Monthly Archives: December 2007

Dec212007

My Golden Compass Daemon

I’ve not read any of Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, and I really don’t have a lot of interest in seeing the film version of the first book, The Golden Compass. (My reluctance has nothing to with the controversy over whether the story promotes atheism, in case you’re wondering. No, the problem for me is more basic than that. The trailers look great, with an impressive cast and wild-looking airships and an alternate-reality version of Victorian England, all really cool, pulpy stuff… and then the damn, cartoony, armor-plated, talking polar bear shows up and suddenly it all becomes extremely silly-looking. Seriously, the Coca-Cola bear just ruined the whole thing for me, like a pin into a cheap balloon.) However, I’m always up for a silly Internet quiz, so when I saw a link over at Puffbird’s LiveJournal for a test to determine your Golden Compass daemon, naturally I had to take it…

(A daemon, in Pullman’s universe, is apparently a sort of animal avatar of a person’s soul. Or some damn thing. I don’t quite get it. But then, I didn’t quite get my D&D character either.)

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Dec202007

What D&D Character Am I?

After a long, long period of trying to deny my true nature and pass for cool, I finally came out of the closet, er, comic book store, about ten years ago and announced proudly to the world that, yes, I am a geek. I think I’ve got plenty of street cred to justify the title, what with the Star Wars/Star Trek fanboy thing, the dozens of tattered sci-fi paperbacks that I devoured during my misspent youth, all my college-years debates over whether a Star Destroyer could beat the Enterprise in a fair fight (Duh! Of course it could!), and, of course, the toys and ephemera and other crap that I collect (quite a lot of it still in its original packaging, just as The Collector would insist). But there’s one particular subset of geekiness that’s never really grabbed my interest, one big hole in my curriculum nerdae that prevents me from becoming fully actualized as a true-blue, Wil Wheaton-level hardcore Geek Master, and that’s… gaming.

No form of gaming, be it electronic, board-, paper-, or card-based, has ever held my attention for long. Just not my thing, I’m afraid. I’ll admit to having some fond memories of the early-80s video arcade experience, but nothing beyond what every Gen-Xer probably shares; shoveling quarters into Donkey Kong and Zaxxon was a novelty that eventually lost its luster. As for role-playing games, the ultimate initiation into the world of the geekly arts… well, I went to exactly two Dungeons and Dragons sessions in my youth before deciding that the whole thing was kind of silly and pointless; all the different kinds of dice and little charts with arcane formulae and numbers and such frankly left me baffled and wondering what the big deal was. I went back to my paperbacks and left the RPGs to the folks whose idea of fun was crunching a few math equations, because as best as I could figure, that’s all D&D really amounted to. In all the years since then, I’ve never once felt like I missed out on something.

Until today. Right now, I’m wishing I’d spent a little more time hanging around the fringes of the RPG scene, because then at least I could interpret my results from the latest silly Internet quiz thing:

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Dec182007

The Cover to End All Covers

A Beatles tribute group doing “Stairway to Heaven” in the style of the Ed Sullivan-era Fab Four? It’s like a message from the Bizarro World, or that alternate universe where Spock has a beard; everything seems familiar, except it’s so very, very wrong… just watch it and tell me if this isn’t one of the stranger things you’ve ever seen and/or heard…

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Dec182007

Christmas Meme, Part 2

Huh… it would seem that when I did that Christmas meme a few days ago, I somehow failed to copy over a number of the questions from SamuraiFrog’s blog, and then I failed to notice the omission. I just now saw that Jaquandor has also snagged the meme from SF, only his version is obviously much longer. So, obsessive-compulsive sort that I am and in the interest of completeness, here is the rest of the Christmas meme, presented for your edification and/or amusement, assuming you can find any of either in these silly things:

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Dec182007

Max Headroom Sings!

Wow… how is it possible that even with my vast collection of ephemera and miscellaneous junk, not to mention my insatiable appetite for trivia and an unceasing affection for the decade I most closely consider my Formative Years — that would be the Awesome 80s, for those who haven’t been paying attention — how is it possible that I have only now discovered that our favorite imitation AI once recorded his very own smarmy Christmas tune? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Merry Christmas, Santa Claus (You’re a Lovely Guy)” by Max Headroom:

An immortal classic for sure, right up there with “What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb).” For the record, I found this fascinating little piece of pop-cultural flotsam here. And I promise this will be the last time I mention M-M-Max Headroom for a while-while-while.

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Dec172007

Ten Bears

Ah, crap… I just read that Floyd Red Crow Westerman, the Native American actor who played all the “wise old Indian man” roles over the past couple of decades, died earlier this week, too. He was 71.

Floyd is probably best known for playing Ten Bears, the kindly village elder in Dances With Wolves (still a great damn movie, and I won’t hear any dissenting opinions just because Costner has fallen out of favor), but he really did turn up anywhere a similar type of role appeared: notably in the films Thunderheart, The Doors, and Hidalgo, and on television in Northern Exposure, Buffalo Girls, Dharma and Greg, and even The X Files. I used to joke that he had basically taken over all the parts that used to be played by Chief Dan George back in the ’70s, but I think Westerman maybe had more of a presence than George did; he always radiated gentle wisdom and a warm, wry sense of humor, whereas George was often more taciturn and unknowable. I predict Westerman is going to be the popular image of an Indian sage for years to come.
Interestingly, the article I linked to above says he was a musician as well, and considered that his primary vocation. I didn’t know that.

I write a lot of little obituaries for celebrities whose work has affected me in some way, but many of them are not necessarily people I ever had a desire to meet. Floyd Westerman is one of the ones I wish I had known.

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Dec172007

The Leader of the Band is Tired…

When I heard last night that the singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg had died, I immediately had a powerful memory flash — not just a mere run-of-the-mill recollection that’s as two-dimensional as an old postcard, but one of those strange and rare experiences when it seems as if time and space become malleable and, for just one brief instant, you are someplace else, someplace you haven’t been in a very long time. In this case, I was 13 or 14 years old, riding in the top bunk of our old camper as the truck beneath it carved through the darkness. I don’t remember where we were going, or maybe it was where we’d been; Dad used to drive the truck-and-camper around town all the time, so it might not have been anywhere special. I can’t see anything beyond the front window except a cone of highway caught in the headlights. In my imagination, the white lines flashing past on the pavement are doppler-distorted stars seen from a starship clicking along at point-five past lightspeed. I’m reading a Clive Cussler paperback, and on my amazing little Sony Walkman — that was a type of portable music player in the pre-iPod days, kids — I’m listening to a cassette of Dan Fogelberg’s Greatest Hits.

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Dec142007

That Sweater… Dear God, That Sweater…

So, one of the songs on that list of my favorite Christmas tunes I put together a year ago is an obscure little ditty called “Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You” by arena rocker Billy Squier. Something got me thinking about that song earlier today, so naturally I thought I’d poke around the InterWebs and see what I could come up with. I found the following clip, a “live” performance of the song Billy gave on MTV along with “the MTV chorus,” i.e., anybody around the cable net’s offices who was willing to appear on camera. It’s a fun little video, full of genuine — if goofy — cheer, and if you remember the early days of music videos and the “vee-jays” who introduced them, you’ll no doubt recognize some faces in the crowd. I gotta say, though… that sweater that Billy is wearing… oy. You’ll never find a bigger apologist for the eccentric fashions of the Reagan Years — I love and miss that decade with a fierce passion, and I’d still have my mullet and Members Only jacket if I could — but that sweater goes beyond even my pale…

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Dec142007

And the Planet Just Keeps Shrinking…

Further evidence of just how damn cool this InterWeb thingie really is: My old high school buddy Keith now lives in New Jersey. Today, he needed to go into The City — which us provincials refer to as “New York” and/or “Manhattan” — on business and he wanted to know where he could go for a good lunch. So what does he do? He shoots off an email to none other than Brian Greenberg, a guy Keith has never met but whom he “knows” from Brian’s comments here on Simple Tricks, and my own links to Brian’s blog. Keith explains his connection to me and his situation and then asks for a couple of recommendations; Brian, good egg that he is, immediately sends back a list of possibilities, and forwards the whole conversation to me for my amusement and/or enlightenment.

I love that this sort of thing is now possible. No, not only possible, but downright routine. There are a lot of things about life in the 21st Century that I really, vehemently don’t like — the apparent apathy of the general public towards US-sanctioned torture, a media obsession with extremely young and poorly behaved people who make far more money than I do, those little condiment packets at all the fast-food places that you can never open without getting the stuff on your hands — but the idea that someone writing a personal blog in Utah can facilitate enough of a social connection between two strangers who live on the East Coast for one of them to ask the other for a restaurant recommendation… well, I do love that.

As I said to Brian when I emailed him back, it’s like the whole country, and to a lesser extent the whole planet, is becoming one big small town, where everybody seems to know a guy. Keith, I hope you enjoyed your lunch. And Brian, thanks again for helping a guy out…

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Dec132007

Christmas Meme

Oh, no, not another meme! This one is Christmas-themed… you know, for a guy who so frequently self-identifies as a grinch, I seem to be doing a lot of writing about Christmas this year. Go figure. Anyway, I ganked this one from the irascible SamuraiFrog. Read on for insight into my unique holiday philosophy:

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