Tag: Ask Me Anything August 2012

I’m cranking out this post because I’d like to be able say that I got all of the questions for Ask Me Anything! August 2012 done before…October. Wow, maybe I should have not run the game during the same month I was trying to crank on a writing project. Anyway, I think that this post should wrap things up…but if I missed your query, let me know! It’s been known to happen. I’m as fallible as…well, something that’s really fallible. Mitt Romney, there we go! He’s pretty fallible!

(The person responsible for the immediately preceding political comment would be sacked, but as he’s the owner of this blog, he won’t be. But he will feel a bit of remorse.)

Lynn asked: If Firefly had been allowed to keep running for several seasons, as it should have, do you think they might have brought back Jubal Early (one of my favorite villains ever) for another episode? We didn’t see him actually die so I’ve always wondered about that. What if you were hired to write the Return of Jubal Early episode? How would you do it?

Yeah…the Jubal Early episode is a particularly saddening one for the series to end on, because that’s when the crew finally figured out how to accept River Tam for who she was. In that episode she became part of the crew…and then the show stopped. Yes, the Serenity movie dealt with that somewhat, but you really started to get a feel for the show’s direction when it got dumped. All together, now: Curse you, FOX!!!

But anyway: I’m of mixed mind on Jubal Early. He’s a great character, the best of villains: someone with a clear ethos. He’s a bounty hunter with the same attitude as Mal Reynolds, with regard to getting the job done. He does the job, he gets paid. He tries to avoid sentiment; all there is, is the job. Plus he was played with nice, calm, businesslike malice by Richard Brooks, which is always a good thing.

Problem is, as Lynn notes, how do you bring him back. See, after infiltrating the Serenity and nearly getting away with River, Early is making his way back to his ship (meaning a spacewalk) when Mal gets the drop on him, and kicks him off into space. Early is last scene just tumbling through space in his spacesuit. Would he have returned? And how? Space is awfully big, and even in a heavily-traveled part of the ‘Verse, I can’t believe that something so small as a person in a spacesuit would be noticed by anyone in a ship, unless they had a scanner that was actively sweeping for really tiny bits of space flotsam and jetsam.

Unless, of course, Early has some kind of emergency transponder in his suit, which he could activate as some kind of emergency, last-ditch, probably-won’t-work-but-you-never-know kind of thing. In itself, that might not be a bad idea; I imagine that in any spacefaring society, a spacesuited person becoming separated from their ship would be a deeply feared thing. (OK, now I’m drawing a blank, because I know that I read a SF novel in the last few years that featured just that as the society’s most feared means of dying. Gonna bug me until I remember.)

And then, any writer of such could just punt the whole deal and have Jubal Early turn up again, very much alive, very much still on River Tam’s trail, and just never explain at all how he managed to not float through space until he died. That, in itself, could lend him some kind of mythological status in the underworld of the ‘Verse; in the words of another Firefly baddie, it could make his reputation ‘solid’. Maybe the “Return of Jubal Early” episode could end with Mal asking, “How did you not just float away into space forever?” and Early just shrugging.

By the way, I just looked up Jubal Early to find out who played him, and apparently Joss Whedon himself indicated that Early was not going to just float around until he ran a tad low on oxygen. So, I wonder how Whedon planned to do it?

(OHHH! The novel I remembered above is Michael Flynn’s The Wreck of the RIVER OF STARS. I’ve still got it, baby!)

OK, moving on. Richard asks: When do you plan to visit Vancouver, Canada? I notice you’ve visited Toronto on many an occasion…but Toronto is not the only nice city in our fair country!

No, Toronto’s not the only nice city in Canada, but it is the only one within a very close driving range to Casa Jaquandor. Unfortunately, the types of trips that require (a) flying and (b) spending at least a week off tend to be out of our price range at this point. But you never know what the future holds. Maybe the book tour for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) will include a Vancouver stop! (Wow, talk about getting ahead of myself….)

Seriously, though, I would love dearly to get to Vancouver. It always — always — looks like a staggeringly beautiful city. (A favorite movie of mine, Cousins, was filmed there, in a way that made it look really beautiful, and not like a dank stand-in for every other dank place in the United States for four seasons of The X-Files.) Frankly, the only thing that really stops me from wanting to live in the Pacific Northwest is the fact that everything is so far from everything else. I’m spoiled by the idea of living within a day’s drive of half the country. But I do miss it out there, even having not been back to the Northwest since 1981.

Christopher asks: I know you have a great love of music, I wish I did, but never have. If you had to choose between them, and one was to be gone forever. Written words or music?

Hmmmm. A couple of different ways to take this question. Do I lose the sense of sight or hearing? If that’s what’s being asked, I’d lose sight, every time. I can figure out a way to get stories into my head and out of it without seeing, but losing music? Ugh! That would be truly awful.

But keeping the ability to hear music and understand it, but somehow be rendered unable to read while keeping sight? So I wouldn’t be able to process stories at all? That’s…horrifying. And there’s an interesting story there, I think…hmmmm….!

Kal asks: I would like to send you a Luckie Loonie coin for all the support you give my blog. Can I have your snail mail addy to do that?

Kal, let me know if this offer still stands! Meantime, folks, if you’re looking for a blog chock full of geeky goodness, you could do far worse than to wander through the archives of Cal’s Canadian Cave of Coolness for a while. I don’t get everything that he posts — I’m not sure yet about Selena Gomez, for example — but I’m sure there’s stuff he doesn’t get about me either. If you haven’t look, go!

Two anonymous queries (not anonymous to me, but they request to be so to you): DO you have a Super Bowl prediction?

Ummm…no, I don’t. This NFL season is off to an insane start, even by NFL season standards. Seriously, this could be one of those weird years where the two best records in each conference are 11-5, and where some 9-7 wildcard team gets blown out 49-3 late in the season, and then gets hot and goes all the way to the Super Bowl. I got nothin’, in terms of predictions. Weird year thus far!

(I’ll say this for the Bills: I think that this year is the referendum on Ryan Fitzpatrick as a starting quarterback in the NFL. If he doesn’t play well — and I mean, really well — I think the Bills have to make next year the “new franchise guy” year in the draft. The good news there is that by building the team around Fitzpatrick, the Bills have guaranteed that a rookie quarterback stepping in next year won’t be doing so for a crappy team. We’re not going to be seeing the second coming of David Carr, who might have been good if he hadn’t been sacked something like 287 times in his first couple of seasons.)

You haven’t been pied in a while. What gives?

Yeesh, it’s not like that happens on a daily or weekly basis. I’m a writer and a handyman, not a vaudeville performer or a clown! It only happens to me once, maybe twice a year. More than that and it might get routine, you know?

(But…watch this space. Pies may fly in my face’s direction sooner than later!)

And finally, I give the last word to Andy: Were you more of a Dukes of Hazard guy or more of a Knight Rider man????

Knight Rider. All the way. Yeah, I watched Dukes for a few years as a kid, and it was entertaining an all, but I grew out of it fairly quickly, and that one year when John Schneider and Tom Wopat were replaced by…two other guys, playing the Duke cousins or something, pretty much did in my interest in that show. Besides, well…it just wasn’t that interesting after that long. There’s only so many times you can watch the boys elude Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, so many times the General Lee can jump over something, so many dirt road chases, et cetera that you can watch before it all looks the same. And to be honest, the show’s popularity was a bit early for me to grok the whole notion of Daisy Duke in those Shorts +4 of Ultimate Shortness.

I always wondered about all those dirt roads, too…was Hazzard County’s annual infrastructure budget all of $1.67? Surely they could afford some road grading and paving, if they could afford to buy the Sheriff a new ride every week.

But Knight Rider? That appealed to me a lot more. There was the James Bond-ish kind of thing going on, with Michael Knight ending up someplace else and in some other adventure each week, and of course, as teevee cars go, KITT trumps the General Lee, every day of the week and multiple times upon the Sabbath. Knight Rider was more my speed, and it was so for a lot longer, than The Dukes of Hazzard. Oh, and by the time I realized that women were Teh Awesome, Knight Rider had Rebecca Holden. Whoa nellie!

And that, I believe, should do it for Ask Me Anything! August 2012. Hopefully my answers in February will be more quickly forthcoming! Thanks for the fine queries, folks. As ever, everything was thought provoking and fun to write about!

Share This Post

Continuing my catch-up detail on Ask Me Anything! August 2012, I’ll wrap up all of Roger’s questions!

Here’s something I plan to do, so I’ll let you try first: come up with a list of the 20 (or 25) most important/influential people in your life. I’m particularly interested in those people who may be out of your life now (a music teacher, a lost friend) who you look back and see their impact.

With respect…I’m going to save this one for a future post. This one will take a lot of thought!

What do you think of the 1986 Paul Simon album Graceland? I know you hadn’t heard the album, but were you aware of the controversy over Simon going to South Africa, albeit to record with black South Africans?

Some background: a while back, I admitted someplace (was it here?) that I had never heard Graceland, the Paul Simon album from 1986. I didn’t ignore the album out of any dislike for Mr. Simon. It’s just that, like many things, it slid by me when it came out because I was into other things at that time, and it remained pretty much forevermore one of those pop culture artifacts that I just plain missed at the time. (Not unlike, as I’ve noted many times, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.)

Well, Roger decided that this constituted a fundamental failure on my part to explore a fine work of art, so he sent me a copy of the album, which I have now listened to in its entirety about seven or eight times (with some internal dipping here and there). I realize this falls into the general category of “Water is wet, film at eleven!”, but…Graceland is just wonderful.

I knew going in that Graceland features musicians from South Africa, and that this represented quite a cultural event in the 1980s, since Apartheid had not yet ended in that country. What I didn’t know was the general upbeat nature of the album. I was kind of expecting a more meditative work, dealing with issues of heavy import such as the relations between the races in a divided country. Instead, the record is…well, I found it a much for fun listening experience than I had expected. That surprised me. (I was also completely unaware of any controversy surrounding the album; I just looked that up, to discover that some people felt that Simon had broken sanctions against South Africa in going there to record his album. I can kind of see the point, but to me, economic sanctions are different from cultural ones.)

I was also surprised that the African elements in the album aren’t as forward as I had expected. I have a sad suspicion that this represents some kind of stereotype-based thinking on my part, but I honestly expected the kind of faux-African sound that marks the score to The Lion King. I wasn’t even aware that I had that expectation in my head until I listened to the album the first time and realized that some of it is just straight-up pop, and when the African sounds become undeniable and unmissable, they are…well, they’re uniquely refreshing. My favorite track on the entire album, for this very reason, is “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”.

The song is also effective, as are most on the album, because Simon’s lyrics tell a story. These songs have the feel of poetry combined with music, instead of many song lyrics which just sound like nonsensical rhymes set to a catchy tune.

Anyway, Graceland is just terrific, and I am indebted to Roger for finally getting it into my hands.

And a more general question: How many times do you need to listen to an album before feel that you know an album? (It’s three for me, BTW.

I’ve never really considered this. It’s a good question. I’m not sure what it is to ‘know’ an album. I can get a general sense of the album’s ebb and flow after a couple of listens — two or three — but for a more thorough exploration of an album’s themes, it takes me longer than that. Sometimes it can even take years, depending on the album! It’s not uncommon for me to listen to some work or album that I’ve ‘known’ well for years and still hear something new, or suddenly grasp something about a particular song, or the like.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that I ever really ‘know’ an album. But then, I am possessed of a constant fear that I am, in fact, a dolt who is masquerading as someone who knows something about anything. This is a useful attitude for a writer, I think — if nothing else, I’m motivated to create works that by definition I will know better than anyone else.

Have you made any plans for your funeral? I assume your wife knows your desires, but do others (e.g., embalming v cremation, organ donation,) should you and your wife die at the same time?

Not asking who, but have you made a decision where your child should stay should both of her parents pass away? What were the bases – her familiarity with them, their income, their values (religious or otherwise), their politics, the size of their house, their age?

Yeesh…I’ve given this very little thought at all, actually! I like to joke about being cremated and then snuck into pepper-shakers at some restaurant or other, but that’s obvious gallows humor. In truth, my attitude on this is basically for those left after I shuffle off to do whatever they feel is easiest and best for their peace of mind. I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when a Klingon dies and Picard or someone asks one of the Klingon survivors what they want done with the body, and the response is, “The body? That’s just an empty shell. Do whatever you want with it.” I know that a lot of people have definite desires for what is to happen with their remains — where to bury, where to be scattered, et cetera — but in all honesty, I have little such opinion, as I figure that I’m not likely to care afterwards, so why care now?

Having said that, I suddenly realize that I’ve never signed my organ donor card. I should probably do that. And I have always admired my paternal grandmother, who had her body donated to a medical school after her passing, so that the next generation of doctors might learn something from her. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t envision something along the lines of the opening credits sequence of the old Jack Klugman show Quincy, which showed Quincy starting an autopsy for a group of police academy cadets, only to watch them all pass out.

OK, that’s it for Roger! Next time, we’ll wrap this whole thing up with some more lighthearted queries.

Share This Post

I know, I know…with all this editing work I’ve been doing, I’ve been ridiculously remiss in getting Ask Me Anything! August 2012 done, to the point that we’re closing in on October 2012. Oy…but herein I’ll take another whack at getting some of these queries answered!

From Roger:

Should Sally Ride come out as gay sooner, as in during her lifetime? It wasn’t a secret to her friends, but some have suggested that it may have been more inspirational.

It’s easy to say that, and I tend to agree that it would have been pretty inspirational to have Sally Ride go open with her homosexuality earlier in life. I think that every openly gay person who lives a normal, productive, and in Sally Ride’s case, exceptional life moves the needle toward ‘Gay Acceptance’ a little more, and that’s a good thing.

But…Sally Ride wasn’t just an inspirational figure, she was a person, and even though circumstances of her life made her an inspirational figure, I can’t hold her to account for choosing not to be such a figure in all aspects of her existence. I am in no way disappointed in her reluctance to come out, if indeed it was reluctance at all. If her line of thinking was “That part of my life is mine and it’s nobody’s business but mine”, I have a hard time taking her to task for that. So ultimately, no, I don’t think she should have come out sooner, unless she wanted to. Which it doesn’t seem that she did.

Do you think the punishment for Penn State in light of the Jerry Sandusky scandal was too strong, too lenient, or appropriate? What do you say to those who believe those who did nothing wrong (current students at Penn State, e.g.) are suffering the bulk of the punishment?

I think it was just about right. That program needed to get hit hard, because the ‘football is king, and coach is God’ mentality there led to a sickening coverup of a child molester. And I’m not interested in all the Oliver Stone-esque readings of the Freeh Report, or the red herring chases that people engage in who are still slavishly in thrall to the Ghost of Holy Joe. I have seen nothing compelling to make me think that things happened pretty much as they’re said to have happened, and I suspect that things may have actually been worse.

As for who I feel sorry for? Well, I feel sympathy here for two, and only two, groups of people. The first are Sandusky’s victims and their families, and the second is the current players who have to take the field wearing the scarlet A. They didn’t sign up for this, and I do feel sorry for them. In fact, I think there’s something admirable about players who opted to stay put and try to help make things there better again — but at the same time, I have zero problem with any player who looked at the carnage and said, “Yeah, I want no part of this shit” and took the transfer to someplace else. I can understand both viewpoints and I don’t see either as more moral than the other.

Who do I not feel sorry for? Penn State students and alumni and fans. Sorry, but you do not have a God-given right to root for a great football program, you do not have a God-given right to your mental picture of Doddering Old Joe Paterno as a figure of Christ-like reverence, and even more than that, there’s nothing super-special about Penn State and its students and “the experiences and the special bond they share” than there is at any other college. In general, I tend to find the whole college-nostalgia thing really odd. I loved my college years and it was a deeply formative time in my life (not just because I met The Wife there). But I graduated nearly twenty years ago, which means that as far as I can see, I have no more ‘special bond’ with someone going there now than I do with someone going to, say, the University of New Mexico. Hell, I’d be surprised if more than three or four professors I had classes with are even there anymore, so for me to start chanting “We are Wartburg!” just feels like a lot of lame clinging-to-a-past.

Everybody had wonderful college professors, everybody made friendships in college that will last their lives, everybody had experiences at college that they will carry with them all the rest of their days. Everybody. The Penn State notion that there’s something special! mystical! transcendent! about Happy Valley that other schools can’t touch is just so much mental self-boosterism. Ultimately, to me, Penn State is just the latest big institution to get caught doing Bad Acts.

In 2013, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Roger Clemens will be eligible for the baseball Hall of Fame. If you were voting, what you you do? Also your votes re: Mark McGwire, Raffy Palmiero, A-Rod and Manny Ramirez (eventually), and, what the heck, Pete Rose?

I’d vote them in, every one. Except for Pete Rose.

Baseball’s steroid era is an unfortunate time, but it was also a time when MLB really didn’t have any strong policies in place to deal with it — just a kind of “You’d better not do this!” kind of thing. If baseball was really serious, they’d have implemented testing with clear guidelines for punishments in the result of failed tests. Having someone get outed years after they played of having broken rules that weren’t really rules doesn’t seem strong enough a case to keep someone out of the Hall of Fame, especially if, in the case of a Bonds or a Clemens, they were awesome anyway. I’m not sure that steroids made Bonds such a baserunning threat or helped him in the field.

Here’s an analogy: a third-grade teacher addresses her class on the first day of school. “OK, Kids, here’s the rule. In each of your desks is a candy bar that I put there. You are NOT allowed to ever, ever, EVER, eat the candy bar. It is FORBIDDEN for you to eat the candy bar. Now, I will never check your desks to see if the candy bar is there. I will not watch what you eat at lunch time, and even though I will leave the room unattended for ten minutes each day, I will still NEVER look to see if your candy bar is there.” So the school year goes on, and ends, and the kids move on…until ten years later, when someone rats out Joey, and the school says, “Well, gee whiz, Joey, you don’t get a diploma then.” That make sense to anyone? Not me.

But Pete Rose? Well, baseball does have clear rules about gambling and betting, and he broke them, and he’s never shown any real remorse. If he wants to really apologize in a way that makes Bud Selig happy, that’s fine, but his grudging approach of “Fine, I’m sorry, you happy now? Gimme me plaque at Cooperstown now.” is just really off-putting.

Now, if they wanted to induct Rose into the Hall with an asterisk on his plaque explaining that he was banned and why, I don’t have much of a problem with that. But as it is now? He broke one of baseball’s most sacred rules, and he needs to pay the price.

More answers to come!

Share This Post

A couple of commenters point out a couple of deficiencies in my Answers post from yesterday, dealing with The West Wing.

Firstly, most seriously, Roger points out that I forgot CJ Cregg. Ugh. I can’t believe I didn’t include her. She was in most of the clips I pointed out, but somehow, it just slipped my mind to actually include her.

And that, in a way, is pretty illustrative of CJ’s character arc through the entire series. In the first season, it quickly becomes clear that while she is seen as an able press secretary, she is not really seen as an effective voice for policy, and the ‘inner circle’ of the White House senior staff seems to view her as a potential danger, given her close friendships in the press corps. This leads to an incident where CJ is told that nothing more is going on and that she can release the reporters for the night, only to have to call them back an hour later when Leo tells her that a pretty big military operation is underway. But she gradually learns to take charge, learning more and more about her job, until finally, five years in, President Bartlet makes her his new Chief of Staff, a position she holds until the series ends with the inauguration of President Santos.

Here’s a nice moment where CJ stands her ground before a couple of high-ranking military men:

And here’s another where CJ decides to smack down a snotty reporter who had earlier taken her to task on her own news program for taking time to change clothes before briefing the press on a suicide bombing in Israel in which two American teenagers were killed:

One of my favorite storylines in the series’s final episodes was CJ’s wondering about her own future. She had an opportunity to oversee a massive philanthropic fund, a welcome change from the White House; but she also had a vague job offer from incoming President Santos. At the same time she had a growing relationship with reporter Danny Concannon, and she had to figure out just what it was that she wanted to do once her time with President Bartlet was over. Seasons Six and Seven were really quite good.

Ben asks, what about Toby and Will? Well, in Charlie’s original question, he mentioned that I’d already addressed Toby, and I did in this old post of my favorite episodes, in which I make clear that Toby is my favorite character, as my list is pretty Toby-centric. Ben also asks, what about Will Bailey. And, well…I just never warmed up much to Will. He really wasn’t the most interesting character to me. Will came in as basically a replacement for Sam Seaborn, and after Sorkin left just half a season later, Will ended up being the Chief of Staff for the new Vice President. This kind of hobbled the character, because the writers made it clear that Vice President Russell was a lightweight who had no business being Vice President at all. Seeing Will in the employ of a lightweight made Will look pretty lightweight, so Will Bailey just never really rose to anything in my mind.

Still, his first meeting with Toby is a nice scene:

OK, there we go!

Share This Post

Thanks for bearing with me, folks…writing the novels is still the priority here, but I do need to get some new stuff up here once in a while, right? So anyway, let’s crank out a few more answers for Ask Me Anything! August ’12.

Charlie, who follows me on Twitter, asks: You do a nice job on your blog of listing your favorite Toby moments. What are your favorites for other WW mains?

Huh. Interesting question! I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am generally a lot less happy with the work of Aaron Sorkin nowadays, where I used to be a raving fanboy of his. A while back I re-watched the first three seasons of The West Wing (those are the only ones I have on DVD), and I found that the shows just don’t flow the way I remember them doing. I also find that the show isn’t nearly as liberal as many assume. Yes, it’s about a Democratic President and a Democratic White House, so there’s a generally liberal bent, but in large part, real honest-to-God liberalism just doesn’t carry the day very often on The West Wing. On the rare occasions that someone actually puts forth a strongly liberal idea, the conversation invariably tilts away from the liberal idea and instead to why it can’t happen, why it can’t work, how wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-we-lived-in-that-world, et cetera. And additionally, for such a liberal show, the conservative viewpoint carries the day awfully often.

But anyway, that’s not what’s asked. What we’re asked is, what are favorite episodes of mine from a standpoint of the actual characters?

President Bartlet’s finest episode, for me, is “Two Cathedrals”, the finale to Season Two. This episode finds Bartlet at his lowest point. He has just revealed his multiple sclerosis to the nation, and his beloved personal aide, Mrs. Dolores Landingham, has died in a car wreck. He comes terribly close to just chucking it all and refusing to run for a second term, after an amazing scene in which he takes the National Cathedral all to himself and scolds God in English and Latin. How Martin Sheen did not get an Emmy for this episode is beyond me.

Sam Seaborn’s best episode? I’ll pick “And It’s Surely To Their Credit”, in which Sam must come to terms with the fact that, on the President’s orders, Leo McGarry has hired conservative commentator Ainsley Hayes to work at the White House. Hayes (Emily Procter) had demolished Sam on a teevee show a few days prior, and he’s still angry with her on that level and on the principle that they’re Democrats, dammit, let the Republicans win the White House if they want to have Republicans in the White House. Sam is openly hostile to her, until someone else is even more hostile towards her — sending her a bouquet of dead flowers with a card simply reading “Bitch” — which acts like a glass of water thrown in his face. The best episodes are the ones where the heroes don’t always look their best.

Leo McGarry’s finest moment comes in the third season, “Bartlet For America”, when Leo is called before Congress to testify about Bartlet’s failure to disclose his MS during the first Presidential campaign. This episode mixes in flashbacks to the campaign, starting with the very moment when Leo came to see then-Governor Bartlet at the New Hampshire Statehouse and proposed that Bartlet run for President. John Spencer had to carry this episode, not just in the flashbacks, and in the Congress scenes, but at the end, when he had to describe what it’s like to be an alcoholic. It’s an amazing episode.

Donna Moss’s best moments, to me, came much later, during the last season, when she had a string of great moments, not any particularly great episodes in themselves. She eventually became a high-ranking member of the Vice President’s campaign, a campaign that lost (to Congressman Matthew Santos), and which drove a wedge between her and Josh Lyman. But they eventually reconciled, worked together again on the Santos campaign, and finally came together as a couple as Santos won and as Lyman became White House Chief of Staff and Donna became Chief of Staff to the new First Lady.

Actually, you know what? Donna did have a great episode, “Stirred”, which included a subplot in which Donna is trying to get Josh to have the President declare a National Proclamation or something like that for her retiring English teacher from High School. This scene is the result:

Josh Lyman? His standout moment comes in “Noel”, the Christmas episode for Season Two, which deals with Josh’s PTSD after he had been shot and very nearly killed during the assassination attempt on the President. This is an episode that really can’t work until we’ve been around these characters a while; it has to seem natural that Donna is the one who picks up on Josh’s erratic behavior and that the breaking moment comes when Josh raises his voice to the President while standing in the Oval Office. Bartlet doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t even say anything. He just glances at Leo, who takes Josh out of the room and orders him to sit with a counselor. And, at the end, this:

First Lady Abbey Bartlet’s moments come in “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen”, just after the President has been shot. Her first instincts are to react as a doctor, so she is asking all kinds of medical questions about what has happened. Then she realizes that she has to tell the anesthesiologist about the President’s MS, and she has to break the news to the rest of the team how bad Josh’s injury is. All this happens in and around flashbacks to the early campaign, when it wasn’t even clear that Bartlet even wanted to run for President and wasn’t really inspiring his team.

Here’s a great moment from a first season episode, in which Abbey and President Bartlet have their first Oval Office argument:

Charlie Young is an interesting character in that the spotlight usually isn’t directly on him, but he’s always there, as Personal Aide to the President. He’s one of my favorite characters, because he stands in pretty stark contrast to everyone else on the show: he is a lot younger than anyone else in the White House staff, and he is smart but not totally immersed in this world until he gets plucked out of a job pool (he wanted to be a messenger) for consideration as the President’s personal aide. Through the show’s run we get to see Charlie’s slow maturing and growth, during which he catches the eye of the President’s daughter Zoe, which causes the President all manner of fatherly annoyance.

In the episode “Celestial Navigation” (which happens to be the episode that made me a fan of the show, after I missed most of the first season to that point), this happens:

Did I miss anyone?

Charlie also asks: What’s your take on pros in the Olympics? Should celebs like LeBron or Federer leave the spotlight for others?

I have never been able to figure out my exact take on this. I really haven’t. While I can appreciate that basketball fans may have loved seeing the original Dream Team all together on one squad, it just looked ridiculous to me. Blowouts aren’t really all that interesting unless it’s your team doing the blowing out, and aside from a generic sense of rooting for American athletes, I really don’t care about basketball. But having pros in hockey at the last Winter Games really made for a magnificent tournament, didn’t it? So I just don’t know. I think that a case can be made for the Olympics to showcase the best in the world who choose to compete, which would include pros, and a lot of those sports don’t even have real pros anyway.

Ultimately…I just don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, sure, a Roger Federer is going to take away some spotlight from someone else, but if the Olympic Gold is therefore won by some amateur who couldn’t even hope to win a set against the likes of a Roger Federer, well, what’s the point of an Olympic Gold? So ultimately, I guess I can see some of the arguments against pros in the Olympics, but I’m just not really bothered by it. Wishy-washy? You bet!

More answers to come, and more quickly. I think. I’ve said that before, you know….

Share This Post

Time to continue providing answers to the queries posed for Ask Me Anything!. A couple of politically-themed ones from Roger today. I’m surprised that, given an election year, there were only two political questions. I’m also glad that there were only two political questions.

These are beneath the fold…but just in case any of my readers on the other side of the aisle are thinking of reading my brief political thoughts, here’s Bugs Bunny to distract you:

OK, just click away now!

What’s your take on the whole Chick-Fil-A issue? Would you boycott it over its owner’s anti-gay marriage sentiment, and more importantly, expenditures? PBS takes $$ for its children’s programming; should they still accept it? And have you ever even eaten at Chick-Fil-A? (I haven’t; there nearest ones are 2 hours away.)

I’ve never eaten at Chick-Fil-A, and to my knowledge, the nearest one to me is in Erie, PA, a place that has a lot of dining choices, even for fast food, that I would select instead. So it doesn’t matter much to me as a real-world thing.

But, I’m pretty much all for boycotts, from either side. Hey, it’s your money, and your choice of how to spend it. Now, I generally don’t go out of my way to figure out which establishments are ‘liberal’ ones and which aren’t and then spend accordingly, because frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time than that. If some of my money ends up in a Republican’s pocket when I spend it, well, them’s the breaks. However, I do have a breaking point, and when someone decides that it’s time to do some gay-bashing, that’s when you stop getting my money. That issue is, for me, a serious deal-breaker. (Which is why I will never read another word Orson Scott Card writes. He is dead to me.)

I continue to be amused at the way the conservatives who flooded Chick-Fil-A restaurants that day claimed to be defending ‘free speech’. Free speech was in no way threatened by any boycott. The Chick-Fil-A guy still has every right to spout his bigotry to his heart’s content. He has a right to speak. He doesn’t have a right to my money. Saying that this was a ‘free speech’ issue is patently stupid.

And the other question:

Who will be President January 20, 2013, and why?

Easy: At 12:01 am on January 20, 2013, the President will be Barack Obama.

But of course, Roger’s asking for who will be President twelve hours after that, when the next Presidential term of office begins. I’m unwilling to offer a prediction at this point, but let me just say that I truly hope that it’s still Barack Obama. I am well and truly horrified at the prospect of the current version of the Republican Party taking control of most, if not all, of the branches of government.

I could go into a long rant as to why…but my heart really isn’t in it. I plan to vote and donate money to the President, but when it comes to political discussion, I’m simply not interested anymore. When the conservative element in this country is willing to admit that climate change/global warming is a serious problem, and that humans are the product of billions of years of biological evolution, and that tax cuts don’t increase revenues, and that gays are people who are deserving of all rights afforded straight persons, and that women’s health should be of equal importance to men’s, and that the fetus isn’t the single most important thing in the Universe, and that we’re not irrevocably on the Road To Ruin when we take an approach to health care in this country that the entire rest of the frakking civilized world took decades ago with little ill effect, and that the free market just can’t solve every ill, maybe then I’ll be willing to listen to what they have to say. Until then, fuhgeddaboudit. I’m going to turn 41 in September, and at that point, I will have lived 25 of my 41 years under Republican policies. When I look around at the state of the country, well…color me unimpressed.

(By the way, no one asked, but overall, I’d give President Obama a B-minus thus far. I’m willing to grant that for most of his term he simply didn’t have enough willing partners in Congress to enact a more liberal agenda, but it would have been nice to see him come far, far sooner to the conclusion that bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is a fool’s chase, especially when the other party has already gone on record any number of times that they have zero intention of cooperating with you on anything. But then, the Washington/US political media’s standard definition of ‘bipartisan’ is ‘Republicans get what they want’, so what are you gonna do. I also wish that Obama had acted with more urgency when he briefly had that filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, just to get nominations — judicial and otherwise — through. I’m less than thrilled with Obama’s failure to roll back some of the Bush-era excess with regard to Presidential power. I’m hoping for more effective governance in his second term, if it comes to pass. We’ll see.)

OK, the next one will have more pleasant answers, believe me!

Share This Post

Continuing the answers for Ask Me Anything!

Chris asks: What’s your favorite vegetarian recipe? (If it’s good, I’d actually love to know the ingredients, not just the name. 🙂 )

First of all, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what’s ‘vegetarian’. I would tend to consider something vegetarian if no animals were killed for the production of the item, which means, I consider vegetarianism to be quite compatible with eating dairy products. That said, I love a pizza with no meat on it. One of my favorite pizzas has garlic and olive oil spread on the crust, topped with mozzarella cheese, and then sliced tomatoes and banana peppers. I think that pizza without meat is awfully great.

And of course, salads. Love salads. You can go in lots of directions.

And fried rice or noodle stir-fries, with lots of good veggies thrown in. I’m discovering that I like quite a few veggies either raw or cooked in stir-fry fashion (i.e., cooked on high heat very quickly). My latest discovery is that stir-fried or quick-cooked string beans make me happy. Yay!

Vegetarian sandwiches are cool, and you don’t have to pile them with salad-type veggies, either. PB&J is vegetarian, yes? Or PB and potato chips? Yum! And a favorite sandwich of mine is cream cheese and sliced strawberries on thick, toasted, whole-grain bread.

Ooooh, and beans! Love beans. I absolutely adore beans. I think beans are wonderful. I tend to include meat in my chili just out of habit, but increasingly it occurs to me that if I just add a fourth can of beans, why would I even need the meat at all? Beans are awesome!

Here are some problem areas: are eggs ‘vegetarian’? I struggle with the dividing lines thereof.

One vegetable I want to experiment with this winter (when I do more baking) is eggplant. Ultimately, I don’t do a whole lot with specific recipes yet, in terms of vegetarianism. My approach has been to gradually incorporate more vegetables in my diet, in keeping with Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” But as I explore this stuff more, I will post recipes and various discoveries as I go!

Chris also asks: And, if you could have one – just one – superhero ability, which would it be and why?

Flight. Wouldn’t it be amazing to fly!

Jeremy asks: My question is: Would you rather invent a true blue rose or the next best smart phone? Why?

I had to do some Googling for this one. It turns out that, as roses evolved, they are incapable of producing a true blue color in their petals, because of the genetics involved. So, of course, people have been trying for years to force the issue and create a rose that will blossom true blue. The things you learn!

And frankly, I’d rather do that than come up with the next great smart phone (or whatever other electronic gizmo). The first true blue rose can only happen once, but there will always be a next great smart phone, or laptop, or tablet, or whatever.

Unless…unless what Jeremy is asking is, would I want to create the first great whatever-the-next-thing-is. If I want to create the first iPad or iPod…or the first Macintosh…or so on. But even so…I’ll take the rose. As William Blake wrote:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Actually, I’m not sure that applies…but I like that poem, anyway.

More answers to come!

Share This Post

UPDATE: Link fixed!

Hey, folks, one last reminder that I’m still soliciting questions, queries, and interrogatives for the August 2012 edition of Ask Me Anything!. Just drop in in comments on this post, or on Twitter, or on Facebook, or in e-mail. Heck, you can try Morse code, but I wouldn’t vouch for its reliability these days. I’ve got some good queries already, so go ahead and throw in some more!

Share This Post