Smile!

Yes, smile! as you gaze upon Picasso's immortal scene of horror and despair, set amid one of the greatest Fascist atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. C'mon, everybody, smile! Don't be a Grumpy Gus! Later on we can all sing The Heffalump Song as we tour Treblinka.

I swear, every new day brings to light a new reason why anyone who ever held any kind of position in marketing should be immediately and involuntarily sterilized.

Click here for an even larger version.

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Disclaimer: Image harvested by me from a late '05 issue of the Smithsonian. All rights reserved, to whoever wants them. Also, this post should in no way be construed to \ suggest that visiting Spain is not a worthy objective, far from it; lots to see in Spain, and I gather the people are reputedly nice--and besides, it is hardly their fault that the ad agency they hired turned out to be run by mental-asylum escapees.

Arrivederci Silvio!

It seems as though the premiership of Mr. Berlusconi is in its final days, and it thus seems only appropriate, in light of his long and faithful service to the people of Italy, to blow a nice big fat raspberry. Ptoo!

Not that there are no downsides to his imminent departure, I suppose--the Economist will be deprived of their favorite whipping boy (and what a whipping boy! The proverbially perfect side-of-a-barn-sized, fat-assed, slow-moving, engorged-with-corruption target non plus ultra). And of course this will be sorta sad--it allowed them to preserve a thin varnish of the appearance of impartiality, to balance the whole "Three cheers for social darwinism!" baseline of nearly the entire rest of the magazine. But they could certainly be witheringly funny when they laid into him--a good reminder to try and not piss of the British if you can help it, as they have preserved in the English language a venomous potential we have largely permitted to atrophy. And with Silvio, they often had occasion to test theirs out.

This is not about the massive corruption, by the way. Or the slimy alliance with the LePen-esque Northern League, or the cheap, opportunistic glomming onto the Iraq war in the face of 90%+ public opposition. These are merely garden-variety acts of political debauchery, and my dislike of the little #&%* runs far deeper. In order to properly loathe him you have to appreciate what he has done, what he is. Image a svelter, vainer, dumber version of Dick Cheney. Now imagine him owning--outright--CBS, ABC, CNN, FOX, and C-SPAN--and appointing the entire board of PBS with zero congressional oversight. It is a massive tribute to his own venality, concupiscence and sheer stupidity that he ever managed to lose another election.

As Hunter S. Thompson said of Nixon, we shall not see his like soon again. Thank God.

Book Reviews: Earthgrip

by Harry Turtledove, 1994

Well, it was nothing if not a suprise to learn that Harry Turtledove, of all people--the Harry Turtledove of the long alternate-history sagas about Byzantium and the Civil War and WWII and about anything else about which you can propose a counterfactual--has also written something like this. The book is much, much better than the comically lurid cover illustration, and consists of three short stories, or more accurately two short stories and a novella. It seems as though Turtledove was in a mood for something light and fun--the pieces are about a crew of space merchants trying to make a living counducting trade with alien species, mostly primitive ones, and seem quite deliberate homages to the Polesotechnic League stories of Poul Anderson in particular, and a ton of other mid-century SF of which many including myself have fond memories.

All three segments have a serious problem, though--a little something called "plot." It feels forced and unspontanous in all three--one gets the impression that the author started with the endings and worked his way backward, and not with the greatest attention to the flow of plausibility either. His settings are, as always, superb, and the aliens are well realized and as genuinely alien as this sort of thing calls for, but one keeps returning to the plot, the book's Achilles' heel; Turtledove is no great prose stylist, nor an inexorable logician, but for someone as broadly learned as himself it is mildly dismaying to find colossal logical holes in all three stories. The G'bur story, for example: The humans have a spaceship. With a large cargo bay. And, in later stories, a laser suitable for intercepting missiles. And they have to resort to fighting an incoming army of barbarian land crabs on foot? With hand-stunners? Turtledove could easily have had the crew whip up some napalm and flambeé the M'sak. Or at the very least drop some rocks on them, for heaven's sake. Heck, why not just hurl a medium-sized boulder from orbit? To say nothing of the fact Turtledove's spacehip apparently comes equipped with a very large solar sail, easily applicable to braising the entire horde into a seafood platter in fifteen minutes or less. Sloppy.

The Atheter story is the shortest, and really just a postcard. It also makes no effort to explain why the Atheters could not have simply taken the seeds and planted the damn things in the right places themselves, manually, bypassing the whole noisy dung-producing animal-vector part--a plot hole that could have been easily disposed of by specifiying that the seeds could only germinate after being digested and expelled. Very sloppy.

The Foitani story is really the best of the lot--had it been written as straight adventure, it would have had definite potential. Unfortunately, this one doesn't even have a pat, forced ending; instead it has none at all, no resolution worth speaking of whatsoever. I mean, the last few pages are just about literally "Well, you three factions have been locked in a genocidal war for twenty-eight thousand years due to the fact that you are viscerally and categorically unable to tolerate each other's philosophical position and therefore existence. But why don't you just try to think about things a little differently?" Oy.

Well, I probably shouldn't sound this critical--truth be told, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Though the oddest thing about it is that Turtledove never actually explains what the heck "Earthgrip" is--the few times the word appears, in the Foitani story, in seems to mean, from context, "loss of high-technology civilization due to warfare," a definition that does not seem to follow from the word itself. Strange...

Yow!

I was blearily monitoring CNN for further signs of the apocalypse at three in the morning today, and boy did I stumble across a doozy: an advertisement. For Fidelity Financial. Set to Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Think about it for a second. Fidelity Financial. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

Now, I freely admit am of the wrong generation for the song to mean something deeply visceral to me; my chief association of it is as part of the classic Simpsons bit where Bart dupes the congregation at the First Church of Springfield into singing it as a hymn one fine Sunday morning. but still--In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Fidelity Financial! Even I can feel the cognitive dissonance; we may need to put down some tarps for the incipient rash of boomers' heads exploding.

Anima Mundi

My morning commute runs, for about a half-mile, along the bank of a flood-control channel. It may be only a concrete basin, but it has not been dredged in quite a while; there is an entire miniature wetlands at its bottom--long dunes of silt, reeds, several decent-sized trees--and it is especially lively now, after a few weeks of torrential rain. The ducks are out in force, and there are lots of other waterfowl I don't recognize--egrets, a few pelican-esque things. Today I saw what I think might have been a kingfisher. It's really a little world to itself down there, and almost makes me wish I knew more about wildlife; the frenzied, quacking activity is quite amusing, and rarely fails to cheer me up a little.

Or perhaps it all simply means it's been too long since I've had roast duck.

Retards

I should preface this by specifiying that this is not a political blog. I care little for public affairs, or at least I have largely ceased to. But, every now and then, one is confronted with stupidity of such transcendent incandescence that a light fisking is really the only supportable reaction. Exhibit A:

It is important in this regard not to lose sight of the wider benefits to be had from toppling the Ba'ath regime in Syria and destroying the nuclear programs/capabilities of Iran and Pakistan*.

*Nominally an allied state. Nemo unquam sapiens proditori credendum putavit.

The economic backwardness of the Middle East and the impunity with which we can determine which governments will be allowed to remain [in] power

"Impunity." See also 1, 2.

demonstrates not just the superiority of our culture but that the current ummah has misunderstood what Allah wants of them--there lies the basis for Reformation.

Yeees. Quite similar to how--as I am sure we all remember from history class--the Protestant reformation was an intevitable reaction to the Muslim conquest and occupation of Europe. To say nothing of the fact that the Reformation delivered an increase in religious zealotry, not the opposite. Islam has already been reformed, you douchebags; the Wahhabis are the Calvinists. What it needs now is to be Enlightened.

I could also draw your attention to the fact that the author seems not to understand the difference between the concepts of "culture" and "munitions"--but that would probably be redundant. The inability to tell the two apart has been the distinguishing trait of that side of the aisle since time immemorial, and explicitly so since this.

So, to repeat myself, retards. Though I guess that's not really their fault. So, also, douchebags. Which is.

And With You Also

The cable news yesterday was all about the one-year anniversary of the Popeship (Popitude? Popage?) of Benny No.16. Oddly enough he actually seems like a reasonably nice fellow, if you can look past that ever-furrowed, perpetually-nervous looking kisser--I swear, he looks like Nixon in a tiara. I didn't have enormous hopes for him, so even the minor fact that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has not yet been issued new "purification kits" of tongs and kindling qualifies as a positive sign in my book. But if I can beg one favor, Benny, let it be this: Live. I know you're 140 or something, but try and make it at least another decade or two. For some reason, a papal transition brings out the absolute worst in journalists; perhaps it is the rarity of the occurrence, but they seem to feel free to attempt "clever" headlines of the kind to make one earnestly wish to be stricken with severe aphasia. "Keep Pope Alive," "Terms of Empopement," "Big Popin'"--the Inquisition is too good for some people.