Cosmos

I'm still not sure if it was fortuitous or ruinous to my life that I missed the original run of Cosmos in 1980 when it ran on PBS. Considering how wrapped up in the subject matter of the show I was at the time, I do wonder how and why I missed it (if the answer was as simple as "it was on at the same time as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," then I deserve to be dragged before a tribunal). One thing is for certain, though: I get the feeling from seeing it now that if I had made the time to watch it then, I might have ventured down a completely different career path and wound up in a very different place than I am now for better or worse.

Like anyone else, I went through a lot of "interest phases" in childhood: times when I was utterly locked in fascination over one subject or another for an indeterminate period before wandering across another field of study (by accident or design) to focus upon for another few months and so on. Amongst these countless flirtations over those years, the two biggest (read: longest-lasting) escapes for my imagination during those years were the fields of paleontology and astronomy.

Oh, I wish I had a way to reacquire some of those Eisenhower-era reference tomes that I would check out continually from the Southfield Public Library during that stretch, if only to compare just how much previously-accepted knowledge has changed (if not completely upended as is almost certainly the case with the old dinosaur books I'd pore over for hours) from the time they were written! To illustrate, I grew up in a time when all of the available books on paleontology envisioned dinosaurs as sluggish, thuggish, cold-blooded reptiles, some of which were so enormous that they were forced to spend most of their lives in the shallows of lakes and rivers to keep from crushing themselves under their own mass. With regards to astronomy, this was also the time when there was no Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto had no moon (and was itself still considered a planet), Saturn was the only planet with rings, and we had never seen close-up pictures of any planets beyond the "inner solar system" (Mercury, Venus, Mars and our own). The last few decades have added much to our knowledge since then, and in quite a few cases old theories have been rewritten, revised, or just thrown out the window based on what we've learned and seen.

One thing that's clear to me now is that it was the unimaginable scale of these subjects that had seized my imagination. Pretty much everything that had to do with the study of paleontology is centered on time and deduction: how we could dig up fossilized skeletal remains of beings separated from our modern world by vast, unimaginable oceans of ages and infer (correctly or not) what kind of beasts these were or what kind of world they inhabited. If that was too much to handle, few kids could deny the romance of envisioning the beasts themselves: I've spent many an afternoon imagining what it must have been like to come across a titanic Brachiosaurus feasting on greens from its swampy home, or perhaps watching a huge horse-like Indricotherium wandering the forests of the Miocene epoch, lunching idly on the leaves of trees.

With astronomy, everything got exponentially bigger and time was doubled up with physical distances so great that they left your mind spinning wheels helplessly in an attempt to grasp just how huge everything is. The sheer unimaginable scale of the universe is something that still stirs me deeply on the rare occasions when I am somewhere that allows you to actually see it: I remember very clearly looking up at the skies, nearly breathless with wonder as I lay on my back in a windswept campground clearing on the shores of Lake Superior and looked straight up at the glowing Milky Way stretching all the way across a night sky totally unspoiled by city lights. What I was seeing in that sky looked limitless (the light I was seeing from the center of the Milky Way had taken 30,000 years to travel to my little spot on the road), but even that endless sprawl of suns, gas and time was only a literal drop in a bucket, a single grid of reference in itself in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

I'd always had a pretty healthy respect for Carl Sagan, dating back to when I was given a copy of the hardcover edition of Cosmos one Christmas probably just after the series had aired. I have to admit that I didn't make a huge effort to read the book cover to cover as my head was in the fantastical clouds as far as literature was concerned (at that time, I had moved beyond science into science fiction, where those pesky laws of physics that wouldn't let you go anywhere beyond this solar system didn't apply), but I'd derived much enjoyment from the pictures and paintings of exotic alien worlds and beautiful galaxies lying randomly about the great expanse. It wasn't until I'd read his novel Contact (not to mention a truly transformative experience reading The Cold And The Dark around tenth grade or so), that Sagan had begin to reach a position of some prominence with me, though by early 1986, music had consumed my interest so completely that there was probably very little that the good Doctor could do to pry me away from the more seductive charms of Eurowave at that point (save for getting me a ride on the next space shuttle, perhaps). Thus, on the days when Mr. Thompson would play back part of an episode during Astronomy class, I was almost certainly tuned out to whatever was on my Walkman that morning instead of bothering to listen to the guy in the red turtleneck shirt and tweed jacket on the TV screen halfway across the planetarium from me. My loss.

Watching Cosmos now, however, has been nothing short of a revelation: what an incredibly entertaining, enlightening and ultimately moving presentation this is. We then are shown the entire history of the universe in the framework of a twelve month calendar; we visit the great lost Library of Alexandria, and experience what it would be like to travel near the speed of light on a bicycle path in Italy. We also visit the planets of Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars up close, discuss the likelihood of God, the possibility of our own self-destruction in our "technological adolescence" and travel to the farthest imaginable reaches of space and time in our "Spaceship of the Imagination." While only occasionally showing its age through its live-action production values (or the aforementioned clothing style then preferred by its host), Cosmos holds up remarkably well nearly three decades from its first airing. What few gaps or revisions that are necessary to the show are supplied afterward as a few moments are taken after nearly every episode that update us on new innovations or discoveries in the episodes subject matter current to the mid-1990s.

As the sole host and narrator of Cosmos, Sagan is a faultless guide through this thirteen hour tour of discovery and curiosity that takes us from the picturesque shores of modern Earth back to the time of the "Big Bang" itself. Engaging, enthusiastic, playfully sardonic, and completely unafraid to wax poetic while illustrating his obvious affection for the subject, Sagan's personality is as infectious as the flu and powers the entire presentation. Perhaps most valuably, he possesses the ability to make the audience understand the often mind-boggling ideas and concepts that drive the modern study of the universe. Thus, Cosmos serves as a wonderfully fitting and lasting tribute to the man and drives home just how great our loss was when he died in 1996.

Wow, Life Is Good Again...

About the only blemish on my existence these days is work (though in my field this should hardly be a surprise anymore). There is no use kidding ourselves: we are looking at a flat 2007 at best if the next, say, six to ten weeks can at least stop the bleeding we've been experiencing over the last four-and-a-half months. We're not quite far enough off of last year's pace to guarantee our first down year since 2001 just yet, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that we're in danger of reaching a Point Of No Return if things don't start to stabilize soon.

On the brighter side of this, while our figures are off a noticeable percentage from last year's pace, we are still far above the truly dismal state of industry sales as a whole. I can't compare the current climate to the post-disco crash that leveled the industry in 1979 since I wasn't around to see it firsthand, but sales of physical product are disappearing faster than Itunes and their ilk is growing, and costs are being cut (and people let go) at a disturbing pace that makes me wonder sometimes if we're about to see a repeat of the artificially-accelerated demise of the vinyl LP. Yes, this sounds paranoid and I tell myself that this idea is suicidal nonsense, but then again I've been witnessing seventeen consecutive years of Really Bad Ideas from a ringside seat and nothing is out of the question anymore.

Perhaps what affects me the most in this situation is the fact that salespeople we have known for years and were in this business because they truly loved it as we do are being dropped like hot potatoes while the lawyers and bean counters who helped turn this industry into the soulless, litigious, facile factory of mediocrity that it is are still sitting pretty behind the wheel. Most of our old intermediaries are now gone, two of our more important contacts in the last two months alone: our Universal sales rep was let go in April, and nearly the entire Midwestern sales staff of WEA (including our longtime rep, with no replacement for us to deal with save for a 1-800 number) got the axe just last week. These are the times that try men's souls ...

Getting away from that funk, pretty much everything else is coming up roses these days. Health wise, all is copacetic (read: the kidneys are well-behaved and comfy), and I'm still being a good boy: as I write this, it has now been almost five months since I quit the cigs. Huzzah! This pretty much beats my old record to a pulp, and while abstaining hasn't always been a breeze (the warmer weather in the evenings lately seems to give me The Jones from time to time for whatever reason), and I've had my "short and terse" days, we're still steady-as-she goes.

With the on-again, off-again spring weather that seems to show up every week or so around here lately, I've been dragging the bike out of the garage nightly in an attempt to burn off some of the spare tire I grew over the wintertime (much of it due to kicking the cigs, I'd imagine). It's been interesting getting my wind back slowly but surely and trying to increase my endurance by alternating 4 minute "cruises" with 30 second "sprints" on the streets around our complex. As of right now, I'm still in a regimen of four sprints per night: the first two are a breeze, the third one is pretty draining, the fourth is damn near torture. By the time I return to the condo after a few minutes of coasting and cooling down, I am misted over in sweat and burning from the waist down, but it's not an unpleasant feeling at all ... at least until I climb the stairs, heh heh.

While we're on this health kick, I was also hit by a Great News Bombshell this past week that I'd never dared to hope for: Hillcrest settled on my bill. I nearly fell out of my chair when I called the Billing department to follow up on my application for financial assistance and was told that everything had been taken care of and my account balance was zero. After thanking the operator for the news, I hung up and nearly danced down the street with joy. At the very best, I'd been preparing for a resolution similar to LakeWest's offer from last summer (I paid half the bill amount in one shot and we called it even), and instead I now have a nice little safety cushion in the bank for dealing with future car repairs, or putting towards a desperately-needed new vacuum cleaner, or any host of future possibilities. Kick ass.

To help with new biking regimen (and as a celebration for the great news from the hospital), I finally made the Great Leap Backwards in audio entertainment quality and picked up a cute little mp3 player while out and about with Sarah. Since I would only be using it for exercise (be it biking or walking), I didn't feel the need to buy a 60-gig iPod and instead opted for a 2 gig Creative Audio Zen V Plus. The sound quality is about what I expected: even with the little EQ interface set up to my liking and "bass boost" pumping up the signal into the little ear buds, the music still sounds only marginally better than a transistor radio broadcast. Then again, high fidelity wasn't really the point of getting this thing as much as having a way to listen to music while timing my bike exercises. For that alone, I'm pretty happy with my new little toy, and here's hoping it pays back by helping me take a few strategic inches off my waist.

I have to admit, these little players are nifty little gadgets that almost make me consider getting a similarly-outfitted cell phone, much as I despise the things on all other counts. Really, this Zen V is a sexier looking USB drive with a headphone jack and a video screen when you get down to the heart of the matter. I loaded a couple dozen four-minute songs onto it and a few video clips for the hell of it (you never know when I might have to kill 25 minutes waiting for something or someone, so why not spend the time watching Pink Floyd's Live8 set), and then ordered an elastic arm band and a little protective case in order to stabilize the thing and thus keep myself from constantly worrying that it's going to fall out of my pocket while I'm cycling.

And now a bit of "Modern Movie Time," if you will: Sarah and I checked out Spider-Man 3 last Sunday. The critics were right: there was far too much going on here to be resolved in a satisfactory fashion, and you wonder why Sam Raimi didn't just settle with a story about Venom while leaving Sandman (and the always-irritating "Goblin Jr." for that matter) for another time and movie. Instead of having a memorable villain who makes a lasting impression on us like Dr. Octopus, the three baddies here have to make the most of their limited screen time, and we barely get to know them at all, thus there is no sense of victory when the inevitable Big Rumble is all said and done (this is especially true of Venom, who is not only never referred to by name but us is effectively given little more than a cameo appearance before being handed his ass on plate by our troubled hero). This is not to say that I was ever bored with Spider-Man 3: I was certainly entertained by it all as it was happening, but it was also nowhere near as good as 2, which I consider the best of the series (and one of the best superhero films I've seen, period).

Lastly, Brian came up the other night and the three of us took in another summer sequel: 28 Weeks Later. Thinking back on it now, I guess this movie offered about as much entertainment as Spider-Man 3, though "entertaining" seems the wrong word to use here: perhaps "being punched repeatedly in the face at odd times" is a better way to describe the experience.

As the title indicates, 28 Weeks Later takes place a beyond the events of the first film and really has nothing at all to do with it outside of the country it's set in and the disease ravaging it. There is a "Green Zone" (subtle!) maintained and patrolled by U.S.-led N.A.T.O. forces on the Isle Of Dogs where the residents of ol' Blighty are being flown back in as the first step to the reclamation and reconstruction of the country. Happily, there aren't any more infected people racing about: the last of them died of starvation months before), but there is an absolutely massive and horrendous cleanup job to be done, and it is in the middle of this commotion that that a typically twitchy Robert Carlyle (who survived an attack of infected folks by deserting his wife) is reunited at last with his two children Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots (I am not making these names up), who were out of the country and thus missed all the mayhem.

I'll leave the rest of the plot for y'all to find out on your own: though I greatly doubt that you'll be surprised to hear that the proverbial shit soon hits the fan, and the second half of 28 Weeks Later becomes as strongly reminiscent of Aliens as the first one was of Day Of The Dead. A couple of military characters (most notably a bored sniper played by Jeremy Renner) figure prominently once all Hell breaks loose and try to lead a band of survivors to safety before the brass decides to wipe the board clean and start over again.

Now comes the rub: while the way the Rage virus rears its ugly head once again is a pretty basic and believable idea, exactly how we reach this point demands a satisfactory explanation that we are never given. Worse, the sequence of events that follows strains even "zombie movie" credulity to the snapping point (and I won't even get into a certain character's inexplicable habit of crashing enough scenes afterward that you start to wonder if the survivors are being menaced by a Rage-infected zombie or Evil Otto from Berzerk).

Even for those who can perform the mental calisthenics to keep them from hurling their popcorn box at the screen in exasperation once the Rage virus gets out in the wild again may still have issues with discerning what happens afterward as near-stroboscopic editing work takes over from that point onwards. If parts of 28 Days Later made you feel prone to seizures, be warned that 28 Weeks Later is sheer visual chaos at several points, and your ability to suss out exactly what in the flying Hell is going on (and to whom it's happening) is severely compromised to progressively irritating effect. In fact, during two key points in the second half of this movie where a main character is in mortal danger of infection or death, it is absolutely impossible to tell if they lived or died until you move on to the next scene.

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that unlike its predecessor, there is a much different, almost viciously nihilist tone to 28 Weeks Later that occasionally makes for some supremely unpleasant viewing: scenes of mass immolation, mass murder, and a whole bunch of infected folks being instantly converted to cold cuts are par for the course here. All of that, however, pales next to a pivotal scene where an infected character spends a couple of minutes pounding a screaming, helpless medical patient into raw hamburger before deciding to engage in some festive eye-gouging for a lark. Plenty of agonized and screams and bodily fluids flying about willy-nilly for all. Yeee-ha.

Spider-Man 3 rating: 3/5

28 Weeks Later rating: 3/5

The Great, The Lame, And The Ugly

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

This isn't going to be pretty: some of the titles being discussed here rank among the most hysterically lame movies ever conceived, so I'd better start with the good stuff and we'll head down to the basement from there.

There aren't many movies that knocked my socks off the way Baraka did when I first saw it sometime in the middle of 1996 (if memory serves). I'm not even sure how I first became aware of this movie, though I suspect it might have had something to do with the opening portion of the Dead Can Dance concert movie Toward The Within (which, as it happened, was the work of Baraka producer Mark Magidson). The beginning of Toward The Within was basically a striking and hypnotic music video for the song "Yulunga" and was comprised entirely of clips from Baraka, after which the film switched over to its advertised live concert setting.

It was a year or so later (most likely during the summer I was working part-time at Suncoast) that I came across a VHS copy of Baraka and decided to give it a whirl. Almost instantly, it became one of my all-time favorite movies, and it was one of the first films I upgraded to DVD after Sarah and I finally made the digital transition after Christmas, 2000.

Completely unencumbered of dialogue or any kind of plot (but putting forth an overall theme of man's relationship to the Earth), Baraka is nothing but wondrous, breathtaking imagery set to music ... a kind of feature-length video album, if you will. One thing that becomes immediately apparent while watching this film is that it was not shot on the cheap: using high-definition 70mm film and traveling the entirety of the civilized world for source material, Baraka continually astounds with sights from locales as diverse as the Galapagos islands, the (burning) oil fields of Kuwait, the city streets of Bangkok, and (in the movie's most chilling sequence), an abandoned "re-education center" in the backwaters of Cambodia.

While researching this post, I also made the joyous discovery that director Ron Fricke is presently working on a sequel to Baraka, titled Samsara, which is slated for release possibly this year. Count that as one film I'll definitely be sure to catch on the big screen.

At some point waaay back in the early days of our first family VCR, my parents rented out the 1978 cult classic Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. I clearly remember watching this with some other friends one evening not knowing what to expect and we wound up having a grand old time. Billed even back then as one of the worst movies ever, I can definitely assert a quarter century later that Attack... falls pretty short in that particular category. Seeing this film again recently, I am happy to report that many of its gleefully cheesy charms have remained intact over time: some of them almost certainly enhanced thanks to all of the period clothes and hair on display, not to mention some of the less-than-PC dialogue between the principals.

So, uh, what exactly happens in this movie? Do you even have to ask? Oh, very well ... for reasons unknown, humanity is at war with tomatoes. These little red fruits roll and leap about in a blindly murderous rage, while a crack team of undercover agents race against time to find some way to stop the menace once and for all. Intrigue, treachery and ham-fisted satire are served up in spades as our "heroes" run into a host of obstacles standing between them and the salvation of mankind.

From a movie that was born to be bad, we'll move along to films that aren't really intended to suck, but wind up doing so anyway. Under this category we'll find the entire oeuvre of Mr. Jean Claude Van Damme, and in particular his sci-fi masterpiece (cough) Timecop.

One thing about science-fiction films that are set in the future is that the events shown during many of these movies are by now in our past, which tends to make you consider just how wildly wrong-headed these visions of the 21st century really were (especially when hardly anyone predicted the rise of the World Wide Web in any form). In this category, Timecop packs a few very amusing futuristic "sights" indeed such as near-windowless cars that apparently drive themselves (and look like a cross between a station wagon and a battleship), people from the 21st century using MiniDiscs for music playback (gawd, they barely did this in the twentieth century, for crissakes) and a secret sect of police that patrol the space-time continuum looking for "ripples" that are caused by bad guys heading back in time and attempting to alter the future, usually by holding up gold shipments during the Civil War or buying up lots of stocks in 1929.

Don't even ask how these temporal "ripples" are detected by computers since theoretically any successful operation that alters the present would be utterly un-noticeable to anyone in the here and now (not to mention how it's possible that anyone aside from the police are able to travel back in time): Timecop is one of those movies that doesn't reward analytical thought. However, if you simply have the need to turn your brain off for an hour and a half while watching The Muscles From Brussels kicking ass and taking names, then step right up for some cheaply-composited CGI, typically soft-boiled action-movie dialogue and plotting, and a fair amount of hulking bad guys getting themselves beaten into hamburger. You can do a lot worse.

Finally, we arrive at 1979's Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, which launched one of the most howlingly bad post-Star Wars sci-fi TV shows to date. What can I say? I was young and didn't know any better: my beloved Battlestar Galactica was killed by ABC in only six months while this dated NBC romp ran for two years. I had to get my space fantasy fix from somewhere, damn it.

With a likable enough Gil Gerard doing his best Han Solo impersonation in the title role, the original theatrical release of Buck Rogers is basically a retelling of the hoary old Trojan Horse fable set on a desolate post-war Earth of the future where the recently-arrived Air Force Captain (and astronaut) has wound up after being frozen alive in his spacecraft in a freak accident way back in 1987. Found drifting in space by the evil Draconian Empire and their skanky princess Pamela Hensley, Rogers is released and sent home with a homing beacon hidden on his spacecraft that will reveal to the Draconians the secret route through the Earth's defense shield. Once back home (where he receives the shock of his life when he is informed of what happened while he was away), Rogers must then overcome the suspicions of the Directorate Of Earth, keep himself from being executed as a spy and also find out what happened to his family and to the old world he left centuries ago.

Admittedly, Buck Rogers... could have been pretty good in the right hands, but instead the presentation winds up aping the worst aspects of Roger Moore-era James Bond with comic assists from a midget in a robot suit voiced by a slumming Mel Blanc. That said, there are some positive aspects to this movie: while the Earth may very well indeed become an inhospitable radioactive desert by the year 2491 if current events keep up, we can at least look forward to the ladies of the 25th century to be walking around in skin-tight blue catsuits (bonjour, Erin Gray!) when not in similarly form-fitting alabaster white military uniforms. Of course, we'll also have those irritating little silver "drones" toddling about underfoot as well, carrying the leaders of our terrestrial government on their chest looking for all the world like flashing Lite-Brites on silver dinner plates.

Now, I do have the complete run of the subsequent TV series on DVD (hey, when the manufacturer drops the lost price to $24.98 for a 5 DVD set, how can I refuse?) in case I feel the weird urge to sit through them all someday. That said, if my memory is correct and the series went nowhere but downhill from this point onward, I'll be having some serious second thoughts with that idea.

Seacrest out.

Baraka rating 5/5

Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes rating 3/5

Timecop rating 3/5

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century rating 2/5

Carol M. Walker 1944-2007

As we all know, this hasn't been a good week for news. While the events that took place in Virginia didn't affect me on a personal level, this sure did ...

From today's Lake County News-Herald:

Carol (Mowrey) Walker
04/22/2007

A memorial service for Carol (Mowrey) Walker, 62, of Mentor, will be 10:30 a.m. Saturday at Maplegrove Alliance Church, 36400 Maplegrove Road, Willoughby Hills.

Mrs. Walker died April 13, 2007, at Hospice House in Cleveland.

Born Nov. 23, 1944, in Cleveland, she had been a longtime Mentor resident.

A homemaker, Carol graduated from North High School and was an alumna of Baptist Bible Seminary and Cedarville College and also a graduate of Lakeland Community College. She was a very active member of Emmaus Bible Fellowship Church in Mentor. Carol was a lifelong learner and a perpetual student.

Survivors are her husband of 42 years, T. James "TJ" Walker; mother, Dorothy (Nimmo) Mowrey of Mentor; daughter, Laura L. (Nick) Marino of North Bloomfield; sons, Eric J. (Leah) Walker of Copperas Cove, Texas and Bryan J. (Jennifer) Walker of Painesville; and grandchildren, Joseph, Emily, Joshua, Zoe, Jonathan, Melody and Jacob.

Her father, Joseph Mowrey, is deceased.

There will be no calling hours at the funeral home. The Rev. Denny Hoynes of Emmaus Bible Fellowship Church will officiate at the service.

The family suggests contributions in Carol's name to Hospice of the Western Reserve, 300 E. 185th St., Cleveland, OH 44119.

Arrangements are being handled by Davis Funeral Home in Willoughby.

When my family moved back to Mentor in 1983, my entire life was uprooted. I was never a "popular" kid by any stretch of the imagination, but I had a lot of friends in Southfield which made the terrifying proposition of going from a school the size of Alice J. Birney middle school to a comparative monstrosity the size of Southfield-Lathrup Senior High School a little less fearsome than it was. Thus, the news that we were moving and that I was to start ninth grade not surrounded by friends but instead by total strangers absolutely gutted me. Worse, we moved to Mentor at the precise start of the school year, so there was no time to get acclimated to the neighborhood or meet new friends before classes started.

Shore Junior High didn't do much to improve my mental state upon arrival. It was a soul-crushing construct: drab, and prison-like, smelling of tile cleaner and populated by a sea of unfamiliar, hostile faces. Alright, it might not have been that bad, I suppose, but a sudden crushing shyness and insecurity had gripped me the minute we left Michigan and stayed with me nearly all the way through my high school years. Despite all of this, within days of starting at Shore, I had found myself a new friend.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that I can't remember anymore what class we had in common (or how we had met otherwise), but we shared a similar interest in strategy games and listening to Top 40 music on the radio, and that was all I needed to make a connection. That new friend was Bryan Walker, and we spent most of ninth grade at each other's houses watching movies, playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and/or Star Frontiers, and just talking for hours about whatever came to our 14-15 year old minds.

When hanging out with friends, it's inevitable that you'll get to know their parents as well, at least to some extent. In the case of Bryan's family, I never knew his father well, but I liked his mother, Carol, pretty much from the instant we were first introduced. She was rarely in a bad mood, always made me feel welcome, and struck me as one of the sweetest, kindest people I had ever met. In addition to sharing the same first name and middle initial as my own mother, there were times I almost felt like Carol was a kind of surrogate mom to me: perhaps sensing my insecurities and shyness, she always made a point to tell me it was good to see me, or that I was looking better or complimenting my speaking voice or what-have-you. At the time, I was usually embarrassed by all of this and would sheepishly blush or squirm and murmur a "thanks," but I realize now that she quietly helped me to reacquire some measure of my confidence and self-image over those first few years when all I wanted was to get the hell away from Mentor High School and run back to Southfield, where I at least felt like I belonged.

I've only talked to Bryan a handful of times over the last few years, and haven't been back to see his old house or his parents in upwards of two decades now. Despite this gap, hearing the news from Bryan yesterday (as well as how long this had been coming) left me just as crestfallen as if I'd seen Carol just last month. For someone so caring and kind to have suffered as long as she did feels terribly unfair, and I feel both relieved for her that it's over at last, and also profoundly sad for Bryan, his father and his siblings for what they have lost.

Spinning Into Oblivion

The following article was shamefully ripped off wholesale from the New York Times.

Op-Ed Contributors
Spinning Into Oblivion

By TONY SACHS and SAL NUNZIATO
Published: April 5, 2007

DESPITE the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.

This is a far cry from the musical landscape that existed when we opened an independent CD shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1993. At the time, we figured that as far as business ventures went, ours was relatively safe. People would always go to stores to buy music. Right? Of course, back then there were also only two ringtones to choose from — “riiiiinnng” and “ring-ring.”

Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (“Do you have the new Sarah McLachlan and ... uh ... is there a Beatles greatest hits CD?”) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (“Can you get the Japanese pressing of Kinda Kinks? I believe they used the rare mono mixes”). Fourteen years later, it’s clear just how wrong our assumptions were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

In the late ’90s, our business, and the music retail business in general, was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears — whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices.

The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to sue the company out of existence — which was like thinking you’ve killed all the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the association’s lawyers could say “cease and desist.”

By 2002, it was clear that downloading was affecting music retail stores like ours. Our regulars weren’t coming in as often, and when they did, they weren’t buying as much. Our impulse-buy weekend customers were staying away altogether. And it wasn’t just the independent stores; even big chains like Tower and Musicland were struggling.

Something had to be done to save the record store, a place where hard-core music fans worked, shopped and kibitzed — and, not incidentally, kept the music business’s engine chugging in good times and in lean. Who but these loyalists was going to buy the umpteenth Elton John hits compilation that the major labels were foisting upon them?

But instead, those labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. These “big boxes” were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our wholesale cost. They didn’t care if they didn’t make any money on CD sales. Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender that frappéed.

The jig was up. It didn’t matter that even a store as small as ours carried hundreds of titles you’d never see at Best Buy and was staffed by people who actually knew who Van Morrison was, or that Tower Records had the entire history of recorded music under one roof while Costco didn’t carry much more than the current hits. A year after our shop closed, Tower went out of business — something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The customers who had grudgingly come to trust our opinions made the move to online shopping or lost interest in buying music altogether. Some of the most loyal fans had been soured into denying themselves the music they loved.

Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the impression that it’s doing something by occasionally threatening to sue college students who share their record collections online. But apart from scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that’s just an amusing sideshow. They’re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

At this point, it may be too late to win back disgruntled music lovers no matter what they do. As one music industry lawyer, Ken Hertz, said recently, “The consumer’s conscience, which is all we had left, that’s gone, too.”

It’s tempting for us to gloat. By worrying more about quarterly profits than the bigger picture, by protecting their short-term interests without thinking about how to survive and prosper in the long run, record-industry bigwigs have got what was coming to them. It’s a disaster they brought upon themselves.

We would be gloating, but for the fact that the occupation we planned on spending our working lives at is rapidly becoming obsolete. And that loss hits us hard — not just as music retailers, but as music fans.

Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato own an online music retail business.


NP: The Best Of D.A.F.

The Dorkiest, Geekiest, Lamest (Yet Shamefully Coolest) .Gif I've Seen This Year

A couple of somethings to spin the propellors of your inner beanies:

Happy Feet

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

I'm not sure if computer animation has "jumped the shark" just yet, so to speak, but there has definitely been a real glut of "product" out there lately, and if I can't even be bothered to even look at Madagascar and Shark Tale (among others), I'll have to conclude that the bloom is indeed off of the rose.

One of a long, storied line of animated characters who was literally born abnormal (possibly the result of clumsy prenatal care by his inexplicably Elvis-like father, Hugh Jackman), an Emperor Penguin named Mumble (Elijah Wood) never seems able to grasp the art of singing, which apparently forms the basis of his entire tribe's culture. However, he can tap dance like freakin' Fred Astaire, which of course leads to all sorts of problems fitting in and being accepted by his peers (and their parents). Sounds familiar already? It should: this particular story of the sympathetic outcast who ends up teaching everyone else a valuable lesson has been done so many times and in so many better films, that it grounds this movie right from the start. In effect, you know exactly what is going to happen: it's just a matter of seeing it through in whatever style the director brings to the picture.

This isn't to call Happy Feet a disaster: there are a few entertaining points where this digital March Of The Penguins-with-a-beat comes oh-so-close to earning a recommendation. Yet every time I reach that point, along comes another squirm-inducing mega-choreographed musical number (or one of a dozen clichéd plot developments that one can see coming over the horizon well before they happen) that squandered whatever good will had been built up to that point. Then there is the third act of the film, which takes a sharp left turn away from being a happy dancy children's frolic and becomes instead a rather grim environmental screed with ghostly live-action actors superimposed over the animated goings-on. While this sudden shift in tone and setting certainly allows the well-known sensibilities of director George Miller free reign, the movie never completely regains it's, uh, feet, and kind of staggers to a (typically) crowd pleasing ending.

That said, beautiful character renderings, breathtaking scenery and involving animation sequences can go a long way towards making up for reheated stories and overly cute dialogue, and Happy Feet certainly packs some breathtaking set pieces for the eye-candy lover in you. I also found myself wishing to see more of the background characters after a while since they at least seemed more interesting and less been-there done-that than the leads (the bickering flock of skuas, and a mincing, yet fearsome leopard seal were a sinister hoot). Also making a valiant effort to save the movie single handedly by playing two roles is Robin Williams (who really should stick to voice acting as this is what he is undeniably best at). While I didn't much care for Williams' Lothario-with-Soul schtick playing Lovelace (and what the hell kind of name is that for a penguin?), he lands nearly all of the funniest lines in the movie as as Ramon, one of Mumble's posse of Adèlie penguin pals.

Rating: 3/5

Catching Up, Part 2: The Return Of Drama

NEW YEARS EVE/DAY (a.k.a. The Return Of Chuck)

At some point around Thanksgiving, maybe a bit beforehand, I'd started to slide back into bad old habits, and my food and drink intake went to hell in a hand basket. A few months with absolutely no follow-through from my late-May drama had me feeling young, invincible and, as it turns out, pretty stupid.

We had spent the evening at my parents house playing a newfangled DVD game and generally having a relaxing time, and it wasn't until we got back home that I started feeling what I thought was a nasty gas bubble forming in my lower gut. A couple of hours passed, and the discomfort gradually morphed into waves of searing pain. I made a run to Walgreens at a bit past 5 A.M. on New Year's Day, but the procured pills did absolutely nothing to cure what felt like a cartoonishly distending abdomen. That is when I knew that this was no gas bubble: about six weeks of eating absolute crap and washing said bilge down with little but carbonated beverages apparently was enough to get my kidneys royally pissed off for a second time, and my already-forgotten old friend Chuck had decided to pay me a New Year's Eve visit.

This time, things went a bit differently than they did last May, but not differently enough. Despite my best efforts to tough it out and try to get the damned thing(s) to pass over an endless 12-hour period, I still wound up in the emergency room. This time, we headed to Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield, which is a longer drive from here than LakeWest, but was also a far different experience all the way around: if you wipe away the fact that I was crumpled up in a ball of suffering, it was a much more pleasant atmosphere than the rather cold and aloof feeling I had in Willoughby last May.

Thankfully, my stay at Hillcrest was also much shorter than at LakeWest (I was walking out of there about 2 hours after being admitted), which, of course, didn't change the final bill tally all that much. $3600, said the bill, of which a whopping $2600 (!!) was for being CAT-scanned twice (which, if memory serves, was about 5 times more than it cost for me to be wheeled into a similarly gargantuan Donut Of Doom at LakeWest). Yeeeeahhh. We'll be discussing that on the phone a bit with whoever is in charge of accounts receivable very shortly ...

So, true Drama has returned to my existence with a grand entrance: but this time not as a result of random shit luck, but largely because I was an utter clod. This was a very expensive lesson.

JANUARY

A bit more drama at work, but it's hard to tell as of now if it's for us or for the industry as a whole. At a month and change into 2007, the music industry is already down a terrifying amount from last year's pace: enough so that the chances of everybody catching up over the next 3 months (let alone 6) are looking rather daunting, to say the least. Ouch. The possibility of the deficit vanishing is made even bleaker by dint of a truly weak new release schedule that will pervade into March, and the fact that nothing from the truly godawful 2006 fourth quarter slate has shown any kind of staying power whatsoever.

That said, it is with a bit of trepidation that I announce that our sales are down a slight bit as well, but only by a ~5% margin instead of the industry-wide 15%. This dubious good news prompted the amusingly optimistic assessment of "so, you mean we are up 10%?" from Greg earlier this month. I suppose that is the best way to look at it, eh?

On the horizon, there are still a few developments that will have to be addressed before The Drama dies down to its usual background dull roar: I have to get the car successfully E-checked sometime between now and the middle of June (a task that you might remember caused me no end of heartache and fury the last time I had to tackle it), suddenly it seems that every damn thing I eat gives me heartburn (or "acid reflux" or whatever they call it these days), Inspector Scene is still unhappy enough with our bathroom electrical outlet that he has been here twice and still wants it fixed to his satisfaction (this has our landlord pretty pissed off, as does another sticking point concerning a leaky water shut-off valve behind the half-bathroom), at some point I'm going to need to visit my dentist, and an unusually complicated (and expensive) tax-time for me has arrived at last. Wheee!

Money will be tight for a bit no matter what happens: I've decided that I'm going to pay off my new hospital bill off piecemeal at my own pace (hopefully after Hillcrest and I reach some kind of compromise on the total, if that is possible). This will certainly pinch for a while, but I'm looking at this process more as penance for being a moron and getting myself back into this mess when I should have learned my lesson the first damned time. The rest of the above will be addressed as time permits ... the line is getting a bit long to handle them all at once, you know?

"THE GOOD PART"

Finally, I will end this lengthy update with some upbeat news: I've been completely cold turkey from the smokes since December 31, and I'm hoping to have finally kicked this thing in the ass once and for all. Seriously.

Yes, I've been here before (a glance at this post brings back the last time I attempted this feat), but never before with a law to keep me honest: this past Election Day saw the passage of a statewide measure that bans smoking indoors in all public areas effective back around December 7 of last year. For about a month, we smokers cheated at work by moving the ashtray to the bathroom and doing our puffing out of the sight of customers, but I knew eventually that I would have to take the next step, and New Year's Eve (as always) seemed a great time to try again, with the reappearance of Chuck that very night making my resolution quite a bit easier to make.

By now, the physical cravings are largely gone, though I'll still feel The Jones at odd times (like after eating a Jersey Mike's Club Sub), and that is easily dealt with by chewing a stick of sugarless gum. No sweat. What is a bit weirder is that I dream of smoking nearly every night now, and the dreams are so realistic that I actually the old not-quite-lightheaded relaxed sigh after sucking on my discorporeal cig. Luckily, I wake up from these dreams with no urge to have a drag, so I guess I can't complain that I'm being a very bad boy while asleep.

Aside from the willpower, another factor that keeps me clean is the math. I was a Marlboro man, and at four bucks and change a pack, I figure that I've already saved over 200 dollars, which is money I am setting aside specifically for Hillcrest bill payments (might as well put this new wealth to good use, eh?). At this rate, assuming I stay clean, I will have saved nearly a grand and a half by next New Year's Eve. Not too shabby.

Dual Dystopia

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

Starting off our home film festival are two visions of the future of our world: neither of them particularly hopeful for the improvement of our species (like, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey) or even very technologically advanced (like, say, Minority Report or Blade Runner). While both of these movies foresee a pretty rough time ahead for the human race, one at least was leavened a bit by some viciously-deployed lowbrow humor. The other was just plain bleak, though very powerful.

Idiocracy is one of those films that was doomed to obscurity by a corporation who had no idea what to do with it. Apparently completed in 2004, Mike Judge's follow-up to the classic Office Space was shelved for two years by 20th Century Fox, and finally dumped into a handful of secondary markets for a few weeks around Labor Day 2006 (The Dead Zone of the movie release schedule, for those who don't know) with no promotion or marketing whatsoever (hell, there wasn't even a website for it). Even more interestingly, Judge will not (or, more likely, is not allowed to) speak about the movie, and Fox has been evasive in their dealings with the media over it, so there is an air of mystery surrounding Idiocracy that adds to the viewing experience, though an awful lot of questions are raised in the end as well.

Considering what incredibly shoddy treatment was accorded this film, the appearance of Idiocracy on DVD might be construed as a minor miracle until one cynically realizes that this would likely be the only way for 20th Century Fox to ever recoup their investment in the project. So, a multi-billion dollar corporation so apparently disenchanted with their multi-million dollar product decides to release it anyway in the hopes of scraping up a few bucks (possibly to finance another Garfield sequel)? Heh. Typical.

Problem is, Idiocracy doesn't suck, which makes all the above even more puzzling.

The central idea of Idiocracy is that humanity, blessed with technology that helps extend and enhance the quality of life and untroubled by natural predators, has become so dominant that the old idea of the survival of the fittest no longer applies. In fact, the opposite starts to happen as the 21st Century gets under way: as the most intelligent people put off having children (and have much smaller families, if any families at all, as a result), while the trailer parks and Mayberry citizens of the world wildly procreate and change the direction of humanity until, by the 26th Century, the entire population of the Earth comes off like some unholy fusion of Billy Madison, Al Bundy and Larry The Cable Guy (I'll add here that it's best to not ask yourself too many questions as to exactly how this world works when the population is so incredibly stupid that they can't even spell it: this movie has enough problems as it is).

Thrust into this future hell (as a result of an present-day Army experiment gone forgotten ... didn't this also happen in Futurama?) is dead-average slacker Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), who instantly finds himself the smartest man on Earth by leaps and bounds, and who quite understandably wants nothing more than to find a way, any way, back to the present.

Sarah and I watched Idiocracy the other night, and a couple of things stuck with me after it was over:

• It is obvious that something was done to Idiocracy (apparently a year after its initial completion), to make it more "saleable" to a mass audience (who would ironically never see it in a theater anyway). Some of the scenes seem to be buying time, as if someone decided for budgetary reasons to cut corners and replace an idea with another return to the "where is that time machine at" subplot. Perhaps the most glaring example of this apparent meddling is the narration which runs throughout the movie: something about it feels weirdly out-of-sync with the rest of the film, and there is a bit too much explaining done as we move onwards, which suggests many planned scenes were either snipped from the final cut or never shot at all. Of course, neither 20th Century Fox or Judge is talking, so it might be years, if ever, before we know exactly what happened behind the scenes here.


• Idiocracy is an angry, vicious screed against modern culture, particularly the championing of ignorance and the rampant, uncontested corporate takeover of every niche of our existence. Stripped of all the (deliberately) lowbrow jokes that get us laughing as well as driving the point home at just how far along we are to realizing this future reality, Idiocracy would be impossible to enjoy, so palpable is Judge's disgust for the dumbing-down of our society at all levels (I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is hardly the kind of film you can show commercials for alongside Norbit).

While this is not the surprise gut-buster that Office Space was, there are several parts of Idiocracy that had me laughing aloud (the circular argument in Washington D.C. over how to properly grow crops, the guy on the hospital P.A. attempting to alert doctors to phone calls/patient appointments, the enhanced role of dinosaurs in political history, and the preferred popular source of 26th Century news were a few favorite bits), while other sequences (like the very formulaic final 20-25 minutes of the film) left me wondering if scenes were cut out or added in by Judge or the studio based on budget restraints or executive meddling.

Nowhere near as amusing, but far better overall, is Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men, which drops us just a mere twenty years into the future. You'll probably wish it was 500 years, though: in 2027, there have been no new children for nearly two decades (in fact, the youngest man on Earth has just died under tragic circumstances), and the world has gone completely to hell as a result. We are never told what exactly happened, or why, or how, just that women haven't been conceiving (either that or men have not been doing their part very well), and that everyone who is not busy being blown up, shot, or deported is simply going through the motions of life and waiting for The End Of Times: as one spray-painted sign memorably reads: THE LAST ONE TO DIE, PLEASE REMEMBER TO TURN OUT THE LIGHT.

As it happens, some parts of the world are far better off than others: we are shown early on from TV imagery that the only functioning government left on the planet is that of the United Kingdom, and as a result everyone from everywhere else in the world wants in, while everyone already living in England wants them out. Political schisms have developed throughout society as "terrorist" human rights groups resort to violence to get their point across while the government and military utilize authoritarian methods to resolve the problem of rampant illegal immigration.
In the midst of this roiling chaos, Theo (Clive Owen) simply tries to keep his head down by working at the Ministry Of Energy and spending his free time with his retired political cartoonist friend Jasper (Michael Caine). What little of Theo's regular life we are shown is suddenly shattered when he is kidnapped and asked by a "terrorist" group led by his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) to secure transit papers from high-up for an illegal immigrant named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) under mysterious circumstances. Theo reluctantly agrees, secures the needed papers from his brother Nigel (Danny Huston) who apparently lives in Battersea Power Station (and must be a huge Pink Floyd fan), and starts off on the remarkably-realized journey that makes up the rest of this movie.

I don't want to get into what happens after this point, since the relentless forward momentum of this film after Theo meets Ke is best experienced unspoiled for full shocking effect. And I do mean "shocking" since Children Of Men is not for the faint of heart: Cuaron pulls no punches in showing us the broken down, desperate remnants of English society. We hardly ever feel safe or that the characters can rest since situations we are watching become unexpectedly complicated by sudden violence that happens right before our eyes. Unforeseen developments keep us off-balance as well, and we're never sure which characters we can trust.

I'll be curious to hear what you think of these movies as they both made me think. Idiocracy is worth a view, though ultimately you'll likely wonder at what might have been. Children Of Men, on the other hand, will probably leave you as haunted and drained: this is one of the most thought-provoking and chilling films I have seen in some time and I definitely regret missing it on the big screen. I hope you'll feel the same.

Idiocracy rating: 3/5
Children Of Men rating: 5/5

'Midwinter' Addendum

Figures. I decide to write one toss-off post admitting that winter weather ain't so bad sometimes and all Hell breaks loose a week and change later. Sheesh.

We were hit by the biggest storm of the season yesterday and today (about a foot of snow, though it's impossible to know for sure thanks to all the attendant wind), and we have more snow on the ground and drifted up against everything in sight than I have seen in years. Looking out the front bay window of the condo, I am faced with a snow drift that reaches as high as my chest, fer cryin' out loud.

All of this started sometime Tuesday morning: the roads were already pretty iffy when I got to work. As it turned out, showing up at all was ultimately a waste of time as it was pretty much a morgue in that place from the moment I got there until the moment Greg called at 7:00 PM and gave me the green light to shut everything down and go home early. The rather terrible sales figures from that day and the next took a nice chunk out of our once-blazing pace, and now the month of February is looking a bit up in the air unless we can make up the lost ground (and considering that this month is shaping up to be remarkably weak on the new release front, we aren't holding our breath) and have a few days in a row when it doesn't, you know, snow.

Driving home that night was a blend of the worst parts of dealing with winter traffic along with the best: none of the roads had been plowed yet, and Mentor Avenue in particular was an utter clusterfuck as none of the lanes were moving, and the vehicles that were in motion were being piloted by suicidal cockmops. Simply getting out of Mentor was what ate up most of my 30 minute drive home as a desperate attempt to access westbound Mentor Ave. by cutting over to Route 306 (by way of a few deserted side streets) put me in the exact same traffic situation, with people making up new and exciting traffic lanes as we went along. Sigh.

By the time I'd gone through Willoughby and down Vine Street, I'd had enough of dealing with street traffic and decided to cut over onto the freeway for the rest of the way home. This was probably not the brightest idea I ever had as far as safety was concerned: the exit ramp, also unplowed, was invisible under a blanket of white, and Route 2 really wasn't much better. That said, at least there were only about two cars in my field of vision heading westbound with me, which took a lot of the worry and stress out of driving (once you realize you can't hit someone else, worries about such things as traction and skidding magically vanish!). It was also odd looking down the limitless deserted expanse of westbound Route 2 before me, while on the other side of the concrete barrier, the eastbound lanes were bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see.


There were a few tense seconds spent aiming my car at the exit ramp when I finally reached Willowick, but once I had slowed to a complete stop a quarter mile later, all was fine (parking in a freaking snowdrift in our unplowed parking lot exempted) and a nice, warm, early evening at home was had by all. I think we need to do these more often.

The next day, as blindingly white and cold as it was, felt like a bit of a drag as it seemed pretty much everyone in Northeast Ohio scored a snow day, save for us hapless retail pukes. Blah.

NP James Brown Star Time

Catching Up, Part 1: The End Of 2006

Unannounced posting sabbaticals are a bitch, especially when they are unannounced to me as well as anyone else out there in Internets Land who has been wondering where the hell I've vanished off to over the last five months.

To sum up, I'll start with The Short Version: life was actually Good (and thus largely unremarkable) until the very end of last year, at which point came The Return Of Drama. Goody goody. A few weeks later, here I am banging away on the keyboard at 2 AM, posting new missives into this forum for the first time in eons. Maybe I need some drama to get the writing glands working again, eh?

Anyway, a belated Happy 2007, everyone. It's been a while, so let's do some catching up on current events, eh? We'll start way back where we left off ...

DVD-RW/EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE(S)

Even considering the amount of data CD-Rs I keep behind me, I'd been battling with data storage issues for most of 2006. By the middle of summer, my copious use of various bit-torrent sites was beginning to outpace my ability to keep up with the backing up of data. This situation is made trickier by the fact that in order to keep a decent share ratio going (and thus your account) on said bit-torrent site, you have to let your downloaded goodies sit on the hard drive for a while (say, a week) so that others can nibble data off of you until you have given back roughly what you have taken. The problem here is that when you are starting to grab a lot of full-res DVDs (4+ gigs a shot), you start to run out of space on a 60 gig internal hard drive really damn fast.

It was while leafing through electronics circulars at my parents' house one weekend that a solution appeared before my eyes in the form of a Western Digital External Hard Drive. Sarah then gave me one as a birthday present a short while later, and suddenly I had what felt like a limitless ocean of 250 gigabytes in storage at my fingertips. Ahhh, much better.

Of course, time and circumstance rapidly changes that perception: I clearly remember a 5 gig hard drive on my computer at the end of 1998 felt like a hell of a lot of space, too. In order to keep things relatively open on this new external HD, I finally upgraded from a CD-RW to a DVD-RW drive, and promptly started planning on eventually shrinking down my collection of 700 burned data CD-Rs to about 100 or so DVD-RWs (which would also require a couple of additional external hard drives to amass the data before re-archiving and oh Christ what a colossal headache this is going to be ...).

NEW COMPUTER

For about a month and change, this new setup your read about above was fine and dandy (especially when combined with my new flat screen monitor ... I now hate CRTs and wonder why I waited so damn long to upgrade), but a few issues with the new DVD player started to bother me in short order. Firstly, the thing never seemed to play things back in suitable fashion, with audio and video jitters plaguing the experience right from the start. It was also very difficult to burn DVDs without errors while working on something else at the same time, and the amount of memory left on my computer while this rigorous task was going for an hour and change finally started me thinking seriously about a new computer.

It had been about 4-5 years (?) since my last upgrade and aside from the DVD issues, it was becoming clearer over the course of the last couple of years that it was time to play some catch-up ball. Making this decision a bit easier was that I was a bit flush with cash at the time (this was about a month in the wake of settling up my medical bills at the time), so I felt that a snazzy new gadget would be a nice way to celebrate Life being Good again.

It was on the last Monday in September that I made the trek down Route 91 to the MicroCenter location in Mayfield Heights on the advice of Dave M., a longtime friend, ex co-worker, and local computer guru (he built the first two PCs I ever called my own). If you've never been to one of these stores, I certainly recommend stopping by, though you might want to leave your credit cards at home as a preventative measure: it's hard for me to imagine a more drool-inducing toy store for grownups.

Walking into MicroCenter that night was kind of like what walking into Toys R Us was like when I was a kid. Temptation was everywhere and it never looked so good. But, I was on a mission, and I had a couple of predetermined machines to check out and compare and ultimately make a decision on. After a half hour of thinking and looking each choice over carefully, I opted for the guy you see above and to the right: a PowerSpec 6650: Pentium 4 HT processor, 1 GB of memory, 200 GB internal hard drive, and a dual layer DVD-R/RW drive (which immediately relegated my recently purchased Sony to storage).

A couple of days followed in which everything of vital importance on my old PC was copied over to the external HD for installation into the PowerSpec, and it took two full installs to work out the tics/"bugs" in the new system and get used to the way this thing worked in comparison to the old PC (whose dessicated husk was unceremoniously junked a week or so later). Since then, save for the usual perplexing behavioral quirks that PCs develop when running various programs in tandem from a dozen different designers and companies, it's been smooth sailing.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Brian has been onto me for about two years to get with the program and watch Sci-Fi Network's Battlestar Galactica show, and I had been fiercely resistant to the idea, largely out of the considerable sentiment I have for the original 1979 ABC TV series. I won't lie and say I was never interested: when the idea was first announced, I wondered if this was the long-talked-about return of the show initiated by original series lead Richard Hatch back in the mid 1990s. When I found out instead that the Sci-Fi Network's new series had nothing to do with Hatch's continuation of the original series and was instead a completely "reloaded" take on the concept, I was pretty taken aback. Things weren't helped when I learned of the switching of my favorite character on the old series (Lt. Starbuck) from a man to a woman role and that the new Cylons looked like they walked off the cover of last month's Cosmopolitan, I lost interest in a hurry and let the show pass me by.

Brian kept up the attack on me to just give the show a chance anyway, and it wasn't until a copy of Season One landed in the used bin at work that I decided to do just that. I finally got around to watching it around the middle of last month for the first time and was immediately drawn into the show, to my considerable surprise. (I might even say that I was blown off my feet, except that I was sitting in this very chair watching all of it, heh heh)

Christmas intervened with my introduction, and I am still midway through Season One as of this writing. I'm feeling the massive temptation to start it over again and have Sarah watch the miniseries premiere at least and see if she wants to continue onwards, though she has her hands full staying caught up with House, Rome and Good Eats (hosted by Beaker's loquacious offspring Alton Brown). So, with or without accompaniment, I will likely re-view the first half of Season 1, and then move onwards (I have all of season 2 awaiting me on DVD and what has been broadcast of season 3 so far sitting on an external hard drive). More discussion to come later.

Q4

Considering this was quite possibly the lamest release slate in the music industry in the last two
decades (during this Christmas season, it seemed like every "hot" item was a repackage or re-imagining of something previously available), we managed to nail our numbers at the store and finished off 2006 with a flourish: the best December in our current location to date, not to mention 2 or 3 new best one-day sales totals, best yearly total, et cetera. Good times.

MORE FUN WITH INSPECTOR SCENE

If there is one thing I have come to dread with the onset of fall, it's our annual dealings with the City Of Willowick and their insanely exacting Buildings Code. Unlike last year's tag-team blitzkreig inspection that was over in about 1 minute, this year's was a much more leisurely poking around by a lone Inspector Scene that wound up injecting the first tiny amount of drama back into my existence (if you count nearly a dozen minor building "issues" to be dealt with as "drama," anyway).

In a fit of pique, we had delayed dealing with any of these "issues" until the last couple of weeks (i.e., when he'd finally had enough of waiting around and called the landlord to ask what the hell was taking so long). The landlord came by Monday evening and we managed to get the entire list taken care of, though apparently not to Inspector Scene's satisfaction: the reinspection this past Thursday left a couple of "issues" still unresolved: one I can probably fix with a single half-twist of a freakin' wrench, the other with a visit from an electrician and some new bathroom tile.

CHRISTMAS

Judging from the media coverage of Christmas at the retail level this past season, I'm pretty sure that I was not the only person who wasn't in the mood for it this year.

Mostly thanks to the incredibly and unseasonably warm weather which parked over Northeast Ohio around early December (and lasted until about two weeks ago), it just didn't ever feel like Christmas this year. As a result I didn't even start my shopping in earnest until the middle of the month as far as online goes, and on the 19th as far as actually walking-into-stores was concerned.

Making matters even weirder was that this was by some stretch the easiest Chistmas season I have ever worked. In effect, the entire pre-Christmas surge as we used to know it was compressed into about 3, maybe 4 days before the holiday (a couple of Saturdays early on, and then the last Friday and Saturday before the holiday itself). The rest of the time (including Christmas Eve), it felt almost like any other month of work in a business sense, though what made the difference is that everyone in the store was actually buying something instead of poking around and leaving empty-handed.

With this weird non-frenzy that characterized most of December at work combined with my late start shopping, I remember quite clearly feeling like this Christmas had just flown on by while I wasn't looking. I'm not saying this was a crappy Christmas by any stretch, because it wasn't ... but it certainly wasn't my ideal kind of holiday season, you know?

All of the above also meant that I could barely be arsed to put up lights this year, yet alone wage my dreaded annual battle for Christmas Tree supremacy with Moe. I think it was on December 20 that I finally gave in and set up the tree, while picking up a couple of new fiber-optic light fixtures (on clearance sale, too ... sometimes it's good to wait 'til the last second, eh?) for Sarah to put in the front window in lieu of standing the tree in front of it as has been our custom in year's past.

The reason for these new fixtures was strategic: I had a plan to keep Moe from getting into the damned tree this year, and for the first time since he joined this household, I can claim total victory in this department. Instead of filling the bay window with holiday cheer, the tree was placed in the corner of the living room and the entire underside was blocked off with a couple of overlapping Scat Mats. The curtains next to the tree were then pinned to the wall to block off any access from the window ledge, and what do you know: these two moves actually kept Moe out of the tree for the entirety of the season! Yeee-ha! Victory at last!

Due to the work schedules of the second-tier store staff (and the inexorable bouncing of the holiday into regular week days), Christmas was not the same two-day holiday I'd enjoyed in 2005 and 2006, but a sole island of relaxation in a long and busy work schedule. Ah well, those were nice while they lasted. This was also a very green yule, right smack in the middle of what felt like was going to be a green winter. Aside from the incredibly glum outdoor setting, it was still a very relaxing holiday, which saw me carting home some new pairs of my favorite wool socks ever, some gift cards, new books and DVDs, and a couple of supposedly-reversible fleece crewneck sweaters from justsweatshirts.com (which are remarkably warm, whether the tags come off or not).

I clearly remember one point during that afternoon sitting in my parents' kitchen, doing some residual Amazon.com shopping on my mom's laptop while the rest of the house napped, exhausted from previous late nights and today's early morning. I was filling in some blanks, basically, cleaning up the wish list a bit and picking up a few items on sale and a few others that had been on my list for a couple of years that I'd decided to move on before they vanished. It was a very pleasant time: quiet and thoughtful and now tinged with a bit of regret as this kind of carefree indulgence is something I currently wish I hadn't done (though the amount I spent wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end, anyway). We'll tackle why in my next post ...


NP Various Artists The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, Volume 1

In The Bleak Midwinter

I am a bit distracted in typing up these rather long life-update posts right now, as the heaviest snowfall of the season is softly blanketing the area outside.

Those who know me well also know my feelings on winter (and all cold weather in general if we define "cold" as "anywhere south of sixty degrees"), which can be a bit contradictory at times, I suppose. I generally am ill-suited to the cold and I always dread dealing with it year after year, yet at the same time I have no problem whatsoever with snow on the ground during the holidays ... it's just that it can basically piss off for the other 50 weeks of the year for all I care. :)

I can make adjustments in my loathing, however, if a significant snowfall should arrive on a day when I am off work (like today) and provide a kind of mellowing, beautiful counterpart to a relaxing, cozy afternoon and evening. There is something quietly hypnotic and serene in a thick, billowing storm of fluffy white that has always soothed me even when I'm stuck in the middle of a 40 MPH conga line on Route 2. The peaceful, striking sight somehow makes dealing with the stuff tolerable as it's coming down, but always ready to become a grating nuisance the instant it stops.

Heading downstairs now to take in some more of the sight. More updating later.

P.S. - Of course, as our lake effect snow warning appears to be extending into the work week as I type this, I fully expect these warm happy fuzzy feelings to quickly vanish the instant I rise for work on Tuesday morning. Such is life.


NP David Axelrod Song Of Innocence