Apparently ‘reboot fever’, in which old properties are exhumeddusted offdragged from the archives for the purpose of maintaining rights ownership revisited for a new generation, has struck the folks at Disney, who are developing a new Rocketeer project. Originally a comic book, The Rocketeer was already made into a movie in the early 1990s. It’s the story of a depression-era airplane mechanic who finds a rocket jet-pack (complete with cool art-deco helmet whose flanges act as rudders for steering), and his adventures thereof as dastardly folk try to get hold of the jet pack for military purposes. (There’s even a Nazi propaganda movie showing an immense armada of Nazi soldiers flying across the Atlantic with their jet-packs to conquer the USA, which prompted Roger Ebert to wonder if they pack sandwiches for the trip.)
The Rocketeer was a fun movie, if memory serves; I only saw it once. It’s genial and entertaining and well-made (if a bit slow in the pacing area), but it didn’t really strike me as something that needed revisiting. Little did I know. Anyway, here is a suite of James Horner’s music from The Rocketeer, which features one of his more endearing melodies. (Speaking of which, at around 40 seconds in, you can hear the first of several instances of one of Horner’s favorite compositional tricks, which I call “the James Horner Rolling Chord of Melodic Punctuation”).
Someone asked me this for Ask Me Anything, and it struck me as a good question, so: what’s your favorite vegetarian dish or recipe? (I like to use this regular posting feature as a means of picking the brains of my brilliant readers!)
Time to continue providing answers to the queries posed for Ask Me Anything!. A couple of politically-themed ones from Roger today. I’m surprised that, given an election year, there were only two political questions. I’m also glad that there were only two political questions.
These are beneath the fold…but just in case any of my readers on the other side of the aisle are thinking of reading my brief political thoughts, here’s Bugs Bunny to distract you:
OK, just click away now!
What’s your take on the whole Chick-Fil-A issue? Would you boycott it over its owner’s anti-gay marriage sentiment, and more importantly, expenditures? PBS takes $$ for its children’s programming; should they still accept it? And have you ever even eaten at Chick-Fil-A? (I haven’t; there nearest ones are 2 hours away.)
I’ve never eaten at Chick-Fil-A, and to my knowledge, the nearest one to me is in Erie, PA, a place that has a lot of dining choices, even for fast food, that I would select instead. So it doesn’t matter much to me as a real-world thing.
But, I’m pretty much all for boycotts, from either side. Hey, it’s your money, and your choice of how to spend it. Now, I generally don’t go out of my way to figure out which establishments are ‘liberal’ ones and which aren’t and then spend accordingly, because frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time than that. If some of my money ends up in a Republican’s pocket when I spend it, well, them’s the breaks. However, I do have a breaking point, and when someone decides that it’s time to do some gay-bashing, that’s when you stop getting my money. That issue is, for me, a serious deal-breaker. (Which is why I will never read another word Orson Scott Card writes. He is dead to me.)
I continue to be amused at the way the conservatives who flooded Chick-Fil-A restaurants that day claimed to be defending ‘free speech’. Free speech was in no way threatened by any boycott. The Chick-Fil-A guy still has every right to spout his bigotry to his heart’s content. He has a right to speak. He doesn’t have a right to my money. Saying that this was a ‘free speech’ issue is patently stupid.
And the other question:
Who will be President January 20, 2013, and why?
Easy: At 12:01 am on January 20, 2013, the President will be Barack Obama.
But of course, Roger’s asking for who will be President twelve hours after that, when the next Presidential term of office begins. I’m unwilling to offer a prediction at this point, but let me just say that I truly hope that it’s still Barack Obama. I am well and truly horrified at the prospect of the current version of the Republican Party taking control of most, if not all, of the branches of government.
I could go into a long rant as to why…but my heart really isn’t in it. I plan to vote and donate money to the President, but when it comes to political discussion, I’m simply not interested anymore. When the conservative element in this country is willing to admit that climate change/global warming is a serious problem, and that humans are the product of billions of years of biological evolution, and that tax cuts don’t increase revenues, and that gays are people who are deserving of all rights afforded straight persons, and that women’s health should be of equal importance to men’s, and that the fetus isn’t the single most important thing in the Universe, and that we’re not irrevocably on the Road To Ruin when we take an approach to health care in this country that the entire rest of the frakking civilized world took decades ago with little ill effect, and that the free market just can’t solve every ill, maybe then I’ll be willing to listen to what they have to say. Until then, fuhgeddaboudit. I’m going to turn 41 in September, and at that point, I will have lived 25 of my 41 years under Republican policies. When I look around at the state of the country, well…color me unimpressed.
(By the way, no one asked, but overall, I’d give President Obama a B-minus thus far. I’m willing to grant that for most of his term he simply didn’t have enough willing partners in Congress to enact a more liberal agenda, but it would have been nice to see him come far, far sooner to the conclusion that bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is a fool’s chase, especially when the other party has already gone on record any number of times that they have zero intention of cooperating with you on anything. But then, the Washington/US political media’s standard definition of ‘bipartisan’ is ‘Republicans get what they want’, so what are you gonna do. I also wish that Obama had acted with more urgency when he briefly had that filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, just to get nominations — judicial and otherwise — through. I’m less than thrilled with Obama’s failure to roll back some of the Bush-era excess with regard to Presidential power. I’m hoping for more effective governance in his second term, if it comes to pass. We’ll see.)
OK, the next one will have more pleasant answers, believe me!
Expect a lighter than normal posting frequency here for a short while. The main reason is that I really need to get the manuscript mark-ups done on Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). I’m way behind the goal I had set for myself, and I need to get the proverbial arse in gear. I’m not going on hiatus or anything, but there will be more days than usual where nothing new appears here.
(By the way, Little Quinn would have turned eight years old yesterday. Time’s passage never stops, does it?)
“Darmok” is one of the most memorable episodes, and for me a high point, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Enterprise makes contact with a people, the Tamarians, whose language has resisted all efforts at translation, to the point where not even the Universal Translator can make head nor tail of what they are saying. Their language appears to be based on random citations of stories, an extreme way of talking in metaphor and citing examples from a rich storytelling heritage to make one’s point. As someone who often thinks in terms of stories I’ve read or seen and who frequently cites them in the case of arguing various points, this hits home for me.
In the episode, Captain Picard and Captain Dathon (of the other ship) go down to a planet surface to face a ‘monster’, to suffer a shared danger, which Dathon hopes will somehow forge a connection between them. It takes Picard a while to realize that Dathon’s ‘kidnapping’ of Picard to the planet surface is intended as an act of friendship, and it takes him a bit longer to put together just what some of the Tamarian phrases mean. They do battle with the creature, and manage to fight it off…but Dathon is mortally wounded. At night, Picard and Dathon sit by a campfire. Dathon is clearly in great pain:
DATHON: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
PICARD: Our situation is similar to theirs. I understand that. But I need to know more. You must tell me more about Darmok and Jalad. Tell me. You used the words, ‘Temba, his arms wide’ when you gave me the knife and the fire. Could that mean give? Temba, his arms wide. Darmok. Give me more about Darmok.
DATHON: Darmok on the ocean.
PICARD: Darmok. (draws on the soil) The ocean. Darmok on the ocean. A metaphor? For being alone? Isolated? Darmok on the ocean.
(Dathon writhes in pain)
PICARD: Are you alright?
DATHON: Kiazi’s children, their faces wet.
PICARD: Temba, his arms open. Give me more about Darmok on the ocean.
DATHON: Tanagra on the ocean. Darmok at Tanagra.
PICARD: At Tanagra. A country? Tanagra on the ocean. An island. Temba, his arms wide.
DATHON: Jalad on the ocean. Jalad at Tanagra.
PICARD: Jalad at Tanagra. He went to the same island as Darmok. Darmok and Jalad Tanagra.
DATHON: The beast at Tanagra.
PICARD: The beast? There was a creature at Tanagra? Darmok and Jalad, the beast of Tanagra. They arrived separately. They struggled together against a common foe, the beast at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
DATHON: Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
PICARD: They left together. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
DATHON: The ocean. (another spasm) Zinda! His face black, his eyes red. Callimas at Bahar.
PICARD: You hoped this would happen, didn’t you? You knew there was a dangerous creature on this planet and you knew from the tale of Darmok that a danger shared might sometimes bring two people together. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. You and me, here, at El-Adrel.
DATHON: Kira at Bashi. Temba, his arms wide.
PICARD: My turn? No, I’m not much of a story teller. Besides, you wouldn’t understand. Shaka. when the walls fell. Perhaps that doesn’t matter. You want to hear it anyway. There’s a story, a very ancient one, from Earth. I’ll try and remember it. Gilgamesh, a king. Gilgamesh, a king, at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, send us a companion for our king. Spare us from his madness. Enkidu, a wild man from the forest, entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the street. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.
DATHON: At Uruk.
PICARD: The new friends went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail. Gilgamesh struck it with his sword.
DATHON: Gilgamesh.
PICARD: They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, ‘he who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.
At this point, sadly, Dathon dies. It’s a haunting moment in a terrific script, made all the better by Patrick Stewart and guest star Paul Winfield (as Dathon). It amuses me that they have Picard claim to not be a very good storyteller, and then he goes on to make even this Cliff’s Notes version of the Epic of Gilgamesh riveting.
I’ve heard some fans over the years wonder why they never revisited the Tamarians on Trek. I’m not sure, but I do think that as good as the Trek writers were, they weren’t always great science fiction writers, and to really be done well, the concept needed someone on the order of, say, a Vernor Vinge. The idea of a society whose collective memory has become so ingrained as to literally form the basis of its language is a fascinating one, and it would need to be done justice.
UPDATE 5-23-13: Thanks to the ever-wonderful Monti Carlo for linking this bit of silliness on Twitter and Facebook! And welcome to everyone dropping by. I hope you enjoy, feel free to look around a while, the furniture’s old so don’t worry about putting your feet up or putting coasters under your drinks! Yes, I’m weird, but I’m harmless. Really!
Spoilers for Master Chef, and mainly a tribute to contestant Monti, below the fold….
Well, I will find whatever episodes of Master Chef remain a lot less interesting, because my favorite contestant, Monti Carlo (yes, that is her real name), has been eliminated. Her departure was pretty upsetting: it was the first time in the whole season she ever found herself in the Bottom Two, and the other one there, Josh, had managed to completely screw up the assigned dish despite having won the earlier challenge and thus having literally been handed a box of the exact ingredients for the dish they were supposed to replicate.
Oh well. I thought Monti was just terrific. She was smart, skilled, and funny. She clearly didn’t know as much about food as some of the other contestants, but she made up for it with an adventurous spirit and a self-confidence that grew as the season went on. I loved the episode where she was given a John Dory fish to filet and cook, and she’d never even heard of that fish before, much less cooked one. The judges noted how long it was taking her to start fileting it, but when she did, she took the knife right to it and muttered, “I’m gonna figure you out.” I loved that.
I don’t think she was destined to win, really; I expect the finale to boil down to Frank (the Italian stockbroker with mad kitchen skills) and Christine (the blind woman with mad kitchen skills). Becky is annoying with her oddly inflated sense of self-worth, and so is Josh, with his pouting whenever he doesn’t get what he wants. I don’t think Monti was going to win, but I think she should have come closer than this. And if Graham (the fat judge) was going to offer the last guy to get eliminated a job in one of his restaurants, why no offer to Monti? Why didn’t Gordon Ramsay offer her the money for a down payment on the food truck that she wants to run?
Oh well.
I also loved Monti because she had fantastic facial expressions. She mugged for the camera wonderfully, so I took some screengrabs and captioned them…as if Monti was the heroine in some kind of cheesy Asian martial arts/fantasy flick. At least, that’s the notion….
Best of luck, Monti…and regards to Danger!
(Monti’s son is named Danger. Really. In the first episode, she noted that he’ll thank her for that one day.)
One of my favorite little things in The Music Man is the way Prof. Harold Hill is able to continually distract the School Board from investigating his background by tricking them into singing. Here’s one such example, which combines with another lovely song being sung by Marian Paroo across town: “Lida Rose” and “Will I Ever Tell You”.
(Note to self: Wow, it’s been a lot of years since you’ve watched The Music Man. What’s up with that?)
If the government came to you and said “We will spend whatever amount of money it takes to do the one thing that you think will improve life in your municipality the most”, what one thing would you pick?
OK, another frozen pizza. Sticking with the Palermo brand and their ultra-thin crust, this time I went the complete opposite way from the cheese pizza I had the first time. This time, I had a Supreme pizza.
In general, over the years, my pizza tastes have shifted from liking tons of toppings to liking only a few toppings. ‘Supreme’ type pizzas too often seem like overkill to me nowadays, what with lots of pizza makers seemingly approaching these pizzas as a way of cramming toppings into every possible bite. The problem then is that all the flavors just end up clashing together, and all those toppings can make the crust hard to get nicely cooked, too.
(Now, there are exceptions here – our favorite local pizza joint, Imperial Pizza, absolutely loads its pizzas with toppings, and they’re frakking heavenly. I am large, I contain multitudes!)
So anyway, here’s the Palermo Ultra-thin Supreme Pizza box:
And here’s the pie just out of the box, before going in the oven.
In truth, I like the way that looks. There is a variety of toppings (pepperoni, Italian sausage, onions, peppers, and black olives), but they’re not so heavily piled on there that the cheese itself disappears. On that basis, this pizza looks promising. Into the oven it goes…
…and about twelve minutes later (the box recommends 10 to 15 minutes of baking), out it comes.
That looks…really nice. Really, really nice. The only downside here is that because toppings are taken right to the edge, a couple of those items actually fell off in the course of baking and wound up on the floor of the oven. There’s a little char around the edges (could’ve been a little more with a few more minutes in the oven), but no real burning. The bottom of the crust, like the cheese pizza, looks great:
But of course, the final test is in the eating. The crust and sauce are pretty much identical to the Cheese-lovers, so I ditto those comments here. The main difference here is the toppings, so what of them? They’re pretty good. Now, let’s be clear here: we’re talking frozen pizza, so we’re not going to be getting the highest quality toppings here. But the pepperoni is pretty good, as is the sausage. The meats are a bit on the dry side, which is fairly typical for frozen pizza; the veggies are decent and taste of what they are. Not great toppings, really, but as frozen pizza goes, they’re pretty good.
I liked this one.
(Why no, this series of posts isn’t just an excuse I’ve given myself to eat frozen pizza. Why do you ask?)
Chris asks: What’s your favorite vegetarian recipe? (If it’s good, I’d actually love to know the ingredients, not just the name. 🙂 )
First of all, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what’s ‘vegetarian’. I would tend to consider something vegetarian if no animals were killed for the production of the item, which means, I consider vegetarianism to be quite compatible with eating dairy products. That said, I love a pizza with no meat on it. One of my favorite pizzas has garlic and olive oil spread on the crust, topped with mozzarella cheese, and then sliced tomatoes and banana peppers. I think that pizza without meat is awfully great.
And of course, salads. Love salads. You can go in lots of directions.
And fried rice or noodle stir-fries, with lots of good veggies thrown in. I’m discovering that I like quite a few veggies either raw or cooked in stir-fry fashion (i.e., cooked on high heat very quickly). My latest discovery is that stir-fried or quick-cooked string beans make me happy. Yay!
Vegetarian sandwiches are cool, and you don’t have to pile them with salad-type veggies, either. PB&J is vegetarian, yes? Or PB and potato chips? Yum! And a favorite sandwich of mine is cream cheese and sliced strawberries on thick, toasted, whole-grain bread.
Ooooh, and beans! Love beans. I absolutely adore beans. I think beans are wonderful. I tend to include meat in my chili just out of habit, but increasingly it occurs to me that if I just add a fourth can of beans, why would I even need the meat at all? Beans are awesome!
Here are some problem areas: are eggs ‘vegetarian’? I struggle with the dividing lines thereof.
One vegetable I want to experiment with this winter (when I do more baking) is eggplant. Ultimately, I don’t do a whole lot with specific recipes yet, in terms of vegetarianism. My approach has been to gradually incorporate more vegetables in my diet, in keeping with Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” But as I explore this stuff more, I will post recipes and various discoveries as I go!
Chris also asks: And, if you could have one – just one – superhero ability, which would it be and why?
Flight. Wouldn’t it be amazing to fly!
Jeremy asks: My question is: Would you rather invent a true blue rose or the next best smart phone? Why?
I had to do some Googling for this one. It turns out that, as roses evolved, they are incapable of producing a true blue color in their petals, because of the genetics involved. So, of course, people have been trying for years to force the issue and create a rose that will blossom true blue. The things you learn!
And frankly, I’d rather do that than come up with the next great smart phone (or whatever other electronic gizmo). The first true blue rose can only happen once, but there will always be a next great smart phone, or laptop, or tablet, or whatever.
Unless…unless what Jeremy is asking is, would I want to create the first great whatever-the-next-thing-is. If I want to create the first iPad or iPod…or the first Macintosh…or so on. But even so…I’ll take the rose. As William Blake wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
Actually, I’m not sure that applies…but I like that poem, anyway.
