Awfully cool free site that helps people--

I'm talking about Free Rice. The idea of the site is that you play a cool vocabulary game (although there's other choices) and for every right answer, they donate 10 grains of rice. That doesn't sound like an awful lot, but I find the game pretty addictive. It will totally add up--you can set your options to keep a "running tab" of how much you've helped donate. One of the cool things about the game itself is that the word choices repeat, so after awhile, you learn new words and actually come away a little smarter.

There are also other really interesting options for multiple choice quizzes on math, art, etc. (I'm actually doing the "art" one while writing this blog--it's educational, in that the paintings might not be ones you are familiar with, but you start to recognize the individual style of a given painter. I'm loving this!)

So, you feel like a bit of a challenge? And you want to feed hungry people? And you don't mind learning new things?

Then, this is totally a thing you will enjoy.

Random out of Context meat-related picture that is on my hard drive for some reason.

Careful who you fire that at!

Okay--Roland Gift Appreciation Society, here.

The Fine Young Cannibal's version of "Suspicious Minds":




You might have to put it on "pause" and let the thing download a little--I did. But it was a fun video.

Nostalgia 2

Nostalgia!!

You never know when it'll strike.

Okay--I have to blog about a toy spaceship.

The picture is from www.Tintoyarcade.com, which is one of the places that sells this unique item that my spouse purchased at a brick and mortar store on impulse, and has so far given him three days of actual pleasure. If not joy.

Joy. That is a rare quantity for a toy to provide, especially for an adult. But this thing is pretty neat.

Okay--it lights up and it flies like a helicopter. That is all it needs to do to be really cool. It operates by way of eight AA batteries, but it seems to hold a good charge, and if you are under the propellers, it feels like a fan on the "High" setting. It makes some noise, and there is no way to control the direction of it (there have been nail-biting moments as it drifted near the ceiling fan in the kitchen, or threatened to dip somewhere over a sink full of dishes and washing-up water) but there's something innately thrilling in that unpredictability. It behaves like a thing with personality. I haven't played with it myself: first of all, it's his toy, not mine, and second, if I played with it, it totally would get stuck behind the fridge, or end up in the sink, or get smooshed. So I just watch. But that's fun, too.

And this is just an example of the sorts of things we are doing on our summer vacation.

Well, that answers that!

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I also write like Arthur C. Clarke and David Foster Wallace. It totally depends on the post I feed the "bot".

Some of my old fanfic is Margaret Mitchell. I also came up positive for Stephen King when I fed in some dialogue I wrote. This is weird fun.

The answer to a long, hot summer? Read something chilling!

I'm like anyone else who likes to go on vacation, get out in the sun a bit, and try and have a relaxing time--but the problem with me is, I never relax. I like a bit of stress and discomfort to keep my alcohol-thinned blood pulsating through my cholesterol-thickened arteries. That's why, instead of choosing romances and such for my lighter summer reading, I like to read books with monsters and vampires and the odd Apocalypse, and things like that. After all, most romance novels are far too unbelievable. I've gotten part of my summer-reading done this week, and I'd like to share my "recommends". (I'm listing them in the order I got them, not necessarily in any sort of ratings-system. )

The first I'm recommending is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith, who is listed on the book cover as "New York Times Bestselling Author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." Although I know that book exists, I haven't picked it up yet, not being all that big on Jane Austen or zombies. Well, that's not entirely true. I liked what little of Northanger Abbey I read and generally approve of costume drama films, and I do like mindless dumb zombie movies of the "They get nourishment from the noorons of the human brain" type. The mash-up just didn't appeal to me on the right level, though, in quite the way that the idea of Honest Abe as a Slayer does.

(I will say, though, that I liked Grahame-Smith's writing at Huffington Post. His snark about McCain/Palin was pretty right on.)

The conceit of this book is that a secret journal reveals the sixteenth president's deep, dark secret: due to the death of his own mother, and a few other harrowing events, at the hands of vampires, the young Abe became a hardened warrior in the struggle to free America from their undead, greedy fingers. It's written in the same slightly gilded language we're accustomed to from Civil War documentaries, and props have to be given to Stephanie Isaacson, who is listed in the Acknowledgements for creating the creepy Photoshopped images that might just start to make the reader wonder if antebellum vampires aren't just a bit plausible. (I'd totally like to see someone make a movie of this in a Ken Burns style, actually.)

If you like history, and the kind of vampires that expressly aren't sparkly, this is pretty neat. The way the thirst and demands of vampires tie in with the other reasons for the Civil War are kind of ingenious as well as the way Grahame-Smith weaves them into Lincoln's real biographical details. It's fun, but makes you go, "Hmm."


Next up is China Mieville's Kraken. At five hundred-something pages, it's not exactly a "light read", but it is a brilliantly accessible story--something of a "shaggy squid" tale. We are presented with a crime scene: someone has David Blaine'd a massive dead Architeuthis Dux right out from the display case at the natural History Museum, and it seems quite possible that some outre cultists of the tentacular deep old ones are looking to immanentize the eschaton with it.

No, really. From the imagination of Mieville, with his great dialogue, smart details, and truly weird turns--this is actually a fun story about the trip a few regular people end up making through a sidereal London that is full of truly side streets and out of the out of the way places, knacky bastards whose B&E's might involve OOBE's or even tesseracts, and streetlights that actually do sometimes beat fatalistic warnings, and my own favorite side-story, the idea of familiars being organized, and even striking. (It's a lot to take in, and probably worth a few reads--it makes me wonder if he isn't planning on revisiting this world with another shaggy shoggoth tale.)

Oh, and lots of apocalyptic death-cultists of various stripes. Can't forget them.

It's a weird combination of fantasy that doesn't rely as much on Lovecraft et als as one might think, and crime drama, complete with hard-boiled cops who have even seen this sort of thing before. Sort of.



(Side note: I am a fan of squid myself. It's not really a sure thing why, but I kind of understand a squid cult. It's hard to make out what the squid pro quo is in worshiping the coming of an ubersquid. That he eats you last? First? Tooling about the Internet, I found a picture and story about the actual Archie. I link this because it provides detail for imagining a squid of immense size being broken out of a water-tight really big tank, and because the details of the preservation of such a specimen are really cool.)


Last but not least, there's Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum; A Laundry Files Novel. I think it might maybe be useful if you've already read The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, but it isn't obligatory. It's just that my introduction to Stross' work was On Her Majesty's Occult Service via SFBC, and I fell madly in love with the universe he's created of a world where the works of Turing and Crowley are equally valid, and where the hypotheticals of Lovecraft's fiction unfold in Reimannian space, told in a way that is very amusing and has really interesting side jokes about technology. And I'd be madly in love with the protagonist: hacker, slacker, technomagus and secret agent Bob Howard, if I wasn't afraid of his significant other, Dr. Dominique O'Brien (who doesn't have to be in my dimension or even real to probably kick my ass or play her scary violin at me.)

The tale involves more potential immanentizing of echatons and the temporary disappearance of the "Laundry's" (the UK secret paranormal spooks') head spook in charge--Angleton, who is possibly weirder and older than we've been given to suppose before. If you're computer savvy and know a little high magick, this shit is funny as all heck. Even if you don't, it's a good tale. I recommend it a lot.

Random out of Context meat-related picture: slightly more artistic.

It's not all whimsy, you know. Although technically, it is still bacon.

I haz also a squid--this is it.

This relates to the book review I'm working on for China Mieville's Kraken, in a way--it's a squid necklace:




It's from Noadi, whose stuff I kind of lusted after on Etsy until I broke down and....well. Steampunk squid it was.

It's a talisman, of sorts. It doesn't give me any luck, but when I look at it, I am promptly reminded "You are the kind of person who has a steampunk squid necklace." Isn't that cool enough?

I'm pretty much down with squid--and depending on the size of the squid, that could be pretty far down, indeed.

I haz ellerphunt. Let me show you it.

This is my elephant bottle opener. It is ridiculously cute, but it's also seriously practical. It's a bottle opener. Because it is decorative, unlike the other bottle openers I have, I can't lose the little feller. That makes it exceptionally handy. Also--again--it's cute. It's a little hard to tell, but the bottle-opener part is right where the trunk is. Cheers!

I got it this past weekend at Strawberry Jam on Main Street in New Hope. It's one of the dozen-or-so odd shops out that way I always find cool stuff in. (If you plan on going there--make a list of your friend's birthdays or anniversaries because they have a great card selection that kind of made me wish I had more interesting friends to give cards to.) Anyway, this blog is about random stuff. I randomly found a carved elephant statue that was a bottle-opener, and this qualifies as pretty neat stuff.

I saw M. Night Shamalayan's "The Last Airbender" this past Saturday.

It wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen. I'd actually say I found it a little easier to watch than Highlander: The Source, which I couldn't even bring myself to hate the way I hated, say Big Momma's House 2 or In the Name of the King, which were movies of pure technical incompetence and carelessness and were bad in every which way. (And I had hopes for In the Name of the King because I know many of those actors are better than that movie--but oh, what a bad miscarriage of a movie it was.)

I am a softy. I give points for trying.

It took me a couple of days to figure out what was missing or could be done better. Other people have definitely written savage reviews and reviews that trashed different aspects--I would say, and this surprises me in no way, the best savage review I read was at Io9. I didn't really want to go that route with the review--but here's what I think:

Not even midway through the movie, I found myself wondering what other directors would have done with the material. This is a bad sign. (But Shamalyan is not one of my faves. I don't know why. He just tries to do this "Hey, I surprised the audience with the thing I did" twist in his movies which is...dumb. Okay. I pulled your finger the first time, Uncle Clever. Now entertain me.) I re imagined it as a Del Toro film--darker, more adult, more fantastic (rewritten, better dialogue) and as a Spielberg film (entertaining and well-crafted with characters who were juveniles, but not juvenilely treated.) Also, I thought about how I would have gone about doing it differently.

I would have started with Aang, not with Katara and her brother discovering him under the ice. Why not start with a little back story--shown, not told? This way, when Aang finds that his home was destroyed by the Firebenders, we already pre-emptively have an emotional connection with them? There's just no reason not to know that Aang ran away from the responsibility of being the Avatar right away. Starting with the back story would make the rest of the story cohere better. The flashbacks show that he had a mentor that was like a father--more of that would have been great! Show him being a kid so we can sympathize with how a youth has this thing thrust upon him.

Then we could start understanding him as a character with an arc, as the pretentious people who care about such things say.

Now, I never saw the animated series, so I'm at a loss for how faithful the movie is to the series. The hints that Katara and Aang are going to bond later along the lines of Anakin and Padme creep me out a little because--they do. I don't know if that's something built-in or what, of if I'm just misreading the heck out of that. But I will say the dialogue is at least as bad as Lucas. I so agree with Charlie Anders--Aasif Mandvi does look a little like he's too aware that what his character is saying is sooo stock-villian-y. But he's still one of the people who is fun to watch in this movie. As are Dev Patel and Shaun Toub--their motivation seems more concrete.

As for goofy melodramatic things like: "We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs." which Katara really does say--the stupidity is, it has so little to do with belief at this point. The Fire folks believe the other 'Benders should be ruled by them or wiped out, and the other people just pretty much believe they should neither be ruled by Fire folks or wiped out. It's not all that heavily ideological so much as existential. I think the real melodramatic bullshit line was when Aang is meditating in the sacred area of the Northern Water tribe and communing with the yin-yang fish, and might as well have a "Do Not Disturb" sign on his head, when Katara offers the weirdly wrong-sounding encouragement that she "always knew" he was the Avatar.

Always knew? Since when? Like, since her grandmom told her earlier in the movie, when it seemed a little like the youngin's had no idea about the Avatar? Or like, since it was kind of obvious that he was the Avatar--why bother saying that? Was it doubtful? Is he supposedly meditating because he doesn't know people think that and are rooting for him to spiritually kick ass? Or was it more like Katara is not speaking as a character (who would have motivations, a personality, and a story) but as an embodiment of the hopes of all the oppressed people depending upon the Avatar?

If the latter--boo. She's Katara. If she has to speak for anybody, let her speak for herself. Develop the character.

The movie was big-budget but clocks in under two hours. I think with attention to the story and character development, the movie could have been a little longer and cost the same but been qualitatively better. More showing, less telling. More confrontation, less narrative. There were good ideas that were explored, like Aang learning to accept the consequences of not accepting his destiny, or the idea that Princess Yue sacrifices herself for the greater good because it gives her purpose--these things shouldn't be rushed or piled in.

I dunno. I see a lot of promise in the material, but just don't think it was made into a good-enough movie. And I won't necessarily knock against the young actors in it, because I can't separate their performances from what they were performing in.

The movie was entirely set up for a sequel. Even though I was lukewarm about this, I would probably watch the sequel, anyway, on the off-chance that lessons would be learned.

I give points, as I said, for trying.

Celebrity hair jam--er, yum?

Jam made from Princess Diana's hair

JAM made from one of Princess Diana's hairs has been selling well at an art exhibition in London.
Sam Bompas, who founded catering company Bompas and Parr, says a tiny speck of the late Princess of Wales' hair has been infused with gin, then combined with milk and sugar to make the preserve, which tastes like condensed milk.

Mr Bompas says he bought the hair off eBay for $US10 ($12) from a US dealer who collects celebrity hair.

This works more as surrealism than food for a variety of reasons. First, the mention of jam with hair in it creates an unpleasant image of something not sanitary (I recall Davy Jones in The Monkees' film Head jokingly requesting a "glass of cold gravy with a hair in it", which made me viscerally grimace the same way--unclean!). But in this case--the hair in the jam is the point. It's supposed to be a minuscule amount, but this leads to a number of interesting cultural questions--

Is any hair the right amount to have in one's jam? And of course, does it matter that the person whose hair it was was a celebrity?

It's infused with gin (might I add, a very English spirit)--so does the alcohol sterilize the weirdness of it being "hair jam"?

And finally--just who is buying this? Because there are some definitely strange and intense people in this peculiar old world, some you might even say have stalkerly-intensity. Are there cults of Diana-worshippers, whose literal renderings of certain archetypes have poetically apotheosized Prince Charles' ex-wife into a goddess-figure whose very hair preserved in a jam (whose ingredient list actually seems a bit easily perishable) would serve as an agreeable sacrament for? Or are they just carefree memorabilia hounds snapping up the jars to sit next to the Royal Wedding hand-painted plates and other Anglophile tourist tat?

(At my darkest imaginings, I envision a solitary paparazzo, gutted with guilt, purchasing jar after jar through proxies and spending sad nights remembering the night she died while slathering the jam on stale crumpets and numbly swallowing each gobby mouthful part in penance and part in some sympathetic-magic urge to incorporate some of her nous into his own corpus and carry her like a cross of fat about his middle for the rest of his life.)

Or, you know, the the usual jam-fetishists. Gooseberries. Poblano chiles. Hair of deceased royalty. All in a day's collections.

It also works more as art because, of course, it's obviously going to depreciate in value once you pry the lid off. There is very little market for used jam. And I can't say I know of any market for used jam with hair in it.

The real down-side though, is with appraisal. All things considered, is it worth anyone's while to DNA-test a batch to see if it really has her hair? (Although this is pointless without a follicle tip I understand. Naturally, one can't expect that from hair purchased at auction and subsequently infused with gin. What a perfect crime for forgers! One could bootleg celebrity-hair jam from Fido's brush for a very profitable period of time.)

It's not exactly something that goes with my decor, personally, as I prefer more traditional objets d'art. Your purloined finger-bones assembled into bird-cages, and miniature books bound wholly in mouse ears. You know the sort of thing.

Jingle-riffic! I just want to go on about jingles.

Some of them are really good pieces of music--and some are just capricious, burrowing ear-worms. I thought I'd litter the brain of my casual wanderer-in with some memorable jingles.


First, I have to single out the work of Barry Manilow. There is not a single jingle-writer on this planet, to my mind, who was better or more influential. You can take or leave "Mandy". But you can not deny the influence of these:

State Farm:



(The "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there" is his--iconic. Used for years.)

Band-aid:

Like so many of these things, you can't find the good, original ad--the one with a very young John Travolta. Here's an '80's version:


Same song, basically.

I think it's actually disputed whether he was the Dr. Pepper jingle-writer on the internets--Wikipedia says Jake Holmes wrote the actual song. Anyway, it was a kick-ass jingle, so enough about Manilow:



He also didn't do the "You Deserve a Break Today" McDonalds' jingle, but it's still interesting:




how just the "You deserve a break" bit could be inserted in differently-themed jingles.

Here's just a really neat iconic ad:



Now, it pre-imagines the "Real thing" campaign, it's multi-national, it's hippie-riffic, and in a way, it tingles the same "universality bone" that this Youtube thingie "Where the Hell is Matt?" did. It's water with caramel coloring, sugar, citric acid, caffeine and flavoring, and just incidentally tastes awesome with rum or whiskey. It's not going to give us world peace. But still, nice ads.

Here's one that always gets to me:



Aaron Neville, give me back those sentimental tears you jerked out of me over undie-fabric! This jingle is the equivalent of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. It makes me unaccountably misty.

Yeah, Richie Havens, you too:



Are we selling the brotherhood of man, or clothes that you will totally "f" up in the laundry inside of five washings, amirite?

One more:



The fabric of my life is spandex. Let's just keep that straight. Lots of elastic and spandex.

Anyway, let's devolve to the obvious:



Have you ever seen a Weinermobile on the road? I have! It makes one so weirdly satisfied: I have seen a Weinermobile. Now I can die, fulfilled. You wouldn't actually die right then. But still. It's like a four-leaf clover or something. You wish you could make a Polaroid of the Weinermobile just to have it wash out in thirty years like many of my baby pictures did. It's a big f'ing deal.

Anyway--that was me, reminiscing about jingles. One of the things that occupy my brain.