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How’d I Find the Lost Tales?

Posted August 5, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Full review of the new direct-to-DVD Babylon 5 work over at theLogBook. Short answer: one story was decent with some fun dialogue. One was dreadful.

Filed in Culture and Media

Musical Mood Check

Posted August 4, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I’ve been trying to put together some more iTunes playlists lately, even though I love just taking my whole library and sticking it on shuffle. It’s the closest thing to WDAVE I’m likely to get. But sometimes it ain’t a bad idea to have a defined playlist to fit a particular mood. Here’s my latest effort for a fairly up-tempo, reasonably upbeat mood. It’s heavy on the 90s alt-pop but then again, so is most of my library:

  1. All This Time – Sting
  2. Under the Milky Way – The Church
  3. Regret – New Order
  4. What Would You Say – Dave Matthews Band
  5. Pain Lies on the Riverside – Live
  6. Human Kindness – Neil Finn
  7. Lost Horizons – Gin Blossoms
  8. Big Bar Fight – Greg Edmonson (Firefly Soundtrack)
  9. Tried to Be True – Indigo Girls
  10. This Is Us – Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
  11. The Boy in the Bubble – Paul Simon
  12. Someday, Someway – Marshall Crenshaw
  13. Wait – Matthew Sweet
  14. Seen the Doctor – Michael Penn
  15. Cruel to Be Kind – Nick Lowe
  16. Annie Get Your Gun – Squeeze
  17. Stupid Songs About Love – Candy Apple Black (Joie Calio from dada)
  18. Crystal Village – Pete Yorn
  19. A Friend of Pat Robertson – dada
  20. Bittersweet Me – R.E.M.
  21. Main Title 1st Season (Extended) – Christopher Franke (Babylon 5 Vol. II)
  22. Special – Garbage
  23. Come Down – Toad the Wet Sprocket
  24. Even a Child – Crowded House
  25. How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Can Have Me) – Spin Doctors

The New Order song is one of those that is utterly tied to a specific memory. I believe this was the summer after I graduated from high school, and I was walking down Roosevelt Boulevard to the bus stop. I was listening to the radio on my Walkman, back when they were big enough to hold cassette players, and that song came on. As the “I would like a place I can call my own” chorus came out, I suddenly had such a rush of energy that I was practically jumping out of my skin. I’m thinking it was the fear and exhilaration of what was coming next, but regardless, I can’t help but smile when I hear the song.

Tried to Be True lets me sneak a second R.E.M. song on here, sort of, since Berry, Buck and Mills all play on the track.

I won a poster while I was on a college visit because I recognized Pain Lies on the Riverside when the campus radio station started playing it. Pretty sure it was a Spin Doctors poster.

Seen the Doctor is actually the first Michael Penn song I ever heard. Then I went back and found out about No Myth and the rest of March. I’m a slow learner sometimes.

I’m experimenting with sticking some of my soundtrack instrumental tracks on playlists with the pop songs. I think it’s working OK.

OK, I’ll open the floor for comments where you can all question my musical taste. 🙂

Filed in Culture and Media

Set Course on the Handbasket

Posted August 3, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Not really a day that’s reaffirmed my faith in humanity. I was out running some errands and stopped off in a gas station convenience store to grab a Snapple. A woman was apparently in some kind of dispute with the cashier over an ice cream or something like that. I couldn’t quite get the details because a) I was trying not to eavesdrop, which was difficult because b) there was a lot of shouting going on. The woman was yelling something along the lines of “You’re an immigrant! Shut up! Shut up!” And after the woman left and I went to pay for my Snapple, the cashier said something to me along the lines of “Every time there’s a disturbance, it’s a black.”

So, yeah, many blows struck for compassion and a shared struggle against injustice and bigotry today. I’m not passing any specific judgment on the dispute I saw today – I have no idea who instigated it or who escalated it. By the time I got there it was past the point of no return. But I gotta think that the stereotyping both people did probably played a role of some kind in making a conflict more likely.

I dunno. No grand point here, just an observation that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while that I wanted to get into the electronic record.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

100 Bullets: A Foregone Tomorrow

Posted August 2, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Clearing out the comics backlog, I read the fourth collection of 100 Bullets. Thoughts follow. This post may be expanded/reformatted into a full review in the not too distant future.

A Foregone Tomorrow pulls the curtain back on several players in the conspiracy plotline; a couple of story arcs do not even feature Agent Graves’ briefcase of bullets. Graves’ presence, on the other hand, looms over the book. Some of the world’s most powerful people wonder about– or fear – his next move, and any number of past, present, and potential allies maneuver around one another. I’m not sure that Brian Azzarello has really answered many questions in this volume – or whether he’s answered any at all, for that matter. But he has opened up the world a little bit, moving from the street-level stories of the early volumes to boardrooms and luxury hotels and then back again. The introductory story uses parallel storytelling to suggest that there is not much different at the core of those very different milieus, which makes a certain amount of sense – after all, Graves moves between them quite easily.

Eduardo Risso and Patricia Mulvihill continue to be an effective line art/colorist team on the majority of the book .There is a special issue included in this collection that features one-page contributions from a number of different artists; each page focuses on a different character or aspect of the overall story. Narrative captions attempt to sum up the tone of what’s gone before. It’s an interesting opportunity to see different visual interpretations of the characters and take a breath before moving forward. I’m definitely on board for the next stage of the ride.

Filed in Comics

Watching the Sun Come Up

Posted August 1, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I was up at 5:30 this morning and went around the corner to pick up some milk. I’ve managed to avoid any kind of nap since then. I got up pretty early on Monday, and did the same on Tuesday before falling back to sleep for a nap. Still, it has me thinking that maybe my body clock has shifted and I’m not so nocturnal any more. So now I need to find my new optimal working hours. And then I need to find some way to convince my daughter to let me take advantage of them. I don’t see that last one happening in a hurry.

Still, this does give me hope that I can function in this crazy daytime world I’ve heard so much about.

Filed in Life in Practice

Plan? Er . . .

Posted July 31, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Back when I was in college, I sometimes lost track of projects or deadlines. I decided to get more organized and follow the example of my boss and picked up a planner with refillable calendar pages. Making To Do lists with the planner was helpful, although I sometimes dropped the habit for lengthy periods of time, which reduced several months of dated pages to scrap paper. Recently, I’ve been reluctant to even carry the thing in my backpack, because it adds a surprising amount of weight and bulk to the package. So I decided to pick up a simple notebook and make my To Do lists there. So far it’s been fairly successful, so I may be saving a bundle by not having to buy those dated pages anymore. Now there’s some smart planning.

Filed in Life in Practice

Matters of Trust

Posted July 30, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I’ve been thinking about this reaction piece Josh Marshall wrote at Talking Points Memo over the weekend, focused on the New York Times editorial calling for Alberto Gonzales’s impeachment. Marshall is struck by how unusual the impeachment of a cabinet official is – the only time Marshall knows it’s been done, the official in question had already resigned. And the reason Marshall figures that it’s so rare is that almost every time a cabinet official runs into as many problems as Gonzales has – with senators saying he’s not credible and the department discombobulated – then said official either resigns to stop the feeding frenzy or gets fired by a boss who wants to look like he’s listening to the people or caring what Congress thinks or what have you. But this time, whatever the reason, Gonzales isn’t quitting and Bush isn’t firing him, and people just seem flummoxed by this. Many people want Gonzales to go, but the only actual procedure by which anyone in Congress can make that happen is impeachment. And impeachment is so seldom used that people are reluctant to use it.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this so much is that it seems to point to something I’ve always been struck by – how much we rely on unwritten rules and understood conventions. There’s so much that we don’t expect or prepare for ahead of time, and for the most we continue to function by giving ourselves some slack to deal with this. But it does leave loopholes in the system for someone who really doesn’t care about keeping up with the conventions – if you’re not willing to play that give-and-take, you can actually get your way quite a bit even if you’re not very well liked at the moment. So it’ll be interesting to watch this play out some more, and see whether any of Gonzales’s opponents decide that they’re gonna have use wht procedural tools they have, clunky though they may be.

Filed in Public Policy

Now It’s a Streak

Posted July 29, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I’m now 2-0 on the season watching Phillies games live. I gotta say, I don’t know for sure if Citizens Bank Bark was worth the money the city kicked in for its construction – but it is a fun place to spend an afternoon.

And now, I am going to begin a week-long experiment that I like to call “going to sleep when I feel tired,” so there’ll be a more substantial post tomorrow. Good night, everybody!

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Tale of the Tape

Posted July 28, 2007 By Dave Thomer

My mother has a crate of old LPs that has she has dutifully kept organized and taken with her as she’s moved. Every so often at a family gathering she asks if anyone wants any of the vinyl albums. I admit I have picked out a couple of records I listened to as a kid, purely for sentimental pack rat value. But few, if any of us, have working turntables. (I have one in my garage, waiting for me to have something to hook it up to.) So that crate just sits there.

We’re getting to a similar point here with VHS tapes. Thanks to DVR and DVD, we rarely if ever tape shows for our own use anymore, and we don’t have time to dig out old tapes to watch the handful of stuff we haven’t replaced on disc yet. If it weren’t for the fact that we’re using the VCR to route the cable into our older TV, I think we would have disconnected it. And I don’t want to just fill a landfill with all this plastic, so these things are gonna sit around until I can get ’em recycled. Ah, format obsolescence . . .

Filed in Life in Practice

Booming Comic News

Posted July 27, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I was gonna steer clear of Comic-Con news posting here, partially because my shift to graphic novels and trade paperback collections means it might be next year before I see any of the titles being hyped this year and partially because I’m filling in on the news desk at theLogBook while Earl is at Classic Gaming Expo doing his video-documenting thing. But one bit today has thrown me for a loop: Mark Waid is going to take the reins as editor-in-chief of Boom! Studios, the comic publisher co-owned by Eureka creator Andrew Cosby. Waid says that part of the gig means that he’ll be releasing more creator-owned works through Boom, and if that’s the case . . . wow, this could be very good news from my point of view.

Filed in Comics
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