While on my lunch break the other day, I watched this short film about dam removal on streams in the Hudson River watershed. Fascinating film, with amazing photography (well-worth watching in full-screen HD). Were there a place I could say my soul resided, it would likely be alongside one of the forest streams of America’s Northeast.
Finally gettin’ our Spring on, here in The 716
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.
Here’s another “Conversation Song”! This is my ongoing series, started last week, in which I feature songs whose lyrics give us one side of a conversation, and we are left to infer the other half.
This week’s song dates from 1976, and the singing duo England Dan and John Ford Coley. It’s a pretty straightforward song: one person is calling the other and suggesting that they get together to, I don’t know, talk old times, maybe rekindle an old relationship.
The lyrics suggest that this is a former love affair, or at least some kind of relationship that ended in a one-sided fashion. For this person to call the other, they have to have not been in contact in a very long time, and there’s a winsome sweetness in the suggestions for a place to go: “We could go walking through a windy park”. The entire song is the suggestion of a get-together; none of the real conversation is in the song at all. But there’s a hint of seriousness in the bridge of the song:
… I won’t ask for promises
So, you don’t have to lie
We’ve both played that game before
Say “I love you”, then say “Goodbye”
Our singer is trying to keep expectations low, downplay the whole thing–but even here they are assuring the other that it won’t get that deep again, even though they’ve “both played that game before”, a game which involves both “I love you” and “goodbye”. One wonders why it’s been such a long time, and what really prompted our singer to pick up the phone. It can’t just be that “warm wind blowing the stars around”.
Here is “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight”, by English Dan and John Ford Coley.
I remember when we moved to Allegany, NY in 1981, I started hearing the name “Bob Lanier” a lot. He had been, as far as I could tell, a very good basketball player who had attended St. Bonaventure University, where my father had just started teaching. Even though he’d been gone for ten years by the time we got there, his star was sufficiently bright to still be lighting up local college basketball talk. Lanier led SBU to its only appearance in the NCAA Final Four, and many are convinced to this day that SBU had a very real shot at winning it all that year, until Lanier was injured in the tournament.
[Aside: One of the common clichés of sports opinion is that you can’t, or shouldn’t, blame injuries for your defeats. This is such obvious nonsense that I can’t believe it’s still accepted as true by sports fans and commentators the world over.]
Anyway, Lanier was a huge name in the Southern Tier, and in Western New York in general. I didn’t realize just how big a name he was beyond my local home region, though, until I went to college in 1989. I was in Iowa, a thousand miles (maybe minus a hundred) from home, in a place where if I told people I was constantly explaining that my residence in New York State did not translate to a proximity to New York City. But one night I was at a season-opening dinner for the college orchestra (which also used local musicians from town), and I ended up sitting near an older guy, one of the trombone players, maybe. He asked me where I was from, and I told him, “Near Buffalo, NY.” He asked why I was in small-town Iowa, and I told him it had to do with my father being a professor at St. Bonaventure.
The guy’s face lit up and he said, “Ahhh! Bob Lanier!”
By this time, Lanier’s college days were twenty years in the past and his pro career five, but he was still well-known, that long afterward. Now, sure, Iowa is a state where college basketball is a part of local religion and thus the locals will tend to know their sport a lot better than in other places, but still, that’s impressive.
I’ve read a lot about Lanier’s outreach work after his retirement from the game, and he seems to have been a genuinely good man as well as a gifted athlete. He’s one of Western New York’s better exports out into the world, and I’m sorry to see him go.
A suite of film music today! We watched Avatar the other night, our first time watching it since we first saw it when the DVD came out after the movie’s initial release, way back in 2009 or 2010 or so. The movie was such a huge hit back then, but it oddly became that huge hit that somehow disappeared down the memory hole, never much being talked about except for when news about James Cameron’s more-than-a-decade of work on a bunch of sequels drips out. In fact, a kind of backlash has arisen around Avatar, for reasons that I might go into in another post. For now, though, here’s a suite culled from the film’s score, by James Horner.
I’ve always had a tough relationship with James Horner; some of his music is indispensable, but his strange habit of self-borrowing and self-repeating is often maddening (in this way Horner was the Aaron Sorkin of film music). For me, Horner’s work peaked in the mid-90s, and little of his work after that period really hit my sweet spot, with one exception: his score to Avatar. This music is evocative and exciting and it conveys the sense of wonder that I find when I look at the stunning visuals of the moon of Pandora.
It’s too bad that Horner died several years ago, and thus won’t be able to write the music for the sequels that are going to finally start coming out this December. I’m sure his work will be quoted, but still, his voice will be missed.
Roger has a quiz-thing! Remember those? They used to be so common in the high days of blogging, and they were always–well, usually–fun and reliable ways to generate a bit of blog content if you were hard up for inspiration. So, let’s do this!
1. Do you like your handwriting?
Not especially. Over the last few years my day-to-day scrawl has become even worse, so I have to remind myself to write more slowly if I want to be able to read my own stuff. I have given some thought, and even made a few small efforts, to revive my cursive, but wow, that’s hard now. I’m going to have to dedicate energy to that, if I want it to continue. Luckily, it gives me a good excuse to use my fountain pens.
2. Do you like roller coasters?
I haven’t been on one in forever, so I’m not sure anymore! But I used to like them quite a lot, though with two provisos: 1. I don’t like being flipped upside-down, and 2. I don’t like coasters in the dark where I can’t see what’s happening.
3. Do you like scary movies?
I love the horror genre, but I don’t like too much gore, and I prefer my horror in print or viewed on the small screen, with lights on.
4. Do you like shopping?
Depends on what! Antiquing? Books? Vintage clothing? That’s all a blast, as are souvenir shops in places I’m new to visiting. Art and craft shows, too. Trips to Target/Wal-mart? Ewww, no. And if I’m looking for something I have to have–say, a showerhead breaks and I need a new one–that’s a drag.
5. Do you like to talk on the phone?
I do not. I’ve been this way forever. When The Wife and I started dating and I returned home to WNY in summer while she stayed in our college town, I didn’t call her enough and my phone calls were of the grunted-reply variety. It took her a bit to get used to my distaste for talking on the phone. Later, I got a telesales job where part of our performance metric was how much cumulative time we spent on the phones. It’s no surprise that I got fired from this job. (That was part downsizing, part “This guy sucks at this”, and we ended up moving a month later so I would have quit anyway, so I honestly can’t hold a grudge.)
6. Do you sleep with the lights on or off?
Off, but I need a bit of light somewhere, be it the light from outside through a window, or a tiny nightlight, something. I get freaked out when I try to sleep in complete darkness.
7. Do you use headphones or earphones?
When I walk doggos around the neighborhood, or sometimes at work when I’m doing something repetitive. Or when I’m at home working, or I’m writing someplace out and about. I actually like headphones a lot and I have several. My favorites now are my Bluetooth earbuds and a pair of Bluetooth over-the-head headphones
8. Do you have tattoos? Do you want any?
No. I do think about it once in a while, but it’s nowhere near a priority for me to get one.
9. Do you wear glasses?
Yes! I’ve had glasses in one form or another ever since I was in first grade. Ask my mother about the time I stepped on my glasses! She loves that story! (I don’t think she likes that story, actually.)
10. What is your strangest talent?
I’ve honestly no idea.
11. Have you ever been in the hospital?
No. I figure that string
12. What color mostly dominates your wardrobe?
Blue, because of the overalls collection.
13. What’s your most expensive piece of clothing?
A pair of Hickory-striped vintage Lee overalls. No, I will not divulge how much I paid for them.
14. Have you ever had braces?
No, thank God. As a trumpet player in school, braces would have been an absolute curse. I seem to recall a dentist who wanted to put me in braces, but my mother put the squash down on that idea.
15. Have you ever been on TV?
Yes. In college, one year our annual Big Christmas Concert was recorded and televised on Iowa Public Television. A while back, a college friend who was also in that concert digitized it and put it online. Ye Gods, how I hated my hair back then! Since then I have not been on teevee to my knowledge, unless it was a crowd shot at some event I visited.
That was fun! More quiz-things, I say! [bangs ale flagon on the table]
The tale is in the numbers. For perspective: I count anything over 1000 words in a day as a really good day.
Saturday:
Sunday:
I feel like I’ve finally cracked the nut that is the plot of Forgotten Stars V. This one has been giving me fits for several months now, and I’ve rewritten the same four chapters at least three times now, with two of those rewrites being from scratch. I’m not sure if this means I need to start being an outliner, or what. I just want to get this draft done.
I’m also kicking myself for having decided to write a nine-book series, because even though I’m in the back half of the series now, it’s just getting harder and harder.
When these guys show up on our deck (and also start taunting the cats in the inside of the sliding glass door):
Two birds from this week. A robin, at work…
…and a hummingbird at home.
As for the post title? Here. The sound isn’t great, but I might well prefer this arrangement to the one Julie Andrews sang.
Then: Hoovervilles! Now: Shapirovilles!
So, a couple weeks back, a video made the rounds of social media that was billed as “A progressive DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!!!!” Now, this is an obnoxious tendency in our click-bait era, when any time a person on one side challenges someone on the other in “debate”, it’s described as “Joe ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISHES Donald!” or the like. It’s pretty tiresome, because every time I watch one of these, it’s never really one person UTTERLY CRUSHING the other. It might be a slight upper-hand, but that’s about it. And this video was a case in point.
The video wasn’t worthless, though, because while it didn’t show Shapiro getting reduced to a pile of sniveling tears, it did put Shapiro’s debate “style” on display. (If you’re not familiar with Ben Shapiro, you are really lucky and really not missing much. He’s one of the current darlings of America’s right-wing, and he’s as nauseating now as he was when he was a 15-year-old kid writing pro-Iraq war columns back in the early 2000s.) A guy stepped up to the q-and-a mike at one of Ben Shapiro’s events and challenged him on the topic of “wokeism” (which is in itself a deeply tiring and dull obsession of America’s right wing, but I digress). When the guy started talking, the audience went “Oooooooh!”, thus demonstrating part one of Shapiro’s strategy: Always have a friendly audience.
The next thing Shapiro did was to let the guy talk just long enough that he’d be able to say that “I let you speak”, and then he began talking over the guy, basically taking over. Shapiro then went into his personal definition of “wokeism”, which is a definition that is just full of nonsensical characterizations, but when the guy at the mike tried pushing back, guess what: Ben starts with the “I let you speak, now it’s my turn” stuff, and he spouted some more nonsense, very quickly. That’s the second of Shapiro’s debate tricks: speak quickly and sound authoritative. The strategy is to get so much BS into the air that it’s difficult for the other interlocutor to figure out where to start.
And when the interlocutor does start, Ben turned to his final trick: he had the friendly folks running his event cut off the guy’s mike.
People like Ben Shapiro are why I think “debate” is a giant waste of time. The ability to debate has little to do with being correct, or analyzing issues, or providing genuine factual context. It’s about speaking quickly and maintaining composure while speaking quickly. The person who controls the conversation is the one who “wins” the debate (and frankly, the idea that a debate should be “winnable” in the sense that a football game is “winnable” is utter nonsense), not the one with the better ideas or the more correct interpretation of the facts. This is why I never watch debates of any kind, not even the final Presidential debates.
The proper way to engage Ben Shapiro, if engage him one must, is shown in the following video. Apparently this guy managed to so get under Shapiro’s skin with this that Shapiro blocked him on social media:
(This is actually an excerpt from a longer video.)
Video like this, where you can isolate each bullshit bullet point that comes from Shapiro’s mouth and bask in the scent of its idiocy, is the best way to deal with him and his comrades-in-arms. (I was going to say “ilk”, but wow, do I hate the word “ilk”. It sounds like an incomplete word, like someone choked out a syllable and someone else decided, “OK, that’s the word, I guess.”) His intellectual nonsense is so much more obvious when he’s not able to surround it by a lot of other rapid-fire nonsense.
This specific brand of Shapiro dopeyness came to mind earlier today when I saw this on Twitter:
In honor of Ben “Don’t you think they’d have already sold their houses and moved?” Shapiro, I propose that since we’re going to see much, much, much more of these “houses crumble into the sea” videos in the years to come, we should dub such locales where this happens as Shapirovilles. Not unlike the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.
Shapirovilles: where the real estate trends favor mer-people!