The life of reclusive, but well-known professors, is partially revealed in this article on privacy-conscious Princeton faculty members such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Nash Jr., Andrew Wiles, and John McPhee (one of the few who permitted an interview for the article). Although they protect themselves from unwanted publicity, these teachers receive high marks from students for a devotion to their other craft of guiding the next generation.

A couple weeks ago we took our first trip to the Seattle Cinerama. It is the movie theater around these parts, so we were told. The screen did not disappoint. The seats are comfortable for old style seats, and are supposedly upholstered in mohair, but my posterior missed the new fangled wide seats, especially towards the end of the lengthy but very enjoyable Return of the King. The sound was excellent; they’re THX Certified, something most theaters in our previous community neglected to pursue. The 90-foot-long, 30-foot-high, curved Cinerama screen actually sits behind their regular 68-foot-long movie screen and its soundwall, so it takes some work to convert the theater to Cinerama screenings. There’s also a special second sound system to match the true Cinerama audio experience. But I’m perfectly satisfied to continue to view mere modern films on the smaller screen in THX.

“You Gotta Believe.”
Many will remember Tug McGraw as a superlative reliever for the Philadelphia Phillies, but New Yorkers remember him as the New York Met who coined their rallying cry “You Gotta Believe.” He helped hugely in their 1969 Word Series season and their 1973 National League championship season. Both winning seasons were unexpected, shocking even. McGraw died on Monday at the age of 59 from brain cancer. You always knew when he had had a good inning; he’d bound off the mound with his glove bouncing merrily on his thigh. He did that a lot. (NY Times obituary)

In a role reversal of sorts, we enjoyed balmy 50 degree weather during our holiday trip to Connecticut and were greeted with a couple inches of snow and freezing temperatures upon our return to Seattle.

Catching up on pre-Christmas news… it is becoming impossible to acquire dragees, those little silver balls used to decorate baked goods, in California, thanks (or perhaps no thanks) to a lawyer who filed a lawsuit about the matter. He doesn’t know anyone who has actually been hurt by the silver sprinkles, but wants them off the market because of silver’s toxicity. Time to go for the gold. (thanks Zail!)

From Ain’t It Cool News, an amusing bit from Q&A; with Joss Whedon at the L. A. Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention:

When someone mentioned that both Whedon and Edlund had worked on the “Titan A.E.” script, Whedon groaned and remembered that, on the way home from the “Titan” screening, his wife told him to “say something funny so I’ll remember that you are.”

Whedon had to be the one who put in the line about naming the planet “Bob.”

I’m taking a break for a week or so. Enjoy the remainder of 2003 and may you have a fabulous 2004. Thanks for reading!

Boston’s Big Dig, which started around the time I left the area and is still dragging on over ten years afterwards, hit a much publicized major milestone Saturday with the full opening of the I-93 tunnel. There is still much work to be done, however. It turns out the fanfare opening was actually an “interim opening” and the tunnel, technically, is not complete. Another lane needs to be finished. Commuters can expect lane closures and accompanying traffic headaches for a while longer. The dismantling of the elevated Central Artery will also take some time as the work is loud and nearby residents would like to sleep. It’s going to be at least another year before the final major projects are completed.

I was planning to mention the WPIX (NYC Channel 11) Yule Log again this year, but what I didn’t plan on was having more than nostalgia on which to base the topic. As fate would have it, a Seattle station, KCPQ-TV, is taking a page from sister station WPIX-TV’s programming schedule and also airing a Yule Log on Christmas morning. Back in New York, WPIX is adding two more hours and additionally transmitting the blazing log on a High Definition channel. Imagine that, the Yule Log in HDTV. Amazing. And lest you scoff at the perceived popularity of a fireplace on television, note that the Yule Log regularly wins the ratings in its timeslot, and not just in New York. The Yule Log.net has a list of stations that will be broadcasting the fire this year. Maybe in a few years everyone will be able to tune into television fireplaces for a lovely Christmas Day. And no, it’s just not the same watching it on the Internet (heck, it’s just not the same watching it on cable TV. Luckily my parents’ TV is still wireless).

For all the Wagner buffs out there who know “The Ring” mythology didn’t begin with Tolkien, Alex Ross of The New Yorker muses over the connections between Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien for his part denied any influence, stating “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.” But, consciously or not, the threads are there, in the cursing of the Wagnerian ring with “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring,” in the sword that is broken and reforged, in the return of the descendant hero to fulfill a quest, and in the woman who gives up immortality for the love of a mortal man. Ross doesn’t turn his musings into a list of similarities or heavy political conjecture; the books have been around long enough for this to be a well-trod topic. After wandering through a brief music lesson and compare-and-contrast exercises, Ross ultimately aims to place Peter Jackson’s movies with music by Howard Shore in the context of opera versus film music. In film, the visuals provide the cues for the soaring score. “But in opera the music takes the lead, generating an imaginary landscape that directors and performers struggle to realize however they can.”