An Explanation But Not an Excuse

There are days when I post a lot on this blog; that's usually because I'm at home all day, not doing much of anything.

And there are days like today, when I'm incommunicado most of the day, on a job interview or various networking activities or such-like. Those days are light blogging days.

So this is probably it for me today -- I'm going to try to read some more of Making Money and get out of the hot basement. Tomorrow, though, will bring some high-quality snark about the coveted Quill Awards.

Today at ComicMix...

Hey, I'm a brand name now! That's sweet.

Andrew's Links: Knitted Hellboy

Of course, having my name in the title makes me think I need to work harder. Must! Dig! Up! More! Content!

Would You Read an E-Book On This Thing?

This, according to MSSV, is the prototype of the Kindle, Amazon's new ebook reader. It's hard to tell how large it is without something to compare it to, but it certainly looks chunky.

The industrial design also appears to be out of a late '70s movie -- Logan's Run, maybe?

Here's another point: it's projected to retail for $500-$600.

And it's going to only read books in a brand-new proprietary format.

Hm. An ugly, oversized, cripple-wared, expensive solution to an non-existent problem. Looks like a winner to me!

[via Booksquare]

Weekend ComicMix Links

Went up yesterday under the uninspired moniker Insert Snappy Title Here.

Ant Farm by Simon Rich

This is the book of humorous essays I got from the library yesterday; I just kept picking it up and reading one more piece. (They're all very short -- two to three pages at most -- so it's harder to stop reading than to just keep going.) And, by the end of the day, I'd come to the end.

Inevitably, I compared Ant Farm to Woody Allen's Mere Anarchy in my head, since I read the two so close together. Allen is witty and erudite, but I have to say Rich is just funnier. I laughed out loud at nearly every one of Rich's essays, and there are something like fifty of them in this book. So, sure, it's a quick read, but it's a quick read of really funny stuff.

For example, here's a bit from a piece called "I still remember the day I got my first calculator," in which the fourth-grade narrator questions his teacher

ME: What the hell else do you have back there? A magical pen that writes book reports by itself? Some kind of automatic social studies worksheet that...that fills itself out? What the hell is going on? [...] So that's it, then. The past three years have been a total farce, All this time I've been thinking, "Well this is pretty hard and frustrating but I guess these are useful skills to have." Meanwhile, there was a whole bin of these things in your desk. We could have jumped straight to graphing. Unless, of course, there's some kind of graphing calculator!
TEACHER: There is. You get one in ninth grade.

Rich's humor is mostly at that level, in the old tradition of the dichotomy of what you expect and what you get. He's got the Dog X-Files, why packages say "may or may not contain peanuts," God giving a pep talk to one of those lunatics who say they talk to God, the last male striped panda attempting to make small talk to a female, and lots of lots of stuff about kids in school.

The bottom line: this book is damn funny. If you're not utterly stupid, or unable to read English, it will make you laugh.

Oh, All Right...If Everyone Else Is Doing It

If you're blogging this week, you're pretty much required to take the "What 'Song of Ice and Fire' House Am I?" test, so I finally did. It looks like the descriptions of all of the houses are rude, so I don't feel so bad about the nasty things this one says...

Your Score: House Stark

18% Dominant, 36% Extroverted, 54% Trustworthy

Responsible. Respectable. Dour. That’s not shit coming out of your ass--it’s honor. You are clearly of House Stark.



You are a submissive personality, meaning that you are more than willing to relinquish control to someone more qualified; you will unflinchingly accept any responsibility that is thrust upon you, including servitude. Unfortunately for you, your unending patience and accommodating nature often make people look to you for a leader. In essence, you are the perfect leader: someone who has no desire to lead, yet is substantially well-qualified to do it.



You are also introverted, which means that people sometimes have difficulty understanding your thought process. Your dependable nature makes you predictable, but you’ve probably got all sorts of emotional dysfunctions when it comes to more intimate relationships. There are very few people whom you trust unwaveringly, and you’re not the type to confide in other people. So cold, so aloof--so Stark.



Finally, you are trustworthy--the very definition of the word. All secrets are safe with you. All of your vows are unbreakable. True to your name, you world is a stark place; there is black, and there is white. Your rigidity tends to undercut your overall value as a friend and ally. Honesty such as yours is hard to come by, which is easy to understand when you consider how easily manipulated you are by less decent individuals. Essentially, you’re the nice guy, and you’ll always finish last.



Representative characters include: Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Sansa Stark



Similar Houses: Frey, Lannister and Tully



Opposite House: Baratheon



When playing the game of thrones, you play it with one sword in your hand and another up your ass.

Link: The Song of Ice and Fire House Test written by Geeky_Stripper on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Itzkoff Pops

David Itzkoff returned to the New York Times Book Review this weekend, with a full-page installment of his column...Pop Culture Chronicle. In it, he reviews five books about popular culture, in one way or another.

This is the point where I should have a snarky comment about how Itzkoff should put his nose to the grindstone and read/review a bunch of SFF books, but -- given that I've spent the last three weeks on Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project -- I don't think I could be that big of a hypocrite.

At least we know he's still around at the NYTBR, and maybe the next week or two will bring us some SFnal reviews to make fun of.

That Explains Everything

I'm reading Terry Pratchett's new novel, Making Money, and thinking about Lord Vetinari. He's quiet, always in command of the situation, unflappable, possessed of remarkable depths of knowledge and understanding. He claims to be merely a servant of the people of Ankh-Morpork. He always has a plan, which invariably works and makes others look foolish.

And, on page 17, he makes a reference to "the psychology of the individual."

Now, suddenly, all is clear: Vetinari is the evil twin of Jeeves.

Incoming Books, Week of 9/8

The boys and I went to the library today, where, for the first time ever, I got more books for myself than they did for themselves. (Thing 2 spent the whole time on one of the games computers, and Thing 1 hasn't discovered a new manga series to love there recently...though he does keep trying to sneak volumes of InuYasha into the pile.)

Anyway, I got a book of humorous essays (Ant Farm by Simon Rich, the guy who did that great "how kids think the world works" piece in the New Yorker a few months back) and six comics things (since I'm trying not to spend my own money on them right now).

In the other category, of books that I get to keep, there were two books I found at my comics store cheap -- The Middleman, Vol. 2 and Sam Henderson's Magic Whistle #9.

And, in the best category of all -- books that people gave me and which I really want to read -- there's Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory.

Now I'd better go read something.

Quote of the Week

"Anyone who is any good is different from anyone else."
- Felix Frankfurter

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

There hasn't been a new book of Woody Allen humorous essays since Side Effects in 1980, mostly because Allen's production of humorous essays has dwindled to one every couple of years. But, as enough water-drops will eventually wear away a stone, in twenty-five years a small pile of short humorous essays will turn into a book.

Mere Anarchy is Allen doing the same sort of shtick as in his early-career collections Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects -- lots of New York color, many Yiddishisms, plenty of show-biz references, and a general aura of an earlier era. It isn't necessarily still the '60s in these essays, but you'd be hard-pressed to prove it wasn't still then. (I wouldn't be surprised if Allen, in essayist mode, really wanted to be S.J. Perelman. Then again, if you're writing a short funny piece in the New Yorker style, Perelman's a great target to aim for, since Thurber and Benchley are too specific and idiosyncratic to copy.)

Mere Anarchy contains eighteen pieces, ten of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. The other eight may be original to this collection; there's no separate copyright information on them. (And once again I must complain about the modern tendency to shirk on the copyright notices -- we can't even tell when any of these pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker. If I were God of Publishing, proper notices or prior publication would be required on pain of death.)

I can't say that any of these essays made me laugh out loud, but many of them made me smile, and all of them amused me. I think you have to at least aspire to be a New Yorker to like this kind of humor; it's certainly not for everyone. But Allen is still great with words, such as this bit from "Strung Out":

I awoke on Friday, and because the universe is expanding, it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work, and because the concept of up and down is relative, the elevator I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi.

If you find yourself arguing with the science in that paragraph, do not read Mere Anarchy. Instead, settle down with a nice boring calculus textbook until you fall asleep, and we'll just leave you in the corner.

Madeleine L'Engle 1918-2007

Madeleine L'Engle, author of the Newbery Award-winning novel for young readers A Wrinkle In Time, died yesterday of natural causes in Connecticut. She was 88 years old. The New York Times has a full obituary.

L'Engle wrote more than fifty books, including poetry, plays, autobiography, and devotionals, but was best known for her novels for teenagers. Most of those novels were intricately interconnected into a complex universe, crossing genres and styles and spanning decades as they told the stories of several families: the Austins, the Murrys, the O'Keefes.

I don't know if young readers still come to A Wrinkle in Time as they did when I was young; I suspect it was the first fantastic book of many readers of my generation. It's an odd, quirky book: beloved by millions, but able to intensely annoy both physicists and Christians with its sentimental science-tinged religion. (or should that be religion-tinged science?) L'Engle had an awareness of death and loss that isn't as common in the Young Adult field as it should be; she always managed the difficult balancing act of writing of a universe full of love in which bad things still happened.

L'Engle was never of the science fiction field, but she led many readers there; for that, and for all of the other gifts of her works, she will be greatly missed.

Movie Log: Twelfth Night

The Wife and I watched Kenneth Branagh's 1988 version of Twelfth Night Sunday and Monday nights, mostly because we keep hoping he'll catch the same fire he did with Much Ado About Nothing (still one of our favorite movies). Twelfth Night is much earlier in Branagh's career; he doesn't appear in it at all; and it's clearly just a straight filming of a specific stage production.

Let me underline that last bit: it's very stagy, and very much a low-budget British TV production, with the usual slamming doors leading to shaking scenery. That can be charming sometimes, and the camera work in Twelfth Night was good in mostly hiding the fact that everyone was standing five feet away from each other and facing forward, but I'm afraid the set let down the side badly. It's all white, and consists of a front door over there, random classical-looking yard furniture and accouterments hither and yon, and gives a general sense of being in a graveyard. (Everything looks white and made out of stone, and it's all low.) There have been a certain number of comedies set in graveyards, but I don't think Twelfth Night was meant to be one of them.

(Not that I know Twelfth Night well at all; this was the first production of it I've seen.)

I didn't recognize anyone in it, and many of them do that Shakespearean talking-way-too-fast-to-prove-that-they-know-their-lines-really-well thing. The guy playing the Fool did a pseudo-annoying-Goth-poet thing, though I'm not sure if he was meant to be quite as annoying as I found him. (He was insufferable, to be blunt.)

And, far be it from me to criticize Shakespeare, but...the mistaken identity plot turns up very late, and is fairly weak. Each of the two people mistaken for the other is clearly called by the wrong name, but they don't seem to notice it. Yes, farces often could collapse like a souffle if one person in the story questioned the plot, but usually, I hope, the question takes more than the one second of "But my name's not Sebastian." (And this could have been fixed easily if Viola, in her grief, had chosen her brother's name as her nom de guerre -- yes, once again, Boy Editor Andy wishes he had been around to give literary giants first-draft criticism back in the day.)

I think this would be of most interest to people who know and like Twelfth Night; it seems to be a good production of the play. And The Wife and I basically enjoyed it, once our ears took the ten minutes to reboot on Elizabethan English. (We find it takes about that long for pure Shakespearean dialogue to turn from blah blah blah into actual coherent sentences.) But anyone looking for much Branagh here, as I was, will be disappointed.

Yesterday's ComicMix Links

I know linking to a list of links makes the baby Jesus cry, but I can't help it...

• Times Gets It Late

One of the Reasons Why, Despite Everything, I'm Still a Republican

I live in New Jersey; these guys are my local Democratic party. (Paterson is the nearest decent-sized city to me; the City of Passaic is just on the other side of that and the namesake of my county.) We have a nearly Third-World level of corruption in this state, entirely because of our Democratic machine.

(The Republicans aren't peaches, but they're at least honest...as politicians go.)