The oddest Bible verse I’ve ever read

clusterflock: A little known verse from Leviticus.

The end of the end credit

The theme song to the Western song Gunsmoke is one of the most beautiful tunes ever played on television. The theme had an actual title - “Old Trails,” written by Glenn Spencer and Rex Koury. It was also known as “Boot Hill.” The version that played over the opening credits of the show was charged and exciting, summoning viewers to the TV for an hour of drama on the Plains, but I was always partial to the slower, more reflective version that accompanied the end credits. Loved those trombones and timpani drums.

Annoyingly, TV Land - the network that delivers Gunsmoke to my house - often blares programming information over the closing tune (always for shows I have no desire to watch) and just when when the theme is getting to the good part. On such occasions, I am reminded of one of the signal moments in the degradation of television and our culture at large - the decision to sacrifice the venerable end credit in the name of more commercials.

I have often wondered who exactly is to blame for this societal wrong. Apparently, I should blame the Peacock Network.

The notion of a new inducement to watch commercials appealed to NBC, which has previously pushed through several innovations in prime-time formatting. In 1994, for example, NBC became the first network to squeeze the end credits all but off the screen, and create a seamless (and commercial-free) transition from one program to the next. All the other networks subsequently adopted the practice, intended to keep viewers from straying during long commercial breaks between shows.

Predictably, it’s all about retaining the viewer by leaving her or him even a second to think about picking up that remote. Stay where you are! You don’t want to miss (blah, blah)! Coming right now! Meh.

The effect of this corporate urgency, the desire to squeeze a dime out of every moment, has affected the front end of programs as well as the closing moments. Such urgency is endangered whenever the consumer is allowed to do anything other than, well, consume. Networks can hardly allow viewers to wander like directionless cattle, and are even willing to risk skipping commercials - theirs, and those of their affiliates - between shows and trimming the opening credits in order to keep you right where you are.

Clearly, brevity is key. No drawn-out intro or hokey theme. Networks don’t have time for that — and neither, prevailing TV thinking goes, do the country’s couch potatoes.

“Producers feel, rightly or wrongly, that that interruption, if you will, is going to lose viewers,” Brooks said.

“I think one of the things that has squeezed themes out is this relentless kind of move toward tightening everything, making it go right from joke to joke, from action to action, from shootout to shootout, so that you won’t press the dreaded remote control.”

Thanks to the elimination of commercials between the end of one show and the beginning of another, shows overlap before fickle viewers have a chance to channel-surf to Another Network. More commercials air within a show, making episodes shorter. Main titles and well-rounded theme songs and scores? Sorry, no time, no money.

Time is money, after all, and networks have become increasingly stingy with each - to the detriment of viewers and such quaint pleasures as a quiet moment after a show, and a good theme song.

Tough times for Bill Murray

CNN: First Bill Murray gets dissed by Greta Eurowhatever, now his wife wants a divorce.

Wordless

I’ve accomplished exactly zero fiction writing over the past month or so, and am appropriately irritated with myself for this. Recurrent bouts of viral gastroenteritis threw me off track, which is understandable; getting back into the traces, to kludge up the metaphor at work here, has been an inexcusably slow process. Meh.

Not much to say about it, except that I’ll have better news to report on this front next week.

Well. That’s about it for this entry, I guess.

“We’re All Samuel Pepys Now”

Bitty’s Back Porch: We live in a republic of letters.

Dinner is served

CNN: Lions doing what, well, lions do.

A sense of where you aren’t

At some point on Saturday morning, I clicked though a few items on the recently implemented, slickly randomized, feed-fueled blogroll at the bottom of the Waveflux homepage. I noted that Mike Davidson, guy-in-charge of Newsvine, had a new post up at his blog, so I clicked on over. The post was about an open web developer position (not qualified, not even a little bit), but I was soon distracted from the entry by the view of Puget Sound that sits atop each page of his blog. The image is updated every couple of minutes and is accompanied by a brief description of the current weather. I sat and studied the image for a little while, then finally broke away to go mow the lawn in the back yard.

All during the lawn chore, I thought about Seattle.

I used to think about Seattle all the time, back in the day. An ideal city, or so it seemed to me. Literate, yet casual. Awesome signature bookstore. Temperate summers. Large and attractive body of water, mountains in the distance, lots of trees. Never mind that I was not and am not the kind of person who actually goes out of doors to enjoy firsthand bodies of water, mountains, or trees. It would be enough, I reasoned, just to know that they were there. This is the same kind of pride-through-proximity that makes New Yorkers proud of Central Park, Broadway, and MoMA even if they never actually go to those places.

Davidson seems to be the kind of person who actually does partake of Seattle’s pleasures; the city is number one on his list of things for which he is thankful:

If the rest of the world knew that we actually have more livable weather than Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Arizona, Atlanta, and even most of Florida, everyone would live here. When it rains, it only mists, and when it’s sunny it’s one of the most beautiful places in the country. If you like to waterski, hike, bike, run, snowboard, climb, boat, golf, shop, parasail, or just about anything else outdoors, you owe it to yourself to visit the Puget Sound region. Come during the summer months and you’ll never leave.

Ach.

I did spend a week in Seattle several years ago, not during the summer months but in October. Considerably cooler and wet most days, but enjoyable. The following year, again around October, I spent a week in Portland, which seemed somehow more accessible. Great town. Compact, easily navigated, attractive in its own way. Like Seattle, Portland also has an awesome signature bookstore. And as with Seattle, I fell in love with Portland and thought about moving there. Never did pull the trigger either time, though; worries about employability tethered me to the spot.

Years passed before I gave my affections to another place where I wasn’t, and on those occasions it was always connected with some vacation spot or other. Chicago, a little. London - a lot. Paris, kinda. Charleston, the South Carolina edition. Even a place closer to home, the picturesque rural wine country surrounding Augusta, MO.

By now, older and slightly more self-aware, I realize that this longing for the place you’re not has much more to do with where you actually are - or, rather, what’s you’re actually doing there, right now. I note that those fantasies of other places are always kind of vague on the whole vocational thing. That is, living in London sounds great until you consider that you have to work in order to live there - or anywhere. Sticking with the London example for a moment: the income of me and M would hardly allow us to live anywhere inside the Green Line. No, we’d be one of the many toilers who commute into the city to live, and then right back out again at the end of the business day.

While I do strongly believe in a sense of place, I also believe that the place matters much less than we think it does. What we do wherever we happen to be seems a great equalizer between locales. If you transplant a crappy job to a beautiful place, you’re still spending eight or more hours doing something you dislike, and that colors everything else. Even your view of bodies of water, mountains, and trees. If, on the other hand, the world in general seems an intrusion on your rewarding and enriching time at work, you could live just about anywhere and be just fine with that.

And there’s avocation to be considered. Most folks don’t live for their jobs, but many of them find a different sustenance in what they do outside of the job, hobbies from which they derive satisfaction and meaning and expression of self. Those activities help create place, especially if they involve some interaction with the locale.

So if we consider place, we have to think about more than what we see - we have to think about who we are.

Well. I think I’ll spend time mulling that over. Right after I check the weather once more in the Puget Sound area.

Going to Indiana

My wife is excited to see the new Indiana Jones flick, and by extension I am too. Like the iconic franchise itself, we are largely immune to critics, so the few tepid reviews I’ve read mean little to me. My plan to get my posterior off the couch and into the theater for this is validated, however, by the earnest review by Ian Spiegelman in Gawker today:

It rocked much, much harder than I thought it would. I was truly afraid that Shia LaBeouf would ruin it. I don’t like young men, period. I especially don’t like young men who are challenging my old heros. But Shia actually plays a pretty interesting, funny character. And when he tries to push Indy into a corner, Indy gives him his awesome dead-pan, which amounts to, “C’mon, Kid, I could break you in half and you goddamn know it. Why not just behave yourself and learn something?” And Shia’s “Mutt” is just obedient enough—and smart enough, recognizing that Indy is probably the best role model any boy or girl could have—to listen and not make the whole movie a stupid generational fight.

The whole Indy-as-role-model theme made me happy throughout the movie. It’s not overdone, and Indy still does all his trademark slapstick falling, tripping, flat-on-his-ass stuff. But when Indy gives advice to this kid, I felt all teary. And then when his advice was stupid, I felt like, “Awesome movie!”

Indy is older, and it shows in the fight scenes, but it also shows that he knows how the fuck to fight. And his big punch-to-punch scene in this movie is the best he’s had since he fought that huge German on the airfield in Raiders.

Spiegelman addresses just about all of my fears going into Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, particularly those regarding the new young Jones boy. I, too, dislike young men - young people generally - in films and on television, which is why you don’t find me spending much time watching the CW. (Happily, others are apparently coming to feel the same way about that network.)

The summary from Spiegelman:

But seriously, a person who doesn’t like this movie is kind of a dick. It truly is a happy thing. Anyone who doesn’t get it, they weren’t supposed to see it.

All righty, then! Off to the googleplex.

“Safe city”

Like many cities, St. Louis maintains a “Safe City incident mapping” page via its police department website. It is rather clunky in its navigation, slow to load, and even slower in processing requests. But what if you want to feel afraid right now? Well, Lifehacker points to a more responsive (if more visually alarming) option:

Crime-mapping mashup SpotCrime pulls data from city police records and news sources and plots it in an easy-to-snoop fashion. Choose a city, a time frame, and the types of offenses you want to see, and you can mouse-over the pinned icons to see thumbnail descriptions, or click an item for a full read. The site claims that humans are working in the background to make sense of the data, and that incidents show up anywhere form 3-24 hours after they’re reported. A good tool for checking out a potential neighborhood for moving or exploring, or just keeping up on what’s going down across town.

No, it doesn’t detail crimes taking place at the moment - relying as it does on police records and news reports - but it may be of interest to realtors and their clients, as well as fearful, garden-variety townies.

Man, I live in one busy city. But never fear: the mayor says they’re working on it.

A cosmic event

CNN: “The big stars live fast and die young.” A champagne supernova in the sky.

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