Final call -- Ask Me Anything!

I ended up being busier than I expected over the weekend, so I didn't get a start yet on collating answers to the questions submitted in Ask Me Anything! August 2010. That being the case, I'm leaving the submission period open until Tuesday morning, August 17. I'll end it at that time. So, one last day -- Ask Me Anything! We won't be playing again until February.

Leave questions in comments at the post linked above. (I do this to keep the questions in one place, for easy gathering.)

Sentential Links #217

Linkage....

:: I don't know why this is true but a cat simply cannot resist the pull of an empty box. (Heck, at Casa Jaquandor, the box doesn't even have to be empty!)

:: You should keep this in mind the next time you think the woman at the cash register at the grocery store is “too slow” or the guy at the parts store seems to be “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” or the girl behind the counter at the fast food restaurant fails to smile perkily enough. Keep in mind that they’ve been putting up with people like you, and worse, all day and if you’re not careful you might just be The One.

:: God, I'm getting tired of those three words, "in this economy." Seems to me that they're turning into a convenient excuse for a lot of BS we wouldn't otherwise be willing to put up with... (Isn't that the truth. Sometimes I wonder if there's not a particular breed of manager who hopes for a crappy economy, because then they can screw the employees and have a nice excuse for doing it.)

:: Horror isn't dead. (Neither is SF, GAWD.) We do not need dudes to save us from this terrifying dystopia. Trust me. The kids are gonna be all right.

:: Let's face it: as Canadians how often have we been in this situation -- having to bitch-slap a Yeti who has decided to get all up in your grill while you are cavorting naked in the snow. (I totally want this fellow doing my cover art when I publish my book. Which will happen after I write it. Sigh.)

:: Sometimes I wonder how the pioneers withstood this kind of heat. Or the native Americans. I suppose they just spent the days quietly, barely moving, staying in the shade or sitting in a stream. Something tells me the native Americans handled it better because they were acclimatized to prairie heat. Nor were they the whiny babies we whites have always been. They didn't struggle with nature, they lived in harmony with it. (Well, the Native Americans probably didn't have nearly as many goofy taboos regarding wearing clothes that we do. When it got too hot, they probably removed quite a bit more clothing than we allow ourselves to.)

:: There was, however, a young kid in a uniform sitting at a big desk, so I walked up to him and said what very well may be the most embarrassing sentence I have ever uttered: “Can you please tell me how to get to Pop Tart World?” (Buffalo can't get a friggin' sporting goods store to want to set up camp here, and NYC gets Pop Tart World. Ye Gods!)

All for this week. More next!

Be very careful when bending over....

This is one of the more unusual marketing efforts I've seen lately: overalls which are iPad compatible! As in, you can carry your iPad around in your bib pocket.



Well...OK then. Not sure about this...but then, I never carry anything around in my bib pocket anyway when I'm wearing overalls. I would think that would feel like walking around with a plate of armor on one's chest. But hey, best of luck with that!

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Who doesn't love some retro-future stuff? Here's a segment from an old Disney show about highways in the future. Some of this stuff is kind of prescient, while other stuff falls into the "Hey, it's the 21st century -- where the $*&#! are my flying cars!"



I'll even trade my flying cars for those cantilevered skyways in the mountains!

:: Scientific American has a nifty interactive doodad about "12 Events That Will Change the World", with the events discussed not just for what might happen but also for how likely they are.

:: Best not to even leave the house, kids -- otherwise you'll be maimed or killed!

:: I always figured, from all of my readings, that the ancient Greeks were a generally humorless lot, but a recently unearthed sculpture reveals a hidden side to Greek comedy:



(I have no idea where I got that from. Saw it months ago and copied it because I thought it was funny, and then forgot about it.)

More next week!

Summing up....

This makes it all pretty clear:



(via)

A Day at the Fair

Today The Family and I are off to the Erie County Fair for a day of gazing upon farm animals and farm machinery, watching the riding of bumper cars by The Daughter, perusing all manner of goods being hawked by artisans and capitalists galore, and consuming All Things Battered And Deep-Fried. Huzzah!

And don't forget, folks -- I'm open to questions for two more days on Ask Me Anything!. Bring 'em on!

"We're in a tight spot!"

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie I've been vaguely aware of ever since it came out, but which I'd never seen, for one reason or another. Mostly that I just kept forgetting about it, and even though I've enjoyed the work of the Coen Brothers in the past, there was just something about O Brother that kept me from...well, no, that's not the way to put it. It just never seemed to jump up past my interest level that can be described as "Huh, maybe I should watch that sometime." But I was at the library a week ago, saw the movie on the shelf, and thought, "Well, check it out and if I don't watch it, fine."

So I watched it, and I loved it. What a wonderfully fantastical movie. It's really something to behold. It's an epic fantasy story, with journeys and traps and villains and betrayals; it's an epic fantasy story with implausible escapes and divine interventions and grim prophecies; it's an epic fantasy story set in Depression-era Mississippi with no actual magic in it at all. Fantasy, with no magic. Or maybe it does have magic. There are events in the film that could be magical...or maybe they're not. We don't know.

O Brother is famously a recasting of The Odyssey, in the deep South. Three prisoners escape from a chain gang, led by Ulysses (!) Everett McGill, who tempts them with promises of a treasure that he hid before his prison sentence. The three men are, at first, literally inseparable; the only reason it's these three men escaping is because Ulysses is chained to these two guys. So off they go, on their way to McGill's home, hopefully in search of treasure, with a very scary and relentless law enforcement man (whose actual legal affiliation is never really explained) on their tails. The three men come across a blind man driving a manual railroad car who speaks prophetically; a one-eyed Bible salesman; three women in a river who seduce them with their song; and...well, I don't want to spell it all out, since part of the movie's charm is spotting all the parallels to The Odyssey.

One that stood out is the early scene in which the convicts come across a group of people, presumably Baptists, all slowly walking through the forest whilst singing, down to the river for their baptisms. The old pastor at our church actually used this scene a few times in services to illustrate the power of baptism, but seeing the movie, I wonder if the actual parallel isn't so much to the power of the Holy Spirit but rather to the Lotus Eaters, who are lulled into apathy by the food they eat. But I digress.

I loved the dialogue in this film -- there's an enormous amount of craft in the script, with characters speaking in the kind of long, florid sentences that you just don't hear much anymore in movies these days (if, in fact, you ever did). McGill, in particular, has a laconically verbose speaking style that's just a joy to listen to. Early in the film when looking for someone to break the chains that are binding him to the other two men, he asks some hoboes: "Say, any of you boys smithies? Or, if not smithies per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before straitened circumstances forced you into a life of aimless wanderin'?" Or, as when he asks his ex-wife why she's been telling their daughters that he was hit by a train and she replies that it's better that than "He's a criminal and in prison", "Uh, I take your point. But it does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny."

The best thing about O Brother is its music, which is deeply steeped in the roots and folk music of the Deep South, including spirituals, jazz, and popular revival music that is the precursor to rock-and-roll. There's a reason the O Brother soundtrack album sold extremely well back when it came out. I'll need to get it myself.

Yeah, I'm late to the party, but O Brother, Where Art Thou? really pleased me on a lot of levels.

Reminder: Ask Me Anything! August 2010 edition

(bumping this post up)



Go here for details! More questions are needed. Serious questions, goofy questions, anything goes! Ask me anything! I'm taking questions until next Sunday, August 15.

Something for Thursday

Here are the last few minutes of a movie I like a lot, Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It. The film adapts Norman Maclean's novella about growing up with his brother in Montana, along a beautiful river with a father who was a pastor and an avid fly-fisherman. I don't think this clip really gives anything away, spoiler-wise.

I really hope he wasn't trying out for "Hell's Kitchen"

Well, I see that Buffalo has hit the national news wire again, this time for the actions of one of our fine citizens. Sigh:

Buffalo police rescued a cat from a Cheektowaga man who apparently was planning to make a meal out of his pet because he thought it was ill-tempered, authorities said Monday.

When Ferry-Fillmore District officers pulled over a car driven by Gary L. Korkuc on Sunday night during a traffic stop, they said they heard a cat crying from inside the trunk and investigated.

What they found has left animal lovers at the SPCA Serving Erie County in shock.

The cat, according to police, was in a cage “marinating” in a mixture of crushed red peppers, chili pepper, salt and oil.

Errrr...OK then.

Apparently the guy likes his spicy food, though: crushed peppers, chili pepper, and salt. Of course, I find out about this the same day that the finale of Hell's Kitchen airs, and another episode of Master Chef, so even as a cat lover who is appalled by the very idea of this, I can't help but be somehow amused at the culinary line of thought here.

The tale has a happy ending, though: the cat was adopted already by someone who isn't planning to cook him.

"I got him home now, and he's just looking and exploring like crazy," she said Tuesday night. "He's really passive and not aggressive at all."

He has a new bed, a new litter box and a new name: Oliver.

"He's all black, but he has white under his chin, on all his paws and on his chest," Dankowski said. "They bathed him so many times to get the spices out, so he feels so soft. He's absolutely beautiful."

OK, I'm sorry, but there's just something a bit morbidly funny about all this. There just is. I'm envisioning a woman holding her new cat on her lap, stroking his back and his chin, enjoying his purring...and starting to get a hankering for a pizza....

How about a version where they flood the theater with water?

James Cameron is working on a 3D version of Titanic, to be possibly released in 2012. This interests me, a little. I think that by then The Daughter just may be ready for that movie. She's already expressed interest in it, and knowing her tastes as I do, I do think she'd eat it right up. And I personally would not at all mind seeing it again on the big screen, as I've never understood the backlash against the film.

But...I'm not that terribly interested in seeing 3D movies. At all. I'm fine with good old 2D; give me a well-shot movie with a good story, and my head will fill in all the extra Ds. I don't need funky glasses, and I'm afraid I'll end up with a headache anyway. I hope that if Titanic does come back to the big screen, there's a concurrent 2D release of the original film, which is just fine for me.

(Oh wait...now that I think of it, there is one scene that might be kind of intriguing in 3D...and it has nothing to do with the ship sinking.)

Dinos! Whiskey! Sexy!

So a little while back we watched Jurassic Park with The Kid, a bit apprehensively as we thought she would find it a bit intense and scary. No dice; she just made fun of us for our worries! But she also insisted on watching the sequel, so I got it from the library and we watched it, after some warnings from me that while she might not find it scary either, she also might find it not as good. This because I distinctly recall my disappointment in The Lost World: Jurassic Park back when it came out, and I hadn't seen it in its entirety since.

Well, having watched it again at long last, I conclude that it's better than I remember it, but it's still not all that good.

The Lost World opens with a family setting up lunch on the beach of a tropical island off which they're moored their yacht. Their little girl wanders off and finds an adorable little reptile thing that acts all cute when she feeds it. This brings out its brethren. Lots and lots of them. Cue the screaming of the little girl, the running of her parents to her side, and the wailing of her mother when she sees what's happening (offscreen). This is actually kind of intense, and I remember wondering, "Jeebus, did Spielberg actually open his movie by killing a kid?!" That would have been a dramatic departure from Spielberg's previous efforts with children in his movies.

But no, the kid is later indicated to have been merely injured. That's good. It turns out that while the original Jurassic Park island was pretty much destroyed (along with all the dinosaurs) in a hurricane, the island next door wasn't -- and that's where they were doing the actual breeding, or something -- all of this explanation stuff whips by really quickly and it's not all that interesting anyway.

The only character from the first movie who really returns for any length of time is Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm, the quirky mathematician from the first movie who was forever telling people what a bad idea cloning dinosaurs is. Since he's the only returning character, we have to spend some time meeting all of the new characters, some of whom we like and some of whom we don't. Malcolm is dating a stunningly beautiful paleontologist (Julianne Moore), who just happens to already be on Jurassic Park II. He also has a techno-whiz friend (Richard Schiff, yay!) and a documentary filmmaker (Vince Vaughn) who seems to have ulterior motives. Oh, and he has a kid. Who is all pouty because she's just been cut from the gymnastics team. And who is also pouty because Malcolm tries, but he's never quite there for her. And who stows away on the boat to the island. Oy.

Of course, there are the industrialists who want to capitalize on dinosaurs to make money, only they're a lot more bent on their dino-riffic get-rich-quick scheme this time out (meaning, they bring a lot of guns with them). Other than that, the movie involves a lot of the same tropes of the first one: humans trapped on an island with dinosaurs. This time the dinos get angrier (owing to people messing around with their young), and the set-pieces get more creative. I've got to give the movie credit: if seeing people suffer grisly demises at the hands of dinosaurs is your thing, The Lost World has a lot more going for it than Jurassic Park.

Of course, there are some mis-steps as well. I know whom I would place money on in the matchup of a velociraptor versus a teenage girl with some gymnastics skill, but apparently Steven Spielberg feels otherwise.

Watching the movie again, I was disappointed that it's not really a story; rather, it's a series of set-ups and pay-offs. Meet people; send them to island. Cut them off from the mainland; release the dinos. Escape dinos; run into more dinos. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the end, when it turns out that the entire movie is just one big set-up for the last giant set-piece, when the stupid dino-capitalists carry out their brilliant plan to bring a T-Rex to the mainland. And not the coast of Peru, either. Nope, their dino is coming to San Diego.

The first film had characters that it was easier to care about, which is part of what makes the second a bit harder to take. Ian Malcolm was the least developed of the characters in the first movie, and yet he has to carry the show this time out, so we have to spend time getting to know him and aside from his quirkiness and the fact that Jeff Goldblum is all kinds of nifty, he's just not that interesting a guy. And what stood out horribly for me this time is that the movie totally wastes its most interesting new character.

Well into the movie, we meet a very intriguing guy. I don't remember his name, but he's a hunter played by Pete Postlethwaite. This guy is calm, cool, deeply smart, wickedly observant, and he's itching to bag a T-Rex. He's also mainly used as a villain and a counterpoint for the "more enlightened view" of nature that the film is trying to underline. We only meet him about a half hour into the film, and when we see him last, we still have a half hour of film to go. The way the movie creates this highly intriguing character and then treats him about as disposably as a character can be treated is the most disappointing thing about the movie.

I ended up imagining an entirely different Jurassic Park II. What if we don't have any of the Ian Malcolm stuff, any of the dumbass-dino-exploiter stuff, and of it -- what if instead we have this old hunter who is tired and bored and can't find any more challenges? And what if we have this hunter hear whispers of an island somewhere? An island where some company was doing some genetic experimenting on animals, experimenting of an indeterminate sort, that resulted in the creation of the toughest big game on the planet? And what if our hunter takes a few friends to go see what's up, and finds, beyond his wildest imaginings, that he's hunting -- and being hunted by -- dinosaurs? That could have been a gripping movie, instead of a movie that gives gripping set-pieces alternating with dull exposition.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is fun to watch. Great action, and I really did like the T-Rex-in-San Diego bit. But the movie is still a misfire. It's a shame.

(Of course, I may just be a tad bitter toward the film because the T-Rex's first meal in the movie is poor Richard Schiff. I don't care if this was several years before he played Toby Ziegler on The West Wing; you don't get to feed Richard Schiff to the T-Rex! Especially not when he's gallantly risking death to save his friends!)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Everybody has feelings about Christmas stuff being on sale in October, but: Halloween candy in August?! Yes or no?

The door that opens is the winner!

A couple of thoughts on the finale of Hell's Kitchen (highlight to read):

:: Jay got a bit too cocky. He ran a good dinner service, but listening to his constant trash-talking just got annoying.

:: I also got tired of hearing him drool over Holli. That's what blogs are for. (Did he really think he was going to get a shot with her?)

:: Holli's kitchen brigade for the final service was awful. Or maybe it just seemed that way due to editing. But the show really made it look as though Jay's kitchen was a well-oiled machine while Holli's was a Model-T that was missing a few parts.

:: I love the way they cut to Benjamin's pouty face within seconds of Holli being revealed as the winner. That was great.

:: I've gotta wonder if part of Holli's win was Gordon Ramsay looking at Holli's son and thinking, "Geez, I can't make that kid cry."

:: Jean-Phillippe apparently doesn't much like getting dowsed with champagne. Which is why that moment was really funny.

:: More next season! Can't wait!

"We're back! We're bad! You're black! I'm mad!"

So after watching Lethal Weapon a few weeks ago, it was natural to follow it up with...Lethal Weapon 2.

The second LW movie is one of the rare sequels that is of comparable quality to its predecessor. I don't think it's quite as good, but it's awfully close. The story this time doesn't make quite as much sense, and it's quite a bit harder to follow, but it helps that the villains in this movie -- South African diplomats, led by the ultra-smarmy Joss Ackland as Arjun Rudd, using their diplomatic immunity to run drugs and launder drug money -- are some of the more gleefully malevolent villains I can remember.

To note that the movie opens in medias res is actually an understatement; I can't think of a way for a movie to plop us in the middle of the action more than this one. After the opening title card fades, the first thing we see and hear is a close-up of Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) screaming "Ya-HOOOO!" in the middle of a high-speed chase through downtown LA. His partner, the more even-keeled Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), is driving as they pursue some thieves, or drug runners, or something. Any explanation for why they're in the middle of a chase is shouted quickly and it's easy to miss it all entirely. I've seen this movie a lot of times, and I've never been entirely sure as to the set-up for the chase. The chase ends, though, and Riggs and Murtaugh discover South African coins filling the trunk of the car. They're on to something, it seems.

This is one of those movies where several different plotlines seem to careen in and around one another, and we're not sure as to what the connections are until the final act. As the whole South African thing percolates in the background, Riggs and Murtaugh are assigned to babysit an accountant who has been laundering drug money, skimming from the take, and agreed to turn state's evidence against the drug dealers. This accountant turns out to be a high-strung guy named Leo Getz, who is played with some energy by Joe Pesci. Did I say "some" energy? It's actually manic energy. Pesci's character was extremely memorable; for years after this movie came out, the canonical impression people would do of Joe Pesci was to say, in Leo Getz's standard way, "OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK." And, of course, his signature bit of dialogue, in which he rants about fast food service: "They f*** you at the drive-thru!"

The creation of a third unique character to bounce off Riggs and Murtaugh is one of the movie's wise steps; had they kept things focused on just the two cops, some of the dynamic might have started to become routine. In the course of the movie, Murtaugh doesn't really develop a whole lot, but Riggs continues to grow and open up after stepping back from being suicidal in the first film. He even becomes attracted to a woman again, who happens to be the administrative assistant to the film's villain.

The film's third act becomes pretty intense, and in some ways, I've always felt it might be a little too intense. The villains decide to make a statement by slaughtering a whole bunch of Riggs and Murtaugh's fellow cops, and attempting to kill Riggs and Murtaugh themselves (they escape, obviously). It begins with the villains murdering a whole bunch of cops, and the film takes a pretty dark turn thereafter, when one villain discloses some information to Riggs regarding his wife's death. I remember this particular revelation being pretty surprising when I saw the movie, and I wondered then -- and still wonder -- if it was really necessary.

The action sequences in the film are all superb; it seems to me that Richard Donner has never really gotten his due as an action director. The humor this time out is broader, but most of it works. Murtaugh has one of my favorite lines of the "Goofy pun the hero makes after the bad guys are done with" variety: "They've been decaffeinated." (This is a pun on the South African word kaffer, which is their equivalent of our own N-word for black people.) And it's hard not to get a thrill from the scene where Riggs uses his pickup truck to destroy a house (a visual effect that was filmed for real using a full-size structure).

I recently read that Shane Black, one of the writers, wanted Riggs to die at the end of the movie, thinking that it was the logical end to his "arc". I'm not sure why there is so often a tendency to think that characters need to die once their "arcs" are complete; Black's thinking seems to be that we've already seen Riggs learn to live again, and once he's open to possibly loving again, well, that's when he's fully back, so it's time for him to die. I don't get this, any more than I get the people who think (Harrison Ford among them) that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi. Riggs dying would have made for a very downbeat finale to this movie.

Wow....

At the school I went to when we lived in Hillsboro, OR last (from fall 1979 to June 1981), this lady was one of my classmates. Interesting to see what she's made of herself. (I only remember her because she is the only "Brenna" I have ever known. Unusual names stick in my head.)

UPDATE: OK, reading this a bit later on, I think I might sound like I'm saying that the only memorable thing about Brenna is her name. That's not what I mean at all; we were in third and fourth grade together, and I remember very few names from way back then. Hers is one.

A Horrific Quiz

SamuraiFrog has this quiz, which I must do. It's kinda-sorta about horror movies.

1: In Ten Words or Less, Describe Your Blog:

Guy obsesses over overalls and Star Wars. Film at eleven.

2: During What Cinematic Era Where you Born?
A: The Classic Horror Era (late 30's to 40's)
B: The Atomic Monster/Nuclear Angst Era (the late 40's through 50's)
C: The Psycho Era ( Early 60's)
D: The Rosemary's Baby Era (Mid to Late 60's)
E: The Exorcism Era (Early to mid 70's)
F: The Halloween Era (Late 70's to Early 80's)
G: The Slasher Era (Mid to late 80's)
H: The Self Referential/Post Modern Era (1990 to 1999)

I was born in 1971, so I'm kind of right on the border between Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.

3: The Carrie Compatibility Question:
(gay men and straight women - make your choice from section A)
A: Billy Nolan or Tommy Ross, who would you take to the prom?
(straight guys and lesbians - make your choice from section B)
B: Sue Snell or Chris Hargensen, who would you take to the prom?

I wouldn't go to the prom.

4: You have been given an ungodly amount of money, and total control of a major motion picture studio - what would your dream Horror project be?

Filming one of John Bellairs's books: The Curse of the Blue Figurine or The Treasure of Alpheus T. Winterborn would be good starting points.

5: What horror film "franchise" that others have embraced, left you cold?

I don't understand the point of the SAW movies, aside from some pretty creative ways of killing and/or maiming people. But I don't want to watch that, so fuhgeddaboudit.

6: Is Michael Bay the Antichrist?

Not while Sarah Palin and Tom Brady are around! (Bay stinks, though. What an awful filmmaker.)

7: Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Frankenstein Monster - which one of these classic villains scares you, and why?

Dracula, probably. Or vampires. Real vampires. Not those stupid sparkly fake-ass "vampires" from Twilight.

8: Tell me about a scene from a NON HORROR Film that scares the crap out of you:

My obvious answer is the same one that SamuraiFrog gave, so that's off the table. The abduction of Barry Guiler in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an extremely effective scene.

9: Baby Jane Hudson invites you over to her house for lunch. What do you bring?

A pizza. Which I leave on her doorstep. And then run away, after ringing the doorbell one time.

10: So, between you and me, do you have any ulterior motives for blogging? Come, on you can tell me, it will be our little secret, I won't tell a soul.

One day someone will ask me the Right Question, and on that day, the world will end. Or something like that.

But seriously...no. I just like to say what's on my mind and write about stuff that interests me. It would be nice if the stuff that interested me interested more people, or if what I had to say about what interests me interested more people, but hey, them's the breaks.

11: What would you have brought to Rosemary Woodhouse's baby shower?

Cream pies and seltzer water, because there's gonna be some hijinks when that kid's born!

12: Godzilla vs The Cloverfield Monster, who wins?

If it's Japanese Godzilla, then Godzilla wins. If it's Devlin-and-Emmerich Godzilla, than the Cloverfield thing.

13: If you found out that Rob Zombie was reading your blog, what would you post in hopes that he read it?

I was once driving with a friend to a meeting for the company we worked for, and I had a CD of The X-Files on, and he said that parts of it reminded him of Rob Zombie's music. I know nothing about Rob Zombie's music, so I have no idea how accurate that is.

14: What is your favorite NON HORROR FILM, and why?

Star Wars. Duh.

15: If blogging technology did not exist, what would you be doing?

I'd probably still be on Usenet or the FSM boards. Shudder.

Sentential Links #216

Two hundred sixteen of these posts.

Here's a weird factoid from my life: 216 is the only room number I remember from my high school building. For years it was a really big room that was only used for study halls, but around my junior year they needed another classroom or two so they put up a wall in the middle of Room 216, turning it into 216 and 217. I have no idea why that's stuck in my head all these years, but I remember spending time being bored in Study Hall 216.

Anyway, the linkage for the week!

:: Certainly our chest freezers are full of meat and it’s difficult to open the refrigerator without beets or carrots or cabbage rolling out and onto the floor, and there’s not always room on the counter due to the cantaloupe or tomatoes but there’s more to life than meat, fruits and vegetables. There’s cheese for one thing. Bread for another. And, of course, sweets. And that’s where bartering comes in. It’s one of my favorite things about going to market.

:: I recognize the library as the remedy to all of life’s problems. (This has nothing to do with Roger's post, actually, but let me reiterate my position that one sure way to mark yourself as an idiot is to say something along the lines of "Since we have Amazon.com now, we don't really need libraries anymore.")

:: Politics in a democracy isn’t a blood sport. We don’t kill members of the other side or intimidate them with violence. But it’s not a parlor game either. It’s serious stuff, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Republicans do a good job of that, and their approach to process “hypocrisy” merely reflects the fact that they have a reasonable sense of priorities. (I'm not sure I agree with Matt Yglesias's point here, but it's interesting to consider. I do think that Democrats would find their lives a lot easier, policy-wise, if they'd get over their somewhat irrational fear of what will happen if they start using process to beat Republicans over the head and get their work done.)

:: It is shameful, of course. Richest country in the history of the word, but don't let anybody tell you we are generous.

:: Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

:: "Anyone who thinks they're ready to be a parent ought to try living with three cats first." (Done, and done.)

:: Are there too many blond female sidekicks?

All for this week. More next week!

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

In the "I should really pay more attention to my surroundings" department, I've just spent 45 minutes scrolling backward through the archives of Buffalo Eats, a blog devoted to food in the Western NY region. I had no idea this blog existed. Huzzah!

100 more SF books everybody should read!

Lynn found this list, which differs substantially from the last one I did, so we'll do the same deal this time: already read it; own it and plan to read it; don't own but plan to read. With occasional comment.

UPDATE: There's apparently not 100 here. Oh well. Call it the "Almost a hundred", then.

The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
Cities in Flight – James Blish
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (I still haven't read any PKD!)

The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
Gateway – Frederik Pohl

The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin (Read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I missed its point entirely.)

The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
Emphyrio – Jack Vance
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon

Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells

Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Timescape – Gregory Benford
More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
Man Plus – Frederik Pohl

A Case of Conscience – James Blish
The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke

Pavane – Keith Roberts
Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
Nova – Samuel R. Delany
The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke

Blood Music – Greg Bear
Jem – Frederik Pohl
Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
VALIS – Philip K. Dick
The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke

Eon – Greg Bear
The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
Ringworld – Larry Niven

The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke

Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
Dune – Frank Herbert

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein (Well, I tried once, and bounced off about halfway through.)

The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
Inverted World – Christopher Priest
Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells
Childhood’s End - Arthur C. Clarke
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells (Hold on, this is on here twice!)

Dhalgren (July 2010) - Samuel R. Delany
Helliconia (August 2010) - Brian Aldiss
Food of the Gods (Sept. 2010) - H.G. Wells
The Body Snatchers (Oct. 2010) - Jack Finney
The Female Man (Nov. 2010) - Joanna Russ
Arslan (Dec. 2010) - M.J. Engh (Given contemporary events, this is a really creepy book.)

In other SF reading notes, I'll just note here that I stopped reading Startide Rising by David Brin about halfway through. There are tons of nifty ideas in that book, but I didn't care one bit about any of the characters, to the point where halfway through I was having to look back to the book's Dramatis personae just to remind myself who was being talked about a lot of the time. Part of the problem, for me, is that a lot of the really interesting stuff in the story (the events of the Streaker's finding the derelict fleet) is over by the time the book begins, but another problem is that I just wasn't roped into caring about the people Brin was writing about. So I looked up a plot summary online just to see where the book went after that, and I'm done. I won't be bothering with the remaining books in the Uplift series.