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Jan202009

Thoughts on the Inauguration

obama-takes-the-oath.jpg

And just like that, one era is over and another begins.

Is it just me, or was it all kind of… anti-climatic? Of course, it’s supposed to be anti-climatic; that’s the way the founders intended it. A peaceful transfer of power, with no palace coup, no martial law or rioting in the streets, just one guy handing the keys to another. But the past eight years, and the past six months especially, have been so emotionally intense, so harrowing, that I guess I expected to feel something… more. Pride that my country finally made good on its ideals and elected a black man to be its president. Pleasure that the first black president comes from my preferred party instead of the other side. Relief that the most hated presidential administration of my lifetime — yes, even more hated than Nixon’s! — has finally been sent packing. Ah, yes, relief. That was the sensation I was really counting on. But honestly? I’m not feeling much of anything, at least not to the extent that I thought I would be. I seem to have gone rather numb.

Well, no, that’s not entirely correct. I’m not numb. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m feeling very much like somebody who’s awakened on the fifth morning of a four-day bender, cottonmouthed and head pounding, and wandered out into a kitchen filled with weak, watery daylight to find a sink full of dirty dishes and a scatter of empty bottles on the floor. If you’ve never been in that condition, trust me when I say you tend to experience a bleary sense of resignation at the clean-up that awaits as well as a single recurring, shameful question: “Man, what the hell went on here?”

The Bush era is over, but our troubles remain, and while I’m happy with our new president and hopeful about what he may accomplish, for me there is a nagging sense of letdown on this inauguration day. I don’t know, maybe that doesn’t make sense. Maybe there’s something inside of me that’s broken, that prevents me from feeling the delirious joy that seems to have infected so many today. All I know is that I have felt so much for so long, and now it’s all come to… what? No reckoning, no accounting, just an oath, some fabulous parties, one man headed home and another man with his work cut out for him.

I loathe the term, because I think it’s been overused and its importance overemphasized, but in this instance, I could genuinely use some closure… and so far, I haven’t really experienced it.

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Jan192009

In Memoriam: Ricardo Montalban

It is one of the great injustices of Hollywood history that Ricardo Montalban — who passed away last week at the age of 88 — never became a big star. Oh sure, he worked pretty steadily from the 1940s through the ’80s and continued to make appearances or voiceovers in various things right on up to the present (according to IMDB, he did an episode of Family Guy just last year). Just about everyone knew his name and silky voice, and we all loved him. But looking through his filmography, it appears that he was rarely the lead, the hero. Even in Fantasy Island, the late-70s/early-80s television series for which most people probably remember him these days, he got only a few minutes of screentime per episode. He functioned on that show very much like Rod Serling in the old Twilight Zones: all he did was set up the plot for that week’s episode, maybe pop back in midway through to provide some encouragement or vital information, and then he summed up the moral of the story at the end. The real stars of that show were the rotating assortment of has-beens and B-listers who were actually doing things in the stories.

And yet… he always seemed like a big star, didn’t he? He just had that air about him, a larger-than-life quality that came from his apparently effortless elegance, his good looks, and a masculinity that was unapologetic but never cruel or bullying, as traditionally macho types can so often become. You can seen what I’m talking about in that photo up at the top, which comes from one of the many ads he did for Chrysler in the ’70s. (If you’re of a certain age, you will, of course, instantly recognize the term “Corinthian leather,” even though there’s really no such thing; sorry, kids, it was all just an exercise in marketing.) Montalban exuded the old-fashioned, magnetic charisma of the Golden Age of Hollywood: like Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, he appealed equally to women and men, and probably for the same reasons. He radiated strength and mystery, but wasn’t threatening to we lesser mortals. He was quite simply, employing a word that I can’t imagine a man of Montalban’s generation comfortably using, cool.

Continue Reading…

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Jan162009

Praise Where Praise Is Due

US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River

Like everybody else in the country, I’ve been captivated by yesterday’s news story about an airliner ditching in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of birds during its ascent phase. The amazing part of the story is, of course, that all 155 people aboard the plane survived with only minor injuries.

Now, whenever these sorts of events happen, the survivors, witnesses, and press inevitably start throwing around the word “miracle.” I know there are a lot of people out there who believe in genuine, literal miracles, i.e., times when God personally intervenes in order to save lives. I don’t. I’m an agnostic — I don’t deny the possibility of a God, but I have a very hard time believing He plays much of an active role in what goes on down here on this little rock. However, I acknowledge that many of my fellow Americans disagree with me on this idea, and when you come right down to it, describing positive outcomes as “miracles” is one of those things that’s not worth getting worked up over, even if I personally find it tiresome.
Still… I’ve got my limits.

Continue Reading…

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Jan142009

Old Movie, Pretty People

I’m having one of those “too busy to go to the bathroom, let alone write anything that means anything” days, so why don’t we just take a moment to push back from our desks, breathe slowly, and gaze upon an image of two lovely people:

Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara in The Black Swan

If you haven’t figured it out from the available evidence, this is Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara, starring here in an old pirate movie called The Black Swan, which I have to admit I’ve never seen. I’ve only seen a couple of Tyrone Power movies, actually — off the top of my head, all I can think of are his take on Zorro and Brigham Young — so I don’t really have a strong mental picture that immediately leaps to mind when I hear his name. Am I crazy, or does he look rather like 1970s-vintage Sean Connery in this shot?

Credit where it’s due: I ganked the photo from Lileks, who, incidentally, has finally converted his Bleat into a genuine blog (i.e., he’s now publishing it with WordPress instead of the hand-built labor of love he’s been creating day by day for the last umpteen years; on the positive side, he’s finally got a reliable RSS feed so I can include him in my aggregator instead of having to remember to click over to his site). And why did I steal this particular image, a screengrab from something Lileks was watching on DVD the other night? No reason, really — I just like looking at attractive people in Technicolor. And there is that Sean Connery thing. That’s just… weird…

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Jan122009

More Wonderful Techno-Biz Writing

It was a busy day in the Proofreader’s Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake. And not merely busy, but spiritually trying as well. Because, for some reason or other — evil spirits? Sunspots? Global warming? — there was a steady stream of extraordinarily ghastly material passing before my aching eyes today. It’s usually not so steadily awful. Most of the time, it’s adequate-to-good with only occasional clunkers to liven up the mix. Today, though… wow. It was all bad today. However, there’s awful and then there’s awful, and the following sentence stood out even against that vast, wine-dark sea of fetid effluvium:

[Acronym A], an enhancement to [Acronym B], allows [Company Y] to manage the performance of critical enterprise applications end-to-end globally and optimize the performance dynamically across any network according to user criticality and bandwidth allocation.

Got that? Yeah, neither did I, not until I’d read it three times. Which is not exactly the hallmark of what I’d call good writing. It burns the creative soul to have to read this stuff, let me tell you…

Incidentally, as long as we’re chatting, here’s a Jargon Alert for you: “value stack,” as in “both competitors are moving up the value stack into IT services.” That’s one I’m going to be trying to work into daily usage for sure.

And finally, the amusing error of the day: I requested that the word “synchronization” be changed to “synchronize.” Well, someone misunderstood my scribblings, so when I got the document in question back for final inspection, I saw that the word had become — are you ready for this? — “synchronizate.” That’s almost as good as the time in 9th grade geology class when my buddy Keith couldn’t think of the verb form of the word “revolution” — that would be “revolve,” of course — and came up with “revolute” instead.

Yeah… good times down there in the old Proofreaders Cave, good times…

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Jan072009

We’ve Got Kingdoms to Save and Women to Love!

I can’t believe I’m about to admit this publicly, but one of my all-time favorite guilty-pleasure movies is The Sword and the Sorcerer, a quickie knock-off of Conan the Barbarian and one of a whole raft of fantasy flicks that emerged in the early ’80s. (If you want to get really technical, both Sword and Conan belong to a sub-category I like to call “barechested warrior” flicks. See also The Beastmaster and — if you can force yourself to sit through it — Yor: The Hunter from the Future.)

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Jan062009

Shadow: 1995-2008

I received an email this morning from a concerned loyal reader, asking if I was all right. It made me realize that I overplayed my hand a bit in that mysterious post yesterday, and possibly I’ve caused some people to worry unnecessarily. So even though this isn’t the long entry I wanted to present on this subject, I’ve decided to go ahead and release the news that’s weighed so heavily on my mind for the last week:

Shadow, the Bennion Family Border Collie, whom you may remember has been fighting cancer off and on for about two years, died on December 30.

He had completed his second round of chemotherapy about seven weeks earlier and my parents and I believed him to be at last cancer-free. He was, however, afflicted with some side effects from the chemo as well as the usual complaints of old age — he had arthritis in his hips, among other problems — and in the final week of his life he was struggling against what the vet initially believed to be a bronchial infection. The antibiotic treatment for that illness seemed to be having little effect, though, so he was scheduled for an ultrasound last Tuesday to explore other possibilities — the worst scenario being a third attack from the damn cancer. But he didn’t make it to that appointment. Instead, he passed away in the night before, in my mother’s closet, where he’d always gone to hide when summer thunderstorms darkened the sky.

I know that not everyone likes animals or keeps pets, and that some who do view them as little more than furniture. All I can say to those people is that that’s not how my family does things. The Bennion animals have always been a very real part of this family, and Shadow was even more so than any other pet we’ve ever had. We all lived together under the same roof in his early years; later, he divided his time between my parents’ house and my own. (If you don’t know, I share property with my folks in an arrangement I like to call “the Bennion Compound.”) He was a constant presence around here, and for my dad especially, a constant companion. Dad took that dog with him everywhere, and Shadow’s death has hit him very, very hard. I’m grieving for my father as much as for Shadow.

I’m still going to write that tribute I mentioned yesterday, the one that’s been so difficult for me to start. I want to tell a few stories, and hopefully give you some idea of what a remarkable and wonderful being Shadow really was, and why it’s so difficult to say goodbye to him. For tonight, though, I thought it best to clear the air. To anyone who may have gotten the wrong idea yesterday, I’m sorry to have worried you. What can I say? I do have a flair for the melodramatic at times.

Here’s one final thing, a memorial card that my lovely Anne made up for my parents to send to their friends:

shadow_memorial.jpg

As always, click to embiggen. If you’re interested.

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Jan062009

Ghost Rider, Huh?

For those looking for your first fix until regular blogging resumes, here’s a quiz courtesy of Konstantin:

Ghost Rider? I’ll confess to not having much familiarity with this character, aside from the Nicholas Cage movie and glimpses of the classic comic-book covers in my Cool Older Cousin’s room when I was a kid. (The COC had lots of stuff that I found both enticing and a little bit scary, which of course is why I thought he was so cool in the first place. My dim memories of his interests are like a catalog of early to mid-70s teenage macho: Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange comics, Bruce Lee posters, kung fu throwing stars and dumb-bells, heavy metal album covers, beaded curtains and blacklights… it was all so arcane and eerie and wonderful.)

Anyway, I’ve always thought that Ghost Rider was at least visually awesome, so I can live with this. What’re your results?

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