Here in Buffalo, most of the trees are now bare, which actually makes for a brighter living room now that all the trees around our building aren’t shading the sliding glass door in the living room. And the other day, the work crews were out installing the snow-plow markers: wooden stakes and steel rods, about four feet tall, whose purpose will be to show the plows where they should stop lest they demolish curbs and scrape the ground apart. Next, I suppose we’ll have the installation of the ice boom in the Niagara River. In the words of House Stark, “Winter is coming….”

(BTW, those who understand that last reference might want to check out the sample chapter of A Feast For Crows that George R. R. Martin recently posted to his website, here. The bad news is that he still isn’t done with the damn book!)

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Wow, the whole “controversy” over the word “Luddite” marches on. (For those keeping score, it began here, and the latest comments can be found here and here.) I’d just like to offer a few thoughts on the whole rigamarole.

1. Firstly, for those who might not have AOL access but do have New York Times registration (it’s free, yada yada yada), the William Gibson article that got under Sheila’s skin can be read here. To sum it up, Gibson wishes that he could set up his computer to “color code” news stories, so that “outright lies” show up in Pistachio, “spin” in Sky-blue, and “misperceptions” in Plum. (Tellingly, he provides no color for what would be “the truth”.) His last graf reads thusly:

Some people, I suppose, might complain that it took the fun out of guessing. Luddites!

I think that Gibson was trying to be funny here, as opposed to insulting. Of course, whether or not he is funny is purely a matter of opinion, but the joke probably fails completely if — like Sheila — you don’t happen to know what “Luddite” means when you see it here. Plus, I can imagine that Sheila wasn’t even in the mood to look up the punchline of a joke at all, given that the first graf of Gibson’s piece, brief as it may be, is rather amazing in its stilted tone. I mean, this passage is just plain square, and to me it is Gibson screaming out: “Look at how hip I am, and look how I can talk like all the Cool Kids!” It renders the meat of the piece, his color-coding of news coverage, inert. It’s as if Gibson is telling a joke that should begin with “A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar”, and instead starts off with, “In the data-encryption havens off the coast of Connecticut, beyond the invisible line that only exists on maps to demark the limits of one nation’s claim on the waters….”

So, we have a piece where Gibson is trying to be “cute”, and not really succeeding; and then, to top it off, there’s “Luddite” as the very last word. I begin to see how this all happened.

2. One of the commenters on Language Hat’s post (link above) on this business issues a breezy dismissal of Sheila, because she was unable to get past Chapter Two of Neuromancer. Well, first of all, judging someone by the books they like is generally dangerous: it’s precisely the kind of attitude that Sheila is complaining about in the first place, the “You’re not worthy unless you read and admire this“. And secondly, I’d have to be in that camp too. I think I tried to read Neuromancer no less than six times in the mid-1990s, when I was concerned with reading what I was supposed to be reading. I never got past the fourth chapter, and quite honestly, with the sole exception of Neal Stephenson I’ve never been able to finish anything in the cyberpunk subgenre of SF. This does not make me stupid, or “Luddite”. It makes me a guy who doesn’t like cyberpunk. I’m sorry, but for me, William Gibson’s literary legacy consists solely of that great metaphor of his, where the sky is the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel. (Which, on my TV now, is a nice sky blue anyway, which I don’t think is what Gibson was getting at.)

3. A lot of the commenters, both at Language Hat and at Sheila’s blog, are aghast that Sheila does not profess a singular love of words. This is kind of hard, and I’m not sure I’ve got a total handle on it, but my reading of all this is that Sheila (and here I go, putting words in the mouth of someone who is eminently capable of doing it herself) values storytelling above all, and sees language as a means to that end. Now, for people who steep themselves in language and words and poetry and metaphor and theme and all those other wonderful things, a person whose primary interest is solely focused on “mere” storytelling seems like an odd entity indeed. Why, they must wonder, would anyone want to just tell stories, and not attend to all the other wonderments of literature? Well, maybe that’s a fair question, but even if it is, so what? The idea that literature has to rise above pure storytelling to be worthwhile is pretty obnoxious, especially when it tends to lead to writers who completely abandon storytelling in favor of wordplay. Inadvertently, many of these commenters end up committing precisely the error that Sheila’s complaining about in the first place: assuming that “mere story” is just something for the stupid hoi polloi. (Now, I don’t necessarily agree with Sheila that “Luddite” is an example of coded language for that attitude, in this particular case, but I am one who has seen the word in play a lot, and yes, it really does get used that way a lot of the time.)

What I think Sheila finds troubling is not so much the idea that one shouldn’t write for the masses, but that often “literary” writing exhibits a condescending view of the masses. Again, I’m not sure that’s really what Gibson is doing in the piece in question, but I’m also not sure that a lot of the people who are arguing against Sheila are in fact arguing against the point she’s actually making.

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David Letterman’s kid was born, and as the title indicates, it’s a boy. Congratulations, Dave! On the vanishingly rare chance that he reads this, I’d like to offer a few thoughts.

1. It’s a baby. Don’t try that “Will It Float?” game with him.

2. Ditto that game where you toss things off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that kids can’t taste things until they are three. Remember this when you fall into the “But you loved peas when you were a baby!” trap.

4. You’re raising a male, so if you’re wondering how best to raise your baby into a real man, take careful note of this lengthy bit of rumination on manhood…and do the exact opposite. Please oh please.

I was going to try to come up ten of these, you know, for a “Top Ten” list. But then I got lazy. Enjoy the kid, Dave!

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If you’re just dying to take a quiz today, you can test yourself either on 80s song lyrics (via John Scalzi) or on horror literature (via Jessa Crispin).

As yet, I have taken neither quiz. Or maybe I have, and am simply too embarrassed to share my results. You be the judge.

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Lynn Sislo, who’s getting into the whole discussion of “Luddite”, also says this:

It’s funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real “real life.” And there’s another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of “real life” as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term “realspace” to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I’ve seen the word “meatspace” which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

She’s right. I don’t want to steal her thunder, since she mentions the possibility of a future post on this, but I don’t get the whole separation of “online” stuff and “real” stuff — or, like Lynn, I don’t think of what I do online as any less “real”. It’s all real, to me; I just think of all the books I’d most likely have never read if I hadn’t seen them mentioned online. Or the music I’d never have heard. Or the films I’d not have seen.

Just to give one example: my budding love of anime began when I saw Princess Mononoke. But why did I rent that film one night, four years ago? Because I already owned the score on CD and, loving the music dearly, wanted to see the film that accompanied it. But why did I already own the CD? Because I’d seen it glowingly reviewed a year or two before that, on one of the film music sites or forums I read. And the causal chain doesn’t stop there, but goes back farther, and it keeps going on: for example, would I have started exploring other areas of Japanese culture (cinema, classical music, food) if not for my introduction to anime by way of a single film by way of a soundtrack CD?

What I do online informs my choices and offers directions for my “real” life that I’d be less likely to consider otherwise. I see no reason to separate the two, the “cyber” and the “real”. And there I’ll stop, before I start sounding like Morpheus in The Matrix.

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For those Luddites (sorry Sheila, I couldn’t resist!) out there who aren’t up on such things, Terminus has a nice two-part explanation of widescreen video releases and their implication for TV. I’d disagree with him about the worth of widescreen being used on such shows as ER and The West Wing; I like the widescreen compositions, and I’m willing to have a smaller image on my TV to get a wider shot. But he provides a pretty good explanation of what’s going on, including a reminder that not all movies should be shoehorned into widescreen aspect ratios (like Casablanca and Singin’ In The Rain).

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I flipped over to The Late Show with David Letterman last night, to find Paul Shaffer behind the desk. It turns out that Letterman’s significant other was in labor with their first kid. As of this writing, I’m not sure if the kid’s been born yet or not, so here’s hoping everything goes well and that the kid, when born, is healthy, has all his finger and toes, and is born with more backbone than, say, your typical CBS executive.

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I’ve been keeping an old copy of Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion in the bathroom lately, because it makes good bathroom reading: just thumb through, find a review, read it, and then…well, you get the idea. Ebert’s always been my favorite film critic, even though I only tend to agree with him about 70% of the time, and he’s never better than when he’s teeing off on a bad movie. A case in point is this hilarious first sentence to his review of some action movie called Money Train:

“Like a guy working two shifts, Money Train keeps slapping itself to stay awake.”

That’s almost as good as his contention that the first Charlie’s Angels movie was “eye candy for the blind”.

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Apparently a lot of folks are listing Top Twenty Movies Since 1980, and since I’m always on the prowl for stuff to post, here’s my own list. (And to be fair, I’ll confine myself to a single Star Wars movie.) In no particular order:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. The best of the Indiana Jones movies.

2. The Empire Strikes Back, 1980. Yeah, I personally rank A New Hope higher, but it came out in 1977.

3. Braveheart, 1995. Battle scenes galore.

4. Rob Roy, 1995. Even better than Braveheart, although the latter won Best Picture.

5. Pulp Fiction, 1994. A great film that spawned a lot of lame imitators, because those lesser filmmakers assumed that the film was remarkable for its jaded and hip tone and imitated that, without realizing that the film was really remarkable for its tight storyline and razor-sharp dialogue.

6. When Harry Met Sally…., 1989. Still my favorite romantic comedy.

7. Say Anything, 1989. The greatest teen romance ever filmed, period.

8. Beauty and the Beast. Disney’s greatest film.

9. Bull Durham, 1988. The best baseball movie.

10. Princess Mononoke, 1997 (I think). My favorite Miyazaki film, although like every other blog post I’ve seen doing this, you could plug in any Miyazaki film at random here.

11. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. I flipped a coin between this and The Two Towers.

12. The American President, 1995. Lord, I love this movie.

13. Whale Rider, 2003. Wow. I literally just watched this one two nights ago. I’ll have more to say about it later this week.

14. RAN, 1985 (I think). Kurosawa does King Lear. Stunning film.

15. Schindler’s List, 1993. This is one of my “desert island” movies.

16. Amadeus, 1985 (guess). The best movie about classical music I’ve seen.

17. The Abyss, 1988. Still my favorite James Cameron movie. I prefer the Director’s Cut, even though it takes the “preachiness” at the end a little too far.

18. Die Hard, 1988. This movie still gets the blood pumping.

19. Witness, 1985. Harrison Ford’s best performance. I wish he’d get back to doing roles like that.

20. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982. Magnificent story, magnificently told.

There you go.

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The Pats won. Ugh.

I’ve previously established that I don’t hold Bill Belichick as a great football coach, although he’s a pretty decent one. Yeah, he’s most definitely better than Gregg Williams, but George Halas, he ain’t. Plus, he’s the coach of my team’s hated nemesis, the New England Patriots (of whose 2001 Super Bowl victory I will go to my grave thinking it was the most undeserved championship in sports history). But, I gotta give the guy at least this much credit: unlike many coaches in today’s NFL, Belichick understands that sometimes the biggest factors in winning aren’t scoring but time and field position. He showed this in last night’s game against the Broncos, in which Belichick made a startling decision. Trailing by a single point and forced to punt the ball from his own end zone late in the fourth quarter, Belichick directed his long snapper to put the ball over his punter’s head. The resulting safety extended the Broncos’ lead to three points. Why willingly give up points?

Because, after a team gives up a safety, they have to kick the ball to the other team, but not from the end zone. Instead, they kick it from the 20 yard line — which means that by giving up two points, the Patriots were able to put the Broncos into significantly less favorable field position. If they had merely punted, the Broncos would likely have had the ball in Pats’ territory, and thus been able to move for a possible clinching field goal. Of course, they could have done this following the safety, but Belichick had to assume that his defense would be able to hold the Broncos — which it did — and then his own team would get the ball back in better field position than if they had held Denver to three-and-out after a normal punt.

I hate to say it, because I don’t like the guy, but that was excellent football strategy on Belichick’s part.

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