IMAGES OF THE WEEK

The Niagara Mohawk Building, Syracuse, NY.

One of the neat aspects of northeastern cities is the prevalence of art-deco architecture (the most famous example probably being New York City’s Chrysler Building), especially in older cities like Buffalo and Syracuse that haven’t seen much by way of significant additions to the skyline since the art-deco era. This building — the headquarters of New York’s Niagara Mohawk Power Company — is one of the most striking examples of the art-deco style I’ve ever seen, especially so since the building’s restoration a few years back. Having driven by the building several times, I can report that it does indeed gleam as much as the above photo indicates.

Here is a close-up of the building’s tower, including the angelic figure near the building’s crown:

(Say, can anyone out there recommend any good introductory books about architecture? I’m finding art-in-building increasingly interesting, and yet I know very little about it.)

Share This Post

New books are for sale on Ebay. Check out “Marketplace”, also at left.

Share This Post

Furthering my triumph over All! Things! Tech!, I’ve added a Google Search function in the sidebar at left, thus making Byzantium’s Shores more staggeringly useful than…well, I’m hoping it enhances things a bit here. Look between “Other Journeys” and the Archive for the Search function.

Share This Post

SciFi Weekly has an interesting interview this week with Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, two of the more notable artists in SF and fantasy. Vellejo’s work should be familiar to anyone with passing interest in SF, such as his cover painting for Vernor Vinge’s novel A Fire Upon the Deep.

Share This Post

OK, I just finished watching this week’s episode of Alias, and I quite enjoyed it — more than when I’ve tried watching this show in the past. They used a tried-and-true formula: an in medias res opening, leaving the heroine in jeopardy, and then flashing back to tell how she got into that situation in the first place. One thing that rankled was the fact that this episode was clearly designed, at least in part, to bring viewers like me — who haven’t been watching faithfully — at least somewhat up to speed. The execution of the miniature “infodumps” was a bit ham-handed, right down to the dreaded phrase, “As you know….”, which I heard at least twice in the episode. “As you know….” speeches are incredibly tempting for a writer who is trying to get information to the reader or viewer that they need to understand the story. But I did enjoy the show’s tight pacing, and it’s always enjoyable watching Rutger Hauer play the taciturn bad-ass (which is a good thing, because that’s virtually the only type of role he ever plays).

As far as TV espionage shows go, though, I think Alias has some heavy lifting ahead of it, if it wants to supersede 24 in my pecking order.

Share This Post

I won’t do any kind of lengthy analysis of the State of the Union speech here — there’s plenty of that, all over the Web. I will note that President Bush continues to be a very effective orator. While he doesn’t have the inate speechmaking ability that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had, GWB has done the next best thing: he’s assembled a team of speechwriters who are better at matching rhetoric to their man’s speech patterns and syntactic qualities than any in recent memory. And Bush has one strength, the lack of which dogged Clinton in virtually all of his major speeches: he doesn’t go on nearly as long. I’m one who remembers Clinton’s speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, in which he droned on for something like three days. Brevity was never Clinton’s strong point.

Share This Post

Via TheForce.Net: the occupational hazards facing an orchestral conductor when the composer of the works on the program happens to be in the concert hall. At least Maestro Slatkin was armed!

TF.N’s story can be found here, and this event was also featured in a lengthy interview with Maestros Williams and Slatkin on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Any mainstream mention of film music should be supported, and any attempt to bring film music to a larger audience can only be a good thing. This is an art form that is woefully underappreciated — musical people tend to view film music as classical music’s bastard stepchild, and film people tend to view film music as something not to be appreciated in any context other than with the film itself.

Share This Post

“Minas Morgul Oliphaunts 45, Isengard Uruk-hai 17.”

I can only assume that this is the kind of thing that was being sought when this Google search brought someone here.

(And imagine: Byzantium’s Shores is the only site anywhere on the Web listed under that particular search term! I’m the one and only!)

Share This Post

Wine Poetics is a blog I happened upon, pretty much randomly, the other day. It’s brand-spanking new — less than a month old — and it’s about wine, poetry, and wine-related poetry. Nice to see blogs out there that aren’t about conservative politics, liberal politics, libertarian politics, tech stuff, or — worst of all — long-winded screeds about football and Star Wars. (Ahem.)

Share This Post

Once again, SDB is confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. I’d love to be able to conclude from the lack of any kind of terrorist incident at the Super Bowl that we’re winning, that we’ve crippled Al Qaeda, that the reason the game wasn’t attacked is because they couldn’t mount any such attack.

The problem, though, is this: rewind history to before 9-11-01, before we declared war on Al Qaeda in particular and on terrorism in general. Prior to that date, “proportional response” was the rule; we contented ourselves with missile strikes whenever we thought we had a good read on where Bin Laden happened to be. How many Super Bowls were struck by terrorist incidents before we crippled Al Qaeda? how many times was the World Series the site of an attack? how many times was the New Year’s crowd in Times Square hit by a suicide bomber? How many times did any of these things happen, back when Al Qaeda was at the high point of its ability and strength?

Answer: ZERO.

The lack of any conclusive evidence for the current status of Al Qaeda, coupled with Al Qaeda’s general modus operandi in the past (striking normal people, at work, on days which are fairly unremarkable in any other way), suggests to me that SDB’s conclusion is frighteningly unfounded.

Share This Post