Author: Alex Good

Fighting MAD

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Fighting MAD

I grew up with MAD Magazine. And much to my delight, I actually held on to a lot of them, including a bunch of these paperbacks. So re-reading them now is a real stroll down memory lane.

This particular book was published in 1980 but the content is drawn from magazines published from the 1950s to the 1970s. What a different world that was! What struck me as particularly strange was the target demographic. MAD was a satirical magazine, including a lot of political satire that I would have thought over the head of most young people. And while there’s not much in the way of politics on tap here, there are passing references to Harvey Matusow and Dave Beck. Give yourself a pat on the back if you recognize either of those names. Or if you get the joke about a subliminal ad in a bookstore telling people to buy a copy of The Hidden Persuaders (1957).

Maybe young people as well as the culture at large were just more aware back then. I mean, I didn’t get (and still don’t get) the 1873 on the pugilist Alfred E. Neuman’s belt buckle. “The Great Dumb Hope” is a spin on the phrase “Great White Hope,” which only goes back to 1911. But what happened in 1873?

A joke like “Great Dumb Hope” wouldn’t fly today for obvious reasons, but this isn’t the most politically incorrect cover among the Mad pocketbooks I have so get ready. Indeed, you should be braced for some of the content here as well. Things kick off with a parody primer for teaching tots how to read that describes the adventures of a brother who helps his grandfather run a stolen car ring and a sister who tortures and kills the family cat. Brother and sister (looking to be seven or eight-years-old) meet up with their buddy Bobby (a juvenile Marlon Brando from The Wild One) for some extracurricular activities:

Bobby sells reefers to the other children at school.

Sometime we buy a stick from Bobby.

We light up behind the garage.

Crazy, man.

Then, in a later piece, there are these final words of wisdom for anyone quitting playing golf:

Giving it up is easier than you think. Many former golfers find that drinking takes their minds off the game. For others, gambling provides a new outlet for that competitive spirit. Sleeping late is also a good substitute. Or beating up your wife.

What did I think of this, reading it as a pre-teen? Did it register at all? If the violence was scary, you could find solace on their being an ad for the “wife-of-the-month” club that promises domestic bliss: “How would you like to come home from the office on the first Monday of every month, and find a new wife cooking supper for you?” When you hear manosphere types talking about trad wives, remember this is the stuff they may have been raised on.

The references to smoking reefers and lines like “Crazy, man” also date things a bit. As does the modernized or “up-to-date” Shakespeare that translates the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet into hep cat patter. “My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound” turns into “My lobes have not yet dug a hundred notes of your jive, but, like, I’m woke to your sound,” and becomes less comprehensible in the process. Or take this exchange: “By whose direction found’st thou out this place?” “By love, that first did prompt me to inquire” becomes “Who finked on how to find my shack?” “Love, baby, love first bugged me to plea.”

That all sounds kind of lame today, but I still got a smile out of reading it again. And several of the pieces included here hold up very well. The parody of a Mickey Spillane novel is great, and the nursery tales retold as newspaper stories were nicely done. But really I found all of it enjoyable, however much it had dated and had slipped into an irretrievable past.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

Watson introduces this story in an interesting way. He tells us that the public will probably already be familiar with it since it has “been told more than once in the newspapers,” but that it’s worth telling again because of the way he’ll tell it. The effect such a story has “is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on the complete truth.”

I say this is interesting because it shows Watson’s self-awareness as a mystery writer, and not just someone who’s interested in presenting the facts. There’s an art to what he’s doing, a point that I think is glanced at in the story’s final paragraph, where Holmes laughingly tells the engineer that while he may have lost a thumb he has gained “experience.” He has “only to put it [his story] into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.” As we might say (and perhaps they were already saying at the time), he’ll be dining out on this adventure for years.

And it is quite an adventure. It has a gang of counterfeiters, and a hapless engineer who first gets stuck in a room that’s actually a giant press, with a hydraulic ceiling that threatens to crush him, and who then finds himself hanging from a window sill until the bad guy cuts his thumb off with a hatchet. It’s all he can do to find his way to Watson’s office so he can tell his story.

It’s not a bad little mystery either. Though Watson begins by apologizing that it “gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results,” that just means there aren’t any of those silly “magic act” scenes where Holmes tells where someone went to university by knowing the size of his shoes. Instead there is just the one point where he cleverly outdoes everyone in locating where the counterfeiters’ house is. This is prepared for by a clue that he even draws attention to, asking the engineer to repeat a crucial point when telling his story. We’re given a nudge that this is important, and the challenge to the reader is to understand its relevance. In these early days of mystery fiction you could probably rely on it being an actual clue, whereas later you’d have to wonder if it was only being introduced as a red herring.

Holmes index

Federal election 2025: Before

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

We’re less than a week out from another federal election here in Canada, so it’s time for another of my super-perceptive and unerringly prophetic political posts.

The story of this election has been the crazy reversal of fortunes in the polling. Up until the beginning of January the Conservatives were predicted to be on their way to winning in a walk. Then . . . well, here’s the graph (you can click on it to make it easier to read):

That is crazy. The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. How did this happen?

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it at all. There were three drivers.

(1) On January 6 Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as prime minister. It was time. People were tired of him. I said in my notes on a previous election that he made me sick. The rap against him was that he was a pretty boy with great hair who looked good on TV but was a mental lightweight. I think that’s pretty accurate. What I could never understand is how poor a retail politician he was. As his critics never tired of pointing out, he’d been a drama teacher. Why was he such a lousy communicator?

Was he a bad prime minister? He didn’t have an easy time of it what with dealing with Trump and a pandemic. But even so it’s hard to think of his having much of a legacy. Not that this is always a bad thing.

Anyway, getting rid of him gave the Liberals a big bounce. Personally I think Mark Carney is a smart guy but also an arrogant establishment man of the type that the Liberal Party has always elevated to positions of power. I doubt he’ll wear well, but for the moment he’s been able to sell himself as a change candidate as he’s never been a politician. That he’s been the creature of politicians, running the central bank in Canada and then the U.K., seems not to have hurt him yet.

(2) Also on January 6 the American congress certified the election of Donald Trump, beginning his second term. This was probably the biggest factor in swinging the race, for two reasons. First of all, Trump has behaved in an unhinged manner right out of the gate, swinging wildly in terms of foreign policy while managing to insult and offend everyone. It’s hard to overstate how despised a figure he is outside of his base.

This has affected our election not so much because Trump has tainted the political right in Canada (Doug Ford successfully ran against Trump in winning Ontario’s provincial election) but because Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, has made a career out of acting like a Trump Mini-Me. Every part of his campaign has been drawn from the Trump playbook, down to saying that Carney was somehow illegitimate for being chosen by a party congress. And the fact is, Canada’s Conservatives just aren’t as good at this stuff as the MAGA movement. Their commercials this cycle, for example, have been terrible. But the bottom line is that while Poilievre has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, the stink is on him too deep, and it’s shown in the polls.

(3) In a polarized political environment, and with our stupid and outmoded first-past-the-post electoral system, third party support has collapsed. That yellow line on the graph marks the fading fortunes of the NDP. They look like they’re going to get crushed, and all those voters are going to the Liberals, in a strategic shift trying to block the Conservatives.

I don’t think this means the end of the NDP though. I mean, I’ve been predicting the death (even “annihilation”) of the Greens for the last three elections, and they’re still holding on (and good for them!). But I do think Jagmeet Singh is gone after this. Politicians have expiry dates and he’s reached his.

As for predictions, the race is tightening but I’m guessing the Liberals stay ahead and may even pick up a majority. Ontario in particular will be a rock for them, seeing as it just went Tory provincially and voters tend to split the difference. The polls are probably right and I don’t think things will change much between now and election day, in part because there isn’t much time but even more so because this past weekend saw record-breaking turnout for advance polls. My own polling station was just a five-minute walk from where I live so I dropped by on several occasions after I saw the line was too long to bother waiting. I finally voted Saturday night. So the election may already be decided.

Political punditry potpourri

Moonlight sonata

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Sometimes when you get up in the middle of the night and there’s a nearly full moon beaming in your bedroom window, you get a nice effect. Of course by the time you’ve got your phone out and taken a picture you know you’ll never get back to sleep. But that’s the way it goes. Happy Easter!

Aliens: The Original Years Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Aliens: The Original Years Volume 2

About the only bad thing I can say about this collection is that I didn’t think it was quite as good as Aliens: The Original Years Volume 1. Given how highly I rate what’s been done with the Alien franchise in comics, that can’t be taken as a criticism though. These are all great comics.

Specifically, what you get here are a bunch of stories that ran in Dark Horse publications in the early 1990s (the rights to the Alien comics line were sold to Marvel in 2020, so that’s why these Epic Collection anthologies are published under the Marvel logo). There are three main stories on tap, introduced by a few shorts. Here’s the line-up:

Countdown: a team of space marines tries to escape a planet with a Xenomorph infestation problem. One of the survivors has a little secret. I knew where this was going but it was still great.

Reapers: I did not know where this was going! A funny Aliens story from the great Simon Bisley. This is a quickie with a surprise gag ending that actually made me laugh. Not a twist I was expecting!

The Alien: the president has to go negotiate with one of the Xenomorph-hating Pilots, who is terraforming Earth for its species to colonize. The Pilot isn’t someone to be negotiated with, but the president has a nuclear-option bargaining chip.

Genocide: a pharmaceutical company that makes a super-steroid named Xeno-Zip needs to harvest a special chemical ingredient contained only in the “royal jelly” of a Xenomorph queen. A joint corporate-military mission is sent to the Xenomorph’s home planet, now riven by civil war, to grab some of the stuff. You may have sensed by now that all of these stories tend to play on basic plots and characters introduced in the first two films (the military-industrial complex seeking to mine or exploit other worlds, the kick-ass but ultimately out-of-their-depth marines, the slimy, soulless corporate hack, the question of who’s human and who’s an android, etc.). What’s odd is that the stories are all so fresh regardless. They add just enough stuff that’s new that every story has its own character.

Hive: a different team are looking for that royal jelly, now described as “the most sought-after consciousness-altering substance in existence.” Giving it a further gloss: “It gives some an intense feeling of well-being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever.” Sounds great! One of the scientists on this mission is addicted to the junk. The great new element here is that they’ve invented a robot Xenomorph to help them. Why hadn’t they thought of that before? I mean, if they can make human androids that nobody can tell aren’t real it wouldn’t seem too hard.

Tribes: this isn’t a comic but a novella with lots of art work. The art is great; the novella isn’t. I couldn’t finish it. Maybe it just wasn’t my thing.

Aliens: Newt’s Tale: this is basically a graphic version of the 1986 film Aliens, except told from Newt’s point of view. There’s some new material at the beginning giving Newt’s backstory but otherwise it’s a quick run through the highlights of the movie, including most of the main moments and memorable lines. Although Hudson’s “Game over, man. Game over!” is oddly missing. I guess it hadn’t become a meme yet.

So aside from “Tribes” this is a line-up of great, (mostly) original stories, each illustrated by a different artist in a distinctive style. I particularly liked the work of Kelley Jones in “Hive.” Another can’t-miss title then in the terrific Alien comic franchise. This is a series that, for decades now, has never seemed to miss.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

This was Doyle’s favourite Holmes story, and has been voted in some readers’ polls as his best. And I think I can see some of the reasons why. It’s quite colorful, with gypsies, a baboon, and a cheetah all prowling the grounds of Stoke Moran for no reason essential to the plot at all. And it has one delightful scene where a brutish man tries to intimidate Holmes by bending a poker. That’s enough for twenty or so pages of fun.

Watson even introduces the story by saying that he can’t recall any case he observed Holmes work on “which presented more singular features.” Which is saying something, because he also tells us that Holmes always worked “for the love of his art” more than “for the acquirement of wealth,” so much so that “he refused to associate himself with an investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.”

But wait. Hadn’t Holmes also observed, on several occasions, that it’s ordinary crimes that are the hardest to solve, while ones that were exceptional in some way were more obvious? In choosing cases tending toward the unusual and the fantastic wouldn’t he just be picking the low-hanging fruit?

I’ll grant that “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is unusual and fantastic. It has the air of a gothic thriller, albeit mixed with some elements familiar to the canon, like evil coming to England from abroad. The features are indeed singular, and the crime downright weird, though oddly enough it also felt in keeping with some of the elaborate-to-the-point-of-strained-eccentricity plots of Agatha Christie. The reveal of the “speckled band” at the end even reminded me of a similar sort of experience I had with a snake in the basement of my old house, though with less fatal consequences.

“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” I found myself nodding along to this. Holmes references the (then notorious, now forgotten) killers Palmer and Pritchard, who both poisoned their victims. But I thought of more contemporary figures like Harold Shipman (Britain’s most prolific serial killer), Michael Swango (subject of James B. Stewart’s book Blind Eye), and in Canada the cases of Mohammed Samji and Paul Shuen (both recounted in Michael Lista’s true crime collection The Human Scale). I say this not because I dislike doctors, but only to shoot down the notion that somehow doctors are less likely to be homicidal psychopaths because they’re well educated and work in a “caring” profession. Doctors are no better or worse than any of the rest of us. To think otherwise is making a big mistake.

To return to the baboon and cheetah, they are both described by the young lady in the story, the damsel in distress, as “Indian animals” that the lord of the manor wanted to have around because they reminded him of his time stationed there. But baboons are not native to India and it seems unlikely Doyle meant the Asiatic cheetah. That species had not yet vanished from India but was very rare (it was declared locally extinct in 1952, with only a critically endangered population still existing in Iran).

As per usual, I think Doyle was just being casual with the facts, and would get a laugh out of people trying to trip him up. But then I think those fact-checkers are just having fun with the idea that somehow everything in the canon has to make sense anyway. Like nailing down the exact dates when the events in every story took place.

It’s not my favourite Holmes story, or the one I think the best. I’m not sure I’d even call it his most memorable case, as I’d completely forgotten it. But then few mysteries do stay in your head. It’s what allows you to re-read them every five or ten years, as though for the first time.

Holmes index

The book of me

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of housecleaning and found this little gem tucked away in a box somewhere. Our Baby. That would be me!

How do you weigh babies anyway? I guess you just sit them on a scale and hope they stay put. I’m told my weight was pretty average.

As you can see it was around this time that entries started petering out. So much for From Birth to Seven. I don’t remember any religious education anyway, so that part may be right. The milestones seem kind of silly to me anyway. Lifted head? Is that an accomplishment for babies? And I wonder what I had to smile about a month in. Is that considered fast or slow? However it ranks, I’m pretty sure that was my last smile too.