August 2006 Archives

I bought "The Sportswriter" at a used bookstore in an airport (which airport I can no longer remember - but it was a great bookstore) and I read it. It's apparently the only book I've read this past month. I'm not sure what I've been doing with my time. Perhaps I've been out there living life the way life was meant to be lived! Or perhaps I've been doing nothing, which seems more likely.

Anyway, this - like most of the books I read these days - has been knocking around on my "to read" list for some time. I liked it, it's an interesting novel, not sad, not happy, just kind of floating there. If I had to sum it up in one short, pithy, nondescriptive way, it's about a man who is slowly becoming invisible and struggling to avoid it. Frank Boscombe likes to go on at length about "literalness" and "seeing around the edges of his life" and why New Jersey is so great and why Detroit is so great. He loves to label things that really can't be labeled, and his bull shit is both endearing, intelligent, and easy to see through. As a reader you both agree with what he's thinking and also realize that he is deluding himself.

Anyway, my MFA classes are starting again on the 6th so I am going to be reading all assigned books for the next few months. I'm frantically trying to finish reading Shelley Jackson's amazing new novel, "Half Life", before my first class, though I don't know if I'll be able to do it. My preliminary review: it's great! More later.

I thought the first four comics might have been a burst of random, one-time creativity. But when I decided to make a fifth, things started to seem a bit more semi-consistent. So I have added a "comics" link to the top of the site and I will now begin posting a new web comic every Monday. That's right! Every Monday! This is a commitment that I will in no way uphold!

Also, for those of you interested in limited technical accomplishments, I have made some adjustments to the site settings so that you can link more easily to a specific section.
Instead of: "http://www.mixedmetaphors.net/index.php?section=blog"
You can now use: "http://www.mixedmetaphors.net/blog".
Isn't that nice?

There's an obvious media bias that nobody is talking about, there is a journalistic personal preference pervading the news, and this blogger has decided it's time to take a stand! I'm talking about the constant pro-Mac position taken by supposedly objective reporters, the blatant advertisements for Apple in the guise of news. You think I'm kidding? Check out some of these 2006 stories on MSNBC.com... (MSNBC! If you didn't know, the MS stands for MICROSOFT, and yet still the Apple-biased media defies its own corporate owner. That's just plain un-American.)

Mac Pro: The ultimate in desktop computing
Back in black: MacBook world's best laptop?
'Boot Camp' for Intel-based Macs likely to woo Windows users to Apple
Why Steve Jobs is winning the digital download wars
Not to mention the pointless retrospective Newsweek article about the greatness of Steve Jobs titled: It's the Apple of His Eye

I was going to include some links to negative articles about Microsoft but that would take all day. It's all "Microsoft admits Windows flaw," "Microsoft fails to quash Vista fears," "Microsoft warns of critical Windows flaw," "Microsoft delays wide launch of Windows Vista," plus a wide range of So-and-so sues Microsoft.

If a news site partially owned by (and branded by) Microsoft allows reporters to flaunt their own computing opinions in the face of the facts how can we trust any news site to objectively report on computers? This is a CONSISTENT and PERVASIVE problem flooding all of the so-called news we see every day, and despite the tremendous amount of evidence the mainstream (i.e pro-Apple) press refuses to acknowledge or even to talk about it! Even when studies show five out of six reporters in the "Mac-Media" use Apple computers to write their stories, still they deny any bias.

But this blogger will not be silenced. I don't care who calls me a PC-nut-job or a Microsoftie or an MSFT-winger, I will fight for the truth!

It turns out that yours truly (i.e. me) has decided to swear off his (my?) unemployed graduate student life-style and get a part-time job. A job? Yes, a job! I am working again. Alas, I am no longer in insurance management, as part-time insurance management positions are hard to find. Plus I wouldn't want one if I could find one. But, I admit, insurance management did make for some good blogging. My current job, so far, has made for poor blogging. I'm working remotely, meaning I'm programming from my NYC apartment for a company in Texas. And I'm working remotely, meaning I'm working in a distant and aloof manner. The few people I interact with at my new company seem like smart yet busy people and provide little fodder for mockery, aside from perhaps the fact that no one responds to my e-mails.

Note: I'm trying desperately to come up with a funny way to end this blog entry but it looks like it's not going to happen. Please go back and reread the two sentences that play with the varying meanings of "working remotely".

For years I've stubbornly stuck to my website's miniscule font size. I'm not sure why. Despite my love of words, I think pages of text are inherently ugly. Websites would be so much more attractive if they weren't bound by things like readability and content. By shrinking my default text size down to microscopic ants wavering just on the edge of vision I turned my page into a shimmering field of white-on-maroon scribbles, into a work of design rather than a work of text.

But lately I've been having trouble reading my own shrunken text. So, finally, I've upped it two levels from xx-small to small. I think it looks terrible. But at least I'm no longer getting headaches trying to read my own website.

Serial killers are called serial killers because they kill people in serial, i.e. in a series of killings. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I started wondering about their opposite: Parallel killers, meaning killers who kill people in parallel, i.e. all at once. Well, we already kind of have a word for that (or so I thought): Mass murderers. But mass murderer really just implies someone who has killed masses of people, which would be a term for a very successful serial killer. In fact, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (aka dictionary.com), defines a mass murderer as:

mass murderer n. 1. A person, especially a political or military leader, who is responsible for the deaths of many individuals. 2. a. A person who kills several or numerous victims in a single incident. b. A serial killer.

Look at 2a and 2b! Those things, in my mind, are contradictory! Yet here they are listed as identical. Oh, dictionary.com, you have mangled the english language once again. Note that Merriam-Webster Online doesn't even have a definition of mass murderer so I couldn't compare.

But it is a tricky point of semantics. Like I said, a serial killer could also be a mass murderer if he (or she!) has killed masses of people in a series of incidents. And, also, a mass murderer who kills his victims in one tragic event might still, technically, be killing them in series. For example, the person my girlfriend refers to as "The Luby's Killer" brought a machine gun into a Luby's and shot everybody (though I too am frustrated by Luby's, I cannot condone such behavior), these people can't be said to have been killed in parallel. Really it requires a bomb or some other exploding device to get to parallel level of killing.

In summary: Mass murderers can be either serial or parallel killers, but not both.

Wait... What if a mass murderer executes a series of parallel killings?

This post is way too morbid. I'm cutting it off.

After reading and enjoying "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" I decided I wanted to read another book by Saunders both for the pleasure and to see if every short story he writes is set in a partially-dystopian near-future featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks. Well, the title novella in "Pastoralia" is, inevitably but surprisingly, about a guilt-wracked man in a partially-dystopian near-future who works at a run-down history-theme park. Seriously. I guess George Saunders decided that he'd found his strange niche and was going to run with it. Not that I'm criticizing the title novella. Saunders has done a remarkable job examining every angle of partially-dystopian near-future stories featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks, taking each one and making it different and entertaining. It's musical, it's variations on a theme. But still.

Thankfully (or not thankfully, depending on how much you desire to read partially-dystopian near-future stories featuring guilt-wracked characters who work at run-down history-theme parks) the rest of the stories in this collection branch out a bit more, revolving more around monologue-obsessive characters who live rich internal fantasy lives, who tend to be chained down to some even more depressing character, and who second-guess every possible choice and are therefore mostly terrified into inaction. Some of these stories end well. Some don't. Thank goodness for the ones that end well. It's not even like they end WELL, they just end on a slightly upbeat note, or they end with the character taking some action, which, even if it's a bad action it's better than no action.

Well, I wouldn't have written so much if I didn't really like the collection. I'll definitely read more of his work.

My girlfriend has a fellowship this summer to work with children and their parents, reading and discussing a variety of young adult fiction. She gave me one of the scheduled chapter books, "Skellig," which I read in a few hours of intense young-adult-like fascination. It's an interesting mix of spooky and sentimental, and I won't say too much about it lest I will give it away. But it involves strange figures in broken down shacks and attics filled with owls.

What distinguishes young adult fiction from adult fiction? There's definitely more of a black and white approach to literature written for young adults, but that's not to say something can't necessarily be literary. There are some fantasical/spooky novels that have a lot of critical respect. ("Skelleg" would fall solidly in the gothic category of literature.) At one point the children are having a discussion about pomegranates and their many seeds. They muse that if all the seeds in one pomegranate became trees and then all the seeds in the pomegranates that grew on that one tree became trees of their own the world would quickly become covered by pomegranate trees. Then there is a theme woven through the book about Persephone, the mythological figure who spent six months a year in the underworld due to her consumption of six pomegranate seeds. Both of these themes would fit right into a literary novel, and I think it's important as an adult reader of young adult fiction to recognize that (just like in adult fiction) some books are better than others.