Oh Audrey, I love you so!
Sigh….
Ten Classical Music “Warhorses” I Could Do Without
Every genre’s got ’em: works that are familiar to just about everybody who knows anything about that genre. These are the “Warhorses”. A list of warhorses doesn’t necessarily comprise a list of the very greatest works, but a list of works that a person with an average level of familiarity with the genre will have heard at least once. Science fiction’s warhorses might include 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Neuromancer. A classic rock radio station’s warhorses will include “Stairway to Heaven”, “Hotel California”, and the like.
Warhorse pieces, though, can lead to a bit of cynicism on the part of performer and listener alike. For the sophisticated listener, the warhorses can be a bit annoying, taking up program space that might otherwise be used for music that isn’t played all that often. Want to hear one of Glazunov’s symphonies live? Good luck. But you’re never more than a few months away from being able to hear the Eroica again. That’s because the Eroica is a warhorse piece: one of those that appeals to people who “love classical music” as long as the classical music they’re hearing is classical music they’ve already heard.
Musicians, on the other hand, can get downright cynical about the warhorses. In my orchestral days in college, nothing made the hearts of the trumpet section sag harder than the appearance of a Beethoven symphony or concerto on the program. Why? It’s absolutely glorious music if you’re on the listening end, but if you’re sitting in the trumpet section, it’s music that makes you wish for the sweet embrace of death, so boring is it to play. You sit there for what feels like hours, counting out measures of rests that number on the hundreds before you make your entrance, in which you play the tonic or dominant on the beat. And then it’s back to counting rests. Likewise, with the warhorses, familiarity can really breed contempt, especially when you’re a lifetime orchestra member and you’re about to play the Tchaikovsky Sixth for the thirtieth time in your career.
But anyhow, works become warhorses for various reasons. Some even become warhorses despite their fate of not being terribly interesting works at all. Here are ten of those works from classical music that, for all their “warhorse” status, I just don’t like and could happily live the rest of my days never hearing again.
10. Maurice Ravel: Bolero.
God in Heaven, I hate this piece so! And Ravel himself wasn’t too fond of it, saying that it contains “very little music”. And he’s right: it’s a terrible, dreadful bore of a piece, droning on endlessly, piling on one repeat of that not-terribly-interesting melody after another. Sure, it’s full of stunning orchestral detail. It’s also full of dung. (And why is this work always cited for its sensual, sexy qualities? If Bolero is sex, it’s the brute force sex of a guy who’s going to get his money’s worth at the Mustang Ranch, by God!)
(If you must hear Bolero, look for the one conducted by Jean Martinon on the Angel label. He brings forth the orchestral details with amazing clarity.)
9. Antonio Vivaldi: The Four Seasons.
Remember that line in Sleepless in Seattle about the statistic that isn’t true but yet it feels true? Same thing about the oft-repeated jibe about Vivaldi that he wrote the same concerto five hundred times. No, he didn’t; that’s not true. But it feels true. For me, listening to different pieces by Vivaldi is like driving down two different street on Buffalo’s East Side. Sure, the houses are different, but hey, the rust is all still rust-colored. (Although, again in my college days, we played some Vivaldi piece that included a female chorus. I have no recollection of what the piece was, but my trumpet part was a blast. I still hated the piece, but man, that part was fun to play.)
(I don’t recommend owning a recording of The Four Seasons. Nothing good can come of it.)
8. Pachelbel: Canon in D.
What’s the most thankless task in classical music? I would guess that it would either be playing the snare drum part in Bolero, or playing the ground bass in Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Sure, it’s the most famous of all themes-and-variations. It’s also as worn out as that box of Arm-and-Hammer baking soda in the back of your fridge, second shelf, behind the jar of wheat germ you bought during your big Health Foods Kick of 2003.
(The only version of the Canon I can listen to anymore is the Canadian Brass version, which isn’t, well, canonical anyway. Ha! A pun!)
7. Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture.
OK, you got me: sometimes I like to listen to the last three or four minutes, that last descent from the highest voices to the lowest before that big chorale tune kicks in, each phrase punctuated by some kind of rising bell figure, and then the famous final “Can Can” eruption. The problem with 1812 is that the piece lasts fifteen minutes, most of which consist of repetitions of material already heard six minutes ago. And how about that coda, which goes on and on and on and on and on, never letting the piece out of its cold, dead fingers? Nah. We’re almost two hundred years past 1812. Time to get over it.
(Just find one that’s really loud, with digital cannons. This isn’t a piece that displays the difference between a great conductor or an average one.)
6. Barber, “Adagio for Strings”
It’s actually a pretty amazing piece of music by itself, when heard for what it is: a piece of music. Unfortunately, years of use in movies and TV shows as underscore to serious scenes of portentous doom have taken their toll on this work. I’m now at the point where I can’t even listen to the thing anymore without thinking of all the various pop-cultural references that the work has accrued. Oh well.
(Leonard Bernstein conducts the LA Philharmonic in an excellent recording of the Adagio, coupled with a scintillating performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Bernstein’s own Overture to Candide. That’s the one to get.)
5. Grofe, “Grand Canyon Suite”
This gets played an awful lot on the classical station in these parts, and it drives me crazy each time. I hate the main motif of the entire work, I hate the hokey Western stuff that sounds like what would happen if some kind of mutant child of Richard Strauss and Aaron Copland were made into a composer. Ugh.
(I don’t own a recording of this and I have no intentions of acquiring one, either.)
4. Mozart, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”
Yes, it’s Mozart. But it’s this piece’s opening bars – which are pretty much known by everybody on Earth, even if they can’t name the piece – are the main reason, I think, why so many casual music listeners tend to look down on Mozart as a genial composer of snuff-box music that is mainly nice but dull. Ask the random person on the street to hum some Mozart, and if they know any Mozart at all, this is what they’ll hum. That’s a shame.
(I do own this on disc, but I can’t remember who the performers are. I want to say that it’s the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi, but I’m not sure.)
3. Beethoven, “Pathetique Sonata”
I don’t dislike this piece at all; it’s just that this is the traditional First Beethoven Sonata of all piano students, so if one takes piano lessons as a kid and attends a couple of recitals each year, then one is guaranteed to sit through this sonata – or at least its first movement – at least ten times by the time one is eighteen. The work can be discovered anew when one listens to a great pianist doing it, say, Alfred Brendel, but it’s so oft-used as a training piece for students that listening to it anew requires substantial effort on my part.
(Brendel’s the ticket here. He’s recorded this more than once, I wager.)
2. Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries”
I cannot listen to this outside of its original context, in the opera Die Walkure. This is another great bit of music that’s been beaten into the ground by years and years of pop-culture. I should note that I have no problem with pop culture, nor do I view the lines between pop culture and “real” culture to be eternally fixed and immutable. In fact, I’m not even sure those lines exist. But pop culture can ruin things on occasion, and for me, “Ride of the Valkyries” is one of those things. And I don’t even like the smell of napalm in the morning!
(I strongly recommend Wagner Without Words, the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell, by way of a Wagner excerpts compilation. The performances are great, and the selections are chosen and conducted with great care by Szell. The Ride doesn’t suffer as much under his hands, especially in the context of the entire program he creates on the recording.)
1. Holst, “The Planets”
Like everybody, I had my fixation with this piece when I was younger. But I tired of it fairly quickly, and now, it’s been over ten years since I listened to the whole thing in one go. Maybe I should try re-evaluating it one of these days, but here’s another problem with the local classical station: they tend to do a lot of playing single movements of multi-movement works, at least on their morning program, and “Jupiter” from The Planets is a very common selection. Each time I sit through “Jupiter” while driving to work, I end up saying to myself, “Yeah, I don’t need to hear that piece any time soon after all.” Yes, it’s dramatic music with superb orchestration; yes, it’s one of the most influential works for much film music of the twentieth century; yes, it’s incredibly popular. But it almost always bores me.
(Get Charles Dutoit conducting the Montreal Symphony, if you like this piece. That’s the recording of it that I have.)
So, what classical music could you all live a perfectly happy life never hearing again?
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Huzzah!
“I’ve recently spent a spell of time being dead.”
I don’t remember where I first saw The Rule of Death linked, so thanks to whomever, but I’m hooked. It’s a web-comic that’s a Western about a man named Pete who, having died, decides that he’d just as soon not be dead after all. It’s got a wonderfully creepy tone to it, along with acerbic dialogue that reminds me of the kind of thing Joss Whedon writes (such as when the town Doc, meeting Pete after Pete’s returned from the dead, says, “You may not realize this, Pete, but yes, accurate identification of life or death is still considered a pretty fundamental ability in my profession.”). There aren’t too many installments yet, but the comic is apparently updated every Friday.
Read the first installment here.
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One Hundred Things That Bug Me
SamuraiFrog did this, and I suppose it looks a little fun, so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s one hundred things that bug me, annoy me, or fill me with rage. (Well, not so much rage.) And yes, as he did, I’ll follow it up in a few days with 100 Things I Love. This is just a bunch of low-grade rants.
1. The notion that we need a whole new format for home video already. DVD is fine!
2. Potato salad that lacks flavor. It’s not hard to make potato salad that’s tangy and wonderful, so why make potato salad that tastes like nothing at all?
3. Non-winning lottery tickets. Not that I play the lottery, because I don’t, but for some reason, lots of lottery-playing folks decide that their tickets, whether for the big drawings or the scratch-off ones, are so useless once they turn out to be non-winners that their owners don’t even bother to throw them out, leaving me to do it. I find piles of those things at The Store on a regular basis.
4. Scrawny chicken wings. Not so much a problem in Buffalo, of course, but try ordering Buffalo wings outside of this area, and the wings may well turn out to be very scrawny. (Or they’ll leave the tips on the wing section!)
5. Dust. The crap gets everywhere.
6. That Dyson vacuum cleaner guy. I know, I’ve complained about him before, but this is a new list, so here he is, too. If this guy’s as smart as he acts in his commercials, you’d think he’d cure cancer or create world peace or figure out how to revitalize Buffalo or something.
7. The Fauxhawk hairstyle. It makes guys look like they have some kind of Star Trekesque ridge growing down the middle of their skulls.
8. Once and Again‘s third season is still not available on DVD.
9. That ability all cats have to summon up a bowel movement for the ages within minutes of the litter box being freshly changed.
10. Cigarette butts. A few months ago I had to put out a fire in one of the garbage cans outside the front door of The Store, because someone tossed a butt in there. They did this despite the presence of a receptacle for cigarette butts just five feet away. That, and the fact that the smokers just toss the spent butts everywhere, indiscriminately, bugs the hell out of me. If we’re not supposed to toss drink cups or burger wrappers or whatever else randomly onto the ground, what makes tossing cigarette butts everywhere acceptable?
11. People who make a big deal about passing me on the road, only to turn off the road within a quarter mile of passing me.
12. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see somebody on Antiques Roadshow admit straight-up that they’re going to sell the ugly gewgaw, inherited from Granpa Willard, that’s just been appraised at $5000 as soon as they can get to a dealer willing to buy it? They always say “No, I’m keeping it forever out of respect to my Aunt Ginny.” Nobody ever says, “Yowza, now I can afford that hot-tub!”
13. The guys at the gym who slam the weights around, grunt a lot, and who sit on the machines for upwards of three minutes between sets. Come on, guys.
14. When I buy a favorite food item…and then forget about it until it’s gone moldy and nasty. That bugs me.
15. Plastic “clamshell” packaging. Mr. Utility Knife makes quick work of this stuff, but it’s still a pain in the arse, especially when one can study the edges of the package and note that it would seem to be designed to open easily, before it’s heat-sealed shut.
16. Wal-Mart wants to build a store near Casa Jaquandor, across the street from a gigantic new shopping center that already has a Target, a Borders, a Kohl’s, a big furniture store, a PetCo, three full-service restaurants, and an eighteen-screen movie theater. Like we need another Wal-Mart, especially at that intersection, which is one of the busier intersections in the Southtowns. And recently Wal-Mart sent out in the mail little brochures encouraging people to step up their civic activism in order to get the Wal-Mart built! This brochure comes with a return-mail card where you can check items you’re willing to do to help Wal-Mart out: Write a letter in support! Attend a meeting in support! Become involved in local Wal-Mart efforts! I found this whole thing a bit creepy.
17. People who buy sleek-looking sports cars, and then move into the fast lane and proceed to drive their snazzy sports cars, which are almost always bright red, as though they are, in reality, white Oldsmobiles.
18. That little pool of spittle that’s on my pillow when I wake up, once in a while. That really makes me cringe.
19. Film music shibboleths: The main theme from Star Wars is lifted from Korngold’s King’s Row! Rudy is a great filmscore! And the assorted tut-tuting that comes from “old-school” film music lovers whenever anyone praises a score that’s less than ten years old: “Well, back in the day, we had real music written by giants like Miklos Rozsa and Max Steiner!” Yeah, so what?
20. The annoyingly persistent belief, out there in the world, that writing is a skill that most everybody has in equal amount, and that the only real difference between a published writer and someone else is that the published writer somehow “found” time to write something, and of course, if only we could free up some time, we’d turn out something so much better than what gets published. (And yes, I include myself in this, to a certain extent.)
21. Shouldn’t the fat guy on LOST have dropped quite a bit of weight by now? Or did they find some hidden stash of high-calorie food somewhere when I wasn’t watching? (I don’t like the show, so….)
22. My freezer. It’s small and awkward, so every attempt to reach in there and grab a single item results in a process akin to that “Jenga” game, but with frozen food that hurts when it falls on my foot or splashes water all over the place when it lands in the cats’ water dish.
23. From my restaurant days: Basted eggs. I hated cooking those things. I couldn’t do it without cheating an using a little oil.
24. I’m always disturbed by the fact that one of our cats just loves the smell of our feet when we return from a shift at work.
25. Marshmallow Peeps. Oh, how horrible.
26. All you want is a medium coffee, and all you have to do is pay for it and get your cup, at which point you’ll go fill the cup yourself from the bank of vacuum pots across the way. From the time you begin your transaction, thirty seconds will elapse, at most, between that time and when you’re taking your first sip of sweet, sweet coffee. So, of course the person just ahead of you in line is ordering some kind of super drink with four shots of espresso, three shots of flavoring, steamed milk, freshly grated nutmeg, and whipped cream on top.
27. If you want to be a Chicago Cubs fan, fine; every team’s gotta have some fans. But do we really have to persist in this notion that somehow the whole experience of Cubs baseball represents some kind of Platonic ideal of everything that baseball should be? Yeesh.
28. John McCain. He’s no more a “straight-talker” than anyone else, he thinks that the problems the world faces right now are to maintain the same policies from the previous eight years that enabled, exacerbated, or outright created those problems, and it strikes me as odd that people whose distaste for Hillary Clinton includes the notion that she’s essentially been running for President since 2000 don’t notice that McCain’s been at it even longer.
29. I didn’t come up with any kind of meaningful post for Shakespeare’s birthday. I suck.
30. Gigi would be a really really really great movie, if not for Leslie Caron, whom I’ve never liked all that much.
31. All those idiots at the movie theaters when each Star Wars prequel came out. Look, if you decided that George Lucas sucked and that you hated him and his work, fine, but that doesn’t excuse trying to turn a movie theater into your own personal MST3K forum. If you don’t like a movie, shut up. If you like a movie, shut up. Just shut up.
32. Prediction: anything judged bad in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be held by geekdom to be the fault of George Lucas, and anything good about it will be credited to anyone else they can find.
33. There’s a wonderful municipal soccer complex in West Seneca, NY. What’s great about it is that it has something like twelve soccer fields (of varying size, I think, for different leagues and age-groups), and the whole place is ringed by a paved walking path that’s about one mile in circumference. It’s a great place to roller-blade – unless there’s a big soccer tournament going on, in which case lots of stupid people will unfold their folding chairs and set up camp as spectators right on the walking path, despite the presence of lots of nice green grass on either side. And then, when I come roller-blading through, they give me scowls and skunk-eyes.
34. The Royal ‘We’. A single person, referring to themselves in the plural? That’s just pretentious, and We wish you’d all stop. We, that is, meaning Me.
35. Buffalo’s persistent lack of a good Dim sum restaurant continues to grate on my nerves. I know there’s a place in Rochester, but I don’t drive there very often, and anyway, I want the real Dim sum experience, where you’re not ordering at a counter but just picking stuff off the carts when it comes ’round. You have to go to Toronto for that.
36. Oh, and thanks a lot, you Homeland Security nitwits, for making it more annoying for us to go to Toronto. I’m sure that tons of stuff that would have been blown up by terrorists otherwise is still standing because you’re all vigilantly giving people like me the skunk-eye when we try to come home.
37. Continuing with that theme, thanks a lot, you Homeland Security nitwits, for making flying even more of a complete pain in the ass than it already is, because there may be some flying in my future at some point. I can’t wait. (Maybe Amtrak will be cheaper.)
38. When people use the saying “It’s not rocket science!” a lot, and then get mad at NASA when they lose a probe or something, thus forgetting the fact that these guys actually are doing rocket science, and it’s pretty hard stuff. So come on, folks.
39. But really, the space shuttle needs to go. And the International Space Station is just goofy. What are we trying to accomplish with this, again? Because we’re seven years past 2001, and I don’t see any base in Clavius yet. I’m just sayin’.
40. Another item I’ve complained about in the past, but here it is again: New York City pizza freaks. Everybody’s got their favorite pizza and that’s fine, but these people insist that theirs is the one true pizza because it’s closest to what some city in Italy makes, that city having taken it upon themselves to pronounce themselves the birthplace of pizza. (They’re not.)
41. I love showing my ID at the pharmacy counter and signing an official form every time I get sick and need to buy some Mucinex, and I’m sure this is turning around the crucial battle on the meth-heads.
42. I’m as skeptical as they come, but it bugs me that they haven’t put Tom Brady on the cover of Madden, because if there is a curse, then….
43. This doesn’t irritate me, actually, but it always makes me wonder: people who go to the gym and work out in jeans. How can that be comfortable for working out?
44. Political pie throwing. This is just lame, folks, and a waste of good pie, as the throwers rarely have good aim and they’ve been waiting so long that the pie’s a melted, gooey mess anyway.
45. Shaving cream pies. If you’re going to get someone messy against their will (or even with their consent), the thing should at least be edible, not sting the eyes, and not taste like soap because it is soap.
46. Film music fans who are incapable of processing the notion that maybe, just maybe, Jerry Goldsmith wrote a few scores that weren’t that good. (And he did.)
47. People who think that the mere act of saying the words “Excuse me” confers upon them the right to just barrel through wherever they happen to be, without waiting for response or acknowledgment or for the people in front of them to just plain move.
48. It still bugs me that I was so wrong about the Dursleys being important to the plot of the last Harry Potter book. Maybe I should sue JK Rowling.
49. Driving pet peeve: I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating that the act of stopping behind a vehicle that is itself stopping at a Stop sign does not count as you stopping at the stop sign.
50. It annoys the hell out of me that Michael Kamen and Basil Poledouris both died while they should still have had years of music in them to come out. Stupid Grim Reaper.
51. About once a month I get cocky with the rechargeable batteries in my personal CD player and don’t change them when I know that I should, and thus, at the gym, when I’m halfway through my treadmill or recumbent bike workout, and when I’m in the middle of a song I like a lot, the CD player dies.
52. And about once every other month I change the batteries, but forget to put the #&$*%!! CD in the player, so when I get to the Y, I’ve got an empty CD player with me. This invariably happens when I’m using the treadmill or recumbent bike whose nearest TV is tuned to FOX News.
53. Why is Survivor still on teevee? Why? Why why why?!
54. Why is Grey’s Anatomy so compelling, when so many of its characters and ongoing storylines annoy me? Is it that I have a weak character or something?
55. I hate it when I’m cooking steak and I suddenly get this moment of self-doubt as to my instincts on when to take the meat off the grill, so I end up with overcooked steak. (I never use meat thermometers on steak. I hate piercing them and letting the juices run out all over the place. But I prefer my steak on the rare side of medium, which requires timing and self-trust.)
56. Several times I’ve purchased on eBay what was listed as a pair of Men’s overalls, and had them turn out to be Women’s overalls. This isn’t hard, folks: if they have a fake fly, they’re for Women.
57. Where the $&#^!! is my Wonder Woman movie!!!
58. Look, folks, of course it should have been left so that Greedo shot first. But the notion that this change somehow completely emasculates the Han Solo character is just silly. Get over it.
59. For years, the touring production of Les Miserables would make almost an annual stop in Buffalo, but I never went, because the timing and money never lined up right. Well, two or three years ago I promised myself that this wouldn’t happen again: next time, I was taking The Wife, because I’ve desperately wanted to see that show for years now. Just listening to the music can bring me to tears, and I’ve always wondered if “One More Day” is as overwhelming a show-stopper as I’ve always suspected. So a few weeks ago I learned that the touring production of Les Miz closed a couple of years ago, right about the same time that I made that promise to myself. Ugh! Ugh ugh ugh.
60. Guy Gavriel Kay just doesn’t write fast enough. He’s got to learn to step up the pace a bit.
61. The movie Dinosaur had a stunning opening sequence, tracking the improbable journey of a single dinosaur egg through many perils. But everything after that sequence was generically dull stuff.
62. I could, many times, do without red lights.
63. I could also do without that periodic article that someone writes every so often about blogging clichés. If I want to use the interjection “Oy”, or, citing an example of something that bugs me, write “I’m looking at you, Bill Belichick”, I’ll do just that, thank you very much. Heh indeed.
64. The only way that boiling is an acceptable means of cooking a hot dog is if you’re a street vendor of the things. And really, I’d be happier if they didn’t have to do it, either.
65. Extreme Makeover Home Edition. I enjoyed watching this show when it at least partially focused on construction stuff, but then it morphed into sappy human interest, Sears commercial, and generally annoying thing. I still want to see what happens two years later when the eight year old kid who loved monkeys at the time doesn’t so much care about ’em anymore, and yet still has to live in the damned monkey bedroom.
66. And if the Extreme Makeover Home Edition people can take one week to build a house the size of a small Wal-Mart, why is Buffalo’s Walden Galleria mall taking over a year to build a friggin’ Barnes&Noble?
67. My sixth-grade English teacher, who was very nice and very well meaning, nevertheless gave me an awful piece of writing advice that it took me years to realize was full of crap. Referring to verbs of dialogue attribution, she sagely told us: “Said is dead.” GAHHH! (he said.)
68. I’ve complained about this before too, but telling a kid of high school age that “These are the best years of your life” constitutes an act of nearly criminal nature.
69. Not enough places offer free WiFi.
70. I’ve become the kind of person who complains about places that don’t offer free WiFi.
71. When people my age fail to recognize a quote from The Breakfast Club, I feel just a little more that the world has lost its way.
72. I can’t stop reading For Better or For Worse, even though it’s a massive bowl of suckitude now. Someone, please stage an intervention. (For me.)
73. Why is instant butterscotch pudding so hard to find in this area?!
74. I really shouldn’t complain about WNED, Buffalo’s classical music station, because they provide a fine service. But in the mornings, they play way too much Baroque music and classical guitar, neither of which trip my trigger.
75. Oh, there’s something: I hate the phrase “trip my trigger”. It doesn’t ring my bell.
76. A few weeks ago I had a few extra pennies so I checked out the Graphic Novels section at Borders, and suffered my usual reaction of intense sticker shock. If comics really wants to become successfully mainstream as a medium, they’ve just got to start pricing their product in ways that make exploration feasible for people looking to get something to read.
77. Insert my usual rant about people who refuse to use their local library here. Reading! For free! Why wouldn’t you do this?!
78. No more Don Pablo’s in Buffalo. That, putting it frankly, sucks.
79. The NFL draft was just held, and while the Bills seem to have nabbed some talent at positions where they have needs, they yet again refused to do anything to upgrade their offensive line (unless you count drafting a single lineman in the seventh round, which is where you draft guys who will be lucky to make the roster at all and then will only do so either as special teamers or as “projects” as an upgrade). That will be my final complaint about that.
80. When does all the brilliant stuff happen on LOST? Because whenever I try watching that show, I only see a bunch of not-terribly-interesting people wandering around an island and brooding a lot.
81. Baseball caps worn off-center. What is that about?!
82. In fact, baseball caps in general. I think that our headgear these days leaves a lot to be desired. People used to wear cool hats, like three-cornered hats, those ones with the giant feathers that they wore in The Three Musketeers, even the simple fedora. Now we have baseball caps. (Although they’re OK for women. I love a woman with long, thick hair, pulled through the back of a baseball cap. But generally, I’m not a big fan of ball caps.)
83. It doesn’t help the cause of shopping for a copy of The Bible when so many of them are shrinkwrapped. It’s not like the book is going to spoil, folks. I can see why “gift Bibles”, the kind you give a child at confirmation or whatever, is skrinkwrapped, since you want to keep the book beautiful until the giving, but when I was looking for a decent study Bible, I was shocked that lots of them are shrinkwrapped.
84. I don’t like it when the rum bottle goes empty three days before payday.
85. Iceberg lettuce. Why do we still cultivate this stuff? It serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It’s not particularly vitamin-filled, it’s lacking in flavor, it’s just plain icky.
86. The Family Guy. An occasional laugh, but for the most part, the show isn’t funny.
87. Countries that still insist on whaling.
88. Is it just me, or does Cracker Jack not taste at all as good as it used to, when I was a kid?
89. I still don’t own Spirited Away on DVD. I have no good reason for this.
90. High fructose corn syrup. Destroying us from within, this stuff is the Satan of foodstuffs.
91. I’ve found a certain law of nature at any gym I’ve ever been a member of. I’ve always found that it’s pretty much impossible to do a complete circuit of a given exercise program in a specific order each time out, because there will be other people present who are using the machines and equipment too, so I have to hop around from station to station. This is really not a problem at all; in fact, I like it in that I try to rotate the machines I use first so that I’m not consistently getting to a particular machine when the muscles that machine works are pretty tired from the entire preceding workout. So what’s the law of nature, then? Simply that no matter which machine you save for last, that machine will be occupied when you reach that last exercise, no matter how sparse the population of the gym happens to be on that particular day.
92. Help me out, readers: is it a bad thing that I’m starting to genuinely like the BeeGees? “Stayin’ Alive” is a fun song, and damned if I don’t think that “How Deep Is Your Love” is just a really good song. Stupid Saturday Night Fever; I knew I shouldn’t have watched that movie a while back.
93. Waking up in the morning, stumbling to the kitchen, turning on the light to start breakfast prep – and only then discovering that I’d never put the previous night’s leftovers away. Even when food was a lot cheaper than it is now, I hated having to throw out half a tuna noodle casserole because I forgot to put the thing in the fridge.
94. My habit of staring at people I think I know when I see them outside of the context in which I know them. I have a bad feeling I can seem pretty creepy when I’m trying to figure out just where I know someone from. Especially when the person is a woman. This tends to happen to me a lot.
95. As a Democrat, it will forever disturb me that in 2004, John Kerry was the best we could come up with.
96. Does this happen in every city nowadays, or is it just a Buffalo thing: when a store someplace is going out of business, they’ll actually station people at various busy intersections in the general vicinity of that store to hold up placards notifying motorists of the store’s impending demise. Are these folks employees of the store who are given this duty as one last hurrah before their jobs disappear? Or are they actually hired for the express purpose of holding up the “Going out of business” sign? And if the latter, are they on official payroll, or is this under-the-table kind of stuff?
97. The US Postal Service’s online package tracking thingie could use a little help. Last week I mailed two packages on the same day. While one was tracked nicely on its journey from Orchard Park to a town in Florida, the other was reported as having left the shipping center in Warrendale, PA for six days, until the notice online was finally changed to reflect that the package had been delivered at its destination address in Texas. Am I really to believe that there were zero intermediary steps between PA and TX?
98. I’ve got a stack of computer games here that I haven’t played yet, because I’ve been waiting until we upgrade our computer chair and table so it’s actually comfortable to sit there for the duration of a gaming session. We’ve been saying we were going to do this for six months. So far, it’s the same crappy table and chair. Ugh. And Galactic Civilizations really looks fun, too.
99. McMansions annoy me, especially when they’re packed so closely together. I’m no hermit, but why on Earth would you want to live within twenty feet of the people next door if you didn’t have to?
100. I must be getting soft. It took me more than a week to come up with all these.
OK, so there are one hundred things that annoy me. Soon I’ll do the opposite: one hundred things that make me happy. (No tagging, here. If you’re inclined, have at it.)
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It’s his gift…it’s his curse.
Becca points out that it’s Lance Henriksen’s birthday. Happy birthday, Frank Black! It really is too bad that Chris Carter never really figured out what he wanted to do with Millennium, but wow, those first two seasons are some brilliant teevee.
At her post, Becca provides five fascinating factoids about Henriksen. Here’s a sixth: he’s a master potter. He used to actually have a site where you could buy his pottery, but that seems to be gone for now. I’d love to sip tea from a Lance Henriksen mug, though!
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Sentential Links #139
Linking the linkable since 2005:
:: I do so love the new feature in Blogger. (Me too!)
:: You’re a Democrat because you want to see certain things get done and unfortunately you need politicians to get them done and politicians are just people, often significantly flawed people. Saints become nurses and doctors and teachers and missionaries. They don’t go into politics. This is what I’ve learned on the blogosphere. The difference between Democrats and a lot of self-styled Progressives is Democrats want certain things to get done; Progressives want a lot of the same things to get done but they want a certain type of person to be the one to get them done. (That’s a nice distinction. I almost always vote Democrat because I’d rather have a scoundrel working to get the things done that I want to get done than a choir boy working to get done stuff that I don’t.)
:: Before you are a partner, a parent, a teacher, an [insert occupation here], you are simply you.
:: Next time: We kidnap the President. (OK, I’m hooked. This blog found via Blue Girl.)
:: “We have about 20 browsers open right now. I think we need to close a couple before we move on.”
:: Even as young as I am I claim the right to be a curmudgeon and to talk about how we did things back in the day and to say we were right, because we were. I know; I was there. I claim the right to be a know-it-all and to give unsolicited advice because I do know more than most folks. One of the benefits of being 50, you see. (Oh, I claim that right too, and I’m only 36. It amuses me to watch Sleepless in Seattle and see that all the phones have cords and that the kid has a record player. It amuses me to watch a Season One episode of Once and Again, which aired in 2000, and during a scene in which the kids are using the Internet, hear one of them say, “Well, sometimes I use Google, but mostly I like HotBot.” Heh!)
And on the note of that last link, a happy belated birthday to Lynn, whose blog never fails to fascinate, elucidate, or paginate. Or something like that. (By the way, her blog’s masthead image is a landscape of Oklahoma. It shows just how little I know of that whole part of this country that I had no idea the region was that mountainous.)
More next week!
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Unidentified Earth 37
As I suspected, last week’s entry was nailed within hours of posting; it’s the lighthouse on Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. One thousand Quatloos to each correct guesser. However, UI 35 is still Unidentified! If any of you ever visit this place, make sure you beware of coyotes or alligators in the sewers. But not elves or leprechauns.
Anyhow, time for the new entry:
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, folks!
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
[Wow! I wrote this post on Saturday and published it using Blogger’s new “Scheduled Publishing” feature, and it works! Cool!]
Here we go!
:: Geez, what a way to go. The question is, does this fellow get added to the official roster of Civil War deaths?
:: I’m going to apologize in advance for this, but I read of the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and I immediately wondered if the museum’s corridors will be punctuated every forty feet by a tollbooth, at which one must pay seventy-five cents to continue with the tour.
(OK, joking aside, I don’t think there’s anything the least bit weird about a New Jersey Hall of Fame. It’s an old and populous state, so of course it’s contributed lots of notable American citizens, including two Presidents. I just can’t help making fun of the Jersey Turnpike. Because the New York State Thruway isn’t mockable at all. Heh….)
:: Back in my orchestral trumpet playing days, I used to wish we could do the Main Theme from Star Wars — until just a few minutes ago when I saw the first page of the score, and saw that as the principal trumpet player, I would have had to make a fortissimo entrance on a double-C. Talk about being exposed if you screw up!
:: I’m conflicted by this. See, I actually agree with what the guy’s singing. Which makes me the biggest geek of all! (Oh, and Billy Dee Williams is awesome for taking part in this.)
OK, that’s all. Be well out there, folks!
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Ben’s Folly
Ben Stein holds forth on the value of science:
Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Can this be true? Has science directly led to death and slaughter? Has science done this in itself and by itself? Did Auschwitz happen because of science? The very claim, put that way, sounds utterly ludicrous, probably because it is utterly ludicrous. The Holocaust didn’t happen because a dispassionate search for the nature of things, carried out by trial and error, led the Nazis to the inescapable empirical conclusion that the Jews are a subhuman race who needed to be wiped off the face of the Earth and erased from history. The Nazis were not given to evidence and experiment. They came to their ghastly enterprise with their conclusions already drawn, their beliefs already settled. The Nazi mindset was not, by any definition of the word that a reasoned person would employ, a scientific one. It was a religious one: a religion of the State carried to the kinds of extremes that leave science far, far behind in favor of absolute knowledge of absolute hatred.
Did science play any role in this? Only in the way that science ever plays a role in the more disturbing aspects of human history: the application of scientific knowledge toward horrifying ends. Science played a role in the development of Zyklon-B, clearly enough. But science also played a role in the development of penicillin. Robert Goddard’s pioneering work on rockets may have set some on the road to coming up with ways to rain explosives down on enemy cities from afar, but that same work allowed us to take our first step toward the stars.
Science is, in itself, neither good nor bad, which is what makes it the ultimate double-edged sword. The great fear of Carl Sagan’s life was that in a time when science had made it possible for humans to finally begin to peel back the pages of the Universe, it had also made it possible for humans to destroy themselves utterly. But it wouldn’t be science carrying out that ultimate act of societal suicide. It would be us.
But for people who would blame science for the things that go wrong in this world, perhaps some reminders are in order. It’s because of science that we can store entire movies on shiny discs so we can watch them on televisions or computer monitors. It’s because of science that we have those televisions and computer monitors in the first place. It’s because of science that we have movies. It’s because of science that we can listen to music without having to wait for our favorite musical ensemble to actually come to town and play the music for us. It’s because of science that we can live in very hot cities in the summertime and not have to accept that we’ll live with sweat.
It’s because of science that an average person today lives to their seventies, instead of their forties. It’s because of science that we can call our friends whenever we want to. It’s because of science that cancer isn’t the automatic death sentence that it used to be. It’s because of science that, even today, we can eat relatively cheaply and relatively healthily. It’s because of science that we can travel great distances in periods of time not best measured in days or months. It’s because of science that we know what our world looks like from afar.
And it goes back through history. It was because of science that we learned how to sail the seas, first out of sight of land, then to mark our way by the stars, and then to mark our progress by way of longitude. It was because of science that the oil lamp gave way to the electric one. It was science that taught us that our world circles a star, and it was science that revealed our world as a globe. It was science that revealed the age of our planet and the great beings that once walked upon it, for many more thousands of years than we, the world’s self-appointed masters, have so much as crawled. It was science that solved the problems posed by bodies in the night sky that moved in ways they seemed like they shouldn’t. It was science that revealed the causes of diseases and the steps required to either prevent them or cure them, and it was science that revealed the interconnection of every living being on this planet of ours and the ways they influence each other and evolve together.
It was science that kept my brain-damaged son from dying within hours of his birth.
What science did not do is make the Germans elect a government that held as one of its central tenets the inherent superiority of the German people; nor did science make that government comprise itself of some of the most murderous people ever to take the reins of a national government. Neither did science make the rest of the world rise up in opposition to that abomination. Did science make it possible for the Nazis to kill six million Jews and however many other “undesirables”? Doubtless, but science also made it possible for the rest of the world to defeat them. Science was, as it has only ever been, a mere tool. Tools can be used for varying purposes, but never has a tool made the user do anything at all. The hammer doesn’t make me strike a nail, nor does it make a murderer smash in a skull.
Carl Sagan once wrote, in Cosmos: “Science is only a tool. But it is the best tool we have.” The Ben Steins of the world would have us set aside that tool without ever realizing how their world has been built in its entirety using that very tool. They want to have it both ways. Would the world be a worse place if the Wright Brothers, experimenting as scientists do, flown at last at Kitty Hawk, and if no one else had ever followed up their insights? Most definitely. But it would be a world in which the World Trade Center would still be standing. Is science to blame for 9-11-01? Using science as a tool, the Nazis were able to create means of industrial murder that appall us even today. But also using science as a tool, we’ve created the very weapons that we employ in wars of choice, wars that I’ll wager Ben Stein supports enthusiastically, not out of any empirical questioning of the results, but out of the application of a kind of nation-as-religious-entity.
A carpenter who blames his tools for the collapse of his structure is a bad carpenter. Ben Stein is a very bad carpenter indeed.