I don't want to be Elfstar anymore!

Hi ho.

2007-04-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

Hi ho.

And, finally, the last post about Panama

2006-03-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

And, in fact, it's not even really about Panama.

I decided on my way down to Panama that, while I would take some pictures of the country, that I'd rather do the ~old-school thing and keep a sketchpad of the trip with attendant notes than shoot seven thousand digital photos. So, well, I did. While I didn't make as many sketches as I would have liked, I did make quite a few. So, like any good child of the information revolution (capitalize it if you like), I have posted some of the better drawings to my webpage. If you'd like to check out the pictures, the url is http://www.alexparise.com/panama. If you live near me, I think that the pictures in the book give a better feel for the trip; I'd recommend that you hold your nose and come visit me to see them if you're interested. Also, I only scanned about half of the pictures - and not even the better half, in a few places. While I still can't draw people, I'm getting slightly better with it.

The regular posts of bad fiction reviews will resume post-haste. I'm sure you're excited.

WTF, Panama, just WTF?

2006-03-17T22:38:00.000-08:00

So it's 1:38 AM after one of the weirdest days of my life - and by far the weirdest day of this weird vacation - and I'm trying to get the day together properly in my head. Forgive me if this is not the most coherent blog entry ever, but if it's bollocksed up then it will have followed today properly.

Today was one of those episodic, death-of-a-thousand-cuts days. The weird experiences of today were as follows: El Ray, the Panamanian Post Office, the homeless dude, Casco Viejo, more street people, Ten, and Next. Insert before/between most of these the hotel room, as I kept coming back to it.

So, get up at 8:30. Breakfast with folks, the realtor (names have been changed to protect the innocent) Francesco Rinaldi comes to see them. We're all supposed to go look at houses, and they want to talk business before we go. I'm not feeling so hot and don't much want to talk business so I head up to the hotel room and read some bad fiction on the terrace while waiting for them to come back.

Fast forward to 12:00. Francesco the gay realtor has left, we're not looking at houses. Fine. Why? Mom's got three homes under contract. Really, you know, here in Panama, about 12 people live in every home. Mom's buying three for her and Gary. Whatever. Again, fine. It's time to go to El Ray, the Shoprite owned grocery store down here, to pick up gifts for everyone, cause y'all don't get shotglasses, no, you are all getting beer and candy and juice and that kind of stuff. Probably on Wednesday if you're in/near New Brunswick, or by mail or what-have-you if you're not. This story will make more sense soon.

El Ray is weird in that once you've gotten all of your stuff to the counter, a kid magically disappears your cart. The cart you originally were using is replaced with a new cart that is owned by the (different) kid who is currently bagging your groceries. Word to the wise: if you bring (say) a big blue man-purse with to put your purchases into, the kid will be confused. And while he'll put his hands all over your groceries he won't touch your man-purse. Though once you've loaded it onto his cart he'll be more than happy to push it out to the curb for a tip - duh.

So, back to the hotel. Beg boxes off of the front desk. Pack up care packages for friends not in NB. There is no packing tape to be found, so (like you might) I presume that there will be some at the post office. Get boxes, head downstairs, fetch a taxi. Today sounds normal, right? Here's where it all goes to hell.

So I'm going to draw pictures today. I want to do it in Casco Viejo, cause it's the section of the city I'm most familiar with and it has the added benefit of having a bus stop for the diablos rojos in a square right nearby, and I want pics of these wierd things for home. So, I get a cab to the post office in Casco Viejo, and we're off.

After driving through Casco Viejo for approx. 10 minutes, the cabbie asks directions of 4 different people and finally figures out that the Casco Viejo post office has been closed and is moving to a new location. Said new location is no longer open. Fine. Let's off to the post office at Balboa Avenue. Cabbie drops me off and I'm $10 poorer than I was before. Whatev.

There's four lines at the post office. The signs at each line is in Spanish but they all look the same. There is one person in each line. I get in the third line and wait. And wait. And wait. Approximately 20 minutes goes by. There is a whole lot of passing of paperwork, of speaking back and forth, of phone calls, of more speaking, of filling out new and different forms, and finally, after all of this, the man hands over like $2.50, the clerk stamps his three non-airmail envelopes and it's my turn.

After some furtive hand signals and a lot of bad English and Spanish I find out that I get to go to the first line. Great. I walk to line one, there's one person in front of me. Remember all that paperwork and shit? There's more of that. Twenty minutes or so later, it's my turn. I'm beginning to get annoyed, but it's a new country, and not mine, so I swallow it. I'd also like to point out that I'm holding two large and heavy boxes and am hating my life.

Anyway. Now that the computer is no longer exploding I can keep blogging. The man at the front of this line tells me to stand in the second line, that I'm in the wrong place. Really beginning to get annoyed now. There's one person in front of me, which of course means that it's another 20 minutes before I get to the front of the line. The line next to me, meanwhile, has grown to four people. I manage to communicate to the lady at the counter that I need packing tape. It eventually becomes clear that I have to go the hardware store next door, that they have no packing tape in the post office.

Rage. Fine. I buy a $1 roll of packing tape at the hardware store, head back to the post office, assemble my packages, and get back in line. Again, one person ahead of me. The line next to me hasn't moved. Once I get to the front of the line, the clerk leaves. I wait. She comes back and starts doing paperwork. I wave, talk, knock until she looks at me, and she tells me that I'm in the wrong line for packages, that that's line number three, which was the very first line I waited in. There's also five people in that line and there have been five people there for the last half hour.

So I left. I was immediately accosted by an extremely dirty homeless man, who jabbered a long stream of Spanish at me. I said "no spanish, english only." He spoke a lot more spanish and ended with "25 cents." I said, "No change. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Nada," and smacked my pocket for emphasis - there was really none there. He jabbered some more, I said fine. I bent, propped my unmailed packages on my knee, and gave him whatever change I had, which was seven cents, apologising the whole time. He yammered longer and then handed me my nickel back with a dirty look and what I presume was a rude hand gesture. Which would have all been acceptable if he hadn't kept my goddamn pennies.

I took a cab home (and this driver was completely suicidal, even when compared to the other cab drivers in the city, and is the only person I've ever seen to push his car up to ~45 mph in second gear), dropped the packages, yelled at Sabrina for a bit because I was so freaking enraged by the post office (and kept a happy face on the whole time), then left to draw and take pictures in Casco Viejo.

The cab driver was normal, but got flagged down in the ghetto by another driver. By the time I figured out what was going on, we'd left, and I had one more thing to feel guilty over: the other cabbie had broken down and his fare, a young single female tourist from Argentina, needed to not be where she was. My cabbie took my mangled statement "no hablas espanol" to mean "she can't ride in my cab" and despite repeated attempts to figure out what was going on we didn't pick her up. Well, fuck me, huh? I'm feeling even more weird now.

So we head over to Iglesias San Remo, a beautiful ancient church in Casco Viejo. I wanted to go back here to take a few notes on the borders of the stained glass windows in the place - these borders look nothing like American or European borders, btw, and they're very gaudy and cool at the same time - and sketch this awesome Virgin Mary in the church. So I sit in a pew and begin sketching.

The experiences of the day so far are really telling on me: my hands are shaking far too much to draw well. Today's drawings are as bad as the drawings on the first day of the trip, I'm sad to say. This sucks because the Mary in question is awesome: the statue is life-size painted, carved stone, holding the church that we're in in her hands. Underneath her are a collection of busted-ass ramshackle buildings which she is apparently protecting. Beautiful in every way imaginable. I wanted to draw her, and I did, albeit poorly.

So I get done my sketches and stand up. Now, I ain't a believer or nothing, but I still figure I'll show some respect to Mary since I sketched her, so I bow to her. Upon bowing, this freaking American snot starts laughing at me. How do I know he was American? You tell me: he was approx. 50, white, had greasy+balding combed over hair, wearing dark, gold-framed aviators, a hawaiian short-sleeved dress shirt unbuttoned halfway, and had a cane and three cameras around his neck. Either North Jersey or Ohio, fer serious. Also, he spoke English. I glared at him and left.

Sorry this is such a long post, it gets longer. It's after two o'clock AM now, and we're at about 4pm. I'm on the street outside the church and am taking pictures. I snag some architectural shots, and then this little guttersnipe walks up to me. He makes hand motions while saying, "Take my picture, I'm hungry." Well, fine. Whatever. I feel like I have some karma to pay off, so i snap a picture of him and his brother and give them a dollar and leave. No lie: twenty seconds later, I hear from behind me, "Amigo!" and there are no less than freaking 20 kids yelling "Take my picture! Take my picture!" running down the street at me.

I eventually get away from all but one of them (while magically retaining my wallet and most of its contents). The one left, I snap a picture of and give a dollar because I just couldn't argue anymore. I mean, he posed and yelled "Please! Please!" I don't know if most tourists get a kick out of photographing malnourished street children but goddamn did I feel like a conquistador dickwad.

I took some more pics and drew some more, managed to not take any more pictures of children (but the four 8 year old girls who asked me to take their pictures while going into the church, all dressed in their finest white-and-blue dresses, were tempting. Okay, truth, I was out of film on the roll and they were in a hurry to go to church. Whatever.) and went up to a square to get the pictures of the buses I wanted. Where I was at in the square there were these two benches that formed an L, and these four old men were sitting there. I took a picture of a bus and these dudes started cajoling me (in Spanish) to take their pictures. I mean, enough already. I said, "English Only, Sorry" and started walking away while looking at the buses that had shown up in the meantime. This comment caused a great stir. After I had gone ~10 feet, I heard a yell behind me, "English!" I turned around. "I know English! Hello!" Okay, sure. "Hello!" Reply: "Hello!" Um. I reply, "Hello!" He replied, "Hello!" C'mon. I replied, "Buenos dias!" And got the hell out of dodge.

Back to hotel. Got dressed for dinner. Went to leave w/o a suit, saw Gary was once again wearing his, put a suit on. Dinner was at the best French restaurant in Panama, called Ten (the price of all the dishes), with Francesco Rinaldi the realtor. Francesco was born in Panama, lived in France for 30+ years, and moved back like five years ago. Francesco knows everyone in the world, used to own his own restaurant, is currently a realtor, raises chickens, goats, sheep, cashews, and mangoes on his 20 acre farm, and is as gay as the day is long. I really liked him. Got tons of data on Panama from him - including that little brother M. might not get too arrested here for his various indiscretions. Good news.

After one of the most amazing dinners of my life, I went outside for a cigarette and to clear my head. I pop in the smoke and am about to light it when a street kid about 14 years old asks me for a cigarette. You know what? Fine. He looked older in the darker light, it was only after I'd handed him the cigarette that I realized he was underage. Well, shit. He mimes that he needs a light. I hand him my lighter. He futzes with it, not lighting his smoke, and starts backing away. I must have given this kid such a look as I put my hand back out because he stopped in his tracks, lit the cigarette, handed me my lighter, and walked away. He was so about to just walk off with the thing, the look he gave me slightly before I stabbed him with my eyes just said, "Sucker!" Eh, whatever, I got my lighter back.

So, back into the restaurant, talked a little more, then Francesco dropped Breeze and I at the "best club in Panama," neXt. Suffice it to say that I don't really do the dance club thing, but if the best club in Panama has a dance floor that would fit 75 max and the DJ's don't fade between songs, but fade down one song and then wait until they feel like starting the next one (about 5 seconds between songs), then, well, the much-vaunted club-centric nightlife of Panama must suck far worse than I thought it did.

But Breeze and I danced anyway. The crowd was weird; when each song ended, about 40 people would leave the dance floor, and as the next song played, more people would filter on until the song ended, and then the crowd would empty out again. Breeze and I didn't dance long because the club sucked worse than we did. However: while we were leaving the floor, some 40-year old guy handed me a card: "BEAT. George Ballesteros. c:6684-4642. t:226-0780. feelyourbeat@hotmail.com," slapped me on the back, and spewed a stream of Spanish at me. Ah, I'm an old hand at this: "No Spanish. English Only." Reply: "No Problem! We are big-time producers! You call us! We make star!" I can only figure for gay porno because fer serious, the only people who like my dancing are sketchy-ass apparently gay dudes. I hate my life sometimes. We left the club in short order.

So the only thing that I had to feel proud of today was when we got a cab and the (excessively suicidal) cabbie quoted us twice what it had cost to go home from where we were now than it had cost to come from much farther than where we were yesterday. I yelled at him. He told me to get in the cab. I wouldn't have, but Sabrina was already in the cab and just wanted to go home. So I did.

Really, you know what? Days don't get to be as weird as today was. It's just not allowed.

Selected texts (and earnest mistranslations) seen in Panama City.

2006-03-16T21:26:00.001-08:00

"Se vende ganga" - I'm sure this doesn't mean what I assume it does.

"El Tigre Verde" - Name of a plant store.

"Taller Car Planet" - Which is actually in Spanish and not a mistranslation.

FEAX Internationale - On a truck

Llamades de Celular 25c

STUDEBAKER - on a building which is theoretically no longer a Studebaker dealership.

Club de yates y pesca DIESEL - Come here to rent a yacht to catch diesel fish.

STUDENTS! Use the overpass the government built to save your life.

"Corruption Makes Us All Poor! To report, call..." - This on a billboard.

Bus names:

The Kronik

Melquisdeth

Macguiver

Nana Alanys

2FAST2FURIOUS

Route 1 Sucks Anywhere You Go.

2006-03-16T08:45:00.000-08:00

Heading out of Panama City is a total trip.

With a few illegal U-turns under our belt well before we left the city, we crossed the Puente de los Americanos (I'm using as much Spanish as I can) and set out down Route 1 to attempt to find a beachfront home for mom and Gary. It turns out that it's really hard to figure out where you're going when you can't read the language and the only map you have is detailed only in comparison to 16th century European maps of the East Coast of North America. Even google maps has nothing on Panama; the best map we could find is probably not out-of-date, but is also a total fiction.

Another word on maps and Panama - even the Census Bureau doesn't have an accurate map. It's not that we couldn't find one, it's that it doesn't exist. This appeals to me, and adds to the whole post-apocalyptic flavor of the country.

There are no signs that tell you what road you're on, nor are the signs for exits clearly marked. Once you're 10km from Panama City, there aren't even any exits, there are only roads to the left and right. There are neither stoplights - of the three I've seen in the country, two were non-functional - nor stop signs, and the speed limits are queer; it's 100km/h (this is roundly ignored; people either drive 15mph or 75mph) on the open country and 65 km/h in towns. There's no warning that towns are coming, either. It's tree-tree-tree-town-scrub-tree-tree-tree. The roads are amazing.

After making another illegal U-turn at a toll plaza since we didn't think we were going the right way, we made a series of bad turns and wound up stopping at a police station to ask directions. No one spoke the proper language, but we eventually were able to tell a cop where we were going. Rather than giving us directions--which would have been admittedly difficult--he told us to follow him, and he showed us the proper way to get where we were going, which was (sadly) where we'd already gone and turned around. The first place mom wanted to go wound up being unfindable.

So was the second.

But we evenutally, through the judicious use of u-turns on the biggest highway in the freaking country, centered ourselves down to see a golf resort, whose name I forget. The place felt terrible--more like a burbclave than anywhere I've ever been before--and we left in relatively short order. It was very high-priced and seriously ugly.

Then we (again circuitously) made our way to the Playa Blanca resort. While mom did not wind up buying a house here, the Hispanic-American salesman Tito drove us about this huge installation in a golf cart (which almost didn't make it up the hills) and yammered about how much things were going to be worth in the future. The sad thing is, I actually think he's right. There is apparently huge appreciation going on here.

Playa Blanca, for all its niceties, has a few oddities inherent:

The closest grocery store is 35 km away. (!)

The closest gas station is 20 km away, and gas costs more than it does in New Brunswick.

It's both hotel and residential, so you're expected to live with full-on transients. Granted, transients in nice clothes, but transients nonetheless.

It boasts a rain record of 11 inches per year, and is 15 km from a rain forest. (?)

You can do anything you want to a house once you buy it but it has to be painted white and have a blue roof.

It is next to tree farms that have ponies browsing in the shade underneath.

And finally, buses are not allowed inside, so the day laborers have to hike out 3km when they're done work to Route 1 to be picked up - and there are a lot of laborers. Side note: a skilled electrician in Panama makes $16 per day. (!)

The way home consisted of a lot of dodging of buses, wild dogs (which I insisted on (knowingly) improperly calling coyotes), chickens, bicyclists, and cattle. And then the sun went down.

The country seems a lot more poplous in the night than in the daytime, probably because the houses really seem to blend into the trees; lights on the hills make it far more noticeable where houses are at night than during the day. During the day it seems completely empty--which makes sense, as apparently slightly over half of the country's population lives in Panama City. But at night, you really see that it's not empty, it just looks it. The lights in the hills are not streetlights, btw--the only part of Route 1 that's lighted is the Bridge of the Americas.

Which I was damn glad to cross when we finally got there. Driving Panama at night is actually scarier than driving 278 through Brooklyn during the day. Again, it would probably have been better if I'd been able to speak the language - but so be it. I am still an ugly American.

Panama City is totally crazy.

2006-03-14T19:32:00.000-08:00

I wrote these notes more or less for myself, but figure I'll post them here anyway, as I hope to share my thoughts on this awesome piece with everyone who happens to read this blog. I like Panama City. Notes commence here:

Panama City appears to be entirely composed of interstitial zones. It sweeps around the bay from the Canal and the Bridge of the Americas east and ends rather suddenly approx. 5 miles from where it starts. The buildings tend to climb in height as one goes to the east, with slums abutting some of the nicest buildings in the town.
The sections of the city that we have so far been in are Casco Viejo, which is the old city, and contains some of the nicer/older churches, the President’s house, and other fun things. Fun parts of Casco Viejo:
Many buildings which have either burned or rotted out have been turned into parking garages. The architectural style which is mostly concrete construction and tends to large, wooden doors and frames set into the concrete means that where doorways have been removed, leaving wide concrete arches, there’s good spots for cars to drive through and park on the tiled floors.
Most floors are tiled concrete.
The older houses tend towards having quasi-French quarter construction; each floor has a long balcony covered in windows which open side-to-side and are mostly the height of the rooms inside. There’s little air conditioning, and most of the units are new (and manufactured by LG); most people seem to use the wind off the ocean to cool their homes.
Most of the balconies have laundry hanging from them.
There’s a hotel near the president’s house called the “Antigua Club” or something like that which is in ruins. Again, with the construction in question, ruins means that there’s nothing inside, and it is just a burned-out shell of concrete, with a tree growing from the chimney. The Antigua Club was destroyed in the 1989 US invasion and has not been rebuilt. The nice writer/artist from Argentina whom we met at the community art gallery (!) says that they’re planning on having some sort of art parties in the hotel, at least until the cops drive them out.
Casco Viejo is about 1/6-1/5 restored. These restorations are in no particular order; one building on a block is fixed and everything around it is crumbling. Paint peels in weird ways in the tropics; buildings look leprosied. Most of the concrete is intact but there are places where the concrete needs repair, usually in the center of large patches of missing paint. There are unrestored buildings on the same block as the president’s house; this is totally foreign to me.
The method of restoration of choice appears to be to remove everything that isn’t concrete from a building, and then redo it entirely. There’s a certain lack of subtlety to this approach that I appreciate. Restoration as scorched earth policy?
Houses are apparently cleaned by dumping soapy water on the floors and brooming said water out to the street. For serious.
The streets are narrow and the sidewalks narrower. The sidewalks are also part step; somewhere in the evolution of the city multi-layer tiered sidewalks were decided to be the way to go. Often the upper tiers are cracked tile.
Many businesses are unmarked, even though they appear to be open to the public. The doors open wide when they’re open and shut when they’re not. Yet more places have doors that are split in half top/bottom, apparently for street-level ventilation with added privacy. I’m not sure how you tell which buildings are businesses and which aren’t; perhaps you have to know before you get there.
Within sight of the President’s home is what appears to be a local ship terminal. Small boats (smugglers?) which are powered either by poles or by outboard motors (sometimes two) and are less than 1m wide and very long are parked outside it (see pics); it’s hard to tell which are still in use and which aren’t but I think it’s safe to say that if the boat isn’t actually flooded it’s in use. The shipyard itself is falling apart, hardcore. It’s beautiful in its own way.
Casco Viejo abuts the slums in many places. We were told by two nice ladies from an upstairs balcony not to walk the way we were going; this was probably good. It’s hard to tell which sections are acceptable to go into and which aren’t; this is part of the whole interstitial community thing I’m talking about. Nothing is clear cut, everything is jumbled. Possibly comparative to Roman towns like Pompeii? Must learn more.
Taxi service is weird. Everything from the hotel costs 3x as much as the ride back to the hotel. You don’t tip cabbies which is truly strange.
My favorite form of transit that I haven’t yet taken are the rojos diablos, or red devils. These are former US schoolbuses that are used instead for passenger transit. Apparently a ride is 25 cents, and the buses are amazing. They’re all painted red, white, and green, and then on top of this is painted anything. Really anything. Dragons. The Pope. Jesus. Wrestlers. Rock stars. Barbarian w/ axe. Bikinied girl. Mel Gibson in The Patriot. Someone who might have been Lao-Tzu. Trees. Oceans. Boats. Recursively, another bus. These things belch diesel fumes like they’ve just been drinking huge amounts of beer, and some have modified chrome exhaust pipes that go up over the emergency exit (blocking it) and vent over the top. Many have missing windows, all are loud, and none of them look like any other. They’re among the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.
Other notes: the Bridge of the Americas turns off its lights at approx 11:15. Good conservationists.
The water around the canal is gross. Thanks large amounts of boats coming through.
There’s a size of boat called “HandyMax,” which is smaller than the size “Panamax.” Panamax boats, meanwhile, are smaller than “Suezmax.” I want to know where the Handy canal is.

Holy Rusted Mother of Storms Batman!

2006-03-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

The first 93 pages of:
Mother of Storms
John Barnes
Tor, 1995
Rating: -6.5, Scale (-12:12)

This is really the review of two books: first, the opening 93 pages of Mother of Storms, one of the worst openings that we at Elfstar Industries, LLC, have seen recently, and second, the last 482 pages of Mother of Storms, the best book that we at Elfstar will never read. Why two reviews? Because the CIO of Elfstar LLC managed to lose the book on the bus, and refuses to buy another copy of it.

We mean, really, the last 482 pages of this book were really good, I mean so good in fact that we're considering stating that books such as the Iliad, Gravity's Rainbow, and Infinite Jest simply be burned as they cannot touch the beauty that is the last 482 pages of this book. The first 93, well, they weren't so good. But the last 482 pages would have roxxored ur boxxors.

Why were the first 93 pages so bad? Well, in that pile of pages, we were introduced to a metric ass-ton of characters, the majority of whom we only meet once. These characters were all totally one-dimensional, and a few of them have reprehensibility as their main dimension. So we at Elfstar Industries didn't really come to care anything about those characters. In fact, we were rooting for ~~several~~ most of them to bite it.

A partial list of the characters that we meet, and the number of times that we meet them, are as follows: The Boy Who Loved The Bomb (one visit), The Horny Engineering Student (two visits), The Beautiful Student Activist (two visits), The Money-Grubbing Capitalist SchwienHunt (one visit), Captain Spaceman (one visit), The Smart Eccentric Hermetic Weather Scientist (one visit), The Money Grubbing Capitalists' LapSchweinHunt (one visit), The Ball of Rage (two visits), The Smart and No-Nonsense Female President (one visit), The Probably a Pervert Vice President (one visit), and The Plucky NOAA Scientist (two visits). As you can tell, that's a lot of characters.

Now, there's a minor problem with the first 93 pages, which we hate to even talk about, but we're going to. It's written in the present tense. Now, normally that's not a problem, because most sub-standard writers don't use it. When a good writer writes in present tense, it's a fine thing; bad writers' present tense prose tends to come off clunky and juvenile. Guess which category John Barnes falls into. Quick! Guess!

So what happens in the first 93 pages of the book? Well, The Boy Who Loves the Bomb drops some bombs onto the north pole, in a premeditated proactive strike against the Soverign Territories of Alaska or something. These antimatter bombs melt all sorts of clathrates, releasing huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The back cover tells us that this is going to cause all sorts of hurricanes and, presumably, the title-referenced Mother of Storms. We quote the back cover because the first 93 pages never get there.

After these exciting (*yawn*) five pages, we're immersed into the world of misogyny, with detailed descriptions of terrible tortures and death used against women. This goes on for a disgustingly long time, and covers several characters. Then there's some rape fantasies (this is after the previously-mentioned misanthropy), some scientific garbage, some quoting of Yeats, some more misanthropy, then, well, some more misanthropy (seeing a pattern? We were disgusted.), some more pseudoscience, some more misanthropy, and then, just before the first city was destroyed, the book was lost.

Now, at this point, the book gets great! At page 94, which we at Elfstar Industries, LLC, did not read, cities are levelled! Civilizations are destroyed! Barnes writes in the past tense! It's incredible! There's no more misanthropy; in fact, the world rejoices in the Power of Women! Why? Because the book ends with a stunning scene, with much flag waving, where Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith lead a plucky group of ex-Navy, ex-Marine, and ex-cropduster pilots in a stunning attack on the very center of the hurricane! Through their self-sacrifice the hurricane's secret store of methane is DESTROYED and the storm ends, bringing the Threat Against Humanity to its knees! And what's more, all the pilots are female! They've had Amelia Earhart's memories and skills plastered over their own, and once they've killed the rampaging hurricane hordes they turn their skills on misanthropy itself, shatter the glass ceiling, and burn down Violence Against Women! The whole world rejoices and women are safe to walk the streets or even cook in the kitchen forevermore!

Man, do we at Elfstar Industries wish we'd read the last 483 pages of the book instead of the first 93. The last 483 pages are a real, red-blooded, American book, not like all the filthy books being taught in college today. Damn, that would have been a great book. It's a shame we didn't, and will never, read it.

Perhaps "Lithe Ankles" Sounds Better in French

2006-03-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

The Mountains of the Sun
Christian Leourier
Berkley International Science Fiction, 1973
Rating: -3.6 (Scale: -12:12)

With a breathtaking cover that prefigures the punk haircuts of slightly later in the decade (though perhaps it would be more punk if the dude in the spacesuit was safteypinned to the... ummm... sphere) The Mountains of the Sun enters the cosmology of Elfstar Industries, LLC, as the first example of French Postapocalyptica that we have had the honor to tear to pieces.

This piece of dreck starts with the wondrous phrase "I am Cal, the man with the long hair and the lithe ankles." Any book that starts with a phrase like that is going to be worth the long haul, and no mistake.

There are three major social groups that this book ~~lampoons~~ describes, two tribes on the recently drowned European mainland, and the stranded Martian settlers who are now coming back to Earth. None of these groups are particularly interesting, laudable, or worth writing a book about; needless to say, the interaction between them is about as fascinating as the interaction between three types of clay.

So, there's Cal's tribe, who are scared of the valley next door because the ancients say that there's a river of fire there. Then there's the rampaging nomads who push them into the valley next door (duh). Then there's the Martian scientists. Surprisingly, these disparate groups interact. There's the manly Cal, the crippled An-Yang of the rampaging nomads who Cal befriends, and then a bunch of forgettable scientists who want to "study" the nomads. Study includes medical experimentation - but "good" medical experimentation. The main baddie is the warmongering nomadish leader T'ong-O, immediately rechristened B'ush-O by your snarky friends at Elfstar Industries.

The best part of all this is that the "good" tribes are obviously French, and the "bad" tribes are obviously Spanish. Obviously, because the scientists talk about their languages' lingual roots. I love inter-European rivalries.

While I was hoping for some good radiation burns from the river of fire, that was just hyperbole. However, there's some nice destruction of tech for scrap metal, and some really insipid native discussion on the purpose of the crucifixes that "are found in all their villages."

Then there are the other problems. The Martian computers: Intelligent? Check. 3-D monitors? Check. Punchcards? Check. Dammit, you try so hard not to make fun of the technology and it's just so easy. I mean, it's right there! There's some plastics that have lasted since the apocalypse. Then there's the 100+ meter floods that the caused said apocalypse; perhaps the earth was pounded by comets? Or God left the tap in heaven on too long? There's not that much water on the earth. There just isn't. It's the same reason Waterworld is so funny - you just can't do it. The math doesn't work.

And finally there are the different tribes' formal speeches. B'ush-O always refers to himself in the third person; Cal refers to his ankles as "lithe" at least ten times throughout the book. An example of B'ush-O's speech: "Such was the affront sufferend by T'ong-O, [sic] mighty chief of the steady-handed warriors." Whew.

The nicest thing about this book is that we Americans get to see that even though the French pretend to have all the best writers and novelists in the world, the best of their published SF is only marginally better than most of the bottom-of-the-barrel American SF, and far worse than the rest of the barrel. France, baby, you've come a long way since Verne.

I Want to Live Under the Flourescent Sun!

2006-03-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

A Different Light
Elizabeth A. Lynn
Berkley, 1981

Rating: -2.3 (Scale -12:12)

A Different Light is--as near as I can tell--one of the last of a type of book that was very common in the birth of science fiction. That type of book is the 200-page serial novel, where the book is written to be published in 3 sections in (well, most likely) Analog, and no filler material is put in after the magazine publication. It's... not the best way to write a novel. The jumps between each section tend to be non-linear (in the bad, pomo way; not the good post-modern way) and the successive climaxes tend to pound up on one another like a train wreck; each successive climax just does that much more damage.

So Jimson (hereafter referred to as Weed, because I can) is an artist with cancer. Poor Weed. Weed will live for like 20 years if he stays on his homeworld. But poor Weed is bored. Weed wants to see things under "a different light" [clever, eh?] and go into hyperspace or whatever and visit other worlds. But if he does, his cancer will mutate, and he'll only live one year. So: Weed travels. Also, he's trying to find his old boyfriend.

Weed seeing things in a different light mostly consists of his hanging out in bars - a true artist - which hardly seems worth extra cancer to this poor reviewer. I mean, were the bars on his homeworld that bad? One presumes not.

So Weed sells some paintings, and that's the first climax. Then the book abruptly changes gears and Weed becomes an art thief. Except, it's not art that he tries to steal, it's masks that enhance telepathy! Good grief, really Ms. Lynn? You're kidding me. He finds the boyfriend and they become enmeshed in shadowy dealings or somesuch. It's lame.

Meanwhile, there's a pile of off-camera sex. All "deviant." Hot man-on-man love. (off camera.) Hot human-on-alien love. (off camera.) Hot man-on-woman love. (off camera.) If you like deviant sex alluded to, and lame art thievery, and crapulent motivations and cultures, then this book is for you.

Then, the third section? What happens? Weed dies. ~~Yay!~~ Boo. But before he dies, he's telepathically uploaded into 12 other people's bodies, and lives on in one even though his personality should have been destroyed. Then there's more deviant sex.

What? Did I just spoil the book for you? Be thankful! Now you don't have to read it! Lynn is apparently a well-respected writer, but this book has all the hallmarks of a first novel that no-one actually read. It's lame. Though I wish I could show you the 70s-tastic cover of the version I read; the actual pic isn't up online. The mustaches are tremendous.

Yesterday's Tomorrow's Past's Future's Imperfect

2006-02-28T09:44:00.000-08:00

Robert A. Heinlein
The Past Through Tomorrow
1967, G.P. Putnam & Sons, NY

Rating: -1.3 (Scale -12:12)

If you read SF, then you know that Robert Heinlein is one of those writers. You know, the giants of the field who you can't possibly criticize because they're too influential, too big, wrote too much that was too popular.

In other words, they're sacred cows. You can't touch them, which is funny, because Heinlein spent a significant pile of his career taking down what he saw as the "important" sacred cows in the society of his day.

Picking on the science in old SF stories is easy, and truly unfair. It's not the science that's the problem with reading it. So I'm not going to; it's the equivalent of saying that fantasy sucks because magic doesn't work. That's not the point. The point is that Heinlein's societal views are at best outdated and at worst problematic.

So then, Heinlein's society. What's wrong with it? Well, there are no minorities. Everyone is white. This is occasionally fair, as in the story Coventry, one of the stories in the collection at hand; all of the people who won't submit to magico-psychic treatments so they don't punch other people are sent to a reservation in Wyoming. They're all white. So, this is good, right? We're not ghettoizing minorities, just the whites. But the whites are also everywhere else. He seems to be predicating his society in what America isn't, and even wasn't at the time of his writing.

The other problem is the rampant misogyny in the book. Even female rocket engineers (The Menace From Earth) are depicted as mostly helpless, whiny, and unlikely to be able to do anything other than push their husbands into action through nagging. Since there were plenty of female entrepreneurs and activists in America while these stories were written, the segregation of women into these crappy traditional roles and tropes is, honestly, painful.

There's other problems, too; the road cities that he suggests are dumb. These road cities are served by huge conveyor belts; cars have become obsolete. Cities exist stretched across these giant superhighways. Anyone who has looked at urban planning once the highway system was started in the 30's would have realized that this would never work - roads like Route 1 go through towns because they're constructed from main streets, not the other way around. Controlled access freeways have been the trend from 1930 on; Heinlein's vision of "road cities" seems hopelessly dated, even from when it was written.

The long and short of this book is that women and religion are dumb and that science and men are great. If this is your cup of tea, then you'll probably enjoy this book more than we at Elfstar Industries. If you prefer actual characters, or actual human interaction, then this book is not for you.

5 Pages per Page!

2006-02-27T08:39:00.000-08:00

The Monitor, The Miners, and the Shree
Lee Killough
1980, Del Rey Publishing
Rating: -2.4 Scale (-12:12)

The size of the picture that we at Elfstar Industries were able to plunder from an unsuspecting website will give you some idea of the lasting potential of this novel. First published in 1980, I don't believe that this little SF set-piece has ever been reprinted; while single-printing books are common in SF, and are often undeserved, this book is one where the single printing is actually fortunate for the world.

The basic premise of the book is as follows: there's this galactic empire, right? And they want proto-cultures to develop without outside influence and join up when they're ready, rather than being pushed from the Stone Age to the Space Age with no middle ground. But, well, capitalism still runs the day, and the planet of Taim is full o' tasty minerals, and people want to mine it, even though the Shree, a flying Stone-Age race, live there.

Sounds political, doesn't it? It's not. Trust me.

The protagonist, Chemel, is first in an all-alien cast of characters. She's the leader of a scientific team out to spy on the Shree to see what stage of culture the Shree are currently living with. But there are miners there already (big damn surprise, thanks Mr. Title) who kill two of the survey team members and cause the rest of them to have to split up, where they're kidnapped by the Shree. Then the book gets Stockholm-a-rrific.

So, why is the book a -2.4? Well, first of all, it's boring. I mean, I didn't even want to read it. This little 190-page vignette read like it was a 600-page monolith. The all-alien cast seemed at first like it would be fun; instead, it read like everyone was a different breed of European nationalist. Not even, really; French-German interaction would have been more interesting than the interactions between these remarkably homogenous aliens. The Shree, on the other hand, share their literary heritage with the "Yes, bwana" school of writing.

The plot was blah, the characters were blah, their motivations were blah. Killough might have written good books, but this particular one was not worth reading, writing, printing, or even editing. It may have been acceptable as a 60-page novella, but I don't expect that even Joseph Campbell could have turned it into a fun read.

The St. Hallmark's Day Beet-Off!

2006-02-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

So those of us without anything significant to do (excepting Sarah and John) on this year's St. Hallmark's Day decided to give Borschtmas a send-off in style. Unfortunately, I couldn't convince Matt to be elected as Remus and run around beating the girls with strips of flayed beet skins, maybe next year.

Nonetheless, much borscht was consumed and even more borscht thrown away, a beet cake was made, and candied beets graced the table. Then the ultimate St. Hallmark's Day movie was watched and much pass-outs followed. Ah, St. Hallmark's Day.

In case you're wondering why this would possibly be posted, or even interest you, here's your very own recipe for candied beets:

beets
Jack Daniel's whiskey
honey
cardamom
cinnamon
cloves
vanilla
black pepper

Wash and peel the beets, slice very thinly. Arrange in a baking dish. In a bowl, combine whiskey and honey in a ratio of 2:1. Add spices, mix well, pour over beets. Toss the beets in the sauce. Bake for one hour at 375 degrees farenheit. After half an hour, add more whiskey and toss again. Serve hot.

Broil the Vote!

2006-02-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

This article is one that I blog about with a certain amount of trepidation, mostly because of my incredibly mixed feelings while reading the article. To summarize the article quickly, it looks like Rock the Vote might be going out of business. They've got horrible financial problems. They've fired 90% of their workforce, keeping only their political director and their webmaster. The quoted steps that they're taking to solve their horrendous financial problems don't seem likely to work. And the political director might "take time off" in the following year.

Parts of my mixed feelings should be obvious. Registering 18-24 year olds to vote is important, even though it didn't seem to make too much of a difference in the last presidential elections. So, okay, this part of what they did is good. Right.

Yet, in the elections the first year that I was in this town, when I helped out with the local elections and lived with a friend who was very involved in the local independent party, I remember all the hubbub surrounding trying to get the voter registration information from Rock the Vote. Since I live in a student town, the local Rock the Vote registration lists would have been very useful for the campaign that the independents were running as a perfect form of targeted advertising. But Rock the Vote would only hand over said registration lists to the Democratic Party. Who, ironically, were the ones that the independents were running against; there isn't even a Republican Party in this little town in which I live.

Maybe if there was a Republican Party, they would have given the registration lists to them too. I don't know. And remember, this is mostly hearsay. While we did get the official county lists, targeting the Rock the Vote lists would have made much more sense for our campaign.

Since then, fairly or unfairly, I've been unable to look at Rock the Vote as anything other than another Democratic machine. Now, while I look at them this way, their board of directors apparently looks at them as simply another way to promote their musicians, keeping politics and profits still interchangably linked.

What it all comes down to is that it looks like Rock the Vote is dead. What that will mean for getting out the youth vote in the next elections will have to be seen. Maybe local groups will pick up the slack, maybe they won't.

Whichever happens, I just hope that all the anger and frustration from the last presidential elections sticks around and actually causes something to happen this time around. My paper couldn't help it, and Rock the Vote couldn't help it, so I'm thinking that the answer is, it won't. But my political Pandora's Box has been thrown fully open, and the original held hope too, right? Who cares if the Ancient Greeks considered hope simply another evil.

The Lard of the Dead! Lard!

2006-02-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

George Romero
Universal Pictures, 2005
Rating: 2.0 Scale (-12:12)

I have to start this off with a confession: it's not just that Dawn of the Dead (the original, you scumbags, not the remake) is my favorite zombie movie, its that it is one of my favorite movies. Period. Perhaps this is a sign of bad taste on my part; I have certainly been accused of worse. Nevertheless, it means that I'm unfairly prejudiced both in favor of George Romero and against Land of the Dead, so this review is probably not worth reading. This is not an unbiased review.

Anyway. On to the movie! So, Pittsburgh is like the only city left, right? Everyone else has been eaten by zombies. Aside from just the inherent cultural crisis of Pittsburgh as the sole outpost of civilization, the world is in bad shape. The people of Pittsburgh need to range farther and farther afield in the search for canned goods to eat--they're not farming or ranching or anything--and the city is ruled by a obsolete and overly decadent elite. Also: the city is surrounded by zombie hordes.

Pittsburgh is a good choice for defense, though, cause they've got rivers on two of three sides, meaning that you can just fence off the last leg of the triangle and you're safe from zombies. Right. If they were safe from zombies, there wouldn't be a movie. They're not safe from zombies because one of the bastards has worked out how to use tools. Not make, mind you, but use.

Of couse, defense brings up how I'd do it. You've got a city surrounded by both suburbs and zombies? Burn down the suburbs. For serious. Strip them of useful material and burn them to the ground. There's already the underground coal fires, for pete's sake, just burn the buildings down too. There's a river that'll keep your city from burning, and if the zombies come you can see them. And that's important.

Not that the ruling class of the city has any interest in actual zombie defense, preferring to run the Romanesque game of "entertain the citizens and they'll ignore the fact that they're living in poverty," the favorite game of ruling classes everywhere. (Planning on enjoying the Superbowl today?) Dennis Hopper plays the leader of the overly decadent elite, and has an overly limited script. His continual screaming at the zombies of "You have no right!" is one of the weakest points in the film.

The shame is, you actually find yourself, well, not rooting for the zombies, per se, but definately feeling for them. The remnants of mankind are so useless that the zombies don't really seem like a bad choice. Even the men you're supposed to like are maybe just bad actors.

The movie follows the Romero formula well, with the initial zombie attack, then some plot building, then the full-on "we're hip deep in zombies." Which is every movie Romero has made, near as I can tell. Where this one really breaks away is in the production values: this one is far cleaner, with far better camerawork, and far better editing. Which is set off by the lack of a script and the overt metaphors, which are far less satisfying than the more subtle statements made in Romero's previous movies.

However. If what you want is gore, this movie delivers in spades. The gore is both excessively gory and occasionally actually stomach turning. There's one point with some zombie fingernails that actually made me shudder. And the thing with the bellybutton ring? Whatever it cost to get put in, that sort of removal is priceless.

The State of Our Union is... meh.

2006-02-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Well, the Internet is good for instant repsonses to things that happen, right? Perhaps, though, the true strength of the Internet is that it allows us to harp on things that happened one entire week ago!

The State of the Union Address is, and has been as long as I've been watching it, one of the best political dog-and-pony shows out there. Fortunately, Bush is more than a one-trick horse. There were a few things that particularly enraged the party, and myself, and I shall simply hold myself to commenting on these things. This is not meant to be a cogent political analysis of the content of the speech; plenty of other people have done this online. Instead, this is simply an expression of my rage at the current King and Court of our country.

First of all, I don't know if you were counting, but there were 63 applause breaks during the 52 minute speech. We know this, because we were counting. Lisa won the $17 in the applause break pool by betting high on the completely unreasonable guess of 34 applause breaks. Ah well. However, if we were to assume a mean of 15 seconds per applause break - and some were far longer - then we're talking almost 16 minutes of clapping during an overall 52 minute speech. You can finish the math.

The speech. I'm almost not sure what to say from here. Everything that smarmy jerk says offends me, okay? I am enraged when I see his face on the screen. When I hear his voice. But there were a few things that he did that really drove me over the edge:

1. Promoting coal as an alternative energy source. Like for serious? I mean, I'm no huge fan of nuclear power, but there's damn good reasons we've been moving towards nuke plants from coal plants. Coal is not an alternative energy source. Coal is more polluting than oil, is just as limited as oil, and is far uglier to extract from the ground. The idea behind alternative energy is sustainability and cleanliness, and coal is neither of these. What is this man thinking?

2. "No human-animal hybrids." While, on one hand, I'd dearly love to have centaurs and minotaurs running around the place, I somehow don't think that this is what Bush is talking about. No, what he's talking about are the Stanford mice with more-human brains. Which is not to say human brains, of course, but animals used as research models, mostly for drug research. Now, I have to say here, I'm not a huge fan of animal research, and look to work in a field to help cut down on it through computer modeling. So in that very same vein, I'm in favor of this. Let me explain:

The main objection to this stuff is religious, that we shouldn't put human DNA in mouses because it's wrong, because our DNA is holy or some such. Well, it ain't, and there's not that much difference anyhow in brain structure between us and mice. Which is not to say no difference; just not as much as you'd think. So if (some) mouse brains were carefully modified to be closer to human brains in some respects, we'd get better models for research. And better models for research means less animal research overall. Would it be better to get away from animal research entirely? Sure. Of course it would. Unfortunately, the systems that biochemical research deals with are too damned complex to cut out animal research entirely. What we should be looking for are ways to cut down on the amount of research that needs to be done. Computer modeling is one way to do that, and using better research models are another way.

3. "History is written in courage before it is written in books." What does that even mean?

So how was the party, you might ask? Well, if you watched the address, then just scroll down and look at the game shown two posts below. How was the party? Fan-freaking-tastic.

3rd Annual State Of The Union Address Drinking Game!

2006-01-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the State of the Union Address, this year's dog-and-pony show by the POTUS, and we're all ready over at the Collective for a little bit of the old tying one or two or perhaps three on! If you're watching at home, with a bunch of people, you too can use these rules to drink along with the President!

Here's the mechanics: At 8:30, once people have arrived, guests stand for each Ministry position. Anyone who is democratically elected to each position gets a little card and follows along with the speech, listening for the clues that will tell the other people at the party (including the other Ministers, of course) when to drink!

Here's the set of verbal and visual cues, with each Ministry:

Minister of Civil Rights
“Alito” – 1 drink
Roe vs. Wade – 1 drink
Overturning Roe v. Wade – 2 drinks
“Non-transparent government” – 1 drink
Wiretaps:
Defends with “national security” – 1 drink
The NSA program is “is fully consistent with our nation's laws and
Constitution” – 1 drink
“I’ll continue to authorize them” in a way clearly inconsistent with FISA –
2 drinks
“If Al Qaeda is calling you, we want to know why.” – 3 drinks

Minister of Taste
“The State of Our Union is Strong” – 1 drink
Introduces a wife of a soldier fighting in Iraq – 1 drink
Introduces a widow of a soldier who died fighting in Iraq – 2 drinks
Introduces a mother of soldiers in Iraq – 1 drink/kid in the armed forces
Wears a red and blue tie over a white shirt – 1 drink
“9/11” – 1 drink
Makes up a new word – 1 drink
Refers to a staffer/Congressman by a pet name (Brownie, etc) – 1 drink
“Halliburton” – 1 drink
Any company really – 1 drink

Minister of Faggotry
“Marriage under attack” – 1 drink
“Successfully fought off attacks against marriage” – 2 drinks
“Activist Judges” – 1 drink

Minister of Health
“Our changes to Medicare are a success” – 1 drink
“Ownership society” – 1 drink
“Health Savings Accounts” – 1 drink
“Healthcare Affordability Crisis” – 1 drink
Call for reforms to reduce judgements in malpractice suits – 1 drink

Minister of War
“September 11, 2001” – 1 drink
“Axis of Evil” – 1 drink
“Iraqi Elections” – 1 drink
“Hamas” – 1 drink
“We will not deal with Palestine” – 2 drinks
“No deals with terrorists” – 1 drink
“No deals with terrorists – including Hamas” – 3 drinks
“Iran cannot gain Nuclear weapons” – 1 drink
“World must unite to prevent” – 1 drink
“The family of nations” – 1 drink
“Terrorist” – 1 drink

Minister of Incredibly Expensive Projects
Any new program announced that will cost more that 50 million dollars:
1 drink
Any new program announced that will cost more than 50 billion dollars:
2 drinks
(These double if he talks about cutting taxes beforehand)
“The Mars Program” – 1 drink
Medicare Prescription Program – 1 drink

Minister of Energy
“Energy Freedom Act” – 1 drink
“Non-renewable sources” in a negative light – 1 drink
“Non-renewable sources” in a positive light – 2 drinks
Expand nuclear energy – 1 drink
Acquire and reprocess spent fuel from other nations – 2 drinks
“Let the oil companies show us the way to renewable sources” – 4 drinks
“Enron” – 1 drink

Minister of Oh My God What Now?
“We are Currently Bombing Iran” – Finish Drinks
“We are Temporarily Suspending Elections” – Finish Drinks
“I am placing legislation before Congress to illegalize abortion” – Finish Drinks
“We are reinstating the draft” – Finish Drinks

That's it! Have fun! Drink up while you still can! One day, our right to drink while watching the State O' The Union will be eroded along with everything else, so do it while you still can!

I Shouldn't Be As Upset About This As I Am.

2006-01-31T09:05:00.000-08:00

A good long time ago, a friend posited to me that all the bad news that you see is actually a good thing. As long as the news was bad, she said, it meant that bad news is the exception and that everything else was good. But when the news starts focussing on good things, that means that good things are the exception, not the rule.

Now, I know that you can find everything on the Interweb. But this disturbs me far more than anything else that I've seen recently. Even more than goatse. Even more than that video with the man and the horse. Because if we have to have the site "happynews.com," it means that we have started to slide over to the point where good things happening are beginning to lose their precedence in the status quo to the bad things that are happening. Which means, I guess, that one day soon the earth is going to stop spinning suddenly and we're all going to be flung into the vacuum of outer space to die of asphyxiation. And we won't even care that much. Why? Because we'll be so accustomed to the bad things that have happened every day that we'll just keep on looking at happynews.com.

Drizzt Gains a Level!

2006-01-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

The Crystal Shard
The Icewind Dale Trilogy, Book I
R.A. Salvatore
TSR Publications, 1988

-5
Scale (-12:12)

Is poking fun at a "Forgotten Realms" book shooting fish in a barrel? Is it beneath Elfstar Industries? Maybe it is, maybe it is. But. At the same time. Look at that picture of the cover. This is a New York Times bestselling author. Maybe someone has to take a closer peek. And maybe that person is Elfstar Industries.

Now, the backstory: I loved this book when I was in high school. That was around when it was published. Now, I do not love this book. This book came out of a box that was well-hidden in my mom's attic. It came home to my house when my mom made me get all my crap out of said attic (awww, mah, do I have to?) with plenty of other lousy books, all of which I had no intention of re/reading. But then my housemate--it was his week to be the evil one--pulled it out of a box and decided it was time. So I got to read it too.

By the "about the author" page, Monsieur Salvatore was a humble CS major in college until he recieved the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a "Christman" [sic] gift, at which point he changed his major to journalism. You can tell by the writing. Not by the quality of the writing, mind, but by some of the place names he decides on. Such as the crystal tower "Cryshal Tirith," no relation to Minas Tirith at all.

The Crystal Shard, in many ways, is not actually related to the Lord of the Rings, however. It is more the spiritual successor of books such as the Conan series, the Gor series, and some of Edgar Rice Burrough's lesser-known works, especially the Pellucidar books. There's a good possibility that this is because Salvatore is writing in a "shared universe," in this case the Forgotten Realms. Please note how this last link owes a lot to the movie versions of Lord of the Rings.

Salvatore might not be a bad writer. I think he is, mind you, but he might not be. When you're writing in one of these, you're excessively limited. The best example of this that I can think of is Janet Kagan's book "Uhuru's Song." Obviously enough, it's a Star Trek novel. Her other two books, "Mirabile" and "Hellspark," are fantastic SF reads, and you should go get them. "Uhuru's Song," well, it's a, well, Star Trek novel. Even good writers suffer when writing in shared universes.

Anyway. "The Crystal Shard" follows the adventures of the Manly Wulfgar, the barbarian about-to-be-king, the Dwarfly Bruenor, son of the uncle of the cousin of the Lord of the Lost Mithril Hall, the Elfly ~~Elfstar~~ Drizzt Do'Urden, and the HalfManly Halfling (read Hobbit) Regis. The book is split into rough thirds, and each bit focuses on a specific series of events. I'd like to take a moment to say that this is the first book I've ever read that contained three epilogues. And two of them are in the center of the text.

There are constant themes running through the text. Drizzt, the Drow (Dark Elf), is a Good Guy. He Likes people. Yet, people are prejudiced against him, often not believing what he says. Why, we should take a lesson from this, right? Prejudice is bad! Except. People don't believe Drizzt because, in this particular shared universe, Dark Elves are bastards. I mean, really, they're Dark Elves. Their name has a capital-Dark in it! A favorite D & bloody-well D adventure is to go lay the smackdown on Dark Elves! They're jerks! Cutthroats! Even Salvatore, in one line in the text, says that Drizzt is the only good one. So, duh, yeah, people are prejudiced against him. It's like if you met a member of the Bush family, and he was all sortsa generous with charities, you wouldn't buy it right off the bat, cause he's a Bush! So, the point here is that as far as social value goes, this book is crap.

There are some other problems. Even in most BEM SF people don't really use the word "monster" too often. Salvatore throws it around like it's going out of style. [Ed. Note: It has gone out of style.] The language is far more stilted than necessary; it occasionally feels like one of those Uncle Sams on Stilts that show up at parades in movies. (Has anyone ever seen one of those in person? I haven't.)

The book moves too quickly. Three pages to deal with a dragon. Two pages to deal with a demon. Two pages to make the greatest warhammer the world has ever seen. One page to beat down a barbarian king. You get the point.

And then there's the coincedental nature of the whole thing. The dragon (three pages) just happens to have in his horde an anti-demon scimitar, which is the type of weapon that Drizzt just happens to use, and there just happens to be a demon (two pages) on its way. It's all just so very... easy. Too easy. Even when he makes it seem difficult, you know everyone is going to survive.

This book sucks. I hate to put it into these terms, but it just does. I whimpered a few times, and never laughed once. But before I go, I'd like to end this review with my least favorite line from the book: "Drizzt seemed able to weigh every move he ever made in the scales of high adventure and indisputable morals." What kind of scales are those? Someone draw me a picture please?

Maybe the World Ain't That Bad.

2006-01-25T14:46:00.000-08:00

Just when I think the world is screwed, something shows up that makes it all better.

This Wheat That This Bread is Made From Was Grown at an Angle Normal to Sea Level.

2006-01-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

X-treme Wheat Bread
Stroehman's Bakeries
Stroehman, 2005

-4.1
Scale: (-12:12)

Extremely Delicious! Absolutley Delicious!

Look, what can I say about X-treme Wheat Bread? You're gonna look at that picture up top and say, "Elfstar, why did you even buy that?" And you'd be right. Because, well, it's gonna be gross. At the very same time, it was 50% off at the A&P, and it is my responsibility to tell you what is what in consumer culture. Otherwise, I wouldn't be Elfstar.

So first: The Packaging. There's graphs on the back comparing this bread and Stroehman's normal breads. Good. It's nutritious. Excellent. There's also this crappy gold-foil plastic around it. Between the gold foil and the name, it was enough for me to buy. There's also a gymnast, and a footballer. It's an ugly disgrace to graphic design, this bag is. What happened to good graphic design on containers? I want to know. I do.

So, before we get to taste, there's something you need to know: on the way home with this travesty of bread, my shoulder bag (read man-purse) broke. So the bread got crushed. "Elfstar," you're going to say, "How can you review crushed bread fairly?" I know, I know. I was crushed too. But, here's the really scary thing: have you ever heard of memory plastics? Well, this here is memory bread. That's right. Leave it alone for a night after you've crushed it bringing it home, and it springs back into its previous shape. Which explains my stomachache after eating it.

So, the taste and the texture. The texture is remarkably like that of other white breads. Except that this is wheat bread. It has a little more tooth than, say, WonderBread but not nearly the right tooth to be wheat bread. Not too spongy, it isn't, but it sure ain't what you want. The taste, well, you can taste the added vitamins, especially in the crust. The crust, if you're paying attention and hate everything, has a slight lactic acid flavor, which I assume was vitamin C or something that broke down during the cooking process. The taste was remarkably like white bread.

So why the low rating? I don't like my bread to taste like a provision beer. That was nast. Also, white bread's bad enough to begin with, why add the taste of lactic acid? And did you see that packagaing? -4.1 all around.

Look at Me! I'm a Freakin' Werewolf!

2006-01-20T14:16:00.000-08:00

The Silver Wolf
Alice Borchardt
1998, Balantine

-3
Scale (-12:+12)

While the book, to its' credit, never uses the word werewolf to describe the main character, "The Silver Wolf" is indeed the chronicle of a werewolf-noble-young girl trying to deal with the intrigues of Dark Ages Rome and navigate the uncertainties of an arranged marriage all at the same time. While the book is not entirely bad, there are several large problems with it.

When I picked up the book, I had no ideas, preconceptions, whatever. So the first thing I was greeted with on the cover was a blurb by Anne Rice telling me how much I'd like the book. Well, that's fine, I don't like Rice that much anyhow, so that's not going to color my opinion too much.

Problem is, it turns out that Rice is Borchardt's sister.

Riding on your sister's coattails to help get your first book published? Fine. No, really. Fine. I'm okay with that. I can't help but find it disingenuous, however, for the publisher to be putting a blurb by the author's sister on the front cover of the book. I mean, what else is Rice going to say? That the book sucks? Of course not. She's going to say that Borchardt is "A daring and vibrant new voice on the female literary frontier..." etc. (Quote comes from aforementioned front cover.)

So, I can't help feeling manipulated. "The Silver Wolf" had a higher rating--not much, mind you, but it was in the positives--before I started feeling like the publishing company was trying to manipulate me into liking the book.

Since I'm riding on the cover already, I'll keep going: a crappy photomosaic of a VERY modern looking girl (the sculpted eyebrows really threw me for a loop) interposed behind a wolf, all in black and white, except for the yellow eyes on both of them? Please. This is a bad, bad cover, and one which someone should have gotten some shit for. Why is it bad? It's not compelling. It doesn't make me want to pick up the book.

That's enough with the cover, avanti! Onto the book itself! The writing is mostly tight. My main complaints with the writing are the a) overuse of b) overused adjectives. Seriously, can't we describe the sea as something other than wine-dark? I never, ever want any author to use that again. I mean, that particular description was more-or-less overused by Homer, and it hasn't gotten less overused through other authors cribbing it. Plus, hasn't anyone noticed that it isn't all that great a description? The sea is blue down in the south and gray up in the north. If every sea was wine-dark there would be a hell of a lot more sommeliers being fired from French restaurants, let me tell you.

I thouroughly enjoyed the setting of the book. I make no claim to expertise in the Rome of the Dark Ages, but from what I do know Borchardt seems to have done a good job of describing both the physical and social nature of the city.

The characters are mostly well-developed. There's a fair amount of cliche character archetypes used, but while they do develop along lines that are expected character trajectories, they do develop as the story goes along. Most characters don't stay too two-dimensional as the book moves.

But, then, there are the other problems. You want to use the Pope as a character? Fine, do so. But really, make him actually Pope-like. Hell, make him seem like a Christian. Seriously, the Pope is one step removed from walking down to a stone circle and sacrificing a goat to Ares. If you were to give him a knife and pushed him towards a sheep I shudder to think what would have happened.

The poor, poor sheep.

We've also got some problems with character consistency. The first time we see Regeane's future husband, he's a minor lord who worries too much. By the end of the book, not only has he not worried once since the first chapter, but he's also a 900 year old werewolf. Who I would not expect to ever see worrying about the hay harvest, let me tell you. After 900 years, one would expect him to have gotten a little past worrying about one year's hay harvest.

There's also a leetle bit too much coincidence in the book for my taste. The main character is a werewolf? Good. I like it. Let's do it. Her intended husband is also a werewolf? Drop dead. Doesn't stick to the wall, my friends. Just doesn't stick.

Also, a final note about the husband: implying that he was King Arthur? You know what? NO MORE FANTASY ABOUT KING ARTHUR. WE'RE OVER IT. IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO IT THEN THROW YOUR BOOK AWAY AND WRITE ANOTHER. FANTASY ABOUT KING ARTHUR IS NO LONGER ALLOWED TO BE WRITTEN.

Please God, no more fantasy about King Arthur.

Especially not werewolf fantasy about King Arthur. *shudder*

I have three more complaints about the book: one, the pages and pages and pages about what all the food was cooked in and spiced with was more than enough. I'm a cook and I was annoyed by the end of it.

Two, sage flowers are purple, not scarlet, as seen here, here, here, and here, with the exception of some varieties of lemon sage, which are both uncommon and not native to Europe. Now, I have lemon sage in my garden and when I let it bolt, it blooms purple. So there. This wouldn't be so big a deal if there were not two descriptions of sage bushes in the book, one of which had purple flowers and one of which had scarlet flowers. If she'd kept it consistent, that would've been fine, but, well, she didn't.

Finally, a complaint about the ending. There are things that you just do not need to do as an author. A trial-by-champion climax is a fine, fine way to end a book. In fact, it's plenty. You don't need to go any past that, such as having the main character be close to being set on fire. The threat of fire is enough, but having the fire be an actuality is simply unneccessary. I cannot think that one person, while reading the climax, would have thought, "Gee, this is great, but what it really needs is more fire!"

In short: "The Silver Wolf" is one of those rare books that starts off strong and gets progressively worse and worse as it continues. Well, I say rare, even though that pretty much sums up Stephen King's entire bibliography. Anyway, asides aside, as Borchardt raises the stakes of the plot, it gets progressively sillier and sillier. Which is a shame--it could have been a much more interesting book and wound up making me laugh out loud.

It's bad enough when a book is bad to begin with. It's much worse when the author screws it up in the middle.

A Little Note, Perhaps, On The Rating System

2006-01-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

Here at Elfstar Industries, LLC, we are committed to presenting to you the absolute best in reviews of the worst things in life. As such, we have developed a scientifically accurate rating system based on the newest algorithmic expressions of badness and goodness in the newly-approaching global monoculture. This rating system is proprietary to Elfstar Industries, LLC, and will not be found on any other sources on the Interweb.

The way the rating system works is thus: some (read lazy) critics will give you a scale of 1-5, or 1-10, to describe the quality of a particular book, or movie, or beer, or bizzarre food item. No, we will not be doing that. Instead, the ratings system will stretch from -12 to +12. Not, of course, that just anything can merit a score of -12 or +12; these are reserved for God and Satan themselves. Place them at either end of the scale that you desire, we're not picky.

But what can possibly stand next to God and Satan? Can something that bad actually be found? The chances that something will be scored at -11 or +11 is unlikely, as there's always something worse, and then where will we stand? The potential for corporate scandal and embarrasment always exists.

Now, how, you may ask, do we calibrate this scale? Well, let's take the beer example, if we may be so bold. For in beer is the best calibration of the scale found: A perfect zero is Budweiser. Why, you may ask? Well, we here at Elfstar Industries, LLC, are happy to tell you why. Budweiser is bland, but not watery. Well, not that watery. Budweiser is inoffensive. Budweiser is consistent - when you ask for one, you know what you're getting. And you can drink it all night long. You might not like drinking it that much, but it's not actively offensive. It doesn't curdle the milk in your Cheerios.

Expand that to books, and to movies, and whatever else, and you'll soon see why our rating scale is the best.