Monster Mashup

Maybe it's because I never really cared for Jane Austen, but I find this rather funny. From the New York Times:

Quirk Books announced the publication of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

But wait, there's more:

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures was developing a project called “Pride and Predator,” in which the giant alien from the 1987 cult classic pays a call on the Bennet family.
...
To some scholars, however, it’s a short leap from verbal sparring to real swordplay. “It makes sense to give Lizzie a grander scope for her action,” said Deidre Lynch, an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and editor of “Janeites,” a collection of scholarly essays about Austen devotees. “It goes with the muddy petticoats and the rambling across the countryside in this unladylike way. The next step is ninja training.”

And there is no sign that it will stop there:

Next year, Ballantine Books will publish Michael Thomas Ford’s novel “Jane Bites Back,” in which Austen turns into a vampire, fakes her own death and lives quietly as a bookstore owner before finally driving a stake through the heart of everyone who has been making money off her for the last two centuries.

Then again, I did just start reading Drood, a fictional account of the "events" that led up to the writing of his last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. From the flap copy:

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.

Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?

Although I'm only 50 pages into it, it's not bad, being narrated by the character of Dickens' friend and author in his own right, Wilkie Collins, so it has that Victorian tone to it. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully no zombies will show up.

Tunes for Our Times

Times change, but not very much.

Beach Reading

The NY Times Book Review arrived in my inbox moments ago and the lead review, by Carl Hiaasen, couldn't be more timely. As I head down to Miami Beach for Graphics of the Americas on Sunday, I think I've found my airplane reading:

FOOL’S PARADISE
Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach
By Steven Gaines

Most people don’t go there for intellectual enrichment; they go for the sex, dope and parties. [Not printing presses? How odd. --RR]

That wasn’t exactly the original idea. Back when the mangroves were razed and the sand was dredged from the ocean bottom — yes, even the beach is fake — the developer Carl Fisher envisioned the place as a respectable winter getaway for well-to-do Northerners, an American Riviera.

As it turned out, gangsters also prefer sunny climates over snow. By 1928, Al Capone and other thugs had discovered Miami Beach, and organized crime was taking over the town.

The GoA Gala is being held at the Fontainbleu Hotel, which apparently has a bit of a checkered history (I confess I know very little about Miami Beach other than what I remember from The Godfather Part II):

Gaines sees symptoms of social dysfunction in architecture, like the garishly emblematic Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue. It was the product of a tumultuous collaboration between an obstinant developer named Ben Novack and the architect Morris Lapidus. The two couldn’t stand each other, and went to their respective deathbeds claiming sole credit for the design of the massive, weirdly curved structure, which was built in less than a year.

Maligned by critics, the Fontainebleau instantly became a lively hangout for card sharks, mobsters and movie idols.

And what do you know: I also got a 40% off coupon from Borders today, too. What are the odds they'll actually have it?

Kindling

Just spent a good four hours formatting my old (mis)adventure in self-publishing—Virus!—for publication on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. (It was really just an experiment in learning how to format books for the Kindle. And if I somehow sell a few, great.)

I was finally successful, and it will be available for sale--for all (or both, if even that many) of you Kindle owners out there—in 12 hours or so for the extortionate price of $8.99. I figure at that price point--which is one I actually have control over--no one is likely to question my sincerity.

Anyway, a couple of observations about the process:

• Amazon strongly encourages that e-book titles be in HTML format, as it claims that is the only format that will convert reliably, even though it says it supports .pdf, .doc, .mobi, and a smattering of others.

• I had produced the book in Adobe InDesign and the Kindle conversion utility doesn't handle native InDesign files (big surprise).

• Getting decent HTML out of InDesign is not easy, especially if (like me) you had a bunch of different document threads and a few illustrations here and there. The Exoport to Dreamweaver command is pretty hit or miss. Perhaps I just need to spend some time playing with it, but I've rarely had luck with it.
  

• What some of the Amazon user forums recommended was copy the text in InDesign and paste into Word, and then you can save Word files out to HTML. You can pretty much imagine how that works out.
  

• I tried that approach, and required a great deal of tweaking styles to get everything looking decent, even by Word's low standards.

• I saved the Word file out to HTML, but Amazon's conversion utility kept choking on it. I toyed around with a few things but to no avail.

• Finally, I just uploaded the Word file itself to the conversion utility and it went through without a hitch. I was able to preview it to get an approximation of how it will look on a Kindle and it didn't look bad. One of the feratufres of the Kindle is the ability to adjust the size of the type, which means that text will inevitably reflow, which I guess is why they don't like PDFs, which are by their very nature a static page format.
  

• The process is not appreciably different from way back in 2000 when I used to experiment with converting files to be read on Palm-based e-book readers.

After doing all this, I just got in the mail the latest Design Tools Monthly newsletter which mentioned some third-party applications for getting HTML out of PDF files. I shall have to experiment further. Of course, I don't actually have a Kindle, but then my birthday is only six months away....

A-Twitter

Because I apparently don't have enough time toilets in my life, I am now on Twitter, for no adequately explored reason. I will experiment with livetweeting from today's SU-Georgetown game. I will either end up hooked on Twitter or I will never want to have anything more to do with it again ever. The world hangs in the balance. Follow along if you dare at http://twitter.com/rromano.

Bride of the Gorilla

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, the latest is the 1951 Raymond Burr/Lon Chaney "thriller" Bride of the Gorilla.

I guess the first question would be: where is the bride of the gorilla registered? Banana Republic, of course.

Lunacy

The last couple of nights have featured a pretty dramatic full moon, and perhaps not entirely coincientally, Scientific American has a story up about an old chestnut, the so-called "lunar lunacy effect," the belief that the full moon has some kind of effect--usually a bad one--on human behavior.

One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

There have been serious attempts to study whether such a phenomenon exists, and actual evidence in support of the effect has not been forthcoming:

Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon. In all cases, they have come up empty-handed. By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called meta-analysis—they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled “Much Ado about the Full Moon,” which appeared in one of psychology’s premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.

I guess the first question that always struck me when the lunar lunacy theory came up is, what would be the mechanism for it? That is, how can the moon affect behavior? Apparently, there have been attempts to ascribe the phenomenon to tidal forces, since the human body is mostly composed of water, but

First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of a “mosquito lunacy effect.” Second, the moon’s gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. Third, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons—when the moon is invisible to us—as it is during full moons.

I read some time ago (can't remember where) that this theory may have originated in the very real phenemenon that, back before there were streetlights, on nights when the moon was full you had more people out at night, and more opportunities for mischief. The SciAm article also suggests one other source of the myth:

before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside—including many who had severe mental disorders—of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras.

I don't know; that does seem like a bit of a reach. Anyway, I have to go turn into a werewolf now...

The One and Only

Once again, The Onion tells it like it is. This is the funniest, yet probaby truest, technology story I have seen in a while.

Warning! Many many bad words; probably not work safe, particularly if you work for Sony.

No Fly Zones

Speaking of arcane, useless knowledge, Friday night I was out with some friends and somehow the topic came up: "to keep flies away, hang clear plastic bags filled with water." Trying to think of some logical reason why this would work, I made a mental note to look into it. It's apparently a popular belief in Florida (so you know logic will have nothing to do with it), as well as in the Caribbean.

What's the verdict? According to some anecdotal reports, it works. According to others, well, not so much. According to this article in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star:

No one is sure where the idea came from, and researchers contend there's no scientific evidence to show that the bags do any good.
...
Some speculate that the sunlight reflecting through the water somehow scares or disorients flies. But Phil Kaufman, a University of Florida professor of veterinary entomology, said there is no scientific research to back up those claims.

"It's a pretty safe bet it doesn't work," he said.

On the other hand, the bags could very well worsen the fly problem, as was found in one experiment whose researcher I do not envy:

[A] North Carolina State University researcher spent 13 weeks looking at the effects of water bags on flies at an egg-packing plant. Mike Stringham, also a veterinary entomologist, meticulously counted droppings left by flies on white "spot cards."

The results were conclusive: The water bags attracted more flies.

"In the control room versus bags, the bags were consistently higher every time," he said.

The great site HowStuffWorks has a take on this, suggesting how the water bag idea might work:

The insect's head mostly consists of a pair of large complex eyes, each of which is composed of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. These eyes can't move or focus on objects like human eyes, but they provide the fly with a mosaic view of the world around them. Each simple eye provides one small piece of the puzzle, much like the way a screen's pixel delivers one detail of the larger picture.

A housefly bases its sense of direction on the direction sunlight comes from. Some entomologists believe that when these complex, sensitive eyes experience refracted light, the insect becomes confused and flies away.

While some supporters claim water bags keep all kinds of flying insects away, most report success with complex-eyed insects, like houseflies.

Nice theory, but they are quick to stress that so-called evidence in favor of the water bags is more than likely a case of the "placebo effect":

In medical terms, this is when people who think they're being treated for a condition feel better, even if that treatment treats nothing at all. The same effect could occur for people who think they are treating a pest problem.

That is, some other factor might be keeping the flies away, and they correlate the lack of flies with the presence of the water bags, which may have nothing to do with it.

So for now, all we have to go on in support of this idea is anecdotal "evidence," which is rarely conclusive. (This is after all the most pressing issue in the world today, so we need this resolved ASAP.) This phenomenon was also cited on Boing Boing earlier this year, and the range of reader comments is indicative of the problem with anecdotal evidence: a few say it works, most say it doesn't. I'll stick with the scientists on this one until compelling evidence that it works is found--but then only if I move into the Amityville Horror house, since flies are the least of my problems.

"Exit, Pursued by a Bear"

That was one of Shakespeare's most famous stage directions, from The Winter's Tale (III.iii). It is unknown whether on stage they used a real bear or someone dressed as a bear; bear-baiting was a popular entertainment at the time, so they had them on hand.

I mention this because--although I am a week late--I recently came across something I did not know about Groundhog Day--in, of all places, a biography of Shakespeare: something very much like Groundhog Day dates back to the Middle Ages.

February 2 is not only the point halfway betwen the winter solstice and the spring equinox, but is also the traditional date for the Christian celebration of Candlemas, or the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. In the Middle Ages, there arose the belief that on this day hibernating animals such as badgers and bears (it varied by country and indigenous hibernating mammal) woke up tentatively to appear on this day. If the day was sunny and the critter saw its shadow, six more weeks of winter remained. If instead the day was cloudy, the weather would turn mild, leading to an early spring. In England there are various references to the "Candlemas bear" and the rhyme "When the wind’s in the east on Candlemas Day/There it will stick till the second of May."

In Germany, the main meterological mammal was the badger and German immigrants to the United States carried the legend with them. In Pennsylvania, where many German settlers ended up, they used an indigenous groundhog (Marmota monax, or woodchuck) instead. Six of one, half dozen of another, really.

Punxsutawney, PA, has been ground zero for Groundhog Day since 1887. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an examination of the weather and mammal-prediction records have put so-called Punxsutawney Phil's accuracy rate at less than 40%, which I would estimate as being still better than any Capital Region meteorologist. Imagine if the groundhog had Doppler radar. By the way, whether a groundhog does or does not emerge from its burrow is believed to be related to the amount of fat it was able to store before going into hibernation, although my guess is that Phil gets a wake-up call.

I should also point out that there is no Medieval tradition that the feast of Candlemas involved waking up to the same day over and over.

Set Me Free

You've heard of Wikinomics and Freakonomics. Now, I guess the latest is Kinkonomics.

Are you asking youself, "where have all the good times gone?" Are you on a low budget? Well, when work is over, give the people what they want--a little bit of abuse, all day and all of the night. According to those dedicated followers of fashion over at CNBC:

One of the kinkier trends to emerge from this recession is that many professional women are turning to dominatrix work to supplement their incomes...

Quan interviews some of the women who've turned to fetish work, including "Linda," who works as a editor by day and a dominatrix at night.

And "Jessica," who works as a web-site designer three days a week, and sees a few fetish clients a week.

Before you go passing judgment, check it out: You can make anywhere from $80 to $1,000 an hour in the dungeon.

Just as long as you're not like everybody else.

Stomach Abuse

Speaking of mistreatments, Men's Health magazine has its 20 Worst (i.e., unhealthiest) Foods
in America 2009. I don't claim to have the healthiest diet in the world, but just reading these descriptions is enough to make me never want eat anything again ever. Some examples:

2. Worst Pasta of 2009

Romano’s Macaroni Grill Spaghetti and Meatballs with Meat Sauce
2,430 calories
128 g fat
207 g carbs
5,290 mg sodium

With three times your recommended daily intake of saturated fat and two days’ worth of salt

Granted, I love a good pasta with meat sauce, but that's just ridiculous! Shame about the name.

8. Worst Burger of 2009

Chili’s Smokehouse Bacon Triple-The-Cheese Big Mouth Burger with Jalapeno Ranch Dressing
2,040 calories
150 g fat (53 g saturated)
110 g protein
4,900 mg sodium

You know this burger's in trouble when it takes more than 20 syllables just to identify it. If you think the name’s a mouthful, just wait until the burger hits the table. You’ll be face to face with two-and-a-half day’s worth of fat—a full third of which is saturated. To do that much damage with roasted sirloin, you’d have to eat about eight 6-ounce steaks. It’s nearly three days’ worth of saturated fat.

By the way, you can order a defibrillator on the side.

3. Worst Starter of 2009

Uno Chicago Grill Pizza Skins (full order)
2,400 calories
155 g fat (50 g saturated)
3,600 mg sodium

This appetizer is like eating a Large Domino’s Hand-Tossed Sausage Pizza! Would you ever think of saying to a waiter: “Why don’t you start us off with a large meat pizza?” If you’re ordering for a party of more than 5 it might be OK, but for smaller groups, it's tilting toward gluttony gone wild.

And let's not forget...

1. The Worst Food in America of 2009

Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake
2,600 calories
135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
263 g sugars
1,700 mg sodium

We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs.

Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It's soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

Remember, as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development once said, "You want your belt to buckle, not your chair."

Off to See the Zard

Wow, has it been two weeks since I last posted? Tempus fugit.

Anyway, over at Movie Mis-Treatments, there is a new post--the 1974 Sean Connery shamefest Zardoz.

After director John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance became a smash hit, he was given carte blanche (if not carte budget—$1 million, pretty paltry even by 1974 standards) to make whatever project he wanted. A recipe for over-the-top self-indulgence? You betcha. Written, directed, and produced by Boorman, Zardoz is an imagining of what human society has become by the year 2293. And it ain’t pretty. Or even coherent.

It’s a triumph of visual style often at the expense of narrative coherence. Heck, Zardoz makes the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey seem as clear-cut and understandable as a Scooby-Doo episode. My guess is the narcotics budget for Zardoz far exceeded the visual effects budget.

It stars Sean Connery, who had just quit the James Bond series and was apparently so hard-up for work that he agreed to don an upsettingly skimpy red sarong and cavort around the Irish countryside groping women who bear more than a passing resemblance to Eric Idle.

And probably the last thing any human should ever have to see is Sean Connery in a wedding dress. From Russia with Love, indeed.

More Movie Abuse

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, there is a new mis-treatment posted. Read all about Zontar, The Thing from Venus, if you dare!

Although the thing’s name is untranslatable into any known Earth language, “it would sound something like ‘Zontar.’”

I think that’s the “thing’s” problem. Just imagine how so much less fearsome it would be if the name sounded like “Timmy,” “Flopsy,” or “Mittens.

Around the Globe--Part 3 of 5

Part 1 of 5 is here, and 2 of 5 is here.

Sunday the 28th we visited the British Museum and the thing about the British Museum is that there is an awful lot of stuff in it. As fascinating as it all can be, you reach the point where your retinas simply can’t take looking at any more things.

After we were worn out by the British Museum, we sought lunch, the walked over the
Millennium Bridge again to the Globe Theater, where we took the tour.

Note that this is not Shakespeare’s original Globe Theater. His original was constructed, it is believed, in 1599 but was destroyed by fire in 1613 A second Globe Theatre was rebuilt on the same site a year later and closed in 1642. Over the years, it has vanished from the face of the Earth.

Fast forward more than 300 years. In 1949, as the story they tell on the tour has it, the American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, came to London for the first time and looked for the site of the original Globe. He was disappointed that all he could find was a beat-up plaque on the side of a building that was currently a brewery. He was chagrined to not to find a more lasting memorial to Shakespeare and his theatre.

Some years later, in 1970, Wanamaker founded what was to become the Shakespeare Globe Trust, and in 1987 building work began. In 1993, the construction of the Globe Theatre itself began. It was an uphill struggle, as the length of time the project took can attest. Wanamaker died on December 18, 1993 but the theater was completed in 1997.

It opened in 1997 under the name “Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre” and now stages plays every summer (May to October). It is a very faithful reproduction of a Tudor era theater, helped by the uncovering, during the building of the new theater, of remnants of the original, which aided in the design and construction. There is no roof or heating (which is why there are no plays in December as it was getting quite cold indeed). The point of contention was the thatched roof; it was one reason why the original burned down, and, in fact, after the Great Fire of 1666, thatched roofs were banned in London. However, it is a special fireproof material, not proper thatch, and there is an elaborate sprinkler system, so the city and theater are safe. The seating capacity is about 1,400, with standing room for about 500 “groundlings.” It is believed that this is about half the capacity that the original Globe would have had. There are no microphones, spotlights, or other modern theatrical technologies—just as it would have been in Tudor times. It’s rather cool; I will definitely have to come back when the theater is open and see a play there.

The next day we went to the source--that is, Stratford-Upon-Avon....

Westminster Abbey and the Tower--2 of 5

Part 1 of 5 is here.

The next day was Boxing Day, which is a bank holiday. Other countries celebrate Boxing Day and; the name comes from the tradition of giving Christmas gifts (“boxes”) to service workers (such as postal workers, tradespeople, etc.). It was, however, also a day for post-Christmas sales and given the crappy economy, just about every store in the city (probaly the country) was having some kind of massive sale. They should have just put signs in the shop windows that read “Just buy something, for God’s sake!”) We had done our research, and it turned out that the only thing that was on our list of things to do that was open was Westminster Abbey, so that was where we headed.

We did the audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons. There was no photography in the Abbey, but it was an amazing structure. There has been a church on the present site of Westminster Abbey for more than a thousand years. Once called Thorney Island as it was surrounded by tributaries of the Thames, the region was originally on the inhospitable the outskirts of London before it became the city of Westminster and the real seat of government. The Abbey we know today was established by King Edward the Confessor—I bet he drove the local police crazy; whenever a crime was committed he would always be confessing to it—in the 1060s. Almost everyone who was anyone in British history is buried somewhere in the Abbey; it is rather a crowded place with tombs and sarcophagi packed in like it was rush hour on a rather ghoulish subway line. Indeed, more than 3,000 people are buried there, and there are more than 600 tombs and monuments. Edward the Confessor of course got his own special chapel (well, he did build the place) and massive monument. I’m sure he would confess that it was a bit ornate.

The Tudors are well-represented. Henry VII has a special chapel, and Queen Elizabeth has a pretty large tomb, which also is where her half-sister, Queen Mary I, is also buried. Oddly, her rival for the throne, Mary, Queen of Scots, has an even bigger monument right next to hers. Sure, Elizabeth was the one who had Mary executed, but Mary’s son eventually became king James I and was the one who built her tomb.

Oliver Cromwell was buried there for a short period, but after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 he was dug up and booted out.

One of the other relics on display at Westminster Abbey is the coronation chair, commissioned in 1297, used by just about every British monarch going back at least to Henry III. Westminster Abbey has played host to 38 coronation ceremonies, the most recent, of course, having been Queen Elizabeth II’s in 1953. The coronation chair has been pretty dinged up over the years, although I’ll bet it gets a fair amount of water damage from Prince Charles’ drool.

There is also a Poets’ Corner, where “men of letters” are buried. The tradition of burying writers and other artists there began accidentally when Geoffrey Chaucer was buried there in 1400. He ended up there not because he was a poet, but rather because he was Clerk of the King’s Works at Westminster Palace. Two hundred years later, poet Edmund Spenser requested that he be buried alongside Chaucer—oddly no one had a problem with this—and the precedent was struck. The men of letters buried there range from the famous (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, etc.) to those whom time has forgotten (Thomas Triplet; no, he was not buried in three tombs). Charles Dickens is also buried there, although on the audio tour Jeremy Irons dismissed Dickens rather cavalierly. There was some kind of bad blood between them, methinks. In the middle of the nave is the grave of explorer and missionary David Livingstone; one cannot resist the temptation to stand over it and intone, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” although one probably should.

The Abbey also houses the oldest door in Britain, dating from about 1050. Yes, we visited Westminster Abbey and they showed us the door. When we later visited Canterbury Cathedral, we asked to see their door but they wouldn’t show it to us.

On Saturday the 27th, we went to the Tower of London, and we did another audio tour. We went through the White Tower, the Bloody Tower, the Cradle Tower, and various other bits of Tower. The oldest parts of the Tower date back to 1066, not long after William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings. Even then. London was the heart of the country he had just conquered, so he immediately went there and had himself crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066. He then set about building a fortress to control, as it was put at the time, “the numerous and hostile inhabitants” of the city (one of the drawbacks to being a Conqueror).

The White Tower is one of the original structures. It has been worked on over the years; the turreted roofs were added in the 16th century, the window and door surrounds were added at various times in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The wooden staircase was built in 1973.
The original purpose of the White Tower (the original “Tower of London”) was defensive, residential, and ceremonial. A beautifully preserved chapel (the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist) shows off the original and intact Romanesque architecture of the Normans.
The White Tower wasn’t completed until about 1090 or so, under William Rufus, son of William I and his successor as King of England. The first major expansions of the Tower were undertaken in the 12th century by Henry I (younger brother of and successor to William Rufus) and Henry II.

The Tower complex was more or less completed (and is the layout that survives) by Edward I in the early 14th century. Needless to say, the Tower has been noodled with endlessly ever since, particularly by the Tudors and the Victorians.

In the Tower Green we came across what appeared to be a fairly new Execution Memorial created by Brian Catling. Contrary to popular belief, not too many people were actually executed at the Tower. Those commemorated by the new Memorial on the Site of Execution are the seven beheaded near the site of execution (their remains are still buried in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula and three Black Watch soldiers who were executed in the 18th century.

We spent the day wandering around the Tower, and it started to get dark just as we were touring St. Thomas’ Tower and it was quite dark indeed and uncrowded when we got to the room and chapel where Edward I died. It was rather creepy. Fortunately the Tower was closing so we were shooed out.

We walked along the Thames up to the Millennium Bridge and for some reason decided to walk over to Southwark. At the south end of the bridge, there is a ramp which slopes somewhat steeply down to the embankment aling the river. At the top of the ramp was a woman in a wheelchair; one slip and she would go flying down the ramp and likely end up in the river. Funny, the guy holding the wheelchair did look a little like Richard Widmark (see 1947’s Kiss of Death). We ended up at Young’s Tavern again before we hoofed it back across the river and back to Bayswater in search of dinner. I believe this was night we found a Persian restaurant, which was rather good.

Christmas in London-1 of 5

I am finally getting around to posting about my trip to London last month. Photos are available via my Picasa online photo album here.

There are three drawbacks to spending Christmas in London. The first is the basic hazard of traveling in winter, which is that plans need to be fairly flexible to accommodate delays caused by the weather—that is, snow. The second is that pretty much everything is closed on December 24, 25, and 26, and even the Tube is shut down on Christmas Day. The third is that, thanks to the shortness of the days (sunset at around 4:30) things shut earlier than in summer and the darkness makes sightseeing (and photography) fairly difficult.

That all said, our recent trip to London went off very well—once the weather let us go off at all. We were scheduled to fly out (Albany to Newark, then Newark to Heathrow) in the late afternoon of December 21—those of you in the Northeast will recall that this was the day we got rather a lot of snow. Needless to say, the Albany flight was canceled. Ultimately, we had to reschedule the departure for 6:30 a.m. December 23. We arrived at Heathrow at about midnight local time. Everything was pretty much closed, and we took a cab to Bayswater where we were renting a flat. Happily, since last April, AT&T had added international roaming so my iPhone actually worked, which was a great help.

The next day, Christmas Eve, most things were closed, son we took that day to simply wander around the city, mostly Westminster, Parliament Square etc., and investigate a variety of pubs. (The fourth drawback to traveling to London at Christmas was that everything was very crowded.)

One of our missions was to find 50 Berkeley Square, which is said to be the most haunted location in London. After wandering through Piccadilly Circus (the name was apt, given how completely nutsville it was), we wended our way through Mayfair and found Berkeley Square. What hauntings have happened at Number 50?

Charles Harper in Haunted Houses, published in 1907 stated that “… It seems that a Something or Other, very terrible indeed, haunts or did haunt a particular room. This unnamed Raw Head and Bloody Bones, or whatever it is, has been sufficiently awful to have caused the death, in convulsions, of at least two foolhardy persons who have dared to sleep in that chamber…” One of them was a nobleman, who scoffing at tales that a hideous entity was residing within the haunted room, vowed to spend the night there. It was agreed, however, that should he require assistance he would ring the servants’ bell to summon his friends. So saying, he retired for the night. A little after midnight there was a faint ring, which was followed by a ferocious peeling of the bell. Rushing upstairs, the friends threw open the door, and found their companion, rigid with terror, his eyes bulging from their sockets. He was unable to tell them what he had seen, and such was the shock to his system, that he died shortly afterwards.

I’ve stayed in hotels that have had rather the same effect. But wait, there’s more:

Strange lights that flashed in the windows would startle passers-by; disembodied screams were heard echoing from the depths of the building; and spookier still, the sound of a heavy body was heard being dragged down the staircase. One night, two sailors on shore leave in London, were seeking a place to stay, and chanced upon the obviously empty house. Breaking in they made their way upstairs, and inadvertently settled down to spend the night in the haunted room. They were woken by the sound of heavy, determined footsteps coming up the stairs. Suddenly the door banged open and a hideous, shapeless, oozing mass began to fill the room. One sailor managed to get past it and escape. Returning to the house with a policeman, he found his friend’s corpse, impaled on the railings outside, the twisted face and bulging eyes, grim testimony to the terror that had caused him to jump to his death, rather than confront the evil in the room above
...
Indeed, it is said that the fabric is so charged with psychic energy that merely touching the external brickwork can give a mild shock to the psychically inclined.

Yeah. Anyway, the house remains the location of Maggs Bros Antiquarian Booksellers, which has been there for more than 50 years.

By this time it was getting very dark (but still only 5:00), so we found a nearby pub and hung out for a while. Then we decided to walk back top Bayswater, which wasn’t a bad walk. One very cool thing about Bayswater is that it is very ethnically diverse so there are all manner of restaurants. We tried a Lebanese takeaway place and it was fantastic.

The next day was Christmas, and we were due at Steven and Amy’s in Hackney/Homerton (because there’s no place like Homerton for the holidays) at 3:00, so we had some time in the morning to do...something. Trouble was, here was nothing open. So we set out in the direction of St. Paul’s by foot. The Tube and buses were no running, and I hate taking cabs (long story), so we walked down Oxford Street and picked up the Strand which then turned into Fleet Street. We ambled into St. Paul’s, but it as closed for touring, just services, so we got out of there pretty quickly. It was about noon/noon-thirty, so we looked for a pub or something, but the two open restaurants near St. Paul’s were mobbed. So on a whim we walked over the Millennium Bridge to Southwark and found a Young’s pub open! Huzzah! So we sat on the patio (it wasn’t that cold out) overlooking the Thames. Finally, we decided we should probably head out to Hackney, so we walked back over the bridge and grabbed a cab at St. Paul’s. One of the myriad reasons I hate taking cab is that drivers never seem to know how to get where I need to go, and since I usually take cabs in cities I do not live in, that means that I never usually know how to get there either, which leaves me in a bit of a pickle. Fortunately, London cabbies do have to pass that geography test—and now they have GPS devices. (Although GPS didn’t seem to help the driver of the car service we took back to Bayswater, and it was a stroke of luck we made it back in our lifetimes; I think we went through a part of London the Romans still controlled.) After a very pleasant dinner with the Hackney lot, we did make it back to Bayswater, and found an open pub a few blocks from our flat so had a few nightcaps.

Back in the Village

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own..."



Anyway, following up on my previous post about Patrick McGoohan's demise, I first discovered The Prisoner when I was in high school; in 1985, the local PBS station started running the 17 episodes, and I was hooked by the end of the first episode "Arrival." Sure, there was the cool Ron Granier theme song, the quintessentially late 1960s visual style (the show was made in 1967), the vaguely surrealistic imagery (Rover the attack balloon is what most people usually remember), the weird beauty of The Village, and the the fact that it can take quite a bit of effort to figure out what is going on a lot of the time--all things I loved about it--but it was ultimately a show about ideas, examining the place of the individual in society. Are we all just numbers in a mechanized, computerized society? Can there be such a thing as a true "individual"? What is to be done with those who won't conform, who don't agree with such Village slogans as "A still tongue makes a happy life" and "Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself"? Good questions all. (Actually, over the years I have come to the belief that numbers are actually more individualistic than names; many people--even in my local phone book--have the same name as me, but no one has the same, say, Social Security number. Unless someone has nicked that, too.)

It was very much George Orwell via Franz Kafka, and I proceeded to videotape each episode. When I went off to college that fall, I inflicted the episodes on various dormmates. That summer, I had also joined Six of One, the Prisoner Appreciation Society (okay, fan club, the only one I have ever joined) and even had an article published in their quarterly newsletter. (I unearthed it the last time I moved and, probably like like most things I wrote when I was 17 [or 27][or 37], it is too wretched to ever be reproduced.) It's still one of those programs I like to revisit (of course I have all the episodes on DVD), and the older I get the more things I catch and the more things I understand. I think I'm even starting to figure out "Once Upon a Time"!

Now I am more resigned (ahem) then ever to visit The Village the next time I am in the U.K.

Favorite episode: "The General"; the one where all learning in The Village is merely computer-generated facts requiring no (nay, discouraging) original thought, and Number Six destroys the computer by asking it "Why?" There is also one scene which is a great satire of artists' retreats, which is what I always kind of envisioned Yaddo being like.

Least favorite episode: Probably "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," where Number Six's
mind is transferred into another body so he can be temporarily released from the Village to find a professor. Kind of a goofy idea, but it was a clever way to get around the fact that Patrick McGoohan had, before the series had been expanded from its original run of 7 episodes, contracted to appear in Ice Station Zebra, and thus an episode of The Prisoner had to be made without him.

Be Seeing You

Sigh.

'Prisoner' actor Patrick McGoohan dies in LA

Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show "The Prisoner," has died. He was 80.

McGoohan died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said.

McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama "Columbo," and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film "Braveheart."

But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in "The Prisoner," a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.

McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades.

Inside Book Publishing

Ever wonder how a book gets from author to remainder bin? Macmillan digital shows how the sausage is made in this hilarious video (via BoingBoing).