Blogosaurus Vex

We’re finally home!  I  have to say, I’m so happy to be back.  I know I raved about how excited I was to be going, but I was homesick by the time we arrived and am now thrilled to be here again.  We did the drive from Winnipeg in two days, with one stop in Calgary for sleep.  Husband did all the driving!  This means we got home a lot faster than if I were driving, but also that my sphincter is tight as a drum and I may never poop again.  Actually, I will – I’m eating cherries by the pound.  It’s only a matter of time.

So, I will give you all the gory tales of the holiday – most particularly my rationale for declaring Saskatchewan the new anus of Canada (displacing the former title holder, New Brunswick) – but for now, I’m too tired.  Also, I’m realizing how much time I waste online.  While on holiday, I read three and a half books, even though we were busy and out and about quite a lot.  (I left all school reading behind and only took fiction – science fiction, at that.)  How did I do it?  Easy.  I didn’t watch TV or go online.  Amazing – when you don’t waste all your time, you have lots of it to actually do things, like read.  I have decided to do more living and less wasting.   I’ll still blog but need to keep the other internet fiddling down to a dull roar.

I read two great books and one mediocre one.  The mediocre one was The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams.  It was okay.  I loved Watership Down and also others of his books, and this one just didn’t stand up.  I give it a “meh.”

One of the great books was A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller.  It’s basically about proto-Catholics who emerge after a nuclear holocaust.  The story takes place in three different times, and tells a sort of morality tale about human nature.  It’s a classic of the post-apocalyptic genre, and could be considered horribly cliched unless you realize it was published in 1956, and therefore predates most other post-apocalyptic fiction.  I thought it was interesting and well written.  There’s a smattering of thought provoking philosophy, but it’s not preachy at all.  And it has nuclear mutants.  What more do you want?

I also read Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban.  What can I say about this book?  It’s one of the most engrossing, challenging, amazing books I’ve read in ages.  Maybe years.  It blew me away.  Here’s what the New York Times had to say about it, and I totally agree: “Stunning, delicious designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid.”

Riddley Walker is also a post-apocalyptic story, but very different.  It’s Riddley’s own story, covering his beginnings in an iron-age society, his change of position in that society, and the crazy shit that ensues.  I don’t even know how to describe the story – there is a surface story but it doesn’t really represent very fully what’s going on in the book.  It’s written in its own language – a sort of demotic English created by the author.  This sounds like a lame device (Trainspotting, anyone?), but it’s not.  The language is hard to get through, and this slows the reader down to Riddley’s pace of comprehension.  The words were also chosen, intentionally, to house as many meaning as possible.  This makes the text rich and deep and excellent for mulling over and pondering.  It keeps you thinking and on your toes.

It’s not an easy read.  The book is short, about 210 pages, and it took me probably ten hours or so to get through it.  I did a lot of flipping back and forth as I would suddenly figure out the meaning of a word or phrase that had previously eluded me, and had to go back to see its original context.  I had to read parts aloud to get the meanings, because phonetically spelled English can be hard to decipher.  There are multiple layers of meaning, and several themes at play to think about.  But it’s a rewarding read.  I know I’ll read this one again, probably soon, before I forget the words I’ve learned.  There’s just so much packed into this book.  Love it!

Now I’m reading Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson, and have I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstaedter next in line.  No more time for the internet, have to go read now.

Posted in Personal, Reading | 1 Comment »

Hi all.  I’m at the public library in Winnipeg, using up my fifteen minutes on the public access computers to let you know we are alive and well, despite the best efforts of that horrible province, Saskatchewan.  Hoo nelly will I have rotten things to say about them when I get home!

For now, I’ll just say we’re having a blast.  We just got back to the city after four days at our friend’s cabin on a lake.  The third night there, we had the most spectacular lightning storm you can imagine.  It lasted about 90 minutes and I estimate there were close to a thousand lightning strikes in that time.  There were times when we were seeing two or even three flashes of sheet lightning in one second!  It totally blew me away (figuratively).  I’ve never seen such a stunning display of nature.  Truly, it was awesome.  Especially the part where Husband scuttled back to the cabin when some bolts hit a bit closer to us than he thought they would (he was out on the dock for best views, while I was inside fretting about whether he was going to get fried). 

Winnipeg has been surprisingly beautiful and interesting.  The only major downside is that apparently every mosquito on planet Earth is here and out for blood, and as a result I look like I have smallpox.  I’m so itchy.  Of course the more you scratch the more it itches, but so far that hasn’t stopped me.  Scratch scratch!

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »

Another day of classes with the bad professor.  I must give credit where credit is due: today was the best class we’ve had.  There was some good discussion.  The atmosphere was friendly overall.  It was much more pleasant than previous classes have been.  It wasn’t great, but it was tolerable.  I’m torn between my empathy for the professor as a human being and my irritation at him as a teacher.  The latter will win out in the assessment.

Anyway, this post is about the embarrassing thing I just did.  Tonight I came home on the skytrain after dinner out with some fellow students.  I had put in my earbuds and was rocking out to some tunes on my little mp3 player, really digging the music.  I’ve been listening to the same song over and over for weeks now – I just love it and can’t get enough (The Rapture of Riddley Walker by Clutch, for those who are interested).  Anyway, it was just at the best part when I arrived at my stop, so I had it turned up good and loud for maximum listening pleasure.  I was just getting off the skytrain when I realized I had to pass gas.

You, dear reader, know that nothing good can come of this.

So, you know that phenomenon where, if you can’t see someone, they also can’t see you?  (More properly stated, if you can’t see someone, they can’t see your eyes.  But anyway.)  Well, I think something in a related vein was going through my head in a slightly less than fully conscious manner, because somehow I decided that if I can’t hear my fart, no one else can either.

Cringe with me.  I’m cringing just remembering it.  Because you know what happens next.  Oh yes.  I let ‘er rip. A very satisfying and undoubtedly noisy fart that I didn’t hear at all.  But all the other people on the platform did.  And they all turned at once to stare at me, the public farter.  I instantly realized what had happened.  And the shame!  Oh the shame!

Let this be a lesson to you.  Farting is much, much worse than accidentally singing along.  So be careful with your mp3 player.

Posted in Personal | 5 Comments »

Guess what I’m doing this August?

I know it’s hard to read because my camera stinks, but that there on my fridge is two tickets to see Clutch perform. I’m so excited I could pop!

Don’t mind the censor marks. I only left in the adverbs.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

To the person or persons who keep calling over and over: FUCK OFF!

Let me explain something about how phones and voicemail works.  Say you want to call me.  I can’t imagine why but we’ll put that aside.  You dial my number, and the phone in my house rings.  Three things can now happen:

1. I’m home, feel like talking, and answer the phone.  Everybody’s happy – hooray for you.

2. I’m not home, can’t answer, and you get booted to voicemail.

3. I’m home, am too busy watching Law and Order to answer, and you get booted to voicemail.

There is no practical distinction between scenarios (2) and (3).  In either case, for all you know, I am in Antarctica and will be for the next four months.  In either case, you can leave me a message on my voicemail.  In either case, it will do you NO GOOD AT ALL to keep calling back at fifteen minute intervals because, as I have explained, no one will pick up the phone.  All you will accomplish is irritating me, making me so choked at the phone (we psychology types call this “displacement”) that I won’t check messages for a week, and then you’re really screwed, aren’t you?

I suspect my frequent caller knows me, knows I ignore the phone, and is trying to wear me down.  Or to catch me coming home, blissfully unaware that there have already been three calls in the last hour.  To this person I say, I understand where you are coming from.  I take full responsibility for being horrible with the phone etiquette.  I can see why you’re doing what you’re doing.  But stop anyway.  You’re bugging me.

The phone is a convenience.  I am not a slave to it.  I own one mostly because one day I might need to call 911, and I require it to buzz people into my apartment.  If it weren’t for that, I’d be sorely tempted to toss it and rely exclusively on email.  (Email is so much more civilised!)  Until that day, I will probably continue to be a turd about phone response. And will appreciate not getting haranguing calls all afternoon long.

So there.  I said it and I’m glad.

Posted in Ranting | 6 Comments »

Don’t you just love zombies?

Posted in Watching | No Comments »

I just checked my spam filter for the first time and holy cats, it is full of spam!  It also had some non-spam comments that I didn’t know were there – sorry guys.  Didn’t mean to hold your comments.  I liberated the ones I found, but there may have been older ones I missed.  I guess I’ll have to start checking the filter regularly.  Keep commenting!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Yesterday I bought and read World War Z, subtitled “an oral history of the zombie war.”  This is without a doubt the best zombie fiction I have ever read.  At this point it might be helpful to remind you that zombie fiction is, as a rule, atrocious – the bar is set pretty low.  And by no means is this great literature.  But I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I sat down with it after lunch and didn’t put it down until I’d read it all.

My complaints are few: the vignette style is interesting, but each vignette should probably have been at least twice as long.  I would just be getting in to someone’s story when it would change to someone else – I never felt I got enough detail or background.  As a result it was hard to feel emotionally connected to any character, which takes a lot of the oomph out of a book.  Some of the vignettes were better than others – meaning some were downright bad.  The much anticipated scene with zombies attacking a submarine?  Total let down.  (Though the hordes of zombies shuffling across America in massive herds like buffalo?  Totally wicked.)  Overall the book was too short, too superficial.  I wanted much more detail and for it to have taken its time – there was plenty of cool material, and the writing was pleasant enough that I’d have spent twice as long with it.

I also didn’t get much of a sense of horror or fear – the recollection mechanism used by the author takes a lot of the drama out of it because, of course, I know every narrator survives.  The short vignettes mean that not only do I know the narrator survives, but I also know his whole story in about four pages.   There’s simply no time to develop fear or horror.

And, as usual, the zombies don’t rot.  Well, they do, but it takes about ten years.  Ten years?  Dude, have you ever seen what happens to road kill after about a week?  There is no way zombies should be surviving for a decade, certainly not anyplace that’s warm or wet for any significant part of the year.  Though now that I think about it, their flesh is described as toxic so I guess if you remove carrion feeders, it might take a lot longer for a body to decompose.  Still.  A decade?  Lame.

The ending seemed truncated too.  I think it would have been better to either expand it to at least three times its length, or drop it entirely and stop the action with the Total War section.  Denouments are so easy to mess up, and alas, this book’s denoument was utterly messed up.  Very boring, very fast, and again, no detail.  I wanted more.

But the good stuff was a lot of fun.  Zombies everywhere!  Government bungling!  Ocean-going zombies!  Zombies that freeze solid over winter and come back with the spring thaws!

In summary, I say, if you like zombies, you need this book.  If you’re not a zombie or post-apocalyptic fiction person, you will probably find this book somewhat mediocre.  I’m a zombie fan and I’m very glad I bought it.

Posted in Reading | No Comments »

This is the problem with zombies: They’re corpses, and they’re decomposing. Eventually, the flesh should rot right off them, sinew and muscle included. With nothing to hold the bones together, the zombie is no longer a threat. How can it chomp its terrible jaws and clench its grasping claws? It can’t, it has no muscles. And it’s totally lame to have walking skeletons – for crying out loud, there’s nothing attaching the bones to each other any more! That’s not a zombie, it’s a pile of bones. A pile of bones is not scary.

So, in theory, any zombie plague should be survivable if you can hole up for as long as the rotting takes to occur. I realize it’s a staple of survivor fiction that the main action of the story takes place during the initial onset of the plague, when no one knows what’s going on and it’s all mad panic and the protagonists have no idea that staying hidden in the farm house it totally not going to work. So the issue of rotting doesn’t really need to be addressed. But as a reader of zombie fiction, I am always left wondering, what happens three months from now when the zombies are all just piles of bones? Plague over, zombies gone, end of story. This takes a lot of the horror out of it for me.

I also believe that magical, never rotting zombies would be a cheat. If you’re dead you have to rot. And in fact, much of the gross-out and terror of the zombie genre comes from the gangrenous flesh and gaping wounds that zombies have. Clearly they are rotting, this is accepted. But by not addressing their ultimate “rot out,” it’s cheating the way Sherlock Holmes stories cheat: there’s no way to solve the mystery on your own. The story always ends with Holmes revealing the lynchpin piece of evidence that the reader didn’t get to know about. You can’t play along. And you can’t have believable zombie fiction if no one talks about what happens over time.

Zombie stories are usually pretty crappy. (I say this as a lover of the genre.) I think there’s inherent power and natural fear that is exploited by the themes of zombie stories: death, loss of loved ones (who then turn on you), and especially the idea of the walking dead. I think this touches deep, nonrational and probably evolutionarily primed fears: dead bodies get poisonous fast. For good or ill, we seem primed to develop many rituals and particularly taboos about corpses. The zombie concept works with this stuff. And it’s a shame that all this rich, ready material is squandered by the poor writing that is characteristic of most zombie fiction.

So my questions to you, fellow geeks, are: What are the best parts about zombies? What makes them cool? What is stupid or what doesn’t work (other than the obvious, i.e., that dead people are walking about)? What is lacking in the zombie genre? What would the idea zombie be like?

Posted in Ranting | 1 Comment »

Or it that Zombiepocalypse?

In the perfect zombie story, what would happen?  What elements should be present?  What’s the coolest zombie idea ever?

Comment please.

Posted in Hobbies | 1 Comment »