ForgottenStars.net

October 22, 2007October 3, 2021

Bills 19, Ravens 14

Wow — a win! I get to post about a win! Woo-hoo!

:: The Bills’ defense, which played exceptionally hard yet again and this time didn’t fold in the closing minutes.

:: Trent Edwards, who didn’t play spectacularly but played with a good deal of poise. I’m not terribly wild about Edwards yet, but it does say something that in his third career start he’s roughly doing what Buffalo fans hoped JP Losman would be able to do in his second season.

:: The quarterback “controversy”. Last week, in naming Edwards the starter this week, Dick Jauron cited JP Losman’s knee injury, an excuse which everyone knows is bogus and only puts off the actual moment when Jauron has to admit that he thinks Edwards is the best hope for the Bills’ future. That was dumb.

:: Losman’s career in Buffalo possibly being over. I’m pretty bummed that Losman apparently hasn’t panned out as a starter and is likely on his way out, because frankly I like the guy enormously. You have to go with who wins, obviously, or who appears more likely to become the guy you’re looking for. If Losman’s not the guy, then Losman’s not the guy, and so be it. But the way the staff is letting him twist in the wind is pretty cold, since he’s never shown himself to be anything other than a team player and a community guy.

And if Losman’s time here in Buffalo is at an end, I do hope that he becomes a quality starter someplace else. I still hope he has success and isn’t just a career backup. And I hope that’s in the NFC, so we don’t have to see him all that often.

:: Is offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild going to call a dumb pass play in every late-game obvious running situation that comes up this year??? He made such a call again, and it hurt the Bills tremendously: leading by twelve and deep in their own territory, the Bills faced a third-and-eight situation. Obviously you run the ball, grind more time off the clock, and then punt. Fairchild, however, calls a pass. Which the rookie QB misfires, resulting in a pick that later gets converted into a touchdown. Ugh.

:: The lack of size on the defensive line. If this team had a big run-stopper in the middle, imagine how good things would be right now.

:: Tom Effing Brady and the rest of his evil, stinking team. God, I am the biggest Colts fan on Earth right now.

Next up: at the Jets, with a late kickoff. That’ll be cool; I like the occasional late kickoff.

Share This Post

October 22, 2007October 3, 2021

Sentential Links #115

Without ado of any kind:

[Oh crud, by announcing that I was going to commence the linkage without ado of any kind, I actually employed some ado after all. Bummer. Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to wait for next week to have our first truly ado-free installment of Sentential Links. My apologies, and now, without any ado now, here are the links. I’ve carefully culled these, so I hope you’ll enjoy…oh bugger, there’s some more ado. Darn it all anyway! Blogging without ado turns out to be like McDonalds without deep fryers. How can it possibly work? Anyhow. No more ado. Seriously. We’re going right into the links, with no ado.]

[D’oh!]

:: A general rule for actors is: If YOU cry, more often than not the audience WON’T. If you do your damndest NOT to cry, if you work to hold BACK the tears, then you’ll have to mop the audience up off the aisles. (This is an older post of Sheila’s, which she linked in the midst of remembering Deborah Kerr. I loved this examination of An Affair to Remember, a film which has already made my 100 Movies list.)

:: The other day I performed the idiotic newbie-author ritual of hanging around by the table where my book was displayed to see if anyone would pick it up. When someone eventually reached for a copy, I fled, fearing he would recognize me from the author photo and make the mistake of thinking that I was simply hanging around to see if anyone would pick it up. (Geez, they put Alex’s book next to a book by William F. Buckley and directly beneath a book by Dinesh D’Souza! Doesn’t Alex deserve better literary company than that? BTW, I’ve already bought my copy, and I plan to read it sometime in the next month.

:: Simple, slick, painless, and foolproof. Typical Microsoft. (See, this is why I use OpenOffice, even if it’s occasionally buggy and sometimes very clunky to use. I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe AC’s post, though, so I Google’d a bit to see if this was really true, and if Microsoft had come up with packaging so bizarre as to require people to go online to figure out just how to open the box in the first place, and, well, wouldn’t you know it. Of course, I, being in the field of Maintenance in my day life, would simply spend about ninety seconds with the box and then say the hell with it and reach for Mr. Utility Knife.)

:: I’ve been trying and trying to understand how so many of the warbloggers have managed to convince themselves that they are doing something as brave and patriotic as actually fighting in Iraq by typing about it. I’m trying even harder to understand how they could be content with that.

:: Do I really believe in Jesus at all, or do I just like Christianity? There’s a big difference between the two, and unfortunately I think I may just like Christianity.

:: I remember the opening night party, saying to David Stiers that as of tomorrow his whole life was about to change. I was right, of course. Thankfully, it changed for the better.

:: I noticed that Billboard has listed my new album under the category of rock. And a radio show in the midwest aired a track from it on their jazz program. And tomorrow I’ll be live in L.A. on a classical show. (Note to self: order Alex’s new CD one of these days.)

:: People want to live in a world where, when you have a medical problem, you locate a doctor and that doctor either does what needs doing, or else points you to an appropriate specialist doctor who does what needs doing. Shopping around for gadgets or browsing bookstores is fun for those of us who are into them; others like clothes-shopping or shoes. But nobody wants to shop around for medical treatment. That sucks. Sick people want treatment.

And that does it for this week. Tune in again next week.

Share This Post

October 21, 2007October 3, 2021

Eerie coincidences

A bit of a postscript to my post the other day about my online friend who died last week.

Over the course of commiserating with other online friends who knew Gummy well, I learned that his last full name was Gregory Twyman. With this piece of information and my knowledge that he lived in the Pittsburgh area, I was able to find Gregory’s obituary in the Pittsburgh newspapers. What was odd was that I happened to glance down the page of obits and saw another name that I knew.

My grandmother on my father’s side was a schoolteacher, many years ago, in a Pittsburgh school district. Now, all the time I knew her she’d been retired, but by trade that’s what she had been: a teacher. I come, actually, from a long line of teachers — in fact, I’m almost the odd one out in not being a teacher myself. But anyway, my grandmother had a friend named Esther Yessel. I only met Esther a single time that I remember, when she and my grandmother both visited us in the first years we lived in Western New York. This was around 1982 or 1983, I suppose.

Well, my grandmother turned 80 in 1986, and she died about six months later. In truth, I suppose I’ve generally assumed that Esther had also died sometime since then — but it turned out that she only passed away last week, at the age of 95. That was utterly stunning to me — not that she had been alive all those years (more than twenty since my grandmother’s passing), but that she died only last week, and that only by virtue of looking for my friend’s obituary did I learn of Esther’s own death.

What a spooky, spooky world.

Share This Post

October 21, 2007October 3, 2021

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

OK, here we go with this week’s oddities of the Web. Fair warning first, though: both of the first two are kind of gross. In fact, these are all kinds of icky. Proceed at your own risk!

:: Guy who claims to have very little tolerance for spicy food decides to take a swig of the hottest hot sauce he can find at the store. I’m not sure if this video is real or not, but his reaction is intriguing. He seems to have come prepared with lots of stuff at hand to stem the heat. I’m surprised that’s the hottest sauce he can find, also — I’m not familiar with that stuff, but it can’t be hotter than Dave’s Insanity Sauce, can it?

(via)

:: This is even ickier. It’s exactly what the URL says it is. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(via)

:: This isn’t icky at all; for fans of the departed series That 70s Show, it’s just Red Foreman issuing a number of variants of his favorite threat: his foot in your ass.

OK, that’s it. Sorry for the ick.

Share This Post

October 19, 2007October 3, 2021

Unidentified Earth 21

Well, well, well! It seems that either I’ve come up with a stumper, or no one’s following this series anymore…anyway, Unidentified Earth 20 has gone as yet unidentified, with only one guess offered. Tsk, tsk, tsk. I suppose I should offer a hint, so…it is in the Middle East.

Ah well, the show goes on; time for the next puzzler.

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

Share This Post

October 19, 2007October 3, 2021

One Hundred Movies!!! (71 through 80)

It’s been a while since the last entry in this series, so let’s get going again! Here are the next ten of my favorite movies (give or take a few I may have forgotten about), starting at #80 and going to #71.

80. Forrest Gump

I’m not sure which movie has suffered the greater backlash, Titanic or Gump. (Come to that, Dances With Wolves also always has to be mentioned in the topic of backlashes against once-beloved movies.) I can sort of understand the backlash, but the sheer hatred that both movies now seem to inspire amazes me. I’ve never found Gump to be what its detractors say it is; I’ve never found it to be an apologetic film for either a conservative or a liberal mindset. In fact, I’ve never much found it to be an mouthpiece kind of film for any real viewpoint at all. I just think it’s a very well-made film with a well-told story about characters who are sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. For a film that takes the basic form and feel of a fable, it really doesn’t offer much by way of easy answers, and Gump’s own answer to the central question of the movie basically boils down to “I dunno.”

Signature moment: Lieutenant Dan’s final “reconciliation” with God, if that’s even what it is.

79. Every Which Way But Loose

Yes, I am openly admitting to loving this incredibly goofy flick. It stars Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe, a truck driver who earns extra money by bare-knuckle boxing in the backlots of southern California, with his buddy Orville (the always wonderful Geoffrey Lewis) and his pet orangutan at his side. Yes, this is a movie whose main characters include an orangutan named Clyde. And it’s full of country music, barroom brawls, and a motorcycle gang that’s only slightly less competent than the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. I’ve never really believed in the idea of a “guilty pleasure”, but darn it, this movie might just well qualify. This is about as goofy a movie as you’re likely to find. (I also like its sequel, Any Which Way You Can, although the first film is better by virtue of its bittersweet ending.)

Signature moment: When Philo finally meets Tank Murdock.

78. Braveheart

I wonder sometimes if this film gets its due, with the current renewal of interest in fantasy filmmaking. Granted, Braveheart isn’t fantasy (although it certainly isn’t history, either), but its approach to depicting the realities of a medieval kind of life turned out to be enormously influential. No suits of armor here that shine in the morning sun and somehow remain clean throughout days of travel; no banners of brightly colored cloth. Instead, everything is mud-spattered and worn, and the atmosphere of the exteriors is one of chill. The battle scenes of The Lord of the Rings would look very different if this film hadn’t pioneered the brutally violent approach to such sequences.

I love this film’s first half, with its dreamy appearance and pacing and dialogue that occasionally rises to poetry. The film slows down a bit in the second half as the court intrigues take over, but that’s fine by me. This film deserved the plaudits it got.

Signature moment: It would be easy to note the Battle of Stirling, with Wallace’s “Sons of Scotland!” speech, but for me, the film’s essential sequence is the courtship and secret wedding of Murron. Without those scenes, the rest of the film would be a dull exercise in medieval history.

77. Bull Durham

Almost my favorite baseball movie of all time! This is just one great moment after another, one of those movies that takes us to an offbeat location (a minor-league baseball team) and lets us live alongside the offbeat characters who live there. The film just oozes authenticity in its setting, which helps us to overlook the frankly bizarre nature of Annie Savoy’s approach to dating (“Within the confines of the baseball season, I am, strictly speaking, monogamous.”). Crash Davis is one of the great characters in moviedom, as far as I’m concerned.

Signature moment: So many, but I’ll take one little touch of minor league baseball lore that may or may not be the way things are done, but it just feels so right that if I found out that this never actually happened at all, I’d be disappointed. I’m referring to when the Durham Bulls’ radio broadcasters have to do an away game, so they get the game action via a teletype, and when there’s a hit, the guy takes a mallet and smacks a block of wood, as if to fool the listeners that they’re hearing the crack of the bats. I love that.

76. Field of Dreams

Definitely my favorite baseball movie of all time! It’s just a great piece of American fantasy. Yes, that’s exactly what it is: a fantasy. What else to call it? The film’s approach to the supernatural is as refreshing as the unlikely subject matter. No one ever sits around drearily theorizing as to just what particular power is at work in Ray Kinsella’s corn field, or why this particular power is steering Ray toward a reconciliation with his father. I love it when a film has enough confidence in its story to simply posit whatever it needs to posit, and then proceeds accordingly.

Years ago, during my college years, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I went to the Field of Dreams itself, in Dyersville, Iowa. It seems trite to say so, but it really does look like that, and yes, I was a bit disappointed when I walked out into the corn and found myself…in a field of corn.

Signature moment: My favorite part of this movie has always been the scene when Burt Lancaster as Doc Graham describes his one half-inning of play in the Majors, which was enough of a baseball career for him to put down his glove and return home to be a doctor.

75. The Poseidon Adventure

Ahhhh, the cheesy 70s disaster flicks! And this one’s just so much fun, with everyone in scenery-chewing form. One can almost sense the director saying, “OK everybody, overact as much as you want, just as long as you don’t overact more than Hackman or Borgnine!” As engrossing as the post-disaster stuff is, I also find something sweetly engaging about the first half hour or so, when we’re being introduced to the cast. This is definitely the only movie you’ll ever see where one of the characters offers the bit of wisdom to “Don’t let your son grow up to be a haberdasher!”.

Signature moment: Any of the arguments between the Preacher and Mr. Rogo. (I changed my Signature Moment for this movie after it was pointed out in comments that the first one I had up here was, really, a big spoiler for the movie.)

74. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I heart Audrey Hepburn. End of story.

Signature moment: “Moon River.”

73. For Your Eyes Only

I always cite this movie to people who insist that Roger Moore played James Bond for laughs most of the time. After the Bond films of the 70s, which were all studies in various kinds of excess and self-parody, the producers returned to the sorts of lesser-scaled espionage that marked the first couple of films in the series, resulting in FYEO, which was the strongest Bond film to come from Moore’s tenure in the role. It’s just a very well-made thriller, very welcome after Moonraker.

Signature moment: Bond’s final confrontation with Locque. In this scene, Moore is as ruthless and cold as Sean Connery ever was.

72. The Living Daylights

Timothy Dalton took over as Bond for TLD in 1987, which turned out to be another instance in which the producers had to dial down the previous film’s excesses (1985’s A View to a Kill). Dalton based his portrayal of Bond on the character as actually written in the books by Ian Fleming, resulting in a fascinatingly vulnerable type of James Bond. The plot is a complex espionage tale, seemingly more in league with a Robert Ludlum novel than a typical Bond flick. It also features one of the series’s best heroines.

Signature moment: The fight in the cargo plane at the end.

71. The Abyss

Perennially overshadowed by Aliens, but not in my book, as this is one of the finest SF films ever made. Seriously, this movie’s got it all – a unique setting, a mystery, loads of conflict between interesting characters, and some terrific “sensawunda” to boot. I actually prefer the Director’s Cut, although that version of the film does tend to lay on the preaching of the film’s “message” a bit thick. Still, this is one wonderful film.

Signature moment: Bud and Lindsay, trapped on a flooding submersible, with one functioning set of SCUBA gear, and too far from the undersea rig to swim for it. I always find this sequence harrowing.

And there we are. Next up: Numbers 70 down to 61!

Share This Post

October 17, 2007October 3, 2021

The Internet is made of people

Always remember that, folks: The Internet is made of people. I got that from Warren Ellis, and it’s totally and utterly true. There are good people on the Internet, and bad people; people you’d follow once more unto the breach, and people you’d toss into the breach head-first and then walk away. There are winners and losers, friends and enemies, casual acquaintances and even lovers.

This is about an online friend of mine who went by the moniker “Gumdrops”.

Gumdrops, or “Gummy” for short, was a film music fan. And by “fan”, I mean, “rabid hobbyist”. I’m a gatherer of film music, but Gummy was a collector. He amassed a pretty impressive collection, many of the discs of which were quite rare. His collection includes, to give just one example, a copy of David Shire’s score to Return to Oz. Just try finding a copy of this. You’ll pay through the nose.

Longtime readers will know that before this blog, my main outlet for online blatherings was the Usenet group rec.music.movies. I gradually became disenchanted over there, and when that disenchantment lined up with my discovery of the blogging medium, the writing was on the wall (or the Web), and I departed r.m.m. pretty quickly after launching this blog. For a time, I also posted at the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, and it was there that I met Gummy.

He was a jovial soul, who usually signed off his posts with “Yuk yuk!”. He had a way of disarming many heated discussions with a quip or two, and it might have been tempting at first to not take Gummy very seriously as a film music fan, but one quickly learned otherwise: this guy knew his stuff. He was conversant on many composers and their works, and he knew far more about film than I do. But through it all, he never took it all that seriously — or, more properly, he never took it so seriously that he lost sight of the passion of his film music, and he never forgot what music is for. He looked for music that moved him, that made him feel something. He was the guy who’s constantly coming up to you, discman and earphones held out, grinning wildly and practically tripping over his own feet as he tells you, “Wow, you gotta hear this!!!”

That was Gummy.

When the FSM boards finally became too generically unpleasant for me and some others to stick around there — it happens, you know — we went back to rec.music.movies, which had become pretty much of a wasteland. Posts were rare, and posts that were about film music and not about where we might procure cheap CIAL!$ were rarer still. But we started posting, a tiny little community, and gradually things picked up. Not to the point of r.m.m.’s hey-day back around 1999 or 2000, but we got some nice discussion going. Often the discussions were sparked by Gummy’s thread-launching posts, when he’d throw out single questions or provocative statements.

Gummy also loved to share his music, and he cheerfully made copies of just about any score in his collection that anyone asked for. I was the recipient of more than a few of his mailings. Scores that I now own, thanks to him, include the afore-mentioned Return to Oz, Howard Shore’s Soul of Ultimate Nation and The Last Mimzy, John Williams’s Jane Eyre, and a large number of Japanese filmscores as well. His generosity was stunning, and it often bothered me that my own film music collection is not nearly as extensive as his, not because I was jealous of what he had, but because I couldn’t really return the favor. Some time ago he told me about some items he was looking for, and by sheer miracle, it turned out that I own them. Last week I finally got around to burning copies.

You can probably tell by my use of past tense in this post that he’s never going to hear them.

Gregory — “Gumdrops” — became suddenly ill last week, and by the time he became ill enough to require hospitalization, his fate was set. He finally died today. I never met him in person; to me, he was “only” a set of words on a screen, and an occasionaly envelope in my mailbox. But remember: The Internet is made of people, and Gumdrops was one of them.

Other friends from r.m.m. have been in contact with his wife, and we’ve learned Gregory’s passion for film music was a lonely passion until he first went on the Internet and discovered that there are other such-passionate people around, all over the world. And amidst all the cantankerous discussions that take place in Internet forums on any topic, Gregory was a person motivated solely by the fact that the music, and the act of sharing it, just plain made him happy. His vocation, it turns out, was furnace installation. He loved the Pittsburgh Steelers (he lived in that area), and he lustily cheered their Super Bowl win from two seasons ago. But he didn’t trash-talk a few weeks back when his Steelers tossed my Bills around like rag-dolls. That’s the kind of person he was. He took joy in things, and appeared to have no patience at all for the joyless side of the very same things.

So yeah, I’ll miss him. He was a friend. Tonight I’ll listen to some of the music he shared with me.

Goodbye, Greg. Yuk yuk.

Share This Post

October 15, 2007October 3, 2021

Still active after all these years

In the hallway at The Store that leads to the public restrooms, the walls are adorned with prints of old photographs from the community (West Seneca, NY), which I assume were procured from the local historical society. I’ve looked at each of these photographs in the time I’ve worked there, since part of my job involves cleaning those restrooms; one of those photos, though, has been particularly interesting to me in that time. Mainly this is because it is on the wall directly opposite the Ladies’ Room, and I often have to stand outside this room for several minutes while those persons inside finish their duties, thus giving me time to study this photograph.

I’ve looked at the faces in that photograph many times, and I’ve come to see personalities within them, just from the way the people look: their postures, their expressions. The photograph is of a schoolroom, and the people are the schoolkids — probably in the ten to eleven year old range — and their teacher. I see things about these kids, and I’m always wanting to discuss these observations of mine with someone else, but restroom cleaning’s a pretty solitary job, and none of the women exiting the restroom (or entering, come to that) are ever much inclined to listen to the musings of the maintenance guy on the old photo.

This, in short, is a job that blogging was meant for. But how?

Well, today I’m standing there as usual, waiting for my opportunity to tidy up that restroom, and it suddenly occurred to me that my cell phone has a camera. I took a shot of the old photograph, e-mailed it to myself, and now I can at last present it here:

First, all of the kids are in the back of the room with a bunch of empty desks at the front, which makes it clear that they all moved to different desks to accommodate the photographer. Also, no one is smiling, which is the way things usually are in old photographs like this — when did smiling become the standard behavior for photographs, anyway? But maybe there’s a tendency to assume that a lack of a smile means a lack of display of personality, and it turns out, that’s just not the case.

The teacher, standing in the rear, looks like a fairly stern fellow, but this might not be the case. In any event, he’s totally focused on the photo being taken: his suit is in perfect order, his posture is straight, and with his hands folded behind his back, he looks like he’s in confident command of this classroom.

A lot of the kids are in similarly straight, controlled postures. But not all of them. Look at that girl just to the teacher’s right: she’s turned slightly toward the back, she has her elbow rested on the back of her chair, and she’s leaning her head against her hand. Also at the back of the room (rear seat, second column from the right) is a girl who is leaning forward with her arms folded on the top of her desk. That interests me, since most everyone else has their arms carefully down, out of view. It’s interesting to contrast those two girls with, say, the one in the second seat back on the rightmost column: that girl is the very model of the posture one expects from a photograph in this era. Her back is utterly straight, her head is held precisely forward, her arms and hands out of view.

Turning to the boys in the photograph, other interesting things appear as I look at this. All of the boys have open schoolbooks on their desks. (In fairness, the angle makes it hard to determine conclusively if the girls are sitting without books on their desks, but I don’t think they are.) I don’t think this says anything about boys and girls, necessarily. Or maybe it does. I’m no historian of education, after all; does it mean anything that the boys have the books?

Again I turn to posture and clothing. All of the boys wear ties, either long ties or bowties. Of the seven, four wear jackets. That boy at the far left is wearing a sweater, it appears, and his left arm is cocked back onto the desk of the girl behind him, and he’s holding his book in what appears to be an exaggerated pose. Nobody’s going to do much reading of a book that size from that posture, so it seems to me that this guy’s showing off a bit. Maybe he’s the cocky one, the class clown.

Moving rightward, we have two boys in jackets and bowties. Nothing about the boy in front really stands out, but there’s something about the boy behind him that’s stronger, more assured. This kid always looks confident as hell to me, and there’s something about him that says “rich kid” to me — maybe it’s his jacket and upright, strong posture. Frankly, he looks like George Will a bit, doesn’t he? Yup, this is the banker’s son, I’ll bet. Here’s the class Republican. (I kid, there — but he does have that upper-crust air about him, even however-many-years later.)

Of the other four boys in this photograph, the two that interest me are the ones sitting in the front of the right two columns. Taking the boy in the dark shirt and light tie, it interests me that he sits kind-of slumped down fashion, with his arms flopped down at his side. He isn’t even feigning an interest in the book on his desk, the way all of the other boys are holding their books as if to suggest that their actual studies are being photographed. This kid is having none of that. This kid looks to me like a blunt, working-class type: not dumb, but rather of the mindset that this particular exercise is just another example of the kind of BS in life that’s best got done with right fast.

The boy at the far right is terribly interesting to me. First, he’s not sitting in the center of that desk; he’s edged all the way to the right of the seat. This is probably because it’s not his normal seat at all, for the reason stated above, but it makes him look terribly uncomfortable anyway, especially in light of the way he is holding his book at an angle and looking up at the camera in a terribly sheepish way. Whereas the last boy wanted to get the photograph done with because it’s all just a dumb waste of time, this kid doesn’t want to be photographed at all. This kid looks scared to me, timid, as if he’s the kid who spends every moment of his school day praying, over and over again, like a mantra: “Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.” He’s in the front of his column, and he looks totally ill-at-ease with this.

What else about this photograph interests me? Well, there’s the total lack of decoration in this classroom. I know it was an earlier time, but no hanging skeleton, if it’s a science class? No wall maps? No chart of the proper forms of the letters of the alphabet? What’s with the apparent netting on the walls? Are there decorations that were removed for some reason at the time of photography?

I also love the desks. I remember desks where chair and desktop were one unit, but these somehow reverse it: the chair is attached to the desktop for the student behind, not the student sitting in the chair. And, of course, this was the era when iron furniture had all kinds of ornate stuff going on in and around the framework. There’s a real sense of craft here.

Unfortunately, the tag that was once attached to the photograph, thus identifying its time and place (in the lower right corner you can see where the tag once was), is long-gone, so I can’t speculate on how old any of these kids might be if they were alive today (or if that might be feasible in the first place). It’s still a fascinating window into an earlier time, when even the apparent formality of a schoolroom photograph couldn’t totally suppress the individual personalities of the children.

Share This Post

October 15, 2007October 3, 2021

Sentential Links #114

One hundred fourteen! Woot! Or something like that. Anyhow, on with the links….

:: Never open a book with weather.

:: When you have lost hope, when your world feels broken, it is so important to remember what a tremendous difference a year can make. Anything is possible. Sometimes the universe surprises you. (Isn’t that the truth….)

:: You know, all in a day’s work.

:: The 3-story rowhouse at #9 Hillsleigh Road in the Notting Hill borough of London is a house I never lived in. Despite this one tiny, insignificant fact, I have some great memories of the years I called it home.

:: Ah, yes, settling Soviet hash through a massive war during which, one assumes, no bloodshed or suffering or any other unpleasantness would have taken place. Too bad we listened to weak-kneed Harry Truman. (And here. I swear….)

:: Most of us are grateful that we got through the Cold War without a nuclear cataclysm; these people see it as a missed opportunity.

:: Al Gore has a habit of bringing out the worst in conservatives — especially their eagerness to smear and their self-imposed ignorance about the nature of science and how the world really works.

No doubt, if they were ever self-aware enough to recognize this, though, they’d just find a way to blame Gore for it.

:: I have many words to explain how very much I loved my father, but none to capture how much I miss him already.

:: Part of the fun of watching new series is seeing how the writing staff experiments and shapes it. BACK TO YOU has top people at the helm. My guess is they’re only going to make the show better.

:: It’s good to see that Deanna, who has long be consigned to child-raising and house-maintenance duties, has accepted her position as a mere employee in Michael Patterson’s Wonderful Life and has agreed to wear a name tag. OR…. He kind of looks like the victim of a drive-by prostate exam. (That last is, technically, a comment by a reader of that blog. But wow, that’s funny.)

:: According to Entertainment Weekly, George Lucas is currently on the hunt for a number of writers to script 13 episodes of his planned live-action Star Wars TV series. (I’m here, George! And I’m not doing anything! I can be out there the day after tomorrow, if you want! Wife? Daughter? Pagh!)

OK, we’re done now. Tune in next week. Because if you don’t, you’re a poopyhead.

Share This Post

October 15, 2007October 3, 2021

Remember

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. If anyone you know has suffered a loss of this sort, let them know today that you are thinking of them, and if possible, consider lighting a candle this evening in memory and tribute to those lives that were either too short or never lived at all.

We first heard the following song, “Held” by Natalie Grant, performed in our church, a few weeks or so after Little Quinn’s funeral:

It’s a Christian Contemporary song, and the imagery in the video is overtly Christian, but the best of art, even religious art, can cross over those lines between faiths and non-faiths. This song has become deeply meaningful for our family.