Judging by covers

There's a book out called Norse Code, apparently involving the search for the scions of Odin by tracing their genetic markers. While there is great potential for silliness, that is an awesome title.

My Brain Hurts

The Urban Mythology/Chick-Lit crossover genre must be stopped. Seriously. Failing that, can we get a list of standards or something?

I'd like to thank me for being here.

So what are you reading now, ‘Cat?
State of Fear by Michael Crichton

What’s it about?
The Global Warming “crisis.”

I take it from your use of quote marks that you don’t believe the hype.
You would be correct.

Is it compelling to someone already inclined towards disbelief?
That it is.

Would it be as compelling to someone who believes in Global Warming?
Doubtful.

But doesn’t it contain actual objective scientific data proving that it’s all bullshit?
As a matter of fact, it does.

Shouldn’t that be considered proof?
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

This subject is one of your major button-pushing issues, isn’t it?
Why yes…yes it is.

Are you taking notes in preparation for the next time the subject comes up?
You bet your ass.

One last question: Do you often interview yourself in this manner?
Apparently I do.

Dog-eared Pages

We went to the library today, because I’d read everything in the house and was starting to get shaky. Mrs. Cat and I took turns watching over Cub so we could each look around in peace. I was sitting with him in the Kids’ Room, idly scanning the notices on the wall advertising their reading groups. The posters had cute doggie pictures on them, and theoretically clever captions to entice the patrons to attend. The first one had a picture of a dog in a snow drift, and the caption read: “It’s to cold! Let’s go inside and read a story!”

Really? You used the prepositional “to” instead of the adverbial “too”?

The other one that caught me showed a dog on its back in the grass, and a caption that read: “I don’t know how to read, so I just lay in the grass and listen.”

Holy shit. I hope you’re not going to be teaching grammar in these classes, because you don’t know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. “Lie” (intransitive – no direct object) means to recline on a surface; “lay” (transitive – takes a direct object) means to place something on a surface.

I started to go to the desk and ask if they had any grammar guides, and why weren’t they using them, but Mrs. Cat came back at that point so I could browse instead of start a fight.

I always check out the “New Fiction” shelf first, to see if there’s anything out there I missed hearing about on the grapevine. I saw two books out of a series by Justina Robson. This is the first part of the capsule description on one of them:

“Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts, and elementals…and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: tortured and magic-scarred by elves, rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal, and carrying the essence of a dead elven necromancer in her chest, sometimes she has trouble figuring out who she is.”

The capsule also mentions the Fae, and at some point in this series, Lila goes to Hell. I’m assuming that’s where she picked up her half demon-half elven boyfriend, who’s also an international rock star.

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s like the author took books by Tolkien, Gibson, Asimov, Rice, Hamilton and Pullman, threw them in a blender, drank the resulting mix, then vomited it into her word processor. The series may as well be called My Story Idea Stew

When I hear writers bitching about how hard it is to get published, I have to wonder if it’s not just them. Apparently you can get just about any ol’ word salad out in print.

Speaking of unnecessary books, Mascot Books is rolling out Bo, America’s Commander In Leash next week. This is just the latest in a series of books “by” or about presidential pooches. Bush’s (R-ead my lips) Millie had one. Even Ted Kennedy’s (D-iver down) dog got a deal.

It’s not really that I object to a company cashing in on all of the “excitement” the media has drummed up about that fucking dog (you know, rather than focusing on the fact that the economic underpinnings of this country have been hauled off and sold as scrap metal), but was a grammatically-correct title too much to hope for?

The publisher’s website states that the book is "the first children's book starring the most famous dog in the world."

Oh, really? So the debut of Lassie Come Home in 1940 means nothing? Clifford the Big Red Dog appearing in 1963 has been forgotten? For God’s sake, The Poky Little Puppy is sixty-seven years old (that’s 469 in dog years).

Goofy? Pluto? Marmaduke? Any of these ringing a bell? There are three-year-olds in Jakarta who can’t find the United States on a map, but I guarantee you they know who Snoopy is.

Look, you’re making money off of a temporary fixation. Great. You will include some short historical facts in order to position it as educational. Fine. But leave the hyperbole to professionals, okay?

I do not drink...whine.

I saw where IFC is putting together their first film production, which will be based on Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series.

This is all well and good, but they’re only going to be able to film the first four or five out of the sixteen that are in the series, because they go from Urban Mythology/Chick-Lit Horror straight to S&M porn. Seriously.

Several of my friends were reading the series along with me, and I actually made it further than they did. All the sex was getting very distracting, but Hamilton kept introducing interesting ideas on the paranormal side, like the gestational period for lycanthropes (it depends on what flavor animal you are), and I wanted to see how she developed them.

That all ended with the last one I read…Harlequin, maybe? No lie, the first five pages have a light sprinkling of plot, and are followed by twenty-five pages of porn. I stopped reading after the first few pages and just started skimming, waiting for the actual story to start, but I got fed up with it and quit.

If these books are available on Kindle, I’d expect a wakka-cha-waah-waah soundtrack to play along. As one of my friends put it:

“I won’t read another one unless the title of the damn thing is Contains No Porn.”

It’s kind of a shame. Hamilton isn’t the best writer, but she’s not the worst by any stretch, and her world was a fun place to explore for a while. Anita was an interesting character. She had her faults, but she also had her code. As she’s overcome her faults, she’s also whittled away at her code, and now she’s just a supra-natural slut who’s boring and complains too much.

Obviously, the whole vampire mystique is based on sex. True Blood had sex, Dracula had sex, The Lost Boys had a Rob Lowe poster in a teenaged boy’s closet (!), Lifeforce had sex – it’s nothing new. But when the focus of your novels goes from “Which monster do I need to take out first?” to “Which monster do I want to take me first?”, you’re no longer writing Horror.

Tarnished Bronze

I just finished reading Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson, and frankly, they just don’t write them like that anymore.

This is a good thing.

As much as I enjoy good pulp, this story was just…was just…wow.

First off, Doc is perfect, up to and including the fact that rain doesn’t adhere to his skin or hair. He is the smartest, fastest, strongest, etc. etc. This does not make for an interesting hero. If you can never be beaten, never be tricked, never be stopped, where is the drama? Where is the danger? Yes, I realize these novels are the literary equivalent of cotton candy, but still.

Then there’s the team; the five guys that Doc picked up that are the second-most experts in their respective fields (the first being Doc, naturally). Their entire raison d'être is to marvel about how awesome Doc is. The author also apparently lost his thesaurus along the way, because he only ever uses one adjective to describe each of the team members; “waspish Ham” or “puritanical Renny,” for example.

Suspension of disbelief is critical when you read Adventure pulp, but even so, the author has to maintain a world the reader can believe in within the context of the novel, and Robeson doesn’t.

The friend who lent the book to me opined that it was impossible to describe how bad it really is, but I think I can. From page 157:

“Upward wound the underground stream.”

Laying aside the fact that the sentence begins with the adverb, the implication is that the water is flowing uphill. With such a basic violation of physics so casually presented, can the rest of the book be any better?

(The answer is “no,” by the way.)

Keep Me in Mind

I’m reading a very interesting book called The Overflowing Brain. The author’s central premise is that our brains have remained relatively unchanged for 40,000 years, and his main question is “How does a Stone Age brain cope with the vast amounts of information in our digital world?”.

I haven’t finished the book, so I don’t yet know his answer to that question, but one part in particular jumped out at me.

Some background:

In the book The Tipping Point, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, studies “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable,” and he states that it takes three kinds of people acting in concert: Connectors, who have “an extraordinary gift” for making friends; Mavens, who are information specialists; and Salesmen, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.

In the section on Connectors, he mentions that these people have very large social networks, usually numbering around 150 people. Gladwell further states that 150 is about the maximum number of people you can maintain deep social ties with (this is defined as people whose birthdays, interests, favorite movies, etc. you know and keep up with – not just knowing their names).

The reason this was called to mind is that in The Overflowing Brain, the author asks why the Cro-Magnon brain was so large, since they didn’t have the amount of information to deal with that modern man does. A theory was suggested that it was used for keeping track of social interactions. The study that was consequently carried out seemed to bear out this theory. It was discovered that the smaller the cortical area (the part we use for processing information and memory) in relation to the total size of the brain, the smaller the social circle maintained by the animal (in this case, primates). According to the chart generated by the research, modern man’s cortical area can support a social network of about 150 people.

I thought that was cool: Our brain size determines the number of close friends we keep.

So next time someone wants to send you a friend request on Facebook, tell them your brain is full.

Bubbles in the Brain

IQ; UQ; We all Q!

So I’m feeling a little bummed today. Y’see, I’m reading this book called Outliers, and one section discusses innate genius. The example is a man who blew the top out of the standard IQ test – he was literally off of their charts – and had to be given another one developed specifically to measure IQs above the range of the standard test. He got every question right except this one: Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to…?

Now, I knew the answer as soon as I read the question, and that’s what brung me low. Apparently I possess the knowledge to be able to answer esoteric questions built on obscure idioms, and the skills to sort and apply them, but this doesn’t translate into people beating down my door to hire me. (I’m not claiming that I would do as well on the rest of the test, by the way – pride goeth and all that; this just happened to be a question I could answer.)

***

Famous Cats in History

Saw this blog post today:

The Cat who started the Civil War

After General Nathanial Greene’s death, a young Yale University graduate, Eli Whitney, came to Savannah to take a tutoring job. Whitney began working for Greene’s widow, Catharine, and it was at Mulberry Grove that Whitney invented the cotton gin, the machine that revolutionized the production of cotton.

In fact, Whitney met Mrs. Greene on a ship from Rhode Island to Georgia when he was moving to take the teaching job and she was going to remarry. They struck up a friendship, and when he discovered that the pay for the teaching job was half what he had been promised, she offered to let him live at Mulberry Plantation while he decided what to do next.

At Mulberry Grove, much of the evening conversation was about the difficult economic situation plantation owners faced. At that point in US history, slavery was a dying enterprise. Slaves were expensive to keep and there was little profitable work for them to do. The market for local crops, indigo and rice would not support large plantations, and though growing cotton was a possibility, it was too expensive separating the cotton seeds from the fiber to make the crop profitable.

A few days later, Whitney was in the plantation barnyard watching a cat try to catch a chicken through a wire fence. Each time the cat would reach through the fence for the chicken, all he would bring back was a paw-full of feathers. This lit the bulb in Whitney’s imagination and he realized that folks were trying to solve the wrong problem with cotton. The solution wasn’t separating the seeds from the cotton fiber; it was separating the fibers from the seeds. He devised a screen-wire basket in which a roller with small picks would pull the fibers through the screen, leaving the seeds on the other side. This became his Cotton Engine, and it was an immediate success throughout the cotton-growing regions of the south. This drove a huge demand for field labor in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and led to a great transfer of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas, greatly upsetting slave families and leading to the upheaval that led to the Civil War some sixty years later.

Had Whitney not seen that cat, who knows what would have happened in American history? This is why a cat should be credited with starting the Civil War.

It was a cute post, but ignores the fact that slavery was not the underlying cause of the War of Northern Aggression.

***

From the Mailbag

(Whose robots would you rather have send you e-mail, Tyrell’s or Skynet’s? )

While I understand and appreciate the frustration people are feeling with their elected public serpents, sentences like this:

“We believe the Federal Reserve together with the above financial elites covertly manufactured the credit and real estate bubble to enhance continued foreign investment in their Treasury debt Ponzi scheme while generating obscene profits for Wall Street at the expense of the American people.”

encroach on tinfoil hat territory. The sheer number of people that would have had to be involved in this “scheme” ensures it wouldn’t remain secret. They have a legitimate gripe, though, since we’re all losing lots of money. Apparently, they are now too poor to even be able to afford commas.

It’s easy to dismiss them as goofballs, but they at least know their way around the amendment process, wanting to convene a National Convention to avoid the rigged system that is Congress. I wish them success in a spunky, underdog kind of way, but I was immediately reminded of this quote from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Interface:

“It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt.”