Tag: Ask Me Anything

I swear that I must have the most polite readers of anyone in all of Blogistan, because I solicited questions for a round of Ask Me Anything! way back in February, and then I only answered a little more than half of them; and still, no one has said to me anything along the lines of “Hey, turkey, howzabout answering those questions!” You all knew I’d get round to it sometime, after all. And here I am, because in these parts, it’s all about you!

:: From Roger: What 2006 death affected you most deeply?

Well, we’re now sufficiently far into 2007 that I don’t remember who all died in 2006! So it’s off to Wikipedia, which helpfully lists deaths by year (I assume that I can trust Wikipedia on the subject of someone being dead, right?). Here are a few names that leap out: Jack Williamson, Ed Bradley, Buck O’Neil, Tetsuro Tamba, Malcolm Arnold, Ann Richards, Maynard Ferguson, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Mako, Jim Baen, Gyorgi Ligeti, Timothy Hildebrandt, Leslie Alcock, Lloyd Bentsen, William Sloane Coffin, Stanislaw Lem, Buck Owens, Kirby Puckett, Octavia Butler, Dennis Weaver, Robert E. Rich Sr., Phil Brown, Coretta Scott King. (That’s a partial list, of course. If I didn’t list someone, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care that they died!)

:: From Traci: How much snow have you gotten this winter?

Now that winter’s over and the ever-present spectre of April snowfall seems to have finally moved on, it seems that we can fill in the blanks on snowfall 2006-2007. According to the Buffalo News from this past Sunday, Buffalo had received 89 inches of snow this season to date; and remember, around 30 of that came in a single instance: the “surprise storm” of October. Had that storm not transpired, this would have been one of the mildest winters, in terms of snowfall, that anyone could remember.

By comparison, as of that same date Rochester had recorded 106.9 inches (almost exactly a foot-and-a-half more than Buffalo), and Syracuse had recorded 140.2 inches (over four feet more than Buffalo).

:: From Jason: Who said, “I’d rather read the worst book ever written than watch the best movie ever made?”

I had to resort to Google for this one, and now that I know it, I’m surprised that I didn’t recognize the quote. Bummer. I’ll leave this one unanswered for those of you who want to Google it yourselves.

:: From Simon: From your ROWR feature (and going back to when it went under a different name I can’t recall right now), can you cull your top five?

Top five? Wow, that’s tough. Hmmmmm….I guess I’d go with Gillian Anderson, Sela Ward, Kate Winslett, Sophie Marceau, and from the “Retro” selections, Audrey Hepburn.

:: From Charlie: If you could become (in a poof-your-wish-is-granted sort of instantaneous fashion) the most talented person in the world at any one thing, what thing would you choose?

This is a tricky question, I must admit: it’s tempting to say “Writing” or whatever other passions I have, but if I became spontaneously talented as such, I’d lose out on the whole “thrill of discovery” that comes with exploring a new hobby or vocation, and the lessons learned via experience. So I wouldn’t want to spontaneously become the next Gene Wolfe or Guy Gavriel Kay.

However, as a kid I was always terrible at any game or sporting activity that involved throwing. I had a poor arm combined with miserable aim. So I’d like to be able to throw something and always be able to hit my target. How would this be useful? Heck, I don’t know. But it would be cool.

And maybe speed-reading, although I’m not sure that if I had the best reading speed on Earth, that in the course of reading War and Peace in an hour I’d miss some pretty important stuff.

:: From Mrs. Mind-Muffins:

What’s the best advice you ever received? Did you follow it?

Not so much advice per se, but as the doctors were breaking to us the likely severity of Little Quinn’s medical problems (about a month after his birth), one of them kept saying over and over again, “No one is giving up on him.”

And:

What would like to be doing n your life five years from now?

Writing, reading, carpentry, a little gardening, listening to music, cooking, eating pizza and chicken wings, talking Star Wars with friends, basking in the afterglow of the Sabres winning the Cup and the Bills winning the Super Bowl, enjoying apple pie (and the occasional coconut cream), walking with The Wife and the Daughter, watching as Buffalo’s population begins climbing again, looking pretty damned prescient when overalls come back in fashion (but screw fasion, anyway). Living.

And with that, I think I’m done. Thanks to all who participated, and next time, I’ll actually get the answering done in timely fashion!

Share This Post

More answers to recent questions posed by Persons Who Reade Thysse Blogge:

:: A couple of queries from Roger:

If you were to live anywhere else, where would you be? What are your favorite 5 or 10 cities?

Call me crazy, but I really like Upstate NY. So I’d be happy in Rochester, and I could probably even live happily in Syracuse. Longtime readers will recall that for a time we did live in Syracuse, from September ’02 until April ’03. I didn’t find that a long enough period living there to really form an impression of the place, but coming from Buffalo Syracuse felt…familiar, and small. Outside of “rush hour”, it’s possible to drive from one end of the Syracuse “metro area” to the other in less than twenty minutes.

Casting my net wider, I really love the entire Great Lakes region and the Upper Midwest. I could live happily in Chicago, Milwaukee, the Twin Cities (not Great Lakes cities, but on the cusp of the region). And if I had to live abroad, I’d be thrilled to dwell in Toronto.

As a kid we lived for a handful of years in Portland, OR, an area which I loved dearly at the time. However, it’s close to twenty-six years since I’ve been back there, so I don’t know. My parents used to comment on how it seemed to them that people in that region had some kind of inferiority complex, in that they’d always say things to my parents like, “Aren’t you glad you don’t live out east anymore?” But I don’t know if that’s really the way things are anymore. Having become used to the fact that living in Buffalo, we can take daytrips to so many cool places, I suspect the main problem I’d have with living in Portland again would be that in that part of the country, distances are so much greater, and it becomes a day trip just getting to someplace else. But again, I don’t know how much that would bother me. I do know that I’d dearly love to see Portland again, and visit some of the places I remember — the ones that are still there, anyway. And I’d love to walk the sands of Cannon Beach and gaze upon Haystack Rock again.

I guess I’d just like to be able to travel more.

Valentine’s Day: a wonderful opportunity to show love and affection or a capitalist ruse?

A bit of both, I suppose. We’re pretty low-key with it in our family (it helps that The Wife’s birthday is less than two weeks after Valentine’s).

(And here’s a small rant: it never bothers me much when stores put Christmas merchandise out on display in early October. But what does irritate me is how Valentines stuff starts showing up on December 21, and how they start rolling out the Easter shit on February 10. Who the hell buys Valentines candy eight weeks before Valentines, and then just keeps it around? Don’t retailers get that Valentines shopping is of the “Oh crap whatamIgonnagetforher!” variety?)

You know what is a friggin’ ruse, though? If you live outside of my part of the country, you may not have heard of Sweetest Day, which was cooked up by a bunch of candymakers decades ago. It’s celebrated almost exactly six months after Valentines Day. Every time Sweetest Day rolls around, I end up thinking of the fake greeting card-company created “Love Day” from The Simpsons.

What’s bigger, Wyoming or Colorado?

Colorado, by about sixteen thousand square kilometers. But Wyoming feels bigger, because it’s got a lot less stuff in it.

(“I thought I was dead once. Turns out I was in Nebraska.” – Little Bill from Unforgiven)

If you were forced to give up overalls, what would you wear, and would anyone have the faintest idea who you were?

Khakis, I guess. And shorts. I used to be the kind of guy who wears shorts year round, although in recent years my body’s thermostat has set itself to “pants in winter”. Oy.

I’d hope people would recognize me! People at work, by definition, rarely see me outside of work, so I suspect I’d look stranger to them in overalls than anything else. If I were to cut the hair, though — and maybe even shave — then I’d be well-night unrecognizable. I look at photos of my former short-haired, clean-shaven self, and I think, “Jee-bus, I looked like an idiot.”

(Oddly, I don’t like regular old blue jeans, and I almost never wear them. I only own two pair. I’ve never found jeans all that comfortable.)

:: Belladonna also had more than one query:

What piece of writing are you most proud of and why?

The obvious answer is my “Twelve Presidents” story that won the Buffalo News contest a few weeks back, but I’m just not sure. There are a number of stories sitting on my hard drive that haven’t appeared anywhere of which I am very fond; I suppose both of those will end up in this space at some point. And The Promised King is the largest-scale thing I’ve done (using a fairly broad definition of “done”, of course, since it’s not done).

“Graveyard Waltz” is special to me because it’s the first story I ever submitted for publication. It was rejected, of course, but the rejection slip — my first ever — at least garnered a brief hand-written note from that particular editor, scrawled in the corner of the form letter. That first rejection slip didn’t feel bad at all; in fact, it felt kind of good in a weird way, because it meant that I was in the game. Kind of like the young pitcher who gets his first start in the Majors. Sure, he gives up eight earned runs in two innings and gets yanked as soon as he walks the first two batters in the third, but hey, he’s in the Majors.

And there are lots of posts here of which I am quite proud, and it’s on the behalf of those posts that I’m always a little frustrated that my traffic here so stubbornly remains exactly where it’s been for so long now. A representative example here would be “Diary of a Ring”. That post was a lot of fun to write, and yet it came and went with little notice at the time. Alas.

If you could meet any one person, living or dead, who would it be?

The most obvious answer here is Jesus, but since I’m all about eschewing the obvious, I would have loved to spend an evening talking music with Leonard Bernstein.

More answers to come. I think I’m almost done.

Share This Post

Here we go with the second bout of answers for Ask Me Anything! version 2.0….

:: Starting with something Star Wars, Simon asks:

While I, too, will rally to the defense of the Prequel trilogy, who would have been better suited to write dialogue for the scripts so that they didn’t sound like a smarmy high school drama class production?

Unsurprisingly, I don’t grant Simon’s premise; I never found the dialogue in the Prequel trilogy all that bad. It’s true that Anakin sounded like a smarmy high-school drama kid, but I always figured that was intentional, since he is a smarmy high-school drama kid. I particularly note how most of the really really awful lines, if not all of them, are given to him. I don’t think George Lucas ever intended anyone to take his “I don’t like sand” pickup line as anything other than a terribly awkward attempt by a very immature kid to impress a girl some years his senior.

And there are good lines scattered all through the Prequel Trilogy, especially in Revenge of the Sith. So for punching-up of the dialogue, I’d have maybe brought in Frank Darabont, or brought back Lawrence Kasdan. It’s tempting to say Joss Whedon, but I don’t think the tone he tends to achieve in his scripts would have worked terribly well with Star Wars.

:: Roger asks:

Presidents’ Day is coming. Who are the five best and the five worst Presidents?

Well, Presidents’ Day is over, but anyway, briefly, here’s how I’d rank them.

The best, in order of their service:

1. George Washington
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. FDR
5. Harry Truman

and the worst, also in order of their service:

1. James Buchanan
2. Richard Nixon
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Ronald Reagan
5. George W. Bush

Honorable mentions to Thomas Whitmore, Josiah Bartlet, and David Palmer.

:: Belladonna asks:

What was your favorite toy during childhood?

Hmmmm. You know, that is really a hard one. I mean, that one is really hard. The few Star Wars action figures I owned were favorites, of course. I had a couple of remote-control cars that I remember fondly, and a small chemistry set that was quite a bit of fun. I never did much with Hotwheels or similar toy cars. The best bath toy I ever had was a wooden boat with a paddle-wheel that was driven by a rubber band; you rotated the paddle-wheel manually to tighten the band, and then you released the boat in the water, whereupon the rubber band unwound and made the paddle-wheel spin. That thing was cool.

There was also the model railroad set-up that we started building, but never much got beyond the construction of the table and the layout of the track itself. We never decorated the thing, which I look back on as one of the bigger missed opportunities of childhood. To this day, I find something magical about a good model railroad layout.

This is weird! I’ve never thought about it much, but I really don’t remember too many of my toys at all. The books, though — now those, I remember well.

(And you want to know what’s really freaky? I was just thinking of the old handheld electronic game “Merlin”, which I liked a lot, and just minutes later, on My Name is Earl, Earl and Randy visit their childhood bedroom whereupon Randy picks up his old Merlin and says that he’s been practicing his Tic-Tac-Toe! That kind of thing always spooks me out. Whhhoooaaaaa….)

:: She also asks:

How do you determine what is private and what you are willing to publicly disclose on our blog?

Well, one easy rule is the “Would The Wife kick my ass if I posted this publicly?” policy, which is always a good one to follow. I also try to generally avoid posting too much about The Daughter, because her life is her own. And of course I resolutely never post about work.

I pretty much go on a case-by-case basis on these sorts of things, and there are many things about my life that never show up here. That’s not to say many of those things never will show up in this space; I’ve got a number of proto-posts stashed away that I started writing and later decided against posting, and there are other things in my life that I don’t post about directly but toward which I allude vaguely around here sometimes, mainly so readers may see those things and go, “Hmmmmm….”, or maybe, “Huh-whuh?!”

More to come over the next few days!

Share This Post

OK, the time has come to start answering the questions posed in Ask Me Anything! version 2.0.

I’m answering these in Order By My Whim, which means, in whatever order I want to. So there!

:: Someone going by the handle “Opus” asks this technical film music question:

I just found your blog via google, as I was searching for some comment on James Horner’s Apollo 13 score. So as long as you’re entertaining questions, here’s mine: Have you ever noticed that, in the last moments of the last scene of the movie (on the Iwo Jima), Horner moves chromatically away from the tonic, thus ending on a chord that bears no relation to the tonality he’s been working on for at least the last 20 minutes of the film? If you haven’t noticed it, do you know where I can find fellow fanatics who would be driven as crazy as I by this nonsense?

No, I hadn’t noticed that. Next!

Actually, though, there’s a more serious point to be made here. When I listen to music, I’m quite good at hearing melodic motifs and the relationships between them, as in leitmotif-based scores like Lord of the Rings; I’m also very keen on instrumentations and rhythms.

But with tonalities? Not so much.

I can hear that the chords that begin Tristan and Isolde are dissonant, and I can hear the dissonances at work in lots of Percy Grainger’s music. But I’ve never been good at being able to tell by ear when a work modulates into a subdominant key, to name one example. I can tell that a modulation has occurred, but I’ve never been good at identifying the destination key or at identifying the new key’s relation to the old key.

I’m honestly not sure why this is (other than that I probably didn’t put enough effort into my ear-training classes in college). Has this level of listening ever been the norm?

(And for a suggestion as to where to go on the Web to meet listeners who are equally attuned to keys, I’d probably pose either the Filmus-L mailing list or the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, where a number of fairly astute listeners hang out. I like to think of myself as an astute music listener, but in this case, I’m pretty much impotent.)

:: Chris Byrd from IndaBuff asks:

Why does Jimmy crack corn?

AND…

Why don’t people care that he does?

Well, I have no idea, either. And that means, to the Google-cave, Batman! It turns out that “Jimmy Crack Corn” was originally a slave song from the pre-Civil War days.

Via Wikipedia:

There has been much conjecture over the meaning of “Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care.” One possibility is “gimcrack corn,” cheap corn whiskey; another related theory is that it refers to “cracking” open a jug of corn whisky; another is that “crack-corn” is related to the (still-current) slang “cracker” for a rural Southern white.[7] Another, and possibly the most popular, is that the chorus refers to an overseer who, without the master, has only his bullwhip to keep the slaves in line. Most etymologists support the first interpretation, as the term “cracker” appears to predate “corncracking”, and “whipcracker” has no historical backing.[8] This suggests that the chorus means the slaves are making whiskey and celebrating. Pete Seeger himself was said to explain the true lyric was “Gimmie cracked corn–I don’t care”,[9] a reference to a form of punishment for something very bad, in which a slave’s rations were reduced to cracked corn and nothing else. In this case, the author seems to have decided that even this punishment is worth it, since the master is now dead and gone.

Another explanation:

Most of the theories about who Jimmy is and what he’s really doing agree that whatever he’s doing, the slave doesn’t care about it because his master is gone. Whether he’s gleefully carefree or woefully despondent is a point of dispute, depending a bit on which of the two main theories you subscribe to:

1.”Cracking corn” is opening a bottle of corn liquor; the phrase is self-referential and means “I’m Jimmy, I’m upset, I’m drinking, and I don’t care.” Well, that sense of crack is certainly old enough, but I can’t find any evidence of “corn” being used independently of the phrases “corn liquor” or “corn juice.” And if Jimmy is really talking, why use “I” in the second part of the sentence, but be Bob Dole-like in the first part?

2.”Cracking corn” really is crushing corn, and it means that someone named Jimmy, presumably a fellow slave, had to start grinding corn for food because of the penury visited on him after the master’s death. This is as plausible as any other piece of speculation, but it’s not a satisfactory answer to who Jimmy is and why he suddenly turns up in the refrain.

I found a lot more along that vein.

Basically, “Jimmy Crack Corn” is a very old folk song that arose from the plantation life of the antebellum South. As such, it’ll probably never be conclusively established just “jimmy crack corn” means, but apparently he doesn’t care because his master’s gone. What’s interesting is that depending on interpretation, he may be happy that his master is dead, or he may be sad.

More answers to come!

Share This Post

I’m still soliciting submissions for Ask Me Anything!, version 2.0. Leave ’em here. I’m planning to start answering questions this weekend, so get ’em in!

Share This Post

I’m gearing up for Ask Me Anything! version 2.0, so get your questions in! Anything goes. There are no stupid questions! (Well, OK, there’s a few, but I think my readership is smart enough to avoid those, right?)

Share This Post

In honor of this blog’s fast-approaching (this coming Thursday!) five-year blogiversary, I’m doing Round Two of Ask Me Anything!. Details here. (Anonymous questions are fine, although nothing…dirty. This blog is PG-13 at worst!)

Oh, and there’s no limit on questions, either. Ask one or ten, if you must.

Share This Post