I finished the rough draft of the baseball story this morning, and it turns out that my previous hopes for brevity were, um, greatly exaggerated. The actual word-count is just under 8,500 — well above the 7,000 I was hoping for. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it down to 7,000 after editing, but we’ll see. I always strive for a ten percent reduction in word-count, which would leave it around 7,650 or so. That’s still my shortest story on record, except for “The City of Dead Works”.

And now I’m onto my retelling of the “Snow White” story. To my great surprise, this one is writing itself, almost. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

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I’ll hold off on posting my thoughts on 24‘s finale until tomorrow, just in case anyone has it on tape and is watching it tonight.

But that last event….damn!!!

I hope they at least give Jack Bauer a day or two to, you know, sleep before they send him right back out to deal with this one.

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I actually seriously considered casting my vote for Clay Aiken after last night’s penultimate episode of American Idol, but I decided not to. I didn’t vote for Ruben Studdard, either. I genuinely think that they could flip a coin between these two guys.

I don’t care if the music they do on this show is safe and predictable. I don’t care if Paula Abdul has the same two comments for everyone (“You made the song your own!” if they did well, “Hey, you’re still better than all those people who didn’t make it this far” if they didn’t). I don’t care if Simon’s mean sometimes, or inconsistent (if he keeps insisting that they’re looking for the best singer, then why the hell does he keep carping on Clay’s appearance?). I don’t care about any of that.

What I care about is that this show celebrates people who have a talent and who are working as hard as they can to be as good as they can be with that talent. American Idol isn’t about sixteen narcissistic creeps on an island forming alliances to screw one another. American Idol isn’t about giving people money if they can hold their breath underwater while driving a car, leaping from a helicopter onto a moving train, and drinking one half-gallon of castor oil in under five minutes. American Idol isn’t about some creep, male or female, trying to pick a mate.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a writer looking for my break, and therefore I sympathize with what Clay and Ruben are trying to do (and what Kimberley and Josh and Trenyce and all the rest tried to do). That’s probably a big part of it. (And I’m not too thrilled about American Juniors, with the combined creepiness of parents who think their kids are uncommonly talented and twelve-year old girls belting out “I’m your lady”.)

Whichever one of these guys wins, deserves it. And I have a feeling that the “loser” won’t exactly disappear into the void. So here’s to Clay and Ruben. Good luck to both, but I’m not going to say “May the best man win”, because they’re both the best, and in my eyes, they’ve already won.

End of sappy sermon.

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A maintenance note: All evidence to the contrary, Byzantium’s Shores has not been renamed, “Cannot Find Server”.

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Notes from real life:

:: It strikes me that sometimes I have to actually remind myself about parenting stuff. A little while ago, my daughter asked if she could have some strawberries. Problem was, I had already taken my seat at the computer to get some work done, so my immediate impulse was to say no and offer some Fruit Snacks or some other thing she could get herself. (She likes to eat strawberries quartered and with a fork.) I then caught myself, and thought: “You dumb-ass, she’s asking for fruit, and you’re telling her no?! Idiot!!” I got her the strawberries.

:: Our apartment’s patio came with some handy hooks in the overhang so we could hang plants, so I put our nice, big ivy plant out there a couple of weeks ago. (It’s been so cool this spring that the plant’s leaves are now tinged with red, but that’s another story.) This morning, we noticed an odd collection of twigs and leaves and various outdoor flotsam in the pot, beside the ivy plant itself. Sure enough, a robin has chosen our ivy as her nesting location. I’m hoping this doesn’t mean that, for the duration of her stay in our ivy, we’ll have to endure a pissed-off robin trying to defend her babies every time we want to use our patio. (But at least the plant is hanging at the end of the patio opposite where we put the grill. That could have made for some unintentional hilarity.)

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While I’ve got SDB’s latest foray into foreign policy on my mind, I note that he addresses the question of “Just where are all those WMDs of which we had such incontrovertible evidence before the war, anyway?” I find his answers, well, unconvincing and chilling.

To his credit, SDB doesn’t engage in any weird “He moved ’em all to Syria” theory; he ends up conceding that, in all likelihood, the WMDs simply aren’t there to be found. He even goes so far as to note that “One can do the right thing for the wrong reason”. Well, the problem with that is that if one does the right thing for the wrong reason, then one tends to form a better impression of the reasoning process that went awry than is really warranted. And also, it hardly helps matters that the original rationale was founded very solidly on WMDs, and only after-the-fact is the revisionism starting up (“We did it because Saddam was/is a horribly heinous man”, an assertion which, while true, immediately raises the question of just why we’re not chomping at the bit to start going after all the other heinous people in power around the globe).

But then, SDB claims that this isn’t even the case, because WMDs were never the real reason for going to war against Iraq in the first place, and neither, apparently, was Saddam’s status as a heinous dictator. It was the whole neo-con Domino-theory, “Iraq-as-step-one-to-defeating-the-Arab-world” strategy all along. One wonders, then, if Islamic terrorism did not exist, but leaving all other things equal, if we’d have given a rat’s ass about Saddam one way or the other in the first place.

And anyway, if this was our real reason the whole time, doesn’t it say something that President Bush would never actually stand up and admit as much? If this was the real reason, why did we constantly have to read about Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz battling Colin Powell for GWB’s soul? If the whole aim all along was to jump-start the Islamic world into the 21st century, why would the President of the United States never stand up and actually say, “Our goal here is to jump-start the Islamic world into the 21st century”?

SDB is pretty sure he knows where the United States should go, and he thinks it’s the same place that the Administration thinks the United States should go. So isn’t it a little odd that we only ever hear this theory as to where the United States should go not from the President, but from several of his underlings? Isn’t SDB bothered at all by the fact that, even if this strategy is the “real reason we went to war” (which I’m far from convinced it is), that the Administration, when faced with the task of leadership on this strategy, opted for bullshitting the American people?

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Here’s something I’ve noticed since I entered Blogistan: a phenomenon I call “Bait-and-Switch Blogging”. This is where a blogger starts off a post talking about one thing, but later turns out to be not talking about that thing at all but merely bringing it up as an example of, or proposition in an argument for, some other thing.

Bill Whittle does this a lot — in fact, I cited him doing it the other day, and as usual, I found the bait a lot more interesting than the inevitable “And that leads me to what’s wrong with liberals” stuff that constitutes the second part of this particular post. The same thing happened in his post a few months back that paid tribute to the Columbia astronauts, although in that case he got the post back on track at the end in one of the more haunting posts I’ve encountered since I’ve been doing this. My advice on reading Whittle is this: By all means read him, but as soon as you detect the gears switching to “Time to beat the liberals”, look away.

But the master of Bait-and-Switch Blogging is SDB, who does this with astonishing regularity. Today’s entry is a case in point: I start reading it, thinking he’s still discussing the logical ramifications of and justification for atheism, specifically as it pertains to inductive versus deductive reasoning, but before long, we’re back into the dreary old “Why French people are goons” and “Why Jacksonianism rules” and all the rest of it. I almost think SDB would do well to write the interesting stuff, followed by a sentence like “It therefore follows that….”, in turn followed by a link to one of his former screeds. Just a thought.

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How could I not check out a blog named for the dominant donut chain in Buffalo?

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Time to indulge a bit of Star Wars geekness. “Attack of the Geeks”, you could say….(stop groaning.)

Anyway, I’ve seen some complaints regarding Darth Vader, R2-D2, and C-3PO lodged on various message boards, newsgroups, blogs, newspaper articles, and smoke-signals since Attack of the Clones came out, and I’m now going to address them. The complaints are:

1. Why doesn’t Vader recognize Artoo and Threepio in the original trilogy, especially if he built Threepio?

2. Why don’t Artoo and Threepio recognize Vader as their former master?

3. Why does Threepio claim, in A New Hope, that he’s not very good at telling stories, when he manages to captivate those Ewoks in Return of the Jedi when he sums up the story for them?

4. Since when the hell can Artoo fly with those little rockets of his?

OK. Since I was good enough to list the questions and number them, I shall now tackle them out of the order in which I posed them. Deal with it.

First off, Number Three. This one’s easily explained. Look at the Ewoks: these guys would probably be entranced by Ben Stein reading Goodnight Moon. Threepio’s not exactly working to a sophisticated audience here, and if Han and Leia look entranced, well, it’s because they’re hearing their own lives being told here. Basically, Joe Blow can probably entrance his kids with stories, but that doesn’t make him Stephen King.

Allrightie-then, on to Number Four: Artoo’s rocket-jets. Yeah, that was a bit of a shock; but then, I’m drawing a blank in the original trilogy and in The Phantom Menace as to an instance of when his rocket-jets would have been especially handy. I’ve seen it suggested that he could use them to get up and down stairs, but those rockets are pretty small. That would probably be a waste of his fuel. I expect he’s got them for emergencies only, and besides, given the decade or so that passes between Episode III and ANH, those rockets may well have been removed. Easy enough. I really didn’t have a problem with the rockets.

Which brings us to Numbers One and Two: why don’t the droids and Vader recognize each other?

First of all, the Star Wars films pretty well establish that these droids aren’t particularly unique. Consider: just about every small ship flies with an astromech droid implanted within it; the Queen’s ship in TPM comes equipped with something like six of the little guys; et cetera. They are common enough that the Jawas are carrying a few around with them in their peddling ventures, and Uncle Owen isn’t particularly impressed with what he sees.

As for Threepio, he’s run-of-the-mill too: droids of his type lurk in the background all over the Star Wars universe, so he’s fairly unremarkable, too. So, when Vader sees them, is there really any reason to suppose that he would immediately recognize them? Even since Threepio doesn’t even look the same in the original trilogy as he does in the prequel trilogy? (Of course, Episode III could well contradict this point.)

And that point is probably academic, because when you really think about it, Vader never gets an opportunity to recognize the droids. In the original trilogy, he is never on screen with them, except for one time: he and Threepio are both present for Han Solo’s carbon-freezing. But even then, Threepio is in pieces and strapped to Chewbacca’s back. Vader, in all likelihood, doesn’t get a good look at Threepio, seeing as he’s got a lot of other things on his mind. After Han is frozen and turned over to Boba Fett, Vader instructs Lando Calrissian to “take the Princess and the Wookiee to my ship”. No mention at all of the droid, who is likely not even a blip on Darth Vader’s radar.

About the only other time, in the original trilogy, that Vader could possibly recognize the droids would be in ANH, if he happened to spot them making their way for the Millennium Falcon in the Death Star landing bay. But seeing as how Vader, at this time, is fighting his old teacher with a lightsaber, I’m inclined to think he doesn’t see them. (Of course, what a funny scene that would make:

BEN: You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

VADER: Sure, I…hey! Those are my droids! You old bastard, you stole my droids! Man, that’s just like you — always a goofy lecture, and then you steal my droids! You ever build a droid with your bare hands? Huh? Hey, you dumb-ass stormtroopers, instead of watching me kill this old guy, how about you go get those damn droids before they get on the ship!

And so on….)

Finally, as to the droids not recognizing Vader, well, it’s pretty obvious their memories are erased between the trilogies. But then, I seriously doubt that Vader’s actual identity is a matter of common knowledge in the Star Wars galaxy. If it was, I’d expect Princess Leia to know it before I’d expect these two droids to know it.. (She is a Senator and all.) Then, of course, when Luke shows up to rescue her, she’d say something like, “Your name is Luke Skywalker? Wait a minute — that’s Vader’s last name! Get away from me!”

OK, I think I got that bit of geekiness out of my system.

(But wait: are dia-nogi standard issue for the sewage systems on Imperial starships and space-stations?)

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Is anyone besides me having trouble loading BlogSpot blogs the last few days? I’m hitting “Reload” a lot to get them to show up, and Joseph Duemer’s blog isn’t loading for me at all.

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