Tag: Ask Me Anything February 2013

(UPDATED BELOW!)

Vasili Kalinnikov is mostly unknown these days, mainly because he was really only starting to show his potential when he tragically died of tuberculosis when he was only 35 years of age. Still, a few of his works are still heard today, with the most familiar (if ‘familiar’ is even a word that can be applied to him) to his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, which is the work on tap today.

This is one of my favorite of all Russian symphonies, because it just oozes “Russian symphony-ness”. Yes, that’s a term I just made up, but if you know what I’m talking about, then you get it! Everything you’d ever want in a Russian symphony can be found here: gorgeously lyrical melodies (including one that’s incredibly ear-wormy), a cyclic structure that sees melodic material from previous movements referenced and recast, terrific orchestration that uses the full complement of the modern orchestra and yet is very clear and precisely classical in its application, and most of all, that wonderful Russian fatalistic brooding that is yet somehow not entirely divorced from optimism. It’s not a challenging symphony, but it is a rewarding one, sure-footed and confident; it’s good enough that I think it should be heard a lot more than it is, and it’s good enough that I wonder what Kalinnikov’s later symphonies, say his fifth and sixth ones, might have been like had he lived to write past the second one.

OK, as I write this it’s late and I don’t want to miss the day, so here’s the Symphony No 1 by Kalinnikov. I will update this post tomorrow with a few more annotations, though, so tune back in!

UPDATE 4-13-13: OK, here are a few annotations. The symphony’s introductory passage sets the brooding mood quire nicely, and as you listen, make careful note of that first theme, because it will recur at the beginning of the fourth movement. Of particular note in the first movement, however, is the second theme (which in this recording comes at about the 1:07 mark). This lyrical tune, sung first by the cellos, sounds nice at first, but I have found over the years that after the movement is done, that melody lodges in the brain like few others. There then follows a third figure, similar to the first, that leads the movement into the development passage (after a repeat).

The second movement, the slow movement, is utterly lovely. I don’t like to indulge visual metaphors much when I discuss music, but the second movement suggests to me the lovely delicacy and fragility of something like, oh, a painted egg. Again, make careful note of that main melody, heard first by the oboes and the violins(at 14:11) and then echoed immediately by the lower strings, because that very melody will return as well in the last movement.

The third movement is a finely constructed scherzo, but the last movement is where everything comes together. After a reprise of the symphony’s opening bars, Kalinnikov launches into a brisk tune that almost has a folk-dance character (27:52) which almost immediately gives way to a more lyrical, but also dance-like, tune (28:09). And then, at 29:49, we hear that wonderful lyric theme from the first movement again, before being plunged right back into the dance. All this interweaves for a while, until Kalinnikov suddenly gets everything building up to the 33:20 mark, when the brass section starts to peal out that delicate, gossamer theme from the slow movement! No more ‘fragile painted egg’; instead now that same melody has all the force of great church bells. Things calm back down, as if Kalinnikov senses that we’re not quite ready for the church bells, so he builds again, starting at 34:16, but this time to gathering energy is undeniable, and again we crash into that slow movement theme, again pealed out by the brass, but if anything it’s even more bell-like (35:01).

Musical moments like the closing pages of the Kalinnikov Symphony No. 1 are why I love the Russian masters so much: the best of them seem to have an internal sense of dramatic pacing that allows them to close things out in the most satisfying of ways. This is a great symphony!

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OK, folks, I think I can finally wrap it up in this post! Hooray and Huzzah! (And remember, if you have something you’d like to ask, always feel free. I’ve got tons of ways you can get hold of me — e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, you name it. And if you want to remain anonymous, I always honor such requests.)

Charlie asks:

It’s Spring 2000, The West Wing is well into Season 2 and you’ve decided to write a spec script to see if Sorkin might let you write a few episodes of Season 3 for him. What would your episode be about?

Huh. I’ve never given that any thought, actually. But since I saw this question, I’ve kicked it around a bit. What kind of West Wing episode would I have written?

Well, I remember reading someplace — perhaps in the introduction of one of the TWW screenplay books that were released some years ago — that originally the President himself was to play a much smaller role in the show. I suspect that ultimately they decided it was just too difficult to keep that conceit in place, especially since they had Martin Sheen playing him. I would have taken that concept a bit farther, and written an episode in which we never see anyone in the White House who ranks higher than Mrs. Landingham. No Sam, CJ, Toby, Josh, or Leo. And certainly no President Bartlet. Just a day in the life of Donna, Ginger, Bonnie, Cathy, Margaret, and those other two guys whose names I could never remember. How hard would this have been? Well, just have the entire senior staff and the President away on a political trip or a diplomatic trip or something, but stay in the White House. Perhaps some kind of domestic crisis could happen, and we watch as the junior staffers try to execute the instructions given to them by their distant bosses. Or something like that — but a real, good sense of what it’s like to work in the White House at that level.

And Chris asks:

Which book scene have you most wanted to live out? Must give book, scene, and which character you would be.

Which heroine (if any) have you fantasized about being?

Taking the second one first: that’s interesting, because I’m hard-pressed at first to think of such a scenario. In truth, I don’t tend to do a whole lot of ‘identifying’ with fictional characters, be they heroes or heroines. I think back to when I used to play with kids in the neighborhood, and even when we did the whole “Let’s play Star Wars!” thing, I was never thinking, “I’m Han Solo!” or “I’m Darth Vader!” or “I’m Luke!” (And of course, back then, I was still in the ‘girls are squicky’ phase of life, so I certainly never yelled out, “I’m Leia!”.) Identifying with fictional characters just has never been something I’ve done much of, which is why one of the most common complaints about the Star Wars Prequels — “There’s no one for the audience to identify with!” — tends to make zero sense to me.

This extends to my writing. When I’m running my characters through some predicament or other, I almost never think along the lines of, “OK, what would I do in this situation?” I don’t do that because I am not in that situation, they are. So the question I end up asking is, “OK, what is she (or he, or they, or it) going to do in that situation?” I am not one of the Princesses in SPACE!!!, so what I would do if stuck in a sticky wicket in SPACE!!! isn’t much use in my story. And that way, I find that the characters really do surprise me an awful lot of the time.

Now, I have fantasized about settings of stories. Oh yes, that I’ve done. And I’d love to live in many of the fictional — especially science fictional — worlds I’ve read about. Less so the fantasy ones, because I’m not really cut out for the medieval lifestyle, but I’d love to be on spaceships and whatnot. And I’d love to own a lightsaber and use it to defend myself and peace and justice in the Old Republic. Or I’d love to roam the decks of the starship Enterprise. Or I’d love to have my own small ship and eke out a living in the Firefly/Serenity universe.

So characters? I don’t fantasize myself into them much, at all. Settings? Oh yeah.

Which takes me to Chris’s first question, which at first glance seems to have already been answered, but not really, actually. There are a lot of book scenes that thrilled me when I read them, and which I would love to see played out. Not with me as one of the main characters, but as “Man with Axe #3” in the background, or “Guy at bar”. These are scenes that are incredibly vivid to me, scenes that played out in my head almost as if I was there, when I read them.

:: The Battle of Andarien, The Darkest Road, Guy Gavriel Kay. The entire final act of that book, winding down the trilogy, is so masterful that whenever I re-read the series, I basically block out enough time so I can do the entire last 200 pages or so in one go.

:: David Bowman’s final trip into the Stargate, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book version, where Arthur C. Clarke is more objectively descriptive than Stanley Kubrick’s odd psychedelia. (Which I greatly admire, by the way.)

:: The final scene of To Kill a Mockingbird…although I suppose the movie really caught that extremely well, didn’t it?

:: One of the first scenes in Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. When a six-year-old Jesus makes his own face appear in all the town’s Passover bread.

:: And there’s a pie fight in Stephen King’s 11-22-63. Because hey, what I wouldn’t give to be a full-bore, all-the-stops-pulled-out pie fight.

And with that, I think we’re done with Ask Me Anything! February 2013. Thanks for all the questions, folks! (And if I missed one, let me know and I’ll do an addendum.)

See you again in August! Well, sooner than that. But for Ask Me Anything!, see you in August.

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Continuing the cavalcade of answers from Ask Me Anything!, so that I can be well-rested by the time the August edition rolls around!

Roger’s final questions:

Your solution to the immigration problem.

Are we in a “post-racial society,” yet, and if not, what will it take?

The US can kill Americans abroad if they are “terrorists”; your thoughts.

The copyright law in my lifetime has expanded the effective date tremendously in my lifetime. Does this distress you?

Are you concerned about MPAA/RIAA copyright overreach legislation such as SOPA?

Well…huh. In all honesty, I haven’t thought much about the immigration ‘problem’, from a policy standpoint. That said, I’m not even sure what the immigration ‘problem’ even is. Do we have too many people trying to come to America? Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how that’s a bad thing. My general view — and again, I have not thought this out in any great detail and don’t have any expertise to offer — is that we should be making it easier, rather than harder, for the peoples of the world who wish to come here to do so, that they might live here, learn here, work here, establish their families here, and add to the next generation here. And I have a very hard time seeing anti-immigration arguments as anything other than “GAHHH more brown people wanna live by me!”, which is not something I generally endorse.

Are we ‘post-racial’? No. Not even close, I’m sad to say. What will it take? I hate this thought, but I generally think it might take another bunch of centuries of human evolution in order to squash the “fear of the other” that is at the heart of racism.

Killing American citizens abroad if they’re ‘terrorists’: this is a really tough one, but generally, I tend to fall on the side of ensuring that due process is granted in as many cases as humanly possible. Realistically, there will be times when our soldiers abroad are in combat against someone who may have once been an American citizen but who is now fighting for an enemy. But I think what Roger’s getting at here is: If such a person isn’t in actual combat but we know they’re sipping coffee in some cafe someplace, should we be sending assassins in to shoot them? Again, I think no, but again, I think realistically, that’s what’s likely to happen. But in general I’m very fearful of what the War on Terror hath wrought, in terms of Presidential power (this is, by far, my main area of disappointment with President Obama) and in terms of due process in this country. Plus — and this is all I’ll say about this — but it strikes me as odd that one person fails to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb and we all have to take off our shoes at the airports, but mass shooting after mass shooting happens in our country, and we don’t do a thing about it.

And copyright law is a train wreck that will continue to unfold. I have no doubt that next time Mickey Mouse is getting close to entering the public domain, Disney will buy another member of Congress (last time it was Sonny Bono) and get the legislation passed to make it another twenty years of copyright. As for MPAA/RIAA overreach, that stuff really pisses me off. Let’s cripple the Internet because of a problem that will never be eradicated, and which I frankly refuse to believe is a problem in the first place. Those industries can tell me all they want how much money they’re losing, but I’m not believing for one second the numbers given to me by an industry that tries to claim that Titanic lost money. Whatever.

OK, just a few left, I think! We’ll finish up this week, for realz!

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And we keep on plugging away!

First of all, I need to revise and extend my remarks from the other day, regarding what fictional planet I would like to live upon. I don’t think I gave the question enough thought at the time, so here are some additions:

The Mars of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (note to self: you’re way overdue for a re-read) strikes me as an amazing place that I would love to see, especially if I, like the long-lived characters of his books, get to see Mars all the way from dead red planet to verdant, ocean-covered blue world. I’d love to see that. I saw these photos om Tumblr the other day, comprising what Mars might look like were it completely terraformed:

Wow.

I’m not sure about any one specific planet, but the Commonwealth of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth novels (one duology and a later trilogy) is an amazing place. Hamilton takes the idea of wormholes between star systems and does something amazing with them: he puts them right on the planet surfaces, so that one can travel from one world to another by train.

I also very much would love to live in Iain M. Banks’s Culture setting. I can’t remember any specific planets (I’ve only read two of the books thus far), but I find the idea of a post-scarcity world deeply interesting.

Ultimately, though, I think I’d be that strange soul who doesn’t really live on any one world. As long as it had room for my books, I think I’d want to live on…a ship. Yup, a ship. A good ship. With a good crew. You can’t take the sky from me!

OK, and now, back to new questions that I haven’t answered yet. These few will be short answers, just because I don’t have long answers to offer on them.

Roger continues his queries as follows:

You get to vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame. How do you deal with the steroid era players?

You get to vote in the Football Hall of Fame. Do you pick a punter? If so, who?

For any Hall of Fame, who has been woefully ignored?

I’ll package those all together.

First, the steroid players. I let them in, if their achievements seem to really merit inclusion. McGwire? Bonds? Yes. Sosa? Palmeiro? Ehhhh…maybe not. Maybe those guys wait.

The problem is that Major League Baseball had no real policy for how to deal with steroids in that era. In the absence of a specific policy dealing with banned substances, I just don’t see a compelling reason that a bunch of sportswriters should get to appoint themselves Keepers Of Baseball Morality. (And besides, I’ve grown quite tired of sportswriters in general. I love good sports writing, as much as I love all good writing, but sportswriters in this country have, in general, become an entire class of sanctimonious asses who get offended if you question their brilliant insights. The idea of some of these jerks standing up as moral bulwarks against the horror of a guy who took drugs to increase his home run production? Who cares?

To me, if we’re going to decide that those players are all ineligible for the Hall, then we also have to basically vacate the results and standings of every season played during the steroid era. Otherwise, it’s just selective morality.

Punters in the Football Hall of Fame? Absolutely. And special teams players, too. Those guys are football players, they contribute to their teams’ successes and failures, and they should he in the Hall, if they’re good enough.

That said, who has been ignored? The Bills’ Andre Reed and Steve Tasker leap to mind. Every year they’re eligible and don’t get in, and inevitably I hear a very deeply silly argument about “How can a team that lost the Super Bowl have that many players in the Hall?” It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Super Bowl Winners, or the Hall of Stats. Tons of guys should be in who never even got to the Super Bowl.

And for my money, if there’s any debate as to whether Kurt Warner is a Hall of Famer, it should end the second he’s eligible. That guy goes in, or the Hall is a joke.

Finally Roger asks:

Did you watch the Super Bowl? If so, did the refs blow the (non-)holding call at the end of the game?

I watched all of the first half and a good chunk of the second half, after the blackout ended. We attended a Super Bowl party at The Wife’s boss’s house, and he lives…out there. Way out there. You go to the Boonies, take a left, drive past East Bumf***, and then another eight miles and you’re there. We left a little after the blackout began, and got home for most of the fourth quarter. Had the blackout not happened, we would have missed almost all the second half. (Interestingly, on the way home, I got to drive through my first ever sobriety checkpoint! Luckily, I hadn’t been drinking at all that night.)

As for the play in question, I was only partly paying attention at that point. I’ve heard arguments both ways on that non-call, and I honestly am not sure. The refs blew quite a few calls in that game, but then, Jim Harbaugh’s play-calling in that situation was awful. I don’t know what possessed him to get first-and-goal that late in the game, when his running game had been clicking all night and when the Ravens’ defense was tired, and then throw four times. And frankly, Harbaugh’s post-game demeanor was pretty douchey. So even if it was an egregiously missed call, I personally am not terribly offended. Karma, and all that.

We’re getting closer to being finished! Great questions this time around…the gauntlet is thrown down for August!

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Another post or two, and I should be able to put Ask Me Anything! February 2013 to bed. Huzzah! (And remember, folks, you don’t have to wait for February or August to ask me anything. I’m always on the prowl for topic suggestions!)

My friend and writing cohort (and Princesses beta-reader) Lynda asks:

When going back to edit your writing, how do you determine what to keep and what to weed out?

My first goal when editing is to look for needless words and get rid of them. In On Writing, Stephen King says that the formula for the second draft is “1st Draft – 10%”, and I tend to agree with that. I like long, wordy books, but not too wordy. Of course, what counts as being ‘too wordy’ is open to debate and opinion, but in general, I really try to tighten up the prose when I start editing. Adverbs? I try to use as few as possible to begin with, and the ones that remain usually perish. Overly long descriptive passages get on my nerves, too, so I try to cut those down as much as possible. And then there is the fact that I can really be repetitive at times in my writing. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it’s a combination of two factors: first, that I don’t always recall what I’ve written before, and thus stand the chance of writing it again; and second, because I suppose I feel a certain amount of insecurity that the reader isn’t going to understand what I’m really getting at unless I pound the point home with a ball-peen hammer.

What I find myself doing, often when editing, is reminding myself that you gotta trust the reader to understand. This is where beta readers come in so handy, and I really wish I’d been using them more in my previous writing projects. When a beta reader comes at you with a question of the “I’m not sure what’s going on here” variety, that’s a red flag. And if more than one of your beta readers questions you on the same point, than that’s a red flag accompanied by sirens and guys shooting flares into the sky and your wife screaming “Stop the car, Frank!” in your ear. (I know my name’s not Frank. Deal with it!) Luckily for me, that didn’t happen much with Princesses, and I had six people read that thing, and I chose six folks whose tastes I can be fairly assured vary somewhat across a number of genres.

That’s the mechanical stuff. Sometimes I’m looking to tighten up pacing or eliminate general flab, and make the book or story flow better. How do I decide, then, what entire scenes to cut? Well…that’s a bit tougher, and it relies on trusting my own instincts when it comes to the storytelling. The question I always end up asking myself is this: Does the reader NEED to know this in order for the story to make sense? If the answer is ‘No’, then it’s not necessarily a slam-dunk that the passage is to be cut, but that is an indicator that maybe I can lose it.

In the specific case of editing Princesses, I had a lot of flabby material toward the front of the book, of the ‘establishing the setting’ variety, and based on feedback, I cut a lot of that in the edits. I also added in a couple of brief scenes in order to strengthen the flow and establish the characters more than the setting. That’s another good point to keep in mind: material that strengthens the characters tends to have a longer lease on life than stuff that’s just there because it’s cool or whatever. Of course, you have to have a relatively liberal notion of what a reader ‘needs’ to know, because if you really make that rule a harsh one, you can go too far the other way. And that’s no good. Unless you’re Hemingway. And you’re not.

There was also one scene in Princesses that I came this close to scrapping completely, simply because it didn’t really move things along — and in fact, I still don’t think it moves things along. But I left it in, because one of my beta readers praised that particular scene for entirely different reasons. So I kept it, on the basis that once in a while, it’s OK to have something happen just because it’s kind of cool.

My friend (and political soul-mate — HA!) Scotty asks:

“Into Darkness”-excited or no, Imax or no, and who’s the villain?

No, no, dunno. Next!

OK, more detail. Star Trek Into Darkness comes out this summer. Am I excited? Not really. As I’ve said a few times, in this space and others, I liked the first one, but mainly because I like explodey spaceshippy stuff. As Star Trek, it was a train wreck, and as science fiction, it was utter crap. But it was slickly made and fun to watch and I liked the cast, so I’ll see the sequel. But ‘excited’? Not really. I won’t see it on IMAX, either, just because I have a feeling the sensory overload of seeing a movie like that on so huge a screen would not be terribly pleasant. I like a standard movie screen just fine, thank you. I like IMAX movies, but ones that are specifically made for that format.

And the villain? I have no idea. I do think that Khan would be a staggeringly unoriginal and uninspired thing to do. So would Gary Mitchell. I don’t know what they’re up to, but on the basis of the first movie and the trailers for this one, I’m not holding out hope for any sense of originality whatsoever. If JJ Abrams is gonna direct Star Wars Episode VII, I’m glad that he’s not bringing his Trek writers along for the ride.

Still more to come! Progress is being made. I think. (Unless you folks sneak in any questions after the fact….)

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OK, I need to pick up the pace a little bit here….

Continuing with Roger’s queries:

How many copies of the Orson Scott Card’s Superman comic will you be buying. I KNOW you’re his biggest fan. 😉

Heh. Clearly Roger already knows the answer to this: Zero, nada, zip, zilch. No way, not in a million years, never. In that order.

Not one penny will ever find its way from my pocket to Orson Scott Card’s, so long as it’s within my power to prevent it. Heh!

If you are selected pope: will you serve, and if so, what will your philosophy be?

Another one that I can answer briefly: I would sell off all of the Vatican’s art treasures to museums around the world, and give the proceeds to the victims of the church’s pedophile priests. I would also order the release of any and all documents involving that scandal to the world’s law enforcement agencies. And if, after doing those things, I hadn’t been poisoned or shot, I would immediately resign.

Fracking: economic boon, or ecological disaster in the making?

Both, which is what’s so damned scary about it. We know what happens to the Earth when we massively produce energy using fossil fuels. Why we’re not throwing as much effort as humanly possible into developing as many clean-energy production technologies we can, is utterly beyond me. I do not think that history is going to speak well of the era in which we are living. We have our collective heads in the sand, and I find it extraordinarily disturbing.

OK, those were depressing. Where’s a flying pie when you need one?!

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Continuing to answer questions posed in Ask Me Anything! (And feel free to pop in with some more, if you so desire, folks!)

These were e-mailed by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

Was your high school safe? Drug or gang problems? Did it have any anti-bullying programs? Do you worry about your daughter’s schools? What about the opposite: what were the strengths of your school?

As far as I know, yes, it was pretty safe. There weren’t any anti-bullying programs to speak of, as in the mid-to-late 1980s, bullying was mainly seen as a ‘rite of passage’ kind of thing. You just had to get through it, back then. A shame, but that’s just the way it was — especially in my town, which is a small conservative town on the edges of Northern Appalachia. I took more ribbing than I’m sure I would be subjected to today in a more bullying-conscious era, but even so, I don’t think I got it all that badly. Mainly it was directed at my weight. And in all honesty, as I recall it, any bullying I suffered pretty much dried up by tenth grade. I think those kids just eventually lost interest, and my sense of it all was that they bullied because it was expected of them, not because they were bullies. If that makes sense.

Gangs and drugs? If they existed at Allegany Central, I had no idea. I’m sure that there was somebody in my class — in all classes, really — who was a source for drugs, if I wanted to go that route. But to this day, I couldn’t begin to tell you who that person even was. It probably says something that I was able to get through high school with that degree of blissful unawareness of whatever local criminal element there was. I didn’t even learn of some of the stuff that went on until Facebook came along, twenty years later, and I saw lots of photos from back then — photos of parties attended by lots of my classmates, parties with lots of beer at hand. I never knew about any of that stuff. I just wasn’t in that crowd…and yet, I wasn’t really ostracized at school or made to feel like I was a lesser person for not being part of that crowd.

Do I worry about The Daughter’s school? Yes, but at a low level. Our particular district has a number of good programs in place to minimize that kind of thing — particulary bullying — and to address it if it happens. She does seem to be trending, socially, in similar ways to myself and what I know of The Wife’s high school experiences, in that she has a cluster of close friends but she’s not wildly social or anything.

One thing I do like about her school right now — the middle school — is that each grade level changes classes at different times. Any bullying that happened when I was in school mainly happened in the halls when everybody was in the hall at once, so seventh graders had to run the gauntlet of eleventh graders. That doesn’t happen at her school now: eighth graders don’t change classes at the same time as anyone else. I don’t know if the high school does that too, but we’ll find out.

Do you volunteer or donate to any charities? How did you pick it/them?

I should probably volunteer more time than I do. I give to the United Way through work (The Store has a long-standing relationship with The United Way), and I donate to a number of different charities and charitable efforts through my church. Mainly I pick-and-choose the ones that sound like they’re doing good things, although I do try to keep my donations ‘local’ as much as possible. I donate to the local library (although not enough).

Hmmmm. I really should do more charitable work…and in terms of volunteering, I am a decent writer….

We’ve been watching BBC’s “Top Gear” on DVDs. Ever watch it? If you did, what did you think? What were your first vehicles, how did you get them (from family? from friends? bought used? new?), and did you love or hate them?

Without getting into too many details, I must in all honesty note that my parents have been of unusually enormous help to my family and I, in the vehicular department. They’ve come to our automotive rescue more times than anybody has any reasonable hope of anticipating. The number of times we would have been well and truly screwed if not for their staggering generosity and help is…well, it’s more than zero. It’s more than five, even.

Anyhow: the first car that I owned outright, mine, myself, was a Plymouth Colt. I loved that car. We drove it on our honeymoon. The only downside of that car was that it didn’t have A/C. After five wonderful years, it threw a rod while I was driving home on I-90 in Buffalo. This was less than a month after an oil change at one of those ‘Kwik-Lube’ joints (and that particular business is long-since closed down). I’ve always wondered if they screwed up the oil change, either by not putting enough in, or not putting the drain plug back on, or just not putting the oil in at all. That car should not have thrown a #*$&%*!! rod. (You know, it’s amazing what you remember: I know what I was on my way home from doing. I’d gone to Barnes&Noble to buy a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Very strange. This was before I had a cell phone, so I had to wait for a patrolling cop to come along and call a tow for me.)

The Wife’s first car that I knew of was a silver Subaru Justy. Tiny little vehicle that she later wrecked when someone making a left in the opposite direction neglected to, you know, actually see her there. Next was a Geo Metro that got amazing mileage, but which she hated. Interesting….

As for Top Gear, I’ve never seen it. Should I? What say you, readers? I know nothing about that show, in all honesty!

More answers to come!

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Continuing the cavalcade of answers to Ask Me Anything! questions. (Entries still welcome, by the way — ask things in comments here!)

The Herkmeister (hey, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s with that name? There’s gotta be a story there!) offers a couple of Star Wars questions.

So, Disney recently announced it would be making a bunch of stand-alone Star Wars films in addition to a new trilogy. The buzz is that first up will be a movie about Yoda (which is awesome because Yoda), but if it were up to you, which Star Wars character would you like to see get his or her own spin-off film?

This is tough. I’m genuinely not sure of what direction they’re looking to take here. How many movies are they thinking of doing? Another trilogy plus a ‘spin-off’ film, with the possibility of more depending on box office? The plans mentioned thus far are really nebulous.

Frankly, I’d like to see the story of how the Jedi began…who was the first person to figure out the existence of The Force, what that looked like, and so on. I think that might be interesting. I have no idea if that tale has been told in any of the hundreds of “Expanded Universe” stories created over the last twenty years. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a film made that tells a story inside the existing films — maybe track the travails of the Rebel alliance after they get beaten at Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. There was a wonderful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called ‘Lower Decks’, which focused on a group of lower-ranked crewmembers of the Enterprise, people for whom Picard and Riker and the rest were all intimidating folk to look up to. That sort of thing might be cool.

And frankly, I think it would be cool if George Lucas made a Jar Jar Binks movie just to say “F*** you!” to the haters. Ha!

Also, any chance of more “Fixing the Prequels” posts?

Yeah, I really need to finish those up. I’m hanging my head in shame. If ever I should get that done (I was about a third of the way through Revenge of the Sith, if I remember rightly), it should be now, as Star Wars fandom seems to be revving up again. I do continue to sulk at the calcification of pop cultural opinion that the Prequels were one unremitting slog of suck, but those last windmills do still beckon, and I suppose I should tilt at them once and for all.

OK, more answers to come!

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It’s time to start answering the questions submitted by You Fine Readers in Ask Me Anything!. As always, I’m still open to questions, so don’t feel you have to stop now!

I’ll start by putting Andy out of his misery, who always finds something off-beat to ask. In this case:

When you eat anything with Alfredo sauce do you get a nasty smell that lingers on your lips after you are done?

I am honestly not sure…but this is likely because I consume Alfredo sauce very rarely. I never keep it at home, and the only time I ever have it is if we’re at Olive Garden and I get the seafood pasta. And we haven’t been to Olive Garden in at least five years.

I do know that according to an episode of The Frugal Gourmet, sometimes Italians will, after a garlicky meal, eat an entire coffee bean or two in order to mask and absorb the garlic odor. Might be worth trying. Or just drink more so you don’t care!

So in my annual pilgrimage up north, I see a lot of the old telephone/ electric COPPER wire that the R.Rs ran along the tracks on poles. My question to you is, with the price of copper these days why aren’t the RR companies taking advantage of all of it and arranging to have a crew whose sole purpose is to take it down and arrange to take it to a scrap yard?

Huh. I’m actually unaware of so much copper wire still strung in such a way. I find it hard to believe that they would leave so expensive a commodity just hanging there, so maybe those wires are actually still in use in some way? I also have to think that if they were able to come up with that much copper to recycle or repurpose, those companies wouldn’t rely on simple scrapyards. The recycling procedures would undoubtedly be a lot more rigorous than that!

Andy also mentioned the glass insulators on the cable poles. These are, in fact, highly collectible by railroad enthusiasts. My father once worked with a gent who was a bigtime railroad enthusiast (he had an amazing HO layout in his basement), who kept a couple of those insulators on a shelf in his office, along with some other railroad-related bric-a-brac.

For being ex elite military guys, was it just me or did the ‘A-Team’ shoot A LOT but never hit anybody!!

I tend to think they were missing on purpose, because they were actually extremely good marksmen, and were just trying to get the job done without causing injury or loss of life. That inspires more confidence than assuming that they really couldn’t hit a damned thing.

And you also have to factor in that, at the end of each episode, when they unleashed their home-made weapon upon the bad guys (you know, the ones who said “We’re gonna kill you in two hours, but for now, we’ll just lock you in this warehouse with four vehicles and an entire Home Depot’s worth of tools, complete with welding equipment!”), the A-Team fellows were able to hit anything they wanted with their potato-guns.

Here are three from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

The sun is starting to have some heat to it (and days are not so brief), but all this warming is exposing more and more dirt. Is your heart lifted by hints of spring or crushed by all the wetness and extra dirtiness?

Here’s the thing about spring: In Buffalo, spring sucks.

Our summers are great, for those who like that sort of thing. We’re never hyper-hot (although I suspect that global warming will be seeing to that in the next bunch of years), nor are we as humid as the east coast. Autumn here is spectacular. Seriously! Vermont and New Hampshire may get all the autumn press, but our autumns are just wonderful: cool, comfy, and beautiful. And then there are our winters, which are…just fine. I’m not kidding here. I’ll take quite a bit of snow over the endless months of bonechilling winds that dominate the winters of the Plains.

Spring?

Ugh.

Spring here is wet and gray and damp and muddy and dirty and…well, it’s two months of unpleasantness. And then it takes most of May for the trees to get green again.

Ultimately, I don’t start getting into a better mood, at least about the weather, until mid-May around here.

Ugh!

Do you have a cell phone? Would you ever give up your landline?

Yup, I have a cell. It’s a LG…well, I have no idea what the model number is. It’s a pretty basic phone, though, and not a smartphone. I suspect that our next phones will be smartphones, as it appears that the market is going to be smartphones only (except for maybe a couple of super-basic phones for old folks). No touchscreen, no Internet. I’m rockin’ it, 2005-style!

I do use it as an mp3 player, and it takes pretty nice photos, for being only 3 megapixels. I would use it as a calendar, but that particular function is just cumbersome enough to use that I don’t; I use my tablet and an actual paper calendar instead. I do look forward to joining the smartphone universe, but it’s nowhere near a high priority. We’ll get there when attrition forces us to do so.

But the landline? That’s gone! Who the heck needs that anymore? Bye bye, landline! The only calls we were getting there were telemarketers, so what was the point? It’s history, and we’ve not looked back.

Ever been to any ballet? Did you enjoy it? How about opera? Gilbert and Sullivan?

Ballet: Yes, but only twice. A few more times for opera.

I saw a ballet troupe when I was in high school (our town had a visiting artists series of some sort), and it was really quite wonderful. I saw another in college. I don’t recall the specific ballets performed, unfortunately, but I enjoyed each. I keep thinking that we need to see The Nutcracker one of these years, but somehow I never realize it’s being performed until a day or two before, by which time it’s too late to plan the outing.

Opera: I haven’t been to one since college, which makes me sad, but The Wife just does not care for it, at all, so I’d have to go by myself. I am highly intrigued by the live broadcasts of operas from the Met at IMAX movie theaters, so I may do that, someday. My first opera was in high school, when my sister took me to see The Magic Flute. I saw a couple more in college, most memorably, Madame Butterfly. I never saw a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta, though, which is a shame, because I love the music; “Behold the Lord High Executioner!” is one of my standard hum-to-myself tunes, and one of my favorite clever bits of film music comes during the chase scene at the end of Foul Play, when the action music is interspersed with quotes from The Mikado.

On both scores, I’d love to see more!

That’s where we’ll stop for now. Got some good questions going this time, and remember, feel free to ask some more!

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