Author: Kelly Sedinger

Some people really want to build a space elevator. Part of me thrills to this idea; another part of me — having read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy — is scared by giving the bin Ladens of the world such a tempting target. But that, I suppose, would be a point in favor of building it.

And what a sight that cable would be! I wonder how far away from the Earthbound-terminal one could be and still see the thing. I wonder how much economic activity would spring up around that terminal, wherever it is. I wonder where that terminal would be, in the first place — someplace with a high level of geological stability, I would assume. That would leave out California. This looks like a job for Nebraska.

(Thanks to Sean for the link.)

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Reviews of John Williams’s score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones are starting to pop up on the Web and Usenet, including this one from Ain’t It Cool News. The good news is that so far the buzz on the score is very positive. The bad news is that the thing isn’t going to be released until April 23. It’s going to be a long four weeks….

(….assuming, of course, that I do not succumb to temptation and track down the MP3’s of the thing that are circulating now….must resist the Dark Side….)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Icon of Christ Pantokrator, Mount Athos Monastery

I’ve been somewhat interested in Byzantine mosaic ever since I read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic duology, in which the protagonist is a mosaicist. There is something fascinating in a wondrous image being constructed from thousands of tiny pieces of glass. Particularly amazing is the detail in Christ’s beard — no uniform brown, but definite contours and light patches. I had never realized that this level of detail is possible in mosaic; the mosaics that I have seen tend to be done with larger tesserae, giving the images a “boxy” look not unlike the graphics on early-1980s home video game systems. Also fascinating is the fact that the images in the mosaics are so dependent on light heightens the religiosity of the image. A well-done mosaic, lit well, seems to glow under its own power. It is no wonder the Byzantines used mosaic so extensively in their religious iconography.



(Click on the image to see the Byzantine Studies page at Fordham University, where I found it.)

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I posted a long-winded review of Howard Shore’s Oscar-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to the rec.music.movies newsgroup. It can be read, via Google, here.

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I keep repeating to myself, like a Zen mantra, “The Oscars are meaningless….the Oscars are meaningless….the Oscars are meaningless….” Or, I borrow from William Goldman: “There is no ‘best’….there is no ‘best’….there is no ‘best’….”

….and yet I’m still annoyed that Ian McKellan didn’t win an Oscar. Oh well, maybe the Academy is waiting to see what he does in The Two Towers, when Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White….or maybe they’re just a bunch of dingbats. I’d like to believe the former, but I fear that the “dingbat” theory will have to hold sway for now.

But at least they made up for it by finally giving Randy Newman an Oscar. What a fine, fine songwriter and musician. What belated recognition. (Not so belated as Cary Grant, who was the Ernie Banks of Oscars, but still belated.)

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Until today, if asked to name the single worst decision made by a sports figure in the last year (meaning decisions directly related to onfield-happenings, leaving out things like Jeff Kent’s apparent motorcycle ride/truck washing), I would have named St. Louis Rams head coach Mike Martz’s bizarre decision in the Super Bowl to only give Marshall Faulk seventeen carries, despite the facts that Faulk averaged 4.5 yards per carry in that game and the Patriots played the entire game in a defensive scheme that practically rolled out the red carpet for a power running game. That was a godawful decision, and because of that the Rams are runners-up.

But the worst sports decision has to be Michelle Kwan’s dismissal of her longtime coach, Frank Carroll. Kwan lost again to Irina Slutskaya, this time at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano. Her skating since she decided to go it alone has been tentative and sloppy, nothing like what had previously been expected from Kwan. As for Carroll? His current star, American Timothy Goebel, like Kwan took bronze at the Olympics and silver at World’s. But Goebel’s star is on the rise. Kwan’s is supposed to be shining brightly; instead it is on the wane.

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One of the better writers of the space opera subgenre in science fiction is Timothy Zahn. His novels set in the Star Wars universe are probably the best available, and I’ve just finished Conquerors’ Heritage, the second volume in his Conquerors trilogy. This is the story of a war between spacefaring humanity and what is at first presented as a ruthless conquering alien race called the Zhirzh. However, the second book of the trilogy is told from the Zhirzh point of view, and the war takes on a new light as it becomes clear that the whole thing is the sad result of a series of unfortunate mistakes, blunders, and failures of understanding. One of these errors is fairly obvious well before it is revealed at the end of Book Two, and the Zhirzh — despite some interesting cultural habits — don’t seem “alien” enough. Zahn hasn’t quite met John Campbell’s challenge of showing an alien who thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. Those are really mere quibbles, though. Zahn tells a tight story with interesting subplots that come together in unexpected ways. I’m looking forward to reading the third book in this trilogy.

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Congratulations to Timothy Goebel, who just won the silver at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano, Japan. (Of course, had Evgeny Pleshenko competed Goebel probably would have finished bronze.) As for the new World Champion, what can be said? Alexei Yagudin is far and away better than anyone else skating right now.

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Just finished: Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures by Noah Adams. Adams, a commentator for NPR, wrote this book to recount a year he spent attempting to learn how to play the piano. It’s a charming book that tells the story of what might be considered a kind of “midlife crisis”.

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There is always something kind of goofy about the World Championships of Figure Skating during Olympic years. They’re always held just a month or so after the Games, and they invariably feel a tad anticlimactic, especially since just about all of the skaters use the exact same programs with which they competed in the Olympics, and some of the newly-crowned Olympic champions or runners-up end up not competing at Worlds. Notable absences this year include America’s Sarah Hughes and Russia’s Evgeny Pleshenko. (Not that it matters in the latter case; Alexei Yagudin right now is the skating equivalent of the 1990s Chicago Bulls.)

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