Remember, the "E." is for E. Coli

It's a bit long, but if you have ten minutes to spare, I guarantee you that this will be simultaneously the funniest and most frightening ten minutes you'll have all day.

Enjoy!

Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles

Today is the 2nd of October in Denver, Colorado. Two days ago, the Denver Broncos played what has over the last few seasons become their usual brand of mediocre-at-best football and were thoroughly trounced by the Indianapolis Colts. Denver is, without a doubt, a football town; people here live and die with the Broncos and the whole city is usually just a bit bummed out after such a humiliating loss. Amazingly, nobody cares right now about how the Broncos kind of suck, because the Colorado Rockies are going to the playoffs.

Today is the 2nd of October in Denver, Colorado, and the sports fans of this fair city and fine state are abuzz about baseball, which absolutely nobody expected back in April when the season began. Nobody is talking about how, in our desperation for the Second Coming of Elway, we perhaps ever-so-slightly over-estimated the abilities of our untried young QB, Jay Cutler. Nobody is talking about how, in all the talk during training camp about the Broncos' loaded secondary, we all merrily overlooked the fact that the D-line can't stop the run to save their lives. Nobody is talking about how the Broncos only just barely beat the Buffalo Bills and the Oakland Raiders, two simply awful teams.

Nope, everyone's talking about heroic triples and game-saving double plays and how Garrett Atkins was absolutely FUCKING ROBBED of a home run by inept umpires and therefore it doesnt, in a karmic sense, matter so much whether or not Matt Holliday actually touched the plate or not. They're not talking about Cutler and Champ and Travis Henry, they're talking about Holliday and Tulo and Todd Helton.

The "humor" columnist in the local free weekly rag wrote a week or so ago about how he would gladly trade a good Broncos season for a Rockies playoff run. Looks like he got his wish. And it looks like everyone in town agrees with him, too.

Including me. Go ROCKIES!

'Tis Not Yet The Season

Dear Hollywood Fucks,

Yesterday was, as you may be aware, the 28th of September. This means that summer has officially been over for less than a week. This means that people are thinking about baseball pennant races, football games, maybe hoping to get a few last tomatoes off the vine before the first frost, that sort of thing. Eager sorority girls are starting to think about whether they'll dress as a sexy nurse, a sexy schoolgirl, a sexy witch or a sexy cat for Halloween and whether they should serve cherry or strawberry Jello shooters at the Theta Beta Zeta Halloween party.

So explain to me, you Hollywood-types, why IN THE NAME OF JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IN A SMOKING BIRCHBARK CANOE I saw an ad on television last night for YET ANOTHER GODDAMNED PIECE OF SHIT CHRISTMAS MOVIE!

I mean...

I mean...

For fuck's sake, people. First of all, even if it were being released at a reasonable time, Thanksgiving weekend, maybe, this Fred Claus thing looks like about as much fun as cleaning up my cat's hairballs. We've got Vince Vaughn, who has officially reached the Ben Stiller "Oh God, Him Again?" Level. We've got a slumming Paul Giamatti, wearing the "You're Paying Me in Cash, Right?" look on his face. It's all cutesy and heartwarming and by the end, ol' V.V. is going to learn a special heartwarming lesson about the True Fucking Meaning of Christmas and Giamatti is going to learn a special heartwarming lesson about how There's Nothing in the Entire Universe as Important as Family or somesuch bullshit like that. Actually, I think the official Hollywood line on the matter is that the True Fucking Meaning of Christmas is that There's Nothing in the Entire Universe as Important as Family. Anyway, I'm sure it's all going to be very special and heartwarming.

Whether it's a good movie or not (though, as it's a Christmas movie, my money's on not), the important factor here is that it's the goddamned 29th of September and last night I saw an ad for a Christmas movie.

It's enough to make me want to go on a multi-state killing spree. Please stop, Hollywood Fucks. Please don't shove your inane Christmas bullshit down my throat earlier and earlier every year. Last year it was mid-October. Now it's late September. Next year it's going to be Labor Day, isn't it? By 2010, we'll be expected to start getting "into the holiday spirit" by the 4th of July, won't we?

Please make it stop. Please.


Not to proud to beg,
Doola

Numismatics

I got a Wyoming quarter in change today.

The designs of the state quarters have hit-and-miss at best. There have been a few pretty sharp designs - New Jersey, Massachusetts and Ohio all spring to mind - amongst the dull and the uncreative. Texas' entry was particularly uninspired: an outline of the state and a big star. But the Wyoming quarter is a new low. It seems to be the answer to the unasked question, "What's the least amount of effort a state can put into its quarter design?"

It appears that a couple of guys, assigned to the task by the governor or the legislature or whatever, got together for coffee (a very small cup of coffee), said, "Well, what about that same damn cowboy-and-bucking-horse silhouette we put on every gawt-dam thing with the word 'Wyoming' on it?" and called it a day.

Behold, I Bring You Novelty Facial Hair!

Readers, pause now to contemplate...

The Imperial!

The Hungarian!

The Chinese!

The Musketeer!

The Garibaldi!

These are but a few of the winners of the 2007 World Beard & Moustache Championships. I'm thinking about buying a case of moustache wax and going for the 2008 top award for the Dali.

When is International It Was Vaguely Amusing Four Years Ago Day?*

Seriously, Internet. This was sort of cute once. Now it's just sad. Let it go.




* Curiously, it's 19 September, 2007. What are the odds?

A Plea

Robert Jordan died this afternoon at the age of 58. Once, a few years back, I took a crack at his fantasy epic, The Wheel of Time. I had a hard time getting into the first book. On a trip to the bookstore, I looked at how many books were in the series (nine at the time, with no end in sight) and decided that I just didn't have the time or energy for it all. Still, that's just me, and Jordan leaves behind a vast legion of devoted fans and an uncompleted 12th-and-final book in the series. It's a great loss not just for his family and friends, but for all those fans, too. I'm sure that Jordan dearly wished to be able to finish that last book, both for his own satisfaction and for his fans.

I learned of Jordan's passing from George R.R. Martin's LiveJournal "Not-a-Blog." And this brings me to my real point. George - I write, as if he's reading this - I implore you, I beg you, please work hard on the remaining volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. Please try to eat right and get some exercise and visit a doctor regularly. The disease that struck down your friend Robert Jordan was, as I understand it, a one-in-a-million thing, unpredictable and unpreventable. Even so, try to stay healthy, George.

Also remember that as much as all fantasy fans and fantasy authors are enamored of Tolkien's famous turn of phrase, "This tale grew in the telling," that isn't license to let absurd bloat creep into your stories. Your Song was, by your own reckoning, originally intended as a trilogy, which soon turned to five, then six and now a projected seven books. Don't make it eight, George, please. Your loyal/devoted/addicted readers love this story, not least for its epic scope, but stories are only as good as their endings. It follows, then, that a story without a proper ending can't be much good at all. This goes for all authors of fantasy and science fiction, really. "Epic" is a wonderful quality, but remember that readers need a great ending just as much as they need a captivating beginning and an exciting middle.

Your loyal readers are just dying to find out what happens to Dany, Jon and Tyrion in A Dance with Dragons, let alone how the whole shebang is going to end. Don't leave us hanging. Pause every now and then to think about those people who have stuck with The Wheel of Time since 1990 and are never going to get exactly the conclusion that your friend Robert Jordan imagined. Surely, Jordan must have left behind enough material that a reasonably satisfactory pastiche of Book 12 will ultimately be produced...but those devoted fans are never going to know for sure what Jordan's Book 12 would have been.

Work hard, George. Your loyal fans want to see "A Dream of Spring by George R.R. Martin" on their shelves - not "...assembled by others from the notes of George R.R. Martin." Please.

Telling Lies

Writing a good fantasy novel is much harder than it looks. Creating something that is sufficiently original, entertaining and memorable is no mean feat. Fifty years later, people are still ripping off Tolkien. More amazing is that fantasy readers are still eating up the Tolkien rip-offs like there's no tomorrow. Those authors who aren't ripping off Tolkien are instead lifting from George R.R. Martin these days. Rare indeed is the new fantasy novel that really feels like something unique. About once a year I get the opportunity to read one of these, and it's always a treat. Two years ago, I discovered Garth Nix's brilliant Y.A. fantasy Sabriel and its sequels. Last year it was Naomi Novik's absolutely terrific Napoleonic-Wars-with-Dragons Temeraire series.

Back in July, we were poking around a nice little bookshop during our trip to Louisville, and a cover in the sci-fi/fantasy section caught my eye. I didn't buy the book then, but I devoted the evocative title - The Lies of Locke Lamora - to my memory, and resolved to pick it up at some later date. Pick it up I did, some weeks later, and am I ever glad I did. It is every bit as good as I'd hoped. I'm going to have a hard time waiting for the sequel - Red Seas Under Red Skies - to come out in paperback.

Author Soctt Lynch has created a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of a novel - two great tastes that taste great together, that is. He has combined fantasy with the caper picture, in the vein of The Sting, Ocean's 11 or The Italian Job.

World-building doesn't appear to be Lynch's greatest interest, though admittedly he shows us only a single location in his fantasy world. That location is the city-state of Camorr, a thinly-veiled copy of Venice in a thinly-veiled copy of Italy. There are deeper mysteries hidden in the setting, to be sure, but the important details are a city-state which has canals instead of streets and which is populated by powerful nobles, wealthy merchants and a thriving underworld.

In the midst of this milieu are the Gentlemen Bastards, led by the titular Locke Lamora (by the way, if you're a Firefly fan and you can get through the entire novel without imagining Nathan Fillion as Locke, I'll be amazed). By the time the main action of the novel occurs, they are already fabulously wealthy, but continue to pull elaborate cons on the wealthy nobility because, to borrow a line from Michael Mann's Heat, they don't know how to do anything else, and don't much want to, either. They pay their monthly tribute to the local equivalent of the Godfather, putting forth the appearance of being moderately successful burglars, and everyone's happy.

Happy, that is, until the arrival on the scene of the Gray King. The Gray King and his associate, the Falconer, are the villains of the piece. Villains in caper stories are tricky, as the heroes are, by definition, criminals and outlaws themselves. So the villains in such stories are the ones who don't want to play by the well-established rules and courtesies of the underworld setting. The ones who throw a monkey wrench into the works. The Gray King does just that, disrupting not only the Gentlemen Bastards' carefully planned con game, but the whole of Camorr's criminal society to boot. And he does it in such a spectacularly evil and theatrical way that you just can't help but hate him.

This is where the story really gets going, and it just cracks right along. Nearly every chapter gives you a great "How are they going to get out of this one?" cliffhanger. There are a few genuinely exciting action scenes, which is hard to do with prose. There is a lot of humor, and a fair bit of pathos, too. We even get a gripping climax and, one of the hardest things to do, a satisfying ending.

All in all, it is a spectacular debut for Lynch, establishing him right out of the gate as an author well worth watching. Of course, if this doesn't sound like your kind of thing, I have a long list of Tolkien, um, "homages" for you...

Itly is Full of Eye Talians

For the last couple of months, we've been kicking around ideas for a trip to Europe during my Xmas break. We're talking about New Zealand as a honeymoon-ish trip at Xmastime in 2008/2009, but we also wanted to do a trip this year...sort of a pre-wedding trip, I guess.

Only moments ago, we booked airline tickets for two weeks in Italy. We'll be flying out of San Francisco on New Year's Day after spending Xmas with Emily's Mom and other family and arriving in Rome the next day. Yet to be determined is just how we'll get to Florence for the second half of our trip.

Having spent a good chunk of the last year studying the history of Western Art - which naturally places great emphasis on the Romans and on the Italian Renaissance - I'm quite excited. Emily's been to Rome before, but is excited to go back. And hey, just six-and-a-half years after we met on a backpacking-Europe message board, we're finally going to Europe together!

Woot!

Square the Squared Square

Emily has already posted a lovely tribute to the late Madeleine L'Engle over on her blog, and said a fair amount of what I would have said. Instead, I will say this:

Writing science fiction is always difficult. Writing science fiction for a juvenile audience, perhaps even moreso. Nobody can really set out to create something that will become "a classic" or something beloved of even a single generation of readers, let alone many. But L'Engle accomplished that where many of her contemporaries did not.

Consider, for example, Robert Heinlein. A large portion of his prolific output was what fans call "juvies." Stuff like Red Planet, Starman Jones, and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was meant by Heinlein specifically for young audiences. Good stuff, no doubt, but Heinlein was clearly dumbing it down a bit. And it's all pretty dated, all rocketships, ray-guns and Martians.

A Wrinkle in Time, by contrast, continues to feel fresh and modern, in spite of having been published in 1962. It has a timeless quality that a vast amount of science fiction, especially science fiction of that era, lacks. Because there is nothing specifically grounding it in the early '60s, it is as easy to imagine it taking place in the '80s or in 2007.

And while it doesn't go into enormous detail about relativistic physics or space-time mechanics, the necessary concepts are explained clearly enough that a relatively intelligent 8-year-old can grasp what's going on fairly well. Let me put it this way: last fall, I took an astronomy class. At the point in the curriculum when it came time to explain some of the more esoteric concepts, the professor brought in a guest lecturer, her husband, who was a physics professor. He began explaining the idea of a fourth dimension, I realized it was something I'd heard before. He was not using the exact words, but his explanation was certainly couched in the same terminology as Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit's description of the concepts to Meg and Calvin. I was stunned when, a few minutes later, he actually used the word "tesseract." I had always assumed it was a word L'Engle had invented.

As it turns out, it's a word she had merely appropriated. It's more of a geometric concept, really, than Wrinkle's teleportation/space-folding/wormhole-ish method of travel through space and time. Still, it was a not entirely incorrect word for the situation.

That's just amazing. Intelligent, timeless and entertaining, all in one package? A combination of high adventure and real science that creates a book that both space opera and hard sci-fi lovers can agree upon as a classic? What's not to love?

A Wrinkle in Time is one of a handful of childhood literary loves that Emily and I share. She's never quite gotten how it is that I reached adolescence without reading the Little House books, and I've never quite understood how it is that she got through adolescence without reading The Lord of the Rings...but A Wrinkle in Time occupies a similar space in both of our hearts and minds.

So long, Madeleine, and thanks for everything.

They Named it Twice

One of the internet's finest curmudgeons, Todd of Death Wore a Featherd Mullet, points us towards a typically atrocious piece of writing from the New York Post:

They mention a quote from the New York Post's Mary Huhn, regarding Louisville band Vhs or Beta: "They also chill by shooting hoops, going to a few concerts or hitting dive bars - about the only kinds of fun available in Louisville, Ky., where VHS or Beta formed in 1997 and still resides."

New York City is an endlessly great city. It has an inordinate number of world-class museums. It is the home of several of the world's greatest pieces of architecture. It has a list of incredible restaurants as long as both of your arms put together. It has a fascinating history. It's not even remotely hard to find great music and great theater in New York City. It has produced luminaries like the Marx Brothers, Bogart and Bacall, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee, Arthur Miller and Neil Simon, Jay-Z and Tupac.

The only real problem with New York is that it's absolutely swimming with fucking New Yorkers. Many of them assume that New York is not just a great city, but the only great city. That New York is the only place in the world - or certainly in North America, anyway - with great museums and restaurants, that no other city has a fascinating history or has ever produced a notable or interesting human being.

They assume that every other city in America locks the doors and rolls up the sidewalks at 11:00pm sharp. Many of them still spout that old chestnut, "Where else can you get a pizza at 3:00am?" Yeah, where else? Well, try, I donno...just about every other city of any reasonable size in the country, dipshits! You can get a pizza - a good pizza, too - at 3:00am in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Houston, Denver, Louisville, Seattle...you can do it in boring-ass old Greeley, Colorado, too. Late-night pizza availability is hardly unique.

They blithely assume that people who don't live in New York desperately want to. Us poor souls who don't live in the Big Apple sit around twiddling our thumbs and imagining what all those glamorous people in New York must be doing right now.

After all, what could there possibly be to do in someplace like Louisville, where they probably don't even have electricity or indoor plumbing, or Denver, where people ride horses around the unpaved, dusty streets?

On Obsolescence

Today, I developed film. That I find learning to develop film to be something akin to learning mammoth-hunting techniques or how to repair steam locomotives makes it no less cool to have developed my own film. I mean, who wouldn't want to eat a mammoth steak from a mammoth they personally killed?

It's a curious thing. A few years back, when digital cameras were first becoming popular and widely available, I swore I had no interest in them. I liked shooting on film just fine. Of course, I also swore, like many people back in 2001, that I would never own a cell-phone and look how that turned out, right? As I've seen more and more digital photography, I've changed my views on the subject substantially.

Above our non-functional fireplace, we have three 8x12" framed prints of photos from our trip to China in 2005. I took two of them with my old-fashioned 35mm SLR; I took the third with Emily's 3.2MP Canon PowerShot. To any but the most expert of eyes, it is impossible to tell which of these things is not like the others. Some of the most beautiful photos I've seen in recent years have been digital - check out Leah's photos, for example, or my brother's. If we accept the premise that digital image quality is as good as film (which I do), then photography in either format is about the same things: composition, color if you're shooting color, value if you're shooting (or converting to) B&W, and an eye for interesting images.

Still, developing film today was a powerful reminder of the reasons why there still exists a substantial number of photographers, amateur and professional, who prefer film. The process of shooting, developing and printing with film is delightfully tactile and enjoyably meticulous. The instant gratification of digital has its own pleasures, to be sure. But there's a lot to be said for the feeling of anticipation and the first glimmerings of excitement at what images you may have as you see your developed negatives for the first time. It was a reminder of what I always said when I argued for film over digital back in the day - any digital medium is a set of instructions which a computer will use to recreate a picture, whereas film actually is a picture.

Even so...I like digital a lot these days, and don't plan on going back to film photography on any kind of permanent basis.

Just His 19th Nervous Breakdown

The Reanimated Corpse of Keith Richards has demanded an apology for a bad review of a recent Reanimated Corpses of the Rolling Stones concert in Sweden.

This explains a lot, and actually makes me feel a bit better about the Stones. Maybe they haven't sold out, after all. Maybe they're not just in it for the money. Is it possible that Keith, Mick and the boys actually think they're still a credible rock-n-roll band? That they think they're going out there and "sticking it to the man" every night? That they truly don't see what a bad joke they've become for basically the entire rock music world outside of their namesake magazine?

"Write the truth," Keith demands in his letter. "It was a good show." Oh, well, if Keith says it was a good show, it must have been a good show, right?

Look, Keith..."Beggars' Banquet," "Let it Bleed" and "Sticky Fingers" will remain undeniable classics, absolute essentials of any rock aficionado's collection for as long as there is rock music, whether on vinyl, 8-Track tape, CD or iPod. Nothing you can do today will change that or threaten the Stones' status as one of the best, most significant and important rock bands in history. Your cameo in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End was by far the best thing about that movie, and you were far cooler in a five-minute appearance than Mick was through the entirety of Freejack.

But Keith, you're both an old man and a millionaire many times over. It's pretty stupid for you to be griping about a bad review in Sweden. And don't kid yourself - there's just no way your fingers are as nimble on the ol' axe as once they were. Don't try to convince anyone that the Stones can put on a show in 2007 that's anywhere near what you did in 1967 - because, c'mon, you and I both know that just ain't so. You're the same age as my Dad, Keith, but you look like you're the same age as Bob Dole. Hard living catches up with you. My Dad, at your age, likes golf, fine wine, Sunday afternoon naps, vacations where he can do a little SCUBA diving and a lot of sitting by the pool. He does not, as a general rule, ever try to convince anyone that he's still 23 years old, or even capable of all the things he was at that age.

Hey, go ahead and keep playing. No one's saying you can't. Feel free to put yourself out there to be the butt of jokes on late night talk shows - and seriously, you're old enough that the jokes about how old you are are twenty years old themselves. Go ahead, keep playing, keep making albums of ever-diminishing quality, keep selling tickets to rich and nostalgic Baby Boomers at $200 a pop. But don't get your Depends in a wad when someone points out that maybe you're not what you used to be.

The Loud American

Every now and then as I write, I use a word that I'm pretty sure means what I want to say, but not entirely sure. At times like these, I pause, open my dictionary widget, and look up the word to make sure I'm using it right. Pretty standard practice, I suppose.

The other day, George W. Bush made a speech in which he compared Iraq to Vietnam. What didn't appear in the news stories and the, "Uh, really, George?" commentary was the bit where Bush's speech writers attempted to make him appear erudite and well-read by tossing in a reference to Graham Greene's The Quiet American. The problem with this, as Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher points out, is that neither Bush nor his speech writers appear to have read or at least understood The Quiet American.

And there you have, in a nutshell, what I loathe about this president and his administration. Their philosophy has always been that the appearance of intelligence, confidence and leadership is just as good as actual intelligence, confidence and leadership. A lie repeated often enough and stridently enough becomes just as good as truth. Pretend to know what you're talking about often and stridently, and it's just as good as actually knowing what you're talking about. They don't pause to look things up in the dictionary because it doesn't matter to them if they're truly using the right word in the right way as long as it appears that they are.

Art is Not a Contest

Ah, the internet. Where everyone is an expert on every subject and isn't afraid to share their expertise. Here, for example, we have a fellow who claims to be "an arts buff" and yet here clearly demonstrates that he knows nothing about art. Whining about the perceived "lack of skill" amongst modern artists, he makes a number of ludicrous claims.

"However," sez he, "I contend that the highest skill in painting is the ability to create a convincing human likeness without resorting to tracing a photograph or other mechanical tricks." This is a dubious enough claim to begin with. This "arts buff" seems like he's probably the kind of guy who goes to an art museum and spends the whole afternoon in the modern/contemporary wing snorting and saying, "Well, I could do that!" or even better, "Well, my four-year old could do that!" It's the sort of thing you hear all the time at art museums. I always say to myself, "There are probably ways to spend the day that you would enjoy more...the Natural History Museum is right across the street..."

People tend to think of "art" as a standard by which creative works are judged. Paintings by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet are Art-with-a-capital-A. Pollack, Rothko, Matisse...well, I could do that. Art somehow has to involve a superior talent or ability that "average" people do not possess. An artist is something akin to a professional athlete. Tom Brady and LeBron James are, by objective standards, better in their chosen fields than an "average" person. An artist must, therefore, be better at art by objective standards than an average person, too.

But it just ain't so. Art is not a standard by which creative work is judged; art is the result of creative work. The world of art can perhaps be divided into "good" and "bad." It cannot be divided into "art" and "not art." The point is not that the artist does something that you cannot do, the point is that the artist does something that you do not do. Although some academics will claim otherwise, the fact is that art is ultimately democratic and open to all. Some academics use terms like "outsider art" and "underground art," but it's really all just art. Art is about provoking response, not engaging in a talent competition.

Our "arts buff" throws out an absolute gem in the midst of this: "Picasso was not top-notch when painting people, and this is one of the reasons I don't consider him a great artist: his greatest skill was in public relations."

Up above, at the top of this post, are two self-portraits. On the right is Picasso's famous 1907 self-portrait. On the left...well, that's by Picasso, too. If the "arts buff" had done, oh, two minutes of research, flipped through a basic book of 20th-century art history, done a single Google image search, he would have discovered that his claim that Picasso couldn't paint people is pure bullshit. Picasso was perfectly capable of painting a convincing human likeness. That simple Google image search would have turned up Picasso's famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, certainly a convincing human likeness, on the 11th hit.

Picasso didn't paint the way he did - or at least, the way he did most famously - because he was unable to paint "realistic" portraits. He painted the way he did because he chose to do so. He chose to explore bigger and deeper concepts than the simple creation of "realistic" human likenesses. He chose to attempt to convey a different way of seeing and to transcend the limitations of human binocular vision.

Apple used Picasso in their gramatically horrifying "Think Different" ad campaign several years back, which is just about right. It's not just that Picasso was able to think differently, but that he was able to see differently. And that, to me, is what great art really is - a medium to convey some small bit of the artist's mind or vision. Great art must have a point of view and something to say. Not that it should have an Aesopian moral - but that it should make the viewer think or feel. Convincing human likenesses are nice, but they rarely do that for me.

If you're out there truly making the claim that the man who created "Guernica" was not a great artist, I just can't lend a whole lot of credence to what you say.

All The Wrong Lessons

The BBC headline read, "Bush Warns of New Vietnam in Iraq." Curious and thinking that this was sort of like warning JFK not to go to Dallas in 1968, I clicked thru...

President George W Bush has warned a US withdrawal from Iraq could trigger the kind of upheaval seen in South East Asia after US forces quit Vietnam.

"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told war veterans in Missouri.

Ah, of course. I had forgotten that in Bushworld, Vietnam was a disaster only because the United States failed to "stay the course" and pulled out after only ten years and a measly 60,000 dead American soldiers and a paltry five million dead Vietnamese combatants and civilians. If we hadn't been quitters, if we'd had the balls to stick with it for another ten years, why then we would have won, dammit. If we quit at the first sign of hardship, like we did in Vietnam, we'll never win anything.

In Bushworld, it is reasonable to assume, then, that the main lesson of the study of history is that winners never quit and quitters never win.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of algebra class is that 2 plus 2 can equal 5 if you insist that is does long enough and loud enough.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of English class is that Winston Smith wasn't patriotic enough and couldn't see how much Big Brother loved him.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of science class is that when your hypothesis is disproven, you need to change to a new hypothesis and claim that it fit the facts all along.

In Bushworld, Aristotle was Belgian, the central message of Buddhism is "every man for himself" and the London Underground is a political movement.

No, That's Your 19th Century Anarchist Revolutionary Name

Is there any game in the history of dumb start-a-pointless-five-minute-conversation-at-a-party game than the "What's Your Porn Star Name?" game? Especially since people always get bogged down in the rules of which one is your Porn Star Name and which one is your Drag Queen Name and so on and so forth.*

(Click to embiggen to legible scale)

As it turns out, there is. Nice work, Cat and Girl (aka super-awesome webcomic that I have somehow only just discovered)!


* Or maybe it's an awesome game and I'm just bitter because my Porn Star/Drag Queen name is Jägen 42nd Avenue. Who can say for sure?**



** Actually, I can say for sure. That game is stupid and it sucks.

Busy Busy Busy

We've arrived home after a busy weekend in Cali. Because of the timing of the flight, we never really ate dinner. I spent the entire drive home from the airport literally salivating over the the idea of seaweed salad and sushi-stuffed tofu bags.

A ham sandwich on thoroughly squashed bread was satisfactory...but I was a little disappointed that our fridge didn't magically fill with Japanese food while we were away...

1000 Words

Jennifer de Guzman, E-i-C of SLG Publishing, has this to say in an entry in Blog@Newsarama's "I ♥ Comics" series:

Here’s a confession: Comics are not the storytelling medium I love best. That place in my heart belongs to prose. I have degrees in English literature and creative writing, and when I tell stories, prose is the medium that comes most naturally to me. I adore words, and even as a kid didn’t balk from reading books without pictures in them.

However, as much as I would like to believe that words can express everything, I know that sometimes they can’t, and that sometimes they need to step aside and let images do the talking.

Think of a funny story that you were a part of. Think of how many times you've told that story, grinning and trying to keep yourself from laughing, and you get to the part about how his pants were around his ankles and he was covered in pistachio pudding and that's when the fire department showed up...and then you look up and realize that you're surrounded by a sea of blank or quizzical looks. You know the feeling, right? What do you say at that moment? "Well, I guess you had to be there..." Some things, you just can't describe with words.

It is, of course, possible to write enormously funny prose. Possible, but difficult. The people who can write truly laugh-out-loud funny prose are few and far between, and generally don't get the credit they deserve. Neil Gaiman described part of his impetus for writing Anansi Boys as the desire to write something funny. It was generally assumed that the collaboration between himself and Terry Pratchett on Good Omens involved Gaiman plotting and Pratchett dancing around in the background tossing out jokes. Knowing that this was not the case and desiring to demonstrate his own ability to be funny, Gaiman set out to make Anansi Boys funny. And it is - but in a more dry, witty, PG Wodehouse kind of way, the way in which you read something, smile and say to yourself, "That's funny," not the way in which you actually laugh as you're reading. Gaiman is a terrifically talented writer, of course, but has a tough time making readers laugh. Even his friend and collaborator, the aforementioned Mr. Pratchett, widely acknowledged as one of the great living writers of humorous prose, can't do it all that often. Or try reading one of the rash of books released by stand-up comics about ten years ago - Jerry Seinfeld's Sein Language, or Tim Allen's Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, for example. Again, amusing, but not really funny.

Switch mediums and you've got something else altogether. Get Jerry Seinfeld actually performing, and the material comes alive and is hilarious.

Which brings us to comics - the first strip pictured above is by the great MAD Magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones. It gives us a quick and humorous little story with no words at all. Not only does it not need any words, the joke only works visually. Try taking the same gag and making it funny as a prose piece or a joke you tell your friends at the bar.

Better still is the "9 Chickweed Lane" strip below it. The Aragones piece could work as some form of motion picture just as well as a comic strip. The "9 Chickweed Lane" strip works only as a comic strip. The gag depends on the interplay of words and pictures, but moreover, it depends also on the familiarity of the viewers with the conventions of the comic strip. It can't be translated to another medium, and it presents a bit of humor that no other medium could create.

This, I suppose, is part of the reason why humor strips dominate the newspaper comics page while adventure serials and soap operas have disappeared either to the dustbin of comics history books or "They still publish that?" obscurity. Although humor is possible in all media, it is something to which comics are uniquely suited.

Take that same story, the one with the pistachio pudding and the fire department, and turn it into a comic. Instead of your audience hearing events second-hand, you've suddenly turned them into...well, yourself. A first-hand observer of the events. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm of the opinion that you're going to get a lot more smiles, chuckles and outright belly laughs that way.

Might be there's something to that old saw about the value of a picture, after all...

Look Up

If you have any way to get out of the city this weekend, do it. If there's any chance you can take off work on Monday, take it. Slurp down a couple of double espressos Sunday night, throw a couple of blankets in the car and get as far away from the polluting lights of the city as you can.

Earth is in the midst of its intersection with the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle. The comet is far away, but the dust it leaves in its path is not. Sunday night marks the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, the biggest and most spectacular shower of the year. This year should be a memorable one, as the meteor shower's peak coincides with a new moon. The sky will be dark and the cosmos will put on a fireworks show better than the 4th of July.

As Earth passes through the dust cloud left behind by the comet, the dust will enter the upper atmosphere at fantastic speeds. The tiny bits of cosmic debris will ignite, leaving spectacular trails of light across the sky. At the absolute peak, before dawn on Monday morning, there could be a meteor a minute.

If you have the chance, drive way way out, as far from the city as you can reasonably get. Throw one blanket across the hood of the car, bundle up in the other as necessary, turn towards the east - the meteors will appear to originate from the constellation Perseus, in the eastern sky, just above red light of Mars - lay back on your blanket, look up, and watch the show.