Here is something I found whilst following some links to a British person’s website. As an American, I can proudly laugh at my own country. I hope you all can, too. If not, please don’t flame me….

:: Are You An American? Take this quiz and find out!!

1. You decide that the relationship with your partner is over. How do you break the news you are leaving?

(a) Leave a tearful note on the table and slip quietly away

(b) Calmly discuss the reasons with your partner for your decision

(c) Attack them with a chair in front of a rabble of cheering pumped-up inbreds on national television.

2. You and your mates decide to have a game of football in the park. What do you need to take?

(a) A ball

(b) A ball and 2 coats

(c) A ball, 50 crash helmets, 4 tons of body armour, 20 cheerleaders, a marching sousaphone band with a grand piano on a trolley, and a team of orthopaedic surgeons specialising in spinal injuries.

3. You are driving along a country road when you accidentally run over a rabbit. What do you do?

(a) Stop and see how badly injured it is, taking it to a vet if it is still alive

(b) Carry on driving, but hope it is still alive, or if not, that it died quickly

(c) Strap it across the bonnet of your car and drive home hollering, whooping and throwing empty Budweiser cans out of the window.

4. You wake up in the morning with a stiff neck after sleeping in an awkward position. What do you do?

(a) Ignore it. It will probably loosen up as the day progresses

(b) Take a couple of aspirins and get on with things.

(c) Take yourself to a prostitute-addicted TV evangelist faith healer in an ill-fitting wig, who will lay his hands on your head, whilst screaming about the devil in front of an audience of gibbering inbreds.

5. What do you have for breakfast?

(a) A bowl of Cornflakes, slice of toast and a mug of tea

(b) Glass of orange juice, croissant and a cup of coffee

(c) A bag of donuts with ice cream, a 32 ounce steak with six eggs sunny side-up, fifteen pancakes with maple syrup, ten waffles, five corndogs and a diet root beer.

6. You and your partner decide to take the plunge and get married. What sort of ceremony do you have?

(a) A quiet party with a few friends in a registry office

(b) A church service followed by a traditional reception at a hotel

(c) A minute long mockery at a 24 hour drive-through chapel in Las Vegas, presided over by a transvestite vicar dressed as Elvis.

7. Your 14-year-old son is going through a difficult phase, becoming disruptive at school and reclusive at home. What do you do?

(a) Don’t worry. Its just a phase and will pass.

(b) Encourage him to get out more, get involved in team sports or join a youth club.

(c) Take him to an armoury and buy him an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and enough ammunition to slaughter a small town.

8. You fancy a night in watching something funny on TV. What kind of comedy do you choose?

(a) A sitcom like Fawlty Towers or Father Ted

(b) A sketch show like the Two Ronnies or the Fast show

(c) A thinly disguised morality play set in a massive lounge where the audience whoop for ten minutes every time an overpaid actor with a superglued grin on his face makes an entrance to deliver a lightweight wisecrack.

9. Whilst getting ready for bed, you stub your toe on your wife’s dressing table. What do you do?

(a) Shout and swear a bit, after all, it did hurt

(b) Make a mental note to move the table so it doesn’t happen again

(c) Immediately call a hotshot lawyer with an uptown reputation, and sue your wife’s ass.

You are responsible for the USA’s presidential electoral process. Do you:

(a) Count all votes and declare a winner

(b) Count all votes and declare a winner

(c) Let the press declare who’s won before the votes are counted; then count only the votes which have been handed in by a deadline whilst not checking if Bud, the hillbilly sheriff of Nowheresville, has left several thousand votes in the trunk of his Chevy ‘by mistake’, then force a recount of only some of the votes within just one state and allow only 12 seconds for the recount to take place; then be amazed that the recount hasn’t finished by the deadline and increase the deadline by another 3.2 seconds; then ignore all votes and let 4 judges decide the result, making sure the judges all support the same candidate; then ponce around the world telling other countries how to run their own elections.

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Via my purely evil counterpart, a satire of President Bush that you’ll probably find funny whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. (WARNING: sound is required and it involves good, old-fashioned potty humor. So if your boss is visiting your desk, don’t click the link.)

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Yesterday I briefly wondered why no one builds brick houses anymore, opting instead for traditional siding with a facade of brick. Now, thanks to uber-engineer SDB, I know why: because if brick buildings do collapse, everybody dies. I probably should have figured that out for myself.

But I still think that a brick facade looks fake, when the regular old siding is clearly visible on the sides of the house.

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I really hope that a year and a half from now, when we’re embarking on what’s sure to be one of the nastier Presidential elections on record, that Democrats don’t get that deer-in-the-headlights look like they did in 2002 — you know, the “Man, we voted for some of his stuff, why are Bush and the Republicans being so mean to us?” Because according to the NYT (registration required), the President’s political strategists are already planning such wonderful touches as holding their national convention in New York City during the first week of September (when in the past they’ve always been held in July and August) so as to neatly dovetail with — you guessed it — the third anniversary of 9/11/01. And no, this isn’t just a Democrat whining about timing; they actually admit what they’re doing:

Mr. Bush’s advisers said they chose the date so the event would flow into the commemorations of the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The back-to-back events would complete the framework for a general election campaign that is being built around national security and Mr. Bush’s role in combatting terrorism, Republicans said. Not incidentally, they said they hoped it would deprive the Democratic nominee of critical news coverage during the opening weeks of the general election campaign.

(Emphasis added.)

This is not shaping up to be a campaign of ideas, in which big ideas are debated. No, we’re in store for ads that juxtapose images of Democrats with shots of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. There’s going to be bloody-shirt waving. There are going to be personal attacks and questions of Democratic patriotism. On the third page of the article we learn from a Bush adviser that Senator John Kerry — a decorated Viet Nam veteran — “looks French”.

This is what’s coming, folks. We’d better get ready for it, pronto. And this time, we’d damned well better fight the fight that’s actually being fought, instead of the one we’d like to fight if only they’d stop playing dirty.

(And I probably shouldn’t be reading political blogs at six in the morning when I can’t sleep….)

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One of the most heartening things I’ve noticed in the last year or so is the presence of comics, manga, and graphic novels in public libraries. Anything to advance the idea that “Gee, maybe it’s not just disposable shit read by shut-in computer nerds who subsist on Doritos and Coke!” can only be a good thing.

Plus, this means I can catch up on some essential comics reading without shelling out $30.00 or whatever for those trade-paperback, ultra-glossy paper editions. Ye Gods….

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I was excited by the privately developed spaceship that I wrote about yesterday for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is my lifelong fascination with and belief in the inevitability and desirability of spaceflight. The other reason, though, was some nifty timing: just a couple of days before, I finished reading Rogue Star by Michael Flynn.

This is the second volume in Flynn’s near-future tetralogy (the first volume of which, Firestar, I reviewed last fall). Where the first volume was roughly contemporary with where we are right now — with some unfortunate differences that Flynn obviously couldn’t have known about back in 1996 — Rogue Star is set in 2009. Where the focus in the first book was on billionaire industrialist Mariesa van Huyten’s efforts to develop the next generation of reusable spacecraft, the focus here is now on the construction of a permanent space station. Flynn is assuming that even in 2009 we will still be using the space shuttle, because the shuttle’s external fuel tank — usually jettisoned and allowed to burn up upon the shuttle’s detachment — is here recovered by Mariesa’s construction crews and used as the actual infrastructure of the new station. These parts of the book, I felt, were the least successful; it got very technical and a bit hard to follow. I suspect a person of a more engineerist background might enjoy those chapters more than I did.

But as was the case with Firestar, Rogue Star is much bigger than that. As in the earlier volume, the focus is as much on the political and personal backgrounds of this new space colonization effort as it is on the mechanics of colonization itself. The conflicts of this novel follow up on those created in the first novel — industrialist versus environmentalist, capitalist versus government — with some surprising results, although some of the results seem a bit too “pat” here. I felt that Flynn was a bit too gung-ho about benevolent capitalism in the first volume, but in Rogue Star he appears much more aware that people tend to make a mess of things whether they work for the government or for private interests. The characterization is much stronger this time around, and I look forward to seeing what happens in the next two books.

Flynn also manages to get in a bit of “sense of wonder” here, as interwoven throughout the book is the story of a manned expedition to a particularly large asteroid. It turns out that asteroids are to play a large part in Flynn’s story, which follows logically from seeds sown in Firestar. But there were still some surprises, and I look forward to seeing how one particular discovery plays out. There is an angle to the space exploration stuff in Rogue Star that I didn’t expect to find here, and it opens some interesting possibilities for the remainder of the series.

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Every Usenet newsgroup has topics that crop up now and then, some of which result in inevitable flamewars and others that result in thoughtful discussion. And then there are some that result in both. On rec.music.movies, the main group in which I used to participate, one such topic was the relationship between film music and classical music.

Generally speaking, film music afficionadoes tend to feel “looked-down-upon” by classical music people. This perception is not without cause. Many lovers of classical music tend to look upon film music as something of a bastard step-child; it’s “classical lite”, and the people who love it are merely goofy folks and geeky fanboys who have never been able to develop the finer aesthetic sensibility or the attention-span required to really plumb the depths of the world’s great music. Likewise, many film music lovers tend to sneer at classical people, thinking them snobs who think themselves the occupants of the Artistic High Ground and who are thus incapable of seeing the many wonderments film music has to offer.

As is often the case, to a certain degree both camps are correct about the other.

Film music lovers tend to fall into three different camps, as far as their attitudes toward classical music goes. First there are the ones who are quite happy to listen to film music and little else; their classical experience is limited to a handful of the “biggest” classical pieces out there or a concert work written by a film composer. They might have a Beethoven CD or two, or maybe a “Highlights from Wagner’s Ring Cycle” CD, but little else. These folks tend to not like classical music much at all, which is surprising since they are already familiar with the orchestral sound, but they find that there isn’t enough “payoff” in classical music.

Then there is a smaller camp of people who mainly love classical music, but also follow film music out of what they perceive to be a filet-mignon lover’s enjoyment of hamburgers and hot dogs. They claim enjoyment of film music, but squarely on a level that’s quite a bit below classical, or an intellectual film critic’s appreciation of Hong Kong kung-fu movies.

And finally, there is the third camp that loves film music and classical music equally well, for different reasons, and sees film music as a “sub-genre” of classical that has its own charms that a lot of concert music does not, while granting that concert music is strong in other areas that film music is rarely able to explore. This is what I call the “centrist-inclusive” position of film music fandom, and it’s where the most level-headed and reasonable folks reside. Including, of course, me. (Did you expect anything else?)

The relationship between classical music and film music is one I’ve thought about for a long time, and I’m planning to explore it a bit in a series of essays, of which this is the introduction. Basically, I want to explore just why I love film music as much as I do, and where it stands in relation to the great music of the past, which is also a central part of my creative life. Stay tuned….

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The state of our “moving in” has finally reached the point where we can tackle the rest of it over time — boxes here and there, things not quite where we think we want them, et cetera. Thus, I can really start hammering away on writing again (although I’ve been doing a bit already, on the “few minutes here and there” basis).

I also get to start taking my daily walks again, for which I am thrilled. Our new neighborhood isn’t quite as conducive to walking as our last Buffalo neighborhood was, but it seems pretty nice. Our apartment complex is fairly large, and one of its side-streets opens up into one of those newer housing developments — the ones where every house is palatial and gorgeous, with perfectly coifed lawns and peripheral landscaping, et cetera. I’ve noticed a couple of things about these housing developments that strike me as odd, though.

:: First, what is the point of putting a facade of brick on the front of a house, when the regular old white or yellow siding is visible on either side? Hell, for that matter, why aren’t houses made of brick anymore? Doesn’t anyone learn the lesson of “The Three Little Pigs”?

:: And why are these gigantic homes built on such small lots? If I own a house that big, I want to have it on a suitably large plot of land. I’m talking two or three acres here. But these houses are sufficiently close to one another that in many cases a person could lean out a bedroom window of one house and spit a loogie onto the side of the one next door. Neighbors and neighborhoods are all well and good, but do we really want the Smiths next door to be less than twenty feet away?

:: I’m sure this is simply because these developments are so young, but an affluent neighborhood such as this that is completely lacking in trees just looks sterile. Trees convey a sense of permanence and history. I’m not sure I’d want to live in a neighborhood where it’s clear that everyone moved in since 1998.

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Rupert Murdoch’s FOXNews is a conservative-leaning network, staffed with many pundits/journalists who made a lot of hay during the late 1990s condemning all manner of things done by President Bill Clinton, including his unfortunate dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

Rupert Murdoch’s FOX Network is a network that is given to somewhat sleazier fare than the other major networks, including a new “reality” show premiering tonight, called Mr. Personality. This new show is hosted by…Monica Lewinsky.

I may give up fiction writing. The stuff I make up just isn’t as good as the real thing.

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This picture, a woman at prayer during New Year’s celebrations in Phnom Penh, appeared on Warren Ellis’s blog, and I just thought it was one of the loveliest photographs I have seen lately. Ellis seems to have something of a fascination with Asian culture and goings-on in addition to the just-plain-weirdness that he chronicles as well.

Not that this image has the first thing to do with Easter, but hey, have a happy one, folks!

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