July 2012 - Page 2 of 5 - ForgottenStars.net

July 24, 2012October 3, 2021

Ride

When Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space, in 1983, I kept thinking, “Why did it take us so long to do what the Russians did twenty years ago?” It’s kind of sad that the Cold War mentality kept me, at eleven years of age, from realizing how inspiring Ride’s efforts were. That, and I honestly could not understand why we’d made space a boy’s club for so long.

I’m saddened to hear of Ride’s passing, too early, from pancreatic cancer. If I could pick one cancer to eradicate with a wave of a magic wand, that would be the one.

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July 24, 2012October 3, 2021

River of Stars

That’s the title of Guy Gavriel Kay’s next novel: River of Stars. As I noted before, it is set in the same fictional China as his last book, the amazing Under Heaven, albeit several hundred years later, so it’s not really a sequel at all.

And now we have the cover art:

I never finished re-reading my way through GGK’s output prior to Under Heaven‘s release, so this winter should be my chance….

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July 23, 2012October 3, 2021

This needs to happen.

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July 23, 2012October 3, 2021

Sentential Links

Linkage….

:: In other words, part of the majority of gun violence is the attitude of “If I feel threatened, I can and should whip out my gun.”

:: Every day I read things that suggest that our left-wing friends are trying to stamp out manliness. Just after 9/11, there was something of a resurgence of masculinity, of the traditions of manliness. (Two different takes on the shootings of the other day…needless to say, I find SDB’s take rather, shall we say, odd. I’m on the left, and I have absolutely zero idea what he’s on about. I’m almost reminded of a certain laughable blog post from back in the day by a guy named Kim DuToit….)

(By the way, it suddenly seems to me that any attempt to enumerate a list of qualities that are shared by ‘real men’ is a sign of a bad way of thinking about things.)

:: I’ve never been to a midnight, opening night showing of a movie. I’ve gone to premieres, though, and I do know what cinematic anticipation feels like. There’s just something about seeing something before almost anyone else that provides an unusual sense of satisfaction. Your view of the film is not colored by what everyone else says.

:: Chuck Klosterman once said something along the lines of not liking Billy Joel as a pop star because Billy never made him see a pop star or something to aspire to: “the only thing he’s ever made me see is me.” That’s exactly what’s so amazing about his music to me.

:: Writing a book ain’t all fun and games, kids. Writing fiction isn’t any easier than writing non-fiction, and vice versa. Both forms can be stubborn and maddening and offer a whole lot of seemingly insurmountable challenges–just of a wholly different sort. But the mountain itself is climbed, I’ve reached the peak. (Having reached one peak already, I’m now aware of the mists dispersing…to reveal another peak. Sigh!)

:: I am a sucker when modern characters are re-imagined into old style projects. (Me too…these are really cool!)

:: I’m kind of like Monk. Very anal. I have my writing space and I never write anywhere else. I have my stuff all carefully arranged, and I don’t like it if something gets moved. I have several recourses that I can turn to when I am stumped or bothered about a piece of writing to remove the so-called block. I always write in silence. No sounds, no music, no interruptions. This is all weird, but it beats lying in a coffin! (Patrick Rothfuss and Terry Brooks have been interviewing each other, and posting the results back and forth on each other’s blogs. Cool stuff, from a ‘peeling back the writerly curtain’ standpoint. Follow the links from Rothfuss’s blog back to the previous three parts.)

:: As a lover of words of all sizes, levels of subtlety, and countries of origin, I’d like to speak to you on behalf of the Citizens for Creativity in Cursing.

I’m a fan of cursing. Not just your standard, four-letter scatological words, crude words spoken without thought, words used by the drunken, the lazy, or the uninspired.

Why limit yourself to four letters? (Why indeed!)

More next week….

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July 22, 2012October 3, 2021

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Buffalo is the 34th ‘manliest’ city in America. NYC, Boston, LA, Minneapolis, and Portland — all cities which rank lower — can suck it!

:: Lit humor (via):

:: For no reason, here’s a Mountain Dew commercial from 1980:

I remember this particular ad campaign pretty well, actually — these ads aired a lot back when I had my first teevee in my own room, when we were living in Portland, OR. It’s a pretty effective bunch of ads, I think, since I recall them now, so many years later. The idea of a bunch of friends going out into the wilderness — that looks, not incidentally, a lot like the Pacific Northwest — on a hot day and then spends a lot of time messing around with water and drinking Mountain Dew to cool off? I think that’s a lot more interesting than some more recent pop ads, which go for dumb jock humor. But that’s just me.

I like Mountain Dew, but I only drink it a couple times a year. One or two bottles, and I’m good for quite a while.

That’s about all. More next week!

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July 22, 2012October 3, 2021

My only thought on the Colorado Shootings

Actually, this isn’t my only thought on the subject, but it’s the only one that I feel like posting, as my remaining thoughts are conflicted, given my longstanding general support of Second Amendment rights (although I don’t rise nearly to the belief, widespread though it seems to be, that the Second enshrines the most important of all rights by a towering margin — in fact, I’m not even convinced that the Second Amendment even says what most people think it says) and my equally longstanding squeamishness when it comes to guns (in short, I’ve never fired one, never held one, and want no part of either).

But anyway, whenever something like this happens, one meme that pops up a lot is the “If someone in that theater, just one person, was packing a gun, this awful thing might not have happened.” Whenever I read that, I don’t hear it as an argument for more people toting guns. What I hear is this: “If I had been in that theater with my gun, you can bet that I would have taken that guy down!”

Which is, of course, complete nonsense. From everything I’ve ever read and learned about these things, this stuff is hard. It’s hard even for military sharpshooters to do their job, even with tons of training that Joe Blow Sittin’-in-a-dark-theater-with-a-9mm-in-his-pants almost certainly does not have. I would wager that, of all the people in this country with legal carry-and-conceal permits, the percent of those who would be able to do something with their gun in that situation other than just contribute to the chaos with more bullets flying around is vanishingly small.

One lunatic blasting away is bad enough. Throw in a few pseudo-Rambo’s? Ugh.

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July 20, 2012October 3, 2021

Film Quote Friday

Here’s a bit from one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. I truly, genuinely believe this movie to be absolute comedic genius.

In the 1970s, “legendary” San Diego news anchorman Rob Burgundy, and his cohorts Champ Kind (sports), Brick Tamland (weather), and Brian Fontana (roving reporter) are used to ruling the roost on their local newscast, until a — gasp! — woman comes along to work with them. Into their station comes Veronica Corningstone, and nothing is ever the same.

Of course, we have to have the obligatory attempts by these guys to hit on her, because they’re men and she is obviously a dumb woman. This is Brian Fontana’s effort:

(Inside Brian’s office)

Brian Fontana: [about Veronica] I’ll give this little cookie an hour before we’re doing the no-pants dance. Time to musk up.

He opens a cabinet that is full of various bottles of cologne.

Ron Burgundy: Wow. Never ceases to amaze me. What cologne you gonna go with? London Gentleman, or wait. No, no, no. Hold on. Blackbeard’s Delight.

Brian Fantana: No, she gets a special cologne… It’s called Sex Panther by Odeon. It’s illegal in nine countries… Yep, it’s made with bits of real panther, so you know it’s good.

Ron Burgundy: It’s quite pungent.

Brian Fantana: Oh yeah.

Ron Burgundy: It’s a formidable scent… It stings the nostrils. In a good way.

Brian Fantana: Yep.

Ron Burgundy: Brian, I’m gonna be honest with you, that smells like pure gasoline.

Brian Fantana: They’ve done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time. [cheesy grin]

Ron Burgundy: That doesn’t make sense.

Brian Fantana: Well… Let’s go see if we can make this little kitty purr. (makes a ‘snarling panther’ sound, not all that convincingly)

(In the newsroom, Brian saunters over to Veronica and tries to hit on her…but she begins wrinkling her nose as the fumes hit her….)

Veronica Corningstone: My God, what is that smell? Oh!

Brian Fantana: (grinning because he thinks the smell is appealing) That’s the smell of desire my lady.

Veronica Corningstone: God no, it smells like, like a used diaper… filled with… Indian food. Oh, excuse me.

She runs away, seeming about to vomit.

Brian Fantana: You know, desire smells like that to some people.

Male News Station Employee: [Disgusted] What is that? Smells like a turd covered in burnt hair.

Female News Station Employee: [Horrified] Smells like Bigfoot’s dick!

Brian Fantana: [Tries to act casual and walk away] Woah, what’s that smell?

(Cut to Brian Fantana being hosed down in a shower.)

Of course, reading a scene like this isn’t like seeing it play out…Paul Rudd’s eerie confidence that his cologne is working its magic when it is, in fact, clearing out the room, and the look on the random woman who walks through the frame, nearly in tears, just in time to unleash the “Bigfoot’s dick” metaphor.

I like it when movies like this lampoon the 1970s, without making it look like an ugly and buffoonish era, too. They make fun of some of the excess, but really, nobody looks downright horrible in this movie — just dated. And I well remember the way local stations used to have their little triumvirates of “Anchor-Weather-Sports”, like WKBW in Buffalo with Irv Weinstein, Tom Jolls, and Rick Azar. Those guys have not done a newscast together in twenty-three years (Azar was the first to retire, in 1989), but people around here still talk about them.

I could go on in praise of Anchorman, and maybe someday I will in another post. Great Odin’s Raven!

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July 19, 2012October 3, 2021

Something for Thursday

I need to watch this movie again, having only seen it all the way through once on a VHS copy way back in college (and there may have been drinking involved), so my memories of it aren’t the best (although I’ve watched parts of it since), but one of the very best things about the animated F&SF flick Heavy Metal is its score by Elmer Bernstein. Here is “The Flight to the Temple”, from the film’s closing segment, the “Taarna” sequence.

What’s great about this score is that it’s kind of eerie at first, then somewhat comedic, then eerie again, depending on the story (the film is basically a collection of loosely-related stories), until we get to the Taarna sequence, at which point Bernstein just lets loose with some wonderfully powerful epic stuff. I love me some Elmer Bernstein!