Harry Potter y los santos de la muerte

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Originally uploaded by sindy

Yes, I couldn’t wait. My pre-ordered copy should be delivered to my house today, but I’m overseas, so I still bought it. Check out the covers for the UK edition, including the “adult cover” on the right.

(Harry Potter y los santos de la muerte is the rumored Spanish translation title.)

Read a book, okay?

Vonnegut on Love, Men and Women

From Timequake, talking about Kilgore Trout (who you might consider Vonnegut’s alter ego):

In the only love story he ever attempted, “Kiss Me Again,” he had written, “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

The moral at the end of that story is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”

Remembering Vonnegut, or God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, one of, if not my favorite, authors, passed away last night. An incredible loss. Discovering Vonnegut was bittersweet– I received Cat’s Cradle as a gift from a guy I’d sometimes rather forget– but for a few years in there, I was obsessed with reading everything by the author and I was constantly lost in the pages of Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Galapagos and others. If there was one author out there that truly shaped the person I am, the way I think, the way I view the world, I would have to say it was Vonnegut. And even years later, after I’d put the worn paperbacks away on the shelves for some time to explore other realms of literature, when I would pick up Breakfast of Champions from time to time, it was both comforting and refreshing. Familiar, but like all good fiction, new things discovered with every subsequent reading. And with his later works, with Timequake, with Man Without A Country, I felt the same way– same old Vonnegut, but still fresh and relevant and his words resonating with me as always.

And most importantly, I always find myself smiling when I read Vonnegut. He was snarky before we knew what to call it.

The NY Times article says how some dismissed him as a “comic book philosopher.” Well, if that’s not the voice of a great American novelist, I don’t know what is.

Check out this post from September 2005 about when he was on the Daily Show. Video clip included.

Zimbardo on The Daily Show, Viacom vs. YouTube

For those of you who may have missed it last Thursday night (3/29), a shout out to Stanford Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) Philip Zimbardo on The Daily Show talking about his new book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and similarities between the famous Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib.

Note the copycat version of video sharing: Viacom’s replacement for all those video clips pulled after the mother lawsuit against Google over their YouTube clips. It’s not a bad reproduction of YouTube functionality in terms of letting me embed this clip here or pass around the URL, but I certainly don’t get my pick of clips, which I suppose is part of the point, but also the ultimate price. Case in point: again on The Daily Show, Larry Wilmore and John Oliver did a great piece last week on the proposed N-word ban in New York City. The piece quickly made it onto YouTube and was subsequently taken down due to copyright complaints by Viacom, but it wasn’t in turn made available by Viacom on the Comedy Central site. As a result, another brilliant combination of comedy, journalism, and social commentary is lost in the endless bowels of cable TV history, only to be re-experienced or heard of again by the lucky re-run watcher. Are you happy Viacom?

E.F. and the Meaning of Liff

Around my office and among my friends, we have this term called “E.F.,” which stands for “Embarrassed Feeling.” It’s basically a succinct way to refer to that feeling you get when you’re embarrassed for someone else because of the awkwardness of the situation, what that person is saying or doing unwittingly, etc. and out of politeness, there’s nothing you can really do about it other than grin and bear it. For example, when you’re in a group of people and somebody starts telling a story that becomes weirdly personal so as to make everyone else uncomfortable or when somebody is trying to tell a funny story and nobody is really responding, but the person just continues awkwardly and desperately with it anyway. E.F. is also a common phenomenon when watching episodes of Three’s Company, owing to the absurdity and general hi-jinks of their plot lines, usually based on some implausible misunderstanding and the ridiculous chaos that ensues (just look at the entire premise of the TV show itself).* There are a number of opportunities and situations in which you get E.F., but at least for me, it’s a particularly torturous feeling that I get on a semi-regular basis and it’s a small comfort to have a term with which to quickly refer to it.

Like E.F., there are a lot of common things out in there in the world that we’re all aware of, but don’t have real words or phrases to capture them with so we can refer to them in our daily conversations. The Meaning of Liff, aside from being terribly amusing, manages to capture a lot of those things, whether the word be adjective, verb or noun, made-up or real:

AINDERBY STEEPLE (n.)
One who asks you a question with the apparent motive of wanting to hear your answer, but who cuts short your opening sentence by leaning forward and saying ‘and I’ll tell you why I ask…’ and then talking solidly for the next hour.

BODMIN (n.)
The irrational and inevitable discrepancy between the amount pooled and the amount needed when a large group of people try to pay a bill together after a meal.

YARMOUTH (vb.)
To shout at foreigners in the belief that the louder you speak, the better they’ll understand you.

For the American reader, it may feel a little strange– the book was written by two Brits, Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) and John Lloyd (who also worked on parts of the radio series of The Guide and produced all four Blackadder series, another favorite of mine), and its contents have a markedly British tone. (Of course, I opted for the authentic UK edition, shiny and new, shipped over from the UK.)

In any case, for those who love words, even made up ones, and being able to sum up the daily idiosyncrasies of life, you should take a look.

Get a random meaning of Liff

*And as my co-worker said of Jack Tripper, “he had such a 70’s f*cking haircut, I just wanted to punch him in the face.” (No offense to John Ritter, God rest his soul. Despite probably being best-known for playing Jack Tripper, he did a lot of other work that I thought was much better and certainly induced less E.F.)

Vonnegut

I love Kurt Vonnegut and here’s another example of why I love him.

The best part of this? Vonnegut’s commentary on how good America is at democracy– after 100 years, you have to let your slaves go. After 150 years, you have to let your women vote, etc.

Just as Jon Stewart says about his own life, Vonnegut’s book helped make adolescence just that much more bearable. I’d rather forget the person who introduced me to Vonnegut, but I’ll never forget Vonnegut and his books. I absorbed his books throughout high school and have probably read almost everything he’s ever published. He introduced me to satire and black humor and that you could somehow find a balance between science and religion and that you could find fault with man to the point of utter disappointment and pessimism and yet still be a humanist.

I just picked up his newest book A Man without a Country. More hilarious insight ensues.

The Great Glass Elevator

I’ve been reverting to childhood entertainment lately– buying DVDs of the Justice League series, reading all the Chronicles of Narnia books again, etc. Among those things, I picked up a copy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I’m very excited about the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie, but I always like this book more. I haven’t read this book in over ten years and I’m sure I didn’t appreciate it then when I did, but Roald Dahl’s description of the government and characterization of the President and his staff are too funny and scarily a propos.

For example, when they discover Willy Wonka and his crew attempting to link up with Space Hotel “USA,” the Chief of the Army exclaims, “Let’s blow them up first, crash bang wallop bang-bang-bang-bang… Come on, Mr. P… Let’s have some really super-duper explosions!” And as they try to figure out who is in the great glass elevator, the Chief Spy plays a game of twenty questions and he leads the President into coming up with his own crazy conspiracy theory as to who these people are and what they are trying to do. More insanity ensues and let’s not forget Miss Tibbs, the Vice President, who also happened to be the President’s nanny. She’s constantly seen having to guide him along and actually sings a song where she laments the fact that she helped the idiot become president.

The book was originally published around 1972, but it’s strangely and frighteningly appropriate for 2005.

Serendipity: downloading comics

Coincidentally, after recently reading so much about comic books and the comic book industry, an item is circulating around the net on the issue of downloading comics versus buying the paper versions. Comic books enter the world of file-sharing! But of course, here’s one situation in which the rationale of keeping digital copies is particularly compelling– comic books, not being in a digital, non-degrading format, suffer greatly from use, both physically and in monetary value. One fan justified downloading comics by noting that it’s one way to reread your favorite comic books without having to damage the originals. Read more:

Downloading comics: threat or menace?

Comic book heroes and history

Well, the bookshelves are starting to fill up. Latest on the list: Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones. When I first picked it up, the colorful book jacket made me think it was a fictionalized account about comic books, the comic book industry, and comic book heroes in the same vein as Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. However, instead, I was treated to an exploration into the history of the comic book industry, including the publishing industry from which it was born. The book generally follows the careers and lives of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman.

In hopes of evening out the DC-centric book, I also picked up Ronin Ro’s Tales to Astonish which focuses more on the life of Jack Kirby and, by extension, Stan Lee. To be honest, not as well written, but still an interesting read if you want to learn about how Marvel and some of Marvel’s most famous characters came to be. Next up at some point will probably be The Comic Book Makers, written by Joe Simon, one of Kirby’s early collaborators, a co-creator of Captain America and the first editor-in-chief of the company that would become Marvel, and his son Jim Simon (who has also worked in comics).

There’s so much hype around comic books again lately with the success of movies like Spider-Man and X-Men, but I’ll say this– I wonder how many people realize how profoundly comic books and the comic book industry have affected popular culture? Think about how many movies, television shows, and more are based on characters that were born over forty, fifty, sixty years ago. The stories in those cheap paper books would go on to shape filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but, more importantly and among other things, how generations of people would think about good, evil, and all the shades of gray in between. And within the industry itself, it’s a sometimes inspirational, sometimes tragic story– they were, for the most part, poor children of immigrants, struggling kids from the streets, who received little credit or compensation but, in the end, gave birth to an industry that pervades every corner of our culture and our lives. The overarching theme of the aforementioned books, rightly so, is how these comic book artists and writers came to create such incredible, such magical, such wonderful things, but received so little compensation or credit and in many ways, we continue to do this in the back of our minds as we make fun of geeky comic book collectors and fail to realize how much the comic book industry has influenced business, art, literature, culture and, in general, our consciousness.