Some assembly required

Thanks to Adam for this questionnaire in two parts, which he in turn discovered via Samurai Frog. Happily this meme comes without forced tagging, but anyone who wishes should feel free to give it a try.

I. The first half involves bolding the things you've done.

Gone on a blind date
Not as such. Gone out with someone I only knew through online correspondence but had never previously met in person, yes.

Skipped school
Most of my senior year in high school! Honestly, I'm amazed I managed to graduate...which may explain my recurring dream in which I have to go back there all these years later and finish all those classes I skipped.

Been to Canada
Not for a very long time, and I'd really like to go back.

Been to Mexico
Sadly, no.

Been to Florida
Sadly, yes. To my lasting dismay.

Been to Africa
Never, but I kind of like the music.

Been on a plane
I love flying and still consider airports to be exciting and romantic places, but I've avoided both for the past few years...partly due to the idiocy of "security theater" at the expense of genuine safety.

Been lost
It's one of my favorite ways to get to know a new place.

Gone to Washington DC
I've been there four times, and each visit was a lot of fun.

Swam in the ocean
At least two of them!

Broken a bone
I don't know how I've managed to avoid it all these years.

Been in a traffic accident
It was an extremely foggy afternoon in California. The car I was in got a cracked tail light. The front of the car that rear-ended us crumpled like foil. Happily, everyone involved had excellent insurance.

Cried yourself to sleep
And that was just last night! (Okay, and the night before.)

Been on TV
Once as recounted in an earlier meme here. More recently, I was in the audience for a Throwdown with Bobby Flay on the Food Network, but I don't know if I appear on camera.

Stole traffic signs
Why would anyone want to do that? I don't get it.

Played cops & robbers
Let's not bring my sex life into this. ("Now this time I'll be the cop and you be the sexy bank robber I've just arrested who's trying to seduce me into letting her go...")

Recently colored with crayons
Not recently enough.

Sang Karaoke
In fact, it was with Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good. Disturbingly, we sang a duet of "I've Got You, Babe." This is true.

Paid for a meal with coins only
It's strange that would be considered strange. See Horn and Hardart for details.

Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
And that was just last night!

Made prank phonecalls
Leaving allegedly "funny" messages on answering machines is the closest I've come.

Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose & elsewhere
Ew.

Caught a snowflake on your tongue
Someone claimed no two of them tasted exactly alike and I was determined to prove this wrong.

Danced in the rain
No, but I have sung.

Written a letter to Santa Claus
Nor have I written to Kwanzaabot. Or the Hanukah Zombie.

Been kissed under the mistletoe
A gentleman never asks and a lady never tells.

Watched the sunrise with someone
Sure.

Blown bubbles
I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles, in the air...

Gone ice-skating
Once. Miserable experience.

Been skinnydipping outdoors
Does anyone still call it that?

Gone to the movies
It seems hard to imagine anyone hasn't...though I wonder if that might change within our lifetimes.

Have a nickname
None of which I care to repeat.

Have body piercings
Sorry, afraid I spent too much time undergoing surgery as a child to see anything liberating or transgressive about cutting holes in myself. Totally cool with other people doing as they please, but it's not for me.


II. The second half is a set of random questions, which I've decided to answer in random order.

1. Favorite drink?
No

2. How much do you love your job?
Cape Cod

3. Birthplace?
Coffee

4. Favorite vacation spot?
Sashimi

5. Ever eaten just cookies for dinner?
Connecticut

6. Favorite pie?
Full of regret

7. Favorite holiday?
With great difficulty

8. Favorite food?
The sea

9. Favorite smell?
My birthday

10. How do you relax?
Oodles and oodles

11. How do you see yourself in ten years time?
Empanada or Cornish pastie

What are you doing here?

A belated happy 45th birthday to the gentleman in the blue box.

Not always to the swift

At last the Presidential contest is over, and a joint victor has been declared.

I extend congratulations to my former opponent Ellen Bischoff -- who made a courageous, daring, and above all foresighted bid for the lead position -- and now shares with me the complete absence of any reward whatsoever, other than the satisfaction of seeing our names mentioned repeatedly on Mark Evanier's blog. At no point did Ellen stoop to mudslinging, character assassination, or dirty tricks, despite ample opportunities. The mutual respect and civility we have shown one another makes it much easier for us to come together now as co-recipients of this honor.

Congratulations also to my runners-up Michael Kilgore, Kris Mandt, Cory Strode, Corey de Danann, Tony Thomas, Roger Green, Bill O'Brien, Michael Hagan, Bob Claster and Anand Kandaswamy. Judging by the fact that we all selected the same number, I can only conclude that each of you is an insightful and discerning individual. Had I not decided to enter the race and then beaten you all, one of you would be accepting this win in my place; I'm certain you would be as gracious and humble about this honor as I am now.

For the benefit of future historians, the hard-fought campaign began here, with further developments recorded here and here. However, I need to address something Mark says here, where he attributes to me this description of the winning strategy:

A lot of us arrived at our guesses by figuring out which states might go black and not go back, and how many electoral votes each represented. Richard may have beaten us all by, he says, picking a number that just sounded about right.

Obviously, this needs to be cleared up. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in August, I was reading Electoral-vote.com every day, as I do every year when the election season begins. I added the now-indispensable FiveThirtyEight.com to my daily political reading immediately after all-star statistician Nate Silver appeared on the Colbert Report. So my choice followed several weeks of closely reading analyses made by highly informed people extremely skilled and crunching numbers and interpreting data. It was a guess, but I'd prefer it to be characterized as an informed guess rather than simple blind chance.

All that said, I indicated to Mark at the Big Apple Con that I felt a bit guilty about being in the lead of his poll because my choice was more wishful thinking than a serious projection: I was certainly hoping the electoral votes would break down somewhere close to where I placed them, but on an emotional level I didn't really expect it would happen. That wish was not for the sake of Barack Obama becoming President (he could have done that just as well at 271 electoral votes) but because I was hoping against hope that voters would repudiate McCain for the clumsy, ill-considered, and frequently offensive campaign he conducted. In other words, it wasn't so much about wanting Obama to win decisively as wanting the McCain campaign to lose thoroughly. Mark tells me he's been hearing this from a lot of people. Neither of us is surprised.

Now that the contest is over I can finally relax and enjoy my shared triumph, as indeed may all America. I hope Ellen will accept this post in lieu of the traditional congratulatory telephone call. And now, on to the victory party!

Hello tomorrow

Via Cult of Mac:

Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.

The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.

The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.

The Comic Zeal developer site is here. Now, compare and contrast Sean Kleefeld on the economics of current comics production:

Marvel has hired Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch to create The Fantastic Four. Hitch receives an electronic script from Millar and begins drawing an issue. But he doesn't make his drawing paper himself; he buys it. Some company had to chop down a tree, convert it to wood pulp, press that into paper, and ship that to wherever he bought it from. Looking at just the gas consumption alone, the paper costs more to make. So they pass those charges on to Hitch in the form of a price increase. Maybe one or two cents a sheet.

Marvel receives all the material electronically. It gets reviewed, approved, and then sent (again, electronically) over to their printer in Canada. That printer needs paper to print the books on, so they have that shipped in not unlike the way Hitch does. Except Marvel needs around 60,000 comics at 32 pages each. Even at only one mil (one one-thousandth of a cent) per page, that amounts to an additional $1,920 every month. Sure, Marvel has deeper pockets than I do, but I don't mind saying that's a fair sight more than my monthly mortgage payment!

But now that printer needs to move those 60,000 comics. They get shipped out to regional Diamond warehouses. Again, increased gas prices impact how much that will cost. And from those warehouses, the books will then be distributed (i.e. shipped by a gas-guzzling truck) to your Local Comic Shop.

The above quote comes from an outstanding series of posts by Sean on the economics of comics, starting here. I'm quoting him out of context to make a rhetorical point he was not trying to make and may not agree with at all, but that's what happens when you say stuff on the Internet.

One place you can get your feet wet in the search for Golden Age comics in public domain available for free download in .cbr format is here. (The same site also offers original and equally free comic stories by some outstanding creators just waiting to be discovered by the world at large.)

This is not an endorsement of Comic Zeal in particular; it will be some time before I'll have any chance to try this particular app out for myself. But the work going in this direction is promising. The absence of those printing and shipping costs (and the oil they consume) is going to make an even bigger difference to the general public in the coming year. That, combined with the popularity and glamor of the iPhone platform, may even be enough to override the major publishers' pyhrric insistence on digital copy protection, which is seriously hampering their thinking about digital comics; if not, other publishers will step in to fill the gap.

Update: John Rogers of Blue Beetle fame weighs in.

The alphabet meme

Still too busy for regular blogging yet, but Adam at Movie Chunks tagged me with a meme devised by Fletch at Blog Cabins, to wit:

It's a simple concept (my favorite kind) - pick your favorite film for each letter of the alphabet. Some will be tough because there's too many choices (R, S, T, L, N, E...wait a sec - that's Wheel of Fortune) and others will be tough because there are so few choices that you have trouble finding much of anything (Q, anyone?). I'm sure I missed some great ones and I'm hoping that you find them.

The Rules

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

The rules don't specify any criteria, but each of these is a particular favorite of mine -- except for one which is an obvious ringer that I've never even seen and probably never will. See if you can spot it! All the rest of these have strong personal associations for me and would be on any list of my favorite films regardless of alphabetical necessity:

Ali
Blazing Saddles
Casino Royale (1967)
Dick
Excalibur
Fantastic Voyage
Ghost Dog
Help!
Idiocracy
Johnny Dangerously
King Kong (1933)
Letter to Brezhnev
M.A.S.H.
North by Northwest
Office Space
Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Quadrophenia
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Sexy Beast
Tommy
Until the End of the World
Viva Las Vegas
Witness for the Prosecution
Xanadu
Young Frankenstein
Zabriskie Point

I won't tag anyone; I'm looking for five volunteers to step up and take the challenge. Or are you all cowards?

Update: Indeed you are not, as the stalwart crew of TS, Mark, Johnny Bacardi, Walaka, and Sea of Green have each risen to the occasion. And honorable mention to plok for fessing up, which also takes courage.

Long time coming

24194160 minutes later

It turns out to be my 200th post on this blog, but it's also a special occasion here for another reason:

Birthday greetings today go out to one of my very favorite bloggers, the charming and talented and always entertaining Becca of the charming and talented and always entertaining blog No Smoking In The Skull Cave. And to Adam of the blog Movie Chunks, of whom I was previously unaware until today but I'm sure will become a great favorite of mine in due course.

Though the personal significance of this day may often be overshadowed in the public imagination by events like the Feast of St. Crispin and the Battle of Agincourt as well as the birthdays of Pablo Picasso and Minnie Pearl, it is nonetheless extra special to us. May you both prevail over all those who scorn and mock you, and see your enemies driven before you in the dust, begging for mercy which will never be granted as the unstoppable force of your conquering armies march ever onward to victory over those who dare defy --

-- oops, sorry, that was my birthday wish. Anyway, you guys have a good one too!

Local news

I was surprised to discover in yesterday's Doonesbury that my former hometown has achieved fame as an exemplar (at least for one cartoonist) of the small-town values held up by the likes of Sarah Palin as "the real America." It's a surprise because I know from personal experience that that town is actually built on top of an ancient hellmouth and controlled by sinister, malign forces who plot the downfall of all humanity. Sort of like Twin Peaks or Sunnydale or Smallville, except without the plucky young people to save the populace from eternal damnation at the mercy of unspeakable nameless things who delight in pain and torment.

In a cruel twist, it's also home to one of the best restaurants I've ever been to in my life. That kind of sucks. You have to enter this vile place of horrific torture to reach this spectacular meal. Still, worth it if you like really excellent Italian food.

Unless he meant the one in Oklahoma (which turns out to be named for the same person) because that place is nowhere. What a dump!

Written in the eaves

Foo Fighters tell McCain to stop using song

And in breaking news...

NEW YORK -- Popular indie rock band Vampire Weekend today issued a statement asking that Senator John McCain refrain from using any of their songs in his campaign, in case he was thinking of doing so at any time in the future. A spokesperson for the band explained, "First it was John Mellencamp, then it was Heart, then ABBA, then Jackson Browne, then Van Halen, and now the Foo Fighters. The band thought it would save a lot of time to make it clear at the outset that permission to use their songs would not be granted."

Following up on this development, fellow indie rockers Death Cab For Cutie subsequently issued a companion statement, declaring "Let's nip this one in the bud right now and spare everyone the trouble of calling their lawyers, okay? Don't use our songs either."

Garage rock revivalists The Strokes, currently preparing to release their fourth studio album sometime after the inauguration ceremonies in 2009, also issued a statement indicating their back catalog was henceforth to be considered off-limits to the McCain campaign.

In response, the McCain team dispatched operatives to all forthcoming campaign stops to verify that all background music played during personal appearances by the candidate and his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin will consist exclusively of music by Ted Nugent, Pat Boone, John Rich, and "anyone else who didn't expressly and specifically tell us not to."

Senator McCain (pictured above with Senator Barack Obama during their debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7, 2008) was unavailable for comment.

Update: And Bon Jovi.

They got the guns but we got the numbers

Found on Gothamist, this map illustrates the sheer number of people living in each borough of New York City by comparison with an entire state of the U.S. of similar population size. For instance, the estimated population of Maine in the year 2007 was 1,317,207; the population of the Bronx the same year was 1,373,659. The above map uses estimates from 2006, but the principle is the same.

Actually, a couple of them now fall short: the entire population of Idaho in 2007 was 1,499,402 people while Manhattan alone had 1,620,867 residents. And New Mexico the same year was quite spacious with 1,969,915 citizens...while the borough of Queens was a little more, um, let's say neighborly at a population of 2,270,338.

And I can get to all these places by subway except for the island of Wyoming, but the ferry there is free.

And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time

Teenagers From The Future, the anthology of essays about the Legion of Super-Heroes edited by Tim Callahan and published by Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, is now available from Amazon.

The book includes my essay "The Perfect Storm: The Death and Resurrection of Lightning Lad" about the early days of the Legion series. The particular storyline I examine is one of the first examples of a multi-issue "story arc" in superhero comics (I also mention a few precursors) as well as an early instance of the "death as a revolving door" motif which has since become a staple of comics as well as other serialized entertainment. All this and a tribute to the great Jerry Siegel, plus a comparison of the different working relationships he and his successor Edmond Hamilton had with their editor, the controversial Mort Weisinger. And even though that seems like it should be enough for one book, this particular volume comes with seventeen other essays at no additional cost, written by...um, a bunch of other people who I'm sure have interesting things to say too. Whatever.

(I'm kidding, of course -- I've read this entire book several times in painstaking detail and I'm proud to be one small part of it. Also, this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the first appearance of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and it means a lot to be able to participate in commemorating that.)

According to Tim, the book will also be available for order through the direct market in either the October or November Diamond Previews catalog. Tim isn't sure whether the book will still be available through Amazon after it appears in the Diamond catalog, so anyone who wants to be sure of getting a copy without actually going into a comics shop should probably order it now.

And that cover is amazingly cool, isn't it?

This post is inappropriate

This was my mother's actual response to news that the first day of the Republican Convention might be postponed or curtailed due to Hurricane Gustav:

"I just hope the men's restrooms in St. Paul are prepared for all those Republican delegates with nothing to do..."

See? Now you know where I got my crass sense of humor.

The whole thing is a blessing in disguise for the RNC. The last thing Republican strategists wanted at the convention was to have those high-profile appearances by Bush and Cheney -- reminding everyone yet again how closely tied McCain is to the staggeringly unpopular incumbent -- but there was no way to exclude them from appearing without it being noticed and remarked upon. Now those speeches can be cancelled altogether without it looking like a sign of embarassment.

Plus McCain and Palin now get an opportunity to rush to the Gulf Coast for a photo op that will make them look presidential. It's like McCain received a special blessing from above in return for picking a running mate so beloved by Christian conservatives.

On the other hand, Focus on the Family may not be able to savor this victory, as they'll be preoccupied with filing a breach of contract suit against the Almighty for utterly failing to live up to their demands. Whose side is that guy on, anyway?

Search for tomorrow

When I was seven years old, one of my most prized possessions was a book called The World of Tomorrow written by Kenneth K. Goldstein and published by McGraw-Hill. (Miraculously, I still own that book today, and it's still one of my most prized possessions.) As the title indicates, this was a book about the future, lavishly illustrated with gorgeous full-color photographs of life in the year 2069.



You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent staring at those photos when I was seven. Well, actually, maybe you would. It was so authoritative: these were detailed photographs, not merely drawings created by some artist, so any reasonable person could only assume this was how the future was actually going to be. I tried to put myself into the world of those pictures to better understand how the future would feel to live in at ground level. What would it be like to walk down that street? What view would you see from that park? What sounds would you hear from the traffic of those automated cars zipping by on their grooved tracks? How would it feel to ride in one? Were those rosette-like buildings carousels or restaurants? Would it be strange to sleep in an underwater hotel?



Because of all those hours staring and contemplating, these images are still the indelible default setting for "the future" in my imagination. This is still the future cityscape I envision when reading a science fiction novel. It's the utopian future Earth of Star Trek; the three-dimensional version of what Curt Swan drew in old issues of Adventure Comics with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

It turns out the photos in The World of Tomorrow actually came from the Futurama II exhibit presented by General Motors at the 1964 New York World's Fair, the very building I wrote about in my previous post. (The original Futurama was presented by GM at the 1939 World's Fair.) Neither the corporate connection nor the association with the World's Fair were highlighted in any way by Goldstein or singled out in the acknowledgements. The book was published several years after the fair closed, in which time a lot had changed in America...and the surprisingly progressive, socially conscious, and environmentally enlightened text wasn't a commercial sop to the automaker. As a result, I went a decades not ever guessing the connection until I came across the familiar pictures by accident a couple of years ago while researching something else.

And now, because we live in the future -- where this home computer terminal I'm using at the moment is connected to a worldwide communications network -- I can share with you something I never dreamed existed: actual motion picture footage of that other future I kept trying to visit throughout my childhood.



Note: the above scans were found at nywf64.com, which offers a thorough guide to Futurama II among other attractions.

If you've only seen it once, you haven't seen it all

As a special treat for those who follow the exploits of the internationally famous super-scientist Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture and his clan, we present an actual photograph of their home and research headquarters, better known as the Venture Compound, circa 1964:



The above picture is the best quality photo I was able to find online after long hours of research. Because the flags and the throngs of tourists may obscure your view of the main building, we also offer an artist's conception depicting a wider angle, as seen in a postcard from the same era:



And this image from yet another angle clarifies the overall design of this impressive structure:



The unfamiliar corporate signage may seem puzzling, but this is easily explained. At the time these images were created, Dr. Jonas Venture leased his distinctive home and research center to the General Motors Corporation for use as their pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York. General Motors used the complex for their Futurama exhibit, in which visitors seated in moving armchairs glided past detailed scenes depicting urban life as it would be lived in the early 21st Century. Futurama proved to be the most popular attraction of the World's Fair: nearly twenty-six million people took the journey into the future during the Fair's two year run.

I've visited the fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows many times, but no trace of the Venture Compound remains. I assume that, having made a tidy profit on the temporary use of his abode, Jonas Venture removed it from the site after the Fair ended and returned it once more to the remote location where it stands to this day. Courtesy of a Mr. Jackson Publick, we conclude with this image of the Venture Compound as it appears today:

Dark as his shadow

This kind of thing fascinates me:

First, Marc Tyler Nobleman -- whose book on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Boys of Steel, has just been published -- notes a significant, but totally expected and unsurprising, omission from the credits of a recent superhero movie, leading him to wonder about the origin of the phrase "the Dark Knight" before it appeared in Detective Comics #40 in a story written by Bill Finger in 1940.

Then, doing the literary legwork, J.L. Bell traces the coinage back to Irish gothic novelist Charles Robert Maturin in 1816.

What, you didn't think Frank Miller invented it, did you?

Found here. Both blogs are really excellent in general and, it should go without saying, well worth reading.

Temporally unavailable

I'm back but I'm not back. Or do I have that backwards? Maybe it's the other way around. I've concluded my annual retreat for another year and have returned to my usual surroundings to get caught up on work and e-mail but I'm not quite in a position to resume normal blogging activity just yet. Thanks in advance for your continued indulgence.

The title of this post is a phrase that seemed funny and apt when I first saw it just a couple of days ago. It was on a sign in a shop window announcing iPhones were out of stock at that location. Doesn't it seem like something out of Doctor Who? On checking Google, I've come across a lot of people using this phrase the same way. The funny thing is, even though the phrase is properly speaking a mistake, if it did exist it would probably mean more or less just what these people think it means. Unavailable in this time. If you come to this locus in spacetime seeking this item, you will not find it here and now. Adjust your temporal and spatial coordinates and try again.

Lightful dwellings

Photo ganked from Gothamist.

I was only peripherally aware of Buckminster Fuller for all these years, but in recent months I've become a bit of a fan and suddenly, as if in reply to my vague stirring of interest, he's everywhere. Really, don't you think it's time we gave the Dymaxion car another shot?

In a pleasing coincidence, a Fuller dome has been constructed near my home on the very week I'm heading off to visit another dome that has a special place in my heart. In other words, it's time once again for this blog to enter a state of hibernative naptosis while I go off to recover from the first half of this year. I will be travelling with geeks, but I won't be checking my e-mail often (if at all) or keeping up with my favorite blogs while I'm in retreat, so try not to ask me anything or say anything interesting while I'm gone.

I have some good stuff in mind for when I return so we'll see about that, eh?

People we couldn't do without

Strangely enough, the vast majority of search engine traffic arriving at this blog comes from people searching on Google for the origin of the phrase "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." For the benefit of anyone who arrives at this entry looking for the same information, those words are written on the tombstone of Billy Pilgrim in the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and they appear again on Stony Stevenson's tombstone in a television program called Between Time and Timbuktu which adapted scenarios taken from an assortment of Vonnegut's novels and short stories. As I describe it at the above-mentioned link, seeing that program at an impressionable age was a major formative influence on me.

I usually claim that my top search referral is "Kim Possible erotic fan fiction", but the truth is those hits take second place to the Vonnegut post. Given the choice, I'd much rather have a blog where people went looking for erotica about cartoon characters than one best known for eulogizing my childhood heroes and role models. Sadly, fate hasn't helped me much in that department.

When I was writing about Steve Gerber, I wish it had occurred to me to call him "the George Carlin of comics" because in some respects that's exactly what he was. (Fortunately the same comparison occurred to Jim McLauchlin of the HERO Initiative, so at least the world was not denied this insight due to my mental slowness.) Of course Gerber and Carlin and Vonnegut were radically different in a lot of ways -- perhaps more ways than they were similar -- but they occupied the same continuum of thought and embodied the same outlook. Devastatingly intelligent, viciously funny, outspokenly skeptical, fiercely enraged by stupidity and hypocrisy, able to see the humor in our vanity even as they watched the human race needlessly destroying itself. These are qualities I've always wanted to possess...especially that last one, because finding the humor in disaster is a necessary survival skill and it's getting harder and harder all the time. I listened to what all three of them said and read what they wrote and always hoped they'd give us still more clues on how to get by. And now these three of my lifelong icons are gone in the span of a little more than a year.

Oh, and one other: although I never met him, I had a tenuous family connection of a sort with Algis Budrys and was a huge fan of his work, especially the novels Who? (made into a very good movie with Elliot Gould and Joe Bova) and the astonishingly prescient yet criminally out-of-print Michaelmas. Carlin, Gerber, and Vonnegut all saw America from the inside; Budrys arrived in this country in 1936 as the five year old son of the ousted consul-general of Lithuania and he never forgot those inexplicable childhood glimpses of Nazi insanity that caused his family to flee their home.

In some ways the immigrant learns a new culture more thoroughly from the outside than the native ever knows it from inside. If you learn a second language, you may be more conscious of its formal rules of grammar and its odd linguistic quirks than you are of your first tongue; you might speak the language more correctly than a native because of all the things they can take for granted that you had to acquire through hard study. In most ways Budrys lived as the perfect assimilated American immigrant, but inside (he would later say) he never lost sight of the fact that friends and neighbors and community were essentially werewolves -- capable of transforming from kind, reasonable people to bloodthirsty monsters given the wrong impetus.

Now that makes two more people who were huge personal icons of mine gone away this year. If you'll excuse me being so self-centered about this, it does feel meaningful: as if something is being stripped away, as if the world is being diminished around us. More so than usual, I mean. And I had a brush with serious illness at the start of this year, and then my mother did, and then I nearly lost one of my best friends, and I did lose another who meant a lot to me. So I really don't want to write any more memorial posts. From now on, nobody I like die, okay?

In the news

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb USENET access

Verizon offers details of USENET deletion

Verizon blocks access to whole USENET hierarchy

You really have to admire the bravery of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for standing up to the all-powerful Usenet criminal cartel that no one else dares oppose. At last, thousands of innocent Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint customers are spared exposure to the depraved rituals of newsgroups such as alt.adoption, alt.arts.ballet, alt.astronomy and so on and so forth, all the way down to those havens of twisted perversion that call themselves alt.yoga and alt.zen. Don't be fooled: obviously those are assumed names. While it may look on the surface as if these sickos are talking about astronomy or gardening or yoga, they're actually trading kiddie porn right under your nose. That's how deep this thing goes. Anything and everything you see is a secret code word that actually means "kiddie porn." Even this very paragraph might be full of sickening perverted filth and neither of us would ever know it!

Moving on...

I need someone to tell me this is a hoax. Hmm, the Telegraph, that's like a British version of the Onion, isn't it? It just does gag stories and satire that aren't meant to be taken as fact, right? Whew, that's a relief! Because this actually being true would have made me sick as a parrot. A dead parrot.

Also, I was literally three blocks away while this was happening, and I had no clue.

Seven songs

At the behest of sean, who bade me answer the following:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

And my reply:

Feist, One Evening -- The tune from the iPod commercial that made her reputation in the States didn't grab me...but it led to her back catalogue getting more exposure here, and when I heard this it pleased me in all the ways the better-known song didn't. Enjoy the video directed by Leslie herself and costarring her fellow Nova Scotia music sensation Buck 65 here. (Edit: damn you anyway, sean, you know everything takes me longer because I'm so old! I was just getting to this!)

Broadcast, Come On Let's Go -- What if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were taken over by the Lloigor from Zenith to become a pop group in Swinging London circa 1967 and wrote the missing love song from the soundtrack of Billion Dollar Brain? It would sound like this.

The Jigsaw Seen, Baby Elephant Walk -- You'll recall their gorgeous cover of the Scott Walker tune "30 Century Man" on the soundtrack of Bender's Big Score. This is another track from the same album, Songs Mama Used To Sing. (The album also includes a peppy version of "Tattoo" by the Oo.) Video here.

Donovan, Barabajagal -- Jeff Beck on lead guitar, Ron Wood on bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and Micky Waller (who just passed away a few months ago) on drums. Wikipedia claims no less than Robert Plant also helped on backing vocals, but I'm not sure about that. People might think of Donovan as the folkie tunesmith with the Dylan cap who introduced the Beatles to the Maharishi, but he's also the guy who recorded songs like this and did backing vocals for Alice Cooper a bit later. Set to images here.

Spanky and Our Gang, Like To Get To Know You -- Looks like I've fallen into a 1967 groove here. This may seem very much of its time to modern ears, from the days of The Mamas and the Papas and the 5th Dimension, but the truth is this was pretty unconventional even then. Check out this vintage performance clip from the Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour.

Rench presents Gangstagrass, Pistol Packin -- Speaking of crossing genres! I've been waiting years for someone to do this, but I didn't expect it to be so awesome. Listen to this and three other tracks here or download the whole album for free here.

John Cage, 4'33" -- Free download here.

I just don't feel like tagging anyone, but consider yourself tagged if you wish to be and haven't been tagged by someone else.