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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Spelling Bee
National Spelling Bee championships begin tomorrow. Last year I watched the final and wept. Don't be left out in the cold - ESPN will be covering the finals Thursday, June 2: 10 to Noon and 1pm to 3:30. Go to the site and see all the kids from North Carolina. Like always, I'll be rooting for the Kid from Shelby, NC. This time it's speller No. 176, Yeeva Cheng. She wants to be a professor and a poet. I can't make any jokes about that.
Aliens are going to eat us. I told you so.
If you're going to liberate a billboard, go all the way. (from BoingBoing)
You Can Live On Gelato
Hey from Rome, which kicks molto assini (literally, many little asses). So far the most wicked awesome thing we have seen has been the Italian National Gallery of Modern Art. But we have not gone to the Vatican or the Colosseum or the Catacombs yet.

In other news, Italian keyboards do not seem to have apostrophes.

In still other news, the George Saunders story from the March 2005 Harper's (apparently not online, though crappily excerpted here) was excellent. Pat described What the Shadow Told Me as satire that will slash your tires. This one cuts your limbs off and leaves you for dead. It's brutal.

In still other other news, the Wells Tower story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" from this issue of Fence and anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (but sadly not online at all) is the single best short story I can remember reading recently. It's a rumination on 21st century preoccpations through the lens of medieval Viking raiders. Towers even manages to use 21st century language without any obvious anachronism. It's just great, and the last page in particular should be much more legendary than it is. Buy the Anchor book just for this.

Jaimee says buon giorno. Ciao.
Kiss me, Son of God...

In case you're wondering what Buddy Lembeck has been up to these last ten years, here you go:

Bibleman is a children's video series about ordinary guy Miles Peterson who puts on the full armor of God to become Bibleman. Along with his side-kick's Cypher and Biblegirl, Bibleman fights evil in the name of God, quoting scripture as his primary weapon.

Official website here.

(via Meesher's boyfriend Ben)

Monday, May 30, 2005

Lots of British Poetry Mags
All in one place. Searchable in multiple ways. www.poetrymagazines.org.uk
Hey, Mr. DJ, I thought you said we had a deal...
Awful European ringtone, previously blogged about here, is set to hit #1 on the British singles charts. Hmm...
A wicked cool blog of Street Art.
The Wooster Collective.I should send them over some stuff I've seen here in GSO. Looks like they update this thing pretty often - I first saw the sight last week, and almost all those posts have since been blown off the page. (image below from the May 15 week in the archives) Way way way good.
French "Non" news.
The French have voted "No" to ratifying the EU constitution. This is a big monkeywrench in the whole EU process. The BBC has some coverage, but what I have enjoyed most is this Red/Blue state-style visual to where yes and no were voted. Also, if you need a map of France with some cities, try here.

Thanks to metafilter on the red/blue map.
PC Gen - d20 Open Source Character Creator.
Via Slashdot a program that allows you to make characters for the d20 system on your computer. Works on most operating systems, including Mac. Also works with almost all the open license books out there, as somebody has converted that data into sets this thing reads. Haven't got to use it much, but looks like you can organize tons of characters by type, name, campaign, etc. The only reason I mention this is because aren't we all supposed to create our characters for our books via D&D before we start writing?
Some Contests for you.
So. You didn't win the First Ever Backwards City Literary Contest. That's okay, we'll have another soon. In the meantime, here are a couple that just got brought to my attention:

Random House's Twentysomething Contest : 20,000 dollar prize for a non-fiction essay by a twentysomething.
We are seeking essays about, but not limited to, the following subjects: Family, Career, Sex, Society, and Self. Be specific. Be unique. We want you to tell us—and, by extension, the entire world—something we haven’t heard before, something that defines you as a member of this burgeoning generation. Make us laugh, make us think, make us mad—just don’t make us yawn.


and

Indiana Review's Latina/Latino Writers Issue. They're looking for work from all genres, including comics and visual art.
We are seeking Poetry, Fiction, and Non-Fiction by Latino & Latina writers that that is well-crafted and lively, has an intelligent sense of form and language, assumes a degree of risk, and has consequence beyond the world of its speakers or narrators. We also welcome interviews with established writers. Content that addresses political, social, and cultural aspects of the Latino and Latina identity and community are welcome but not a pre-requisite for consideration. Our intent with this issue is to showcase the vibrant and diverse voices of new and established Latino and Latina Writers.
Backwards City back online
Hey all loyal readers. Sorry for the blank posting this weekend - we've all been away celebrating the wedding of editors Jaimee and Gerry. They're just now landing in Rome, probably. Congrats to them and to everyone who made the ceremony and subsequent reception so memorable. Pics available soon, no doubt. I look forward to seeing the one of Me, Tom, and Patrick looking "mean" with our mustaches (grown for the rehearsal dinner only).

In the meantime, Tom, Jennifer, Jenny, Fay, and myself spent yesterday meandering our way back from Wilmington. We went to Wrightsville Beach and even I, token Filipino, got sunburned. I ran into three out of four Yars sisters from my past in Chattanooga - Hao, Soeung, Khan. Real cool folks who deserve essays of their own; I went to school with two of them, worked at the Children's Museum with the other. I recognized them, among the sea of people, because of Hao's wrap-around dragon tattoo. I wish I had photos.

Afterwards we went to Durham to eat at Elmo's Diner. We got home to discover the tree in our front yard (a huge healthy conifer whose only crime was being really really ugly) had been felled and chopped like a two-year old's hot dog lunch. We suppose our landlords did it, but a phone call would have been nice.

Anyway, we'll give you what we can in Gerry's Absence. Go Team Backwards City.
Thursday, May 26, 2005

Crosses Burned, Vigils Planned. Durham, NC
Terrible and disgusting news from Durham, NC - Three Crosses set ablaze by Klansmen(this part "under investigation") last night. There are vigils planned this evening, and we encourage anyone who is able to go to do so.

From open letter from the NC Peace and Justice Update List:
Last night, Wednesday May 25, "Several motorists spotted a tall burning cross near Interstate 85 and Hillandale Road around 9:15 p.m. It was located near the back parking lot of St. Luke's Episcopal Church. At the same time, callers to 911 reported another cross burning near Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and South Roxboro Street.

About an hour later, Durham firefighters responded to another burning cross on Dillard Street in downtown Durham, just across from the WTVD studios. Fliers purportedly from the KKK were left at that location. The United House of Prayer for All People is located nearby. The crosses were several feet tall. Officers took away the burned crosses for further investigation". (From ABC 11 Report)

The Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham is calling for vigils at all three locations tonight, Thursday May 26, and believe strongly that a large community response to the cross burnings is important. The NC Peace & Justice Coalition encourages everyone in the area to join in a loud community response to these acts of violence, hatred, racism and intimidation.

Directions and the full letter follow in the comments.
Also, a link to some more NC based Hate.
Thanks to the LUCIPO team for heads up on this.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Gone Marryin'
I'm stepping out for a bit. While I may still post very occassionally from internet cafés, I'll be in Italy and France until the end of June on my honeymoon and mostly incommunicado.

PClem and Ezra will continue their excellent blogging work, and there's talk that Tom Christopher may even return from his self-imposed exile with fantastic news of The World Outside.

As for my part of the blog -- your daily quotient of marginally cool links stolen from MetaFilter, Boing Boing, and elsewhere -- hopefully it will be satiated in some small part by the awesome guest-blogging phenomenon of Neil Howard Farbman, attorney-at-law. Neil and I went to high school together, and despite our best efforts we continue to look, speak, and think alike. Really, the only thing that distinguishes us is the fact that one of us was born completely without a soul. See if you can guess which one.

So don't go nowheres. I'll see you in June.
Greensboro's Top Ten Blogs
Really, the top nine blogs and then some other guys. From Yes! Weekly. You should visit all of these sites daily, preferably in alphabetical order.
What Kurtis Davidson Told Me
Fantastic reading. Afterwards, I picked up a copy of the looks-to-be-incredible What the Shadow Told Me (previously blogged here), as well as a copy of Biminim Strimpoonanamam's seminal The Best of the Short Story of the World, available from Spine Moneky Press, which includes English-to-Burmese-to-English of Shirley Jackson's "Jackpot!", Franz Kafka's "The Paint Eater", Chekhov's "The Dog-faced Woman", and Hemingway's "Spic-and-Span Shiny Somewhere," among others.

After the reading we also received free copies of the What the Shadow Told Me discussion questions, unfortunately not-yet-available at www.kurtisdavidson.com. But here's a taste:
1. You have been overheard to say, regarding What the Shadow Told Me, "This is the greatest book I have ever read. It has changed my life." Explain.

2. T. Coraghessan Boyle has written that What the Shadow Told Me "redefines black humor." Given that Boyle himself is a black humorist and assuming that What the Shadow Told Me redefines black humor in the best possible way, Boyle is acknowledging that everything he published prior to June 27, 2002 -- the date of his comment -- is by definition inferior to What the Shadow Told Me. Given this, should American readers rise up en masse and demand that Boyle relinquish to Kurtis Davidson every literary honor that he received before that date? And royalties, too? Justify.
Again, these guys are great writers (and great readers). Definitely make the trip to see these guys if they come through your area.
You Remind Me of Me
Fresh on the heels of the *excellent* Among the Missing (blogged here), I've been reading Dan Chaon's new novel, You Remind Me of Me.

I found that the novel begins surprisingly slowly at first, but suddenly near the end of Part One there's this wonderful eureka moment when you suddenly realize how all the different strands you're reading connect together, a few pages before the characters start to. It's really something. I'm digging this novel, and I'm digging Chaon's work.

Here's one quick little passage that moved me:
The baby's large eyes settled on him, and though this had been one of his happiest nights in his whole life, it made him melancholy. He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely -- to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinzed the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information -- a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.
Which describes how you're feeling all the time.
Don't Forget, Greensborovians: Kurtis Davidson Reads Tonight at The Green Bean at 7 pm
This will be a blast. See you there, then.
Dueling Banjos
In the Times of London, Richard Dawkins says creationism is God's gift to the ignorant, while in the New York Times Snitchens says English departments should be abolished.

One is right, the other mind-bogglingly wrong. Can you guess which is which?

[via A&L Daily]
Tuesday, May 24, 2005

How to Become an Early Riser
Some pretty sensible advice, actually.
The Christian Game Developers Foundation
"We have to give them quality alternatives that match the excitement of secular games while promoting Christian values - without the violent or sexually explicit content."

Good luck with that.
Our Long International Nightmare Is Finally Over
The Spice Girls have reunited.
'What If Prozac Had Been Available in Van Gogh's Time?'
In his new book, Peter Kramer considers this very question. Salon considers his consideration here.
Awkward Interloper of the Realm
Christmas Day With My New Girlfriend's Family As a Circa-1982 Text-Based Computer Adventure Game. At McSweeney's. Reminds me of Unemployed: The Great Adventure.
The Compleat Calvin
Sweet! They're coming out with The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and it's only $100. Jaimee's Christmas shopping just got easier. Editor and Publisher has more.

The reruns and question-answering are designed to promote "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" -- AMP's huge, three-volume, 23-pound collection of all 3,160 "Calvin and Hobbes" strips that ran in newspapers between Nov. 18, 1985, and Jan. 1, 1996. The hardcover, slipcased set -- which will be released Oct. 4 with a first printing of 250,000 -- also includes new art and an introductory essay by Watterson.
[via Bookslut]
He Was One of the Grrrrreeeeats
Rest in peace, Tony.
Monday, May 23, 2005

The 2-4: Looking Ahead to Season 5
24, Season 3, Episode 23. Jack is talking to Stephen Saunders, a James-Bondian superagent who turned supervillain after the British government left him behind in Kosovo to be tortured:
Jack: "What happened to you, Stephen?"

Saunders: "I was abandoned by the people I worked for, as you'll be someday."
After tonight's finale, the direction for Season 5 seems obvious.

And it could actually be pretty good -- if the writers are brave enough.
We've Removed the Area of Your Brain That Understands Sarcasm
They can do that now.
Trust. Profit. Deniability.
How Big Pharm is conspiring to turn all our children in vampires. [via MetaFilter, Boing Boing]
Mathwards City
How to Tell If a Number Is Divisible by 7.
Immortality by 2050?
'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'
Sunday, May 22, 2005

George Lucas in Love
I think I first saw the .wmv of George Lucas in Love six years ago, when I was a freshman in college. With all the Episode III hype, it's making the rounds again. Which is nice, because it's a classic.

[also via Cynical-C]
How to Write a Novel in 100 Days or Less
Your day-by-day calendar.

[via Cynical-C]
PClem Reviews What the Shadow Told Me
Patrick's review of What the Shadow Told Me, the new novel by the curiously two-headed Kurtis Davidson -- who incidentally is appearing in the next issue of Backwards City Review *and* is reading at The Green Bean this Wednesday at 7 pm -- ran in the N&R this week. It's not online, but here's a taste:
Team KD exhibits the wild creativity of Thomas Pynchon (I thought of “Vineland” quite often) in the made-up song lyrics, plays on pop culture, and intricate plot connections of every character. I found it required less head scratching than Pynchon, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Instead of post-modern dilemmas, the satire in this novel is self-directed. Writers, literary agents, creative writing teachers, university administrators, and editors are spared no mercy in the attack.

When [literary editor] Malcolm Day is asked what he thinks of Alice Walker’s writing, he says, “The Color Purple is one of my favorite films. Oprah shines in her cinematic debut.”

Kurtis Davidson gets away with pushing humor to the limit. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from the nonsensical pidgin English translation from the Tamil translation of the original English. A gangster rapper releases an album of pornographically reworked Christmas carols that end up being freebies to toddlers at a cancelled Black Santa appearance. Luke Perry, Dom Deloise, Olga Korbut and Strom Thurmond are among the dozens of celebrities name checked.
See you this Wednesday.
Los Scuzz
One sort of funny thing that unites the Men of Backwards City (swimsuit calendar forthcoming January 2006) is our shared, total reliance on our ladies for transporation. I realized this this weekend when Jaimee took her car out of Greensboro this weekend and left me stranded.
  • I sold my car the week after she moved down there and now use Jaimee's car.
  • Tom took his car back to Ohio after moving in with Jennifer. Uses Jennifer's Goblin.
  • Patrick just sold his car after taking the license plates off six months ago. Uses Casey's sweet ride.
  • Ezra was using Fay's car until it broke down.
  • Conclusion: We're all dirtbags.
    Proposed Reading List for an Italian Getaway
    Speak, Memory -- Vladmir Nabakov
    Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
    The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories -- various
    Chronicles, Vol. 1 -- Bob Dylan
    The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
    The Naked and the Dead -- Norman Mailer
    'Weinstein's Ninjas Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles'
    At the Tiny Ninja Theater, Hamlet is performed by toy action figures. Seattle Weekly has the review.

    [via Bookslut]
    Evolutionary Biology Can Be Fun
    Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

    But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant - doing their part for the perpetuation of the species - without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

    ...in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution," has no evolutionary function at all.
    [New York Times link should be safe for work, right?]
    Saturday, May 21, 2005

    You Are No Match for the Dark Side
    Now you can play Twenty Questions with Darth Vader. Thanks, Burger King!
    'Short and Curlies'
    In a fragmented world, the distinction between novels and short stories is becoming blurred. Here, Philip Hensher asks why.

    [via Bookslut, who asks, rightly, "Is it even possible that this article on short stories be titled something more offensively awful?"]
    'Funny as Hell' (Attention Greensboro Literati)
    Backwards City Review is sponsoring the first of many Greensboro readings this Wednesday at 7 pm, and we hope you can come.

    Kurtis Davidson (aka Kurt Jose Ayau and David Rachels), authors of What the Shadow Told Me (winner of the 2003 Faulkner Society of New Orleans Award), will be reading at The Green Bean (341 S Elm St.) at 7 pm on May 25 (this Wednesday). Among other notable accomplishments, one of their excellent stories will be appearing in the second issue of the incredible Backwards City Review.

    Praise for the work of Kurtis Davidson:
    "Admirable if wicked entertainers . . . an aggressive, devil-may-care satire that flies like a Scud missile in the face of political correctness."
    --Julia Glass, National Book Award Winner, Three Junes, 2002

    "One wild ride of a novel . . . redefines black humor."
    --T.C. Boyle, Inner Circle, Riven Rock, and Drop City

    "Put an insider-mystery worth of Dick Francis through a Dave Chappelle blender, and you'd get What the Shadow Told Me. Funny as hell."
    --Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
    Hope to see you there.
    Calvino
    MetaFilter has a great thread up with a boatload of Calvino links for your mind-blowing pleasure.
    Friday, May 20, 2005

    The Daily SuDoku
    A new SuDoku puzzle every day.

    The first rule of SuDoku is: Every row, column and box of 3x3 cells must contain the numbers 1 through 9 exactly once
    The second rule is there are no other rules.
    Learn to Dance (with Napoleon Dynamite)
    Self-explanatory.
    The Many Deaths of Samuel L. Jackson
    At Entertainment Weekly. [via MetaFilter] Jurassic Park? Who knew?
    I'm In Love With Greasemonkey
    Useful GreaseMonkey scripts. FireFox is so great.

    To install, just go here, save the .xpi file to your desktop, and click "Open File..." in FireFox.

    For starters, I highly recommend using AmazonA to change all your referrer links to backwardscity-20. (Note: You have to save the file to your hard drive and edit the .js for this to work.) Finally having a Delete button for Gmail is pretty sweet, too.
    Speak, Cleveland
    The Cleveland of "American Splendor," the 2003 Oscar-nominated movie, is a dreary 1980's town of thrift stores and shambling eccentrics, a place where you'd barely care to spend two hours, let alone a weekend. Today, Cleveland hardly feels like the same place. In the 1990's, public-private enterprise replaced center-city blight with new sports stadiums and the lakefront Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Meanwhile, downtown's revival spurred gentrification into forgotten enclaves along the Cuyahoga River. There's a thriving art scene in Tremont, and the retooled Warehouse District has become a place to be, rather than flee, after dark. Clevelanders remain, by nature, a self-deprecating lot. But before long, calling their town hip, cosmopolitan - even splendid - won't sound so ironic.
    Spore Has A Website
    The amazing looking new game from Will Wright has a (rather unimpressive) website.

    [via MeFi]

    UPDATE: Slashdot has more.
    Grand Theftendo
    Grand Theft Auto III ported to the original NES. [via Boing Boing]
    Personalize This
    I know some people get irritated by my Google-worship at times, but now you can Personalize Your Google Homepage.
    Other Movies By George Lucas
    Dr. Vendyl Jones, "the famed archaeologist, the inspiration for the Indiana Jones movie series, has spent most of his life searching for the Ark of the Covenant. The ark was the resting place of the Ten Commandments, given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, and was hidden just before the destruction of the First Temple.

    The Talmud says the Ark is hidden in a secret passage under the Temple Mount. Jones says that the tunnel actually continues 18 miles southward, and that the Ark was brought through the tunnel to its current resting place in the Judean Desert.

    Throughout the many years of his quest, Jones has been in close contact and under the tutelage of numerous Rabbis and Kabbalists. Extremely knowledgeable in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah sources dealing with Holy Temple issues, Jones has now received permission from both known and secret Kabbalists to finally uncover the lost ark." [via MetaFilter]
    Thursday, May 19, 2005

    Endor Holocaust
    What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long. A commentary on the ultimate, tragic fate of the Ewoks from theforce.net's incredible Star Wars: Technical Commentaries resource.

    Also of note: Astrophyiscal Concerns, Injuries of Darth Vader, and Continuity, Canon, and Apocrypha.

    [Via this outstanding MetaFilter thread linking to original Usenet posts about Return of the Jedi, c. 1983.]
    Kelsey Grammer is...Beast?
    That's what Coming Soon is claiming.
    Then we got to Beast. "It was the best man for the job. The name is... Kelsey Grammer! If you would have seen his read. It is kinda weird when you think about it for a second, and the key was with the X-Men movies is get the best man for the job. He blew us out of the park. Yeah, yeah, and he's also my neighbor..." As we laughed, Arad reassured us that the "Frasier" star is the right man for the job. "When you look at it you see how again we are continuing with inspired choices."


    I'm listening.
    The History of Nuclear War in Fiction
    I wrote a paper on this for my tenth-grade English class. Now literary nuclear holocaust has finally hit the big time.
    Movie Reviews (and More) from Andrew Rilstone, Gentleman
    Incredibly comprehensive movie reviews from a man well-versed in nerd lore. This site's no longer being updated; Rilstone has a blog now. Worth spending some time poking around. [Via that same Sith MetaFilter thread]

    UPDATE: I like, in particular, what Andrew says here, because it in many ways mirrors my thoughts from last night:
    The original movie was abstract and non-specific, and therefore it colonized the day dreams of a whole generation of children. It would not be too much to say that it put us in contact with the Deep Structure of Story, a framework on which we could and did hang almost anything we wanted. It is instructive to compare, say, the 1977 Marvel comics 'sequel' to Star Wars with Splinter of the Minds Eye or even the notorious Christmas Special. They are referring to different universes.

    The prequel trilogy, on the other hand, is specific and crowded; and therefore, it will colonize the day dreams of no-one at all. We can internalize the simple structure of Star Wars and therefore feel that we are inside it: Attack of the Clones overwhelms us with specific detail. However exhilarated we may be, we are only ever on the outside looking in.

    The prequel trilogy is supposed to provide a backstory for the originals. But the original films had their own back story, and it was a good one:

    'A young Jedi named Darth Vader who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil helped the Jedi hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father. Your uncle didn't hold with your fathers ideals; thought he should have stayed at home and not gotten involved. Your father's lightsaber. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade, the same as you father'


    Clear, coherent meaningful, and infinitely suggestive. Once upon, on a farm, there were two brothers, Owen and Anakin. One day, Ben the wizard came along, and asked them to become Jedi Knights and fight against the evil empire. Anakin went, but Owen stayed at home. Anakin had a baby son, and he left it with his brother to look after. Anakin was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a good friend to Ben. He was not, in any sense, the messiah or the saviour of the universe. Ben also had another young apprentice, Darth. Darth was jealous of the master's hotshot new apprentice. He was consumed by the Dark Side of the Force, and murdered Anakin. He betrayed the Jedi to the evil Emperor. The dying Anakin gave his lightsabre to Ben, to pass onto his son. But when Ben goes home, Owen won't accept the lightsabre, and won't even tell the boy how his father died. The boy grows up in ignorance of his father, even though the scar on his forehead is purely metaphorical. And then, one day…

    This is rather a good story, and its existence is an important part of the original power of Star Wars. The main purpose of Phantom Menace is to annihilate it: to make us forget we ever even imagined it.
    Fictional Curse Words
    At Frakipedia. Via Gravity Lens.
    'A Vision At Once Gargantuan And Murderously Limited'
    The New Yorker's Anthony Lane reviews Revenge of the Sith. [Via MetaFilter]
    Chris Ware: God Lands on the Moon, 2005
    Chris Ware has an exhibit up at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. Looks like there's some great pictures there. The piece below is from a series called God; its title is God Lands on the Moon, 2005. Click to enlarge:



    I think the part of my fall schedule I'm most excited about is teaching Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth at the end of my Intro to Lit class. Should be a great time.
    Why Brits Drive on the Left
    Can't vouch for the accuracy, but here's one theory.

    This webpage, which I can't vouch for either, has different supposed reasons.
    The Trouble with Prequels (or, The Emperor Has No Clothes)
    I want to tread cautiously here, because I know this is a moment of nerd triumph (Lucas actually made a good movie!) and also a time of deep nerd mourning (There may never be another Star Wars movie!) And it's not like I'm going to tell you not to see Revenge of the Sith, because of course you should see it. But if you're like me, you'll find that your most true, most basic emotional reaction to Episode III tonight is neither ecstasy nor sadness, but detachment and regret.

    Supposedly we were going to see Episode III and suddenly understand why The Phantom Menance and Attack of the Clones *had* to be made. We were going to appreciate those movies in a new light as important, indispensable aspects of the Star Wars mythos.

    Well, I don't. I hate those movies more than ever.

    I've been opposed to the prequel concept from the start. We never needed to see what Anakin Skywalker was like before he became Darth Vader. We learned all we needed to know about that from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. And having now seen the last of the prequels -- the "whole story," as it were -- we can now say fairly that these movies were little more than the rote, soulless recitation of exactly what we already knew. There were no surprises here. As with most prequels, there just wasn't any point to all this.

    Sure, we got to see Yoda fight. Sure, we learned a few little wrinkles about stormtroopers and the twins' mother. But there was no story here that needed three movies to tell -- and while Revenge of the Sith is very fun and even (in parts) moving, I don't know that it needed to be told.

    What's worse, all the prequel trilogy ultimately does is cheapen the original trilogy. Not by revealing all its twists three movies too soon, because no one will ever watch Star Wars in numerical order. Not by putting its special effects to shame, because I think most viewers will have the critical sophistication necessary to make the jump between III and IV without difficulty. And not by exposing the creative flaws of the original trilogy through repetition and unnecessary self-reference, although it's done that in spades.

    No, the prequel trilogy's greatest sin is that it taints the original trilogy with what I can only call lameness. That it fails as a tragedy in its own right is self-evident; bad scripting, bad acting, and bad overall structure saw to it that these movies could never live up to the tragic promise of Anakin Skywalker, to the story each of us made up in our own head. Now this literary failure reverberates throughout the original trilogy; with every bit of foreshadowing and circularity, with every callback, with every narrative non sequitur and logical plothole, the massive, poisonous failure of the prequel trilogy infects the grandeur of the movies that helped define my childhood.

    You see, the movies were never all that great to begin with; it was always only the magic surrounding them that made them seem that way. For me, and I suspect for a lot of us, that feeling's gone now. Six years after Jar Jar, even Empire doesn't feel all that magical anymore. What it feels like is the second-to-last episode in a middling science-fiction series that doesn't hold together very well at all, once you stop and think about it.

    The prequels have taken a once-in-a-generation epic and turned it into just another franchise, just another dead ritual of nerd arcana. Watching the original trilogy now feels like an exercise in kitsch, not a sacrament, and that's a shame.

    I'm fairly certain this will be an unpopular opinion, because Sith is hands-down the best Star Wars movie since Jedi, and maybe since Empire, and because no one likes a spoilsport who thinks too much about aesthetics when everyone is just trying to have a good time. Like everyone else, I liked the movie, I'll probably see it again, and I'll probably get the DVD. I'm glad that Star Wars fans have finally got the movie we've all been waiting for since 1983. But right now, I wish the prequels had been made wildly differently, or else not been made at all.

    An amusement park at the Grand Canyon might be a whole lot of fun, but it'd ruin the view. For all their fun, for all their thrills, for all their technical wizardry and billions of dollars earned, the prequel trilogy has tarnished the luster on something that once seemed truly great -- and I think that's something to regret.
    Wednesday, May 18, 2005

    Don't Give Me That Bullsith, You Know Who I Am
    Off to the midnight showing of Episode III with 4/5 of the BCR editoral staff.

    If anything happens to us, PClem will assume total control.

    See you at 4 am.
    Great Moments in the History of Civilization
    GameSpot has a preview of the fourth title in the Civilization series, Civ4. If you're a Civilization-head -- and my brother and I are both most certainly that -- you'll be interested in the unprecedented big changes proposed for the new game. Here's a taste:
    The key thing to keep in mind that while the overall idea hasn't changed (you guide a civilization from the dawn of time to the near future, and you'll explore the world, found cities, research technologies, and compete against rival civilizations), the formula has been overhauled in a way that it hasn't been before. Johnson told us that they wanted to get rid of the things that have always not been fun in Civilization, such as having to constantly clean up pollution or battle corruption or things such as that. In their place are a slew of whole new gameplay features and ideas that have us excited about a Civ game like never before.
    Religion added, the tech tree system completely overhauled, governments and culture redefined, new systems of leadership...sounds like a fun time.

    There are screenshots, too, though they won't tell you much.

    [via Slashdot, which also has previews of the new Mario title and We Love Katamari]
    The Last Supper
    Big day for nerds all across America. Until Lucas decides to make 7-9, as he inevitably will, this is it. Click to enlarge:



    [via Boing Boing]
    Superman: Red Son Action Figures
    I am getting one of these.



    I talked about Superman: Red Son way back at the beginning of the blog. This action figure rocks.

    [via Gravity Lens]
    The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
    IGN has a preview of the new Zelda from E3. So does Gamespot.
    Tuesday, May 17, 2005

    Blogiversary's End: There's Nothing I Can Do
    One last thing.

    The 2005 Backwards City Blog Post of the Year
    Forever's Gonna Start Tonight

    Listen again. For the first time.
    Blogiversary V: The Inevitable Anticlimax
    In which our blogiversary celebration comes to an end, and PClem becomes the blogaholic we always knew he was.

    April
    Haruki Murakami's Holistic Detective Agency
    These Things Happen To Other People. They Don't Happen At All, In Fact.
    Everything They Do Is Cool
    Mandarian Phrases for Firefly Fans
    The AMAZING STORY of SUPERMAN-RED and SUPERMAN-BLUE!
    Louie Armstrong's "Oops I Did It Again"
    Lexicon: The Role-Playing Game
    More Accurate McDonald's Slogans
    April Madness: Comedy Movie Tournament
    In Soviet Russia, the Adventure Chooses You
    The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon
    Yyaaaargggg!
    Seuss vs. Selling Out
    I Am 8 Bit

    May
    Illustrating Gravity's Rainbow
    Deanimator
    I've Seen Things That No Man Should See
    The Shiznit
    So, There's This Thing Called a Persona...
    Self-Referential Aptitude Test
    Insane Sand Sculptures
    Obscure Disneyland Facts
    Mr. Potatohead Illustrates the 7 Deadly Sins
    Congratulations Are in Order

    It's been a good year. Thanks for stopping by. See you in '06.
    Blogiversary IV: Blogiversary Resurrection
    And throughout the not especially cold winter, we kept it real.

    January
    The Law of Unintended Consequences
    Did Aliens Visit 17th Century France?
    Greenberg's 'On a Return to Being a Polemic against Light Verse' at VerseDaily.com
    The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella When Attacked under Unequal Conditions (PartI)
    Sidewalk Chalk Guy
    Hot Young Poets
    Gin & Juice
    Straight Outta Compton: Folkified
    Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
    Bunny Suicides
    How You Will Die

    February
    Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons
    The Superfriends Act Out Office Space
    How To
    Outkast/Kill Bill Mashup
    Umberto Eco, "14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt"
    The Jewish Hero Corps
    The Cuddly Menace
    On Bullshit

    March
    The Nameless Dread
    What's Your Wu-Tang Name?
    Important Changes to Your Citizenship Agreement
    Scenes from the 1971 Sears Catalog
    Polish Circus Posters
    Mapping My Childhood
    They Still Draw Pictures
    Spore
    Turn Your Eyes Up Loud
    John Latta's "Umbrage" from Backwards City #1 is Today's Poem of the Day at Poems.com
    French Documentary on Chris Ware
    Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon
    Ed Cone's Beginner's Guide to the Blogosphere (With My Additions)
    Religious Action Figures
    Comic Motivational Posters
    Two Great Tastes
    Forever's Gonna Start Tonight
    Blogiversary III: Return of the Son of Blogiversary
    Tragedy struck in early November as 98% of our staff applied for refugee status in Canada. Somehow, the rest of us managed to pick up the pieces and move on.

    November
    How to Start the Revolution
    Hamlet in l33t speak
    Boilerplate: History of a Victorian Era Robot
    The Zoomquilt
    The Dude Abides: Buddhism and The Big Lebowski
    Maps of Imaginary Places
    Terrible Classic Superman Covers
    Pixar + Nietzsche = The Incredibles

    December
    2004: The Year in Pictures
    A Bit About the Culturally Accepted Presence of Elves in Iceland
    Exercises in Style
    If Hemingway Wrote 'The Night Before Christmas'
    How to Write Good
    The Real Life Stonecutters
    Japanese Death Poetry
    Patrick Egan is Dr. Fun
    Life in China
    “Business Is Amassing Great Sums by Charging Admission to the Ritual Simulation of Its Own Lynching”

    The Big Five: Popular Science Books That Will Change The Way You Think
    The Best Board Games of 2004
    Cargo Cults
    Skeletal Systems of Cartoon Characters
    The Holy Books of Bokononism
    Reflexion
    A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible
    The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
    Blogiversary II: Son of Blogiversary
    Moving into late summer, the stakes were higher than ever before. Our second installment of highlights from the Year-That-Was:

    August
    'The A-Team Resolves Lapses in Homeland Security'
    Zombie Outbreak Simulator
    How to Write a Best-Selling Fantasy Novel
    Planet of the Apes Remixed as an Episode of The Twilight Zone
    Kodomo no Kuni
    Mr. Grumpy Doesn't Live Here Anymore

    September
    Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Text Adventure Game
    50s-Era Civil Defense Brochure from Denver
    A Brief History of Duckberg
    Crazy McDiagram
    Kyptonite U-Lock Bike Locks Are Worthless
    Zork-as-Life

    October
    Domino Art
    How to Live in a Simulation
    Comics 101
    Pirates and Emperors
    The Monster at the End of this Book
    The World According to Bruce
    And Happy Reallifeiversary to My Brother
    ...who turns 22 today.
    Happy Blogiversary I
    So it's our one-year blogiversary. A year ago today we had one reader (Hey, Neil) and $15 in the bank. Today, with your help, we've got $20. We're also regularly topping three hundred readers a day, which is pretty inconceivable to me.

    Throughout the day I'll be linking to a few of the past year's highlights from the archives. I've made absolutely no effort to balance my contributions with contributions from the other editors; I'm just skimming the archives and pulling those posts I remember being awesome, and as often as not it's something that I posted in the first place. Plus, I'm a deranged egomaniac, and every little bit of attention helps.

    In any event, this installment covers May - June, and includes our most popular post ever, Our Brains Don't Work, which is still getting regular hits. Enjoy!

    May
    The Brick Testament
    Duckomenta
    Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China
    The Rules of Calvinball
    Sand Art

    June
    I Love Death
    The Last Breakfast
    Top Ten Most Untranslatable Words
    Exploding Dog
    High School Marching Band Performs 'Paranoid Android'
    Songs to Wear Pants To

    July
    Spamusement
    Fleep
    Shatner Sings
    The 100 Most Important Art Works of the Twentieth Century
    Alien in Thirty Seconds Reenacted by Bunnies
    Our Brains Don't Work
    'Rhyme & Unreason'
    Speaking of writing contests, Arts and Letters Daily links to this profile of Foetry, the site that exposes bogus poetry contests. (UPDATE: Ezra's got some really good important things to say about Foetry in the comments, including a shockingly bizarre 'outing' incident involving none other than BCR #1's own Marcus Slease.)

    Also of note: this fairly negative review of Jared Diamond's new book Collapse from the London Review of Books.
    Congratulations Are in Order
    We're proud to announce the winners of our first-ever fiction and poetry contest:
    Poetry
    1st Place: Becky Cooper, "This is What I Know"
    2nd Place: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, "goat song"
    3rd Place: Joanne Lowery, "Worry, the Giraffe"

    Fiction
    1st Place: Alika Tanaka, San Francisco, CA: “S”
    2nd Place: Dave Housley, Wheaton, MD: “On Sunday Will Be Clown”
    3rd Place: Julia Ridley Smith, Roxobel, NC: “The Ugly Cousin”
    The winning stories and poems will be published in Backwards City Review #2, which comes out this summer. Order yours today.

    We'd also like to acknowledge our finalists and semifinalists, who made us regretful we could choose only three:
    Poetry Finalists and Semifinalists
    Eric Amling, "Madam, I'm Atom"
    Jill Beauchesne, "Almanac"
    Rupert Fike, "At the Art Brut Show"
    Anna Fulford, "A Bird in the Hand is Worth $1.50/hr"
    Marty Hebrank, "Sadly to the Marrow"
    Armine Iknadossian, "The Return"
    Chad Parenteau, "The Dead Won't Stop Moving"
    Lynne Potts, "Whole Worlds Had Already Happened"

    Fiction Finalists and Semifinalists
    Jacob Appel, New York, NY: “Sand Castles”
    Sarah Blackman, Tuscaloosa, AL: “We Can Be Jack and Sally”
    Timothy Croft, Tuscaloosa, AL: “Unlike Cheoung Ek”
    Lisa DeCook, Bowling Green, OH: “Andy or Just a Few of the Things That Could Have Happened Instead”
    Christopher Harris, Amherst, MA: “The Astonishing Adventures of the Redeemer”
    Teague Whalen, Harbor Springs, MI: “Drivin’ Up to Denver”
    Jennifer Witt, Elon, NC: “Confidence”
    Thanks and congratulations to all entrants. The quality of work we received was truly beyond our expectations and it certainly made ours and Fred's job beyond difficult.

    Stay tuned for the details of our second-ever contest!
    Monday, May 16, 2005

    Sith Hype
    A. O. Scott in The New York Times more or less takes a lightsaber to his credibility and claims that Revenge of the Sith is better than the original Star Wars. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm fairly certain there's not a single possible universe in which that is the case.

    Reading the review, it's plain that even Scott doesn't believe it. Not really.

    When you're done there, wash the bad taste out of your mouth with these Salon.com anti-Lucas classics: George Lucas, Galactic Gasbag, which details Lucas's "debt" to other, less well-known scifi writers, and David Brin's immortal question: 'Star Wars' Despots vs. 'Star Trek' Populists: Why is George Lucas peddling an elitist, anti-democratic agenda under the guise of escapist fun? Here's a quote from the latter:
    Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?

  • Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.

  • "Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.

  • Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.

  • True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.

  • Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.

    That is just the beginning of a long list of "moral" lessons relentlessly pushed by "Star Wars."
  • Brin's got more. Much, more more.
    King of the Planet
    You pick your fighter.
    You pick the tactics.
    You pick the catchphrase.
    The game does all the actual playing, but the prep work -- that's all you.

    I'm not going to lie to you. I was crushed when my sneaky beserker monkey who yelled "Suckah!" finally met its match at the hands of a different monkey.

    [via Little Fluffy]

    UPDATE: If that's not enough game for you, there's always the incredibly nauseating Reverse 2.
    Now I Can Play The Theme From Final Fantasy As I Walk Around Campus
    Seriously.
    Big Day Coming
    Check back tomorrow for the announcement of the winners of the first-ever Backwards City Review fiction and poetry contest, a sneak-peak at the cover for BCR #2, and our one-year blogiversary instant nostalgia extravaganza.
    The Disappointment Artist
    I don't have a tremendous amount of other things to say about The Disappointment Artist beyond what I said yesterday, that it's good, worth reading, and that I fear Jonathan Lethem preemptively stole all my best bits.

    Not many of the essays are online, unfortunately. You can read "You Don't Know Dick" at Bookforum here and "Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn" from Harper's here. Comics geeks will definitely appreciate Lethem's take on Jack Kirby at the London Review of Books here.

    But the absolute best essay in the book, "13, 1977, 21" -- which focuses on Lethem's seeing Star Wars 21 times in the summer of 1977 -- can only be found in bastardized form at the New Yorker website here. The full essay in the book is far superior.

    But the passage I wanted to highlight here is a quick rumination on writing workshops from the book title's essay, "The Disappointment Artist," which should hit all of us a little close to home:
    That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal and patri- or matricidal impulses, fox-in-henhouseish preying on one's own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes--venereal flare-ups, to use a metaphor beloved by Dahlberg. The famous teacher who steals from his students--that's a story going around. Alternately, one hears of the writer with the former protege, one extensively favored with opportunities, opened doors, who's now, after publication, brushed his mentor off but only after making an unacknowledged appropriation of signature aspects of the elder writer's live-performance shtick. Typically, in our correct, passive-aggressive era, hostility has gone underground. The last remaining interrupters, ranters, tantrum-artists--and a handful do still roam the creative-writing landscape--are mentioned with the tittering that disguises our uneasy awe. No one approximately my own age will tell even his or her worst students, as Dahlberg often apparently told even his very best, that they are simply not a writer, that they ought to give it up. And every one of us feels a queasy guilt at this hesitation; are we perhaps only leaving that job to be done by some subsequent disenchanter--an editor, or a series of rejection slips, a teacher braver than ourselves? Are we like bogus farmers, raising crops already scheduled to be destroyed in some government buyout?

    No one can say. So we smile in the classroom and work out murkier feelings among ourselves. Tongues scarred with bite marks, then loosened by a little red wine, wag in late-night gripe sessions. A few teachers circulate excerpts from the laughably inept, others memorize the unforgettable lines. A prize-winning poet shocked me years ago, explaining casually, almost sweetly, that the majority of her students could be shown how to write an adequate, competent poem--the problem was that few of these poems would ever be anything but too "boring" to read. The ferocity and finality of that modifier wasn't lost on me. A cheery type (at least by Dahlbergian standards), I like many of my students personally. Their striving mostly stirs me, often inspires me, sporadically breaks my heart. Yet I participate in the venting, too, and the whispered framing of guilty questions: Is it for more than the paycheck that we go on propagating this farce?
    As a recent writing student myself, I can assure you that this very question is forever on our minds as well. I'm just glad to see a writer teacher finally admit it.
    It Was All Thanks to Egan
    Arrested Development will return for a third season.
    How Real is "24"?
    Could terrorists blow us up with the "nuclear football"? Do jihadi cells party in clubs and recruit infidels? Could Jack Bauer legally kidnap and torture you? What the paranoid hit show gets wrong -- and what it gets right. At Salon.

    The show seems to get quite a bit wrong, actually. See you at 9.
    Sunday, May 15, 2005

    Secret Wall Tattoos
    Step 1: Stay in Hotel Room.
    Step 2: Remove artwork, mirror, iron, etc.
    Step 3: Draw a picture where it belongs.
    Step 4: Replace item.
    Step 5: Greatness.

    Thanks, Steve!
    Things I've Been Enjoying Lately
  • The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Although I'd heard nearly every song on this album in other forms, I'd never actually heard this album in its entirety. It's amazing. I've been listening to it over and over.

  • The Office DVDs. On loan from the Egan collection. Hilarious. Better than expected.

  • Jade Empire for the X-Box. On loan from the Plemons collection. A twelve-year-old-boy-masquerading-as-an-adult has got to do what a twelve-year-old-boy-masquerading-as-an-adult has got to do.

  • The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem, who I'm increasingly convinced is the A+ version of Gerry Canavan. Some of these pieces may not be new to you, but it's a great book. I'll have more to say about this when I get back to Greensboro.
  • Friday, May 13, 2005

    We May Find It Out on the Street Tonight, Baby
    Jaimee and I are heading to Wilmington tonight for some last-minute wedding preparation. See you all on Monday.
    Theme from Beverly Hills Cop + Self-Aware Anthropomorphized Frog + "Let's Go Crazy"
    = profit? I have no idea what this flash file is or where it comes from, but I do know this song is now forever playing in my head, and this gift I now give unto you.

    [MetaFilter did it to me]

    UPDATE: Reading the comments in the MetaFilter thread reveals that this is some type of ad for a ringtone in Europe and the UK. Also, that the frog is anatomically correct.
    Milton Bradley, Call Your Office
    Somebody's made a cute little board for Blogopoly.
    Thursday, May 12, 2005

    I'm embarrased at myself.
    So, cracking my knuckles and laying down this first-in-a-long-time post, I'm worried what you will all think of me. But, to give myself some credit, I'm just now escaping from a huge mountain of a semester and hope to work slowly back to making meaninful posts.

    In the meantime - The Onion is actually worth checking out today. The front page has one or two funny moments. I was amused by the digs at scientology and the "News in Photos" series of photoshopped products. But what I was really happy to see was the Onion AV club and their take on the summer lineup of films entitled "Prelude to Dissapointment." I hadn't even heard of many of these movies, but considering how I hate to watch them it's no wonder.

    After you've read it, why not tell me what 70's movie/tv show you're going to write the remake script for and what decisions you'd make in casting and plot?
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Trailer
    Several of our regular readers just exploded from joy. That one special effect they've half-finished looks pretty good.
    Oh, Sith
    The New York Observer brings the first [warning! spoilers!] negative review of Episode III to the table that I've seen. And then he goes you one better:
    There has not, in fact, been a good Star Wars movie since the first one. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, despite the presence of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, the hologram of Alec Guinness and the voice of James Earl Jones, are rote elaborations of a story arc that was pretty thin to start with. Like the prequels of the last six years, they were made primarily to gratify a marketing line and, possibly, their creator’s ego. Yet, although their props and characters—from Cloud City to the Ewok Village—ultimately seemed to have been designed with toy stores firmly in mind, Empire and Jedi still managed to convey a sense of Mr. Lucas’ childlike thrall to all things gadgety and goofy, a loss much lamented in a Simpsons episode that lampoons the diminutive director of a Star Wars–type movie.
    Literature and Bioethics
    The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting roundup of novels from autgors like Ishiguro, Atwood, and Percy that tackle bioethical concerns.
    Wednesday, May 11, 2005

    Stroup This Effect
    Click the color and not the word. You'll get a headache.
    Klingon Elvis
    Good lord.
    Damn You, Nalgene
    Even very low levels of a chemical found in plastic containers and tin cans boosts risks for prostate abnormalities in mice, and may do so in humans as well, researchers report.
    More at MonkeyFilter. Every college student in the world just got prostate cancer from their Nalgene bottle.
    Do the Laws of Physics Change Over Time?
    Or did I just blow your mind?
    The Dirty Punk Effin' Anarchy Machine
    Oi oi oi!
    More Terrible Movies To Come
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy could be turned into a horrible movie trilogy, said the people behind the awful, awful movie.
    Try These Fun Hoaxes
    Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker, via AL Daily.
    Obscure Disneyland Facts
    BCR #1 contributor Cory Doctorow gives us the pointer.
    9. Perhaps inevitably, Opening Day -- July 17, 1955 -- was a disaster. Asphalt poured just hours before guests arrived hadn't fully dried, and women's spiked heels sunk into Main Street. VIP passes were widely counterfeited, and double the expected number of people showed up. Rides broke down. Because of a plumber's strike, Walt Disney had to choose between drinking fountains and bathrooms. He opted for the latter, telling a reporter, "People can buy Pepsi-Cola, but they can't pee in the street."

    15. Disneyland is home to feral cats -- nobody knows how many -- that come out at night, after visitors leave. Years ago, more than 100 were discovered living inside Sleeping Beauty's castle.

    37. Conspicuously missing on Opening Day: the Matterhorn. In its place was a two-story-high pile of dirt from the excavation of the castle moat. It was billed as "Lookout Mountain." The Matterhorn didn't open until 1959.
    Tuesday, May 10, 2005

    Firefly: The Comic Book
    Dark Horse is proud to present a three-issue comic book miniseries that takes place between the TV show and feature film.
    Sudoku
    Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.
    'Disabled Girls Are Easy'
    Cool, funny article from Lucy Sholl at Ouch!, a group lifestyle blog by disabled writers at the BBC.
    It's not that I'm complaining about the male attention; that would be an unwise thing for a single girl to do. But this type of man - the sort who sends you running to the Oxford English Dictionary for the precise definition of 'stalker' - wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Despite my obvious reluctance, these men seemed sure that I was their ideal woman, as long as my personality didn't come into it. I was a blank canvas onto which they could project whatever odd, antiquated ideas they had about men and women. I was to be a romantic heroine from a Victorian novel, coughing blood into the occasional handkerchief while he, the melancholic hero, carried his burden bravely.

    I suppose for a certain type of man, the idea of a disabled girlfriend carries a number of advantages. "Well," they think, ""he'll always need me, she'll be grateful, and it'll be hard for her to run off with anyone else." Through friends, I also heard that a couple of men (30 years older than me, and of no fixed abode) thought that, while I'd be out of their league normally, they'd be in with a chance because of my disability. It seems your market value slips when you're disabled, and going for a disabled woman means you'll be able to get one who's a bit prettier, cleverer and younger than you would otherwise. A win-win situation, really.

    After a few years of going out and meeting men in bars and pubs, I became quite cynical. It started to seem as though men's reactions to me could be fitted into three categories. The stalkers - those of the porn-and-emigration tendencies, for whom my disability was an advantage; the bottlers, who could hardly look at me once confronted with my disability; and those who were simply in denial and secretly believed that, given the chance, they could 'heal' me.
    The whole site is pretty good; I'd never stumbled across it before.
    May the Farm Be with You. Always.
    Grocery Store Wars: Join the Organic Rebellion. I can't tell whether this is good or so-bad-it's-good. It may be both.

    (See also: The Meatrix)
    Correction: I Was in a Coma
    What's it like waking up after years in a coma? The BBC looks a couple of case histories.

    [via Geekpress]
    Encyclopedia of Sex
    A wildly not-safe-for-work encyclopedia of sexual slang, which is actually quite useful if you're like me and there's a few of these terms you just never got definitions for. For instance, now I finally know what a 'Dirty Sanchez' is.

    Though I wish I didn't.
    If It's Raining Shrimp, It Must Be The Apocalypse
    Up on Mount Soledad, Janet Andrews is reporting it rained shrimp on April 28. She and others found masses of baby shrimp on the tennis courts of the Summit residential development.
    Things That Don't Exist
    thingsthatdon'texist.com
    Today's Special
    Oh my god! The bugs are coming! Move the mouse to avoid the bugs and eat the yellow balls whenever they appear.
    Monday, May 09, 2005

    McSweeney's: Medical Case Histories on Mount Olympus
    Excellent.
    20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War
    Well that's cheery.
    May Is the Cruelest Month
    The Priory Group says more people take their lives in May than in any other month, which could be down to the climate.

    The extra sunshine, which helps combat depression, may also provide the people the energy they need to act on their suicidal feelings, they believe.
    Dracula: The Blog
    Bram Stoker's vampire novel, published by its own calendar.
    The Problem of Evil: God and the Tsunami
    Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens discuss how well religion deals with natural disasters like December's tsunami in the latest issue of Free Inquiry. Needless to say, given who's writing, the answer is "It doesn't," but the articles are worth considering anyway. Atheists, humanists, and most surprisingly even Buddhists receive their share of abuse as well.

    You just don't usually hear about evil Buddhists. But no one can escape the wrath of Hitchens.

    [via Gravity Lens]
    The Seven Basic Plots
    The Washington Post has an interesting article on the subject. Overcoming the Monster. Rags to Riches. The Quest. Comedy. Tragedy. Rebirth. Rebellion. Mystery. That's it. That's all you get. The author is very clear about this:
    Booker ends his 700-page treatise with a diatribe against literature of the past two centuries. Modern fiction has "lost the plot," he argues. Moby-Dick initially may look like a heroic Overcoming the Monster tale, but in the end we do not know who is more evil, Captain Ahab or the whale who kills him. While the ambiguities of modernism trouble Booker, some of his readers will be even more disturbed to find "E.T." and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies extravagantly lauded in a book that disparages the complex moral pessimism of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the achievement of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past , which he dismisses as "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling."
    And here I thought complexity and ambiguity were good things.

    [Both this one and the previous one via A&L Daily]
    But Satre is Smarter
    “The writer must not allow himself to be transformed by institutions.

    Whoops.
    Insane Sand Sculptures
    Holy crap #1
    Holy crap #2



    [via Boing Boing]
    Self-Referential Aptitude Test
    1. The first question whose answer is B is question
    (A) 1
    (B) 2
    (C) 3
    (D) 4
    (E) 5

    And so on. Neat logic puzzle. Self-reference is fun.

    [via Boing Boing]

    UPDATE: Geez, that took longer than expected. Think I finally got it, though.
    Dark Age
    Kind of fun Gaunlet ripoff. [via Little Fluffy Industries]
    Sunday, May 08, 2005

    Hey, Where's The Chappelle Show?
    MSNBC has the story.
    Fat Dynamite
    When Fat Albert and Napoleon Dynamite mate, anything is possible. Awesome.
    Enough Prequels Already
    George Lucas may be bringing Star Wars to TV, but the news isn't good: according to [potential minor spoiler warning] this article in The Daily Telegraph, he plans to set the series between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

    What a terrible idea. We don't need to know anything about this time period, and I can't imagine any era of the Star Wars universe I'm less interested in knowing about.

    One ray of hope: does this mean he is planning to do Episodes 7-9 after all? Is he setting the series early rather than later to save that storyline for the movies? That's the only rationale for this I can come up with.
    Consistency Uber Alles
    Metaphilm has a good introduction to continuity and the nerds who worship it. If you've never understood what the hell the nerd in your life was talking about, read this.
    Mr. Potatohead Illustrates the 7 Deadly Sins
    ..while Kimberly Yau takes the photographs.

    greed
    lust
    pride
    envy
    gluttony
    sloth
    anger

    [via the 8th Deadly Sin, Boing Boing]
    MagazineI'llNeverPublishIn.com
    The New Yorker's story is good again this week, as is this book feature about novels from China.
    Children's Past Lives Research Center
    "Either Dr. Stevenson is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century." -Dr. Harold Lief in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

    By collecting thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life, Dr. Ian Stevenson offers convincing scientific evidence, if not proof, for reincarnation.

    There's more at Dr. Stevenson's homepage here. The Skeptic Report gets its shots in here and here.
    Saturday, May 07, 2005

    Geography Game - Canada
    Be mocked by your knowledge of Canadian provinces.

    And then play all the other versions.
    Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight
    Oh...god.

    It's tragic, but it's also the greatest headline of all time. Discuss.
    Steampunk
    Cool photoshop contest at Worth1000.com: Vintage consumer electronics.
    HySpace.com
    Hyrule's Online Friend Community.

    [via MetaFilter]
    Rating the Superhunks
    Stumbled across this page while looking for something else -- An Approximate Print Journal Ranking compares the circulation and acceptance rate of a number of major publications. We'll be on that list someday.
    Friday, May 06, 2005

    A Complete Waste Of Time
    A Whole Lotta Games.
    How to Speak
    ...Pittsburghese
    ...Baltimorese
    ...Bostonese
    Free Comic Book Day
    Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. Stop by a store on your way to the Time Travel Convention.
    Honest With Me: Musical Stories on Bob Dylan
    Cool feature on Dylan from KEXP 90.3 FM: Dylan's friends and fans tell stories about the master at work.

    [via MeFi]
    Games & Stuff
    The Phone [Shockwave]

    Hapland [Flash]

    SmartStick Adventure 2 1/2 [Flash; Warning: short]

    Zork [Flash]
    Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy Assassination
    At the Skeptical Inquirer.

    [Via A&L Daily, which like me never gets tired of articles about Shakespeare]
    I've Seen Things That No Man Should See
    Malkovich!

    Malkovich can malkovich any malkovich malkovich.
    Happy No Pants Day
    I better not see any of you out there wearing pants.
    Thursday, May 05, 2005

    The Flynn Effect
    Why are IQ test scores rising around the globe? Steven Johnson, who we've talked about before, thinks it might have something to do with video games and other intellectual junk foods.

    Interesting article, particularly the second half, which provides some hard data on IQ testing:
    The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:

    The same person tested twice: 87
    Identical twins raised together: 86
    Identical twins raised apart: 76
    Fraternal twins raised together: 55
    Biological siblings: 47
    Parents and children living together: 40
    Parents and children living apart: 31
    Adopted children living together: 0
    Unrelated people living apart: 0

    After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.
    But things may be more complicated than they look:
    Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.

    Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."
    Like I said, cool article, but I still have trouble believing in the Atkins-like power of video games to make us smarter. In my life, video games have made me far more stupid, and continue to do so.

    In his story from BCR #1, Michael talked about junk miles: "the mileage one accumulates without actually getting better, stronger, faster—mileage that does nothing to correct mistakes in your form." Intellectually speaking, the bulk of pop culture is junk mileage. It's doing nothing for you.

    So how do I explain the Flynn effect? I'm not a psychologist, but I'd guess that people are getting better at taking IQ tests because the content of IQ tests is no longer mysterious, but a known quantity that one is prepped for from early childhood.

    Then again, I'm one of those people who thinks IQ testing is bunk.

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