The Spiders from Mars

Today’s Silly Sci-Fi Summary explores a truism about the cinema. They say that some movies are so bad they’re good—well, some movies are so bad that they make you want to chew your own head off. The following film decidedly falls into the latter category.

Previous movies in this series are:

The Atomic Brain
The Amazing Transparent Man
She Gods of Shark Reef
Moon of the Wolf
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Queen of the Amazons
The Incredible Petrified World

Sometimes a filmmaker has a vision, a view of the world that challenges our preconceptions and leaves us changed in some way. We are different after our cinematic journey. But then some filmmakers got nothin’ and are content to simply have scantily clad women frolic on an island while loathsome men (and occasionally spider puppets) paw at them.

The Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
Auteur/Perpetrator: Fritz Böttger (credited as Jaime Nolan, like it matters)
Star of Shame: None to speak of
Monster(s): Half-man/half-spider/half-nightclub manager, two other lecherous oafs

Let’s be clear: the spiders are the least of the horrors in this movie; far more creepy and disturbing are the humans in it, but I guess “Island of Leering Goat Men” wasn’t a compelling enough title. (IMDb tells us that this German/Yugoslavian co-production was actually called Ein Toter hing im Netz, or “A Corpse Hangs in the Web.” One of the alternate U.S. titles is “It’s Hot in Paradise.” I guess no one was quite sure which direction they were going (aside from down the drain). This was a tough one to make it through, and even the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version is rough going.

Oh, and the “horrors” also include the dubbing.

I should have known this was going to be rough when the opening titles feature stripper music. This does not bode well.

Hm... “Distributed by Pacemaker Pictures.” That could explain why the movie goes off when I use my garage door opener. Maybe I shouldn’t use the microwave while this is on. Then again, maybe I should.

OK, scene 1....The horrors!! Oh, it’s just Los Angeles. A palm-tree-lined boulevard. (remember that: the establishing shot is a palm tree-lined boulevard.)

And then...the horrors! Oh, it’s just a guy parallel parking. He is parking in front of a “talent” agency (and one does use the term loosely). Inside, several women are seated in a waiting room; a sign on a door tells us that they are waiting to see “Mike Blackwood.” As one women tells us where Singapore is, the cameraman is immediately distracted and pans down to another women adjusting her stockings. Ah, so the movie’s style is established right at the outset. As one of the women reads about the chief industries of Singapore, another asks, “Doesn’t it say anything about the 32 night clubs?” Damn World Almanac; always leaving out the important things.

The horrors! Oh, it’s just the women’s bad, overdubbed accents, as they discuss whether they have ever been to Singapore. One lady mentions she had a friend who was an oil sheik who took her there. (Huh?) “Aren’t they the ones who run around in them turbans?” “Listen, honey, when they take their turbans off they’re all the same.” Regular Algonquin Round Table this. So we now have the premise of the movie: the women are going to audition for the opportunity to travel to Singapore to dance in their 32 night clubs. Interestingly, this is one of the first movies to tackle the controversial topic of outsourcing. You know, companies offshoring their exotic dancing jobs to Singapore. Tsk.

The horrors! Oh, it’s just the manager who is selecting women for the Singapore trip, “Gary,” whose torso is a perfect square. Have no fear (or, actually, have plenty of fear): he will be shirtless very soon. He swaggers around the room and fondles the women upsettingly. One woman stands up. “I’ve already been to Singapore.” “And you look like it.” What the heck does that mean?

Gary and Georgia, his secretary (or something), walk into the office, where talent agent Mike Blackwood, who looks like Dr. Strangelove, greets them. Gary sits behind Dr. Strangelove’s desk, and they begin auditioning women in the creepiest, most upsetting way possible: the women come in one by one (in an endless scene) and either show their legs and/or dance about clumsily. (Sample dialogue: “This is Babs. Her legs are worth their weight in gold.” It’s a wonder she can walk. “I’ve had all the boys I can take.” Yow. “Are you always so picayunish?” Huh?) Gary says yes or no to each of them in an unnecessarily cryptic manner: He puts his feet up on the desk and, if he likes a girl, he crosses his legs. If he doesn’t, he leaves his legs uncrossed. Georgia understands. I feel for her. Gary then feels the need to explain this pointless system to Dr. Strangelove. “You always were a crazy guy,” says Dr. Strangelove. Oh, yeah.

Cut to an airplane taking off and flying over New York City. And— wait...New York City? They’re flying from L.A. to Singapore via New York? They are soon over Honolulu. What? And I thought getting from Albany to Atlanta involved some weird connections!

The horror!! Oh, it’s just stock footage of a plane in flames and heading toward the ocean (i.e., stock footage). Our auteur dramatizes the horror of the plane crash by putting two women on an all-black set and filming them in extreme close-up as they scream and fall forward. It is one of the silliest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Meanwhile, Dr. Strangelove is on the phone and drinking. “There’s no need to fear the worst. The last we heard the plane was on fire and we lost radio contact....It’s been four days.” Well, that certainly doesn’t sound serious!

Cut to a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Gary and several of the women are splayed out within it. One of the women is crying; “Would you stop that bawling!” says Gary. “You’re driving us all crazy.” It’s a good thing he’s there. “A ship has got to come by here. There’s got to be some land.” How big could the Pacific Ocean be, anyway? One of the women sees a bird. “Where there’s a bird, there must be land!” says Gary. A regular Noah, he is. And sure enough, it takes a while for them to notice the large island directly in front of them. They all start paddling for it.

Because Gary is the lone male, he has to physically carry each of the women from the raft to the beach, while at the same time being as condescending as possible. Oddly, as the women lie on the beach, Gary feels the need to adjust the position of their arms, as if he is posing them for something. It is at this point that all the women turn into shrill, petulant succubi while Gary in turn treats them like misbehaving two-year-olds. That must be part of the filmmaker’s vision. So here they are, trapped on a tropical island—and one with evergreen trees. (Evergreen trees? Are they native to the tropics?)

The next day, the stripper music strikes up as Gary announces that there is water. That is, a waterfall.

The horrors! Oh, it’s just Gary, shirtless. Here’s how to picture it in your mind: go to your kitchen, open a can of Crisco, scoop out a handful, and form it into a ball. Then, roll it in hair. That’s this movie’s leading man. Oh, and as he drinks from the waterfall, there are some overdubbed slurping noises which will forever haunt your dreams, as will the sight of Gary rubbing his hands all over his body. Excuse me, I have to run out and be violently ill...

There went breakfast. Anyway, the women literally crawl into the waterfall and moan appreciatively. Thank god Gary has his shirt on again. “That’s enough, girls! Let’s go have a look around.” Are they on a schedule? As they wander around the island, Gary demonstrates his alpha male capabilities by cutting his hand on a bush. You know, there should be two of him, as he is just too much man for one body. The girls’ accents and the overdubbing start getting even more bizarre.

One of the girls finds something. “A hammer,” says Gary. “There must be someone on this island.” Ya think? I mean, it could be a naturally occurring hammer. “A hammer, with a long handle. It must be for the purpose of excavating some sort of metal. Most probably uranium.” What is he, Louis Leakey all of a sudden? one of the girls says, in a ridiculous southern accent, “Can you eat that?” The horrors!

They then come across a cabin. Inside...the horrors! Actually, yes: they find a man stuck in a giant spider web. How do you blunder into a giant spider web like that? Did he not see it? Gary disposes of the body, and we zoom into what is apparently supposed to be a spider, but looks more like a cross between a crab and an owl (a cowl?).

They investigate the cabin, and learn (between scenes, I guess) that the place belonged to a professor of something or other, who had kept a diary. Georgia says, “The poor professor, when he made the last entry in the diary, never knew how horribly he would die.” I think that applies to most people who keep diaries. “Discovering that uranium deposit didn’t help him any,” adds Gary. I would imagine that large uranium deposits are of help in a very limited number of situations, and being trapped in a giant spider web probably isn’t one of them.

Fortunately, the professor has a lot of canned goods, and the rest of the shrill harpies file in for food. “It must have been a gigantic spider to weave such a large web.” Are we sure she’s not an entomologist?

The provisions will last for a month. Meanwhile, they also find a trunk full of the professor’s clothes. Why did he have women’s blouses? Oh, I so don’t want to know. The girls start fighting over a shirt. “Now stop it or I’ll take care of both of you,” scolds Gary. Um, what does that mean? Spankings? (In this movie that would not surprise me.) “Give me something to drink,” demands Gary, and Georgia gives him a bottle that is on a shelf five inches from his hand. He really is unappealing. Where are the giant spiders when you need them?

The girls continue to bicker, and they all sound like Wilma Flintstone. One woman suddenly has a posh English accent, and says, “I simply cannot stand this frightful heat any longer.” Good job, old bean. And she starts stripping, which pretty much gets to the main point of the movie: to have all the women frolicking around in their underwear. “Why don’t you throw your dirty blouse somewhere else?” The horrors! Oh, that’s just that really atrocious southern accent again. And of course there is an outdoor shower, which the director particularly liked.

Gary announces that it’s time for sleep, at which point the stripper music kicks in again, and we cut to the outdoor shower.

The horrors! Gary stands in the window, shirtless, rubbing his torso. one of the women walks past and rubs against him slowly, moaning “Oh, Gary.” Hang on, I have to go be violently ill again...

There went last night’s dinner. Anyway, Gary finds a revolver, and decides to go for a walk. That can only mean one thing...yes! Spider! Spider! Spider!

Sure enough, as Gary is rubbing his back against a hollow tree (huh?), a giant spider (or whatever it is) creeps out of the hole and bites Gary. Gary shoots the spider, but thanks to the spider bite, he immediately transforms into a half-man/half-spider mutant, although he isn’t any more or less hideous looking; kind of a lateral move, really. The girls all start walking through the woods shouting for Gary. That goes on for a while.

We then cut to a lone woman walking by a pond. The stripper music kicks in again; and she is soon killed by Gary. Two other girls hear her scream and run to her. As they find her body, real sexy music pipes up very loudly. (They’re not real clear about a variety of things in this movie, are they?)

The girls then all start fighting with each other. That goes on for a while.

Twenty-eight days later, two of the women see a ship on the horizon. One of the women starts yelling to it. The other says, “Would you stop that screaming! You’re driving me crazy.” Yeah, you certainly wouldn’t want them to hear you. The ship goes on by. I don’t blame it.

The horrors! Oh, on another part of the island, two more creepy, lecherous, loathsome guys pull up in a boat, and start unloading it. Who are they? Mr. Backstory fills us in: “Bob, I’m sort of glad the professor picked us out to help him with his work.” Ah. And: “Bob, all you think about is whiskey and women.” They then proceed to unload enough whiskey to float the Queen Mary. They waste no time becoming unappealing and creepy. Bob hears giggling, and climbs a tree and leers at several of the women who are frolicking partially nude in the water. He licks his lips...sorry, have to go be ill again...

There went lunch from two days ago. Anyway, the horrors! One of the swimming girls—Gladys—screams and is pulled into the reeds.

The other girls come across the dead spider and the gun from when Gary was bitten. That was 28 days ago, and no one noticed this before? They then ask what happened to Gary. You mean he/it hasn’t shown up for 28 days? What has he been doing all that time? Rubbing his torso?

Meanwhile, it turns out it was Bob who had pulled Gladys into the reeds, and he is suddenly mostly nude and they are lying side by side in a romantic embrace. Gladys thinks nothing of this guy’s sudden appearance or that he may have a boat.

Then the others hear a noise in the woods, and it turns out it is Bob’s partner. They point the gun at him, and his response is, “Hey, baby!” The horrors!

There is this exchange of dialogue among the women: “I think he’s handsome.” “He doesn’t look too terrible.” “They’re the ones who are the most dangerous.” The horrors!

Bob returns with Gladys, and things go really downhill from here. They all introduce each other; the guys tell them that their disappearance made all the world papers. Of course it did. Their ship is coming back in two days. “Just wait until you get back to New York...Maybe you’ll make it to Hollywood.” I thought they had been in Hollywood. Remember the establishing shot? There aren’t palm trees in New York. (I think this movie needed a botanist on the crew.)

The horrors! They then have a big island-themed party which goes on interminably. There is lots of whiskey, Bob hits on all the women, the other guy has a thing for Ann (there was a woman named Ann?). People dance, they love, they fight with each other, and Bob’s partner wastes no time getting his shirt off. Sorry, have to go be ill again...

There went every meal I have ever eaten. Anyway, the party goes on for rather a long time. Ann and the guy who is never named try to have some kind of romance, while Bob gets in trouble by hitting on everyone. One of the girls literally says to Bob, “Hello, big boy.” The horrors! He breaks off from kissing one girl to go off with the second one. For some reason, during this seduction scene, a telephone starts ringing. (Oh, it’s a trumpet. Why it sounds like a phone, I have no idea.)

This goes on forever. I’d recommend you go do something else for a while, and I’ll let you know when something marginally less upsetting happens.

After a lot of sexist blather from the men, Bob and Joe (ah, so that’s his name) start fighting with each other, for reasons that are unclear. But then they start laughing maniacally. Maybe this movie is an educational film on bipolar disorder. The horrors!

Bob wanders down toward the lagoon, shadowboxing while he walks. Maybe the spiders will come back into the movie. Hope springs eternal. Could it be...Yes! One of the spiders bites Bob, and he drops. And none of that turning into a werespider or anything. He’s dead! Woo hoo! Gladys finds his body and screams. Joe and the girls come out of the house. Joe says, “That sounded like a...” yes? “A scream.” Ah. Gary the Spider Mutant chases after Gladys, and Joe and the others chase after Gary. Joe discovers that the gun he tries firing is out of ammo. Doh! He runs back to the cabin to get more, and Gary chases Gladys to the top of a cliff, and Gladys plummets to her doom.

Like most movie monsters, Gary can instantly transport himself long distances in no time to attack whoever is conveniently attackable, and sure enough Gary pops in to attack Joe. He then vanishes, while Joe and the girls make it back to the cabin. Gary, who I guess had to run and pee in the bushes or something, comes back, bursts in the front door, and starts pursuing Georgia. She says his name, and he backs off. While Gary turns his attention to Joe, Georgia lights what looks like a stick of dynamite (dynamite?!). Oh, it’s just a flare of some kind. Whatever it is, Gary doesn’t like it, and he flees. They all light flares and chase after him. Joe says, “No one goes alone. Everyone stay in pairs.” So what do we see? The very next scene one of the women alone.

They chase Gary through the woods. Joe says, “Stop, the quicksand starts here.” Quicksand? Of course. Gary gets that sinking feeling.

Cut to exterior, boat sailing away and...

The End!!! Yes!!!

Oh, man, did this one bite. During the interminable party scene, I read some reviews online and apparently there were a number of these kinds of “nudie/stripper/horror” films released in the early 1960s, particularly in Europe. There are probably better examples (there would almost have to be), but this one has nothing whatsoever to redeem it. Acting? Terrible. Dubbing? Laughably inept. Makeup effects? The neighborhood kids do a better job on Halloween. Script? Come on; this thing could not possibly have been written. It’s basically porn without nudity, and a horror movie without horror. Logically speaking, this movie doesn’t exist. And, oh, how I wish that were the case!

Free for All

I’ve never quite understood the animus that many people have for paying for software. I mean, sure, I’m as much of a cheap bastard as the next guy, but I can think of a million other things I’d rather pay for less than software (cable television, all those arcane mobile phone charges, and don’t even get me started on health insurance). I have no serious objection (other than Jack Benny-esque cheapness) to paying for tools that I use for my business—or even for the things I enjoy outside of work (which do not involve software).

I mention this because yesterday was apparently Software Freedom Day, which I initially interpreted as meaning “turn the computer off and do something fun,” but my hopes were quickly dashed when I read that it is actually about switching to Open Source software. I confess I have mixed feelings about Open Source software; sure, it’s free, and my inner Jack Benny likes that, but I have found that it often requires a bit too much work, even just to download it. I have been using NeoOffice (and am writing this in NeoOffice), which is an Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office for the Mac, and while I don’t dislike it, it seems to do pretty much the same things that Word does only in a more confusing and convoluted manner (as if that were possible). After all, my beef with Microsoft Word is not that it costs money; it’s that it sucks. My favorite word processor thus far is actually Apple Pages, which even though it has its limitations, seems to suck less than Word does. (I have also used OpenOffice on Windows and it seems to me to have all the same things that annoy me about Word. Sure, it’s stable; but that reminds me of the old joke: “The food here is terrible.” “Yes, and such small portions.” Again, my problem with Word—or even PowerPoint—is not that it’s not free, but that it is annoying and unpleasant to use.)

On the desktop publishing front, I tried downloading Scribus—Open Source desktop publishing software—this morning and was confused almost immediately. These are my download categories:

• Source tarball
• SVN Snapshots
• Templates and Sample Documents
• Scripts
• Color Profiles

What the hell is a tarball? Where’s the, um, program? Oh, and this headline caught my eye:

Scribus 1.3.3.12 Stable Release Announcement

Oh, good, it’s a stable release. Thank heaven for small favors. Those of us who are running businesses based on the usability and stability of desktop publishing software really don’t have the luxury of dicking around with what is basically hobbyist software (don’t comment; that’s not the slam you think it is). I’m sure Scribus is a fine program, and I will give it a try one of these days, but for now, I am perfectly happy to stick with Adobe InDesign. And anyone—like a graphic designer—who bases their business and their livelihood on software can ill afford to have that software be anything but reliable. Why do you think it took eight years for designers to switch from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign? Because the former worked, it worked well (or as well as anyone needed it to) and the latter had to prove itself before entire workflows could be transitioned. This stuff has to work, it has to work consistently and reliably, and it has to work without a lot of fuss and bother. Few people in graphic design like updating software; that’s why we rarely do it unless it’s absolutely necessary.

I’m not trying to dis the Open Source movement (quite the contrary; there’s an article in the current issue of Scientific American about how a group of scientists and other innovators has adopted the principle of the Open Source movement to develop advanced prosthetic limbs, simply because the market for them is too small and the development costs too high to make them a high priority for traditional bioengineering research), and I think if you are a computer hobbyist who loves getting under the hood of software and constantly updating and tweaking programs, then Open Source software is for you. It reminds me of people who are really into cars and love getting under the hood and tweaking things—more power to ’em. As for me, I just want to turn the thing on and go where I need to go without a lot of bother. That’s pretty much my attitude toward software, as well.

More importantly, though, while I respect the hobbyist and, well, socialist nature of the Open Source movement, I also respect the fact that there are people who are trying to build a business around software development. How do we promote economic growth if we expect that more and more things will be free? How do we make money? Flaky stock market bubbles? All become consultants and explain to people how to use their free software? If we’re going to start socializing products and services, I can think of better places to start than computer software (don’t get me started on health insurance). (But then seeing how many companies and industries come to the taxpayers for a bailout when the so-called free market fails them, perhaps we’re closer to socialism than anyone cares to admit. Not that I’m necessarily opposed to that; let’s just be clear about it and do it right. The 20th century provided countless examples of it done wrong and disastrously so.)

It also strikes me that there is the expectation that software will be free simply because it is easy to copy and send back and forth. It takes minimal effort to download software, and very little effort in making it available. (This is why no one ever expected that CDs would be free, but apparently MP3s are supposed to be. Like all we ever paid for was the physical medium.) Physical items are much more difficult; so even though, by the logic of the Open Source movement, automotive enthusiasts could create their own cars and give them away for free, the logistics are much more difficult and the physical materials a bit too expensive for that to be practical. But in theory, that is how the automotive—or any—industry should work. What would happen to our economy if that were the case? Sure, there are few materials costs in software development, but there is an investment in time and “intellectual property.” Of course, there is a growing feeling that intellectual property should be free...but if that’s the case, what the hell are some of us supposed to do for a living? Manufacturing jobs don’t exist here anymore. And I don’t even eat at McDonald’s.

At the end of the day, I have no objection to paying a fair market price (yes, that’s a big qualifier) for things that I use and/or like. After all, that’s how our economy is supposed to work.

Talk Talk Talk

Well, last night I appear to have won the Toastmasters Division F Humorous Speech Contest with my "Fly the Unfriendly Skies" speech (scroll down, I'm too lazy to link). As a result, I now compete at the District Level, and journey to beautiful, downtown Trumbull, CT, on October 11. As it turns out, the Grand Poobah herself, the president of Toastmasters International, will actually be visiting our District Conference. Gulp! As if that weren't enough, it turns out there is a Toastmasters club in Newburgh, NY, which will be in attendance. I'm toast...

Remember a Day

Founding member of Pink Floyd dies

Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, has died today following a struggle with cancer. He was 65.

Wright was the band's long-term keyboard player, as well as a songwriting contributor to classic albums such as Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. He also mastered a wide range of instruments including the synthesiser, saxophone and Farfisa organ, during the many years of Pink Floyd's career.

The band formed in the mid-60s, during which time Wright performed as a vocalist on many of the their songs. However, his preoccupation later on was with experimental compositions, a credit to the many instruments he played.

Wright released a solo record in 1978 called Wet Dream and went on to form pop group Zee in the 1980s, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, neither were quite as successful as his original band.

Wright performed with the surviving members of Pink Floyd in 2005 for Live 8.

Fellow founding member Syd Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in July 2006.

Talk Talk

I am happy to report that last night, against all odds, I won the Toastmasters Area F4 Humorous Speech contest, competing against three other folks from several other clubs in the Area. I now get to progress to the Division F contest to be held Thursday, September 18, hosted by State Farm in Ballston Spa.

I will be making some tweaks (including some cuts—I was, I was told I came within 10 seconds of being disqualified for running too long) for the next stage, but for the amusement of those who are not able to come to any of the contests, here is the text (sans ad libs) of the speech as it stood last night:

Fly the Unfriendly Skies

In April 2000, my fear of flying hit critical mass. Granted, I was never a very good flyer. Whenever I flew, I would grip the armrests with a force that could crush coal into diamonds. On one particularly rough flight, I gripped them so tightly that my fingers became embedded and I couldn’t get them out. After we landed and everyone deplaned, I was still unable to get free. The flight attendants had to literally remove the armrests from the seat and I needed to find an emergency room to have them surgically removed. So there I was, walking through the Los Angeles Airport looking like Edward Armresthands or something. It was very embarrassing—and it was then and there that I vowed that I would never fly again. And, for the next seven years, I kept my word.

In the years since, I had joined Toastmasters to get over my fear of public speaking and began accepting offers to speak professionally. Last year, I had to give a presentation in Atlanta, Georgia, so I began to investigate how to get to Atlanta. By train, it would take about 18 hours—one way. Since I would only be in Atlanta for less then 12 hours, that meant that it would take longer to get to Atlanta than I would actually be in Atlanta. That seemed really silly to me, so I decided that it was high time (so to speak) to conquer my fear of flying.

I went to online and started looking at flights. Did you know that the least expensive way to fly from Albany to Atlanta—and I’m not making this up—is to fly from Albany...to Detroit...to Chicago...to Atlanta. Why not throw Seattle in, as well? The kicker is that would actually take longer than the train! So that wasn’t going to work.

I discovered that there are no non-stop flights from Albany to Atlanta, but Delta has nonstop to Atlanta from, of all places, Newburgh, NY. Yes, the bustling metropolis of Newburgh, as opposed to the backwater of Albany. But, whatever. It was a one-hour flight; up, down—perfect! I made my reservations, gritted my teeth, and hit Purchase. And I was on my way.

It was then that I remembered one potential problem. I know there’s not a term for this, and there probably aren’t any self-help books, but in addition to a fear of flying I also had a dread fear...of Newburgh, NY. Now, let me explain. Some years ago, a friend of mine told me about a near-fatal experience she had in the Newburgh, NY, hospital, thanks to the ineptness of the staff. And she said to me, “Whatever you do, never go to the Newburgh, NY, hospital.” To which I responded, unthinkingly, “Oh, I can’t imagine my ever needing to go to the Newburgh, NY, hospital.” I’m not superstitious, but even I know that you don’t say things like that! It just incurs the wrath of the supernatural force that avenges really dumb statements. So now I suddenly had a whole new level of anxiety in addition to the flying: what would happen to me in Newburgh on the way to the airport that would result in my ending up at the Newburgh hospital?

So the next several weeks were fraught with tension.

Finally, D-Day arrived and I am happy to report that I made it to the Newburgh airport without incident. Now, I wasn’t expecting a huge, international airport like JFK or LAX, but I was unprepared for how small the Newburgh airport actually was. For example, the main terminal was located in a strip mall between a Family Dollar and Mr. Wang’s China Buffet. The runway doubled as McDonald’s drive-thru. On the plus side, the only time flights were delayed was when someone didn’t want pickles on their Whopper.

I was very early, as usual, so I checked in—at the Dunkin Donuts counter—and shambled into the terminal and chanted the religious mantra I always repeat when I am under stress: “Where’s the bar?” Well, not surprisingly, there wasn’t one. And Mr. Wang’s didn’t open until five, so I was out of luck there. Fortunately, I had my carry-on bag and had brought a bottle of my favorite single-malt Scotch—a little “liquid courage.” However, you can’t take containers larger than three ounces through airport security—so I had to improvise. (Take out and hold up Ziploc bag with 8 or so 3-oz vials of amber liquid.) Unfortunately, one was shampoo and I had neglected to label them, so it was kind of like Russian roulette. Blecch.

So the plane started boarding and I guess I was expecting a bigger plane, like a 747, or one that was...airworthy. I should have been suspicious when I saw “Spirit of St. Louis” written on the side. The plane looked like something the Air & Space Museum had rejected for looking too antiquated. I climbed in behind the pilot, tied the rope around my waist, and put on the leather aviator’s helmet and goggles. There weren’t armrests, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

The pilot got on the megaphone. He introduced himself as “Wrong-Way Rogers,” which did not inspire confidence. But, soon we started taxiing down the drive-thru—I mean, runway. We were only slightly late taking off; the pilot didn’t want pickles on his Whopper. But soon we were in the air. And, sure enough, an hour later, we landed on time...in a cow pasture not far from the Atlanta airport, which wasn’t bad when you consider that we didn’t have any real instruments to speak of. I quickly deplaned, and was about to kiss the ground, but then remembered that it was a cow pasture, so I simply heaved a sigh of relief.

That night, it occurred to me that in the past few years, I’ve actually conquered what polls have found to be peoples’ top fears: public speaking, flying, Newburgh, NY.... Death is also up there, but I think I’ll put that one off for a while.

I’ve actually flown about a half dozen or so times since then, often on real planes. I have discovered, though, after one particularly horrible experience involving a missed connection and a night spent in an airport, that I had been wrong all these years: I wasn’t afraid of flying, I was afraid of airlines! Which, as anyone will tell you, is a perfectly rational fear.

A Change of Mind

Today’s Silly SciFi Summary courtesy of my Sci-Fi box set poses important questions about an issue of crucial importance in the 2008 Presidential election: brain transplants.

Previous movies in this series are:

The Amazing Transparent Man
She Gods of Shark Reef
Moon of the Wolf
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Queen of the Amazons
The Incredible Petrified World

The Atomic Brain (aka Monstrosity) (1964)
Auteur/Perpetrator: Joseph V. Mascelli
Star of Shame: None to speak of
Monster(s): Creepy old woman; feral creature that resembles Stephen Stills; vaguely Hispanic woman with the brain of a cat

Called Monstrosity in its original theatrical release (and one uses the word “theatrical” advisedly), it was retitled The Atomic Brain for subsequent TV and video infliction— I mean, releases. Putting the word “atomic” in any title in the 1950s and 60s was a surefire way to tap into both Cold War fears of nuclear destruction as well as fears of science getting up to not-at-all-good things. The Atomic Brain, though, is less about either of those things than it is kind of a creepy middle-aged male fantasy. Or female nightmare. Or feline horror (there are certain scenes in this movie that would be utterly terrifying to any cats in the audience.)

This movie was also done on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The movie certainly opens abruptly! Less than a second into it, we are asked, “Can death be outwitted?” Certainly not at chess, as Ingmar Bergman could tell you, although I always thought that if I challenged Death to a game of Scrabble I’d have a fighting chance. But what does that have to do with atomic brains? We are told about how medical science patches up and heals injured people (and the narrator makes this sound like a bad thing)—but “is the transplantation of the human brain the next step?” As it turns out, scientists say yes, but then the narrator goes off on a tangent about “blood-sucking vampires.” A bit of a leap from one to the other, I should think.

In the background, we see Dr. Frank (not Dr. Frankenstein, I hasten to add) puttering around in his lab. I wonder if he is really Dr. Konstantin Frank,* before he got into winemaking. But I digress. Back to the blood-sucking vampires... “Is man now doomed to produce a race of ever-living monstrosities?” I would say yes, but then I’ve been to South Florida. And now we get to the premise of the movie: will rich old people steal the bodies of the young and transplant their brains into them and live forever? Young people, of course, live forever. They never become old; no, not at all. But, okay, I’ll grant the premise. Do go on. “Such questions may see fanciful”—or downright goofy—“but at this very moment, scientists are working on the answers to brain transplantation...and human bodies are used.” They are? (The scary thing is that the religious right thinks that this is exactly what scientists are actually up to!)

We are introduced to Dr. Otto (not Konstantin) Frank and his latest victim—er, patient: a young girl who had recently died and whose body had been stolen. We are told that Dr. Frank transplanted an animal’s brain into her body. What animal? A dog? A cow? A ring-tailed lemur? A spider? Who knows, but it might make a difference. Fortunately, she was just the right height so that the metal support straps cover up her naughty bits. “The brain cells are being reactivated by an atomic fission.” Well, that explains the title of the movie, but—huh? “Has he found a way to outwit death?” Good question.

We then cut to a cemetery, and the night watchman (in a cemetery?) is making his rounds. Dr. Frank needs another body, so he breaks into a vault using a sledgehammer and chisel. As it turns out, he has the physical strength of a two-year-old so it takes rather a while. The watchman sneaks out his bottle (of course) and is easily overpowered by Dr. Frank’s pet/bodyguard/goon Hans, who is one of Dr. Frank’s failed experiments but, as MST3K pointed out, is a dead ringer for Stephen Stills. The narrator expresses wonder about the “monstrosity.” Well, what was anyone expecting? If you transplant an animal’s brain into a human body, what do you think is going to happen? That the result will be able to solve quadratic equations and join Mensa? Jeez. Talk about unreasonable expectations.

Meanwhile, “Inside the vault, a body waits.” Well, there’s probably little else it would be doing. Stephen Stills takes the body back to the car. Well, he’s handy to have around, at any rate. And probably easier to manage than graduate assistants.

The car returns to a large mansion, conveniently located a short drive from the cemetery. Dr. Frank pushes the button to open the glove compartment and the automatic gate slides open. To open the glove compartment, does he need to use his garage door remote? Another experiment that failed, I suspect.

It turns out that Dr. Frank’s lab is below the mansion, and the new body is brought down for another transplant. The narrator expresses concern that brain tissue in dead bodies decays rapidly; “where are the live, fresh bodies he was promised?” Surely FedEx gave him a tracking number. The narrator is also pissed about the fact that all his scientific research has to be conducted at the whim of “a miserly old woman brooding upstairs in her bedroom.” You know, this is the weirdest adaptation of Great Expectations I’ve ever seen.

We then cut to the crotchety old Mrs. March, the rich old miseress herself, played by Marjorie Eaton. Marjorie Eaton, IMDb tells us, had a long distinguished career playing mostly uncredited old women. Here, she gets her star turn. And it is very upsetting. The narrator has mixed feelings about her and her money, “Money horded through a long greedy lifetime, each day more money, each day death getting closer. Ah, but to start life again in a brand new body, beautiful and young.” But wasn’t she at one time young (you would think so) so logically at some point she will arrive back at the same place. Ah, but there are other issues going on: “Hasn’t everyone tried to cheat her? Wanting her money while they smiled at her ugliness?” That does kind of sum up our economy as whole, if you think about it. Then we are introduced to Victor, “this old fool.” Boy, for a narrator, he’s certainly judgmental.

Mrs. March and Victor are evaluating the girls they have “hired” and who are due shortly. “Pleasing personality,” scoffs Mrs. March, “whatever that might mean.” It certainly is a foreign concept to her. Maybe the problem isn’t her oldness.

On the radio, KPLOT breaks in with a news announcement about a body being stolen from the cemetery.

Down in the lab, Dr. Frank has strapped the new body into his atom brain thingie—the metal straps also hide her naughty bits. Boy, I guess every woman in that town is the same height.

Mrs. March and Victor pay a visit to the lab. “The bodies must be fresh,” says Dr. Frank. Well, don’t say “hi.” Dr. Frank also points out that if the police shows up, he has a special button that will set off a nuclear explosion. A what?! Uh, isn’t that a bit of overkill? (And I think you can pretty much anticipate the end of the movie. Although, even at only 10 minutes in, I’m already anticipating the end of the movie. Badly.) When Mrs. March hears of this she says, “Be careful!” Ya think? They watch as the dead girl is reanimated. “She lacks one thing: a brain,” says Dr. Frank. Oh, who needs one of those? They’re more trouble than they’re worth a lot of the time. Victor, like a dork, taps on the glass, as if she were a fish in an aquarium.

Then, suddenly, terror! Horror! Oh, never mind; it’s just a Pan Am flight landing. Sorry; I have a perfectly rational fear of airlines.

At LAX, we are introduced to three young women, who are accompanied by some of the goofiest music cues in the history of movie soundtracks. One buxom blonde apparently has a xylophone in her underpants, which plays in time to the movement of her buttocks. Whatever meager shred of dignity this movie may have had (and it had none) is now gone forever. Her name is Bea and she is supposed to be British, although her unaccountably vaguely Australian accent sounds like someone doing a bad imitation of a Foster’s beer commercial. She sits down next to Nina (pronounced Nyna, for reasons passing understanding), who is supposed to be Austrian (certainly not conveyed through her accent, which only kicks in about every third sentence). Then Anita wanders over and says “Por favor, I no speak anglays very good. ” Oh, please kill me. (On the plus side, one can imagine Lou Dobbs’ head exploding, which is the only way of getting through this scene.) It turns out that the three of them have been hired as “foreign domestics” (huh?) by Mrs. March. Victor turns up to drive them back to the mansion. Victor has trouble pronouncing Anita’s last name (Gonzales). He lives in Southern California and he can’t pronounce the name Gonzales? He should get out of that mansion once in a while.

Now things start to take a creepy turn. “Three new bodies,” says the narrator. “Three fresh new bodies. No families or friends within thousands of miles. No one to ask embarrassing questions when they disappear.” Yeah, those crazy Europeans, not caring when young women go missing overseas. “Victor wondered which one Mrs. March would pick....Victor knew his pick, but he still felt uneasy. Making love to an 80-year-old woman in the body of a 20-year-old girl was insanity.” Ewwww!!!!! That’s what this is about? I need a shower. Yes: Mrs. March planned to have her brain implanted into one of the young girls, and she intended to transfer her fortune to the one she selected (that is, to herself). Victor, apparently in love with Mrs. March (but why?), was looking forward to a best of both worlds scenario—if that’s the best term for it. “It was unpleasant to think what was going to happen to these girls, but a man has to consider his own future.” I’m guessing the theater’s concession stand did not do a brisk business while this movie was playing.

They pull up in front of the mansion. Bea asks, “Aren’t there any nybors?” That accent has got to go. There are no other servants, but, Victor says, “I don’t think you’ll find it boring.” Meanwhile, Stephen Stills prowls the yard and looks on...

They enter the house; “What a jolly little plyce this is,” says Bea, so not British.

Anita sees Stephen Stills peering in the window and screams, although David Crosby would actually be scarier. Everyone ignores her.

They go upstairs and are introduced to their boss. Mrs. March takes great delight in ogling the women and poking their butts with a cane, and it is creepier than you could ever imagine.

Victor goes down to the lab to get Dr. Frank. The brainless woman is wandering around (huh?) loose (if she has no brain, then how...oh, never mind). The narrator tells us, “As with the other bodies stolen from cemeteries, the nerve endings of the brain were too far gone to receive a proper transplant. The experiment had failed to produce anything more than a walking, breathing, zombie-like creature.” Sarah Palin? “But the doctor permitted her to walk around the laboratory. She was quite harmless and at times even...quite amusing.” I am so happy that the movie does not elaborate, as there is already an all-you-can-eat buffet of loathsomeness here. “She doesn’t need to have a brain,” muses Victor. “There could be advantages.” Ewwww!!!!!

Dr. Frank is ordered to give the girls an examination, and the girls begin to get suspicious that they are not mere domestic help. What tipped you off? The job interview in your underwear, maybe? Mrs. March yells at Victor, “Have you disconnected the phones? Can’t I depend on you for anything?” Buy, I can see why she appeals to him.

During the exam, it is discovered that Anita has a big birthmark in the shape of West Virginia on her back. “Hideous,” says Mrs. March. “She’s useless. Do anything you want with her.” The other two are “perfect medical specimens.” Outside, Stephen Stills howls.

Nina in her not-Austrian accent tries to quit. Mrs. March does not let her. Victor wanders in while they are half-undressed and makes some sort of disturbing guttural noise that sounds like someone backing a car over a goat. It is the most pleasant thing to come out of Victor’s mouth, actually, especially when he inexplicably offers his congratulations to the girls, who are starting to catch on that something is weird.

Victor, speaking of old goats, shows Bea to her room. The xylophone is still in her underpants, and it makes a strange plinking arpeggio as Nina slides across the bed. Anita’s bedroom is in the basement, while Nina’s is at the top of the house. “I’ll have to show you,” says Victor. Of course he will.

Bea tries to use a wall phone to make a call, but it doesn’t work. So I guess the March house uses Verizon.

Later that night, Anita is in bed, and hears a weird tapping noise. She opens her door, and, as she screams, we zoom into her teeth and cut to black.

The next morning, Bea and Nina are polishing the silver (if not their accents) and musing on what happened to Anita. “I don’t blyme her for not wanting to sleep in the bysement.” Could she please not talk? Mrs. March shows up and yells at them not to polish the silver as it will stain their hands. They are also told that Anita has left during the night. Later, Bea is castigated for walking up stairs; “those pretty legs will get ugly muscle.” It’s a weird management style.

Nina intercepts Bea at the bottom of the stairs. “Become with me,” she says. Huh? Become what? Oh: “Bea, come with me.” You know, commas exist for a reason.

They—and their weird, freakish music cues—sneak down into the bysement—er, the basement. (Now she’s got me doing it.) They discover that Anita’s clothes are still in her room. “Why would she leave without her clothes?” Have you seen her clothes? They then jimmy open a door; Dr. Frank, whose lab is down the hall, hears something, and wanders out to investigate, clutching a cat. But the girls are gone. Why is he clutching a cat? Oh, now things start to get really upsetting.

The narrator tells us that the doctor’s most important experiment is about to take place, and the grafting will take place with a living breathing human body. That is, Anita’s. “And the brain would come from the doctor’s favorite cat.” (Now this is turning into a Lou Dobbs fantasy.)

Upstairs, Bea is packing. Nina comes by and they decide to somehow flee the house. The soft, almost silent closing of a suitcase catches Mrs. March’s attention through two closed doors and a long hallway. Mrs. March gets up and walks slowly down the stairs, the oboe simulating the sound her joints must be making. (Who the heck is the music editor for this movie?!) She creeps down to the basement and finds the jimmied door and evidence that it had been the girls. As it turns out the girls are right behind her. They quickly run in the other direction.
Meanwhile, Mrs. March struggles back upstairs and locks Bea and Nina in a room.

Victor comes back and tells Mrs. March that she has an appointment to see their lawyer in the morning to change her will. She yells at him for taking so long. Yes, she is one hot mama.
They go down to lab to see what the doctor has been working on and...OH MY GOD!!! Yes, the cat’s brain was successfully transplanted into Anita’s skull—I’m guessing he had to use no small amount of those styrofoam packing noodles or something since a cat’s brain is pretty small compared to a human skull. Mrs. March is horrified. “Does she have all the instincts of a cat?” Is that really the first question that pops into your mind? Dr. Frank demonstrates, and Anita successfully captures, kills, and eats a mouse. I personally don’t want to see the litter box.

While the doctor had been busy doing upsetting things with a vaguely Mexican girl and a cat, the brainless woman ambles outside and is mauled and killed by Stephen Stills. The grisly tableau is watched from the upstairs window by the girls. For some reason, even though the girls are three floors higher than the underground, concrete-lined lab, Dr. Frank can hear Nina yell “Somebody help her!” He runs out and chains Stephen Stills to a tree, which is reminiscent of the most recent Crosby, Stills, and Nash tour.

Later, the girls serve Mrs. March, Victor, and the doctor dinner and, in the kitchen, plot their escape. Bea will attempt to seduce Victor (like that will be difficult). She will then get the car keys. Bea finds Victor in the study having a nightcap (following all his daycaps, I guess). They go for a quiet romantic walk outside past the chained up, hideously mutated creature. While they are having a tender moment in the bushes, Mrs. March calls to Victor, and he goes back to the house. Bea wanders over to a gazebo and sees Anita hanging from the top—do cats climb up concrete and iron gazebos? Someone has apparently confused cats with monkeys. Anyway, Anita scratches out Bea’s eye.

In the blink of an eye (so to speak), Anita is on the roof the house somehow. Nina opens the window and looks up and sees Anita peering over the eave. Nina runs up to the roof to help her. Trying to get down, Anita plummets to her doom (actually, she falls quite gently to her doom).

Now the wheels are really coming off the wagon, and they hadn’t been screwed on too tightly to begin with. In the lab, Dr. Frank is treating Bea while Mrs. March and Victor look on. He holds up her eye in his hand, “Astonishingly complex isn’t it, the human eye.” Could you be more creepy, please? Nina bursts in, is shocked by seeing Bea with an eye missing, and she then tells them that Anita is dead. Dr. Frank runs out. Nina is pissed; she orders Mrs. March and Victor from the lab, and oddly they obey. Dr. Frank returns and says that his prognosis for Bea is good. “I’ve preserved the eye. Let me show you...” No! “She is a very lucky girl,” says Dr. Frank. “Do you think that ironical?” Ironical? Dr. Frank then expresses his sour grapes that other doctors have won Nobel Prizes, while he is stuck in a crazy old lady’s basement because she is the only one “who can supply me with the funds I need to continue my work.” Nina is not impressed.

Bea wakes up and freaks out when she realizes what has happened.

The next day, Victor and Mrs. March return from a day of shopping for Nina’s/Mrs. March’s new wardrobe. They have also made a hair appointment...in Nina’s name. Later, Nina tries on the new clothes while Mrs. March ogles. The narrator reminds us, “the stupid girl wasn’t just modeling Mrs. March’s future wardrobe...but Mrs. March’s future body. So round, so nicely rounded in places that men like.” Sounds like an old Lucky Strikes commercial. Oh, and what a surprise, lecherous old Victor bursts in without knocking. “Don’t stop your style show on my account.” Oh, I think they should.

And now the gloves come off: Mrs. March tells Victor point blank that he is no longer needed. “You are no longer needed,” she says, “close the door on your way out.” “So I’m no longer needed at all, is that what you’re saying?” Um, yes; which word did you not understand? Victor hints that something macabre is about to happen, and Nina catches it. She is curious. Victor slinks out. You think he’s gonna drink?

Yep, sure enough, he is in the study downing what looks like a bottle of A1 Steak Sauce. Nina drops by and asks for clarification to his earlier comment. Victor drunkenly accuses her of being in on a plot to cut him out. Um...by having her own brain removed? He then shows her a press release (press release?) announcing that the March millions will be left to an orphan girl (she’s an orphan?). I guess they’re hoping it’s a slow news day. Victor then adds, “The next press release will be ‘March mansion destroyed by fire.’” Do you really need to send a press release out for something like that? Usually huge mansions that are consumed by fire make the news pretty much by themselves. And sending it out before the fire might raise suspicion. She implores him to help her and Bea get away. He agrees, and has her sign something. Then he tells her to go out to the car and wait.

After Nina leaves, it turns out that Mrs. March has been hiding in the drapes and she pops out and stabs him with a knitting needle. Or I think she does. It’s filmed and edited so weirdly that you’re not sure if they’re even on the same set as each other.

Nina then goes to Bea’s room and, suddenly very Austrian, tries to get her to accompany her escape. “Now; I won’t gow.” Still not British. Nina runs back to the study and finds Victor’s body. She screams, more out of relief than terror, I should think. Dr. Frank chloroforms Nina and brings her down to lab. Mrs. March is strapped into the bed next to her, and it looks like it’s showtime. Mrs. March drones on about how because of her hideous old body, “No one ever gave me any attention. Just my money. I never knew what it was like to be loved for myself.” Hadn’t there been by definition a Mr. March? And, hey, what about Victor? He inexplicably had a thing for her and she treated him like crap! “Why did you kill Victor?” asks the doctor. “Victor was a fool.” You know, again, I don’t think the old body was the problem.

All right, we’re in the home stretch here. Mrs. March is anesthetized, and the doctor glances over at where the cat’s brainless body is hanging. He has an idea...

Some time later, Nina wakes up...and she is still Nina. Where is Mrs. March? Her brain has been put...in the body of the cat! (I guess it would have to be really crammed in the cat’s skull.) The doctor says, “You are now a very wealthy woman, Nina.” He wonders how he can keep access to her money. The cat is pissed and immediately scratches the doctor. “Dr. Frank enjoyed this transplantation,” the narrator tells us. Is that a tone of gloating?

Well, Mrs. March gets the last laugh. The cat manages to trap Dr. Frank in his atom brain tube thing and at the same time trigger the nuclear destruct device. So, basically, it’s like any cat. Nina is still strapped to her gurney. Bea, in bed, suspects something is up and staggers out. She pulls her bandage off to reveal an empty eye socket. Thank you, movie. She helps Nina escape. She runs back for her eye, which she spies in a Petri dish. However, her depth perception is obviously not what it used to be, and she blunders into a piece of machinery and is electrocuted before she can get to it. Doh! Nina flees the building just as it is consumed in flames. She wanders away, followed by the cat—that is, Mrs. March. “She would follow that girl. Some time, some place...revenge would come.” How is that gonna happen?

The end.

And that was how Dr. Frank transitioned from transplanting brains to opening a Finger Lakes winery. Boy, Dr. Frank did have a wildly awry moral compass. He said the goal of his research was to save lives, but if you can only transplant brains from one live body into another live body, that kind of means you have one extra brain that has to be disposed of. In other words, someone has to die to save someone else who wasn’t really dead to begin with. It’s probably futile to examine the moral implications of a movie like this too closely, but all brain transplant movies have the same problem. Maybe the goal should be to work on transplanting human brains into animals. But, as Dr. Farnsworth said in Futurama: “Sure everyone’s in favor saving Hitler’s brain. But put in the body of a great white shark, and suddenly you’ve crossed a line.” So maybe we should just all keep our brains to ourselves. Think about it won’t you? Thank you.

*I hasten to point out that I have visited Dr. Frank’s Finger Lakes winery many times and his wines are excellent and having nothing whatsoever to do with transplanted brains.

Seward's Folly

Someone at AAA is either eerily prescient or has a warped sense of humor. I went out to the mailbox today and Going Places magazine had arrived. What was on the cover but...
I think we could all use Roadside Assistance right about now...

Word Press

I have added a new feature to my Web site: a free monthly downloadable crossword puzzle. Check out the debut puzzle here. As always, comments are appreciated.

More Blogging

I have now become a more or less regular contributor to WhatTheyThink's PrintCEO blog.
This week, I posted about my recent trip to the Creative Freelancer Conference in Chicago.

Panda Bait

Wha? Yes, for those who think that the only environmentally bad part of a computer is on the outside, Asus

today launched the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook, a groundbreaking bamboo-clad product that is truly green throughout every phase of its life – from its conception, production and use to its eventual recycling and disposal.

The only drawback they don't tell you about is that you will end up being menaced by pandas.

Patently Absurd

Via Engadget, and apparently not an April 1 post, Microsoft has filed for, and received, a patent that "essentially amounts to Page Up / Page Down functionality." That is:

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

Now I see no reason to be shy about submitting my patent for "A method and system on a keyboard for turning a lowercase letter into an uppercase letter. In one implementation, pressing a Shift key while simultaneously pressing a letter key causes that letter to appear on screen as a capital letter."

What Would MacGyver Do?

Well, not unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a list of problems solved by MacGyver.

In Praise of Procrastination

So what happens when you write a book called 100 Things to Do Before You Die and then have actually done all 100 things? Well...

100 Things' author dies at 47

So, I'm in no hurry to do them...

Cute? No, It's Snot

Do you want to revolt family, house guests, or even just yourself? Sure, we all do! Then how about this giant, nose-shaped shower gel dispenser:
If it clogs, you can order a giant bottle of Afrin.

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.