Category: Random Linkage

Yup, it’s time for a “Wow, look at all the open tabs, let’s clear some of those out!” posts.

::  What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture.

Interesting article about the proliferation of numerical analysis for just about everything these days:

Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels. In the century and a half of MLB history covered by the database Baseball Reference, the 10 years with the most strikeouts per game are the past 10.

On another note, I should write a post sometime about the movie Moneyball, which is a fascinating sports movie from the standpoint of the front office, a good piece of evidence for my belief that Aaron Sorkin is at his best when he’s paired with another writer to neuter his more annoying quirks, and also an interesting case study in how to not manage.

::  A post about the title song from the movie That Thing You Do!, the wonderful 90s flick about what happened when a bunch of teenagers from Erie put together a garage rock band and ended up being a national one-hit wonder. The film was directed by Tom Hanks, and he directed it very well, which is why I’m often surprised to think how he never really pursued directing much at all after this one. Maybe he just didn’t want to. That’s fine!

As for the song, though, I did not know that it was written by Adam Schlesinger, the brilliant songwriter who was behind a lot of the amazing satirical songs that formed the backbone of Rachel Bloom’s masterpiece series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Schlesinger, sadly, died at the too-early-age of 51 in the first wave of COVID-19.

Oh, here’s the song, if you don’t remember it. It got quite a bit of airplay in the 90s when the movie was a thing:

::  Black conductors, long excluded, are now on the podium. But will it last?

When Jeri Lynne Johnson made it to the finals of an orchestra tryout in California and didn’t get the job, she didn’t think much of it.

“It happens. It’s like dating — you kind of work or you don’t,” says Johnson of the chemistry that gets tested when a conductor stands before an orchestra for the first time.

But when Philadelphia-based Johnson asked the head of the selection committee what she could have done differently, “He said, ‘We just didn’t know how to market you. You don’t look like what our audience expects a maestro to look like.’”

Orchestra conducting has been the almost entirely-exclusive bastion of white men for just about the entire two century period that the job has even existed. Woman conductors have only started breaking through into the mainstream in the last couple of decades. Black conductors? Imagine that quote above: “We didn’t know how to market you.” Why not…as a thrilling and exciting musician? The same way you market every new conductor who takes a music director position with an orchestra?

My God, we have so damned far to go.

(Classical music’s racism is often obvious, but it’s also worth noting the crustacean-like resistance to change at all in the genre and in people who follow it. I remember attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert some years ago where the first half of the program was a modern work, and the second half was a Beethoven piano concerto. At intermission I heard the old ladies behind me saying things like “At last, now we get to the good stuff.” I can hear them now, exiting the concert hall after a Black conductor has led a performance of, oh, Brahms’s Third: “Well, I like Brahms, but I suppose he’s woke now.” Ugh!)

::  Who doesn’t love a ranked list? Here is The Best Crime-Solving Writers In Fiction, Ranked!

If that sounds confusing–and it did to me at first, too–it’s referring to fictional writers who also end up being detectives, like Richard Castle of my once-beloved show, Castle. (Who is on the list, by the way. He’s not Number One. If you’re wondering who Number One is, I won’t give it away, but it’s really kind of obvious, especially considering recent events.)

::  For my money, the essential reading following the passing of Jerry Lee Lewis is everything Sheila O’Malley has written about him.

::  Finally, here’s an excellent Twitter thread about what a gigantic mess everyone’s favorite WonderGenius, Elon Musk, is making of Twitter.

https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1588530481376931840

I, myself, have never been much for the notion that people are to be automatically afforded massive amounts of deference and respect because they have simply managed to amass some large amount of wealth. But in this country, I am in a distinct minority in this viewpoint, I think.

That’s all for now. Time to start letting the tabs pile up again!

 

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Yup, I’ve got a bunch of open tabs, so time to clear out some stuff!

::  Some good discussion (prompted by me, yay!) over on Roger’s site about (among other things) baseball, home runs, PEDs, “real” records, the degree to which people’s distaste for Barry Bonds is racism versus Bonds being a generally unpleasant guy, and more!

::  One of the original Buffalo Bloggers from way back when is still going strong at All Things Jennifer.

::  Caturday, via Cal, who loves cat-based humor.

::  Two from The Atlantic. First, Hollywood Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Avatar. I particularly like this observation:

I’ve always been amused at the ironic notion that Avatar had no cultural impact because nobody can name its main character; maybe that’s because the story hasn’t been crammed down viewers’ throats year after year since its release.

That’s a pretty good observation, isn’t it? The “Name one of the characters!” notion interests because, well, isn’t that true of a lot of big singular hits? I very much doubt if, outside of major franchises driven by lots of sequels, people remember the names of major characters much at all. And really, not even then. Sure, the average movie-goer can name some, if not most, of the superheroes on display in all the MCU movies, but how many can you then name by their real (i.e., not their superhero monikers) names? “What’s Iron Man’s name?” Everybody is going to know “Tony Stark”. But: “What’s the name of the bad guy in Iron Man 2?” “Uhhhhh….”

“Can you even name these characters?” is really absurd, when you come to think of it. I can name only one half of the main couple in Brokeback Mountain, but that doesn’t argue against that film’s impact.

The Wife and I rewatched Avatar a few months ago. I found it as involving and engrossing as I did back in 2009; it creates a fascinating world full of, yes, interesting characters. And it remains as visually powerful as it was then. One point the Atlantic piece makes is that Cameron’s 13-year-old visuals, which should look a little dated due to advances in technology, actually still look better than most spectacle-laden movies these days, for various reasons. I found that to still be the case. (Plus, Cameron has never really gotten his due as an action director. I love the MCU and can honestly say that I haven’t disliked any of those movies (though there are a few that we haven’t seen yet, from the most recent batch), but there are times when the action sequences in those movies get hard to follow. That is never a problem with Cameron, who always makes it very clear who is where and who is trying to do what.)

Finally, out of curiosity, I looked up the current list of highest grossing films by year. Scroll through this list and notice how just about every year the biggest hit is either a sequel, or an installment picture in a larger franchise (look how many MCU movies take their year’s title), or the year’s big Disney release, or the first installment in a film franchise (Harry Potter, which had a built-in audience because of the juggernaut nature of the books). The notable exceptions (setting aside 2020, which was a bad year for movies for obvious reasons)? Avatar, which is still a singular film, though for not much longer, and Titanic.

::  Second: America’s False Idols.

Our nation once idolized astronauts and civil-rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions of dollars and move financial markets. To justify that adulation, we made shareholder returns the sole metric of success, and so shareholders are the most successful.

It’s hard to disagree with that. Witness the cult surrounding the likes of Elon Musk.

::  The eternally thought-provoking Sheila O’Malley, who is among other things a critic for RogerEbert.com, links one of her reviews with this bit of thought as introduction:

My response to this movie was so strong I had to interrogate it a little bit. What is this bringing up in me? Why such a personal reaction? This calls into question the whole film critic thing in general. Why distrust a personal reaction? Isn’t that the whole deal? The problem with totally trusting your first reaction is sometimes you can get swept away by something that – on a second look – is fairly empty. And so you “relating” to it or something is actually a filter that might have more to do with where you are at at that particular time … and once you move out of that time, the film will reveal all its flaws. Meanwhile, you are on record praising it to the skies. This has happened to me. I have gotten things wrong.

This is why I really could never be a professional critic, i.e., someone required to write intelligently about their opinion of a given work–be it a book, a film, a symphony, whatever–after experiencing it a single time, and quickly, too. I have too many times had the experience Sheila describes above, where I loved a thing at first but later thought “Wait, hold on a second,” and the reverse of this where I dislike a thing at first and only later came to realize how good it was.

Sheila is always very introspective in her writings, which I always prefer in my critical reads. I tend to be deeply suspicious of critics who write in such a way as to erase themselves and their own biases and emotions from their work; this kind of thing tends to feel as if these critics are trying to imbue a sense of objectivity to their work in a field where things are inherently subjective. And few things irritate me more in criticism than the assumption of right or wrong answers.

:: Kurt Steiner is the world’s greatest stone skipper.

Yes, you read that right:

Over the past 22 years, he has won 17 tournaments in the United States and Europe, generating ESPN coverage and a documentary film. In September 2013, he threw a rock that skipped so many times it defied science. This year he hopes to smash records on both sides of the Atlantic, giving him a platform for sermonizing about a sport he believes is nothing short of a means for the redemption of mankind—“a legitimate path to an essential inner balance,” he says.

This is a fantastic article. I’ve always loved the writing in Outside Magazine, and this is a case in point. I was surprised, reading it, that Kurt Steiner’s life unfolded just south of mine, in the hills and wilds of northwestern and northern Pennsylvania. I’ve been through many of the towns and places named herein. The article begins on Sinnemahoning Creek, a stream whose name I remember; I must have accompanied my parents to that stream in our canoeing-and-kayaking days. Steiner is 56, I’m 51.

And ultimately I’m amazed to discover that competitive stone-skipping is a thing.

::  Finally, I learned this week that Josh Allen has a kind of gross pre-game ritual. I can see how this might help calm one’s nerves, but even so…ewwww!

That is all.

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I was not prepared for mid-to-upper 80 degree temps this week, folks. I’ve found over the last several years that I handle heat a lot better than I used to–time was when 85 degrees would reduce me to sitting in a pool of my own sweat, wishing for the sweet release of the Reaper’s icy touch (or, less dramatically, the inevitable return of winter)–but the heat made something of a sneak attack yesterday. It’s still a warm weekend to come, but not quite so warm as yesterday, thank the Gods! On the good side of the ledger, though, is that we’ve finally turned the corner into actual Spring. And this is no small thing: it’s worth remembering that just two years ago, we had snow on Mother’s Day. Yikes!

Anyway, it’s time to close up some tabs I’ve had open a while! Here are some links.

Transgenderism in the Old West. No matter what the TERFs and other creeps might have you believe, transgenderism is not a new thing. At all. It’s probably been around since we were drawing on rock walls in caves.

All Hail the Spiedie! What’s a spiedie, you ask? It’s a fantastic sandwich that has somehow never managed to move much beyond its regional beginnings in Binghamton, NY. Note to self: Buy a bottle of Salameda’s Sauce and get spiedies on the menu for this summer’s grilling! (Flavorwise, if you’re a WNYer, spiedies are in the ballpark of our beloved Chiavetta’s sauce.)

When murder-mystery writers have surprising real-life experience with their subject. Reminds me of a favorite exchange in my favorite Hitchcock movie, Dial M for Murder:

Tony Wendice: How do you go about writing a detective story?

Mark Halliday: Well, you forget detection and concentrate on crime. Crime’s the thing. And then you imagine you’re going to steal something or murder somebody.

Tony Wendice: Oh, is that how you do it? It’s interesting.

Mark Halliday: Yes, I usually put myself in the criminal’s shoes and then I keep asking myself, uh, what do I do next?

Margot Mary Wendice: Do you really believe in the perfect murder?

Mark Halliday: Mmm, yes, absolutely. On paper, that is. And I think I could, uh, plan one better than most people; but I doubt if I could carry it out.

Tony Wendice: Oh? Why not?

Mark Halliday: Well, because in stories things usually turn out the way the author wants them to; and in real life they don’t… always.

Tony Wendice: Hmm.

Mark Halliday: No, I’m afraid my murders would be something like my bridge: I’d make some stupid mistake and never realize it until I found everybody was looking at me.

On reading Ulysses on my iPhone. I’ve never read Ulysses, so I have no personal axe to grind here, but I continue to believe that the reading experience should be seen much more broadly than just paper.

Sheila O’Malley’s April viewing diary. Nobody does deep dives like Sheila does, and this is a case in point. She earned an amazing opportunity to write an essay about Raging Bull for that film’s upcoming Criterion Collection release, and in preparation she did a deep dive into Robert De Niro’s career. I’ve never seen Raging Bull, but I’ve seen a lot of De Niro through the years, and Sheila’s insights are always golden.

(Yes, I probably should see Raging Bull, if only to confirm my suspicion that Ordinary People‘s Oscar win really was a travesty.)

John Scalzi had thoughts a few weeks back when news broke of Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter. Since then there are other news items that alternately make it sound like the deal is all but done, or that Musk is looking for an exit strategy to kill the deal, so I’ve no idea what’s going on. That Musk has openly stated that among other things, he’ll reinstate posting privileges to the 45th President is not encouraging.

Roger on rote memorization. In all honesty, I never hated doing memorization in school, though I was always rather pigheaded about what we were required to memorize. It really is nice to be able to rattle off quotes of stuff; having King Henry V’s Agincourt speech in my memory bank (maybe not entirely accurately, but enough to get me by) is something that I am convinced will one day serve me well. It hasn’t yet, but it will!

Anthony Bourdain: 39 Books to “Unfuck” Yourself. I will never not miss Anthony Bourdain. Never. He was brilliant and curious and full of love for the world, and more than all that, he was literate. You could sense his deep reading in every word he spoke on his various documentaries, shows, and in his own writings.

Finally, I close with a song I heard just last night on the episode of Letterkenny that we watched. (More on Letterkenny another time. Suffice it to say that we love it, and it is not like anything else on teevee, anywhere.) I had, to my recollection, never heard this song before, but I have already put it into a playlist I’ve been working on. Here is “It Always Happens This Way”, by Toulouse.

 

 

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…of having 50 open tabs.

Yes, 50.

I leave Chrome open all the time, and on the rare occasion that I do have to close it, or it closes during computer updates and restarts, I always restore to the most recent collection of open tabs, which grows over time to the point where when switching from one tab to another via the mouse, I run the very real risk of accidentally closing the tab, because the tab is so tiny it’s easy to hit that innocuous little ‘X’!

So, as a means of getting my tab situation under control for now, I present to you, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between in the audience, a Grand Selection of Links!

Item the First! Here we have an article about the word decimate, which is a really vexing word in that the natural shifting of language has pushed it away from its original meaning (to reduce something by one-tenth), to a more general meaning (to destroy, with a usual connotation of pretty thorough and cataclysmic destruction). Decimate is one of those words that attracts word-pedants like a lamp outside attracts moths at night; use it in is present-day general meaning and you can almost set a stopwatch to someone stepping in with “Actually, that word really means….”

And I get it, I really do. Neil Gaiman (I think) once said something about shifting words, something along the lines of “When a word with an original specific meaning loses that meaning for something more general, as a writer I lose a tool.” And we have plenty of great words for “general destruction”, don’t we? I, for one, don’t really have a need for decimate to have a new meaning.

But, here’s the thing: I also don’t really have a need for decimate‘s original meaning, either. When’s the last time I needed to refer to something being reduced by a tenth? I have zero recollection of ever needing a word for precisely that, and I’m not really thinking up any likely future scenarios for the same, either. For me, decimate is most useful in a poetic way, if the word sounds best in the sentence I’m writing. So honestly, I don’t have a big dog in the decimate fight.

And more generally, I tend to be very meh on the idea that words should have precise meanings and that language shifting about is a bad thing. With exceptions, of course! It really grates on my ears and eyes when I encounter a “foodie” someplace saying that some restaurant’s dish or general food is “inedible”, when what they mean is “I don’t like it”. No, folks. Rocks are inedible. Little Caesar’s is not.

Item the Second! An article about the history of American coffee, from the coffee-and-chicory mix familiar to Civil War soldiers to the Robusta-bean dominance of the mid-20th century to coffee’s present-day high mark. The article is a summation of a podcast episode that I haven’t listened to, but I might! I do love my coffee, after all. I didn’t come around on coffee until my 20s, and it took ice cream to get there (I should see if I’ve told that story), but coffee’s an every-day thing for me now.

Interestingly the article ends by citing the rise of the light roast in contemporary coffee-making and brewing, because that’s where real flavor is. Here, I have to refer you to the wisdom of Detective Harry Callahan: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I’ve tried many times, but I have to admit now that I really do prefer a dark roast.

Item the Third! It’s continually amazing to me how much of astronomy, much of the time, is just quietly going along learning stuff, but then something explodes someplace in the universe, and BOOM!, we suddenly learn a lot of new stuff. This article is a good case in point: a star’s explosion appears to be caused by a black hole literally consuming the star from the inside out. Wow!

Item the Fourth! An article about “Broadway Melody”, the 13-minute ballet that takes place in the last act of Singin’ in the Rain.

When I first saw Singin’, back when I was a kid in the mid-80s, I was confused by this strange and long number that takes place as the movie is heading toward its climax. If you haven’t seen the film, at this point our heroes, led by Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, are converting their disaster of a talkie into a musical, and Don goes to the producer to describe all that’s left to film: one number. The producer asks, “What number?” and Don says, “Here, I’ll describe it to you!” And then we go into a kind of dream sequence, which is the “Broadway Melody” ballet. Which, in a very meta way, is supposed to exist in a fictional movie…so it’s kind of doubly fictional! Strange!

Anyway, as noted, this entire ballet sequence confused me. I hadn’t seen a ton of musicals at this point but I’d seen enough to know that the musical numbers usually either advanced the story or expressed emotions felt by the characters. Not always, mind you, but most of the time that’s what the songs and dances are for. They establish character, show you what they’re feeling, and move the story along. “Broadway Melody” does none of those things! It’s an entirely self-contained entity, a musical story within a musical story, that has zero relevance to the larger film’s tale. Once it ends, thirteen minutes later, we’re back in that producer’s office, with Don grinning and saying, “So, what do you think?”

(In a real-life nod to a habit of actual producer Arthur Freed, the producer in the movie says, “I can’t quite visualize it!” Apparently Freed wasn’t a visualizer, either.)

The “Broadway Melody” sequence over time came to be one of my favorite parts of the film (though I’ll be honest, every minute of this movie is one of my favorite parts of the film). It’s a work of art all on its own, and despite the fact that it is clearly just plopped into the movie with a transition so bluntly awkward as to make you wonder how on Earth anyone ever thought they’d get away with doing it that way, it always works for me, because the song is great, the ballet’s story is a classic tale full of internal character development, and it features some of Singin’ in the Rain‘s most iconic dance imagery.

Item the Fifth! A neat post about the background of the legend of Dick Whittington and his cat. I owned a book as a kid about this story, and it stuck with me for years; in fact, the Whittington story is a partial inspiration for the fantasy novel I’ve been wrestling into shape for years. (Think Dick Whittington-meets-Alexandre Dumas, with a bunch of Renaissance-Faire stuff thrown in, and you’ve got it. Why something so simply conceived has been so hard to write, I honestly don’t know.)

Item the Sixth: Mary Oliver on how books saved her life. A quote:

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

[…]

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Item the Seventh: Roxane Gay on the Will Smith-at-the-Oscars fiasco. I have offered no comment on this subject in any forum anywhere, on the assumption that my opinion on this is in no need of being aired. (And don’t ask, because not only will I not share my opinion, but I’m not even sure I have an opinion to be shared!) I do value Ms. Gay’s thoughts and views on many topics, though.

Item the Eighth: A Twitter thread delving into the awful nature of Florida’s new “Don’t Say ‘Gay'” law. What the American right is legislatively doing at all levels right now is absolutely and utterly appalling.

Item the Ninth: A sad article outlining the concerns about Bruce Willis’s mental decline over the last ten years or so. I knew none of this, having not paid much attention; I didn’t even know that Willis’s career the last several years has been an apparent assembly-line of one direct-to-video project after another. I’ve long been a fan of Willis, having been won over by Die Hard after my initial distaste because I really disliked Moonlighting, the 80s teevee series that first made him a star. In addition to the action work for which he became a huge star, Willis also did a lot of frankly underrated character work in movies like Mortal Thoughts, Nobody’s Fool, and his turn in Pulp Fiction.

Also, a brief note of appreciation here for what is probably the goofiest entry in Willis’s filmography, the action flop Hudson Hawk, in which Willis plays a thief who gets out of prison and immediately returns to thievery, eventually ending up in a gonzo scheme involving lost works of Leonardo da Vinci. It’s not a good movie, but it is one you can enjoy if sufficiently lubricated, and I love that Willis and his partner-in-crime (Danny Aiello) time their heists by singing old classic songs as they work. Just the fact that this movie resurrected “Swingin’ on a Star” from obscurity elevates it, for me.

Item the Tenth: A photograph that sums up rather a lot of one big part of my childhood. I didn’t own everything in this picture, but I had quite a lot of it!

Item the Eleventh: Roger on composer John Rutter’s Requiem. I haven’t heard Rutter’s Requiem, but I will have to give it a listen soon. Requiems are a category unto themselves, where great composers are concerned, from the Viennese classicism of Mozart’s to the awesome romantic bombast of Berlioz’s to the gentle introspection of Faure’s.

Item the Twelfth: Jim Wright on “When Fascism Comes to America”. I have nothing to add here.

That’s how it starts.

You see yourself as a victim.

You see The Other as terrorists, murderers, convicts, and rapists.

You paint The Other as the worst possible thing you can think of, Satan worshipers, pedophiles, criminals, subhuman, the Enemy.

You use that rhetoric, revenge, get even, and you tell those most privileged by your society that they are the real victims.

And when you gain power, you use the mailed fist of government and the military to crush your opponents — and to keep that power, you’ll need to carry through on your promise.

You’ll have no choice but to actually line up those you hate against the wall and put a bullet in their heads. The mob who raised you up to power will accept nothing less than blood.

That’s where it starts.

Item the Thirteenth: I don’t want to end on a bummer note, so here’s a comedy sketch someone shared with me online, when I briefly discussed what I call “the Jesus Pivot”. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, maybe when you’re doing some Internet research on some random thing, as I was doing last night. You do a search and you find an article someplace about that particular thing, on a site you’ve never visited; you read the article, which starts out by discussing the very thing you’re researching–only somehow the specific topic is simply being used by the author as a starting point, because you end up on the back half of the article talking about Jesus.

This isn’t new–honestly, I’d say that a majority of sermons I’ve heard from all the Christian pastors in my life follow this structure–and it’s not really even always confined to pivoting to Jesus. But still, when I’m not expecting it, the Jesus Pivot always kind of weirds me out a little, and I find myself stabbing for a “Back” button as quickly as I can.

The video oddly presents the sketch twice, and the second time appears to be silent, so when the sound cuts out, you’re done. (Also, the user has disabled embedding.)

OK, that’s all! With this post I managed to clear down to only 27 open tabs! Yay!

 

 

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