Flat Daddies

I thought that the Piers Anthony blurb would be the weirdest and most depressing thing I would read about today. I was wrong.

From the Boston Globe, by way of Daily Kos:

Guard families cope in two dimensions : `Flat Daddy' cutouts ease longing

Maine National Guard members in Iraq and Afghanistan are never far from the thoughts of their loved ones.

But now, thanks to a popular family-support program, they're even closer.

Welcome to the ``Flat Daddy" and ``Flat Mommy" phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home.

The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

``I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket," said (K.J.) of (C.), whose husband, (J.), is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. ``The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I've tricked several people by that. They think he's home again."

At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board....

At what point did I stop living in the reality-based world and start living in a twisted Saturday Night Live skit?

If I ever went to war, I'd have decidedly mixed feelings about being replaced by a cardboard cutout. Displaying and honoring a photograph of an absent person makes perfect sense. It's a reminder of the person, but does not pretend to be a replacement for them. Carrying a cardboard cutout around and propping it up in chairs and sofas is just a bit... creepy.

How 'bout we install Flat Bush and Flat Cheney and Flat Rumsfeld in Washington D.C. and send the originals to Iraq, just like the real daddies and mommies in the Globe story?

Note: I elided the identities of individuals in the story excerpt above, in case they find this story horribly embarrassing upon later reflection.

Ick.

Piers Anthony's sexual obsessions seem to just get more and more distasteful. From his August newsletter:

I mentioned starting to write Xanth #32, Two to the Fifth. Naturally it's not as simple as a straight math pun. It moved well in the month of Jewel-Lye, especially considering it was part time work, and I wrote 44,600 words. There is a complicated mission for Cyrus Cyborg, the son of Roland Robot and Hannah Barbarian, who got together in Pet Peeve. The stork brought them a crossbreed with some assembly needed, and Cyrus was created adult. Remember the Three Princesses, Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm? They are now twelve years old, precocious girls eager to get into things the Adult Conspiracy forbids. Rhythm is assigned to help Cyrus on his mission, incognito; he knows her identity, but others don't. At one point she leads him to a pool in a glade and confesses that she has a crush on him and would like to marry him. ?But you're a child!? he protests, dismissing it. Uh-oh. Now she's a Girl Scorned. She is also a Sorceress. He really should have found a nicer way to set her straight; one simply does not safely dismiss a Sorceress of any age. She invokes a spell that makes her ten years older, for one hour, bursting out of her clothing, and stands before him a lusciously nude age 22. She grabs him, stuns him with a kiss, and hauls him into the pond with her. It is a love spring, by no coincidence. There follows an intense ellipsis; Cyrus doesn't have a chance. Then the spell runs out and she reverts to age 12. Cyrus is left passionately in love with a woman who won't exist for another decade. I did mention that it is unwise to dismiss a Sorceress? Rhythm's vengeance is complete. Then the stork arrives with a bundle for her. Did I mention why the Adult Conspiracy exists? Her parents will never understand. She's in one bleep of a picklement. This is just an incidental scene in the larger novel, though it does relate to the main theme. Their daughter will play a vital role in the conclusion.

Did I mention... Ick? No doubt he also throws in a reference to the "Rhythm Method."

Disturbing news from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Boomers' Retirement May Create Talent Squeeze

With 6,000 administrative jobs to fill per year, institutions are finding that the usual recruitment methods are not enough

This is, indeed, a shocking development. To further investigate the crisis, your trusty reporter managed to catch up with an academic administrator who had time for a brief interview.

“The younger generation of academics, all these … teachers,” he said, shaking his head of silvery-coiffed Executive Hair sadly. “They just don’t have the necessary experience and mental attitude to successfully fill my eminently admirable administrative role. Why, I hear that some of them actually think the purpose of a university is to teach students!” he said, with a pleasantly roguish chuckle.

Yours truly inquired further. What accomplishments of the current generation of academic administrators should an aspiring younger generation seek to emulate?

“Why, just look around you!” he said. “We’ve succeeded in raising both tuition rates and administrative pay to record high levels, while replacing substantial numbers of full time teaching faculty with part-time adjuncts. (Trust me, it’s much easier to run a company... er, I mean university... when you can pay people subminimum wages without benefits and fire them on a whim.) The amount of money spent on large, high-status building programs has skyrocketed, and we’ve managed to successfully inculcate the idea that universities don’t need cost centers like libraries.” He shuddered slightly, and winced. “Nasty things, libraries. Cost money. Not like students. They represent your revenue stream. Of course, it’s better if you don’t have to have the silly creatures actually hanging around the campus after their tuition payments have cleared, which is why we’ve made great strides in introducing online education…. But that’s another story, for another time. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get moving. We’ve hosting a very exclusive corporate fundraiser at the University Presidential Palace this evening, and in the meanwhile, I have a tenure bid to deny, a library system to dismantle, a tuition raise to justify, and a faculty union to bust.” He shrugged charmingly. “I’m swamped!”

I saw it on Slashdot, so it must be true.

Spider Robinson is reportedly going to complete a novel, Variable Star, which Robert Heinlein left unfinished in 1955.

Recent reads

The Innkeeper's Song, by Peter S. Beagle. Three mysterious women arrive at a country inn. Each has secrets and obsessions; each is pursued or drawn onward by someone from her past. The story is told through alternating viewpoints of different characters as their paths converge and complications develop. Although it doesn't possess quite the startling, crystal-clear originality of some of Beagle's earlier work like Come, Lady Death or A Fine And Private Place, it's a fantasy adventure worthy to keep company with those of Leiber and Howard and Vance.

Speaking of superheroes....

Did you know that the weekly newsletter of Hitler's SS once issued an official rebuttal to a Superman comic?

Not-so-recent reads

Super-folks, by Robert Mayer. It's amazing, sometimes, what you can find in a library's stacks of unwanted donated books. Take this one, for example. It's a somewhat battered and soiled book-club edition. The rather crude cover art seems to be inspired by comic books, complete with flamboyant typography, exaggerated "action" poses, and speech balloons. The pages inside are thin, almost the consistency of newsprint, and bedecked with 1970s style borders, pageheaders, and goofy-looking chapter numbers straight from the same school of animation that produced Schoolhouse Rock and The Electric Company.

And yet it represents one of the more innovative works of "superhero" fiction of the past few decades, and may be the progenitor of one of the most successful animated motion pictures of last year.

From the bookjacket:

There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead. Batman and Robin were dead. The Lone Ranger was dead. Superman was missing. Even Snoopy had bought it, missing in action over France.

In this fading pantheon of heroes, the very last to give up combat against the forces of evil had been the most powerful hero of all, unseen in almost a decade since, unknown the world, his Superpowers had begun to fail.

Slipping into the humdrum routine of middle-class life, using the humdrum secret name David Brinkley, he was now forty-two years old, married, with two children and a third on the way....

If that sounds a bit familiar, give yourself a prize. To a great degree, it's the same scenario as The Incredibles. There's even a reclusive and eccentric tailor-to-the-superheroes, although in Super-Folks he does not proffer a discourse on the hazards of capes.

There are differences between Super-Folks and The Incredibles, of course. The latter's tongue-in-cheek explanation for the demise of superheroics is absent here. In its place Mayer supplies a sinister but plausible explanation for the gradual disappearance of his protagonist's superpowers, one perhaps more in line with public concerns of the late 1970s. Although both feature superheroes experiencing midlife crises of some kind, Mayer's take on the psychological and social lives of superheroes is considerably darker and more cynical. His protagonist, although gifted with superior strength and other superpowers, is not exactly an intellectual giant and is dogged by all-too-human worries and compulsions.

Even if one isn't particularly interested in whatever intellectual chain of influence may connect Super-Folks and The Incredibles, it's a worthwhile fun read, and one that I wish were more readily available.

Recent Reads

Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke. This seems to represent the second rank of Clarke's considerable output of short stories written from 1949 to 1968 (with one outlier from 1987), stories which didn't make the cut for his previous collections. Fortunately, most second-rank Clarke stories are still worth reading.

It struck me as I read these stories that, unlike much modern science fiction which presupposes that the technological innovations incorporated in the story are fundamentally incomprehensible to the reader, Clarke most often uses some fundamentally comprehensible concept as the foundation for his story. Most readers with a basic level of scientific literacy will understand the concept of, say, chemically processing seawater in order to recover its dissolved mineral content ("The Man Who Ploughed the Sea.") Or interplanetary travel, which is after all nothing but a further development of the principles that took us to the moon in 1969 ("Saturn Rising"). Or manned spacecraft returning from orbit to the surface of the Earth ("Hate"), or human beings cultivating and tending herds of whales the way that 19th-century cowboys tended their grass-eating "dogies" ("The Deep Range").

The stories that interested me the least were those in which Clarke resorted to vaguely metaphysical hand-waving, as in "The Other Tiger". In "Wall of Darkness", he combines both approaches. I felt a crashing sense of disappointment as the story, which had begun with a strange but plausible description of life on an ancient planet where tidal forces had stopped all rotation causing it to turn the same face toward its sun constantly, suddenly lurched toward a vague and unexplained twist of metaphysics at the end. I still haven't figured out what the Mobius strip had to do with the planet, and worse yet I don't care. I'd rather know how the planet's weather systems were affected by its lack of rotation and the consequent uneven heat-absorption from its sun.

Is this a hint of what's wrong with much modern science fiction?

Edit, 8/31. I have been trying for two days to respond to the comments from Carlos and Yam. Enetation, as usual, is either too incompetent to provide the service they promise or simply refuses to do so. Meanwhile, Blogger's comments link refuses to appear except in the permalinked version of the post, which is only accessible by clicking on the nearly-invisible number sign next to the date. Helpful advice would be welcome.

Response to comments:

C. I liked the portions of 2001 that dealt with the comprehensible and plausible prospect of space travel. The big freak-out at the end sort of lost me.

I've stuck with Enetation for the moment because (1) I can't get the Gmail comments to show up on the front page of the blog. They only appear in the permalink, which you can only get to by clicking on the little number-sign. And (2) I don't want comments from archived posts to disappear. I will eventually cut-and-paste them into Gmail comments if I can get the latter to appear properly where they should.

B., unfortunately none of the libraries in our local network seem to have any of the Niven collections that contain that story. I'll have to seek it out through other means. Thanks for the recommendation, if that's what it is. Hm, the library needs a collection of Niven's short stories anyway.

Felix culpa

I owe Clark Ashton Smith a posthumous apology. In a previous post, I accused him of recycling plots. It seems that what actually happened is that the publishing industry recycled one of his stories, including it in two separate collections under two different titles. I read the second collection years after having read the first one, and I vaguely noticed the familiarity of the plot without noticing that I was, in fact, reading exactly the same story. Lest others fall prey to the fiendish misdirections of Mal Dweb, please note that "The Maze of Mal Dweb", as published in Xiccarph, from Ballantine's famed 1970's series of adult fantasy reprints edited by Lin Carter, is essentially the same story as "The Maze of the Enchanter" as published The Double Shadow, from Wildside's recent Fantasy Classics line (no editor noted).

Nitpickers should be advised that I did not compare the text line by line to look for minor editorial changes.

Not-so-recent reads

Traveller, by Richard Adams. The Civil War, as seen and reported by Robert E. Lee's famous horse.

Adams is best known for his collection of stories written from the viewpoints of various kinds of animals. Traveller is as successful as any of these, although it doesn't contain as much of Adams' implied criticism of human society and its practices as books like Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. The horse's good-ole-boy cornpone voice, and his total ignorance of much of the context of what's going on around him, become annoying from time to time, although I suppose they can be read as a parallel to the kind of strategic ignorance that characterizes many individual soldiers' knowledge of the war. I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

Not-so-recent reads

Guardians of the Flame: The Warriors and Guardians of the Flame: The Warrior Lives, by Joel Rosenberg. I've been known to say that the writers of gaming-related novels are the pulp writers of our day. Like most of the stories churned out for Astounding or Weird Tales in past decades, their work gets little critical respect or even acknowledgement outside of the specific group of fans for whom it's intended.

Has anyone ever seen a review of, say, the Halo books by Eric Nylund and Walter Dietz, in any of the "literary" book columns, or even the professional library trade publications? I haven't. And yet they're some of the most quickly-circulating items in the library's collection, and have been on Locus's list of genre bestsellers for a year or more. R.A. Salvatore and Margaret Weis have made the big time, with impressive trade hardcovers of their books now available in most bookstores and even reviewed on a regular basis. But like a good many less successful gaming-related authors, they got their start writing stories, probably following editorially-determined guidelines, that were designed to tie in to existing gameworlds derived from Dungeons and Dragons or some other packaged product.

This is, I suppose, a long and complicated way of introducing a brief review of an older example of such writing, Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series. I don't recall whether the trademarked phrase "Dungeons and Dragons" is ever specifically invoked in the story, but the book is clearly modelled on the conventions of D&D.

It begins as a fairly standard gamer's wish-fulfilment scenario: a group of college-age gamers are magically transported into the gameworld that their referee/gamemaster/dungeonmaster has been describing to them. Swordplay, clever strategems, and adventure ensue.

To Rosenberg's credit, he introduces a number of somewhat more sophisticated concepts as the story progresses. Karl Cullinane and the other "characters" encounter ethical, emotional and political quandries as well as the inevitable swordsmen and wizards, and deal with them in ways that are not always entirely successful and frequently have consequences that are all too permanent. I was surprised to find a degree of psychological realism in a book that was clearly packaged by the publisher as a purely escapist fantasy, but there it is.

Round and round and round

My current temporarily adopted hometown has achieved something that no other place in the US can claim. The only question is.... why?

Livingston's dual roundabout is first of kind in N. America (Lansing State Journal)

Motorists, engineers go round and round on roundabouts (Detroit News)

Round and round they go Lee Road/U.S. 23 interchange near final stage of construction (Livingston Community News)

That's right, B-town has installed not only a dual side-by-side roundabout, but another such mixmaster immediately on the other side of the highway. That's three multi-lane traffic roundabouts immediately adjacent to each other. This is in addition to one existing roundabout in the middle of Main Street.

Local reaction seems to be dubious. Another writer to a local paper suggested that local businesses keep 911 on speed-dial to report the hourly wrecks that will result from this little piece of insanity.

In the meanwhile, in the unlikely event that anyone comes to visit, avoid that exit.

Candidate o' the day

If I lived in Iowa, I could vote for this fellow.

I sue you, you sue me....

The Big Purple Dinosaur Who Must Not Be Named goes to court to suppress satire. Not so fast, sez the EFF.

Link o' the day

Behold... the postmodern critical essay generator.

Recent viewings:

The Starlost: The Beginning.

Amish in Space!

With computers! And furry cowboy hats!

I recall years ago reading a book which I found in the library of my high school which satirically described the process by which a good idea for a science-fiction television program was turned into howlingly awful slop by the dictates of peabrained television producers. The book was The Starcrossed, by Ben Bova. This was the series that inspired the book... if "inspired" is the right word. Those who are curious can consult Wikipedia for a brief discussion of the history of the series.

The props and costumes are reminiscent of contemporary episodes of Doctor Who, but the good Doctor rarely had to deal with scripts this silly.

At one point I found myself muttering, "Okay. So now the Amish-in-space are holding a black mass... in front of their supercomputer... while wearing furry cowboy hats....." Hysterical giggling seemed the only appropriate response.

To be fair, the basic idea of the series had some promise. It's set on a generation starship, which is carrying hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of separate bio-spheres, or self-contained human cultures, toward a new planet. Our Heroes come from Cypress Corners, a biosphere which evidently contains descendents of the Amish culture.

No, the writers don't explain how Amish people came to be aboard a spaceship. Neither do they explain how the second male lead manages to keep his hair blowdried and moussed (or gelled, or whatever it is that made certain men's hair turn rigid and poofy in the 1970s). Or why the agrarian Amish seem blithely unconcerned that their rustic blacksmith shops and houses are made out of geometrically-patterned slabs and their fireplaces all seem to be gas-fueled.

After a silly plot involving a romantic triangle and an evil theocratic Amish preacher, Our Heroes discover the passageways which connect the different parts of the generation ship. Thus the stage is set for a continuing series of adventures in which they explore different futuristic human cultures while trying to discover what has gone wrong with the giant ship and its mission.

The first such isolated culture has no women. Thus its inhabitants have turned into The Culture of Really Annoying Gay Stereotypes, presided over by an oily hypermacho "governor" who wins and keeps his position through gladiatorial combat. The inhabitants, though produced through Brave New World-style in vitro methods, seem to have an instinctive knowledge of what "women" are, and immediately decide to worship the female lead as a goddess....

It's entertaining in the same way that MST3K is entertaining, but I can see why Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova wished to disavow it.

Osama Bin Forgotten

In case you haven't read about it elsewhere...

Most people think he's plotting another attack on the U.S. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration disbands the CIA unit responsible for finding him.

Recent viewings in brief

Scoop. All the usual Woody Allen characteristics are present -- the wacky premise; the casually absurdist view of Death and the afterlife; the deadpan, self-deprecating one-liners. But for some reason the whole enterprise seems somehow lifeless. (No pun intended.)

Lady in the Water. The latest thriller from M. Night Shyamalan is watchable, but don't think too seriously about it. "Madame Narf" sounds like a character from a badly-translated Japanese anime.

Hearts and Minds. This early-1970s documentary will forever put to rest any doubts that you might have had about the stupidity and cynicism of the Viet Nam war.

Go ahead and enjoy the deadly mayhem, just don't smoke anything.

The horrible, dangerous antics of Itchy and Scratchy... er, I mean Tom and Jerry... are to be censored.

Look upon them and lust.

It's hot library smut! (probably work-safe, despite the salacious title.)

This Just In

The NY Times, as seen by Republicans.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

An amusing website for those of us who have noticed that falling cars in movies have a distressing tendency to explode before they hit the ground.

Seen on the road

A couple of days ago I noticed that one of the local police departments has purchased some snazzy new cars.

Now, I do like my somewhat stodgy Impala, but I have to say the Dodge Charger cop cars are very sharp looking machines. I have a feeling the cops in the drivers seat of these 340 hp hot rods are just waiting with bated breath for some idiot to try to outrun them. The state patrol's Crown Vics look downright stodgy sitting next to them.

Random librarians-in-the-media quotation of the day

From a New York Times article describing how the NY Public Library is finally abandoning its ancient, homegrown classificaton system in favor of the Library of Congress Classification System:

"Perhaps the most delightfully named branch of the federal bureaucracy is the Library of Congress Cataloging Directorate, which sounds oddly like an office of totalitarian librarians...."

For some reason I am reminded of McSweeney's list of "Library science jargon that sounds dirty."

Recent listens

Petey, by Ben Mikaelsen. Due to factors beyond my control I was obliged to either read or listen to this book. It's not an experience that I particularly enjoyed.

Partly this is because of the subject matter of the book. "Petey" is a man born with cerebral palsy, a disorder which in the early twentieth century was frequently mistaken for extreme mental retardation. After his parents find themselves unable to care for him, he lives practically his entire life in a series of institutions. The author describes in numbing detail the progress of each and every acquaintance who gets to know Petey throughout his long, long life. Since Petey is unable to move or speak clearly enough for most people to understand him, there's not much in the way of thrilling action or adventure. Petey is almost always a passive recipient of other people's actions, rather than an actor in his own right. This allows him to act as a kind of touchstone for other people's characters. Unfortunately, most of them aren't very interesting, either.

I can sympthasize with the plight of people like Petey, and it is an interesting experiment to try to construct a book out of the small details and slow routines of a life so constrained. Unfortunately, the author too often subjects his reader to preachy sentimentality and clumsy writing, especially in the second part of the book, in which Petey acts as a positive influence on a confused and lonely teenager. Worst of all is Mikaelsen's habit of attributing concrete actions to abstract concepts. ("Contentment smoothed his face...") One or two occurances of such phrases can be excused as a rhetorical flourish. But when they recur over and over and over again, I begin to wonder when abstract concepts like Anger, Compassion, Contentment, etc., grew arms and legs and started walking around on their own doing things to people. The worst example occurs in the very first chapter, when the author says of Petey's mother, "Fear gutted her mind," thus compounding logically fallacious reification with evident anatomical confusion.

Recent Reads

Ill Wind, by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason. This thriller begins with an intriguing premise. In response to a disastrous oil spill, an oil company releases a "designer microbe" which is supposed to break down the petroleum. Unfortunately, the microbe's appetite for hydrocarbons turns out to be much less finicky than they had anticipated. Disaster ensues.

Unfortunately, about the middle of the book, the focus shifts away from the mechanics of the authors' doomsday scenario and the book turns into a postapocalyptic survival story of the Enlightened Few versus the Militaristic Barbarians. It's not bad on its own merits, but it didn't interest me as much as the first half of the book in which the "petroplague" and its effects were the center of attention. It is intriguing to contemplate how much of our everyday life, and the infrastructure that supports it, is based on a set of complex, artificially-manipulated chemical substances derived from a substance that was practically ignored until the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Both heroes and villians are ensemble casts. I found that the good guys seemed to blur together. It's the villians of the piece who are truly individualistic, especially one memorably narcissistic sociopath. It's a little disturbing seeing the world through *that* pair of eyes. The authors upset the readers' expectations somewhat by making their first glimpse of a character who will become one of the primary antagonists of the novel a positive one. It's a bit unsettling, and perhaps helps to suggest that "interesting times" sometimes bring out the worst, rather than the best, in people.

Sundiver, by David Brin. Brin's "Uplift" series of books are well known and successful, but it seems to get a slow start in this first book. The "dolphins in space" theme, which seems to become much more prominent in his later books, is here just a minor subplot.

Dolphins, like chimpanzees, have been genetically modified by human beings to achieve sentience. This turns out to be fortunate when humans make contact with more advanced alien races, since it turns out that the whole structure of politics among advanced spacefaring races is based on a presumption that a species can only achieve sentience through being "uplifted" by a more advanced race, which then exercises authority over its "client" species. Humans have no known Patron, but can at least point to two species that they themselves have "uplifted", thus fitting themselves, albeit somewhat insecurely, into the framework of interstellar politics.

It may be that I was just in the mood to be bored when I read this book. The human characters seemed uninvolving and the alien characters freakish. As frequently happens, I found the setting to be more interesting than any of the characters. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, seems to have an eventful past which is alluded to but never fully explained. As the story opens, he's working in the dolphin uplife project. But before long he's pulled away to help investigate a series of strange occurances on a kind of high-tech bathysphere being used to explore the Sun. People inside the shielded Sundiver have reported seeing apparitions -- "Sun Ghosts" -- in the chromosphere, shapes which appear to have life and volition. This throws a wrench into not only human thought, but the complex prestige-and-protocol system by which the Uplifted races view the universe. For all their superior technology, they have never discovered any such thing, and it may ruffle some feathers (or analogous appendages) to be upstaged by a mere "wolfling" race outside the established system of patronage. Sundiver, and those aboard her, may be delving into an unexplored sphere of hellish heat and pressure, but they're also delving into the philosophical rifts that divide humans into political factions like that technology-admiring "Shirts" and the fiercely independent "Skins", and the far more devious rifts of politics between alien races, some of whom may not care particularly about the best interests of a race of insolent barbarians without any history or connections in the great game of interstellar politics.

Recent Reads

Goa: Blood of the Goddess, by Kara Dalkey. This book is "fantasy" only due to the presence of a mysterious powdered substance which has apparently-miraculous medical effects. Otherwise, its setting is a fairly straightforward historical portrayal of Goa, the Portuguese colony in India, in the year 1597 AD. (In an afterword, the author briefly discusses the history of Goa, and acknowledges the librarian at the U. of Minnesota who helped with her research.)

The story follows several threads simultaneously. An apothecary's apprentice from England, taking passage on a ship bound for the East Indies, and finds himself entangled with not only a privateering captain and crew, but a far more mysterious woman and an alleged "sorceror" being pursued by a Portuguese warship. Meanwhile, a Special Envoy from the Grand Inquisitor of Lisboa has been dispatched to the colony to investigate strange doings in the Goanese office of the Inquisition. Heresies and corruption are rumored to be afoot.

The author's depiction of the "santa casa" of the Inquisition is frighteningly believable, especially as she takes care to show how its "tender mercies" are justified to a young and idealistic monk.

I noticed this book when I was looking at weeding candidates in the SF collection of Suburban Public Library. The book hadn't checked out in couple of years, but its title, with its allusion to an exotic place about which I had heard vaguely interesting things, attracted my attention. So did the cover painting, a glowing, golden-orange Richard Bober painting of a sailing ship approaching an Eastern city. I enjoyed the book enough that it's going back on the shelves. And I might just go out of my way to see that the library gets the second and third volumes in the story.

Up North ramblings

I spent last Sunday night at this place, and Monday attending a day-long workshop about library instruction at the nearby campus of Busy Bee College.

I've found it very easy to get accustomed to being able to make such trips without having to worry about whether my rusty steed will make it there and back without ending up in the ditch.

After the workshop, I wandered about the town, camera in hand. Cadillac reminds me of a somewhat diluted version of Marquette. It has a residential area with a few nice old lumbermen's mansions:



It has an attractive traditional downtown area with a collection of touristy shops, although none of them were able to satisfy the craving for thimbleberry jam that the sight of think, piney northern forests and blue lakewater had reawakened in me. ("Ya hafta go upta da Yoop, up over The Bridge for that.")

A degree of awareness of the local history is in evidence with this fading but still informative building:



A sign explains the reason for the little Shay locomotive on display near the lakefront.






One of the town's former passenger depots is now a veteran's center, and the nearby lakefront possesses everything that I could reasonably require for a pleasant afternoon's stroll:




It appears that someone in Cadillac has constructed the world's biggest and heaviest set of wind chimes.



Those are brake drums, and yes, they do chime quite nicely when they contact each other. It would take a hurricane-force wind to accomplish this without human assistance. If one gets tired of heaving chains and brake drums together, there's always the nearby giant wooden xylophone and a bench carved out of tree roots for an appreciative audience (if any such existed.)

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As evening approached, so did a short train of the Great Lakes Central, formerly Tuscola & Saginaw Bay Railroad, which has taken over the remnants of the former Ann Arbor and Pennsy lines in the area.



As evening approached and the sun sank toward the lake, the local orchestra prepared to play a concert in the small theater-like structure on the lakeshore.



But not for me. Miles to go, promises to keep, that sort of thing.

Recent Reads

Futureshocks, ed. Lou Anders. This collection includes short stories by a number of leading lights of science fiction, all of whom were apparently asked to contribute projections of "What terror does tomorrow hold?" In other words, these aren't happy cheerful stories full of optimism and faith in human nature; they're visions of how our future could go horribly wrong. Fortunately, SF does this kind of thing pretty well.

Standout stories include:

Paul di Filippo's "Shuteye for the Timebroker", in which the development of chemical treatments which eliminate the human need for sleep results in a hyperdriven, 24-hour-a-day economy. A "timebroker" can make a good living acting as middleman and directing people to various amusements at all hours of the day and night... but not if he loses his job, his health coverage, and his anti-sleep medication. I wasn't convinced by the resolution of the story, but it's an interesting glimpse at a possible future.

"The Man Who Knew Too Much", by Alan Dean Foster, takes a cockeyed view of the ever-expanding amount of information available to individuals. An obsessive bookcollector who acquires more information than his brain can absorb creates a cluttered home and a problem for movers. But what if such obsessives could download the knowledge straight into their brains? (Yes, I recognize that I resemble the protagonist in this story.)

Caitlin Kiernan's "The Pearl Diver", like much of her work, skimps on plot but has a wealth of foreboding atmosphere and arresting imagery.

"Before the Beginning", by Mike Resnick and Harry Turtledove, asks a logical question about time travel: What if you could set the controls to the instant before the Big Bang?

Adam Roberts' "Man You Gotta Go" proposes both a possible destiny of an interstellar-travelling human race and an answer to Fermi's Paradox.

Canadian Robert J. Sawyer, who has written about the possible intellectual and social consequences of human contact with alien civilizations in Calculating God and elsewhere, seems to wonder, in his story "Flashes", whether the human race is really ready for such levels of knowledge. Similar thoughts in SF date back at least to Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory", and have been presented in novelistic form as recently as Vernor Vinge's 2006 Rainbow's End, but Sawyer presents them as well as anyone.

Recent Reads

Sex and the new S1ngle Girl (updated edition for the 70s), by Helen Gurley Brown. "The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men", by the founding editor of Cosmopolitan. I! don't! think! I've! ever! seen! an! adult! use! so! many! exclamation! points!

The Shape of Things to Come?

From the AP by way of CNN: "Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to offer free, high-speed Internet access to everyone in its Silicon Valley home town -- a hospitable gesture that the online search leader hopes to see spread to other parts of the country...."

It will be interesting to see what obstacles the existing telecom companies and their hired legislators throw in the path of such plans. In Michigan and other states, similar plans by municipalities and other community bodies have been threatened with legislative bans in order to protect the established monopolists (who, in my case, have priced cable internet service so high that I simply cannot afford it).

Recent Reads:

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Does this book have a central theme? I don't know, but I enjoyed it anyway. Mitchell tells a series of connected stories that span several hundred years, ranging from the narrative of a South Seas traveller to the picaresque letters of an eighteenth-century musician to the machinations of a mystery novel to a science-fictional world of cloned beings to a postapocalyptic setting reminiscent of Riddly Walker or On The Beach. As one of the blurbs on the cover duly notes, Mitchell pulls off the distinctive voice of each genre in a convincing manner, which makes for an entertaining writerly tour-de-force.

Recent Viewings

Sledge Hammer! (Season One, Disc One)

How triggerhappy is Sledge Hammer?

* He talks to his .44 Magnum and sleeps with it cushioned on a pillow next to him.

* In the pilot episode, he's delayed in his drive to work because a sniper has started shooting at people from the top of a building. Hammer nonchalantly opens the trunk of his rolling-wreck road-barge, pulls out a bazooka, blows up the building, and drives on in to work.

* Also from the pilot episode:

Sledge Hammer: The two men then pointed their shotguns at the clerk, so I took out my magnum and shot and killed them both. I then bought some eggs, and milk, and some of those little cocktail weenies.

News reporter: Inspector, was what you did in the store absolutely necessary?

Sledge Hammer: Oh yes, I had almost no groceries at all.

The humor in this 1980s comedy is frequently about as subtle as its namesake, and the constant reiteration of one key comic concept (a snarling, hypermasculine, hyperviolent police detective whose preferred solution to any problem is ALWAYS violence, preferably as loud and destructive and gratuitous as possible) can get old rapidly when several episodes are viewed in quick succession.

However, it is a fun show, largely because it has sharp writing and gleefully goes out of its way to offend just about everyone. Jonathan Rasche plays the off-the-wall protagonist without a shred of visible irony, looking for all the world like the world's angriest Angry White Male, nostrils flaring, eyes staring in cold blue fury; an authoritarian-minded Aryan ubermensch gone completely berserk. In the best cliched tradition of cop shows, he has a harassed precinct chief who hates him and repeatedly suspends him but never quite gets around to firing him, an ex-wife whom he constantly gripes about, and an assigned female partner ("Dori Doreau") who is gorgeous, brilliant, and able to karate-kick evildoers into next week.

The show satirically targets not only the cliches of the Dirty Harry/Die Hard genre, but the whole genre of police-related movies and television programs. One episode on this disc -- titled "Witless" -- parodies the 1985 movie Witness; another, "Dori Day Afternoon", revisits the scenario of 1975's Dog Day Afternoon.

But, believe it or not, there's a degree of subtlety as well. Some of the funniest bits are casual, throwaway, split-second gags that many viewers will miss. Check out the, er, checking-out scene in the pilot episode. Or the casual reference to the protagonist's father in They Shoot Hammers, Don't They?. Yes, it was inevitable that he would be named Jack, but the comment's made in such a casual, passing manner that its very non-jokiness becomes a kind of joke for whoever's paying enough attention to catch it.

Some episodes may evoke a different feeling today than they did originally. I'm thinking particularly of an episode in which passengers of an airliner (led by Our AntiHero and his fetching partner) beat up a criminal who's holding them as hostages, after which Hammer storms the cockpit. (He doesn't know how to fly the plane, but, typically, that little matter doesn't occur to him until later...) It's typical of the series' blatantly irreverent and blackly-humorous take on things that the episode ends with the airliner crash-landing in the middle of a giant billboard proclaiming "Third World Airlines : We Covet Your World!", after which the surviving criminal leaps from the airplane, only to be run over by a truck on the highway beneath. Hammer observes, in his customary deadpan tone, that "you really are safer in an airplane than on the highway."

The writers of the series clearly had some fun seeing how far they could push the eccentricities of their absurd main character, too. Instead of a silencer, he uses a "loudener"; he thinks the death penalty is too lenient because "there's always the possibility of reincarnation"; he vacations in Beirut; and so on.

And, amazingly, the show IS still fun, largely because the durable cliches it mocks are still with us.

How many planets are there, anyway?

Walk around in Captain Picard's head

An eccentric way to spend an afternoon if you happen to be in the north of England.

It appears folks do this kind of thing in Michigan, too.

Testing, testing, one two three

Enetation's incompetence has finally become too exasperating to bear. Will Blogger's built-in comments feature save the day? Let's find out.

Edit: Well, well. For some reason the Blogger comments link will only appear in the permalinked version of the blog post. Does anyone know what's going on and how it can be corrected? I'd like to avoid completely abolishing the Enetation comments link to avoid losing the content of old comments (with an eye toward perhaps cutting-and-pasting old comments into spiffy new Blogger comments so that previous conversations on this blog don't vanish into limbo.)

Recent Reads

Feed, by M.T. Anderson. This book has been marketed as a YA book, but in fact it's one of the best pieces of science fiction, adult or otherwise, that I've read in the last year.

The protagonist, a teenager in a media-saturated near future, has been implanted with a constantly-connected wireless internet connection, the "feed" of the title. The stream-of-consciousness first person narration puts the reader inside his mind, complete with constant interruptions from targeted advertisements and other come-ons. The result is an effective depiction of one speculative near-future in which I hope I never have to live.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that most science fiction deals with two classic questions: "What if...?" and "If this goes on...?" Feed deals with both. The "feed" upon which the story depends is not, literally, available today, so on one level the story portrays the possible consequences of a speculative technological development. On a metaphorical level, though, the of constant and pervasive electronic connectivity that permeates our society approximates the ubiquitous "feed" and its instant, though shallow and biased, responsiveness to queries and "customer profiles".

A first-person narrative can't help but be sympathetic to its narrator, but the protagonist of Feed is anything but a hero. At times while reading the novel, I wanted to kick his self-indulgent butt (possibly because, in some ways, I recognized his failings as ones that I have at times displayed). Even though the author supplies plenty of clues to explain his choices, he's still an exasperating moral failure. The ending is ambiguous. I don't think it constitutes a spoiler to say that at the end of the novel, it's questionable whether he has truly "learned a valuable lesson about love."

Recent (and not-so-recent) reads

The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood. Atwood's entry in Knopf's series of modern interpretations of myth is, like The Handmaid's Tale, a first-person narrative of relations between the sexes in a patriarchial culture. As the title suggests, it's the story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, as told by her in the gloomy vales of Hades, thousands of years after the events that made her name a byword for domestic fidelity. Atwood has some fun with the story, interjecting her own version of a Greek chorus and, half-seriously, some bits of Robert Graves' theories about prehistoric matriarchy. Penelope casts a different light on the events related in The Odyssey. The warfare, the journeys, the disguises and escapades of Odysseus are absent, or related secondhand. Instead we have the recollections of a young girl, the daughter of a petty King and a minor water-goddess, who later became the trophy-wife of a far-distant king of an isolated and provincial island, a man famed for his devious mind and clever schemes. When he's called away to war, she learns just how fragile her authority is in his absence. And when he stays away, the human vultures start to gather. Schemes and counterschemes play out as in the Odyssey that we all know, but in a slightly different key. And then there's that uncomfortable matter of the twelve hanged maids....

Weight, by Jeanette Winterson. Winterson's entry in the Myth series deals with the story of Atlas, the Titan who supposedly held the world on his shoulders. Sadly, the details of the story have escaped my mind in the months since I read it. I seem to recall it as being difficult to follow, and quick glance back at its pages reinforces that memory.

Company, by Max Barry. If you've ever worked for a company in which you suspected that nobody in the head office had the slightest clue what the company actually did, this is the book for you. A very funny satire on internal corporate behavior and vacuous management-by-fad from the author of Jennifer Government.

Abbey's Road, by Edward Abbey. A collection of essays in three parts. The first part is a series of travel narratives about a trip through Australia, a typical Abbey mixture of shrewd social observation and absurdly macho misadventures, such as his decision to drive a rented car across the Australian outback, blissfully disregarding the fact that there is no road to speak of that spans the hundreds of desolate miles he plans to cover. His descriptions of an Australian cattle ranch, the treatment of the aborigines, and the railroad to Alice Springs are also entertaining. It's like listening to someone telling stories in a bar, or around a campfire. One suspects that parts of the story may be, shall we say, taller than the events that actually transpired, but the detailed descriptions and observations convince us that he's mostly telling the truth. Part the second is "Polemics and Sermons", in which firebrand Ed blazes away in fine, impassioned style about the right to bear arms; politicians; the environment; "The Winnebago Tribe", etc.. Finally, a small collection of biographical pieces drawn from his experiences as a park ranger, fire lookout, traveler, womanizer, occasional drunk and perpetually irascible troublemaker. Good reading, although one gets the impression that Abbey could be a difficult and frustrating acquaintance.

Love, Roger, by Charles Webb. Somnolent story of a young man who works at a travel agency and sleepwalks through a series of amorous affairs with various young women. A blond nursing student from Wisconsin writes him a letter and asks to marry him. He meets a neurotic brunette and has sex with her. She fears she might be crazy. He has sex with a prostitute. The blond nursing student drops out of nursing school and travels across country so that he can take her virginity in the corner of the travel office. (Quoth she: "It's just that I wanted to get rid of my misconceptions.") The vacuous young man, the blond and the brunette move in together. I get the impression this is supposed to be shocking. Perhaps it was shocking in 1969.

The Drum Goes Dead, by Bess Streeter Aldrich. This short book begins with an arresting image. "Bellfield is similar to a hundred small midwestern towns. From the air its buildings look like so many dishes clustered together on a flat table. The covered soup tureen is the community hall. The red vase in the center is the courthouse. The silver tipped salt shaker is the water tank...." We meet Richard Lanner, a decent honest middle-aged chap who's become quite depressed by the world and is starting to become cynical about Christmas... until he plays Santa Claus in the local Christmas pageant and realizes that it's for the children.

The Yellow Room, by Mary Roberts Rinehart. For some reason this woman had a successful career as a writer of mystery novels. This one put me to sleep, and I don't mean that as a compliment. The heroine is an insipidly helpless girl who spends most of the story wandering around aimlessly and watching while other people solve a murder at her family's huge summer mansion in Maine. Meanwhile she worries about the servants and what her mother and brother and sister-in-law think of her and mopes over her boyfriend, who was reported dead by the military a year ago. But... is he really dead?

The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell follows a similar pattern in most of his books. They follow a male protagonist, an inhabitant of some time and place notable for its military contests, as he grows up from humble origins and becomes involved with the great battles and political/military leaders of his time. Fortunately, Cornwell is a skilled writer who's able to keep the reader interested despite his repetition of familiar themes, and he always does good research. (He even cites his sources in the afterword. Bless you, Mr. C!). This time, his protagonist, Uhtred, is the son of a Northumbrian lord in the ninth century A.D. The Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms of England are beginning to collapse under the assaults of Viking invaders from the North Sea, and Uhtred becomes involved in the forefront of the conflict. Through his eyes, the reader has a historically plausible firsthand view of the long conflict as the English kingdoms teeter and fall in succession. Uhtred, like many medieval warriors, develops personal connections and obligations to both sides, which permits Cornwell to show the attitudes and strategems of both the Danes and the English. The most notable English leader is, of course, Alfred of Wessex, whom we see develop from a weak, confused teenager into the politically astute and militarily competent leader whom we know from history as Alfred the Great, savior of England. The story isn't concluded in this volume; Cornwell states in the afterword that "Uhtred will campaign again." A good read for anyone who enjoys medieval history or military fiction.

Yet more reasons...

...to avoid airlines like the plague.

Pricing themselves out of the canon

An interesting look at the problems that literary anthologists face in getting permission to reproduce stories, poems, etc.

Over the hill

From this job ad: "The Libraries seeks a diverse pool of applicants with ALA-accredited M.L.S. or M.I.S. degrees awarded December 2006...."

Republican smear tactics in Ohio

When all else fails, start a whispering campaign that your opponent is gay. Never mind that he's been married (to the same woman, unlike, say, Newt Gingrich or Ronald Reagan) for many years.

If he objects, of course, you can just demand that he prove it. (How, one wonders? By having sex on broadcast television? I thought Republicans and religious conservatives were against that sort of thing, but maybe I was wrong.)

If you're challenged about it in the public press outside your safely insular network of intraparty communiques, you can loudly and publicly fire some convenient person. Meanwhile, you let the e'mail smear circulate through your Astroturf e'mail network of true believers, while refusing to forward a correction or disavowal to that same network. That way you successfully motivate your gay-bashing followers to stampede to the polls to vote against the purported "faggot", while piously claiming to be "doing the right thing" in the view of those outside the circle of the self-appointed elect.

The above brought to you by the Ohio Republican Party and the "Ohio Restoration Project", a tax-free religious group that recruits so-called "Patriot Pastors" to indoctrinate their followers to the worship of Caesar and stumps for partisan political candidates in violation of the law.

Of course, the Bush Administration's IRS is just too, too busy to enforce that law... they have more important things to do. From the LA Times:

[T]he IRS warned All Saints Church in Pasadena that it was reviewing the Episcopal church's tax-exempt status because a priest criticized the Iraq war shortly before the 2004 presidential election. Church leaders say they have no intention of scaling back their criticism of the war....

All Saints still awaits a resolution. Two days before the 2004 presidential election, the Rev. George F. Regas, the church's former rector, delivered a guest sermon that pictured Jesus in a debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Although Regas didn't endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would have told Bush that his preemptive war policy "has led to disaster."

The IRS sent the church a letter June 9, 2005, stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church."

Too many churches!

Residents of the Christian Republic of Texas may find this entertaining.

WorldCat on the web

WorldCat is now available to all comers.

Over the years, I've had several conversations with librarians who wanted to ban the public from having access to multiple-library databases such as WorldCat. And I've encountered libraries, even large public libraries, which outright forbade such public access, reserving it to staff-only use. What an appalling display of arrogance! I could understand a policy of directing users to other sources such as the local library catalog and fulltext periodicals databases first, since materials found through those sources are more likely to be available locally. In libraries outside the US, I could understand a policy of preferentially directing users to interlibrary union catalogs that were less US-dominated, such as Canada's Amicus. However, an outright denial of WorldCat access to the public seems to me to reflect nothing more noble than the library staff's desire to reduce their workload by keeping their customers ignorant of useful materials that could be requested from the library if customers knew of their existence.

If you're unfortunate enough to be dependent on such a library, web-WorldCat will be a welcome bypass route around the librarians' roadblock. However, as we'll see, if you have access to WorldCat by way of FirstSearch or some other traditional gateway, there are still reasons to prefer it for certain types of searches.

Quick reactions:

Interface

The Google-like one-line search interface is familiar and unintimidating to web-denizens, and it will probably meet the needs of most users, but an advanced-search option enabling the user to make more precise searches is also needed. I don't like being forced to use a dumbed-down, one-line, undifferentiated keyword search when a more precise definition of search parameters is needed.

This type of interface is the best model for Google because the sources of Google's metadata -- the terms describing what webpages are about -- are so notoriously unreliable. Even so, Google offers an advanced search option, which the web version of WorldCat fails to do.

Unlike Google, OCLC has excellent, professionally-produced metadata available. Its data, derived from library catalog records, are clearly and reliably classified and labelled. Author information, title information, subject headings, publisher identification, etc., are separately identified in OCLC's data, and they need to be separately searchable. There's no other effective way to search for books *about* Henry David Thoreau, for example, without drowning in a sea of editions of books *by* Henry David Thoreau. Or to find, say, a list of books put out by a particular publisher, without also including unwanted materials whose titles, authors, or other datafields include terms similar to the name of the publisher. I'll refrain from supplying more specific examples. The creative researchers of the world can no doubt supply all the weird queries needed to demonstrate that an advanced search option should be made available as soon as possible if web-WorldCat is to be as useful as its older cousin.

Edit: It appears that it is possible to specify which type of search one wishes to do, but only in a way that is extremely unlikely to be discovered by most users. (Compare search results for "ti: leaky roof" with results for "leaky roof".)

Coverage

A quick couple of searches for fairly obscure titles suggest that the web-WorldCat service includes OCLC catalog records that are not widely held, including archival materials that are held by only one institution. This is an improvement over previous methods of open access to WorldCat, which excluded records of items held only by small numbers of institutions. However, web-WorldCat will not identify some holding libraries/institutions.

For example: a search for Paul C. Morris's Schooners and schooner barges of Cape Cod, a cassette tape of a verbal presentation by a maritime historian, will locate the OCLC catalog record for the item. But when one clicks on the "libraries" tab of the search results page, the web version of WorldCat claims that "no libraries with the specified item were found." In fact, according to a search of WorldCat by way of FirstSearch, there is one institution that holds a copy of the tape. (Clams, Inc., of Hyannis, Maryland. This appears to be their website; the tape appears in their catalog as a library-use-only item.)

Similarly, a search of web-WorldCat for Mahlon Neill White's The Leaky Roof : the story of a railroad, a history of a small regional railroad, offers access to the OCLC catalog description of the book and indicates that 13 institutions own copies. In fact, according to FirstSearch-WorldCat, there are 16 owning institutions. The ones excluded from the web-WorldCat results appear to be the State Historical Society of Missouri, SMU's DeGolyer Library, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The first two are ILL nonsuppliers, but the WHS is listed by OCLC as an ILL supplier.

I initially thought that the criteria for exclusion from web-WorldCat's list of holding institutions might depend on whether the institution is an ILL-supplier, but the WHS example suggests otherwise. Perhaps holding institutions, or certain types of holding institutions, were allowed to opt out? Or perhaps the determination is made on an item-by-item basis, depending on whether the institution does or does not permit circulation of the specific item? Someone with more cataloging expertise than me would have to answer that.

I'd welcome any thoughts that other folks have on the subject -- this is just a quick preliminary set of reactions on my part.

Does this company deserve to live?

From today's Detroit Free Press: GM pins hopes on pickups.

Today I paid $3.19 a gallon for gasoline. With worldwide energy demand growing inexorably, and the dominant petroleum-producing regions perpetually teetering on the edge of war, it seems unlikely that the price of gasoline will drop significantly over the long term. Am I interested in spending $30,000 for a vehicle that, if I'm lucky, will barely get over 20 mpg "with some engines"? Is this going to "revitalize" the company?

Of course, GM could have been far ahead of everybody else with a popular, useful all-electric commuter vehicle... but no, that would make too much sense.

I'm sorry to have to say it, especially since the local economy is entangled in an inextricable deathgrip with US automakers. But companies this stupid deserve to die.

Noooooo!!!!

You remember that old Monopoly game that you used to play with your freinds/siblings/parents? The one with all the crinkly multicolored bills? The "Monopoly Money" that is so widely recognized it's become a catchphrase in modern English? And the funky metal pieces? The battleship, the roadster, the shoe?

Some pinhead (probably from Hasbros's marketing department) has now decided to replace the popular and durable game that has lasted for over half a century and with some gussied-up "Here and Now" version of the game that depends on cheap flimsy plastic "debit cards" and an equally cheap and flimsy cardreader that will predictably need new batteries every time the game is pulled out of storage and break within a few years, rendering the game unusable. For this, they more than triple the price of the game.

But, hey, it has "cool tokens that are iconic to life here & now". Whoopie.

Fortunately, there are enough real copies of the game in existence that people who want to play a version that works should still be able to do so for the foreseeable future.

A strategic overview

... of one theater in the Republican class war.

Ick.

Indictment issued in library foot-kissing

Sabbathday Lake

The Boston Globe takes a sympathetic look at the present-day lives of the last remaining Shakers.

I feel a certain sympathy for their way of life, but I'd have a hard time swallowing their religious doctrines.

Apropos of nothing... I wonder if they worry about people showing up and pretending to convert just in order to make themselves the heirs-presumptive of what has evidently become a very valuable piece of real estate?

The Next Big Thing for library acquisition departments?

Amazon announces that they will now provide library processing services to library customers, much like traditional library wholesalers such as Baker & Taylor, Emery Pratt, Blackwell North America, and Yankee Book Peddler.

Caesar and God

From the Amherst Times (also reported in the NYT, but not accessible there.):

DISOWNING CONSERVATIVE POLITICS, EVANGELICAL PASTOR RATTLES FLOCK

Discussion at Dailykos.

Scary recipes

From an ongoing discussion at the Fiction-L list:

"Christine Feehan's forthcoming hardcover, Dark Celebration, the latest in her romance series that features blood sucking Carpathians who are turned into evil vampires if they don't find their lifemates, features recipes used for a holiday get together...."

I wonder if the recipes include, say, blood sausage?

Bookdealer turns detective

As described by the Grumpy Old Bookman. Secondhand bookdealer Clive Keeble tracks down a library thief who was selling his ill-gotten goodies on eBay.

Death to thieves! (Although this one will probably get away with the proverbial slap on the wrist. It's not like he did anything serious, like download an mp3 or something.)

Once and future viewings

The Wicker Man (1973)
Several months ago, pursuant to a discussion on a fiction listserv, I rented and watched The Wicker Man, a 1973 British Lion Film Corporation production that seems to have languished in undeserved obscurity for thirty years after a postproduction management shakeup doomed it to a halfhearted release and nearly total destruction. Literally. The British archival copies of the film were, according to those-in-the-know, discarded and entombed in a landfill beneath a highway.

Fortunately, though, American B-movie icon Roger Corman kept a copy of the US-released version of the film. Christopher Lee, who played Lord Summerisle in the movie and has described it as the best movie he ever appeared in, seems to have plugged it persistently enough that it was eventually, finally, re-released on DVD.

It's quite a stunner in its own way, a practically uncategorizable film that has aspects of horror but does not conform to the standard cliches of that genre. It occasionally incorporates music and dancing much like a musical, and the plot follows the general outline of a police-procedural thriller. But what really sets it apart is the philosophical and mythic underpinnings of the story, which are only gradually revealed and which I will not discuss in any detail here. One can easily see how timid, unimaginative executives might have been afraid to release it.

It's beautifully filmed, also. The fields and trees and skies of "Summerisle" seem to glow with an almost supernatural radiance. Not to mention its bonny lassies, whose charms are, um, quite evident. (Note: there are several nude and sexually-suggestive scenes, including one in which a very naked Britt Eklund tries to seduce the protagonist, a staunchly orthodox Christian.)

It's enough to make one think that Lord Summerisle may be on to something after all....

An excellent if disturbing movie, well worth seeing for anyone who's interested in religion, myth, and cinematic suspense. James Berardinelli has an insightful review posted here, but if you're at all interested in the movie as I've described it so far, you probably should see the movie before reading the review due to the presence of a number of spoilers. Among other things, it may be your only chance to see a young Christopher Lee dancing down a country lane in drag, wearing a long black wig!

Now comes word that Neil LaBute, the writer and director of such brilliant little gems of cinematic misanthropy as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, has remade The Wicker Man with fellow Detroit native Ellen Burstyn in the role of Sister Summerisle. LaBute discusses the film in an interview here. It will be quite fascinating to see how LaBute and Burstyn re-interpret the film's story. A feminist cult, perhaps? Goddess theology? According to IMDB, the release date is September 1st.

Just in time for the harvest season....

Edit, 2:15: LaBute discusses his interpretation of the film here. Spoiler alert continues -- see the 1973 movie first!

Busheviks!

Some great cartoons from Kirk Anderson.

All your colors are belong to us

Several sources report that a US District Court for the eastern district of Louisiana has ruled in favor of a group of universities which sought to prohibit a clothing manufacturer from making and selling clothes in their color schemes.

The ruling means that the Defendant can no longer use LSU’s purple and gold and Oklahoma’s crimson and cream, Ohio State’s scarlet and gray, and USC’s cardinal and gold in producing apparel that refers, but not necessarily by name, to those universities.

The Court’s decision is important in that few courts across the country have ever directly addressed the issue of color schemes as stand-alone trademarks.

“The University is pleased that the court has confirmed that our Scarlet and Gray color scheme is an integral and protectable component of our brand message," said Rob Cleveland, Assistant Director of Trademark & Licensing Services, The Ohio State University. "This serves to validate 128 years of Scarlet and Gray tradition and ultimately strengthen our position in the stream of commerce.”

It seems unclear to this non-lawyer exactly how the above will be applied in practice. The court's decision seems to apply to items that use the university colors with some emblem or text that refers to the university, but that's sure not the way that the Ohio State flack is spinning it. Five'll get ya ten that at least one university's legal department will sue someone for use of "their" colors with or without any accompanying emblems or text. It would indeed be amusing if universities and their lawyers interpreted it to mean that they owned a "trademark" on the use of color combinations of, say, orange and white, or green and gold, or , um, green and gold....

Perhaps other entities should get in on the landgrab, if this new spectrum of frequencies is now available for ownership. Which used-car dealer will be first in line to trademark red, white, and blue as an "integral and protectable component of his brand message"?

Edit, 12:05 pm. Thanks to Fiend for pointing out an online source for the text of the court's decision which does not, like the court's own website, demand registation and payment of 8 cents per page for viewing public documents.