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Something for Thursday

Here’s a bit of wonderfully beautiful film music writing, from the movie Medicine Man, by Jerry Goldsmith. This is one of those movies to which Goldsmith gave a pretty good score despite the fact that the movie is complete crap. (The flick has Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco as two biologists in the Amazon, trying to track down a lead on a potential cure for cancer before those pesky myopic Brazilians bulldoze the entire forest. Connery can’t quite figure out for the life of him what he’s actually looking for, even though the movie has telegraphed it to the viewers so strongly that we’re sitting there, shouting at the screen, “It’s the ****, dummy!”. (I redacted it in case you want to watch the movie, which I don’t recommend.)

Anyway, there is one wonderful scene in the movie: a sequence where the characters climb into a set of Rube Goldberg-esque chair things suspended a hundred feet above the ground and pull themselves on ropes from one tree to the next. This cue, called simply “The Trees”, underscores that scene, which is mainly good because the characters stop talking. It starts out nicely enough, but the gorgeous melody blooms forth at about the one minute mark. The track ends with some boilerplate suspense stuff once the beautiful scene has ended, but the middle four minutes are pure film music magic.

Here’s “The Trees”. (Don’t bother watching the video, it’s just a picture.)

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In the Bag

John Cole on today’s Tea Party nonsense:

You know what really irritates me about the tea parties? The basic fact that if right now, it were President John McCain and not President Obama, and nothing else had changed, these tea parties wouldn’t exist. You know it, I know it, and even the teabaggers know it. It is just such transparent bullshit that it is offensive. The most these guys ever did during the last lost eight years was put a limp Porkbusters logo on their website, but now that we have President Malcom X George McGovern Shabazz, they are freaking out like there is no tomorrow. So absurd.

That’s about right. This had nothing to do with taxes, or spending, or anything of the sort. It had to do with a Democrat in the White House, pure and simple.

A couple of other quotes I liked today. First, Steve Benen:

So, at some point in the future (we don’t know when), some politicians (we don’t know who) might find it necessary to raise taxes. Whose taxes would be raised? It’s too soon to say. How much would taxes go up? No one knows.

But the mere prospect of a possible future tax increase has led untold thousands of activists, an entire cable news network, corporate lobbyists, conservative bloggers, conservative talk-radio hosts, and Republican officials to organize a series of national events. With extraordinary foresight, they’ve organized thousands of rallies to register their outrage, not at existing tax rates, but at tax policies that haven’t been proposed, but might exist at some undermined point.

Got it.

And Andrew Sullivan:

But the substantive critique must remain the primary one. Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you’d cut.

If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against.

All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

And by “specifying cuts”, well, cutting earmarks and volcano monitoring just isn’t going to work. Kevin Drum has the goods on that.

In short: the Tea Party people just aren’t serious. They don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re in love with policies that didn’t work the first time(s) they were tried. Other than that, though, they’re fine patriots, each and every one!

(I had to watch some of this nonsense today while I was at the Y working out; I like to use the stationary bikes and the one I chose was unfortunately directly underneath the teevee that’s tuned to FOX News. Now, most of the teevees at The Store are also tuned to FOX News, and every time I walked by one of them today, their footage was breathless Tea Party stuff. FOX isn’t even trying to pretend to be “fair and balanced” anymore, are they? They’re the Limbaugh-Coulter-Beck News Channel.

Anyway, there on the teevee at the Y was Glenn Beck, who strikes me as being your standard right-wing teevee pundit these days: loud and blitheringly stupid. At one point he had Jeanine Turner on so she could do the “OMG, I’m the only Republican in Hollywood!” schtick that Republicans in Hollywood like to do, and for a few minutes they blathered on about what a wonderful leader Sarah Palin is.

This Sarah Palin.

Guffaw.)

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Waiting for an absolution that would never come.

Ninety-seven years ago tonight, the HMS Titanic was steaming across the North Atlantic when it hit an iceberg and sank two hour later. It’s a well-known story, obviously — but it’s one of the most compelling stories of the modern age, being one of the most famous reminders that with all our technological prowess, Mother Nature can always lift a hand and swat us down like the mosquitoes that we probably are, in her eyes.

Sheila has a nifty post up about the sinking, in which she ruminates more on people who develop a high degree of interest in the ship and its dolorous fate. Sheila’s posts often teach me something new, and this one is no exception: I had no idea that photos exist of the probable iceberg itself.

(Images courtesy titanic-nautical.com.)

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Twenty-five cents (part 3)

Clearly this series of posts isn’t impressing anybody, because nobody has bothered to remind me about it! But anyway, we’ll continue now, picking up with Ohio:

Ohio

The first time I looked at Ohio’s quarter, my reaction was, “Huh?” It’s the ever-boring state outline, with a picture of the Wright Brothers’ airplane prototype and a spacesuited astronaut, explained by the helpful motto: “Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers”. The Wright Brothers were born here, that’s obvious, but who’s the astronaut? Was it just John Glenn, or others? So Ohio used its quarter to honor famous people who did their famous things someplace other than Ohio. OK, I guess, if you like that sort of thing. I, however, am underwhelmed. They could have mentioned Cleveland’s place in the history of rock-and-roll, for example. Meh.

Ohio’s quarter: $0.11

Indiana

Another state that proclaims itself a crossroads, but this time, it’s the Crossroads of the entire country. Yup, the quarter reads: “Crossroads of America”. There’s a ring of stars on one side with a larger star in the middle of it for some unknown reason, a boring monotextured state outline, and a Formula One race car honoring the Indy 500. This design just screams out “Mailed in by the committee for designing a quarter the night before the assignment as due”.

Indiana’s quarter: $0.09

Illinois

As much as I love the Great Lakes region of this country, I’ve gotta say, the quarters these states have come up with are all pretty uninspiring, with New York’s being the best of the lot thus far. Here’s Illinois, another committee-designed hodgepodge of elements that had to be included: Illinois has farms and Chicago, and it gave us Abraham Lincoln, and it’s the twenty-first state, and the coin reminds us that we’re in the 21st century now, and let’s not forget the constant state outline. They probably felt they had to get Lincoln on there, since nobody takes the poor penny seriously anymore, but every state has farms and big cities, and the “21st State and century” bit is just goofy.

Illinois’s quarter: $0.09

Michigan

Finally someone in the Great Lakes region gets it right! See, you don’t have to jam your quarter with lots of unrelated stuff. Michigan shows all five Great Lakes, with Michigan itself rendered topographically. Simple and therefore successful.

Michigan’s quarter: $0.20

Wisconsin

Folks, I have nothing against cows, cheese, or corn. But this, along with the banner reading “Forward” (which has nothing to do with the other design elements), just looks slapped together at the last minute, like Indiana’s. At least they didn’t stick an outline of Wisconsin on there…but this quarter isn’t terribly inspiring.

Wisconsin’s quarter: $0.12

Minnesota

I like the scenic picture they used here, the boat on the lake and the duck (although the duck is so big, relative to the boat, that it feels like they crammed two pictures together), and I’d rank this quarter higher if not for the Minnesota outline, which screws up the composition entirely.

Minnesota’s quarter: $0.15

Iowa

On my personal pantheon of states that have been most important to me over the years, Iowa’s probably second, since I went to college there. The state really does take eduction really seriously, and they chose to reflect this on their state quarter, while at the same time honoring favorite son and artist Grant Wood. It’s nicely done.

Iowa’s quarter: $0.19

Missouri

I like the design here a lot: it’s nice and symmetrical, with what I assume is the great Mississippi River with three people rafting past woods on either side, with the Gateway Arch in the distance. Nothing much to critique here.

Missouri’s quarter: $0.19

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll finish the South and move into the Southwest.

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Sentential Links #165

Linkage, linkage, linkage….

:: So maybe the Rodent Alliance are still out there, despite the Empire’s best efforts. (So does all this photography make SDB a Bothan spy?)

:: She claims that the mystical orb she holds is the key to spiritual enlightenment, but its roiling inky blackness tells a very different story. (God, I love Comics Curmudgeon.)

:: You know, most women I know never use coy or silly euphemisms for their period. They just say, “I have my period.” Or, “I’m on my period.” Why is it, then, that we have a cornucopia of slang terms for, well, that time of the month? And are they insulting or funny? I can’t decide. But I can list them. (OK then. I worked with a woman once who referred to it as “Betty”. As in, “Leave me alone. Betty’s here.” This got really confusing when we actually hired a woman named Betty.)

:: “Ohhhhh yeahh… yeahyeahYEAH!… oh, this is good…this is really, really good, Mommy! Ohhhhh yeah baby… Hehehehehehehehhhhh.” (It’s not what it looks like.)

:: While the media prefers to give a platform to ecological revisionists like Senator James Inhofe or Michelle Bachman because they are better television, the “boring” Aral Sea is fading away into environmental oblivion.

:: Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

:: Do you know the best thing about living in the Boston area? It really is the Athens of America. (So what does that make Buffalo? The Budapest of America? East Berlin, before the reunification? Hmmmm…new blog to me, by the way.)

:: In a weird way, it was a lot more fun to be a geek back then. It was kind of like Fight Club, something you experienced but didn’t talk about. The pleasure derived, in part, from keeping the secret. Now it’s mainstream; geeks rule the world, and we don’t have to be uncomfortable about people mocking us for liking the weird stuff we like, and in fact it seems like more people like that weird stuff than ever before. Maybe our culture has outgrown the need for magazines like Starlog. And isn’t that a sad thought? Because with mainstream acceptance comes a certain loss of specialness. (I loved Starlog, back in the day, especially when the mag was more focused on more esoteric areas of SF-dom. I haven’t picked up an issue in many years, but I liked that it’s still on the magazine racks. Alas. I will note that I like geekness now more than I did back then; I like feeling more mainstream for once. I never totally grokked the whole “outsider” thing about geek culture, and I for one am glad that geek culture is a lot more mainstream now. Note to self: subscribe to Geek Monthly.)

More next week!

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Unidentified Earth #63

Here we go! Last week’s UI 62 is as yet Unidentified, with one erroneous, but astute, guess. We’re looking at a place that holds a world record in that entry. UI 61 was identified, once we reached the “hint” stage, as Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town that no longer exists because the coal mines underground beneath the town caught fire years ago and have rendered the entire town unfit for human habitation. We actually drove through Centralia years ago, my family and I; it lay on one route we would occasionally take between WNY and the Philadelphia area where my grandmother and aunt lived at the time. The town was dying even then, and it was surreal to see smoke venting from pipes stuck in the ground in an attempt to allow the gases below to escape.

UI 58 was also finally pegged as Mt. Sunday in New Zealand, which was the site of the Edoras set for The Lord of the Rings. So, I believe that makes us up-to-date. Time for the new puzzler!

Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: Well, the track listing for the score CD for Star Trek is out there, and…well, let’s just say that these track titles don’t make it easier to take this movie seriously. Do we really have a Trek score with track titles like “Hella Bar Talk”, “Run and Shoot Offense”, and “Does It Still McFly”? Sorry to geek out here, but come on now.

(The music is by Michael Giacchino, J.J. Abrams’s composer of habit. I’m of mixed mind on Giacchino: he writes decent enough music, but each time I hear him I get the sense that he’s doing more pastiche of other composers than producing his own work in his own voice. So I’m concerned that this score will consist of him aping Jerry Goldsmith.)

:: I know that Republicans have pretty much gone batshit insane over the last year, but now they’ve reached a point where Little Green Footballs is saying “Whoa Nellie, we need to stop being so crazy”. Wow.

That’s about it. It was a slow week for funny weirdness, I guess. (And one of these isn’t even funny weirdness, just me enjoying a political trainwreck.)

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Tabling the issue

Ken Levine has a gripe about restaurants and the seating of customers:

I’m one of those people that hate to be shown to a bad table. In addition to the discomfort of being by the kitchen or next to the screaming baby, I always take it as a personal insult. The host just assumes I’m an idiot and doesn’t know the difference. Or I’m too unimportant to be shown a decent table. Better to leave the good one open just in case the Pope should happen in off the street.

This caused a number of bells to go off in my head, as a former restaurant manager, so here’s what I wrote in his comments thread:

Not sure if this has been mentioned in the thread (I did read through it all but may have missed it), but all restaurants have bad tables, and all restaurants are aware of their existence. The problem is that bad tables are unavoidable; if you open a restaurant, you WILL have a bad table or two somewhere in your dining room. It’s a fact of life. Like gravity.

The big factor that isn’t mentioned here, I think, is that many, if not most, restaurants divide their dining rooms into “sections”, with each server taking a particular section. This is to avoid the servers having to bounce all over the entire dining room and helps to ensure that no customers will be overlooked (if a server knows that this cluster of tables right here is his responsibility, then he presumably won’t fail to notice a new group of people sitting in his station).

Now, most restaurants I’ve worked in rotate the stations so that you don’t have the same person waiting the same section of the dining room each and every night. Thus, every night, someone else gets the section with the bad table or two. But here’s the rub: hosts are trained to avoid filling sections too quickly — i.e., you try to avoid giving a server two or three new tables in succession, which suddenly causes them to get overworked and make it possible to overlook customers.

This also implies that hosts will attempt to seat customers at the bad tables. They do this not to screw those customers, but to try to keep the serving staff evenly worked through, and to make sure that the poor server who has the crappy table(s) that day still gets a chance to earn some money. Believe me, if you’re the server whose section includes the table everybody asks to be moved from, you take home less money that day than you would otherwise, through no fault of your own.

All I’m saying is that when you get put at a crappy table, there’s a very good chance they’re not assuming that you’re too stupid to know it’s a crap table.

Restaurants have crappy tables for the same reason that hotels in the Bahamas still have rooms that overlook the parking lot instead of the ocean. And they try to get customers to use those tables for the same reason that those hotels book those rooms.

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Something for Thursday

One of my favorite albums from the 1980s is Genesis’s Invisible Touch. I think a lot of people probably think of this album, if they think of it at all, as basic 80s pop, but I was strongly attracted to it because it’s really a fairly gritty and depressing album. The two “up-tempo” songs, the title track and “Anything She Does”, are peppy enough, but that’s about all the pep that you’ll find on this record. “Anything…” is about pin-up girls and their static, unattainable nature (“Fiction/That’s all you really are I know…”), while “Invisible Touch” describes an infatuation with a woman only seen from afar (“Well I don’t really know her / I only know her name. / And though she will mess up your life / you want her just the same”).

After that, the album’s themes get more serious. “Land of Confusion” is a cautionary song about life in the nuclear age, with that famous video using puppets to perform satire on the geopolitics of the time. The album’s two ballads, “Throwin’ it All Away” and “In Too Deep”, are both about failed love affairs, one from the point of view of the person ending the affair and the other from the POV of the person being left. Both are beautiful songs, but both are quite sad. The first asks “Now who will light up the darkness / and who will hold your hand? / Who will find you the answers / when you don’t understand?”, while the second has Phil Collins meditating thusly: “I gave you too many reasons, being alone, when I didnt want to. / I thought youd always be there, I almost believed you, / All this time, I still remember everything you said, oh / Theres so much you promised, how could I ever forget.”

One of my favorite rock songs of all time is “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”, which to my ears describes the harrowing night of a strung-out drug addict (“I got some money in my pocket / about ready to burn, / I don’t remember where I got it / I gotta get it to you.”). This song is sometimes heard in a shortened version, but it just doesn’t sound right to me outside its eight-minute length with the long instrumental interlude in the middle. And then there’s the two-part, eleven-minute “Domino”, all of eleven minutes long. I have no idea what “Domino” is about — maybe nuclear annihilation? It’s a very strange song, but deeply compelling, as well, with some of the album’s finest imagery in its lyrics: “Sheets of double glazing help to keep outside the night, / Only foreign city sirens can cut through, / Nylon sheets and blankets help to minimize the cold. / But they cant keep out the chilling sounds.”

Rounding it all out is a vocal-less techno track, “The Brazilian”, that was actually used in a gritty episode of Magnum, PI. For all the pop sound on the Invisible Touch album, the songs themselves are not pure pop at all. There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of this record.

Anyway, here’s one of those two ballads, “In Too Deep”.

I remember how a lot of the kids I hung out with in high school and college had specific pop or rock albums that they listened to on their Walkmen at night, with all the lights out. Invisible Touch was mine.

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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