BooksFirst - December 2006

Books Bought

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
The Executioners by John D. MacDonald

Books Read

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
Why Things Are, Volume II: The Big Picture by Joel Achenbach

Commentary

The Grafton and MacDonald books were bought at Ace Books in Culpeper, Virginia. Culpeper is an exurban town near Washington, DC that has become a trendy pastoral refuge. The town has a genteel country manor feel and the main street is lined with gourmet restaurants. Lodged over a bicycle shop, Ace Books is a sprawling chaotic used book store of the type that are increasingly hard to find. I collect first editions of both Grafton and MacDonald and while neither book was high on my must-have list, I love browsing and rarely leave a used bookstore empty handed.

I have read about every word of fiction written by Carl Hiaasen and nobody is better at bitterly showcasing the absurdity of Floridian culture and politics. For Nature Girl he has dialed back the sarcastic commentary and focused on his trademarked oddball characters. The titular nature girl is a divorced mom living in a trailer park that executes a revenge fantasy on a sleazy telemarketer. Most of the action takes place on Dismal Key, the most heavily trafficked deserted island in the Everglades. The whacky characters that make landfall include a culturally confused half-breed Seminole, a ditzy FSU co-ed, a crazed stalker, an over-sexed amazon, and the ghost of a drunken tourist.

The book disappointed me because my hopes are always so high for Hiaasen and he seems to have taken the low road. Telemarketers and Indian casinos are fodder for bad stand-up comics, not someone of Hiaasen’s caliber. I expect a deeper cut at the dysfunctional culture that is slowly choking south Florida. Still, mediocre Hiaasen is better than most everything else.

Normally, I don’t buy short story collections, but when I was at Balticon last year, Neil Gaiman read a couple of selections from this as then unpublished book. True to it's title, Fragile Things comes in a thin translucent onion skin book jacket. Gaiman has made his reputation as a dark macabre comics writer, novelist, and blogger. The stories in this book have a lighter more contemplative touch. Frequent themes include melancholic childhood memories and perplexing encounters with strangers. A Sherlock Holmes-H.P. Lovecraft mash-up deserves to be an entire novel. The last story is an American Gods follow-up that is worth the entire book by itself. I ran across a podcast interview where Gaiman talks about this book and other topics as well. His preternatural mastery of words in any medium makes me think he has powers beyond mere mortals.

The last book I read before having to give up non-fiction for NaJuReMoNo Month was a freebie from a Boodle Porching Hour meet-up of Achenblog groupies in early December. Master satirist and unofficial Achenbach liaison, bc, had scared up a case of remainders from Joel’s basement to distribute as door prizes. In his more loquacious days, Joel wrote a column called “Why Things Are”. In typical journalistic repurposing, these columns had been collected into books as a secondary revenue stream. Why Things Are, Volume II is obviously the second of these.

I love light science oriented trivia books. I cut my teeth on everything Asimov I could put my hands on and still have a hard time passing up a Stephen Jay Gould collection. In tone, Why Things Are II (and I assume Volume I as well) most closely resembles the Imponderables series (Do Penguins Have Knees?, et. al.) but has a wider ranging choice of topics. The answers are well-researched and clearly tax the Rolodex of Achenbach. Unfortunately, many answers seem to reduce down to “Because I said so.” Even better than the short answer sections are his longer “special reports” that cover interesting topics like serial killers and the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. Now I need to hunt down Volume I. Maybe next time I’m in Culpeper I can spend more time treasure hunting at Ace Books.

I can’t promise you a free book if you show up at a Boodle Porching Hour, but the great conversation and cheap happy hour eats can’t be beat.

Second Annual NaJuReMoNo

Last year I started a partially tongue in cheek response to National Novel Writing Month that I called National Just Read More Novels Month or NaJuReMoNoMo. Last year I was new to the blogosphere and a little taken aback by the NaNoWriMo phenomenon. The goal of NaNoWriMo participants is to “write” a 50,000 word “novel” within 30 days. Tod Goldberg is one of many who have written very lucid deconstructions of the silliness of the effort.

Fortunately, I think most of the participants don’t take it very seriously. At Balticon this year I met a woman who had “won” three times. She seemed otherwise sane except for being at science fiction convention. Geekwif, one of my blogfriends, ran the gauntlet this year. All in all it seems to be a harmless diversion.

My complaints with NaNoWriMo are few and petty:

• If you are going to have a month long competition, you should pick a longer month, especially one without a major family holiday near the end of it.
• Writing is hard and should be left to the professionals. This of course does not apply to blogging.
• Finishing quickly is not a virtue. I think the ladies out there will vouch for me here. A good novel is going to take more than a month. Obviously NaNoWriMo ignores the requirement for good.

I think the good writers that have spent a lot of time writing something worth reading deserve some recognition. January is a cold long useless month and perfect for reading. That is why I encourage people to spend the next 31 days reading novels.

My silly web-meme is much easier thab NaNoWriMo and better for the economy. Use those holiday gift cards from BigBoxOfBooks™ or OtherBigBoxOfBooks™ or even OnlineSiteWithEveryBookEverWritten™ and load up the nightstand with novels, not dietbooks or memoirs or Gooey Plus Plus Programming Manuals. Spend a month wallowing in the fictitious worlds of your favorite writers. It is a great excuse to polish off all the books you have been meaning to get to.

Sorry, Crock. Self-help books don't
count for NaJuReMoNoMo

The rules are the same as last year. No memoirs, no matter how fictitious. Books must be started from the beginning and you can't have read them before.

Once you have completed even one novel, you have earned the right to post one of these crudely drawn icons on your website. Pick the icon that matches the number of novels you finish by the end of January. If you want to, update your running count throughout the month. You can either use the Copy_Image right-click to save the icon to your own computer or copy and paste the text into your own post or template. If you copy the text, you may have to remove some linebreaks to make the image work.

	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/yyz9cr" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/y5hjbf" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/y5a9kn" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/sfmjg" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/wewz4" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	<a href="http://tinyurl.com/yxcwk3"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/y6a3sk" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>

If you go past ten, you are either cheating or have enough time on you hands to make me highly envious. Feel free to create your own icon, banner, or blinking Flash animation. Just spread the word.

Happy reading.

Best Of 2006, Part 2

Every six months I do a Best Of post as much for me as for my readers. My Best Of for January thru June can be found here. I often lose track of when I wrote something I want to link to again. It also makes for a nice button on my sidebar for newer readers to realize what they’ve gotten themselves into so they know to avoid me in the future.

I’ve noticed that most of my posts fall into recognizable categories, so that is how I’ve organized the notables for the second half of 2006.

Travel

My wife and I drove over 7500 miles cross-country and back this summer. This trip gave me tons of memories, over a thousand pictures, and blog-ammo for nearly two months. Pretty much all my posts in July and August came out of that trip. My favorite travel post is the Brewery Tour Battle from our layover in St Louis and not just for the hidden link to the aroused Clydesdale. I also took a lot of video, some of which has been posted to my YouTube account. The Graceland Tour overview is the best of these and the blog post has more detail about my pilgramage to the home of The King.

Comics

The daily funnies page, dead tree and virtual, is still one of my most compulsive obsessions. I jumped on the good-bye to For Better Or For Worse bandwagon early with my predictions for The End of the Foobiverse. Expect more foobsnark in the very near future. I like to excel in fields with little competition, which is why I am the self-declared biggest fan in the world of Sally Forth. My latest entry is about Hilary Forth and her best friend Faye. The subtext of the post is a little, uh, mature and I may have stepped over a line, but I’m still proud of the work I put into it.

Studio 60

I eagerly anticipated the latest incarnation of Aaron Sorkin’s Altmanesque Random Rantings Set In A Tension Filled Work Place also known as Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. As part of my summary of the pilot, I invented a Drinking Game that thanks to some blogwhoring and a mention on Defamer went viral and became the most hit blog post I have ever written by a long shot. I should have quit while I was ahead but I have gone to the Studio 60 well several more times including comparing it unfavorably to 30 Rock.

Personal Stuff

The blog has been light on the purely confessional slice-of-life stuff lately, but I did do a nice write-up for my 20th anniversary about my wedding that my wife might never read. I’ve also lived vicariously through my son and his rocketry club.

Hookers

It wouldn’t be Foma* without a post about my number one long-term traffic generator, Brandi Britton. A year after her misdemeanor prostitution arrest, she has yet to have justice served. While I did an update right before her latest court non-appearance, it is the comment section from a much earlier entry that has become an emergent phenomenon that I try to police as lightly as possible.

Future Trends

After being accused of being the Whitest Blogger Ever, I have decided to take off the kid gloves and delve in politics a little more when I can come up with a unique angle that hasn’t been beaten to death in the other echo chambers on the web. My comparison of the Iraq War with Red Dawn ignited some genuine controversy. Hopefully my readers know it is all in good fun and they will always be welcome no matter what beliefs they hold. Or how big of a jerk I become.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: This is where I ask you to stroke my ego by mentioning something I’ve overlooked. I also let you turn the blogwhoring table and link to the favorite post you’ve written recently.

The Christmas Elf

Christmas memories are tricky. They are so tied up in wishful thinking, pop-culture and the collective unconscious that they really can’t be trusted. Joel Achenbach falsely remembered a childhood of watching Christmas specials with his mom. His mom refused to collaborate this fantasy. I’d get a new mom.

I have a rather vivid memory from my early elementary school days, back when kids quit believing in Santa Claus but want to keep the game going. I had been an elf in a school Christmas pageant. I saved the elf costume and hid it at a neighbor’s house. Early Christmas morning I woke up before everybody else like I always do and went to the neighbor’s and changed my pajamas for the elf suit.

I then returned home and woke everybody else up insisting that I was one of Santa’s helpers left behind to help with the presents. Everybody played along but kept trying to trick me into admitting I wasn’t an elf. At first they wouldn’t let me open ‘my’ presents, because some elf-imposter shouldn’t be opening someone else’s gifts. Eventually they relented and accepted my convoluted reasoning. I had a great time playing along and helping keep the Christmas magic going.

I have no evidence this ever happened. I have never seen pictures of me in the elf costume and my parents never bring it up as one of their fond memories. They prefer to remember the year I woke everybody up at 12:30 am thinking it was 6:00 because the clock hands were straight up and down. Still, that memory of Christmas morning as an elf is as real to me as Santa Claus and his flying reindeer.

Thanks to the good folks at Office Depot, I can recreate that magical morning on the internet. Click here or on the elf for my special Christmas production exclusively for readers of this blog. Or go here and make one of your own.

Merry Christmas

from Yellojkt

Blatant Christmas Cheer Spreading™: Share a memory from your childhood or link to your own Christmas story.

Christmas Presence

I hate to sound curmudgeonly in the run-up to Christmas, but it’s a pretty well established maxim that up to a third of all money spent at Christmas is wasted. The recipient either doesn’t like it or doesn’t want it or would not have paid as much as you did for it. Even gift cards aren’t a true solution. The get lost or forgotten, or they expire or aren’t good with other discounts. I have a real problem with this. At some point, someone used real money to buy the gift card and why should money be less useful because it is on a card instead of a piece of paper with a picture of a president.

On the other hand, gifts have value more than the price of the item. A recent Washington Post article told of a study that determined people (well, college students, but they are close enough) thought something they were given was worth more than the same item if they had to buy it. A coffee mug was worth up to four more dollars more in their minds if it had been a gift. I think it just reflects the buyer/owner divide. A quick glance through Craigslist will reveal people think their used stuff is way more valuable than it really is.

Sentimental value goes to the heart of the real purpose of presents. My parents visited recently and we had a discussion about gifts. My dad and I thought you should give people something you think they would like. My mother insisted that you gave a present because it was something you want the person to have. That is a really, really, big difference and explains a lot of gifts over the years.

Some presents just scream that there was no thought whatsoever. The lamest present I ever got was from my brother. Still wrapped in the paper bag it came in, he gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita he had clearly picked up from a Hare Krishna in the airport on his way home. Nothing like last minute shopping from religious fanatics with shaved heads.

My wife has a lot of experience with useless gifts. She is a teacher and every Christmas she is bombarded with tacky crap. There are just so many cliché teacher gifts. You only need so many Christmas tree ornaments featuring apples. She finally had to institute a no-candles policy because she got tired of hauling an entire bag of them to Goodwill every year. She is very appreciative of gift cards for places where she shops, which is about everywhere. Even that is subject to some horse-mouth checking. She tells her students she likes books, so they get her a gift card from OtherBigBoxOfBooks which is near where her students live but not as convenient as the OriginalBigBoxOfBooks near us. At least the kids' parents were thinking of her.

If you do subscribe to the silly useless presents school of throwing money away, nothing is better than the Dave Barry's Desparation Gift Giving Guide. My favorite on this list it the Electronic Message Brassiere. This $500 light-up lingerie lets a woman display a message across her chest right where men will most notice it most. My wife’s suggestion was to write “TAKE OUT THE TRASH”. She figures she might as well as ask me do something useful while she has my undivided attention.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What is the worse present you ever got or gave? Start here to read some answers from the Achenblog.

Plagiarism Police: Sorkin vs. Spy

I’m a faithful watcher of Alan Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as any reader of this blog can tell since I invented the Studio 60 Drinking Game and held a Studio 60-30 Rock Face Off. I’m also a huge fan of the late lamented Spy magazine having just read and reviewed the coffee table tribute to that snarky pioneer.

This leads to the current case in front of the Plagiarism Police®.

Docket: Aaron Sorkin vs. Spy magazine

Accusation: Lifting fictitious factoids from snarky 90s magazines.

Evidence:

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip "The Christmas Show" by Aaron Sorkin	Spy, January 1991 "The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer" by Bruce Handy et. al.
Matt: They calculated the number of homes with children and the average weight of two presents per child. Danny: What did they find? Matt: He would need 214,200 reindeer pulling a sled weighing 321,000 tons at 3,000 times the speed of sound.	This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons… We need 214,200 reindeer.

Defense: None, he has never been called on this before I just brought it up. My guess is that he would use Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #4. The original Spy magazine article has been widely distributed on the internet with and without attribution. It is so you-biquitous that it merits its own Snopes page.

Closing arguments: If you are going to quote faux-facts, you should at least copy the source correctly. The article assumes two-pounds of presents, not two presents per kid. Sorkin in general plays so fast and loose with his factoids that nobody really expects him to acknowledge his sources. According to some, he barely acknowledges his co-writers.

Verdict: Dismissed for lack of interest.

Sentence: Community service is recommended. Give us more original sub-plots like the New Orleans jazz tribute and fewer ad hominem attacks on the bloggers and the internet that are Sorkin’s uncredited cowriters.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What have you seen suspiciously cribbed from the internet?

You-phemism Of The Year

Time magazine has named You as their Person Of The Year. And by 'You', they mean 'Us' - bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, MMRPGers, SecondLifers, commenters, boodlers, lurkers, and anyone else with an online life no matter how desperate or lame our 'real' life is.

I'm sure this pick by Time staffers was hardly younanimous. The criteria for POTY is the person that has the most impact, for good or bad, on the news. They have increasingly relied on abstractions instead of actual people. Past winners have included Whistleblowers, American Soldiers, and Peacemakers, as well as inanimate objects like The Computer or Planet Earth.

Time has been shying away from picking ostensibly evil people out of fear of bumming people out. Who really believes that Rudy Guilliani had more impact in 2001 than Osama bin Laden? When pressed they do go with evil. Ayatollah Khomeini made the cut in 1979 and Dubya has been named twice.

My fellow boodler, bc, has already accepted this honor on behalf of himself, me, and you, but I feel youniquely qualified to represent the spirit of the honor. In addition to the blog you are reading now, I have accounts with Flickr, YouTube, GoogleVideo, LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, and Frappr, making my online presence nearly youbiquitous. I am youphoric over the honor Time has accorded me and feel that the internet is youniting the world in unyousually youniversal youphony.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Enough about me, how do You feel about your award?

Plagiarism Police: McEwan vs. Andrews

Earlier this week, the Achenblog had a very wide ranging discussion about plagiarism accusations against Ian McEwen and his book Atonement. As a new feature, I am holding mock trials against the more egregious examples of suspiciously similar excerpts.

Charge: Stealing a passage from a memoir about nursing practices in World War II.

Evidence (from Slate):

Atonement by Ian McEwen	No Time for Romance by Lucilla Andrews
In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise.	Our "nursing" seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains.
…only after the second change of washing water should the freshly soaped back flannel and back towel be passed to the patient so that he could "finish off for himself."	…the freshly soaped "back" flannel and "back" towel were to be handed the patient with the words, "I am sure you would like to finish yourself off now…

The Defense: (Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #3) Ian McEwen in a long article that invokes his dad the military veteran, he concludes with, “For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her. I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author's note at the end of Atonement, and ever since on public platforms…”

Closing Arguments: I'm not familar with Atonement, but I have read (well, listened to the unabridged audiobook) of Saturday. The novel Saturday covers one day in the life of a twee British neurosurgeon who gets in a fenderbender and has his life fall apart. If this sounds like a tough premise, you’re right. I found the book absurdly plotted and had a tough time sympathizing with his upper-class twits. Still, the medical scenes were very well researched and clearly beyond the scope of expertise of a novelist.

I expect a writer to have to rely on more knowledgeable sources a little bit because it’s so bad when they get it wrong. I lost all respect for Tom Clancy when MacDill Air Force Base got called Fort MacDill. You have to get the small stuff right. For McEwan to hew very closely to the written account is to avoid risking embarrassment by changing details that either didn’t or couldn’t happen. Also, the burden of proof against fiction writers is much higher than for historians and the like. Nobody wants to see tons of footnotes in a novel.

Verdict: Misdemeanor cribbing. No real plot points or themes were stolen.

Sentence: The official epithet for McEwan shall hereafter be appended to be “Booker Prize winning author and alleged plagiarist” as a cautionary warning against writers wishing to cite him as a precedent.

Next case on the docket: Sorkin vs. Spy