are for kids.

Here's my latest review for Library Thing Early Reviewers program. Gladiatrix, or "One Woman's Inability to Have a Good Day".

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The move has been... let's call it "delayed". I'm sure that in years to come we will look back on the events of this week fondly, but right now no so much.

No really, I'm fine.

This I can tell you: two nights before closing on a house is awfully close.

And now presenting...

Did something last night I haven't done in ten years -- stood under the lights of the stage at the Marie Maday. Fortunately, I remembered to keep the lights in my eyes so as not to be distracted by the highly bored faces in the audience. That and my own actor move, frowning and shaking my head at everything the other characters say, made it a fairly painless experience.

One of the odd things about staged readings is the question of movement. Do you look at the other actors? Nudge, punch, etc?

Heh heh...

Emphasis mine. CNN.com sure knows how to make you do a double-take.

Back to the croaking

You’ll forgive me if I start this post with a quotation. Pulled from a recent book by a local writer, it describes his experience in setting up a new business, and I can’t help but find it very telling.

“There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one... said he was sorry for me… for [this] was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us.... This man continued to live in this decaying place… refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.”

Now, allow me to clarify. The source of this abridged passage is founding father Benjamin Franklin’s widely-read autobiography. So when I say “a recent book by a local writer”, I mean “recent” compared to the sack of Troy and “local” compared to Addis Ababa. The city he describes is Philadelphia and the topic is the establishment of his legendary printing house.

All Buffalonians know their share of croakers, and even indulge in the occasional croak themselves. It’s difficult to resist. But the two examples Franklin gives of “appearances to the contrary” – new buildings and higher rents – can undoubtedly be seen here.

Five minutes clicking through BuffaloRising.com will bring up quite a few updates on new builds or conversions. The Federal Courthouse, an old Expo hotel, Rock Harbor, the new Burchfield Penney – feel free to append as many et ceteras as you like. Take a drive down-town and witness cranes actually putting buildings up. Not exactly the image of decay you hear from the croakers.

As for rent increase, I can only offer anecdotal evidence, as I’m sure you can yourself. But consider the following, which I gleaned from an email debate between a croaker and someone with a more realistic perspective:

• In May, CNN Money listed Buffalo as the country’s fifth fastest-growing real estate market.
• Forbes put us within the top 100 cities in which to get a job in 2008.
• Newsweek lists City Honors as the #11 public school in the nation.

Spend an idle hour at buffaloniagara.org and find plenty of similar statistics, all of which certainly seem to be from unbiased third-parties.

Franklin gives plenty of advice in his autobiography, including that when positing an argument one should try to avoid definitive statements, that one should pad one’s statements with tempering “I believes” or “so I understands”. In this case, I will ignore this well-intended advice and state quite definitively that we should put a quick end to all of our self-defeating nonsense lest we end up like the man in Franklin’s parable. It’s not the snow that keeps people away from our fair city, it’s the croakers.

WBFO, #2 Finale

The new WBFO listener commentary is up. 'Cause I know you guys NEVER get tired of hearing me prattle on.

Monday Link Love

Now tell me this isn't cool. I'm glad we have reached a point as a society where we can search a limitless trove of knowledge before we've even finished a word. Why aren't we all Atlanteans yet?

WBFO, #2

A slightly-less funereal version of the Aunt Mickey post is my latest WBFO listener commentary, which will be aired on Tuesday AM at 6 and 8:30. Further updates as events warrant.

Only a Matter of Time

For some time now, my brothers have been my pathway to true geekiness. For example:

• It was my desire to understand their ways that introduced me to Magic: The Gathering, with long-lasting results.
• Pete gave me his copy of Record of Lodoss War, which was a first for me in many respects -- first time owning a full TV series, first anime in my collection and the first with subtitles.
• It was at Morgan's apartment that I played my first round of 8-man Halo, prompting me to buy the Xbox and leading to a few of the geekiest things I've ever done, including holding a video game tourney as fund-raiser, manning Halo at a bachelor party, and participating in a game-inspired improv show.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when I learned that Pete is currently playing World of Warcraft, I decided to try out the demo. We're not really letter-writers, but we are certainly gamers -- perhaps this will give us a chance to hang out, right?

Well, let me tell you this. PA has it right once again. From what I can tell so far, the game is mainly a steady stream of tasks involving killing X number of Y monsters. Snooze.

Now, I assume that once the tedium of grinding is done and you actually team up with people, some coolness can occur. Except that people are a pain in the ass. So, we'll see.

Croakers

Here's a snippet from His Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin.

There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one then lived in Philadelphia.... This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us.... Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it.

This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.

Sound like any towns you know?

Link-love

A bit more link-love for you tonight.

Stumbled across Wordcount recently, a little app that list words by usage. And yes, I did contact the creator to see if his tool could be used to trend data for use in my continuing offensive against the word "iconic" (sorry Eric), but he replied in the negative. #47267, FYI.

reCAPTCHA is awesome. Take one of the more annoying aspects of modern life and use it for the advancement of mankind's great work.

See Me

A few videos for the lot of you.

If you haven't been over to The Humanist yet, you should really watch this. A bit more impassioned than the approach I would take, but then isn't that always the case? The passage of proposition 8 in CA is yet another blot of the record of America, proving once again how far we have fallen from the immutable ideals laid out by our forefathers. For shame, California.

The complete Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello has been posted in excellent quality.

And most importantly, turn it up, man!



_________________

P.S. -- I just ran across an old favorite. I've watched about four minutes of West Wing in my viewing life, and this just happened to be a few of them.

And Good Luck.

Looks like Obama beat me to the punch in becoming the first internet president. Change.gov sounds like a fine plan for doing what the nets were built for -- getting info from one person to another. I'm all for it. Also, seems like a fine way to tag people who might try anything untoward. And then, of course, it's only a matter of time before people start getting arrested for things they email to the President-Elect. And once some evil overlords take over, an extensive digital record of people's opinons can easily be scoured for dissenters. We'll have ourselves an old-timey central-government-fueled witch-hunt based on these emails.

Or blog posts.... dang it! Well, I've assumed since age seventeen that once the new order of hyper-christian dictators begins I'll be among the first on the block.

Of Dewey and Geneology

Coughing one's way through the book-paper dust of an inherited library is a fine way to spend an evening, surely. When my father's Aunt Mickey decided to pack up the essentials and relocate to a home with fewer staircases, I did not -- could not -- understand how many books I was about to glean from her collection. The currency with which the elderly trade is bifold; possessions and the memories attached to them, and my wife Jess's and my reward for muscling Mickey along in her move is books.

Not all of them, not by the longest of shots. Aunt Mickey is a highly clever woman, the acuity of her speech never giving away her eighty-five years, and it would appear that the fountain of her continued youth is reading. As my wife tells it after days spent packing a life's worth of possessions into cardboard with the deftness only an Army-brat upbringing can teach, she owns at least ten times as many books as we do, and has read them all. Imagine that! Actually reading all the volumes in one's personal library.

I flicked through the boxes of books Aunt Mickey sent Jess home with every day, searching for arcane ISBN numbers in order to log them in my own unachievable task list and wondering what rubric she used to determine which would go to us and which to the "donate" pile. Why, exactly, did she feel that I specifically needed 'Robert's Rules of Order'? Why so many 70's-and-80's woman-power paperbacks? The musty pile surrounding me on the couch certainly represented the prism through which Aunt Mickey views us, and sleuthing out the whys made for a lusciously narcissistic diversion.

Corners of paper stick out from many of the books. Aunt Mickey did not just read her library, but continually annotated it. Scraps of notes in the horrific handwriting to which all in my family are heir can be found in a large percentage of the collection. Newspaper clippings have been folded into to the covers with the care of a film preservationist. Would you like to know the answer to Carroll's raven-and-writing-desk riddle? I've got it, tucked into the leaves of an annotated Alice. Images of Mickey sitting in her casually mod living room, gasping with interest at an article and describing it to my uncle as she tries to remember just where precisely that one book got to are now among my favorite non-participant memories.

Time spent with these books has given me an archaeological taste of my aunt's life and those of her family. One of my cousins went through a youthful period of UFO obsession in the sixties, for example. Somebody in the family studied more than a little French. A better argument for dating one's books cannot be made; a reading life like Mickey's could be measured in the tree-rings of the inside covers.

And what of when I am eighty-five? How will some great-nephew know my life? Through a pile of video games and check stubs? At the very least I can hope that my new acquisitions will provide a feeling of connection to family history and that my own library -- and life -- will be as worthy of interest.

A-men.

Allow me to channel a little Humanist with some Saturday Site-Love for artofmanliness.com.

We all know that manliness has suffered greatly over the last 40 years. The causes of this descent into effeminacy are multifarious, but lingering on them brings us no closer to revivifying the near-dead corpus of Man. This site champions our cause. Want to learn how to shave like your grandfather? Take a little trip.

Turn on the TV for fifteen minutes and you'll see how much modern US society hates men. Every commercial and most shows depicts us as fat, slothful fools. It is our own fault -- as traditional gender roles were destroyed in the previous decades, instead of doing the correct thing and simply eliminating bias against women we unmanned ourselves, incorrectly associating our strengths with the evils of our forefathers.

The rising popularity of gentlemanly items like cuff-links is indicative of the fact that men yearn to return to the days when the positive aspects of our nature were encouraged and revered. So, man up.

A New Hope

My crusade against the word "iconic" has been documented in part here on B A Start. I swear, not three days go by before I see it used. I refuse to believe this is due to some kind of increased awareness -- we all know it was Superman Returns.

I was doing some reading this afternoon and found a suitable replacement: paradigmatic. And this in an essay published in the Spring of 2007. Please, journalists bloggers and ad writers, start using this word as an alternate. I'm starting to lose it.

All I Need to Know I Learned from 'Big Trouble in Little China'.

#1 - Independence is manly.
#2 - Muscle shirts are only to be worn by men who are a) jacked and b) pricks.
#3 - Childhood fears don't really go away.
#4 - Reporters find the need to put themselves into ludicrous amounts of danger to get something called a "scoop". Don't become a reporter.
#5 - You see a dude dressed in samurai gear, he's probably magic. Do not mess.
#6 - That group of old men who spend all their time playing some board game know something.
#7 - Next time someone throws a knife at you, just grab it out of the air and throw it back.
#8 - If given the option, leave Kim Catrall behind.

Morningstar

It should come as no surprise to B A Starters that I am and always have been a fan of illustration made during the fifty years encircling the change of the prior millenium. I submit for your halloweeny enjoyment, this pic by Kay Nielsen.

I don't know what tale this is from, but damn if it doesn't look like Castlevania. And it's got the Nielsen big-canvas-small-subject thing going, which I always enjoy.

A bigger version here.

"Kun" is an honorific for boys

I would like an explanation, and I would like it soon. Anyone want to tell me why Domokun is advertising Halloween for Target? How exactly did the lovable if mysterious mascot for NHK become the spokesperson for spooooky holidays here in the US? I, for one, am baffled.

I mean, I get it. Target has been doing their best to get all coolified, what with their off-mainstream music finds etc. Why not grab viral phenom Domo? He's cute, he's from Japan, geeks love him -- he's god damned perfect.

And yet, there's something a little odd about it.

Sure, part of the cool thing about Domo was that he wasn't well-known, but that's a fairly standard geek complaint when stuff gets out to the normies. I tell you what I find unsettling. Domo hatched in front of a TV screen and fell blindingly in love with it. The little fuzzy dude just can't get enough terebi. He's a TV mascot and he loves TV. Unlike here in the US, where our TV mascots encourage us to go outside and play.

So there he stands at Target, his gaping maw hoping to convince us to purchase halloween goodies for the kids, while secretly he's at best an addictive personality and and worst an utter sellout. I love Domo, and seeing him in a US advertisement gives me a bit of evil joy.