerily similar in my mind to that of watching a soap opera. I’m not sure if that’s what GRRM has in mind, but there it is.
I’m not trying to belittle things here, because it’s fun to delve deeply into stories like this. But even so, reading that last book, I remember a certain creeping frustration that things weren’t unfolding so much as grinding along.
Martin’s series gets compared to The Lord of the Rings a lot, which interests me. I just re-read LOTR a month or so ago, so it’s fresh on my mind, and what struck me this time is how surprisingly focused Tolkien keeps things: he’s got the story he wants to tell, and he pretty much sticks with it. Martin, however, focuses everywhere. If Martin had written LOTR, we’d have long chapters describing the trials and tribulations of the folk at Bree. We’d have chapters showing the befouling of the Shire while Frodo and the others are away. We’d have the meetings of the Council of Wizards. We’d have chapters set in the North and around the Lonely Mountain, showing what the dwarves up there are up to. And Gondor? We’d see all of the intrigue there.
At this point, I’m not sure that there even is a story that Martin is trying to tell. I think he’s immersing us for a very long time in a heavily populated world, a world where there are good people and bad people and people who are just kind of all right, and where sometimes these people do horrible things to one another and where love is not necessarily a happy thing and where sins of fathers ripple out through the generations and where there is murder and incest and people thought dead who turn out to not be dead and…so on. Basically, all the things you’d find in a soap opera.
I swear that I don’t mean any of this disparagingly — but I’m just not all that convinced by repeated claims that George RR Martin has done something staggeringly new and stunning and original with this series. It’s a fantasy soap opera. General Hospital meets the Wars of the Roses. The Sopranos with swords. Dallas with dragons. The X-Men when Chris Claremont was in charge.
As for the show itself? Very well done, for the most part. A few more characters might have been named. I didn’t care for the look of Winterfell, with all those round towers — it seemed a bit too elegant in a long shots. But still, very effective. I took one look at Joffrey and immediately thought, “Oh, you little f***er. And the acting was uniformly excellent — I liked the way everybody looked. I’m fine with Tyrion not being as ugly as described in the books. Part of my problem right now is that I’m spoiled by my knowledge of what is to come; like it or not, I can’t set aside the more favorable opinion of Jaime Lannister that the third and fourth books created to hiss the pure shit that he is in the first two.
And as for the books, I remain deeply skeptical that Martin will ever finish them, and I remain deeply hopeful that if he does finish them, the very last line of the last book is “Hodor.”
(Can’t wait to see Hodor, actually. Talk about an actor lucking out — he can memorize all of his lines in less than two seconds!)
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while, but various things have distracted me and kept it pushed down the priority list for several months. But now, it really is time to start the final edition of Fixing the Prequels, by turning to the final film in the trilogy, Revenge of the Sith.
Before I begin, it’s worth a reminder of what I’m about here. I love the Prequel Trilogy (abbreviated ‘PT’ hereafter), and have since I saw each individual film on first release. I found them all involving, exciting, and in the case of Revenge, emotionally crushing at times. I know I’m a minority in this, but I’ve never much cared about that. Even so, I must admit that as much as I love the Star Wars prequels, I don’t love them unreservedly, because they are flawed. There are things wrong with them.
That’s not an unusual opinion, but I think that my view as to the degree of that opinion is. Most folks seem to hold the flaws of the PT as fatal flaws, sinking the films to the point where the only appropriate response to them seems to be outright mockery. I don’t believe that. I think that a lot of the flaws in the films are overblown; others arise from misinterpretation or possibly a failure to understand what George Lucas was at times really getting at. And still more perceived flaws in the PT come, I think, not from a sense of genuine error on Lucas’s part but the simple fact that, by the time Lucas made these three films, tastes had changed in a lot of ways.
So when I talk about “fixing” the prequels, I’m not about wholesale rewrites and bagging on the direction of the films in all particulars. I point out flaws along the way, but my goal is also to highlight the things in these films that I find admirable, the things that keep me coming back to them frequently. My approach is to address two kinds of flaws: the ones that I think are real, genuine flaws, and the ones that I’ve heard cited as flaws from other people over the years but which I either don’t see as flaws or as fatal flaws. I’m about credit as much as criticism here, which I think is a more measured response to them than a lot of the people who deeply despise the Prequels would admit. It has long interested me that, in almost all cases of such discussion, the people who hold a negative view of something are the ones who invariably claim to be seeing the thing objectively. My response is to simply point out that having a negative opinion is not seeing something “objectively”; it’s having a negative opinion.
And now, with all that preamble behind us, let’s move on to discussing Revenge of the Sith, a fascinating film that even as I write this I’m not sure about, as to how I’d go about “fixing” it. This is mainly because I’m not entirely sure what I think is wrong with it. But as I work through the film, I expect some thoughts will crystallize. So let’s start at the beginning, which means as it always does in a Star Wars movie, a crawl:
War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.
In a stunning move, the fiendish droid leader, General Grievous, has swept into the Republic capital and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine, leader of the Galactic Senate.
As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their valuable hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a desperate mission to rescue the captive Chancellor. . . .
It sets things up nicely. I especially like that opening: “War!” This crawl is pretty blunt, with none of the “politics” stuff that many claim to have been bored by in the first two Prequels. (How they could be “bored” by a couple of lines of text is something I’ve never figured out, but no matter.) What stands out to me in this crawl, however, is that second sentence in the first paragraph: “There are heroes on both sides.” That’s an interesting line, there; it seems out of place, but I think it works in an interesting way: it calls to attention the ambiguous nature of the Clone War, the War to Preserve the Republic: we know that it’s basically a fake war, started for no other reason than to trick the Republic into destroying itself.
Revenge opens with a massive space battle, of which I’ve heard many differing opinions over the years. Detractors say that it plays like a video game on the big screen, and is impossible to follow. This has always struck me as odd, because it’s always seemed to me that George Lucas goes out of his way to make this incredibly frenetic space battle as easy to follow as possible.
After the crawl, we have our traditional pan down to a planet and a spaceship. (AOTC, remember, actually followed its crawl with a pan up.) The planet is Coruscant, and the ship is a Republic attack cruiser. The music dies away almost completely at this point; all we hear for about thirty seconds is a steady, but off-kilter (because it’s in 5-4 time), beat of drums. The camera starts to zoom in on the cruiser, when two new ships enter from behind: small fighter craft. Only two. We follow these two ships as they skim over the surface of the cruiser, out into space beyond it, and then back and dive. The camera follows over the edge of the cruiser, and there – spread out before us – is the enormous space battle.
As soon as the two Jedi starfighters come into view, the music starts in again, with the famous “Force theme”. We don’t need any dialogue or to even look into the cockpits to know that our two Jedi are flying these ships. Also, of all the ships coming and going in the skies above Coruscant, these are the only two ships of this type. This isn’t like A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker was only one of a bunch of X-wings. Even more, the Jedi starfighters are, by design, similar to what will eventually become TIE fighters, and those ships’ thrusters emit cone-shaped blasts of exhaust (presumably because the battle is taking place high in Coruscant’s atmosphere, as opposed to in the vacuum of outer space).
Another thing that interests me about this space battle is that we see almost none of it. Really. This battle clearly involves several times as many ships and combatants as the big battle at the end of Return of the Jedi (of course, a one-to-one comparison there isn’t easy because that one has a Death Star in it), but aside from lingering shots that quickly flash by, we are shown nothing of the battle itself. Nothing of the strategy, nothing of which side is winning and which is losing, nothing of tactics. All we see of this battle is what Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi see as they fly through it, on their way to General Grievous’s flagship. The battle is frenetic, and there is a lot happening onscreen, but it’s not at all hard to follow, so far as I can tell. The battle is entirely secondary to their main concern: getting through it alive to land on General Grievous’s ship and find the Chancellor.
So, after quite a bit of space derring-do that involves flying directly through a cloud of attacking fighters, evading missiles, and dealing with a bunch of small droids who get onto a fighter’s hull and then scuttle about taking the ship apart, our two Jedi heroes land on Grievous’s ship. I like a lot of the dialogue through here: at one point, Obi Wan notes “This is why I hate flying!”, echoing two lines from Attack of the Clones. I also like how when Obi Wan’s ship is infested by the buzz droids, Anakin’s first notion is to blast them off, which has Obi Wan screaming in protest, at which point Anakin says, “I agree. Bad idea.” So he comes up with something else.
What I also like about this whole sequence is John Williams’s music, which is full of interesting things like quotes from the “Force Theme”, sections in 5/4, and one heroic quote of the Rebel Spaceship Fanfare when R2-D2 dispatches the last buzz droid. This was a musical touch that I liked immensely.
Anyway, back to the General’s ship, where Obi Wan and Anakin have just landed. There’s an interesting touch here as the two Jedi take on a typically large number of battle droids: Obi Wan leaps out of his ship and ignites his lightsaber before his ship has even slid to a stop; Anakin, however, waits until he’s stopped completely before grabbing his saber and hopping out to join the melee. I like that. It’s the kind of tiny detail that gets lost amidst a lot of the melee, the kind of blink-and-you-miss-it thing that nevertheless illustrates something about the story and our characters.
Now Obi Wan and Anakin must make their way to the observation deck where the Chancellor is being held captive. This involves more run-ins with battle droids, malfunctioning elevators, and relying on R2-D2 when R2 is dealing with his own problems. (He has to hide from a couple of battle droids when Obi Wan starts talking to him through his comm-link.) I wouldn’t change any of this material, because the banter and chemistry between Obi Wan and Anakin really works pretty well, in my opinion:
ANAKIN: I sense Count Dooku.
OBI WAN: I sense a trap.
ANAKIN: Next move?
OBI WAN: (grins) Spring the trap!
And this, the transition from the space battle to the derring-do aboard General Grievous’s ship, is a good place to stop. Next time we’ll rescue the Chancellor, land half a ship, and find out that Anakin isn’t always shooting blanks. Excelsior!
Linkage….
:: Is it possible that you get to a point where you own so many tools that you forget what you own? (Yup, it’s possible. I’ve never bought new versions of tools I already own, but I have done jobs with the wrong tool only to discover later on that I own the right tool, and I then realize, “Huh, this would have made that job a lot easier.”)
:: There’s a poetry here; dust from a local storm blowing a few kilometers above, but translucent enough to allow us to see beyond it to a different kind of dust blowing among the stars. (The video over there is amazing. For God’s sake, go watch it.)
:: This leaves the most important issue. Is this the masterpiece of modern fantasy literature that it’s made out to be? No, not even close. (An older post, but I saw it for the first time this week. He’s writing about George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ll probably re-read the series sometime in the next year, but my general view right now is that the first two books are really good, the third one’s pretty good, and the fourth was a disappointing slog. We’ll see what happens in the fifth, I suppose. Maybe.)
:: How many times are the going to try and make the same movie? They made it right the first time.
:: There’s such an utter disconnect with reality that AMERICAN IDOL has become the O.J. murder trial with a band. (It’s funny: this is the third article I’ve read in a couple of days ripping on this season of American Idol, and yet, each writer has a different view of who’s good and who sucks. That’s kind of funny, to me.)
:: You can walk away from the things you never really liked doing in the first place.
More next week….
Like the title says: a lllooonnnggg quiz.
1. Tell us who the last person that you took a shower with.
I think The Wife would object. (To me describing what we do, not who the person is! Because it’s The Wife. And now I’ve said too much. Stupid quiz….)
2. Tell us about your favorite tee-shirt. Extra points if you show a pic. (We know. What can you do with freakin’ extra points?)
Probably any of my tie-dyed t-shirts. I don’t really wear t-shirts with logos on them much anymore, and only once in a while the occasional picture of something. I prefer solid colors and the like.
3. Has anyone ever hit on you even though they knew you were taken?
I have no idea. One reason I continue to profoundly happily “off the market” is that I was one of those guys who had zero notion of how to distinguish friendliness from flirting.
4. Do you plan what to wear the next day?
Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends. One nice thing about a job with a uniform is that planning what to wear is not necessary.
5. How are you feeling RIGHT now? Why?
Full, because I just had dinner. (An Italian sausage on a bun and some roasted potatoes, if you must know.)
6. What’s the closest thing to you that’s black?
My portfolio. It’s on my desk, right next to the laptop.
7. Tell me about an interesting dream you remember having.
Ach…I can’t. I rarely remember my dreams.
8. Did you or might you meet anybody new today?
Not officially “met”, no. There are lots of people in church whom I don’t know all that well, but I didn’t “meet” any of them.
9. If you could be doing anything right now (or perhaps after you finish this ridiculous meme) what would it be?
I’d say “writing”, but truth is, I could be writing right now. I guess I wish I could be traveling with The Wife.
10. Can you think of a meme question that’s never been asked?
“If you were going to be hit with a pie, what flavor would it be?” Nobody ever asks about pie-throwing preferences. It’s odd, really.
11. What comes to mind when I say China?
“Please step up and lead humanity into the future, because I’m not sure right now that America is going to get it done.”
12. Are you overly emotional?
I don’t think so…but some people might say that I am. Who knows?
13. If you could listen to just one rock album (CD, vinyl or mp3) which one would you pick?
One album right now, or one for the rest of my life? I’d go with Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I suppose. (But Abbey Road is making a serious challenge!)
14. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it?
Both. But I “bite” with my lips, if that makes sense. Not with my teeth. That’s unpleasant.
15. Do you like your car?
Love it! The only thing I don’t like about it is that the A/C doesn’t work and is highly cost-prohibitive to fix. (Have I mentioned that I’m driving a new car? New to me, that is? No? Hmmmm…need to blog about that.)
16. Do you like yourself?
What’s not to like!
17. Would you go out to eat with Charlie Sheen?
If he’s paying, you bet. I never turn down free food. If I’m paying? Well, if that’s the case, it’s a fast-food place, we bring separate cars, and he’s not allowed to talk.
18. What was the last song that you listened to?
“Every Which Way But Loose”, by Eddie Rabbitt.
19. Are (or were) your parents strict?
Not really. As I mentioned when a similar question came up on Ask Me Anything! last month, they tended to set some general rules and then wait for me to screw up. (Which I usually did.)
20. Have you ever wondered what attending a wild orgy (if only to watch or…) would be like?
I expect it would be like some of the movies we watched while drunk in college: sweaty and unpleasant-looking.
21. I say cottage cheese. You say:
Throw in a spoonful or two of slivered almonds, and yum!
22. Have you ever met a celebrity?
A few Buffalo Bills, my Congressman at the time (Amo Houghton, incidentally the last Republican for whom I cast my ballot), and former Buffalo Philharmonic conductor Semyon Bychkov.
23. What was the last movie that you watched at home?
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (Which is a far better movie than its reputation.)
24. Is there anything sparkly in the room you’re in?
Of course! I’m all about the sparkly. I have a wall sconce with a candle on it; from the sconce hangs a sun-and-moon sun catcher and several strands of Mardi-gras beads. And my dragon-head incense burner has some glitter on it. I love sparkly!
25. What countries have you visited?
The US and Canada. (I have it on my parents’ word that I’ve been in Mexico, but I was too young to have any memory of it.)
26. Have you ever made a phone call while you were drunk that you’ve regretted? If yes, do tell.
Thank goodness, no. My days of getting drunk with any regularity were several years before cell phone ubiquity.
27. Where were you going the last time that you were on a train?
There’s a train museum in Medina, NY that does special train runs on occasion. Christmas before last, we went for the ride. It’s just an “out and back” excursion which takes about an hour. I love trains and wish we took them more seriously in this country. Our lack of high speed rail is one of the most maddening things I can think of.
28. Bacon or sausage?
Depends. I’ll typically order sausage with my pancakes or waffles, but bacon is wonderful, too.
29. How long have you had a cell-phone?
My first one was for a year or two in 1999-2000, but we let the contract expire owing to financial constraints at the time. The Wife got a phone in 2004, when she found herself needing to make tons of calls regarding Little Quinn’s health care; she added me to the mix in 2007, and I’ve had my phone ever since.
30. What other memes do you do regularly?
Saturday Centus. Other meme-things I check out, and if I like the week’s installment, I do it.
31. Who is the craziest meme host?
Not a clue.
32. Who invented chop sticks?
I don’t know, but he’s right up there on my list of Top Inventors of All Time, along with the person who invented the sandwich, the individual who invented overalls, and whoever invented the Spork.
33. Who are you going to be with tonight?
When The Wife gets home from work, her.
34. Are you too forgiving?
Nah. Being forgiving is a good thing. I tend to stew for a while and then I get tired of stewing.
35. When was the last time that you were in love?
It’s a constant state, with me.
36. Tell us about your best friend.
Well, he dropped in on me one day to convince me to run for President. I didn’t think I could win, but he put together a team that…oh wait, that’s Leo McGarry. Sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of West Wing lately. My best friend is The Wife. Duh.
37. What was the stupidest thing you learned in high school?
I didn’t learn anything “stupid” in high school. I don’t believe in learning “stupid” stuff. (Although I didn’t really see the point of the typing class. But then, I never took that class.)
38. What was the last thing that you cried about?
What Sydney Carton does at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. God, what an amazing book that was!
39. What was the last question you asked?
“Did you wash your hands?”
40. Favorite thing to do this time of the year?
It’s Buffalo, so: root for the Sabres, and bitch about our irritatingly crappy spring. Seriously, spring here sucks. It’s like winter warms up into the 40s and then stays there stubbornly, for two months. Ugh!
41. If you had to get a (or another) tattoo, what would it be?
Washington crossing the Delaware. (No, not really. I have no desire for tattoos.)
42. How would your best friend describe you?
“He’s 5’10”, with long hair that’s going gray.”
43. Have you ever seen all three Twilight films?
No. Reading one book was bad enough. Awful, awful crap.
44. Ever walked into a glass door?
Yes. At The Store, on the day of Buffalo’s October Storm in 2006, I was pushing carts in the parking lot because no one else from that crew could make it in. Everything was OK, until the power finally went out just as I was shoving a big stack of carts into the door. Wham.
45. Favorite color on that person that you are attracted to?
Purple. Or yellow. Or blue. Or red. Or black.
46. Have you ever slapped someone?
Yes. (I’m not proud of it.)
47. What hair style (for you) would you like to see return?
I don’t care about style. Deciding what to wear because society arbitrarily decides what’s “socially acceptable” is silly.
48. What was the last CD you bought?
Wow, I honestly don’t remember. I haven’t purchased a CD in years. I always loved CDs, but prices are unacceptable.
49. Do looks matter to you?
A little. Not as much as to many, I hope.
50. Could you ever forgive a liar?
Sure. And if it’s a one-time thing and they’re genuinely contrite (and the lie’s of a certain magnitude), I can even trust them. But it would take a while.
51. What’s the hardest bill to pay every month?
Currently, I do a pretty good job of budgeting for my bills.
52. Do you like your life right now?
Yes. There are things that could be better, of course, and things I hope to change for the better both near-term and long-term. But we’re not wallowing in despair right now, either.
53. Do you sleep with the TV on?
No. We don’t even have a teevee in our bedroom. I’ve been known to fall asleep during our later shows in the living room, though — especially on nights when I’ve had to get to work at O-dark-thirty.
54. Can you handle the truth?
Depends on the truth, doesn’t it?
55. Do you have good vision?
Yes. I got glasses for reading back in the 90s; I got a new pair in 2001. I then didn’t go to the eye doctor again until just last year, whereupon the doc questioned why I was there at all, since my prescription hadn’t changed at all in nine years. I had to show him how scratched up my old glasses were; I wanted a new pair for that reason alone, and I figured I might as well get the prescription checked. I only wear glasses for reading and computer stuff; otherwise I get a headache after a while.
56. Do you hate or dislike more than 3 people?
I don’t like hate. It leads to the Dark Side. Dislike? Yeah, that’s unavoidable. I don’t put numbers on it, though.
57. How often do you talk on the phone?
Daily, although it’s usually to The Wife.
58. What celeb would you like to come home to?
Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic.
59. What are you wearing?
An old burgundy Old Navy sweatshirt under a pair of blue Dickies overalls.
60. What is your favorite wild animal?
Of the land? I love bison. Of the sea? I love orcas. Of the Muppets? This guy!
61. Where was your facebook picture taken?
In my bathroom, because the light’s good in there. (Calm down!)
62. Can you waltz?
Not officially, no.
63. Do you have a job?
Yes.
64. What was the most recent thing you stole?
I don’t steal things, unless we’re talking about the occasional pack of Post-it notes or Sharpie markers from work.
65. Have you ever crawled through a window?
Not to get into a house or apartment, no. There was some window crawling during college, when we’d wait until dark one year and go explore the construction site of the new music building as it was going up. One time I stupidly wandered out onto this very long beam and got myself to the point where I had to keep moving forward. That was kind of dumb.
And that’s it! Wow, what a long quiz!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Chris Sims answers an eternal question (that’s only been an eternal question for a few years): If Harry Potter battled Batman, who would win? I wouldn’t dream of giving away Mr. Sims’s answer, but I tend to agree. I do disagree with him on the extent to which Harry Potter is a passive hero in the books. It’s true that he doesn’t take the bull by the horns as much as one might expect — especially in the early books — but I think it all fits together with the series’s entire thrust that no matter how good one is, you just can’t do it alone.
(I’d also note that I’m not the biggest Batman fan in the world. I’ve liked most of the movies, but I was never really able to get into Batman in the comics. I know, I know, The Dark Knight Returns is one of the greatest of all comics and all that, but I just didn’t care for it — and I will never be able to accept Batman defeating Superman. I just can’t get there in my head.)
:: I don’t know why I never thought of it, but what if, in Pac-man, when you exited the maze via one of the tunnels, instead of appearing on the other side of the maze, you appeared in a completely new maze? Warning: this thing is addictive, and some of the mazes are diabolical.
:: Trace some of the world’s great historical (and a few fictional) journeys and voyages. Fascinating stuff, although I’d hoped for more detail.
More next week!
So this week we’re supposed to offer a review of one of last week’s entries [link fixed]. As is my wont, I shall cheat.
Mr. Shakspur’s new play, Pimplius and Dimwittica, is precisely the kind of farce that the Queen (God Save the Queen!) has sought to eliminate from her Royal Stage. Mr. Shakspur’s thinking is beyond our guess; his characters are dolts, his plot idiotic, and his tiresome iambic dodecameter only reminds one of his cross-town rival. He is even rumored to have cast live women. Pimplius‘s ending, wherein all onstage die in a pie-fight using poisoned pies, even steals from his rival’s famous “Prince of Denmark” tragedy. Pimplius and Dimwittica: ‘Tis crap.
(Playing at the Oblate-Spheroid Theatre. All seats discounted.)
Today is “Record Store Day”. I won’t be going to any record stores today, simply because I’ve got other stuff to do today. But like many folks of my age group, I miss the music stores of yore.
Record stores for me always ran a close-second to bookstores for sheer amazement potential. Depending on the size of the store, I could spend quite a bit of time in a record store. If it was your typical small record store in a mall, I could be in there for twenty minutes or so — long enough for me to dig through the soundtrack section, and later, the classical and rock sections. But at bigger stores — Buffalo’s old Record Theatre locations, for example, or my personal recorded music Mecca, Toronto’s Sam the Record Man — I could get lost in those places for hours. (Ahhhh, Sam the Record Man — what a great place that was! I’d get so excited, seeing those giant spinning neon records on the storefront.)
As I grew up in a small town in Western New York that only had one record store — which was a mall store — I never had the experience of “being a regular at the local record store”. I’d catch glimpses of that culture when I’d come with my parents to Buffalo and sometimes beg for a stop at Record Theatre or some such place (joints which were usually a bit off the beaten path of wherever else we wanted to go that day). I’d see customers casually gathered around the registers, talking about the finer points of albums by various artists. I’d walk right by on my way to the classical section, where I’d invariably be the youngest person there.
There was a small classical-only store in Rochester years ago that I liked; this place had the same kind of record-store vibe to it that any rock-centric record store has, except the regulars at the register would be vigorously debating things like which was better, Herbert von Karajan’s first Beethoven cycle or his second one, or whether the Fritz Reiner era of the Chicago Symphony was better than the Sir Georg Solti era, and so on. I once bought a Berlioz record there, and seeing that the conductor was Charles Dutoit, the guy at the register nodded and said, “Oh yeah, this guy does some good Berlioz. But you really need to hear Colin Davis do Berlioz.” And luckily, I was able to say, “I’ve already got it. Davis is awesome!”
Of course, record stores transitioned to “music stores” once the compact disc pushed the vinyl out the door. I always liked the vinyl, personally — the sound of a brand-new record was great, but the drawbacks were obvious, primarily in the way the LP sound deteriorated a tiny bit with every scraping of the grooves by the needle. I spent two or three years primarily listening to music on cassettes, mainly from 1988 to 1991 or so. I’d buy blank tapes a lot of times and record my LPs onto them, so as to avoid the wear-and-tear on the records, a task which was supplanted once the CD took over for good. I still loved going to music stores, though — I was never so much in it for the format as I was for the music, and for a time there, the music store selections got better and better, as the small CDs took up far less rack space than the old LPs (especially once CDs stopped getting packaged in those ridiculous tall cardboard boxes, and when stores stopped using those idiotic plastic guard-things for theft deterrence).
Of course, we all know where this ended up; the rise of digital music and downloading and a general degree to which music lovers were sick of being asked to pay $17 for a CD pretty much drove the mainstream record/music store into oblivion, leaving select few outlets open as niche stores. I do sometimes miss browsing at music stores, but I’ve adapted quite a lot to the “new” way music gets around, by following recommendations from people I trust, by sampling, by listening to clips on Amazon and YouTube and the like. Record stores were a big part of my adolescence; I’m kind of surprised to reflect on it and realize that I don’t miss them more than I do.
