Some Questions About DVDs

I ripped this one off from the Big Stupid Tommy.

1) Total number of films I own on DVD/video:
Let's say about 65-70 DVDs. Aside from tapes on which kind folks have taped television shows for me, I only have one film on tape: the original unaltered Star Wars. I dread dread the day when this tape gives up the ghost; it is irreplaceable.
2) The last film I bought:
The Four Feathers. A flawed but very interesting film; unlike many I prefer this 2002 version to the 1939 version. For the total geek experience I recommend reading A.E. Mason's 1902 novel of the same name prior to watching either film. (And here's an essay on some of the history behind the movie, forthose who find such things of interest.)
3) The last film I watched:
Hombre.
4) Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):
It is difficult to make such a list and limit myself to five choices, but I will take a stab at it. So here we go (and these are in no particular order):
1.Star Wars
2.The Wild Bunch
3.The Killer
4.Grosse Pointe Blank
5.This is Spinal Tap.

Ask me again tomorrow and I'll easily come up with another five.

I would also like to point this post of no small genius: Stegosaurus=Badass.

Bullshit. Stegosaur would whip Tyrannosaur's ass. The tyrannosaur respects this fact, but sometimes Stegosaur has to bring the thunder anyway.

Definitely badass.

Light House Cleaning

This is the part of the show where I unload various and sundry links that have been gathering dust in my folder lo! these many weeks. Enjoy.

The first thing is I do not like mystery novels, I like private eye novels. Big difference. The second thing is that three of the big names currently working in the private eye (or crime fiction) genre are Connelly, Pelecanos annd Lehane. The third thing? These three men were inspired by a man named James Crumley. I just finished reading his second-to-latest novel The Final Country and I was quite chuffed to learn that his lates, The Right Madness was recently published.

The funniest Christmas ever. Seriously. Followed by Dogblog, which is self-explanatory.

A collection of paperback novel covers. Old school paperback novel covers. When I was just a sprout, these kinds of paperbacks were easily found at yardsales and secondhand book stores. You can still find them today, but not quite as readily as years ago. A shame for kids of today. One of the chief pleasures of my childhood was a trip to the used bookstore, where two or three dollars might (and usually did) yield up reading treasure like these beauties.

Liveplasma. Go play with this and report back. I can't explain it, but it's a pretty cool toy for music and movie geeks.

I like vintage posters, not least because they bring to mind an era when travel was glamorous and full of adventure, not a cattle call. I also suspect I like the look and feel of these posters for the same reasons I dig fedoras: they're much more cool and stylish than anything going on today.

Book Challenge

Which it's the Book Challenge, coutresy of an Irish Elk...

1. Total Number of Books I've Owned:
I estimate I currently own about a thousand books. But that includes the three bookcases in my apartment (and the storage unit under my bed) as well a half-dozen odd boxes in the attic of the house I grew up in, plus a bookcase in my childhood bedroom there.
2. Last Book I Bought:
Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie.
3. Last Book I Read:
Chicago Confidential - Max Allan Collins
4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:
Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard. I probably read this book 50 times while growing up.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Another title I read and re-read as a boy, and one which kick started a lifelong interest in the 'literature of the fantastic.'
Beat To Quarters by C.S. Forester. The road to Patrick O'Brian began here.
Eloise by Kay Thompson (and brilliantly illustrated by Hilary Knight). A family tradition.
Massachusetts: a Guide to Its Places and People by the Federal Writer's Project of the Work's Progress Administration. This hardcover original was a gift from my grandfather.
5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blog:
Five? Five!? That seems a tall order for a blog-of-small-readership like this one. Try three:
Heather (because I know she just went book-shopping.)
beth (who used to have a book blog)
Sheila (who probably already got this meme)

Dog Show

This was my friend.

Turning the Karmic Wheel

Be cool to the Pizza Dude:

If I have one operating philosophy about life it is this: "Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it's good luck." Four principles guide the pizza dude philosophy.

Principle 1: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness.

My Way of Thinking

Cultural Creative 81% Romanticist 75% Idealist 69% Existentialist 56% Modernist 38% Postmodernist 31% Fundamentalist 19% Materialist 13% What is Your World View? (corrected...hopefully) created with QuizFarm.com

Sheila and beth also took this quiz. Crazy kids.

Grazing the Open Pages: Baseball

In this, the second edition of Grazing the Open Pages, I give you an anecdote involving the pitcher Dock Ellis, from the incomparable Roger Angell's Five Seasons:

Dock Ellis, now a Yankees but then a Pirate, decided early in the 1974 season that the Cincinnati Reds had somehow established dominance over his club, and he determined to set things right in his own way. (This incident is described at length in a lively new baseball book, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, by Donald Hall.) The first Cincinnati batter of the game was Pete Rose, and the first pitch from Ellis was at his head - "not to actually hit him," Ellis said later, but as a "message to let him know that he was going to be hit." He then hit Rose in the side. The next pitch hit the next Red batter, Joe Morgan, in the kidney. The third batter was Dan Driessen, who took Ellis's second pitch in the back. With the bases loaded, Dock now threw four pitches at Tony Perez (one behind his back), but missed with all of them, walking in a run. He then missed Johnny Bench (and the plate) twice, whereupon Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh came out to the mound, stared at Ellis with silent surmise, and beckoned for a new pitcher.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the same scene playing out in the major leagues of today.

Historians Online

I've completely blanked on where I found it, but here's an article on history blogs. The article efers to a number of history blogs; some of the ones I've been check out are:

CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog

Break of day in the trenches

War Historian

Top Forty

Courtesy of boston.com, a listing of the "at-bat" songs, along with samples for download of certain Red Sox players. (What, no Bellhorn?). I am disappointed to see that the Ortizzle no longer has Jump Around as his song.

The Listing

This a list of what I've read so far this year. Reviews will follow according to the usual schedule. Meaning you'll see them some time in July.

1. Wasteland of Flint - Thomas Harlan
2. The Shadow of Saganami - David Weber
3. Dark Voyage - Alan Furst
4. Flights of Passage - Samuel Hynes
5. Banewreaker - Jacqueline Carey
6. The Million Dollar Wound - Max Alan Collins
7. Flying Blind - Max Alan Collins
8. The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
9. Ripples of Battle - Victor David Hansen
10. Rainstorm - Barry Eisler
11. True Detective - Max Alan Collins
12. Jeeves in the Morning - P.G. Wodehouse
13. Moneyball - Michael Lewis
14. True Crime - Max Alan Collins
15. The Reckoning - Charles Nichol
16. Why Not Us - Leigh Montville
17. Last Citadel - David L. Robbins
18. A Tale of Two Cities - Massarotti & Harper
19. Bodyguard of Lies - Anthony Cave Brown
20. Faithful - King & O'Nan
21. The Game - Laurie R. King
22. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
23. The Lessons of Terror - Caleb Carr
24. Jeeves and the Tie that Binds - P.G. Wodehouse
25. Hero - Joel Rosenberg
26. The Professor and the Madman - Simon Winchester
27. The Thirty Nine Steps - John Buchan

Reqiescat in Pace John Beresford

On Tuesday May 10th, 2005, John Beresford was murdered on the streets of Boston. He will be greatly missed by friends and family. Greatly.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

Update: a very nice piece in today's Globe.

Pick Three

Two links of interest I've come acrosss in my travels recently....

Mondegreen: a handy new word.

Misheard lyrics come with many alternate names, only some of which form compound nouns when joined with the word "boneheaded." Some of the names that have been used: Music Ear Disturbance, disclexia, chronic lyricosis, and Litellas (after Gilda Radner's befuddled Saturday Night Live character). The technical term prized by aficionados is mondegreen. If your dictionary doesn't include "mondegreen," throw it out and buy a better one.

The term "mondegreen" was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Atlantic article. As a child, young Sylvia had listened to a folk song that included the lines "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen." As is customary with misheard lyrics, she didn't realize her mistake for years. The song was not about the tragic fate of Lady Mondegreen, but rather, the continuing plight of the good earl: "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green."

(lva)

And an article on independent book stores in the Boston area.

Foulke'd Up

Not that anyone cares, but I've now officially lost patience with Keith Foulke. Keith Foulke is not the new black. Keith Foulke is in fact the new Derek Lowe. He makes me cringe and whimper everytime he toes the rubber. In his care, three run leads vanish like candy at recess.

Dear Diary

Thanks to the Singapore Sox Fan, I discovered an interesting livejournal community - major league baseball players. Of course they're all fakes (I hope) but some are screamingly funny. For example, here's a bit from A-Rod's diary:

I'm walking through the training facility, and everyone's just watching me struggle to get to the ice packs (Mr. McCarver was nice enough to bring them down to Tampa for me, except he keeps asking me if he can adjust them for me. Weird.), and nobody was helping me, and I just...I fell down. I couldn't help it. It hurt so much.

And one from Matsui (entirely done in haiku I believe):

Why we play so bad?
Maybe there is curse they say
Maybe is true thing

There are plenty of major league teams represented, you can check the listing here.

Shootin' Gallery

I whiled away this rain afternoon seeting up a flickr account, uploading photos and setting up some albums (or 'sets' in flickr nomenclature.) There's a lot of features I haven't check out yet, but I'm up and running.

Testing

Mollynapping,
originally uploaded by Irishblues.

I've been playing around with flickr all afternoon.

This is snap of the sorely missed Molly the Wonder Beagle.

Loose Ends

How do you think this blog tastes? Me, I think it needs more content, but sadly the cupboard is pretty bare. So I'll have to use some left-overs, so to speak. Think of it as a kind of tuna blog casserole. Mmmmmm, sounds good, eh?

In plain English, what I'm going to do is finish up two seperate series of posts that were left incomplete. The first series was supposed to be a set of three on skydiving but only two were written. I should also finish my tale of Operation: Roaddogs, last summer's baseball road trip. I think when last I wrote, the Bunny and I were motoring out of Milly-wah-kay towards Chicago. Kind of a shame to stop there, since Chicago is where things really started to get weird. There are six posts in this series already; I don't know how many more will be required so this one could take a while. The installments so far are:
Day 1: Trust Jesus... Baseball Jesus
Day 1: Black Hole Sun
Day 1: Alice's Restaurant
Day 2: All Skate
Day 2: Hungry Like the Wolf
Day 3: The Quest for Cheese

Wow - that's only halfway through the trip. You folks got some extra goodness coming your way, since I haven't even touched upon the strange tales of Eddie the Navajo Marine, Rio the Viking Bartender, and the World's Worst Bikini Contest.

So Noted

Bronson Arroyo pitched a helluva game today (I'm assuming he's not coming back out for the ninth), holding the Tigets hitless through six, and allowing only over eight innings, with eight strike- outs to match.

Which is exactly the kind of ass-kicking performance the Red Sox needed. Which is why I'd like to be able to say the Sox ran away with this one. But they didn't. Oh they're winning - by a score of 2-to-1. And I'm scratching my head wondering how a line-up that looking pretty anemic in spots* managed to crank out a dozen hits with almost as many runners left on base.

Update: the Sox won, after a remarkably unscary ninth inning relief appearance by the Great Amazo.

*Today's batting order seemed especially weak. Consider (after nine):
Kevin Millar,batting fourth (Fourth!? What. The. Fuck?) : now hitting .245 after going 1-for-5.
Bill Meuller: now hitting .239 after going 0-for-4.
Jay Payton: now hitting an even .200 after going 0-for-4.
Mark Bellhorn: down to .231 after going 0-for-3.

Thankfully Trot (4-for-5) and Tek (3-for-4) continue to whack the shit out of the ball. Why oh why is Tek not hittting fourth when Manny has the day off?

Another Round of Blues

For reasons I won't bother explaining, I haven't felt much like posting here as of late. Yet for reasons I can't quite fathom, there are folks who continue to stop by here. So I feel obliged to offer up some sort of content, so people don't think this blog has gone under entirely.

I am here but not here; just think of me as The-Ghost-Who-Walks. Minus the purple body suit of course.

And now onward... right, the afore-mentioned booksale. There are few things I like better than a purhcasing a dozen books for $8.00, and few things I enjoy more that rooting around in stacks of used books. Sure, the internet has made it ridiculously easy to obtain any book on your 'To Find' list, but it's infinitely more satisfying to do the finding yourself. I'm passionate about books (really Dan? Honest?) and I find ordering books online to be a very sterile experience, as opposed concluding a chase for a long-sought title in a newly discovered used book store. And if I could find a way to get paid to do that - hang out a shingle as Silver Fox, Book Hunter - why I'd be a very happy man.

Anyway I came across a couple of books on my 'To Find' list...
People of the Lie - Dale Peck
Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
..as well as an assortment of 'Just Because' titles, including...
King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
Reading the Fights -Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Halpern (eds.)
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon (ed.)
Not bad for an afternoon's labor.

Keeping with the literary theme, here's a link to Boston Globe piece on book blogs.

And lastly (for now) - you should be reading The Darth Side regularly. Daily. And I should note that this blog was first pointed out to me at the Hidden Rebel Base, where I have been sadly remiss in posting.