Tag: Quiz-Things

The first answers are in from my questions on the Interview Meme: Lynn, Laura, Dave, Tosy and Cosh, and TeflonJedi. Everyone else, your questions await in the comments to that very first post linked above, so grab ’em!

(And if anyone else wants five questions, I’ll still entertain any late-comers. Such is my devotion to the great Interview Meme!)

UPDATE: Minutes after I published, I saw that Two Write Hands has answered as well.

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All those of you who requested questions for The Great Interview Meme will find your questions posted in the comments on that post! Get thee hence!

And if anyone else wants questions, you can still volunteer. I love the Five Questions game!

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For those who volunteered to receive five questions from me for the great interview meme-thing, I’ll be generating those over the weekend and will send them out on Monday. If anyone else wants in, just leave the comment there (or here). And since this is a reciprocal thing, I may ask a few of you to hit me with five questions as well.

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I see that one of my favorite blog-memes is making the rounds again: the Five Question Interview, in which I answer five questions posed to me by the blogger on whose blog I saw the meme in play (in this case, Electronic Cerebrectomy), and then offer to ask any questions myself of anyone who wishes them! Hoo-ray! This game comes around about once a year or so — I suppose that’s how long it takes before it wends its way out of my little corner of Blogistan and then back again, but I’m always happy to see it return.

Anyhow, SamuraiFrog posed five questions to me, and here they are:

1. You’re a fantasy novelist. What kind of books did you read as a child and which ones stand out for you as influences?

My reading interests were often all over the map. My mother, as I’ve noted before, had a tendency to punish my mis-deeds by handing me a book and telling me that I’d watch no TV until I read said book. Even more deviously, though, she’d make sure that the book she gave me was the first book in some series or other. The first time this happened was Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, the first volume in his Prydain Chronicles. I was nine years old at the time. This was my first exposure to epic fantasy with a map and everything. I’ve never recovered.

2. I’ve been enjoying your reviews on space opera novels. Is there another genre or subgenre you’re planning on giving a try?

I’ll probably read the occasional hard-SF work, since that’s the second type of SF I tend to like a lot. (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy rocked my world pretty strongly.) Military SF tends to not be my cup of tea, although some of it I like (the Vorkosigan series by Bujold, for example). I’ve flirted with alternate history, but for me, a little of that goes a long way. Cyberpunk also never rang my bell all that much.

As for fantasy, multi-volume “fat” fantasy isn’t a major obsession of mine these days, although there are some series that have caught my eye. I’m interested in reading earlier stuff now: Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, and so on.

How about non-SF genres? I have to admit that I’m tempted to read some bodice-ripping romances. I’m always on the lookout for really compelling love stories; it’s the romantic in me, I suppose. (Go ahead and suggest some.) I also want to read some Larry McMurtry Westerns, and I’m sure I’ll get a hankering for some horror sooner or later. (I tend to read horror in spurts. Like blood!) Espionage novels aren’t much of a love of mine anymore, although I tore through a number of them back in my late-high-school years. Non-genre fiction? I’ll read some every so often, if I hear of a title that sounds especially interesting.

Reading some Jane Austen is high on my “to do” list. I’m currently reading Wuthering Heights, and re-reading Jane Eyre is also high on my list. I loved it when I read it in high school, but I haven’t picked it up since.

3. We both have a love of film music. I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the majority of scores I’ve heard in the 21st century; what’s your take on the modern film score?

I always have a hard time making generalized statements about the state of any art right now, because I really do believe that those who inhabit a certain time are in no way best equipped to judge their own period’s art. Today you can go to any film music message board or forum and find postings like “Wow, today’s stuff has no flavor of its own, and it’s crap compared to Goldsmith and the giants of yesteryear”, but I’d be willing to bet that if you could go back in time to when, say, The Wind and the Lion was a new score or when Rosza’s King of Kings had come out, you’d find more than a few film music fans of those times saying, “Meh”. (This is generally why I generally scorn the notion that professional critics should be taken as the best arbiters of quality. Read up on even the very best critics of all time, and you’ll find them being flat-out wrong much of the time.)

That said, I think that film music today isn’t to my taste nearly as often as it’s been in the past. The rise of “corporate culture” in Hollywood has only had the same effect on movies that the corporatizing of, say, radio has had: the general spread of homogenization. Film scores tend to sound the same much of the time, and what’s worse, they’re intended and even required to sound the same. Films are edited with “temp tracks”, in which music from other films or classical works are slapped into the film as an intended guide for the composers, but then, the composers are required to produce scores that sound very like the temp tracks, as opposed to the works they’d produce using their own instincts and their own voices.

Many fine scores also get rejected when the films test poorly at screenings, since usually at that point in production the score is just about the only thing that can be changed. The film Troy is a notable example; Gabriel Yared wrote a fine score for that film, but when the film tested poorly, the score was removed and James Horner was brought in to crank out a replacement score in a matter of weeks. James Newton Howard had to score King Kong in a similarly short period after Howard Shore’s effort was turned down (a shocking development at the time, after the brilliant work Shore had done for Peter Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings).

Mainstream film right now is not an environment where composers can be distinctive, individual, or innovative, and that’s a shame. For an entire series of examples of how the director/composer relationship is supposed to work, one only need go to Japan and look at the films of Hayao Miyazaki. The idea that he’d ever tell Joe Hisaishi what kind of music to write is unthinkable, and the result is that Hisaishi’s scores for those films are, in just about every case, either very high in quality or just outright masterpieces. There are some highly talented composers today, just as much the case as was ever so in film. But it does seem to me that finding good film music tends to involve digging through lots of lesser work, as though we’re pushing the ratio in Sturgeon’s Law to 93 or 94 percent.

But then, I think we have to be careful. Were previous “golden ages” of film music as golden as all that? Are we forgetting the misses, and assuming that what was truly great was representative of film music as a whole during those times? Or, even worse, are we inflating scores that are OK but otherwise fall into that giant realm of musical works which don’t make “the Canon” but don’t quite deserve total obscurity, either? You see this kind of thing all the time on lots of film music forums: composers who are completely forgotten today, except by the most encyclopedically-knowledged of film music fans, who wrote decent enough scores for the kinds of films you used to see aired at two in the morning on AMC or on the “Two-buck DVD rack” at the supermarket, lauded as “unjustly forgotten masters”. You also see composers’ entire bodies of work elevated to unfairly high stature. (Let’s face it, the man scored more than two hundred films and TV productions. Not everything Jerry Goldsmith produced is a classic.)

So who’s good right now? James Newton Howard seems to be the current favorite of the “Goldsmith was God” crowd. For my money, Howard Shore’s the best working today, but for some reason, I think he gets overlooked a lot. Gabriel Yared is superb. Michael Giacchino is a musical chameleon, and a first-rate one, at that. Thomas Newman’s voice is unmistakable. Jan A.P. Kaczmarek is something of a newcomer to filmscoring outside of his native Poland, but what little of his work I’ve heard is wonderful. David Arnold’s work tends to be viewed in lesser light, but I like him. Alan Silvestri is in no way a great composer, but he’s a very fine one, very professional, whose music always does exactly what it’s supposed to do (and he’s got a tremendous melodic gift). I’m not a big fan of Danny Elfman, but he’s got his moments. And there’s the “bad boy” of film music, Eliot Goldenthal. Finally, you know what? Hans Zimmer’s music doesn’t always suck. He’s written some good stuff, as have Klaus Badelt and Harry Gregson Williams.

And hey, I’m not about to write off the current film music era as long as John Williams is alive.

4. When did your interest in classical music begin, and what was the piece that really pulled you in the first time?

It’s very hard to say when it began, because it was always around to some degree in our home, as far back as I can remember. My sister is six years older than I, and she started piano lessons early enough that I don’t remember her not playing the piano (although I do have one very vague memory of riding the freight elevator at the piano dealership, a memory which may well be totally wrong). So there was classical music, as well as other genres, as early as I can recall.

I started my own musical adventures in fifth grade, when I was talked into joining the band. I played French horn that first year, but switched a year later to the trumpet. Even so, I didn’t really feel the “bite” of the music for another couple of years. I recall that the first orchestral score I studied was Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. That work was, and continues to be, for me a revelation. And I’ve written before of how I came to Berlioz, which was a year or so after I came to Mozart.

In short, it was gradual. There’s no guaranteed way to make kids love classical music, but the best way is almost certainly to make sure they’re surrounded by it from early on.

5. Finally: how, exactly, is Jaquandor pronounced? I’ve been saying it as though the Q made a K sound and ignoring the U.

To get a definitive answer on this, you’d probably have to ask Doug Moench, the writer who scripted the comic book from which I snagged the name. The comic is Six From Sirius, a space opera (big surprise!) espionage tale that came out as a Marvel Limited Series in the mid-1980s. That said, I pronounce it “juh-KWAN-dor”.

OK, that ends that. If anyone would like five questions from me, just drop into comments here and indicate as much. I’ll craft some devious questions and e-mail them your way.

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OK, it seems that while I was taking a break, I got tagged by SamuraiFrog with a quiz-thing. So here goes:

INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so.

1. Confessions of a Sophisticated Writer
2. The Urban Recluse
3. No Smoking in the Skull Cave
4. Electronic Cerebrectomy
5. Byzantium’s Shores: The Occasional Meditations of yada yada yada.

(Not sure why we’re doing this. It sounds vaguely chain-letterish.)

Next, select five people to tag.

You know, I rarely tag people on these kinds of things, but I suppose I will, just this once:

1. Jen (14221)
2. Erin
3. Jason Bennion
4. Jayme Lynn Blaschke
5. Tosy and Cosh

And now for the questions!

What were you doing ten years ago?

Settling into married life.

What were you doing one year ago?

Well, what’s odd about activities like this is that I can actually go back in the archives and look! So…[clicks and reads]…well, I wrote some posts a year ago today. Nothing terribly earth-shaking, so I’m assuming it was a day at home. Since it was a Sunday, I was probably doing laundry.

Five snacks you enjoy.

1. Summer fruit: nectarines, peaches (O my beloved white peaches!), strawberries.
2. Ice cream.
3. Nacho chips, dipped in salsa-cheese sauce. (By the way, Buffalonians, if you ever have leftover Mighty Tacos in your fridge, before you nuke ’em for reheating, slather them with salsa-cheese sauce. Ohhhhh, the nachoey-cheesy goodness!)
4. Pretzels, dipped in fine mustards. (I like the fat Dutch ones best, but I generally love pretzels across the board.)
5. Nuts of all kinds.

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics.

1. “Hotel California” (long song, but not that impressive to know the lyrics, as the song opens with a minute of instrumental and closes with three more minutes of guitar stuff)
2. “American Pie” (Decoding this song is probably an exercise in futility. There’s no way the whole thing makes sense.)
3. “Some Enchanted Evening”
4. “On the Street Where You Live”
5. “I Dreamed a Dream” (Look, ma, showtunes!)

Five things you would do if you were a billionaire.

OK, I changed this one, because it was originally what you’d do if you were a millionaire, but you can’t even retire on a million bucks anymore. But a billion? Whoa, nellie! I’ll also assume that I don’t earn my way up to billionaire, but that I somehow get the whole lump sum at once.

1. Ten million dollars each to all of Buffalo’s leading cultural institutions.
2. I’d spend however much money it takes to place subscriptions to each of the top five science fiction and fantasy magazines in the public library systems of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country.
3. I’d build something in downtown Buffalo. Maybe apartments or something. The more people living downtown, the better.
4. Cerebral palsy research would get a huge windfall.
5. Heck, I don’t know…it’s hard to spend a billion dollars. A scholarship fund that pays full tuition to the University at Buffalo for anyone who wears overalls for every day of their college career? Pay for SF’s WorldCon to take place in Buffalo? Set up an organization that advertises Buffalo’s attractions in places other than Buffalo? Who knows?

Five bad habits.

1. Swearing like a sailor.
2. Thinking, “I’ll do some writing just as soon as I get ___ done”, with ___ being some menial task or whatever that doesn’t need done all that urgently.
3. Putting off car maintenance.
4. Assuming the worst-case scenario at every juncture. (Although truth to tell, this habit has actually proven fairly useful in recent years.)
5. Forgetting what books I own when I go to the bookstore.

Five things you like doing.

1. Answering blog-quizzes.
2. Eating red meat.
3. Voting for Democrats.
4. Consuming pie.
5. Waxing poetic about the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Five things you would never wear again.

Hmmmmm….

1. Oxford cloth. If I have to, I will, but I generally can’t stand Oxford cloth.
2. Neckties. Again, I will if I have to, but I must admit my belief that the necktie is just about the dumbest damn thing ever invented, in terms of men’s clothing. (Now, the bow-ties with tuxes are fine. Those are classy. But just generic ties, because that’s what guys wear? Ick.)
3. Argyle. In any form.
4. Cowboy boots. Nothing against them; just not my cup of tea.
5. Tank-tops. Maybe just around my own home, if we ever own a house, and I’m mowing the lawn. But not in public. No way.

OK, I guess that’s it.

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Zounds, I’ve been tagged by PZ Myers for the “Eight Things” quiz-meme thing. I could just link the answers I gave when someone else tagged me with this a couple of weeks ago with the fine phrase from Prime Minister’s Questions in Britain, “I refer the right honorable gentleman to the reply I gave some moments ago”, but hey, that’s the lazy way out and I’m all about…well, that’s not true, I have nothing against being lazy. But anyway, eight things:

1. The first baseball game (MLB) I attended in person? 1984, I think. Phillies 2, Pirates 1, at Three Rivers Stadium. Early in the season, so it was cold and I ran my father’s wallet down by drinking a hot chocolate every inning. In college, I would discover a drinking game called “Beer an Inning”, in which you do exactly that: you must consume a beer each inning, and if the inning ends while you’ve got beer in your bottle, you must chug it. Sounds easy, but a couple of double-plays will mess you up hard.

2. The first football game (NFL) I attended in person? 1997 season at Rich Stadium. Broncos 23, Bills 20, OT. The Bills were behind 20-0 when Todd Collins got benched and Alex Van Pelt came in and nearly rallied the Bills to the win. This was about halfway through the season, so it was really cold and drizzly and unpleasant in the stadium…and the hot chocolates had to come out of my wallet, so we only had one or two. I gave up on Todd Collins as a player during this game, when he threw an interception that was returned by a 300-plus pound defensive lineman more than seventy yards for a touchdown, and all Collins did was lay down on the field and watch the guy go the distance. The Broncos went on to win the Super Bowl that year.

3. I’m done apologizing for the fact that I like to eat at Applebee’s.

4. I make pretty good fried chicken. Not that often, because you know, that stuff’ll kill you if you eat it too often and still, no matter how good your chicken is, it’s never quite as good as any that comes in a paper bucket. But still, my chicken’s pretty damn good.

5. I like rum. (OK, I used that one next time. I like Southern Comfort too, then.)

6. I have to admit that I envisioned Digby as a male, but I think that’s because I knew a guy in college whose nickname was Digby. There’s nothing particularly male or female in Digby’s blog writing, so I just went with my personal association with the name.

7. I know I linked Charlie Stross’s essay on space colonization the other day in Sentential Links, but let me just note that my general instinctive response to well-reasoned, scientifically-sound arguments that we are likely to never leave this Solar System is a very immature, “LAA LAA LA LA LA LA I can’t hear you LA LA LA LAAAAA!”

8. For lack of anything else: The Daughter just turned eight the other day. Her best friend, who lived next door, moved with her family to Alabama this morning. Unless something dramatic changes, she’s never gonna be a big sister again. Her last report card this year was excellent. She likes to read. She can’t swim yet, but she learned at age five how to run a feeding pump. She likes anime. And many are the days when she’s the sole reason why I don’t elect to elevate from this sorry plain of existence for something more to my liking.

I’m supposed to tag people, but I won’t do so specifically. I’ll just let this suffice: if you’re a Buffalo-blogger, consider yourself tagged. Heh.

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Lynn tags me with a meme where I’m to reveal eight things about myself, or give eight facts about myself, or reveal eight habits, or something like that. After more than five years of blogging, coming up with new stuff that I actually want to reveal here is kind of hard.

1. Remember that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine dates the guy who zones out every time “Desperado” comes on the radio? I’m the same way with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1.

2. Musical instruments I feel like I should like, but which I really don’t: the harpsichord, the classical guitar, the harmonica.

3. I listen to The Daughter talk about her collection of Pokemon cards, and it hits me that this is what I sounded like to my parents when I talked nonstop about Star Wars.

4. I think there should be a national restaurant chain that does nothing but sell those regional specialties that are beloved in one place but completely unknown just fifty or a hundred miles away. I’m thinking of beef on weck, scrapple, spiedies, Maid-Rites, broasted chicken, and so on. The restaurant could be funded with Piers Morgan’s money, after the dingoes eat him.

5. I believe that rum makes the world a better place.

6. It’s been over a year since the last time I set foot in a Wal-Mart.

7. I don’t recall how it happened, but my family has now become spoiled: we can no longer consume pancake syrups like Mrs. Butterworth’s or Log Cabin. We pay the hefty price for real maple syrup, and we do so cheerfully.

8. I’m the only member of my family who enjoys the flavor of coconut. This means that I can load up on Mounds bars and not feel the slightest bit guilty for not sharing.

I’m supposed to tag people, but I’m not going to. Grab it and post away if you like, folks!

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Haven’t done one of these in a while. This is via Electronic Cerebrectomy.

1. I’ve come to realize that my last kiss… has exited my brain. Seriously. Don’t remember it.

2. I am listening to… the wind in the trees. Nothing going on right now, no music playing, no teevee droning.

3. I talk… in iambic pentameter. OK, not really. But it would be cool.

4. I want… to rewind the calendar of my life back to, oh, August 10, 2004 and see if it all plays out differently.

5. My best friend(s)… is at work right now, if she’s got the same work schedule this week that she usually does.

7. The weather is… stunning: sunny and low humidity. Bite me, all you “I hate Buffalo weather” dweebs.

8. I hate it when people… act like people, instead of acting like persons, if that makes sense.

9. Love is… when your default reaction to something terrible happening is fear that the other may not make it through.

10. Marriage is… kept from gays for absolutely no good reason that I’ve ever heard.

11. Somewhere, someone is thinking… “Wow, I could really go for some Cheetos and Mallomars.”

12. I’ll always… want just one more chicken wing or slice of pizza.

13. I have a secret crush on… Mirna from The Amazing Race. Actually, this isn’t really secret, but then, I don’t keep my crushes secret. I advertise ’em, front and center.

14. The last time I cried was… sometime in the last day. I can summon up tears on command now.

15. My cell phone is… out there somewhere, waiting for me. I don’t own one. Don’t need one.

16. When I wake up in the morning… I either lazily lay in bed a while, or I utter a curse before lazily laying in bed a while. This depends on the hour and how well I’ve slept.

17. Before I go to bed… I clean out the old sinuses with the Neti pot. Hey, you asked.

18. Right now I am thinking about… why I can’t live a life of romance and derring-do like d’Artagnan.

19. Babies are… for other people, apparently.

20. I go on MySpace… once in a great while. I set up a profile there in case anyone on MySpace was looking for me; the only purpose it serves is basically to direct people here. However, I’ve never yet seen a referral show up in my SiteMeter stats. I generally think MySpace is pretty useless. It bugs me that I have this awesome 2006 computer with a DSL connection that I can use to look at MySpace pages that look like the personal websites I used to see when I was on my 1996 Compaq Presario surfing my dial-up connection.

21. Today I… took The Wife to a medical appointment, where I read thirty pages of The Three Musketeers in the waiting room; went food-shopping; and went for a long walk while listening to the Revenge of the Sith score on my personal CD player.

22. Tonight I… will take The Family Whose Number MUST NEVER EXCEED THREE out for dinner at our favorite road-side burgers-and-hot-dogs joint. Then we’ll come home, watch TV, read, put The Daughter to bed, and call it a night.

23. Tomorrow I… will finish up some reviews for GMR and start writing again. It’s time once again for my fictional children to step up and do their surrogate duty.

24. I really want to… know what exactly it is that some people think is so “intelligently designed” about the human body.

25. Someone who will most likely repost this? Nobody, probably — my bitter tone here will probably scare them off. Time to go get some food, I think.

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