Best TV theme/opening credits?..

..OK, it’s probably still Banacek, but this certainly gave it a run for its money back in the day. Jerry Fielding’s fabulous score for McMillan and Wife, staring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. I had a huge crush on her at the time, but now I’m wondering whether I actually had a crush on Jerry Fielding’s arrangement. She was cute, though..

done

O Holy Night:(update)

..Sorry, the Studio 60 New Orleans clip has been pulled from Youtube at the behest of NBC. Gotta love those guys..

O Holy Night

I think by now we’ve all seen enough of Studio 60 to appreciate that it’s further ammunition, as if any were needed, for the Sorkin-is-God brigade of which I am, of course, a fully paid-up member. Sharpest show on TV since, well, The West Wing.. Great characters, great dialogue – but my favourite moment so far has been a musical one, and one that I thought at the time was about to go horribly, mawkishly wrong..

Here’s the set-up, as described in the Times-Picayune:

“…Andrews plays a displaced New Orleans trumpet player subbing for a member of the house band on the show-within-the-show. When a producer discovers that Andrews’ character is working because L.A.-based musicians have been surreptitiously calling in sick so that relocated New Orleans musicians can earn some extra cash near the holidays, he cuts a sketch and replaces it with a performance of “O Holy Night” by a band of the trumpet player’s hometown peers… The episode-concluding sequence, in which the band performs in front of projected photos of post-Katrina flooding and snapshots of recovery, struck an appropriately emotional chord…“

Sounds like your worst Disney-inspired saccharine nightmare, right? Mine too. Here’s how it turned out..

Not too damn shabby, huh?. When was the last time a musical performance as good as that actually made it onto mainstream US TV, or mainstream TV anywhere for that matter? Oh yeah, I remember now – it was Yo-Yo Ma performing the Bach G Major Cello Suite on, you guessed it, The West Wing..

 

Doh!

I’m reminded of the old statistics joke about 50% of the population being of below average intelligence, or, as George Carlin succinctly put it.. “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider than that.”

…and we really are failing our young people if we’re teaching them that the word ’satisfactory’ no longer means ‘good enough’. Words fail.. or at least half of them do…

We are family

.. so, who to vote for to replace the current President, who also happens to be the son of the last-but-one President? Should it be the wife of the last President, or the cousin of the man who’s been pulling the strings behind two of the last three Presidencies? Tough choice – democracy, it seems, is all relative…

From today’s Daily Telegraph… 

Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are cousins

The wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney has revealed that her husband is closely related enough to the Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him “cousin”.

Lynne Cheney said that she had made the unlikely discovery of kinship between President George W Bush’s hawkish deputy and the charismatic black Illinois senator while researching ancestry for her new memoir, Blue Skies, No Fences.   We are family? The men are apparently eighth cousins, but Mrs Cheney said she did not include this in her memoir. “This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor … could be responsible down the family lines for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick’s and Barack Obama,” Mrs Cheney told MSNBC television. According to Mrs Cheney’s spokesman, Senator Obama is a descendant of Mareen Duvall. The French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650s from England. The Vice President’s full name is Richard B. Cheney. A spokesman for Senator Obama, who wants to be the first black US president, offered a tongue-in-cheek response. “Every family has a black sheep,” said Bill Burton. (via Daily Telegraph)

Blogged with Flock

Tilt/shift Sunday

Prize Brooker

Charlie Brooker, ladies and gentlemen..

Happened to tune into this segment in the early hours a couple of nights ago, and thought it was about the best bit of TV commentary I’d seen in quite a considerable while. And, hey presto, sure enough it’s already up there on Youtube..

Jack’s back!

“I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.”

Jack Handey (of course)

Limits? It would appear not..

Just some girl hulahooping..

..actually, it’s the quite remarkable Elena Lev doing her Cirque du Soleil thing..

To fill the hour

‘Happiness’ – that’s our theme for today. Been getting mighty tired recently of people telling me that ‘happiness’ should be our goal, in that simplistic, faux-enlightened way that seems to be the province of self-appointed mystics and Daily Mail readers. Complexity, richness, all those other things are out. ‘Happiness’ is the way forward – and guess what? – apparently I am not always the living, breathing epitome of it..

So, with that in mind, I have collected a few pertinent remarks. Wasn’t easy – had to sort through a veritable mountain of nauseating platitudes of the ‘power of now’ variety – but I thought these few people had some relevant things to say..

Carl Jung:

“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Edith Wharton:

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

” I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”

M. Scott Peck:

” The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Michaelangelo:

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

Mark Twain:

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

W. Beran Wolfe:

” If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.”

…and, as usual, I have a favourite…

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“To fill the hour — that is happiness.”

molti ritorni felici, Ennio

Jennifer Connelly, my God but that girl could stare..

“He is altogether lovable – but he’ll always be a two-bit punk, so he’ll never be my beloved… What a shame.. “

Limits, again

Am reminded today, for some unfathomable reason, of a thing I used to feel when younger – not so much these days – a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia, of already missing the place I was in. I remember my first real trip abroad, must have been about 13-14, wandering round Malta in the blazing heat. Came across the remains of some old Roman settlement and was suddenly hit with a wave of sadness – that ‘you-can-never-go-down-to-the-same-river-twice’ kind of thing. I would never see this place again, not the same way. I could revisit it, but it wouldn’t be the same place, or I wouldn’t be the same me..

Anyway, used to get that a lot, as I said, not so much now. Not sure whether I miss it. Ha – not sure if I’m nostalgic for the feeling of nostalgia, that sounds like me.. On the odd occasion it does happen still, it’s usually triggered by searingly hot days, freshly-cut grass, melting tarmac, certain pieces of music, or the poetry of Borges, most notably this one.. (I make no apologies for the fact that I may have previously posted it here some time ago…)

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Quotes of the day

.. Courtesy of my randomizing widget..

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

“Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.”
- William Hazlitt

…and my favourite, from the inimitable Jack Handey…

“If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man, I guess I’m a coward.”

Thank God, it’s all in your mind..

Neuroscience and God: “The current issue of Scientific America Mind looks at how neuroscientists are using brain scans to study the biology of spiritual experiences. The fMRI images seen here are from a study by University of Montreal researcher Mario Beauregard and his colleagues. The scientists scanned the brains of nuns as they recalled religious epiphanies to see which areas of the brain lit up. From Scientific American Mind:

Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine—a new discipline with the warring titles ‘neurotheology’ and ‘spiritual neuroscience’—not only might reconcile religion and science but also might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will. Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier, healthier and better able to concentrate. Ultimately, however, neuroscientists study this question because they want to better understand the neural basis of a phenomenon that plays a central role in the lives of so many. ‘These experiences have existed since the dawn of humanity. They have been reported across all cultures,’ Beauregard says. ‘It is as important to study the neural basis of [religious] experience as it is to investigate the neural basis of emotion, memory or language.’

Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental illness noted a link between ‘religious emotionalism’ and epilepsy. Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

It’s going to be a fine night tonight..

Happy birthday Jane..

I remember how we were going to sit in this field
but never quite did

… rain or appointments or something…

The name of the OS

Umberto Eco, September 30, 1994

“The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the Kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

“DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

“You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to.

“And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic…”

Can’t argue with the algorithm

…nice spot..

Official: James Blunt is a w*nker | The Register:

For all we know

Donny Hathaway (October 1, 1945 – January 13, 1979)