Monthly Archives: March 2008

Mar212008

Restless Kind

On the days when I’m just buried at work — days when my inbox is overflowing and people keep prairie-dogging over the walls of my cube to try and convince me that they’re going to have a heart attack if I don’t do their project RIGHT NOW, ahead of all the other projects that belong to all the other people who are also having heart attacks, and I’m wondering at just what point in my life the road diverged and I ended up on this particular path, and oh by the way, is there an alternate-universe version of me who’s having a lot more fun right at this very moment in time? — yes, on days just like the one I’m having today, I find myself drawn irresistably to the pop-rock music of my formative years in the mid-1980s. You know, the stuff that’s heavy on the crunchy-sounding rhythm guitars and always has a wailing solo after the third verse, but never gets really hard enough to cross the line into true metal? Yeah, I’ll admit to listening to a lot of that stuff regardless of what kind of day I’m having, but on days like this one, I really get dedicated about it.

Maybe it’s because the bombast effectively masks the background noise in my office environment, or maybe it’s because the simplistic lyrics about teenage sexual frustration and youthful machismo are easy to tune out when I’m trying to read copy. Or maybe, just maybe, some part of me is yearning for the time in my life when I didn’t have grey hairs because I can’t seem to figure out how to fit everything I need to do into an 18-hour period of wakefulness. A time when all that was on my mind was music and teenage sexual frustration and dreams of the future…

Well, you get the idea. I’m having a miserable damn day at work and that makes me pine for freedoms I never appreciated when I actually had them. It seems like the longer my to-do list becomes, the more frantically my overworked brain craves escape. I have a lot of fantasies of just walking away from the meat grinder and going vagabond, of tramping through Europe and driving with the top down and riding a Harley somewhere on a desert two-lane. Which would be a good trick, since I don’t actually own a Harley.

I’ve been listening to Night Ranger this afternoon, one song in particular, over and over. It’s synching up with my daydreams and fitting my melancholy mood in a way that’s almost scary. It’s a song called “Restless Kind.” I would’ve put up a YouTube clip, but I haven’t been able to find one. It wasn’t a big hit for the band, and I guess they never did a video for it. Too bad, because it’s actually quite pretty, and very appropriate for anyone who feels like taking an advance on their upcoming mid-life crisis. Here are the lyrics, at least, if you’re interested:

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Mar192008

In Memoriam: Arthur C. Clarke

Back in high school, my AP English teacher was fond of telling us that all fiction could be divided into “Literature with a capital L” — i.e., the good, important work, the books you read for AP English class — and everything else, which was, by implication, crap.

Needless to say, his list of “Literature with a capital L” did not include any science fiction titles. (Well, to be fair, it did include 1984 and Brave New World, which are technically SF, but they weren’t SF by my exacting standards of the time… no spaceships, you see.) This was 1987, way before geeks conquered the world, and SF was a ghetto genre that was widely dismissed as kid stuff, or else as disposable, escapist fare that couldn’t possibly provoke any worthwhile thoughts in its readers, and could possibly even be harmful to thinking. Even when you were reading the best the genre had to offer, there was something slightly shameful about being seen with it, as if you were just exiting a strip club and didn’t want to run into anyone you knew.

Nevertheless, I was a fan, dammit, and I was utterly incensed by the idea that the books and movies I loved above all others were considered second-class. I was a smart kid with good grades, college-bound for sure; reading SF certainly hadn’t caused any damage to my brain cells. Obviously, I needed to send a message, to strike a blow against the elistist literati who thought that dreary English moors made for better settings against which to explore the human heart than the surface of alien planets. It was, in the immortal words of Chris Knight, a moral imperative!

My message was to be a lengthy research paper on the genre, specifically on the giants of science fiction’s Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Through sheer logic and examples I no longer recall, I set out to prove that the work of these three men was just as significant and influential, just as important, and most of all just as literary, as anything produced by Faulkner or Fitzgerald or whoever else we’d been reading in class.

What can I say? I was young.

Looking at those three authors now, through eyes that have seen a hell of a lot more of life than the ones that eagerly watched my old teacher for any signs of capitulation in the face of my audacious act of rebellion, I suspect I would probably come to different conclusions than I did back then. I haven’t actually read these authors in years. But from what I recall of their work, Heinlein — always my favorite of the three, by the way — would probably strike me as a writer of excellent adventure stories that weren’t lacking in significant ideas but perhaps also were not as profound as my 17-year-old self believed. As for Asimov… well, I doubt I could get through an Asimov novel these days; even when I was 17, I thought his characters were little more than cardboard props, and I suspect his most famous works probably haven’t aged very well. No, out of my “holy trinity,” only Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction author who died yesterday at the age of 90, produced anything that I would dare to call “Literature.”

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Mar172008

Don’t Talk Back to Darth Vader, He’ll Get Ya

Several people have sent me links to the following video, including most recently our Simple Tricks East Coast correspondent, Brian Greenberg, so I suppose I’d better stop procrastinating and get it posted up, as it appears to be the current happening thing here on the InterWebs. It’s somebody’s three-year-old daughter recounting the plot of Star Wars and doing a pretty fine job of it, too. I’m not somebody who finds the antics of three-year-olds particularly cute, so trust me when I say it’s worth your click.

I’m amazed by how articulate she is, even if the video has been obviously edited to condense some of the standard little-kid rambling. She also seems to have a surprisingly cogent grasp of the movie, which her dad (who shot the video) swears in comments over on YouTube is entirely real and uncoached. (I’m especially amused by her comment that “the ‘siney’ one always worries,” which is as concise a summary of Threepio’s character as I’ve ever encountered). Amazingly, she’s seen the movie only once, spread out over several days. Smart kid.

(On a side note — and admitting up front that, as a non-parent, I have no authority to be saying a damn thing about how other people raise their kids — isn’t three a little young for a movie like Star Wars? I was seven when I first saw it, and, as enthralled as I was, I was pretty badly traumatized by the smoking skeletons of Owen and Beru. I wasn’t too sure about that beastie in the garbage masher, either. Maybe I was just a wussy kid.)

Anyway, as long as I’m talking about Star Wars, here are a couple other items of interest:

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Mar142008

Riverton Ricin Maker is Awake

I just read that Roger Von Bergendorf, the man who is believed to have poisoned himself with the toxic substance ricin in a Vegas hotel room, has regained consciousness. The authorities claim there is no sign of contamination anywhere or any evidence that Von Bergendorf was connected to terrorism, but they also have no idea what he was doing with the stuff; also, they’re still not saying what, if anything, they found in that house they searched in my hometown. I hope we don’t have to wait too much longer to find out what the hell was going on. ..

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Mar142008

Is It Really So Simple?

Scalzi on the abysmal exchange rates of the moment:

…in the long run it would be nice to have my home currency seen as stable and having value. The cynical part of me wonders how much the global perception of the dollar will change simply by having a new occupant in the White House on January 20, 2009. I guess we’ll find out.

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I’ll admit that I know very little about economics or all the arcane factors that influence how well or poorly we’re doing as a country — I find even simple 401k investments utterly baffling and intimidating — so I have no opinion on this idea myself. But I do wonder just how much psychology and prestige plays into something like the value of a nation’s currency. Anyone have any thoughts?

I will say that, if there’s anything to this, a post-election rebound for the dollar would be excellent news for me, as The Girlfriend and I have been talking about finally taking that dream trip to Scotland next year…

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Mar132008

More on Dave Stevens

Normally I don’t dwell over obituaries after I write my own tribute to the deceased, but in the case of Dave Stevens, I’m learning a lot of interesting things about a guy I actually knew little about.

For instance, the LA Times obit notes that Stevens drew storyboards for Raiders of the Lost Ark — the Official Star Wars blog specifies that Stevens illustrated the truck-fight sequence and “a famous lost Shanghai scene from Raiders which was later repurposed for Temple of Doom,” a little piece of trivia I’ve never encountered before — as well as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video in 1983. (A slight tangent: I just purchased the 25th anniversary CD of the Thriller album, which includes a bonus disc of videos; I’d forgotten just how captivating and entertaining that “Thriller” vid is. Jackson may have turned into a creepy loon over the years, but at his creative peak, he really was something. An immense talent derailed by, I believe, psychological problems that no one wants to call him on.)

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Mar122008

Photobucket Meme

Here’s kind of a strange meme that I ganked from SamuraiFrog. The instructions are:
1. Go to photobucket.com
2. Type in your answer for each question into the PhotoBucket search bar.
3. Choose your favorite photo to represent your answer.
4. Copy the HTML and paste it here.
5. Answer only in picture form.
My photographic answers are below the cut, to save on load times for anyone to whom that might be an issue:

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Mar102008

Experience? Who Needs Experience?

Here’s an interesting bit of food for thought:

Suppose you had to choose between two Presidential candidates, one of whom had spent 20 years in Congress plus had considerable other relevant experience and the other of whom had about half a dozen years in the Illinois state legislature and 2 years in Congress. Which one do you think would make a better President? If you chose #1, congratulations, you picked James Buchanan over Abraham Lincoln.

So much for that campaign tactic…

(Source via.)

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Mar102008

Indy IV “Payoff” One-Sheet

As expected, that one-sheet for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that you’ve been seeing around is just the “teaser.” Here’s the regular release design, which the official Indiana Jones web site is calling the “payoff” poster:

Indy IV payoff poster

I’ve never heard that term before, but it seems to fit. In more ways than one. I really like this design. It’s in keeping with the standard pattern for Indiana Jones movies: the first poster depicted just Indy alone, and now this design is a collage featuring all the primary characters with a bit of action at the bottom. It is, in fact, very similar to the regular release design for Last Crusade, which is as it should be. It makes this fourth movie feel like it really is part of the series instead of just an afterthought. (Of course, we’ll see what the actual movie is like, but I think at this point my skepticism has degraded to about the same consistency as cheesecloth. I’m ready Uncle George, take me now!)

Still a couple of months to go, of course, before opening day. In the meantime, I think I’ll get out the old credit card and acquire another item for the Archives…

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