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About Me
Posted 2:58 PM, Nov 30, 2007 |
I added a lame “about” page where you can learn about me. It’s on the sidebar, in the YoG fustlethrum. I read on some anonymous person’s blog that the first thing they do when they encounter another blog is read their “about me” page. Sadly, I didn’t have one. Now I do, and the site is finally complete.
Also, I got my first Christmas present today - yes, everything happens early around here. It’s a new… alarm clock! Happily, I do not need the alarm portion except, perversely, on Sundays. This one, though, is better than my other one in that it is not dust-covered and also has a CD player. It’s shiny.
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Review: The Abstinence Teacher
Posted 2:57 PM, Nov 30, 2007 |
Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher is eminently readable, but only because the characters and actions are old (by now) tropes and it feels like you know the story before you’ve even started. I’m not sure if Perrotta tried to paint an unbiased view of both sides of the fundamental Christian-fueled abstinence agenda that’s been placed in schools, but if he was trying to be unbiased, he fails. The entirety of the book left me uncomfortable - Perrotta’s characters are easily skewered, his targets too easy. Perrotta’s writing is fine - readable, descriptive, and straight-forward - but his choice of characters and his plot are both unoriginal and, ultimately, sadly, uninteresting. Worst of all, if one assumes Perrotta’s intentions were to provoke debate (rather than just skewer the fundamental Christian right), he badly fails at that as well.
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Eve Online
Posted 6:47 PM, Nov 28, 2007 |
The EC and I know what seems like a mountain of World of Warcraft players. Every time we turn around, someone else has just gotten a new level or gotten their significant other to play, or even, gasp, gotten the EC to log in and run into a wall for 5 minutes.
In general, I’m kind of up on video gaming in general, but I’d never heard of Eve Online until this New York Times article. For an idea of how intense and serious people are about this, check out this pdf, the latest Quarterly Economic Report on everything in the Eve Online universe, from the distribution of skill points among player characters (something I understand from Dungeons & Dragons) to things like Veldspar sales volume, by month, including your regular old Veldspar, dense Veldspar, and concentrated Veldspar. Me, I prefer strawberry-flavored Veldspar, but there was no information on its sales volume.
Also, this document about player councils (or something - I didn’t read it) includes, in its bibliography, four separate works by Immanuel Kant, two by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. Take heed, the robots are coming.
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Review: The Road
Posted 1:58 PM, Nov 28, 2007 |
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road should have been pretty boring - clocking it at about 280 pages, nothing much happens. There are about 4 or 5 notable scenes, and the rest of the book is walking, looking at the ashy, post-apocalyptic wasteland that is as much a character as the two main human characters are. That said, that it should have been boring, it wasn’t. It was suspenseful - the suspense probably heightened by the longer stretches of unsuspenseful prose - and the characters were more real than in a lot of books where authors spend entire chapters giving you character history and motivation. Here, the characters, thanks to McCarthy’s spare prose, seem a lot more real, somehow. It’s depressing, sure, but well-written and actually a little moving, something which doesn’t really occur for me a lot in books. So that’s saying something.
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Hidden Tracks
Posted 10:51 AM, Nov 26, 2007 |
Two musical questions this morning:
1) Why do bands put on hidden tracks? Why not make it a regular track? Do any of us feel “special” or “lucky” or even “rewarded” to find a hidden track? I don’t. Also, it seems like extra tracks are actually just tacked on to the last track on a disc, so the last track is, like, 13 minutes long, but 6 minutes of that is silence, separating the last listed track and the hidden track way at the end. This is a pain - there’s nothing like putting some CDs or mp3s on random and enjoying a mix of songs and then having to wait through 6 minutes of total silence for no particular reason.
2) Why, when you see bands live, do they end almost every song by banging on the drumset and playing random chords, instead of doing a normal ending chord or whatever? Bands don’t do that on CDs as much as they do in concerts, and, while the bands always seem to enjoy making as much noise as possible, I usually stand there with my arms crossed, waiting for them to finish their flagellating.
So answer those two questions, and/or tell me if you enjoy it when bands thrash around at the end of every song.
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Review: The Life and Times…
Posted 10:31 AM, Nov 26, 2007 |
As I told the EC when I started reading Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, the only memoirs that are any good meet at least one of two criteria: the writer had an interesting life, or the writer is a good writer. Bryson admits that he has not had an interesting life (or at least the part he writes about in the book - his childhood - wasn’t any more interesting than anyone else’s), so my only hope was that Bryson would be a good enough writer to make the book worthwhile. He almost is.
Most of the humor comes from him making fun of people that are either deceased or unidentifiable due to his use of pseudonyms. (For instance, the kid nicknamed “Lumpy” for the fact that he always poops his pants, well, that guy can’t be too happy with his portrayal in the book.) A lot of the laughs Bryson gets are pretty mean-spirited, unfortunately, which doesn’t fit in with the saccharine 1950’s and early 1960’s that Bryson portrays. Too bad - it could have been good if it weren’t so mean-spirited.
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Gallery: Canyons Near Malibu
Posted 8:22 PM, Nov 22, 2007 |
It’s been more than a month since I last posted any photos, so I took Thanksgiving as a chance to go up the coast just a bit, since the EC was working, and take some photos in relative peace and quiet (which, around Los Angeles-area beaches, even in late November, is not really peaceful.)
Nevertheless, I took some pictures on the beach - nothing new there in terms of content, so I processed them a little more than usual (in some cases, a lot more than usual) in Photoshop. I also took a drive through some of the canyons east of Malibu. Some of these canyons were affected by fire, which you can see evidence of in certain pictures.
Another thing you can see evidence of is the nature of the canyon roads. They’re twisty, filled with hairpin turns, bordered by the steep canyon walls on one side and the steep canyon ravines on the other.
Canyons Near Malibu
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take as many photos as I would have liked. With all the hairpin turns and the sighting of three speedy motorbikes as well as one speedy Lamborghini, I wasn’t going to take many chances pulling off the road unless there was plenty of room. These locations were few and far between.
Also, right before I turned on to the canyon road (I don’t recall which one, as there are many near Malibu), I saw a sign advertising the availability of rattlesnake vaccines. Since it was just me taking photos, I didn’t want to tromp around in too much brush and rock.
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Review: Gone, Baby, Gone
Posted 9:13 AM, Nov 22, 2007 |
Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone isn’t the kind of book I usually read. (I’ve been saying that a lot lately.) It’s pretty standard crime fiction; it’s an easy read with a compelling story, but one that ends up, like most, a little too confusing for me in the end. It’s always tough to keep track of which characters know what, who was double-crossing who, and what everyone’s motivations are. Lehane tries to have a couple characters lay it out, recapping the book in a paragraph or two of dialogue, but even those didn’t quite work for me. Anyway, yeah, this was pretty good, but won’t win any awards, hint, hint.
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The Benjamins
Posted 8:38 AM, Nov 22, 2007 |
So Torii Hunter is off to Anaheim, getting $90 million for 5 years. That’s a lot of money, so it’s hard to argue with Hunter taking the deal, but I’m going to do it anyway.
What I kept hearing out of Hunter, his agent, and the press around him was that he loved the Twins, wished he could play for them. He also loved the idea of playing for a team like the Nationals, or other teams in areas with large African-American populations.
But, in the end, he went to good old southern California, home of the rich and famous. In the end, it turned out, it seems, to be about money, which is how these things always turn out.
I think Hunter’s fantastic - sure, he strikes out a little bit too often (okay, a lot too often) - he’s not perfect, obviously. But he’s a great fielder, a great team leader, and has great enthusiasm and passion for the game. He’s a fun player to watch, and good for baseball. He’s a unique personality in a lot of ways, but not in the most important one, if you’re a Twins fan - it’s all about the money.
I don’t know what the Twins offered him - presumably it was less years and less money per year - but I’m sure it was multi-millions per year, which is, as we all know, enough to get by on. It never really makes sense to me when players turn down multi-million dollar offers that come from teams for which they “really want to play.” Such is the case with Torii.
He had a great year last year - his best offensive year ever - and he got paid for it. One wonders, though, if his outstanding year and his outstanding contract went to his head a little bit; did the fact that, after A-Rod signed with the Yankees, he was the premier free agent on the market go to his head a little? You hate to read too much into a single comment, but Torii had this to say about the deal with the Angels: “They shocked me… They shocked the world.”
Sorry, Torii, you’re good, you’re popular, you got a good deal, but in no way did it shock the world. The deal and locale barely shocked me. It was all about the money, which, sadly, isn’t shocking at all.
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Scorpion and Jellyfish
Posted 4:53 PM, Nov 21, 2007 |
Cryptozoology news:
Scientists recently discovered the claw of an ancient scorpion. Extrapolating from the size of the claw gives the resulting scorpion an approximate length of 8 feet. Straight Dope has weighed in (not on this story directly, though) about the maximum size of insects and arthropods, due to the way they breathe as well as the fact that their skeletons are exo- rather than endoskeletons. Not sure what any of this means, other than that the end is nigh.
In what I consider way more awesome (in the true sense of the word awesome) news, a billion-strong band of mauve stinger jellyfish completely decimated 100,000 salmon in Northern Ireland, wiping out $2,000,000 worth of fish. It took boats hours to reach the fish because they had to get through the “mass of jellyfish” in their path. It’s not immediately clear what kind of food the mauve stinger eats; its Wikipedia article may as well have been written in another language
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Triple Rock Trivia Night
Posted 2:51 PM, Nov 20, 2007 |
The EC and I are reasonably big fans of bar trivia. Here’s a little snippet about the Triple Rock Social Club’s (Mpls., MN) brand-new trivia night.
Highlights include the should-be-obligatory music round, and a taste round in which teams had to guess the added flavor to some Turkish delight. No kidding!
It also includes a little trivia for you to test yourself on, naming the books various characters appeared in - I scored a lowly 3 out of 12, and am not afraid to admit it. In retrospect, I should have scored 4 out of 12, but most of the books represented on this list, while classics (and relatively modern ones) are books I have not read. I’m not sure if that causes my poor showing to reflect a little better or a little worse on my literary person.
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Review: The Dead Beat
Posted 10:46 PM, Nov 19, 2007 |
Okay, so this site lately has been all reviews, apart from my ridiculous notes about Password variants. Things will get back to more personal stories about lawn bowling and the like soon enough. Also, I will get tired of writing reviews soon enough. But not yet.
Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat is really a collection of short pieces about different facets of obituary writing and reading. As someone who’s never read obituaries, at least not as a past-time, the whole thing seemed macabre and kind of weird, to say the least. Now, though, it at least makes sense, even if it isn’t, as fascinating as Marilyn Johnson wants it to be.
As with all collections (even though it doesn’t present itself as a collection, it is), it’s hit-or-miss. This one hits more often than not, and is a recommended (quick) read.
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Super Password Plus
Posted 12:09 AM, Nov 19, 2007 |
Unbelievably (or maybe not, if you know me), I spent a few minutes tonight explaining, in pretty significant detail, the differences between Password Plus, originally hosted by Allen Ludden (husband of Betty White) and Super Password, hosted by Bert Convy. The differences are:- On Password Plus, if, after the final clue is guessed and the team which correctly guessed the final clue is unable to guess the overall puzzle theme, the puzzle is thrown out and no money is awarded; on Super Password, before the puzzle is thrown out, the other team gets to guess and thus has a chance to earn the money for that particular puzzle.
- Super Password had a Ca$hword.
- Super Password allowed the use of opposites as clues (for instance, saying “hot,” generally with an upward inflection in the voice at the end of the word, as a clue for the word “cold.”) Opposites were not allowed on Password Plus.
- Password Plus featured “the option.” If your team had “the option,” either by the flip of a coin to start the game or by correctly guessing the previous password, the clue-giver could choose to play or pass, i.e., give the first clue or allow the other team to give the first clue.
There are other minor differences, but these are the notable ones.
Also, a new, Regis Philbin-hosted Password variant is in the works.
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Review: No Country for Old Men
Posted 10:49 PM, Nov 18, 2007 |
In the interest of cutting to the chase, No Country For Old Men is a fantastic movie in so many ways.
The superficial - the cat-and-mouse game between Brolin’s and Bardem’s characters is perfect. It’s reasonable, doesn’t rely on unbelievable coincidences. It manages to juxtapose moments of violence with moments of beauty, something not unfamiliar to the Coen brothers’ movies.
But the real strength is the characters. They’re all incredibly real, incredibly well-drawn, and most through only small snippets of dialogue. (It seems like Bardem’s wonderfully creepy Anton Chigurh gets the longest speeches in the movie, with a couple of exceptions for Tommy Lee Jones.) Even the quietest characters, like Carla Jean Moss, manage to convince us that they are real characters through what they say and how they say it. Likewise with Chigurh, who wouldn’t be half as frightening as he is in the movie if Bardem didn’t deliver his lines in a way that perfectly matches the character - fatalistic and dispassionate.
Since the Coen’s made Fargo, they’ve made a couple popular films (O Brother and The Big Lebowski) and also some real clunkers like Intolerable Cruelty. Considering that Fargo, in some circles, was one of the last truly great movies made about America, it’s nice to see the Coen brothers make a serious, important, and mature movie like this one.
No Country For Old Men is, in a lot of ways, a much darker, more pessimistic Fargo. There is the somewhat-obvious focal point of large sums of money and the violence that it can generate in a tornado around it. Also, the main characters fall into two camps: police (the hunters) and killers (the hunted), with the exception of Llewelyn Moss, who is mostly caught in the middle and is, in fact, both the hunter and the hunted at the same time; his character thrives on the disjunction between the two roles.
Anton Chigurh is a distillation of the evil and malice that was present with the two villains in Fargo, but without the bumbling nature and the constant gaffes. He also, chillingly, has the emotion that drove the Fargo characters stripped from him as well. Chigurh could never react in the same way that Buscemi’s Carl Showalter does when he shoots a parking ramp attendant after arguing about the price of his parking ticket.
There are parallels between Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson and Tommy Lee Jones’s Ed Tom Bell, too. Both are soft-spoken, and both are good at what they do, although they don’t give that impression. But more important are their differences.
Both movies have these characters delivering the thematic punch line, wondering at the violence in the world and what causes it and what they can do about it. The mammoth difference is that Marge Gunderson is determined to keep working at figuring it out and stopping it; she’s even willing to bring a child into the world, an act of hope and faith that things will get better. Ed Tom Bell, however, has given up, to put it simply. Violence is senseless and unstoppable, even incomprehensible. His defeat is simple: he retires. For a man who has made a living of his job, the scene with his wife, late in the movie, when he tries to figure out what he can do with the vast expanse of day ahead of him, is incredibly painful and telling. Ed Tom Bell isn’t just retiring - he’s really killing a gigantic part of him, or, perhaps that part has been killed by the increasing violence, and he’s finally just succumbing.
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Review: Microtrends
Posted 10:45 AM, Nov 17, 2007 |
Mark Penn, the author of Microtrends, claims to be a numbers guy, pulling apart the statistics to find groups approaching 1% of the population that will continue to grow and affect the general path of society. He says these groups, like extreme commuters, adult video game players, and vegan children should be catered to in terms of advertising and politics.
Unfortunately, early on Penn makes it clear that you can’t trust him, using faulty logic and contradicting himself just paragraphs apart.
“Now candidates enthusiastically target Soccer Moms — although someone may want to let them know that trends move fast, and Soccer Moms, too, have moved on.” (p. xiii)
“Soccer Moms had been there for a decade of more…” (p. xiv)
So in the span of two pages, he tells us that now Soccer Moms have moved on, but that they had been there for 10 years before anyone noticed them. It doesn’t add up - if there were Soccer Moms around in 1980 and 1990, why not 2000 or 2010? He doesn’t support this argument, and doesn’t even acknowledge the disparity between his statements.
In addition, he, like many pop-social commentary writers, doesn’t seem to understand the Internet or its magnitude. In a chapter on Pro-Semitism, Penn notes, “An entire blog is devoted to the propriety and sensitivity of using a chuppah…” An entire blog? No way. That movement must really be making waves to have an entire blog about it. In the same fashion, there is a strong anti-Microtrends faction that the author needs to consider, as there is an entire, lengthy blog post about not liking the book. Seem ludicrous? So does his statement.
Unfortunately, things like these plague the book and make me leery of Penn. (He also makes a mistake in the origin of the term southpaw, attributing it to the standard orientation of ballparks and thus the fact that a pitcher’s left arm and hand are traditionally facing south - a quick look at an online etymology source notes that the term southpaw appears in 1848 “in the slang of pugilism.”)
All these things add up to problems when Penn starts using statements like “According to one researcher,” or “One study shows.” Penn has already called his experience and conclusions into question, and the only question the reader can ask is, “What about the other researchers and studies?” Unless the reader wants to do the investigative research on their own, they’re out of luck. Their only recourse, then, is to just put the book down and draw their own conclusions.
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The 2007 Yoggies
Posted 10:42 AM, Nov 15, 2007 |
Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Yoggies.
If you read YoG regularly, you probably already have a good idea of what I like (a few things) and what I don’t like (a lot of things). But, of course, there are things that I like a lot, and those are the things that will get a Yoggie.
Now, for something to be considered for a 2007 Yoggie, basically, I have to have enjoyed that thing this year. In most cases, these are things I discovered during 2007, but not always.
These are a few of my favorite things:
Albums:
4th place: Menomena: Friend and Foe. This album has saxophones on it. So that’s cool. It’s catchy. And the guys in the band wrote some computer program on which they “write” the music, and then once they have it on the computer, they figure out how to play it on their instruments. They seem like cool, creative guys - in their two albums, they’ve done interesting stuff with the packaging (a flipbook for their first album, and I don’t really know how to explain their second album’s packaging, but it’s pretty creative). These are fun guys.
3rd place: Field Music: Tones of Town. Field Music sometime sound like the Beatles, which is a good thing. Sometimes, they sound just kind of insane. Also a good thing. They also use horns. (Also a good thing.) They write these short, perfect little pop songs, and, even though their songs are about 3:00 long, they manage to pack several songs worth of hooks and melody into each one. This album is like their brains bled all over the recording equipment.
2nd place: Okkervil River: The Stage Names. Okkervil River are pretty awesome. They have awesome lyrics that are literate, smart, and funny. Will Sheff sings like he’s going to explode. Whatever these guys are singing and writing about, it’s always something they care about. This album is a lot catchier than their last few, but fortunately, they didn’t let the hooks and melody overshadow the song construction and solid writing. And they use horns. This is a common theme.
1st place: Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala. Jens is the man. This is the album that is going to make him popular, and if it doesn’t, it should, and if it doesn’t, I won’t be too disappointed, because his little quirks and his strange style is a nicely-kept secret, too. He tours with a group of ladies clad in white that play, you guessed it, horns, along with a DJ. His album uses samples liberally, but sounds organic; it sounds like the perfect pop record. Another wry, funny, smart guy. Best album. Best.
Books:
Honorable Mention: Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I re-read this book again this year because it’s awesome. It’s the kind of book you can get lost in, the kind of book that sticks with you for weeks, the kind of book where, when you see weird things, you wonder, “What would Toru Okada think of this?”
3rd place: Sam Walker: Fantasyland. This is a niche book about fantasy baseball in the most premier league in the country, the kind of league where fantasy owners can outfit their actual players in t-shirts with their team name on it. Ultimately, though, it all boils down to fantasy baseball that people play in their offices or with their bar friends. If you like baseball, you will like this book. Therefore, many readers of this year’s Yoggies will not like this book. Sorry.
2nd place: Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’m usually not a big fan of books about other cultures - call me America-centric if you like. This book does take place in New Jersey - at least half of it does - with the rest taking place in the Dominican. The real draw is Oscar Wao: he’s an overweight Dominican into science-fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dungeons & Dragons. This book is awesome for so many references about this stuff, but that’s only the superficial. This book is awesome because Oscar Wao is awesome. Awesome.
1st place: Frank Portman: King Dork. Put this website down and go read this book. Especially if you’re in, like, 9th grade or so. This book is the book that all “young adult” fiction should aspire to be. A great story written with style. (One complaint might be that the writing style and language is a little advanced to be written by the narrator, but what kind of kids try to write books when they’re still in high school? The smart ones.) I didn’t say much about this book other than that it’s awesome. Best book. Best.
Games:
2nd place: Lost Cities. Yeah, I know, you’re all like, “But I really like Monopoly.” Well, too bad. Monopoly is out, man. Lost Cities (and the next Yoggie winner, if you have more than 2 people to play with) is in. It’s a simple card game - the rules take less than 5 minutes to explain - but it’s got a little depth to it. It’s a game that can be played almost as solitaire, or with a considerable amount of interplay between players. It’s fast. It’s simple. It’s thought-provoking. It’s Lost Cities.
1st place: Incan Gold. Three words: great multiplayer game. Another pretty simple game, but one that keeps everyone involved all the time - you’re never truly out of it, unlike in Monopoly, during which most players spend time eating chips and waiting for everyone else to finish. It’s a risk-reward game about exploring Incan temples and retrieving gold while avoiding the hazards of exploration. Sounds complicated, but it’s as simple as can be. The best games are simple and efficient, not featuring a thousand rules you have to remember. Incan Gold is one of the best games. Best game. Best.
Concerts:
1st place: The Decemberists with Andrew Bird, Band of Horses, and the L.A. Philharmonic @ the Hollywood Bowl. This was my first trip to the Bowl, and it turned out to be an awesome venue - we were able to get relatively close to the stage and had no problem seeing, and of course, the sound is fantastic, especially with the Phil. Band of Horses are fine - they’re an awesome opening band, it turns out, good to help you get into the swing and the mood of things. Andrew Bird came out, did his whistling, did his violin thing, his singing, his funny, weird chatter, and that was terrific, as always. The Decemberists came out with full philharmonic arrangements for some of their songs, which sounded great all souped-up, as if they were dressed for a night on the town. I’ve seen the Decemberists 4 times now, and they always put on a good show. This was a good one, other than that they keep playing “The Tain,” which is 18 minutes long. It’s good, but man. But they played as long as they could, in general, and played a ton of good stuff. This was a good show. In fact, it was the best show I went to this year. Best show. Best.
Movies:
2nd place: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I see a fair number of movies, but don’t remember most of them. It’s weird. So I’m sure this list should be a lot longer than two. But anyway, about The King of Kong: it’s about Donkey Kong. Does that interest you? Even if you said no, you’d be surprised to learn that it actually does interest you. This movie is a great documentary about the quest to legitimately obtain the world-record Donkey Kong score. It’s got a perfect hero, a perfect anti-hero, and everything else that, ultimately, makes good video games satisfying, too. My only complaint, again one that could be shared with pretty much every video game, was that parts of it seemed too staged, too geared towards making the good guys really good and the bad guys really bad. But the sheer entertainment value overwhelmed all of that.
1st place: Michael Clayton. This movie maybe gets the nod because it was the last really good movie I saw, but it was really good. We need more adult dramas like these, movies that little bratty kids don’t have any interest in sneaking into, and movies that make you think in many ways. You’ve got to think just to figure out, at least in the first twenty minutes, what exactly is even going on, but then you’ve also got to think about ethics and morals and all that stuff, unless you just want to have a good time, in which case you don’t have to think about anything, and this movie will let you do that, too. Only the best movies work on all these levels. Only the best. Best movie. Best.
Miscellaneous Honorable Mentions:
Really Good Martinis. I spent a lot of this year making really good martinis (using the word martini loosely). I got pretty good at it. If you want a blueberry martini, or pomegranate, or grapefruit, or whatever, I’ll put it all together. But this Honorable Mention is really about drinking them, not making them. They taste good. That’s the most important part. I don’t care who makes it, as long as it tastes good. And they taste good. Good.
The Santa Monica Public Library, Montana Ave. Branch. I was never a library user before, really. I worked at a library - reshelving books was my first real job, and taught me that librarians can be real jerks. Happily, this doesn’t hold true at the Montana Ave. Branch. The librarians there are just fine. But more than this, I actually go there and get books. All the time. I’ve managed to get over my weird compulsion with owning books that I read, which allows me to spend more money on martini ingredients and also allows me to read books that are only available in hardcover, something I would try to avoid. I have a constant list of books on hold at Montana Ave., and I’ve learned that libraries are fantastic. Fantastic.
Conclusion: Okay, that wraps up the 2007 Yoggies. It’s been a long, strange trip, and we’ve still got 1.5 months left! If anything good comes up in the rest of November or in December, I’ll make sure to include it in the 2008 Yoggies, scheduled for November 15, 2008. Mark your calendars and rent your tuxedos and black dresses.
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Review: The Dogs of Babel
Posted 12:21 AM, Nov 15, 2007 |
It occurs to me, as I finish my 58th book of the year, that many of them are a blur. Ask me what my favorite part of Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck was, which I started on December 31, 2006, and finished somewhere around January 3rd, 2007, and I probably can’t tell you. (Actually, I can - that was a good one.)
But YoG can tell me when I started and finished that book, and every book I’ve read for the last 3+ years, way back to DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. So, in an effort to think just a little more about what I’m reading - and building up to the critical review smorgasbord that will be the 2007 Yoggies (check for those later today) - I’m going to write about the books I read. You may not care, but I do. YoG helps me keep things in order and remember things - it’s like a little journal that I let you peek into.
So anyway, The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst wasn’t very good, in so many ways. It’s not the kind of book I normally read - a pretty light read, a Today show book club recommendation, and a smarmy little romance. Sure, sure, I read it really quickly and couldn’t put it down, but I’m unsure if I couldn’t put it down because it was good, or because I’m going to the library tomorrow and want to be able to return it.
It’s really corny and cheesy. The characters veer wildly from emotion to emotion, whether it’s from sanity to in-, love to thoughts of leaving, or scholarly pursuits to general nuttiness. The characters are like every character in every book you’ve ever read all rolled into one.
You know, if you want a light read, something to curl up with on a rainy day, well, even then, I don’t really recommend it. You might check out, say, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, or just about any of Murakami’s shorter novels - Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun, or Norwegian Wood and you’ll be in infinitely better shape, and a little smarter for it.
I really wanted to like this book - I did. I want to like every book I read. Most of them are “referred” to me by other websites, other people, whatever, wherever, but I put them on my list and get to them months later (due to the aforementioned giant backlog that is my life today) and don’t remember how they ended up on my list in the first place. This is good: I have no bias towards any books, other than that I, sometime in the past, a someone I once was, thought I would like it.
Basically, I feel bad because I didn’t like it at all, and now I’m posting these thoughts up where Carolyn Parkhurst can come and read them, and she’s a nice woman, I’m sure, and I’m sure she tried really hard and did her best with this book, and then I didn’t like it. Are all critics stuck in such an ego-centric universe, and if so, how do they get over it? (I assume they do.)
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Break
Posted 6:20 PM, Nov 13, 2007 |
I went to Starbucks today with the ultimate intention of breaking a hundred-dollar bill from a customer into five twenties - the customer owed us $60, they paid us $100, and I gave them $40 of my own money, meaning that YOMS now owed me $40 (and I would be unable to make the deposit for YOMS until I had $60 in separate bills). So I decided to buy my two employees some hot chocolate, too, so I wouldn’t break the $100 over a single hot chocolate.
Alas, though, Starbucks refused to break the $100. They wouldn’t make the hot chocolates prior to asking me whether I had some other way to pay, and when I said I did, they started making them. They said they couldn’t break the hundred “this late in the day.”
Huh? Haven’t been people coming in and paying with twenties all day? Maybe they’ve been making deposits during the day into a safe, but seriously, they could have made change if they had wanted to. I was, begrudgingly, short with these employees. After all, I do frequent their establishment. After all, I helped make change for a total stranger on the street so he could go to a Jens Lekman show and thus I could not.
A plague on the House of Starbucks.
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Prelude to the Yoggies: Overexposure
Posted 10:41 PM, Nov 12, 2007 |
In an effort to fire up the hype machine for this year’s inaugural Yoggies, I was thinking about my favorites from the past year with the aim of writing this post. That’s a poorly-worded sentence, so I’m not off to a good start.
But I was checking out my “holds” list at the Santa Monica Public Library: all the books I have on hold and am waiting to come in so I can read them. For some of them, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I’m, like, 125th, but there are several that I’m first in line for. In total, though, I have eleven books on hold. In addition, I’m in the middle of two books - not only George Saunders’ The Braindead Megaphone but also Infinite Jest, which I’m really always in the middle of. The EC and I are taking it one page at a time, which will last us about 3 years. (For those unfamiliar with IJ, I’m not kidding. It will take us that long. If we’re lucky.) Plus I have another library book sitting here beside me that I haven’t started. So that’s 14 books waiting to be read by me.
There are countless other books I own that I haven’t read, also; some of those I have no interest in and can’t remember why I purchased, and some I just, well, haven’t found time for yet, frankly. (Sorry, Garrison Keillor. I’ll get to you. Later.)
In addition, today I ran across a review of an old David Mitchell book, Cloud Atlas. I’ve read it, and loved it, and the review made me want to read it again. But who has the time to re-read books?
In addition to all those books, lately I’ve fired up the BitTorrent and have been picking up various concert bootlegs (thanks to largehearted boy, which has now been added to the sidebar). Right now, I’ve got a live Okkervil River show churning through iTunes, am decoding two Sigur Ros shows and a recent Yo La Tengo show, and have a bunch of other bootlegs I haven’t gotten to yet.
I also have approximately $200 of store credit remaining at Amoeba Records.
Then there’s my RSS newsreader. Most of my time there is spent right-clicking on various feeds and selecting “Mark as Read” even though I haven’t read them.
I’m also back to playing Go, just a little bit, getting back up to speed one game at a time.
It’s a good thing I don’t watch much television or movies - the difference there is that there’s little on television I want to watch; there are plenty of movies I’m itching to see, including No Country For Old Men, a long-ago recorded Seven Samurai and maybe Shampoo (don’t ask).
What am I to do? There are not enough hours in the day, and I don’t even work 40 hours a week. (As further indication of my problems, I initially typed, “I don’t even bowl 40 hours a week.” (As a further, further indication of my problems, while retyping that last sentence, I initially typed, “I don’t even bowel 40 hours a week.”)) So you can see I have many problems.
At the very least, I’m getting good at determining what I will enjoy prior to tasting. Okkervil River is fantastic, as is George Saunders. My lawn bowls game is better than ever.
Is it time to retire yet?
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A Store Near You
Posted 4:24 PM, Nov 12, 2007 |
1. Looking for a recommendation for a book about investing. Would like a book recommendation that assumes the reader can tell different denominations of money apart and nothing more.
2. Looking for a recommendation for an alarm clock that works with the new version of the iPod shuffle - not the old, tall and narrow one.
3. While I’m asking for recommendations, a note that on Thursday, in an effort to beat the glut of end-of-year best-of lists, I’ll be posting the first annual Yoggies with my favorite things from the year. The lists will include music and books, may include concerts, movies, buffalo chicken sandwiches, and other favorite discoveries of the past year.
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No Jens Lekman For You
Posted 11:07 AM, Nov 11, 2007 |
Last night, Dr. Dr., the EC, and I all went looking for Jens Lekman tickets. Lekman is a Swedish folk/pop singer who is fantastic and was playing a sold-out show at the smallish, nearby Troubadour. We went over around 8:00, when the doors opened, and hung around with a bunch of others looking for tickets until about 9:45. We had no luck.
However, one guy, who had been waiting there longer than we had, had the opportunity to buy one ticket for $25 (a slight markup). He, unfortunately, only had two twenties, and was unwilling to pay $40, so was giving up all hope and heading for the nearest busy highway. But, the three of us, obviously not needing just one ticket and feeling sorry for the guy, pooled our various ones and fives and came up with change for a twenty, which we gave him. He then bought the ticket and, presumably, enjoyed his night. (Peering through the window, longingly, we saw him enter and exit the restroom, and both times he didn’t even look outside at his lonely, change-giving companions. Instead, he strode purposefully about, Lekman CD in hand, marveling at his good fortune.)
We, instead, went to Canter’s Deli, where we sampled such delights as knishes, pastrami sandwiches, matzah ball soup, spicy pickles, and cherry phosphates. I, regrettably, passed on finally trying an egg cream. (Sadly, I would have tried it had I known that it consisted of soda water, milk, and chocolate syrup; no eggs or cream at all.)
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Avoiding the Issues
Posted 5:43 PM, Nov 7, 2007 |
I generally avoid politics talk on here, but here (via kottke), David Foster Wallace makes a case that perhaps terrorist-caused losses in the United States are one of the costs of freedom, much like vehicular deaths are one of the costs of mobility and autonomy. (By the way, it’s a short, easy-to-read piece, so if you’re generally scared of DFW, well, it’ll all be okay, relatively, anyway.)
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Tangent (Magic: The Gathering)
Posted 12:04 AM, Nov 7, 2007 |
This was going to be more about Magic: The Gathering and less about, well, everything else, but instead it ended up mostly about everything else and not so much about Magic: The Gathering. (In fact, I retitled this entry - originally, it was “Magic: The Gathering (Tangent)” but the title needed a little revision after it was done.)
I do remember one time Sid came over after school — my mother always felt bad for Sid, I remember this. She even told me once, which was a frank expression of how she felt about one of my friends - very direct and a little unusual. I remember my parents and I picking Sid up from his house in this, like, college housing area, and taking him to band concerts. There Sid and I would be, dressed in white shirts and black pants and ties (I still have that same narrow black tie) in the minivan, off to another band concert where we’d both play trumpet without much interest or ability. My mom always felt bad because Sid’s parents never came to the concerts themselves - we always had to pick him up and drop him off. But I digress:
So this one time Sid came over after school, and, of course, we were playing Magic at the dining room table. Will was over as well, and our session stretched on into the evening. It also happened to be the night of parent-teacher conferences, which, now that I wasn’t playing Dungeons & Dragons in school, were pretty uneventful, usually.
However, this grade period, there had been a lot going on. It was the first grade period I remember during which my mom had been sick, diagnosed with cancer, and, even though I didn’t think I was less focused, perhaps I was.
I had taken a test in pre-calc on conic sections (parabolas, ellipses, circles, and hyperbolas) during this particular grade period. Now, of course, conic sections are a breeze, but I remember them being a confusing blur of similarly-styled equations, only pluses and minuses separating some of them, and all these letters, and man, that was weird stuff.
This was back in the day when teachers would just let you go up to their desk and look in the grade book with the other students to see what your grade was. I remember going up to look, and this kid, Michael, was standing next to me, and I pointed at my test score (out of 60 points) and asked Michael, “Hey, does that say 8?”
“Yeah, it does, man.”
If you can’t do the math, as I clearly couldn’t on that particular test, 8 out of 60 is a shade over 13%. So that pretty much obliterated my pre-calc grade for that six-week stretch; however, I figured I would end up with a C, since I did pretty well on everything else. (I also don’t recall mentioning this particular 13% to my parents when it happened - I didn’t really have the experience of actually trying and still getting a 13%, so how was I supposed to know what to do with it?)
So there Will and Sid and I are, playing Magic at the table, a game which I think my parents had begun to wonder about the healthiness of, especially at the voracious quantities at which we were playing, when my parents came home from conferences, report card in hand. There, in pre-calc, I had a D. A nice, big, gap-toothed smiling D.
To this day, I don’t remember what they said about it - they must have said something - but I do remember that we stopped our Magic game for nigh on 30 seconds, and that report card was never mentioned again, that D was never spoken of. Whatever my parents said, it wasn’t much; I always assumed they’d come back to it at some point after my friends left, but they never did.
I can honestly say that, at the time, I didn’t make the connection between my mom being sick and me totally bombing a test on conic sections. Now, it seems obvious, but then, it was just two different things happening in two different realms. I guess it’s also obvious, now, that my parents saw the connection right away and probably figured that if I didn’t learn conic sections and instead spent the time playing fantasy-themed card games for hours on end, the world would be fine, and so would I.
I never thanked the parents for letting that D slide, so now is as good a time as any: thanks.
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Inland Empire
Posted 9:59 PM, Nov 4, 2007 |
The EC and I watched about half of David Lynch’s latest, Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern. It’s just shy of 3 hours and, after the first half, we found ourselves wondering what in the world was going on. And, like most confused people our age, we consulted the internet.
Below are snippets from a variety of reviews about Inland Empire:
“In the end, it’s best to make peace with the film’s essential and deliberate inscrutability…” - TV Guide
“Inland Empire is maddening…” - Premiere
“[The film] resists synopsizing more than anything else he’s done. Some viewers have complained, understandable, that it’s incomprehensible…” - Chicago Reader
“Only David Lynch could make the incomprehensible so compelling.” - Baltimore Sun
“Inland Empire left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension.” - Portland Oregonian
All these quotes were taken from the movie’s entry at Metacritic, and every single one of them was taken from the text of a positive review, including some overwhelmingly positive reviews - the movie received full marks from TV Guide, Premiere, and The Chicago Reader, despite its “incomprehensibility” and “inscrutability.” Roger Ebert gave the film four stars but really didn’t say anything more substantive than that the film is a “fractured telenovela,” also noting that “synopsis is futile.”
Clearly, I am not in the target audience for this film, although I like “art house” movies, but it seems to me like movies are, for the most part, intended to tell stories. I guess there are exceptions, like Baraka, which I also disliked and didn’t finish (and also received a positive review from Ebert.)
I like Lynch’s other films - many of them are a little “messy” but they’re all coherent enough to be compelling, even the insanely weird Lost Highway. Mulholland Dr. was one of my favorite movies in 2001. However, Inland Empire just seems too self-gratifying, a movie made by Lynch for Lynch and with no real consideration for an audience outside of Lynch.
I do not recommend, other than to get your take on it. If being able to offer your opinion about this topic on this particular website is reason enough to spend three hours of time, you may be in the target audience of the clearly insane.
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Limits of Human Understanding
Posted 11:06 AM, Nov 3, 2007 |
I think someday we will reach the limit of human understanding only because it will take, like, 65 years to teach someone what we already know, thus leaving no time for further exploration. It already takes a long time to get to be a doctor or a lawyer, so pretty soon, the way things are going, it’ll take your whole lifetime just to cover the existing body of knowledge.
So that’s just a thought.
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Thoughts on Halloween
Posted 5:07 PM, Nov 1, 2007 |
Here’s hoping you all had a fantastic All Saints’ Day.
Some thoughts on Halloween:
I read somewhere that the most popular costume that this one particular guy had seen was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Odd, but then one girl came in to YOMS and that’s what she was going as.
Seems like Halloween has really been appropriated by adults, what with sexy costumes, college students running around trick-or-treating, etc.
Spent parts of yesterday in the car, looking at folks on street corners who were not in costumes and then saying things (inside the car) like, “Nice costume. What are you going as, an affectless loser?”
See you next Halloween.
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