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As a longtime James Bond devotee, I’ve been enjoying ABC’s broadcasts of the Bond films on Saturday nights lately. Tonight’s entry was “Thunderball”, a film about which I’ve always had mixed feelings. The opening act takes too long to develop, with Bond happening upon intrigue at some British health spa. Of course, the intrigue has to do with the eventual scheme being run by SPECTRE, and Bond is sent to the Bahamas to follow up on a lead (which happens to involve a beautiful woman, of course) and the plot finally gets moving. But even then the story takes itsDown the rabbit hole….

Current reading: A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing. This is a play that I saw performed way back when I was a freshman in college (1989, to be precise). The story involves two men, a Russian and an American, who are both arms negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland during the Cold War. When I saw the play performed, it was just a month or two before the Berlin Wall came down and the German Reunification began; at that time the Soviet Union still existed. I wondered, when I found a copy of the play in the Buffalo and ErieDown the rabbit hole….

As much as I love Buffalo, a major failing of the city is the lack of a Chinatown and a good dim sum restaurant. Dim sum, for those who haven’t discovered it yet, is a kind of Chinese brunch where servers push carts around the dining room, stopping at each table to offer diners their choice of various delights — steamed dumplings filled with all manner of things, small shrimp dishes, wonderful soups, and — if you are brave — chicken feet. (They’re rather like a chicken wing with much smaller bones.) You sit at your table, drinking tea, awaitingDown the rabbit hole….

So, the Canadians have their gold medals. The sharing of the gold, between them and the Russians who were originally awarded it, seems to me to be the only tenable outcome of this whole affair — at least as far as these participants go. It will be much more interesting to see what changes are made in the future regarding the judging of figure skating, which has for years been dominated by croneyism, log-rolling, and mutual-back-scratching. As for the actual skaters involved in this dispute, the Russians should not be stripped of their medals as they had nothing at allDown the rabbit hole….

Why “Byzantium’s Shores”? Well, for one thing it just sounds exotic to my ear, five syllables which strike me as fairly melodious. But more importantly, Byzantium was a place where east and west met along with new and old; it was a city which looked backward to the fallen glories of Rome and forward to the eventual rebirth of the continent that lay to its west. It seems a good fit, then, to cite such a place to name this space where I shall explore my own tastes — tastes which range wildly from the techno music of Tangerine DreamDown the rabbit hole….

A screaming comes across the sky…. Somewhere, in strange light, a mind conceives…. In a hole in a ground, there lived a hobbit…. Call me Ishmael…. (….as I cannot think up my own wonderful starting sentence for this experiment in Net babble, the least I can do is pilfer some from the best. Let the wine flow and the words fly!) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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