One of my favorite bits from the great old TV series Cheers is when Sam is planning to go out with all the regulars at the bar to watch The Magnificent Seven, but he excludes Diane. She lays a guilt trip on him, and he decides to bag the watching of the movie because he’s going to feel guilty. So everyone else decides not to bother, as well. They’re all sitting around the bar, looking depressed…when Carla sings the first couple of bars of the famous theme music to the movie. Norm joins in, then the rest of them, until they’re bellowing Elmer Bernstein’s most famous melody while they’re grabbing their coats and running out of the bar to go watch the movie after all.

I’m bringing this up, of course, because I finally watched The Magnificent Seven for the first time this weekend.

As seems to be the case with just about every classic Western I ever watch, I enjoyed it but didn’t love it as much as many others do. This is probably because the basic plot of the film, which is already cribbed from The Seven Samurai (another film I haven’t seen), seems familiar to me by now, and because I’ve never been enamored of Westerns to begin with. I loved the first third of the film, when the “seven” are coming together — especially the quiet confidence of Yul Brynner’s character. Once they get to the little village they’re trying to protect, though, I thought the film slowed down a lot, and the climax didn’t really seem to build so much as arrive.

Still, it was a fun movie. My favorite line, of course, is when one of the seven picks off a distant bad guy who’s making his escape. The guy standing next to him — the Western obligatory young guy who’s not as good with the gun as he thinks — says, “That’s the best shot I’ve ever seen”, and the shooter snaps back, “One of the worst. I was aiming for the horse.”

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A possible downside of my doing BlogRolling is that I check in after a few hours, see only a handful of “New Posts” indicators, and now I’m thinking, “You bunch of lazy dogs! Start blogging!!” Of course, then I have to remind myself that few, if any, of the people on my blogroll are unemployed freelancers.

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A careful examination of my sidebar will reveal not only the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body (hidden in a secret code) but some other changes as well. On two of these I followed Sean‘s lead, and on the other (blogrolling) we apparently had the same thought at the same time. Weird. Or not. You decide….

:: I’m giving BlogRolling a try. This service makes maintaining my blogroll neat and painless, and also puts a little marker (this one: (^) ) beside any blogs containing new posts in the last twelve hours. I’ve also decided to list my blogroll alphabetically, instead of the pseudo-category scheme that I was using that, as it was not indicated anywhere actually in the blogroll, likely made little sense to anyone but me. (Basically, I had liberal bloggers together, right-wingers together, SF-community members and writers together, my Collaboratory cohorts together, and my arch-enemy on top. Now, it’s just a boring old egalitarian alphabetical scheme.)

:: I signed up for an RSS feed; that’s in one of the buttons toward the end of the sidebar. As of this writing it’s not yet functional, but I think I’m waiting for some kind of completion to their registration or something. Either that or I just bollixed the whole thing to begin with.

:: And I added a “GeoURL” link. This service allows you to find out which bloggers are closest to your actual, physical location. I’m not sure if this is actually useful, but hey, it looked nifty.

(BTW, that Jimmy Hoffa thing was a joke. I have no idea where his body is.)

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There’s nothing like weird sports lore: did you know that in baseball, you can be the winning pitcher without pitching to a batter?

And Kevin Drum is wondering if any sport has a greater ratio of build-up to actual event than the Kentucky Derby. I’m not sure, unless one counts a figure skater’s practice for the Olympics — four years for about six minutes of skating. But then, there are events in between such as the annual World Championships. (Actually, it’s Chad Orzel who’s wondering this, but I read about it on Kevin’s blog.)

EDIT: I dug up the box score from the game where the pitcher won a game without facing a batter. The short version of the story is that he came into the game with two outs, executed a pickoff maneuver which ended up catching a baserunner in a rundown for the third out, and then left the game. His team then scored the go-ahead runs in the next frame, giving him the win. Looking at his line, I see a goose-egg dutifully entered under his pitch count.

Oh, and I fixed the link to Mike’s article. I used the wrong permalink.

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Am I slowly going insane, or are television seasons becoming shorter by a day or two each year? I seem to recall season finales once taking place in late May, due to May sweeps, but now it’s gotten to the point where every show that I watch will have aired its season finale by May 15th, not even halfway through the month. And some of the shows that I watch — Ed, Scrubs — had their finales last month. Of course, in the case of Ed it might well have been the series’s finale. But still, I’d love to get back to the days when a TV season for a mainstream show involved twenty-four or twenty-five episodes, as opposed to the twenty-two that we get now. (24 is the notable exception, for obvious reasons.) I know it’s not going to happen, because the actors want time to do bad movies and such, but this business of watching three or four new episodes, followed by a two month period in which there might be two new episodes until the next sweeps period, is just grating.

And while I’m griping about TV, it would be cool if ABC could tap into a whole new source of movies, so as to avoid showing Armageddon every two months. And unless my eyes deceived me, they’ve now shown Gladiator twice in the last six months. Ah well….

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My most recent review for Green Man Review is up. It’s for an album called Some Company by pianist/singer Skott Freedman.

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I wrote a while back on the role of the critic, and my disbelief in “objectivity” whenever a critic writes a review. Specifically, I’ve always found tiresome the people who profess to simply being “objective” whenever they write a negative review. I used to get into lengthy debates with people on Usenet on this topic, people who genuinely thought that they were the arbiters of true greatness in art.

So I’m happy to see today that Roger Ebert agrees with me:

Subjectivity is the only possible approach to reviewing. What is a review but an opinion? Those who call for you to be objective are revealing that they have not given the matter a moment’s serious thought. Most times, those calling for objectivity are essentially saying they wish you had written a review that reflected their subjective opinion.

To paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, once again Mr. Ebert gets it exactly right.

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Everyone likes to make fun of old drivers, and I am no exception. Two recent observations:

:: When I am out for my daily walk and I’m on a street that has no sidewalk, old drivers move out less than just about any other group of drivers I can think of. Even pickup-drivin’ rednecks with three rifles in the gun rack will move over for pedestrians and cyclists more than old people. And if I’m walking on a Sunday morning, and the old drivers happen to be on their way to church, I sometimes swear that they’re actually moving in the opposite direction just to show their displeasure at me doing anything other than sitting in a pew on that particular morning.

:: Old drivers are known to be slow drivers. It’s not uncommon to be speeding along some highway where the legal limit is 55 and encountering some fogey, usually in a white car (formerly an Oldsmobile, but since they’re not making those anymore the make of choice will change), and have to hit the brakes so as to avoid rear-ending this person driving between 36 and 42 mph. There is, though, one place where “Old driver equals slow driver” does not apply: parking lots. For some reason, old people turn into Leadfoot Larry or Agnes the Accelerator as soon as they’re in a parking lot. I can be backing out, slowly as can be, looking both ways at least four times, and yet as soon as the back end of my car extends out into the aisle more than four feet, LOOK OUT HERE COMES GRANNY!!

Oy.

(Yes, I know, this post is a bit snarky and age-ist. I’m genuinely sorry. But I’ve had encounters of both varieties in the last twenty-four hours, and I’m a bit annoyed at both. That, and the caffeine from my morning coffee is starting to kick in now.)

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Sometimes in blogging you just have to go with the most obvious quip available:

“I’m shocked! — shocked! — to find that gambling is going on here!”

Ah well…I do have to admit a certain amount of glee in seeing the latest entry in the Right Wing Hypocrite Parade, and Bennett’s a big one. This is the guy who has made a cottage industry out of preaching and generally being smug; the sheer tonnage of words he’s spilled on the subject of how he thinks people Democrats should live would, to use an Aaron Sorkin analogy, stop a team of oxen in its tracks. But as per usual, these folks seem to think that the Sword of Morality only has one edge — the left one.

(And for defenders of Bennett, I’d like to ask a question: positing the old canard that “Actions speak louder than words”, I’m wondering if Bennett’s charitable contributions to social welfare organizations over the years — you know, the “thousand points of light” that are a priori preferable and better than similar public programs — total significantly more than his gambling losses.)

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Time for Lazy Blogger’s Space-Taking Trick #7: Nifty pictures.

These are taken from a set of astronomy slide shows I found on MSN a while back. Enjoy.

Cassiopeia A, the remnant of an exploded star.

Jupiter and its four largest moons, sometimes collectively called “the Galilean Moons”. From top: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.

The Whirlpool Galaxy.

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