Things I'm wondering about today-existentialism

Is there a God? If there isn't, what is the purpose of life? If the universe doesn't care about me, should I?

Actually, nothing so dramatic today because who cares about the universe-I fixed a huge problem at work this week and I have Japanese eggplant I'm going to cook this weekend. I'm wondering specifically about existentialism and Albert Camus. During our book discussion for The Postman Always Rings Twice, we discussed how Camus had said it inspired him to write The Stranger. I mentioned that I didn't know much about Camus besides he was an existentialist and got a funny look from someone who said, "I wouldn't say that."

This bugged me-did I have it wrong? So I went to teh googul. Trying to side-step the whole definition of existentialism (which no one really understands no matter what they say), it's a slippery movement. I guess the trend is to declassify some former existentialists including Camus, who considered himself an Absurdist. Camus in fact rejected the label. The Camus Society of the UK though says it's perfectly reasonable to label him an existentialist, however they don't get hung up on labels (that's so existential. Uhm, I guess.)

I don't want to cite 1000 sources. The bottom line is academics are torn but it's pretty much ok to say he is, even if he thought he wasn't (The Myth of Sisyphus was evidently intended to challenge existentialists. I don't read much philosophy because, not to brag, I don't understand it.) So, if someone tells you that Camus was an existentialist, there's no need to look at them as if they said, "Jane Austen was the greatest American writer of the Belle Epoque, much better than her contemporary John Dos Passos."

Things I'm wondering about this week

I called my mother the other day and caught her in the middle of watching Starship Troopers. I could just as easily say I'm wondering why my mother would be watching something like Starship Troopers. But let's not get existential. I mentioned to her that some people complained that the Heinlein source material was antisemitic, or at least that is what I remembered. We both agreed that clearly there is nothing about the movie that struck us that way unless Denise Richards is Jewish which would be an embarrassment to Jews everywhere.

I googled this and couldn't find a lot. One was a comment on a far-right wackjob site that I'm not going to link to (apparently, liberals want you to believe that it's racist. He's totally right too. It's all part of my brilliant liberal conspiracy to take over the country and kill Jesus by convincing dittoheads that Paul Verhoeven films suck. Bwah ha ha. Except for Showgirls which is totally awesome. I'm erect, why aren't you erect?)

The evidence in the Wikipedia article is pretty flimsy. They just say basically that "bugs" sounds an awful lot like "Jews" (really? How are you pronouncing that?) And Verhoeven's uniforms looked kinda Nazi-ish but Verhoeven says he didn't even finish the book-it was boring and depressing. Hah! I love you Paul Verhoeven. All is forgiven.

I read Stranger in a Strange Land and HATED it violently so I will not be reading anymore Heinlein but it's interesting how jingoistic Starship supposedly is while Stranger is so hippy dippy-and sexist. I've heard The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is interesting but a really tedious read. Everyone speaks in some kind of patois that is difficult to pick up on. No thanks.

So, I dunno on all that. Onto other matters. Namely, my co-worker Herb came into my office today and was admiring my periodic table. He mentioned that thorium is being looked at as a reactor fuel that is better and more stable than uranium. We wondered why, if that's so, it hadn't been considered before.

I wondered if it was rare but that's not the case. Apparently, it's been known for a while that thorium is a good alternative and will produce less waste. The reason it's not being used is mainly to do with the existing infrastructure, which is set up to use uranium. The decision to use uranium was originally driven by Cold War expediencies. India and Australia have huge thorium reserves.

Underwhelming adventures but awesome conversations

Speaking to my boss is almost always entertaining, as you'll see below. For the purposes of vague anonymity, I'll call him Gary.

He was telling me this morning about his weekend, which involved going to some ice cream place where he took his picture. He was showing me the patron pictures on their website so I asked, "So, your picture is on the website?"

"No, why would it be on the website?" Gary said.

Ok? So basically he had a picture of himself at the ice cream place? No. It was a picture of his motorcycle parked in front of it. He wasn't even in it. None of this is that funny except it took several minutes to figure out that he basically took a picture of his motorcycle and had ice cream this weekend.

So I mentioned I was on NPR on Friday (I am a huge dork about these things. I was once filmed jumping rope in a boxing class at my old gym for the local news when they did a story about bootcamp classes. I taped that segment and pretty much everyone I knew at that time was forced to watch the tape until my co-workers made fun of me for jumping with my mouth open and I got self conscious.)

This conversation followed:

Gary: MPR?
(he then starts to type "MPR Vanessa" in his Google bar)
Me: NPR, Gary. Like the radio?
Gary: I don't listen to that. It's not MPR?
(He keeps trying to type "MPR Vanessa" so I was like, forget it I'll send you the link. I explained what the show was about)
Gary: Who did you invite?
Me: John Steinbeck, Werner Herzog, Pepa.
Gary: Pepa?
Me: Like Salt N Pepa? Caravaggio.
Gary: Who the hell is that?

Me: A 17th century paint...oh nevermind. Stan Lee
Gary: Stanley who? That sounds boring. Your party would suck.
Me: Please.Who would you invite? Sonny Barger?
Gary: Porn stars
Me: Like Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson?
Gary: You know their names?
Me: You don't? You're the one what watches it.
Gary: Yeah but I don't know their names. Doesn't that bother you?
Me: In fact, yes. I guess you fast forward through the credits. So your list would just be "Three random porn stars?"

He did listen to the show though which was very nice of him. He's really a nice guy. That conversation was so awesome though I wish I could have taped that and put it on the radio. My friend JB was cracking up and was like, "I must Google 'MPR Vanessa' now." It actually linked to a story on Minnesota Public Radio so Gary was closer than we knew.

Slightly underwhelming adventures in public radio

I am a big fan of podcasts. One of the shows I listen to is American Public Media's The Dinner Party Download. Last week they mentioned they were going to have a special web article for their 100th episode and solicited listeners to log on and name their dream dinner party guests, alive or dead.

Well, that's a snap right? You're probably making your list right now. Anyways, done and done. I logged on and made a vast, rambling list that included Paul McCartney, Idris Elba, Caravaggio, Pepa, and Brigitte Nielson (I was torn between her and Sandahl Bergman-I was a big fan of 80's movies with sword-wielding bitches.)

I was not expecting to receive this email from the show's producer, Jackson Musker:

Hi Vanessa, 
 
 
. 
Thanks a ton for sharing this amazing guest list (actually TWO lists!) 
Werner Herzog and Pepa together...I love it.  My hosts and I have had so 
much fun reading all of these responses (ranging from Harry Potter to 
Dolly Parton to Jesus of Nazareth to RuPaul!) that we started to think 
it'd be great if we could include fun little vignettes of these guest 
ideas on our radio show...not just on the website. Since your reply was 
one of the stand-outs, I'd love to call you sometime tomorrow and chat 
for just a couple minutes about your picks, if you're game.  I'd tape a 
brief part of the conversation - maybe 30 seconds - and then we'd air it 
on this Friday's show.  (I'll be on the line with you, guiding you 
along.  And it's taped, not live, so we can tape til we get a good cut. 
:-)) We're hoping that 5 or so of the best responses can be part of the 
on-air show. 
 
 
 
Please let me know if this sounds okay to you...and if so, what time 
tomorrow you'd like me to call you for the super quick chat.  Maybe 
sometime in the morning Pacific Time?  (I'm in Los Angeles.)

RuPaul and Dolly were indeed on my list. Jesus was.....not. Anyways, sure I said.

I was told to narrow it down to two favorite guests, so I did. The co-host Rico called and interviewed me the next day. Despite trying to mentally prepare, I got all sweaty palmed. First, let me say it's perhaps not apparent from the show but that guy has a future as a phone sex operator if he ever wants to change careers. From his throaty, "Well, hello Vanessa in Ohio!" I was weak kneed. Plus it was weird to talk to the guy when I listen every week. Then I started worrying how to condense what I was going to say into something brief and brilliant and informative and awesome. And my voice-wait, was I talking too high-pitched? Is my Kentucky accent leaking out and coating the audio like Karo syrup? You also can't tell from listening but they do several takes that go like this:

Rico: "Ok, say your name and where you are and how often you listen."
Me: "My name is Vanessa and I'm from Columbus."
Rico: "And when you listen."
Me: "Shit. Oops, can you edit that? 'My name is Vanessa and I'm in Columb-'"
Rico: "Oh, hang on. Let me check the record level again. Ok, go."


And so on. So by the time I finally got comfortable with the whole process, he had to hang up and I wasn't really sure there was anything usable on that tape although we did talk a few minutes about how Liza Minnelli and Werner Herzog would get along and how he was a big Herzog fan and was going to go to a screening in a few weeks of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" that Werner was hosting (!) whilst "Hey, I Think I Love You" played in my head.

Amazingly, I did make it onto the show for about 30 seconds like Jackson predicted with two other listeners. It's a little over 10 minutes in, should you be inclined to listen. It really is a cool weekly show, regardless of my one-time cameo:

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/dinnerpartydownload/2011/06/episode-100-randy-newman.html

The fears of my sounding too high-pitched and squeaky were unfounded. Instead, I'm speaking in a lovely baritone that would make Tom Waits sound prissy.

On IQ tests and other jive

So, someone convinced me recently to get my IQ tested if they paid for it. I took the tests last Saturday and it wasn't that bad actually as the whole process took about 90 minutes. 

The first is the Wonderlic which I just assumed was some convoluted acronym but it's the dude's name. A perfect score is 50. Apparently, they estimate that if your chosen profession is "warehouse", you will score a 14 while an average IQ is 20. I think I did ok at this one but because of the 12 minutes/50 question restriction, I didn't waste much time on anything that started out like, "Sally has 10 apples, Dave has 7.5 apples. How many apples will they have to eat to get to Dayton by 3pm if one of them is on the South Beach Diet?"

The second test was the Mensa Admissions Test. That was longer. Lots of visual reasoning and some more word problems. I ate it on that latter section.  Also, a girl who sat next to me stood up and reached over me for a pencil. Strangers touching and hovering over me--do not want.

During the course of taking these tests and talking to Dennis and Googling, I've learned there are a surprising number of high IQ societies. One called Triple Nine posts its requirements online and I see I'm already too dumb to be a member (they want an ACT score of 32, I got a 28. They want an SAT of 1450, I got 1100-something. Ouch. They want an IQ of 149, according to an online test which isn't valid anyways I'm around 144.) Triple Nine only has about 980 members worldwide though so it's not like I'm missing out on world of social interaction.

At least if I am shitcanned from Mensa, there is always Tensa. It's all kind of irrelevant anyways. What would I get out of joining Mensa anyways? Maybe I'd meet Geena Davis or Alan Rachins. Mmmm...LA Law.

Study in Pink versus Scarlet and personality disorders unbound

I watched the first episode of the BBC's excellent Sherlock series last night. I can't say I'm a connoisseur of Holmes adaptations but I'd call this one at least one of the best ever.

I want to list some of the similarities and differences between the Scarlet and Pink versions while they are fresh in my mind:

• Rache=revenge in Scarlet, Rachel in Pink (funny inside joke where he mocks an ME who postulates it's German too)
• Scarlet thread of murder running through life versus... a woman who wears a lot of pink
• Watson is returning from Afghanistan and needs a place to stay in both. Nice add of the cell phone clues to his background (and it was his sister. So funny.)
• I like the bromance and how everyone thinks they are a couple. Even Holmes at one point thinks Watson is hitting on him.
• Both killer are cabbies who kill with poison
• No Mormons this time. I guess they take enough of a beating over Big Love
• Much better showdown with the killer in the Pink version both on Holmes and Watson's parts
• Holmes writes a newspaper article on science of deduction but the update naturally turns it into a blog
• No Mormons means no Utah backstory. Hooray.
• Both killers have aneurysms. 
• Lestrade is likable here, more so than in the book although he's not really unlikable in the book either. Apparently, they cobbled him together from slightly different portrayals in the canon. 
• What? No Gregson?
• More victims. No revenge motive. Just the random fuckery of a personality disorder with too many IQ points

BTW, Holmes has this great line, "I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." After I laughed, I thought wait-what's the difference? Turns out no one is really definite. A lot of it sounds like a sociopath is more prone to be what they call (or used to call) a disorganized offender, someone who is impulsive, sloppy and prone to being caught quickly. Whereas a psychopath is an organized offender. They are both Antisocial Personality Disorders and some are in favor of eliminating the distinction. Some also say a sociopath is more a product of a poor environment whereas a psychopath's problem is pathology, like something squirrelly with their amygdalas. Anyways, Holmes seems much more like a psychopath than a sociopath to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Some fact checking

Last night I went with some friends of mine to a talk on Laos. Thom is in a group that meets once a month to hear a speaker and have dinner at the faculty club. The median age of the group is 60-something so I feel like a toddler there which is kind of cool.

Alas, they spend too much time yammering about member introductions and club business and it's kind of a snore, that part. And then the slide projector quit working so we didn't get to see enough of the pictures but I did learn that the ethnic group that we worked with in Laos was the Hmong. Although officially we were never there. The speaker also told us he had a silver watchband (which I got to see) that he had to hide in Laos or people would have cut his hand off to get it. He wears a watch on each arm, one is the silver one. Actually, I'm wondering why he does that? Doesn't the time dissonance between the two bother him? He said Laos still had a communist government. This is nominally correct although they appear to be more like socialists in recovery now. I don't know much about this part of the map other than what I've read about Vietnam and Cambodia. I should pick up a book on this.

Sometimes the dinner thing can be kind of tedious depending on who you sit with. Once we sat with a lady who did something with public health in the county so we had an interesting conversation about epidemic prevention and H1N1. Plus, she watched Star Trek. But another time, we sat with some....nice people who talked about the zoning laws in their rich suburb for 30 minutes. This is where the rules of polite society are some of the most chafing for me. You are boring me. I know it's hard to make conversation with strangers. Why can't I pull out a book and read? I don't care what your township's rules about streetlights are. It's not personal.

There was a nice retired dentist at our table though who didn't talk about zoning liked a few things I was familiar with: Indian food, Bhutan, Thomas Jefferson and Ken Follett. He also talked about a history book he was reading, the title of which escapes me because I had trouble hearing him and I'm also not sure he got it right. He said there had been a number of Magna Cartas in history to which I said-really? Specifically, one involving Charlemagne. I threw this in my mental fact-checking folder. Bad facts check in, they don't check out. Ideally.

Actually, he was correct so that's cool. Bonus, Thom leaned over to ask me what year the Magna Carta was and I said 1215 but I wasn't positive. And now, can I just say, up high! And you never know when having a map of Asia in your head or knowing the bibliography of Ken Follett can come in handy. I asked if he had read the cathedral books and he had but it was kind of loud in there and I couldn't hear that well so I dunno if he gave them the thumbs up.

Philomathia: malaria and my third world disease story

I'm reading a book about malaria and it's pretty interesting. I like this micro-history trend. The pathogen is eukaryotic and started out probably as a protozoan floating in an African pond and at some point decided to hitch a ride on mosquito larvae, Anopheles in particular as only their physiology seems to support it and then only about 60 something out of the over 200 species of Anopheles. My rating of the book is going to be influenced by how well these questions are answered:

• When was prophylaxis developed and how does it work? Update: chapter 5
• How did the Carolinas become habitable? Apparently, and not surprisingly, they were hotbeds of malaria in colonial days to the point where Germans said it was impossible to live there but it seems certainly by civil war times they had lots of residents.
• Is she going to talk about the new work on malaria vaccines? Update: Yes, chapter 7.
• I'd like to know why the Scottish colony on Panama got its ass whipped but the Spaniards had enough mojo left to attack it. I know that one won't be answered as she has already told the story. But, the Spanish were sick too. Is it shear numbers? Update: resolved in the chapter on quinine. The Spanish tried to keep that native remedy quiet.
• Geographical imprecision makes me fucking insane. You can't introduce a story about the British in West Africa and not even mention the country. There are lots of countries formerly colonized by lots of greedy Europeans in West Africa. The one she is talking about, I believe, is Sierra Leone since she mentions Freetown. On an unrelated note, of course a site about the former British Empire would have a .uk URL.

When I went to Syria, I opted to take an anti-malarial even though it's not an issue in Damascus but it is up near Aleppo. I might have wanted to go to Aleppo (and I had the chance and didn't and that was regrettable.) But more to the point, I did NOT want to get sick over there. I think I took Chloroquine-yep, I just looked it up and those bright pinkish purple pills look familiar. I had to take it once a week for every week I was there or something like that. It was especially cool to take it as I remembered it being a plot point in a MASH episode.

I also took an oral vaccine for typhoid (I always get this mixed up with typhus--typhoid is the one that is a type of Salmonella.) And the Hepatitis A vaccine. And, I got sick anyways with some kind of diarrhea from Hell which I had for at least half my time in country. Know what it's like to shit your pants in 110 degree heat miles from a flush toilet? I do! My poor roommate though had amoebic dysentery, although we didn't know that till we got back home and she went to her doctor. Apparently you keep that variety forever, like fruitcake. I had to take her to the hospital in the middle of the night where she was misdiagnosed as having an upset stomach and told to eat boiled potatoes (she could barely walk because the cramps were so bad so I was skeptical at the time. What was cool though is our Yemeni housemate insisted on coming with us and hailed a cabdriver he knew to take us to the hospital.)

Anyways, I got sick but I didn't get Hep A or Typhoid. Now, what struck me as curious (if not brain damaged) is there was a woman in our group who wasn't from OSU but was studying Arabic on her own from Texas. She was some kind of religious whatever. Nice lady though. Her independent study really showed when she spoke Arabic. Know what Arabic with a thick Texas accent sounds like? I do! We were discussing our medical preparations for the trip one day and she said she went to some kind of naturopath (alarm bells going off yet?) who advised her NOT to get the Hepatitis A vaccine because there were problems with it. I was sick and hot and sleep deprived and covered with dust most of the time which made me much less likely to hold my tongue so I said, "Really? Cause I have a problem getting fucking Hepatitis in a third world country." As far as I know, she didn't get sick. Although she did suffer some kind of bedbug or flea attack at the house she was staying at.

My poor roommate had such a germ fetish before we went to Syria. She wouldn't eat off of her plate if you grabbed food off of it (not that I did that personally but our male classmates would do it just to see her reaction.) When she found out she had dysentery, she called me and informed me she had "ate poop." And, yeah she kinda did. But I probably did too.

Sad news for BBC World Service

I listened to the latest episode of The World in Words and the BBC World Service is being cut. 5 languages are being eliminated and it looks like the Balkans are being hit particularly hard: Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian along with Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean. Several more including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Russian will be internet only. The one that makes the most sense is they are greatly reducing their presence on shortwave, except for in Africa which shows the most use. The World Service is not only the single impartial news source for parts of the world (well, there's still Voice of America but they've been hit by cuts too and aren't as good, although it was naturally a BBC spokesperson who said this. But I think they are right), but they represent an important source of soft power for Britain.

Finally, some are concerned about what world government could move in to fill the vacuum left in the BBC's wake. The names floated were Iran, Russia, and China who, now that you mention it not surprisingly, have been moving to expand their broadcasts in other languages. They have a Swahili station that is widely listened to in Kenya. The problems with all of these of course is all of them are state mouthpieces. Iran would easily be the most egregious of the three.

There's some grim belt tightening going on in Britain currently. The Guardian Science Weekly podcast has been concerned about the freeze on science funding in the UK and the future of the Royal Society's book prize for science writing. The shortlist for last year can be found here. My favorite based purely on titles is We Need to Talk About Kelvin.

On a completely different topic (but it does concern beloved old England and science), I found a copy of Ken Russell's trippy should-have-been camp classic The Lair of the White Worm for a few bucks and bought it. I always preferred Ken Russell to Nicholas Roeg, the other director that springs to mind when discussing weird British filmmakers of the 70's and 80's. Wikipedia tells me among other things that Ken is 87 years old now and that Crimes of Passion was considered an all-around failure which is news to me. I think that movie is awesomely hilarious ("What are you going to do? Fuck somebody to death?" "Only the right girl." RIP, Tony Perkins.)

Anyways, White Worm. Roman snake gods, a classic performance by Amanda Donahoe, a young Hugh Grant, that chick from Dynasty being nearly violated by a wooden ceremonial dildo (that looked a lot like Tony Perkins' pointy tipped death vibrator in Crimes of Passion come to think of it), blasphemy. Good times. However, I blanched at the scene where the archeologist uncovers the skull of the white worm at a Roman dig site. His girlfriend asked, "Oh, the Romans didn't have pet dinosaurs?" "No," he says, "they were 25 million years apart." 25??? Try 65 million, minimum. Oh, Ken. I know the British school system is superior to ours. Yes, it's a stupid thing to get hung up on but it is still bugging me. At least he didn't say 6000 years ago. That seems to be almost entirely American idiocy thus far.

Finally, timelines. They are important. I always struggle with some of the early man dates. I got a book from the library called Science ASAP by Alan Axelrod that I think I'll have to end up owning. His section on the Bronze and Iron Ages is riveting. By 5000 BC, people were wearing copper ore ornaments. It took them 1000 years to figure out how to smelt copper ore. But some copper was harder than others and some was too soft to do anything practical with. We now know of course this was due to the impurities in the different samples. It took them another 1000 years, ~3000 BC, to figure out that smelting copper and tin together yielded the much tougher alloy bronze and the Bronze Age began.

They knew that there was a still tougher material, iron, but the only easily obtainable source of it was in meteorites (these were the only rocks where iron was not mixed with non-metallic substances and they were somewhat rare.) The problem was wood fires weren't sufficiently hot to free  iron from ore until ~1500 BC when the Hittites invented charcoal by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Result: no flame but a much hotter fire. And voila.

This process never yielded a product as good as that found in those rare ferrous meteorites though. The smelting process was perfected over a few hundred years to cause the carbon from the fire to combine with the iron until carbonized steel was born ~1000 BC at the advent of the Iron Age. There was a great episode of Nova about the making of Samurai swords which explains some of this.

It's kind of amazing this all happened over millennia. It's more amazing because like many scientific discoveries, it likely resulted from someone paying attention during a happy accident.

The movies that make you verklempt

So, I went to see True Grit this weekend with a friend of mine. Quite good and looks beautiful-several scenes could be stills you hang on your walls. The ending had that distinct Coen Brothers melancholy tapering off. And is evidently true to the Charles Portis book which I've been wanting to read.

The movie was therefore by my reckoning kind of sad but my friend had this intense reaction to it. He's kind of really in touch with his emotions in a way that makes me feel that I have a ball of Turtle Wax for a heart in comparison. We went to eat and he said he was choked up about the movie. And yes definitely. He started crying in the restaurant. My food came. I wondered if it was rude to eat. I decided it wasn't.

I didn't have that reaction to this particular film but there are certain films whose mere mention will start to choke me up. I tried to make a list. I feel it is incomplete so if I am so inclined and I don't find searching the blog for it maddening, I will add to it over time.

• What's Eating Gilbert Grape?: that one scene where Johnny Depp introduces his reclusive obese mother (Darlene Cates) to his girlfriend Juliette Lewis and she tells her by way of apologizing for her size, "I wasn't always like this" to which the girlfriend says, "Well, I wasn't always like this." I can't think of a more perfect response. 
• Au Revoir Les Enfants: ok I'm kind of cheating because how can Nazi shit not choke you up? But that final scene where the Priest is being led away from the school along with the Jewish students and teachers he harbored there AND the fact the story is at least partly autobiographical for director Louis Malle. Oh God. Pause for Kleenex. 
• Saving Private Ryan: Heroism, cowardice, sacrifice, Tom Hanks says "Earn this" and dies. 
• Gardens of Stone: the final scene where James Caan tells his girlfriend Angelica Houston he's asked to be deployed to Vietnam and she says, "I know."
• Farenheit 911: I don't care what anyone says about Michael Moore. It hits me in the gut to see that woman overcome with grief on the Washington Mall over the death of her son in the stupid fucking war.
• Philadelphia: A friend of a friend described the scene to me where Tom Hanks shows his Kaposi legions on his chest in court and how that scene made him break down in the theatre (he told me this story when we were at visiting hours at a funeral home which is kind of weird for several reasons including I don't even remember why I was there.) I thought the scene didn't sound that tear-jerking. Then I saw the movie at the dollar theatre. Yes, it is that tear-jerking. And then the freaking Neil Young song they play at the end.

A co-worker and I once decided that the Christmas Claymation special "Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey" sent our whole generation into therapy. If they were still airing it today, I'd probably still cry every year when Nestor's mother died. Although its Christian propaganda nature would probably just cause me to shun it entirely.  You know what Rankin Bass special they unjustly did stop airing is "The Year Without a Santa Claus." Brilliant. I see both it and Nestor are on YouTube. Goddamn it, stop looking at me with those big sad eyes Nestor. I am not watching you.

(Good grief, ABC Family thinks they have to edit Nestor to make it suitable for broadcast? Didn't I see a clip of their show about teen mothers on The Soup where a girl tells her mother that she had amazing sex and that's why her daddy died?)

What show exactly did Andy Kaufman get kicked off of?

I was listening to an old Lyrics Undercover podcast today about REM's "Man in the Moon", which btw might be one of my favorite songs ever. They mentioned Andy Kaufman being voted off of Saturday Night Live. This always confused me because I've heard at different times he was kicked off of either Fridays or SNL. I also have a dim memory of watching Gary Kroeger tell people to call in and vote and I only remember him being on SNL. I also remember this was back in high school or junior high and my friend Carla was sleeping over and she wanted to call in but we couldn't agree because she wanted to vote for him to be on SNL again while I thought his stupid Latka routine killed Taxi and I said vote him off. Shit, I didn't know he was going to die of a rare lung cancer shortly afterwards. Also, we ended up trying to pull the phone out of each others' hands and broke the jack so the question quickly became moot.

According to Wikipedia, it was indeed SNL. There was a blowup on Fridays about him breaking character in a sketch and getting into an on-air fight with a producer but that was staged. I remember that (although I didn't see the show-I never watched Fridays) but the voting incident occurred on SNL. I kind of remember now reading a history of SNL that mentioned it was a prank but a serious one. It hurt Andy's feelings when he was voted off but he abided by the vote although he did appear on tape one more time to thank the people who voted for him.

I'd really like to see his movie "My Breakfast with Blassie" (for some reason, my favorite part of the REM song is when Blassie is name-checked. I get a shiver.) It's one of those moments that make me wish I had Netflix. But, I am just not down with having to subscribe. I'm bummed out Blockbuster might not survive. Then again, they wouldn't have that flick anyways.

I also remember A&E had an old show that was taped at the Improv. Cindy Williams hosted it once which was kind of a surprise but she had a background in standup, particularly with Andy Kaufman. He used to do his routine in nightclubs and it was her job to stand up and mock him in a French accent. I found Kaufman annoying about half the time but that sounds hilarious.

Best and worst of 2010-a rambling pastiche

So, I actually thought to make a "2010" shelf on Goodreads this year thus I am able to correctly assess my reading. Wow, I read more mysteries than I thought. Here are some of the high and lowlights:

Worst read of the year: White Noise. Well, thanks to Don DeLillo, I don't have to pick a book that was just ok but dull and unfinishable (Judgement Calls) or amateurish and sloppy (Slipknot). I could pick one that was fuck you awful. Smarmy satire about academia that was a smarmily pretentious as the behavior it sought to mock. Hated. It.

Best discovery of the year: I have never been inclined to pick favorite authors because I gravitate more towards individual books. (Well, there was that time in 8th grade when I discovered romance novels and I told the local librarian that famed romance hack Janet Dailey was my favorite writer. I wish I could look her up and tell her I grew out of that.)

Anyways, John Steinbeck is officially my favorite writer after I devoured Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Moon is Down last year. I struggle to pick my favorite among them but I think it's Cannery Row. Still don't get the poison cream puff thing that Ed Ricketts' wife likened the book too. I read The Pearl back in 8th grade and didn't really like it. I read East of Eden in college and loved it although other than reading Of Mice and Men a year or two ago, I hadn't really picked him up since.

Best mystery: This is a tie between Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith and Garnethill by Denise Mina.

Best scifi: Again, I'm torn between The City and The City by China Mieville and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. I liked but didn't love Cat's Cradle.

Best short story collection: well, I didn't read that many but the winner is easily Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom which left me feeling everyone on the planet should read it.

Best memoir: Spider Eaters by Rae Yang. I would say it's the most visceral memoir of the Cultural Revolution but who am I kidding? It's the only memoir of the Cultural Revolution I've read. Still, it's rare because she admits to being in a group that beat a (possibly mentally ill) man to death after accusing him of attempted rape on flimsy evidence.

I am happy to have overcome my literary prejudice toward graphic novels. Not sure why this was. I didn't really like Watchmen that much (which makes me unique on this planet I realize) but that's not the reason. I certainly loved comics as a kid-mainly Archie and The Fantastic 4. Anyways, Ghost World cured me. In fact, I have Volume 1 of The Walking Dead waiting in the car right now.

My favorite TV show is impossible to pick but at the moment, I'm obsessed with Breaking Bad. I even have the elements picked out that would show up in the opening credits were I in the cast (vanadium and nickel...)

I don't really have a least favorite show as I just turn shit off if I don't like it but Gretchen winning Project Runway was probably the worst tv moment of the year for a show I used to love. Granny panties and pleather? Really?

Things I am wondering about today

First, what is it about Winter that makes me so listless and unmotivated? Is is the Holidays? Is it that December in Ohio is like living on one of Saturn's moons sans the lakes of Methane? (and the new arsenic-based life. Or...not.) I haven't finished a book in a week or so. I can't seem to concentrate on the one I'm reading and it's a bunch of short stories about the devil. Who doesn't like reading about the devil? I remember I used to work with some fundamentalist people and they were into this book called The Adversary-which is actually the literal Hebrew translation of Satan, I'm always amazed when fundamental types stumble on a legitimate fact-about how Beelzebub was hiding under your bed and making you watch porn and sleep late on Sundays. Satan, he brings readers together. Not even Old Scratch is motivating me currently though. After I work out, I want to sit in front of the television and wish I had a Snuggie.

There seem to be several books called The Adversary so I dunno which one they were getting so excited about.  One of those same people also told me very seriously that Ouija boards are a way that demons can attack you. Ok, making fun of people who believe this stuff is such a cliche but really I'm fascinated. FASCINATED. How can someone be so irrational about one thing but otherwise a functioning, reasonably intelligent member of society? For a cheap thrill, go to Amazon and read the Ouija board reviews. Too many silly parodies but still, intriguing psychologically. Some people are offended they would make a pink one, the better to snag the Hello Kitty crowd.



I did at least find a book on flags of the world at the library that I've been reading. Being able to identify world flags is my new obsession--along with my old obsession of reading reference books cover to cover. I learned that the Confederate flag (obviously not a world flag, thankfully) is an example of a saltire or Southern Cross (or crux decussata if you dig the whole Latin thing.) It's actually the second official flag design the Confederacy came up with and was intended as a battle flag. Some people complained it was "too white" (which is kind of what was wrong with the Confederacy) and looked like a surrender flag. The original flag looked too much like the US flag and apparently troops got confused on the battlefield. Funny the little illuminating details you can pick up in the most random of ways.

I had a history professor in college who said the Civil War was just about States Rights and not slavery which was doomed to end anyways and everyone knew it by then. I repeated this for a few years-the guy was an American history professor so he's know, right? I dunno if that's really accurate though. Wasn't the state's right to allow slavery the question? Lincoln apparently went through several mindsets on the slaves and thought at one point that people would never accept them as citizens and wanted to ship them to Liberia.

Moving on--the damn dog pulled a muscle or something a few weeks ago in the park and I had to take him to the vet. He was prescribed an NSAID called Previcox. What I found curious is the package says it's not for human ingestion. Ok, why not? Not that I need to take my dog's arthritis meds (I have my own-yay?) but I'm curious. I can't find an answer online but I did learn it's a Cox 2 Inhibitor which is what Vioxx was. Hence the "cox" in the name I suppose. Cox 2 is an enzyme that is linked to pain and inflammation and maybe cancer.

I Googled about it and found a story about a guy whose lab died from presumably a bad reaction to Previcox. Disturbing. Luckily, my dog didn't have an adverse reaction. Unluckily, he still seems to be having trouble with his front leg so I might be buying xrays in the new year.

Final thoughts on God is Not Great

 I really got stuck in the mud with Hitchens. I think it would work better to read it in parts when the mood hits rather than straight on from cover to cover. I will say it really crystallized my feelings about religion. The damage to human society clearly outweighs its ephemeral benefits. We can create secular structures to feed the poor, etc. In fact, we have. What's much harder is mitigating the effects of their war on science, on free thought, on minorities, on homosexuals, the terror and murder committed in your wholly imagined deity's name. I already felt the Vatican was morally culpable for their stance on condoms in Africa but I didn't realize they also spoke out about Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued on his life. But wait-not in his favor. Against him for defaming a world religion.

It also seems clear to me that banning gay marriage on religious grounds is CLEARLY a violation of separation of church and state. 

I remember once asking a Deacon about how the Church's stance on contraceptives/AIDS was valid (it's a long story how this came about) and he said, well isn't it true those people are doing something they shouldn't do anyways? So, they shouldn't be fucking? Sorry to break it to you dude but this is a biological imperative for most humans and no amount of beads or magic water is going to change that. What if they are married? After all, the Church does tell married people in Africa that they can't use condoms even if a partner is infected with AIDS and spreads rumors they don't work. Which make them both immoral and stupid. God, fucktard. I wish I had said all of that to him (except maybe the fucktard part.)

I think that's another reason I had to quit reading. It made me too angry. I did highlight some passages I liked. Way too many to preserve here. I'm glad I bought the book at any rate.

A few great lines from Hitch and where the author rambles on about why Catholic matriculation sucks it

He's a controversial figure even in some Atheist circles but so help me, I love me some Hitch.

So before I talk about why this line is so great, a brief diversion. I was reading something online yesterday which linked to something else and so on and soon I was watching a video of that twit who became Miss California (I refuse to use her name and add to her Google hit count) who made those remarks on how she thought gay marriage was wrong. But "opposite marriage" was ok, she believed, in her country, in her family. The same stupid twat later lost the Miss California crown for being an uncooperative asshole. So she sued for discrimination (it's like TOtally wrong for people to discriminate against her, in her country, in her family you guys! OMGee!) But then a sex video surfaced and she walked away with nothing. Interestingly, it was a solo sex video. Tsk,tsk. Evidently she never saw this poster.

So the point, which I haven't forgotten, was the video I watched was a clip of her addressing some family group (when did family start to equal fascist, by the by?) where she called herself "brave" and said that God put her there for that moment. Naturally, the chuckleheads in the audience creamed themselves over this. Where to start? Over to you, Hitch:

How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that-in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

 But wait, here are some more bon mots just from Chapter 1:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way-one might cite Pascal-and some of it is dreary and absurd-here one cannot avoid naming C.S. Lewis-both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear.

Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or offends reason.

We...find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

I went to Catholic school as a child with all of the forced Mass and Confession attendance that entails. Bleah. I read Hitchens and a small (largish?) childish part of me still wants to go "I'm reading an Atheist book and YOU can't confiscate it. Suck on that." Really having trouble with that be the bigger man philosophy.