Wow.  There’s only about four people out of the current 20 that I care to listen to.

Randy, Paul and Simon really picked some average singers this year.

An authoritative compendium of the fifty nuttiest pop-singers of all time. Oh, yeah…The top of the nuttiest pops is pretty well a given, being that guy who started out as a poor young black boy and seems to have finished as a rich old white woman. Madonna is left out, although most of the usual suspects are there… including David Bowie. (who famously forgot most of an entire decade)
And then there is Sting, whose latest musical project is a collection of songs by John Dowland, which I think are an amazingly good concept. Even if you have never heard of John Dowland.

Enjoy, and be amazed and amused!

(unclear pronoun corrected - thanks!)

Among one of the small stories that I remember hearing, or reading after the monster tsunami that struck South-East Asia on the day after Christmas several years ago was the one about the clouds of mental-health professionals, breathlessly hurrying in to offer grief and trauma counseling to the understandably traumatized survivors… only to discover that… well, most of them were getting along fine. And if not fine, at least reasonably OK; yes, they were grieving, they were traumatized by all sorts of losses, their lives and livelihoods, their communities and their families had been brutally ripped apart, but a large number of the survivors seemed inclined to be rather stoic about it all. They seemed to be more interested in pulling up their socks, metaphorically speaking, and getting on with it. It appeared that, according to the story, their culture and religion predisposed them to a mind-set that said: the incomprehensible does indeed happen, wheel of life, turn of fate and all that, and when it happens, pull up your socks and get on with it.

The peripatetic grief counselors seemed a little at a loss, that their services were in so little demand in the face of (to them) such obvious need. I was also left wondering if wall-to-wall counseling was somewhat akin to taking a ton of over-the-counter remedies for a case of the flu or a cold. In most cases, you’re gonna get over it, anyway.

When my parents lost their house, lock stock and contents in the Paradise Mountain/Valley Center fire in 2003, Blondie and I were monitoring the whole situation from a distance. This was the house that my parents had built together, after owning the land for nearly twenty-five years previously. It had everything in it that I remember growing up with, from the spiky Danish Moderne teak dining room set, to a complete run of American Heritage magazines, from the days when it was in hard-cover and without advertisements, and every shred of mementoes and furniture inherited from our grandparents and Great-Aunt Nan… everything that had not been diverted to my sister Pip, my brothers and I. My parents were left with two vehicles, the clothes they stood up in, their pets, and a small number of things my mother put into her pockets when she did a final sweep through the house as the fire roared up the hill, or that the firemen grabbed off the walls when the heat of it began exploding the windows inwards.

They were rocked… for about a day. And then they borrowed a camper, and moved right back onto their hill, and began planning to rebuild the house. As my mother philosophically explained many times to us, their friends, and those members of the disaster-relief community offering counseling and therapy, she and my father had gotten off rather lucky in comparison to others. They were retired, and did not have to rebuild a business, they had escaped the fire with their pets and themselves physically unscathed, and they were completely insured. All they had lost were things. And one more thing: they had lived in fire country for many years, and always in the back of their mind was this very possibility. They knew the risks and accepted them willingly. The odds caught up with them, at last but they pulled up their socks and got on with it. I own to being quite proud of my parents for being so stoical about the whole thing… really, it harks back to my current obsession, the 19th Century. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs, and accounts of fairly shattering events, and yet the people writing them afterwards seem remarkably un-traumatized and quite grounded, following upon events that by twentieth-century mental health practice would have justified a life-time valium prescription and a couple of decades of survivor-support meetings. As I told Mom and Dad about one of the characters I am writing about , “Today, he’d be in therapy for post-traumatic stress… but he’s a Victorian, so he’s only a little haunted.”

I have to admit to a sneaking affection for the Victorians; at once terribly sentimental and operatic in their emotions, but at the same time fully aware that bad things could, and indeed happen fairly often. Husbands buried wives with depressing frequency, also wives burying husbands ditto, and parents buried small children ditto and vice versa; accidents of industry, transportation and war occurred with similarly discouraging frequency. Victorian death rituals are infamous for what we have thought, during the enlightened century just past, to be terribly over-wrought, indulgent and … well, just too morbid. But I do wonder, if maybe they might have been better able to cope, and emerge being able to function after catastrophic tragedies, knowing that the possibility of such experiences was always out there. Sure, there were people back then who were entirely shattered by various traumatic experiences, and self-medication with a variety of interesting substances was not something of recent invention— opiate addiction positively soared among injured Civil War veterans— but still and all, one does wonder.

Discuss among yourselves, if interested!

So, anyone else going to stay up and watch the Oscars tonight?
Meh… I was surprised as heck to discover that I have actually seen anything nominated this year for anything like a major award. Blondie dragged me to “The Devil Wears Prada”… which made me wince uncomfortably about some of the people that I have worked for. And we watched “Pirates of the Caribbean” on video. I did actually go out and see “Flight 93″ (my review here), but it’s only up for editing.
Good enough reason to watch some taped stuff… catch up in the morning. About the only thing that interests me at this point, is which actress was suckered into wearing the most hideous gown, but I’m damned if I’ll burn a couple of hours of my life trying to figure that out.

Later: Oh man, the Goracle’s global-warming screed getting an Oscar while large chunks of the US are snowed under and frozen stiff is a vein of irony as rich as a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip. Relish it deeply!

So we whiled away an overcast Friday afternoon by going to the movies. There were three reasons for this: I feel I am duty bound to boost the first-weekend attendance of any intelligent and interesting-looking bit of historical film going, Blondie will watch Ioan Gruffudd in anything; double points and drooling slightly especially if he is costumed in tight trousers, tall boots and a shirt romantically opened halfway down the front… and where was I? Oh, third reason. No car crashes, explosions and machine gun fire.

Be warned though: when it comes out on DVD, it will make an excellent drinking game. Every time you see a British actor you recognize from Masterpiece Theater, knock back a shot for every presentation he or she was in. I guarantee everyone at the party will be paralytic by the end of the first half-hour, forty-five minutes max. It does have the distinct vibe of those lush and lovingly produced British television epics of a certain sort: all it lacks is the genteel host, sitting in a leather armchair, turning the pages of a book and setting the scene in orotund tones. The settings and costumes, and period details were as immaculate as they always are in these efforts. Rooms didn’t look like sets; they looked like rooms; many of them crowded and cluttered, and sometimes rather dim.

The first few minutes seemed a little awkward, rather jarring in setting up the characters and premise, and I mentally rewrote some of the dialogue. Bad habit of mine, having been intensely steeped in period literature, but either I adjusted or the writing got better. I think the latter, for a lot of the later dialogue was on-point.

The story was of that of William Wilberforce; a name not terribly familiar to Americans, and his long and discouraging struggle to outlaw slavery in the British Isles and in the British Empire as it was at the end of the 18th Century. The accounts of the abolitionist movement taught in our schools is pretty much focused on the American abolitionists at a later date, many of them inspired and even encouraged by Wilberforce himself, so this story is not a terribly over-familiar one to most Americans. William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, to give a couple of examples- them we have heard of. Often and at length.

The structure of the story might be a little hard to follow, initially: it hops back and forth, telling the story of Wilberforce, as a fairly well-born and well-connected young Member of Parliament, a forceful orator and able politician, and a good friend of William Pitt the Younger. He is young and dashing, beloved by his friends… even his household staff is fond of him, and accustomed to his eccentricities, among which is a fondness for all kinds of animals not normally considered as pets. He is also extremely and unashamedly devout, and in an effort by his good friend Pitt to find him a cause by which he might serve both God and Mammon (in the form of Pitt’s government) … he becomes devoted to the cause of abolishing chattel slavery, to the endangerment of his health and sanity.

Among Wilberforces’ first political allies in this effort who are not related to him by blood are the amazingly twisty Lord Charles Fox (Michael Gambon), political genius extraordinaire, and Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), a scholar with a bent for research and a passion for abolition. They are both given memorably amusing lines of dialogue: really, if I hadn’t seen “Cold Comfort Farm, I wouldn’t have thought Rufus Sewell had it in him to be a comic, and sometimes rather touching foil. (He usually gets the rather grim and earnest roles.)

Other noted moments: Ciaran Hinds, as one of the principal opponents to abolishing the slave trade, Lord Tarleton. Recently come from battling those rebellious Americans, he is the representative for Liverpool, and shows off his damaged sword-hand, as a war wound. Most Americans would have dearly loved a very much larger piece out of Banastre Tarleton than that, so he makes a very suitable villain.

And there it is: the movie makes clear what a long and dedicated effort it took to bring this about. For it meant a lot of work; writing, and preaching and persuading, not just of the high and the mighty, but of the ordinary people. Of this are solid, and very real grass-roots movements made, or at least, those of them that last, one person at a time being convinced against their economic self-interests. It does not happen overnight: it takes a while, and if anyone should be seeing this as some sort of politically correct fable, expecting the righteous cause to effortlessly sweep all before it… well, this should give pause. People grow old, grow weary and blind, loose their health and their illusions, and die before the cause is won. But when victory comes, it is sweet and just… and one which all can take comfort in, having been brought around by reason and persuasion. And the occasional political sly maneuver.

Money and time well-spent, overall. Not quite as literary as “Shakespeare in Love”, but not as drearily PC as “Amistad”. (Blondie says that the male leads are majorly studly and straight, which knocks out a certain theory about actors who can swish about in cloaks and swords and all that.)

Aside from a big fat nothing… not bloody much. The Stephens Party book (links to various chapters here and here) is been submitted to two small publishers (respectively one month ago and two months ago) where it seems to have been received with raptures of disinterest. Or at least I assume so, as the silence has been deafeningly… er, silent. Not even the usual form letter of rejection. And I included stamped-self-addressed envelopes, too…

I’ll give it another month or so and then submit it to Tor books, which is the only one of the semi-biggies who even accept direct submissions. However, they will not look at anything which has been sent to anyone else! Nein! That is Absolutely Verboten! Violate the Rules You Vill Be Flogged! Or something dire, like that, I assume. So, I can’t send it to them until the other two places exhibit even more obvious disinterest.

The other angle of approach is to Get An Agent. There are a lot of them, which is good. Show bits and pieces and chapters to enough of them, and the odds are that someone will like it enough… and think it is an easy sell to one of the Big Publishers, and at least there is someone on your side who knows someone, who knows someone who might be persuaded to look on your scribbling with favor. But still, it is pretty exhausting, firing off queries and letters, and sample chapters, as per their various requirements. I’ve been at this since November, actually.

Thus far, I have sent out six or eight queries per week, to various agents who are supposed to have a special interest in historical fiction. Thus far, I have racked up one agent who has looked at the whole manuscript and who loved it, but didn’t think there was enough suspense, or sex in it… and that also no one had ever heard of those people, and another who read two chapters, and said it would be a hard sell… but that I could definitely write, and please let her look at my next book. She also sent me a list of what sort of historical fiction has sold recently. This is not exactly a brush-off, seeing as that was an improvement over the usual raptures of disinterest, and/or form rejection letters, but not all that much immediate help. I think I am handicapped by not having been married to, or had an affair with anyone notorious, plus zilch interest in writing about the supernatural. Or porn. The next book is also a pretty massive project.

I already have a draft of the first fifteen chapters, out of a projected 45. (75,000 words, for anyone who keeps track of this kind of thing.) This will certainly expand to more, as characters and situations take my interest, and as other elements of the story occur. My daughter, among others, has also suggested breaking it into several parts. It would fracture the story arc a little… but it would let me pitch the first segment, already revised and polished, and let me finish the rest of it in something like peace and quiet.

Sorry for the vent, but this has been a crappy week. I didn’t even much enjoy a trip to Borders, to spend the gift card that my sister sent for my birthday: I kept picking up books that were written by crappier writers than me, and thinking that they could get an agent, and a publishing deal, and I can’t even get arrested by the literary establishment. This is probably the reason that writers turn to drink.

Oh, just for grins and giggles, the first chapter of Adelsverein is below the jump. Share it with anyone who might be able to help me get somewhere with it.

(more…)

The natural history of the “scofflaw”… another one of those interesting essays, found through Samizdata.

Ordinarily I don’t link to stuff that Instapundit links to, as I suspect that is redundant… but in the case of this particular “shrinkish” essay, I make an exception. The good doctor touches on some very salient points… and kind of explains why the level of discourse on certain topics has sunk to the vitriolic level that it has. Read and follow the links, for extra credit.

So, yeah, my heart hasn’t really been in this blogging thing for a while… no, no nonono, I am not working up to pulling the plug, it’s just that I have been diverted by another mission. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, I’m just laying down to bleed a while, then up and fight again… but I know how Timmer feels. There’s a lot of stuff going on, which in days of yore I would have been perfectly at home, piling on with the rest of us. Some of it is just the usual blogger shit-fit: Marcotte who? At where? Ummm. OK… this is the blogger-face you want with your campaign? It’s always a bad sign when you piss off more than you make friends with. Didn’t anyone actually read hers and that other blog before taking them on board officially? Apparently not. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, as we used to say in junior high.

Anna Nicole Smith, news coverage of, 24-7. Umm, OK. Clear demonstration that the major legacy media are not serving us well, although the Princess Di-like coverage fairly well illustrates the adage about first time tragedy, second time farce. We’re kinda over served in the farce department here, although the astronaut Lisa whats-er-fern is probably grateful for it.

Britney Spears, bald. Sorry, I’m not stooping to the obvious here. (Although the remembrance of a cartoon entitled “Her First Masked Ball” keeps popping up in my mind. I think it was in National Lampoon in about 1979. You google for it, you pervert.) Girl, the trailer park is calling. It is your destiny!

Talk about flashbacks to the 1970s, though… watching our major political parties and politicians maneuver over the last couple of days. Tragedy and farce, tragedy and farce, people. Only this time it’s going to be a tragedy and a tragedy again. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. It’s been like watching a blindfolded person walk over a cliff; for the purposes of scoring domestic political points, just go ahead and kiss off and abandon our allies (yes, we do have some, here and there, although you wouldn’t know it from your abject flunkies in the legacy media) and pull our forces out of Iraq in 90 days or whatever other timeline you have pulled out of your ass which will look good in the polls. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

Sell out our national credibility and commitment to a long and difficult mission for a mess of pottage and polls. Do whatever it takes to keep you in that nice little office you have scored for yourself. Just keep thinking of your short-term interest. Just keep hoping that all that jihadist narsty stuff in the woodshed will all go away, when George Bush exits the White House. Yep, just keep hoping. Get your friends and mouthpieces in the legacy media to help you out with that. Everybody will love us once again, once the Bushhitlertyrant is gone, and our betters are in control. Take a nice long drink of the Koolaid, comrade, you will feel so much better.

Me, I am trying to take the long view. With luck the blogosphere will circumvent the “flee-all-is-lost-in Iraq” meme, as best we can. No more kindly and authoritative Uncle Walty declaring without opposition after the Tet Offensive , that “all is lost in Vietnam! Flee, flee for your lives!” And also there is a means of fighting the “our troops are bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-criminals” meme. Here’s hoping we can scotch that one, right at the starting post, although given that the so-called military expert for the Washington Post is singing that little ditty like his hope of heaven depends on it doesn’t necessary ensure that that particular meme will go down without a fight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride in the next two years: fasten your metaphorical seatbelt, and prepare to weather the shitstorm

Me… I have the feeling that bad stuff is going to happen. And that I can do my best part now by going back to our stories, or recollections of who we are, and what we had to overcome. We have had hard times, bad times, times when we might have given it all up. We have to remember these stories. Our past, those stories that some of us know, and that some of us have yet to be reminded of, we will need them, very soon. Things will start happening, in the next months or years. Events will overtake the best intentions of us all, and so we need to be reminded of our history, our stories and our heroes and heroines.

They are a talisman, our hope, our light in the dark when every other light has gone out.

I am not alone in obsessing what fuels the radical elements of Islam in their apparent desire to hasten the end of days. The various mechanisms that contribute to its propagation (indoctrination in the schools, grinding poverty, corrupt leadership and so forth) are nothing new, but this whole thing seems to be something of a different phenomenon. While I do not by any means consider myself to be a scholar of theology, anthropology or, for that matter, history, all of these topics provide insight into the pickle we find ourselves in. Nor is it my intent to write a scholarly paper on the things that I’ve been reading, but to rather tell a little about them and why they are interesting. (more…)

What did a well-known naturalist, a daring mail-coach driver on the hazardous route through West Texas, a fiery newspaper editor, a tireless peacemaker and advocate for the Indians, and an amateur tinkerer/inventor all have in common, besides all being present in Texas in the 1840ies? Frederick Lindheimer, William “Big Foot” Wallace, John Salmon “Rip” Ford, Robert Neighbors and Samuel Walker all served at various times under the command of Jack Hays, the legendary Ranger Captain.

The Rangers of that time were nothing like their present-day iteration… an elite State law-enforcement body. And under Hays’ captaincy, they became more than just the local mounted volunteer militia, called up on a moments’ notice to respond to a lightening fast raid on their settlement or town by Indians or cross-border bandits. They took to patrolling the backcountry, looking specifically for a fight and hoping to forestall raids before they happened, or failing that, to track down raiding parties, recover loot and captives, and to administer payback. There was only one abortive attempt to have them wear uniforms. Ranger volunteers provided their own weapons and horses, and usually their own rations, although the State of Texas did supply ammunition. They were famously unscathed by anything resembling proper military discipline and polish, as the regular Army would discover to their horror during the Mexican War. A contemporary newspaper caricature of a typical ‘Texas Ranger” featured a hairy and ragged creature resembling “Cousin It”, slumped on a horse and wearing a belt stuffed all the way around with knives and pistols.

All that Hays asked of his Rangers was that they follow him… and fight. And so they did, for Texas attracted young and restless males with a taste for adventure, a bit of ambition and no small propensity for administering violence when called upon. They came like moths to a flame, before, during and after the Texas War for Independence; many of them gravitating like a trout going upstream into an enlistment as a Ranger or service in the local militia. During the early 1840s Hays commanded a company of fluctuating size, operating out of San Antonio, which turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and made his name a legend in Texas. Many who had only heard of him were utterly flummoxed upon meeting him in person for the first time. He was slight and short, quiet-spoken and almost shy, appearing to be (and a contemporary sketch and various descriptions conform this) about fourteen years old. In between forays and patrols he drilled his company tirelessly in shooting and horsemanship, copying many of the tricks of fighting from horseback used by the Comanche and other Plains warriors. Meeting the Comanche on anything like equal terms in a fight at short distance had to wait on a single technological innovation, and Hays was the first to put it to effective use.

Until 1844, the Rangers fought primarily with the same kind of weapons that Americans had always used: single-shot flintlock or percussion rifles of various type and design, augmented by single-shot pistols. While such rifles in well-trained hands were punishingly accurate, they were awkward and slow to reload, and nearly impossible to use from horseback in a running fight. Even single-shot pistols took time to reload, time during which an opponent with a bow and arrow could get off any number of accurate shots. But in 1839, motivated by some mad, god-only-knows, pie-in-the-sky, by-god-it’s-crazy-but-just-might-work impulse, the State of Texas ordered a quantity of 180 patent .36 caliber 5-shot revolvers from Samuel Colt’s factory in Paterson, New Jersey. A portion of them were actually issued to certain Texas Navy fighting ships, where they served about as well as expected, but they began to be largely used by the Texas Army… and increasingly by Ranger units, to astonishing effect.

The early Paterson Colts were delicate, and needed constant care and maintenance: loading the cylinder and reattaching it to the barrel was a finicky and careful business. To modern eyes they are over-long in the barrel, heavy and clumsy in appearance. In 1843, they were expensive… but worth every penny to the men who carried them into a fight with mounted Comanche warriors. Being able to fire five shots before needing to reload evened the odds considerably; and Hays’s Rangers usually carried two; it was also possible to purchase extra cylinders, have them loaded and change them out quickly. Colt’s reputation in Texas was made, especially after Hays and a party of fourteen Rangers armed with Paterson Colts charged and routed a party of eighty Comanche, in a running fight along the Pedernales River.

A subsequent design improvement for military use in the Mexican War saw Ranger Samuel Walker working with Samuel Colt on improving the original design. This new design, a six-shot .44 revolver which weighed a whopping four and a half pounds made Colt’s reputation and his economic future secure. Subsequent iterations of the Colt revolver proved enduringly popular in Texas to this day. Traveling there in the early 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote “There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.”

For all it’s various shortcomings, the Paterson Colt, and its descendents filled a very particular need— the need of a horse- mounted fighter for a repeat-fire weapon that was relatively accurate at short range, rugged, easy to use, and capable of evening the chances of survival against a hard-fighting, and similarly mounted enemy. In the hands of Rangers, soldiers, lawmen and citizens, a Colt revolver was all that.

Except on occasions where a shotgun was called for, but that’s another story.
(Next: An unexpected peace treaty with the Comanche)

The lengths to which the far left will go to avenge the election and re-election of George Bush have amazed me since 2000, but their most recent behavior takes vulgarity, indecency and cynism to a new level. This business of the so-called slow bleed strategy has nothing to do with whether we should or should not have gone into Iraq, and everything to do with adding suspenders to the belt in insuring that defeat is certain. I for one believe that the notion of micromanaging military affairs to the extent that they have threatened is unconstitutional under Article II Section 2. While Jack Murtha and his supporters would have us believe that his convictions are especially valid on the basis of his military service, I submit that his pandering to the fanatic left wing base of his party is his sole motivation and completely negates any respect he may have earned in the service of his country. Actually, earning the disrespect of his fellow Americans has been a work in progress since at least 1980, when he was caught up in the Abscam scandal

If you want to hear what a true hero has to say about funding the troops, watch Texas congressman Sam Johnson here as he speaks at House hearings. Not only a true hero, but a gentleman to boot.

It’s not that I don’t care about the current political situation or what’s happening in Iraq, it’s more that I’m so disgusted with the situation that I simply can’t bring myself, on most days, to even think about talking about it. Let me be clear here. The fact that we don’t even have Baghdad secured at this point and that we’re just starting to push back at the Iranians in country completely pisses me off. WTF?!!! On the other side of the aisle, the folks that are talking about cutting funding and that we’ve already lost, and we need to pull out make my blood boil even hotter. You don’t talk shit while your folks are on the ground trying to get things done. Either have the balls to pull us the fuck out or shut the fuck up and give us what we need to get it done.

UPDATE: Congressman Sam Johnson from Texas is much more eloquent.

I know far more about Anna-Nichole Smith than I ever wanted to. Loved the Guess Jeans billboards…otherwise…shrug.

You’ve got to admire Britney Spears dontcha? When that girl melts down, she melts down alllllll the way. You have to forgive me though…I think the bald look is HOT.

It’s only February of 2007. How come I’m hearing about who’s running for President NEXT YEAR? Election years are becoming like Christmas Seasons, they’re backing up earlier and earlier every year. Hell, at this rate, they’ll start running for President as soon as they get elected to the Senate…oh…wait…

I caught the repeat of SNL’s Christmas Show last night. Justin Timberlake is a funny guy. Not my style of music, but he doesn’t suck at that either.

Buying a house is stressful and gives me mild anxiety attacks. We’re so lucky we have a good realtor and a decent credit union. They’ve literally held our hands through the whole process.

I HATE job hunting. I’m willing to take a BIT of a pay cut as I transition to civilian life, but some of these corporations are on DRUGS if they think I’m willing to start at half my current salary. I’m in the freaking Air Force. We’re just above the poverty level for Chrissakes.

How come STATE OF THE BLACK UNION isn’t considered racist?

Why do these people who keep talking about Katrina recovery keep wanting MY money to fix the problems? I didn’t choose to live in a freaking time bomb and I resent the fact that they want MY money to rebuild in an area that’s still below sea level and will flood AGAIN if another hurricane hits. Pardon me, but go fuck yourselves.

I was reminded vividly last night when watching TV, of one of the classic and foolproof methods for picking out the murderer, early in a movie mystery. The method is to spot a relatively big-name or rather-better-than-average actor during the first act in what looks like a very small, walk-on part. Eventually, though, there will be the dramatic unveiling of the actual guilty party, where serious acting chops are required to chew the scenery in a properly dramatic fashion.

Lately, producers of the better sort of mystery move have gotten wise to this; they cleverly cast relative unknowns who are damn good actors, or salt the cast thoroughly with the same sort of relatively somewhat knowns… but in the instance of the movie that Blondie and I were watching… just about every part in the whole movie was played by a big-named star! Practically everyone with a part was a star, except possibly the two little pug dogs. And not only that, the dialogue was clever, the costuming was to die for, and oh, the set! Especially the Lalique frosted glass panels in the dining area; Blondie could not get enough of them, whenever they showed up in the background. For sheer period luxury, it beat the Titanic set all hollow.

We hadn’t watched this movie in a long, long time, so it was nice to see some of the very best of the lot at top form, and well as looking extraordinarily dishy… thirty years younger than we have seen them lately! It was also rather nice to be reminded that not all of the expensive, block-buster, all-star movie extravaganzas from the early 1970s sucked like a Hoover factory.

Murder on the Orient Express… reminding us of what we used to gladly pay the ticket price to watch. Rent or buy, and watch it again, especially if you haven’t seen it in a long time, and want to be reminded of what Hollywood used to be able to do.

And Blondie says that Sean Connery is gorgeous… and even now, if he didn’t remind her so much of her grandfather, she’d do him in a hot second.

Oh, the blogging has been light this last week, since I was trapped in the snares of literary endeavor. That is, pounding out chapter 12 of the new book. Some of the chapters come easily, as if they were already written down in my head, and some of them are hauled out inch by inch and word by word. Last week was one of the “hauled out inch by inch” weeks, but the week before I knocked out three chapters. Eh… go figure. I also had a couple of hours to work on Friday at the part-time secretarial-admin job, that between a weekly shift at the radio station, my retiree pension, and the very-slightly-more than paltry income from blogging allows me to stay at home and slave over a hot computer writing this century’s answer to “Gone With the Wind”.

So I am completely uninterested in the hot-news-item do jour, the pitiful life and sad demise of whats-er-fern (Ok, so her and Princess Di- first time tragedy, second time farce, and all that? Are we sure that the late and extravagantly mourned Ms A.N. Smith was not actually some animatronic creation devised by the tabloid industrial complex in order to generate the maximum quantity of tawdry headlines? I mean, inerrantly choosing the maximum tackiest of life choices at every possible opportunity… that goes beyond a gift: that argues a fiendish degree of forethought and planning. Oh, well, at least there is no breath of a whisper that she got it off with anyone really, really important in politics. Yet, anyway. Where was I… oh, yes… creation of semi-competent pop literature. Back on track, sorry for the diversion.)

I did briefly slip the shackles of duty yesterday: my sister Pippy had sent my daughter and I both gift cards for Borders Books, and so we popped down to spend a semi-blissful afternoon picking out the books that we wanted. Blondie went for an illustrated Terry Pratchett, but I had resolved to spend the gift card on some books that I could use for “the book”… ones that I didn’t have to keep returning to the library! I already possessed a good number of books that I needed for the writing of “Truckee’s Trail”, but in writing “Adelsverein” I am starting from scratch, and discovering that there exists a ton of excellent and thoroughly researched non-fiction about the German settlements. Either I can check it out from the library and keep it for about a month and a half at a stretch with renewals, or buy the stuff that I know I will need for longer.

And this book is going to be longer. I’ve already mapped out thirty chapters, and they have a wicked way of expanding, as interesting happenings and characters beg for more attention. Forty years worth of events in the Texas Hill country has an insidious way of becoming totally fascinating. Not to mention the people, of course. I write sometimes with a book open on my lap, to refresh my memory about places, descriptions, events and people. This is our history, and those who came before us; I need to get it all right. How it looked, tasted, smelled, what people in that time would have thought and felt and seen. Details count. I put myself in that place, with a book in my lap, and it all comes clear.

Oh, yes, the people: both the real ones, and the ones that I have totally just… you know… like made up? They take on life of their own, which is exhilarating and kind of scary at the same time. It’s easy and at the same time hard to write about them. For instance: in the next couple of weeks I will have to write about the deaths of three very appealing characters… one of whom is a fairly major hero. Sorry, it just has to be, for such sad events drive the plot, and it has always been so, from the instant that I conceived the whole story arc. (And it really was in an instant. I read something in one of the books… and just knew instantly that that was something which had to be a part of it story. This has happened, over and over. Really.) But still, it will be hard to write about. I was in tears for one whole afternoon, writing about a character in an early chapter who was fairly dispensable and barely seen anyway.

About the only harder thing to do will be about half a chapter on the heroine’s wedding night; something tender and erotic and a bit funny. Knowing that most women of the era were kept in a total state of ignorance about what the marriage bed involved, and that most men had a fairly detailed idea… and that a lot of married women of the era adored their husbands with desperate and operatic devotion (Queen Victoria herself, exhibit 1)… well, really, that argues that a fair number of Victorian-era bridegrooms must have done some fairly effective sex-education, at speed and on the fly, as it were. Otherwise, I presume their wives would have been (a) traumatized incredibly, and (b) loathed their so-called helpmates to really unparalleled degree. I am fairly sure that good properly married Victorians really had about as much fun in bed as any of the rest of us… they just didn’t go on about all the details as much. This proper reticence just makes it harder for the rest of us. I don’t mind, really.

Blondie says she will loan me some of her bodice-ripping romances, in order that I should get into the proper spirit. Yeough; if they dictate that I should have to write a sentence like “she grasped his throbbing man-root and guided it into her turgid flesh” I am so going to put my head in the oven. (For about 15 minutes)

It is an electric oven anyway, but you get the general idea.

I am glad to know that all of the federal income taxes I pay for an entire year won’t even cover the cost of one hour’s flight time in a C-32 - the plane that Nancy Pelosi feels that she needs. Just think, I can pay taxes for half of my working career knowing that I have covered the expenses for one round trip flight from Washington to San Francisco. Of course, there will be a reimbursement (at coach rate) for friends and family. Undoubtedly coach rate will have been established by reference to a red-eye flight booked several months in advance. Wouldn’t a more fair way be to calculate the ticket cost by amortizing the amount of paying passengers over the total cost of the flight? Hell, they’re all rich anyway.

It makes me sick.

Found at Photon Courier, a long and fascinating story about the redemption of the Irish underclass in 19th Century New York City, and the man known as ‘Dagger John’, who almost single-handedly worked miracles for a desperatly disfunctional community.

A must see for fans of USAF history is the History Channel Modern Marvels episode on Edwards AFB. While the planes are stars, the show also touched on some of the wild personalities who brought the projects to life, Bob Hoover being one of the more notable.

What can I say, I just love planes.

I just returned a few days ago from Munich, having had to respond to a Summons for Oral Proceedings at the European Patent Office. It was quite an experience – much more formal than the equivalent process in the USPTO. The issue related to a patent application that has been wending its way through their system for several years, and has been repeatedly rejected for a lack of inventive step. After about 3 ½ hours of debating the topic they finally conceded that it was indeed patentable. We don’t win them all, but a victory in the EPO is particularly sweet.

I had planned on doing some blogging while there, but could not bring myself to pay an additional $25/day for broadband access. Watching TV was not much of an option either given that the only English language choice is CNN International. I am completely burned out on the left wing bias of US MSM, but it is nothing in comparison to the Hate America tone in Europe. The release of the UN study on global warming had the European media in a frenzy over US refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, particularly ironic given the concurrently running story of China bringing on something like 5,000 coal fired generation facilities over the next few years.

Oh well, the beer was good. Red Haired Girl asked me to get a souvenir to give to her (yikes!!) boyfriend. I had a craving for a decent burger and fries anyway, so I headed to the Hard Rock Café to kill two birds with one stone. While there I struck up a conversation with a group in the midst of travelling to thirty some-odd cities to collect HRC guitar pins. These people are passionate about their hobby. In any case, I persuaded them to help out with some free Daily Brief publicity. Hopefully at least the gentleman holding the sign will be a new reader.

I will likely be travelling to Romania in the next several weeks, so I will try to get some new pictures with a vampire theme.

In the meantime, I am anxiously awaiting the onset of spring weather. There is a fine brisket in my freezer with an appointment with the smoker.

So according to this story which has been linked and commented on here and there across the blogosphere may indicate that our dearly beloved theatrical-release movie industry may be making a tight circle around the drain, at least as far as the domestic audience is concerned. They’ve been circling it slowly for years, but this time dare we hope that the end is nigh?

Meh. Maybe, maybe not and cry me a river in any case. I fall squarely into the demographic of that 30% that dislikes the movie selection. Yes, I am well aware of the axiom that 90% of any variety of popular culture sucks, yes I am at that cranky age where I have probably seen or heard a lot of it before. (And that little of it that I haven’t, I don’t want to. Thanks) I know that the movie-audience demographic segments most prized by Hollywood these days are A: Sub-literate, non-English speaking audiences who want to see lots of car-chases, explosions and machine-gun fire, B: pimply-faced American post-adolescent males given to communicating mostly in grunts, who also favor the above-listed cinematic elements and C: Politically correct and heavy-handed wank-fests mostly aimed at each other and a small circle of the self-consciously superior bi-coastal cognoscenti.

Hollywood gets by these days by throwing out multi-million dollar chunks of bloody chum to a large audience who gobble it up by the bucket, meanwhile salvaging their artistic pretensions by cobbling together some precious bit of art-house fluff which is ooh-ed and ahhh-ed over by the critics and all their friends, while the paying domestic audience avoids as if it were made of plutonium. This has the added benefit of allowing them to say scornfully “Really, the domestic audience just can’t handle difficult and challenging film-making! Smithers, fetch me another megabucket of chum for the masses!” (Epic Movie, anyone?)

Yeah, they turned out a regular smorgasbord of the craptacular back in any year you could name, but they also managed to churn out stuff that wasn’t half bad at all: movies with coherent and clever plots, snappy dialogue, fairly adequate performances, and the occasional happy ending… that also weren’t a remake of an older movie, part 8-whatever in some series that stopped being any fun at around part 3, or ripped from the pages of a comic book. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for chrissake people, I am a grown-up! I stopped reading comic books at about the time my lips stopped moving when I read to myself! Please don’t start telling me about graphic novels. I have a copy of Maus and no, I don’t want to see a movie made out of it. Seriously.

If it weren’t for the lonely 1-2% of stuff produced which doesn’t suck with the force of a factory full of Hoovers, and a fairly agreeable collection of movies produced for cable and broadcast TV— at a mere fraction of the cost and the pretensions involved in theatrical productions — I swear there’d be nothing worth renting on DVD.

Might someone in the heart of dark heart of the Hollywierd beast be paying attention, and worrying about why people are staying away from the megaplex in droves? Possibly… but gloom and doom about falling movie attendance has been lurking around for about twenty years, ever since Michael Medved first began banging on about it in this book, and I haven’t seen any turn-around yet. Count me as one who is not holding my breath waiting for the whole edifice to collapse like a house of cards; not as long as they can go on unloading the buckets of spectacular and sub-literate chum on the overseas market.

In the meantime, I have a nice little second-hand copy of Cold Comfort Farm, with Eileen Atkins, Kate Beckinsale and Stephen Fry and a whole lot of people who can… you know, like act? And it’s got clever dialogue and an amusing plot… and there are no car chases at all. Oh, but the bull gets out and they have to chase after it, but that’s about it.

(Also cross-posted at Blogger News Network)