MangaJkt

I am such a sucker for these silly avatar generators. Here is the latest:


It's supposed to be your manga self, but I look like the dorky guy that tries to cheat at Yu-Gi-Oh but gets foiled.

I got the meme from HRH Courtney, Queen of Everything who looks positively ravishing in hers and you can get yours here.

And to prove that it is the sensation that is sweeping the nation, I even independently found the secret manga-tar of 2fs. And in some weird coinky-dink, we are all wearing the same glasses. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it sure makes me nervous.

BlatantMemeSpreading™: Show me yours.

Marley's Millions

This post contains spoilers for a best seller about a pet. Figure it out or read on.


I first heard of Marley & Me, the book about a hyperactive Labrador retriever, in an online chat with a writer that said that he had wriiten a few books, but didn’t make “Marley and me money.” I wasn’t quite sure what that was. It seems it’s 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Owen Wilson. It’s pretty flattering when you can get Jennifer Anniston to play your wife.

Normally I avoid schmaltzy books like that as if they were radioactive. When my son had to read Tuesdays With Maurie, I cringed and wondered what was happening to our education system. That sort of sap had no place in a classroom.

But half-way to Atlanta we stopped at a cheesy discount outlet for a stretch break and I found a CD audiobook version of Marley & Me for only six bucks. It was abridged to six hours and read by author John Grogan. I went for it since I knew I had over twelve more hours of driving that weekend, much of through radio unfriendly Bible Belt mountains.

My wife, who had read the kiddie version abridgment was worried it might be too sad. Spoiler Warning: Marley dies. I decided to give it a go anyways. The story of a newlywed couple that cluelessly adopt a highstrung puppy. We found that the story mildly mirrored our own early married life. The Grogans started a family soon after testing their parenting skills with a dog. While the specific details varied greatly, the overall arc rang a bell.

Also, a lot of the book takes place in West Palm Beach during the early nineties when we lived there as well. We enjoyed the sarcastic commentary about West Palm, Palm Beach, and Boca Raton as much as some of the antics of the titular dog.

And some of the tales, even allowing for comic exaggeration are just horrifying. The dog is destructive, neurotic, and poorly disciplined. Behavior that would get him sent to a pound by most owners is laughed off. While I won’t spoil any specific incidents, some are amusing, some are touching, and some are disgusting.

And of course, some of it gets maudlin. As Marley ages and the inevitable end looms (and don’t all dog stories end the same way), we were reminded of the slow year-long decline of our dog and our decision to end his pain less than a year ago. By the time we hit the DC suburbs, we were both crying.

And here is where Grogan earned his Marley money, which may or may not be millions, but it's definitely enough to recover the cost of all the damage that uncontrollable beast did to his houses. The story itself is nothing special. Lots of people do the things he and his family did: raise some kids, change jobs a few times, and bury a pet. He took a rather typical story that millions of people lived and gussied it up into some sort of universal tale of growth.

This is a story arc that millions of middle-class Americans can relate to. And as Groban tells, lots of dog owners are perversely proud of their dysfunctional dogs. Even I once came up with 100 Things About My Dog. If only I had known what a gold mine setting down the life story of a beloved pet was. But it was Grogan that tapped into this part of the American psyche.

And when you have poured your heart out, what do you do for a encore? Marley has already become an empire with special gift editions, the upcoming Christmas Day release, a website with a blog, and perhaps someday a special line of chew toys. In October, Grogan is releasing a prequel about his childhood. But somehow I doubt his childhood was as universal as his love for his dog.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is your pet worthy of a bestselling memoir?

Lighthouse Hunting On The Cape

When I’m on vacation in coastal areas, I like to hunt lighthouses. Now, some people don’t think that there is much sport in that. And they have a point. Lighthouses tend to be large and very slow moving (except that sneaky Cape Hattteras one) and they have few natural defenses. Indeed, their number has been slowly declining, making them that more tricky to capture.

Here are some of the lighthouse I managed to shoot while on vacation in Cape Cod this summer.

	Ned’s Point. Technically not even on Cape Cod, this lighthouse is in the particularly picturesque town of Mattapoisett. Hiding at the end of narrow road, this squat preternaturally white lighthouse is a favorite of sunset picnickers. When captured right near sundown, the shadows go from merely pretty to absolutely stunning. This lighthouse was caught while on a sidetrip to New Bedford, but it only whetted my appetite for more prey. Near the end of our trip I decided to spend and entire day stalking that most elusive beast, the Cape Cod lighthouse.
	Chatham. I did a lot of bicycling while on the Cape and one morning I decided to ride from our rental to the Chatham light. It seemed like an easy 15 mile ride, but when I got to the end of the trail, it turned out that the light was another four miles down the road. I got to Chatham Beach too late to join the yoga class going on down on the beach, but I did catch the flag raising over the Coast Guard station that doubles as the lighthouse station. I did have the good sense to have a road crew meet me at the lighthouse to load my bike and drive me back to the house in time for breakfast. Mornings are a good time to catch these lighthouses because they aren't expecting hunters at that time of day.
	Nauset Beach. One of more famous lighthouses on the Cape, this one is also one of the harder ones to shoot. It sits across from a National Park Service beach that is so popular in the summer that the rangers have a full time job keeping cars from stopping along the road to disgorge passengers in a tricky attempt to avoid the parking fees. My strategy was to be dropped off at the Visitor Center and ride my bicycle along the Salt Pond Trail to the Coast Guard House. From here it was another mile and half along the coast road to the lighthouse. It may think it was tricky, but it never stood a chance.
	Three Sisters. These three small lighthouses are particularly sneaky. They claim to be retired and taken to hiding in the forest near Nausset Light. Two of them have even ditched their lights in a vain attempt to escape notice. Fortunately for me, there was a path leading right to them. I snuck up on them, took a bunch of quick shots and called for my support vehicle. There are three parking spaces right by the Three Sisters with a ten minute limit. The spaces are usually occupied by the aforementioned beach fee jumpers, but they also gave me just enough time to load up my bike to move on.
	Provincetown Lights. According to the maps there are three lighthouses in the Provincetown area, but they are particularly shy and hide in areas inaccessible by car or bicycle. Of the three, I only got the faintest hint of Long Point light, the one directly across from the P-town beach on the long spit of land that encircles the bay.
	Highland Beach. I saved one of the best for last, waiting until sunset to stalk it. Most of the sunsets on our vacation were pretty lackluster, being mostly overcast and gray. This one, however, showed some promise. Highland Light puts on airs by residing on a golf course. It even owns its own house.

As you can tell, lighthouse hunting is a time consuming sport involving stealth, guise, and cunning. But the trophies are worth it. You can see more views of these lights at the Flickr set or hunt them down yourself.

A Good Sport

As we watch television in our quadrennial obsession with all sports obscure (and admit it: would you even cross the street to watch a swim meet if there weren’t a ton of hype and national pride and TV cameras wrapped around it?), millions of people around the world are asking “How is that a sport?” And let’s face it, a lot of things that are at the Olympics shouldn’t be. The dictionary is little help because its definitions are so broad. Here is one from the online American Heritage dictionary:

sport (spôrt, spōrt) n.
1. a. Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
b. A particular form of this activity.
2. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
3. An active pastime; recreation.

These definitions are overly broad and could include about anything. We need a stricter set of tests and criteria. Here are my canonical, authoritative and indisputable requirements for a sport.

A sport must have a winner.

This means it must be played by a set of rules and have a way of determining who is best. Without rules, it is just exercise. Yoga is many things: a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life, but no matter much you stand on your head, it is not a sport. Mountain climbing is another litmus test activity. People keep records for all sorts of feats for climbing. Fastest ascent, number of ascents, number of mountains climbed, but unless you are having a race under fixed conditions and declaring a winner, it is an activity, not a sport.

When I was in elementary school, there was a trend towards non-competitive games like pushing giant earth balls around a field or rolling down hills. Fun, active events but not sports.

A sport must involve physical ability or skill.

This separates sports from games. The most common physical attributes necessary to a sport are speed, strength, endurance, agility, or a combination of the above. Intellectual prowess may be needed in many specific sports, but it is not a necessary requirement. Sprinting is pure speed. Baseball, even pinch hitting, requires speed, hand-eye coordination, and strategy.

Chess is a game. A very hard one, but no physical ability is required. In fact, mastering it seems to preclude physical activity. The grey areas are in defining the level of physical prowess required. The most debated distinction is motorsports. Is the mere driving of a vehicle physical enough to merit classification as a sport? The hand-eye coordination and endurance necessary to be a competitive NASCAR is extreme. Taken down the scale, one could argue that lawn mower racing is also a sport. Perhaps. In the same sense that kickball is really just a watered down version of baseball. They can be called sports, just very low-level ones.

Also, the distinction between a game and sport is rather fuzzy. Golf is clearly a sport because of the extreme skill necessary. Few people can drive four-hundred yards or sink 30-foot putts like Tiger Woods. Going down the other extreme, darts and bowling are what I call the beer-drinking sports: activities where the calories consumed usually exceed the calories expended. This rough caloric intake guide also eliminates many games that require great skill but little exertion such as marbles, horseshoes, and Space Invaders.

Anything meeting the first two rules where score is kept in some objective counting type of tally is a sport.

The object being counted can be runs, goals, points, or strokes, but there needs to be a way to determine who did more (or in the case of golf, less) of something. Most team sports fall into this category, but it also covers individual sports such as tennis. In many ways this rule encompasses most people’s traditional definition of a sport.

Anything meeting the first two rules that involves measurement of speed or distance is a sport.

This rule covers most traditional track and field events. You are either racing others or seeing who can move something like a shot-put, javelin, discus, or yourself (either vertically or horizontally) through space. Racing can include other components such as bicycles, skates, horses, or again, arguably, motor driven vehicles. Really nothing very controversial here.

The next rule is where I start to lose people because the following exceptions rule out activities as a sport.

Anything choreographed, set to music, or that includes an artistic element is not a sport.

Once you include music, it is A Performing Art, not A Sport. This rule eliminates everybody’s favorite winter game (behind curling), figure skating. At the amateur level, they like to de-emphasize the artistic aspect in favor of the athletic component by strictly regulating the type of music, skimpiness of the costumes, and the number and type of stunts that must be performed. But the mere fact that artistic merit is over half the score makes it less than a sport.

Ballroom dancing and cheerleading are trying to gain legitimacy as a sport rather than a competition, but it is nearly impossible to weed out the inherent artistic elements that make these activities distinctive.

The above rule is really a subset of the bigger, most controversial rule:

Anything involving subjective judging is not a sport.

If judges are involved it is either a Talent Competition or a Beauty Pageant. Now judges are different from referees or umpires in that the latter enforce the rules, while the former determine the winners. Let’s make that clear through a few examples. Weightlifting is a sport because the winner is the person that lifts the most measurable weight. Bodybuilding is a beauty contest because the person with the best looking muscles (as determined by the judges, not by any standards of good taste) wins. Swimming is a sport because the winner is the person that finishes first. Diving is a talent competition because the person that makes the prettiest and most difficult dive wins.

The real problem area here is gymnastics. Gymnasts are very athletic and train very hard. So do ballerinas, but nobody is calling ballet a sport. In both endeavors, their ultimate goal is to impress an audience, either a paying crowd or a group of judges. In gymnastics, everybody is doing pretty much the same moves and stunts, but the winner is the person that does them the best, i.e. is the most talented, not the strongest, swiftest, or most accurate. You could make gymnastics a sport by adding quantifiable criteria like who can hold an iron cross the longest or vault the furthest or do the most camels in a row, but that would destroy the reason people watch gymnastics, for the elegance and grace. Both very unquantifiable qualities.

I know I am courting controversy here, but my criteria are clear and objective. Just like sports should be.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Name an activity and I will determine its sportiness based solely on my criteria here.

Let The Games Begin

Tomorrow night marks the beginning of the Beijing Olympics. I previously wrote a post about all the different narratives that will be told in the press. And many of them are already being touted. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t see a story about the smog-filled sky or some crack down in the name of security.

But soon all the words change to images as hundreds of hours of coverage begin. NBC and it’s associated networks are going to constantly remind you that they are in China and you are not. They will do that with a barrage of pictures of the iconic features of Beijing and China. Here are a few images you can expect to see over and over again.

	Birds Nest Stadium. The centerpiece of the Olympic construction effort is truly a unique and impressive structure. I posted a panorama of it here. This where the opening and closing ceremonies will take place. What was a construction entrance in the foreground is now a beautiful plaza tailor made for the television cameras.
	Bubble Natatorium. Right next to the stadium in the Olympic Village, this enclosed aquatic facility is a trippy glass clad cube that looks like your watching Finding Nemo on acid. With Michael Phelps as a hometown hero, there will be a lot of coverage of the swimming events here.
	Tienanmen Square. This plaza which was the site of the infamous protests in 1989 has the tomb of Mao in the center and is ringed with museums and government buildings. The Chinese are strictly limiting press opportunities here to avoid any embarrassment.
	Portrait of Mao. With the giant portrait of Mao overlooking Tienanmen Square, expect plenty of establishing shots from here. Sensitive to the protests here, security will be ultra-tight. A "Free Tibet" banner over this picture would ruin the games for the Chinese.
	Forbidden City. Just inside the gates off of Tienanmen Square is this mammoth palace complex. When I was there a year ago, it was getting a massive facelift for the games. Cameras can't do justice to the size and grandeur of this place.
	Temple of Heaven. This ceremonial palace south of the Forbidden City is much more colorful and picturesque than the bi-chromatic main palace. The vast open expanse includes large orchards and is a popular place for kite flying. I would hope that this area gets plenty of exposure.
	Great Wall. The Great Wall at its closest is about thirty miles north of Beijing, but it is an irresistible photo-op. It's more than a wall, it's a metaphor.
	Terra Cotta Warriors. These relics from the dawn of Chinese history are really from Xian over 300 miles away, but their fierce visages beg to be shown off.
	Smoggy Skylines. I hope NBC didn't bring a blimp because it's not going to be much use. Visibility in Beijing is measured in blocks, not miles. I harp and harp on this but the smog is going to be the big story of The Games. Let's hope for clear skies, but expect to see a lot of clever camera angles trying to hide the omnipresent haze.

I also expect to see shots of the many smaller temples around the city as well as images of the huge modern shopping centers and office buildings. Beijing is a city of history and contrasts. The hype and hysteria has been building for four years. Let's let the games begin.

BooksFirst - July 2008

Books Bought

See the Special Vacation Edition post

Books Read

Armageddon In Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut, introduction by Mark Vonnegut
The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald

Comments

For rock stars, death has always been a good career move. For writers, not so much. Often before the corpse is cold, the vultures are rifling through the file cabinet and the trash can for anything that can be sold as “undiscovered” to the core fanbase. In the case of Armageddon In Retrospect, that seems to be several similarly themed short stories that Vonnegut wrote in the fifties for the magazines but never got published, probably for good reason.

Most of the stories have prisoners of war as major characters. Some are in Dresden after the fire bombing that was the centerpiece of Slaughterhouse Five, some take place in recently liberated POW camps. An awful lot of the stories have to do with looting the bodies of the dead or terrorizing the citizenry fleeing the oncoming Russian conquerors. These stories are really only interesting in context as very rough drafts of his later work.

Most of Vonnegut’s very early work was re-published in Bagombo Snuff Box where there was a greater variety of topics. While I hate to cast aspersions on son Mark’s motivations, most of this was better kept lost. He supplies a brief preface and there are some non-fiction sections at the beginning that are like warmed-over out-takes from Palm Sunday. If we are going to just go through the pocket lint, I would have preferred more context and connecting material. But, alas, we are never going to get that from Kurt and have to settle for the scraps we can scrounge.

The book itself is just gorgeous with thick creamy paper and colorful illustrations before each chapter. But that doesn't make up for the rather thin content inside.

The fourth Travis McGee novel picks up slightly from the second and third. The titular Quick Red Fox is a big star actress that between husbands got talked into an orgy that ended up captured on camera by a blackmailing proto-paparazzi. Lyssa Dean pays the extortion, but when a second round of blackmail requests comes around she turns to salvage expert Travis McGee to protect her reputation. Trav really could care less but he needs the money and Lyssa’s assistant is a gorgeous if emotionally repressed gal Friday. And we all know where that is going to lead.

The real fun of this book is watching McGee go around the country and squeezing the real story of the lost weekend out of all the participants. At least the ones that are still alive. The plot is a little convoluted and there are a few too many red herrings, but it keeps the pace up. If anything, the book ends a little too quickly with too much of the denouement happening off-screen. The only really good fight sequence is when Travis takes on a pair of ultra-butch lesbians in a scene that is played for laughs. It’s a little squirm inducing given modern sensibilities, but comes off with a some naïve sociology thrown in.

The first four Travis McGee books are all short quick reads and show some growing pains. By the time of Red, MacDonald is getting his sea-legs and rounding out the character nicely. I'm really enjoying this trip down memory lane and can't wait to get into some of the longer meatier books.

Don't Cut Out The Middleman

One of the first things I am going to miss with my son off at college is watching campy geeky TV shows with him. Previously, I've mentioned that our favorite shows last season were Chick Chuck and The Big Bang Theory (which had very little banging unless you count Melissa Gilbert).

Earlier this summer, at dinner my son said he wanted to get home early in order to watch a new show called The Middleman. I said not to worry, I already had it programmed into the DVR. Great minds think alike that way.

The Middleman is an hour long comedy on ABC Family that can best be described as a cross between Men In Black and Alias. There are also generous dollops of The X-Files and The Avengers mixed in. All done in a campy winking at the camera style.

A mysterious fighter of things supernatural and extraterrestrial recruits a young artist as his apprentice. Wendy Watson (or Dub-Dub), played by Natalie Morales, is a cute twenty-something art student that lives in an illegal sublet with her even more attractive roommate. There are also a series of mysteriously omnipresent other hipsters hanging around as eye candy.

Matt Keeslar plays the titular yet unnamed Middleman as a 50s era Dudley Do-Right straight arrow that drinks nothing stronger than milk and swears with G-rated exclamations that would make the Cleaver family wince.

Each episode has the two Middlemen fighting some ridiculous form of villainy. So far they have fought talking gorillas, fish zombies, and cursed tubas. The witty banter is razor sharp and filled with pop culture asides. If you don't know who Gorilla Grodd or Howard the Duck are, you are missing some of the best zingers. There are also funny running gags like the little time and place in the establishing shots. It's all very high density comedy.

While being on ABC Family would make you think it's too clean cut to be entertaining, that is not the case. There is some sly mild sexual and drug-related innuendo (I did mention that the lead character is a twenty-something artist, didn't I?). One of the funny recurring gags is the beep and black mouth bar anytime a character says something that would draw an FCC fine.

With my son at college, I don't have anyone to laugh along with while my wife rolls her eyes at the zingers that go over her head. The show airs Mondays at 10pm EST. Their website contains the usual silly promotional gimmicks including a Middleman character generator. I always like to use these things to create a Mii-like avatar, but the guys seem to come out sort of androgynous and emo-ish. The girl dress-up doll is intended to replicate Sexiest Woman Alive Angelina Jolie circa Mr. and Mrs. Smith because their kids would probably make great Middlemen themselves someday.

The Next Yellow Jacket

My son goes off to college today. We put him on a plane to Atlanta so he could go to freshman orientation over the weekend. He has to go early because he is joining the marching band and their band camp starts in a week. In between he will be staying with my brother who lives in Atlanta.

Next Friday my wife and I will load up his belongings into our SUV and make the twelve hour drive to Atlanta so that we can move him into the dorm on the following Monday. Then we turn around and leave him on his own and head back to our empty nest.

If you have been following my intermittent posts about college hunting, you would know that my alma mater, Georgia Tech, home of the Yellow Jackets, was on his short list. He called it his safety school, and sadly it was. He applied to three more competitive schools but the roulette wheel that is the admissions process for ultra-selective schools came up double zeroes.

And while I could be accused of some sour grapes, I think he is just as well off. While he is very talented in math and science, we haven’t seen any evidence of the drive needed to succeed at schools as rigorous as some he applied to. Not that Georgia Tech is a basket-weaving summer camp. I have no doubt he will be challenged more than he expects to be. The hubris of youth is nearly unlimited.

The question I get asked most often is if I’m happy that he is going to my old stomping grounds. I am, but not for the reasons people assume. While I wear my school pride on my sleeve (and my internet alias), I was more interesting in getting him into a school that would be good for him.

The time to get a kid thinking about colleges is long before the post-PSAT mail blizzard starts filling your mailbox (and nowadays, your kid’s e-mail inbox). As you can tell by the picture, my subliminal soft-sell of GT over the years has been subtle and low key. But it has never been exclusively aimed at Tech.

From the age that he could walk, we have visited college campuses Over the years we have strolled the grounds and browsed the bookstores of places like Wake Forest, Duke, Chapel Hill, Stanford, Berkeley, Oklahoma State, Virginia and MIT among others. So when it was time to select colleges, we had lots of reference points. For awhile there I was worried that he wanted to be a Blue Devil. All he knew about Duke was that they had a good reputation and were big rivals of his dad's school. Fortunately, that phase passed.

Finding the right college is a game of matching the student with the school. And like personal relationships, there may not be One True Match, but there are fits that work better than others. My son wanted a strong engineering school in a metropolitan environment. And Georgia Tech fits that bill very well for him. For a different kid under different circumstances, I would feel very differently about shilling my school.

Parents want the best for their kids. Sending a kid off to college is the culmination of eighteen years of parenting and coaching and school trip chaperoning. After nearly two decades of daily involvement, it’s hard to let go. As we have been helping him pack, there have been a lot of tears, mostly my wife’s, but some of my own.

My son has been chomping at the bit to go off to college for at least a year now. He is embarking on a grand growth experience and has nothing but exciting times ahead. I hope he does well and has fun. And he will because he is not the one that has to head back to an empty house full of memories.