You didn't miss anything; I did.
I try to post here daily, but it just didn't work out today. However, tomorrow will see the auto-posting of my usual weekly and monthly round-ups of books coming in and books read, which I hope counts for something. See you after that for possibly more substantive blogging, particularly if anything happens that's worth fulminating about.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Competitive Physics
I spent the day at BEA, and may write a bit about that tomorrow. But, for today, I'm tired. So, instead, I reached into the vaults for this bit of frivolity. It had very little to do with the thread on the Straight Dope Message Board in which it appeared in 2000, and it has even less to do with whatever posts will surround it here. But I wrote it, and I still think it's funny, so...
[voiceover]
Hello and welcome to the 2000 Niels Bohr Open. It's a sunny day here in Los Alamos, where thirty of the world's top physicists have gathered to compete for the most coveted award in all science: The Golden TOE.
First up will be Tsatsumaya, from Case Western. He's chosen a very difficult opening, the Kip Thorne superstring variation, but he looks to be in good form. His arm is racing across the whiteboard, but wait! Oh, no -- he can't cancel the infinities! And Tsatsumaya is out of the competition!
Next up will be Jorgensen of Caltech, but first, a word from GE...
[voiceover]
Hello and welcome to the 2000 Niels Bohr Open. It's a sunny day here in Los Alamos, where thirty of the world's top physicists have gathered to compete for the most coveted award in all science: The Golden TOE.
First up will be Tsatsumaya, from Case Western. He's chosen a very difficult opening, the Kip Thorne superstring variation, but he looks to be in good form. His arm is racing across the whiteboard, but wait! Oh, no -- he can't cancel the infinities! And Tsatsumaya is out of the competition!
Next up will be Jorgensen of Caltech, but first, a word from GE...
Recurring Motifs:
Humor: Attempts At,
Old Posts Resurrected
Friday, May 29, 2009
Picking Up Girls -- a Controlled Experiment
So, with the aid of a phone that automatically takes a picture when it detects a smile, they devised an experiment to test the "puppy pulling power" of ten different popular breeds in the UK.
I'm sure there's something deeply dubious, sexist, and otherwise horrible about this, and the various Humorless Forces of the Internet will soon put their boot in -- but it's also a wonderful example of using geeky advantages to counterweight geeky disadvantages, and I have to salute that.
(I also note that there's a distinctive posture of the young women as they lean over to pet the dog -- I'm uncertain if capturing that was part of the point, or a serendipitous bonus. One excellent example is below.)

[via Geekologie]
Recurring Motifs:
Linkage,
Thrilling Tales of Science
Free MP3s!
And these are the legal kind, too!
If I weren't crazy busy right now -- which, of course, I am -- I'd be poking through this selection of free MP3s (from Amazon, of course, who have proven themselves masters at hooking consumers with low prices and then landing them with higher prices once that hook is firmly set) for stuff I like right now.
If you have more time than I do, click this banner. (Amazon seems to think I might make some money if you do, which seems like an Underpants Gnome Scheme to me, but what the heck. I could use a blog post tonight to prove I made it home safely.)
If I weren't crazy busy right now -- which, of course, I am -- I'd be poking through this selection of free MP3s (from Amazon, of course, who have proven themselves masters at hooking consumers with low prices and then landing them with higher prices once that hook is firmly set) for stuff I like right now.
If you have more time than I do, click this banner. (Amazon seems to think I might make some money if you do, which seems like an Underpants Gnome Scheme to me, but what the heck. I could use a blog post tonight to prove I made it home safely.)
Recurring Motifs:
Amazon Pimpage,
Free Stuff,
Music
Quote of the Week
"Never miss a chance to have sex or be on television."
- Gore Vidal
- Gore Vidal
Recurring Motifs:
Quote of the Week
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Report from the Land of Certified Valuation Analysts
Yesterday I was in the exhibit hall at the ungodly hour of 6:15 AM -- when it was supposed to open -- only to find it already populated by accountants, some of whom (my colleague told me) had been there when he arrived at 5:55. I know not what breed of creature these strange "CVAs" are, but I am sure that they are not men.
Business in the hall ebbed and flowed with the rhythm of sessions and breaks, as always, and we'd made an encouraging amount of sales when we closed up at 6:45 PM. (I was in that hall, more-or-less continuously, for over twelve hours. When I wasn't selling books or rearranging books, I was mostly catching up on e-mail.) Then we went out to dinner, so I got back to my hotel room at about 9:30.
Today was pretty much the same, except the hall didn't officially open until the princely hour of 7:00. I was there five or ten minutes early to find it already full of CVAs eating breakfast. Again, sales were encouraging; we have a shot at beating last year's meeting.
Tomorrow I've got another 7:00 start, though the hall supposedly closes at 4:00. (Nobody's been pushing people out the door so far, though, so it might not happen that way.) Then we get to pack up everything, mark it for shipping via two different carriers, and bug out. (And that, for me, means driving straight home so I can get to BEA Saturday.)
I hope to do nothing more strenuous than spreading cream cheese on a bagel on Sunday. If I feel really ambitious, I may drag the family out to see Up. But maybe not.
Business in the hall ebbed and flowed with the rhythm of sessions and breaks, as always, and we'd made an encouraging amount of sales when we closed up at 6:45 PM. (I was in that hall, more-or-less continuously, for over twelve hours. When I wasn't selling books or rearranging books, I was mostly catching up on e-mail.) Then we went out to dinner, so I got back to my hotel room at about 9:30.
Today was pretty much the same, except the hall didn't officially open until the princely hour of 7:00. I was there five or ten minutes early to find it already full of CVAs eating breakfast. Again, sales were encouraging; we have a shot at beating last year's meeting.
Tomorrow I've got another 7:00 start, though the hall supposedly closes at 4:00. (Nobody's been pushing people out the door so far, though, so it might not happen that way.) Then we get to pack up everything, mark it for shipping via two different carriers, and bug out. (And that, for me, means driving straight home so I can get to BEA Saturday.)
I hope to do nothing more strenuous than spreading cream cheese on a bagel on Sunday. If I feel really ambitious, I may drag the family out to see Up. But maybe not.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
It Must Be True -- It's Science!
In case you haven't seen it yet, an earth scientist explains exactly How Gay Marriage Causes Earthquakes.
I'm looking forward to a similar explication of the mechanism on the East Coast, which is less well-known. But I believe the love waves from Christopher Street cause flooding in Central Jersey.
I'm looking forward to a similar explication of the mechanism on the East Coast, which is less well-known. But I believe the love waves from Christopher Street cause flooding in Central Jersey.
Recurring Motifs:
A Series of Tubes,
Great Mass Movements of Our Time,
Linkage
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Never Drive a Car When You're Dead
Here's my day so far:
- Get up late. (Sleep until almost 7 AM!)
- Finish packing, check e-mail, walk kids to school.
- Drive four hours to Boston.
- Spend nearly two hours getting our boxes released from the bowels of the hotel.
- Spend over two hours unpacking boxes and newfangled computer system and arranging them pleasingly on tables in the basement of said hotel.
- Answer work e-mails for another two hours or so.
- being back in that hotel basement at 6:15 tomorrow morning for the opening of this conference
- working through breakfast and the morning break
- running over for a meeting at eleven elsewhere in Boston
- running back for the hoped-for lunchtime rush
- working through a couple of afternoon breaks and trying not to fall over before the end of the evening reception at 6:30
Monday, May 25, 2009
Nation by Terry Pratchett
Nation is positioned as a book for young readers, but it shows no sign of being the first of three; it tells its story definitively and has an ending that doesn't leave much room for more stories about these particular characters. Given Pratchett's history, it might be dangerous to be too definitive, but Nation is, and I expect will stay, a single novel.
The tone is very similar to the recent Discworld books; that's Pratchett's mature voice, and it invests everything he writes. He's wry and thoughtful and quietly omniscient, as usual and as always. Nothing is a surprise to the narrative voice, which gives a sense of inevitability to everything that happens. It's a tone derived from the classic British books for young readers, from Nesbit and Lewis and the rest, shorn of most vestiges of talking down -- Pratchett only talks down to his readers as a god talks down to humanity -- but still with those undertones of knowing best and just simply knowing. The narrative voice in a Pratchett novel is never surprised or perturbed, no matter what happens.
Nation is a mildly alternate history, set in a world that's very much like our own in the 19th century, with many names changed, some probably altered geography, a few unfortunately silly names, and a convenient tsunami to start the plot. There's nothing there that Pratchett couldn't have worked around in the real world -- there were major tsunami in 1833 and 1883 -- but perhaps the habit of fiction is just too strong with him at this point. It's unfortunate, though, because the small shards of alternate history push Nation away from the realistic novel it's mostly trying to be and towards the realms of Fantasyland, where anything can and does happen according to the author's whim.
That tsunami I mentioned hits the Nation, an island somewhere in the unfortunately named Mothering Sunday chain -- it's never a good thing when you can hear the author guffaw at his own joke -- and the sole survivor of the natives is Mau, a young man who was in the process of becoming a man at the time. Since he was on his way back from Boys' Island, site of the usual vision quest, the tsunami's wave lifted his canoe and battered him senseless, but didn't actually kill him.
It did kill everyone he'd ever known -- his entire village, his entire island, his entire Nation. He paddles back to discover the carnage, and, not completely sane, to bury the dead while trying not to think about what he's doing. These early chapters are the most powerful in the book, and Pratchett does an excellent job of portraying Mau's shell-shocked disassociation and his gradual return.
There's another important survivor of the storm: Ermintrude Fanshaw, a young woman who was a passenger on the English ship Sweet Judy. The Sweet Judy found itself tangled in the trees of Nation, and, through the kind of happenstance that Pratchett has always made careful use of, every single sailor on that ship was cleanly killed and Ermintrude was left untouched. Ermintrude is also Very Important, and that fact is vitally central to the novel -- it's the whole basis for the alternate history, so Pratchett must have decided that she must not only be a young woman from another culture on the other side of the world from Mau, but that she also have social and political responsibilities and a position he could barely understand. (This reader started suspecting Pratchett of stacking the deck at about this point.)
So Mau meets Ermintrude (who, once they have any words in common, calls herself Daphne, joining the long Pratchett tradition of women who name themselves). They start to communicate, with the usual wry Pratchettian commentary on miscommunication and disparate worldviews. They begin to build a new community, as other damaged survivors, from other islands and places, come to join them in ones and twos. Pratchett is a traditionalist, so this is all much more Robinson Crusoe -- stolid, serious, constructive -- than Blue Lagoon. (One never goes to Pratchett for romance.)
Nation could have been the story of two young people meeting after a vast tragedy and finding each other, but that would have been too inwardly-focused for Pratchett: his work is essentially focused on societies than on individual people, and he takes the importance of the eucatastophe much more seriously than most. So it instead is the story of the rebirth of civil society in the wake of destruction and anarchy, and all of the events of the novel line up according to that schema.
The writing is supple and powerful, and the characters -- particularly Mau and Daphne -- are fully realized and deeply rendered. But there's a definite feeling, especially as Nation rises towards its climax, that this is a novel of the old school, teaching a moral that would not have been out of place in this world's 19th century. The great failing of Pratchettian societies is that every person has a place in them -- one place. It's not fair to argue with a novel's premise, but Nation's left a vaguely unpleasant taste in my mouth. Pratchett does make the ending feel inevitable, but it's the bad kind of inevitable -- the one predicated by a world in which horrible things like tsunami happen, and where humans must bend under the storm. Our own world is one such, and it's not inappropriate for fictional worlds to be the same way. But when those fictional worlds have places named the Mothering Sunday Isles, and plucky girl heroines who change their names to Daphne, and two teenagers who can found an island nation and outwit nasty pirates, that tightening of possibilities in the last act feels like a demand of the author rather than of the world.
Nation is a fine standalone Pratchett novel, and very suitable for younger readers. (In fact, my objections to it are mostly in the ways that it's "suitable for younger readers" in an old-fashioned way.) Again, it exemplifies all of his mature strengths and weaknesses -- it's a fine yarn by a great storyteller that wants to be more inevitable than it organically should be. The old Empire is not quite dead as long as Pratchett is still writing, and I hope he continues to do so for years to come.
Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/23
First is the new novel by Kage Baker, The Empress of Mars
Also from the manga world is the first volume of Yokai Doctor
The seventeenth book in the"Graphic Classics" series, all edited by Tom Pomplun and published by his Eureka Productions, is Science Fiction Classics
And last for this week is a Seth-o-rama from Drawn & Quarterly -- two books of classic comics for kids that he designed, and then a new collection of the Seth strip that recently ran in The New York Times Magazine.
Last and largest is the book by Seth -- George Sprott (1894-1975)

Recurring Motifs:
Reviewing the Mail
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Saturday Is Bond Day #11: Moonraker
It was a crowd-pleaser in that room, but I'll tentatively say -- before seeing For Your Eyes Only next week -- that this is where the Roger Moore Bonds teetered over into self-parody. As I noted briefly in the last entry, Moonraker is one part Star Wars and one part photocopy of Spy Who Loved Me: space battles, a tough competitive female agent as the Bond Girl, a world-destroying villain with a secret lair to top the last one, and so on. In fact, the only obvious thing for a big 1979 action movie that it doesn't have is a monorail in the villain's lair. (I explained my theory of villain monorails to the boys when we saw You Only Live Twice -- which has the platonic idea of a lair, with not only a monorail, but a volcano, space-launch capacity, and Blofeld -- and Thing 2 has joined me in my love of all things monorailian.)
Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax is a surprisingly good villain, and Lois Chiles is a decent Bond Girl even working under the snicker-inducing name "Dr. Holly Goodhead." But this movie really belongs to Richard Kiel's Jaws, who was brought back from Spy either as part of the general transplantation or because of his popularity. Either way, Moonraker almost turns into his story, and he not only gets a girl, but also gets his own face turn near the end and a happy ending. Speaking of happy endings, Moonraker exactly matches Spy's ending as well, making this viewer wonder when, precisely, cheap Xerox machines reached the offices of United Artists.
Watching Moonraker soon after Spy inevitably diminishes it, as does watching it with any solid knowledge of physics. (The "zero-gee" space scenes are particularly painful, or laughable, depending on your tolerance for such things.) This is where the Moore Bonds lost their tenuous attachment to consensus reality and started floating away into their own realm, which was fine as long as Moore could sustain them. He still could, this time. Next up is For Your Eyes Only, and we'll see how he did there.
And I'll end with a question for the audience: how far into the series should we watch, myself and my two sons (aged 8 and 11)? I'm committed to running through the last Moore, A View to a Kill, and I'm tentatively planning on including Never Say Never Again (the tepid return of Connery in an unofficial film) and The Living Daylights (the first Timothy Dalton, in a script only mildly changed for him). I'm pretty definite that we'll miss License to Kill, the bloody and depressing second Dalton film, but I'm unsure whether to queue up any of the Pierce Brosnan movies. Any opinions on their suitability for two boys who will have seen all of the Connery and Moore films by then?
Recurring Motifs:
Movie Log,
Saturday Is Bond Day
Saturday, May 23, 2009
OMGWTFBBQ!
(I've always wanted to use that particular initialism, but never before found the appropriate place.)
Yesterday's "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix, written by yours truly, reviewed the first volumes of three manga stories about (and, presumably, for) schoolgirls: Orange Planet
, Ichiroh!
, and 13th Boy
.
Yesterday's "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix, written by yours truly, reviewed the first volumes of three manga stories about (and, presumably, for) schoolgirls: Orange Planet
Movie Log: Zack and Miri Make a Porno

The title explains it all here: Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are ten years out of high school, stuck in dead-end jobs, living platonically with each other, and chronically out of money. When all of their utilities are cancelled over Thanksgiving, they decide to break out their last-ditch money-making scheme: to have sex with each other and film it as a porn movie. (They're also somewhat inspired by meeting the gay-porn-star boyfriend of an old high school friend, played way against type by Justin "I'm a Mac" Long.)
So they assemble their cast, including such nudges to the viewer as ex-porn star Tracy Lords and current porn star Katie Morgan. And then most of the movie is a "hey, let's put on a show!" plot, renowned on stage and screen for at least the past eight decades. It's a Kevin Smith movie, so there's plenty of cursing and a few disgusting supposed-to-be-funny moments, but the actual funny luckily outweighs the supposed-to-be-funny this time. But he's still not a master of pacing, so Zack and Miri lurches from scene to scene arbitrarily, and wanders away from itself several times.
It's a big shaggy lunkhead of a movie, as Smith's better films are, and it's got a fair bit of heart, for which Smith never gets enough credit. But there's still something essentially juvenile about Zack and Miri; it's the joke told by that AV Club geek behind his hand in the lunchroom. If you can be satisfied with that, Zack and Miri is cute and even approaches honest emotion at times.
Quiet Disappearances
Sometime in the last six months or so, the ghost of my other blog -- and the ghosts of its sister blogs, all done for that company that changes its name about as often as I change my socks -- quietly disappeared from the Internet. (There are echoes of it on the Wayback Machine, but I doubt it's all there. And it was mostly linkblogging, so it's not anything that needed to be saved in the first place.)
Yesterday is the two-year anniversary of my final post there -- and of the unpleasant meeting I had that very same day, which led to lots of good and bad things in subsequent months. The lesson from that is that all things pass -- and I hope that the current crop of the laid-off in the publishing world can take a little comfort from that. Things do get better -- they get different, too, but they do get better.
Yesterday is the two-year anniversary of my final post there -- and of the unpleasant meeting I had that very same day, which led to lots of good and bad things in subsequent months. The lesson from that is that all things pass -- and I hope that the current crop of the laid-off in the publishing world can take a little comfort from that. Things do get better -- they get different, too, but they do get better.
Recurring Motifs:
A Series of Tubes,
Blogging About Blogging,
Science Fiction
Great Moments in Bullshit
Writing about art always has dangers for the unwary, and never more when it's modern works being rhapsodically described. Here's one unfortunate partial paragraph by Peter Schjeldahl from the May 4, 2009 New Yorker:
(Example one. Example two.)
If any single work at the Met show ["The Pictures Generation," of '70s and early '80s work] could stand for all, it would be one of a series executed with minimal labor, in 1979, by the artist Sherrie Levine: fashion ads from glossy magazines trimmed to the contours of the profiled heads of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, and framed. Looking at them, you register the sainted Presidents and the soignee models -- and the forms of silhouette and of color photography -- in stuttering alternation. Your brain can't grasp both at once. Nor can your heart. The images aren't neutral. They come loaded with political and social associations, bearing on notions of "America." With diabolical efficiency, Levine made good on a claim commonly advanced for Pictures art: spurring consciousness of how, and to what ends, representations affect us.Uh huh. Sure they do.
(Example one. Example two.)
Recurring Motifs:
Deep Thoughts,
Notable Quotables
Friday, May 22, 2009
Incoming Books: 22 May
But with an afternoon free, and being in NYC...I ended up at the Strand, one of the great bookstores in the world, and of course I didn't walk out empty-handed. I bought a Garfield book for the boys, and a whole stack of good things for myself:
Death By Laughter
Poems and Translations
Sounds of Your Name
And last was The Blue World
Tomorrow is a trip to the library, which may mean another book or two for me. And then I need to write up what came in for review this week -- including two Seth-intensive boxes from D&Q today -- for my Monday-morning post. In short: there are a lot of books here, and that's wonderful. I hope your lives are equally filled with good books.
Recurring Motifs:
Incoming Books
Movie Log: I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single

Alain Chabat is Luis Costa, a professional "nose" who develops perfume and is utterly under the thumb of his widowed mother and five sisters. So much so that when they decide that it's time for him to get married -- he's in his early forties, and presumably has had some relationships, but we see no actual sign of them -- that he doesn't know how to say no politely.
So, instead, he hires the younger sister of a friend from work to pretend to be his fiancee and then dump him at the altar -- then, he's sure, his family will let him wallow in his sadness in peace. Unfortunately, the women in his family immediately prefer Emmanuelle (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to him, and so they blame him when she doesn't show up at the wedding.
Another plan follows, intended to make the Costa women hate Emmanuelle, but, of course, this movie really is the story of two things -- first, how Luis finally grew up and stood up to his family, and, second, how he and Emmanuelle finally fell in love. He does, and they do, but none of that really happens until very late in the movie -- it's not a conventional Hollywood rom-com, which is a very good thing.
I Do gets silly at times -- very early on, it telegraphs that it will not be overly serious when, in a flashback, Luis cannot remember if he was in one of two musically-named phases, with the appropriate over-the-top costumes for each. It means well, and it has fun along the way, but it's not out to do anything but entertain, which is just fine.
The one way I could fault I Do is to say that, for a French movie about love, there's vanishingly little sex in it. Most people could watch this movie with their aged mothers or maiden aunts without raising a blush. For many, this may be a positive -- but, when I see a French movie, I expect a bit more joie de vivre.
Recurring Motifs:
Movie Log
We Have Ways of Making You Have Fun
Amazon has an Outdoor Fun Store
this year, and you know what that means -- you must have fun, and you must do it outdoors, and you must purchase the appropriate implements of fun to do so.
Your e-commerce overlords trust that only one notice will be necessary....
Your e-commerce overlords trust that only one notice will be necessary....
Recurring Motifs:
Amazon Pimpage,
Linkage
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