So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at the age of 84. I have anticipated and dreaded this day for years. Vonnegut was a man of advanced years and engrained vices. He once threatened to sue cigarette companies for not killing him fast enough. So it goes.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Kurt Vonnegut. The title of my blog is a tribute to his pseudo-religion of Bokononism. Unlike the wire services and newspapers, I don’t have a canned pre-written obituary to dust off. I have to fight back tears in the few minutes I have before work to sort and organize my thoughts.

I have only had personal contact with him twice in my life. In my freshman year of college, I handwrote him a long fawning letter on cheap stationery and sent it to him through his literary agent. Weeks later I received a business envelope addressed in blue magic marker with no return address. It was his reply, which was gracious, personal, and inspiring.

(Click on image for a full-screen, no reading glasses required version.)

I keep it framed on the shelf with my Kurt Vonnegut collection like a holy relic. The magic-markered signature complete with his trademark assterix has faded, but the words still ring in my ears.

For years, I hoped to meet him in person, but events always conspired to thwart me. The events and rituals of life led me away from the infrequent lecture tours he would make. Finally, I caught up with him at a book signing in Northern Virginia. The line wrapped around the block and only current copies of Timequake would be signed. Despite this assembly line affair, he kidded me about the garish shirt I was wearing and posed for a picture. That snapshot is lost somewhere in a giant plastic box of photos, but that moment is burned into my memory.

His works have been assimilated into the canon of modern literature, but it was not always so. For years he toiled unrecognized destined for the paperbacks-with-lurid-covers fate he heaped on his alter ego, Kilgore Trout. It wasn’t until the counter-culture latched onto his words expressing the absurdity of war and ridiculing the hypocrisy of society that he earned his moment in the sun. His reputation has faded and tarnished since the hippy-dippy era, but his messages have transcended that age. Like Orwell and Huxley, his cautionary warnings are more relevant today than when they were written. The satire of ‘Harrison Begeron’ has become public policy and “Vonnegutian” is a deep and complex adjective.

Much of what gets written about him in the next few days will be wrong. His cynicism and bleakness will be emphasized. People will miss the deeper meaning. Under his simple style he hid complicated ideas. He is the type of thinker that religious zealots fear. He teaches that we should be kinder and gentler to each other than any god or prophet would ever have us be. He is a Humanist of the transcendent variety. He sees humanity as frail and misguided creatures, and under the cynical pitch-dark humor, there was always hope.

While he did not believe in the comforts of the afterlife, I hope he is out there somewhere, laying on his back, grinning horribly, and thumbing his nose at You Know Who.

Update (3/17/07): I also have a meta-tribute with lots of links to other articles about and memorials to Kurt.

Ring My Bell

I hate it when comic strip characters, even ambiguously gay ones, have way more cultural savvy than me. I had never even heard of Joshua Bell until a few days ago, but he is obviously famous enough to be a Dennis the Maestro punchline. It seems Joshua is a rock star in the classical music world and is both single and straight, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Washington Post columnist and noted prankster Gene Weingarten talked Bell into performing for nearly an hour at the entrance to the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in DC. I am familiar with the place, having used that station for business and pleasure many times. I’ve even met fellow bloggers there since it is an easy to find and well traveled location. If you watch the video, in the far upper right is a newsstand that does way more business selling lottery tickets than magazines, even if you account for the broad selection of titles that are normally delivered in plain brown wrappers.

Weingarten wanted to know if genius would be recognized when presented in a location where it’s not usually expected. His social experiment met with deafening apathy. Bell’s open Stradivarius case collected only 32 bucks, which won’t get you nose bleed seats at most of his performances.

The long feature article has much hand wringing over the lack of culture in society and our failure to stop and hear the roses. They conclude that much of art is in the context. How true. It’s also a matter of matching material and style to the audience.

A much more successful street performer, although I hope to never see him in Carnegie Hall, is Times Square’s Naked Cowboy. On our recent band trip to New York, I was herding a group of about twenty teenagers from the Virgin Megastore to the Sam Ash music emporium so they could gawk at piccolo trumpets and enameled clarinets when I saw The Naked Cowboy drawing a crowd at the point of Duffey Square (which is really a triangle). I led the group across Seventh Avenue so they could gawk in person. One girl in our group even got up the courage to get groped by him. Those pictures are sure to be on Facebook by now.

Naked is a bit of a misnomer, the Naked Cowboy actually wears a hat, boots, and Hanes cotton briefs with his name Sharpied onto the back. His guitar has a tip jar opening and he spends more time posing than playing. One proud pair of parents had their cute daughters tag-team him while taking pictures.

He has a ready set of lines like “Take your time, I can do this all day” as he flicks his tongue suggestively that tends to speed up boyfriends taking too long fiddling with the focus. The weather that day was pretty cool but business was brisk and there was no evidence of shrinkage in the crowds around the Naked Cowboy.

So the next time Joshua Bell wants to do a little busking, I suggest he leave the three million dollar Stradivarius at home and don some tighty-whiteys instead.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Who is your favorite street performer or where is a good place to see them?

BooksFirst - March & April 2007

Books Bought

Q Is For Quarry by Sue Grafton
S Is For Silence by Sue Grafton
G Is For Grafton: The World of Kinsey Millhone by Natalie Hevener Kaufman and Carol McGinnis Kay
The Best of The Best Volume 2 edited by Gardner Dozios
Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
Schrödinger’s Ball by Adam Felber
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Selected Poems 1947-1995 by Alan Ginsberg
Slouching Towards Nirvana by Charles Bukowski

Books Read

She's Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders
Lost In A Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik

Books Abandoned

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde

Comments

Between travel and the NCCCC, I’m running late with the BooksFirst this month and I needed to stretch the deadline a little. All three books I read this month came from the public library, putting me even further behind on clearing the purchased books backlog. In my defense, several of the books I bought this month are for collecting and reference, not reading.

Somewhere along the line I started collecting the Kinsey Millhone mysteries by Sue Grafton. Since they are all in chronological as well as alphabetical order, I thought it would be easy enough to keep track of where I was, but even that is too daunting a task. I am pretty sure I have read A through E as well as G, but I could be wrong. In the meantime, I snarf up the new hardbacks as soon as they hit the remaindered bin or show up at the used bookstores. G is for Grafton is a compendium that will help me keep track of all the books once I am far enough along for it to make sense.

As a goof, I keep a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems (1947-1980) in my office next to my engineering reference books. Unfortunately, when I went to read “Howl” as an example of the poetry my son should be reading in his high school English class instead of Carl Sandburg, I didn’t have a copy in the house. While trolling bookstores in Harvard Square, I ran across this other Ginsberg collection that seems well suited to my occasional need to read Beat Poetry aloud.

Cambridge was also the location for my find of the Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence reprint of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. My wife bought me the true first edition by Charles Scribner's Sons for our first (the paper) anniversary. I also have the 1952 book club edition and the Utopia 14 paperback edition. Normally, I would pass on this one since there are still true firsts I don’t own (Welcome To The Monkey House, anyone?), but the very friendly proprietor of Lame Duck Books gave me five bucks off so he could regain the shelf space.

Now onto the books I read:

Every subculture has a tradition of collecting conversion stories. Fundamentalists can rattle off their testimonial of how they took Jesus as their personal savior at the drop of a hat. Every gay person or lesbian has several versions of their coming out story depending on the context. The “hitting bottom” episode is a staple of 12-step programs. She’s Such A Geek is a collection of reminisces by women recounting when and how they knew they were a nerd. The stories are by a wide range of women of all ages, backgrounds, races, and sexual identities. What they have in common is a career in or touching technology.

Despite the varied backgrounds, a lot of these testimonials begin to sound familiar. One common theme is the isolation and the sense of alienation. My son is looking at colleges and a big factor at the more hardcore schools is The Ratio. MIT has a 45% female enrollment while Georgia Tech hovers around 30%. The military service academies strive for 20%. This book is a good insight into the personality of women that are willing to follow their muse into the sciences. Perhaps someday women in math and science won’t be such a novelty and this book will look quaint.

The other two books I read are sequels to books I read back in January. Lost In A Good Book is the follow-up to The Jane Eyre Affair. Here Thursday Next becomes even more engulfed in the fictional world were literary characters are real people. Her nutsy alterna-universe where extinct species have been genetically re-engineered and time travel is just another layer of daffiness is further developed. Unfortunately, the book reeks of mid-trilogy set-up and ends rather unresolved. These are fun books and it may be worth the trouble to continue on.

A book I started but couldn’t make it past the first two chapters was The Big Over Easy, the first book in Jason Ffordes’s other series. In this one the premise is that nursery story characters live among us and they tend to live particularly film noir-ish lives. The relentless puns and endless layers of nursery story allusions made this just too much trouble. Funny how an author can approach something the same way and just cross a fine line that can’t be defined until it is broken.

I managed to force my way through Throne of Jade, the middle book of the Temeraire dragon series. Here the dragon and his Napoleonic War-era rider get sent on a diplomatic mission to China where draconian culture is much more enlightened. This sets off some concerns about how you are going to keep your dragon on the farm after he has seen Peking. I’m a little perplexed about the use of nineteenth century British aristocracy as heroes knowing what little I know about The Opium Wars and gunboat diplomacy. There are also hints of a yet to be developed theme equating “ownership” of dragons and slavery. It will be interesting to see if that can be pulled off tastefully. One of my complaints with the first book was the leisurely pacing, and this book slows it down to downright languid. The dragon spends most of the book petulantly pouting while traveling by ship and it takes over 250 pages to get to China. Once there, the court politics that make up the MacGuffin of a plot are confused and hurried. Let’s hope there is a little more action and a lot less moping in future volumes.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Are the second books in a series always dreadful, or are some clever expansions of concepts that need room to develop?

Mike The Foob Comes Clean

Since I first outed Mike Patterson as a closeted gay man leading a desperate life of lies, his situation has become even more pathetic. Since the mysterious fire that was sparked by his smoking some of Weed's finer namesake herb, his whole family has moved back in with his mother.

Here, back under the secure arms of the only woman that has ever understood him, Mike has undertaken a series of passive-aggressive actions to stay under her roof. He spurns any help from his mother-in-law. He half-heartedly looks for apartments but rejects them all as being too far from work. When faced with a managerial decision commensurate with his position as a fashion magazine editor, he uses the opportunity as an excuse to rashly quit. His secret lover, now going as Jo, even gives him a celebratory party where he can meet new men.

Unfortunately, his wife who has a steady income and his father, both eager to get Mike out of the care of Elly, have conspired to buy a house. Faced with the threat of a mortgage that would quash his hopes of ever escaping the Foob Closet, he finally confesses that his loveless marriage is just a sham.

Well, that's how I read today's strip. With the Lynnions you have to read between the lines, but I know that is what they are getting at. Just look at the shock on Dee's face and the John's shame at the pathetic husk of a man that is his son.

Run, Dee, run. Get out while you can still raise your kids out from under the shadow of this family that makes the collected works of Eugene O'Neill and Tennesee Williams look like a Father Knows Best boxset.

NCCCC: Best Ambiguously Gay Duo

Suspiciously close buddy characters have been staples of the comics scene since at least Mutt and Jeff. Often these character seem to be much more than friends. Inseparable, the characters share a bond that dare not speak its name in a family newspaper. Well before Robert Smiegel immortalized the phrase, the Ambiguously Gay Duo has been in the closet of the funny pages for ages. For the last catagory in this years National Coolest Comics Character Competition, we need to uncover which ones are the best.

First, lets eliminate a few that didn’t make the cut. While Rex Morgan is clearly the biggest flamer since Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, his string of boy-toys (and Troys) don’t ever stick around long enough to form the lasting bond we are looking for here. Another good nomination was Ted and Sally Forth. I’m on the record defending Ted’s masculinity and I can’t reverse my stance now, no matter how much recent strips seem designed to mock me. I am also ruling Mike Patterson and Weed ineligible since I outed Mike in great detail recently. And finally, while we all dream of being the bacon in a Margo/LuAnn/Tommie club sandwich, it just isn’t going to happen. Get over it.

Breed standards: Subtext is the key here. Everything should pass the “dirty minds only” test. The couple should be defendable as “just friends”. Peppermint Patty and Marcie are the gold standard in this category.

Faults: Any hint of camp or self-awareness ruins the effect.

Lets put the nominees under the proctoscope:

Sarge and Beetle Beetle Bailey	Pro: The sub-dom roleplay that goes on everyday at the parade field of the most don’t-ask/don’t tell army base this side of Advanced Language School is shocking. The vicious sado-masochistic rituals that Sarge and Beetle engage in makes me think that at least one of them has forgotten the safe word.	Con: At a post with Lt. Fuzz, Julian, Plato, Sgt Lugg, and Private Bipps, Beetle doesn’t even qualify as the gayest character in his own strip.
Hagar and Lucky Eddie Hagar the Horrible	Pro: These two spend an awful lot of time together. Sailing ships, raiding castles, even getting stranded on deserted islands. What are two Vikings doing spending so much time in the tropics anyways? Eddie even tags along with Hagar on dates with his wife. They form the ultimate bear/nellie couple.	Con: Eddie has pretty poor fashion sense for such a nancy-boy. And if I were married to Helga, I would spend a lot of time with my cabin boy, too.
Herb and Jamal Herb and Jamal	Pro: The awkward glances and frequent longing stares make you wish these two would get a room. While Herb is ostensibly married, his frequent declarations of devotion to Jamal are just short of Brokeback Mountain obvious. Jamal should have scored ages ago with Yolanda if he had any interest whatsoever. Which he obviously doesn’t.	Con: The relationship is sappy, verging on cloying. These brothas need to do a better job of keeping things on the down low.
Frank and Ernest Frank and Ernest	Pro: Have you ever seen these two apart? This inseparable couple have way more than just a straight man/stand-up relationship. A zombie strip that has never been funny at any level, let alone subliminal. Let's face it, the cleverest thing about the strip is it's title.	Con: These two are way too slobby to ever get any action at any of the good bars.
Bernice and Delta Luann	Pro: Since Wheelchair Guy left the scene, Bernice has been wearing more and more comfortable shoes. And Delta has never been seen with any romantic interest at all. My guess is that when wet blanket Luann isn’t around, they listen to a lot of Tracy Chapman together.	Con: It’s just not sexy. Not in the least. Besides, a Bernice/Delta/Tiffany triangle is about the only permutation that hasn't been tried.
Dennis and Joey Dennis The Menace	Pro: At least we know who is the pitcher and who is the catcher in this couple. Joey’s too small, too tight clothes just scream future rent-boy. It would also explain Dennis’s reluctance to ever play doctor with Margaret or the hot-to-trot Gina.	Con: Opening that can of worms calls into question the whole Dennis/Mr. Wilson relationship, which is a place I don’t want to go.

Take a stab in the dark and shed some light into the comics darkest closets. As always, feel free to explain your choice or make a suggestion of your own in the comments.

Back From The Band Trip

I have not fallen off the face of the Earth. It was much worse than that. I was a band trip chaperone. If you recall my post from last year, you will know this is an annual act of masochism on my part.

For four days, my job was to keep 80 teenagers from getting drunk, killed, or pregnant. I think we managed the first two. We won’t know about the last until August when we have fittings for marching band uniforms.

This year’s trip was to New York. In addition to the competition we saw the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, The Producers, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Ground Zero, and Downtown Newark.

We also got a three boroughs driving tour. On Friday night there was a fatal accident that closed the Lincoln Tunnel. After circling midtown for over an hour, our bus driver decided that the only way we were going to get back to our hotel at the Newark Airport was to take the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and then the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge across Staten Island. To kill time on the three hour ride, the band director tried to start a sing-along of “No Sleep Til Brooklyn”, but the Beastie Boys reference went over everybody’s head. Kids these days.

Rather than return to Baltimore with the band, my family instead pressed on to Boston. It seems some tech school in Cambridge keeps sending my son junk mail. Since we were half-way there, it seemed like a good chance to do a college visit. The weather was miserable, but the campus is gorgeous. All the student tour guides spent a lot of time emphasizing that getting accepted is pretty much a crap shoot no matter how good you look on paper.

That doesn’t keep the helicopter parents from trying to game the system. One particularly pushy mom kept asking transparent questions like “How many hours of community service do they expect you to have?” and “How many activities should you mention in the essay?” I suppressed the urge to kill.

So for six days, I have been internet deprived except for the browser on my cell phone. Tomorrow we head out again to go down to Atlanta so we can give the alma mater a fair shake. We’ll see how the North Avenue Trade School compares to that place along the Charles.

When I get back we will resume all the regularly scheduled features of this blog, like finishing up the National Coolest Comics Character Competition and the much overdue BooksFirst for the month.

In the meantime, don’t remove me from your bookmarks. I have over 500 pictures from the trip to download and several amusing anecdotes to share. We'll have a fun time reliving the misery that is being the parent of a teenager.

NCCCC: Best Evil Anthropomorphic Animal

Enough with people. Now it is time to move on to non-human characters in the National Coolest Comics Character Contest. And I don't mean the cute critters like Marmaduke and Heathcliff, we want to look at the talking animals we love to hate.

All comics can be divided into the ones that include talking animals and the ones that don’t. This really has nothing to do with the quality of the strip, it just sets a different tone. Some of the funniest strips are the ones where at least one of the talking animals is a complete jerk. Animal characters get to do and say things real people could never get away with. Garfield once aspired to this territory, but he descended into a Disney-fied marketing machine never to emerge. The real successes are the edgy but funny takes.

Breed Standards: While the exact personality can vary, a “good” evil character is unrepentantly self-absorbed. Think Danny Devito from Taxi. An evil animal should have several recurring victims and never show any remorse. Any actual resemblance in personality to the base animal type is a bonus.

Faults: Cuteness. Any sense of humanity whatsoever.

Dogbert Dilbert	Pro: Dogbert gets the nod over fellow character Catbert The Evil Personnel Director because he is a more rounded jerk. Between his cynical business schemes, his unethical consulting scams, and his general abuse of the titular geek, Dogbert is always on the prowl for some way to cheat or steal.	Con: Sometimes he gets just a little soft and cuddly. Since he spends most of his energy ripping off clueless managers like the Pointy Haired Boss, it could be argued he is doing a public service.
Bucky Katt Get Fuzzy	Pro: Mean, vicious, and completely delusional, Bucky Katt is everything cat-haters see in the feline species. His sense of self-entitlement is completely out of whack with his actual abilities. He is often obnoxious just for practice and the dynamic between him and dim-witted Satchell is everything Garfield and Odie would be if they were actually funny.	Con: Bucky is very dim-witted, which blunts the effect of his more nefarious ideas.
Rat Pearls Before Swine	Pro: Probably the purest evil character in a comic, Rat exists just to torment. He is unrepentantly malicious and will frequently do things just because he can.	Con: A little over the top. You would think Pig, or at least Goat, would have caught on by now what a total a-hole Rat is.
Zoogie The Gene Pool	Pro: Not so much evil as vile and obnoxious, Zoogie is everybody’s worst roommate or frat brother. Gross and obnoxious are his hallmarks and he clearly emulates Bluto from Animal House. His clueless macking on every female character is truly cringe inducing.	Con: Like the Animaniacs, but not in a good way, it’s tough to decipher what sort of animal Zoogie is supposed to be. My guess would be koala, but even that is just a stab in the dark.

So there they are. Cast your vote and determine which is the funniest and evilest at the same time.

Nerd Tools

What is the oldest holy war in the technology world?

Internet Explorer vs Firefox?
Windows vs Mac?
Fortran vs Pascal?

It’s none of these. If you really want to start some bad blood between nerds of a certain age, start an argument about Texas Instruments vs Hewlett Packard. The Calculator Wars was one of the first battlegrounds between ease of use and computing horsepower. What calculator you used was considered a sign of how serious you took your studies.

When I started Calculus my junior year in high school, I was very proud of my brand new state-of-the-art Texas Instruments TI-30 scientific calculator. It had an exponential number display and everything. A friend in the class who would go onto to do great things in robotics (you can see his work in this video) had a Hewlett Packard HP-34C and would try to convince me of its superiority. It had some rudimentary programming ability and he taught it some parlor tricks, but I couldn’t see the big deal.

I decided I needed a new calculator to start college with, so I got the sleek brand new TI-55-II. Well, the TI-55-II was a complete piece of crap. On mine, the “7” key in particular was sticky to the point of rendering the thing unusable. Besides, I saw a lot of fellow engineering students using the newest HP and I had to have one. Per pressure is mighty powerful.

I sweet talked my folks into laying down some gift money so I could get an HP-41CV, the latest andgreatest calculator in the world until the CX model came out This machine was the workhorse number cruncher for the rest of my college career. The 41 had some quirks. It used size N batteries, which are half the size of AA’s and very hard to find. You know you are in a Nerd Nirvana when you can buy size Ns. I’m not sure Radio Shack even carries them any more.

The hurdle that HP calculator buyers faced was learning Reverse Polish Notation (or RPN). Once the concept behind the system was grokked, converts became missionary in their zeal to spread the word of the superiority of this system. RPN completely changes and reorders the way one looks at a math problem. There is a zen simplicity to manipulating a memory stack that makes other entry methods seem kludgy. To this day, I get befuddled by a standard algebraic calculator because the data entry is so convoluted.

I eventually bought along an HP-11C as a back-up calculator and even taught my wife how to use a HP-12C. For awhile it looked like the 12C might finally let HP make inroads into the general population. The HP-12C with its financial functions became the default calculator for real estate professionals. It showed professionalism and class. I think they also like the gold trim. The rest of the world remained unimpressed.

When my HP-41 bit the dust, I was heart broken. I searched for a replacement and found the HP-32S which was true RPN but lacked many of the advanced functions I had gotten accustomed to. I ended up hunting down a HP-48G which had a four-line display and used RPN notation. RPN entry is my theft prevention device. Younger engineers that have never seen a decent calculator take a look at it and put it down in bewilderment. The absence of an ‘=’ button befuddles them. They just don’t understand. It makes me shake my head in disbelief that someone can get an engineering degree without mastering RPN.

I am so brainwashed into RPN notation, that when I got my Treo phone I was frantic that there was no decent native Windows Mobile RPN program. I eventually used my old PalmOS MathU program with an Palm emulator. It doesn’t look pretty, but it keeps me sane.

Am I a true HP/RPN geek?

No.

I never learned synthetic programming. I never used a calculator serial port as a data acquisition tool. I have never downloaded a program (even though somewhere I have a cable to do it with). But to know I could have done these things if I wanted to is enough. Not unexpectedly, there are a lot of web pages devoted to vintage calculators, both HP and TI.

Hewlett Packard has lost the Calculator Wars. Texas Instruments with its graphing calculators moved into the middle school and high school market and overtook the hearts and minds of impressionable algebra and trig students. My son has a whole draw full of TI-83s and 89s and who knows what else. The power of Excel and the ubiquity of laptop computer make all the advanced functions of a true scientific calculator obsolete.

I feel like on of my professor that lamented the loss of slide rules. To him, a slide rule was a badge of honor to be wore on a belt. A phallic symbol that showed you were a true engineer. A craftsman is known by his tools. I may never use anything much more complicated than the square root key, but I continue to use my HP with pride. Like a badge of honor.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What are the tools of your trade?