BooksFirst - October 2006

Books Read

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss

Books Bought

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Comments

I haven't finished the big book I started last month, so that will have to wait. In part just so that I would have something to write about, I bought and read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the runaway bestseller about punctuation.

My grammar education was severely neglected as a kid. For several years "Language Arts", as English has been renamed, consisted of self-paced SRA workbooks with little teacher lecturing. When grammar was supposed to be taught in fifth and sixth grades, we had something called Roberts English which was to do for grammar what New Math did for arithmetic: make it so theoretical and confusing that it was useless for practical purposes. I have never diagrammed a sentence and I don't know the past imperfect from a dangling participle.

In high school, English was all literature based and while there was plenty of writing, the emphasis was on interpretation and not on mechanics. Still, the AP grade was good enough to get me out of freshman composition in college. What I'm trying to say is that my writing skills are self-taught outsider-art style. I just write the way it looks right without any formal knowledge of rules other than what I pick up from skimming Strunkenwhite's Elements of Style once a decade.

When my wife and I edit my son's school papers, we have enormous fights over punctuation. I work from a less-is-more ethos, while she believes every clause deserves a comma. I usually give in to her because I don't have any solid ground to defend my choices with. Like ending sentences with prepositions. Or beginning sentences with conjunctions. I know these things are 'wrong', but I do them anyways.

So I thought Eats, Shoots & Leaves would put a few arrows in my quiver for future arguments. I was wrong. Despite being subtitled "The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation", it is surprisingly wishy-washy. It even refuses to take a stand on terminal, or Oxford, commas. I like them, but so many people insist they are wrong that I usually just capitulate. I did learn to justify my putting punctuation marks outside the quotes in certain cases as the 'British' way of doing it.

The one major point hammered home again and again is to not create plural's by adding apostrophe-s. Well, duh. If this is advice worth ten bucks, perhaps the need for the book is more desperate than I realize.

The book is breezy and full of funny anectdotes and quotes Gertrude Stein just a little too much, but it didn't do much except reinforce my prejudice against silly grammarians with fussy and arbitrary rules. A coworker of mine, a lady of a certain age whose job is to make engineers sound not completely illiterate, just kind of snorts at the book. Now I understand why.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Feel free to ridicule any misteaks I have made. I will get to excuse them as ironic statements.

HalloTeen

When is someone too old to trick-or-treat? Not at sixteen, according to my son. And according to the Washington Post, he’s not alone. It seems like kids old enough to drive still like to go door to door for free candy. Here is a quote from the Post:

Call them greedy, call them intimidating, call them the unwelcome elephants in the Snickers factory, but the teenagers who inevitably appear on Halloween doorsteps are grasping for more than a fistful of sweets.

"When you're our age, it's like it's cool again to go," explains Anna Karnaze, a 17-year-old junior from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, who went as a toilet-paper mummy last Halloween and plans to trick-or-treat as a pirate tonight.

According to my kid, it’s all about the free candy. Never mind that the scene is as social as much as it is greedy. I used to be the parent in charge of walking him around until middle school when he started venturing out on his own. Tonight he took the car to a friend’s neighborhood. We just warned him not to trick and drive.

He at least bothered to dress up. The jester’s hat and pirate shirt came from the Renaissance Fair, so he’s getting good use out of those impulse purchases. He also did his own make-up. That shows he has some pride.

Judging by the kids that have knocked on the door tonight, he’s not completely out of the demographic. This year’s crowd is skewing older, but so far most of the costumes are pretty good. It’s later in the evening when you get the lazy stragglers.

And best of all? Tonight we are giving out the leftover candy he got last year but never bothered to eat.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: How old is too old?

Bonus Cuteness: Every year we dress up my dog so he doesn’t scare the little kids when he greets them at the door. And the costume? A yellow and black yellowjacket, of course.

Quizzical

Lazy bloggers resort to quizzes. Yes, I'm being lazy. But these quizzes are intriguing. The first one is from Geekwif who can't figure out why her nerd score isn't higher. I wonder how mine got so high. I guess since I am an engineer, I would expect to be very nerdy (as opposed to dorky or geeky).

I don't remember where I got this second quiz but since it shows I should be an engineer, it's tough to argue with.

Your Career Personality: Brainy, Logical, and Efficient

Your Ideal Careers: Archeologist Astronomer Book editor Business manager Civil engineer Designer Economist Inventor Judge Scientist

The Quick and Dirty Career Test

The next quiz is philosphical. I really don't quite know what they mean by 'existentialist', but it could be worse.

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 75% Materialist 75% Cultural Creative 69% Postmodernist 63% Modernist 56% Idealist 50% Fundamentalist 38% Romanticist 25% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

The final quiz is one used by kb on her Read/Think/Live blog where she cleverly associates social alienation with real aliens.

Alienation Test Results

Your Scores
Meaninglessness = 13
Cultural Estrangement = 19
Powerlessness = 15
Normlessness = 18
Estrangement from Work = 19
Social Isolation = 16

Scores should range between 5 and 25.
Scores from 5 to 11 could be considered "low,"
from 12 to 18 "moderate,"
and from 19 to 25 "high."

I think these results are the ones I should be worried about. None of these scores are less than "Moderate" and two are into the "high". I hope these quizzes don't bum you out, but they sure made me think.

Media Myths and Uniformity

Here is a picture of four of our five Chinese exchange students with some of the kids from the host families. As you can see, the kids all pretty much dress the same. I recently ran across an Alberto VO5 commercial that has been airing where two students at a Maoist-looking institution use hair gel to rebel against the system.

I showed this video to our guest and he seemed more perplexed than offended. He's pretty sure the actors aren't even speaking Chinese since he couldn't understand a word of the commercial. We asked if uniforms were required at his school. We had to explain the concept of uniforms by describing soldiers and doctors. He wasn't aware of any schools where kids wore uniforms.

Uniforms are the current faddish panacea for discipline problems in both urban and suburban areas. I'm not sure dressing alike solves the problems. My son wears a steady rotation of black tee shirts with jeans. If that's not a uniform I don't know what is.

One supposed advantage of school uniforms is that it avoids the cost of kids demanding expensive designer clothes. Have you priced school uniforms? Hello? A closet full of khakis and monochrome polo shirts is still clothes that have to be bought and laundered and replaced when they wear out. My wife gave our son the tee shirt she got from the local AppleStore grand opening. Cost to us: free. He gets all his baggy shorts and cargo pants at Kohls and if you ever pay full price there, you're getting ripped off.

If a kid won't go to school without the latest Amercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle (I'm old-school enough to remember when AE was business attire) that is a decision between parents and their children. School uniforms, like teen driving curfews and license restrictions, just allow parents to shrug their shoulders and abdicate their authority to The Man.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Dealers choice: Is the hair gel commercial trafficking in offensive stereotypes or just some clever social satire? Or: Do school uniforms make a difference? If China has abandoned them, why are we eager to adopt them?

HoCo Hooker Update

Update (1/29/07): Brandy Britton committed suicide over the weekend according to a report by the Baltimore Sun.


My favorite blonde, D-cup, over-educated call girl, Brandy Britton, is back in the news. This time, against her lawyer’s recommendations, she is spinning her eye-rolling tale of how $300 an hour is a fair price for her ‘companionship’ to the Baltimore Examiner. She explains that the 150 condoms at her house were necessary tools in her research into HIV transmission vectors. She also thinks anyone without nine bottles of lube just isn’t enjoying sex enough.

If you will recall from my last post about her, she waived a judicial hearing for what is a fairly routine charge to get jury trial. Regrettably, my jury service is over, because I’d love to be on that case even if my blog would cause a mistrial. I know way too much about her and the case that I shouldn’t know.

According to an Examiner sidebar article, sleepy Howard County has made 52 prostitution arrests so far this year. Most of these probably involve truck-stop hookers and shady massage health spas, not a woman with a doctorate degree operating out of a soon to be foreclosed on $400,000 home (that is the appraised value, fair market worth would be much higher) on a sleepy Wisteria Lane-like cul-de-sac. She has already rebuffed one plea bargain offer.

Her latest version of events include paranoid tales of police persecution and harassment. While it does seem odd that it takes eleven cops to raid one two-story colonial for a middle-aged woman armed only with Astroglide, I doubt that anyone is now bugging her living room. Her latest court date has been delayed, this time apparently by the prosecution. The only other new press is a letter to the editor defending her based on the Examiner article.

Several things about this case still don’t add up. One mysterious critical event in her chronology is the short marriage to her legally-declared abusive husband, Isamu Tubyangye. During that time, the cops seemed more than familiar with her address, having to answer at least 27 domestic disturbance and other calls. How he plays into the legal and psychological dramas at UMBC is still confusing as well as exactly when Brandy turned on the red light as Alexis.

This low-life has seemed to vanish off the face of the earth after pleading guilty to assault twice and serving jail time for it. The Examiner article says that calls to his Florida home went unreturned. That means the reporter is paying no attention at all to the comments section of my blog, which clearly place him in Australia. If the reporter had been around for the two days before I deleted the comment, he could have jotted down the exact street address.

Which brings up the small community of BrandyHaters that have been sympathizing with each other as well as posting new information about Brandy and her ex-husband. My Brandy posts have brought out commenters that keep adding to the dialog long after most blog posts have closed shop. These folk have gotten so cozy together, I almost expect them to start trading recipes. While most of the parties post anonymously, there seem to be at least a half-dozen regulars. They include:

• The wife of her former boss
• The wife of a former ‘client’
• A close friend of her now-remarried first husband
• The former girlfriend and baby-momma of her second husband
• A friend of the second husband’s current girlfriend in Australia

Obviously, most of these people have a grudge or an ax to grind, but some of the links and research are interesting, if not likely to be admissible in court. For example, while most of Brandy/Alexis/whoever’s official websites vanish soon after I link to them, this page on an escort service site (NSFW, in case you need to be told) still has pictures from her Alexis days.

Prostitution is frequently referred to as a victimless crime. When a husband is spending thousands of dollars on a call girl, there are victims, just not the ones in the legal process. One commenter (perhaps the same one) also makes the point that sexually transmitted diseases from a sex worker are a risk to more than the john. Of course, this applies to any style of promiscuity, extramarital, commercial, or otherwise.

The story has a high titter factor, which is why the press and public (present company included) keep following it. But there are real victims and ruined lives littered in the wake of it. That is hard to remember when there is so much theater of the absurd surrounding this case.

As an aside, Luke Broadwater, the writer of the Examiner article calls Centennial High School “perhaps the best school in the best public-school district in the state” which means he agrees with my characterization of it as “the highest performing high school in the highest performing county in the state” when I first blogged about Brandy back in January. Just sayin’.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: None. This post will probably not have trouble attracting comments and there is enough whoring in Howard County going on without my contribution.

Chinese Diplomacy

This week we are playing host family to an exchange student from Beijing. As part of an effort to expand the teaching of Chinese in the United States, my son’s school has been trading visits by administrators between our school and a similar one in China.

As part of the next level of exchanges, five Chinese students are spending a week shadowing regular American kids as they go about their day. In my son’s case, that includes his typical weekly schedule of two marching band practices, a math team competition, a meeting of the rocketry club, and a band festival. Since our student listed math as his favorite subject, this should be a good match.

One of the first things our student said is “My English is not very good.” Well, it’s infinitely better than my Chinese, so we have to stick with English. When we talk to him, we try to explain things a couple of ways until some of the words we use sound familiar. His favorite word is ‘Oh”, so we are not quite sure how much of what we explain sinks in. When he really needs to get a point across, he’ll resort to a little pocket electronic translator.

My wife is in charge of debriefing and interrogation. So far, we know that his dad is a chemistry professor and his older brother is a high school teacher. He also has a little sister, so that sounds like a big family by modern Chinese standards. His textbooks in China are a fraction of the size of my son’s backpack-busting monstrosities. Their school day runs from 7 am to 5 pm and school vacation lasts about two months. He also understands the universal language of teenagers, video games.


The students and their teachers arrived Sunday afternoon after spending two days in LA sightseeing. To give him the full American home experience, we cooked a dinner of hamburgers and macaroni and cheese. After demonstrating the proper assembly of a hamburger on a bun, he took quite a while to make it all the way through a Trader Joes quarter pound buffalo burger with cheese, topped with lettuce and a tomato slice. My son occasionally polishes off two of these, but our Chinese friend thought just one of these was an awful lot of meat.

That may be the last home-cooked meal we give him. Our on-the-go weekday schedule tends to include a lot of fast-causal food like Quiznos and Chipolte. We’re not sure he’d be up to a full-sized burrito. Some things are just cruel to inflict on visitors from another country.

Breakfast today was toast and jelly, which he made into a sandwich, following the example of the hamburger from the night before. As we turned the corner on the way to school, his “Oh” seemed genuinely impressed with the size of the average American suburban high school.

A week is almost too short of a trip for this sort of thing, but we hope to give him and the other students a fair look at the life of typical American teenagers. We intend to get to a grocery store, the mall, and a night at the movies. We have tickets to a jazz concert by my son’s saxophone teacher and the whole group will spend a day doing all the touristy stuff in DC, then they are back to Beijing. Hopefully some American students will return the favor and visit there this summer. All the parents involved with the program have already volunteered to chaperone.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What should a visitor from China see to get a true impression of typical American life?

Are You Experienced?

I have been following Sue Trowbridge’s great multi-post account of her vacation in Vegas. I blogged twice about us passing through Vegas and while the city is full of spectacle, the most impressive display to me was the Fremont Street Experience. While the Bellagio fountains are stunning, they are not nearly as immersive or hallucinogenic as the Fremont Street show. In order to bring tourists back to the old downtown strip, the city has turned the original strip into a covered open air mall. Four times a night, the ceiling turns into a giant video screen three blocks long.

We caught the last show of the night which featured a stunning air and space spectacular. The show is nearly six minutes long and my video is a single shot with no editing. If and when you are in Vegas, make the trip downtown and catch a show you will never see anywhere else.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What is your favorite light show or tourist extravaganza?

Me And Travis McGee

Back in high school, a girl whose taste in books I respected (she was also a fan of Kurt Vonnegut and pre-movie Princess Bride) told me I should read the Travis McGee novels. Based on her recommendation, I spent one summer working my way through the seventeen book series. Part of the gimmick for the series is that all the books have a color in the title, making reading them in chronological order a tricky task. Early in the series, more than one book would come out a year, so copyright year alone wasn’t enough to figure out the sequence. Fortunately, the books are fairly self-contained and didn’t get much of a continuing storyline until late in the series.

Travis McGee, the anti-hero in rusted armor of the series, is a lanky beach bum who rights wrongs for people caught in legal gray areas for a 50% share of the net recovery. Despite this mercenary approach, Trav, as his friends and paramours call him, is an avenging angel that is always on the side of the underdog and the disenfranchised. It helps if the victim is attractive and sexually vulnerable. The books are full of the softcore obligatory sex scenes that were a fixture of trashy paperbacks of the sixties and seventies.

John D. MacDonald was a World War II veteran and an MBA’ed business refugee that cut his teeth in the same oversaturated post-war magazine market that gave Kurt Vonnegut his big break. MacDonald then moved onto the lurid cover paperback original scene before beginning the Travis McGee series.

What separates Travis McGee from Matt Helm and Remo Williams and his contemporaries is the sense of place developed form the Florida setting. While the first several books jumped around, the series eventually settled down to focus on the environmental and financial horrors in shady Florida real estate deals gone awry. The books are much more exciting than that synopsis makes them sound.

As a then-Floridian, I took particular delight in books that exposed the hypocrisy of the region. Behind the adventure there were always biting commentaries on whatever injustice MacDonald wanted to filter through his muscled alter ego. Travis eventually gained a retired economist as a sidekick, so that the more esoteric exposition could be plausibly revealed.

After I worked through the series, I read other novels by MacDonald and then I became more than a fan. I became an obsessed connoisseur. I started hunting down the yellow paged first editions of each book. I bought books about Travis McGee. I watched bad movies based on MacDonald novels. After college I had moved back to Florida and got wind of a semi-academic symposium in Sarasota on the by-then late John D. MacDonald and dragged my wife to it on a whim. There I met even more devoted fans of the man. Some had flown in from California just for the event. I had even started a now lost Geocities page that was to be the ultimate Travis McGee fan site.

Finally, on a trip through Fort Lauderdale I made it to the Holy Grail of McGee fandom, Slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar. This fictitious address at a real marina was completely imaginary until the developer actually built an F pier. The Travis fame forced the place to start numbering the slips from 101 to protect the privacy of the actual owners.

In tribute to Travis McGee, and to give literary stalkers like me a photo op, they placed a literary landmark out on the dock. In a moment of true geekdom, I made sure I immortalized my visit on film. In the next several months, I intend to recreate those heady summer days where I read the Travis McGee books as fast as I could get them by rereading them at a book a month pace. I will post a review or commentary or whatever you want to call it on The Deep Blue Goodbye soon.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Is there a regional writer that you like just because he or she writes about places you are familiar with?