Sometimes in sports when a bad team rebuilds, a specific progression can be traced. First, they are the bad team that everyone wants to play because they’re an easy target; that was the Buffalo Bills last year. Then, they become the bad team that nobody wants to play: they still lose most of the time, but they scrap and claw and fight and always keep the game close. That could very well be the Buffalo Bills this year, especially after the opener yesterday, which they lost, 37-31 in overtime, to the New York Jets.

Most of the Bills’ “question marks” going into the game actually did well. The offensive line was able to run-block effectively, allowing Bills RB Travis Henry to put up over 140 yards rushing. Their pass-blocking wasn’t as good — Drew Bledsoe faced an awful lot of pressure — but that will most definitely get better. The defense also did a good job of keeping the Jets offense from ever really developing a rhythm for more than a series or two. So how did the Bills end up losing? Because their special teams, which for more than three years now have been substantially less than “special”, blew the game by giving up a blocked punt and two kickoff returns for touchdowns — including the opening kickoff in overtime, so the game ended in OT before there was ever a play from scrimmage. Special teams play has been a train-wreck for the Bills ever since that playoff game in Tennessee that they lost (also on a kickoff return, this one with twenty seconds or so left in the game). Oh, where is Steve Tasker when you need him?

How was Drew Bledsoe’s performance? Well, it’s wonderful to be able to watch the Bills and have some confidence in the quarterback again, something which has not really been the case since Jim Kelly’s retirement. He did throw two interceptions, although I only consider one of them to be a true interception because the other was one of those deals where the receiver gets a hand on the ball, but then the defender pops him, knocking the ball into the air where another defender, who happens to be in the right place at the right time, plucks it from the air. Calling those against a QB’s stats has always struck me as a bit unfair. Maybe they should be called “deflections” instead of “interceptions”. Bledsoe also engineered a last-minute drive to tie the game, which was utterly thrilling. Welcome to Buffalo, Drew.

(An interesting side note: Drew Bledsoe’s first play from scrimmage in his NFL career, back in 1994 with the Patriots, was a pass play on which he was sacked by Bruce Smith of the Bills. His first play from scrimmage as a Bill was a pass play on which he was sacked. Weird.)

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A quick maintenance note: I have removed the permanent link to James Lileks’s site, not because I don’t care for his viewpoints — although I don’t — but because his writing style has become grating to me. I was originally interested in his writing because I found a certain kind of warm humor in it, but that element appears to have vanished completely.

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I expect that every writer has a shelf full of reference books to which they turn on a regular basis. Even a writer who works in fantasy, making up his or her setting and details as the work goes along, has to rely on a number of references for things like environmental information, literary techniques, poetic allusions, and the like. Some of my more frequently used reference works include the following.

:: The Rand McNally Atlas of the World: Masterpiece Edition. This is one of those gigantic atlases with close-up, topographical maps of just about every place on the earth. Immensely useful.

:: The Oxford Essential World Atlas. Why have two atlases? Because the Oxford one is smaller, being a large trade paperback as opposed to an eighteen-inch high, two-inch thick tome like the Rand-McNally. Sometimes I don’t need the close-up view, so the Oxford suits me fine.

:: Historical Atlas, by William R. Shepherd. And then there are times when I need to know what the borders of the Ottoman Empire were, or perhaps the ecclesiastical districts of Plantagenet-era England, or the route of Marco Polo’s journey to China, or the limits of Mongol encroachment into the West. This book has all that and more. I’ve meant to update this book over the years — the one I own dates from 1956 — but the old one hasn’t lost its usefulness one whit.

:: Scientific American’s How Things Work Today. I haven’t had a whole lot of use for this book in my own writing yet, but it’s full of information on the current state of technology for laypersons.

:: The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference. This is a big catch-all book about the current state of the sciences. If I ever turn to writing SF, I suppose I will use it more than I do now, although it’s a fascinating book to dip into.

:: The Oxford Book of English Verse. Here’s another one that I should probably update, as my copy is seventy years old. Every writer needs an all-purpose collection of poetry….

:: Immortal Poems, edited by Oscar Williams. ….or two. This one’s more compact, being a mass-market paperback. It also contains a lot that the Oxford doesn’t.

:: World Poetry, edited by Washburn, Major and Fadiman. This is just what the title says, and it’s as wonderful as useful.

:: Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Also just what the title says. This book has capsule bios of authors, capsule entries on their major works, entries on literary techniques and movements, and a lot more.

:: The Bible, King James Version. I’m not much concerned with the theological aspects of the Bible, so I keep the KJV, which is a towering achievement of the language.

:: Almanacs. I’m not loyal to any particular almanac. I buy a new one every three years or so; currently I have the TIME Magazine almanac. I bought this one, as opposed to the World Almanac, simply because it was cheaper at the bookstore I was in on the day that I decided to update my almanac. You never know when you’re going to need some tiny little fact like who won the 1949 World Series or when the Chrysler Building was erected or the dates of King Henry VII’s reign in England.

:: The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. This book is absolutely essential.

:: Dictionaries. Currently I own two: The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition and The Oxford Pocket Dictionary and Thesaurus, American Edition. (I’m not sure how the Oxford can be remotely considered a “pocket” dictionary. The thing won’t fit in any pocket I’ve ever seen.) My AHD has more entries than the Oxford, but the Oxford has the thesaurus in the same volume. I am also a member of a book club that includes access to the full Oxford English Dictionary online, although I don’t use that perk as often as I originally thought I might.

Of course, there are a large number of other books that I use as reference materials, but the ones listed here are my main workhorses.

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This weekend was a sad one in my family: our oldest cat, the nine-year-old Persian named Jasmine, passed away. It was very sudden and very quick, which is bad because of the shock but is also good because of the quickness of the whole thing. We are one of those families for whom pets are pretty much full family members, so her loss was hard. Also hard is explaining what has happened to our three-year-old daughter. She understood that something happened that made Mommy and Daddy very sad, and she understood that Jasmine became very sick…but she evidently hasn’t put the emotions and the reality of the event all together yet. This is the first death in the family that she has experienced.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Multnomah Falls, Oregon.

I’ve lived near one of the world’s greatest and most famous cataracts, Niagara Falls, for more than twenty years now; but before that I lived near another of the most beautiful of the world’s waterfalls, the spectacular Multnomah Falls. This cataract is located in the Columbia River Gorge, an hour or so from Portland. The water volume is certainly nowhere near Niagara, but Niagara can’t begin to boast Multnomah’s amazing height. The falls are created when a lovely but unremarkable stream plunges more than six hundred feet over an escarpment. The hiking trails in the park devoted to the Falls yield a number of amazing views, from the pool where the Falls land to the bridge at the Falls’ midheight to the observation deck located at the very brink of the Falls. It’s been more than two decades since I saw Multnomah last, and I would dearly love to go back.

The image links to an official National Parks Service website devoted to Multnomah Falls.

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IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS, part one.

This is a new semi-regular thing I’ll be doing whenever I feel like it, not unlike my “Poetical Excursions”. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a movie and noticing a small detail that either enhances the mood of the film or imagination of its setting (these are almost always intentional), or that detracts from the goings-on in a bad way (these are not). Basically, in this mini-series I will simply cite some details that I’ve noticed in films I’ve seen, for good or ill. These details won’t always reflect on my overall opinion of a film, however; I may cite a detail that I love in a film I dislike, or vice-versa.

So, here we go….

GOOD: Dumbo. In the film’s very last scene, after Dumbo has learned how to fly with his ears and has saved the circus and become a celebrity, he is flying along behind his circus train while his mother, the previously harshly-treated Mrs. Jumbo, relaxes in style in her new luxury car. As the music climaxes, Dumbo swoops down into his mother’s waiting arms, and returns her embrace by wrapping his immense ears around her. I love that.

BAD: Contact. There are a few grating details in this film, which all arise from the digital creations of things that weren’t there to begin with. Now, I can deal with actual CNN personalities appearing in the film, although I would really rather that Bob Zemeckis and the film’s crew had gone the way of, say, The West Wing and created their own White House Press Corps and news reporters. Seeing Bernard Shaw report on fictional events in the film is jarring. Equally jarring are the appearances by Bill Clinton, who was President at the time of the film’s making. They use actual speeches of his, with the words edited so as to reflect the President’s reaction to the film’s events, but still the whole thing seems fake. And finally, there are some aerial tracking shots over the immense crowds that gather at the VLA in New Mexico and Cape Canaveral for the testing of The Machine. In these shots, the same green tent appears…over and over and over. Ugh.

GOOD: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. After the big chase through the Coruscant skyline, which began when Obi Wan Kenobi lept through a glass window to grab onto the flying assassin droid, some worker droids are shown replacing the glass. A lovely touch.

BAD: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Now, you’d think that a filmmaker of George Lucas’s attention to visual detail would notice the fact that late in the film, Padme presses the exact same button on her ship’s control panel to do completely different things. This is not unlike the fact that the “Fire Phasers” button on Star Trek is rarely in the same place twice.

BAD: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Speaking of Trek, how can the bridge of the Klingon Bird of Prey in STIV be completely different from the bridge of the Bird of Prey in the preceding STIII: The Search For Spock, when they’re the same ship? Were Kirk and crew sufficiently bored during their time on Vulcan that they rebuilt the bridge and still left it looking like a Klingon bridge?

GOOD: Superman. When Lois Lane is hanging for dear life from the helicopter that has crashed on the roof of the Daily Planet building, Clark Kent exits the building at street level. Something flutters to the ground behind him, and it turns out to be Lois’s hat. That’s pretty good, as is Clark’s small expression of frustration when he looks for someplace to change into Superman and notices that phone booths have been replaced by phones-on-poles.

BAD: Raiders of the Lost Ark. When Indy and Sallah take the headpiece of the Staff of Ra to the Imam for deciphering, they are told that the staff is to be “six qadam high”. (I have no idea how that unit of measure is really spelled, by the way.) Sallah helpfully puts in that this is about seventy-two inches, which we can deduce is six feet. Therefore, one “qadam” equals one foot. But on the reverse of the headpiece is the direction to subtract one “qadam” to “honor the Hebrew God whose Ark this is”. That makes for a five-foot staff. So far, so good — until the actual scene in the Map Room, where the Staff of Ra is shown to be at least six inches taller than Indy himself. So, are we to conclude that Indy’s height is four foot six?

Tune in again….

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I watched part of the Frontline special on PBS last night, the subject of which was Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, an examination of religious themes surrounding the events of 11 September 2001. What I saw of the show was fascinating, and I hope to see it in its entirety again. The most striking segment depicted a rabbi who has used transcriptions of those gut-wrenching cellphone calls from those who died in his daily chants. Hearing those words — Tell the children I love them, take care of them, I love you, goodbye — sung to those Hebrew chant melodies is utterly haunting.

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Until now, author Neil Gaiman has been primarily known as the writer behind the remarkable Sandman comic book series. He’s written other things — a couple of novels, some other comics, and a battery of short fiction — but he’s still been mostly known as the Sandman guy. That’s likely to change, though, now that Gaiman’s novel American Gods has won both the Hugo and the Bram Stoker awards for Novel of the Year and now that his newest book, Coraline, is drawing rave notices.

I actually finished reading American Gods on Saturday, the day before it was awarded with the Hugo. Now, I haven’t read the other novels that were nominated this year, so I cannot honestly say whether the award was given correctly. I can only say that Gods is an excellent novel. The story is about a man called Shadow who has been paroled from prison on the same day that his wife is killed in an automobile accident. With nowhere else to go, Shadow ends up in the employ of a strange man named Wednesday who moves in some very strange circles. It turns out that Shadow is to play a part in a war between the fading, old-world Gods and the new-fangled American Gods, deities such as commerce and the Internet. Along the way, lessons are learned and secrets revealed, as is always the case in large-scale works like this in which nothing is ever as it seems.

Gaiman achieves an interesting mix of literal description and metaphorical construct in depicting the conflicts of his novel. At one point, he goes so far as to write:

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as a metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman…religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

The book is at times quite literal in its description of events, and at other times it takes on a dreamier, surrealistic tone — especially in passages involving Native American spirituality and its relation to the onset of American society and the constant arrival of new Gods. This can seem facile at times, for how else would one contrast the businesslike demeanor of America versus the more spiritual concerns of others? However, it gradually becomes clear that Gaiman is after something else, and the line blurs substantially as the novel progresses, and as we begin to suspect that the two sides depicted in the novel may not be quite as we are told they are.

Gaiman’s use of setting is also fascinating. The book is set mostly in the upper Midwest. (Gaiman himself lives in Minneapolis.) He invokes landmarks and attractions that will be well-known to anyone familiar with that area as settings in his novel, and particularly fascinating is his depiction of the seemingly idyllic town of Lakeside, Wisconsin which may not be quite as idyllic as it seems.

The novel is very episodic in structure, basically moving from one set-piece to the next. There isn’t so much of a linear development of the plot, which may bother some readers. Gaiman also includes small vignettes that take us out of the main action of the novel entirely in order to depict side-struggles and events in his America, where Gods interact with mere mortals. The most impressive of these, to me, was the lengthy vignette involving an Arab immigrant to New York City. American Gods was written before 11 September 2001, but it is difficult to not read this section of the book in that light. In fact, reading this book after 11 September is an exercise in the American spiritual landscape, as Gaiman makes us wonder just who our gods really are.

The book’s only flaw, in my estimation, is its conclusion. Gaiman leaves one particular story thread, and a fairly minor one at that, unresolved until after everything else has been dealt with; then he returns to that story thread and ties it up with a few more revelations. The answers Gaiman gives are satisfying, but the episode still feels a bit out-of-place. Perhaps, though, this is Gaiman’s intent — his way of depicting the continuing cycle of divinity at play with the profane. I’m not really sure.

I found American Gods immensely enjoyable, as a piece of contemporary fantasy in the manner of Charles de Lint or Robert Holdstock. Recommended.

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Everything that the vibraphone is today can pretty much be traced to a single musician: the amazing Lionel Hampton, who used his proficiency on that instrument to become one of jazz’s leading lights.

Sadly, Lionel Hampton has passed away at the age of 94. NPR’s tribute to Hampton can be heard here.

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A couple of nifty links:

:: ABCNews has a nice article about people who collect things that actually doesn’t make collectors look like, well, weirdos of The Simpsons‘s “Comic Book Guy” variety.

:: Slate has an interesting article making the case for Randall Cunningham as a member of football’s Hall-of-Fame. I never thought that Cunningham’s career was quite up to that level, but after reading this, I’m not so sure. And that touchdown pass of his against my beloved Bills in 1990, where he dropped back into his own end zone, ducked under a certain Bruce Smith sack (and this was Bruce Smith in his prime, mind you) and then put the ball in the air for what turned out to be a 102-yard touchdown pass, remains etched on my brain after twelve years. (The Bills won that game, by the way.)

:: More football stuff. (Get used to it!) All the ESPN gurus have their predictions up on one handy page. The Rams appear to be a majority pick to win it all, although it’s not unanimous. What is unanimous is that nobody is picking the Patriots to repeat. On a page to himself, of course, is the Tuesday Morning Quarterback, who is back writing football-related haikus.

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