On October 25, 1415, five hundred eighty-five years ago, a greatly outnumbered English force dealt a crippling military defeat to the French army at a field called Agincourt. Before the battle, the English King, Henry the Fifth, had to rouse the troops, and here is how a playwright of some renown in literary history crafted the King’s speech:
Lovin’ the Lantern
I just saw this article about the Green Lantern movie that is currently in production. It’s sounding like a pretty nifty production:
See, here’s the the thing – I can’t tell you how Green Lantern will be as a movie, but after visiting the New Orleans set of the film I can tell you that director Martin Campbell and company are working to make the biggest, most epic, most sweeping, most cosmic superhero film yet. Forget Hal Jordan versus muggers in an alley, Green Lantern is really about Hal Jordan battling to save not himself, not his girlfriend, not even just his city but the entire planet Earth. Green Lantern is a huge movie, with set pieces that will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. I can’t spoil where the final battle takes place, but it’s an INSANE location – it certainly isn’t your standard issue end-of-the-movie warehouse, bridge or warehouse-like supervillain lair.
And it’s not just Hal Jordan. Green Lantern will feature the entire Green Lantern Corps; while visiting I saw life-sized cardboard cut outs of Tomar-Re and Kilowogg, the alien GLs who help train Hal Jordan. I saw mock ups of Oa, the planet at the center of the galaxy where the Guardians of the Universe oversee the galactic police force that is the Corps. And I saw much, much more – stuff that will make not just GL fans but hardcore space fantasy nerds salivate with excitment. I’m talking massive planetary and space vistas, incredible alien life forms and crazy space ship designs.
Yeah, this better not suck. I’d hate for something to sound so completely made for me and turn out to be a turd in the punchbowl. I am pleased to learn that Martin Campbell is directing; he is very good at directing action sequences that are highly kinetic and yet easily followed by the viewer. I’m looking forward to this.
(If you click through the article, make sure to click all the way through to the large versions of the two pieces of concept art they have posted. The Lantern cemetery is a beautiful, haunting space-opera type of image.)
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Halloween Quizzery
SamuraiFrog did this, and thus, so must I.
1. What is the worst treat to get when trick-or-treating?
Milk-Duds. God, those things are horrible. Just awful. They’re supposed to be chocolatey-caramelly goodness, but they’re really rock-hard balls of chewy crap. I hate them.
Weirdly, though, after first grade, I never trick-or-treated again. It had to do with our moves in my childhood. In second grade, we lived in West Virginia, and as I recall, the town there didn’t allow trick-or-treating. (I may be misremembering, to be honest.) Third and fourth grade were spent in Hillsboro, OR, where there was trick-or-treating, but I decided I liked handing out the candy more. After that, we moved to Allegany, NY. But we lived out from the village center a ways, where we weren’t really in a “neighborhood”, per se; we were about a quarter mile from the next house. So the next time I went trick-or-treating? When I chaperoned The Daughter on her first trick-or-treating excursion, back in 2001.
2. What character from any horror film would you most like to play?
I’m probably best suited to be the guy who lives on the grounds of the haunted mansion and creeps everybody out, always saying creepy things to the kids, before they discover the true horror and then prove myself to be a hero before dying horribly. If I get to do the part in overalls, so much the better.
3. Would you rather be a zombie, alien, or psycho? (why)
A psycho alien. (I’ll admit, I’m not sure why zombies are so pop-culturally cool right now.)
4. How many Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elm Street movies combined do you have on dvd?
Zero. I actually hate those kinds of movies. I watched one once, in a hotel my family stayed in. My parents went down to the hotel bar for a drink, and I found one of the Friday the 13th‘s on HBO. It was laughably stupid and bad and confirmed my at-the-time negative opinion of horror as an entire genre.
5. What is the scariest movie you have ever seen?
Either The Exorcist or The Silence of the Lambs, both of which I consider brilliant.
6. Lamest costume you have worn on Halloween?
I don’t do costuming much. In fact, the last one I wore for Halloween was when I went on my afore-mentioned last trick-or-treating excursion as a kid. That costume was a Captain Marvel costume that my mother made, because I loved SHAZAM!. And that costume was f***ing AWESOME.
7. Favorite Halloween treat?
Mini candy bars. I also like Smarties, and the fruit-flavored Tootsie Roll things, which I like a lot more than Starbursts.
8. Friendly-faced jack o’lantern or scary one?
Either-or. I just look for creativity.
9. Have you ever had nightmares about a scary movie character chasing you?
I don’t think so. One thing I remember — not Halloween-related, actually — was going to visit my maternal grandmother. She lived with my uncle in Pittsburgh, in a two-story house with a basement that was also the garage (owing to Pittsburgh’s hilly locale). My uncle’s automatic garage door opener sent a horrible noise through the house that scared the living shit out of me when I was young.
10. Best thing about Halloween?
It’s really the one holiday left that’s all about fun, even in the scary sense, and that hasn’t been shot through with a whole bunch of sanctimonious bullshit. What harms Halloween (and the entirety of harvest season in general) is not anything to do with Halloween, but actually the retail world’s insistence that on October 10, it’s time to say “Screw Halloween” and put out the Christmas stuff.
11. Strangest Halloween custom you’ve heard of?
None, really. Can’t think of any.
12. Person in your family who most likes Halloween (not counting yourself)?
My wife and The Daughter. (Who was actually insisting, three weeks ago, that she was too old for trick-or-treating. She’s 11, you see, and too old for such nonsense. No amount of me pointing out that we always see kids way older than 11 out there getting candy was budging her from her position. Learning that her friends in school are still trick-or-treating, though? That did the trick. Huzzah!!!)
13. Are you superstitious? If so, name at least one superstition of yours.
No, I’m not.
How about you all?
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Sentential Links #225
Linkage time….
:: In other words, there are bizarro ideas on both sides of the fence. No argument there. And yet, there are differences. Here’s my list: (Click through to read one of the best posts I’ve seen yet regarding the whole “Hey, you liberals have crazies on your side too!” argument.)
:: Everyone on the street feared her and did what they could to avoid her. I didn’t like her one bit. But nobody deserves what happened to her. Nobody. (How should one feel when someone one knew personally, and deeply loathed for good reasons, passes away after a debilitating disease?)
:: He doesn’t yet understand what an arsehole is!
:: This fella isn’t getting any younger. I’d like to see it before it’s gone.
:: Spock says its interior is impervious to scans and that it was built by a civilization with technology superior to that of the Federation, which would seem to be anyone capable of making an iPhone. (Ah yes, the “Kirk as a Native American” episode…which I remember as being a bit better than its reputation over the years.)
:: It Gets Better because, some day, maybe when you least expect it, you will open your hand, and there, in the middle of your outstretched palm, you will find a crystal. Hold it up to the light, and watch how the crystal sends little rainbows swarming across the walls, ceilings, floors, into the darkest corners of wherever you are. (New blog to me. I was bullied sporadically, but never consistently or all that much; I guess I was the kid the bullies picked on if they felt like bullying but there was nobody else around they would have rather bullied. It almost seemed like their heart wasn’t totally in it, when they got round to bullying me, and sometimes they even looked a little bored. I was “a fat kid”, but I wasn’t even the fat kid, nor was I the weakest kid or the wimpiest kid. As high school went on, it slowed and slowed until, around my junior year, it just pretty much ended entirely. Some of the former bullies even became, if not friends, at least guys who didn’t really give a crap about bullying anymore and found it easier just to hang out and talk about sports if there was nothing else going on. But yes, it does get better. Eventually. Nothing lasts forever, not even the worst times.)
All for this week, folks!
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So close to a win!
The Buffalo Bills came off their bye week today, and headed to Baltimore to face the Ravens. The Ravens are widely considered one of the league’s best teams, with a fearsome defense, and an offense that combines a punishing running attack with a significantly-improved passing game. The Ravens are also coming off a very tough loss last week in New England, an overtime defeat that left them angry and needing a win to keep pace with the Steelers in their division. The Bills, on the other hand, headed into today boasting one of the NFL’s only two winless records, and a defense that would have a sieve saying, “Who are you calling ‘porous’?” So the scene was set for a big loss and another pie in the face of Bills fans everywhere.
But…as Chris Berman likes to say, “That’s why they play the games.”
The Bills hadn’t had a quarterback — any quarterback — throw for more than 300 yards in a game in something like four years; so Ryan Fitzpatrick today threw for almost 400. The Bills hadn’t taken a big lead at all this year, so today they jumped out to a 24-10 lead in the second quarter. The Bills’ offensive line had looked horrific on a depressingly common basis, so today they only gave up a single sack, provided decent pass protection, and made for a productive, if not explosive, running game. The Bills hadn’t put up a strong rally from a late-game deficit, and yet today they bounced back from being down 34-24 to tie the game with seconds left to force overtime.
Unfortunately, the Bills’ defense had not protected a lead in any game this year, and they still haven’t. That 24-10 lead quickly disappeared to become a 34-24 deficit, with the annoying announcers — seriously, these guys were terrible — pronouncing in the third quarter that with a mere ten-point lead, the Ravens had the game “well in hand”. The Bills tied it, sending it to overtime. But, as usual this year when the Bills score a nice number of points, the defense can’t stop anybody else from scoring, either. In the NFL, scoring 34 points should mean a win. But so far this year, the Bills have lost games in which they scored 34, 30, and 26 points.
Looking at that, however, I see continued reason for potential optimism for the team’s future. Everybody around here — especially Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan — thinks that it will take three or four years to get the team respectable again, assuming the current brain trust is even up to the job. But here’s the thing: right now, the offense is pretty good, and will probably be even better if the Bills can add a stud quarterback with their more-certain-every-week high 1st-round draft pick. That means that what really needs fixing is the defense, not the entire team. If the Bills can start to address that, and do so convincingly, then I think that maybe they’re only one or two years away from being good, not three or four.
Yeah, I know. “If.” But all of football is “if”, isn’t it?
Oh, and overtime? The Bills turned the ball over in Ravens territory, on a stripping of the ball from Shaun Nelson. Now, I expect when I listen to some day-after radio tomorrow on this game, some Bills fans will insist that Nelson’s forward progress had been stopped on the play and therefore it should have been whistled dead before Ray Lewis was able to strip the ball, but I’m not sure that’s what happened. It looked to me like the Ravens defenders (a) surrounded Nelson, (b) held him up so he couldn’t get down to the ground, and (c) kept pushing him forward to keep forward progress alive until someone could get the ball out of there. That’s how it looked to me, anyway — a smart play by a smart defense where everyone thinks as a team. I don’t really blame Nelson for that.
I do blame Bills center Geoff Hangartner, though, who got really stupid at that moment. Instead of keeping his cool and hoping the defense could make a stop and prevent a game-winning field goal (granted, a tall order for the NFL’s crappiest defense), Hangartner got frustrated and threw his helmet to the ground. Bills fans all know (thanks to Andre Reed in Super Bowl XXVI) that this is a 15-yard “Unsportsmanlike Conduct” penalty, which put the Ravens in field-goal range before they even ran a play. A couple of snaps later, in came their kicker, boom went the kick, and splat went the pie.
I don’t think today’s game was very discouraging, really; it shows that there’s a lot more to the Bills that we can be optimistic about for seasons to come. Yeah, it’s still a loss, but there are worse fates than being pied.
Next week, the Bills face the Chiefs, who last year were awful but are quickly improving. Bring ’em on!
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Suck it, Girl Scouts!
Well, I suppose that title may be putting things a bit…strongly. And definitely rudely. Sorry about that, Girl Scouts.
But!
Everybody loves Girl Scout Cookies, right? I know that I do. I love cookies in general, but the Girl Scout ones are special. My favorites are the Thin Mints (everybody’s favorite, I suppose) and the Coconut Samoas, those wonderfully chewy blends of fudge, caramel, and toasted coconut. Of course I’d love the Samoas, given my adoration of coconut, be it in candy bars, in cream pies, on cakes, et cetera. Even on fried shrimp.
Of course, the problem is that Coconut Samoas aren’t available year-round; you have to wait for the Girl Scouts to sell the things.
Until, that is, the fine folks at Keebler finally decided that Americans have suffered this state of affairs long enough. Behold the item I spotted quite by chance at The Store today: Keebler Coconut Dream cookies!
And they are wonderful.
The best part of this? The Wife and The Daughter are both afflicted by that odd disease that renders both of them hating coconut, which means that all these cookies are belong to me. Huzzah!
:: As long as I’m babbling about junk food, here’s the latest new candy I found. These have been on the market for a few months, but they’ve been hard to come by in my neck of the woods. It’s the latest variation on the chocolate-in-a-hard-candy-shell notion: the Pretzel M&Ms.
They look pretty much like any other filled M&M out there, obviously. How do they taste? I like them, but your enjoyment will likely hinge on whether or not you find chocolate-covered pretzels delectable, as I do. These basically taste like little morsels of chocolate-covered pretzel, which is reasonable because that’s what they are. I won’t buy these very often, but they will be welcome at Casa Jaquandor when I feel the need for an M&M fix.
:: OK, I wasn’t going to post this here, but just to show that I’m not all about the junk food these days, here’s one of my favorite early fall treats: fresh Concord grapes. Oh my, I love these things — even with their seeds. You don’t get that kind of grape flavor from the normal red or green grapes we usually buy. Living in a grape-growing region has lots of benefits, and they’re not all in corked bottles.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: Via Jennifer, the Evolution of the Geek.
:: If you wrote a film script for studios in the 1920s, you probably received a rejection in the mail similar to this:
:: If I could wave a wand to resurrect a single monthly magazine from yesteryear, it’s not much of a contest. I’d bring back OMNI. In a heartbeat. I really enjoyed reading the back issues that I “inherited” from my sister in the mid-80s. (Or maybe I stole them…I don’t really know anymore….)
More next week!
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Sunday Stealing
Another week, another quiz ripped from Sunday Stealing. They call this one the “Presuppose you live in New England” Quiz.
1. Have you turned the heat on in your house yet this fall?
Yes, but only a handful of times. Those days are coming, though.
In a yearly ritual, we had to have the apartment complex maintenance guys come out and re-light our pilot light when it got cold enough for us to want the heat on. You’d think I could do this myself, but they’ve got the heaters installed in such a way that I can’t really get at the pilot light housing without difficulty, so we just figure, hey, that’s what they’re paid for. And wouldn’t you know it: the two weeks after that were warm ones again. Only now are we starting to think, “Hmmmm, should we fire up the heat or not?”
2. Do you allow your pets on the furniture?
Yes, because (a) a lot of our furniture just ain’t nice enough to worry that much about, and (b) they’re cats and they’ll be on the furniture as soon as we go out anyway.
3. What were your final words for September?
“Come again soon!” I like September a lot.
4. What are your first words for October?
“Ohhhh, greetings, old lover. Come and stay a while…let us lay together in the dark for a time.” Yeah, I really like October.
5. Do you think you’ve ever seen a ghost?
No. As much as I’d love to live in a world that has ghosts and such in it, we don’t live in that world.
6. What is the one color that represents this time of year?
Orange, maybe. Or red, because a lot of my favorite long-sleeved shirts are red.
7. Which of your senses do you think is most sensitive this time of year?
Smell, I think. But maybe that’s because the air is so much clearer and crisper, and the smells are carried on its wings so much easier than during the humid, aroma-free breezes of summer.
8. What is your favorite thing to do at the county fair?
Eat.
9. What do you like when you have a cold?
Colds suck, they really do. Generally, I’m all about hot tea when I’m sick. (But during the chiller months, I drink tea anyway.)
10. Are you willing to spend over $100 for a piece of winter clothing, like boots or a coat?
Not at present.
12. What do you have too much of in your kitchen?
I just this morning discovered that we have a lot of soy sauce. Not sure why that is.
13. What gripes do you have about this time of year?
My favorite NFL team is awful. And living in Buffalo, it always irks me that fall is absolutely stunning here, but it doesn’t get the respect it deserves; instead, lots of Buffalonians spend our gorgeous autumns bitching about the snow that is in the offing a month or two from now. We know it’s coming, and yet, we bitch about it. Drives me crazy. We should be pushing fall as a tourist thing — come for leaf-peeping that’s just as awesome as Vermont’s, plus the benefits of a big city!
14. Other than yourself, are you responsible for getting anyone ready in the morning?
The Daughter is pretty much self-sufficient in terms of getting herself ready for school now, but I still make sure she’s up and moving right along.
15. When was the last time you cleaned your gutters?
Never. We’ll own a house someday, though, and this crappy job will be mine. Ugh.
16. So, it’s after Labor Day. Will you still be wearing white?
I don’t wear a whole lot of white, but I won’t let the time of year stop me. This, like just about every other fashion “rule”, is stupid. [Danger! Rant forthcoming!] In fact, “fashion” as a whole is stupid. I hate “fashion”. “I’d like to wear that, but it’s not in right now!” What a dumb thought process that is. [Rant has been terminated.]
17. What shows are you most looking forward to this Fall?
I’m guessing this quiz is old already, because we’re well into the swing of the teevee season. All the usual suspects, I suppose, although we’re gathering quite the backlog of Grey’s Anatomy episodes now. We’ll have a marathon sometime.
What I’m really looking forward to is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the movie theater. Can’t wait. Part One opens sometime this winter.
18. What three things have you just not gotten around to from the summer, but probably should do before snow flies?
Nothing really, except for changing the oil on The Wife’s car. First I need to get hold of a couple of those ramp-things to elevate the front of the car, though; this will make things easier.
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Happy Birthday, Universe!!!
On October 23, 4004 BC, God decided that there needed to be a Universe, so he made one: this one! Yay, God! Yay, Universe! Yay, Bishop Ussher for figuring this out!
(Orrrrr, one could take the messy view espoused by those nasty Scienticians, who think that some kind of natural processes shaped the entire Universe over the course of 15 billion years. Stupid Scienticians!)
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The Piratical Epoch continues….
Roger talks about baseball. I used to love baseball — maybe even more than I loved football. I loved the game’s slower pace, the way a game unfolded rather than took place. I loved how long the thrilling moments of tension would last, and the way that in the hands of skilled spostscasters, those moments would almost seem cinematic in a way that the tense moments in football often are not. In a football game, when your team is trying to drive for a winning score in the final moments, it’s still Come to the line, set, snap the ball. But when watching a baseball game, in a tight spot in the 9th inning — well, let’s say your team is holding a one-run lead with one out in the 9th. Your team’s closer is on the mound, and he’s a pretty good closer as closers go, but he’s got one run already on base and the next two batters up are the best hitters the other team’s got. The way this might unfold on teevee? Instead of football’s “Watch the guys come to the line and snap the ball, always from the same angle”, in baseball you’ll often get a series of shots:
Closeup on the pitcher as he leans forward to see the signs.
Long shot so we can see the catcher.
Quick cut to the guy at first, getting a good jump.
Back to the pitcher, who takes his stance.
Cut to the batter, who taps the plate with the bat and readies for his swing.
Back to the pitcher, who glances over his shoulder at the guy at first.
Back to the long shot. The catcher readies for the pitch.
The pitcher stands there, ready. Glances at first again. Seems about to wind up.
He winds up, and finally, when the tension’s greatest and the crowd is screaming wildly, here’s the pitch.
The batter swings.
Makes contact.
The ball goes…somewhere. Where? Well, that determines the next moment.
That’s what it’s like when baseball is really good. When it’s bad, though — well, this parody (from Buffalo’s own WGR Sports Radio) isn’t as far off as you might think. (“Greg Buck” is a character they use in fake “authentic” broadcasts which are often utterly hilarious.) Baseball’s problems are well-established — the games take way too long, the big post-season games start so late that they often end well after midnight, the game’s lack of real revenue-sharing hampers small-market teams to a point, and of course, the steroid issue which makes a lot of it just seem fake, anyway.
It would be easy to me to say that those reasons are the main factors in my not really paying much attention to baseball anymore, but the truth is…that photo up there. That’s Sid Bream, beating a throw from Barry Bonds in Game Seven of the 1992 National League Series. Bream’s run was the winning run, which put the Atlanta Braves in the World Series for the second year in a row. (They’d lose the Series to Toronto, in what was the first of Toronto’s back-to-back Series wins. Neat baseball factoid: Joe Carter made the final out of the 1992 World Series, and then the next year, scored the final walk-off run of the 1993 Series. Two consecutive series ended on Joe Carter doing something.)
That NLCS was one of the most nauseating experiences I’ve ever had as a sports fan. The Pirates had fallen behind in the NLCS, 3 games to 1, and their loss seemed a foregone conclusion. But then they won Game 5, and after that, they won Game 6 in a big way, with their big bats finally exploding for a bunch of runs. In Game 7, they took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the 9th. All they had to do was record three outs…but instead, the Braves scored three runs, with the final two coming on a single from a backup catcher named Francisco Cabrera whom no one had ever heard of before (and no one’s heard from since). Cabrera’s hit is burned on my brain: the pitch from Stan Belinda, and Cabrera’s swing in which he just kind of flailed the bat out there, seeming to have zero idea of where the pitch actually was — until he’d smacked it over shortstop Jay Bell’s head into left field.
And Barry Bonds couldn’t throw out Sid Bream, who is legendary for being one of the slowest guys on the basepaths in baseball history.
My love of baseball didn’t end that night, obviously. I’d watch it for some years afterward, loyally and faithfully. But what did end that night was the last season in which my team didn’t suck. The Pirates have posted a losing record every year since that one. Eighteen of ’em. Nobody has ever done that, in any sport. They’ve had at least five distinct “rebuilding efforts” since then, and another is supposedly underway right now. But hope for Pirates fans does not spring eternal, as we’ve seen kids born the last time the Pirates were a winning team first turn old enough to drive…and then old enough to vote. Just three more, and they’re old enough to drink.
When you favorite team sucks for that long, it’s no surprise that your enthusiasm for the sport in general flags a bit.
Just seeing what’s happened in baseball in general since 1992 is amazing. Players have played entire long careers in that span, and never encountered a good Pirates team. The game’s hallowed records have fallen (owing to drugs, of course). The Boston Red Sox won the World Series twice, finally ending their curse; the Chicago White Sox won the Series once, ending their own long drought. Major League Baseball expanded twice, adding four teams (Colorado, Florida, Tampa, and Arizona); each of those teams has been to the World Series since entering MLB, and two have won it (Florida twice and Arizona once). When last the Pirates were good, the Yankees were fourteen years removed from their last Series win; since then, they’ve won five and appeared in two more. When the Pirates were good, the Angels, Astros and Rangers were all known for not being good very often. Since then, the Angels have won a Series, the Astros have been to their first, and the Rangers are about to go to their first.
Wow. A lot of water under the baseball bridge. And the Pirates still stink.
