Aaron refers me to another of those Top 100 lists that are breeding like mosquitoes in the Louisiana backwaters: the Top 100 country songs.

I’m not the biggest fan of country music. So much of it leaves me totally, utterly cold. But when I find a country song or artist that I like, I really like it. I don’t boast enough familiarity with country to have a lot of strong opinions on this list, but I do think that Eddie Rabbitt’s “Every Which Way But Loose” should be on there. (By the way, the movie of the same name — and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can — are favorite guilty pleasures of mine.) I think “The Gambler” ranks ridiculously low, and “Lucille” should be there. I am also an unapologetic John Denver fan, so a lot of his songs should be there.

I must admit that “Stand By Your Man” is a “leave me cold” song; there’s just something creepy about that song that makes me think of an abused wife not leaving. I know, that’s not remotely the point of the song, and I have no idea how I ever even formed that association, so don’t lecture me on how I’m missing the point. I know I’m missing it, but I can’t help it, in this case. Oh, and the song has been irrevocably goofed in my mind by hearing Minnie Driver belting it out in a Russian accent in the James Bond movie Goldeneye. I don’t think there are too many songs that can survive that treatment.

And maybe this makes me a bad American, but I just don’t like “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood. The song itself is OK, I suppose, but the way it’s been adopted as the Official Anthem of the Republican Party doesn’t do it any favors. Sorry. (I’m pretty tired of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, too. For some reason, my patriotic leanings are most stirred by “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful”. I also dig Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy is Coming”, which is more of a protest song — but then, protest is a big part of why America exists in the first place.)

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I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and therefore I went out for my morning walk earlier than usual — I exited the front door at 6:45 am. Within ten minutes of departure, I was passed on the street by a school bus that already had kids on it.

And I used to think that I had to get up too early to get to school….

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The “Three Graces” fountain in the Mirror Lake, Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, New York.

I like to use my Image of the Week to show off neat things in Buffalo that my readers probably don’t know anything about. It’s my way of showing Blogistan that Buffalo isn’t just snow, chicken wings, and the Bills. But here’s an example of something in Buffalo I had no idea about.

The Forest Lawn Cemetery is usually mentioned in any roster of Buffalo’s architectural and historical sites (President Millard Fillmore is buried there), but I’ve never been there despite all that. So I spent some time today glancing through some online photo galleries of the cemetery, and there are some very striking bits of sculpture there that I need to go see sometime. A case in point is this fountain, which is actually a replica of a sculpture a Hudson River estate that was installed fairly recently (1987).

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I’m sure I’ve received it many times in my years online, but I only noticed it yesterday morning: a spam message in my inbox, advertising…a spam-blocking service. Weird.

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So, you want to read the books of Christopher Moore (who has a new one coming out any day). Well, Khan Noonian Singh has you covered.

Moore’s an enormously gifted writer of books that are filled with elements of supernatural horror (elements only; these aren’t scare books) and lots of dark humor. (I mean lots. If dark humor’s your thing, Moore is your guy.) My personal favorite is Island of the Sequined Love Nun, whose plot is indescribable. Bloodsucking Fiends is a hilarious take on the good old “Boy meets vampire” story. Lamb is Moore’s most ambitious novel, and it starts out great (I will never get over the image of Jesus as a boy making his own face appear in the Passover bread) but becomes uneven toward the end. The others are as Khan says (although I keep forgetting to actually read Lust Lizard…strange!). Oh, and Practical Demonkeeping contains within its pages the best literary insult I’ve ever heard: “I have seen greater intelligence in the crotch lice of harem-whores.”

Turning me on to Christopher Moore is, in fact, one of a handful of reasons why I have not yet done The Old Bird in….

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Mickey has an interesting post about Peter Jackson’s revisions to the Lord of the Rings story: what he has left out, what he has added (or given extra emphasis), and what he has focused on to the exclusion of other things. It’s pretty interesting. I don’t entirely agree with him, but I see where he’s coming from.

(Spoilers for Return of the King ahead)

Mickey’s a bit worried about Jackson’s failure to understand the point of Tolkien’s “Scouring of the Shire” sequence. For those who have not read the book, and are not wary of spoilers, this is a sequence that comes after just about everything else is done: the Ring has been destroyed, Aragorn has become King and married Arwen, and the Hobbits of the Fellowship have returned home. But they discover that the Shire is no longer the peaceful, idyllic place they recall. Rather, it has been taken over by some mysterious individual (who turns out to be Saruman) and forced to live very differently: the doors have locks, the trees have been uprooted, et cetera. So our intrepid Hobbits rally the Shirefolk to drive out the ruffians. In the course of all this, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is then in turn killed by some Hobbits.

This episode does exactly what Mickey says it does: it shows how the great War of the Ring has ultimately affected the Shire; it shows that truly nothing will be the same in Middle Earth, not even the Shire. It’s a stark depiction that the Third Age has ended, and it’s not an isolated episode: in the timelines of the book’s Appendices, Tolkien identifies the Scouring of the Shire as the true end of the War of the Ring.

But the episode also does what Jackson says it does: it sticks out like a sore thumb. I had the same reaction, the first time I read it back when I was ten: you get through all of the exciting stuff, the climax of the great quest, and then there’s another hundred or so pages of aftermath and other things to be taken care of. I didn’t really grasp what Tolkien was getting at until I re-read LOTR in college, and even then, the Scouring isn’t something I really enjoy. I suspect Tolkien actually intended this to be the feeling of that chapter; the return to the early tone of The Fellowship of the Ring clashes mightily with all the heroic language that’s been the book’s hallmark pretty much since “The Council of Elrond”, and when that tone returns with “The Gray Havens”, it’s a relief. We feel the way Frodo feels: it’s time to leave this world.

The problem is that Jackson is making a movie on its own, as opposed to a straight telling of Tolkien’s story. I’m really not sure how he could return the Scouring and not have the film of ROTK grind to a total halt. I suspect he’s making roughly the right decision here, although I do hope he can find some way to indicate that the Shire after the War of the Ring is not the same Shire before it.

I also partially agree with Mickey’s take on Jackson’s de-emphasis of the Hobbits. But I don’t agree that Frodo is the main character. While Frodo has been “wimpified” a bit in the movie, I think he’s more the main character of the movie than he is in the books, where Tolkien chooses a structure that keeps Frodo offstage for great passages of material at a time (the entirety of Books III and V, mainly). When I did a research project on LOTR in high school, I found a number of scholarly articles on the work suggesting that the main character is not Frodo but Aragorn (note that the third installment is titled Return of the King, a direct reference to Aragorn). Frodo’s quest is only the centerpiece of the story for a brief portion of the whole (from the Council of Elrond to the Breaking of the Fellowship), and after that his story does equal time with the larger War of the Ring.

I’m not sure if LOTR even has a “main character”, in the sense that Indiana Jones is the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Orson Scott Card once defined a “main character” as the character in a story whose actions and decisions drive every other event in the tale. So, looking at it this way, I think the main character of LOTR is actually the One Ring, itself. Tolkien even uses language thusly, repeatedly ascribing intent to the Ring, and Peter Jackson has retained this aspect with lines like Gandalf’s “It wants to be found”, and Galadriel’s description of the Ring “betraying” Isildur. The Ring is a character, and it is the main character, in much the same way that Darth Vader is the main character of the Star Wars saga.

And then there are those Star Wars fans who…oh, wait. I didn’t want to rant about that today. Whoops!

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One bit of political rhetoric that has become supremely annoying to me is the old canard “We can’t solve the problem by throwing money at it”, which implies that whatever the particular problem in question happens to be, increased spending is in no way part of any possible solution. This statement is always intended to simply shut off debate and cast the other side as wasteful spenders who just want to flush money down the toilet. What the money would actually be spent doing is not even relevant, then, because no more money can possibly solve the problem. “Throwing money at the problem” is simply rhetorical hand-waving that usually means: “I just don’t want to spend any money on that problem, but since saying so directly makes me look like a meanie, I’m going to phrase it in such a way that makes you look like a dolt.”

Case in point: Erie County Executive Joel Giambra has come down as opposing any addition sharing of the county sales tax with the City of Buffalo, even though Buffalo’s finances are such a train wreck that services are being cut with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel (several hundred teachers were laid off last week, for starters) and a control board is being appointed by the State of New York to get Buffalo’s cash flow fixed.

Sales tax in New York state is seven percent. However, years ago Erie County decided to increase revenues by adding one percent on top of that, so in Erie County sales tax is eight percent. It’s a yearly thing, and it’s always billed as “temporary”, but the County Legislature re-approves the additional one percent every year. And the County keeps all of that extra money, to be used throughout the county. The City of Buffalo gets thirteen percent of that money. However, the City of Buffalo accounts for a third of the County’s population. But when asked if Erie County would consider helping with the City of Buffalo’s dire budget crunch by giving it more of the County’s sales tax take, County Executive Giambra’s response was: “We can’t solve the problem by throwing money at it.”

How wonderful to hear such rhetoric coming from a guy who originally ran for County Executive on the idea of “Regionalism”, claiming that “we’re all in this together”…i.e., that the City of Buffalo’s economic health is essential to the overall economic health of Erie County. How thrilling to hear from one of the key people in the whole business to boil his leadership down to, “You made the mess on your own, you clean it up.” (Which isn’t true, but hey, there are elections to be won and stuff.)

Consider: you’re a physician, working in an emergency room. A patient is wheeled in who has been in an auto accident and has lost a limb. Blood is gushing everywhere. Sure, you’re not going to help this guy by throwing band-aids at him. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to stop the bleeding.

(Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde wrote about this the other day, and he gets it exactly right.)

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Hey, Aaron! Read this, and tell me if you’re not thinking of our old fictional friend from college, in whose name we acquired a Discover card….

(OK, the story is this: once, Aaron and I took one of those ubiquitous Discover Card applications that proliferate on college campuses like rabbits, and filled it out with a fake name. [OK, we used that wonderful juvenile crack-up name, “Phil McCracken”.] Under “Gross Income”, we put something like, “Yes, it is.” Under “Sex”, we put something like “Never between meals” or some such, all the way down the line. For some reason, though, we used Aaron’s actual mailbox address for the thing. Then we sealed it, dropped it in the mail, and forgot about it. [I don’t recall if we were drunk at the time.]

Yep, you saw it coming: a few weeks later, a card arrives in the mail for Phil McCracken. They issued the card. And what’s more, we had a female friend call Discover and claim to be Phil’s wife, requesting an increase in the credit limit.

Since then, I’ve always had the suspicion, lingering in the back of my mind, that our entire economic system is in fact constructed upon a finely-tuned foundation of bullshit and nonsense.)

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Annoying observation: don’t you hate it when you pluck off that annoying little stub that sometimes forms at the edge of your fingernail (I guess it’s called a “cuticle” or something like that)? And you only pull off just a tiny bit, the part that shows, and it doesn’t hurt at all, so you go onto the next thing…and five minutes later you glance down at your now-bloody thumb?

I sometimes wish the human body was equipped with that female voice that cars have now: “Your door is ajar….your lights are on….your thumb is bleeding….”

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Someone’s a bit proud of himself, eh? (Actually, he should be. I’m sure my head would erupt into a billowing ball of smoke and fire within six days of starting law school.)

By the way, lawyers are now being educated on line. Interesting….

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