Years ago, I'd heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.

The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:16 PM  |

1. "My Sharona" - The Knack
2. "Le Freak" - Chic
3. "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" - Rod Stewart
4. "Bad Girls" - Donna Summer
5. "YMCA" - Village People
6. "Reunited" - Peaches and Herb
7. "Ring My Bell" - Anita Ward
8. "I Will Survive" - Gloria Gaynor
9. "Too Much Heaven" - Bee Gees
10. "Hot Stuff" - Donna Summer

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:39 PM  |

“Well, I did google you,” one interviewer said, “and I found your web site.” She had an injured foot, which was propped up on the chair next to mine and pointing at me in all its Ace-bandaged glory.

“Oh,” I answered.

“I have concerns about some of your writing,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Particularly, your letters to Star Jones raised some questions.”

...


Then I realized what was going on. The interviewer thought I was actually stalking Star Jones. So I said what anyone would in that situation: “I’m not stalking Star Jones.”

As soon as I heard myself say the words, “I’m not stalking Star Jones,” I knew the interview was over.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:24 PM  |

Dead men allegedly tell no tales. But in Chris Bachelder's antic satire U.S.!, mystical resurrection begets the renewed ability to write dreadful, politically transparent fiction. The word-slinging stiff in question—famed muckraking author of The Jungle (1906) and avowed socialist Upton Sinclair—is serially reanimated and assassinated countless times after his "death" in 1968, having written an astounding 87 books by the age of 90. Dogged productivity carries no reward for the undead: Sinclair's murderers are accorded increasingly more acclaim as each successive novel is met with proportionate amounts of critical vitriol. A righteously absurd, corporeal allegory for the demise of the radical Left in America and a meditation on the efficacy of the political novel, Bachelder's vicious cycle of afterlife and death is also malevolently funny.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:35 PM  |

Three employees of UNCG Postal Services were arrested last week for mail theft. Last Tuesday, police arrested two full-time employees and one part-time student employee on various charges relating to student reports of missing mail. The three are accused of stealing mail while at work.

...

The stolen mail consisted mostly of birthday, holiday, and graduation cards, which are more likely to contain cash or other valuables. A four-month joint investigation by UNCG Police and the US Postal Inspection Service used decoy cards and surveillance to find suspects responsible for the theft.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:05 AM  |

(a) In the future, some rich people have chips in their heads that record everything they see.
(b) When those rich people die, people called "cutters" splice the recorded footage into a video to be shown at a person's funeral, almost always with the intention of making that person look like a saint, even when they weren't.
(c) Robin Williams is one such cutter, perhaps the best in the business -- he's the guy you want splicing your footage if you have really nasty secrets you don't want revealed.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:11 AM  |

One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:40 PM  |

So, let's say you poke out my eye...

Then, instantly, my eye becomes yours. To get the value exactly right, we say an eye is worth an eye. You have a right to my eye. Now you can say to me, "I'm going to take your eye." Then I'm going to say, "Hey, what would you be willing to accept instead?" It becomes an initial bargaining position.

If you want victims to be more highly valued and you want real, adequate compensation, this is how to do it. Now if I offer you what some lousy insurance company says your eye is worth -- say, $100,000 -- you'll say, "No way! I would never have let you take my eye for that." Instead, you can be sure I'll put the same value on not losing my eye that you would have put on yours, and I will pay you that amount to keep my own eye. How about $5 million? Let's start there. And we'll bargain it out.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:18 PM  |

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:05 PM  |

Academics have bravely tried to pin all kinds of meaning on Jaws. (My favorite theory, found in a Web search, ventures that the shark is the embodiment of the vagina dentata myth). But the moral (and morality) of Jaws seems pretty straightforward: The preppies are gonna get it. They've been sitting out the 1970s, Benchley is saying, practicing free love on Long Island when they should have been marching with protesters in Harlem. ("Nothing touched them—not race riots … not police corruption.") The shark—like a thousand horror villains before and after—is nature's revenge for their carefree debauchery, their unwillingness to get with the program of equality and universalism. "People who are sexual outside of marriage get punished," says Stefan Fleischer, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who teaches Benchley's novel. "And if it's society as a whole that has loose morals, it'll get eaten up by a shark."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:18 PM  |

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:27 AM  |

Kevin Brockmeier's second novel is both eerie and intimate, as befits a book whose first chapter appeared in both "The O'Henry Prize Stories" and "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror." It begins in a city, or, rather "the city," a metropolis not unlike New York (it has a river, a subway and a Christopher Street) but that has no discernible boundaries -- in fact, it seems to go on forever. The people who inhabit the city work in diners, banks and jewelry shops; there's even a modest newspaper. They drink coffee, drive garbage trucks and play mah-jongg. Everything about them is ordinary except for the countless different hallucinatory ways they got to the city: by crossing a "desert of living sand," riding a trolley through a forest of giraffes, and falling into an "ocean the color of dried cherries." Everyone in the city is well aware of the fact that they are dead.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:53 AM  |

At the start of several episodes in the first season, Bauer tells us, “Today is the longest day of my life.” In late January, I set about watching a hundred and two episodes of “24.” It was the longest week of my life...

Watching the series the way I did, I tended to notice annoying repetitions; it seemed to me that Jack whispered “We’ll get through this” to his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), at least five times in every episode she was in, and that almost every bit of Jack’s dialogue was rendered first in an intense whisper and then in an angry shout, as in “Where is the bomb? I said, ‘WHERE IS THE BOMB’!” (The second line is always said with Jack’s gun thrusting closer to the other guy’s head.) Also, just in case you didn’t pick up the tip in season one about cutting off a dead person’s thumb so that you can use it on the electronic-identification pad at his office, you see it again in season four.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:29 AM  |

i. I will publish nothing, favorable or unfavorable, about books or articles I have not read through at least once. (By “publish” I mean any writing or speaking that “makes public,” including term papers, theses, course lectures, and conference papers.)

ii. I will try to publish nothing about any book or article until I have understood it, which is to say, until I have reason to think that I can give an account of it that the author himself will recognize as just.

iii. I will take no critic’s word, when he discusses other critics, unless he can convince me that he has abided by the first two ordinances. I will assume, until a critic proves otherwise, that what he says against the playing style of other critics is useful, at best, as a clue to his own game. I will be almost as suspicious when he presents a “neutral” summary and even when he praises.

iv. I will not undertake any project that by its very nature requires me to violate Ordinances i–iii.

v. I will not judge my own inevitable violations of the first four ordinances more leniently than those I find in other critics.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:27 AM  |

The 16th volume is the first installment of what is anticipated to be a long narrative about an obsessive collector of superhero and toy paraphernalia named Rusty Brown. His sole friend throughout his lonely life is Chalky White, who like Rusty, was once a boy fascinated by superheroes and their ability to protect the vulnerable. Unlike Rusty, though, Chalky gives up collecting comic book figures, marries, and starts a family. Yet, all this has yet to occur in the first installment, which is concerned primarily with setting up the characters and the scenery of Rusty's and Chalky's childhoods.

Our first introduction to Rusty is while he is lying in bed on a cold winter morning, saying "I love you" to an action figure doll of Supergirl while his father yells at him to shovel the snow on the driveway. This scene succinctly captures the psychological architecture within Rusty: a chubby little boy living with an uncaring father and whose consolation is a fantasy world where he has super powers.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:09 PM  |

As for the boomers' accomplishments, Steinhorn exaggerates them, and downplays or ignores developments that present them in a less flattering light. As noted above, the generally conservative trend of American politics over the past 28 years is a serious problem for his thesis. If boomers are so liberal, why did they, in combination with their elders, elect Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes? Steinhorn argues that deep cultural shifts and politics don't necessarily track, and that most Americans don't pay that much attention to politics. But the fact that they don't itself raises serious questions about how much boomers actually care about their supposedly hard-won ideals, and whether they are willing to sacrifice anything to realize them.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:46 PM  |

Surely many moral duties are defeasible, and in that sense relative. We all recognize that although lying is typically wrong, under certain circumstances — to protect someone's life, for example — it is justifiable. Yet the fact that one moral claim can sometimes give way for another does not mean that the first claim is groundless, any more than traffic laws are invalidated because ambulances can run red lights.

...

The pope has used the term "relativism" to describe not only non-absolute standards, but also uncertain ones. The alternative to certainty, however, is not nihilism but the recognition of fallibility, the idea that even a very reasonable belief is not beyond question. If that's all relativism means, then it is hardly the enemy of truth or morality.

Accepting that we are fallible doesn't keep us from thinking that we're right. It just keeps us from thinking that we couldn't possibly be wrong. And that's a good thing.

True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:49 PM  |

The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering. And then she says, "I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn't for me. A little money -- less than one might imagine -- from her parents' estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries."

"There must have been something else wrong with Susan," says the young journalist, "something they didn't tell us. Otherwise she wouldn't have been damned like that -- denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared about had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind."

"I don't know about the girl in the books," says the professor, "but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers' and her little sister's bodies. There were a lot of dead people in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school -- it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:47 PM  |

Do you have a pessimistic view on life?

I don’t know. When you have children you make a decision…you can’t be completely pessimistic. Obviously you’re making a kind of decision that, you know, if you’re interacting with other people, you want to have a family, that means you got some sort of hope, some interest in the future, so yeah…But there are certainly elements that make themselves clear in my stories…I don’t look at the world as a beautiful place all the time. I think in my stories there’s a few little moments, there’s one moment in Black Hole where a boy and a girl experience these intimate, happy moments and the girl says: ‘Even if I have this one little tiny moment, it ‘ll be good.’ And very very quickly thereafter they’re having sex, and there’s this kind of horrible premonition. So almost immediately that one little spark of hope is suddenly overshadowed by this dark cloud. But they do have, briefly, a good moment (chuckles). What can I say? That’s me!

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:30 AM  |

True story. As an undergraduate, my friend took a creative writing course from David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University. On the first assignment he turned in, Wallace wrote, “I swear to God if you ever turn in a piece of shit like this to me again I will flunk your ass. I shit you not.” The meaning of this anecdote is open to interpretation, but to me it suggests several things about Wallace's way of relating to others.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:29 PM  |