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F*** You, Daylight Savings (but REALLY f*** you, clock changes)

Oh fer f***’s sake, here we go again.

At this point I’m willing to join the growing chorus of Americans (who are always completely ignored because a constant disconnect between public opinion and actual public policy is a weird but permanent fact in American democracy) who say “Just keep DST year-round and stop changing the stupid clocks twice a year.”

I say this even though I personally greatly dislike DST: mornings go from slowly brightening when I get up for work to being stone-dark again, and honestly, the extra daylight at the end of the day doesn’t do me any damned good. I hear testimonies to the contrary each and every year: “It gives me more time to get my yard work done!” And I’m always thinking, “Does it? Really? Are you really out there mowing the lawn at 8:45pm?”

(The answer to this, I’ve discovered, is in quite a few cases, “Yes”, because I’ve also learned that Americans are frankly deeply weird about their lawns. But that’s a thing for another day.)

I’ve never understood the people who like it to still be sunny well after 8:00pm, and it really screws up my Circadian rhythms when from mid-June to mid-July it’s still bright enough outside to read without lighting assistance after 9:30pm. I am by temperament a night person (forced by the requirements of employment to embrace mornings, with eternal skepticism and mistrust) who needs darkness to wind down! But I also need times of darkness (physical darkness here, let’s not get all metaphorical) to really live my life. I like contrasts in my life: light and dark, hot and cold, sweet and sour, dog and cat. When DST is at its peak, there’s no contrast for me to enjoy. The beauty of deepening dusk and the following night come too late, for an entire month, to really savor.

I suppose this might go back to when I was a kid. I remember being put to bed as a kindergartner at 8:00pm when the sun was still streaming through my bedroom window, and I’ve never recovered. (This is not intended as an indictment of my parents! I get the whole “set bedtime” thing. But I found it incredibly hard to go to sleep at such times, and I still do.) But for me, now, Daylight Savings’s peak period, when it extends useful daylight almost to the time when local news is airing its late-night installments, inflicts upon me a kind of reverse-Seasonal Affective Disorder, when too much sunlight when I don’t want it gives me a feeling of general disquiet, unease, and unrest. This only goes away by late July when the shift of sunset back the other way starts to give me noticeable dusk at a time when I can notice it. This is another reason why August is my favorite summer month.

But even so…as I get older, it’s the changing of the clocks that I hate most about this dumb American policy that benefits nobody at all except our weird sun-worshiping culture. I will spend most of the coming week in a sleep-debt fog, motivation will be harder to summon up, and I will probably hit to coffee pot harder than I really should. And honestly, the “fall back” version won’t be much of a relief when it comes, either, because we’ve now set that one so far back in the year that it feels like a plunging of the world into darkness too quickly.

I don’t like Daylight Savings Time, I don’t like changing clocks, and I don’t share our society’s obsession with SUN SUN SUN. But if I have to pick my poison, I choose keeping DST and shutting down this idiocy of clock-changing. After all, as Mr. Eastwood once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

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Twenty years a blogger….

Last week a local person graciously cited me as a creative person worth following online, which was a compliment I greatly appreciated! But what really took me back was the description:

https://twitter.com/MeyersMusings/status/1498029014023352322

Two decades? Really?

That’s when it hit me: Last month marked twenty years of me blogging.

I launched Byzantium’s Shores on BlogSpot back in February of 2002. I almost made it to twenty years of maintaining that same exact blog, but last year I went ahead and pulled the trigger on migrating to this space, because owning one’s own space online is really the way to go as corporate interests become more and more vested in controlling the content that is posted in the spaces that they own (and then, oddly, entrust the moderation of said content to badly-programmed AI bots that confuse tone and do things like require a certain popular commenter to take down a post the AI had labeled as “hate speech”, when all it did was post verbatim an official statement by the 45th President).

Looking back at 2002 and my road to blogging, some of it seems pretty clear and some of it is kind of foggy, like anything would be when viewed from so long a distance. I’d been a prolific poster on a few Usenet newsgroups at the time, but I was already chafing at wanting to write about stuff that wasn’t really on topic for those few newsgroups where I was a regular. Then a Google search for an old friend’s name turned up an interesting-looking website of his, which looked like basically an online journal, and shortly after that, I remember reading an article in an issue of TIME or NEWSWEEK about this new thing: “blogs”, short for “web log”, which are exactly what my friend was doing. He was maintaining an online journal and writing his occasional thoughts about…things.

I started looking around for blogs–

(OK, an aside here: I have ALWAYS hated the word ‘blog’. Can’t stand it. It’s the word we’ve settled on, but I really wish we’d called them e-journals instead. That would fit better with e-mail and e-books, and connotatively, ‘e-journaling’ sounds a bit less nerdy than ‘blogging’.)

–and after I figured out how to set one up, using Blogger and its hosting site BlogSpot, off I went.

Functionality back then was really bare-bones. Permanent links to posts were a total crapshoot as to whether they’d work or not. There was no photo hosting of any kind, and back then “hotlinking” photos on other sites was a big no-no. Google was still several years away from buying Blogger, so the service didn’t have very deep pockets. Unless you knew at least a little about HTML, you were locked into a few basic templates and you couldn’t even change your typeface on your blog. Unless you paid Blogger for the “pro” version, every blog had a toolbar with ads splashed across the top.

Here’s one of the first blogs I ever followed, back in the day. This one closed up shop a year and a half after I started blogging, and I’m honestly a bit surprised that it still exists online at all. I found that one, if memory serves, via a “Randomly Featured Blogs” sidebar that would show up on the main Blogger site. Blogs at the time were so new that you pretty much found new ones by following links back and forth and bookmarking the ones you wanted to keep reading when you found them. If you really liked another blog, you’d put it on your “blogroll”, the list of links to other blogs that you maintained on yours. The more times you got listed on others’ blogrolls, and the more times popular blogs linked yours, the more traffic you’d get. There was a “process” to “going viral” back then.

I didn’t post under my real name initially, as this was still the era–a waning era, to be sure, but it was still the thinking–that you shouldn’t share your real name online. Gradually this became less and less workable and less and less of a big deal, so the old screen name “Jaquandor” is now pretty much of a personal anachronism that dates back to my AOL days of posting on Usenet.

The tone of blogging back then was wild and wooly. When I started, 9-11 was less than six months in the past; I’m not even sure that the dust had even stopped settling, literally, at the World Trade Center site. As the nation reeled from that attack and as other powers started pushing for a war that was cast as a response to that attack (but I think we all know by now had almost nothing to do with it, along with another war that was a response but instead led to twenty years of bungling), so the online discussion turned mainly to matters of politics and war. Even then the general political tone polarized quite a bit, with bloggers skeptical of the war on one side, and bloggers vociferously for the war on the other.

I read a lot on both sides back then, and when I say that the folks for the war were for the war, I mean, they were FOR that war. They wanted it badly. There were times when I could almost sense their glee when the first bombs started falling. My own feelings on the war were mixed at first, but I quickly soured on the whole idea as it became clear that the whole thing was an exercise in chest-thumping triumphalism (“Mission Accomplished!”, the banner read, after just weeks of combat in a large independent country) and masculinity-run-amok.

The “blogosphere” at the time was an eerie forerunner of what we see in a lot of social media today, in a more prolix era, a time when people weren’t limited to 280 characters, or even 280 words. Anyone who remembers a blogger named Steven Den Beste will remember some really wordy screeds cheerleading the war. Den Beste was a strange dude whom I found weirdly compelling, kind of an intellectual tire-fire from which I couldn’t divert attention. He was a former engineer who retired to a blogging-from-his-apartment lifestyle, and he would often start his very long posts in an interesting fashion, describing some issue in science or from his old engineering life or whatever. This was always kind of interesting, until he’d inevitably reveal how the thing he was talking about was really a metaphor to support yet another argument of his for why bombing Iraq back to the days of Nebuchadnezzar was really the best thing for the region. Den Beste would later abandon politics on his own site and recast his blog as an anime-fandom blog, though he contributed more and more political screeds to other sites. He often insisted that he didn’t like labels and that he had no real political “home”, but as the years went by, it was increasingly clear that he was a mainstream right-winger. I eventually stopped reading Den Beste entirely when he expressed feelings of schadenfreude toward those who felt that George Zimmerman’s acquittal in killing Trayvon Martin was a travesty. A year or two ago I suddenly remember Steven Den Beste and searched his name, wondering if he was still out there cranking out anime reviews. Turns out he died in 2016.

I don’t mention him now to throw rocks at him, but Steven Den Beste is one of my main memories of the tone of the “early” blogosphere (which I preferred to call “Blogistan”), at least on the national or worldwide scale. He even linked me a couple of times, once with bemusement when I responded with what I hoped was obviously fake outrage at his negative review of Attack of the Clones. I think he got it: his link to my response was something like “Kelly Sedinger comments here, and he might want to calm down a little!” If nothing else, Den Beste was more than willing to engage people who thought he was full of crap. Again, I don’t intend to single him out negatively, but I mention him at length precisely because he was a memorable voice back then, in a time when even then there were a lot of voices, many of which were saying the same things in the same ways.

Blogging had a more local focus as well, and once we resettled in the Buffalo area after our brief stay in the Syracuse region in 2002-2003, I started connecting with local bloggers, some of whom focused on politics and others who focused on other things. A small but fun community arose, and we even had several meet-ups out in the “real world”, the first of which was at a brewery-bar in downtown Buffalo. The local blogs brought up local issues, and national issues, and not just politics as well: I remember debates about the merits of various styles of pizza, which of the Democratic candidates in 2008 might be able to win, what the Bass Pro plaza in downtown Buffalo should be like (what a hoot!), and so on. If that sounds like all the kinds of things you see now on Facebook and Twitter, well…there’s a reason for that, isn’t there? But the Buffalo blogging community was a cool one, and though many of those folks have long since abandoned their blogs, they’re still online in social media and I still follow many of them.

People like to scoff at the idea of an online “community” being any kind of community at all, but…when Little Quinn died, a bunch of people I only knew online showed up at his wake to pay respects. I will always remember that.

Blogging now, in 2022, has changed and has remained the same, in a lot of strange ways. Facebook and Twitter have taken over many of its main functions, and for people who still want to do long-form work that is ill-suited to those platforms, there are paid platforms for monetization like Patreon, Substack, and others. The essence of blogging is still out there but is largely decentralized. Maybe that’s a good thing, as blogs never really seemed to break through into the general awareness in the way that Facebook and Twitter and others later would, even if a lot of that functionality still exists. Locally I remember that a few times a year the Buffalo News would report on blogs, and each time the tone was pretty much the same: “Hey, there are these things called ‘blogs’! What are they? Let’s find out!” And the article would feature a few local bloggers. I was never one of them. Yes, this annoyed me.

It is interesting to see the “essence” of blogging come back, albeit in the form of paywalled newsletters and content-aggregators like Substack and the rest. I’m of mixed mind on this, to be honest. People should be able to get paid for their work, but I do miss the wild-and-wooly nature of the “early Blogosphere”, which was kind of a free-for-fall. And I continue to be irritated that the paid-content model is almost entirely subscription based. There are many times when I’ll find something I’m interested in reading…but I am not interested in signing up for a year of access for a single article in which I may be interested. This is not just a problem with paywalled news sites; I’m now seeing it on sites that are basically all but blogs in name. Just this week there’s been an in-depth article making the local rounds about the now-infamous “13 seconds” in the recent Bills-Chiefs playoff game; this morning I went to check that article, only to find that after reading ten paragraphs, the rest is cut off by a “This article is for paid subscribers only” notice. Look, content-creators of the world, I have to be honest: never say “never” and all that, but I have not once, to this point in my life, found a paywalled article online that I wanted to read so badly that I upped for a subscription to a site. The solution here is some kind of pay-by-the-article micropayment system, which is often suggested but so far never created. One waits and hopes.

Blogging also cemented overalls as a major piece of my online identity, as it were! Blogger finally added photo-hosting services sometime in the mid-aughts, so I added a profile pic, in which I had happened to be wearing overalls. The photo was a terrible one (no, I don’t think I still have it, and no, if I find it I won’t share it), which I took using an old Polaroid Instamatic camera and then scanned in using our old flatbed scanner (geez, just typing that description of the process makes my eyes glaze over!), and someone joked about me resembling an axe-murderer! (It was a terrible picture! But it was my first attempt at such a thing, and if anyone knows how much I hated having my picture taken as a kid, that was a really big corner to turn.)

So anyway, here I am, still blogging away, now on ForgottenStars.net, still holding forth on many of the same topics as always, along hopefully with some new ones. When I started blogging, I was still eight or nine years away from really starting work on Stardancer, after a few “trunk” novels (one of which I posted online as a blog itself before taking it down a while back). It was four living spaces ago, The Daughter was still in her “terrible twos”, The Wife and I were only approaching five years of marriage, and a whole lot of friends and life and stuff ago.

A lot of people have come, gone, and come again in the time I’ve been blogging. Some I discovered at some point and have followed ever since (her, her, him, him) Many bloggers have given up the habit but are still friends online; many more have vanished completely. Some I have sadly outlived (Messrs. Mannion and Teachout, for example). I remember regular readers who fell away over time–I hope this was a function of life and not a shift in my writing!–like a woman who lived in Winnipeg and another named Michelle who was a fellow candle in the dark in a time when the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was still deeply unappreciated. And if my blog has never been widely read, at least I also have never much had to deal with obnoxious trolls.

And to think, when I started Byzantium’s Shores in February 2002, I figured that maybe, maybe!, I’d have about a year’s worth of things to say before I wrapped that little sub-hobby up and moved on. Little did I know. As ever, I continue marching on, for however long I feel like doing this.

…and if you’ve been reading (or have read me at any point along the way), I thank you!

Totally NOT an axe-murderer.

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Still masking.

Seen on Twitter yesterday:

In recent weeks in New York, the masks have been coming off. The Governor dropped her mask mandate several weeks ago (minus a couple of exceptions), and most counties have followed suit. My employer, The Store, kept its own masking policy for employees in place…until yesterday, when masks were made “optional” for employees who are fully vaccinated and boosted.

I’m still exercising my option to wear the mask, and I plan to keep doing so until the policy is revised to forbid them.

Why? Well, I set out my reasons for simply not minding masks back in September, and my opinion has not changed. I do not hate wearing the thing. Most times I forget it’s even on after a few minutes, and at this point I feel weird without it. But it’s not just that: I like being at an even lower risk of either contracting or giving someone else COVID. And moreover, I like the fact that I have not had a cold in more than two years.

I’m not a sickly person in general, but in “normal” years I could usually count on getting “the bug that’s going around” a couple times a year. From the first scratchy throat to the final cough clearing up would usually take around a week to ten days, and while it wasn’t debilitating, it wasn’t fun, either. And with masking and maintaining a healthy distance from most folks, I haven’t had a single cold since sometime in 2019. I like that.

And you know what else I like? I still like not being told to smile. I live in a world that overvalues the smile, with the expectation that everybody must have a giant permagrin at all times. The removal of masks has reminded me of this, as one of the biggest selling points is “Now I can see everybody smiling!” With a mask on, I smile as much as I ever did…but with the mask, my nonsmiling moments aren’t nearly as frequently assumed to be angry moments.

Honestly, I’ve reached a point where noses and mouths look odd to me. I’m fine looking people in the eye, not having my mood judged, and not having spent money on NyQuil or Mucinex since Josh Allen was a rookie. So yeah, I’ll be keeping my mask on a while longer, if you don’t mind.

Actually, I’ll do it if you do mind…and really, that might be another incentive to keep wearing it. I mean, if you saw Ron DeSantis yelling at some kids to take their masks off the other day…well, screw that guy and anyone who thinks like that.

 

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Forty-four percent

I see that he has finally exited the stage, after tormenting the nation for twenty-two years, or fourty-four percent of my life. He’s gone. It’s over, at long, long last.

I look forward to eventually learning the real secret of his strange longevity, but that’s about all I plan to think about with regard to this guy.

Oh, and the Greatest Of All Time is still Mr. Montana.

That’s all I have to say about that.

 

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My current reaction to a certain news item

There’s a thing that might be happening today, or it might not, and absent confirmation by the person who can confirm whether the hoped-for thing is in fact happening today, I will keep my reaction noncommittal. Moreover, everyone acting as if the thing that might be happening today actually is happening today would do well to listen to the wisdom of Mr. Toby Ziegler in this West Wing clip.

Or, failing that, Professor Jones’s wisdom from this scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

INDY: Well? We made it!

PROFESSOR JONES: When we’re airborne, with Germany behind us, then I’ll share that sentiment.

Indeed.

Confirmation. I need it!

 

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The problem with the playoffs is only one team gets a happy ending.

I haven’t written about football in this space (well, not this space, but you know what I mean) in years. I stopped watching football regularly more than ten years ago, and now I only watch if I happen to be someplace where it’s already on someone else’s teevee. But one would have to live under a rock to not know that a recent renaissance has taken place for the Buffalo Bills, after a long seventeen-year-long stretch of never making the playoffs and often being downright bad.

I’m not going to do a deep dive of any sort into yesterday’s playoff loss, a 42-36 defeat by the Kansas City Chiefs. You can find that sort of thing elsewhere–especially analyses of the self-inflicted wounds that were the special teams and defensive playcalling in the last 13 seconds of regulation time, when the Bills–owning a three point lead and just that long away from advancing–instead gave up a field goal to force overtime, and then a touchdown in OT to lose. What a sequence.

(I did not watch the game, by the way. I follow games online at times, seeing social media reactions and checking the box score in-progress. Why not? Sports got along just fine with most fans not seeing the games on teevee for decades.)

I will note, though, that the NFL’s overtime rules continue to be absolutely insane. It is inexplicable that they continue with overtime that makes it possible for a team to win while the losing team never so much as touches the ball. This defies all reasoning, and no other sport does it that way. Basketball and hockey have extra periods, and baseball just tacks on additional innings as needed, so the home team always gets one last at bat. Not so the NFL, which has decided that if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, the game ends. But the game does not end if the first team only scores a field goal. This ridiculous kludge of a rule was what the NFL did after another notorious playoff game, one involving the San Diego Chargers and the Indianapolis Colts, if I recall correctly. The Chargers got the ball and won immediately on a field goal, while Peyton Manning, then one of the game’s biggest stars, watched in sullen silence before heading for the locker room.

The same thing happened last night: Buffalo’s Josh Allen, one of the games brightest stars these days, never got a chance. You can’t tell me that the NFL wants it this way. There’s a reason they scheduled Bills-Chiefs as the late game on Sunday of Divisional Playoff Weekend: because that’s the game most people would want to see. And yet, it ended in a lame coronation because of the league’s stupid overtime rule.

The way to fix this is, for me, fairly obvious: add ten minute periods as needed, and just keep playing until time expires and there’s a winner. I’d keep play moving by awarding no timeouts to either team, and I would eliminate the coin toss by simply positing that the visiting team gets the ball first. (Oh, and I’d also eliminate the opening coin toss as well. In baseball, the home team always bats in the bottom of the inning, and I’d do likewise in football: the visiting team receives the opening kickoff in the 1st, and the home team receives in the 3rd.)

A game’s stars need to play. The NFL’s current system allows for a possibility of the game’s stars being spectators to their own defeats. This is just absurd.

Also, on Josh Allen: my God, can you imagine having a quarterback put up the postseason that guy did, and still falling short? It’s astonishing, and it reminds me of a scene from Star Trek:

What’s happening here is that the Enterprise is participating in some simulated war games, pitting Picard against Commander Riker. But as they get underway, Data has just lost a strategy game like chess to some guy, leading him to conclude that he must be malfunctioning. Picard finally has to go tell him that no, he’s not malfunctioning, he just got beat.

Anyway.

That’s about all I have to say about last night’s game. It’s time for the offseason. The draft is in three months. Training camp’s in six. Better luck next year, Bills.

 

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Live and Let Rank: The Official and Correct Ranking of the James Bond Movies, part 2

Continuing my Official And Correct Ranking of the James Bond films! This time we will go from Number 20 to Number 16. Our first entry contained the one Bond film I outright dislike, followed by several that just don’t do a whole lot for me and which are almost never my flick of choice when I decide I want to watch a Bond movie. With this list, we start getting into “Not my favorite, but watchable and sometimes I’ll turn it on for fun” territory.

Here’s the ranking thus far:

26. LIVE AND LET DIE

25. DIE ANOTHER DAY

24. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

23. GOLDFINGER

22. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

21. A VIEW TO A KILL

And now, we move on!

20. TOMORROW NEVER DIES

Some years ago a blogger named Snell had a James Bond blog that he updated for major Bond events (new films, news of new films, that sort of thing). Sadly Snell died about a year ago, so he never got to see No Time To Die, but he did cite me in his review of Tomorrow Never Dies, when I had previously referred to that movie as “a film I like as an action movie, but not so much as a Bond movie.” I stand by this assessment to this day. Tomorrow Never Dies would, I think, be frankly better if it was simply redone for some other action hero. It took me a long time to really figure out why I always have such a weird relationship with this movie, and I finally figured it out: TND is the least subtle Bond movie ever. This movie doesn’t have a single ounce of subtlety in it. And that’s my problem with it.

You may be thinking, “Bond? Subtle?” Well, yes! The Bond series won’t ever be in the Subtlety Hall of Fame, but these movies do tend to deploy subtlety in enough doses to be effective. TND, though, is just blunt-force trauma from start to finish. The precredit sequence is a thrilling mini-action movie on its own, yes–and it ends with Bond apparently being able to include “flying a modern jet fighter with more skill than trained pilots” in his skill set. Bond can apparently use the touch-screen controls on his 90s-era phone to drive his new car with as much precision as he’s ever driven anything else. This gives us another very nice action sequence (the action in this movie is some of the best-filmed action in any Bond movie), but again, a disconnect: He can drive like this with a remote control he’s never touched? And he’s laughing with delight as he does so, minutes after he saw a former lover murdered?

On that last point: my general take on the Brosnan films is that they are full of great ideas that are executed poorly, for one reason or another. This is why a lot of ideas from Brosnan’s films showed up again in the Daniel Craig run: it’s as if Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, writers of Brosnan’s last two movies, were set free by the jettisoning of the Bond Formula that came with the series reboot, and thus were able to put their ideas to better use. Note that Purvis and Wade did not write TND, so they’re blameless here, but TND has two great ideas, and only one is done well. The one they nail is the media mogul villain who is manipulating events for his own profit. Yes, we’ve seen this in You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker and A View To A Kill, but Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver is a particularly nasty and believable piece of work, coming as he does in the late 90s, when we were just starting to become aware of giant media conglomerates starting to consolidate their power.

The other great idea in TND, though? The one handled badly? That’s Paris Carver, the Teri Hatcher character.

Think about James Bond, and all the ex-girlfriends he has all over the world! Think how many times he’s had the break-up speech. Yes, some of those were undoubtedly mutual; I’m sure Octopussy was fine with it, because she was a mature woman with her own doings in life. Others, though, were probably less thrilled to get dumped by Bond. And here comes TND, which puts Bond in the position of having to contact one of his former lovers from an old adventure of his! That is a great idea! I loved this idea. The previous Brosnan flick, GoldenEye, had Bond squaring off against a former Double-O, and now this one has him with a former lover. But the character is wasted, just becoming another in the long line of Bond Girls Who Die At The End Of Act One. Bond and Paris have a conversation (“Tell me, James, do you still sleep with a gun under your pillow?”) that is immediately eavesdropped on by our boy Elliot, who is instantly aware of his wife’s possible faulty loyalty. So we know her fate barely a minute after she’s introduced onscreen.

Lack of subtlety? How about the film’s briefing scene? It takes place not in M’s office but in a car speeding to the airport, and it serves less as a briefing and more as a series of sexual puns using the word “pump” (“Contact Mrs. Carver, your former lover, and pump her for information. You may have to do a lot of pumping. Pump away, 007.”) And the Michelle Yeoh character? Yeoh is terrific! I totally believe that she’s pretty much Bond’s equal, though once again we get a Female Bond who ends up in a pickle while Bond does the world-saving all by himself. We don’t get much about her as a character, unfortunately–the movie has to spend its first act on Paris Carver, so that we feel bad when she’s killed, and by this time the plot is whisking along so there’s no more time for any character stuff, so Wai Lin is shorted in the character department. She and Brosnan do have chemistry, but so did Brosnan and Hatcher, so this movie wastes two potentially good female characters.

Joe Don Baker’s not-Felix Leiter character? I liked him a lot and I wish he’d been around for more of these. Alas.

Oh, and TND saw the arrival of new Bond composer David Arnold, who did terrific work here, weaving in snatches of references to older themes and alluding to John Barry’s style while doing his own thing. The title song by Sheryl Crow isn’t a favorite of mine, while the kd lang song that closes out the film is a terrific ballad in Bond tradition. Arnold’s score actually incorporates the kd lang song’s tune, so I assume that was meant to be the title song before someone higher up the food chain at Eon Productions or MGM mandated using Crow. Anyway….

19. QUANTUM OF SOLACE

OK, after the big word-dump on TND, I’ll try to rein it in a bit on Quantum. We’ll start with the Rule of Bondian Time, a law I’m just now positing: Beware a Bond film that ends in under two hours.

I’m serious. I’ve just looked it up, and there are, to this writing, five Bond movies with run times less than two hours, and four of those are in the bottom half of my rankings. (One of them does make it into my Top Five, but every rule has an exception, no?) Bond stories need time to unfold. They tend to be fairly complex, plot-wise, and each one needs to establish a new set of characters. When these movies get short, it’s almost always to the detriment of story, character, or both. Can Bond movies be too long? I suppose, though I tend to default to Roger Ebert’s formulation: “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.”

As of this writing, Quantum of Solace is the shortest Bond movie ever made, at 1 hour, 46 minutes. This comes after Casino Royale‘s 2 hours, 24 minutes, so Quantum feels like a bit of whiplash, especially when Quantum does a first for a Bond movie: it starts literally minutes after the last one ended. I’ve come to think that this may have been a mistaken choice in terms of narrative, because Quantum asks us to (a) follow Bond’s relentless quest for the nefarious organization behind the scheme that ended up costing Bond the first great love of his life, Vesper Lynd, and (b) acknowledge Bond’s grief at the disastrous end of his first true love affair. Quantum ends up being slightly more convincing on the former score and less so on the latter, partly because it compresses all of this into basically a few days of story time, and because it passes by so relentlessly quickly that none of the story elements really come together. Shame, that.

Quantum was partially hampered by a writer’s strike that sent the movie into production before the script was really ready, and stories abound of Daniel Craig spending his time not in front of the camera hastily scrawling script pages off to the side. Also, the movie looks strange for a Bond movie: washed out and even garish at times, and the action sequences are famously terrible, with quick-cut speed substituting for establishing shots so at times we’re not even sure what the hell even happened. Quantum is worth watching, but it’s ultimately a frustrating misfire.

David Arnold returned to score, but I have no real opinion of his work here. I should give the album another listen at some point. The song is not my cup of tea. I’ll leave it there.

18. THUNDERBALL

After talking about two movies that whip along and give their stories too little breathing room, here’s one that gives its story too much breathing room. There’s a lot of good stuff in Thunderball, but it all comes in the second act; the first act is 40 minutes or so of plot set-up, and the last act feels like 40 minutes of slow-motion underwater ballet “action”.

Thunderball is that odd duck of a film, the one that made the James Bond films a legal mess for decades, owing to some literary partnership between Ian Fleming and Kevin McCrory. I won’t go into that here, but there are legal reasons why Blofeld and SPECTRE disappeared completely from the James Bond mythos after Diamonds are Forever, and why McCrory was able to make his very own Bond movie 18 years later, called Never Say Never Again and starring Sean Connery, featuring the exact same story as this one.

The villain’s plot is very straightforward here, and there’s something kind of refreshing about the Bond films where you get the villain’s scheme in the first act. SPECTRE steals two atomic bombs and threatens to detonate them someplace unless they get paid a pile of money. That’s it. Again, it’s refreshing! It sets the movie up as a race against time. How odd, then, that a movie whose plot is a race against time has some of the worst pacing of any Bond movie.

The first act, as noted, is all set-up: Bond is at a health clinic, where some other guy is recovering from surgery to be made to look like an RAF officer. Bond notices weird shit going on but isn’t sure what to make of any of it, but he somehow angers some dude to the point of tit-for-tat injurious pranks, and there’s a very uncomfortable “seduction” scene that is frankly rape. Meanwhile the surgery guy turns out to be a SPECTRE guy who is standing in for an RAF guy on a plane that’s carrying two atomic bombs. He takes over, poisons, the crew, and crashes the plane in a specific spot in the Bahamas so the main villain, a SPECTRE guy named Largo, can steal the bombs. And he kills the RAF officer body double, who has already been killed, and who is the brother of Largo’s girlfriend.

Yes, Thunderball gives us all that convolution in the first act, before we ever get to Bond getting briefed by M.

Once we finally get Bond to the Bahamas (sent there instead of Canada because Bond just happened to find the RAF guy’s dead body at the health clinic even though the RAF guy was seen boarding–that’s our body double!), Thunderball gets more interesting, though it remains pretty convoluted. Bond pisses off Largo by beating him at cards, and then Bond seduces Largo’s assassin, and then Bond seduces Domino once he figures out that Largo has the bombs. Finally we get to our climax, which as noted, is a really long underwater chase-and-battle sequence, followed by ships, followed finally by a fight on the bridge of an out-of-control speedboat.

Thunderball is a gorgeous film to look at, and there are some iconic moments in it. But it just feels slow and bloated every time I watch it, and I also think this is when Sean Connery started seeming a bit less invested in the part. John Barry’s score is outstanding, and of course there’s that gonzo song crooned by Tom Jones, with its ridiculous lyrics (“And he strikes…like Thunderball!”) and his apparent death from self-inflicted asphyxiation on that last high note.

17. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

I loved You Only Live Twice as a kid, but I’ve liked it less and less as time has gone on. Another simple villain plot, this time involving outer space: SPECTRE is swiping American, and later Russian, space capsules right out of the sky, hoping to trigger a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, apparently at the behest of China. The British, seeing some weak indication that maybe the kidnapped ships came down somewhere near Japan, send James Bond to check it out.

YOLT is another example of an under-two-hour Bond film not being as good as it should be, but in this case, I don’t think the issue is pacing. The issue here is that the 1960s-era sexism and racism is just impossible to ignore. This movie has so many moments of pure cringe that it casts a pall over the entire thing (“In Japan, men always come first and women come second!” Bond is told, to which he responds, “I just may retire here!”). Also this movie makes a very odd narrative choice regarding the “Bond girl”: it keeps the first one around almost to Act Three, and then she’s killed off. So we actually have some investment in her character, and the one that’s brought in minutes later to finish out the movie is almost literally a stand-in. Her name is “Kissy Suzuki”, which we only know because the credits tell us this.

Donald Pleasance is on board as Blofeld, and this time we finally get to see his face, which has an odd scar on his right eye. I’ve never been able to decide if I like Pleasance’s take on Blofeld or if I hate it. He does seem creepy and evil at times, but at others he seems almost whiny. He’s weird. There’s a beautiful woman assassin who is way less interesting than Thunderball‘s Fiona (one of the series’s best femme fatales), and there are many moments that just defy disbelief (how are they watching video footage of the helicopter seizing the car of goons? And is dropping cars full of goons into the ocean to drown really a thing?).

YOLT is another of the “Under Two Hours” Bond films that I tend to rank lowly, but of it’s one of those that I don’t think really suffers much for its relatively short running time. All the story is there. I just find the movie more and more uncomfortable to watch as the years go by. (This is also not surprising given that the film was scripted by Roald Dahl, who in addition to being a wonderful writer, was a wildly problematic guy.)

On the plus side, YOLT is quite beautiful to look at! There are a lot of very nice Japanese vistas, and there’s a distinctive early shot where some American and Russian officials are meeting to discuss the alarming events the kick the movie into motion. I particularly love a particular fight scene on the Kobe docks, when Bond is running across the roof of a warehouse, evading goons as he goes. This is actually an aerial shot, which is unique even for this series. There are some painful special effects along the way (artifacts of the time, but still, yeesh–did they have to do rear projection with Connery in a boat? Could they really not get that shot for real?), and for a short movie, the pacing isn’t what damages it. I even like the song, sung by Nancy Sinatra, with its lyrical hook.

16. SPECTRE

Ohhh, poor Spectre. This movie has taken quite a beating since it came out, and not all of it has been undeserved. It really is a wildly convoluted movie, story-wise, and it probably does go too far in trying to suddenly tie the previous three Craig films into a single story entity. Personally, I would have been fine with bringing Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace into the “single narrative” fold, but Skyfall was a bit too much for me, as that movie really stands on its own in a singular way. But other aspects of Spectre that have led most fans to pushing this one farther down than I do? I’m fine with them. Once again, we see how wildly divergent opinions among die-hard Bond fans can be!

So, what of Spectre? Well…I really do like it quite a bit. In fact, writing this I’m wondering if I should bump it up even higher on my rankings…but maybe not. It feels a bit like an attempt to recreate the magic and mood of Skyfall, likely because the same director returned for it (despite his previously having said that he was a “one and done” Bond director). A lot of the mood, the film’s visual look, the framing of shots–a whole lot of Spectre is obviously reflective of Skyfall, which is OK for the most part. And some of what happens in this movie is downright amazing! Of course, the opening tracking shot in Mexico City; and I love the Alps setting and the train through the desert.

Storywise is where things get a bit dicier for Spectre, though again, I like this movie more than most. After Skyfall, the legal quagmire that had dogged the Bond franchise for decades finally got resolved, so at long last, Eon Productions was once again allowed to use Blofeld and SPECTRE. I’ve always wondered if they had a script in progress when this legal gift came in the mail, and rather than wait a movie or two to get back to Bond’s version of Moriarty, they grafted Blofeld and SPECTRE (renamed in the new film to no longer be an acronym) onto their existing story. There’s a feeling of disjoint here between the schemes of Blofeld and those of C (Andrew Scott), the new head of MI6 who is developing a super-duper rights-violating surveillance system. Blofeld is behind all of it, but we don’t really get that much of a sense of it, do we?

And then there’s the whole business of Blofeld being “the author of Bond’s pain”. Most fans seem to take this as meaning Blofeld has been specifically plotting against James Bond for his entire life, inserting himself into every single bad thing that’s ever happened to him, but I don’t take it that way. I think he’s rather run his own life and his own schemes, and when things have happened in such a way that James Bond has been on his radar, he’s acted to screw Bond as hard as he can. That I can see, and that I have no problem with, in all honesty.

People also hate the idea that Blofeld was actually Bond’s foster-brother way back when, and honestly, I don’t hate this, either. Not in this context. There’s a theme running through all of Daniel Craig’s Bond films, distinct from any other actor’s run, of Bond confronting the sins of the past, whether it be Vesper Lynd’s past, M’s past, or, eventually, his own. Throughout these movies Bond is constantly having to deal with the fallout from other peoples’ various bargains with the devil, so I honestly have no problem at all with all of this eventually boiling down to what his parents did, or what happened in his youth.

What does bother me in Spectre is that a lot of this whips past, sometimes in the middle of actual action sequences or very quick conversations, so the film can’t actually set any of this stuff in the context where I think it makes sense. Bond calls Q at one point and says something like, “Look up Franz Oberhauser!” The moment is gone too quickly, so the script doesn’t really give us any reason why Bond is asking about some guy with a German-sounding name. Likewise, the opening Mexico City scene: Great scene, but apparently it was Bond acting on his own. When we find out why he went there to kill that one guy, it turns out that it’s M, the old M, Judi Dench’s M, telling Bond via posthumous video: “Find this guy, kill him, and then attend his funeral.” Why? She doesn’t say. How did she have this information, and what was she doing with it? She doesn’t say. This is what bothers me about Spectre: not the what of what happens, but the fact that an awful lot of it doesn’t seem to rise naturally in story terms. Things happen in this movie because…this is where something happens in this movie.

Take the fight on the train. That’s a hell of a fight! One of the best fight sequences in Bond movie history, if I’m being honest! But…it happens hours after they board, so what was Hinx waiting for? And don’t all those other people on the train notice something like a couple of secret-agent types destroying almost three entire train cars’ worth of stuff? How did Bond win that fight and then get allowed to stay on the train until their stop? That whole sequence is strange…but it’s there because “this is where something happens in this movie.”

Spectre has a nice score by Thomas Newman (following up his work on Skyfall), and while the song–“Writing’s On the Wall” by Sam Smith–seems to be fairly unpopular with fans, I actually quite liked it.

Next time: Numbers 15 through 11! We enter the top half of my ranking! Huzzah!! Taking stock, here’s how many films we have left, by Bond actor:

  • Connery: 3
  • Lazenby: 1
  • Moore: 4
  • Dalton: 2
  • Brosnan: 2
  • Craig: 3

Tune in!

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Our annual Festival?

Thanksgiving is over, and now comes Christmas!

Every year I hear a lot of complaint that Thanksgiving is a thing that gets lost in the shuffle between Halloween and Christmas, and that Thanksgiving should be its very own thing with no Christmas trappings of any kind allowed until Black Friday at the earliest. But to be honest, I don’t agree, and the reason why has to do with how we structure our year, how we see time, and how we mark the passage of days.

Human culture has always structured its years around annual events, like planting time, harvest time, full moons, solstices and equinoxes, and the like. These events formed the basis of the earliest liturgical calendars of our religions, and feasts and festivals would accrue around them. Perhaps the most famous of these long festivals these days is the month-long fasting celebrated by Islam as Ramadan. These types of celebratory events used to unfold over multiple days. The Olympic Games were a festival. So too, once, was Christmas: the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” refers to Christmas not as a singular holiday but as a festival, one that took twelve days to unfold. Twelve days of celebration, of feasting, of prayer, of reflection.

Now, our American society seems on one hand to want to limit celebrations to a single unit of time, one holiday and only one at a time, but on the other hand open itself up to celebrations that take place over time. We seem to want, in other words, a singular holiday and a festival, but we don’t approach it this way, do we? No, we come to the Christmas “season” like a time for lots of demands on our time: there’s cooking and cleaning and shopping to be done, and there are parties and special church services and the Christmas play and yada yada yada. All of these could be seen as trappings of a festival, but since we try to limit our celebrations to one holiday, we more see these things as items to be checked off a to-do list, required preparatory motions to be endured before we can take our one day off to celebrate, feast, pray, and reflect before getting on with the appointed industry of our lives.

I think we need to recalibrate our approach to and expectation of Christmas. I think we need to see this entire time of year as a festival, and I think it’s fine to posit Thanksgiving as the beginning of this festival. It just doesn’t make sense to me to cordon off Thanksgiving as its very own thing, independent of and separated from Christmas. I’d rather have our great Christmas Festival begin with Thanksgiving, a great day of feasting, and then extend over the however-many-days-there-are between that at the 25th of December…and then extend it right to the 1st of January. Instead of getting upset every year that Thanksgiving is “eclipsed” by Christmas, let’s approach it in the same spirit, because really…shouldn’t we do that anyway? It seems to me the emotional fabric of both days is very similar, and the two days are close together.

So let’s have Santa and the turkey at the same table.

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SNOW!!!

Feels like it took longer than usual this year, but it’s finally here!

SNOW!!!

I reserve the right to get sick of the stuff once my traditional cut-off date, St. Patrick’s Day, rolls around (though for some reasons to be revealed later, my tolerance for snow this year might actually be increased). But for right now, I am happy as a clam, because SNOW!!!

 

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How to Anger the Twitter Gods

I’m in Hour Two of a twelve-hour long suspension from Twitter because I broke one of its rules. The suspension happened very quickly, so obviously I didn’t manage to render my thought in poetic enough fashion to not trigger Twitter’s content bots against violent content or something. I deleted the tweet, but the 12-hours are still imposed. Oh well!

Not that big a deal, and if you’re wondering what got under my skin, it was a series of things Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said about his current COVID status and how mean the NFL is to not consider his essential-oils-and-homeopathic-bullshit regimen as “immunization” equivalent to being fully vaccinated. He started off with saying something like “I’m going to be done in by Woke People and by Cancel Culture.” Now, I’ve recently adopted the personal policy of filing such citations of “Wokeness” and “Cancel Culture” under the same category as when people claim to be “Politically Incorrect”: After that, I stop listening to whatever it is they’re saying.

But one bit of dumbassery Rodgers said did manage to actually tweak me. He was babbling about “his own research” and “his own immunization regimen” and a whole lot of crap, but then he was quoted as saying something about how “liberals hated vaccines when 45 was President but as soon as Biden took over they loved them”. This is so mastadonical in its rhetorical turd status that I couldn’t help myself, so I fired off a tweet expressing my hope that Mr. Rodgers tear his ACL as soon as he steps on the field next.

Yeah, not my best hour. Shouldn’t have said it. I grant that.

But it’s still complete bullshit.

I’m no expert on all the details, but my understanding is that Operation Warp Speed, the program spearheaded by the 45 administration to facilitate vaccine development, was pretty much a success. There’s a reason why all those vaccines were ready to go not long after Joe Biden’s inauguration. No one with half a brain seriously credits the Biden Administration with the entirety of the US vaccine response.

And there was a time when the right (and I assume now that Aaron Rodgers is one of those) believed the same thing. There was a brief time when they were really trying to push giving credit to 45 for the vaccines. Someone, I think it was Geraldo Rivera, said something like “Let’s call it the Trump Treatment!” The idea that the American left would be suddenly vaccine-hesitant if 45 had won re-election and everything else had been the same is a pleasant fiction, but there’s no doubt that if 45 had won a second term and everything else had been the same, FOX News and everyone else would be trumpeting the vaccines as one of the greatest humanitarian triumphs in history, all because of the greatness of President 45. We know this because they actually did start talking like this, before they collectively decided that no, the real victory lay in pulling back on their pro-vaccine talk, instead defending the honor of Ivermectin and amplifying anti-vaccine voices as much as they could (while privately making sure that each and every person working for FOX News is vaccinated).

In short, Aaron Rodgers is a deluded dope who has no idea what he’s talking about. But on Twitter, you can’t wish him a season-ending injury. OK. Message received, Twitter.

But this site right here is my site and I get to say whatever I want on my site, so: Hey, Aaron Rodgers! I hope you blow your knee out!

(Comments closed on this one.)

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