I’ve wondered on occasion at what point The Daughter would be an appropriate age for introduction to Monty Python. Well, I wonder no more.
(Well, within reason. There’s quite the range between Holy Grail and Meaning of Life, obviously.)
Let me know when he loses Glenn Reynolds and the Powerline boys….
George Bush has lost the support of Richard Mellon Scaife. This would be like…I don’t know, me rooting for the Patriots or something. Wow.
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Earth?
It seems that the current installment of Unidentified Earth is a stumper! This makes me happy, although it also makes me wish I’d saved this one for a while, because I suspect that most of the remaining ones I have bookmarked — enough to get us into January at least, at the current rate — will almost certainly be easier, with a few that I’m sure will be identified almost instantly (the only reason I’ll be doing those is basically that they look really cool from space).
So, anyway, I’ve updated this week’s episode with a hint. Have a look. I’ll post another hint tomorrow evening as well, just in case the thing is still unidentified!
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Breaking the Ships
One of the unfortunate mainstays of Buffalo’s outer waterfront the last bunch of years has been the presence of an old ship that basically got docked here and then forgotten about, as it rusted in its moorings for years and years. Well, that ship has finally been taken away, towed out of Buffalo’s waters on its final voyage. Although the ship’s fate is apparently now unclear, I suspect it will ultimately sail to the fabulous land of India, where it will likely end up in a place like this:
That’s a shipbreaking yard on the coast of India, where decommissioned ships are literally run aground and then slowly dismantled by laborers. It can be very dangerous work, so let’s hope that the former blight on Buffalo doesn’t ultimately end someone’s life when it reaches its ultimate destination.
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Sigh….
I’ve started experimenting lately with the writing of poetry. I’m not willing — yet — to post any of those efforts here, for two reasons: first, I’m not sure what I’m doing, and thus am not at all sure that I’m not producing total crap; and second, the subjects I am committing poetry about are more personal than I usually get in this space. I’m just noting a bit of conflict in my head about my desire to commit poetry. Part of me is thinking, “Cool, another way to write!”, while another part is thinking, “Isn’t there another way to deal with this stuff? Something involving a bottle made of brown glass, or perhaps a frontal lobotomy?”
On a parallel note, thank God for Youtube. I figured that by now, someone would have uploaded the greatest single scene in the entire run of The West Wing, and sure enough, someone finally did.
Wow, I miss Toby Ziegler.
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Sentential Links #106
This week’s linkage. Click, or an army of locusts will descend upon thee and pick thy bones clean! BWAA-HAA-HA-HA-HA!!!
:: As an Olympic-level bullshit artist myself, I just have to give it up for a guy who created an entire make-believe field out of thin air and declared himself the leader in it. (My parents sent me to see a performance of Kreskin’s back when I was in second grade. It was a terrific magic show. Even then I somehow sensed that it was all BS, but wow, what fun BS it was!)
:: They say all good things come to an end…. but I believe that really good things are never really gone for good. (Sorry, but I’m not replicating the typeface and color effects! Looks like an essay contest is in the offing. Check it out. This is a blog I never seem to read enough.)
:: I don’t have much to say about this. I do want to mention that it falls into one of my favourite sub-categories of comics: Iron Man getting his ass handed to him. (Never much liked Iron Man. He struck me as a really butch version of C-3PO. [I know, Iron Man came first, but not in my world!])
:: The doors should be closed when the zombies come.
:: It an utterly epic sensation – a sense of standing on the slopes of a high mountain in Winter, the cold northern wind cutting you crosswise as you gaze intently into the wilderness valley that fills your vision below. It is a sense of warm fires, hoppy ale, and strong mirth on cool Balsam nights as one is encamped beside an old tree beneath a high forest canopy. It is that smell of earth, trees, and tobacco – each smell simultaneously commingled and distinct. It is the myriad of stars in the velvet midnight heights; it is the glowing lamps of Faërie disguised as fireflies. And it is the whisper of rain in the Verdant Seasons… (Another serendipitous blog discovery. I found it while Googling the exact wording of the brief passage at the very end of The Return of the King, when Frodo beholds “the far green country under a swift sunrise”. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Hey dummy, why didn’t you just get up and walk ten feet and look up the passage yourself in one of your two copies of the actual book?!” Well, if I did that, I wouldn’t have found this very nice-looking blog, now would I?)
:: Oh, dear Lord! You made many, many poor performers. I realize, of course, it’s no shame to flub, but it’s no great honor, either. So what would have been so terrible, if I had been given one good performance? (Ah, the bane of musicians and former musicians the world over. As one who’s been there, the thing about soldiering on past a performance flub is something that one does get better at doing, through practice. Unfortunately, the only way to practice soldiering on past a flub is to, well, flub in performance.
A personal tale here: in my junior year of college, one of the works we performed on our band tour that year was Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy [one of the great masterworks of band repertoire, and for my money, one of the great masterworks of music in general]. Well, in one of the inner movements — I think either the fourth or fifth, but I couldn’t say for sure without looking it up, which I’m too lazy to do just now — there’s a spot where the whole band builds to these massive, fortissimo chords that sound five times. Well, in performance, I once lost count of which blast of the chords we were on — and sadly, I wasn’t lucky enough to have overcounted, and thus put my trumpet down after what I thought was the last chord. No, I added an extra one, all to myself. In the middle of the brief silence that was written on the page, the glory of my own sound blazed forth. Never have I wanted to leave the stage less than I did at that moment, because I well knew what the main topic of discussion would be once the concert was over.
So if you’re going to flub, make it a big one. The calamitous mistakes are the best — and in some genres of music, no one in the audience is likely to notice.)
Well, that’s all for this week. Until then, it’s a jungle out there!
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The stupid! It burns!!!
It’s official, folks, and I can no longer deny it. I am a complete idiot, and am no longer fit to sully the doorsteps of Blogistan.
This is the Jason I had in mind, so if he has any interest in coming out of self-blog-exile, he can take those same questions and go with them. For the actual Jason who responded, I’ll come up with some real questions tomorrow.
God, am I stupid. I deserve some kind of embarrassing punishment for this! Suggestions for punishments can be left in comments, I suppose, but keep it clean. We’re still PG-13 here!
[slinks away, shoulders slumped]
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Invisible Rope
Now, if they’d pantomimed being yanked off their feet when the cars hit their invisible ropes….
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Just let ’em work until their heads thud against their desks
Kevin Drum on the American unwillingness to take vacations:
Of course, I’m hardly one to talk. In theory, I agree with Ezra [Klein, who has a LA Times op-ed about this], and I would have preferred a job that paid 10% less but provided 10% more vacation. In reality, I rarely even used the two weeks of vacation I got. Partly this was because I was caught up in the work ethic feedback loop that’s spiralled almost insanely out of control in America, but also, ironically enough, because I only got two weeks of vacation. So I hoarded it. You never know when you might need it, after all! Maybe if I’d gotten six weeks of vacation time I would have actually used more of it.
But I was hardly the worst. The really disheartening cases were the people I’d call into my office and practically order to go on vacation. They had accumulated, say, 300 hours of vacation time and weren’t allowed to accumulate any more. Take a couple of weeks off, I’d urge. If you don’t, you’ll be working for free, burning through vacation hours you’re no longer earning. Sometimes my exhortations worked, sometimes they didn’t. Very sad.
Maybe I’m lazy, but I’m continually baffled by the American obsession with working freakish numbers of hours at the job, and the fact that we’re so reluctant to take vacations (or to grant them to our workers). I’ve never seen the virtue in doing that much work. I even remember reading with some astonishment an article a few years back in the Buffalo News advising workers to take their laptops and cell phones with them on their vacations, so they could spend three or four hours a day making calls and answering e-mails and servicing accounts. What the hell’s a vacation for, anyway?
I somehow suspect that there’s some connection between our attitude toward vacation in this country and our tendency to take mental illness less seriously than physical illness. I’d try to do some connecting of the dots thereof, but I’m kind of tired right now. Maybe I need a vacation.
(Actually, that may not be a bad idea. Now that I think of it, aside from my sister-in-law’s wedding back in July ’05, over the last three years I haven’t taken any significant time off from work that wasn’t somehow related to the health problems and deaths of our attempts to increase our family size beyond three.)
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Books: I read ’em
Some recent reading:
:: I was a bit disappointed in Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, by rock critic and Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield. It’s a good book, to be sure, but it just felt a bit off to me. In the book, Sheffield uses mix tapes as a staging device for describing his life during the 1990s; each chapter opens with a facsimile of those fill-in labels that come with the box for blank tape cassettes, with the titles all filled in with the songs on that particular tape.
What disappointed me about this one? In truth, I’m not entirely sure. It could be that I found the book slightly unfocused; it’s not totally about the music, and it’s not totally about the relationship, either. Both aspects of the book seemed to get shorted, for me. But more troublesome was the general pall that hangs over the entire book, since Sheffield tells us right up front that his wife Renee died of a pulmonary embolism, one of those meaningless deaths where you’re going about your daily grind when suddenly it all ends and you’re gone before you can hit the floor like a burlap bag filled with gravel.
I’m not trying to make light of Sheffield’s horrific experience or the difficulty of his grieving, and I genuinely suspect that my feelings about Love is a Mix Tape stem from the fact that it didn’t turn out to be the kind of book I was expecting, and given personal factors, it didn’t turn out to be the kind of book I needed when I picked it up. So don’t take this as a non-recommendation, because it isn’t.
:: I mentioned him a couple of weeks back, but I’ll say more about him now: Nick Bantock. A month or so ago, a dear friend of mine gave me a hand-made gift that instantly put me in mind of Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine trilogy, and it not only occurred to me that I hadn’t read Griffin and Sabine in a number of years, but that I hadn’t read the follow-up Morningstar trilogy at all.
And then, a day or two after that thought occurred to me, I was in Borders and found four of the six books between the two trilogies on the “Bargain Book” stacks, each for $2.99. So I picked them up and bought the rest on eBay, over a week or two gathering a total of two copies of each trilogy: one for myself, and one for my friend whose birthday is next month. (Don’t tell her.)
I love this series, I really do, and I think it’s now to join Lord of the Rings and the books of Guy Gavriel Kay on my “To re-read in its entirety every few years” list. (I wait several years between re-reads to keep things fresh: there are still details in LOTR that catch me by surprise each time out.)
Griffin and Sabine and Morningstar are epistolary works, with their stories told entirely in the texts of letters and postcards mailed back and forth between the main characters. In the first book, Griffin and Sabine, English artist Griffin Moss receives an enigmatic postcard from Sabine Strohem, who is herself an artist who designs postage stamps for the tiny Pacific island nation of the Sicmons. Strangely, Sabine starts right off by referring to changes Griffin has made to a work of his that he hasn’t shown to anyone. Right off the bat, this story is by turns mystical and sensuous.
I’ve never read anything quite like it — especially seeing as how Bantock is himself a maker of art books. Instead of just printing the text of the postcards and letters, Bantock lets us handle the physical artefacts themselves. To read the letters, you actually have to remove them from their envelopes, which are glued to the pages. It sounds like a gimmicky device, but I loved the tactile sense not unlike reading a collection of love letters found in a dusty attic. Bantock is wise enough to give almost no narrative comment other than what’s in the letters and postcards themselves. At times this makes the story a bit hard to follow, but really, this is at it should be. The reader has to fill in the blanks by imagination, which is the way it would be when one reads a collection of old letters, anyhow.
I’ve checked out a bunch of other Bantock titles from the library, and will report on them in due course. (When I read them, of course.)
:: Finally, I’d been meaning to read Bill Mauldin‘s Up Front for some years, which I own as part of the Library of America’s amazing Reporting World War II collection, and I finally did so. What an amazing, stunning book. Seriously, I can’t recommend this highly enough, for anyone who wants to know what life was like for the infantrymen of World War II, or for anyone who admires good war writing, for that matter. I’d be very interested to hear just how life for the infantrymen in Iraq today compares with that Mauldin describes for those of World War II, over sixty years ago. There’s not much more to say than that, other than that I’m glad to have finally gotten to this one.