20 April 1999: Calming Down a Bit

Tuesday, 20 April 1999:

Calming Down a Bit

I'm slowly mellowing out from my apartment-related panic of the weekend. This is good, since I shouldn't decide whether I want to move in a state of mind like that. I think it's going to be a tough decision one way or the other, and I should be more reasonable (albeit not necessarily rational) in making it.

One factor in favor of moving emerged last night when a bunch of us went up to the Cafe Barrone in Menlo Park to play Bridge. I was very impressed with the cafe, as they serve tasty sandwiches and very yummy hot apple cider. Moreover, they serve coffee in similar glasses to those used by the Espresso Royale, my coffee shop of choice back in Madison, which of course evoked a certain nostalgia in me. This place is also next to Kepler's Books, a good independent bookstore I went to several weeks ago. So the lure of the peninsula is growing stronger.

Bridge went pretty well, although we played some really unbalanced hands during the evening which made it very challenging. And for some reason I'm finding it harder and harder to focus the more I play Bridge, possibly because I'm loading up my mind with more and more details of bidding, and it's difficult to keep them all straight, and easy to get confused. I did manage to recognize a few advanced bids last night, and was fairly pleased with that, even if I did put my partner in the wrong contract once because I boneheadedly had filed one of my hearts with my diamonds. (On the plus side, I nearly made the same mistake a few hands later, and corrected myself just in time. My partner observed, "See, you learned something from that after all." Gee!)

My friend Tracy in Wisconsin is reading my journal, and says I should add a glossary of Bridge terms to give people context. Perhaps I will. I'd also like to add a cast of characters to this journal. Although then I might feel obligated to make each person's name a link to their entry in the cast list, which might be a pain to keep up with. Hurm.

Yesterday and today at work have felt a little barren, in large part because nearly every member of my team has been out of the office (sick, on vacation, or working from home) the last couple of days. I didn't have a specific need to talk to them, but it's a bit of a downer to be the nearly the only person on my hall who's in the office. I like having people around.

On the up side, I took my car in for the California smog inspection, and it passed with flying colors. Well, at least it passed soundly compared to the numbers on the certificate: The allowable maximums tended to be in the 100-140 range, and I was scoring numbers from 25 down to as low as 1. To be honest, I was surprised it passed at all, as it's an old car from another state which hasn't had its exhaust system worked on in about four years, but I guess I was fearful for nothing. Now I can take it in to get registered, although I have to wait for my replacement Wisconsin title to complete the process. Still, a great step forward.

A few links I've unearthed recently of note:

First, a San Jose Mercury News article on the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis' album Kind of Blue.

There's also the list of English words not yet taken for use in a .com Web site (thanks to Diane Patterson). extemporaneous.com seems like a rather good name, actually...

And, Tony Isabella points out Women in Refrigerators, a site about the awful things that happen to female characters in comic books. (It's named for a particularly vile scene in Green Lantern in which the hero's girlfriend is murdered and her body stuffed in a refrigerator for him to find.) One interesting thing about the list for me is that I've actually read very few of the stories described, often having tagged the comic as a loser from the start, or having given up on it as it slowly went downhill, before the story in question occurred.

Finally, Laurel Krahn links to a list of the 100 greatest SF TV episodes. There's a lot here I haven't seen, since I never got into Quantum Leap, for example. But many I have seen. Here's what I wrote to Laurel about it:

Hmm, let's see, my pick for the best SF TV show ever is also my favorite episode of B5, and is something like their fifth Babylon 5 episode on the list - "Severed Dreams". Although "The Coming of Shadows" isn't a bad choice.
How they could put the good-but-routine "Comes the Inquisitor" above it I'll never know...
"The Best of Both Worlds" the best Star Trek: The Next Generation episode? Well, maybe if you exclude part 2, which pretty much copped out on everything they'd set up in part one. One of the bigger letdowns in SF TV...
Okay, I wouldn't pick "Survival" as my favorite Doctor Who episode, but it is my favorite of the post-Davison era (almost everything with Colin Baker reeks, and "The Curse of Fenric" is overrated gobbledygook) and it's nice to see it get some recognition.
My fave DW? Tough call. "Genesis of the Daleks", "Logopolis" and "Mawdryn Undead" stand out at first thought, but only because there are SO MANY excellent Tom Bakers which don't *quite* reach that plateau. I guess I'd give "Genesis" the nod for having a tighter plot and some actual social commentary...
"Arrival" the best Prisoner episode? Uh, how about "Chimes of Big Ben"? Or "Hammer into Anvil"? I'd pick the latter, myself.
Haven't seen enough Blake's 7 to have an opinion, but "Orbit" is excellent.
Finally, it appears that three of my four favorite Classic Trek episodes don't make the list: "The Doomsday Machine", "The Cage", and "The Ultimate Computer". Nice to see that "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is there, though.

John and I have been talking a lot about my pick of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as the best SF movie ever made. (My Trek page was written before I saw 12 Monkeys, which I think is about as good, albeit very different.) John basically thinks I'm nuts to make that pick, and seems especially affronted at the fact that I don't even consider Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Good film, I agree, but a typical Spielberg film: Very entertaining, even a little thought-provoking, but Spielberg doesn't, in my mind, make "great films". He just doesn't seem able to raise it much above the level of merely entertaining.)

John made the interesting observation that I seem to emphasize characterization in determining what kinds of stories I enjoy the most, and I think he's right. This is ironic because ten years ago I was very strongly plot-oriented in my tastes, and often felt that time spent on characterization was time wasted. I'm not sure exactly why my tastes have changed in that way. I do still think a strong plot is crucial to a good story, and ST2 does have a strong plot, but it's also a very character-driven plot.

John also points out that since ST2 relies on the background of the TV series, it has an advantage that other movies don't; few films can achieve the depth and texture of characterization that TV shows can, because they're just not long enough. While this is true, I also note how many TV shows fail to capitalize on this advantage of the format, and, moreover, how poorly other Trek movies have done at using the series' backstory to produce a great film. Maybe it's not as easy as it seems.

As another friend of mine, Bruce, likes to say of opinions: "That's what makes for horse races!" My attitude towards reviews or opinions of anything artistic is that they are always filtered through the particular experience and biases of the viewer, and any thoughtful opinion is usually useful or interesting in some small way, since everyone's experiences are different. I'm well aware that I'm in the minority with my pick here, but hey, it's not like I bet the house on it...

Michael Rawdon (Contact)