Blogging in this space, which has been kinda sporadic anyway, will be even more sporadic over the next week, because I am on vacation. I’ll probably still have some stuff up, but don’t hold your breath.
And now for something completely different:
Something for Thursday
Oh crap, it’s Thursday! And in my time zone, it still is, for another 19 minutes. Ha! Sorry to drop the ball so completely, but I’m in “Vacation Mode” at work and in my head and I’m still trying to extract this frakking book from my head. I know where the book is going, but I’m well into the third (and final) act and I’ve got quite the juggling act going on, and I’m finding it in general a bit of a struggle to make sure everything happens that’s supposed to. Plus I’ve got my Muse, doing his drive-by visits, which are always helpful but also a bit vexing as I try to figure out how to use what he’s giving me.
But anyway, enough whining. Here are the End Titles from Hook, by John Williams. This very fine score has pretty much disappeared except from the consciousnesses of devoted film music fans by virtue of the movie being, well, not all that good.
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Toys from the FUTURE!!!
This Retrospace photo really takes me back. The one toy I remember not owning from childhood that to this day I still kinda-sorta want is the Big Trak, the rover-vehicle thing in the upper left corner. See that keypad on the back? You used that to load a program of movements, and then the Big Trak would take off, executing the turns you programmed. And it made cool laser noises, too. I always loved the cut of that thing’s jib.
And that kid in the lower right, sitting in that seat-thing? I didn’t have the seat-thing, but I had the spaceman helmet and air tank that he’s wearing. Cool stuff for a budding space dude. Zap! Pow!
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Writing is like this, installment # 5748
Here’s another metaphor for what writing is like. Take the wonderful opening scene (sorry, I can’t embed the video) from Love Actually (a movie about which, if you say bad things, I will fight you — that’s no lie). Billy Mack, our drugged out singer, is recording a cover version of a classic oldie but with the lyrics ‘repurposed’ for Christmastime. OK? So he’s recording, and it takes several takes because he keeps getting it wrong. He gets more and more frustrated with himself, culminating in one of the best self-directed bits of profanity in movie history.
But then, he buckles down, dials in, and he nails it. And he knows it, he knows he’s nailed it, so he keeps going, getting into the moment. And he’s really creating something now! He’s got it!
And then, the realization hits him, and at the 1:54 mark in the video, he says to his producer, “This is shit, isn’t it?”
Even when it’s going great, you’re never far from the conviction that you’re still producing tripe and treacle. You’re never far from stopping typing, staring at the screen, and saying, “This is shit, isn’t it?”
That’s what writing is like.
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One doesn’t see too many job listings for executioners these days
I’m trying to wrap my head around this story. A convicted murderer is about to go free in Indiana. The case has never been in doubt; this isn’t a case of innocence-by-DNA. The woman confessed to the crime, and there has never been any challenge to her conviction. The sentence, however, was: the woman was sentenced to death. But she was only 16 at the time.
Murderers are…well, they’re murderers, and I struggle with my notion of how best to deal with them. I honestly do believe in rehabilitation and maybe even redemption, and this woman has served 27 years in prison. Is she rehabilitated? I guess that’s not really for me to say. It’s a tough question. But the idea of sentencing someone to die for a crime — and this one, involving a butcher knife and more than 30 stab wounds, is pretty heinous — before they’re old enough to have even most of the privileges our society reserves for ‘adults’ seems extreme.
And then I read further in the article and I learn that until 1988, you could be sentenced to death in Indiana as young as ten years old.
Many years ago, I believed in the death penalty. It seemed pretty clear to me: murderers should be executed. Eye for an eye, and all that. But I changed my mind when Ted Bundy was executed.
If you were to draw up a list of every murderer in the history of the human species, and rank them in order of who most deserved the death penalty, I think there’s a pretty good chance that Ted Bundy would wind up in the top ten. He is among the very worst things our species has ever produced. But I’ve never forgotten the news footage of his execution, during which a raucous and celebratory crowd was gathered outside the prison, brandishing hand-painted signs that said things like “Barbecue Ted” and “Fry Bundy Fry”. Those images were like a bucket of cold water, thrown upon me. The state was killing a human being, and there were folks outside the place where it was happening. And they were having a tailgate party.
I haven’t had much confidence in the moral underpinnings of the death penalty since then.
In my lifetime, at least one state maintained the legal authority to execute ten-year-old children. The mind reels.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome (Russian edition)
Oddities and Awesome abound! This week, a trio of Russian stuff.
:: The first human to travel in space, Yuri Gagarin, died several years after his flight in a plane crash, the details of which have never really been made clear…until now. I continue to be amazed, this many years later and what with the news today, by humanity’s need for secrecy.
:: Today is the 50th anniversary of the first human female space flight. I’ve never understood why it took the United States more than two decades to get a woman into space. (Although, in more cynical moments, I think I do understand it, but I don’t like the implication.)
:: Finally, a more frivolous and non-space related item. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is mad at Vladimir Putin. I’ve never been able to figure Vladimir Putin out (I always get this vague sense that he’s the James Bond supervillain that Dick Cheney always wanted to be), but the fact that he has angered the Patriots makes me happy.
More next week!
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This week’s potential cover art
I might as well make this a quasi-regular thing, huh?
OK, that’s it for now, lest I get carried away. Time to get back to writing. This week was a bit rough in terms of pure output, mainly because I’m into the hard part of the book, the part that I’ve been entrusting to The Muse all along, the “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it” part. Well, I’m at the bridge now. Time to cross it, armed with the little scraps of Burger King wrappers, old coffee cups, and Post-It notes that The Muse has occasionally seen fit to huck out the window of his Dodge Dart at me.
Back at it!
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From the Books: “Me the People”
I’ve recently read a book called Me the People: One Man’s Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, by Kevin Bleyer. Mr. Bleyer is, among other things, one of the writers for The Daily Show, which means that this book is a mixture of humor and serious discussion, with the occasional problem that at times it’s difficult to separate the two. But it still present a fascinating look at the process by which the Founding Fathers arrived at the Constitution, and what kinds of problems exist in trying to force a modern, technological superpower’s society on a governmental structure created by a bunch of agrarian former colonists more than two hundred years ago.
In all honesty, I’ve never been much for idolatry of the Constitution. I recently had a friend try to draw me into a conversation on gun control, and I strongly resisted, not particularly wanting to venture down that particular garden path, well, ever. But my friend did ask me this: “Well, you believe in the Constitution, don’t you?” That struck me as an interesting question, because, well, what does it mean?
Do I believe in the Constitution? I suppose so, in that I believe that we have a government that is structured according to the provisions contained within the Constitution’s pages. And that’s about all that I believe about it. I don’t believe that there is anything especially sacred about the Constitution, and I don’t believe that the Constitution represents some kind of moment when we rose to greatness. In truth, the Constitution is a muddled mess of a document, and the government it creates isn’t so much a brilliantly constructed Machine of Democracy as a hodge-podge, ramshackle mess of compromises with difficulties exacerbated by some really poor writing.
When discussing various issues, I try to never get wrapped up in talking about what “the Founding Fathers wanted”, for a number of reasons. To begin with, the Constitution simply does not represent any kind of ‘consensus’ on the part of the Founding Fathers. A lot of them disliked the resulting document and simply accepted it as “the best thing we’re likely to end up with”. When the biggest matter of consensus arising from the Constitutional Convention was a general sense of “Meh, this was the best we could do, folks”, the idea of ascribing any particular thought or philosophy to “the Founding Fathers” doesn’t make much sense. Heck, Thomas Jefferson even thought that we should scrap the entire thing after a few decades and take another whack at it. As far as I can see, referring to “what the Founding Fathers wanted” is a reference to nothing at all, because they all wanted different things.
More importantly, though, is that a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. The United States Constitution was adopted 224 years ago. Even if there really was some kind of consensus as to what the FF’s wanted, why should that even matter now? Maybe because it’s our own history, but the time of the FFs was a lot longer ago than I think we tend to realize, and I’m increasingly of the view that keeping our governmental structures rigidly organized according to the thoughts of people who lived and died that long ago may not be a great idea. Consider the following list of things, and consider that FFs lived closer to these things, time-wise, than they did to us:
Queen Elizabeth I
William Shakespeare
The defeat of the Spanish Armada
Johannes Kepler
Nostradamus
Suleiman the Magnificent
Cervantes
Ben Jonson
Did the FFs intend for their Constitution to still be running the show 224 years later? I have no idea. But I suspect they’d be a bit baffled by the lip service that is paid to that old document these days, and it says something to me that they included a mechanism for changing the Constitution for a reason.
Here’s how Bleyer sums things up:
Now we understand how it all happened — or rather, almost didn’t.
The Constitution wasn’t a “Miracle at Philadelphia” written by “an assembly of demigods”. On the contrary; what began as a measured, deliberate effort to rescue a beleaguered country became a perpetual unresolved-motion machine — a maddening cycle of nonbinding votes by a parade of toothless committees, marked by fits and starts, fights and “full stops”, conducted by a combative group of exhausted, drunken, broke, petty, partisan, scheming, squabbling, bloviating, backstabbing, grandstanding, godforsaken, posturing, restless, cow-tipping, homesick, cloistered, claustrophobic, sensory-deprived, under-oxygenated, fed-up, talked-out, overheated delegates so distraught and despairing they threatened violence, secession, foreign allegiance, even prayer — and concluded, for those who didn’t abandon the proceedings altogether, with as much premeditation and forethought as a game of musical chairs: the last, least abhorrent, mutually-somewhat-acceptable idea on the table when the music stopped — or the heat became too unbearable, or the liquor too strong, or the rioting too loud, or the pressure too intense, or the company too loathsome, or the wigs too uncomfortable, or the patience too thin — became the law of the land. As much the product of an “assembly of demigods” as a confederacy of dunces.
From page one, the Constitution is, by its own admission, a compromise. It is what you get when you drink beer for breakfast.
Or as Ben Franklin put it as the Convention ended: “Thus I consent to this Constitution, because I expect no better.”
If they thought it stank, why should we pretend that it smells of roses and lavender?