From Goodreads.com:
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season by Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Here are the three most boring subjects in popular nonfiction:
1. Anything about running
2. Camping stories
3. Recaps of baseball games
Since Faithful is 75% recaps of baseball games, it’s pretty boring.
Actually, let me modify that list. More tiresome than all of those things combined are first-hand accounts of catching balls at batting practice, and since Stewart O’Nan takes up another 5% of the book with paragraphs and paragraphs of those, that only leaves 20% of the book that couldn’t be easily replaced by strings of the letter Z.
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School nachos and unidentified nuggets, courtesy of http://assfacemclegs0.blogspot.com
I just finished listening to today’s Morning Edition story “What’s Inside the 26-ingredient School Lunch Burger?” about the movement among parents to rid school cafeterias of processed food. The nonsense geysering forth from the people on both sides of the issue made me so indignant that I spoke the word “dipshit” aloud multiple times in my shower before 9am, then dropped everything else I had to do this morning (i.e. repeatedly clicking the Get Mail button until I’m employed) to immediately write a rebuttal.
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Here, I dug up this a thing I wrote March 17, 2003 to explain the origin of April Fool’s Day to middle-school kids.
Did you ever wonder about the history of April Fool’s Day? Well, we’re going to tell you about it anyway! This is not a joke:
400 years ago in Europe, they used a different calendar than we use now. New Year’s Day fell on April 1, and people partied and got jiggy with things every April 1, much the same way we do now on New Year’s.
Then, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII got an idea. For various Pope-related reasons, he designed a new calendar with New Year’s Day on January 1. He declared that everyone in the world must use his new calendar. (Back then the Pope could do stuff like that.)
When the Pope spoke, people listened. But the thing was, 400 years ago, news didn’t travel very fast. It took some people YEARS to find out about the new calendar. So the uninformed were still getting jiggy every April 1, while other people had previously jigged out back in January. Folks who knew about the new calendar looked at the April 1 jiggmeisters, pointed, laughed, and called them “fools.” They even played pranks on the fools. We imagine the pranks went something like this:
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Reading the news that Magic Johnson is poised to become a part owner of the Dodgers, it occurred to me that, 21 years ago when Johnson announced that he is HIV+, the idea of someone living 21 years with HIV was almost unthinkable. The amazing success in the treatment of AIDS is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. With that in mind, here’s a piece I wrote for the teen audience of The-N.com on June 5, 2006, the 25th anniversary of the first reported case of AIDS.
25 years ago today, the Center for Disease Control reported the first five cases of a disease that we now know of as AIDS. When I heard that fact this morning, it reminded me that, if you’re reading this (which you are) you’ve never known a world without AIDS.
I usually hate pointing out that I’m older than you, but today I’m remembering when I was in junior high and high school, which, though it was several years after those first cases were reported, was right at the time when AIDS took over the public consciousness and changed ideas of sex forever. When I first became a teenager, a high school student going into a drug store and asking for condoms would’ve been treated roughly equivalent to a high school student going into a drug store and asking for a bag of weed. By the time I graduated, high school students could pick up condoms from the school nurse.
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You’re probably feeling down because the United States now has a higher poverty rate than 31 of 35 measured countries, just edging out economic powerhouses like Chile and Mexico. You’re disappointed that we have a more severe infant mortality rate than 28 out of 31 nations. But it’s time to cheer up! Because, according to Amnesty International, we’re still near the top in one important statistic:
America ranks fourth in the world in the number of government-mandated killings of its own citizens!
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I just remembered that several years ago I attended a lecture by Pulitzer-Prize-winning “comix” artist Art Spiegelman, during which he compared himself to legendary poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr. Speigelman said his own work was much more difficult than poetry, because a poet just has to write words, while a comics artist has to write words and draw pictures.
from Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman, 2008
I’m not a Christian, and certainly not a Catholic. In fact, my beliefs fall pretty much opposite of what anyone could reasonably define as “spiritual,” with the exception that I’m certain there’s a troll living under the Fletcher Dr. bridge. And when it comes to art, my tastes lie with Richard Serra’s monumental, twisted steel plates or Ellsworth Kelly’s radiating colored shapes. Yet despite all of that, the greatest work of art I’ve ever seen, the one that I hope aliens find when they descend upon our dead civilization after following the electromagnetic trail of an ancient Red Lobster commercial, is Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
No photos of the chapel can prepare you for the real thing. Looking at an image of a single panel of the ceiling is like looking at a single frame of a movie, and looking at an image of the whole ceiling is like looking at that movie’s print unspooled across a pool table. The scope of the work just can’t be reproduced in two dimensions. But I’ve just discovered the Vatican’s high-res virtual tour of the chapel, and it comes as close as possible.
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From Goodreads.com:
In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes edited by Leslie S. Klinger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The back cover of this collection says the stories “easily match or beat Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective,” which aside from not really making sense is just blurbtalk. With a few exceptions, these stories are deservedly forgotten and lacking style, character, interesting plots, or any sense of how to structure a mystery.
Those exceptions include a Sherlock-less train mystery from Sir ACD himself, who shows up like Springsteen at SXSW to show the kids how its done, and the funny and ingenious “The Problem of Cell 13″ by Jacques Futrelle, featuring his fantastic Thinking Machine. And at the other end of the spectrum is “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” by M.P. Shiel, one of the most enjoyably terrible mysteries ever written, which I wrote more about here.
The book itself is an amateurish production, with one of the least appealing covers I’ve ever seen and art-school-quality illustrations that are unattractive in the most boring way possible. Rookie mistakes abound, including footnotes appearing on the wrong pages and the lack of any information about the man who edited this collection and wrote its notes and introduction, Leslie S. Klinger. That’s a slap in the face to Klinger, who’s one of the world’s foremost Sherlockians (not to mention the editor of Neil Gaiman’s new The Annotated Sandman.)
Anyone without a truly compelling interest in Victorian detective fiction can pass this up, or better yet put the $16.99 towards Klinger’s perfect The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
View all my GoodReads reviews
As a small child growing up in Pittsburgh, every St. Patrick’s Day I would carefully look for leprechauns on my walk home from school. I never saw one. (Though once I was pretty sure I did; it turned out to be a discarded Capri-Sun packet.) I know now that I was being foolish, because leprechauns have been extinct in Pennsylvania since 1972. They’ve died off from most of the globe, except for isolated regions of the United States where domestic leprechauns released by Irish immigrants formed small feral populations, all of which are critically endangered. Even in Ireland leprechauns are sadly classified as “threatened.” The chief factor in their population loss in Ireland is traffic accidents, which are estimated to decrease their number by as much as 7% a year. (A full 37% of roadkill found in Ireland is leprechaun.)
All of the above is just an elaborate excuse for me to post this chart I created in 2006 for the defunct The-N.com, delineating Things That are REAL, Things That are NOT REAL, and Things That are EXTINCT:
If I had any disposable income to dispose of (or for that matter any income at all) I’d be disposing of a significant portion of it on the brand new Petridish.org.
The brilliantly named Petridish.org is a Kickstarter- or IndieGoGo-style fundraising site for science projects. They’re in beta right now with a dozen initial campaigns ranging from biology to astronomy to environmental science. A California entomologist needs only another $1300 to fund an expedition to Madagascar to find new species of ants. A Harvard researcher is more than 60% of the way to the goal for his project to discover the first moon outside of the solar system. And a Stanford conservationist could really use a leg up in her fundraising to track sea turtles in Peru.
My favorite of the 12 comes from psychology researcher Morgan Gustison, who plans to study the complex vocalizations of gelada monkeys in Ethiopia. That’s largely because my animated pilot The Monkey Planet features a fat gelada monkey (and political crony) named Crick. But also I’m fascinated by the study of animal communication and intelligence, a rapidly evolving field that’s showing us how wrong we are about what we thought we knew. So I’m sacrificing a couple of Crunchwrap Supremes to send Morgan a crisp five-dollar bill.
Just like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, Petridish allows you to donate in any amount, and the scientists offer rewards for various pledge amounts. For $50 Morgan will send you a bag of Ethiopian coffee. Or now’s your chance to finally start collecting framed algae pressings.
Sign up for Petridish, give a little, or send a note of support to the scientists. The work they’re doing matters.
