Word Up

OK, you may ask, what have I been reading this summer? Well, glad you asked:

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
May 2008
Fiction

Perhaps Dickens’ most famous novel—and the one he called his “favourite son”—this is the closest he ever came to autobiography, and even then he changed many things because, as he wrote to his friend John Forster, he was fearful of being too autobiographical. Young David is born shortly after his father has died, and his mother eventually takes up with the abusive Murdstone and his sister Miss Murdstone (wasn't Dickens great with names?). The Murdstones are not especially fond of children, and things come to a head when David bites Murdstone and is eventually sent away to boarding school. And thus begins David’s adventures, which will lead to abject humiliation in a blacking factory (the most autobiographical portion of the book) and his eventual rescue by his eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood, whose only objection to him was that he was not born a girl. The loquacious Wilkins Micawber, who does a stint in debtor's prison, was a stand-in for Dickens’ father. David eventually finds fame and fortune as a writer. There was an amusing story behind one character; Miss Mowcher, a dwarf-like hairdresser and manicurist for David’s schoolfriend Steerforth, was apparently based on Dickens’ wife’s chiropodist, who after the chapter featuring her appeared (David Copperfield, like all of his books, was published serially in monthly editions), threatened Dickens with legal action. When Mowcher subsequently reappeared in a later chapter, her character had changed somewhat. David Copperfield may not be Dickens’ best novel, but it deserves its high reputation. It was also the point—midway through his bibliography—where he began planning out his books in advance, rather than writing them on-the-fly. David Copperfield was also much lighter in tone than his books would become from here after.

Bleak House
Charles Dickens
May 2008
Fiction

The one. The pinnacle (in my opinion) of Dickens’ career. This epic novel about the British legal system and all its flaws is the best of all his books. The book centers around the Courts of Chancery (well-named, since you “took your chances” in it), and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a dispute over conflicting wills that has dragged on for years and has become rather infamous. “Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That's the only good that has ever come of it.” It concerned an inheritance that was gradually being consumed by its own legal fees. The two potential heirs, cousins Ada and Richard, are left in the care of benevolent John Jarndyce, who long ago gave up on the case. With them is the orphan Esther Summerson (who narrates about half the book) whose own lineage turns out to be a surprise to everyone. Meanwhile, the evil lawyer Tulkinghorn has uncovered a secret about Sir Lester Dedlock and Lady Dedlock—and is eventually found murdered. Part social satire, murder mystery (the first in English literature, and Inspector Bucket is an extremely funny character), convoluted legal thriller—Bleak House has it all. Great characters—and I think one of the best books ever written. (Although the scene in which Mr. Krook spontaneously combusts was perhaps a bit much.) Many of the locations in the novel were featured on the Charles Dickens walking tour Steven H. and I took last April in London, so it was cool being able to accurately visualize many of the locations. There was also an excellent BBC production of it that starred Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock that is probably the best Dickens adaptation I have ever seen, although like all of them tends to lose a lot of the humor of his prose.

Hard Times
Charles Dickens
June 2008
Fiction

The least subtle of all Dickens’ books (and the shortest), Hard Times is a diatribe against the kind of cold, emotionless, statistics-and-facts-driven social theorists who had emerged following the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Gradgrind, prominent resident (and eventual Member of Parliament) of the northern industrial town of Coketown, opens the book with his lecture to the young students of the Coketown school: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” His own children are discouraged from doing anything but studying, and they are strongly reprimanded for playing or going to the circus—or, basically, doing anything fun. Naturally, this turns both his son and daughter into psychological basket cases; his daughter ends up in a loveless marriage to the blowhard banker Mr. Bounderby. (He is described thusly: “He had not much hair. One might have fancied that he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.” Heh.) His bluster about being a self-made man, as it turns out, is all a lie. Gradgrind’s son Tom ends up as a gambler and thief. Hard Times is social commentary with a sledgehammer and while it’s funny and rings true a lot of the time, it suffers from being a bit too “in your face.”

The Physics of the Impossible
Michio Kaku
June 2008
Non-Fiction

Kaku is a physics professor and popular science writer and appears frequently on Discovery and Learning Channel documentaries. He is also a science-fiction fan so has decided to investigate how possible various sci-fi technologies are. Death rays? Transporters? Tractor beams? Faster-than-light travel? Time travel? How far away are we from these things? As it turns out, quite a ways. He organizes the book into Class I, II, and III “impossibilities” (in ascending order of impossibility), and even the most probable of the impossibilities are decades, if not centuries, away. Perhaps discouraging for those who were hoping to experience Star Trek in their lifetimes, still it does provide an excellent look at the current state of the cutting edge of physics research. Even if we won’t be beaming ourselves around any time soon, it’s interesting to know that there is actually fruitful research in “teleportation” going on. It’s a fascinating book, and Kaku does a good job of clearly explaining even the most abstruse physical concepts.

Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
June 2008
Fiction

I don’t recall ever having read Gulliver’s Travels before, but my local Barnes & Noble was having a 3-for-2 sale on B&N imprinted classics, so I picked it up and took it away on vacation (appropriately). This is highly unsubtle social satire (some of it a bit too rooted in what was happening politically in Europe in the early 1700s). We all know about Lemuel Gulliver’s travels among the Lilliputians (the tiny people), less so his travels among the Brobdignagians (giant people), the flying island of Laputa, inhabited by pretentious intellectuals (an extremely funny chapter), the noble horse people the Houyhnhms, and the barbarous humans, the Yahoos. Good vacation reading and laugh out loud funny in places.

Dear American Airlines
Jonathan Miles
June 2008
Fiction

I blogged about this excellent book before.

Little Dorritt
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

After the social satire with a sledgehammer of Hard Times, Dickens returned to form with Little Dorritt. One of the traumas of Dickens’ childhood was seeing his father imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison. (There was a tremendous illogic in the laws in Britain at the time where, if someone owed someone else money they could not repay, they were imprisoned—virtually ensuring that they could never work to earn the money to pay those debts. Dickens often pointed out the utter absurdity of these laws.) Debtors prisons thus appeared often in Dickens’ novels, even from the start (Samuel Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers is incarcerated in one). Little Dorritt explicitly looks at the psychology of those imprisoned. William Dorritt is put away in the Marshalsea Prison for 20 years, where he becomes “The Father of the Marshalsea,” earning a place of honor and respect among the inmates and turnkeys. His daughter Amy (the titular “Little Dorritt”) was born while he was an inmate, and has never known life outside the prison, and even though she is free to come and go, she chooses to return to the prison at night. She has a secret day job as a seamstress for the elderly Mrs. Clennam, whose son Arthur (the book’s main protagonist) has just returned from many years abroad. Arthur becomes interested in Little Dorritt and, after some investigation, ultimately manages to secure for William Dorritt an immense inheritance to which he is entitled. Released from the Marshalsea, William Dorritt and family travel around Europe attempting to distance themselves from their past life—not entirely successfully. (The scene where Dorritt has a stroke at a fancy dinner party and imagines himself back in the Marshalsea is completely heartbreaking.) There are also various other plots and admittedly things go a bit overboard toward the end when there is a rather convoluted plot involving evil twins and mistaken identity. Still, this is one of the last great Dickens novels, full of great characterization and social commentary. (The great wealthy capitalist Merdle, before whom everyone bows down, turns out to have been a swindler and forger who ends up being the ruin of many of those who worshipped him.) Oh, and let’s not forget the Barnacles who run the fictional but oh-so-aptly named Circumlocution Office, a government agency specifically designed to ensure that nothing is ever actually accomplished.

A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

Dickens only wrote two historical novels and the more famous of the two (A Tale of Two Cities) actually is less successful than the less famous (Barnaby Rudge). A Tale of Two Cities is set during the French Revolution and features the famous opening line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and the famous closing lines “It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before...” Charles Darnay, an expatriate Frenchman who has renounced his aristocratic family, now lives in London, choosing to earn a living rather than live as a parasite on the peasantry, which is how he sees his family. He falls in love with and marries Lucy Manette, the daughter of a physician who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years. Darnay is accused of treason against England, but is acquitted thanks largely to the efforts of his brilliant but drunken lawyer Sydney Carton who, as it turns out, is a dead ringer for Darnay physically. They all end up in Paris at the time the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror break out and Darnay is identified as being a relative of the family of Evremond, against whom the Defarges (including the perennially knitting Madame Defarge) have a specific grudge. Darnay is sentenced to the guillotine—but Carton arranges to swap places with Darnay and sacrifices himself largely for the sake of Lucy Darnay, with whom he is also in love, albeit futilely. Ultimately, A Tale of Two Cities is unsuccessful because the characterizations are not as strong as those in Dickens’ other novels (part of this was due to the short weekly serialization of the novel, which imposed more rigorous plot demands on him than the more leisurely monthly editions he usually published). But at the same time, he oversimplifies the French Revolution; he begins by sympathizing with the peasants and their revolt against an abusive, taxing, and ultimately useless aristocracy but then depicts the Reign of Terror as little more than insensible mob violence (depicted a bit more convincingly in the Gordon Riots scenes in Barnaby Rudge). Still, it’s Dickens, so how bad could it be?

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

Widely regarded as Dickens “most perfect” novel, Great Expectations does encapsulate in a comparatively short novel (under 500 pages) all of Dickens’ strengths as a novelist. At the start of the book, orphan Philip Pirrip (Pip) is a small child, playing in the Kent marshes. He encounters an escaped convict and procures him food, which he tries to keep hidden from his abusive older sister (his guardian) and her husband, the simple yet kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. Some years later, Pip is asked for by the reclusive and decaying Miss Havisham, whose early jilting has resulted in her spending her entire life in a dark house, occasionally wearing a yellowed wedding dress, and visiting the cobwebbed and rat-infested dining room where her wedding feast has been sitting for more than 30 years. Pip is smitten by Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, but she deems him “too common.” After several years of his mysterious and bewildering visits to Miss Havisham, Pip comes into a fortune thanks to a mysterious benefactor, and moves to London to become a gentleman, full of great expectations. He distances himself from Joe, believing the blacksmith to be “too common.” Then he finds out who his benefactor really is...and all his expectations are dashed, and he realizes what a schmuck he was in thinking that he was somehow “better” than Joe simply because he had a few more pounds. A very very funny book, full of the characteristic Dickens characterizations and social commentary. If there is one Dickens novel to read (if the 900+-page Bleak House seems too overwhelming), this would be it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami
August 2008
Non-Fiction

My favorite contemporary novelist is Japan’s Haruki Murakami, and he just published a short memoir about running. In the mid-1980s, when he first decided to become a novelist (he had previously owned a jazz club in Tokyo), he decided to start running, as well. (There is a connection as both writing and running are notoriously solitary activities.) Even now, in his 50s, he still runs marathons, and much of the book describes his preparing for the New York Marathon. He also reprints an article he wrote about the time he ran the original “marathon”—that is, the route from Athens to Marathon in Greece, when the name and official distance of a marathon derives. It’s a slim book, probably not of much interest to anyone not a Murakami fan, but for those of us who are, it’s a somewhat revealing peek into his life.

Reading the OED
Ammon Shea
August 2008
Non-Fiction

Ammon Shea is a fanatical collector of dictionaries and he decided to spend a year doing something that actually sounds pretty cool: reading the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Now, you may ask yourself: why would anyone want to read a book about a guy reading a book? That’s a perfectly fair point, and about as good a point as the question, Why would anyone want to sit down and read the OED from beginning to end anyway? But then I inevitably ask, why would anyone want to watch Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, or any movie that’s playing at the mall, so to each his own.... I actually found Reading the OED very entertaining—not only the author’s struggles to physically read it (he was plagued with headaches throughout the project and at one point finds that he suddenly needs glasses). The trick is not to think of the OED as a dry reference book, but an entertaining history of the English language, which any good dictionary is, really. Words some into fashion, they go out off fashion—some words have only ever appeared in dictionaries and have never been actually seen “in the wild.” The OED is rather like a natural history museum, or a zoo, if you prefer. The bulk of the book (and, unlike the author’s subject, it is not a weighty tome; I finished it in about two hours) comprises highlights from the OED. Very often, the author exults in discovering “I never knew there was a word for that!” Or, every once in a while, “Why on earth is there a word for that?” The poster child for the latter is unbepissed, which means “not having been urinated on.” The author comments, “Who ever thought there would actually be a need for such a word? Is it possible that at some time there was such a profusion of things that had been urinated on that there was a pressing need to distinguish those that had not?” One shudders to think.... Other examples he cites are:

Fornale: to spend one’s money before it has been earned. Kind of the basis for our economy, it seems.

Gove: To stare stupidly. The author notes that every dictionary has defined this word this way, save for Webster’s Third, which defines it as “to stare idly.” Perhaps it is a coincidence that the editor of the Webster’s Third was named Gove...

Hypergelast: A person who will not stop laughing.

Kakistocracy: Government by the worst citizens. No comment...

Marterteral: Having the characteristics or qualities of an aunt. Why avuncular (having the characteristics or qualities of an uncle) is somewhat popular but marterteral passed out of common parlance—and, unlike avuncular, is flagged by Word’s spellchecker—remains a mystery.

Natiform: Buttock-shaped. Ironically, not used as an insult.

Onomatomania: Vexation at being unable to find the right word. We’ve all had this problem at times.

Peristeronic: Suggestive of pigeons. Gotta love it.

Petecure: Modest cooking. That is, more or less the opposite of an epicure.

And my favorite:

Constult: To act stupidly together. For those in my line of work, it’s that first “t” that makes all the difference!

The Magdalen Martyrs
Ken Bruen
August 2008
Fiction

Steven H. sent me a CARE package of books from Britain for my birthday and one of them was The Magdalen Martyrs by Irish author Ken Bruen. It’s of a genre I guess one could call British neo-noir, as it is a modern version of the kind of dark crime novels (featuring a bitter, battle-scarred anti-hero as the detective/narrator) commonly attributed to Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Bruen’s anti-hero is alcoholic, drug-addicted former “Guard” (I really don’t know what that is, some kind of Irish police, I suspect) named Jack Taylor. Taylor becomes involved in two cases, one involving tracking down the “angel of the Magdalens”—that is, the person who helped unfortunate girls escape from an abusive Catholic laundry. The other case involves proving that a local businessman's father’s death was not accidental. I can’t say that I ever really cared about either case, as I really disliked the Jack Taylor character and found much of the novel a bit of a bore, as Taylor really did little more than drink and consume enough drugs to kill a medium-sized rhinoceros. Not one of my favorites.

The Devil’s Home on Leave
Derek Raymond
August 2008
Fiction

I read Derek Raymond’s He Died With His Eyes Open last year, and liked it (though not hugely). Steven H. also sent me this one, which I ended up liking more. Raymond is another of the British neo-noir writers, but I like him a lot better than Ken Bruen. (I did have to e-mail Steven H. and ask what certain British slang terms meant! A “grass” or “supergrass” is apparently an informer. So now you know, even if you have never bought a Supergrass album.) The no-name anti-hero is a lot more likable than Bruen’s Jack Taylor, and has more in common with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The novel begins with a body being discovered—bled, boiled, cut into several pieces, and placed in plastic shopping bags. (OK, I probably should not have started reading this while eating dinner.) The book is set in the 1980s and as no-name starts investigating, espionage, treason, and people selling out to the Russians come into it. A Defense minister is involved, as is a vicious soldier who was deemed too brutal and violent even for the Army. No-name has is requisite fights with authority and the powers-that-be but turns out right in the end. It’s all rather along the Chandler formula, but then it’s a pretty good formula. (I was reading this in a pub in Chicago after a day of conference sessions, and some folks I had met came in and joined me; they asked me about the book, and I said “It’s rather a British Raymond Chandler.” The response was, “Oh, I don't like spy novels.” Sigh.)

The Blog is Back

After The Industry Measure was shut down last spring, I decided to "chill out" for a while. After many years of being on the treadmill of non-stop reports, weekly e-mail blasts, blogging various places elsewhere, and many many other projects, I was completely burned out. I had becomes less a writer and more a delivery system for words--and I had run out! So I took as much of the summer off as I could to replenish my words. Now, summer is over, and it's back to the salt mines. I shall be attempting to post here more regularly (famous last words), with my usual mix of fiction experiments, summaries of bad science-fiction movies (I have made only the smallest of dents in my 50-film cheesy science fiction DVD collection), and, of course, harbingers of the looming robot holocaust. Consider yourselves warned.

Raman Noodles

I was just at the dentist this morning for my six-month cleaning, and while I confess I have never had the pleasure of experiencing a drill, this seems like a cool idea, although my initial thought upon reading the headline was that the laser would do the "drilling." Not so:

Tooth Lasers Could Make Drilling a Thing of the Past

UK researchers have developed a technology that spots tooth decay before it begins using a technology based on Raman spectroscopy—a method that is currently used to identify chemicals. A new study has determined that harmful bacteria can be detected by analyzing how light is scattered when a laser is fired at the tooth.

"No, Mr. Bond, I want to you rinse!"

This New Thing Called E-Commerce

Says the New York Times:

To Save Gas, Shoppers Stay Home and Click

To go shopping these days, more Americans are trading in their car keys for a keyboard.

Online shopping is gaining at a time when simply filling up a gas tank to head to the mall can seem like a spending spree.

First of all, just about every story about retail shopping trends over the past decade has pretty much used the headline "[Insert reason du jour here], Shoppers Stay Home and Click." That is, e-commerce has been growing steadily anyway for the past 10 years, and high gas prices are just one of many factors contributing to that growth. It's not like e-commerce was on a downward trend. Personally, I hate shopping, and I can never find the things I want in proper stores, so I prefer buying stuff online. In terms of gas, I calculated what it costs to get from my house to the Strip Mall Hell at Exit 15 and it is about $4.50, or what the average shipping cost of something is. So that's a wash, as far as I'm concerned, but I am aware that many people live some distance from shopping. It's entirely possible that shipping costs may rise since UPS and USPS vehicles use, well, gas.

However, the one drawback to e-commerce is that while chains do not lose business, individual shops do, which means layoffs and branch closings, and fewer jobs in a given area, furthering the economic pressures. After all, one of the reasons why these price hikes are so bad is that people's pay has not increased accordingly.

It's funny, though, how in all the discussions of the increasing costs of everything, everyone stresses saving and that the very thought of suggesting that employers pay people more is verboten. Funny, that.

Picture This

Barry Ritholtz, author of one of the blogs I read at least daily, the Big Picture, has looked at the state of the economy today, and is mad as hell and can't take it anymore:

The collection of ne'er do wells, clueless dolts, political hacks, and oh, let's just be blunt and call them what they are -- total Idiots -- expands into an ever larger circle.

While the Republic burns due to the unsavory combination of incompetence, ideological rigidity, and crony capitalism, the fools and assclowns seem ever more determined to avoid any personal responsibility for the damages they have wrought. Instead, they flail about blindly, blaming everything and everyone -- except their own horrific negligence.

This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries.

As a nation, our institutions have failed us: Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve slept through the most reckless and irresponsible expansion of bank lending in history for reasons of ideological purity. His opposition to the Fed’s regulatory role reached the point of malfeasance long ago. History is unlikely to be kind to the Maestro.
...

Go read the rest, and then pick someone you'd like to hit.

Christmas is Coming...

Via Gizmodo, for sale: the typewriter Douglas Adams used to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is signed and comes with a first edition of Hitchhiker's. Well, for $25,000 it had better come with a first edition book, as well as an Infinite Improbability Drive. Or at the very least a few Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.

With Six Errors You Get Eggroll

Ah, the perils of automatic transliteration: via Boing Boing, a Chinese Restaurant whose owner had a wee bit of a problem with his translation software:
Be sure to try #404, the File Not Found Chicken.

Heartwarming Gifts

Well, Grandma never knitted like this: woolen organs.

"What did you pick up at the craft fair--Oh my god!!"
I wonder if they can be worn for warmth.

Rejoyce

Happy Bloomsday!

Spanish Fry

Hmm...Spanish children sound remarkably like American adults. But at least children don't drive while yakking.

Spain treats child phone addicts

Experts are concerned by children's increased use of mobile phones

Two children in Spain have been admitted to a mental health institution to be treated for addiction to their mobile phones, Spanish media report.

The children, aged 12 and 13, were sent to the clinic by their parents, who said they could not carry out normal activities without their handsets.

Stimulus Package

Well, you know, a sluggish economy can affect everyone.

"Donner, Party of 4"

One of those headlines that always attract my attention:

Crash survivors considered eating pilot

Survivors of a plane crash in southern Chile who spent five days huddled in a broken fuselage in sub-zero temperatures said yesterday they considered cannibalism during their ordeal, in an echo of an Andean plane crash 36 years ago.

Of course, if it had been a U.S. airline, the survivors would have been charged for an in-flight meal.

Album of the Day--June 11, 2008

Foxtrot
Genesis
1972
Charisma Records
Produced by David Hitchcock

There must be some misunderstanding. I had first become aware of the band Genesis back in 1980 when Duke came out, and a year later, on the strength of the title track, had picked up Abacab on vinyl, which I ultimately didn’t care for all that much, even if it was their huge commercial breakthrough. I had also been familiar with Peter Gabriel, from the very weird “Games Without Frontiers” I had heard on the radio the previous year. Shortly after the Abacab purchase, a friend of mine at the time told me that Peter Gabriel had been a member of Genesis in the early 70s, and loaned me a couple of albums from that era, which I immediately fell in love with. My favorite—which continues to be one of my favorite albums of all time—was 1972’s Foxtrot. As I look at my original vinyl copy, bought back in 1981, I’m surprised it hasn’t been worn completely through.

Foxtrot was the band’s fourth album, and the second with the classic lineup of Gabriel (vocals, flute), Steve Hackett (guitars), Tony Banks (keyboards), Michael Rutherford (guitars and basses), and Phil Collins (drums). It starts with the haunting “Watcher of the Skies,” lyrics by Banks and Rutherford, about a race of aliens that come to Earth, land in a desert, and think that the human race has gone extinct. It opens with a haunting solo Mellotron before the whole band kicks in. Musically and lyrically, it is a compelling track and was even better in concert, especially with Gabriel performing it with his bat-wing-headdress-and-cape alien outfit. “Time Table” (lyrics by Tony Banks) is a simple song about the passage of time, the rise and fall of great civilizations, and how history tends to repeat itself. “Get ’Em Out by Friday” (lyrics by Gabriel) is a very funny theater-esque piece written as a play; each character is given a different musical motif and vocal style, and tells the story of evil estate agents who are in the process of evicting several tenants from their homes. Later in the song, after a passage of time we find out why:

18/9/2012 T.V. FLASH ON ALL DIAL-A-PROGRAM SERVICES:
This is an announcement from Genetic Control
“It is my sad duty to inform you of a four-foot restriction on humanoid height”

EXTRACT FROM CONVERSATION OF JOE ORDINARY IN LOCAL PUBORAMA:
“I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the properties
That have recently been sold
Taking risks oh so bold
It’s said now that people will be shorter in height
They can fit twice as many in the same building site...”

Side one (in the old vinyl days) ends with “Can-Utility and the Coastliners” (lyrics by Steve Hackett) about the legend of King Canute, who supposedly ordered the seas to retreat to mock the sycophancy of his followers.

Side Two opens with a short solo guitar piece called “Horizons” written and performed by Steve Hackett, before launching into what has been regarded as Genesis’ magnum opus: the 22:54 “Supper’s Ready” (lyrics mostly by Gabriel), which begins with the narrator returning home after a long Odyssey-like adventure and finding his suitor somehow changed (said to be based on a strange otherworldly experience Gabriel had with his then-wife). Still, it’s good to be home, because “supper’s ready.” he then describes his travels, which involved some kind of war, wandering the aftermath, finding solace in the surreal and vaudevillian “Willow Farm,” and then experiencing an apocalypse out of the Book of Revelation (actually, the only book of the Bible that I have read—I didn’t know they had LSD back in Biblical times). Ultimately, he makes it home again, with a renewed sense of purpose, love for his suitor, and belief in god. It’s a lyrical and musical tour de force, and was a concert favorite, especially when Gabriel donned the giant flower outfit for the “Willow Farm” section. Anyway, the whole album has not left my CD player or iPod for about a week.

I wasn’t impressed by the remastering of the Foxtrot CD (for some reasssssson it’sss ssssomewhat too sssssibilant for my tasssstessss), but I hear an SACD version with 5.1 surround is coming out in September, which I am eagerly looking forward to.

By the way, I love the Internet sometimes: I found on YouTuve some clips from old Genesis concerts. Here is a great version of “Watcher of the Skies” from the Foxtrot tour:



And, find of all finds, here is “Supper’s Ready” live (in three parts). Oh, to have not been five years old in 1973!

Meat the Press

Dear lord, has it come to this?

Chain Saw

Yesterday, friend passed along one of those e-mail chain letters that have become the modern day equivalent of urban legends. This one related to high gas prices, and was a reprise of one that made the rounds a couple years ago, reading in part:

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this please.
...
I hear we are going to hit close to $ 4.00 a gallon by summer, and it might go higher!! Want gasoline prices to come down?
...
By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $2.00 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $3.71 for regular unleaded in my town.
...
How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying gas.

But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here's the idea: For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL.

Yadda yadda yadda. Whenever I get one of these (especially one that doesn't make a lot of sense) I immediately go to Snopes.com (the urban legends and myth debunking site) and, sure enough, found it. Their commentary, in part, reads:

Oil companies can manipulate their prices somewhat...but they can't alter the basics of supply and demand: prices go down when people buy less of a good, prices go up when people buy more of a good, and prices go way up when demand outstrips available supply. The "gas out" schemes that propose to alter the demand side of the equation by shunning one or two specific brands of gasoline for a while won't work, however, because they're based on the misconception that an oil company's only outlet for gasoline is its own branded service stations. That isn't the case: gasoline is a fungible commodity, so if one oil company's product isn't being bought up in one particular market or outlet, it will simply sell its output to (or through) other outlets.
...
The only person who really gets hurt in this proposed scheme is the service station operator, who has almost no control over the price of gasoline.

So, sorry guys, as with weight loss, there is no quick, easy, painless way to reduce gas prices without sacrifice or hardship:

The only practical way of reducing gasoline prices is through the straightforward means of buying less gasoline, not through a simple and painless scheme of just shifting where we buy it. The inconvenience of driving less is a hardship too many people apparently aren't willing to endure, however.

In case you're wondering, gas prices are the result of the free market working the way the free market works. C'est la vie. In case you're wondering why gas/oil prices have risen so dramatically, we should eschew conspiracy theories (as satisfying as they may be) and look to basic economic factors. Former Labor Secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich has a short list of reasons:

(1) growing demand from developing nations, especially China and India. This is the main reason for the price rise over the last six years.

(2) the dropping dollar. As it drops, because of our trade imbalance and overall indebtedness to the rest of the world as well as our slowing economy, everything we buy from abroad -- including much of the oil we import -- costs more; everything we sell to foreigners -- including much of the oil we produce -- costs less to them. I attribute half of oil's price rise since January to this.

(3) Global investors (including, perhaps, your own pension fund) are anxious about the American economy, and looking to hedge their bets against future declines. Oil is one of the commodities that looks like a good bet. Hence, there's speculation in oil futures. This isn't a nefarious plot. It's the way the market works. A bit of a speculative bubble is forming, so beware. I attribute a big part of oil's price rise over the last few weeks to this.

(4) Instability in the Middle East. Israel's recent bellicose statements about Iran have generated fears about the continuing capacity and willingness of Middle Eastern oil producers to generate oil (about a third of world oil production). OPEC refuses to produce more. Some of oil's price rise over the last week is attributable to this.

Yes, high gas prices are causing hardship, but there is little anyone can do directly (by the way, repealing the gas tax in whole or in part, permanently or temporarily, will not solve the problem, because it would only increase demand as gas got "cheaper" which would only drive prices up more), aside from altering behavior--that is, driving less, using public transport where possible, etc. No, not everyone can do that, and we should think about why that is. I remember having conversations with people (usually in California, big shock) about how much I hate driving and how I wished public transport--or at least sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly layouts--were more readily available, and the response was always a derisive laugh, followed by "Oh, but the car is such a symbol of freedom." Yeah, how's that working out? I just feel so free. Let's face it, we have created a car culture without thinking of the consequences--and now the consequences are here. If we want change, we should demand it--but it's not going to come easy.

More on E-Books

TechNewsWorld has reports of more navel-gazing among book publishers, but one publisher--Springer--having some success. The rub, of course is that:

[Springer's] voracious readers are a learned lot that generally do not confuse reading with pleasure. For them, it's all about research, information, how-to and why-for stuff.

Last Friday, I unwittingly stumbled onto an interesting way to bridge the gap between print books and e-books. I went to downtown Saratoga in the evening, and as usual on Friday evenings, took the bus into town. (By the way, extortionate gas prices--$4.25 at Exit 13 yesterday!--must be having an affect, because the bus has been getting more and more packed over the past few months.) Whenever I take the bus, I bring a book to read at the bus stop, during the ride, and while I am waiting for friends to show up wherever we happen to be meeting. However, the weather being warm, I had no jacket (and thus few pockets), and the book I am reading (Charles Dickens' Bleak House) is very thick, so I didn't feel like schlepping it along. But while standing at the bus stop, I used my iPhone to find an online edition of Bleak House. I clicked the link to the chapter I had left off at in the print edition, and was thus able to continue reading seamlessly while out. When I got home that night, I moved my bookmark to the new spot.

Perhaps that's the model for e-books; buying the print edition will get you a password to access the online edition (Dickens and other classics are in the public domain) that can be retrievable from a mobile device. Or, alternatively, only the online edition can be bought for a lesser price. Perhaps alternative downloadable formats can also be available. My suspicion is that the success of the Amazon Kindle is giving Apple some ideas...would that that were the case, although portability would really be the only reason I would ever think of reading e-books--and portability using a device I already use for other things. That is, I was multitasking on the bus I was also listening to the iPhone's built in iPod, periodically checking e-mail, and dodging telemarketing calls from Time-Warner.

Speaking of book buying, what in the Sam Hill has happened to Borders? The one here in Saratoga has remodeled itself in such a way that they barely carry anything anymore--there are no more "new books" tables, just a small rack with the bestsellers, and the music section was redesigned in such a way as to purportedly hide the fact that the stock is much much smaller than it used to be. They still send me a ton of coupons for books, CDs, and DVDs, and I have stopped even trying to use them because I can no longer find anything there that I want. Which, for me, is saying something! It seems like I have to go online these days to get anything, which is shame because I really like browsing (if they ever close the Newbury Comics on Newbury St. in Boston I shall go ballistic.). Sigh. It's sad to read that this is apparently happening all over.

And speaking of buying stuff, I find it supremely funny that the big supermarket chain in the region--Price Chopper--has started this massive marketing campaign called "How much have you chopped your food bill?" at about the same time that prices for everything have started rising dramatically. You know, I can do math, and I have not chopped anything, and in fact have spent a substantial amount more, despite the fact that I always buy the exact same stuff week after week. And people wonder why I'm cynical. Jeesh.

The Trouble with Tribulation

Are you dreading or looking forward to The Rapture? I confess, having been brought up vaguely Catholic, it wasn't until I saw the very bad Mimi Rogers movie The Rapture that I had ever even heard of it, and only within the past 10 years realized that it was a real thing. Well, I don't mean a real thing. I mean...oh, you know what I mean. But for those of us who are looking forward to said Rapture (if only because it will make all the people who preach about the Rapture go away) we can still be annoyed by them post facto all during the subsequent Tribulation, thanks to a new service (via Boing Boing) called You've Been Left Behind. I kid you not:

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.

(Sent by "the e-mail"?) Anyway, consider yourselves warned. Six days, though. Hm. Hardly seems like enough time; I would imagine that the party will last at least twice that length...

Oh, and did I mention that it costs $40 a year to subscribe--until the Rapture. Seems like they win either way.

Death to Alexander Graham Bell!

Oh, right, he's already dead. Well, I say we reanimate him and kill him again.

The telemarketing calls gave gotten so wildly out of control--and on the off chance I decide to answer, there is usually silence, broken only by my piercing shriek--that I'm not even bothering to turn the ringer on anymore. Send me an e-mail. However, I do check my call log, and have found a great Web site that lets you find out who these assclowns are: 800notes. (Actually, you can just do a Google search for a specific phone number and it will send you right to the appropriate forum.) I have noticed I do get a lot of calls from a Syracuse company called Barrier Windows. I Googled them and the first hit was this story from Channel 3 News about how they prey on the elderly and infirm. Someone needs to figure out search engine optimization! (More to the point, why would I buy windows from a Syracuse company anyway?)

I have also discovered--both through 800Notes and unfortunately answering the phone, that I am being pitched repeatedly by automotive warranty companies, insisting my manufacturers' warranty was about to expire. How would they know that? Is Toyota selling my name and number? If so, I'm selling my car.

Tet[ris] Offensive

For those who were hooked on Takeshi's Castle (redubbed with vile, unfunny sexual innuendo by Spike TV and shown as MXC) or any of the other extremely bizarre Japanese game shows that have existed, I give you: Human Tetris:

Disturbingly, there is more where that came from.

Hell's Housing Bubble?

I guess my question is, would I ever want to hang out--especially for eternity--with anyone who wasn't on this list somewhere? I think that would be the definition of hell.

Still, I wonder if it's even possible to not be on it. Sports fans? Money lovers? (There goes the U.S. economy.) They certainly don't make repentance sound all that inviting.

Nutted by Reality

Via Dr. Joe, The Wall Street Journal has the latest forecast of the future of books...I don't disagree with any of it really, but damn if it doesn't sound horribly unpleasant, at least to me. The money quote:

It's not about the page versus the screen in a technological grudge match. It's about the screen doing a dozen things the page can't do.

I know I'm alone on this (just call me Samuel T. Cogley--how's that for an obscure Star Trek reference?), but I'm perfectly happy having the page do only one thing, especially since it does it pretty reliably. Usually, the more functions a process has, the less good it is at any of them and the more ways it can screw up.

The other money quote is:

to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the BlackBerry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.

Well, I had a BlackBerry, and it was so badly designed and aggravating to use--and battery life so bad--that I damn nearly was driven back to writing letters and did not mourn its loss in a Corning parking lot in the slightest. And, hey, I miss writing letters. As for the iPhone that I have admittedly waxed poetic about...well, once the novelty wears off, it becomes as good and bad as any other electronic device: sporadically stops working, loses connectivity, does what it wants to do rather than what I want it to do ("No, don't check for new mail...I want to delete the shit you've already gotten! No, stop! Grrr!!!!," is my daily exhortation to it), etc. Again, it's often a great tool for my work, but not so much for my life, which these days I seek to simplify.

Perhaps I am growing too old to appreciate (or even like all that much anymore) new media--or perhaps I'm just getting fed up with it. After a day of everything electronic acting up, it's nice to turn everything off and crack open a book that does not require batteries, will not abruptly shut down or quit, will not magically stop working, will not lose connectivity should the moon change phase, etc. Yes, electronic media are wonderful for getting work done and accessing information--and even getting news--but at the end of the day when work is over (and yes, work is over at the end of the day)...sayonara.

On a similar note, Publishers Weekly has an update on Penguin Books:

Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of 2008 have surpassed the house's total e-book sales for all of last year. According to the publisher, the spike is "more than five times the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008." Penguin Group CEO David Shanks said he attributed the jump, in large part, to the growing popularity of e-book readers.

That said, the publisher has been doing its part to add premium features to its electronic content. To that end, the house is developing properties like the Penguin Enhanced e-Book Classics; the first title in that series, Pride and Prejudice, will debut this summer and include such bells and whistles as reviews (of the original publication), a filmography, recipes and notes on etiquette. Nine more titles will be released as Enhanced e-Book Classics throughout the fall.

Well, since the Kindle is just about a year old, those growth numbers are not all that surprising. (The statistical lesson I have learned from analyzing new media all these years is that dramatic growth rates are easy when you're starting from a very low base.) And, yeah, I bet everyone with a Kindle is going to immediately spring for the collected works of Jane Austen. This is likely more of a school thing (oh, and most of the classics are in the public domain; read: cheap to publish). And as I have repeatedly been told as of late, unbidden, by random people on the bus, trains, planes, in bars, etc., I am apparently the only person in the world who reads the classics, like Dickens, for pleasure. Tough.

Also via Dr. Joe (yes, I am catching up on my e-mail links today), a Wall Street Journal story about a writer/professor with a Brobdignagian book library. This passage sums up my attitude, and that of other people like me who Really Like Books:

These days it may appear that books, per se, are doomed. The electronic readers are ever lighter, smaller, and more sophisticated. Google is undertaking to scan and digitize every book in the world -- not without some resistance. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that even the reading devices are pointless, since according to him nobody reads anymore, at least not in the sense of sequentially taking in long and complex works. I have nothing against the readers, and may find myself buying one eventually -- they'd come in very handy on trips, the way the iPod does. I'm all in favor of the comprehensive digitizing of the world's books, since that would very much ease small points of research (and I'm not worried about losing control of my copyrights, since it's unlikely many people would read entire books online that way). As far as the decline of reading goes, I am nervous, but also believe that matters of taste and inclination do swing around on long orbits.

But I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too -- the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.

Amen, brother!

Here's a thought. I have found over the years that just about 99% of anything I have ever liked is either quickly discontinued (foods, brands, etc.), cancelled (TV shows), or otherwise phased out (CDs, record stores, book stores, basic intelligence). Armed with that knowledge, perhaps it's time to pull a George Costanza. Yes, I think I will sell off my book collection and buy a Kindle. Yes, e-books, here I come! I love cellphones! I will drive and talk all the time! I love Microsoft products! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

Can Spam?

On the subject of vile-sounding foods...canned bacon?

Each can comes with 40 to 50 slices of lipids and protein, produced using three pounds of raw bacon plus:

• water
• salt
• sugar
• smoke flavoring
• sodium phosphates
• sodium erythorbate
• sodium nitrite

I think I'm going to be ill...

America Drinks...and Gains Weight

Men's Health (via Boing Boing) rounds up the unhealthiest beverages in America, barring the obvious like soda and booze. Some choice examples:

Worst "Healthy" Drink
Glaceau VitaminWater (any flavor; 20 oz bottle)
130 calories
33 grams sugar

Vitamins and water might sound like the ultimate nutritional tag team, but what the label doesn’t say is that a bottle of this stuff carries nearly as much sugar and calories as a can of Coke. Makes sense, though, since this so-called functional beverage is produced by our often-sugar-crazy friends at The Coca-Cola Company.

I never quite understood the point of "vitamin water" or and less so "protein water." Special K has a product called "Special K20" and all I can think of is that it is some kind of potassium oxide (the chemical symbol for potassium is K). But then maybe it is. Oh, and elemental potassium explodes when it comes into contact with water, which would certainly make the water aisle at Price Chopper more entertaining.

Consumer Reports this month also ponders why water has gotten more complex than it needs to be. Sorry, I remain happy with tap water run through a Brita filter pitcher, although I have not changed the filter in about five years, so I'm probably making it worse. (OK, I do have somewhat of a weakness for Saratoga Sparkling Spring Water but, hey, I live here.) If I ever need vitamins, I shall take them. If I ever need more protein than I think I get, I'll have a steak, which would be far more enjoyable than water anyway.

This just sounds vile:

Worst Smoothie
Jamba Juice Peanut Butter Moo’d Power Smoothie (30 oz)
1,170 calories
169 g sugars
30 g fat

Jamba Juice calls it a smoothie; we call it a milkshake, with more sugar than an entire bag of chocolate chips. (Note: We're pretty sure this is the drink Hollywood actors rely on when looking to put on 20 pounds for the role as a heavy!)

I confess I've never had a smoothie; they always just sounded gross to me. Well, except for a chocolate milkshake...

I'm not a huge fan of pina coladas, and even less a fan of Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)":

Worst Summer Cocktail
Pina Colada
625 calories
75 g sugars

Made from a blend of sickly-sweet pineapple juice and fat-riddled coconut milk, pina coladas may be this summer's biggest beach-body saboteurs. In fact, the only redeeming part of this drink is the garnish — that lonely chunk of pineapple hanging from the rim. Try a lime daiquiri or a mojito instead and save up to 400 calories a drink.

I'm on board with the mojito substitution... Oh, and speaking of vile, check out the calorie count of this:

The Unhealthiest Drink in America
Baskin Robbin’s Large Heath Bar Shake (32 oz)
2,310 calories
266 g sugar
108 g fat (64 g saturated)

Good lord! It's basically a diabetic coma in a cup!

I do not claim to be an expert on health or nutrition by any stretch of the imagination. But I do read nutrition labels and once I do the math and convert "calories per serving" from the decidedly unrealistic serving sizes that companies come up with to make their stuff look healthier than it is, I balance that figure against what my treadmill tells me I work off--I burn 620 calories in a one-hour workout. Any food I buy--especially junk food or snacks, which I generally avoid like the plague (OK, I have a weakness for pistachio nuts, the most addictive food in the world)--is always weighed (so to speak) against the question, "How many extra hours will it take me to work this off?"

Moore's Law

Ron Moore, the creator and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica (a great show, far far better than the cheeseball late 70s incarnation which I unfortunately watched religiously at the time and now cringe when I see clips of it...call it a misspent youth)
..what was I saying? Oh, right: Wired has an extensive interview with Ron Moore, who discusses all the ancillary media that are not involved with producing a television program:

Wired: You've been committed to...Webisodes, the blog, the podcasts. What's the importance of those?

Moore: Now I think they're almost expected. Now they're part of what it is to do a television show, especially in this genre. This genres fans are very connected to their computers, to all these multiple platforms, and they look for it. They're there to be served, so why wouldn't you serve them? We're planning webisodes for this season. My podcasting will continue, albeit depending on how quick I am about it, it'll happen.

And I can sympathize with this!:

The blog is more — I don't know what to do about the blog. I go back to the blog. I created my own blog. I do it in bursts, and then I fall away from it. I find myself without a lot to say sometimes, and that's a fatal flaw in the blogosphere evidently. You're supposed to say something whether it's of value or not.

Wired: The fatal flaw is that people do it anyway.

Moore: Yeah, I just don't have a lot to say. I don't have a topic for a blog, so I don't write one till I think of something or the mood hits me.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Every once in a while, I read a review of a book I must immediately run right out and pick up--and, more to the point, read. Such was the case Friday, when the NYT Book Review--a version of which I get via e-mail--came and featured a review of a first novel by Jonathan Miles called Dear American Airlines, a somewhat epistolary novel written in the form of a complaint to the titular airline for stranding the complainant overnight in O'Hare Airport. Given my recent misadventures with air travel (my irrational fear of flying has been defeated and replaced by a perfectly rational fear of airlines), this book struck me as a must-read. So I ran out yesterday morning, found it, and, it being a rainy afternoon, curled up and zipped through it.

The premise is that the narrator/complainant, Benjamin Ford, is a middle-aged not so much Beat as beaten New Orleans poet, whose muse died some decades earlier, and now lives in New York City eking out a living as a translator of Polish novels. In his youth, he fell in love with Stella, and they had a daughter, Stella Jr., and his drinking and general blaséness about life ultimately alienated them, and the Stellas (Stella Jr. being less than a year old) fled to California. Benjamin has had no contact with his daughter ever since--and now, he gets an invitation to her imminent wedding and believes that it will be his one chance to atone for all the sins of fatherly absence. However, thanks to American Airlines, his flight is abruptly diverted to Chicago (Peoria, actually, though they bus him and the other passengers to O'Hare), where all remaining flights have been cancelled because of "bad weather." ("Since when do you cancel flights in mid-air?" the complainant asks.) And thus, in his rage, he begins the excoriating letter (which is really quite a satisfying read for anyone who has ever been shafted by an airline), which soon turns into a discursive autobiography.

It turns out that the extended layover turns O'Hare Airport into a kind of purgatory, and as anyone who has ever been stuck in an airport knows, it's rather like a fermata wherein time slows to the point of stoppage (Benjamin also wonders, quite rightly, if memory serves, why there are so few clocks in airports) which gives him the opportunity to reflect on his life. Alongside his own narrative he also digresses and presents chunks of the novel he is translating, a story of a Polish World War II veteran who lost a leg at the battle of Anzio and, since his country barely exists anymore, he wanders Trieste. The Polish narrative increasingly dovetails with Benjamin's own story, ultimately resolving themselves at the end of the book.

If it were just a scathing indictment of airline incompetence, the book would be good enough, but that Jonathan Miles takes the premise even further is what elevates the novel. Yes, it is extremely funny; every page has some great one-liners and observations (a meditation on why there is never graffiti in airport rest rooms, where one would think you would find the bitterest, grumpiest, complaint-oriented people; how uncomfortable airport seating is--"this place is well-armed against comfort"; and imagining the corporate grunt sitting in his cubicle reading this extended missive). But it is also extraordinarily thought-provoking and poignant.

At first blush, this seems like the kind of book that could have been written in probably as long as it took to read (which was really just a few hours), but it's for more complex than it appears; metaphors and return, recur, and pay off; various narratives intertwine; it's really quite impressive. And at the end, you kind of wonder whether or not the layover wasn't the best thing that ever happened to Benjamin.

It's odd how such a slim, simple little book can be so profound, enjoyable, and really stay with you for a while. I'm surprised there hasn't been the threat of a lawsuit from American Airlines, which would actually be a good thing since it would give the book the publicity it so richly deserves.

Clear Eyes?

Scientific American is going rather ballistic over this idiotic Ben Stein movie Expelled, a Michael Moore-esque anti-science, pro-intelligent design "documentary." Columnist (and Skeptic magazine editor) Michael Shermer relates in an editorial in the print edition of SciAm (behind the paywall online) how he was interviewed by Stein for the movie (which had been misrepresented to him as a more or less objective look at the crossroads of science and religion) and how Stein pitched a nutty when Shermer wouldn't give him the responses he wanted.

The film is apparently virulently anti-Darwin and purports to show how intelligent design is being deliberately excluded from schools and universities, and that those who deign to teach it are being summarily persecuted. It's all bullshit, of course; all of the cases presented in the movie have more to them than is presented, and those who were fired were often let go for reasons having little or nothing to do with espousing "intelligent design." Even more bizarrely, Darwin is blamed for fascism and the Holocaust (funny, I thought Hitler had been behind that) as well as communism, which is ironic since Darwin was actually heavily influenced by Adam Smith, and "social Darwinism" and "survival of the fittest" (a phase not coined by Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer) have been oft-used to justify unfettered capitalism. And actually, the Stalinists rejected evolution because they deemed it to be a capitalistic explanation of biology! So someone didn't get the memo, it seems.

I have not seen the movie, but it sounds pretty ridiculous. I am occasionally spammed by acquaintances who send me Internet links condemning evolution and Darwin, apparently in the assumption that the magic power of e-mail is enough to make me repent and reject a subject I have been interested in and reading about for more than 20 years. The focus on Darwin is curious; I mean, evolutionary biology has progressed a little bit since, you know, the 1850s. Specifically, genetics was unknown until the 20th century and after Darwin's death, so the mechanism by which evolutionary change happens was unknown to Darwin. In fact, I dare say that no contemporary biologist would consider him- or herself a "Darwinist." It's kind of like considering Copernicus to be the exemplar of modern astronomy. Sure, he laid a great foundation, but the field has, um, evolved since. And all the people who claim that "evolution is just a theory" obviously haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about and I would strongly recommend, oh, I don't know, maybe reading a book or two about modern evolutionary biology. (I highly recommend Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer-winning The Beak of the Finch.) It's rather like me, who knows next to nothing about religion and who has never read the bible, challenging the Pope about Christianity. I would be quite rightly laughed out of the Vatican--assuming I wouldn't be anyway.

It's odd how this seeming war between religion and science has escalated, since it always seemed to me that science and religion are two completely different things that (ideally) should have two different purviews. Science is about objectively finding explanations for natural phenomena through empirically gathering evidence and reproducible experimentation. New evidence can and often does supersede older explanations, which is exactly what is supposed to happen in science. Religion, on the other hand, relies on faith and belief to give the believer's life meaning and provide a moral framework for proper behavior (which doesn't always seem to work out too well). I don't see that there is anything that precludes someone from being both scientific and religious; in fact, an excellent and inspiring recent book by the Dalai Lama (The Universe in a Single Atom) is the result of said Lama reading science books, visiting research institutions, talking with scientists, and ultimately finding no conflict between scientific thinking and the tenets of Buddhist spirituality--and in fact, he explicitly states that where scientific fact comes into conflict with long-held religious-based explanations of reality, it's religious belief that must change in the face of new evidence to the contrary. It doesn't take anything away from the spiritual and moral underpinnings of faith, it seems to me.

One of my early intellectual heroes was the late Stephen Jay Gould, a vocal proponent of evolutionary biology and someone who was also religious. (And, he having been Jewish, he probably would have objected to this whole "Darwinism caused the Holocaust" nonsense.) Gould never saw that there needed to be any conflict between the two camps. The trouble starts when one side starts insisting that the other needs to incorporate the beliefs of the other. And since we never hear of scientists insisting that particle physics be incorporated into religious sermons, guess which way this goes. It really comes down to whether religion should be taught in science class and maybe I'm a sinner, but I think science should be taught in science classes and religion should be taught in religion classes. A shocking idea, I know. This applies to any other topic; I would never expect Charles Dickens to be taught in high school biology class (but how cool would that be?), but I would also never expect to dissect a frog in English class (but, again, how cool would that be?).

Oh, as for so-called "intelligent design," I don't grant the premise. As someone who has a human body (it could be argued), I find little about it to be intelligently designed--and less so the older I get. And ask any woman who has ever given birth how intelligently designed the whole thing is; if you don't get a stream of lurid profanity as a response, I would be very surprised.

Album of the Day--May 31, 2008

Jesus of Cool
Nick Lowe
1978
Stiff Records
Produced by Nick Lowe

Yep-Roc Records has just released the 30th Anniversary special edition of Nick Lowe's first album (yikes--1978 was 30 years ago?!), which I highly recommend. Nick Lowe is a somewhat ironic figure; he was one of the driving forces behind the emergence of the British punk rock scene, and yet he wasn't all that fond of punk, at least in its rawest form (as exemplified by the Sex Pistols, The Damned, etc.), and always had more of a pop sensibility. He started out in the early 1970s as the leader of pub-rock favorites Brinsley Schwarz, which spearheaded a "back to basics" movement in reaction to all the progressive art rock that was around (I actually like both), which ultimately was the raison d'être of punk. When the Brinsleys imploded, Lowe went solo, and at the same time became house producer for the new Stiff Records, which signed many of the new bands--like The Damned, The Pretenders, etc. He also produced the first three albums by Graham Parker & The Rumour and all of Elvis Costello's albums up to 1982 (Lowe still turns up as bassist and producer for Costello). Lowe's 1976 single "So It Goes" (and the just-as-good B side "Heart of the City") was pop infused with a touch of punk. (And if you were listening to AM radio in 1979--as I was--there was no missing his only U.S. hit single "Cruel to Be Kind.") Anyway, his first album was eagerly awaited, and for good reason, as every track on it is a winner. (The American record label quailed over using "Jesus" in the title and released it over here as Pure Pop for Now People. And this was 1978; imagine the nutty everyone would pitch now.) The album demonstrated Lowe's pop songcraft, his trademark witty lyrics and no frills "bash it out" production style. The album opens with the almost heavy metal-y and sardonic "Music for Money," and switches gears with the new wave-y British single "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass," purportedly written while his band was opening for Bad Company, who destroyed their dressing room. There is the tender love song "Little Hitler," title courtesy Elvis Costello (who would go one better on Armed Forces with "Two Little Hitlers"), and the album closes with the almost Paul McCartney-esque "Nutted by Reality." My favorite song has to be "Marie Provost," a Twilight-Zone-meets-Night-Gallery ditty about a faded movie star of the silent era ("She was a winner/Who became the doggy's dinner") whose career goes south with the advent of talkies and who ultimately ends up being eaten by her pet dog ("That hungry little dachshund!"). The backing musicians include members of Graham Parker's Rumour and Elvis Costello's Attractions, as well as guitarists Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner and drummer Terry Williams--who, with Lowe, toured as Rockpile, and whose sole studio album Seconds of Pleasure will probably be album of the day very soon.

Went With the Wind

Well, this is really just too much. Dick Martin and Harvey Korman taken on the same week? Surely the inscrutable forces that control the universe can't be this cruel. Well, OK, obviously they can. But still...

It is hard to gauge the impact both Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show had on my upbringing--well, maybe someone with a degree in psychiatry could. Anyway, both shows for me were of TV's Golden Age, and it remains amazing to me that two seemingly "square" comedians like Rowan and Martin could have been the hosts of the hippest show on TV at the time. But it worked, because Laugh-In took from the past the past (the tux-clad hosts, the televisual homages to Ernie Kovacs) combined it with topical humor, a late 1960s sensibility, and pure silliness. It was rapid-fire humor--sketches rarely lasted more than a few minutes--and if something didn't work, you didn't worry, because something else would come on in a few seconds.



On the other hand, sketches on The Carol Burnett Show were long, but hardly seemed so. A favorite Korman skit of mine was their Jaws parody Jowls. The highlight of these sketches was Tim Conway getting Harvey Korman to laugh--and at 6:08, that happens. Good-luck ham, indeed.



And this sketch, "No Frills Airline" seems eerily prescient.



A couple years ago, Harvey Korman and Tim Conway toured as a duo, performing sketches and routines. Ken and I had the very great privilege to have seen them at Proctors. (Yes, we were probably the youngest people in the audience.) I seem to recall them reprising the classic Dentist sketch:



And, of course, one of the greatest comic moments in TV history, featuring Korman as Rhett Butler:

Ah, remember when television was actually enjoyable to watch?

But let's not forget Harvey Korman's quintessential bad guy Hedy (that's Hedley) Lamarr in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

The world is a much darker place today.

Telemarketing On-Demand

Here's something interesting, although it may use a definition of "interesting" hitherto unknown to humankind...

I keep getting calls to my mobile phone from the phone number 518-242-8975. They average about four a day, never a message--but then no one ever leaves a message (makes me wonder if I pay extra for voicemail--if so, I should just get rid of it). I really only ever have my mobile on vibrate mode (actually, I did have the ringer on once and when someone called I didn't recognize the ringtone and thought it was a noise on the TV...doh!) and rarely answer it unless my caller ID recognizes the caller. So when I am out and check e-mail using my iPhone, I find these missed calls. Usually I don't care, since I have found that, on the rare occasion when I am motivated to answer an identified call, 99% of them are people asking me for money. I once gave $25 to a charity, ended up on some list somewhere, and now suddenly I find myself in the middle of Dickensian London. Most of the major organs have called me (Heart Association, Lung Association, etc.) as has every disease known to man. Let's not even bring up the Democratic Party, which has telephonic stalking down to a science.

Most people I hang out and/or work with have learned over the years that e-mail, text messages, and Instant Messaging (in that order) tend to be the best ways to get in touch with me. In case you were curious. It's not that I'm antisocial...well, actually, yes, it is.

Anyway, I was morbidly curious, and decided to try to figure out who it was--without actually calling the number (I sure as hell wasn't going to do that, lest it encourage them in some way). On a hunch, I googled "518-242" thinking that maybe I can find out in what town the 242 exchange is located. Interestingly, I turned up a whole user discussion forum about the full number 518-242-8975. Turns out, it is actually Time-Warner Cable. Which is curious, because the number on my Time-Warner account is my landline number, and my land phone correctly identifies them on the rare occasion they call me. So I assume the 242 number is the telemarketing arm of Time-Warner, trying to sell me more channels I would never watch in a million years. On the day when I can purchase cable channels a la carte, I will upgrade from the 24 channels I currently get. Until then, paying for a larger package would just be money down the toilet, since I very rarely watch TV anymore that's not a DVD. Sports are about it, and even then the vile, loathsome commercials keep me from watching at any great length. (Quite frankly, I'd rather read books.)

On the subject of how the telephone has become an instrument of torture and aggravation, I have noticed that I get a lot of calls on my landline (which may not be on the Do Not Call registry, now that I think about it) that are from machines. That's no fun--how can I torture telemarketers the way I used to?

When I lived in California, back before Caller ID and the Do Not Call list, they used to call me all the time when I was cooking dinner (this was when I had a proper job and conventional business hours--ugh), so I used to harass them mercilessly. My favorite thing to do was hold the phone right down into a loudly sizzling frying pan and tell them I can't hear them over the sound of my dinner burning. Once I morally offended someone who was trying to sell me American Express's death insurance (or whatever it was called). (Apparently, if I die, the plan ensures that AmEx gets paid. Um, if I die, AmEx is on its own.) Anyway, the telemarketer told me I could sign up for a free 30-day trial membership--to which I laughed and responded, quite logically, I thought, "You mean if I die in the next 30 days, I can be assured that this plan works? What a deal!" Seemed innocent enough, but she launched into arias about how it was nothing to joke about. I assured her that it was, in fact, something to joke about, and hung up. I must have developed a reputation among the telemarketing community because the calls started to peter out of their own accord.

But I digress...anyway, back to the machines. Perhaps it's the early stages of the robot apocalypse, I don't know. But now I just get inundated by them. So if legitimate people call me and wonder why I choose to ignore the phone ringing (which is really quite distracting when you're trying to write something), it's because 9 times out of 10, it's someone or something annoying. Makes you want to go back in time and beat Alexander Graham Bell senseless with a cordless handset.

I Continue to Keep the Book Publishing Industry in Business

As I pause in my Dickensiana, here is what I have read over the past couple of months:

A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter F. Miller
Read: March 2008
Fiction

One of the classics of science fiction (it won the Hugo Award in 1961), I am ashamed to admit I have never read it. But now I am glad I did. The book starts several hundred years after the present time, after a nuclear war has made much of the Earth a wasteland. The few people that survived have a distrust of intelligence and literacy (hmm...it doesn't sound too far in the future, does it?) and have destroyed most of the extant books. Groups of monks are the only ones who have preserved books and other relics of the past, without really understanding much of it. For example, The Monastery of the Blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz celebrates a 20th-century engineer, and a handwritten shopping list ("Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma") is a sacred document. Over the course of the book, several hundred years pass, and civilization starts to restore itself and repeat its same mistakes. It really is a wonderful book, decidedly pessimistic, but ultimately is one of those books you can't forget about once you've read it.

The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
Read: April 2008
Non-Fiction

On a related note, the non-fiction (perhaps) The World Without Us is a somewhat distressing but rigorously researched look at how long it would take the planet to wipe out any trace of our existence should humans abruptly vanish. Cheery, huh? (Well, actually...) It really wouldn’t take very long at all, especially in places like cities where it takes a great deal of effort to keep nature at bay as it is. Interestingly (and upsettingly), all the great works of humans--art, architecture, etc.--will be the first to go, while all the shit--billions and billions of tons of discarded plastic, nuclear waste, other garbage--will stick around. Makes ya proud. The upshot is that 99% of nature would be quite happy and relieved to see us go, the exceptions being, perhaps, most domesticated animals (except cats, which can easily become feral--big surprise). Definitely food for thought--and fantasy.

The Stone Gods
Jeanette Winterson
Read: April 2008
Fiction

I had to do it. I had to be recommended the Bookslut book review site. Like I don’t have enough to read! One of the titles that got a good review was the science-fiction novel The Stone Gods. It is not unlike A Canticle for Leibowitz in that it deals with human idiocy being cyclical, that as one planet is destroyed, we repeat the same mistakes on another. It's not a great book, but a quick and enjoyable read (I read it in one round-trip train ride from New York to Washington DC). It's not entirely clear (and this is intentional) on which planet it is set, or when, but a team is sent out to explore a new pristine, blue, and habitable planet. Along the way, an interplanetary love story--between an iconoclastic human woman and a female robot--plays out. And there is an interlude on Easter Island, the history of which gives the book its basic theme (and title). It's pretty funny and kind of nuts. Very enjoyable.

A Curious Earth
Gerard Woodward
Read: April 2008
Fiction

Another book reviewed in Bookslut was A Curious Earth, which is OK, but not great. When his wife passes away, elderly Aldous Jones sinks into inertia and puttering about his London home. Eventually, he eases back into life and visits his somewhat estranged son in Belgium, where he falls in with a group of artists, and falls in problematic love with one of them. He returns to London and begins pursuing leisure activities, artistic endeavours, and new relationships. It's a good book, full of nice little observations. The title, by the way, comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, "...And I'd like to look a little more/At such a curious Earth!" A little bit inspiring, a little bit funny, a little bit tragic. it's a lovely book, though falls short of being really great. And some plot points strain credulity. But still...

Odyssey
Jack McDevitt
Read: April 2008
Fiction

While in Washington DC last month, I happened to be in the hotel bar reading The Washington Post Book World and read a good review of science-fiction author Jack McDevitt's latest novel Cauldron. I had never heard of him before, but it sounded interesting. In my wanderings around DC, I came upon a Barnes & Noble and while they did not have Cauldron (or a working crypt...), they did have a bunch of his older titles, so I picked up Odyssey (2002). The premise is that, a couple hundred years in the future, there is a growing backlash against funding space exploration and travel--exemplified by the "Academy." At the same time, there are increased reports of sightings of mysterious outer space objects which are called "Moonriders." As a PR move, it is decided to send an exploration to find out what these things are. Oh, and they find out all right... I like McDevitt--he has a pretty realistic view of the future (I'd bet he's a Babylon 5 fan) although I thought the end of the book was a bit of a letdown. Still, this book was part of a multi-book series, and I like how he makes mention of past stories (even I have not read them--in fact, it makes me want to go read them). I would definitely read more of him, although I'm not in a big rush.

Well, after that sorbet, back to Dickens and David Copperfield, as I am eager to find out how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dagnabbit!

Or perhaps "Nagdebit"...

I confess I have only ever used a debit card once in my life, the reasons being a) I am admittedly paranoid about giving stores direct access to my bank account (continue reading if you think I'm nuts) and b) I have always withdrawn the estimated amount of cash required in advance (because I only ever go to stores--especially grocery stores--with a specific list of items and I am not one for impulse buying), thus ensuring that I don't spend more than I want to.

So then, back in March, I found myself on line at Hannaford's (a local supermarket chain I like better than Price Chopper) and suddenly realized that I had forgotten to go to the ATM. As ever, the fact that my life is a tightrope walk between cheapness and laziness kicked in--and breaking out of line, going to the store's ATM, and getting back in line would take effort, plus their ATM charges me a $2.50 fee in addition to the $2.00 my own bank charges me to use other banks' ATMs. So when cheapness and laziness are both involved, well, that's a no-brainer...

So I used my debit card for the first time in my life, and a week later I see the following story in the news:

A security breach at an East Coast supermarket chain exposed more than 4 million card numbers and led to 1,800 cases of fraud, the Hannaford Bros. grocery chain announced Monday.

Hannaford said credit and debit card numbers were stolen during the card authorization process and about 4.2 million unique card numbers were exposed, placing the case among the largest data breaches ever.

The breach affected all of its 165 stores in the Northeast...

Naturally, I keep Scrooge-like tabs on my various accounts and detected no nefarious activity, but yesterday my bank, in response to this unprompted by me, sent me a new debit card.

Y'know what? I shall continue to stick with cash.

Theatre of the Absurd

No, not Beckett and Ionesco.

I just got my latest mailing from Proctors, which is a great old vaudeville-era theater in downtown Schenectady. I've been there a few times, and it's a great venue that harkens back to a time when going out was actually kind of pleasant. They have some cool things coming up: Avenue Q, which I've heard good things about, and, even better, a revival of Sweeney Todd. Might have to look into that... Of course, the way things are going in Hollywood (and on Broadway), the recent movie Sweeney Todd will likely be adapted into a musical, then re-adapted back to a movie, and over and over again. (Speaking of which, I'm waiting for Mel Brooks to turn his Silent Movie into a musical.)

However, there are also some really disturbing things coming up at Proctors. CSI: Live?!? Ooh, and with audience participation. Come and get autopsied live on stage! I swear, the poster literally says "Fun for the whole family." ("Daddy, what's all that DNA evidence in that hotel room?" Shudder...) A One Man Star Wars Trilogy?!? Even I'm not that nerdy. (Shades of George Michael Bluth from Arrested Development.) Legally Blonde: the Musical?! Oy. Now, does that mean it's going to be re-adapted back into a movie? Awesome 80s Prom? That sounds utterly horrifying. Heck, I didn't even go to my own prom in the 80s (they weren't happy when I suggested "Teenage Lobotomy" as the prom theme). And, good grief, Mark Russell is still around? Yikes.

Statistics Are a Gas

I went to get gas this morning ($3.79! zoinks!--but then in London it works out to something like $10 a gallon, so maybe I shouldn't complain). When I got back I thought it would be interesting (there being a definition of "interesting" I'm sure you are not familiar with) to track how much I spend on gas since I bought my Camry almost a year ago. Fortunately, it's easy to get relatively consistent series since a) I always put off getting gas until the little gas pump indicator light shows, then I fill the tank, and b) I always use the same credit card and I track all my credit card purchases in Excel because I am basically a high-tech Dickens character. And unless I am traveling, I always go to the same gas station.

The chart below shows how this worked out:
Remembering one of the chapters in Daniel Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics, I can manipulate the interpretation of these data by simply changing the scale in Microsoft Excel. So on the one hand, I can see that my spending on gas has gone wa-a-a-a-a-y up in the past 11 months:
Whoa! It's through the roof! But not to worry: with only a few clicks, I can make my gas spending far less egregious:
Ah, there, that's better. Gas has hardly gone up at all.

I could also compare this to what I spent on gas in 1980 which was essentially nothing, since I was 13 years old then.

Just remember that when people use statistics and other mathematical legerdemain (or what Dr. Joe calls "calcubation"), they can prove just about anything they want to. Fortunately, I have nothing to prove and am just being silly.