Confounder in Chief

Less than 24 hours after the President reminded us of the problem of putting an inexperienced, shallow, political hack in charge or the greatest nation in the world (this is the guy who can't even manage an appropriately solemn speech after 13 American soldiers are shot, choosing instead to offer an adolescent "shout out" to someone in the room who had received an award that the President can't even properly identify), he urges Americans not to "jump to conclusions" about the situation yesterday at Fort Hood.

Great advice from the man who created a furor by jumping to conclusions about a policeman doing his job when a potential break-in was reported. But of course, the Prez has balanced that by failing to reach any conclusions whatsoever regarding the request for more troops in Afghanistan, even though weeks have passed since the man he put in charge of that mission said that he needed those extra troops to do the job...

It'll be nice when we can get a real President in the office instead of this cardboard cutout...

Cash Gone, Clunkers Still in Office

The government's "cash for clunkers" program has proven to be a dismal failure, according to a report at Edmunds (click here for the full story).

Turns out our government spend $24,000 per car to give away $4500.

And there are some who actually (a) want these weasels managing health care, (b) believe for a moment that they can keep any program on budget, and (c) will actually reduce costs through savings?

Changing Lanes

For the past few years, I've had to own a van for work reasons. Our shipping group has been comprised of three stores, and no vehicle smaller than a van would have handled the number of boxes we had to pick up on an average week--and since I'm the guy who drives to the FedEx hub to pick up our books, I needed that larger vehicle.

Now, I've got the best van on the market--a Nissan Quest (and I can offer a detailed comparison between that, a Toyota Sienna, and a Honda Odyssey, having owned all three)--but it's still a van. That is, it's adequately comfortable with an above average sound system and car-like performance... but it's still not my vehicle of choice.

We considered the Buick Enclave--twice, in fact--but both times, I've been put off by some of the vehicle's rather unsophisticated technology (kludgy navigation system, mushy sound on anything other than CD/DVD) and its rather awkwardly designed cargo area (lots of room, but poorly configured).

Most of all, I've been put off by the sales people who work for Buick/GM. My problems with Carl Black Kennesaw and Heritage Buick/Cadillac were detailed a year or so ago. I tried Carl Black Alpharetta and Jim Ellis Chamblee in the past few weeks, and after what seemed like auspicious starts, things ground to a halt. Jim Ellis seemed interested, aggressive, and competitive until I looked at the vehicle... then all contact ceased. Finally, after nine days, they contacted me and said they had a vehicle that I would want... only they didn't. Somehow, he had jumbled my list of desired features. colors, etc. with someone else's, and said he'd recalculate. That was six days ago.

Carl Black Alpharetta seemed disinterested. I spoke with a salesperson who seemed eager to meet with me; then, when I showed up, he immediately handed me off to someone else who seemed unfamiliar with the Enclave. He answered what he could, but he seemed more interested in selling me the vehicle he had right then than in selling me the vehicle I wanted. (Makes me wonder why Buick offers a variety of options when no dealer wants to acquire them for the customer.)

The info I've read about the upcoming 2010 Acura MDX sounds intriguing. I enjoyed the Acura when I had it--fun to drive, bold lines, comfortable, great sound for an SUV. And now, for the first time in years, an SUV should be sufficiently large to meet my business needs at least three out of four weeks.

Don't know that I'll get one--but it's nice to know that I can make it work if the vehicle is sufficiently impressive. Guess we'll find out in December, when the 2010 MDX is slated for release.

Cool Foods

Tonight we had homemade chili for dinner--and of course, that means that we have enough left over to supplement two more meals: one tamale dinner, and one hot dog dinner.

Since the cooler temperatures got here, we've been making a lot more of my favorite "cool weather" meals, and it made me realize how much I prefer fall and winter--not only because of the temperatures, but also because of the foods that we tend to make during those season. So now, in no particular order, my favorite "cool foods."

(1) Chili
(2) Irish stew (somewhere in these pages I posted Mom's recipe for that, in fact)
(3) Homemade chicken noodle soup
(4) Susan's spaghetti and meat sauce (we have a number of different pasta recipes, but Susan's original spaghetti and meat sauce recipe--the one we've used for 38 years now--is still a cold weather favorite)
(5) Homemade vegetable soup (which we really should call vegetable beef soup, since we add a little beef to the recipe for flavor) and cornbread
(6) Turkey and dressing (I could eat it every week)
(7) Meat loaf (best served with Jamaican Hellfire Sauce, although Susan would vigorously disagree)

And the added benefit for all of these? They either add heat or humidity to the kitchen/great room area, a detriment in the summer but an asset in the fall and winter, when central eat is likely to dry out the air.

Don't Let Me Down

As anyone who knows me had probably assumed before I ever wrote this, I bought both the Beatles Mono and Stereo Box Sets back on September 10th (the one after 9/09, get it?). I haven't written about them because I wanted to take a while to listen to them and draw some conclusions before saying anything.

First off, I have to point out that this isn't a revelatory new release or anything; extreme statements by some fellow Beatles aficionados to the contrary, the 1987 CD releases weren't abhorrent in any way. They were a little flat, a little lifeless in places--even in comparison with other 1987 era mixes--but they weren't awful. Of course, the fact that the first four 1987 albums were done in a mixdown mono (not the true mono mix, not a stereo mix--sort of a variant mix in their own right) left a lot of fans (including me) dissatisfied. So I was glad to get these reissues.

Don't assume that I've waited 22 years for better versions of the Beatles albums, though. In the intervening years, I've transferred the first four stereo albums in my Mobile Fidelity boxed vinyl set to CD, so I have those songs in stereo; I've acquired the Dr. Ebbett's mixes and the Millennium mixes, enhanced versions of the original CDs tweaked by technologically advanced Beatles fans; the Purple Chick mixes, which include all sorts of bonuses, alternate takes, etc.; and the Capitol mixes of the first eight American Beatles albums, which is in many cases the way I actually prefer to hear these songs (the Dave Dexter remixes, as I've said before, were always punchier and richer in sound on those early discs than the comparable British original albums, and since that's what I heard hundreds of times in my childhood, some of those songs sound more "right" to my ears because it's the sonic signature that has been burned into my brain cells).

I listened to the stereo set first, because I prefer stereo to mono. The first two albums still sound thin; since most of the songs on those albums were recorded "instruments left, vocals right," there's little room to improve the bass resonance, for instance--all the instruments are packed together in one channel, and the dynamic range can only be tweaked so much. Voices are clearer, like a layer of gauze has been removed, but there's nothing remarkable here.

From the third album on, the sound begins to improve remarkably. Once the remastering engineers had multitracks to work with, they were able to do much more with bass response, drum crispness, vocal clarity, etc. The mid-period albums sound crisp and sharp and have a strong presence--but it's the last albums that sound the most improved. Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour show some improvement, but the albums that really stand out are The Beatles (aka the White Album), Abbey Road, and Let It Be. The sound is energetic, punchy, and realistic in a way that the original CDs weren't; it comes across as if you're truly listening to a studio monitor mix rather than a standard CD.

(A couple of fans have created their own DTS 5.1 mixes from these albums, and the sound is quite impressive. There's enough stereo separation and instrumental clarity to make the 5.1 mixes seem quite believable; I think I've listened to those albums in quasi-5.1 as often as I've listened to them in stereo.)

The box set is quite nice, but there's nothing amazing about the package itelf. The features about the making of each album are intriguing, the booklets offer some great background info and rare photos, but the best package of all is the Box of Vision, a 12" x 12" album-sized box designed to hold all the stereo CDs plus their accompanying booklets and covers, along with an album-sized hardcover reproducing the album art in the size that it originally appeared. I bought the Box of Vision before I received the stereo set, so I already had a home for the discs as soon as they arrived.

The mono set is the more impressive package in terms of design. The CD covers are true miniature reproductions of the original album covers, and each CD is packaged in a protective plastic inner sleeve to prevent scuffing and scratching (yes, even after charging over $200 for the stereo set, they didn't even put the albums in protective plastic inner sleeves... pretty chintzy, huh?). But the problem is, these are mono mixes, and they simply don't have the resonance and the rich sound field of the stereo version.

I have a theory that a speaker can only reproduce complex sounds up to a certain levels before the instrumental sounds blur together to create a single-speaker sound that is an amalgam of all the instruments than the distinct sound of each instrument. Stereo spreads the instruments and voices over twice as many channels, so each speaker only has to reproduce half as many component sounds; mono requires each speaker to reproduce them all at one time, so instruments get buried in the mix. There are many mono mixes where I can't hear guitar bits very clearly at all, or piano lines get lost in the overall sound. The same songs in stereo distinctly sound each instrument, and I hear nuances that just aren't there in the mono.

Even so, it's good to have the mono mixes. These aren't just remixes; in some cases, they are different takes or different versions of the same song, altered in post-production with differing sound effects, slightly different mix speeds, etc. In truth, they are variant editions, and the completist in me sees the necessity of having both sets. Furthermore, the mono box set is the only place where you can get the legitimate stereo versions of Help and Rubber Soul, since George Martin remixed those albums for the stereo versions in 1987, creating another variant mix.

What I'm hoping for, of course, is that Apple and EMI will choose to release a 5.1 DVD-A version of these albums at some point. That would offer the clearest, most high-fidelity version of the albums possible, spread across six speakers so that each speaker can reproduce a smaller facet of the overall sound, creating a much greater fidelity. If you want to get an idea just how good that could sound, listen to the DVD-A version of the Beatles Love and you'll realize just how breathtaking a genuine 192kHz 5.1 mix could be. It seems absurd that every album by the Doors or Genesis or the Talking Heads could be available on DVD-A or SACD, but the body of work of the most influential band in rock history is only just now getting upgraded CD versions; there should have been a 5.1 DVD-A set offered on the same day as the remastered CDs. That's the set that will be the ultimate version of the Beatles music; everything until then is just an interim improvement.

Hey, Wait a Minute...

I think I would rather have had the old price on that Macbook Air...

A Life In Four Colors (Part Twenty-Seven)

As if my childhood didn't have enough expensive hobbies and interests to fill my time and devour my meager allowance, 1965 was the year that I added yet another passion to a group that already included comics, monster magazines trading cards, model kits, and the Beatles.

This time, though, I was late to the party, so to speak.

The rest of the world had succumbed to 007-mania with the release of Goldfinger, but I didn't see that film until its re-re-release; I suspect my parents were concerned about the emphasis on a gold-painted naked lady that was a part of the marketing campaign (I can guarantee you that my mom wasn't convinced this was at all appropriate for a 10 year old, which was my age when Goldfinger was initially released).

But by the time the international press campaign for Thunderball launched in earnest in 1965, I knew this was something I wanted to experience. Action, intrigue, suspense, espionage, glamour, and amazing effects (well, they were pretty amazing for the time... the underwater scenes were far beyond anything I had ever witnessed on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, that's for sure)--yep, I wanted to know more about this James Bond...

Because Dad worked for a newspaper, he often had access to press kits for films; in the past, those press kits hadn't included the sort of films I'd like to see (no one was doing a major press promotion for The Tingler or The Screaming Skull), but the pre-release buzz for Thunderball caught my attention right away... and this was a film for which Dad could get the press kit. Well, sort of--it was cut up, with a few images missing, because local theaters would ask the newspapers to use some of these images with their newspaper ads. The black and white press kits included, in addition to stills from the film, a number of press-release-style articles and film ads in a variety of sizes for every market.

I had seen references to James Bond in at least one movie magazine that I had picked up, but it hadn't made much of an impression on me. I had also seen a DC Comics adaptation of Dr. No that appeared in Showcase a couple of years earlier, but that seemed dull and lackluster compared to the usual Showcase contents. This whole Thunderball thing, though--now this looked great. James Bond looking debonair while a jetpack carried him away from his adversaries; James Bond grappling underwater with the lead adversary as a virtual army of well-prepared black-clad scuba divers prepared for the confrontation; James Bond surrounded by beautiful women... And all the while, he always looked suave and nonplussed, in spite of the danger that awaited.

Because the marketing for this film seemed more action-oriented and less sensual in nature than that aforementioned golden girl image utilized to promote Goldfinger, Mom and Dad were willing to let me see this film at the DeSoto Theater in downtown Rome. I was entranced by the storyline, by the visuals, but most of all by the sophisticated agent 007, who always knew just the right thing to say and do. Forget Batman or Superman or Spider-Man... I wanted to grow up to be this guy! I wanted the cool cars and the gadgets and the glamour and the glory--just like millions of other people who found in the 007 image the sort of intrepid hero that we all could admire.

Bond was as much a hero as any of those comics characters I loved; oh, he didn't have a costume as such, but he had a heroic identity, he had the gadgets, he had the funding, and he had the skills necessary to confront any adversary. And unlike Batman, he had this really great accent that made everything sound impressive!

Actually, 1965 was the year when I discovered two new passions: James Bond and a television show that my parents casually mentioned as being "sort of like James Bond." I was intrigued; how could any television show capture the global intrigue and the level of excitement of James Bond?

So at my mother's suggestion, I tried an episode of this quirky NBC series called The Man from UNCLE. And right off the bat, I saw that Mom was right!

Rather than presenting a James Bond clone, The Man from UNCLE starred two heroes, each of whom represented different aspects of the Bond persona. Robert Vaughn's Napoleon Solo was the suave, handsome (well, supposedly--but I never really saw why that big-headed lug was considered attractive), and adept at the art of espionage--but it was David McCallum's Ilya Kuryakin that appealed to me more. He represented the down-to-business side of Bond's persona; his accent gave him a bit of an exotic air, his appearance echoed vaguely of the Beatles early look, but his black turtleneck and shoulder holster wardrobe made it clear that this was the man who took care of business.

I missed most of the first season of Man from UNCLE, but caught up with it in reruns. While it lacked the expansive budgets and on-location scenarios of the Bond films, it had one advantage: it came on every week, whereas we only got one Bond film a year. And like James Bond, UNCLE had it share of magazines, trading cards, toys, and other paraphernalia to eat up whatever budget an eleven-year-old might have left over after investing in all his other entertainment addictions.

Today, in an entertainment world filled with high-tech effects-laden comics-based films and television series, it might seem odd to hear of a comics fan embracing the world of Bond and UNCLE because they were about as comic-book-like as one could find in films or on television. But back then, Bond and UNCLE were eye-opening, because they showed me that (a) larger-than-life heroes could find be extremely successful and popular, and (b) the aforementioned heroes didn't have to wear a colorful costume or have amazing powers to engage in wonderful adventures.

KennedyCare?

I've seen talk of naming the healthcare takeover program after Ted Kennedy. I can see that. It's speeding full speed ahead with no regard to the lay of the land. It's going to put the American budget underwater. The opinions of the majority of Americans are being back-seated by the Democrats. Anyone who makes waves is ignored. And once they sink the American budget with this program, there's no coming up for air.

Yep, I think it would be quite appropriate indeed to name it after Teddy...

Dull-plicity

Duplicity is a film about two stars, a director, and a supporting cast trying to convince viewers they've made something clever and intriguing when they're really turned out a lethargic, lifeless, dreary waste of time. Thankfully, I figured out this twist less than halfway into it and quit watching...

Chalk It Up...

When Susan and I went to Athens a month or so ago to see the Embroiderers' Guild exhibit, it just so happened that there was an exhibit of pastel art on another floor of the same facility. We took the time to check it out and I was quite impressed--but the exhibit also reminded me how much I used to enjoy working in pastels when I was a teenager.

I didn't think much about it, but Susan apparently remembered. For an early birthday gift, she got me a set of pastels and some textured paper. I haven't gotten around to actually doing anything artistic per se, but I've played around it a little bit with it just to remind myself of pastel techniques and to get used to the feel of it once again. Pastels still rank right up there with watercolors as one of the media that I most enjoy and most admire.

Have no idea if I'll produce anything worthwhile, but it doesn't matter; I think I'm going to have a good time with it, at least...