Just Read: Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard

I've hit another "I don't want to read fiction" patch, and just spent about half an hour poking through my bookshelves looking for something to read next. (Not good enough but close: New Grub Street by George Gissing and Shadows of Blue & Gray by Ambrose Bierce.) The feeling was even worse Sunday night, so I chose something very frivolous to read.

This thing, in fact: Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard.

I picked it up as a bound galley from a giveaway shelf at work (and which is going back to that same shelf tomorrow). Stoddard was a young Englishman in 1998 (he's thus only a slightly older one now) when he moved to New York to be with his then-girlfriend and decided he wanted to stay here. He doesn't seem to have had much in the way of skills or aptitude (or desire, or motivation) for anything in particular, and eventually drifted into being a sex guinea pig columnist for Nerve.

There's a fair bit of deviant sex in the middle of the book, but the beginning is the usual "my life and hard times" crap, in which Stoddard explains who he is and how he got there (in a manner that made this reader just wish he'd get to the smutty stuff or at least do anything interesting and non-cliched). The sex stuff trails off near the end, too, as Stoddard tries to assess The Meaning of His Life.

So, yes, it is the standard sex worker memoir, only from the point of view of a guy who wrote a on-line column for three years, instead of being a dominatrix or porn star or something more obviously sex-worker-ish. It's only mildly lame, but I wish I'd been in a mood to read something more substantial two days ago. (Once I start a book for pleasure, I pretty much always finish it; I have managed to develop strategies to partially read books for work, but they don't really apply to something I'm reading ostensibly for my own enjoyment.)

And it is a memoir, not a collection of columns or anything else; I gather the actual sex stories are more detailed in the Nerve columns (which seem to all still be available online for free, unlike the book, which costs money and is only available on that old-fashioned paper stuff), but I haven't followed them. So only read this if you want the true story of one English lad's sexual awakening in (very) downtown Gotham.

Movie Log: Caddyshack

I'd never actually seen Caddyshack before; I guess I spent all my early '80s dumb-comedy time with Meatballs and Ghostbusters. (And this was an R-rated movie that came out when I was 11, so I couldn't officially see it for a while...and I have to admit, I had very little interest in golf then, or even now, which kept me away from it as well.)

But I'm watching a lot of old dumb comedies now, and catching up on the ones I missed. (I hope to catch up on serious movies eventually, but I haven't been in the mood to watch anything depressing alone recently -- and "serious" usually means "depressing," when it comes to movies.)

This is basically a generic shortish movie in the semi-serious Breaking Away mold, with a bunch of comedy subplots (Bill Murry as the gopher-hunting groundskeeper, Rodney Dangerfield as the rich jerk who might buy the country club, and so on) hanging loosely from various points, and (incidentally) providing most of the interest. In the time-honored comedy movie tradition, it apparently started off being a semi-straight golf movie with supporting roles for a bunch of funny people, and those actors ran away with the movie, since they were much more interesting on a minute-to-minute basis than the ostensible plot.

I suspect it's funnier seen in a crowd than alone, but it was pleasant enough by itself. It does feel very '80s to me, though, and not just in a "look at how young those people were" way. (And, if I were actually a feminist -- I'm not, though Vassar tried its damndest to make me one -- I'd comment on the very few roles for women here, including the one "hot slut" who manages to be the love sex interest for two of our main characters, sleeping with both of them to ensure that R-rating.)

I'll end with two things that puzzled me:

1. Where is this movie supposed to be set? I might have missed some dialogue placing it -- and it's not that important anyway -- but I'd like to know. It seems to be in some generic suburbia that isn't near New York, but nothing more specific than that.
2. And why does the hero's girlfriend have a thick Irish accent? Is she supposed to be straight off the boat? Was that a joke of some kind?

Movie Log: Meet the Robinsons

The boys were finally back to health and the streets cleared of floods on Saturday, so we went out to see the movie we'd planned on seeing two weeks ago: Meet the Robinsons.

It's not as good as it could be, but it's much better than the last Disney CGI effort, Chicken Little (which had a few good jokes and a nice look, but otherwise was a mess). It lost a bit of momentum when we saw it, since the picture cut out twice (and, the second time, the sound cut out too and the house lights came on for about five minutes). Come to think of it, I should also mention that we saw it in 3-D, because the boys love that, though I find it distracting and confusing. (I wear glasses, and my eyes are not of equal weakness, so 3-D often doesn't quite work for me. The more "3-D" this movie got, the more it hurt my eyes, which should be taken into account.)

Given all that, I liked Meet the Robinsons quite a bit, and probably would have liked it much better under perfect conditions. It's not a Pixar-level family movie, but, on the other hand, neither was Cars. (Robinsons is better than Cars, though it's close: the obvious message in Robinsons is beaten in with a somewhat larger sledgehammer, but the incidental humor in Robinsons is much more organic...and funny...than that in Cars.)

Speaking of that obvious message...I can't remember the last time the moral of a movie was underlined by actual fireworks. (And I am not kidding. Ouch.) I know that scene was supposed to be over-the-top, and therefore funny, but it was just painful and obvious in its "look at us, we've got a Good Message in this here movie, just like all those Christian talking vegetables do"-ness. If the message had actually been integrated into the movie, rather than sitting on top of it like an egg floating on a sea of breakfast-sausage grease, Robinsons could have been the best animated film since The Incredibles. OK, one other thing -- the Robinson family is very big, and introduced very quickly, and (even with the joke about that afterward) it doesn't quite work.

Even given those two failings, it's a very funny movie (both visually and verbally), with wonderful characters and a gorgeous look. (If William Joyce wanted to storyboard and production-design one animated movie a year, I'd be perfectly happy; his style lends itself very well to modern CGI.)

Let's see, what else? Oh, yes -- it's a time-travel movie, so certain expectations are set up. Anyone at all familiar with time-travel stories will see a certain plot twist coming a good half-an-hour before its revealed, but one does have to grant that this is a movie for kids. And the movie plays fair with the twist, so I'm not complaining about it: just pointing out how smart and savvy I am.

All in all, this is one of the better animated movies of recent years, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again on DVD eventually. (And, if I know my kids, seeing it again and again and again...)

Just Read: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

I have a longish post -- which I'm not sure if I'm going to publish -- called "Ruminations on the 'Old Man's War'-iverse," where I poke at the background details that have been bugging me since Old Man's War. (I seem to do this a lot; I have another unpublished post about Darkover, and there's one thing about Kage Baker's Company series I'm trying to put into the right words. I have the kind of mind that likes to have everything tied up in neat little packages, so when books I like have details I can't quite believe in, it's like a rash I have to keep scratching.)

Anyway, leaving my bizarre idiosyncrasies out of it, this is another swell adventure novel from Scalzi, ending the loose trilogy of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. This is the one with the big revelations about the universe (my other post, if I ever publish it, is my attempt to avoid spoilering them while obsessing about some of the same issues), and quite a big finish.

I still think Ghost Brigades is the best of the three by a slim margin, but this is the kind of adventure novel that SF needs more of -- intelligent and fun, accessible and dealing with interesting skiffy questions. (Oh, and it's written in first person, which I usually like.)

It also was published less than a week ago, so all I should say about the plot is that John Perry is our narrator again (as in Old Man), and that he and Jane Sagan are tapped to lead a new colony...and then stuff happens.

I Talk Like Dis, Y'Hear?

Apparently, Jersey has not managed to completely ruin the pure English I learned in my cradle. Another meme, of course:

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northern. Whether you have the world famous Inland North accent of the Great Lakes area, or the radio-friendly sound of upstate NY and western New England, your accent is what used to set the standard for American English pronunciation (not much anymore now that the Inland North sounds like it does).

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

We're going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Different Same Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different...

Just Read: Gods and Pawns by Kage Baker

I have now read four books by Baker in the last three months, and am finally caught up (if you don't count Rude Mechanicals...and I'm not, really, because I expect it'll turn up in a bigger collection in a couple of years).

Damn is she prolific these days. She's only been writing for about a decade, and, even with a hiccup while jumping between publishers in the middle, she's still managed to publish an eight-book series (plus two related collections of short fiction), another novel, and two other books of short stories.

Now, don't get the idea that I'm complaining, he said, oddly quoting Al Capone, I like it when authors I like are prolific. It's just some of them can write nearly as fast as I can read...

This is the second official "Company" story collection (after Black Projects, White Knights, but also after The Children of the Company, which is a fix-up of previously published stories with a little bit of new connective tissue), and it collects seven stories -- two of them original to this collection. They're mostly sidebars to the main storyline, as far as I can tell (since the main storyline has a lot of semi-separate threads to it), but the novella "Welcome To Olympus, Mr. Hearst" is pretty important to the big ending in The Sons of Heaven.

As usual with Baker, some of these stories are quite long -- three of the seven are novellas, one of which ("The Angel in the Darkness") was even published as a separate book. If you like lots of short stories that you can get through quickly, Baker is not your writer.

Nobody should start reading the Company books here, but, if you've read the others and are waiting for Sons of Heaven, this is a great way to pass some time.

The Meme History of Genre

Even if John Klima didn't do my last meme, I still owe him a good dozen-or-so, and thus I'll do one of his. I tried not to look at his list before doing mine, but I'll go back afterward and see where we agree.

Instructions: Starting with 1890, list one book from each decade that you think represents the genre and the way it's moved from then to now.

I tried to pick the most influential and important book I could think of from each decade, rather than the one I liked the best, but that wasn't part of John's instructions; if this does attain meme status, I could see people doing it either way.

Decade	Year	Title	Author
1890s	1898	The War of the Worlds	H.G. Wells
1900s	1908	The House on the Borderland	William Hope Hodgson
1910s	1912	A Princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs
1920s	1928	"The Call of Cthulhu"	H.P. Lovecraft
1930s	1932	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
1940s	1948	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell
1950s	1950	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury
1960s	1961	Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert A. Heinlein
1970s	1973	Rendezvous With Rama	Arthur C. Clarke
1980s	1985	Neuromancer	William Gibson
1990s	1996	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	J.K. Rowling
2000s	2001	Perdido Street Station	China Mieville

(I will note that I used the Ultimate Science Fiction Timeline to refresh my memory of what was when, and to keep from forgetting everything.)

I seem to have created an almost entirely science fictional list; that wasn't my intention, but it's the way things looked to me while I was doing the list. (I'm sure some of these would be different if I did it again tomorrow, though.)

Checking John's list, I see that we agreed on The House on the Borderlands and Neuromancer, but not otherwise. That's about par for the course.

Movie Log: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask

For whatever reason, the late '60s and early '70s were the heyday of ridiculously long movie titles...like "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask", a minor early Woody Allen film that I somehow managed to miss watching when I was twelve (when I would have really appreciated it). I'm sort of vaguely wandering through the early movies of Allen these days, so I watched it last night.

It's also a great example of one of Hollywood's more endearing bits of folly: the idea that, simply because something (in this case, a book) was very successful in one medium it must be turned into a movie, which will then be even more successful. This works for things which have stories (particularly fiction), but tends to break down with objects such as...well, such as a popular question-and-answer book about sex, which is what this movie was very, very loosely based on.

Everything comprises seven separate vignettes (each around ten minutes long), all loosely inspired by a chapter title from the book. I'll warn anyone thinking about watching this that the first vignette, which features Woody Allen (also the director and writer) as a medieval Fool and Vanessa Redgrave as the randy Queen he's trying to get it on with, is by far the worst piece of the movie -- it's dull, unfunny, goes on too long, and is so dimly lit it's hard to see what's happening at times. The movie does get better from there.

In fact, the other six pieces are pretty good -- they're variable, but they're all funny at least in places, and the movie recovers the ground it lost in those boring first ten minutes. Gene Wilder has a great turn as a doctor who falls in love with a sheep, and the last section (with Tony Randall as the head of the crew inside a man's brain as he goes on a dinner-date and then has sex) is inventive and wonderful. But it's all so very '60s: this is the squinting look towards the sun of a culture that had tried to ignore sex for a good generation or more. (And still gets things wrong -- the "What is sodomy?" section is actually about bestiality, which is not at all the same thing.)

So, for someone my age, it's like looking at a time capsule of what my parents' generation thought sex was. And thinking of it that way is really creepy. Ew. Sorry I mentioned that.

Quote of the Week

"John W. Campbell, who must have thought about this too in his time, put it this way to one of the writers in the forties: 'People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction editors, well--'

A long Campbellian sigh.

Silence."
- Barry N. Malzberg, "Grandson of the True and the Terrible," in The Engines of the Night

I Guess I'll Take That As a Compliment...

John Klima has declined to do every single stupid meme I do -- and who can blame him? -- but he does say that he and I "look like starting linemen for SF's pro football team." (I can't fault that, either.)

So, who else would be on the SF pro football team? Do we have a good running back? Does anyone have the arm for quarterback? Anyone know how to punt? (I'm pretty sure Tom Doherty would be our Bill Parcells.)

OK, The Internet Is Now Officially Full

Because even the freakin' Sherrif of Nottingham has a blog.

A Thought Experiment

Let's say that you are the cynical and secretive human interstellar government of a few hundred years hence. (Not too much of a stretch, yes?) You're not actively evil, but you're perfectly willing to do nasty things (or, though inaction, allow nasty things to happen). You're also in a state of war, and have been for some time.

What you need to do now is to plan a secret colony. For some handwave-y reason, hollowed-out asteroids, other kinds of space-based habitats, or anything involving non-Earthlike worlds is out. It has to be a shirtsleeve, dirt-farming colony, as God and Robert A. Heinlein intended.

Now, for good and sufficient reasons, you need to equip this colony with a lower tech level than they're used to. You can either pick an 1850 level, or a 1970 level. Other than pure "screw with the colonists" reasons, can you think of a reason not to pick the 1970 level? (They'd be, as far as I can see, of about equal difficulty, since all of the items in each package would have to be created from scratch in either case.)

A Puzzler

So, if your governor -- a guy you've never liked and didn't vote for, and who has a sense of personal entitlement larger than his personal fortune -- is seriously injured in a car-wreck in large part because he didn't wear a seatbelt and because he had the car's emergency lights on "to keep on his schedule" (against state law), are you required to feel sorry for the guy?

Just asking...

Update: According to news reports, that governor's car was going 91 in a 65 zone, so I'm now even less inclined to feel sorry for him.

You Keep Saying That. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "There are no second acts in American lives." Yes, blowhards like to trot this out to deny it when talking about some media darling who is making a comeback. But they're all idiots, since that's not what Fitzgerald was talking about. Despite all of the misquotations, he did not say "second chances," and he did not mean "second chances."

An "act" is a theatrical conceit, and Fitzgerald was referring to the typical three-act play. American lives, in the Fitzgeraldian conception, have a first act (the set-up) and a third act (the climax), but they rush from one directly to the other without the usual building of tension and complexity in the middle. In other words, America is a land of smash hits and smash failures, one after another, without pause -- exactly what the people who quote that line to refute it are trying to say in their own stupid ways.

So cut it out.

A Meme, A Meme, I Do Confess 't

Liz Williams was doing it, so it's clearly our end of the alphabet's turn...

What do you think about Ouija boards? That random nerve twitches can be quite entertaining the certain types of people.

Your favorite TV shows? I only seem to watch TV these days with the kids, so probably Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is starting to grow on me, too -- maybe I have a secret fondness for animated shows with long titles?

What’s on your mouse pad? At work, I use at SFBC mouse pad, just because. At home, I'm using one from some now-defunct groceries-over-the-Internet company (name now forgotten), because it was free, and because it still works fine.

Favorite board game: Scotland Yard, though I haven't played it in ages. I like Stratego, too, which I also haven't played in forever.

Favorite magazine: I guess The New York Review of Science Fiction, unless I can choose something now-defunct, like Spy from about 1989-1993 or Movieline in the early to mid-90s.

Favorite smells: {sings} "These are a few of my many smells, won't you come and smell me..." Pass.

Worst feeling in the world: That something horrible has happened to your wife or kids. (I'm a worrier, so I get this one a lot.)

Best feeling in the world: I've never felt that good, so I wouldn't know.

Favorite soundtrack: Akira.

What is the first thing you think when you wake in the morning: What I need to get accomplished at work that day.

Roller coaster - scary or exciting? Fun. Not scary, unless something goes very wrong. But not really "exciting," either. A good roller coaster is relaxing.

How many rings before you answer the phone? If The Wife has had the phone last (meaning that it's in some very unlikely place), I won't find it before it goes to the machine. If I put it back in the cradle where it belongs, then probably two rings. But it's not for me, anyway.

Future daughter’s name: Megan Elin.

Future son’s name: The one we didn't use for Thing 2 (The Wife talked me out of it) was Graham.

Favorite foods: Yes. Basically, anything a doctor has ever said was bad to eat.

Chocolate or vanilla? Chocolate chunks in vanilla.

Do you like to drive? Yes.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? Despite Thing 2's attempts, no. (His bed is piled full of them, and he occasionally gives me one at bedtime to keep me company at night.)

This is where I trot out my usual comment about the ages of people who take meme polls. What am I, a fourteen-year-old cheerleader?

Storms - cool or scary? Annoying, particularly when they drop eight inches of water on your head. They're only "scary" if you're under the age of twelve, and only "cool" if the roof over your head isn't your responsibility to fix if a tree falls on it.

What type was your first car: A deeply uncool metallic green 1998 Ford Windstar. It became "mine" about a year ago; I still drive it.

If you could meet one person dead or alive - who would it be? The live one. What do you think: I'm stupid?

Favorite alcoholic drink: Whiskey sour, these days.

What is your zodiac sign? Do not make me come over there and slap you.

Who is your favorite poet? Robert Browning

Do you eat the stems of broccoli? I try not to eat any part of broccoli, if I can avoid it. If I'm setting a good example for the boys, I'll eat the whole thing.

If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be? Something not unlike what I do now, only with much more money, power, and dancing girls. No, strike that. I'd like to be a robber baron, please.

If you could dye your hair any color, what would it be? The one that strikes people who write quizzes like this dumb.

Have you ever been in love? Yes.

What is on your walls in your room? In this room right here, four bookcases, a cork-board, various other important papers attached with tape, and a "Speed Limit: C" sign. At home, there really isn't a "my" room. I'm a grown-up.

Is the glass half empty or half full? I don't have a glass. My Snapple bottle from lunch is completely empty. Does that help?

What is your favorite Snapple? What a segue...plain.

Favorite movie(s): Love, Actually; Much Ado About Nothing; Gregory's Girl; The Dead; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Are you a lefty, righty, or ambidextrous? Right handed.

Do you type with your fingers on the proper keys? I don't even know which are the proper keys.

What’s under your bed? The floor. (The boys, through jumping on the bed, broke the frame and have done serious damage to the box spring as well.)

What is your favorite number? e. It's irrational like pi, but doesn't get the publicity.

Favorite sport to watch: Baseball, I guess, though I haven't watched a game since the kids were born.

Say one nice thing about the person who sent this to you: No one sent it to me; I grabbed it on my own. But I quite liked her novel Snake Agent.

Person you sent this to who is most likely to respond: John Klima is the one most likely to pick up memes from me, I think. I'm not officially sending it to anybody.

Person you sent this to least likely to respond: See above.

Favorite quote: "Now when I was a boy, my Daddy sat me on his knee, and he told me, he told me many things, and he said, 'Son, there's a lot of things in this world that you're gonna have no use for. And when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!'" (Tom Waits, Lucky Day)