April 2005 Archives

Apparently the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is being made into a movie for potential release in 2005. I stumbled upon this when looking up Chabon in IMDB.com to see his credits for "Spiderman 2", where, interestingly, he is given credit for "screen story" not for "screen play." He does get screen play credit for AAoK&C, at least in IMDB right now.

I'm probably the last person in the world to know about this. Anyway, there's more information about it here.

Well, I finished all my books while traveling to NJ/NY an had to buy one in the minimal airport bookstore for the ride home. I ended up with "Bringing Down the House," the journalistic non-fiction story of some MIT students who learned how to do "team counting" in the mid-90's and took the casinos for millions in blackjack.

It's actually quite interesting if not a little overdramatic. I enjoy it when mathematicians take center stage and it was fun to see a bunch of MIT students fall into the seedy Vegas lifestyle. The ending never quite comes through with the dangerous explosive ending the blurbs on the cover lead you to expect, though there is a bit of rough housing and some ominous smoking figures in alleyways.

The book falls into the "random metaphor" trap with sentences such as "the casino would take more money than a NYC rental agent" that are a little out of place. I kept feeling like the author was trying to hard to take an interesting gambling story and make it clever or literary.

For those interested in the cheating method rather than the story, I'll explain it here. Counting cards at blackjack is actually pretty simple, there is a standard simple method called "HiLo" where you essentially just keep track of high vs low cards in your head. It lets you know when the remaining cards in the deck are statistically more likely to be in your favor. If you do this perfectly you get about a 2% edge over the house. There are two flaws with it: 1) It's really hard to make a lot of money this way because you have to keep betting even when the deck is not in your favor, and 2) it's really easy for the casino to spot. When a guy bets 5 dollars, 5 dollars, 5 dollars, 100 dollars, 5 dollars, etc., they know something is up.

The team strategy they came up with works by having "spotters" at the black jack table who keep count and always bet the minimum even when the cards are good. What they do is signal for another player to join the table when the count is good. This new player joins and bets really heavy, then leaves when the spotter tells them the count is no longer good. The player will then go to another table with a different spotter saying the count is good. This way you get rid of flaw (1) by always playing the maximum bets at tables with good counts and only blowing very low bets with the spotters when the count is bad. And you get rid of flaw (2) because it is much harder for a casino to catch. The player making big bets is ALWAYS making big bets, so he doesn't seem to be inconsistent and doesn't look like he is counting cards. In fact, he isn't counting cards, he's just coming to a table when someone else calls him there.

Anyway, most casinos won't let you join a table in the middle of a blackjack shoe (what you call the six decks played until reshuffling) anymore so this doesn't couldn't work. But it's pretty crafty. Quite simple, actually.

"The Final Solution" is an interesting combination of the mystery genre and literary fiction. I haven't read a lot of mystery novels, so I can't comment on how well or poorly it maps to the genre, but it does a decent job of being literary. Pulitzer-Prize-winning Chabon really likes to play with genre... he wrote what IMDB.com calls the "screen story" for SpiderMan, for example.

This novel is set in 1940s and tells the story of an old and formerly famous detective coming out of retirement for one last case. (The old man is suspiciously similar to Sherlock Holmes, though his name is never mentioned.) The title of the novel refers both to the detective's last case and the fact that the mystery involves a young boy who survived the Holocaust. The old man is a very complete character, he has not aged well and is struggling with the loss of his mental acuity, at the same time he is trying to pull it all together and not just solve a mystery but recapture some of his past glory. The rest of the cast does not quite make the leap from one to two dimensions and appear more like stock mystery characters.

While I won't give anything more away, I wasn't that satisfied with the mystery's conslusion. I actually liked the story's conclusion well enough, but not the mystery. For a novel that both elevates and emulates the mystery genre, the solution was a bit too cliche and a bit too easy.

I decided to give some more Lightman a try after reading "Einstein's Dreams." "Reunion" is written with a very light, quiet tone. It's about an older man who is overwhelmed by a flashback to a lost love while at his college reunion. The story is really resolved but it shouldn't be. It's less a complete plot and more like a witness to an intimate moment in his memory. There are a few things that don't fit together, mainly the build up to the flashback when he prepares for the reunion and starts meeting a few old friends. There is a great section about the strange biography written by an old acquaintance, but it gets dropped and doesn't really tie back into the story. I realize how it thematically fits in with the larger work, but the placement stuck out to me. All in all it was a good book and I'd like to read his other novel, "The Diagnosis."

Note: I've got four books to enter here since I've been traveling and haven't had time to update BookTrack. I'm entering them in the order of completion, but not the specific day completed.

So have I mentioned I really love Steve Martin? How could I not love him? He's a comedian, he's a novelist, he's a playwright... I suppose with all that going for him one can forgive him for the acting thing.

Anyway, a wonderful friend of mine gave me this book of plays for my birthday. It was an entertaining read, though I think perhaps I'd enjoy it more on stage. These remind me of plays that I would write, though despite my unlimited pride that's not exactly a compliment. There are some moments that just seem a little immature to me, and by immature I mean in a theatrical sense, as if the playwright is playing some meta-games not because they are essential to the work but because the playwright is still exploring with the medium of stage. For example, at one point an actor grabs a playbill from an audience member to point out that someone entered the stage in the wrong order of appearance. It's funny, but it also seems a bit too silly, out of place in the larger work, and a little amateur... like I said, something I myself might write.

I've got a lot of books to catch up on in BookTrack so I'm going to skip commenting on each of the individual plays.

For those who care, I have officially accepted a place at The New School for matriculation in Fall 2005. I will be studying to get my MFA in creative writing, with a focus on Fiction. The program is in the evenings, so my plan is to continue working, though I don't know doing what just yet. I'm interviewing with some companies, though those companies shall remain nameless now and forever more, just in case I start working for one of them and then post further office rants. I'll be spending the summer consulting for a former boss of mine (who was let go in the first round of corporate layoffs last November and has since found work as CIO of a new insurance company) starting May 2nd. That means I'll be in Austin only for weekends over the summer until I officially move to New York (with or without a fulltime job) in mid-August.

Like many else who have read this book, I did so because it is Salman Rushdie's first novel. Rushdie is one of my favorite authors, and I place "The Moor's Last Sigh," "Satanic Verses," and "Midnight's Children" among the best books I have ever read. "Grimus," while well written (in terms of language and style) and showing hints of Rushdie-to-come, is really a jumble of a work and difficult to read.

The plot can (loosely) be summed up by the following list:
1) Boy becomes immortal
2) Boy goes to find man who made him immortal
3) Boy stumbles upon an island of immortal people and weird stuff happens until it stops.

I've pontificated about good/bad genre science-fiction and good/bad literary science-fiction before, but this book is hard to characterize. It's definitely got the traits of genre science-fiction, in that it invents a new universe with its own rules and then the books ends through a manipulation of that universe. You can't look at the ending and think about how it reflects upon our world, because it's purely invented. But it doesn't have the satisfaction of an Asimovian logic puzzle because the universe Rushdie creates doesn't have any sort of consistent explanation. In fact, this book ends almost literally with a deus ex machina, or, in this case, an "alien ex machina," because some alien characters that were mentioned only briefly and tangentially (maybe 5 pages out of 400) suddenly show up at the end and help set things straight.

As for literary science fiction, it's hard to really call it that either. It definitely explores the themes of being outcast from your peers and longing to belong, plus the concept of free will, plus the abuse absolute power and knowledge. It also has the beginnings of trademark Rushdie wordplay. But the characters aren't really compelling and I don't see them as particularly multi-dimensional (aside from the fact that they often travel multi-dimensionally). (That was a little trademark Rushdie wordplay for you.) So it's hard for me to call this good literary science-fiction or good genre science fiction. I suppose it is just mediocre literary and genre science fiction.

Anyway, don't read this book unless you've read everything by Rushdie and you want to complete the set (like me). And please don't read it first if you've never read his other books.

My girlfriend gave me this book for my birthday and I've been reading through it in small doses (e.g. in the bathroom) ever since (I quickly learned that reading it before bed was a bad idea). It's a clever survival guide to surviving a zombie attack, and, supposing that zombies do actually have the characteristics described in this book, it would make quite handy reading. The interesting thing is that at no point in this book does it ever break character. The entire book is written as if it is a totally serious survival guide. I want to call it "funny" but it isn't really funny. It's kind of meta-funny. It's one big joke and it's funny because it takes itself so seriously, but each individual part is not actually funny. Probably it was meant to be read in bits and pieces to joke about, however, being obsessed with zombies, I read it cover-to-cover.

Assuming both participants are for some reason fighting to the death, who would win?

Fight: 1,000 Ants vs. an Unwrapped Hostess Twinkie
Winner: 1,000 ants

Fight: Three Rabid Squirrels vs. Horse
Winner: Horse
Notes: Though the horse would later succumb to rabies

Fight: Sisyphus vs. Rock
Winner: Rock

Fight: Sisyphus vs. Papyrus
Winner: Sisyphus

Fight: Papyrus vs. Rock
Winner: Papyrus

Fight: My Previous $250 Cell Phone vs. My Current Crappy $40 Cell Phone
Winner: My current crappy $40 cell phone
Notes: I am assuming winning the fight in this case is interpreted to mean "able to make and receive phone calls."

Fight: Giant Iowa-State-Fair-Winning Hog vs. a Giant Iowa-State-Fair-Devouring Frog
Winner: Giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog
Notes: The giant Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog is so grossly oversized that it can hardly move. The giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog is supernaturally large and can therefore not only move, but, in fact, can devour the entire Iowa State Fair, and since the giant Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog is a part of the Iowa State Fair, the giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog, by definition, also devours the Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog.

Fight: 250-Pound Chain-Twirling Biker vs. Ninja
Winner: Ninja

Fight: Loca Maria from "Taco Xpress" vs Juan from "Juan in a Million"
Winner: Loca Maria
Notes: Not only are her breakfast tacos superior, she could almost definitely kick his ass.

Fight: Eleven Healthy Wildebeest vs. Two Tigers
Winner: Eleven healthy wildebeest
Notes: Assuming the eleven healthy wildebeest organize and attack rather than scatter they can hold their own, though several may be brought down in the process.

Fight: Me vs. Truck
Winner: Truck

Fight: Mouse vs. Cat
Winner: Cat
Notes: This is not a cartoon

Fight: Coyote vs. Roadrunner
Winner: Coyote
Notes: See previous note

Fight: Superman vs. Spiderman
Winner: Superman
Notes: Of course! Not that Spiderman isn't way cooler than Superman. .. but, seriously, Superman is pretty much unbeatable.

Fight: My Faith in the Basic Goodness of Humanity vs. Current Events
Winner: My faith in the basic goodness of humanity
Notes: It was a close fight

Fight: Tree Frog vs. Lake Frog, in the desert
Winner: Tree frog
Notes: Both frogs eventually die of dehydration, but tree frog holds out longer

Fight: Regular Squirrel vs. Flying Squirrel
Winner: Flying squirrel
Notes: See "Superman vs. Spiderman" notes.

Since I finished reading my last book on the first leg of my plane ride to New York, I had to buy some new books for the trip home. I got "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" at the Barnes & Nobles near Times Square, and then finished THAT book on the first leg of the plane ride home. Fortunately I had the foresite to buy TWO books, so I had a back-up for the second leg.

My sister-in-law recommended this book to me and I thank her for it! It's a "mystery" novel about an autistic child trying to solve the murder of his neighbor's dog. It's interesting because the child notices things that a normal person wouldn't, but also misunderstands the most basic of clues. It's really not a mystery novel, but a story about an autistic child struggling to deal with his family, his schoolmates, and the confusing non-autisitc world around him. It's great, especially if you love novels with obsessive-compulsive narrators who label chapter headings with prime numbers, as I definitely do.

Now I'm halfway through Salman Rushdie's first novel, "Grimus", so it looks like Tolstoy will have to continue to wait.

I'm in New York for a Monday interview (what can I say, I'm a fast mover...) and interestingly enough (ironically? coincidentally?) I am staying in a hotel that is across the street from the headquarters of my old/current company. I can actually see the old stomping grounds from my hotel room window. (Well, I probably shouldn't refer to it as "the old stomping grounds" since I was only there twice in four years. Alas, my obligations took me instead to West Des Moines, Iowa. West Des Moines, Iowa is one place I will definitely not miss.)

I don't have very much funny to say right now but I figured I would post something since I paid eleven dollars for internet access. And I didn't even have any new e-mail! I needed to get somebody's phone number off the net - I hope that person appreciates the eleven dollars I paid to get his phone number.

The definitive update on my life is: I'm probably coming back to New York sometime in the next one to six months. Okay, that wasn't really definitive, but it's lining up that way. And I can't really say "back" to New York, since I never actually lived in New York, but I'm from New Jersey, and that's close enough, it's the tri-state area. New Jersey boy is coming home.

With cleverly diminishing linguistic wordplay, "Ella Minnow Pea" follows the island of Nollop as the totalitarian town council systematically bans letters from the English language as each of those letters falls one-by-one from a statue in the center of town. The statue is honoring the man (Nollop) who created the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." The plight of the oppressed villagers is hysterical and moving, and as the letters fall from the statue so to do they disappear from the book itself.

This is the author's first novel, though he's written over 25 plays, and you can tell this is a playwright's work. It's composed entirely of letters (as in mail) which, really, is just an extended dialogue made up of letter-based monologues. Plus it's obsessed with language, and playwrights are all obsessed with language. Because of the letter-format, it does lack descriptions of people and places, though while that may be a problem for some it wasn't for me.

I read the whole thing in about two hours (on a plane) and, alas, was left stranded without another book to read (I forgot "Anna Karenina" at home - will I ever finish it? Who knows?). Being that it is such a clever and quick read I definitely recommend it, especially to anyone who likes word play (which includes most of my friends). Thanks to Lucy for recommending it!

So it did bring up one question... Why is the famous sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" not "The quick brown fox jumped over A lazy dog" instead? It would cut out two letters, still hit all the letters in the alphabet, and still being perfectly grammatical.

I've been a bit frantic lately (what with the mass layoffs and all) so I didn't enter this book when I finished it and now I've forgotten what day I actually read the final words. We'll just have to accept "a few days ago" as the completion date. I bought this while in the Portland, Oregon airport from Lowell's, which is apparently a really nice independent book store chain in those parts. Obviously the airport terminal branch isn't quite as nice, though it was, in fact, the nicest airport bookstore I've ever perused.

"Homeland" is Sam Lipsyte's second novel. His first was "The Subject Steve", which I apparently read before Book Track was started. The first novel was quirky and funny with real touches of social commentary, so when trapped with nothing to do in an airport I decided to get his new book.

This new novel is written in the guise of one charming loser's "update" to his highschool alumni bulletin, including his retelling of interactions with various former classmates, his strange new freindship with his now-deprincipaled-principal, and his dealing with the long-past circumstances that got him the unfortunate nickname "Teabag." He's a burnout and he's somewhat of a pervert and, of course, is hard not to like. The novel doesn't really wrap up all the issues that he has in his life, rather it watches him watching other people deal with their issues, and through that we think that maybe Teabag (or, properly, Lewis) will finally do something about his own.

I was pleased to read this second book, it was as funny, quirky, and socially commentarilicious as his fist novel, and I'll definitely be following up on new Lipsyte novels when any are published.

Two very important updates on the life of MixedMetaphors.net today.

One, it's my birthay.
Two, I was fired.

Yes, that's right, your read correctly: it's my birthday.

Oh, and also I was fired. Fired because my boss felt my blog was presenting a poor image of the company. No, just kidding. I suppose I should really use the term "laid off" or "downsized" as it turns out the months of stuggling to get resources funded, budgets approved, and project directions determined were signs of an impending office shut down. The entire Austin office is being closed over a period of six months.

As for my feelings about it, my spirits are high. I believe my team is a top notch group and I expect they will all find new jobs easily (if you are looking for some seriously high quality java developers let me know and I'll send some resumes your way). As for me, I have no worries. Let's just say I'm a man with options. Yes, options. This seems like the perfect opportunity to have a bulleted list! But, no, I don't feel like making a list. Suffice it to say I could create a list if I wanted to, a list of: options.

Perhaps MixedMetaphors.net will now go back to clever ramblings about superpowers instead of angered rants about corporate politics. But who knows what will be next? Nobody knows!

His homepage.
His blog.

The term "resounding no" strikes me as overused. It's one of those terms that has become so commonplace it takes on a wide-spread casual use, standing in where the original would do, except in this case the original is a two letter word. Noes always seem to resound, which, essentially, means they ring out or, rather, are loud. I think what someone means when they say "resounding no" is "emphatic no", or perhaps in some more accurate cases they mean that multiple people said "no" at once, but really what I think people now mean is simply "no".

I looked up "resounding no" (in quotes) on Google and got back 88,500 results. I also looked up "resounding yes" and got back 131,000 results, so, apparently, "resounding yes" is even more overused than it's negative counterpart. Interestingly, "resounding maybe" returned 1440 results and "resounding sorta" 8.

The moral? Everyone is aware that noes and yeses resound and to say as such no longer means anything. In the future I'd suggest choosing a more descriptive and original adjective.

Here are some possible alternatives:
- An emphatic no
- A frustrated no
- An enthusiastic yes
- An echoing no
- A particularly supportive yes
- A trenchant no
- A momentous yes
- A dogmatic no

Or, perhaps, the classics:
- No
- Yes

I'm a little concerned about the treatment water gets at most self-service-beverage eating establishments. Go ahead and order a water at any fast-food place and you'll see: people who have requested soda get large sturdy chalices, often logo-emblazened, to slake their calory-craving thirst, but the water drinkers get tiny dixie-cup-sized thin plastic cups, just about enough for one shot of H2O. Why this second-class cuppery? Once the restaraunt has lost the soda sale it's not like it'll cost them more if you fill up a thimble or a bucket. But beyond the simple size-descrepancy, the water doesn't even get it's own spigot at the soda fountain. It's almost always relegated to be a sub-function of one of the less popular non-carbonated drinks (lemonade, for example) where one has to manually press the tiny lever with one's finger. WITH ONE'S FINGER! If I can't shove my cup up against a giant plastic switch it's hardly worth drinking. Half the time what you get is a mix that's 3/4 water and 1/4 lemonade. This is no way to treat water.

I don't have a solution to propose aside from the half-jesting post title. And there's really nothing to be done about the mini-sub-spigot issue aside from, perhaps, jumping the order counter and demanding to fill up my cup directly at the kitchen tap. Next time.

Allergy season is upon us. It's the time of year when I walk around sniffling and sneezing, clutching to crumpled up tissues stuffed haphazardly in my pocket, and zonked half out of my head on pills. Sometimes I think that allegy medication doesn't actually relieve any symptoms but instead just makes me not care about it as much. I'm thinking that I should move to the desert. I'll probably develop an allergy to cacti.

I'm not sure I understand the concept of allergies. Why do we have them? Yes, medically I understand what is going on. But I mean on a more philosophical level: why allergies? What purpose do they serve? Evoluntionarily speaking they don't seem to provide any benefit. Did cavemen have allergies?

Here are some things I've tried that have not lessened my allergy symptoms:
- a daily spoonful of local honey
- blowing my nose over and over and over again
- putting my face over steaming water
- changing my A/C filters
- holding my breath when I walk past somebody mowing the lawn
- lying down
- sitting up
- watching tv until two o'clock in the morning
- whining about it

Here are some things I've tried that have not necessarily lessened my allergy symptoms but have at least made me case less about it:
- Prescription drugs
- Over the counter drugs
- And, most successfully, prescription drugs and over the counter drugs at the same time