I blogged about IT almost two years ago. What a terrifying, haunting, amazing novel.
Page One: IT
A Teevee Report
Now that we’re a little ways into the new teevee season, here are some thoughts on some shows.
:: Hell’s Kitchen ended a few weeks ago, somewhat mercifully, as it turns out. This last season was awful. I wrote before about the obvious fact that the producers were keeping Elise around for the sake of drama, but as the finale unwound, it became clear that keeping Elise around for the sake of drama was the only thing keeping the show remotely interesting to watch. Hell’s Kitchen has become nothing more than formula, with nothing ever different, right down to the formats of specific episodes. I found myself predicting each episode’s challenge, before they happened. “Oh, eight chefs left? Time for the Blind Taste Test!” “Final four — time for a visit from the family members, followed by Taste It and Create It!” “Oh, it’s the final two? This means they’ll cook their five dishes for five judges, and whoever wins more gets to pick their team for the final service first.”
There is absolutely nothing ever new about Hell’s Kitchen anymore. Nothing ever happens that we haven’t seen happen to a different batch of chefs in previous seasons. The challenges are always the same; the only thing that changes are the ingredients. Each episode follows a rigid pattern: Reaction to last week; new day and new challenge; losers do crappy punishment while winners have fun; dinner service; upstairs drama over elimination nominations; elimination. It’s all just boring now. And the worst thing is, they don’t have to completely re-invent the show to reinvigorate things. Here are a couple ideas, just kicked off the top of my head randomly:
– No more “men versus women”. During the “signature dishes” challenge, each head-to-head winner goes on one team, each loser to the other. This way you get a whole team of people with a chip on their shoulder from the get-go.
– Have a challenge early on whose reward for winning is the right to trade one chef to the other team, of their choice, for a chef from the other team, of their choice.
– Leave Hell’s Kitchen. Take the chefs to actual, existing restaurants and have them cook one night for actual, paying customers. See what happens.
Just a couple of thoughts…but Hell’s Kitchen really needs to mix things up, and stop being the same thing every year with nothing changed but the faces.
:: The Big Bang Theory continues to please. I would like the show to return a bit to its ‘geek humor’ roots; the focus has been on ‘geek romance’ a bit too much. I like the ‘geek romance’ stuff just fine; the show does it well. But there’s been just a bit too much of it.
:: CSI: Miami and Hawaii Five-0 are my go-to shows for goofy, over-produced, brainless, cops-and-robbers, overactors galore, gonzo fun. Ken Levine writes about why H-5-0 is bad, but while I concede some of his points, I don’t care. On Monday nights at 10:00 when I’m tired and winding down my day, a stupid cop show is just what the doctor ordered.
:: The Office isn’t outright painful to watch, like it was last year, but it’s still not that great. It’s basically “watching someone flounder about a management job” with the same group of office cohorts. It’s not a show I look forward to much anymore; it’s something that is non-crap in a timeslot between shows I like watching.
Ohhh….wait a minute. We’re watching The Office right now as I write this, and Darryl just had one of the best lines in the show’s history. He was upset about not winning the lottery, but then he realizes he’s being an ass and says:
“You know what? My future’s not gonna be determined by seven little white balls. It’s gonna be determined by two big black balls.”
Credit where due, that was a terrific line.
:: I watched two episodes of The X-Factor. And then I stopped, because it’s the same damn thing as American Idol. I don’t care. Really and truly, I don’t care.
:: The Amazing Race is off to a typical start. It’s hard to figure out who to root for early on, so the show’s mainly about the travelogues and laughing at the annoying ones. What I do not like is the presence of two racers who are former winners of Survivor. This is irritating. They got eliminated really early on, but it’s just annoying that apparently CBS is going to be bringing former contestants back on both TAR and Survivor each time out now. I’ve stopped watching Survivor entirely because of this. If they want to bring back old contestants, then just have an “All-Stars” edition. Bringing back two contestants at a time is just stupid. (And even dumber is the apparent fact that the new contestants apparently aren’t even bothered by this — why isn’t the automatic reaction never, “Hey, these guys have played before! Screw them, let’s vote ’em out first time we’re at Tribal and then play the game our way!”)
:: The Mentalist has returned, in kind-of annoying fashion. Last season ended with Patrick Jane coming face to face, in a shopping mall, with Red John, the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter. They even cast Bradley Whitford as Red John, giving the part some gravitas. Then, as Red John was walking away, Jane shot and killed him. That was how the season ended. With this season, Jane has to answer for killing the guy…but after that’s wrapped up, Jane drops the bombshell that I feared was coming: The guy he shot wasn’t Red John. And the second episode seemed to confirm this, so now…the Red John subplot marches on.
This, quite frankly, sucks.
I still enjoy The Mentalist, because it has a good sense of humor for a show. But the Red John thing just needs to end. It’s getting unbelievable at this point. Red John isn’t just a brilliant serial killer; he’s been established as being able to establish a large enough grip on other people that he inspires them to kill themselves on his behalf. It’s just getting flat-out unreal, and worse, continually playing the “Jane is closing in…but now he’s not!” card is lazy writing. How much more interesting to use Jane’s victory over Red John to explore what happens to a single-mindedly driven person like Patrick Jane when he finally achieves his grim goal…but instead, the search for Red John continues.
:: In a similar vein, the search for the killer of Detective Beckett’s mother continues on Castle. I’m more forgiving, since Castle wasn’t so brazen as to suggest that the storyline is over before resurrecting it next season, and because Castle is, in general, much better written than The Mentalist. But here, too, I’m starting to tire of the storyline, because it can be a crutch for the writers. It gives them something to do every time sweeps rolls around, and it gives them a way to keep stringing Castle and Beckett along, when it’s obvious they really should be together at some point.
I end up wishing that writers would have enough courage, or confidence, to finish a story and then, if the show goes on, honestly explore the implications of that story and the ramifications when it ends. It would be a lot more compelling than these types of years-long mysteries that aren’t really mysteries but rather onions with endless layers to be peeled back.
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Something for Thursday
I have never owned an Apple product. Not one. Our desktop PCs have all been, well, PCs; ditto the laptop on which I’m writing this. I listen to music on an MP3 player or on my LG phone, which doubles as an MP3 player. I don’t have any particular problem with Apple products; I simply opt to use other things that work just fine for me.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t owe Steve Jobs a personal debt for having shaped the world in which we live. Jobs was one of those figures who straddles the world in so many ways that his influence reaches into our lives in many ways we never even realize. He was an Edison, a Tesla, a Lennon, a Lucas.
In his memory, just because it seems appropriate to me, here is the End Credits music from TRON.
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You learn something every day!
Whilst on break at The Store today, we observed our coffee bar employee making a smoothie that looked particularly tasty. When we asked her what flavor it was, she told us, “Peach and raspberry. It’s a Peach melba”. This got us on the topic of the word “melba”. What does that mean? Is there a flavor called “melba” that pairs particularly well with peach? And is this flavor any relation at all to those little slices of dried bread, called “melba toast”?
So in a moment of downtime later on, we did some Googling and found out that in the late 1800s, there was an opera singer — a soprano — named Dame Nellie Melba. Apparently Dame Melba had quite the career, and she was especially beloved in her native Australia, as she was that country’s first international music superstar. A French chef invented four foods in her honor, including a dessert called “Peach Melba”, and, believe it or not, Melba toast (which he created for her during a time of illness, when her diet was restricted).
Here is what Dame Nellie Melba looked like:
And there you have it. There really was a person named Melba, much beloved in the musical realm in her time, but whose name lives down to us today in culinary terms.
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Answers, the final!
Wow…due to all the stuff that went on last week and the busy work week the week before, I forgot to finish Ask Me Anything! August 2011. Sorry about that, folks. I suck. Kinda.
Anyway, Scotty has a couple that will result in a couple of lame answers, unfortunately. Not because they’re lame questions, though! Just my answers.
You’ve periodically extolled the virtues of spum, any thoughts on the various whisky families?
I know virtually nothing about whiskey. Seriously, I’ve had extremely little whiskey in my life. I occasionally have a bottle of Seagram’s 7 around because I like 7&7’s, and once in a great while, if I’m buying something at the Candy Store, I might pick up one of those teeny bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I wouldn’t really even know where to start! (I tried a small bottle of some kind of Scotch once, and I did not like it, at all. Maybe it was a bad brand, because I really hope that stuff isn’t representative of what those Scotsman have been drinking for centuries. If so, well…no wonder they’re an angry lot!)
Growlers-love them or not?
Unfortunately…I know absolutely nothing about growlers. Never partaken of one. I suppose I should, huh? Growlers are apparently big thick glass bottles that you fill with beer from a tap at a store that deals in such things. It sounds like the kind of good idea that can be around for years before I say, “Hey, I should check that out.” In fact, it is the kind of good idea that can be around for years before I say, “Hey, I should check that out”!
SKWaller also has a couple that I hope I can answer more fruitfully:
Why is it that on the days that I work the hardest, longest hours on editing jobs, I can’t sleep at night? I get really tired *and* sleepy (for me, they are different matters, entirely unrelated), but there I sit at 5am, unable to go to sleep. And then, when I finally do go to sleep, why do I dream about carrot cake in the shape of a rabbit? No, there are no drugs or alcohol involved.
Wow. Being up at 5am might be part of it!
But seriously, it just may be the case that this type of work just happens to fire up the part of your brain that’s the hardest to allow to run down to the point of sleep. It often takes me time to wind down from a shift at work; luckily I don’t work night shifts, so I don’t have to wind down in order to go to sleep. But when I worked in restaurants, I could never just go home and go to bed after a closing shift.
As to the dream about carrot cake…I got nothin’. Sorry!
Do trees feel pain? I used to think so (I read The Secret of Life of Plants back in the 1970s), but I’ve given this considerable thought.
Pain is a signal that something bad is happening and that we should either get away from what’s causing the pain, or fix whatever is wrong. Since trees (and other plants) can’t run away, or go to the doctor, what would be the purpose of them feeling pain?
What are your thoughts?
Wow…that’s some deep stuff. I’d have to say that trees do not feel any kind of ‘pain’, in any kind of way that we could relate to meaningfully. Trees certainly do have ways of responding to negative stimuli, but to describe that as ‘pain’ seems to me to possibly stretch the very concept of ‘pain’ beyond a breaking point.
I remember a day early in the year when I was a sophomore in high school, in Biology class. One student tried to argue that humans are inherently superior to trees, but the teacher was having none of it:
“Trees can’t move around!”
“Then they don’t get in accidents.”
“Trees can’t invent stuff!”
“But do trees really need anything other than what they have?”
“Trees can’t think! They have no emotions or thoughts!”
“Which means that trees don’t have to see the psychiatrist!”
And on. The teacher’s point was that we shouldn’t look down on trees, or take an approach to living things that is based on notions of superiority and inferiority. I tend to agree with this. Sometimes I think we just can’t help thinking along those lines, though — it’s almost hard-wired into us, probably as a leftover of our hunting-and-gathering forebears.
I don’t know what trees feel or think, or if they do feel or think in any way that approaches what we mean when we use those words. I do think that I’d like it if our trees were like Tolkien’s trees, and that they spoke to one another, and had deep, long memories.
OK, folks, I think that’s it. Sorry it took me a month and a half to wrap this up, but hey, I got there, and that’s what counts. Start thinking up your questions for the next go-round! February is only four months away!
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GWAAA?!
How do we know when the show’s over, anyway?
EDITED: I forgot the link!
Michael Kinsley can kiss my ass.
Seriously. Chris Christie can’t be President because he’s fat? Really?
If Christie becomes the Republican nominee for President next year, I won’t vote for him. But that will be because of the insane beliefs of the Republican party, not because of the girth of its nominee. That’s it. For me, it’s ideas and policy, not anything else.
To make it easy, here is a list of qualities that make zero difference in my weighing a person for their Presidential potential:
Fat
Thin
Black
White
Asian
Male
Female
Married
Single
Has kids
Has no kids
Gay
Straight
Catholic
Protestant
Jewish
Muslim
Confucian
Atheist
Mormon
Likes broccoli
Hates broccoli
Likes the Star Wars prequels
Hates the Star Wars prequels
Roots for the Bills
Roots for the Dolphins
Served in the military
Did not serve in the military
Worked in the private sector
Didn’t work in the private sector
Has executive government experience
Has no executive government experience
Likes baseball
Likes football
Likes soccer
Likes dogs
Likes cats
Likes chinchillas
I could go on. In truth, I’ve never been a big fan of Michael Kinsley, and this certainly does not enhance my view of him. What a dumb-assed article. I hope Kinsley meant it as a joke, because if he didn’t….
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Sentential Links #263
Time for linkage!
:: Now I did not live there. It was only four days. But there was a point, walking by the Royal Ontario Museum on our second day there, when I said to my wife: “I think I could live here,” assuming that we had employment, etc. Good mass transit, bikes, educational capital, intellectual stimulation, massive multiculturalism; there were plenty of places we DIDN’T get a chance to see. And there are angrier people in lots of US cities I’ve been to, starting with Albany, NY. (Toronto really is a fantastic place…and it increasingly irritates me that I haven’t been there in five years. WTF, self?!)
:: There are not too many things I am good at but RILING UP my father is something I EXCEL at! (Knowing Andy personally…I’ll bet this is totally accurate.)
:: If we can’t make you look good, you’re ugly! (Well, sheesh….)
:: Elvis Presley never did talk shows, he never appeared on Johnny Carson, he never “made the rounds” of promotion like other entertainers did. He was completely elusive to the press, which of course added to the mystique (but also, conversely, isolated him). The isolation did work in his favor, as it kept Presley sightings to a bare minimum, upping his worth even more. (Sheila has been posting a lot about Elvis Presley, in typically amazing fashion. It occurred to me, at some point whilst reading her series of posts, that I don’t currently own any Elvis in my music collection. None, at all. It’s weird how our music collections “morph” over time, isn’t it? As we embrace one format and then the next and then the next? I used to have some Elvis…on cassette. I may have owned a CD or two — in fact, I may still own a CD or two, in some box somewhere. But as I more and more see “my music” as “what’s taking up huge amounts of GB on my external drive”, owning something on CD somehow becomes “not really owning it”…despite the fact that owning something physical, like a CD, seems more intuitively real than owning a digital storage device that currently happens to contain somewhere within a sequence of ones and zeroes that, when processed by a computer program, constitute the thing in question. If that makes any sense at all.)
:: Kerosene needed to be cheaper than whale oil to force a global change. In other words, no one would switch until we had killed all the whales. (This is what depresses me about the state of things today: we know the problems we face, and to a large extent we know what we need to do to fix them. But we do none of the things we’re going to have to do someday anyway, because…hell, I don’t know. But we don’t.)
More next week!
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Random Stuff from the Week that Was
So, last week was my 40th birthday, as I noted at the time. Because of work schedules, we rarely celebrate birthdays on the dates on which they fall; instead we schedule some time off as near as we can, and celebrate then. It was a great week, though, it really was. Of course, it got off to the perfect start, with this happening:
And the week really did stay about that good! I worked a short work week before taking a five-day weekend (which includes today, so I’m back to work tomorrow), and I wasn’t unproductive during that work week, either. Then The Wife and I had a nice couple of days off together, during which we took a little trip, and as several people asked me on Facebook and in e-mail, there were pies.
But more on those in a bit…random thoughts and stuff first.
:: Autumnal weather has at last taken hold in Western New York…which, for me, means “time for overalls”. That’s just one of many reasons why this time of year is my favorite. Cool weather means overalls, and time off means naps!
Of course, naps are always welcome, but there’s something about naps in fall and winter that makes them so much better than naps in spring and summer. Sometimes naps in summer feel like wasted time. Of course, that’s just humans, I suppose. Cats never feel like napping is a waste of time. In fact, I wonder sometimes what the evolutionary benefit is to cats of getting all that sleep!
I also wonder where cats slept before the invention of the cardboard box.
:: Car repair places irritate me. We had to take The Wife’s van in for some work, and wouldn’t you know it, they found other stuff wrong that really needs to be fixed soon soon soon! We’ll get those things fixed, but not at that place, which is almost certainly overpriced. The only reason we went there is that we needed to get the tires rotated, which is free since that’s where we got the tires. We also had them check the oil and find out what the “Check Engine” light was all about, which is where it all started. Luckily it’s not super-pressing, so we can save up money and then get the fix done. But ye Gods, I hate the “Hey, we found some stuff on your car!” stuff.
But hey, at least we’re not this guy:
Ye Gods, indeed! This, folks, is why I maintain a state of deep suspicion of other people when I’m driving.
:: The Wife and I made our annual excursion to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival this weekend. We discovered this festival quite by chance in 2007, when we planned a getaway sans destination. All we knew was that we were going away, but we had no idea where. I did some Googling and found out about this Festival, and aside from 2008 (when The Wife journeyed to see her ailing mother), we’ve gone every year since. But Ithaca’s quite a long drive from Buffalo (two-point-five to three hours), so we always stay someplace in Rochester overnight and then take the remaining drive the next day. This year we stayed near the Eastview Mall, and we had dinner at PF Chang’s, where we’d never eaten before.
We loved the meal we had there. They have a nice “dinner for two” menu which made the meal more reasonable than we’d even expected, and the food we had was really quite good. No, it wasn’t as good as the best Chinese I’ve ever had — that honor goes to a dim sum place in Toronto, and the Shanghai Restaurant, also in Rochester (Henrietta, specifically) — but it was certainly better than the local takeout joints we like to frequent at Casa Jaquandor. I took some photos of our food, and I put them on Flickr, but…they’re not very good photos. Too dark, really. I was taking them with my phone, and I had the flash off as the phone flash is an LED that makes everything look slightly unnatural. Sometimes I like that effect, but not with food. Anyway, we shared an appetizer of crab-filled wontons (pretty much the same idea as any “crab rangoon” you’ll get anyplace else, although much better prepared), cups of hot-and-sour soup (again, same idea, but terrifically prepared), and then we split Kung Pao Shrimp and Orange Peel Chicken. It was a wonderful meal.
And the place was packed when we arrived, so we put our name on the list and then went to wander the mall for a bit. It’s been several years since I’ve walked a mall. I remember the Eastview Mall from when I was ten years old — the place has been there for many moons — but it has more than doubled in size since then, and now it is positively massive, with several wings added since then that are actually larger than the one wing that used to comprise the entire mall. Lots of folks think that malls are dead, but they’re not; they seem to be accreting, though, so an area with a bunch of small malls eventually becomes an area with one big mall.
Oh, and for ten bucks I got a set of Star Wars cookie cutters at Williams-Sonoma. Score!
:: The next morning we departed Rochester (OK, Victor) for Ithaca. Someday I want to have more than just a single overnight trip for this journey, because really, I just love that part of New York State. It actually starts right in my own town, with the start of Route 20A, which is my favorite drive anywhere. It’s just a gorgeous drive, through the hill country that rests about ten to twenty miles south of the flat I-90 corridor. Sure, since we were going to Rochester I could have saved at least half an hour by taking the Thruway, but why do that? The Thruway has zero personality…and to drive it, you have to pay tolls. Ugh.
After spending the night in Victor (a southeastern suburb of Rochester), we drove the next day first through Pittsford and some of Rochester’s eastern suburbs and then farther east, through towns like Phelps, Palmyra, Waterloo, and Seneca Falls. I always love driving through these towns, with their central business districts lined with brick buildings, occasional crossings of the Erie Canal, and out in the country between towns, driving past farms and properties where the houses often look like they were built before the Civil War. Undoubtedly, some of them were. There’s a real sense of driving through history, I find, in those old towns. Waterloo bills itself as the birthplace of Memorial Day. Seneca Falls played a role in the women’s suffrage movement. And Joseph Smith originally hailed from Palmyra…which means that in the space of less than fifty miles, we drove through the birthplaces of Memorial Day, womens’ rights, and the Mormon church!
And then there’s the drive south to Ithaca itself. Because of the presence of the Finger Lakes, each one running north-to-south, between Buffalo and Ithaca, there is no ‘straight line’ route available. You either drive south, and then east; or you go east, and then south. We always do the latter, so we can drive along the shores of Cayuga Lake. The Finger Lakes are just stunningly gorgeous, all year. I adore that whole region…and at last, it was into Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, huzzah!
:: On our previous trips to the AppleFest, each time it’s been a gorgeous, bright, crisp, sunny Fall day. This time…not so much.
Yeah. Brrrr. Luckily I wisely dressed in layers.
Cold, rainy, and dingy.
As usual, there was a pilgrimage to Autumn Leaves Books, with their nice stock of F&SF. I could spend an hour here, easily. Autumn Leaves is not your “typical” used bookstore, with dim lights and stacks of books teetering everywhere; this store is bright, spacious, and organized. This time I wrote out a list of books that I wanted to look for — mostly space operas, of course — and I actually found one. I also bought an SF book by LE Modessit Jr — I’ve never read him before — and a fantasy trilogy by an author I’d never heard of before at all. Why not?
It wasn’t all bookstores for me, though…we looked up a knitting/crocheting store for The Wife, and she loved the place. She’s developed a real love of crocheting over the last couple of years, and she’s always on the lookout for good places to buy supplies. She liked the selection, the bright organization (some yarn stores can be dark and depressing, she says), and the pair of women who worked there were very gregarious and helpful. Of course, I know next to nothing about yarn, so while she was looking at stuff…
…I was taking photos of myself in the mirror and of cool-looking yarn.
Eventually we warmed up with some hot cider…
…and had a lunch of waffles and fried chicken. Now, I had expressed some skepticism of this food combo when I first encountered it, but I must admit…it’s a terrific match! Loved it. Next year we’re getting two of ’em. There’s this wonderful little restaurant in the middle of the Downtown Commons in Ithaca that features waffles in what must be dozens of permutations.
Finally, after touring all of the craft tents (where we bought The Daughter a bracelet and where I bought The Wife a necklace-and-earrings set), we decided that it was time to start heading home. And it was a good time for that, too, because this is what the weather turned out like an hour or so later:
On the way home we stopped for dinner at a joint in Avon, NY called Tom Wahl’s, which is a burgers-and-dogs drive in…but the burgers were really very good and their onion rings are fantastic. It’s a chain in the Rochester area, and their root beer is awesome.
:: And finally, there was my favorite part of the week: the coconut cream pies. Four of ’em, thick and gooey and creamy. Mmmmm, pie….
Then to blow out the candles…
…and, finally, splat!
Here’s the video I made of this pieing.
Yeah, I know, it’s weird. So what? It’s also fun. Life is just too short to take oneself seriously all the time. Maybe I’ll get five pies in my face when turn fifty! A pie in the face isn’t exactly a birthday tradition for me — we do it once or twice a year whenever, depending on opportunity — but maybe it will be now. Pies in the face rule.
So, to recap: the Bills beat the Patriots; I get to wear overalls again (which, I might add, are all fitting better since I’ve been losing weight!); an overnight trip with my wonderful wife through the finest parts of New York; used bookstores; yarn stores; new jewelry for the ladies in my life; dinner at PF Chang’s; Star Wars cookie-cutters; waffles and fried chicken; burgers and onion rings at Tom Wahl’s; and I get hit in the face with four coconut cream pies.
That’s a great week, folks.
