Would you rather have a smaller package at the same price, or the same size package at a higher price?
Fantasy vs. Reality
Great quote from Sean Connery:
It’s great to put across fantasy. It’s a constant surprise how reality is harder to put across than fantasy. I never forget that Stephen Crane wrote a very fine book about war, The Red Badge of Courage, although he’d never been in a war. And then he wrote a very bad book called Shipwreck, although he had been in a shipwreck. And this explains a lot of things.
Via (in comments).
Share This Post
X-Files Case Report: “Deep Throat”
“Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this Earth not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?”
“Because…all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.”
“Precisely.”
“They’re here, aren’t they?”
“Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long, long time.”
That exchange comes at the end of “Deep Throat”, the second episode of The X-Files. Even more than the Pilot, “Deep Throat” establishes a lot of the groundwork for what is to come over the course of the series. More tropes are introduced: Government secrecy and conspiracies; government collusion with apparent alien visitors; shadowy governmental agencies which are apparently above the law; the continual failure of Agents Mulder and Scully to come away from their investigations with any proof at all of what they know to be the case. And most importantly – indicated by the title of the episode – the establishment of an inside source of information who will be Mulder’s confidant and informant, but who may or may not be on Mulder’s side.
This story takes place mainly in an Idaho town near an Air Force Base that does not appear on any maps, due to the secretive nature of its work. A pilot there has turned up at home, cowering in the corner and covered with terrible rashes and skin lesions. The Air Force takes him into custody, and holds on to him for several months, telling his family nothing at all of his whereabouts or status. Somehow Mulder gets wind of this and tells Scully that “we’re heading to the Spud State to investigate a little kidnapping.” When Scully asks why Mulder is interested in an apparent kidnapping with no “paranormal” element, Mulder replies, “This case has a smell to it. A certain ‘paranormal bouquet’.”
But before leaving for Idaho, Mulder is confronted by a dark-suited man who tries to warn him off the case and tells him that he can give Mulder information when it is in his best interest to do so. We’ll never learn this man’s name; we will only know him as “Deep Throat” (which I don’t recall anyone in the show actually calling him). This, too, will be something of a meme throughout the show’s run: people telling Mulder things in sufficiently vague terms that he doesn’t really have a great deal of choice to make.
Off go Mulder and Scully to Idaho, where they learn that experimental aircraft are being tested – but the aircraft are capable of speeds and maneuvers impossible in current aeronautical technology, which leads Mulder to hypothesize that the government is working on technology gleaned from the UFO that crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 (the Air Force base in the episode being one of the places to which wreckage of that craft was taken). Suddenly the missing pilot is returned to his family, but he seems very strange now, oddly passive and childlike, and he can’t remember anything. Mulder thinks he has had memories erased, but Scully thinks that’s impossible; more likely, the strange pilots up there are the washouts of a testing program who couldn’t handle the stress.
Anyway, our two agents meet a couple of teenagers (one of whom is played by a young Seth Green) who like to sneak onto the AFB grounds and watch the test flights (which happen at night), which of course leads Mulder to do the same…only he gets caught, after seeing one of the aircraft up close and personal. Mulder’s whisked away by men who are doing something medical to him. Meanwhile, Scully is on her own and has to figure out how to get Mulder back, which she finally does – only to discover that he has no memory of the last twelve hours. They return to Washington, with Scully indicating in her field report the completely inconclusive nature of their investigation. Mulder, meanwhile, meets again with his new informant. The exchange above closes out the show.
“Deep Throat” is a fine, fine episode, and in retrospect, it’s probably one of the most important in the series’s run. It establishes so much of the dynamic that would later dominate the show’s developing mythology, especially the knack Mulder has for being right while never being able to come up with any evidence. I also like how Mulder and Scully are still at odds quite a bit of the time, with the trust between them still not there and with Scully basically approaching her assignment to the X-files with professionalism but also with skepticism bordering on conviction that all of it is complete BS.
This episode also establishes the high level of production values that were a key part of the success of The X-Files. Many shots are downright cinematic in nature, as is the way the showrunners are able to shoot around the Vancouver area in ways that double for the less-mountainous areas of Idaho. I also liked the framing of the episode’s final scene, in which Mulder is jogging on a college track when Deep Throat comes to visit him; there is a nice combination of long shots and close-ups that makes the scene nice to look at. The X-Files is often credited with bringing cinematic production values to television, and it’s easy to see this influence in this episode.
So, what is to come? The truth, after all, is out there!
(Oh, this was also the first episode to use the show’s signature titles sequence, complete with Mark Snow’s distinctive X-Files Theme and the “Truth is out there” tag line. The pilot’s credits had simply run over the opening scene, after the teaser.)
Share This Post
It’s like the song, George! Downtown! There’s your answer!
Here at Casa Jaquandor, our regular day to go to the library is Thursday. That’s carved in stone. We always go on Thursday. Except for weeks when Thursday is some kind of holiday, such as the upcoming Thanksgiving Day…or last week, when Veterans Day fell on a Thursday. So, we decided to postpone until Saturday, and instead of going to our own Orchard Park Public Library, we headed instead into downtown Buffalo and the Central Library. We’ve been to the Central Library a few times, but not in a while; we like to get down there a few times a year. One great thing about living in a county where all the libraries are members of a larger County Library system is that you have access to all the books, county-wide; but that’s only a help if you know what you want. For browsing, you’re limited to what’s available at the library you actually visit. Now, the Orchard Park Library is a lovely facility and over the years we’ve spent a lot of time browsing there. But the Central Library is something else.
First, though, we had to actually get down there, into downtown Buffalo. And that meant…Route 5 and the Skyway, which is actually our favorite route into the city anyway. Below the fold are photos from the day.
Route 5 leads past a lot of Buffalo’s industrial past. First, you come to Lackawanna and the steel mills that no longer do much of anything at all.
These kinds of urban ruins are endlessly fascinating. All these giant machines used to be so much of the source of money in Buffalo…and now they just sit there, idle, unused, slowly oxidizing.
And then, we’re past the former steel foundries and we’re into the region of Buffalo’s earlier mega-industry, when the city was the shipping terminus on the eastern Great Lakes. Next up are the grain elevators.
Finally, it’s up and over the Skyway itself. This is a very tall bridge that rises up over Buffalo’s inner waterfront, presumably built this way to accommodate the huge ships that once pulled into the inlets to load and offload at the grain elevators. Nowadays, there are almost never any ships down there, and the Skyway itself has become a source of much debate ’round these parts; many folks think it should be demolished and replaced with ground-level highways and drawbridges, in order to allow for easier access to the waterfront and in order to remove from Buffalo’s dormant waterfront an enormous eyesore. I, personally, don’t have much of a dog in that fight; the Skyway’s not the most attractive thing and it does cast a large shadow on the ground, but it does provide a fast way into the city from where we live, and lots of cities manage to have bright, vibrant waterfronts even with expressways and big bridges towering over it all. (Toronto is one of them.)
Plus, there’s the view you get when you come over the top of the Skyway, with the entire city of Buffalo looming right before you.
After a bit of driving around downtown trying to remember which street we were looking for admiring the architecture, we arrived at the Central Library and headed inside — but not before finding this fountain, which we hadn’t seen on our last visit (because we’d gone into the library through another entrance).
It’s a beautiful object. The water wasn’t running, I suppose because of the onset of colder temperatures. I did find the placement here kind of odd — the fountain’s just sitting there, at a street corner. I wondered why it wasn’t placed on the Library plaza or in Lafayette Square, across the street.
And then it was into the Library, where we spent about two hours, reading and browsing. I spent some time in the Mark Twain Room, which is devoted to the display of various ephemera pertaining to the great writer. I loved his chess table:
But what really caught my eye, over which I lingered for some time, were the pages from the manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I find something very appealing about seeing these pages: Twain’s neat cursive script, his large hand contrasted with the small paper he used, and his on-the-fly editing. A writer’s work-in-progress always fascinates me — you can see the progress, right there, on those slightly faded pages.
A trip to the library is mainly, though, about browsing the stacks.
It’s funny how, over the years, that particular stance there has become totally natural to me. It comes from almost four decades of working my way through bookstores, libraries, and my own bookshelves at home. It’s the rightward head-tilt I adopt in order to better read the titles on the spines.
Years ago, my sister took a trip to England for one reason or another — her first, actually, she’s been there many times since — and she brought me home a copy of a musical score. Mozart’s Requiem, if memory serves. I still have that score, in my parents’ home somewhere, along with all of my other scores which will come home with me one day when we have space enough to house them. But the score was printed in the UK, so the title on the spine was printed in the reverse of the way we do it here in the US: the title ran up, not down, relative to the front cover. I suppose if I ever take a journey to England, I’ll have to recalibrate my neck for their bookstores, the same way I’ll have to recalibrate my driving for their roads!
This led to a bit of experimentation with self-portraiture, whilst perusing the cookbooks:
And you never know when you’ll find a book seemingly tailored exactly to your interests!
Yup, a book on donuts. In fact, they had several books on donuts. I checked out two. Yay, donuts!
When we finally left the library, the daylight hours were waning quickly. The view of Lafayette Square was very pretty, though:
And then it was back to the car, and back to the Skyway. Over the Buffalo Naval Park (note to self: Go to the Naval Park! It’s ridiculous that you’ve never been there!)….
And along the lakeshore as the sun began to set over Lake Erie.
On the way back, it was back past the steel mills and the neighborhoods in their shadow.
These neighborhoods always look sad to me. I suppose that many years ago, they were the homes of families whose fathers and husbands worked in those now-dormant mills. Now, they’re houses that have outlived the reason they were built there.
And lastly, the Ford plant in Hamburg. This factory is still going strong, although it somehow manages to end up on the “endangered list” every few years. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
Such was our day.
(And, between The Wife and I, we actually managed to max out my library card! Time to read some of this stuff.)
Share This Post
Eight years in
Sheila O’Malley has been blogging for eight years. I was actually blogging before she was — this February I’m coming up on nine years — but on the occasions when I get a horrible case of “blog envy”, the awful feeling one gets after reading someone else’s blog post of “Ah, so that’s how it’s done and I’ll never figure out how to do it myself”, the cause is almost always one of Sheila’s posts. Her blog is one of the marvels of the Interweb, and I’ll have words with anyone says otherwise!
Share This Post
Sentential LInks #228
Linkage! Linkage! Linkage!!!
:: Well, that’s nice, but monarchy is still a flawed system of government!
:: After the Star Wars series played out, Boba Fett had a little known career in B-movies.
More next week!
Share This Post
“I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
Sheila O’Malley points out that today is the 149th anniversary of the publishing of Moby Dick, with a typically fantastic post on the book. I’ve started — and stopped — reading Moby Dick a number of times over the years, ever since college, but just a month or so ago I finally got all the way through it. My original notion was to serialize it for myself, reading two or maybe three chapters a night, as Moby Dick is comprised of 135 very short chapters. I figured that taking the book in small chunks would make it, oh, more digestible. What I didn’t expect was that this manner of reading the book didn’t make it more “digestible” at all — at this point, it turns out that I’m able to digest the book just fine. What my self-serialization of Moby Dick did was make the book more exciting. Much more exciting — and this is all the more amazing, seeing as how if you distill the book down to just those parts where something is actually happening, it’s probably only about a hundred pages long.
I was lucky in that I knew very little about Moby Dick, aside from the “big picture” stuff. What I knew was this: A guy we’re supposed to call “Ishmael” gets a job on a whaling ship, the Pequod, which is skippered by a fiercely grim Captain Ahab, who lost one of his legs to a white whale upon whom he has vowed vengeance. Off they go, presumably to do some normal whaling, but in reality to seek out the white whale, named Moby Dick. They find the white whale, in the end, but Ahab and everyone else on the Pequod perishes in the struggle. Everyone else save Ishmael, who floats away to safety atop a coffin carved by his drowned friend, a savage named Queequeg.
And of course, I knew that Moby Dick played a thematic role in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which Khan views James T. Kirk as his own White Whale, even dying with the same words as Ahab: “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”
The greater part of Moby Dick is given not to the story of the pursuit of the whale. Nor is it given to deep analyses of the psychology of whalemen, alone on their ships at sea for months or even years at a time, with their only other human contact coming when they meet other whaling ships. The bulk of the book is given to the whales and their nature and their hunting. Chapter after chapter after chapter goes by, each dealing with some aspect or other of whales and whaling, and it’s in this way that we do, in fact, gain insight into the psychology of whalemen and in the nature of Ahab’s pursuit — for as we learn these things, we start to learn just what it is that Ahab is after.
The book opens, before the first chapter, with many pages of quotes Melville has tracked down pertaining to whales. He must have been steeped in the literature of the sea back then, to have been able to collect all these:
“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!”Nantucket song.
It’s interesting that the book proper opens with that famous line, “Call me Ishmael”, when we lose track of the narrator for great swathes of the book at a time. Ishmael disappears entirely, as does Queequeg and Starbuck and even Ahab and the Pequod much of the time. I wonder if in some way Melville isn’t trying to ultimately get us to identify not with any of them but with Moby Dick himself?
One final observation, which I’ve made before (I know I said it on Facebook, anyway): while Moby Dick‘s opening line is one of the most famous in all literature, I find the opening sentence of the second chapter to be strangely evocative of the adventure to come:
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.
Interesting, then, that we follow Ishmael as far as the side of the water — and from that point on, we don’t follow him much at all.
(The image atop this post is from a painting called Whale Fishery, by Ambroise Louis Garneray. The painting is used as the cover art for the edition of Moby Dick that I read.)
Share This Post
What does it mean when our guys score more than the other guys?
The Bills won! The Bills won! The Bills won! So, no pie in the face of my cartoon Bills fan this week.
But now, I’m sure that some Bills fans are disturbed by a victory now, since the focus for many here has changed from winning this year to securing the best possible draft pick for next year. The Bills have been streaking toward the first overall pick, with which they would hopefully be able to pick the best quarterback in the draft (hopefully either Andrew Luck or Ryan Mallett; hopefully not Jake Locker, whose stock has been dropping). So, now that most teams have played nine games, let’s look at the Bills versus the other teams who are in position to end up picking first.
The Bills, of course, are now 1-8 on the year. If they pick first and Luck or Mallett are there, the Bills will almost certainly take one of those two. The question mark right now is whether or not Luck will actually decide to enter the draft or remain in college. He has indicated in the past that he plans to return to Stanford next year, and Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan is constantly pointing out that Luck may see that he’d be drafted by Buffalo and decide not to enter the draft, especially since his coach, Jim Harbaugh, rejected the Bills’ head coaching job last year. The motivating factor in favor of Luck’s entering the draft is money: when the NFL gets its new collective bargaining agreement, there will almost certainly be some sort of salary cap structure for rookies, so there is a big chance that the 2011 Draft will be the last one where rookies can get enormous contracts to launch their careers. And who knows? Maybe Luck will look at the Bills and see a team with more potential than many thought before the year started. They’re not a total wasteland of talent, after all. We’ll see.
Also sitting on a single win are the Carolina Panthers, who are also really bad. I don’t know much about the Panthers, but I do know that they drafted one of the top QB prospects last year in Jimmy Clausen, so I tend to think that unless Clausen looks really awful, the Panthers are unlikely to be looking for a QB next year. So, if the Bills end up picking behind them, maybe they still get a shot at Luck.
Next up, at 2-7, we have the Cowboys, Lions, and Bengals. I’m not sure I see any of these teams looking to go QB high in the draft — maybe the Bengals, if their almost-certain new coaching staff decides that Carson Palmer needs a change of scenery. I don’t see the Cowboys dumping Tony Romo, and the Lions still have last year’s top pick, Matthew Stafford, as their young prospect. Stafford seems to have some injury problems, though, that could put the Lions in the QB market. But I’m not so sure.
Then there are the 3-win clubs. The Bills are almost certainly not going to win three games, so I think there is very little chance that any of these clubs will end up edging the Bills in terms of draft position. But, you never know! So, our 3-win teams are the Browns, Broncos, Vikings, and the Cardinals. The Browns have a QB prospect drafted just this year in Colt McCoy, and the Broncos traded up to get Tim Tebow, so both teams may be looking to draft something other than a QB. Not so those other two teams, though; the Vikings absolutely need to address their future QB situation, with Brett Favre looking worse and worse, and the same goes for the Cardinals, unless Derek Anderson somehow manages to turn it on over the rest of this season (unlikely).
So, it seems to me that even if the Bills don’t end up picking first overall, they might still have their pick of quarterbacks if they end up picking behind Carolina, Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland, Denver, and maybe Cincinnati. They’re screwed, however, if they’re beaten for draft position by the Vikings or Cardinals.
Another scenario that could screw the Bills anyway is if any of those bad teams end up (a) drafting ahead of the Bills, and (b) firing their current coaching staff and hiring Jim Harbaugh, who might well decide to draft his college standout, Andrew Luck. But we’ll worry about that when it happens….
Share This Post
Food Is Fun!!!
I haven’t blogged about food lately, so…here’s a post about food.
:: Up there in the photo is my dinner from the other night, when The Family and I went to Ted’s Hot Dogs, a Buffalo institution. If you don’t live in Buffalo, here’s another reason to move here. The hot dogs are cooked to order over a charcoal grill (yes, they have industrial-strength hoods over their grills), and then topped with whatever. My usual default is mustard and onions, but lately I’ve been rediscovering relish, so I got one with mustard and relish. They also have terrific onion rings, and their fries are OK. Ted’s rules.
(Actually, for some reason they also have a single location in Tempe, AZ, so if you live there or are heading there, you can get yourself a little fix of Buffalo.)
:: I made an easy chicken casserole the other night. Here’s the formula:
1.5 lb chicken
2 cans cream of chicken soup
1.5 cans of milk
.5 lb shredded cheddar cheese
1 box of chicken-flavored stuffing mix (or equivalent amount of homemade stuffing), cooked according to directions.
Cook the chicken, shred, and put into a greased casserole dish. Add the cans of soup and then use the cans to measure out 1.5 cans of milk (or less, if you want your casserole thicker). Stir this all up. Now layer the shredded cheese on top of the soup-and-chicken mixture, and top with the stuffing. Bake at 375 until bubbly.
I forgot to take a picture, sadly enough.
Share This Post
Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Check out this great compilation of behind-the-scenes photos from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which also includes photos from the four TNG movies. Stellar Cartography was a really cool set — and there are a couple of really creepy photos there of Alice Krige as the Borg Queen from First Contact, when they were filming the bit where the Queen was nothing but a head and a spinal column. I also like the “Man In Suit!” shot of the guy who played the oil slick that killed Tasha Yar, Jonathan Frakes looking like he’s coming on to women constantly, and a couple of shots of close-ups where you see that the poor actors are acting with a big-ass camera about ten inches from their faces.
And here are my two favorites. This is Brent Spiner, Rick Berman (the main Trek producer during the 1990s), Patrick Stewart, and, sitting in the Captain’s chair, Trek composer-extraordinaire Jerry Goldsmith.
And I’m not sure when this next one was taken — probably from the set of either Insurrection or Nemesis. I’d remember if I could place those alien dudes Patrick Stewart is mugging to, but the first of those two films was merely forgettable while the second was awful. But that’s not the reason for posting this photo, anyway.
Yup — there’s Deanna Troi herself, the ever-gorgeous Marina Sirtis, finely sporting a pair of overalls. Huzzah!
(I always thought Sirtis was utterly beautiful, and a fine actress to boot. I remember being glad when the producers finally realized that she was a gorgeous woman who didn’t need plunging necklines and skimpy skirts to look gorgeous, and just put her in a regular old Starfleet uniform.)
:: This is the kind of thing I wish I could think of. I wonder who makes ’em? Come on, Cal, give us a link!!!
:: This is kind of strange. Over at ToolGuyD, one of my favorite blogs on hardware and tools, a post recently appeared scoffing at a very weird new tool being made by Husky. (Seriously — that tool is just strange. I looked at it at Home Depot last week, and I couldn’t believe what a goofy item it is.) Well, they’ve since received a number of posts on that tool in comments that they now believe to be posted by shills either for Husky or for Home Depot. It’s all very strange! Why go to this level of chicanery to try to stand up for a 48-in-1 ratcheting wrench that looks just plain odd?
More next week!
