Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

How bad did you feel after your last breakup? Did you bounce back quickly? Maybe you just thought you did.

They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Steve and I will be in Switzerland from September 11-18. We'll be visiting Zurich, Geneva, Zermatt, and Interlaken. Tips on must-see sights and activities in those areas are welcome. Already on the schedule: the Matterhorn, the Glacier Express through the Alps, and paragliding in Interlaken.

Didn't Twin Peaks have this problem also?

The only post you will need on why Veronica Mars sucked after Season One.

Internet Begging

This has been eating at me for a while.

The blogging world has a weird relationship with monetary exchange. A few years ago everyone was convinced that micropayments would change the world. We all know how that went. There are a few bloggers who manage to make an independent living (which I distinguish from using recreational blogging as a springboard to a paid position), but the vast majority are lucky to get a few bucks from CafePress or GoogleAds. At the same time, many bloggers are clearly putting out product that we wouldn't think twice about paying for, if it appeared as magazine or newspaper columns. We, have, however, become accustomed to getting great stuff for free.

At the same time, there have been several prominent episodes of online begging, with true and false sob stories attached. Many of these pleas are viewed contemptuously, although the blogosphere is capable of pulling together to help in some instances. Tone is important; an entitled twenty-something asking for help with her credit card debt is going to come off poorly. Paying bandwidth costs is generally looked upon as legitimate grounds for a donation drive. A single instance of misfortune can result in a surprising outpouring of generosity. I've chipped in to such campaigns on occasion and do all of my general-purpose charitable giving online.

I can't, however, bring myself to give to some people, even if I enjoy their writing, even if they seem like good sorts, and even if they are no less deserving than others I do help. These are the chronic sufferers. Their problems are constant and overwhelming; no amount of reader assistance ever seems to push them back from the precipice. Instead of a constantly present but unassuming tip jar or an occasional, businesslike donation drive, we are bombarded with incessant posts on their fragile state of affairs and long litanies of woe. They squat at the edge of the information superhighway, bandages rolled back to expose their leprous sores. It is not that their problems are not grave or that they do not deserve something (charity, or at least recompense for the writings they produce). It is merely that the unseemliness of it all induces repugnance.

There's little or no wisdom in repugnance, so I am open to being convinced that I should root out these feelings.

Music Recs

Glen Whitman needs new music for his iPod. The same musical ossification happened to me, which makes it really hard to make good mix tapes. Help Glen! In the alternative, help me!

Hmph.

I don't know why I read things that only make me angry. For example, Pandagon:

I have my suspicions that when the Republicans talk up “tort reform” to stop “nuisance lawsuits”, they’re not exactly talking about stuff like this. [Short version: scientist posts negative reviews of a book on his blog, criticizing its new theory of developmental biology as having no basis in reality; the word "crackpot" was used. The author, a critic of "Darwinian orthodoxy," sues.]

Right. That would be why the tort reform proponents at Overlawyered covered the story days before Marcotte got around to it. That coverage was even noted at the website Marcotte quoted. But why acknowledge facts when inaccurate smears are available?

Once upon a time there was a monster

This movie is made of awesome.

At some point I am going to run out of Korean movies with this guy in them (recs?), but not today.

Also, British Actors Are Hot.

Why have the decade's most popular movies been saturated with Englishness? Check out the list. A few thoughts:

1. England has a thriving theatre scene that produces many well-trained actors, far out of proportion to its population relative to the USA.

2. An easy way to make a character seem classy or intelligent to an American audience is to give him an English accent. (British English may also be more globally comprehensible than any other accent or dialect, save perhaps American English; yay empire.)

3. England has a different relationship to fantasy literature than does the USA: it is more mainstream there and often on the adult bestseller lists. There is thus a lot of English-language fantasy with a British flavor (and it's orders of magnitude easier to get something adapted if it's already in English). Add to this that blockbuster special effects movies have taken off in the last 10-20 years and that fantasy books were extremely difficult to film prior to the recent advances in FX. Result: there is a giant backlog of British fantasy to adapt. (This is the same dynamic that we have seen with comic book movies.)

4. Pirates are cool. The draw is not in any way related to Englishness. It is merely an accident (through the filming of Treasure Island) that pirates speak with Cornish accents.

5. Titanic: I guarantee that even if there had been no English passengers or crew, they still would have made this movie and it would have looked the same; it's not as if there weren't plenty of sumptuously wealthy Americans.

6. Shrek: the only reason the title character has a Scottish accent is because Mike Myers's father was Scottish and he used him as the inspiration for the father in So I Married An Axe Murderer and for other, later characters, all of which are buffoonish or grotesque. Because Britishness comes off as classier (see 2.a), the apparent contrast between our expectations and the character's behavior is heightened. Would Fat Bastard have been funny with a flat Midwestern accent? Probably not (assuming he was funny at all).

No Concord Over Conchords

You know, I am normally all about unconventionally attractive guys with accents, but a girl's got to draw the line somewhere. These two are just nasty.

Interesting Development

A new message board for law school applicants, law students, and young attorneys has arisen. Can its community moderation scheme save it from the fate of its predecessor?

GN/BN

BN: The documents I am reviewing, for reasons unknown, smell distinctly of skunk.

GN: I like the smell of skunk.

Why doesn't someone make a skunk perfume? Or maybe just a vial of scent to huff. It's not any grosser than dirt.

Aspirational Garments

Isn't this dress lovely? This is pretty cute too. And this is probably too bright, but it's fun!

If you spool through the Autumn/Winter '07 collection here, you can see my favorite suit again. It's image 20.

It works as a caption for most blog posts, too.

Everyone here knows where I stand on the dating across party lines issue, but the fact that doing so is usually dumb doesn't make this attack any less contemptible.

If I hear one more person sneer about how libertarians are just conservatives who like to smoke pot or have gay sex, I'm going to pop a blood vessel.

Photo Retouching

Check out the portfolio here. I think the saddest part is that retouchers had to make some of the female stars larger (fatter arms, adding curves) and smoothed out the black hollows around their protruding clavicles because they looked too thin in the original photos.

(h/t to The Superficial and its discussion of Britney Spears's recent Allure photo shoot)

Flowchart

Flowchart
Originally uploaded by Vjornaxx

I feel like watching Bring It On all of a sudden.

West Virginia Mountain Mama

Overlawyered highlights a particularly lurid fact pattern in a recent West Virginia Supreme Court decision:

Robert Cleavenger and Marissa Strahin were lovers, but at some point the relationship ended. Strahin, pregnant with Cleavenger's child, moved in with Earl Sullivan in Braxton County, West Virginia. This perturbed Cleavenger, who decided to resolve the matter with a high-powered rifle. Thinking discretion the better of valor, Sullivan fled his property in a car, taking Strahin and her brother, Daniel Strahin, with him. Cleavenger pursued, and fired at the fleeing car, hitting Daniel in the arm.

And then everybody sued everybody else. This scenario would make a great season opener for a country-fried Law & Order spinoff.

How you (speed) read

Tyler Cowen linked to an interesting article on reading speed the other day. Considering the medium, I was surprised that the post got so little reaction. Surely everyone online reads a bit faster than average? Wouldn't you want to know why?

The study teased out the effects of three skills we use to read: sentence context, whole-word recognition, and letter-by-letter decoding.

To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g. “Contribute others. The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word recognition, they alternated capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out letter-by-letter decoding, they substituted letters in such a way that word shape was maintained (e.g. “Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).

Letter decoding accounted for 62% of reading speed, whole word recognition 16%, and sentence context 22%. Sentence context was more important for faster readers than for slower ones.

I note that the test passages were from a Mary Higgins Clark novel. Could using a formulaic mystery have catered to those who rely heavily on predicting what happens next for their speed? Additionally, it's harder to use word recognition in works with archaic or unusual diction. I'd like to see the breakdowns for a sample of Beowulf or Ulysses.

Incidentally, I read graphic novels incredibly quickly; my eyes leap to the text in each cell very rapidly. It's necessary to force myself to slow down and look at the pictures.

Poem: Heat

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

H. D.

Characterization and Race Hypos

How would Buffy have been different if Xander had been Chicano? If Cordelia had been Persian? If Willow had been Vietnamese?

Discrimination and Food

Today we had lunch at a very good ethnic restaurant. One of the more unusual things was that the restaurant had multiple menus. One was printed on paper in English and had the standard, bland Americanized versions of the cuisine. The one we were given, a bound booklet, listed many more uncommon and spicy dishes and was also in English. A third menu was posted on the wall, with over a dozen permanent and rotating items listed in a foreign language. (There was also fourth version, a second paper English menu with some but not all of the adventurous dishes from the booklet.) We were not advised of the existence of any menus but the one we were given, the English booklet version. Not everyone received the same menu(s); another Anglo couple was given the booklet and the boring takeout menu when they sat down.

Now I am aware that in at least some jurisdictions, businesses can be sanctioned for posting help-wanted notices in a foreign language without providing a translation. Similarly, I don't think it would hold up in court if a restaurant gave its black customers a menu that included only cheap plates of collard greens and fried chicken, even if it could produce evidence that those customers were generally poorer and didn't order the foie gras. So is there a legal problem with untranslated menus? With providing different menus to different customers?

UPDATED to add that different menus can allow restaurants to establish dual pricing schemes as well.

*I hasten to add that I have no desire to get the restaurant in question in any sort of trouble; the service and food were excellent. This is one of the ways how law school warps your brain.

People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

It occurred to me while reading a discussion of race in fiction that I almost never imagine the faces of characters in books that I read. I do recall my perception of Scalzi's Fixer Young changed from white to black as he introduced the new tidbits about the character, but if you asked me to describe my favorite characters from books I've read numerous times (even characters I have crushes on!) , I would be making it up as I went along. The only recent occasion I can recall attempting to visualize a character and assign a race was when a character with an usual name was introduced in this book and I had to make up my mind whether the person was East Asian or African.

At some point I took an online quiz that implied that an inability to visualize faces in this way indicates some sort of non-neurotypical brain issue, but for the present it just makes me really terrible at playing the "cast this hypothetical film adaptation" game.

That Guy Rides Again

"That Guy" returns in rare form. Do read the comments.

Book Review: An Exchange of Hostages

I actually read this book when I was living in Clerksville, but Moe's Books had a copy and it had registered highly enough on my shelfworthiness scale to make me buy it. I'm not sure who originally recommended Matthews to me; I think it was Dylan.

This older and somewhat hard-to-find novel is worth reading, although you need a strong stomach. In what now seems like a prescient choice, it postulates a tyrannical interstellar government, the Jurisdiction, which uses torture as both interrogation technique and execution method. But to be an excellent torturer, one needs a nuanced understanding of the body. Under Jurisdiction, a "Ship's Inquisitor" is first trained as a physician. Most of you can see how this gets gory quickly.

Our protagonist, Andrej Koscuisko, is the scion of an aristocratic family and graduated with honors in neurosurgery and pharmacology. He is sent by his father, the family patriarch, to join the Fleet as a Ship's Inquisitor, a position of power. Resistance appears futile, and Andrej permits himself to be made part of the apparatus of oppression.

This is in effect a character study. A totalitarian system and patriarchal culture constrain Andrej's perceived choices until his persona inverts itself: The doctor who reassembled broken bodies becomes a dealer of pain and death. Agonizingly, Andrej learns that he enjoys his new work. Despite this, he still struggles to do good. He treats the station's bond-involuntaries with respect; his surgical skills save one and his adept manipulation of the law preserves another. His kills are clean. But this is rather faint praise, and Andrej is acutely conscious of his sin.

For comparison, Matthews also provides the points of view of Joslire Curran, Andrej's personal slave at the station, and Mergau Noycannir, an ambitious court clerk who has been put in the Inquisition program at the behest of her political master. Joslire, who escaped execution for undisclosed crimes only to be controlled for decades by a governor in his brain, has served many student-torturers before. The tiny current of decency in Andrej draws him in. In a life ruled by pain and cruelty, this may be enough to command loyalty. And loyalty Andrej will need; his skills inspire jealousy in Mergau, who lacks medical training. She is suspicious and hyperaggressive, but determined to provide her superior with a pet torturer, breaking the Fleet's monopoly. Andrej's cycle of sadism and guilt pales in comparison with her sociopathy, and the chapters using her point of view are appropriately suffocating.

If you are looking for an inspiring tale of rebellion against an evil government, this is not your book. But as an exploration of the consequences of imposing such a system, it shines. Recommended.

Fighting Words

Steve will undoubtedly disagree with this advice:

I would not recommend As I Lay Dying, or really any Faulkner even if you were dying slowly of cancer and every other book on Earth had been burned.

This is so wrong.

Think about this: the Air Force is by some lights the most woman-friendly branch of the military.

Airman Who Alleged Rape Faces Court-Martial

Must Reads?

If this blog had a greatest hits section, which posts would be in it?

One Sentence Book Reviews

Mistress of the Art of Death: Useless romantic plot grafted onto otherwise enjoyably lurid historical mystery makes sequels possible, but prospect painful.

The Nature of Monsters: Ye olde English science attempts to prove the theory of maternal impression through ghastly experiments, but our plucky heroine escapes, of course; read Mary Reilly instead.

Beguilement: Why did I think that I would like Bujold more if she wrote romance?

The Black Company: The clunky writing makes this action-packed tale of mercenaries and magic a slog, and the antagonist comes off like a female Sauron.

By my lights, at least

This is a bug, not a feature:

If people are planning to make a fixed amount of money after which they can move away and live comfortably for the rest of their lives, higher tax [rates] actually encourage work. They make you work a longer time to accumulate the millions you need to live comfortably.

Are we in the uncanny valley yet?

First magazines, then baby pictures and movies. Will the creepy digital manipulation ever end? Does anyone actually like the slick, plastic appearance of human skin in these images?

Steve Hates Biographical Comics

Steve: There are two strains that constitute three-quarters of all graphic novels. The first is predominantly male and can be summed up as "I am an antisocial loser who writes comic books." The second is mostly female and consists of the plot line "Ooooh, my family raped me."

Me: And sometimes it's both!

No Gold Stars for Breathing

Is it really surprising that some states have low graduation rates? Fifty percent is horrible, but a target of 95% is overly optimistic. The only way you can get rates that high is if a high school diploma doesn't mean anything. If you're going by IQ,* that 5% consists of the mentally retarded. "Not mentally retarded" is not equivalent to "deserves a diploma."

* insert the disclaimer of your choice regarding IQ testing

Puzzle

Is there any reason why a housekeeping service would shut off the heater and air conditioner by flipping the circuit breaker? This is the second time I have come home to a clean but hot apartment.

UPDATE: It is not the maids. The circuit breaker somehow flipped itself this morning. This only happens with the AC/heater breaker, and as far as I know no other outlets are on the same circuit.

Heroic Measures for Fido

Karl asks me to discuss the ethics of heroic lifesaving medicine for pets. As someone who spent over three thousand dollars on a cat she adopted from Little Rock Animal Control, I am perhaps not an unbiased commenter. Regardless, I do wonder why this is even an issue.

We don't typically look down on people who could have bought a Honda Accord but instead chose a Lexus, or people who take expensive vacations, or those who dine out regularly. They choose to spend their money on an extra-smooth ride or a couple of weeks in Kenya or several dozen memorable meals because these things bring them pleasure. How is spending an equivalent amount so that you can continue to have the pleasure of an animal's company any different?

If costly treatments cause a pet undue suffering, that's another thing. One has a moral obligation to consider the price your pet pays for your utility. But that calculation is something pet owners must always perform, whether they are deciding to move to a house with no yard for the dog or if the cat should be declawed. Heroic treatments should be considered carefully, as the decision is likely to be made at a stressful time, but there's nothing substantively different about them in this sense.

Some people value their pets as highly as others value flat-screen televisions or trips to the Bahamas. Why should we cast aspersions on their love of companionship?

Breeding

The blogosphere kerfuffle on defining eugenics has largely failed to include the creepy exhortations for Western women to have more babies, which often come from right-wingers or nationalists. Why stress reproduction by native women? Wouldn't Angelina-Jolie-style baby importation (or just increased immigration) also provide future participants for the pension system pyramid scheme? I don't buy that we avoid these two options due to fear of cultural change; even if you required immigrants to be brainwashed to worship the Declaration of Independence and apple pie, there would still be a surplus of applicants.

Unrelatedly, I really wanted to go to this, but I was too depressed and swamped with work.

Stupidest Thing I've Read Today

From one of the Douthat's comment threads, this (I know, fish, barrel, etc.):

Transhumanism . . . is an abominable idea no matter how few its adherents or how unlikely the possibility of attaining it. The ultimate thing that's wrong about it is that it seeks to make us absolute masters of our own destiny. It seeks to create a world without pain, suffering, or death. I don't think that human beings can nor should seek to enjoy such a world; there is something to be said for acceptance of one's limitations and for what fate brings us, rather than trying to exert total control over life. Simone Weil said that the ultimate acts of submission to God, lie in the acceptance of hard labor, suffering and death. Modern society, through capitalist economics and 'transhumanist' ethics, seeks to do away with all three.

How about this: Hector Dauphin-Gloire and his ideological compatriots can have a society where pain, suffering, and death feature prominently, and the rest of us can pursue transhumanist ends to avoid these things. The problem is not that people have these bizarre ideas about the necessity of suffering for development of virtue, it's that they seek to make the rest of us "virtuous" by causing us to suffer and die.

Snape and Lily, Non-HP Version

This is Snape's expression almost all the time:



And this is Lily's best glassy-eyed stare, inspired by my hypnotic swaying of a Gryffindor tassel:

Question Time

Open thread for readers to suggest topics for me to blog about.

And a question for all of you: Am I correct to be rationally ignorant of this whole Beauchamp thing?

Single Woman's Apartment

A checklist.

Stupid Post of the Day

A discussion of a news story on children dying after being left in hot cars attributes blame in an innovative way:

[It's the heat of summer, w]hich means the tragic stories of kids left in their cars by forgetful/neglectful parents will start rolling in. . . . [W]hile I do think these people should still be punished, I feel for them a little more.

A few parts of this story seriously pissed me off, though. First, this.

A relatively small number of cases about 7 percent involved drugs or alcohol. In a few instances, the responsible parties had a history of abusing or neglecting children. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.

My emphasis. How sad is that? If I were the employers of those parents, I would consider myself directly responsible for their children’s deaths.

Not just responsible, Constant Reader. Directly responsible.

This guy really hates Ron Weasley.

I had to go out of town for a funeral, but I am back now.

If you haven't already seen this review/page-by-page breakdown of HP 7, you're missing something. The author's site was apparently suspended as a result of his Archie comics parodies.

(h/t Dylan)

Red Spock, Blue Spock

What is better than one Spock?

Two Spocks!

(h/t Karl)

Make Cheese Not War

I bought some tasty cheese in the Bay Area this weekend and packed it in my purse for our return flight. Apparently this was a bad idea. Cheese lovers, beware. You may be on the watch list.

Advice

What I really need is for Alan Tudyk to tell me what to do.

Fin

I just finished HP7 and I am simultaneously thrilled to have been vindicated regarding one plotline and puzzled as to how the movie studio is going to portray said plotline, given the foreshadowing they cut from the Order of the Phoenix film.

Spoilers are okay in the comments to this post.

INOKIYAAR

A brush with sexualized humiliation led Rod Dreher to identify with victims of abuse. This was certainly a formative experience for him, but I couldn't help but think as I read: Of course. Of course they stood aside and allowed you to be assaulted and humiliated. Why were you surprised? Had you never seen these blank faces before? Perhaps when those same boys (or even boys in Dreher's "popular" crowd in his grade) sexually humiliated some younger boy or girl?

My seventh-grade art teacher saw a group of boys grope me almost daily for the better part of a year. She couldn't help but see; I sat directly in front of her desk. Her face was always a controlled blank. Eventually terror recedes into resignation. If this sort of thing had happened to Dreher enough times, he wouldn't have to ask "[w]hat kind of broader culture allows the weak to live terrorized by the strong in this way?" It's our culture. His and mine.

The Relationship Between Bloggers and Commenters

Megan makes an astute observation on the relationship between commenters and bloggers. I agree that commenters in some part reflect the persona of the blogger, if only because commenters often read and become invested in a particular website because it resonates with them or they identify with the blogger or the blogger's community. But Lizardbreath's remark that commenters not only reflect the blogger, but manifest more fanatical and concentrated versions of the blogger's views, is even more accurate.

I'd extend Lizardbreath's theory of commenter extremism to co-bloggers. Generally, a blog with a preexisting spin will become more radical as additional co-bloggers join and (especially) when original bloggers are replaced. I have noticed that this is often accompanied by a mysterious obsession with putting images in posts. Cases in point: Pandagon and Feministe. As time goes on and the original bloggers are supplemented or replaced, writing quality declines, the ideological or political content becomes less moderate, and people start using the image tag as a substitute for argument.

I think this has something to do with blogs being almost innately a niche medium. When you begin blogging, you try to appeal to a wide audience. But as the readership develops, the blog often finds its niche in the blogosphere: something is a feminist blog, or a progressive blog, or a techie blog. The most extreme, intentionally provocative posts gain the most links and the largest influxes of commenters, and the blog becomes part of what we used to call a webring based on the alignment of these frequently-linked posts. The new commenters, who were attracted by more radical posts, comment on other posts. The other blogs in the ring may continue to link, feeding more commenters who are already readers of these similarly-aligned sites.

Eventually the culture of the comments becomes aligned with the most extreme views held by the blogger. Radicalized commenters are typically the most enthusiastic participants in such a blog comment community (and the ones most likely to be asked to be co-bloggers due to their sizable contributions). The echo chamber continues to be constructed. Dialects and inside jokes develop, raising the entry costs for new commenters. Without fresh blood, intra-webring incest means that commenters eventually become twisted and horrible reflections of the original blogger.

Now what this says about me and my commenters, I can only speculate.

Bloomin' Onion Notwithstanding

Confidential to small-town hotel employee: Outback Steakhouse is not a "four-star restaurant."

Random Roundup

Some things that caught my eye:

Thoughts on the difficulty of making friends as an adult:

In college, you get drunk and make out. In adult life, you get drunk and tell someone you secretly have wanted to be their friend for months.

A theory of why (some) people read novels:

Basically, people read novels either for style; for characterization; for subject matter; or for plot.

"Serious" contemporary novels tend to be confessional, and are all style and characterization. The plots are defective or predictable and the subject matter is always the same (i.e. 'me').

"Serious" modernist novels (like those by Joyce and Pynchon) are all style and subject matter. Nobody reads them for plot, and the characters aren't very interesting.

"Serious" 19th century novels (Austen to James, let's say) are mainly about characterization, and secondarily feature style and plot. The subject matter is always the same, i.e. getting some woman married.

"Popular" novels from every era are often careless about style but ramp up the focus on plot and subject matter, often creating or describing marvellous new worlds in which the heroes have interesting adventures.

and how to make butterbeer.

Do Not Want

Last night Steve and I went to buy fancy accessories for the wedding we're attending in the Bay Area this weekend and made a side trip to play with the iPhones at the Apple Store. Did you know that you can't type emails in the landscape orientation? Even my small, pointy fingers are too big for the portrait-oriented keyboard. Bleh. Call me when iPhone 2.0 comes out.

And yeah, today is my birthday. I am officially in my late twenties. Eek.

Book Review: The Serpent Bride

I originally went to the library to pick up some underrated science fiction novels, but it didn't have any of the books I was looking for and I was forced to scan the New Fiction section for possibilities. I picked up The Serpent Bride because it sounded like it might be trashy fun: something on the order of Jacqueline Carey, but less porny.

When you Google "The Serpent Bride," the first result is a Harry Potter fanfic in which the author misspells Ginny Weasley's name multiple times in the first paragraph. Despite this, and despite my not having read the fic in question, I would probably recommend the story over the novel.

Things in this book that are more awful than Ginny/Draco:

• Schemes to save the world that require forced marriages and involuntary pregnancies, which of course turn to love.


• A southern place called Isembaard with a magical ruler.
  


• An evil sentient glass pyramid. (Steve's reaction: "You know what would be better? A talking pie! That solves crimes!")
  


• Birdmen with names like "WolfStar," "StarDrifter" and "StarWeb," some of whom can work magic by tapping the power of the "Star Dance."
  
  
• The mortal incarnations of Light and Water, who are allegedly attempting to avert Armageddon, making rookie mistakes like trusting birdmen crossbred with innately evil wraiths, not killing the crazy guy they know is obsessed with the evil pyramid, and breaking up the forced marriage they so carefully orchestrated (because hey, mortal incarnations of Water have needs, too).


• A female character has her position ripped from her, her child murdered, and is brutally gang-raped as a result of the actions of one character. She then falls in love with him.
  


• Repeated grandfather-granddaughter incest.


• People who sleep with each other because "blood calls to blood," not out of any conceivable motivation, because that is what the nonsensical plot requires.

The goofy names and CamelCase alone (StarDrifter? I think that was the name of a My Little Pony) made me want to throw the book across the room, but for some sick reason I kept reading, expecting that surely things would start to make sense soon. At first I was cutting it some slack because I thought it was by a new author, but then I realized she had published six other books in the same world. Six times times before, some editor has read a manuscript with orange-haired, purple-eyed winged sorcerers who screw their relatives and thought: $$$! This is a sign of the coming apocalypse. In fact, that makes The Serpent Bride the seventh sign, so get under your desks, children, because the end is nigh.

As even an animated critic would understand, it's a lot less fun to write a positive review than a negative one. I also read The Lies of Locke Lamora recently and enjoyed it, but I haven't written a post yet because it's more difficult to explain why a book is good than why it's bad. I may do a joint review of it and its soon-to-be-released sequel. In the meantime, read it, or some of the books in the Volokh thread, or even fanfiction by ESL students. But please, do not read this book.

UPDATE: Aspiring authors: Check out this filleting of a recent YA fantasy novel. Take heart that if these books can get published, so can yours.

Pantheists Keep Out?

It seems like most people agree that the protesters who claim that the constitution supports exclusion of Hindu priests from providing legislative invocations are wrong. But the protesters have a respected voice on their side: Judge Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit.

Updated to state that the protesters claim that exclusion of the Hindu priest is not just permitted but required, and also to remark that most people, in their discussion of this issue, seem to assume that enactment of the protesters' position into law would be unconstitutional. I posted merely to note that according to at least one federal judge, it is not.

Before you even ask: No.

Eugene Volokh posts data on the percentage of gays and lesbians in the general population. Hilarity ensues, with multiple male commenters refusing to believe that only 3.5% of women have had same-sex experiences, since women these days go to college and we all know what happens there. This is coupled with a total lack of realization that at least some of that girl-on-girl is performance for the benefit of men like them, not a representative manifestation of the women's sexuality.

The rampant homophobia in the comments section is, of course, not funny.

Defining Sex Crimes

Ezra Klein is puzzled by the difference between the legal definition of rape and how participants characterize their sexual interactions.

On a semi-related note: at least in Missouri, you can't be forcibly compelled while you're asleep, and the force of penetration is distinct from the force used to compel. For now, anyway.

Curiouser and curiouser

Today at work I got an unusual phone call. Someone identifying himself as _____, from the D.C. Fraternal Order of Police, called me up to ask for money. I usually put phone solicitors off by saying I prefer to donate by mail (who wants to give credit card info to strangers on the phone?), but he said that their procedure was to put you down for a pledge by phone and then send a officer to personally deliver your receipt for the donation.

Since I didn't want a cop to come to my office, I said no.

Nobody else that I talked to at my firm has received this kind of solicitation. And I've never heard of personally dispatching police officers to process donations to the FOP. My mother gave for years and they just sent her a receipt and decals in the mail.

Book Review: The Dream of Scipio

I mostly read for escapist reasons at this point in my life, so I sometimes don't get all the way through more low-key novels. In the summer of 2003, while I was living in New York, I had an Iain Pears-a-thon and checked out The Dream of Scipio, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and a handful of his art history mysteries. The latter fit the escapist-fun criteria to a tee, and Fingerpost is like The Name of the Rose, but in 17th c. England. Scipio, however, lacks a mystery plot and is instead more of an extended meditation on philosophy and ethical decision-making. I only now got around to finishing it.

The book is quiet, but eventually builds a fair amount of suspense; the worlds of each character are cruel, and deadly consequences loom as each character must decide how to act. Each ethical problem in some way involves the treatment of Europe's Jewish population, which I confess to finding a bit hackneyed. Need an easy moral dilemma? How about a Holocaust storyline? Lazy, that.

Of the three figures we follow (Manlius, the author of the Neoplatonic treatise from which the book takes its name; Olivier, a 14th c. Christian poet; and Julien, a French scholar in the early 20th c.), Manlius gets the shortest shrift, which is a pity, considering that the ideas he propagates and acts upon directly produce the events which complicate the lives of the other two characters.

The experience of reading Scipio was in some ways frustrating; Manlius is distant, Olivier somewhat dumb, and Julien almost always passive. The only unambiguously sympathetic characters are peripheral females who motivate the leads but who do not take center stage. These women are fully-fleshed out, which makes their sidelined status more irritating. Could we not have had a similarly symmetrical tripartite narrative with these figures placed centrally? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In its present form, Scipio is a worthwhile read, but not particularly pleasurable. Recommended for people who think Neoplatonism sounds like a good hook for a novel.

What goes around comes back around

I had this boyfriend in high school who loved to sing R&B songs by Boyz II Men and Jodeci. Who knew that sort of stuff would become popular again?

UPDATE: It came from the comments section: Tevin Campbell! And more Tevin Campbell! And some Color Me Badd! And a little All-4-One!

D.C. Police Don't Care About Attempted Burglary

Yesterday, two men tried to break into my friend's home while she was inside. One man attempted to pry the door open and the other tried to get in the window. She called the police and, because the men were still milling around in a nearby alley, she was able to identify the perpetrators. One of them had just been released that morning; he had been either charged or convicted (not sure on details) for robbery.

The police told her that "D.C. doesn't have an attempted burglary statute" and so they could not arrest the men. They let them go, although now they know who my friend is, where she lives, and that she fingered them to the cops.

Somehow, I am having trouble believing that there was nothing the police could have done.

She lives in the Third District. I hope nobody reading this has the bad fortune to be "protected and served" by the cops there.

(Previously)

UPDATE: Hello, new readers. For what it's worth, the police in question were almost certainly aware that attempted burglary is a crime and chose to make the above untrue statement as rationalization for refusing to arrest the burglars.

I can has dressez?

Happy birthday to me from Steve!

Budgeting Tip

To keep track of your finances with ease, upload a budget spreadsheet to Google Documents and you can edit it from anywhere.

"What languages were denied to you from fear?"

This doesn't strike me as the best way to discuss linguistic differences.

GN/BN

GN: Energy Spatula is blogging again.

BN: She's blogging about her MS diagnosis.

Things I shouldn't buy

I like dresses. They save you the trouble of matching a top and a bottom, are feminine but can also be comfortable, and are, with a nice cardigan or blazer, office-ready. This site was mentioned on Serafina as a good place to buy dresses in smaller sizes. Check these out!

This plaid or this green print would look great with a black shrug or short jacket.

Very classy.

For the weekend.

This cardigan is also cute.

Semi-relatedly, I'll be so happy when all of these stupid shirts that look like maternity wear go out of style. Empire waist good, billowing stomach panel bad.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

Adrien Brody as Spock. (via)

Reflection

It sucks to be neither a Jackie nor a Marilyn.

Blast from the past

In the spirit of frivolity . . .

Banning DTC Ads

Doctors want direct-to-consumer drug ads banned. A ban might work if everyone had an established relationship with and made regular visits to a provider who kept up-to-date on the latest developments in pharmaceutical research. We do not live in that world.

If you think that everyone has a certain problem, or that acquiring that problem is inevitable, why would you go to the doctor about it? If you tried a treatment years ago and it failed, how would you know that there are new drugs or formulations that might work for you? Is it realistic to expect patients to talk to their doctors about amorphous clusters of maybe-symptoms, given that they rarely have more than a few minutes with the doctor?

Random Roundup, now with extra randomness

Should you vote for Fred Thompson because he's "sexy"? No.

On the perceived dangers of women's physicality.

More hazards of having a female body.

Time to make the snow cones!

What not to read: Overrated novels.

What to watch: Movies with this guy.

My government professor gave away his kidney.

Tim Wu is down on the iPhone. People are grumbling that the AT&T network takes a whole minute to load the New York Times webpage. My Blackberry is on what's considered the best network in the D.C. area and it still takes 1.25 minutes to load The Volokh Conspiracy, which is mostly text. If I am going to have poky load times, I'd rather have a shiny iPhone to assuage my anger.

Fiction for the non-fiction reader

What are some novels that you'd recommend to someone who can't get through a novel and thus only reads non-fiction? I thought the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or something by Max Barry might be just the thing, but perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Hate Mail for CVS

Dear CVS pharmacy,

If you close at 6pm, perhaps you shouldn't allow customers to select 6pm as a pick-up time for a prescription.

Hate,

Amber

Paging Karl

Thoughts while listening to Nuthin' But a G-Thang: what was the last major hit to prominently mention contraception? Salt-N-Pepa's Let's Talk About Sex was also in 1992, and the more explicit verses often did not get airplay.

Who needs the next generation?

Human labor will be replaced by robots. I've been saying it for ages.

Is this the way it's really going down?

Don't want to think about it
Don't want to talk about it
I'm just so sick about it
Can't believe it's ending this way . . . .

I blame Children of Men

Via a friend with connections to the book biz, a new young adult novel about a society of immortal, childfree humans. Sounds like a dream life, eh? But alas, it's supposed to be a dystopia. My friend sent me this marketing blurb with commentary:

"In Anna's world, every adult must make the chilling choice: live forever and never have children, or abandon your role in society to have a family. Which would you choose? Which would your parents have chosen? THINK ABOUT IT."

Chilling! Yes, Amber, make that hard decision: you can do exactly what you want to do, but you also get to live forever. "You can eat all the chocolate you want, but you can NEVER gain weight. What will you choose?"

The actual plot seems even stupider than the marketing would suggest. Wouldn't any society in which one had to forbear reproduction in exchange for immortality condition acceptance of the immortality-causing process or substances on sterilization? The Man can stop aging, but somehow tubal ligation and vasectomies are beyond his skill? Pah.

Deracination: Complete

Upon learning that I grew up in Texas:

"But I see you and I think—New York!"

Oldest = Smartest?

Eldest siblings have significantly higher IQs. (via)

The devaluation of conversational currency

I don't understand the incessant focus on the necessity of knowing about tawdry celebrities and interchangeable sports stars for conversation. Any mental real estate taken up by these ephemeral and essentially worthless persons will rapidly become dated when they die of overdoses or blow out their knees and are replaced by a new generation of idiots to gossip about. If you need to make small talk with someone (and this is itself questionable; any "social lubricant" function performed by chit-chat can also be achieved by discussing other topics), why not talk to people about themselves? That's everyone's favorite topic, and it has the bonus of allowing you to actually get to know the person instead of just what s/he thinks about Paris Hilton.

Then again, it's established that I just don't get sports.

AutoAdmit

I'll have this to say, they do protect their own.

Random Yale women bashed; threads stay up, despite nationwide publicity and a lawsuit.

Long-time female poster outed; threads deleted within a matter of hours.

Cowboys, pudding, etc.

I can't believe that I never heard of this movie before.

Eyeball Update

For those of you who were concerned about my vision issues, the resolution:

I recently got more powerful glasses and contacts. I also have an eye that tends to be focused inward. Apparently when one's vision is less than completely corrected, your eyes tend to point outward (therefore, my doctor explained, people who have eyes that drift outward are sometimes given overly-strong prescriptions to force their eyes in). My old prescription provided less than complete correction and thus pushed my inward-focusing eye outward. My new prescription pushed it further inward, making everything wonky and horrible. So, theoretically, things should return to normal after I go back to my old prescription .

Agreed.

Jake Gyllenhaal = not that attractive. But maybe we just haven't seen the most sensual side of him.

Mmm, Max Barry.

The cover of this book is making me so hungry.

(The inside is good, too. Very fluffy, very readable: like Terry Pratchett and Office Space combined.)

My double vision gets the best of me*

I have been seeing double for most of this week. At present nobody knows what is wrong with me. All I know is that I wore my new glasses all weekend, switched back to my contacts on Monday, and have had increasingly worse double vision since that time. Apparently I need to find a strabismus specialist or something.

UPDATE: This sort of thing is what I have been seeing. I can see normally if I close my bad eye. (Of course, this is the opposite of what you want to do, as it just weakens the already-weak muscle.) Double vision is not new for me, but in the past I have only seen this when I deliberately unfocus my eyes and I could re-focus them easily. Now I am having a lot of trouble focusing at all.

* Rejected post title: It's not a tumor!

They can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone.

I don't want to link because that might come off as criticism of a person who very generously provided information about her job at a university to a discussion on college financial aid, but this really rubs me the wrong way:

Universities produce a huge amount of this country's scientific research; they bring top scholars together and give them resources to work on society's intractable problems; and yes, they educate students, both first-generation college students and extremely privileged students who, we hope, will benefit from an education that brings them into close contact with less-privileged peers, emphasizes diverse perspectives, and challenges their comfort zones. (emphasis added)

Underprivileged college students are not zoo animals. They are not objects to be used to teach privileged students about how the other half lives and pop their bubbles of ignorant entitlement. They should be at elite colleges because those experiences will benefit them more than other educational or vocational opportunities, not because they can be examples of diversity who give the rich students additional perspective.

If anything, we should send poor students to elite schools so they can learn how to take advantage of the rich kids. They should figure out what persona they can adopt to ingratiate themselves with the wealthy and then work the connections they make with the rich kids paying full tuition to their benefit. Room with some blueblood and start a business out of the dorm together with his capital! Marry rich! Meet parents who could give you a job! Find out about careers and sectors of the economy that you never dreamed existed! If the perspective of rich students is narrow, circumstances often make those of poor students even narrower. How can you know if you'd want to be a lawyer or a CPA or a banker if you've never even met one?

I hate the idea that scholarship donations should only go to community colleges and public schools instead of more elite private schools as well. One of my best friends was the first in his family to get a college degree. Without the extremely generous financial aid provided by my college, that might not have been possible for him (not all colleges do their students the disservice of making them fund their educations with all or even mostly loans). And I highly doubt that he would ever have heard that you can make wads of cash as a redistricting consultant if it were not for the opportunities afforded by our small private college and its institutes, which offer undergraduates the chance to do research and are funded by and named for the very self-aggrandizing rich donors that some deplore.

Small private colleges that have more of a focus on teaching are probably a better environment for an underprepared product of a middling-to-awful public school than a some huge university where your class is a giant lecture hall with a teaching assistant who never learns your name. No professor at UCLA is going to call you on the phone if you miss a class. A CMC professor would. (It helps that there are only a couple of dozen students per class in small colleges, so your absence is notable and noted.)

Also, "awesome."

It is very pleasant being around someone else who likes to say "dude."

Four Eyes Rides Again

New glasses!

Cheese Racket

I am convinced that cheese stores fail to label your pieces of cheese so you aren't able to write down the specific varieties you like and must return and buy any cheeses that look like your favorite.

Book Reviews: Kingdoms of Thorn & Bone, Books 1-3

Imagine George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, but with the sex, blood, and despair turned down 50%. That's what Gregory Keyes's Kingdoms of Thorn & Bone books are like. If you're jonesing for some ASOIAF but can't wait for A Dance with Dragons, these are your methadone.

Keyes sets up a politically complex, medieval parallel world on the verge of dynastic war that is thrown into total chaos by the sudden reemergence of ancient evils and strange magics. (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) The ruling family of Crotheny happen to be direct descendants of the sorceress who freed the world from magical enslavement, and only the scion of this line can hope to avert a new apocalypse. But forces with mysterious motives murder most of the royal family and it's not clear whether the creatures of legend that have reemerged are friends or foes. Can Princess Anne, many-times-granddaughter of Virginia Dare (yes, that one), save her world? You won't find out until book 4 comes out in January 2008.

The characters are less multidimensional than Martin's, but Princess Anne makes a believable transition from bratty royal to born-queen-in-the-making. Keyes's experience with fencing and linguistics is well-used to make battle scenes with a vaguely Mediterranean itinerant duelist more interesting than your average fantasy novel sword fight and the character of what would otherwise be a generically nerdy monk more complex. He does leave several threads hanging (what we are told about a shadow order of nun-assassins doesn't make much sense, a belle dame avec merci is something of a deus ex machina, and the big reveal in book three is somewhat unbelievable), but the books are rather addictive regardless. Recommended for fantasy enthusiasts.

Paris Hilton has nothing on her.

The only moral abortion is my abortion, part xxiv. (via)

Path to French Citizenship Closed to Women

It really ticks me off that women cannot join the French Foreign Legion.

This bow-chika-bow brought to you by Trojan?

Great question from Hockey Jones:

[W]hy don't condom manufacturers make their own porn and use these films as advertising (i.e. use the condom in the porn/ad)?

Unrelatedly, my Un Lun Dun review is below.

Green Blood

Migraine medication turns you into a Vulcan. (h/t Karl)

Gender Apartheid

If you haven't already seen this article about an American woman's experience living in Saudi Arabia, it's worth a read. The issues she raises are not new. Matt Yglesias has thoughts as well.

English Majors, Math, and the Billable Hour

Is this more work than a New York City BIGLAW associate has to do? If associates bill 200-300 hours per month and don't die, I have trouble believing that younger and more resilient undergraduates would crumble under the load of three classes.

Shadow Curricula

These all sound like HLS to me.

Reading Material

A list of books recommended by famous authors. Some of them even sound readable. You can guess which one I bought for Steve.

Blog Book Club: Whatever Edition

I know I owe you all a review of Un Lun Dun. Consider this a placeholder.

Bottom line: recommended. A bit dark for younger children, but would be okay for 10 and up.

UPDATE: Here are my thoughts on China Mieville's latest book [SPOILERS AHOY] .

Mieville completists (in which category I include myself) should be aware that this is a children's book. In the light of some recent discussion on children's literature, a few things stand out:

• The protagonist is female
• She is a person of color (British Asian)
• She is not conventionally pretty, wealthy, or high-status
• "Performance of gender" is not used as a proxy for character traits (or really at all)
  
• The government is viewed as corrupt and evil and no retrograde hierarchy is put forth as a replacement

A world is in danger and a savior must come, but when prophesies about the identity of the chosen one fail, a new hope rises. Mieville turns meta and gets in some digs at the cliches typically associated with the hero's journey, in particular the role of the sidekick.

In the grand children's book tradition, the child hero succeeds despite, not because of, the adults around her. Deeba, the heroine no one expected, acts on her own feelings of loyalty to friends and family and solidarity. No stand-in for God intervenes in the story to tell her what to do (I hate Aslan). Figures who do attempt to shoehorn her into a conventional quest narrative are viewed as fallible and untrustworthy. Only by subverting convention and remaining skeptical can she defeat the villains.

There are some scary parts in the book, and Mieville's trademark obsessions with filthy cityscapes and repulsive organic forms do manifest themselves in small ways, but this is far from New Crobuzon. Recommended for readers 10-100.

What goes around

Conventional porn producers undercut by new technology? Wasn't this dynamic part of the plot of Boogie Nights (only then it was film versus video)?

A dissenting opinion on AuH2O

In my (admittedly outsider) opinion, fashion, like food, is typically ingredients-intensive or composition-intensive. A loose, unstructured style may give the texture or quality of fabric a chance to shine, whereas a more complex, structured piece puts the focus on how it comes together and less on what it's made of.

That's why I don't see how people are surprised that stuff like this didn't get the approval of the fashion establishment. Most of it is relatively unstructured, with few crisp seams and lots of raw edges. It's not tailored to fit and support the curves of a female body or to accentuate the angles of a male one. And a lot of it looks less like original pieces and more like "found object" assembly.

It's not composition-intensive in that it doesn't look like a lot went into the design, beyond "hey! let's sew a t-shirt onto a skirt!" And it's not ingredient-intensive in that the fabrics themselves are "salvaged" (read: already partially worn out) and look to be unremarkable materials (t-shirts? what appears to be a synthetic slip/petticoat? ugh). Almost all of the interesting pieces, like the MetroCard dress, are utterly impractical and can't be dialed down from couture to RTW without losing what makes them good.

Sure, it's could be that they would feel shamed by the designer's environmentally conscious ethos, but isn't it also possible that this stuff just isn't that great?

UPDATE: Apparently the MetroCard dress itself isn't an original idea. That picture's from 1994, people.

I'm not too impressed with the designer's smarts, either. She can afford her own shop in the East Village but not a dress form? I don't even sew anymore, but I know that making a dress form on the cheap is not hard.

UPDATE II: The crude, didactic menstrual blood paintings displayed in an online gallery . . . not good either. These are better, if that's the right word.

I'm sure the designer is a nice and well-meaning person, but maybe design school or toiling a couple of years in the trenches would be a good choice after all?

You can guess what my favorite swear word is.

You know, I'd feel less annoyed about people attacking bloggers for swearing if those people's favorite politicians didn't use the same language.

Relatedly: this, which I've linked to before.

It would be better than the current state of affairs.

Me: I would trust Tyler Cowen to be our philosopher-king.
Steve: He would tell us what to eat and where to eat it.
Me: "I have just spent the NEA's yearly budget on the works of obscure Haitian folk artists."
Steve: And Mexican painters.
Me: And he would appoint at least two attractive, economics-oriented women named Megan as Secretaries of something and then advise us to listen to them.