No, I never scratched any of these. Even if I did wonder what Punk Berry Penguin was like. According to the promo material (printed on the back) they are “KAPOW! (Kid Activated Power Scents!) Super Fun Scented Bookmarks Activated by Scratch Action!” I’d be concerned that some of that smell might come off on the book I was reading!
Book: A Natural History of Human Emotions by Stuart Walton
Clever idea, but I didn’t think Andrew Grant pulled it off.
Here’s the clever part: a retelling of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the form of text messages. Note that the story itself isn’t updated to modern times. We’re still out on the moors at the end of the nineteenth century. But I guess everyone has some kind of Internet connection and iPhones. So the events are presented as a series of brief posts with follow-ups and likes/dislikes from other characters.
So, clever idea. You’ll have to know the novel pretty well because if you go into this cold you’ll get confused trying to follow the plot. But given the target audience I think familiarity with The Hound can be taken for granted. Where Grant lost me is, first of all, in how public the posts were supposed to be. People like and dislike things that they shouldn’t know about, at least if the plot is to make any sense. Then, as a second point, things get a bit woolly when the Hound and Sir Charles Baskerville’s ghost “like” different posts. I realize this is all tongue-in-cheek and having a bit of fun, but there’s a failure of internal logic that I found myself digging my heels in against. I
So it had potential, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other writers have had a go at something similar (I seem to remember seeing Shakespeare done as text messages), but it didn’t work for me in this instance.
The houses behind me are coming along quite quickly now. They were out yesterday working in the rain even. These pics are from last week and you can tell they’re not wasting any time. The first picture is even an action shot as they’re pouring stone into the foundation.
And here are a couple of pics from the end of work yesterday.
And from the other side.
We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.
Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.
I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.
But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.
Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.
Just an update to a previous post where I introduced Millie and Bonnie. They’ve gone back to their regular home. Their owner really wanted me to adopt them because she’s selling her house and moving in with a guy who is allergic to cats so she can’t keep them. But even though I like cats (though not as much as dogs) I don’t think they’d be a good fit with me. I’m sure they’ll find a nice forever home though.
Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
By Luke Kemp
Page I bailed on: 60
Verdict: This made me think a bit of my response to Peter Turchin’s End Times, being a work of Big History that tries to come up with a master thesis of how and why things fall apart, with the help of “some new terminology and lots of numbers.” But I think Turchin was probably on to something more. I just couldn’t get on board with what Kemp was saying here, beginning with his choice to label all the societies he was discussing as “Goliaths.” A glossary at the back defines a Goliath as “a collection of interconnected hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour.” A Goliath is not just a state or a civilization, but a mosaic of dominance hierarchies “organized primarily through authority and violence.” So Goliath = Leviathan? Given that the first chapter tears down “Hobbes’s delusion” (that the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short) I don’t know if Kemp would go that far. But I couldn’t be sure. Goliath just seems like a really poor attempt at branding to me, and it continues with such concepts as Goliath evolution, Goliath fuel, and Goliath traps.
Language aside, I had a sense that Kemp maybe had a decent, if overly broad, argument to put forward that might have worked for a magazine article or podcast but that I just didn’t feel up to spending 500 pages with.
The Simpsons have been with us for so long that a list of minor recurring characters from the show would likely be as long as the tax rolls in some small towns. And yet, even though it’s been years if not decades since I watched the show, I can identify all of them, or nearly all of them, as soon as they’re introduced. Examples showing up several times in this collection include Dr. Nick (catchphrase: “Hi everybody!”), Gil the worn-down salesman, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Hell, I even remember the Cletus song.
But I said I recognized nearly all of these guys because I had no recollection of Dr. Colossus. This sent me to the Internet to see if maybe he was introduced sometime after I stopped watching, but actually he’s been around since 1994.
I didn’t even notice Dr. C the first time he shows up in this collection, when he briefly appears with his mother before Judge Marge. But then it’s easy to miss things in these comics as they often have so many gags appearing even within a single cell that you have to squint and read the fine print to catch them. As usual, the stories are pure zaniness, giving you no idea where they’re heading aside from the fact that at the end normalcy (or what passes for normalcy in Springfield) will be re-established, with the Simpson family as indestructible as ever. Which makes you wonder at their evolution from what were, at the time, subversive roots, into something so conservative you could even think of them as an institution. Though after nearly fifty years that may be a natural progression.
Got this from some friends who went to California a couple of years ago. It’s another 3-D bookmark, this time of poppies along the coast. Very seasonal, and having a bookmark is the next best thing to being there!
Book: The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Evan Osnos
A Holmes story by Michael Sims that takes a novel angle. So novel that the penny never dropped for me even with the title. Surely this was the story of the racehorse Silver Blaze, not strictly a memoir.
But no, it’s a memoir, or at least a part of one, relating the events of the story “Silver Blaze” as told by Silver Blaze himself.
Like I said, a novel angle.
I can’t say it adds much to the story, basically just reinforcing how noble a fellow Holmes is and how nasty Straker and Brown are, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. These kinds of stories are typical of children’s literature and I felt something like nostalgia reading it, taking me a back to a world where I imagined animals as basically having fully human personalities and intelligence but no ability to talk.
Are lions always courageous? Bees any busier than other insects? I don’t know. But I do think ants deserve their reputation for industriousness. Whenever I see these little piles of dirt I know a lot of work has been getting done. Even in places where you don’t expect it, like this arcade outside a mall.
Alex Good 