To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
This 1959 booklet (third printing in 1961) discusses Hemingway’s work from a time when he was very contemporary and explores how Hemingway’s prototypical hero evolved from the 1920s to the 1950s as Hemingway’s life progressed. Weighing in at 40 pages total, it’s a nice short refresher on Papa and almost makes me want to read The Sun Also Rises again. But that’s already on my read shelves, and I have hundreds of unread books to read first.
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I watched 300 on Tuesday night. Before the movie, in the 25 minutes of previews/commercials preceding the movie, the trailer for an upcoming film called Pathfinder played.
Remember, friends, Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others widely panned 300 as a jingoistic propoganda piece, and it was a stylized depiction of historical events.
Pathfinder, on the other hand, is the story of Viking raiders in historically inaccurate headgear who come to North America to pillage the native American villiages. They leave behind a child whom the natives spare and raise. When the Vikings return some years later, the child has grown up a killing machine, and he takes the Vikings on and looks like (according to the trailer) he beats the snot out of them.
So, thematically, we have a white man raised by savages–sorry, living-in-tune-with harmony oppressed victims–who goes onto slaughter his own kind for their imperialism. Based on actual events? No, a remake of a a 1987 movie. Except that the 1987 movie had different tribes of Scandinavia as the victims. They were changed to native Americans because that’s one more easy button to push, no doubt. Fortunately, though, the new filmakers left the raiders as Vikings and didn’t go whole hog and make them time-travelling Nazis or greedy businessmen. Subtlety.
I can’t wait for the big media reviews to call this a bit of jingoism in favor of rebeling against one’s forefathers’ beliefs, violently. Since it’s not an apostate being marked for death, it’s rebellion against white bread America (well, Scandinavia, but white bread), I expect its potentially propogandaish themes will be overlooked.
Me, I probably won’t see the film to judge its individual merits, but it doesn’t look interesting enough for me. That’s a matter of individual taste, though. Throw in a couple of mutants and maybe Adam Sandler, and I’d be there.
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As many of you know, I am something of a Larry Niven fan (other reports: N Space, Rainbow Mars). I read Ringworld in high school, and I was awed. I like the stories that start out with a sense of wonder (see also Alan Dean Foster’s The Dig).
But this book is ultimately not that satisfying. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read The Ringworld Throne, but that’s only fair, since it came out 16 years after the first sequel (The Ringworld Engineers, 1980). But this book isn’t the best of the lot. The first parts of the story are paced okay as more exploration and learning goes on, but the pacing of the end is too rapid and jump cut to really hold my interest. It’s a collage, nay, a kaleidoscope of scenes that end in a rapid denouement whose meaning is clear only when Louis Wu explains it and the magic of hastily conceived and underexplained science fix everything.
I can see why. The first part, Niven’s introduction, explains how classes and scientists have been working the Ringworld over for almost 40 years and have prompted him to write the sequels to explain the inaccuracies plausibly. But that drive to explain everything is what eventually diminishes the impact of the original and why he rushes through this book and takes care of the Ringworld in such a fashion as he’ll never have to write about it in Known Space again.
The book didn’t end as badly as the Rama series did, though, so it’s not dead to me.
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St. Louis shootings wound 2, kill 1
If only we could get the shootings off of the city streets and into jail, St. Louis would be a far safer place.
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Briefly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had the the crime in this story wrong:
Now, if we could only get tax invasion really made into a crime for bureaucrats, we’d be getting somewhere.
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The Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund interviews Fred Thompson.
(Link seen on Instapundit.)
Jeez, man, set up an exploratory committee so I can start sending money and volunteering time instead of doing a cavalcade of backwater blog posts.
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So I walked down to the Old Trees Recreational Complex to get a residency card so I can save $1 on ice skating sessions at the rink and save $10 on continuing education programs if I ever needed to learn how to line dance with the elderly. But that $1 per session, over the course of a year where I will go once, will save me a total of $1.
So I arrived with my new driver’s license because it has my new address and I thought that would be enough.
“Do you have a piece of mail with your current address on it?” the woman behind the counter said. “A utility bill?”
I looked through my wallet for anything else. I took out my Old Trees Library card.
“They don’t make you show anything with your address on it,” she said.
I don’t normally carry with me my current outstanding personal invoices for commodity consumption, so I had to walk away empty-handed.
But rest assured, America; even though I had to prove my current address to get this driver’s license with my Old Trees address upon it, that in and of itself was not enough to satisfy the demands of the vigilant public servant. We can all sleep easier knowing that it’s harder to get an Old Trees ID than a driver’s license, and that our ice arena and architecture tours are safe from terrorists who refuse to pay full price.
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In this column, he subtly hints at how he feels about competing computer technologies:
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
No word on how many Linux adherents lost lunch money on the playground to Brooker immediately after publication of said article.
(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)
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Let’s sue Cracker Barrel for its racially insensitive name. There’s got to be some scratch in that, ainna?
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Written in 1995, this book takes a recent current event as a starting point and reimagines it humorously, much like Lucky You. In this case, it’s a devastating hurricane (unnamed) that ravages southern Florida and brings together a motley bunch of characters around a crime or two.
The subplots: A woman on her honeymoon begins to doubt the wisdom of her marriage when her husband decides to drive from Disney World to the Miami area so he can take video of the damage and heartbreak; a crazy ex-governor gone native kidnaps him; a pair of unlikely conspirators decide to pose as a homeowning couple to participate in an insurance scam; the son of a woman killed in the storm seeks revenge upon those who sold her a shoddy mobile home; and a crooked former home inspector makes sacrifices to a voodoo god and tries to get some of his grift on.
So there’s a crime involved, but it doesn’t really carry the story. Hiaasen jump cuts the subplots and the characters interact, but the inevitable climax on a key comes too early, the denouement runs a bit long, and the book lacks some of the rush that his others bring.
So it’s somewhere between Lucky You and Nature Girl (which I didn’t like so much). Still, it’s a readable and enjoyable book, just not one of Hiaasen’s best.
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With each one of these books, his About the Author section gets longer and more full of world-beating achievements. Too bad I’m the only one bothering to read him 35 years later.
But this book is better than Fields of Wonder, probably because it deals with burying people under those fields instead of burying bits of McKuen in women he’s known.
Would I recommend it? No.
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Come on, you cannot believe it either, even when you hear it in his own voice.
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From the quiz Smart, very smart: Test tells if you know what a fifth-grader knows:
13. “You are as strong as an ox.” Is this statement a simile or metaphor?
Oh, yeah.
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Sometimes, when I try to reach the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) into the address bar of my browser, I transpose the a and the g.
And I am ashamed! Briefly. Before I hit the backspace key and can hide my homophobia from the world.
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Sure, some might think (if some were like me) that MfBJN started the Fred Thompson bandwagon with this essay from August 2006, but it’s doubtless that Frank J. has sealed it with his Frank Facts About Fred Thompson.
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The exorcists in our government have caused the demon to flee, but now they’re complaining about the loss of ritual, offerings to the church that persecuted the demon:
“They get a lot of government contracts, is this going to affect the investigations that are going on? Because we have a lot of evidence of misuse of government contracts and how they have cheated the American soldier and cheated the American taxpayer,” Clinton, speaking in New York, said of Halliburton.
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I bought this book at St. Michael’s book fair earlier this year; between Great Tales of Mystery & Suspense, my reading pace for the year is shot.
This book runs 574 pages and comes from the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine from the first half of the last century. It collects murder mysteries, a couple of ghost stories, and a long piece on the Alger Hiss espionage (starring Congressman Richard Nixon as the hero, which explains why former Vice-President Nixon offered a blurb on the back).
Some of the stories overlap with The World’s Most Infamous Crimes and Criminals, but they’re told with a punchier (partially digested) style. Also, overall, this book was not as depressing as The World’s Most Infamous Crimes and Criminals as it didn’t have matter-of-fact accounts of genocide.
Worth the buck, except for the part where it made me spend a week or so reading it. Looks like I’ll be reporting on coloring books for the next couple of weeks so I can get my average up.
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Woman killed in police station:
A 35-year-old woman was killed inside the Fox Lake Police Department on Sunday afternoon as she frantically tried to flee her husband, authorities said.
A pedestrian called 911 around 4:45 p.m. after seeing a man ram his car into the woman’s car in the parking lot of the Fox Lake municipal building, according to the Dodge County Sheriff’s Department.
The woman, whose name was not released by authorities Sunday night, ran from her car and fled into the building as her husband pursued her inside, the department reported.
By the time a Fox Lake police officer arrived, the 40-year-old husband was getting back into his car, authorities said. There was no sign of the woman.
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David Nicklaus writes a column on the drastic electricity price increases in Illinois, and finds a common villian: The government.
The Legislature, after all, passed the deregulation law in 1997 that led to this year’s rate increases. Consumers benefited for a decade from a rate cut and then a rate freeze. But the utilities, which no longer own power plants directly, had to buy power on the open market beginning this year and pass the cost on to consumers.
Statinalizing the power companies won’t solve the problems that exist when physical suppy and demand collide. Government officials only trade in perceptions.
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As some of you know, I have recently passed out of the meaningful demographic. In addition to getting the cold shoulder of marketers and television programmers everywhere, I’ve recently discovered some of the horrible, terrifying conundrums of this horrible age between youth and agedness. Such as:
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