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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "thegameiam" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:22 pm
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surprises
Tonight, Sarah and I watched Up. This is a very good movie, but the billing and advertisement it has is radically misleading. This is not a comedy - there are funny parts, but it is not a comedy at all. Rather, this is a reflection on coming to terms with pain, and making the best of what you are handed. Sarah and I were both completely unprepared for the emotional intensity of this movie: unlike most other films which deal with loss and abandonment, this one is honest about how that feels.
It's very good, and definitely worth watching, but it is far more sentimental than romantic, and more reflective than comic.
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Last week, we used our free tickets to see The Arena Stage production of The Fantasticks at the The Lincoln Theatre. It was okay - I hadn't ever seen the show before, so I'm not sure whether the director's approach of setting it in an abandoned amusement park added something or not, and I'm not sure whether the show always has so many cool magic tricks.
The central premise of the story, that El Gallo will, by hurting this couple, cause their love to be deeper and fuller, is sophomoric at best, and at worst profoundly distressing: that is of course the precise type of manipulation that the kids' fathers engage in that leads to the trouble in the first place. However, this is a complaint of the basic story, not this version of it. The acting and singing are good, although El Gallo certainly has the most interesting part - if you like the basic story and music then you'd probably like this version.
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We tore out the Japanese Hollies today - we were able to give them to a person who lives in Virginia to plant in her yard. Afterwards, Sarah planted tulip bulbs over on the east side of the garden path in the sun-spot, so hopefully our backyard will be quite different next year.
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Last week, Sarah and I watched Role Models, and it was absolutely hilarious. We agreed that most people would just find it funny, but it hit a lot of specific funny-nerves for us. It had the most sympathetic take on LARPing I suspect will ever find its way into a non-fan-written movie, and of course KISS was used to great effect and success. Bobb'e Thompson and Ken Jeong's performances are both over the top, and could not have been improved in any way. Fun, fun show.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: Opeth, "Atonement"
Tags: house, movies, reviews
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12:51 am
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In sickness and in health
11 years ago today, Sarah gave her assent to become my wife. There is not a single other thing that has happened to me in my life for which I am more grateful. She is the moon who lights my path at night, and the sun that guides my waking moments.
If I had it to do over again, there would be no hesitation in my actions - I regret not a minute with her.
If this moment were my last, I would consider myself tremendously blessed to have spent this much time with her. God willing, we will have many more moments - I look forward to being an old man with Sarah beside me.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: Seal, "Crazy (Acoustic)"
Tags: sarah
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12:27 am
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The business of the past week
Last weekend, I broke a tooth. Specifically, a lingual cusp on a mandibular molar which had a filling sheared down to the gum-line. One problem with that for me is that I can't ignore the jagged edge - it was very distracting. Fortunately, my dentist is exceptionally old-school: he got me in on Monday morning and put in a temporary cap. I remember that the UMD school had done that with a different molar before, and they put eugenol under the cap, and enough of the tooth grew back that I didn't need a root canal+crown. I don't know if I'll get that lucky again, but I've got an egregious temporary in place for the next couple of weeks.
Yes, Bill Cosby is completely correct about visiting the dentist.
Speaking of how old-school this dentist is, all of his records are paper, and all of the bills are handwritten. He and I had an interesting discussion about the push for electronic medical records: in his case, he would have spend a vast sum of money for the digitization, and he has no in-house computer expertise; the cost of system maintenance and ensuring its security would take his business from being successful to being financially underwater. For someone starting out, it would make a lot of sense to structure a business this way - however, if you're 5 years from retiring, it's unlikely to be a profitable proposition.
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I was blissfully unaware of the controversy that Camile Paglia stirred up in the early 90's. She came to my attention last year with her analysis and defense of Sarah Palin, and I think she's got an interesting and refreshing perspective. So I finally picked up one of her books, Sex, Art, and American Culture. I finished it this morning, and it was a revelation. Several of the essays are negative reviews of academic works, and the erudition she uses in skewering the unfounded pretensions found there is an excellent display of what a real education can provide.
Paglia's criticisms of the emptiness of the academic environment ring true. What's fascinating about this is that they were delivered in 1991, and yet they don't seem dated. This is a good book.
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Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a very good long-form short story. Mysteriously, it's published as a standalone book - it tops out at 60 pages with a generously large font. However, the formatting oddity aside, this is a great story, setting a classic sf topic as an authentic arab story. Chiang's experiment succeeds quite well, and this story is worth an afternoon.
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The DC Library finally improved their website! The catalog is now functional! There are still a couple of "beta" moments - if you put a book on hold, you get dead-ended to a page saying that it was successful - but this is a huge step in the right direction. Props to all involved.
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For those who have been asking, Sarah is having more GI issues which are being treated with varying degrees of success. We're doing some more diagnostic tests this week, and hopefully they will shed some more light on how to get her through this. We're also looking at a different approach to integrative medicine (more on this as it develops) - that might be able to identify and correct underlying issues which are the source of the assorted ailments she's had over the last several years.
It's pretty hard on her spirit to have so much health trouble. Prayers, good thoughts, and get-togethers are welcome and appreciated.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: See Spot Run, "Weightless"
Tags: books, reviews, s-f, sarah
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11:00 pm
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Provocative
I don't know what first alerted me to look for Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. However, I'm very glad that I found it: this is the best book of short stories I've read in a very long time. Chiang possesses the gift of distillation - his stories are precisely as long as they need to be, and no longer. Further, they explore religious and cultural themes in a truly fascinating way: he takes the story of the tower of Babylon at face value, and then explores what it would mean to be one of the workers on it; he postulates a world where the animating force behind the golem is widely used; he explores what it would mean to live in a world where angelic visitations, along with visions of heaven and hell were commonplace. Refreshingly, he does not shy away from horrifying implications of his premises. The stories were breathtaking in their beauty: At the end of each one, I found myself torn between hurrying on to the next one and meditating on the significance of the one I had just finished. He only has one other book in print at this time, and I can't wait to read it.
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In contrast to Chiang, I know precisely what attracted me to Genesis: I was walking through the new books section of the Arlington County Library, and a book by Ben Bova caught my attention. However, while I was looking at that one, I saw Genesis. It's a short novella, and it uses a classic form in a new way. The structure of the book is a prospective student attempting to pass an entrance examination - similar to Connie Willis' D.A. among many others. However, this book has a metastory structure - the student is presenting a biographical analysis of a person critical to the founding of her society. In the process, there are marvellous debates about both what it would mean to live in an ideal society, the criteria for rebellion to be legitimate, and what it means to be human. This is a great book which is completely impossible to put down - I picked it up on Friday and finished it on Shabbat morning before shul.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Whatnot - Thunderclouds | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: books, reviews, s-f
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08:09 pm
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Struggle not with crazy
Twice in one week, I came face to face with some serious nut. Specifically, I ran into Rabbi Imanuel Ravad, of mikvah-tikvah-hope fame (warning: sound). His basic methodology is to go to various orthodox synagogues (I saw him on shabbat at KMS, and then during the week at Kesher Israel) and hand out pamphlet packages. At KMS, I successfully avoided him. However, I was late to pray at Kesher, and so I ended up actually talking to him.
If I were trying to make myself come across as crazy, I would talk like he does. His whole raison d'être is to get not converts, but disciples: he want to convince orthodox Jews to go missionize to the conservative, reform, and unaffiliated population. He speaks peremptorily - perfectly willing to cut you off if you question one of his catchphrases in the middle - but I was able to get him to string some sentences together. The price of doing this? I had to read his pamphlets. Yikes.
Let's dissect this:
There's an outer trifold heavy-gauge four-color one-sided flyer - on this, we see a dove with an olive branch, a rose, and something that looks like it's supposed to represent water. Reading the text, we see that a bunch of words are randomly capitalized and/or underlined, and there is both an accusatory statement about the wealth of the community and an exhortation to raise money and send it to him for mikvah education.
There were TWO identical donation envelopes, and they were covered on both sides (!) with exhortations about how important it is to raise money for this project. The envelopes show that the random use of capitalization and underlining is a regular practice of Rabbi Ravad (interestingly, his name in Hebrew is spelled with the " implying that it's an acronym - perhaps he is claiming lineage from the RAVa"D - but who can tell?). Along with the envelopes were a refrigerator magnet and a sticker, the former bearing a collection of phrases which appear elsewhere, and the latter bearing a bizarre picture of a table with a rose on it along with the slogan "PLEASE LEAVE the TABLE CLEAN As you would like to find it!"
That sticker had caused a bunch of weird conversations between Sarah and I a few years ago, back when we were last at Max's, we noticed that one of them was stuck on the wall over the table in a booth. We puzzled over the symbology of the rose on the table - it led us to think that there was some sexual undertone to it, but we eventually came to the conclusion that it was just the result of the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" design process.
Now on to the meat of the thing: there are two fold-out pamphlets, 11"x34", which are four-folded into 8 normal magazine size pages, and then horizontally trifolded to fit inside the flyer. The pages have a confusing orientation which is unnumbered - one set of four facing pages are all oriented the same way, while the other side has two pages upright, the third upside-down, and the fourth (a black-and-white copy of the outer flyer) oriented sideways. I understand why the last page would be sideways, but the reasoning for putting what I'll call the 7th page upside down escapes me. The pamphlets are a dizzying array of typefaces and fonts, single spaced with less than a centimeter of margin.
The actual content of the pamphlets could best be described as requiring winnowing - much of it is filled with assertions rather than proof. One example:Repentance could not be a meaningless slip of the tongue or a fleeting thought. There is a need for the sinner to recognize and realize the severity of his sin and rebellion against the Creator, G-d. To that end he must realize and sense the greatness of G-d. The best way to effectuate this sense is through immersion. Therefore, repentance requires immersion.
My thoughts: I believe that proof is supposed to precede any statement which begins with "therefore." Assertion != proof.
Much of the rest is filled with poor argument such as the following:2. "Although I have explained that anyone who repents is required to immerse, nevertheless the lack of immersion does not undo the repentance! As soon as one meditates on repentance, he is considered as an unblemished righteous person. (Ohr Zaru'a)
3. However it is difficult to comprehend how a person who has committed a sin, or crime, can so easily cleanse and purge himself just with a fleeting thought of repentance, without any physical action to correct his wrongdoing, especially for sins between man and man, which require that compensation be made for all damages, followed by a request for forgiveness from our fellow man before asking forgiveness from G-d. Perhaps the "Ohr Zaru'a" writes: "as" an unblemished righteous, because he is still missing few actions in the process of repentance in order to make it complete. Immersion is one of those necessary actions (I.R.)
Now, I'm not exactly a talmid hakhham (well-educated student of the wise ones), but the argument attributed to IR there (I'm guessing that that is Imanuel Ravad) is one of the least well-thought-out things I've ever encountered - here the Ohr Zarua is specifically disagreeing with Ravad's thesis, and Ravad turns him on his head.
And yet, those are the most coherent two paragraphs in the entire 16 pages. If you want a sense of how these read, check out the English-language articles page on his website. Or don't if you value your sanity. Warning: these are MS word .doc files (boo, bad netiquitte!).
Anyway, it's my opinion that if you were trying to get someone to think that the whole enterprise of mikvah was absolutely insane, you'd do what Ravad is doing. Perhaps this, like Halichos bas Yisroel is secretly an antisemitic plot designed to make people hate their own religion? Nah - even the antisemites would think he was crazy.
Feel free to avoid this guy.
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To lighten things up, the real question is this: Is Darth Vader a whiny little bitch? ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) theferrett clearly thinks so, and his reasoning is quite compelling...
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: Living Colour - Cult Of Personality | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: rant, religion
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12:55 am
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Ideals
I just finished two books, and was surprised that they both touched on some of the same themes.
Manliness, by the amusingly-named Harvey Mansfield, is not a self-discovery book, although it's shelved with them. Mansfield's thesis is that not much effort has been put into defining and characterizing manliness - both the positive and negative aspects of it. His approach passes the sniff test with regard to the inherent contradictions in the gender-neutral society, and several chapters are spent in a philosophical review of the philosophical underpinnings of feminism and its development. In truth, this is a book of philosophy. He makes a pretty coherent case that many of the approaches taken by those thinkers at the core of the feminist movement were less about changing the roles that men and women had and more about attacking the idea of roles at all - he shows the thread of will-to-power thinking from Nietzsche to de Beauvoir. One refreshing aspect of this book is that it serves as a refresher survey in a large number of philosophical approaches. I liked his concluding approach (based on John Stuart Mill) that the best way to address society in general on this topic is to increase the distance between public and private behavior and expectations. While his tone fluctuates from conversational to pedantic, I think this is still a pretty good book. He did make a connection that I hadn't thought of previously in a throwaway line - Darwinian evolution can be understood as a market-based approach to understanding speciation and diversity: neat!
I also finished both volumes of The New Frontier, and it lives up to its hype. This is great superhero storytelling, and it would be at home in any list of the best comic stories ever.
However, the interesting thread which tied these together for me is the heroic ideal - much the way Bill Willingham approached the heroic, Darwyn Cooke and Mansfield both assert that the true measure of heroism is not lack of fear, but the act of rising above it. There is something manly about most classic superheroes, but it's hard to quite put my finger on precisely what it is.
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Sarah's still suffering from GI-crud, so I stayed up to make both chicken soup and applesauce, and I think the soup is ready to go away now...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Paco de Lucia, "Mantilla de Feria"
Tags: books, comics, reviews
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01:09 pm
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Reverse Order
Today, I painted another coat on my door (finally), and so I get to wait until it dries to close it. I was hoping to go on a pre-veterans' day program, but Sarah's doing a GI-routine, and there's no lock. So I'm home for a bit...
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Last night, we went to the wedding of one of my cousins to a delightful woman, and it was lovely. (Better: this is one of my gentile cousins marrying another gentile! Rare and shocking - I've said before that my family is the intermarriage problem). The location was unusual: the Mansion House of the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. Coming after Shabbat, we were late, so we missed the penguin (which apparently bit my mother and grandmother).
Everything about the whole affair was classy and unpretentious, much like the couple themselves, and I wish them all the happiness that can come with marriage. It's a great institution, and I'm glad to see them institutionalized. (rimshot)
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We spent shabbat in Kemp Mill with some long-time friends, and we got so see a bunch of folks we haven't seen in a very long time. Kemp Mill is pretty much where a large number of the community end up once they have children, and the best thing about it is the large number of old friends.
However, it's very, very suburban - no sidewalks, and other than the shul, pretty much nothing is walking distance. The synagogue (KMS) and community seem very oriented and geared toward raising children: to a person, every one of our old friends who we saw there are parents. Day school tuition and the inherent insanity of it were major topics (one year of a mid-priced Jewish high school costs more than my entire college education). There was a bar mitzvah (this is common enough that the "Yankees win!" kiddush is getting put off to December...), so the kid gave the sermon and it was pretty decent for a 13-year-old. I was surprised at how cavernous the main sanctuary is: I had a hard time not just hearing the sermon, but also when the Rabbi spoke, and it didn't seem to just be me - kaddish was thoroughly out-of-synch. The sheer number of children running around at any time was stunning to me: I know intellectually that lots of people have lots of kids, but seeing them racing around that much (the image should be "pack of Tazmanian Devils") was unexpected.
I can't for the life of me figure out why nobody has made sidewalks a crusade: here is this community which has oriented its priorities toward raising children, and in fact it isn't actually safe to go anywhere. Worse, given the size of the Orthodox population, there are huge numbers of people walking in the street on Friday night and Saturday morning. And of course it's dark. If I lived there, I would make it a priority to have sidewalks installed - or at least the asphalt pathways like those on college campuses: the danger of breaking an ankle is a lot better than the danger of getting run over.
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Why is netflix awesome? Because this week, we watched The Lost Room, and it was phenomenal. I've rarely been so completely hooked and transfixed by television. Sarah and I were strongly reminded of a higher-budget version of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. All of the characters were believable (!) and there is a strong Monkey's Paw component to it. It's so good that we gave it 5 stars, and it might need to be part of our permanent collection.
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We had gotten our free theatre tickets, and used them to go to 26 Miles last Tuesday. It's a road trip between an estranged mother and daughter, and it's excellent. The WaPo review is decent, but I disagree with their characterization of the male roles as "thin"; the moment that I was hooked was the encounter with the tamale vendor (about 1/3 of the way in). I don't think I've encountered a more true description of how cooking is an aspect of love - the poetry of his words brought tears to my eyes. At that moment, I was hooked: I identified painfully with the parental estrangement brought on by divorce, and the whole night was draining emotionally. Strike that: not draining, but cathartic.
This play does what only very good drama can do: it says true things with just enough distance that an audience member can identify with the story and actually go through the emotional journey. I highly recommend this play.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  busy
Current Music: Rush - Losing It | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: family, house, reviews, s-f, sarah, theatre
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07:11 pm
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Something new for today
It turns out I've been making a couple of incorrect berakhot (blessings) for a long time. I regularly eat puffed wheat (yum!) for breakfast. I had always (heh - by "always" I mean "for the last 12 years") thought that puffed wheat would get the blessing mezonot beforehand and al hamihyah afterwards. Well, when I went to find out the blessing for puffed kamut (everyone needs a change, right?), I learned that I should have been saying adama beforehand and borey nefashot afterwards.
It turns out that the former combination is for grain products not the grains themselves - much like hagefen is for wine, not grapes.
Old dogs, new tricks, and all that...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Pagan Baby"
Tags: religion
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10:30 pm
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Saying it better than I can
I've been pretty appalled at the Obama administration's conduct with regard to Fox news. I see this as an example of Nixonian enemies-list-style politics, and it's frustrating that nobody seems to have reminded the President that he isn't the president of half the country: he's the president of the whole country, which include lots of folks who will disagree with this or that, and many who might not even be polite about their disagreement.
In the Examiner, Dennis Miller says it a lot better than I do. Now that is how the smack is laid down.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  sleepy
Current Music: Bela Fleck, "Four Wheel Drive"
Tags: politics
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08:05 pm
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Musings on a night with extra silly
For the life of me, I don't understand what would possess otherwise sane people to drive into Georgetown on Halloween - 3/4 of the streets are blocked, and the ones that aren't are choked with cars and half-drunk folks dressed as RoboCop.
Then again, maybe that's the attraction...
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When I walked home after shul this morning, I passed Commander Salamander, a local punk accessory store which normally has mannequins in the bay windows, and I noticed that they had changed from a week ago. And then one of them waved and winked at me. I about jumped out of my skin - it was an "is this Amsterdam?" moment, but it cracked me up for a few hours. She was dressed in the "Halloween sultry" style - more "bad girl devil" than anything truly sinister...
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Foxfier pointed me to this post about the origins of a Scottish custom, and it got me thinking about some of my Halloween angst.
I've been in the "Halloween is a terrible thing" camp for years now - I've had letters published attacking it, and have been one of the iconoclasts standing athwart the tide of custom in every venue in which I've found myself. Sarah has largely put up with this: she considers Halloween harmless fun, and in fact has True Blood-style fangs in at this moment (I tease her by implying that she's sparkly like the Twilight vampires).
Part of my reticence about this comes from a reasoned critique of Halloween - the symbolism of going begging door to door, with the implied if not actualized threat "trick or treat." Another part of my reticence comes from my rejection of all things pagan - my conversion to Judaism is an explicit rejection of the polytheism and loose morality (let alone their shaky grasp of historical evidence) that I had encountered among the neopagans. I'm pretty much alone among the people whom I know in that I have in fact actually smashed idols. In my case, they were my own (my father had a bunch of my stuff in his garage that he wanted me to take, and among them were my idols and altars - a sledgehammer made very satisfying work of this), and I really understand aleinu when it talks about detestable idolatry being removed from the world.
But perhaps I've gone too far in this - by treating this as something to oppose, do I strengthen it? Do I provide legitimacy to that which is inherently manufactured via misunderstanding? Maybe I should just have an absinthe and relax - the over and undertones which are present aren't that serious - certainly Halloween as practiced in Georgetown bears exactly zero resemblance to an actual pagan celebration (whether the actual one or the neopagan versions of the touchy-feely-one).
Food for some thought for me.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  thoughtful
Current Music: Steven Lynch, "Taxi Driver"
Tags: rant, religion
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09:59 pm
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Spiritual Boredom
Spiritual Boredom, by Dr. Erica Brown, is an excellent book. She looks at boredom as a mental and linguistic phenomenon. While the book has far more thought-provoking ideas than mitigative suggestions, this should not be perceived as a flaw; her exploration of precisely what one experiences in boredom are thorough and edifying. One idea that she discusses, and even makes it into the practical suggestions at the end is the Chomskyan idea that the language of boredom is itself something that creates boredom - that been there, done that is a caustic phrase which implies that experiences do not improve or change with repetition. It's a very short book at only 170 pages, and this is an vein which could have been more thoroughly mined out, but she provides an excellent starting point for self-analysis. I highly recommend reading this if, like pretty much everyone on the planet, you have ever found organized religious services boring.
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I have finally admitted defeat: tonight Sarah and I joined that bastion of excessive capitalist fervor, Costco. Ugh. Yes, it is cheaper, and yes, something there gives me a dirty feeling inside.
I had the moment of Costco-zen tonight: I saw Sweet-n-low saccharin packets at a decent price - $10 for 1500 packets. And then I realized: I'm the only one who uses them, and I use one per day, so this would be something well over four years worth of Sweet-n-low. And back to the shelf they returned.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Magnapop, "Satellite"
Tags: books, rant, reviews
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10:39 pm
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I had no idea this was so good
Sarah and I watched Casablanca for the first (!) time tonight, and I can honestly say that I never expected it to live up to its hype, but I'm completely floored. How in the world had I not seen this before?
Current Location: home
Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: none
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06:12 pm
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Half a loaf
I've been meaning to write something nice about President Obama for a little while - I'm glad he gave me an opportunity. Specifically, I think that his medical marijuana policy is a step in the right direction. Which direction is that? Why, New Federalism, of course! Regulation of a substance which does not actually traverse state lines should of course be a state, not federal matter, and so I see this as a glimmer of light in an otherwise cloudy sky.
Of course, the topic at hand is one which is rife with silliness - of course marijuana should be legalized, even though it's prone to cause all sorts of ills (like forgetfulness, gluttony, and listening to the Greatful Dead). The simple fact that something isn't healthful isn't sufficient reason for society to take an active interest in it, in my opinion anyway - but then again, I'm against all of the nanny-state foolishness that returns every few years: the many-headed hydra of do-gooderness must be opposed at every step, or we'll find ourself living in a bubble-wrapped, homogenized, sanitized existence, where only the pre-selected options are permitted to us.
However, there are two things about Obama's approach I don't like:
1) This is inherently selective enforcement of the law. That is a troubling state of affairs, which can lead to the corruption of the entire justice system. I could easily see the administration changing their mind if confronted with an "unpopular" suspect. As Shakespeare said in Measure for Measure(2:1) We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
It would be better to entirely repeal the law, and make the de facto and de jure laws the same.
2) The approach to federal power that the current (and previous) administration(s) take is one I don't like - it presumes that a state only has those powers which are explicitly granted to them by the federal government. This of course, is a complete inversion of the Tenth Amendment (and the entire constitutional system): sovereignty is derived by the states from the people, and is granted by the states to the federal government, not the other way around. This is a basic premise of limited government, and in fact government by the consent of the governed. Citizens of states should not be forced to grasp for crumbs of free authority dropped from the glove of the federal government.
It's imperfect, but it beats the previous administrations take on the same topic, so for that I'll say "Thanks, President Obama!"
Current Location: home
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: The Police, "Synchronicity II"
Tags: politics
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04:06 pm
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Self-actualization in opposition to antihappiness (spoiler)
I finished reading From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust on Shabbat evening, and it was good. This is thoroughly odd book: the premise is that this is a self-help book which has been written by the therapist of a group of superheroes whose internal neuroses are tearing them up - the supervillains have all been defeated in the so-called Götterdämmerung battle, you see, and the organization (analogous to the Avengers or Justice League) is not-quite purposeless at this time.
There is a plot to the therapy - Dr. Brain follows the heroes through a whodunnit and uncovers all kinds of hidden relationships and contradictory explanations as the mystery unfolds. The heroes and heroines are familiar without being directly ripped off from mainstream comics (although the origin of the BrothaFly owes more than it should to Peter Parker). The narrative is entirely from Dr. Brain's perspective, and is laced with all sorts of analysis-psychobabble which would be familiar to anyone who has endured mediocre therapy sessions, and this psychobabble is sufficiently realistic to be a turn-off for the book. Between that and the characters complete unlikability when they are introduced, there were a few points about 1/3 of the way in where I wasn't sure whether I would keep reading.
However, I'm glad I did.
X-man* is an obnoxious Black Nationalist who sees conspiracies behind every action, and projects his anger onto his relationships with the other heroes and is very much the caricature of the racial demagogue in his dealings and statements. He announces a hidden racial legacy of the now deceased Hawk King, and sees every other event which befalls the heroes as being a part of this larger conspiracy. He attempts to use this esoteric legacy as evidence that he should become the new chairman of operations, and in so doing paints himself as a paranoid schemer who is using all those around him to fulfill his own personal ambitions.
Think Rorshach, except Faust did a better job than Moore did of showing how unpleasant someone that paranoid is to be around.
Much of the action tracks X-man's descent into paranoid ravings and projection fantasies, and he provides the impetus for the group's adventures and is the most interesting of the subjects of Dr. Brain's analysis.
( plot spoilers below the cut )
The book has one of the best-plotted stories underlying it that I've read in a long time, and the the relationship dynamic between Iron Lass and Power Grrrrl is a wonderful subplot. As a bonus, it provides the best explanation for Kryptonite that I've ever seen (certainly since John Byrne's Man of Steel series, and I think that Faust's is actually more clever).
I recommend this for anyone who enjoys superhero comics.
* it took me a minute to figure out X-man's gimmick: X like Malcolm, not like Cyclops...
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How cool is the Arlington County Library? I lost my card the other day, and not only did they let me check out a passel of books without it, they found it and mailed it to me. Awesome. Big cool points in my book.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "Black Dog"
Tags: books, comics, reviews
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05:56 pm
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One of the guys
Foxfier asks about male/female groupings in an interesting way. I have observed this phenomenon in two not-quite-single-sex environments: work and the synagogue.
Because I go to an Orthodox synagogue, the overwhelming number of people who are there when it isn't a Shabbat or holiday service are male. However, we've had several periods where one or two women will regularly attend. The women in question tend not to be dating any of the men in attendance, or are married but there without their husbands. In the socialization after prayer, I notice that these women become "one of the guys" - they're completely welcome and integrated, but in effect they're not functioning as "representative women": their gender is ignored because to not ignore it would change the dynamic of interaction between everyone there.
As for work - being a network engineer, a typical work environment can have the aroma of sweat socks without trying very hard. There are women in networking, but there sure aren't very many - on my project there are about 15 people on the engineering staff, of whom one is female. There are a lot of women in the sales and project management working groups, but not so many on the actual tech side. Most of the women I've met in networking environments behave remarkably like the men in the same environs - this goes for all of the back-and-forth "doing the dozens" and other endemic habits.
I wonder if the condition that Foxfier is describing - that groups tend to be dominated by one gender or the other - could be based on self-selection to avoid both preening and competition? If there's one woman and three men, the men may start showing off to impress her. However, once she's made it clear that she's not available to any of them, and they've accepted that, the four of them can interact without puffery of that nature. Just a thought...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Doves, "Darker"
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05:28 pm
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All Good Things
I picked up Michael Flynn's book Falling Stars on Friday, and devoured it yesterday. I don't think I've ever read a more satisfying conclusion to a science fiction series. Not every loose end it tied up, because in the words of Dr. Manhattan, "nothing ever ends." Chase and Jacinta's relationship is excruciating - it's hard not to wonder whether I or anyone else would do as well in that situation. The growth of Jimmy Poole as a character is a wonder - his actions are a refreshing testament of what it means to be a man.
This whole series has a conversational, easy to dive into feeling - it reads like current events that didn't in fact happen. Amazingly, it feels more plausible than many of the things which did in fact happen during the same time period.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: U2, "One Tree Hill"
Tags: books, reviews, s-f
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10:26 pm
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If I can predict the news on one channel, am I a mainstream medium?
Tim Burton's movie, 9, was pretty good; that is to say, I liked it, like I like all of the other Burton movies. There were some plot weaknesses - it wasn't quite clear precisely how the macguffin was supposed to actually help, but apparently it did somehow. Of course, the visuals were fantastic, and were the best reason to be there, but the premise bears a little reflection: the rise of the robots is a familiar trope, but the difference is that the machine coveted the souls of the resistance - more than their defeat, it craved the very humanity whose downfall it had orchestrated. And of course, that is the very flaw which led directly to its downfall. Provocative, and I hope that this author writes more stories.
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L. Jagi Lamplighter blogs as arhyalon, and her new book Prospero Lost is quite good - Miranda and Mab are compelling characters about whom I want to know more. One of the things I like a great deal about Lamplighter's book is that she has clearly envisioned a whole world which operates according to its own rules - not that she'll reveal what they are all at once, but the rooms in the houses she describes feel lived-in and homey.
However, there is a serious flaw with this book: it has no ending at all. It doesn't end, it just stops - there's a note "to be continued in..." but as far as I can tell that next book hasn't yet been written isn't yet available, and it would be mighty nice to be able to read this all the way to completion at once.
Add'l edit: I also forgot to mention how clever Lamplighter's approach is to the binding of the Aerie Ones: this is the best explanation for the industrial revolution I've ever encountered in fiction.
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On the other hand, Ender in Exile fits almost-neatly between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game, and is a joy to read. I've been a fan of Card's work since I lived in Utah (I didn't write Ender for nothing, eh?)
It's refreshing to see Card return to the story of Ender himself with the improved writing skill that he's developed over the past thirty years, and for long-time Enderverse denizens, this book is like a tub of really, really good and satisfying popcorn.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Rush, "Mystic Rhythms"
Tags: books, reviews, s-f
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11:18 pm
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To everything there is a season
With the passing of Shmini Atzeret (the extra day of festival at the end of Sukkot), we've moved on from the season of big thoughts and strong cares into the more everyday pedestrian times. However, I still had a few observations I wanted to note.
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) is a very, very thought-provoking book, and it is usually portrayed as being a depressing look at the futility of human existence. However, it has never had that effect on me - I see the complaint that there "is nothing new under the sun" as freeing me from the burden of crafting something which is truly new - this is comforting, not disturbing. Further, Solomon's attempt to fully understand human existence through various rigorous pursuits is a clear failure; this is another comfort - human existence is Gödellian and uncertain in nature, and any attempt to formalize a perfect understanding while remaining within human limitations is bound to fail. That the wisest person ever failed in his attempt only reaffirms the notion that I myself would fail as well. The comfort here is that once there is acceptance that knowledge or proof have limits, then the existence of any particular limit of knowledge is no longer shattering to the psyche; even more so, we can accept the idea the different people may come to different answers. We must content ourselves with the knowledge that God alone has the answers to all of the questions.
I still do not like that Simhat Torah services last longer than Rosh Hashana.
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this game looks really awesome</i>.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The Police, "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic"
Tags: religion
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11:03 pm
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Oh, Rocky!
Sarah and I, along with georgetowner and shoshiboo saw opening night of The Rocky Horror Show (stage not picture) at Montgomery College in Rockville.
This show is fabulous, and is completely worth hiring a babysitter/dogsitter/etc. It plays tomorrow through Sunday, which meant that tonight and tomorrow were the only Jewish-holiday-friendly shows.
The cast is lively, the band is talented, and the audience was completely into it. I was surprised at how much lines have changed since I was in the cast (umpteen years ago - the mere fact that someone probably has photos of me in Brad's fishnets is reason enough to never run for public office...) - there were also the timely references to Palin, Billy Mays, the election, "nom nom nom," and many others.
There were some technical difficulties with the microphones, but the cast worked through them like pros. In particular, Sarah Lasko (Janet) and Eric Wisniewski (Frank) were outstanding - Wisniewski was captivating from the first moment he showed up, and he was the best Frank I've seen since Tim Curry.
I had a funny association come to mind after we left - I thought about Reefer Madness and the assorted morality plays of last century. It's an interesting tidbit to note that the mere encounter with the forbidden is enough to completely destroy the lives of Brad and Janet. Frank himself, while played as the sympathetic character, is actually truly monstrous: he's a cannibalistic, murdering rapist who extorts sexual victims into submission. The "horror" in the title of the show is of the Grand Guignol variety - over the top and in your face. And in the end, the truth of the matter is actually spoken by the (relatively) less extreme Riff: "your mission is a failure, your lifestyle's too extreme." Even the presence of the criminologist serves as a collective "tut-tut" at the travails of the lost virtue of our hero and heroine. Someone could write a great master's thesis on this someday.
In any case, this is an excellent show, and totally worth seeing before it vanishes.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Aerosmith, "Sweet Emotion"
Tags: reviews, theatre
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09:57 pm
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Sukkot
Working by myself, it took a total of 2.5 hours to (a) move the plants off of the patio (more tomatoes and cantaloupes to harvest - whee!) (b) take down the existing umbrella & remove the patio chairs (c) haul the sukkah-construction-stuff outside (d) erect the sukkah, and (e) get all of the tables and chairs together and set up.
We hosted two large (9-10 ppl) and one small meal, and were able to do this without using a single piece of disposable plastic or paper. I'm pretty happy about that: this is a first for us this year, and it entailed a whole heck of a lot of dishwashing, but it's worth it to me. I like to think that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve.
This was also a grill-heavy weekend: grilled chicken and kebabs for friday night, planked salmon for saturday night, and burgers for sunday. Mmmmm.... rea'ah nikhoah laSHEM... (c.f. Leviticus 1:17 for the pun). I also made applesauce (recipe below), and that was a big hit as well.
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I really like sukkot as a holiday - I get a strong sense of the feeling of being under God's direct protection and providence. In addition, the prayers particularly speak to me: the hoshanot are probably the oldest consistent prayer form we have - the parade around the reading desk with the arba minim (four species, not four sectarians) has been a contiguous form since the first temple days. All of the other prayer forms we use - the silent prayers, recitation of psalms the way we do them, piyut (liturgical poetry) are developments of comparatively recent vintage - only up to 3,000 years old (psalms, but the big change was the eschewment of instrumental accompaniment 2000 years ago), and in some cases as few as 500 years (many piyutim).
The hoshanot themselves are meditative rather than rational - this is part of why many prayerbooks leave them untranslated, because translations completely fail to capture the essence of what it is that makes them powerful prayers. I think there is a similarity between the meditative nature of the hoshanot and that of the end of the selihot service - the aneinu, for instance, has the same type of alphabetical meditation as today's l'maan amitakh, but the way it feels is quite different. Aneinu is said at a frenzied pace each person by himself, where we are begging God for our salvation on an individual level and hoping to get our request in "under the wire." Hoshanot, by comparison, are stately, with the leader chanting a phrase to be repeated by the congregation during the processional. This is a call for communal, rather than personal, redemption. The different words used in the repeated chant (aneinu = "answer us", hosha na = "please save us") go to the different emotional states - being answered necessarily preceeds a petition for salvation.
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David's Applesauce (cooks for 8-10 hours)
12-15 apples of various varieties (I tend to get 4 granny smith, 4 gala, and then the rest whatever happens to look good at the instant - recently it was courtland/honey crisp/rambo)
crock pot
ground cinnamon
ground cloves, ginger, allspice, nutmeg
Peel the apples and coarsely chop them (not the cores, because cyanide isn't your friend). Toss them into the crock pot, add several shakes of cinnamon and a pinch of the other spices. Add about a shot of water (just enough to wash a little of the spices to the bottom), and cook on "low" overnight. DO NOT OPEN THE LID. After the time has elapsed, remove from heat, stir well, and enjoy.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Led Zepplin, "All of My Love"
Tags: house, recipe, religion
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