There's a scene in the movie Dave, early on, when the President of the United States (played, in a dual role, by Kevin Kline) wants to cut the funding of a fairly popular program, without appearing to be the bad guy. So he gathers his flacks in Congress and basically orders them to cut the funding, saying: "I don't want to look like a prick. I want you guys to look like pricks."

The more I learn about President Bush, the more I suspect that this little scene in Dave formed the basis of his political education. Via Matthew Yglesias, I see that while Mr. Bush has publicly praised the AmeriCorps program, his pals in Congress (pals like Tom DeLay, who has no aversion whatsoever to looking like a prick -- in fact, he seems to relish it) have cut the program's funding.

AmeriCorps isn't a huge program, and some find it tempting to blow it off as just more liberal "feel-good" nonsense that really doesn't benefit anybody. In fact, one such individual chimes in on Matthew's comments section, challenging people to name just one substantive thing that AmeriCorps has done. I responded (among others) with my own experience: in West Seneca, NY -- the Buffalo suburb in which we lived before moving to Syracuse for six months -- AmeriCorps volunteers did much, if not all, of the groundskeeping work on public grounds (parks, the lawns at the town hall and library, etc) as well as garbage cleanup along the town's busiest sidewalks and thoroughfares. They also do virtually all of the groundskeeping and maintenance work at West Seneca's nicest attraction, the Charles E. Burchfield Nature and Art Center.

The AmeriCorps budget is so small that cutting it as a deficit-reduction measure makes absolutely no sense. I'd be thrilled if President Bush would stand up for his professed admiration of AmeriCorps by demanding that his band of merry men in Congress restore its funding. But meantime, I think I'll refrain from holding my breath.

(EDIT: I wrote this post before checking today's Buffalo News, which has this story. A quote about what the volunteers have done:

Lazzara [Mark Lazzarra, executive director of AmeriCorps West Seneca] said that since its inception in 1993, members of West Seneca AmeriCorps have tutored 20,000 students, cleared 20 miles of waterways, shoveled 250 tons of snow, delivered 16.5 tons of food to 65 pantries and done 90,000 hours of community service and 50,000 hours of violence-prevention mentoring.

Yeah, that's just the kind of thing we need less of these days.)

Instead of confronting pressing national problems, our president lands airplanes while Rome burns.

Senator Jim Jeffords (Ind., Vermont) recently gave a speech that neatly summarizes why so many of us are, shall we say, less than satisfied with President Bush. And he's not even a Democrat.

(link via Ruminate This.)

I have a recurrent feeling these days, that I'm living in the wrong trouser-leg of time.

And, going even farther, SF author Charles Stross commented the other day on why he's less than satisfied with the 21st century.

(crossposted to Collaboratory.)

Stop this sentence before it kills again!!

Last time I was at the library, whilst perusing the New Nonfiction books, my eye fell upon a volume with the seductive title Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, by Ian Christe. Now, as a onetime lover of all things metal (and I still enjoy a good head-banging song every now and then, the louder and faster the better), I figured this would be an entertaining book, and so far it is.

But near the end of the introduction I happened upon what may be the worst single sentence I have ever read:

Emerging like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a contemporaneuous influence, Black Sabbath was as irreducible as the bottomless sea, the everlasting sky, and the mortal soul.

I think I see what Christe is trying to get at here, but my reaction is more like, "Oh man, somebody open a window...."

Well, as of today, Short Fiction Month 2003 is over. It was a lot of fun, and I just may devote an entire month to short fiction again in 2004, even as I plan to not allow my short-fiction reading to completely atrophy like I've done in more recent times. Short fiction is the literary equivalent, I think, of dim sum: small morsels, to be sure, but no less artfully crafted than the larger works (and, in some cases, more artfully done), and nourishing both on their own and when taken together.

I read 60 stories in all, by 43 different authors. I was awestruck by a handful of them, enjoyed most of them, was a bit baffled by a small handful, and I actually disliked only one (P.C. Doherty's "The Serpent's Tooth"). Fifty-nine for sixty is a pretty good average, especially since I basically selected stories at random. I did not go into Short Fiction Month with any specific stories in mind, with the exceptions of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" and Poe's "The Murders of the Rue Morgue"; I did, however, plan on reading specific authors: Wodehouse, Poe, Thurber, and Roald Dahl are the big ones there.

So, today I'm back to reading novels. I'm going to start Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist (which I'll be reviewing for GMR), and something else that I'll pick later. Probably a big-scale space opera, which is rapidly becoming my favorite SF sub-genre. (As if you couldn't tell, what with all of my Star Wars blathering lately!)

Here, in alphabetical order by author, is a listing of the stories I read during Short Fiction Month.

Asher, Neal: "Snow in the Desert"

Bisson, Terry: "Bears Discover Fire"

Borges, Jorge Luis: "The Rose of Paracelsus"

Bradbury, Ray: "The Million Year Picnic"

Chabon, Michael: "The God of Dark Laughter", "In the Black Mill"

Clarke, Arthur C.: "Reunion", "The Secret"

Dahl, Roald: "The Butler"; "A Dip In the Pool"; "Genesis and Catastrophe"; "The Hitchhiker"; "The Landlady"

Davidson, Avram: "The Golem"

De Lint, Charles: "In the House of My Enemy", "The Stone Drum"

Doherty, P.C.: "The Serpent’s Tooth"

Duncan, Andy: "The Chief Designer"

Engstrom, Elizabeth: "Riding the Black Horse"

Friesner, Esther M.: "Blunderbore"

Gaiman, Neil: "Bay Wolf"; "Nicholas Was…"; "Snow, Glass, Apples"

Goldstein, Lisa: "The Fantasma of Q-------"

Heinlein, Robert A.: "The Farthest Place"

Holland Rogers, Bruce: "Alephestra"

Hopkins, Brian A.: "North"

Kessel, John: "Every Angel Is Terrifying"

King, Stephen: "Everything's Eventual", "L.T.'s Theory of Pets", "1408"

Kress, Nancy: "Patent Infringement"

Lafferty, R.A.: "The Configuration of the North Shore"

Libling, Michael: "Timothy Gobel's Bug Jar"

Lovecraft, H.P.: "The Call of Cthulu", "The Outsider"

Masterton, Graham: "Pig's Dinner"

Matheson, Richard: "The Funeral"; "The Near Departed"

McHugh, Maureen F.: "Interview: On Any Given Day"

Monteleone, Thomas F.: "It's In the Bag"

Moorcock, Michael: "Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel"

Norton, Andre: "Mousetrap"

Oates, Joyce Carol: "The Sky-Blue Ball"

Poe, Edgar Allan: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Masque of the Red Death"

Sheckley, Robert: "Shoes"

Sheffield, Charles: "The Diamond Drill"

Smith, Michael Marshall: "A Place to Stay"

Swann, Thomas Burnett: "The Manor of Roses"

Thurber, James: "The Macbeth Murder Mystery"; "You Could Look It Up"

Traviss, Karen: "The Man Who Did Nothing"

Vernon, Steve: "Catcall"

Wellman, Manly Wade: "Walk Like a Mountain"

Wodehouse, P. G.: "The Purity of the Turf", "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald"

Wolfe, Gene: "A Cabin on the Coast"

Yumiko, Kurahashi: "The House of the Black Cat"

Occasionally, when I sign on to Blogger I will peruse the "Recently Published" list, just to see what gems I've missed lately. And one strange thing I'm noticing is that a lot of bloggers are employing random capital letters in their titles -- for example, if I changed the title here from Byzantium's Shores to ByZanTiuM's SHoRes. Is this some new nugget of "coolness" whose memo I missed, or is there a purpose here?

Looking over the spam in my e-mailbox this morning, I'm suddenly struck by what seems to me a tragedy of medical science and bioengineering. I mean, how terrible is it that we have the ability to expand parts of the human body, and yet our abilities in this regard are limited to male genitalia and the female bosom? Why can't we have, say, "Make your pancreas BIGGER!" pills for diabetics, for example? Wouldn't basketball players like to find a little pump-device that enlarges their hands?

It just doesn't seem fair, does it?

Time for a George Carlin moment:

"In New Hampshire, the license plates read, 'Live Free, or DIE'! Well, I'm certainly not gonna move there! I don't want to live anyplace where they mention death, right on the license plates...Idaho's license plates read, 'Famous Potatoes'. I guess those are the extremes in thought. It would seem to me that, somewhere between 'Live Free or Die' and 'Famous Potatoes', the truth lies. Probably, it's a little closer to 'Famous Potatoes'. But, that's just one fella's opinion."

Here's an awesome baseball trivia question: Is it possible for every hitter on a team to finish a game (full nine innings, an official game, not an exhibition) with the exact same batting average as when the game started? If so, how?

The answer is in this fine article.

(Thanks to Greg for the link.)

Two more days in Short Fiction Month. Ah, well....I hope I pick good ones for the last couple of days.

:: Michael Chabon may become one of my favorite writers. I was entranced by his juggernaut of a novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and in the last week I read two of his stories: "The God of Dark Laughter" and "In the Black Mill". These are atmospheric horror tales in the Lovecraft vein, and both are excellent. Chabon has a gift of language that's a pleasure to behold: not only do his stories entrance, but the sentences themselves are works of art. Chabon is an author whose work I want to explore more deeply.

:: Graham Masterton is another author I want to explore more. He's actually been on my radar screen since I read a brilliant short story of his four or five years ago, "The Secret Shih-Tan", which is about a chef and his encounter with a secret cookbook whose recipes are, well, demented in their ingredients. That story isn't horrific in any supernatural way, and nor is the one I read the other night, "Pig's Dinner". Both stories are, though, quite gory. Masterton doesn't seem to be a guy who shies away from blood and guts in his fiction. I often find gore in print ineffective; you can tell me, "blood gushed from the place where his arm used to be", and I won't react much at all. Print has a way of lessening the impact of blood-and-guts. Masterton, though, knows how to do it. "Pig's Dinner" actually had me going, "Ewwwwwwwww!!"

:: One sub-genre I've always enjoyed is the "Stuffy English Explorer" tale, in which our hero sets out from his stuffy club (where he and his fellow explorers sit in overstuffed leather chairs drinking Port) to go and find some mythic or lost item. Lisa Goldstein's "The Fantasma of Q------" is just such a story. In these stories, the denouement can almost always be predicted very early on. But that's not the point. This was a good one.

:: A general note: I can't speak too highly of the annual Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collections, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I think they're up to number fifteen, which will be coming out in another month or two. The fiction in these books is of invariable high quality, and for anyone interested in these genres, the books are worth their price for the introductory "Year in Review" essays alone. (The companion Year's Best Science Fiction series, edited by Gardner Dozois, is of comparable quality.)

I'm proud of the fact that, as a high school and college student, I never descended to reading Cliff Notes for the various literary works I was assigned. I'm less proud of the fact that, more often than I care to admit, my solution to the "Holy crap, I can't understand this book at all" problem was to simply not read it and bluff my way through class discussion, a talent which I honed to an unfortunately high degree of effectiveness. But a lot of times, I really did read the book, even if I was hopelessly incapable of really appreciating it. (I've often wondered if forcing Shakespeare upon unwitting ninth graders is really a sound educational policy, but that's a digression for another time. Jason, this is precisely the kind of question you might consider on your blog....hint, hint....)

I understand the idea behind Cliff Notes, as an educational aid. What I didn't understand was the way students actually used them, which struck me as a tacit admission like this: "Man, there's no way I'm gonna read that book. But just the same, I'm afraid of looking like a dunce if Mrs. Wigglesby calls on me." I was always thinking, "Be honest! Bluff your way through, and if you get caught, admit you didn't read the damn thing! What's she going to do?"

And yet, my ability to academically bluff somehow never translated to being able to bluff in a card game. Go figure.

Why am I rambling about this? Well, someone recently arrived here via a Google search for the Cliff Notes to a book. What book? Not Pride and Prejudice. Not Ulysses. Not even A Farewell to Arms or The Grapes of Wrath. No, someone was looking for the notes on a Stephen King book. And not The Stand or 'Salem's Lot, either. They were looking for King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

On the off chance that this person is reading this, please hear me out: On Writing is a terrific book, and it's a short one (288 pages in my hardcover edition, not a doorstop by any means). It's insightful, funny, and toward the end (when King discusses that encounter with a reckless driver that nearly killed him a few years back), downright moving. Instead of looking for the Net to do your homework for you, read the damn book. For Christ's sake.

End of complaint.

GGAAAHHHHH!!!!

(Note to self: be more careful about following Joseph Duemer's links in the future.)

It's Caption Time! Have at it:



(Yes, I'd probably experience the same result riding one of these damn things.)

(UPDATE: For some reason -- fairness, I guess -- I feel I should note that I enjoy "funny Presidential pictures", no matter who the President pictured happens to be. There's just something inherently funny about a President of the United States, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, wiping out on a Segway. I laughed when Bill Clinton got knocked down by his over-exuberant dog a while back [albeit he was out of office at the time]. Watching the video of Ronald Reagan calling Princess Diana "Princess David" always makes me chuckle, and if I really want to laugh, all I need do is form the mental image of Jimmy Carter trying to beat off a homicidal rabbit with a canoe paddle. So I'm not posting this to make fun of this particular President, much as I might like to. [Well, I do think it's funny that this happens the day after Rachel Lucas informs us that Bush's greatness is a function of his returning of manhood to the office.] )

Best Pun-based Headline for a Blog Post Ever.

(And anyway, if you have any love for baseball at all, you should be reading this guy's blog.)

Here's a creepy news story about the suicide epidemic in Japan, and how the Internet is partly affecting (and being affected by) that epidemic.

If you have geotags on your web log and an RSS feed (which I do -- heh), and you ping Weblogs.com each time you post, you'll show up on The World as a Blog, a map of the world that shows the physical location of blogs as they update. Pretty nifty.

(To use Weblogs.com, after you register you'll be able to ping the site via a special form, which means that you'll appear on Weblogs.com's continually-updated list of recently-updated blogs. To make this easier, as soon as you've pinged them -- after you get the "Thanks for your ping" message -- bookmark that screen. Then, to ping you just load that page from your bookmarks. That's it.)

Here's another Star Wars putz. Grab they bucket of over-ripe tomatoes....

(Courtesy TF.N, which I religiously click every day despite my pledge a couple of weeks ago to try to remain "spoiler-free". I canna do it, Cap'n!)

I seem to recall Carnak the Magnificent once lamenting his long wait for a certain movie to come out on DVD.

Is this the one?

(He probably already knows, but I'm looking for space-filler here....)

A heads-up for people on Blogger who are using the YACCS commenting system: if your blog was started before last September, then you may need to get new YACCS code so the comments work correctly with the new Blogger. You do this by going to the YACCS site, signing into your Control Board, clicking "More", and then "Get Code". Then you just replace the YACCS code already in your template with the new code.

(Users can still leave comments with the old code, but the front-page link won't indicate any comments. I discovered that I had received about ten comments that I didn't even know about!)

I don't read Andrew Sullivan that much, because he mainly strikes me as a twerp with an axe to grind against the world in general and anyone who's ever wronged him in particular. He's now weighing in on the looting of the Iraqi museum, wondering if those who criticized the administration (including, as a general class, yours truly) are willing to apologize now that it's turned out that the number of priceless artifacts stolen is apparently much, much lower than originally thought. (Instead of thousands of priceless items being gone, it now appears that only 33 priceless items are gone, while many more items of "indeterminate value" have disappeared.)

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no intention of apologizing for my castigation of President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, or anyone else on this point merely because our negligence did not have results quite as lousy as first reported. Just because the officials at the Iraqi Museum spirited a lot of the priceless stuff away to hiding places, in anticipation of rampant looting, doesn't excuse our Administration for its complete failure to prevent that looting in the first place.

Let me put it this way, Mr. Sullivan: if I ever catch my daughter playing with matches, I'm going to yell at her and most likely punish her, even if she doesn't actually ignite the carpet and cause the house to burn to the ground.

"It could have been worse" is not equivalent to, "We did nothing wrong and you owe us an apology".

IMAGES OF THE WEEK





Gregory Peck, who died today at the age of 87.





David Brinkley, who died today at the age of 82.

Peck was probably best known for his portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird -- a character who was just last week named the AFI's Top Movie Hero -- and that was a great performance, but I remember Peck more for his work on The Guns of Navarone. I haven't seen that many of Peck's films -- he made a lot of them -- but his work always impressed me. He had a way of taking over the moral center of a film that was very striking.

As for Mr. Brinkley, I used to watch his Sunday morning show on ABC quite frequently. By then he was already an "elder statesman" of television news reporting, and he carried himself as such on the show. What I remember most is his clipped vocal delivery, in which he emphasized every second or third word with a unique "speeding up" of the pronunciation. No one else quite spoke like Brinkley did, although Phil Hartman did a dynamite impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live, skewering both Brinkley's delivery and supposed cynicism.

What strikes me is that with each passing year, I get closer and closer to seeing the film and television personalities I grew up with passing away.