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Wednesday Caption Contest

I’m starting a new weekly thing, now that I’ve scanned all these old timey German magazine images.  Here’s an image that you should supply a caption for.  GO!

What do you call your sister-in-law’s cat?

Is it my cat in law?  Anyhow, check out this vid by my sister-in-law’s husband:

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Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection

A Record of the Year of Infection

A Record of the Year of Infection

by Don Ruff and illustrated by Chris Lane

Jenny came home last week with a new zombie book for me.  She said she considered it the “me” equivalent of flowers.  Isn’t that nice?  Zombies is crafted as a journal that a scientist/birder keeps during his time trying to survive a food-additive-driven (perhaps) zombie outbreak.  He has both narrative and sketches in the book, along with an involving tale.  Some thoughts:

  • It’s a lovely book, with great zombie art and character sketches.  The writing is crisp and economical, but tells the story well through short vignettes of survivors the main character encounters.  The drawings are pretty great too, especially the portraits of living people.
  • The stories ring true — there are lots of people who survive by happenstance, and the result is that everyone is in mortal peril all the time.
  • I like the gimmick of the food-additive zombie menace.  This means that anyone can change at any time, especially because they all have to keep eating the food despite its potentially dangerous qualities.  At one point, our narrator writes: “It’s my birthday today.  I’m 33.  To celebrate I had a potentially zombifying nutritional bar from my pack (peanut butter chocolate chip) and a bottle of potentially zombifying nutritional water that promises calm focus, energy, and antioxidants (tropical breeze).”  As with most zombie texts of the past few years, it’s some technological development that shapes the outbreak.  This time, it’s aspertame (kinda).
  • This book features a section on how to kill the zombies as well–it’s very hard, apparently, as one particular area of the brain controls the motor function.  In other words, it’s easy to shoot them in the head and not kill them.
  • Toward the end of the comic, we get some sense that the zombies are starting to get smarter.  Woe to us all.

Overall, a good read.  Especially if you received it as a sign of affection.  Ain’t bloodthirsty undead cannibal corpses romantic?

Is that Groucho?

I’ve been scanning and uploading images from an old book a friend loaned me.  It’s a German humor magazine chock full of public domain pictures.  Delightful stuff (except for the racist images).  But the picture below caught my attention because it looks a little bit like Groucho Marx is standing around in the background.

Is that Groucho?

Is that Groucho?

Check out this one too — what the heck is this guy doing?

Tasty paperwork

Tasty paperwork

And finally, I can’t help but think this is an image about sexy dreams.  Or acid trips.  Or both?

Sexy Dream or Drug Trip?

Sexy Dream or Drug Trip?

This Week’s Tweets

  • 21 July: writing log: fiction, 550 words
  • 20 July: The E-Dead essay finished and emailed. Good? it’s done. Bad? 20 days late.
  • 19 July: Good get your hackles up music: Carl Orff’s “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi – O Fortuna”
  • 18 July: Congrats to Sky Wang, a CCC student, whose short film won ‘best of show’ from THE ACCOLADE, http://is.gd/dwM7J

We’re doing something right

On the way home from the pool the other day, a couple days before we’re going to go camping with our friends Michelle and Christopher and their daughter Jordan:

Avery: I love you, Daddy.

Me: Well, thank you, Avery.  I love you too.

Avery: I love you, Mommy. And I love Finn.  And I love my two grandmas.  And I love my Grandpa.  I love everybody I know.

[Jenny and I grin at one another over her head as we walk along.]

Avery: And I love Jordan.

I didn’t inquire why Jordan wasn’t covered in the ‘everybody I know’ claim.

The Titanic “Conspiracy”

The Titanic Conspiracy

The Titanic Conspiracy

Cover-ups and Mysteries of the World’s Most Famous Sea Disaster by Robin Gardiner and Dan Van Der Vat

This book has a comprehensive set of allegations and “mysteries” that aren’t answered by the various inquiries into the sinking of the ship, which were essentially white-washings of the event designed to blame nobodies and to leave the responsible parties relatively unscathed. Gardiner and Van Der Vat would become famous for the other book they published in 1996, in which Gardiner argues (and Van Der Vat disagrees, apparently) that it wasn’t the Titanic that sunk, but the Olympic.  This book doesn’t make that claim, but it does allude to it at the end.

A few comments:

  • My favorite of the mysteries is the newspaper that published a schedule that put the Titanic in port on Tuesday evening.  The authors suggest that somebody at White Star screwed up and published the secret speedy schedule early, indicating that Smith’s excessive speed was part of a plan.
  • They really criticize J. Bruce Ismay’s claim that he was “just a regular passenger.”  Their two pieces of evidence: one, he carried around one of the ice warnings all day; two, he didn’t pay for his berth.
  • They also spend a lot of time detailing the various testimonies about how many people went on each life boat.  The inquiries found wildly different numbers for “people saved.”  The authors make a lot of hay out of the overturned lifeboat that one of the other ships discovered much later, right near a bunch of bodies.  This despite the fact that the other ships claimed to account for all the lifeboats.  Of course, they didn’t bring all the lifeboats aboard, so the overturned one found later could have been one of the ones left in the water.
  • The book also puts a lot of focus on the missing binoculars, which were an essential part of the lookout’s arsenal.  They raise a point that I hadn’t thought of before — in the 30-degree weather, the binoculars would have provided relief from the constant wind of the ship moving 22 knots through the water.
  • The best bits of evidence in the book are the excessive detail used to document the numerous ships spotted by passengers and crew in the two and a half hours between the collision and the sinking.  These ships will be essential to the intentional-sinking theory, but as it is they’re just interesting.

This book isn’t all that satisfying because it doesn’t collect the evidence into a coherent picture — something the other Gardiner books apparently do.  I’m looking forward to reading those.

I Love You, Man

I love you, man

I love you, man

I’d heard a little about this “bromance” before, but hadn’t sought it out.  It’s a funny movie, with an amusing set of characters and funny situations.  A few thoughts:

  • The Jason Segel character is a little uneven — he’s  a strange mix of likeable and utter dislikeability.  Likeable: honest and forthright and funny.  Dislikeable: doesn’t clean up after his dog.  There’s no clear sense of why he has these mix of traits.
  • I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Paul Rudd where he plays such a helpless character.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I saw some similarities to the man in the movie (sensitive, can be friends with women) but he was a bit over the top as well.  I guess that’s how it’s supposed to be.
  • It’s a movie with honesty about characters, which is a nice thing.  Despite what I’ve written above, the characters are within the realm of realism and worked for me.  The only character that’s a little extreme is Thomas Lennon’s frustrated gay ‘date,’ but he’s too funny to leave out.
  • Boy, Jon Favreau captured the super jerk here.  It just got irritating, though, that Peter kept trying to befriend him.  There’s a certain point at which you stop trying to be nice to assholes, and you just be civil.  Also, nice cameo by Lou Farigno.
  • The movie follows the classic romantic comedy plot, with the search for a friend filling in for the search for a lover.  It’s a great twist on a common storyline.  It’s even got the mistake/breakup/resolution finale that all such films must have.

Overall, it’s an entertaining movie that captures well the plight of finding friends as an adult.

Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance

by Bill Kelter & Wayne Shellabarger

I added this book to my Amazon wishlist after it got a very positive review on BoingBoing, and it turned up in my birthday gift pile.  Veeps provides a short, pithy bio of each Veep, along with relevant facts about the administration he worked for and why he’s worth remembering.  The illustrations are funny and there are lots of great quotes, often from the Veeps themselves about why they don’t want the office.  My favorite is the one from William Almon Wheeler on the cover, “I regret that I was nominated.  You know I did not want the place.”

It’s a nice little book, perfect for reading a little bit at a time.  Kelter and Shellabarger do a great job filling in little bits of history and outlining why each Veep was good or stinky.  Most were empty suits (by nature or by circumstance), but there were a few very competent men whose Presidents actually gave them something to do.

Some tidbits:

  • John C. Calhoun (vp to JQ Adams & Andrew Jackson) saw his political career spiral out of control over the social infighting of the Washington ladies circles.  Jackson’s choice for Secretary of War, John Eaton, had an affair with a married barmaid over which her husband killed himself.  Eaton then married the woman, nicknamed “Pothouse Peggy” and shunned by the snooty Washington wives.  When Jackson appealed to Calhoun to get his wife to be nice to Eaton’s new bride, Calhoun refused (or claimed little power in swaying her).  Jackson didn’t forgive him.
  • Martin Van Buren was quite an asshole in his own right, but his Veep, Richard Mentor Johnson, takes the cake, IMO.  Johnson, like many slave-owning men of the era, took advantage of his female slaves.  But to the horror of society elites, Johnson took one of them into his house to live as his common-law wife, bearing their children and running the household.  Johnson seems pretty progressive until you learn that after his wife died, he brought another woman into the house to replace her.  She ran away with her husband, one of Johnson’s other slaves.  When they were caught, Johnson sold her out of spite and then took her sister into his house instead.
  • U.S. Grant’s Veep was Schuyler Colfax, a particularly corrupt man who had the nickname “Schuyler the Smiler.”
  • Henry Agard Wallace, FDR’s second Veep, who gave up the office only eight months before FDR died, was a new-age nutcase who believed in the Masons and thought the Russian communists weren’t all that bad.  The Washington elite were terrified that FDR would die and leave Wallace in charge.
  • I have only the casual GenXer’s view of Watergate, it being before my time and never one of my topics of reading (though I did read Haldeman’s memoir), so I didn’t really know much about Spirow Agnew, except that he was one of Nixon’s scapegoats.  Turns out he was also a corrupt scuzzo.  Who’da thunk?

An enjoyable little book.  Nothing amazing, but not bad either.

The Last Cop Out

The Last Cop Out

The title of this one is particularly striking.  The Last Cop Out.  I haven’t read it.  Do you think it means “The Last Police Officer to Leave” or “The Last Evasion of Responsibility”?

Plus, the purple prose on the back is hilarious: an orgy of blistering destruction.

Garden update

It’s been SUPER hot here.  We’re doing our best to keep the plants robust, but they’re tired tired tired.

  • The peas are done, so we’ve pulled them out.  I think we’ll pull out the vertical nets too, till the soil, and plant a second round of lettuce.
  • We had a nice set of green peppers going until the heat melted them all.  Now there are just two waiting on the plants.  Grarrr.
  • The squash and squash like plants are already flowering.  We’ll have some of those soon.
  • The tomatoes are nearly there — the first one will probably be ripe tomorrow.
  • It looks like we planted too many potatoes, so they’ll be small this year.
  • The same goes for the sweet onions, which we harvested today.  They’re supposed to be drying out for a week, and then we can start eating them.
  • There’s one cute carrot in the middle of where the lettuce patch will be.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire

by Stieg Larsson

The second book in Larsson’s Millennium trilogy continues the adventures of Blomkvist and Salander, following threads that began in the first book.  A few thoughts about the book:

  • I’ve read much (and agree with the ambivalence other people express) about how Larsson’s book shows and revels in a lot of the violence against women which he dislikes.  This was a bigger problem in Dragon Tattoo than in the second book.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some disturbing and brutal scenes, but nothing to the level of the scenes in book 1.
  • I suppose it’s necessary for the story and perhaps I’m a bit naive, but MAN this book has a lot of men who secretly hate women.  Okay, it’s the villains mostly, but the number of people in this story who walk around thinking viciously misogynist things was pretty depressing.
  • The villains who emerge as the story goes on are pretty great, especially Roger.
  • I thought this book does a better job balancing the central mystery and the exposition.  One of the complaints I heard from others as they read Dragon Tattoo was about the financial stuff at the beginning.  This book gave us more about Lisbeth and Mikael (Lisbeth especially), but was able to do so because the central mystery is about her instead of about some extra person.
  • This book goes full speed right up to the end.  I’ve heard that Kicked the Hornets Nest starts right where this book ends, and I can totally see it.

Oh, and there’s actually a point where you “get” the title to this book.  A nice change.

Oh Boy!

Oh, Boy!

Oh, Boy!

by Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern; City Lit Theatre, 10 July

We went to the delightful production of Oh Boy! at the City Lit theatre in North Chicago last Saturday.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Some quick thoughts:

  • I like the one-set-per-act format.  Oh Boy! is one of the Princess Theatre musicals, which competed with large-scale Broadway productions but had only a small theater and not much stage to work with.  As the program said, they had to make sense instead.
  • The cast was generally excellent, though the male chorus didn’t get much space to shine.  My favorite actor of the evening was a member of the female chorus who wore yellow.  She made great use of her eyes, often stealing attention from the person singing in that number.  Really funny.
  • Usually, in Wodehouse’s work, there’s a jaunty character who wields hilarious turns of phrase — think of Bertie Wooster — and whom we like.  Jim is that character in this play, but I’m up in the air about whether to like him or not.  He’s well-intentioned, but in a smarmy, Eddie Haskell way.  I didn’t take the program with me and now I’m stuck without the actor names, but the man who played him was great.
  • I like farces.  This play is a great farce, with plenty of shenanigans and silly songs.  But Oh Boy! makes use of a convention that I generally dislike in fiction — c.f. Meet the Parents — the cowardly lie.  In some farces, much of the humor comes from one character’s ever-escalating lies, usually started to avoid embarrassment.    To be fair, high society in the 1910s was very judgmental, and scandal was more damaging than it is today (perhaps), but still.  I came out on the positive side, but there are a few times in the play where my internal critic was grumbling.
  • In many ways, Oh Boy feels a lot like the Shakespearean rom-coms.  Recipe for Oh Boy!: Take a pinch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘s lovers sporting in the woods, add a dollop of A Comedy of Errors‘ identity confusion, and a helping of Twelfth Night‘s teetotaler Malvolio.  Stir vigorously.  Fold in the jealousy, the earnest lovers, the cynical wits, and the bumbling cop from Much Ado About Nothing.  Pour into a pre-1920s upper class environment to set.  Sprinkle with the preposterous, abrupt ending from any of the above.  Serve to applause.

There’s one number that’s stayed with me for its disturbing content: “A Package of Seeds.”  The stagecraft to present the song is hilarious and delightful, with good dancing and singing from Jim.  But the song itself is kind of monstrous.   In it, the playboy Jim laments that there aren’t enough “beautiful girls” to go around, so he’d love to just have a garden to grow them in.  The second verse includes a creepy image straight out of a horror film, for me: “All through the winter, they’d lie there below/ tucked underneath a mantle of snow.”  I imagine a Frankenstein-like laboratory with frozen women in rows, blue with frost and frozen, like the Paris Hilton image on the poster for House of Wax.  Oddly, the female chorus in the play seem to enjoy this idea.

To be fair, the second act features a female version of the song, “Rolled into One,” in which Jackie expresses a similar lament.  But where Jim’s complaint is that he just can’t get enough girls — he wants his own harem, after all — Jackie’s complaint is that each man is limited in his uses.  She would be happy with one man if he embodied all these things at once.  But it hits on the sexism built into the play itself — the man wants lots of ladies, the woman has to make do with lots of men until she finds the one who has it all.  Oddly, she settles for Jim, with whom she has practically nothing in common and who has VERY different beliefs about marriage and children than she does.  I’ve included the lyrics below.

“Rolled into One”
From Oh Boy!

Though men think it strange
Girls should need a change
From their manly fascinations;
The fact is, this act is a thing we’re driven to.
You don’t have much fun
If you stick to one;
Men have all such limitations.
Look ’round you, I’m bound you
Will find that this is true.

At the opera I like to be with Freddie,
To a musical show, I go with Joe.
I like to dance with Ted, and golf with Dick or Ned,
And at the races and other lively places,
Sam and Eddie are fun.
But I’m pining ’till there comes in my direction, one combining,
Every masculine perfection,
Who’ll be Eddie,
And Joe, and Dick and Sam, and Freddie,
and Neddie and Teddie rolled in one.

Every where you go,
Men are useful, so
Just collect them when you find them.
Catch twenty, that’s plenty, I don’t think you need more.
If they say you flirt,
Don’t be feeling hurt,
That’s a way they have; don’t mind them.
They tell us they’re jealous,
But that’s what men are for.

“A Package of Seeds”
From Oh Boy!
Beautiful girls are so scarce, I have found;
There never seems half enough to go ’round.
I’ve often wished that in gardens they grew,
Warmed by the sunshine and wet by the dew.
If I’d a garden where girlies would grow,
You’d find me there with my spade and my hoe.
My little garden, I never would leave,
I’d work from daybreak until the eve.
Daytime and night, I would cheerfully toil.
I’d kill the blight and the blight and encourage the soil.
And when at last, I had cleared it of weeds,
I’d go and buy me a package of seeds.

All through the winter, they’d lie there below,
Tucked snugly under a mantle of snow.
April, at last, warmth and showers, would bring,
And all my flowers would bloom in the Spring.
Primrose and Myrtle and Lilys I’d see.
They’d be there growing for no one but me.
Delightful creatures: a garden of girls
With fairest features and lovely curls.
All ’round my garden, in rapture, I’d roam.
I’d stay all day there all day there and never go home.
I can’t imagine what more a man needs
Than lots of ground and a package of seeds.

The City & the City

The City and the City

The City and the City

by China Mieville

Mieville flexes his inspiring, impressive author muscles again, making me jealous and happy at the same time.  He’s a great writer, and this book goes in a different way than many of his others have gone.  (To be fair, I’ve only read two others, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, which are both novels in the New Crobuzon world.)

The City and the City tells the story of two cities that are topplegangers of one another — they have a shared physical space but are two separate countries, with two separate populaces and two separate governments.  There are some parts of the city that are completely Ul Quoma, other parts that are completely Bezel.  And then there are shared spaces where people from both cities mingle while assiduously pretending they don’t. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery involving someone from one city killed and dumped in the other city.

Some thoughts:

  • Mieville, like so many great writers, develops a fantasy world that just works like it does.  He doesn’t go out of his way to explain how it works (nor why), but we quickly come to accept that it is the way it should be.
  • The parallels with the eastern bloc and its tiny post-Soviet nations shape the story in significant ways.  One half of the city refused Western help and yet has found its own niche in the modern world.  The other accepted Western help and has foundered in it, failing to climb up at all.
  • I love the invocation of secret societies, of nationalist and unification political groups, of varying methods of policing, arcane technology, and archeology.  All these things dot the story.
  • Yet we never get an explanation of how or why the city IS the way it is.  We just know that to cross from one city to another illegally is BREACH, and brings down the eponymous mystical, slightly magical authority of the interstices and the gutters between the cities.
  • We read this book for my SF book club, and one of our members (newly immigrated from France) emailed me to ask about the words breach and crosshatching.  I puzzled for a little while before I felt I could explain them adequately.  You can read the summary of our discussion on our book club blog.
  • My question to anyone else who’s read this — is it your impression that there are two distinct topographies, and that citizens of the two cities can only see one another in and from within and through the “cross-hatched” zones, or is it your impression that physically, this is one city with two groups living in it?  Or, to ask it another way, in the areas of the city that are ONLY Bezel, is there a corresponding area in the Ul Qoma map that matches that area?

One can’t help but read the story in the context of ideas about urban spaces.  Lynch’s idea in Image of the City, that we each learn our cities by use and experience more than by the bureaucratic shaping of city planners combines with Davis’ City of Quartz suggestion that we control populations through our own reverence for accelerating panopticism.  Trying to help undergraduates wrestle with the idea of white privilege, I invoke my own experience driving in the United States.  In my entire lifetime, I’ve been pulled over once.  For a broken tail light.  On a rural road in the middle of the night.  Most black people have an entirely different experience of community policing.  My experience of the roads is far different than theirs.  A second example — when I travel downtown, I use my electronic CTA card, which is linked to my credit card which is linked to my bank account which is linked to my employer.  Circuits of transactions occur without me worrying or even noticing the cost, $3 being part of my routine budget as a middle-class white-collar worker (or are academics said to have some other kind of collar?  Am I a middle-class mortarboard worker?).  Someone who has to use a cash card and remember how much is on it and perhaps beg fellow travelers like myself for 75 cents so he can get on the bus after his train ride has a much different experience of the same city.

The City and the City makes literal the figurative lines of class and society that we each enact daily.  Whereas the citizens of Ul Qoma “unsee” Bezelians wearing shabby clothes and driving shitty cars, Chicagoans do the same for the indigent in our city.  It’s an effective metaphor, and a great book.

The Dad Life

Thanks to Jason for this:

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