Funny how every time I visit a Tripod site, I am the 10,000,000th visitor to that site! How can I possibly be that lucky? I really should start playing the lottery.

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October tends to be my favorite month, because I always find its cooler weather refreshing after a hot summer, and that’s when baseball is reaching its climax and the NFL season is starting to form its storylines and the TV season is starting. But given the neat things that happen in May, I might have to reconsider:

A Skeptical Blog is a year old.

Kevin Drum had a wedding anniversary.

So did Greg. (Of course, Greg’s not particularly enjoying this particular May, but then, you know….)

(And, actually, so did I. But I don’t talk about myself here. Except when….um….move along, please….)

Matthew Yglesias had a birthday.

Wil Wheaton finished a book.

Each installment of the greatest film series ever came out in May.

And Old Slugworth‘s head exploded in May. (It hasn’t, yet. But it will, when he reads this. Heh heh heh….)

So, it looks like our fifth month — the “Lusty Month of May” — is good for a lot more than just leaving flowers on people’s doorsteps. Happy May!!

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Geek Eruption Elert! Warning!! Annoyed Star Wars Fan-boy Ranting Ahead! Go Back, Before It’s Too Late!!!

Still there? Don’t say I didn’t warn you….

OK. The good folks at AICN have launched something they’re calling “The Jedi Council” (first two installments here and here), in which AICN’s Moriarty, who on the AICN pecking-order is second only to Harry Knowles himself, is looking to continuously take the pulse of Star Wars fandom in the roughly two years remaining before the saga concludes with the release of Episode III.

Moriarty, though, is concerned: it seems to him that Star Wars fandom should be reaching its fever-pitch right about now, with the saga’s final filmed installment now entering production. But it’s not: Star Wars fandom is of mixed opinion now, with what appears to be a minority eagerly anticipating Episode III, and the remainder either ambivalent about the next installment or actually fearful, given what they perceive to be massive shortcomings in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. They have “lost faith”, a common description for their feeling which occurs just a few paragraphs in.

Somehow, I managed to read the articles, both of them, all the way through, even though by about halfway through the first one I wanted to reach through my modem and give Moriarty and his whiny cohorts the biggest dope-slaps of their lives.

I’m not going to embark on more passionate defense of TPM or AOTC. I’ve done all that before, in the articles linked in my sidebar and also back when SDB panned AOTC. That’s not what I’m after here, except to note that in a vast number of cases, when people have panned the two prequel Star Wars episodes, they’ve failed spectacularly to actually understand the plot or the story or what George Lucas appears to be attempting to do. Surely, when assessing a work of art, some attempt should be made to at least understand what the artist is trying to do. I really don’t have a problem with someone not liking the new Star Wars films, but the tone of the criticism leveled at Lucas seems to often take the tone of not merely disliking what Lucas has done, but of excoriating him for not doing what the fans wanted him to do.

I wish I could remember where I read this, but there was a positive review of TPM back when it came out that included what seemed to me very sage advice: “You probably need to see this movie twice: once to get over the movie that George Lucas didn’t make, and then once to appreciate the movie that he did make.” Another reviewer, this one for AICN (it wasn’t Moriarty or Harry or anyone I remember), also praised the movie and made a similar point: “Since Return of the Jedi in 1983, I’ve made Episode I in my mind a thousand times. Should I really blame Lucas when his version of Episode I isn’t the one I enacted all those times in my imagination?” (That’s a paraphrase. I’m not digging through AICN’s archives to find that article.)

There probably isn’t a movie at all that George Lucas could have made that would have withstood the weight of sixteen years’ worth of expectations. I would bet money that if he had made The Phantom Menace, exactly as is, in 1986 (three years after ROTJ) instead of waiting until 1999, the film would have been much more warmly received. Part of this is the expectations thing, but another part, I think, has as much to do with what else transpired in the film world in those sixteen years. For all the people Moriarty says have gone into filmmaking because of Star Wars, the fact is, those people have stayed in filmmaking because of all the other great films since then.

It’s as simple as this: tastes change, and they can change in a lot shorter time than sixteen years. That long wait for the new Star Wars movie seems kind of short now that it’s been over for four years, but when I think of just how my own tastes have changed in just the last ten years, I’m astounded: I hated Diet Pepsi in 1993, and now I drink it every day; ditto coffee; I hated horror in general and Stephen King in particular in 1993, where now I love both; I hated mushrooms on pizza, now I like them; et cetera. My fiction-reading in 1993 was almost exclusively epic fantasy; I now read very little epic fantasy and a lot more horror and science fiction. Music? I hated the French Impressionists then. My love of film music was dormant.

Star Wars fans of today are not the way they were back in 1977, or 1980, or 1983. They’ve been though too much: they’ve been through Pulp Fiction and Titanic and The Matrix and the arrival of anime. And they’ve been through the Age of Irony…which George Lucas doesn’t seem to have ever entered.

And there’s the rub, at least in part: where Star Wars fans still love the original trilogy, because it’s simply too iconic not to love it, their tastes in storytelling have been shaped by what’s happened since. But George Lucas’s own tastes in storytelling have not advanced. I suppose that could be taken as a failing on Lucas’s part, but I don’t, really. I’m more saddened that there seems to be less of a place for Lucas’s style of storytelling today than in the fact that Lucas is still telling these kinds of stories. Lucas has grown enormously in terms of his visual style — witness the duel between Anakin and Count Dooku, with its eerie closeups of their faces only illuminated by their flashing lightsaber blades — but his developing visual sense is still employed in telling the same kinds of stories. I like to think that the pendulum swings, and that these first three Episodes will eventually find their audience. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for it: my own musical hero, Hector Berlioz, had been dead eighty years or so before his music started to blossom in popularity (and in many ways it still has yet to do so in Berlioz’s own country).

So whenever I hear these fans griping like this, I think of that scene in The Breakfast Club when Principal Vernon is complaining to the janitor about today’s kids. “They’ve changed,” Vernon says, to which the janitor responds, “Bullshit. The kids haven’t changed, you have.” I don’t begrudge anyone that George Lucas’s current efforts don’t appeal to their current tastes. But I don’t get the anger.

I’ll continue this tomorrow or the next day. Damned people complaining about Star Wars…don’t they know that I have work to do?!

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Some statistical nonsense on my Short Fiction Reading Month: I started the actual reading a couple of days before May 13, but my first update post on the subject appeared on the 15th, so I’m calling that as my starting point. Thus, I will return to reading novels on June 15. And there was much rejoicing…or thudding of heads hitting their desks as their masters fall into deep slumber.

Anyway, as of today I have read 33 stories, by 20 different authors. Of those 33 stories, 9 are science fiction, 5 are “humor” (at least that’s what I’d call them), and the remainder are a mix of fantasy, dark fantasy, suspense, and outright horror.

This little project is turning out to be a blast. Everybody should read more short stories. As Stephen King says in the foreword to his latest collection, Everything’s Eventual: “For me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.” I absolutely plan to work more short-fiction reading into my regular reading regimen once the intensive-month is done.

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Oy.

I think a neat horror story could be written on the premise of combining Mike Tyson’s and Michael Jackson’s genes into a single organism. But I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to write it.

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Since Memorial Day fell during my unplanned hiatus, I obviously didn’t write any kind of post honoring America’s fallen that day.

Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.

One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.

When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we past, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.

That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.

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I seem to have gone a while without updating my progress on Short Fiction Month, so….

:: From some critical comments I’ve seen lately, it appears that Edgar Allan Poe has fallen somewhat out-of-favor. His prose-style — very breathless and, in some cases, over-the-top — simply isn’t in style. That seems to me a pity, as I still find him enormously effective. I re-read “The Masque of the Red Death”, which I think is a small masterpiece of description. That story’s visuals are striking, and I’m a reader who tends to gloss over long passages of descriptive prose. (Mr. Mxyzptlk will no doubt recall our mutual fondness for The Yearling and its pages-upon-pages of descriptive crap….) “The Cask of Amontillado” is a story that’s escaped my notice in my previous explorations of Poe, and I’m not sure why. It’s quintessential Poe: madness and murder. I didn’t enjoy “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” quite as much, but it’s still an interesting antecedent of the detective story.

:: Cemetery Dance is quickly becoming one of my favorite magazines (now, if only I could get my own short fiction down to the length where I could start submitting to them!). It’s the best horror magazine out there right now, with regular interviews and feature articles in addition to the fiction, which isn’t always straight-out horror — they do “dark fantasy”, as well. From a recent issue I read Brian A. Hopkins’s “North”, a story of a boy’s trip to the wilderness with his father and their strange encounter there, and a slick tale by Thomas F. Monteleone called “It’s In the Bag”, which invokes the fears of airport security and reality television shows. Some months ago I gave a very negative review of one of Monteleone’s novels, so I found this story a very pleasant surprise, indeed. (By the way, fans of Stephen King should be reading Cemetery Dance, because one of their regular features is a lengthy news article about All Things King.)

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Signs of the times: at some point in the very near future, the City of Buffalo’s finances are likely to be placed in the hands of a state-appointed “Control Board”. This is basically the State of New York saying to the City of Buffalo, “Not only have you made a mess of things, but we don’t have any faith in your ability to fix things, either. So we’ll do it.”

Things are about to get pretty ugly, I think.

What strikes me as odd is that no new political leadership has emerged in Buffalo, despite years of the kind of crap that is now going to result in the State basically slapping a dunce-cap on the City’s head. The Mayor is in his third term, and in his last run for re-election he was unopposed. (There was probably a Libertarian candidate or something, but come on, now.) The County Executive is in his second term, I believe. Do economic bad times lead to a “Throw the bums out” everywhere but here?

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Here’s a restaurant pet-peeve of mine: restaurants that fail to seat parties in the order that they come in, regardless of what seating arrangements are actually available.

Listen up, restaurant seating hostesses of the world: If a party of three enters the doors at 6:10 p.m., and a party of six enters at 6:25 p.m., and a table that can seat up to six becomes available, take the party of three first. End of discussion. That’s the only way the system is going to work. If you try to keep a big table open because sooner or later a large party is going to come in, the interim period will only annoy the smaller parties you keep waiting at the door. (Of course, this is within reason. If you have a separate room or a very large table that is specifically designed for very large parties — say, ten or more — by all means, keep it for the large parties. But six? Nah. Let ’em wait. They should have left the house earlier.)

As a restaurant manager, yes, I prayed for that scenario to not actually occur: that a large party walk in and be put on a waiting-list because we seated two people at a table for six. But in nearly every case where we put the small party there, it was because there simply wasn’t anywhere else available, and it’s simply not fair to penalize customers who come in first because their party isn’t as big as the party that may or may not be on its way in the door. And I never felt comfortable asking the small parties to move, unless they were finished with their meals and only engaging in post-meal discussion. (And not really even then, frankly.)

Of course, people with large parties tend to not be the most understanding folks in the world. They often didn’t understand why a party of two or three could be told it would only be ten to fifteen minutes for a table, whereas the larger party might be told twenty to thirty. I once had a woman call the night before about the possibility of seating a party of eighteen, and I took her name and specifically told her that we did not take reservations, all seating was first-come-first-served, we couldn’t guarantee that her entire large party would be together. She said OK…and then, the next day when she actually showed up, she got haughty, insisting that she had reservations, and that the manager to whom she had spoken had promised her immediate seating. I pointed out that I was the manager to whom she had spoken, that I had said no such thing, and that she’d have to wait.

(People will often lie to get their way in restaurants, like the family that would come in for Sunday buffet and claim that their two daughters were both under twelve, so as to get the cheaper kid’s price…despite the fact that both daughters had, shall we say, blossomed nicely, and one had even driven the family van into the parking lot. I don’t know too many twelve-year-olds with learner’s permits. These people would look me in the eye and say these things…and since it was Sunday and they were invariably nicely dressed, I have to assume they’d come from church. Imagine that: lying through your teeth at the first stop upon leaving church on Sunday.)

So, look, seating hostesses: unless your restaurant actually takes reservations, then first-come, first served means precisely that. (Unless, of course, you’re in one of those Disney World restaurants with that insane “Priority Seating” system. Do they still do that?)

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As long as I’m ragging on Blogger, I might as well pick on them for being bad writers, too. I’ve been checking out status.blogger.com, and my jaw dropped at the awfulness of the first sentence of this post.

Writers of the world: Whenever someone says, “Anybody can write, so why should I pay you to do it for me?” use this sentence to refute them. The ability to concatenate words into grammatically correct patterns is not synonymous with the ability to write.

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