ForgottenStars.net

October 14, 2007October 3, 2021

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

And away we go!

:: It always interests me how many times a pretty obvious idea just never gets acted upon, until someone finally realizes, “Hey, no one’s ever actually done that, even though everybody’s thought of it!”

I mean, really: who hasn’t opened up a fortune cookie and thought that it would be funny if the fortunes were pessimistic?

:: A bad disco arrangement of the Main Theme from Star Wars. Bad interpretive dancing. Bad trumpet playing. All together in one moment of awful goodness. On some kind of meta-level, this is certainly George Lucas’s fault. Curse you, Miss Douglas, for making me doubt The Flanneled One!

:: This is clearly an example of plucking the low-hanging fruit, but I’m always a sucker for news anchors who lose their composure and start giggling uncontrollably on the air. (The slow motion of that model falling is priceless, though — especially the second time, when she gets all wobbly before finally going down.) Of course, for the ESPN lovers among us, the canonical instance of this sort of thing is Charlie Steiner’s reaction to Carl Lewis singing the National Anthem before an NBA game. (Actually, Steiner lost it a bunch of times on air, but the Carl Lewis one was the best.)

Tune in again next week.

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October 13, 2007October 3, 2021

One ring to rule them all….

It’s coming out three weeks from this Tuesday. Mine’s pre-ordered already. I’m carrying around a cloth with me to wipe up the drool.

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October 13, 2007October 3, 2021

BuffStuff

The other night, the Buffalo News gathered a few of the Usual Suspects from the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan to talk about blogging. You can hear the entire presentation, via a series of podcasts, starting here. It’s all interesting stuff, and as always, it’s entertaining to hear what bloggers actually sound like when they’re not typing. Check it out.

Also, it’s clear to me that the Buffalo section of my blogroll is fairly out-of-date, so if anyone has suggestions as to what needs to be added here, feel free to drop a link in comments. I’m gearing up to do an overhaul of the entire blogroll soon anyway.

Finally, remember that we’re trying to get a Blogging Christmas Party together for Saturday, December 8, in the evening. Time and location aren’t totally settled yet — I’ve tossed out the Buffalo Sports Garden in Orchard Park at 7:00 pm, but that’s open to debate as always (someone pointed out that their menu isn’t very vegetarian-friendly, for instance). I’ll try cobbling together an invitation-type thing sometime soon, but if anyone seriously disagrees with that tentative location, now’s the time to speak up!

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October 13, 2007October 3, 2021

One Year Ago

Destructive weather II, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

This was the scene at One Jaquandor Way, one year ago this morning, when a massive lake-effect snow storm hit the Buffalo area very early in the year, destroying many still-leafy trees in the process and knocking out power to thousands of people, many of whom suffered thusly for more than a week.

Here’s my post from the day after the storm. Oddly enough, except for a few flickerings of our lights, we never lost power at Casa Jaquandor. But what a strange, strange week that was: lines outside the gas stations that looked like something out of a 1978-era news film; The Store was powered entirely by a generator truck for at least five days after the storm; the general look of weariness that marked anyone whose power hadn’t been restored yet; convoys of giant power trucks dominating the roads.

And in the middle of it all, the Sabres were opening their season 10-0. Wow, what a time!

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October 12, 2007October 3, 2021

Bass Pro…and counting….

It’s a “Done deal”.

Bass Pro is coming to Buffalo, where they’ll be building in the same location they were originally going to build, but which they then decided not to in favor of a second location that was then scuttled when a bunch of preservationists decided that we needed to preserve some stuff that isn’t there to be preserved anyway, at which point they decided to go back to Location A but with a different plan for a building to build anyway.

Do I have that right?

I’m wondering in what order these events will happen:

1. American troops leave Iraq.
2. A manned mission lands on Mars.
3. The Buffalo Bills win a Super Bowl.
4. The Buffalo Sabres win a Stanley Cup.
5. Bass Pro opens in Buffalo.

I love the new design. But then, I loved the last design. I just want something, anything, built. I’m just afraid that at this rate, they’ll end up building a new 7-11 down there with one of those vending machines out back that dispense nightcrawlers for a buck.

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October 12, 2007October 3, 2021

Unidentified Earth 20

And here we are again, after last week’s abject failure to keep up. Unidentified Earth 19 proved to be the easiest one to date, apparently; my readers beat it up and took its lunch money. It was, of course, St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. I’m probably supposed to award Quatloos to everyone who got it right, but it turns out that nobody used the church’s official name, the Cathedral of Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat. So no Quatloos for anyone! Ha! (Sure, that’s unfair, but they’re my Quatloos, dammit.)

By the way, it turns out that the Cathedral isn’t part of the Kremlin at all, but merely resides next door to the Kremlin. I always thought it was on the Kremlin grounds, but both the Cathedral and the Kremlin are on Red Square. OK then.

Anyhoo, time for this week’s puzzler:

Where are we?

As always, rot-13 your answers, please!

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October 10, 2007October 3, 2021

Cowboys 25, Bills 24

I guess I need to say something about this game, which has already attained legendary status in Buffalo’s annals of negative sports outcomes. I tend to have a sunnier outlook on stuff than most Bills fans, so here it is: I don’t think Dick Jauron should be fired (yet), and I think that this game may turn out to be a key foundational event in building the character of a good team to come.

How’s that?

The offensive play-calling is baffling, and of this current coaching staff, if there’s anyone whom I think should be on a “Job Endangered” list, it’s offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild. I don’t understand running a reverse on third-and-one; I don’t understand the continued refusal to take shots downfield; I certainly don’t understand his continued refusal to run the ball in obvious running situations late in games. This was the third time this season that the Bills went “pass-wacky” in a late-game situation:

:: There was the long bomb at about three minutes to go in the Denver game, which the Bills led at the time, 14-12. Had they simply run the ball and kept the clocking going, and everything else had unfolded the same way, the Broncos would have run out of time before kicking the FG to win 15-14.

:: The Bills threw in a similar situation in the Jets game, thus failing to run any time off the clock. This left the Jets enough time to attempt a drive for a tying FG. They came up short when Pennington threw an interception, but it wouldn’t — and needn’t — have ever come to that.

:: And in this game the Bills led 24-16 with six minutes to go. Third-and-eight from the Dallas 11-yard line, so they’re easily within FG range. Instead of running, grinding away a minute or so of game time, and getting three points in the bargain to go up by 11, Fairchild called ‘pass’. The pass was picked off. The Cowboys didn’t get points off that turnover, but they preserved clock and the more manageable point margin they needed to overcome.

I genuinely don’t understand why the Bills’ coaches keep doing this stuff. It makes no sense. I don’t know a single Bills fan who would rather have the offense score touchdowns than have the whole team win games.

On the quarterbacks: I personally think that JP Losman has to be put back in now, if he’s healthy, but with the proviso that he’s got to show his stuff, now. He had time for growth last year. If the Bills go another four or five games and he still looks the way he did in the first two games this year (when he didn’t so much play poorly as barely play at all), then bring on the Edwards Era. (Of course, if some other team wants to offer up a compelling trade offer for Losman, including one or two high draft picks, I’d hope the Bills would take it.) I’ve been rooting for Losman because, frankly, I like the guy and hope he has a great career. Losman just seems like a good guy, and I like that. But production’s production, right?

(However, some perspective is always helpful: if Losman had been under center Monday night and produced the exact same result — 150 yards or so passing, 0 TDs and a very bad INT, leading the offense to producing just three points — Bills fans would be calling for his immediate one-way ticket to the waiver wire.)

Finally, I’m hearing a lot of negative stuff about Dick Jauron, how he’s too stoic and he’s not that good on the X’s and O’s and how his press conferences can be maddening affairs. (His defense of that third-and-eight pass play? “Well, you don’t know that if we run the ball, the back doesn’t fumble.” Huh?!) I agree to a point. But then I think of how lackadaisical and just plain apathetic the Bills looked through large whacks of the Gregg Williams and Mike Mularkey “eras”, where this year’s team (and last year’s), play with as much fire and heart as I’ve seen a Bills team even during the glory days. They come up short because of talent, injuries, and yes, poor strategy. But when I look at the way this supposedly overmatched team came out and very nearly knocked off the NFC’s best team, I wonder if we’re not selling Dick Jauron short as far as his motivational skills go.

Anyway, this week’s a bye week. Next up, the Baltimore Ravens, with former underachiever Willis McGahee making his return to Buffalo. I hope they kept his old hotel room and video game controller warm for him.

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October 10, 2007October 3, 2021

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

PZ Myers has created a new blog-meme thing, and he’s tagged me as part of his initial attempt to turn Blogistan into his own personal petri dish. How appalling!!!

Oh well, here are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

OK then. PZ gives his own set of questions to start with:

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.

2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is…

Cold Mountain.

3. The best sexy song in rock is…

Gloria, by Patti Smith.

OK, time for my modifications, with my own answers:

1. The best near-future novel in SF/Fantasy is…

Firestar, by Michael Flynn.

2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is…

Shakespeare in Love.

3. [deleted original] The best opera recording in classical music is…

Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Sir Georg Solti/VPO.

OK, I hope I did that right. Now, to do this right, some tags: Tosy and Cosh, Samurai Frog, TeflonJedi, Lynn Sislo, and — in an further experiment with plugging memes into collectives — the crowd at No Fear of the Future.

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October 10, 2007October 3, 2021

(Not that I would have anytime soon, anyway)

I will never, ever, ever, vote for another Republican candidate for anything, as long as I draw breath.

Why?

Ezra Klein:

Something has gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home, insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud, make threatening phone calls to the family, interrogate the neighbors as to the family’s character and financial state.

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

John Cole:

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

Oh, and for the “You guys do it too!” crowd, here’s Ezra again:

And here’s another question: Does anyone remember DailyKos launching a feeding frenzy trying to smear or discredit Ashley? Anyone hear of Markos Moulitsas camping out outside her house to see if Ashley was really grieving? His readers interviewing her teachers to see if her academic performance had actually improved as a result of the President’s hug? Did any of that happen? Or did the Left raise some questions about the political appropriateness of the ad without trying to destroy the family’s name and reputation?

There’s a difference here. And it’s not in which side elevates sympathetic stories and individuals into the public eye. They both do that. It’s in how low the other side stoops in response.

I could vomit, I really could.

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October 8, 2007October 3, 2021

A Quiz!

I knicked this from Still Life with Soup Can. I don’t remember doing this one before, so here it is. It’s about…food!

1. How do you like your eggs? Scrambled, with cheese or without, with a liberal sprinkling of black pepper and hot sauce. Or as an omelet with many, many kinds of fillings.

2. How do you take your coffee/tea? Black with quite a bit of sugar. I’ll use a creamer now and again as a change of pace, but mostly, I subscribe to the wonderful Turkish proverb: Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as Death, and sweet as Love. (I’ve never tried real Turkish coffee, though.)

3. Favorite breakfast food? My love of pancakes and waffles knows no bounds, but at a restaurant I’m likely to order some kind of combo plate with eggs, meat, and toast. These days, though, my main breakfast meal tends to be a bowl of frosted shredded wheat, topped with blueberries (fresh if possible and not expensive, frozen otherwise), with a glass of orange juice.

4. Peanut butter – smooth or crunchy? Smooth, because that’s the preference of the WomenFolk of Casa Jaquandor. I personally have no great preference either way.

5. What kind of dressing on your salad? My favorite is poppyseed dressing. For some reason, in restaurants I reflexively order ranch, even though it’s boring. At home, I’m switching to extra virgin olive oil mixed with balsamic vinegar. Eventually I’ll start doing things like making my own vinaigrettes.

6. Coke or Pepsi? Usually Pepsi, but I like Coke too. I wish I could get Passover Coke in these parts (although in truth I haven’t tried any of the stores in the Jewish neighborhoods of Buffalo). I’ve pretty much stopped drinking diet pop, because I’m told the chemicals in them are all kinds of bad. Have I researched this matter myself? Of course not. Because I just do what I’m told, that’s why.

7. You’re feeling lazy, what do you make? A couple hot dogs, or maybe a bowl of Ramen.

8. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order? Italian sausage and onions. Or pepperoni and banana peppers. Or ham and mushrooms on a white crust. (By the way: Chicago pizza is pizza. Deal with it, you NYC-style pizza crybabies!)

9. You feel like cooking. What do you make? Depends on my mood, really. If I’m feeling ambitious, I make a mean Pastitsio (just made one last week, as a matter of fact). I do good fried chicken, although I do that maybe once a year. My mac-and-cheese is good.

10. Do any foods bring back good memories? Ramen noodles, which I ate from a very early age — especially if I have any rye crisp bread to butter and then dip in the Ramen broth. Spanish rice and corn bread is a stand-by dish from when The Wife and I were first dating. And, of course, a roasted turkey.

11. Do any foods bring back bad memories? Hmmmm…can’t think of any off the top of my head.

12. Do any foods remind you of someone? Spanish rice. See above. And ditto the also afore-mentioned Ramen with rye crisp; that reminds me of my father.

13. Is there a food you refuse to eat? Broccoli. I consider anyone who claims to genuinely like the flavor of broccoli to be delusional.

14. What was your favorite food as a child? Totino’s frozen pizza.

15. Is there a food that you hated as a child but now like? I’m coming to enjoy mushrooms, although not to the point of eating them by themselves, or having stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer. But I do like them in stuff, like on a pizza. That used to be a dealbreaker for me, but now, I’ll cheerfully eat a pizza with shrooms on it. Oh, and squash.

16. Is there a food that you liked as a child but now hate? Not hate, per se, but there’s stuff that while I don’t dislike it I genuinely wonder what I thought the fuss was — like those dirt-cheap frozen pot pies, for instance. For a frozen pot pie, Pepperidge Farm or Marie Callender’s make much better ones; and really, if I’m really hungry for pot pie, I’ll make one myself.

From my college years, though? I can’t fathom how I went for a year consuming Easy Cheese on a regular basis. Ewwwwwww.

17. Favorite fruit and vegetable: Blueberries; Green peppers.

18. Favorite junk food: Chips of just about any kind (except that horrible “Dill Pickle” flavor), chocolate chip cookies, ice cream.

19. Favorite between meal snack: These days? A couple ounces of mixed nuts, or a cup of yogurt, or a granola bar.

20. Do you have any weird food habits? With chicken wings, I tend to eat the “drummies” before I eat the “wing” section. When we make any kind of baked pasta dish, I have to get a serving from the edge of the pan, where that crusty goo forms. And whenever we get pizza, I start eating it with a knife and fork, until I eventually decide to just pick it up like you’re supposed to do.

21. You’re on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on? I don’t do diets; rather, I try to build new eating habits. I love peanut butter spread on celery, though.

22. You’re off your diet. Now what would you like? Everything!

23. How spicy do you order Indian/Thai? I don’t order Indian or Thai. Why? Because I never make it a priority to get off my arse and go sample Indian and Thai. I admit that this is a serious flaw in my food education.

24. Can I get you a drink? Yeungling lager; or Blue Moon pumpkin ale; or Sam Adams Cherry Wheat; or a rum-and-coke but only if it’s Captain Morgan; vanilla rum and root beer.