Short rounds: of southern accents and cancerous snapping turtles

I've a free moment between family gatherings and outings, so here's a short rounds post on Talk Southern to Me, as well as David Sedaris' new book Calypso.

First up, Talk Southern To Me.   As mentioned a few days ago,  I was interested in the book because its author produces a series on YouTube called "Sh%t Southern Women Say".  Talk Southern to Me is similar, a bit of southern culture and humor, which has chapters on southern manners and culture but is mostly about language; every chapter closes with sayings related to it, and what's not covered there is included in a list of words and their translation at the end. Southerners have a distinct family of dialects, whether we're from the country-club-and-family-money society, or the trailers, muddin', or outlaw-country side of the woods. Southerners, of course, will see themselves and their families in every chapter, and -- depending on how many Yanks they count in their circle of friends -- may be startled to learn that more of their use of language is distinctly southern than they thought. (Expressions like "He used to could", which a Michigan friend of mine of mine was baffled about, are an example.)   Although Fowler is very general at times, I love discovering southern creators who are enthusiastic about preserving the distinct culture of the South in a positive, fun way, instead of edging into prickly defensiveness. Particularly amusing was the section that potent expression, "Bless your/her/his/their heart",  can be used for everything from sincere sympathy to a manners-approved method of gossiping.

David Sedaris, for those who don't know, is an American-born humorist whose essays and short fiction usually evoke a strong sense of pathos, often being unbelievably personal, so much so that discomfort turns to giggles.  Sedaris is an acquired taste, I think, as if a reader is introduced to him in the wrong way they might be left thinking "Why would anyone read him?". He has a strong taste for the odd and unusual, and enjoys derailing social scripts by  asking taxi drivers about local cockfighting laws, or inquiring of supermarket clerks if they have any godchildren. His latest collections of musings, Calypso, seems to be inspired by the onset of old age, as he and his siblings cope with not only the decline of their once-formidable father (who now needs constant care and is alarmingly pleasant to be around,  a distinct change from his forbidding childhood presence), and the suicide of their sister Tiffany.  David himself had a momentary scare with cancer, but the tumor was easily isolated and removable, and he happily fed it to snapping turtles after finding a doctor who was willing to do the operation for him and give him the tumor. Apparently it's illegal for surgeons to give people anything that comes out of them during surgery (presumably C-section babies are an exemption).   Sedaris had hoped to feed the tumor to a snapping turtle which had a cancerous growth on its head (his favorite turtle), but the cheeky reptile disappeared during the winter.  I enjoyed Calypso well enough, but I'm probably too young to appreciate it in full given the general theme.   My favorite Sedaris story remains "Six to Eight Black Men", his rendering of Christmas in the Netherlands.

Oh, and apparently the Southern Women Channel just posted a new episode not a month ago to celebrate the end of hurricane season:

"Lord, I hope it don't flood the Wal-Mart."

"Didje git your milk and bread?"

"Fill up the tub so we can flush the commode!"

"Bless her heart, she's wearin' white rain boots after Labor Day."
"Pray for me, I gotta tell my husband they postponed deer season." 

Very Good, Jeeves

Very Good, Jeeves
© 1930 P.G. Wodehouse
304 pages

This past Saturday I had a very happy surprise. Taking a break from a day of  sacking my closet, wardrobe, and bookcases to donate to charity and get me closer to my simple-living ideal,  I grabbed a tale of Wodehouse stories to re-read during lunch. Imagine my delight to realize...this was a collection I'd purchased to read one April, then forgotten that I hadn't already read it.  (I have quite a bit of Wodehouse, and they all blur together in the imagination.)

Now, I've reviewed other Wodehouse story collection before, and he like Bernard Cornwell is so consistent that my comments, both descriptive and appraising, would only copy past reviews.   With a few adjustments, I could literally paste-in my review for Right Ho Jeeves, as the difference lies in one being a novel and the other (this) a collection of stories.   In short, Wodehouse has a brilliant way with the English language, which is never funnier than in his hands,  and he tells amusing stories about a society wastrel and his Machiavellian butler, who works endlessly to keep his young master out of trouble,  i.e. marriage and useful employment. Jeeves' solutions also have a way of destroying tacky articles of clothing and art that Bertie insists on dragging home. In a full-length novel there are multiple schemes from different people afoot, sometimes conflicting with one another and sometimes complementing one another.    What one values most (language aside) from a Wodehouse novel is how innocent they are, providing  mirth and drama without a hint of malice.  (A few months ago, an article called "P.G. Wodehouse: Balm for the Modern Soul"  made me especially appreciative of this.)


There's a full run-down of the stories on Wikipedia if you're curious. 

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
© 2014 Caitlin Doughty
272 pages

Memento mori -- remember your death. Young Caitlin Doughty couldn't help but remember it; as a child she was traumatized by the memory of another girl her age plummeting to her death inside a shopping mall.  The event led to episodes of compulsive behavior as Caitlin did whatever she could to keep the Boatman at bay, whether that be avoiding stepping on newly-fallen leaves or drooling into her shirt.  A slightly older Caitlin, one facing adulthood, realized she had to face Death, too: so she started working at a crematory.   There, faced on a daily basis with faces of decay,  she began to realize that her unhealthy obsession with avoiding Death --  avoiding  facing the reality of it -- was endemic to modern society,  and began to chart a new course for herself, as someone who sought to help people deal with death in a more healthy manner.

Corpses aside, this is a funny book -- but one with a serious heart.  Caitlin uses her experiences at her first funeral home -- with a good bit of physical and morbid comedy as she learns the ropes --  to review how  death and funerary practices have changed in the United States,  and to explain what actually goes in during cremation or embalming.   For most of history, death was an everyday reality, inescapable. Disease and famine  were never far away, and when deaths happened they were handled within the home; family members saw to the final care of their loved ones' remains.   Death is  now shoved away into the recesses of our minds, hidden until a serious sickness or a sudden accident forces it into the light. Doughty argues that this is psychologically and socially unhealthy: not only is contemporary society obsessed with youth, but it fights death to the point of making itself miserable. Although we continue to defer death,  Our triumphs in modern medicine have produced a bitter victory: as societies become more proportionally populated by aging citizens,   we're left with a question:  where are the adults who will be taking care of these rising aged?  The numbers of geriatric physicians are falling, even as the need increases.   On a more practical level,  people's refusal to consider death means that when it happens,   few families are prepared for it, financially or otherwise.. Few can distinguish between what is legally necessary and what the funeral home recommends, and are cajoled into accepting burdensome fiscal obligations.

When Caitlin began working in a crematory,  it was a way to make money and face her fears. What it became, however, was a vocation, as she realized she wanted to help people manage death better.  Not only did she want to educate people about what happened to their bodies after death, but she wants to open eyes to the possibility of making death a meaningful part of life again.  It isn't necessary to eject people from their loved one's homes as soon as they perish, or pickle them and entomb them in vaults that seal them off from decay,   the author argues. The family can and should be part of the burial process; Caitlin's own funeral home now offers families the option to wash and dress the deceased themselves, as well as push the button that begins the cremation, which serves as a powerful moment of closure. She also explores the concept of green burials, which return allow human remains to be reclaimed by nature quickly and purposely.

I cannot recall how I stumbled on Doughty's YouTube channel ("Ask a Mortician").   which made me aware of this book, but I'm glad I did. Although it's often funny, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is a work of tender reflection on the most haunting aspect of the human experience.  It's definitely one worth reading.

Related:
Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, F. Forrester Church
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

Agent to the Stars

Agent to the Stars
© 1997, 2005 John Scalzi
286 pages

They're heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere.  Extraterrestrials exist, and they've been watching our television.  The good news is they don't hold it against us -- though they don't want to meet any of our politicians.  They've seen the debates.   Who are they? They are the Yherjak, an amiable race of aliens who have the misfortune of looking like giant mounds of snot. They smell like fish. And...they're aware that this will cause a little image problem in a first contact situation.   Obviously, they need a good agent to finesse things -- to maybe use Hollywood to introduce the planet the idea of repulsive-but-friendly aliens.   Such is the setup for Agent to the Stars, a wonderfully funny  light-SF tale that features sarcastic aliens,  talking dogs,  and a little Hollywood drama, including abducted paparazzi.

After reveling in the Star Trek spiff that was Redshirts,  and especially in the codas which so transformed a comic novel into something seriously touching, I looked forward to this on its premise alone. Scalzi doesn't disappoint. This is not 'serious' science fiction, or anything close to it;  our aliens are smelly blobs of goo that have learned everything they know on Earth by watching TV, and their language is laced with culture references and sitcom quips.  Their interactions with humans --  main character Tom Stein, rising talent agent, is not the first -- have helped them put things into perspective, and to realize that  people don't spontaneously have conversations in which they recommend laxatives to one another while watching TV --  but  their fanboy passion for television makes them goofy fun to hang around.

This is not purely a comedic novel; as with Redshirts there are serious moments, developing late in the novel when one character is involved in a serious accident that, tragic as it is, presents an opportunity if the morality of it can be worked through.  Tangentially connected to the main story is Stein's well-meaning attempt to help one of his starlets branch out by landing her a serious role as a Holocaust survivor who later becomes a civil rights activist in the US's turbulent sixties.  The movie is a biopic about a real-world survivor-activist, and her efforts to help people see the essential humanity of one another, looking past differences in appearance and culture, obviously gives the aliens' desire to contact humanity and be received in brotherhood a little more oomph.

That aside, the novel is consistently funny throughout, and I'm going to keep poking around for more by Scalzi.

Of Neanderthals and dogs and extinction level events

Time for science short rounds!

Last week I read The Invaders,  a much-anticipated work about how dogs gave humans a competitive edge over their neanderthal cousins. This brief book posits that human beings function like invasive species, and after establishing a few housekeeping facts (the background of climate change, the available evidence for judging human / neanderthal populations and their diets) argues that humans and Neanderthals were competing for the same space in some regions of the globe, rather like wolves and coyotes, and that humans drove neanderthals out because of their advanced tool usage and domestication of wolves. While Neanderthals did use tools and traps, discovered tools to date suggest that the Neanderthals were more ambush predators, hiding and taking their quarry in close quarters. We sapiens used more ranged weapons like thrown spears. The wolf-dogs enter the book's argument relatively late in the game (~ 50 pages from the book's end), so this is chiefly a work about sapiens v neanderthal competition is therefore a book more of interest to those curious about ancestral man than his ancestral best friend.

Additionally, I finished listening to What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Questions, penned by the author of XKCD and read by Wil Wheaton. If you've never encountered XKCD before, you probably don't spend a lot of time on the internet.  It's a webcomic of "romance,sarcasm, math, and language."   I can't vouch for the romance bit, but science and math humor are a constant.  That's the same of What If? in which the author uses his legit-science background to respond to outlandish questions submitted to his website. What if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating? What if we could drain the oceans? What if everyone was gathered in one spot and jumped at the same time?  Although none of these scenarios are remotely possible,  Munroe disregards this and puts math -- and humor -- to work  exploring the possibilities.  Naturally,  geek references abound. (River Tam of Firefly is consistently quoted as an expert on how fast it takes to drain a human body of all its blood, assuming adequate suction). Wil Wheaton is golden in his delivery, barely hiding his humor at times when Munroe's writing is tongue in cheek. There's an entire chapter on the positive effects of the sun  suddenly not working.   If you're into science, What If? is great fun. 

Tales from a Techie

Tales from a Techie: Funny Real Life Stories from Tech Support
© 2014 Matt Garrett
250 pages

I've been reading tech support horror stories since I was first online in 1997, from Rinkworks' "Computer Stupidities" to Reddit's "TalesfromTechSupport" subreddit. On a whim I searched Amazon to see if there were any books in that vein and saw this one on Kindle Unlimited, so I read it through. It's a quick read, written in a conversational tone, and is amusing from time to time. Tech support stories mix technical curiosity (learning about older systems or picking up troubleshooting procedures) with a good dose of schadenfreude in general. Here the appeal is almost all schadenfreude, as most of the issues are things like spilling coffee into keyboards, dropping ipads into bathtubs, and rescuing computers from gobs of malicious software acquired on websites of ill repute. The problems recorded here aren't technically interesting, so the appeal is in commiserating with someone who is forced to spend his days pointing out to people that computers need to be plugged in to work. One unintended but amusing element of the book is that Garrett uses the same two pseudonyms for all of his male and female clients ("Bill" and "Claire"), to the effect that he seems to work for two extraordinarily incompetent and slightly schizophrenic people.

Love Among the Chickens

Love Among the Chickens
© 1906 P.G. Wodehouse
150 pages

"He's a very young gentlemen, sir," said Mrs. Medley, in vague defense of her top room.
"And it's highly improbable," said Garnet, "that he will ever grow old, if he repeats his last night's performance. I have no wish to shed blood wantonly, but there are moments when one must lay aside one's personal prejudices and act for the good of the race. "

Meet Jerry Garnet,  a mildly successful but currently stricken-for-ideas author whose creativity is plagued by the constant distractions of his apartment, chiefly from the musically inclined but ungifted chap upstairs.  Garnet wants to get away, and at just the right time comes his old friend Ukridge, who has just conceived a marvelous idea for getting rich quick: move to the country and keep chickens!  Ignoring a letter from another friend that says, in effect, "Ukridge will be coming to touch you for money, so clear out",   Garnet affably joins his old companion in what quickly becomes a debacle, but one Garnet doesn't see coming because he only has eyes for the neighbor's daughter. P.G. Wodehouse's first novel, Love Among the Chickens is short and amusing, though not nearly as riotous as his later works. Those familiar with the Wooster stories will recognize the germ of many a Wooster plot here, in schemes that go awry. The biggest, of course, is the notion of keeping chickens: Ukridge is so careless  about what kinds of chickens he gets that he ends up with mostly roosters. Roosters are notoriously poor at laying eggs.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Eleven Campus Stories
© 1951 Max Shulman
223 pages

Imagine if PG Wodehouse wrote stories about a girl-crazy freshman at the University of Minnesota, circa late 1940s. That's kind of what reader will find in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I first read this book in 2003; it was a going-away gift from my high school librarian, who had to discard it but thought I would like it. She was right -- I loved it. I loved the silly humor, the archaic slang ("Wow-dow", "he fractures me", etc), the presence of this world that was so obviously different from mine. The eleven stories are not sequential, or  integrated; unlike I Was a Teenage Dwarf, the Dobie here is not a fixed character. In one story he may be serious and cunning, and in another he's apparently been given a dose of ecstasy, nibbling on girls' fingers and jumping about "like a goat". He studies, variously, mechanical engineering, law, chemistry, journalism, and Egyptology. Every story pivots on Dobie's relationship with a girl, and more often than not he's the one being led around by the ear, a bobby-soxed captain at the helm. Other times his desire to impress or woo a woman lead him astray. These stories are FUNNY -- funny for the silly language, for the absurd scenarios, for the tongue in cheek narration. There's also a lot of physical humor, something that's hard to pull off in a literary medium. No wonder I took to Wodehouse so strongly when I first read him: he reminded me of this first brush with Shulman, who for me, never lived up to this book , no matter what else I read by him. (A lot of the other stuff was more bawdy than absurd.)

Read The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It'll fracture ya. 

Related:

• The closest Shulman ever came to matching this book for me was Barefoot Boy with Cheek, another campus-life satire.
• "Love is a Fallacy". One of the stories is available online.  This is sort of a Frankenstein story in which budding law student Dobie tries teach logic to a girl he'd like to marry...only to have the tables turned on him. 

Grunt

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
© 2016 Mary Roach
285 pages

I've never given much thought to the idea of military science. What might it involve? The chemistry of better weapons, the psychology behind successful strategy gambits? The science encountered here, in Mary Roach's Grunt, is similar to that performed on the early astronauts and the materials that would take them itno space. What happens to the human body under these conditions? What kind of material is optimal, based on these variables? What if this situation happens? If that sounds plodding, you don't know Mary Roach. Her books mix comedy and science, and achieve the comedy both by zeroing-in on subjects that are taboo (dead people and feces, say) and through Roach's droll delivery. Here she plagues military researchers and servicemen by investigating the labs where combat-ready clothing is engineered, watches seamen struggle to escape a sinking submarine simulation on scant sleep, reviews the progress of artificial limb-building considers the virtue of applying maggots to a flesh wound, and plays with a TCAP system so soldiers in the field can communicate without destroying their hearing. The experiments conducted to improve men and materials (or in the case of submarine crews, to tax them further on less sleep) are typically interesting in themselves, but Roach adds offbeat appeal by sharing weirder studies. (One study indicated that polar bears were fantastically interested in menstrual blood, but not by blood drawn from veins. This is apparently a polar bear thing, as black bears were equally bored by drawn blood and menstrual blood.)

Interesting as ever, but -- as usual -- not something to read with lunch.

Boomsday

Boomsday
© 2007 Christopher Buckley
336 pages

By day, Cass Devine is a public relations specialist who labors to ensure her clients' sh-tuff doesn't stink. By night, she's a  tax revolutionary, stirring the pot -- blogging furiously and urging young people to take to the streets and protest against the social security crisis. In only a couple of years, Social Security will be bankrupt -- despite DC's usual solution of raising taxes on under-thirties even more. Cassandra's national movement lands her in jail, and turns on senator into a presidential candidate who turns to her as his on-the-lam adviser.  They have an idea:  do that thing in Soylent Green where older citizens voluntarily  have themselves euthanized, but instead of being turned into snacks for the younger generation, the aged are rewarded with generous benefits and tax breaks in the years before their "Voluntary Transition".    Like They Eat Puppies, Don't They,  Boomsday is sadly comic, though its characters are not quite as reprehensible on average.The social security problem is one the American public heard a lot about during the Bush years, but oddly has slipped under the radar, at least as a television talking point.

This one is mildly funny, mildly vulgar,  and mildly forgettable.  I liked it more than  They Eat Puppies, but less than Thank You For Smoking.

Redshirts

Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas
© 2012 John Scalzi
320 pages
Audible presentation read by Wil Wheaton, runtime 7 hrs 41 minutes.

"I'm not even supposed to be here! I'm just Crewman #6. I'm the guy in the episode who dies to prove the situation is serious!" ("Guy", GalaxyQuest)

Redshirts is not what you think it is.

To be sure, it's mostly what you think it is, what you've heard it is; a spoof of Star Trek that mixes it in with concepts from The Truman Show and Stranger than Fiction, and comes within a few words of quoting that other great Star Trek spoof, GalaxyQuest. As far as spoofs go, it lives up to its reputation for being hilarious and meta. We have self-aware redshirts who avoid interactions with the bridge crew of a Federation , having realized that those guys go on away missions with crewmen and come back with bodybags. One member of the crew believes that the good ship Intrepid is in fact a TV show, and that when strange things happen, that's the Narrative at work. A lot of the silliness of shows like Star Trek is played with, particularly plot implausibilities, and the ability of battered characters to heal overnight, like the much-abused Miles Edward O'Brien. After a couple of ensigns begin to that they're living in a conspiracy, they go on a mission to put things to rights, and it involves time-travel, doppelgangers, and other such hijinks. If that were everything, I'd put this book up on the shelf having gotten my laugh, and think of it fondly from time to time as I do Night of the Living Trekkies. But that's not the entirety of Redshirts. Buried at the end are three codas, titled "First Person", "Second Person", and "Third Person" respectively. These three codas transform an amusing novel into one which is profoundly moving. I can't say if the conclusion's effect on me is merely a consequence of the author's writing, or if it was Wil Wheaton's delivery. Suffice it to say, I never thought Wil Wheaton could move me, but he did.

The Great Explosion

The Great Explosion
© 1962 Eric Frank Russell
187 pages

Following the discovery of faster-than-light travel, Earth's population fell by half as her children fled to the stars.  After decades of benign neglect, the powers that be on Earth -- the military and politicians -- have decided to reassert their authority.  A grand ship is built, and ordered to fulfill an even greater commission:  arranging a meet between the imperial ambassador and the local leaders, so that his lordship can declare to them that it's time to rejoin hands with Earth and march together into the future.  But as the Dude would say -- yeah, well...that's just, like, your opinion, man.

The Great Explosion is a SF comedy, an expansion of the author's amusing "And Then There Were None" (1951).  The plot is straightforward: a ship with hundreds of crewmen, soldiers, and government flunkies visit a series of planets and attempt to reunite them to the lovingkindness  (a compound word  translating to "rules and taxes") of Earth.  Shockingly, however, no one who left the Man behind on Earth is eager to see him come back -- whether they're criminals, nudist health freaks, or libertarians. Anyone who has had an ill experience with government functionaries -- from IRS auditors to DMV clerks -- will find vicarious amusement here,  as a series of rebellious characters annoy, exasperate, obfuscate, and harass humorless G-men and their pompous, pot-bellied prince.

The third story is the heart of the book, as the ship lands on the planet 'Gand'.  The imperials  are utterly tactless in their approach to the locals, regardless of the planet, but Gand is a particularly bad place to be grabbing people and pressuring them for information. Gand is composed entirely of some tribe of libertarian anarchists, who don't cotton to authority.  So deeply do they loath the idea of uniformity or regimentation that there isn't even a common style of clothing.  Every  intrusive question is answered "Myob*!", and attempts to physically coerce the Gands is met with civil disobedience. One exploring sailor on his bicycle, out of uniform, manages to discover what makes the Gands  tick. Close to the Gandian heart is cooperation; they don't even use money, instead using a barter system of favors, or "obs". The Gands live in small communities in constant contact with one another, meaning that free riders ('scratchers') don't get away with it for too long. Those who break rules are shunned. The Mahatama would be intrigued.

As a novel there are faults; the health-nudists of Hygeia, for instance, insist that Earth deal only with them, and ignore a smaller community on their planet. Why?  Who knows, because  the Earthers leave without this other community ever being mentioned again. There the ship goes directly to another planet where there were settlers, but now...there aren't. Every sign of civilization also points to the planet's population being long gone, their structures surrendered back to Nature. What happened there -- again, who knows, because the Earthers enter orbit, decide not to risk a pandemic, and break orbit.  As a rule, creators of fiction avoid introducing elements have have no functional element in the story, so to see two instances of it back to back was rather odd.

Still, I enjoyed the original short story, and this expansion of it.  It's a short bit of comedy with some food for thought sprinkled in.

*Mind your own business!

Related:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein. Another libertarian society where culture is more important than force.
The Martian Chronicles, with another chapter of free-spirited settlers being chased down by  humorless drones working for the government.

Baghdad without a Map

Baghdad without a Map and Other Adventures in Arabia
© 1992 Tony Horowitz
285 pages

So your wife is on extended assignment in Cairo, and you’re a freelance journalist without a regular gig. What do you do? Why not wander around northern Africa, the Arab world, and Iran whenever an opportunity presents itself – chasing stories, even when they led you into dark mountains where grenades and AKs are cheaper than a week’s worth of the local narcotic? Baghdad without a Map presents anecdotes from Tony Horwitz’s time spent in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and Iran, mixing comedy and tragedy.

Because Horwitz is chasing stories -- a refugee crisis in Sudan, for instance, or the still-simmering conflict between Iraq and Iran on the border -- he is often exposed to misery and danger. He still finds humor in the chaos of Cairo's streets, the chanciness of Egyptian-Sudanese air travel, or the loopiness of Yemense men after a goodly amount of qat-chewing. Horowitz attempts to learn about local cultures and politics as he can on the ground, conversing with people in his rough Arabic, chewing qat, or playing soccer. Although much of the middle east has changed drastically since the 1980s – the invasion of Iraq and the Arab spring just in the last ten years, these snapshots of life in the middle east are worth taking a look at for readers with any human interest in the region.

The Wheels of Chance

The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
© 1896 H.G. Wells
193 pages

What an odd little story! Begin with one J. Hoopdriver, a draper's assistant who lives for nothing but spare opportunities to ride his bicycle -- or rather, to crash repeatedly on his bicycle, banging up his legs but still delighting in sheer momentum. Mr. Hoopdriver, at the novel's beginning, is finally embarking on his yearly vacation: a cycling tour in England. Immediately he spies a beautiful woman, crashes dramatically, and earns her pity and his own chagrin. He chances to see her again, later on, and this time in the company of another fellow who claims to be her brother. His love-sickness not withstanding, Hoopdriver can tell that something's amiss, especially after the "brother" accuses Hoopdriver of being a detective. Delighted at having a game to play, Hoopdriver pursues the odd couple, eventually changing roles to that of a clumsy knight- errant once he and the woman (Jessie) realize the other chap is a genuine cad. Jessie's intention was to Be Her Own Woman, but her first ally turned out to be a manipulative fink. Eventually the gig is up for everyone, but Hoopdrive ends the tale most invigorated, having gone on a quest and discovered a friend who could put a little steel in his soul and allow him to dream of doing greater things with his life.

Although the story is nearly inconsequential, there's much charm. Wells' writing is often fun (one passage remarks that while Hoopdriver was in the throes of indecision, gravitation was hard at work and thus the man found himself on the ground with a bleeding shin, still wondering what to do), and sometimes beautiful, as when he's describing the landscape or the dreams of these two. Still, there were two reasons I picked this book up: bicycles and H.G. Wells -- and that, in the end, was the reason I finished it.  If nothing else this is literature from bicycling's first bloom of mass popularity.

Related:
Bicycles: The History,  David Herlihy

H.G. Wells and his wife Jane Wells

Before Plan 9

Before Plan 9: Plans 1-8 From Outer Space
© 2012 various authors
354 pages

TV Producer:"About the title...it's highly inflammatory. What if we changed it to 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'?"

Ed Wood: ...that's ridiculous. 

(From Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I shall spend the rest! of our lives. But this is not a book about the future, it is one about the past. Specifically, it's a prequel to the 1950s cult classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space.  For those who have never experience the particular pleasure of it,  the film features aliens making contact with Earth,  who have hopes of convincing us not to blow up the universe by creating three "zombies", two of whom are actually vampires.   I watched it a few weeks ago as part of a series of 1950s SF (along with Them! The Beast from 20,000 Fanthoms, Satellite in the Sky, and World Without End) and have since become morbidly fascinated with the work of Ed Wood. How could I resist this little volume, each story-chapter documenting the nine previous plans that the mysterious aliens visited upon the Earth?    Like the movie, this book of tales is more comedic than thrilling, and by plan 8 the novelty had worn off on me entirely.  The premise is that roughly since the Age of the Dinosaurs, the same group of aliens has been cloning itself and maintaining a watch over Earth, attempting to persuade Earthings (first intelligent dinosaurs, then humans) not to blow up the galaxy.  The stories are most clever early on, as the authors insert the aliens into the tale of Odysessus (turns out all those gods and monsters were alien creatures, who knew?), ancient Egypt (aliens did build the pyramids!), and the story of the Pied Piper.    There are numerous references to other SF stories and legends -- Roswell, obviously --  and even one particularly funny hat-tip to Ed Wood himself. In a chapter set in Victorian America, a scientist named Glen must pretend to be a woman to find out where mind-control corsets are taking all the wives of his village; naturally, he asks people to call him Glenda.  The Nazi antics seem like something out of an old Captain America plot (Heil Hydra!), and then we get a bunch of monster movies towards the end.   Some references attempt to explain the silliness of the film, like the alien saucers being suspended by wires:  an alien complains that Earth's atmosphere is so turbulent that their ships are damaged and having to be towed by other ships in higher orbits.

If you find Plan 9 from Outer Space to be in the "so bad it's good" kind of movie,  you may enjoy these little stories to a degree.  My enthusiasm waned after the Victorian story, which I think is my favorite.

Laughter is Better than Communism

Laughter is Better than Communism: Politics, Wit, and Cartoons
180 pages
© 2014 Andrew Heaton

 A couple of years ago I stumbled upon Andrew Heaton’s “EconPop”, a series of videos in which he used popular films to illustrate economic concepts in a playful way.  Laughter is Better than Communism  employs a similar approach, collecting satirical pieces on politics and economics written from a libertarian angle. Heaton's pieces include commentary on occupational licensing and gerrymandering, which despite their role in undermining political life and economic growth, don't receive as much attention from libertarians as something like foreign policy. Even when he treads ground covered by other authors, though, Heaton's comic style makes his delivery unique nonetheless. He writes as an entertainer, not a lecturer, and liberally festoons the book with cartoons to illustrate his points. In the chapter on gerrymandering, for instance,  Heaton presents actual maps of congressional districts which have been grotesquely molded to create a certain constituency (a bloc of conservatives in a liberal city, for instance, or  the corralling of black votes into a single district), side by side with illustrations of what those distorted electoral maps might resemble: a man surprised by lightening, for instance, or a lemur throwing a boomerang.


Despite the amount of cheek and comics, though, Laughter has a lot of serious points to make. This is a partial education in political economy and economy in general:  Heaton covers the problem of Congress, for instance, of how the behavior that makes an individual congressman popular in his district (using federal money to build things in that particular state) makes Congress dysfunctional and loathed collectively, because money is constantly being taken from people, only partly reappearing in odd pet projects, and Congress itself  spends all of its time arguing and moving the money.  He hails the salutatory effects of trade between individuals and nations,  noting what he used The Dallas Buyer's Club to illustrate : commerce brings people together who would otherwise despise one another, and gives them a reason not to kill each other.  It also allows them to prosper together,  pooling their expertise and gifts.  Impediments to trade -- like occupational licensing laws which prevent private citizens from developing their own interests and helping people, or burdensome regulations that make growing a small business impossible -- are often erected through bipartisan efforts for good intentions, but often rob the many on behalf of the few, like businesses which have already established themselves and want to squelch further competition.  Heaton alternates between real examples and fictional scenarios, but if you're interested in learning more about how occupational licensing perpetuates poverty,  there's a documentary called Locked Out that may be of interest to you. Listen to a five-minute interview here with that movie's subject, a Tupelo woman named Melanie Armstrong who fought a law forcing her students to obtain an expensive license to braid hair,  read an article on the subject, or read her story directly.  This isn't just about braiding hair, but more largely how occupational licensing serves as  barrier  against self-empowerment, perpetuating poverty in the United States.  The last ten minutes are particularly encouraging, as -- after Armstrong's legal victory --  a wave of impoverished people were able to pursue their own dreams. Hope was restored.

In short, Laughter is Better than Communism fun little collection of Bronx cheers aimed at planners, prudes, and other people who feign to know better than others about how to live their own lives.


More of Heaton:

Revan Paul: And it doesn't matter if it's 'bulk metadata' or not -- who you send holograms to is information about you.

Luke: Ten thousand? We could almost buy our own ship for that!
Ben Kenobi:  The government has increased the cost of risk, and so our supplier is increasing the cost of his services. It's basic economics, Luke. We're gonna do a little lightsaber work, and then I'm going to have you read a lot of Milton Friedman.

The aforementioned economic appraisal of The Dallas Buyers Club. 

Laughing Without an Accent

Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen
© 2008 Firoozeh Dumas
256 pages

In 2003, Firoozeh Dumas charmed readers with stories about her transoceanic childhood, unfolding in both in Iran and the United States in the 1970s. This sequel to Funny in Farsi uses the same basic approach, blending funny stories about her relatives with reflection on the immigrant experience and the human experience in general.  Here, though, a third culture has entered the picture -- that of her French husband's -- and, with more stories about her life as a parent, she is more serious at times.

 I remember her familial caricatures fondly from last year, especially that of her frugalistic father. Here we find him mystifying his son-in-law by presenting him Christmas gifts wrapped in on-sale "Congratulations, graduate!" and "Happy birthday!" wrapper paper --  subjecting the family to various misadventures after attempting to bring home several  "bargain-priced" tables in a purple hatchback, Her mother's enthusiastic but creative use of English also features again. As a parent Dumas writes more seriously, recording her personal triumph in showing the family TV the door; not only did she create precious space for imagination and rest in her home, but her children were spared thousands upon thousands of commercials.  Imagination is important to Dumas; as a college student she is dismayed to realize her fellow students think getting drunk and gyrating is a good time. She'd much prefer a morning walk accompanied with literary conversation. (Her mother attempts to warn off the future husband, stating that Firoozeh never stops reading.) Through the humor and reflection readers are allowed to experience the warmth of her extended family, gathering frequently as they do -- even if it's just to watch The Price is Right and yell at Bob Barker. (Her father's love of bargains makes Price his absolute favorite bit of American television programming.)  

As with Funny in Farsi, I found this simultaneously educational, funny, and cozy.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
© 1963 P.G. Wodehouse
227 pages

As had so often happened before, I felt that my only course was to place myself in the hands of a higher power.

"Sir?" [Jeeves] said, manifesting himself.

Bertie Wooster has two great weaknesses: needy friends and forceful females.  Now, alas, they're conspiring to take him to a  house whose master is quite certain Wooster is a kleptomanic loony who ought to be put away. Still, for the sake of two friends whose engagement is endangered  by something mysterious, Bertie must journey and face great personal peril, from village constables to Scottish terriers, to play the part of peacemaker. Naturally, he ends up in jail.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves is a short novel in PG Wodehouse's hysterical Wooster & Jeeves tales. They've come up before, but in summary: the main character, Bertie Wooster, is a society wastrel who lives on a family allowance and spends most of his time chumming in gentlemen's clubs and avoiding the schemes of his family to get him either gainfully employed or married   He does attempt to make himself useful in getting his friends out of scrapes, usually by attempting to manipulate events. In this he typically ,makes things worse, but fortunately he has his brilliant valet, Jeeves.   There is no social predicament too complicated for Jeeves to finesse, though sometimes at Bertie's personal expense.

In Stiff Upper Lip, Bertie labors to save his friends' engagement primarily so that the newly-freed bride to be won't renew her interest in him, but when he arrives at Totleigh Towers one problem quickly multiplies into a blizzard of shenanigans that blinds even Jeeves for a bit.  As always,  Bertie-Jeeves books are a brilliant joy  to read just for the language.   I wonder if these books weren't written under the influence of ardent spirits, because they're too giddy to be the work of  a sober mind. Bertie can't tell a story without inventing a noun ("Aunt Agatha called up with a what-the-hell"),  a gerund ("I what-ho'd her"),  or verbs ("legged it over to the Drones').      

Wodehouse is positively mirthful, a welcome start to the year -- but interested parties should start with something like Carry on, Jeeves, instead. This is a sequel to another story and I would have been lost utterly had I not read Wodehouse previously and watched the DVD specials with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry repeatedly.

When It Was Worth Playing For

When it was Worth Playing For: My Experiences Writing About the TV Show, 'Survivor'
© 2015 Mario Lanza
466 pages

THIRTY-NINE DAYS, SIXTEEN PEOPLE, ONE SURVIVOR!

Once upon a time, there was a show called Survivor, which promised to chuck sixteen Americans on an island and give $1,000,000  to the last man or woman standing.  Or so Mario Lanza thought. Turns out the show was more like high school meets the World's Worst Camping Trip (with narration!), but it still fascinated people from a psychological point of view.   After all, CBS was going to  be encouraging sociopathy on live television. Who wouldn't want to watch it? (They tune into elections every four years, don't they?) Sure enough, its finale would be one of the most-watched shows in television history, rivaling those of sitcoms which had cultivated audiences over a span of decades. Mario Lanza was watching Survivor from the beginning, and found it so interesting he had to write about it, eventually being partner in a site that featured a Survivor contestant as a writer. In When the Game Was Worth Playing, Lanza reviews the first three series -- the 'pure' ones -- highlighting the most extraordinary moments as the game evolved.  Those 'moments' aren't just ones witnessed onscreen, as central to Lanza's writing is the fan experience, the gossiping and spoilers -- and he also includes a few tales from the production side, having interviewed several contestants.

What Lanza quickly realized about Survivor, especially during season two, was that it wasn't so much a story as a confluence of them --  at least seventeen, those of the contestants and those of the producers.  Survivor is not reality television, Lanza says by way of the producers, but 'unscripted drama': the show's producers create storylines out of the contestants'  camera footage. More than one villain has been created solely through judicious editing.  This is always done in the name of better television, of course,  creating drama to stave off boredom. (Or creating the pretense of drama, as with the constant previews that the dominating Tagi alliance was fracturing, or that Kucha in Australia were on the verge of an epic comeback.)   Lanza comments at length on moments when the game changed -- the ambush of Gretchen demonstrating that this was a game of  ruthless politics, where those outside the power alliance were doomed regardless of their survival skills or personableness.   But Lanza's theme is the fan experience, and he contends that the second season can't be appreciated without the first -- for there the players were attempting to differentiate themselves from the original contestants.  Derided as merely the "new" incarnations of favorite characters -- Mad Dog as the new Rudy,   Elisabeth as the new Colleen --  and unhappy with the Machiavellian triumph of the Tagi alliance -- Colby, Tina, and others tried to make it to the end with their honor intact.     I didn't begin watching Survivor until Thailand,  and so especially enjoyed this glimpse into the speculative life of the fans in the first few seasons of the game, constantly teased as they were by the producers' tricks. (A graphic of the 'final four' was released that proved to have nothing to do with the actual final four)  Also of interest is Lanzo's speculation as to how the third season altered every Survivor which followed. It introduced twists, which the producers use to squelch power-alliances from running amok, and led to a return to more predictable island settings that didn't actually jeopardize contestants' lives. According to Lanza, one Australia player -- not just Mike Fall in a Fire Skupin -- was airlifted out for malnutrition.


While I haven't watched Survivor since the days of Guatemela and Fiji, I knew from the moment I saw this book that I'd enjoy it. I discovered Lanza's writing years ago, via his Survivor Funny 115, and have revisited that list of Survivor's 115 funniest moments several times since. Not only that, but I have DVD copies of Borneo and Australia and have watched them both....several times. I know who wins each and every challenge, but I still like to watch them for the sheer goofiness.  How can you beat Greg Buis bursting into "Who Knows?" from West Side Story, or running around the beach after discovering a  bloody chicken corpse, demanding to know who counted the chicken before it hatched?    I'm therefore an utterly biased audience, one who stayed up until 2 am to finish the book and didn't even care so much about the time. Definitely a fun one for Survivor fans.

Psst, in joke:  the first sentence of my review for Lord of the Flies was taken straight from Jeff Probst's intro Survivor Borneo, with a little adaption.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away
© 1999 Bill Bryson
288 pages

"It's been a funny  old night, when you think of it. I mean to say, wife drowns, ship sinks, and there was no Montrachet '07 at dinner.I had to settle for a very middling '05."

After living in Yorkshire for twenty years, Bill Bryson and his family decided to go for a change of scenery and moved to America. For him, it was a return, though not to his home.  To be sure, New Hampshire was much different from his native Iowa, but America itself had changed in the intermin, in ways both bewildering and delighting.  I'm a Stranger Here Myself collects various columns Bryson wrote about life in late-90s America, most of them funny.  Bryson is not the cranky old man of Road to Little Dribbling, but here only a late-middle age father who insists on inflicting his childhood memories on his children, only to discover that dumpy motels and drive-in movie theaters aren't nearly as fun as they used to be. There are also a couple of satirical pieces -- fake computer instructions, fake IRS directions, and a morbidly funny story from the last night of the Titanic. (Inspired, no doubt, by the move release.) A few of the pieces are personal in nature, merely Bryson making fun of himself for being an absent-minded fuddy-duddy who has a tendency to  mail his pipe tobacco instead of his letters and frequently needs to phone his wife to be reminded why exactly he's in town.  Other times, he is more serious, as when he comments on the loss of local accents and the impending doom threatened by everyone driving everywhere instead of walking, like the English do. (The one time he tries walk across the street  in America, he is nearly run over.)   There's also a chapter called 'Our Town', which mourns the loss of small-town America -- which I was happily surprised by. I've been thinking about buying Bryson's book about travels through small towns,but assumed Bryson would sneer at them for being provincial. Instead, he's as sentimental about them as I am, so don't be surprised to see The Lost Continent pop up here within the next few months or so.