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Did you hear about the amusement park ride that got stuck and left the riders stranded?  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  This has always scared me about amusement parks–things break.  I could never enjoy amusement parks because I was always all-too-cognizant of this fact.

In other thrilling activities, like mountain climbing or deep-sea diving, you at least have the illusion that you are in control of things.  (Note: I have never done these things; I am just saying that’s how it seems to me.) You are not, but you have the illusion of it.  Thrill rides purposely strip away the illusion, leaving you completely at the mercy of some old machinery.

I don’t want to be at the mercy of some stupid gear or pulley system.  I’m no mechanical engineer, but I’ve disassembled and reassembled enough home garden equipment to know one thing: gears and pulleys and levers and all that stuff break all the time, often for no apparent reason and with no warning.

I know that the rides are inspected and everything, but there is always a chance of something going wrong.  “Murphy’s law” and all that.  Apparently, this does not strike some people as a reasonable fear.  And I do understand why amusement parks could be fun; it’s just that whenever I go to one I find myself doing less relaxed enjoyment of speed and thrills, and more amateur engineer inspection of every ride and machine to see if any are actively falling apart.

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On Sports Illustrated today, there’s an interesting excerpt from the book When Saturday Mattered Most by Mark Beech.  It’s about Army Black Knights football coach Red Blaik’s invention of the famous “Lonesome End” formation in 1958:

Blaik[…] began to wonder. What if a team lined up in nothing but unbalanced wide-receiver sets, making them constitute the entirety of the offensive attack? And what if the receiver — in Blaik’s words the “far flanker” — was positioned far wider than was normal?

Unbalancing his offensive line, Blaik knew, would not only give his offense overwhelming force on one side, but it would also compel the defense to make a choice — whether to remain in its normal alignment, conceding the advantage to Army’s running game on the strong side, or to shift players over Army’s extra blockers, leaving itself exposed to a play that went the other way. Splitting the end extremely wide on the strong side would break up the defensive front.

What’s cool about this is how seemingly minor this innovation was.  So he had the end stand a bit further out.  So what?  But sometimes, making minor tweaks can lead to game-changing results, just because no one else thought of it because it seemed so minor.

I remember in Marv Levy’s book Where Else Would You Rather Be?, he mentioned how some American football coaches who went to the Canadian league dealt with the fact that Canadian football is 12 against 12, rather than American-style 11 against 11.  Levy said they simply put the extra player far out near the sideline, forcing one man to cover him.  And then just ignored those players, and played 11-on-11 football.  Not the ideal solution, but still clever.

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I happened to see some of the 1979 movie The Amityville Horror on TV the other night, which was convenient coming on the heels of talking about The Haunting.  I liked it pretty well, although several scenes bore a close resemblance to some in the earlier film The Exorcist.   I’ve already noted one similarity here, and there was also a scene where a police detective talks to a priest that resembled a scene from that famous horror film.  Even so, I thought Amityville seemed to be a vastly superior film.  I want to see the whole thing some time.

It’s not as subtle as The Haunting, but it still moves slower and more insidiously than the “shock” horror movies of today.  And I like that.  I was a little disappointed in the ending where they escape from the house.  In the allegedly “true story” on which the film is based, the family did not explain what had finally caused them to leave the house, saying it was “too frightening”.  Now, whatever you think of their motivations, you can’t deny that this “leave it to the reader/viewer” technique is way scarier.  The movie should have done that, too.

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Yeah, speaking of things that need re-working, this Wagner thing could have used some editing.  I won’t hash over all the details, but at the end of act II of Götterdämmerung (“The Twilight of the Gods”)there’s a part where Brünnhilde, Hagen and Gunther are planning to eliminate Siegfried.  You’d think you could show them deciding on this in a minute or two, but they just go on and on repeating the how and why of it over and over again!  The acting and singing is marvelous, but gotterdammerung, we heard you the first hundred times!

I think I understand why it’s like this, mind you.  Wagner’s operas were written for live audiences sitting in fancy clothes in uncomfortable seats, not television viewers, as there was no such thing as television.  The opera seems to be five hours long, and though there are periodic intermissions, I think they needed to give audience members a chance to get up now and again.  You could go out for a stroll, come back, and you haven’t missed any new developments.  This was probably necessary for the 19th-century opera-goer.

But I am a 21st-century television viewer.  I can sit and watch TV for hours, as long as something new is happening fairly frequently.  This was roughly five-hours long and I wasn’t even terribly interested in the outcome, and yet I still watched it.  So it can be done.

My take on this whole production is that the stage was cool, the actors/singers were all excellent–but the thing was just too long and repetitive for television.  They should have gone ahead and done the live performance, and then used the same cast and filmed a miniseries for PBS to show instead.  Maybe that’s too much strain on the singers, though, I don’t know.

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I posted about the movie The Haunting the other day and Thingy confirmed in the comments that the remake wasn’t very good.  That’s so often the way with remakes.  The great director John Huston was right when he said:

They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures – I’d love another shot at ‘Roots of Heaven’ – and make them good?

I found out the other day that they’ve remade the famous N64 video game Goldeneye 007—again!   And today the “Black Mesa” Half-Life mod was released. Granted, that’s just a fan-made effort to satiate the demand for a new Half-Life game, so it’s a bit different.

Huston said it–they should do remakes of lousy movies, books and games.  Not necessarily the worst of the worst, but the ones that had potential and fell flat.  The game Daikatana was actually a good concept, it just didn’t work out.  They should take another try at it.  Alfred Hitchcock remade his own film The Man Who Knew Too Much.  And I think many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories could have benefited from a reworking, especially The Shadow Out of Time.

Oh, well.  I guess it makes economic sense that only popular things get remade, but it makes no artistic sense.

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The first time I saw Robert Wise’s 1963 movie The Haunting, I was pretty young and I didn’t like it much.  Too boring, I thought.  But upon subsequent viewings I have come to think it’s actually a pretty effective horror film, because it does not rely on the grotesque and horrible to instill fear, but rather on subtle psychological manipulation.

In brief, the story concerns a paranormal researcher’s study of a reputedly haunted house.  The film focuses on one participant, Eleanor Lance, who is apparently sensitive to the supernatural.  Gradually, it begins to seem that the unexplainable phenomena of the “haunting” is directed at her.

What makes the movie interesting is that it’s hard to tell whether Eleanor is truly being haunted by anything or if she is just going insane.  The ambiguity makes for a good “let the viewer decide” puzzle, which I like very much.  I suppose the closing narration does tip the balance somewhat in favor of a supernatural explanation, but still, it’s very good.

One weakness in the movie is that Eleanor herself is not very sympathetic.  I think the viewer is supposed to pity her, and I guess I kind of did, but to an extent it made her seem so vulnerable that it doesn’t seem that surprising that the house would cause her such distress.

The other problem I have isn’t so much with this movie in particular as it is with the whole “Haunted House” genre, which is that haunted houses aren’t especially scary unless you go inside them.  Apparently, as the opening narration makes clear, “Hill House has stood for 90 years”, and hasn’t hurt anybody except those who decided to live in it during that time.  This isn’t really that scary, because you know that as long as you don’t go in the place, you will be okay.  It may pose a threat to sensitive souls like Eleanor, but not to the world at large.

To me, that isn’t frightening in the way that Lovecraftian monsters or even creatures like the Wolf Man and such are, because those things are autonomous and can go all around spreading terror.  While haunted houses just sit there, being haunted.

However, with that said, it’s still very effective; the House itself looks very sinister, and the cinematography does a great job conveying unseen threat.  If the “Haunted House” concept isn’t all that frightening upon reflection, it certainly is easy to forget that while watching the movie.

I know they remade the movie in 1999.  I haven’t seen the remake, but I have heard it was much less subtle than the original, and made the supernatural much more explicit.  I won’t judge without seeing it, but seems plausible.  Horror movies have declined a great deal since the ’60s.

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With the season getting started in earnest today, Dan Kois writes in Slate about good football books.  I’ve actually never read most of the ones he mentions; I probably should.

Some of my personal favorite football books:

  • Paper Lion by George Plimpton.  Plimpton was a journalist and essayist who decided to write about what it was like to play football.  He went through training camp as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and got five plays in a scrimmage at the end of camp.  It didn’t go well, but the point of the book is mostly about the fascinating personalities in football at the time.  It’s very well-written, and for someone like me, who was abysmal at sports in their youth, Plimpton’s experience is easy to relate to.
  • The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam.  It’s about Bill Belichick’s career and his knowledge of football.  Sort of a biography, but it also contains some important points about strategy and tactics.  I would recommend supplementing it with…
  • Patriot Reign by Michael Holley.  This book is not terribly well-written, but it does contain some very interesting information about football coaching.  If you’re into the strategy of the game, I recommend it for chapter on how they stifled “The Greatest Show On Turf” alone.
  • Where Else Would You Rather Be? by Marv Levy.  The memoir of the great Buffalo coach.  Levy might have been the greatest pro coach never to win it all, but his tone is light and not at all bitter.  He recounts many amusing stories from his long career.  I don’t think you even need to be a football fan to enjoy this book, although it helps.
  • Football Physics by Timothy Gay.  This book is fun; it’s an introduction to basic physics using examples drawn from football. I suppose it’s more a “physics” book than a “football” book, but it still makes the subject matter easier to read about.

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Heeeeere we go again!

Ha, I just like the selection of cartoony ones. It’s often wonderful when designers put some time into vectors for their site. Throw in some rad typography and its golden!

Uh… yeah.  What makes this funny is that it’s on a previous “funny spam comments” post.

I just want to say I’m newbie to blogging and truly liked your web site. Almost certainly I’m likely to bookmark your blog post . You surely have really good stories. Thanks for sharing your webpage.

Hmm… with equivocation like that, you have no business writing spam for a living.  You should go into politics!

It is the best time to make a few plans for the longer term and it’s time to be happy. I’ve read this publish and if I may I wish to counsel you some attention-grabbing issues or tips.

What are you, a horoscope?

Good morning. The content is quite nice.

You aren’t even trying.

And the prize-winner:

At this time I am ready to do my breakfast, afterward having
my breakfast coming again to read other news.

You should probably take some medicine for that.

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My blogger friend Thingy mentioned reading and enjoying Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 awhile back.  I’d never read any books by him, so I decided to give it a try.  I’ll try not to spoil it here, but it’s about time-travel and the unintended side-effects thereof.

It’s quite good, all in all.  You can tell he made an effort to research the styles and vernacular of the 1960s, and he also does a pretty good job of presenting  both the good and the bad aspects of that era.  There was also a lot of the hint-don’t-tell kind of cosmic horror in certain parts that I really liked.

The ending was a bit weaker though still good.  Again, without giving away too much, there was a part of it that reminded of the book A Clockwork Orange, and that felt kind of cliched.  The ending was… I guess, “bittersweet” is probably the best word for it.

I might analyze it more in-depth later, but for now, I just want to recommend reading it.