So I’m reading John Scalzi just now, and I see that he’s a bit upset that the big news out of the recent WorldCon isn’t the Hugo win by Robert Charles Wilson for Spin (which I might read sometime, or I might not — hey, is it a space opera?) but rather “a certain science fiction writer being a public jackass at the Hugo ceremony”.

Well, it doesn’t take much awareness of the SF community to figure out who made an ass of himself; I sighed and said to myself, “Gee, I wonder what Harlan Ellison did now”. I figured maybe he showed up with the only existing manuscript of Last Dangerous Visions, hucked it into a trash can, and then set it on fire. Either that, or he publicly groped a prominent female SF writer.

So it was the latter: he groped Connie Willis, apparently. On stage. In front of, well, everybody.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden‘s take on this is exactly right:

Just as with George W. Bush’s now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison’s tit-grab is this: “Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you’ll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will.”

Apparently Ellison has apologized. Maybe it’s enough, maybe not. But behavior like this needs to be squashed like a bug, every time it happens.

(And of course, this post is mainly an excuse to use as a post title a pun on the title of one of Ellison’s most famous stories. What a geek I am….)

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This ought to be up PZ Myers’s alley: the blue-ringed octopus.

Cute, isn’t it? This little creature’s venom can kill an adult human in minutes; its distinctive blue rings are not visible until the octopus is about to attack; and it illustrates Yoda’s famed maxim that size matters not. The blue-ringed octopus is about the size of a golf ball.

More linkage from the MeFi thread wherein I learned about this little beastie.

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The Buffalo Bills finalized their 2006 roster yesterday. Daimon Shelton makes the team, which was to be expected after the amazing prowess he displayed last season in third-down and goal-line situations. Ahem.

Also making the team is safety Coy Wire, signaling that the Bills remain committed to maintaining a strong presence of “Meh” on their roster.

Stay tuned, sometime this week, for my annual kickoff of football-related postings. It’s almost time for a whole new season of bitching about the Bills’ O-line, the New England Stupid Patriots, Joe Theissman’s babbling idiocy, and more!

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It’s just wrong, folks.

I love John Williams as much as anybody, but I can’t get behind this new theme he’s written for Sunday Night Football on NBC. I just can’t do it. The music itself is OK — listen to it — but hearing that, I think of droid armies on the march against the Jedi or a Nazi convoy trundling along a desert valley while Indiana Jones tries to overcome them on horseback. I don’t think of football.

Now, this isn’t Williams’s fault, of course, and I don’t think any composer could cause my brain to associate some new piece of music with football. I don’t make too many strong connections between music and something in the concrete world, but this is one of my few such associations: this music is football. Not John Williams, not Jerry Goldsmith, not anything else. (Well, maybe Hank Williams Jr. But that’s it.)

Are you ready…!

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[WARNING: Here I rant.]

How nice. Apparently some blogger visited Buffalo at some recent point, and, having failed to be impressed, decided to write a blog post in which he lies about the city. A lot.

Now, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade – though you’d be stupid to have a parade in Buffalo – but we happen to think that Buffalo, New York deserves to die. In fact, it possibly begs for a killing.

A few of our editors — let’s just call them “Chip” — spent some time in Buffalo recently, and we must say that we wouldn’t spend 38 years in Buffalo without gunfire: Stuck in that dank hellhole, we’d shoot ourselves long before then.

No, fuck you. This post is nothing that anyone else out there who doesn’t know Buffalo from any other place doesn’t regularly dish out.

“It’s miserably cold in Buffalo!”

Well, if you think Buffalo’s too cold, then you must not like lots of cities in the US either, like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland ME, and so on. None of those cities has an average temperature in January more than two degrees higher than Buffalo’s, and a few of them are lower.

If you think Buffalo is “miserably cold”, then don’t come here. But don’t blame Buffalo for the fact that you’re a damn wuss.

“It snows quite often!

No shit. But lots of places get more snow than Buffalo; in fact, Buffalo doesn’t even crack the top ten cities in the US for snowfall. (We’re eleventh, beaten out by the likes of Flagstaff, AZ.) Also, snow isn’t the whole story of a winter. Frankly, I’ll take more snow and temperatures in the 20s over less snow and winter temperatures in the single digits or colder (without factoring wind chill), which are the norm in the Great Plains cities.

Oh, and guess what! Lots of people — gasp! — actually like snow. I know, it’s hard to imagine people enjoying winter and stuff, but there’s a reason that we have stuff like hockey and the Winter Olympics. It’s the snow and the ice.

So put on a scarf and grow the hell up.

“It’s horribly windy in Buffalo!”

Hmmmm. Well, yes, we do have wind here. No doubt about that. But our winds don’t bring us extremely frigid air from the Canadian plains in winter, nor do our incredibly dry winds fan the flames of our wildfires in summer, nor do our winds carry lots of moisture from the tropics except for a few brief periods in summer when everybody‘s hot and humid. Our winds mostly come across Lake Erie, which makes Buffalo one of the few places where the temperature in summer has never officially hit 100 degrees in all the time they’ve been keeping records. Yes, our winds do produce lake-effect snow, but refer back to the point above. (And that’s only an issue as long as Lake Erie hasn’t frozen over; once that happens during the winter, we’re pretty much done with snow.) And our summer winds are good for boating. (Yes, people do outside-type stuff in summer here. It’s because our summers are nice, and our autumns are the best on the damn planet.)

Here’s food for thought for the Buffalo Wind haters: our average wind speeds are only slightly higher than locations in Hawaii. I hope the Hatemongers aren’t vacationing there anytime soon! They might blow away, being so wussy and all.

Then we get this crap:

Further, as a cultural center, Buffalo’s moribund. Sure, it’s home to a good art museum. But that’s about it. It used to be a haven for avant-garde classical music (Lucas Foss, Morton Feldman), but now it’s completely dried up. The Buffalo Symphony plays nothing but standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience.

Yup, we have a good art museum. But which one? This one? This one? This one? This one? This one? I mean, the Hatemonger must be claiming that only one of these is a good museum and the others all suck, because surely he wouldn’t be saying something like that without even knowing of the existence of those other museums. Why, that would be dishonest!

Also, Hatemonger must have taken in some of our local theatrical productions and found them wanting? He doesn’t mention theater, but Buffalo’s vibrant local theater is always cited as one of the city’s cultural icons. Too bad they failed to impress Hatemonger. (Surely Hatemonger didn’t fail to take in a show! That would be dishonest!)

I also have to thank Hatemonger for alerting me to the existence of the Buffalo Symphony. Here, all this time I’ve been following the exploits of the Buffalo Philharmonic, not the Buffalo Symphony! (He can’t mean they’re one and the same, right? Surely someone cognizent enough of Buffalo’s cultural wealth wouldn’t get the name of the orchestra wrong, would they?)

As to repertoire, no one would dispute that the heyday of new classical music in Buffalo is over. But “standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience”? What twaddle. Yes, there are representative works from the standard repertoire in the offing for the upcoming season, works by Brahms and Schumann and the like. But this season will also see performances of Shining Brow, an opera written in 1991 by Daron Hagen; Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto, a work by a prominent film composer of the mid-20th century that isn’t exactly an “old warhorse”; “Seven Passages” by contemporary Iranian composer Behzad Ranjbaran; Roberto Sierra’s Concerto for Saxophones; “Three Hallucinations” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” by John Corigliano (one of the biggest names in contemporary classical music). And more.

If the blue-haired ladies in the BPO audience enjoy hearing all that, then good for them! That will make them more aware than some asshole blogger.

So let’s re-write one of Hatemonger’s paragraphs, shall we? The original — “A few of our editors — let’s just call them “Chip” — spent some time in Buffalo recently…” — should actually read, “A buddy and I spent went to Buffalo on a business trip. We got there on a Tuesday and left on a Thursday, we never left our hotel room except to take a cab to wherever our business meeting was, and we spent the rest of the time sitting in the hotel bar drinking Bud Lite, munching stale Beer Nuts, and alternating between watching the news on Channel seven and listening to some guy named Bauerle who must really hate where he lives. And we figured, hey, that’s good enough for us. Fire up the blog!”

You know what? You hated Buffalo? Then don’t come back to Buffalo. We don’t want you. It’d be one less asshole to export from our once-great and soon-to-be-great-again city.

(Oh, and by the way, Hatemonger: Niagara Falls isn’t part of Buffalo. It’s a whole different city, thirty miles away. Your mention of it in your post makes about as much sense as if I were to say that Manhattan sucks because Yonkers is ugly. And Timothy McVeigh isn’t even from Buffalo, but from some other town that’s a distance away. But don’t let the facts get between you and the Stupid Well, because when you’re thirsty for Stupid, you gotta drink deep and all.)

(Original link via Alan.)

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I saw a quiz over at Paul’s blog, so I will answer them as well, as is my wont:

1. A month before it happens you’re told you’re going to lose your memory. How do you prepare for it and do you attempt to regain what you’ve lost?

Hell yes, I try to regain it. I try to write down as much of it as I can, I suppose, but then I’d have trouble prioritizing things to remember. Hmmmm.

2. How do you describe your outlook on life?

“Life is quite absurd, and death’s the final word….”

3. You fall in love with your soulmate, decide to get married, and then find out that person is going to die soon. Do you marry them anyway?

Absolutely. (But here’s the thing about soulmates: I’ve never believed that there’s only one.)

4. What are three of your favorite ice cream toppings?

I like hot fudge, chopped-up Reese’s pieces, and fresh berries.

5. Is there one article of clothing you love to wear no matter how out of style it is?

Hmmm. That’s a head-scratcher. I should think that over a bit. Gee.

6. Is there one color you wish would go away in fashion?

A color? No. But then, I think “fashion” is just about as stupid an endeavour as I can think of. I find it hard to fathom how a few people in some city somewhere can up and decide that this year, this is what looks good, but a couple of years from now, we’ll all decide that it all looks horrible. And then a few years after that, the look we liked and then hated is judged favorably again! Screw that. I wear what I like.

7. What’s the first department you head to when you go shopping in a department store?

Assuming we’re talking about a place like Target, usually I either veer toward electronics or men’s clothing, although I almost never buy anything in either. Hardware’s always fun. Toys are a necessity. I usually save the DVD section for last.

8.How far away do you live from your parents?

Sixty or seventy miles, roughly. Maybe a little less, but the route from here to there requires lots of “over hill and under dale” stuff through the Southern Tier.

9. Growing up, who was your favorite cartoon character?

Bugs Bunny. Still is. Didn’t care much for the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, because there was no hope for the coyote. And I love Sylvester, but there’s this one with him where his owners go away for two weeks, but leave him a cupboard full of canned tuna — but the mouse gets the can opener, and Sylvester is foiled throughout the whole cartoon. That one pissed me off. F*** you, Mouse!

10. You plan a romantic evening and everything goes wrong, including the fancy dinner you burned. What do you do?

Swear a lot, then apologize profusely as I order a pizza.

11. What’s the last thing you bought at the store?

Which store? Today I brought home some hot dog and hamburger buns. Last time I was at Borders I picked up a copy of The Art of Revenge of the Sith and a better quality King James Bible than the one I already owned.

12. Have you ever walked out in the middle of a movie?

Never, but I have shut off DVDs or videos halfway through.

13. What celebrity do most people say you look like?

To my knowledge I’ve never been compared to a celebrity.

14. Is there any piece of jewelry you always wear?

I wear my wedding ring and another ring The Wife bought me most of the time, but not at night. Also, when I’m not at work, I wear a bracelet of silver beads that was made by a friend of The Wife’s in honor of Little Quinn.

15. Have you ever tried to pick someone up?

No. I’m terrible in situations where I don’t know people, and it takes me a little while to open up a bit.

16. What’s the one thing you always manage to lose on your way out the door?

Nothing, really, although I do leave the grocery list at home occasionally.

17. Out of these creatures which one are you most afraid of:
A.) Snakes
B.) Spiders
C.) Rodents

Rodents, I suppose. Although I’m probably freaked out in equal measure by all three: not much if I just spot one somewhere, but if one manages to get onto my person before I’ve spotted it, I tend to fly into this mixture of fear and rage that’s not at all healthy for the beastie to provoke.

18. What’s the last gift you bought for a friend?

A dear friend of mine at The Store had a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I got her a couple of small items like a journal to write in, a candle, and a tiny incense burner.

19. Do you ever buy people things for no reason?

Often. I love giving people stuff.

20.What’s your favorite way to spend a lazy summer afternoon?

Reading, writing, walking, putting music on the stereo and dancing while trying to look like I’m not dancing.

And there’s the latest Blog Quiz thing….

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Serpentes on a Shippe.

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I see that other folks (here and here) are listing twenty-five favorite TV characters, so I’ll prove ever the follower of established trends and do the same! There are some ground rules: No puppets or cartoons (otherwise we’d all be listing Homer Simpson and Statler&Waldorf); No mini-series; No reality-show people; All characters must be regulars on the show.

Here are mine, in no particular order. Keep in mind that if I write this post tomorrow instead of today, I probably name at least fifteen characters who don’t appear on this version of this list.

1. Fox Mulder, The X-Files.

2. Dana Scully, The X-Files. These two always had such a great chemistry. Back when the show was on, fandom tended to separate into two camps: “Noromo’s” (for “no romance”, i.e., folks who wanted Mulder and Scully to remain strictly platonic), and “shippers” (who wanted a “relationship” to exist between the two). I tended to fall into the Shipper camp, but it impressed me greatly how it just gradually became clear that Mulder and Scully were in love without there being a Moonlighting moment when the air just went right out of the show. And both were perfectly portrayed by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

3. Dr. Elliot Reed, Scrubs. Anyone who has ever known anyone who was freakishly smart and freakishly competent but who was also so neurotic as to be convinced that they were actually stupid and inept will recognize Dr. Reed. Sarah Chalke always plays her wonderfully.

4. Chandler Bing, Friends. I think that Chandler grew more as a character over Friends‘s ten seasons than any of the other five; when the series launched, he was pretty much the least interesting of each of them, seemingly existing only to inject wisecracks into the dialogue. (Frequently very good wisecracks, admittedly). By series’ end, he’d become a committed family man whose heart was nearly broken when he and Monica could not conceive.

5. Rick Sammler, Once and Again.

6. Lily Manning, Once and Again. Well, duh! I wouldn’t love this show nearly as much as I do if not for the outstanding work done by Billy Campbell and Sela Ward as the leads, two emotionally wounded divorcee’s in their forties who find each other and fall in love.

7. Toby Ziegler, The West Wing. It bothers me that Richard Schiff won’t be on Aaron Sorkin’s new show. Nothing against Bradley Whitford, but Schiff was by far my favorite actor on The West Wing.

8. Claudia Jean Cregg, The West Wing. Alison Janney’s my second favorite actor from The West Wing. C.J. was a brilliantly written character.

9. Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Star Trek.

10. Captain Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My favorite Trek captains. Nothing against Picard or Janeway, but the original series and DS9 were my favorite Trek incarnations. (I’ve still never seen an entire episode of Enterprise, so I have no opinion at all about Captain Archer.)

11. Rayann Graff, My So-Called Life.

12. Enrique “Ricky” Vasquez, My So-Called Life. What an amazing show this was. Rayann was a troubled teen; Ricky was struggling with his sexuality. I haven’t seen this show in years, but it’s burned on my brain.

13. Frank Black, Millennium. Sadly, this show never figured out what it really wanted to be, so it produced two seasons that were often brilliant but disjointed and a third that wasn’t very good at all. At the center of it all was Frank Black, however, a man haunted by…something, who was often trying to puzzle out…something. I loved this show and always felt that it was on the cusp of greatness before Chris Carter put the absolute wrong person in charge of season three. Oh well. Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black was a standout of understated acting.

14. Nash Bridges, Nash Bridges. You know, I’ve never met anyone else who liked this show! But for a while, I found it highly entertaining before it got too soap-opera like in its last season. This show was always a lot of goofy fun, with Don Johnson and Cheech Marin playing flamboyant San Francisco cops who sped around San Francisco in a bright yellow Barracuda, solving all manner of violent crimes. Eventually Yasmine Bleeth even joined the cast, providing some nice cheesecake.

15. Dr. John Carter, ER. In the pilot, Carter was a surgical intern who barely knew which end of a scalpel was up; eight or nine years later, he was the steady hand running the ER. I’ve made no secret in the past that for me ER not only jumped the shark a while ago but, after jumping it once, kept circling back to jump it again and again and again (this past season’s cliffhanger ending was just embarrassing); but I loved the show for a long time, and Carter’s realistic growth, portrayed on a realistic time scale, is a big reason why.

16. Jonathan Quayle Higgins, Magnum PI. Man, did I ever love Magnum PI! Higgins was such a great character, too: he was mysterious without ever seeming mysterious. Was he really Robin Masters, rich author of potboilers? Did he really have all those exploits as a soldier in various militaries? Thinking back on the show, just who really was Jonathan Higgins? We never really knew, and we never really realized we didn’t know, either.

17. John “Hannibal” Smith, The A-Team. Come on, who didn’t love it when George Peppard would grin at the end and say, “I love it when a plan comes together!”? I loved it!

18. Detective Andy Sipowicz, NYPDBlue. A bigoted, sexist, alcoholic, and burned-out New York cop in the pilot, Sipowicz would spend the next ten years being put through what might be the toughest emotional territory I’ve ever seen a regular TV character suffer. He got shot, nearly fired, married, lost a son to violence, had another son, lost a partner to disease, lost his wife to violence, lost another partner to violence, married again, and eventually became the boss of his precinct. All the while played brilliantly by Dennis Franz.

19. Frasier Crane, Cheers and Frasier. What a great character he was.

20. Dr. Addison Shepherd, Grey’s Anatomy. My current medical drama of choice. Lots of nifty characters here, actually — but Dr. Shepherd is a good doctor and an interesting, sympathetic character. Since the show’s major subplot continues to be the attraction between Dr. Meredith Grey and Dr. Derek Shepherd (often referred to as “Dr. McDreamy”), the writers could have made Dr. Shepherd’s wife an uninteresting shrew, but they didn’t do that: Addison is her own character with her own problems. Plus, she’s a smokingly hot redhead.

21. Gil Grissom, CSI. A forensic scientist whose hobbies are roller-coaster riding and etymology. What’s not to like?

22. Jamie Buchman, Mad About You. Helen Hunt’s character on a show that was one of the better sitcoms for a few years, before it started sliding a bit. (And its final season was an unmitigated disaster.) To this day, sometimes if I suspect that The Wife is having a bit of fun at my expense, I’ll say, “I heard a tone”, to which she’ll respond, “There was no tone!”

23. George Costanza, Seinfeld. Yeah, the show’s genius was in its ensemble nature, but I was always a George fan. The episode where George decides that every instinct he’s ever had has led nowhere, and therefore he must do the exact opposite of whatever his instinct may be, is a favorite of mine (to an attractive woman, George introduces himself: “My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents”).

24. Jarod, The Pretender. Now here was a show that deserved a better fate than to be dumped by NBC just so they could free up Saturday nights for Vince McMahon’s dumb-assed “Extreme Football League” crapfest. Jarod was a “pretender”: a genius who was so smart as to be able to pass himself off as just about any kind of professional at all. He used this ability to go around the country righting injustices while a group of operatives from a shadowy organization called “The Centre” tried to track him down, for their own nefarious purposes. This wasn’t a great TV series, but it was solidly entertaining.

25. Ed Stevens, Ed. Big-city lawyer moves back to his small-town Ohio roots, and runs a law practice out of the bowling alley he runs. The “ten dollar” bets were always hilarious. Another show I miss, although it probably lasted about as long as it really could have.

For good measure, here are an addition ten characters I like, from the “recurring character” category. These are characters who weren’t series regulars, but showed up every now and then:

1. Q, from various incarnations of Star Trek. How do you make a character who is virtually omnipotent interesting?

2. Harry the Hat, Cheers. It was sheer genius for the writers to make the final victory of Cheers over Gary’s Old Towne Tavern come at the hands of Harry the Hat, who had robbed Sam Malone blind a number of times over the years.

3. Cigarette Smoking Man, The X-Files. He was “recurring” almost to the point of actually being a regular, I suppose. And I’m limiting myself to just one recurring character from TXF, which had a bunch of ’em.

4. Detective Martens, NYPDBlue. He was the Internal Affairs cop who showed up whenever one of the precinct detectives did something wrong (or might have). Everybody in the squad hated him. Still, he was played well.

5. Ryan Chappelle, 24. The manner in which Chappelle went from “recurring” to, well, never recurring again still surprises me.

6. Danny Concannon, The West Wing. He came and went, as a White House reporter and romantic interest for C.J. (later revealed as her post-White House husband).

7. Ben Sullivan, Scrubs. Played by Brendan Fraser, Ben Sullivan appeared in three episodes of Scrubs, the last of which is one of the greatest episodes of a television I’ve ever seen.

8. Mr. Edwards, Little House on the Prairie. He was always so much more flawed than any of the Ingalls clan.

9. Princess Ardala, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Yeah, Erin Gray was hot as Wilma Deering, but my crush was always on Pamela Hensley’s Princess Ardala, who was one of the show’s villains.

10. Mac, Magnum, PI. Now here’s something odd: two different characters, played by the same guy. Thomas Magnum used “Mac” as a nickname for Lieutenant McReynolds, who was a pudgy naval officer with a sweet tooth. Magnum would often bribe Mac with dessert items in exchange for information he wasn’t supposed to have, or access to places he wasn’t supposed to get into, and so on. Mac was eventually killed in an explosion that was intended to kill Magnum. But then a few seasons later, Magnum thought he spotted Mac on the streets of Honolulu. This, however, turned out to be a con-man whose real name may or may not have been Jim Bonig. This second “Mac” would occasionally be an annoyance for Magnum, and also occasionally an assistance.

11. Newman, Seinfeld. OK, an eleventh character. Newman was just a classic. It’s a constant aggravation of mine that the only time in my life when I’ve known someone named “Newman”, it was before Seinfeld came along, so I could never greet her with a hearty “Hello, Newman!”

That’s it. List your own favorite characters today! All the cool kids are doing it!

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I wasn’t involved at all, so as a pure external observer, I’ve been terribly impressed this weekend with how Buffalo Old Home Week has been going. It is unbelievably heartening to see the rolling-up of the sleeves on the part of many people in this region to get whatever we can going before someone gets Albany to wake the f*** up.

Anyway, as always, it’s time for a pop-culture metaphor. This new bout of optimism in Buffalo has me thinking of the movie Major League. Remember Cerrano, the voodoo-practicing big slugger who, while able to send just about any fastball out of the park, cannot ever hit a curve ball to save his life, no matter how much he prays to “Jo Buu”, his god? And remember, how in the climactic game against the Yankees, Cerrano comes up to bat in a crucial late-inning situation while also mired in a long slump? Standing at the plate, Cerrano addresses Jo Buu for the last time:

I pissed off now, Jo-Buu. I good to you, I stand up for you. If you no help me now, I say f*** you, Jo-Buu. I do it myself.

I’m kind of thinking Buffalo’s getting to be a bit like that: F*** you, Albany. We’ll do it ourselves.

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