I’m waiting until after I’ve seen the film to write a detailed analysis of the score to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Suffice it to say, though, the score CD is an absolute joy. My skin literally shivered as I heard the Ring motif in the very first seconds of the album, and judging by the motifs from the first film revisited in that opening cue, I can only imagine what is depicted in the film’s opening scene. I cannot wait….is it Wednesday yet?
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One reason I was able to complete my Christmas shopping today is that the Bills game (against the Chargers) did not sell out 72 hours before kick-off, so the NFL’s blackout rule kicked in….but I’m wondering, why? My understanding — and it’s borne out by a few minutes of searching online — is that the rule applies to a 75-mile radius from the stadium in question. Syracuse is roughly 140 miles away from Orchard Park, NY, where Ralph Wilson Stadium is located. Why, then, should the game be blacked out in Syracuse? especially when the TV markets don’t overlap, given the presence of Rochester, NY between the cities of Buffalo and Syracuse? Perhaps someone can explain this to me.
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I don’t have much to say about the whole Trent Lott fiasco, except to note that since it was not an “off-the-cuff” remark — a la Al Gore’s unfortunate wording that got morphed into the urban legend that he invented the Internet — but rather an actual, written comment in Lott’s text for that day, I can’t fathom what on earth he was thinking. Even if he is a raging racist (and I suspect he’s at least a non-raging racist), surely a politician of his experience would be able to craft his rhetoric better than this. I caught a replay of the moment the other day, and I was so flabbergasted that he could actually, knowingly write and say those words without realizing how they would be interpreted, I could only think of that scene in Reality Bites where the Winona Ryder character finally has had enough with the nasty female anchor on the news show she writes for that she slips some…unfortunate words into the prompter feed, causing the anchor to say something live, on-the-air, like “I wet myself”. Of course, that’s not the case here, although Lott might well wish it was.
We all say stupid things, things we wish we could take back. But we rarely plan on saying stupid things. We rarely put them into the body of our prepared text. This is precisely the kind of laughably absurd story that keeps me a political junkie (although I try not to write about that here).
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Another reason I’ve been light on the blogging lately is typical for this time of year: Christmas shopping. I’m all done now, and it was fairly painless — even the insanity of trips to the mall on a Saturday and a Sunday in December. The only irritating thing was in the way people these days appear sometimes to have completely forgotten that the concept of “personal space” ever existed — at times, in various stores, I felt like a pinball being bumped around a set of bumpers.
We also taped all of the yearly Christmas specials so we could watch them on a single night — Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and my favorite, A Charlie Brown Christmas. We also ended up watching a couple of newer “sequels” to those classic shows, which were not very good. I’m all for sophisticated humor and whatnot, but the line “Let’s go out in the snow and make a fertility goddess!” simply does not belong in a Christmas special. Nothing against fertility goddesses, but to everything a time and place, eh?
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One benefit of the health-regimen I adopted last January has been that I’ve spent the time since almost cold-free, except for a couple of one-day bugs. Well, that ended this weekend. Ugh.
Luckily, this cold — even though it’s lasted two and a half days — is still nowhere near as bad as some of the nasty colds I’ve had in the past. I still do not believe in taking 10000 milligrams of Vitamin C a day, but I have to believe that my weight loss combined with my exercise regimen combined with taking a multivitamin each day has something to do with it.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Ballycotton Lighthouse, Ireland.
I was doing a bit of noodling around on the Web, looking for information on lighthouses — research for a future writing project, really — and I found this lovely image of a lighthouse in Ireland, which seems to me to capture both the beauty and the solitude (or loneliness) of a lighthouse.
A good clearing-house type of site for lighthouse images can be found here.
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Some book notes are due today.
:: The vagaries of the publishing world require that some classic works of fantasy fiction stay in print forever, as in the case of The Lord of the Rings. Others, however, are left to go out-of-print for long periods, after which they are reissued by another publisher, stay in print for a while, and then go out-of-print again. One example of this phenomenon is John Bellairs’s wonderful first novel, The Face In the Frost. It’s in print and available now, but despite this book’s near classic status in the fantasy field, it’s been vaccilating in and out of print ever since its initial publication in 1969.
The Face In the Frost is Bellairs’s only work of adult fiction. After its publication, he turned his attentions to children’s literature, producing a body of work much of which has never gone out of print. His specialty was gothic fiction, and he was very adept at creating suspense and unnerving moods through atmosphere and characterization rather than through graphic gore or shock value, and while all of his children’s books entertained me greatly, a number of them actually caused me to leave the light on in the hallway all night, lest one of Bellairs’s demonic creations enter my room and….you get the picture. Bellairs is also able to accomplish this kind of scare in The Face In the Frost, and in re-reading it last week — for the first time in nearly ten years, since I bought the book last time it was published — I discovered anew this writer’s gifts.
It’s not all horror, though; Bellairs is one of those “chiaroscuro”-type writers who leavens his scary material with humor, some of which is immensely funny. This was true of all of his children’s books, and it is true in The Face In the Frost, but the humor is based more on puns and literary in-jokes than on the follies of exaggerated personalities from his works for young readers. His language is also a joy. This is a book where characters utter lines like this: “Oh, good heavens! Great elephantine, cloudy, adamant heavens full of thunder stones!” It’s a book where a wizard sits down before his magic mirror to plumb the depths of what his scrying device might reveal…only to have the mirror show him a game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.
The story is fairly straightforward: two wizards, Prospero (“and not the one you are thinking of, either”) and Roger Bacon, are dear old friends who stumble onto the activities of a third wizard who is, as they say, “dabbling in the black arts”. The book follows their adventures as they attempt to find this wizard, identify his aims, and finally balk them. The plot really isn’t the thing, here; with Bellairs, the emphasis is on language, mood and character. The Face In the Frost is a joy, and any person claiming to be a lover of fantasy but has not read this book is, as Bellairs might say, “a pompous, posturing hornswoggler….guilty of mystagogic muckification and pointless prattle”.
:: If I had been a scientist, my sciences of choice would have been, without question, astronomy and cosmology. I’ve always been keenly interested in the stars and the universe and the Big Bang and how it all fits together. It really is what Carl Sagan called “the grandest of mysteries”, and there is nothing in my mind so beautiful as to look at a moonless night sky, filled with stars.
Our Cosmic Habitat by Martin Rees is a brief precis of the state of cosmology today and of the problems facing cosmology right now. This brief book is fairly short on the history, instead giving a quick background on the nature of the stars and planets, of gravity, and of the shape of the universe before delving into the questions of origins. The book’s central focus is on examining the possible answers to Einstein’s famous query: “Could God have made the world differently?” I won’t summarize Rees’s answers to that question here (partly because I’m not entirely sure I understood them), but I will note that the book is compelling, written in a clear and concise style that, being as devoid as is possible of scientific jargon, makes it all about as clear as it’s likely to get. Particularly fascinating is Rees’s discussion of how the qualities of our observable universe, from the shapes of galaxies and the formation of stars to the rise of life itself, are dependent on a small group of “initial settings” — numbers which, if their values are changed even minutely, would have led to a much different universe — and very likely precluded life at all.
Readers looking for a history of cosmological thought would be better served by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (which really should be read by everybody, anyway) or Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age In the Milky Way, but readers wanting to know just where we stand right now as far as science’s understanding of the universe could do far worse than to read Rees’s book. Rees is, among other things, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain.
:: Those of you who tend to walk right by the “Bargain Books” section at Borders or Barnes&Noble, cut it out! You never know what treasures lurk on those haphazardly-stacked tables. The other day I was perusing the “Bargain Book” table at Media Play, and I found Roger Ebert’s Book of Film for six bucks, in hardcover. I’m not the filmgoer that I used to be, but this is a terrific collection of film-related essays and writings.
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Ah, to partake in every blogger’s solution to a lazy day: Random Linkage!!!
:: I saved this link a while ago and forgot about it. It’s a Slate article about the shortcomings of President Bush’s new initiatives on “forest management”, otherwise known as “Give the loggers what they want”.
:: Harry Knowles doesn’t like Star Trek: Nemesis.
:: Yes, this is shamelessly filched from MeFi, but any lover of Edgar Allan Poe should love this 404 message.
:: WOW. This is one of the few times a website has ever made my eyes pop. Trust me on this.
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Over at Ed’s Daily Rant, Ed recently took a breather from short and pithy (and entertaining) political observations to present something of a guide to the wide, wonderful world of….malt liquor. Malt liquor isn’t my thing, really, but once in a while it’s neat for a change. It’s sure better than that Zima stuff….