Hah! Beards are back! It only took ninety years & the better part of my grandparents' lifetimes! The article is full of the usual coastal musing about zeitgeist & reactions against metrosexuality and all that rubbish. To be honest, I wear a beard because I don't care to shave. That, and it keeps the wind off my face in the cold months.

Via Ann Althouse, who is resolutely opposed to hairy males. Given the fact that she had to put up with smelly, bearded hippies in the Sixties, I can't say I can blame her.

Oh, this is good. Three hostages were "found" according to Agence France-Presse. According to a - perhaps more thorough, perhaps less biased - CP (Canadian Press News Service?), the three "peace activists" were freed by a military operation. Never attribute to a military operation what can be obscured by the passive voice and some vigorous handwaving, eh, AFP? Bah.

Later versions of the AFP report seem to have been merged with less-insane BBC and unknown (AP?) wire service reporting.

Via Iraqi Coalition Casualties news aggregator.

This is pretty harsh. An Iraqi doctor in Kirkuk was a member of an insurgent cell, and under the chaos of emergency-room chaos in a violent city, managed to kill dozens of wounded Iraqi soldiers and police by lethal injection over a nine-month period before his cell leader was captured and ratted him out. Let me repeat that one - he was caught because his line-of-command was captured. If not, he'd still be murdering helpless wounded soldiers while pretending to be a hard-working, selfless professional. "Insurgent" really seems to be the wrong term of art in cases like this. "Serial killer" seems more appropriate.

But keep this in mind the next time you see an outraged quote in the paper from an Iraqi morgue attendant or doctor. The enemy aren't all street scum, drug addicts and bearded lunatics. Some are a more subtle species of monster.

Via the Iraqi Coalition Casualties aggregator.

Gah! Somebody bought a crate of Nestle-brand water "to serve at conferences" here at work. First of all, it's unnatural to have the name "Nestle" on a bottle of water. Nestle is chocolate, not fru-fru bottled water, bedamme! Secondly, this is Bellefonte. Note the derivation, beautiful spring. The whole town gets its water from a vast roaring beast known as "the Big Spring". Not only is the town water taken from a pure mountain spring, it's bottled and sold as such. We get spring water on tap in this town! To pay per bottle for it is nigh on blasphemy!

Speaking of blasphemy & water bills, the borough delivered the water bill for February for the church across the street to my box on Saturday. Fifteen days late & to the wrong address - way to go, post office!

Hm. Jim Morrow's the Last Witchfinder just showed up from Amazon. I remember him talking about it at that ParaCon reunion Fred organized in, hrm, 2000 I think? It's been a while since the Eternal Footman. For those in the area, he's one of our local writers. Or he was, last time I checked - he hasn't moved, has he, Fred?

Back when I was working for the Kerrs at Nittany Office Supplies, I found myself selling Jim a ream of old-fashioned continuous-feed computer paper and some pencil lead, probably for this book. He apparently writes long-hand on a scroll of computer paper, sort of like Kerouac & his taped-together roll of paper in a typewriter for On the Road.

Below the cut is that long-promised photoessay on the Union Cemetary Gatehouse here in Bellefonte, concentrating on a strange late-Victorian-era architectural detail, the impaled gable. Images courtesy of Jason Gullickson of mylens. Click the "+" for more.

This is a building standing on the northwest corner of the Union Cemetary property in central Bellefonte, arching over the entrance to the cemetary from Howard Street. Union Cemetary is an old hilltop-style cemetary behind the county courthouse complex on High Street, between Howard and High Streets.
Union Cemetary inspired this poem not long after I first moved into Bellefonte. It's a grand old cemetary, which holds the graves of three Pennsylvania governors, including Civil War-era Governor Andrew Curtin, his brother the general, and an interesting scatter of nearly-anonymous USCT graves at the foot of the hill among the "colored" section which testified to Bellefonte's prewar service as one of the stops on a spur of the Underground Railroad.
As you can see, the Gatehouse is clearly a neo-Gothic building, albeit a rather modest and unassuming specimen of the species. It has three sharply-defined gables in the front, and four gables in the back:

The Gatehouse looks like a stylistic whole from the streetfront, but as you can see from the rear view, it has had at least one extension built in the century or so since its initial construction, and possibly two if that unbalanced dormer on the right-centre of the building is what it looks like - an extension built on an earlier, more-harmonically balanced extension from the rear of the original right-rear of the building. You can't quite see it here, but that lower "gable" on the left hand side is actually a detached shed located across a patio & artificial spring from the proper left-rear of the Gatehouse itself.

As you can see from both the front and rear images, the house actually arches across a functioning entrance to the cemetary, a paved road wide enough & substantial enough to take your Expedition-class SUV without strain - I ought to know, I've dodged such beasts more than once, walking under that arch. Another obvious later addition is the ungainly concrete-brick chimney to the right of the gateway arch. Looks like heck, especially compared with the period clay chimney-pot at the far right, but the probable inherent ineffeciency of that very clay chimney-pot is most likely what inspired that concrete chimney addition.

This view here demonstrates some of the more exccentric elements of the Gatehouse, and of this class of Victorian construction in Bellefonte in general. First is the peculiar steep roof detail in between the gables. Note how the slope of the roof in between the "v" makes a sharp diagonal overhang with the face of the building itself.

But the second, more interesting, element, are the beasties resting in the peaks of each of the three front gables. There are wooden posts jutting downward from each gable-peak, looking for all the world like a set of stair-bannisters nailed upside down into the cleft formed by each gable's sides. It would be peculiar enough if this were an architectural detail unique to the Gatehouse - the crotchet of some crazed do-it-yourself-er Victorian, but it seems as if these "spar pointed down" gable-impalements were some kind of craze among the lesser lights of Victorian Bellefonte at its influential height. I haven't found any of these impaled gables among the buildings put up by those who actually ran the town in those heady days, but minor buildings, built no doubt by the lesser landed folk and the middle-middle class, can be found in certain parts of town with said spar-impaled gables.

There is the Gatehouse, of course, but you can also find these impaled gables in the surviving neo-Gothic houses along High Street south of Union Cemetary as well. Here is what must be the most outrageous example of an impaled gable, in which the spar has actually been run through the roofline of the gable, and protrudes from the gable like a giant's sewing-needle. You'll also note the wooden detail-work visible around the central spar, which would have left the impression of a less intrusive, harmonious whole in the gable-assemblange - if the architect had not then allowed the central spar to jut skyward like a wooden lighting-rod! The peculiarity becomes more acute when you realize that there seems to be no lighting rod at all in this agglomeration - that seems to be all wood in there. Surprisingly enough, this building has not yet been struck with lightning, or at least, not enough to cause its destruction in the century or so since its construction.

Oh, by the way? Nothing has made me more inclined towards the pro-life point of view than this ongoing nonsense about "Roe for men". I thought it was monstrous when I first heard about it on NPR last week, and it certainly hasn't grown on me in the interim.

So we've gone from "men not telling women what to do with their bodies - let 'em kill fetuses!" to "men telling women what to do with their bodies - force 'em to kill fetuses!", have we? You don't even need to believe that a fetus is a baby to find this all really, really maddening.

Why do I bother with cable? I mean, I haven't managed to keep current on a single show I set out to watch this season. I've pretty much given up on sitting down to watch the Shield or Battlestar Galactica - the Shield because I kept falling asleep or getting distracted by the State of the Union or just plain old forgetting that it was on; Battlestar Galactica because it's on Friday nights for the love of Zod, and as unlikely as it seemed when I was younger, I've somehow managed to grow a life in my dotage - more often than not, I'm out & about on Friday nights.

Bwa!

In the defense of the mother, I suspect this is some kind of Chinese-calligraphy take on Andy Warhol. The examples look far too neat & clean to be real calligraphy, though. At least not the Japanese version of calligraphy. Slop & spastic incoherence seem to pass for passion & artistry in the work I've seen. I suspect this means that I don't "get" calligraphy.

I've been watching Blue Seed this week, from a big pile of borrowed DVDs from Big Dave. Back when I first encountered this series, I didn't really warm to it, and to be honest, I only watched two episodes. The combination of what looked like typical schoolgirl-tentacle foolishness & way, way too much emphasis on the heroine's panties conspired to send me off in search of less goofy pastures. Those elements are still there - although the whole tentacle thing proved to be a first-few-episode sort of thing - but with age comes patience, I suppose, and the show is proving to be not bad for what it is.

What Blue Seed *is*, is a blend of the usual kind of teenage-protagonist angst-fest aimed at the high school/junior high school market, and the sort of workplace/ensemble procedural aimed at the older college-age fanboy market segment. They pull this off by introducing a miko/designated virgin-sacrifice schoolgirl, Momiji of "legendary Izumo", and inserting her into a semi-secret government anti-monster agency staffed by the usual suspects. So it's a schoolgirl *in* a workplace-ensemble show - kind of like Witch Hunter Robin, except that nobody ever thought to force Robin to go to school... ANYways -

Momiji has been raised from infancy with the understanding that she's special, and precious, and is expected to be willing to be sacrificed - literally, life & all - "for the good of Japan", in the undescribed eventuality no-one around her bothers to explain or elaborate upon. This leaves her a little unprepared when a strange, rather supernatural guy shows up and threatens to kill her, but the extingencies of plot and contrivance eventually leads said male-lead, Kusinagi, to become her monstrous knight-protector as she jets off to Tokyo to work for the government, hunting down & fighting the plant-like "Aragami" which her specialness is destined to combat. Sort of. It gets kind of complicated, in the bludgeony, ponderous fashion that -Nineties TV anime often demonstrated.

The politics of Blue Seed are pretty fascinating from a historical perspective. The manga and TV were written in the ugly aftermath of the collapse of the Bubble Economy. This was the period in which the failure of a mad speculation-fed private-sector construction boom was followed in turn by an equally mad public-sector explosion of civil-engineering boondoggles, each more wasteful than the last. It seemed from this end of the Pacific as if the Japanese government was determined to cover every square foot of their country, rural, urban & waterway, with ferroconcrete in a desperate Keynsian war against recession & desperate denial of the death of the Japan of the Future.

This scramble for construction is in every episode of Blue Seed either as part of the plot, or as busy-work going on in the background. Not that this was unusual for the anime of the early Nineties - but the *way* that Blue Seed deals with this real-estate lunacy is somewhat unusual. Almost all of the monstrous outbreaks of Aragami un-naturalness are directly or indirectly associated with "unnatural Japan" - a distinct and damning comparison of nature-loving traditional "old Japan" with drunken, busy, ugly "modern Japan". The usual episode is "construction company destroys vital element of traditional Japanese countryside, Aragami start killing people, starting with the construction workers". As the series grinds on, you get more and more of a feeling that the writers think that the humans have it coming. All the philosophical arguments get handed to the villains, who become more and more sympathetic, or at least, talkative.

I haven't finished watching the show yet, but as an eco-reactionary text, it's quite striking. Can't say that I *like* the politics all that much, but it isn't finger-nails-down-the-chalkboard irritating. At least it's the villains spouting all the "old ways are best, nature unspoiled, damn all modernity anyways, kill off most of humanity for sustainability!" horseshit. Even if you get the idea that we're supposed to be ambivalent-to-sympathetic to the monster-Luddites.

Hmm, the storm which barely dusted Bellefonte has apparently encased State College in inches of ice, and the folks from State College are trickling in to work full of horror stories of wrecks & road-ice.

Next Wednesday, March 15th, is the fourth annual Eat A Tasty Animal For PETA Day. I'm debating whether to attempt to cook a steak here at work, or just throw up my hands, admit that I'm no kind of cook, & head on up to Garfield's at the mall for lunch on the 15th.

Around one in five adults smoke these days. And I swear every single one of them play in the bar-sponsored free poker tournaments. *Cough* *cough*.

Link via Adam C at RedHot.

Update: the endlessly cynical Minuteman thinks that the Post has got it wrong, and that it's all about the bootlegging and the Prohibition and the taxation. Eh, I've never been able to take the idea of cigarette bootlegging seriously, and the article specifically notes a wide-spread shift from branded cigarettes to the much cheaper generics, which suggests that your average smoker gets around tax hikes by sticking it to Big Brand Tobacco, rather than trying to dodge the taxman.

There's a sign up for the new development on Benner Pike above Bellefonte - "Skyview Terrace". My parents' first house was on a Skyview Terrace. That's a hell of a coincidence. We'll see if there's anything in my price range in a few years... looks like at least a few of the buildings will be duplexes or townhouses, so you never can tell.

Mmm. Not sure what I think of Monster yet. I really want to think highly of it, and there's strong design, layout & composition reasons for loving that manga's visual style & presentation. It's also an adult story about adults doing adult, normal, non-risque things without much in the way of fantasy or science-fiction elements, which is a nice change of pace. The author has a reputation for excellence for things like 20th Century Boys, Mr. Keaton & Yawara. All well & to the good.

But the writer goes & throws out his whole plot-arc & theme in one sharp-edged, undigested, vomitious mass at the end of the first volume, blowing any credit he'd earned for subtlety or lightness of touch in the preceding chapters. Lame, lame, lame. Even if it was laid out in a fine, stylized, handsome fashion. Like using a Stradivarius as a club, really.

Do better, mangaka. That's an order.

You know, reading all the blogs going on about the Oscars, I realized that I haven't seen a movie in the theatres in about three months. Maybe I'll go see Ultraviolet if Dave has the time between packing next weekend & I don't end up spending the weekend driving down to Harrisburg or something stupid like that.

Doesn't help when the local in-walking-distance theatre keeps booking crap like 8 Below for multiple weekends.

Nothing much going on, somebody on the Con's staff has had a massive brain fart, and I'm halfway worried that I might find it necessary to go down to the meeting on Saturday, which I had rather preferred not to, if at all possible... Ran into Jason Gullickson while we were both out walking yesterday afternoon, and we went over to the Union Cemetary neighborhood to take some photos of the distinctive Victorian-era architecture along High Street and Howard Street on either side of the cemetary. At some point I hope to get ahold of the images & put together a bit of something. Later in the week, possibly.

I've been mostly sitting around, watching old anime. Irresponsible Captain Tylor, notably, thinking of the late Jeff Thompson, and wondering how it is that someone so young died so unexpectedly. I kept waiting for someone to post about how it was all a stupid, sick joke of the sort fans historically have been guilty of playing on each other.

Didn't do well at the HiWay championship last night, and went on to lose some money at the home game after all of us went out before the final table, but at least I got free pizza and a t-shirt out of the experience, so I shouldn't bitch too hard. Especially after the guy who came in second to me at the last championship told me that he had *not* gotten the cash prize I had thought went to second-place, and had been a little peeved that I had run off so fast after being the only one "in the money". I owe him a drink next time, I guess.

I think I need a break from the home game - I'm not doing well at all, and not really enjoying myself at them.

My friend Ben is moving to Denver today. We were helping him haul stuff down to the car & trailer, and moving his abandoned furniture down to the curb. About the only good thing about friends moving away is the opportunity to scavenge decent furniture from their abandons. I finally got rid of that couch with no back legs in exchange for one with, y'know, legs. And a shelf. You can never have enough shelving.

Ben is hauling whatever will fit into his little Civic hatchback & the biggest trailer that U-Haul would rent him. It's got a "45 MPH" limit sign on it, but he's talking about taking the interstates to Colorado. I told him I'm worried about that big trailer flipping his little car if it gets wobbly. Not exactly the best time of year to be driving cross-country, either. Be careful, Ben.

Woo-hoo! Lookit those clods fly!

The last three days, they've been dynamiting in the fields on the other side of the Restek running track/leechfield. I talked to a worker, and he said that they were putting in a sewer main tap for a new three-hundred-unit residential subdivision, connecting into the county sewers via our industrial park's system.

They're dynamiting because this whole ridge is about three inches of topsoil on top of solid dolomite. If you need to do any sort of serious landscaping or ground work, you're going to need to break out the explosives, because you aren't gonna get anywhere with simple digging machinery. Probably explains why the development of this area has been so painfully slow - too expensive in comparison with the other possible projects on more forgiving plots.

Monkey money?!? MONKEY MONEY?!? An Indian who runs an Rotterdam-based steel-making conglomerate makes a hostile takeover bid for a rival European steelmaking firm and the head of that firm has the brass-balls gall to refer to said Indian's offer as "monkey money"?

OK, Europeans don't get to call Americans "racist" any more. I revoke their stone-throwing privileges until they get some shutters installed over the glass shingles.

"Monkey money". Christ on a crutch.

I see that it's supposedly some sort of French idiom. I don't goddamn care. It sure as hell sounds prejudiced in English, and I'll bet you my nest egg that Mittal does the majority of his business in English, just like every other Anglo-Dutch or international-Indian businessman on the face of the planet. And I'm also pretty sure that if an American businessman of the status and alleged calibre of someone like Guy Dolle produced such a racially-charged brainfart as "monkey money" in earshot of the American press, he'd be running a hot-dog stand in Omaha inside of a month. If he was particularly young - more likely he'd be clipping coupons in Boca for the rest of his very, very long retirement.

Pretty good Swann article in Sports Illustrated.

Via a link on RedHot from Mark Kilmer.

I was watching my uncle get an editor's award on C-SPAN last night, which meant wading through a lot of other newspaper folk getting their awards. (Well, more like skimming through - I kept flipping back and forth from watching a DVD of Akira.) He was given it by Ben Bradlee. I thought Bradlee was dead?

My mother called partway through, and I ended up swearing like a sailor in front of her about that idiot editorial cartoonist who spent fifteen minutes reading his cartoons out loud. One presumes that if the association gave you an award for your work, they would BE FAMILIAR WITH IT, YOU FOOL! Also, he didn't say word one about the Danish matter, but found the time to whinge comically about NSA monitoring. Yeah, you brave, brilliant artist, go ahead and "make mock o' uniforms that guard you" - you know they'll not CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF & BURN YOUR HOUSE like certain other folk whom apparently don't exist in your cartoon world outside of Hillary Clinton in a burkha. Wonder if that has anything to do with the whole "chop your head off & burn your house" factor?

Bah.

Oh, well. Congrats, Uncle Ron.

Article on the move of "space opera" from pejorative insult to semi-legitimate subgenre. I think the authors exaggerate the ignorance of post-1975 fans as to the original, pejorative sense of the term; also, their definition of modern, 1980s-era space opera as being generally optimistic is rather... myopic, given the examples offered. How are the collected works of Iain M. Banks particularly optimistic, even in comparison with the gloomy bastards of the New Wave?

Found it via Coffee & Ink.

Yezidis! Michael Totten met with the "Baba Sheikh" - introduced to him as a sort of "pope of the Yezidi" - and visited a temple-town called Lalish in Kurdistan, which the Yezidi call their "Mecca". Deeply cool.

Chizumatic & Steve Den Beste are back.

Bill Bennett & Alan Dershowitz:

We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree...

What two perspectives are those, social paleo-conservatism and newly-minted neo-conservatism? I mean, Alan Dershowitz wrote a book semi-in-favor of judicial torture, for the love of mike. You don't slide much further to the right of that without getting into Franco territory, to slide deeper into Godwin territory myself.

No arguments with the substance of their argument - I'm not too sweet on the supine mainstream press on a good day when they *aren't* bearing the throat to aggrieved violent street-thugs & bearded maniacs. But ad hominem has a value independent of invective - who makes the argument informs the value of the argument in a practical fashion.

A voice testifying against interest is more interesting and more convincing than a person arguing his or her own case, to the benefit of his or her own intellectual trend or inclination. This is why a "hey! this liberal is talking up a conservative argument" or "wow! look at this reactionary attacking this Republican administration" only has impact for the first few iterations for any particular actor before that actor expends his or her "testimony against interest" ad hominem value, and becomes a voice for the side he or she is now habitually supports.

I'm thinking in particular of Roger L. Simon and Christopher Hitchens, who both played the "leftist in support of the war" hand so hard that they're essentially spent as voices of the "left", and probably Pat Buchanan & the Lew Rockwell libertarians for counter-examples thereof on the left, although I don't pay close attention to the leftward version of this phenomenon, and those might not be the best possible examples.

Via Glenn, who bought the "two perspectives" line hook & sinker.

Ah, and it's a fine graupelly morning.

When did they change the spelling from "grapple" to "graupel"? Damned froggy of them, if you ask me.

So does Netflix suck for anime titles, or doesn't it? I've heard both. In particular, what's the turnaround like on their long-titles, series with multiple DVDs. ADV's Macross box sets, for instance. Anybody have any recent experience with Netflix?

Jessica, you were talking about gold few weeks back. What do you think of this article? I know what I think on the subject, but I'm generally biased against the whole gold-bug notion, so I suppose I'm not the most objective of voices where gold is concerned. I like the idea that the increasing wealth of the Indian & Chinese consumer is buying up the price of jewelry.

There is some heavy shit going down around the world. I won't belabor the potential ugliness of the Samarra Shi'ite shrine bombing, because it's all over Rantburg and the rest of the blogsphere, and because it's so clearly a situation on the verge of a full-blown pogrom. But this bit from Michael Ledeen about the riots in Benghazi is something I had *not* noticed, and illustrates just how much gets covered up & ignored when emotion & knee-jerk reaction filters the news, on the right as well as the left.

Those Benghazi riots, with more than a dozen dead, got reported as just another particularly violent set of protests in the wave of anti-Danish-cartoon violence. But Ledeen's emailer suggests that A) it actually had more to do with a calculated anti-Italian move by the Libyan government and B) the actual violence occurred after the authorities lost control of their rent-a-mob and it turned into a nasty anti-regime riot bordering on an uprising. Ledeen & his emailer make it sound like a mini-Hama in the offing, which would be deeply, deeply ugly if it's the case.

Gah! I innocently enter "Genesis" into an EPA label lookup engine, and get buried under with sixty instances from a company named "Frank Miller & Sons". Rat bait, herbicide, weedkiller, insecticide, algicide - they've named every single blamed thing they sell "Genesis"! It's like George Foreman & his multiple sons George, except the Foreman family isn't running an inventory system with their boys' names!

There's an insecticide needle in here somewhere... ahah! Found it! The one Bayer CropScience 'un in the haystack.

Mind-warper for the day: Eric S. Raymond's essay on the legacy of Stalinist memetic warfare. Essentially, he's re-imagined the post-Marxist/transnational progressivist intellectual hangover as a species of pollution - the imaginative equivalent of buried nukes or bioweapons contaminating intellectual groundwaters. Hell, on a small scale, those WWI-era shells French farmers still keep getting blown up by now and again in the fields of the Somme or Meuse. He calls this poisoning by abandoned, unguided Stalinist intellectual warfare Gramscian damage.

Raymond:

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating.

I've always called it "the monster in your mind" when I've encountered this societal rage in others, although usually not to their face. But Raymond seems to be making a case for the intellectual equivalent of environmental poisoning: not ideological vampirism, but Stalinist lead poisoning, the product of a stunting of a person's moral and intellectual growth at a vulnerable age.

Raymond doesn't stop with that idea. He goes on:

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

He worries that the replacement which fills in the space left by the termination of the "suicidalist" ideology will be a monster, less likely a jihadist caliphate than a radicalized, hateful European-style fascism, bitter from repeated terror-nukings:

The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking "“crusader" cities, they'’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.

I recognize this is over-quoting, but I love that last sentence with a pure and platonic ardour.


Via Instapundit this morning.

Played poker most of the weekend. Saturday was kind of odd. The host's schoolteacher-in-training fiancee was playing Spanish-language Taboo with her friends, and it degenerated into what the host said was a mix of a political argument and really fithy girl-talk. Still, it was a better night than Friday, when the host was pouring gallons of beer & a concoction made mostly out of apple rum into everyone, and half the table was falling-down drunk. I was the most sober player at the table, and I *still* lost my shirt. I think maybe I ought to dial it back a bit - I'm losing more than is good for my continued sunny disposition.

Speaking of sun or the notable lack thereof, how about those wild temperature swings? Cold as heck last night; even my mother down in Florida was complaining about how cold it has gotten. Betcha the Canadian High Plains are baking again, though - seems to this winter's pattern, with the High Plains & the East swapping warm and frigid air masses back and forth.

Check out this mindwarping taxonomy of American libertarian trends using, apparently, Fischer's subcultural tropes from Albion's Seed. I have *got* to read that book.

After weeks of intensive thumb-twiddling here at work, I'm all of a sudden under the gun. So it goes.

Damn, looks like March arrived ten days early. Two warm days, followed up by a full-bore Wuthering Heights high-wind spectacular.

Hey, Fred, I was wrong - we hadn't been completely thrown out of that Uzbekistan airbase. They're still straggling on out, over six months after we were given our walking papers.

It's a lovely, warm day. Perfect for walking around in circles on asphalt with your head stuck in a book.

What? You enjoy nature *your* way, I'll enjoy it mine.

I've been spending a lot of time watching my old anime DVDs & some borrowed DVDs, including the old Bubblegum Crisis OAVs, so I put in my Bubblegum Crisis 2040 videotapes last night on a whim. Watching the old, "classic" OAVs in rapid succession with the 2040 TV series, I can't imagine why people prefer the OAVs. In writing, animation, plotting, and pacing, the TV series is far, far superior. Admittedly, the plotting, pacing, and writing does a severe drop-off about two-thirds of the way through the series, and it really is a classic "Chiaki Konaka joint", complete with butch female protagonists, yuri-ai undertones, and gloomy, dark overtones of ambiguity & morally dubious motivation; even given all that, I still have a special fondness for the TV series that I just can't muster for the original.

And in the end, what do I think of Griffith's Battle Tactics? He's clearly an infantry specialist - the vast majority of the book is on infantry tactics, infantry battle, and how the other services or branches affect the infantry. He doesn't even so much as quote a contemporary tactics manual for either the cavalry or the artillery. So, I suppose it's almost predictable that his natural inclination is to blame a third supporting branch for what went wrong with the infantry in the Civil War - the engineers.

And I guess I'm somewhat sympathetic to this inclination - I want to indulge in contempt for the engineers - the Popes and McClellans and Rosecranses and Lees and Hallecks whose elitist misfires ought to be to blame for the slaughter and the stalemates. But the time-lines don't favor his arguments about the usage of entrenchment as much as Griffith'd like you to think - and his rather slap-dash binary division of early-war and late-war only partially hides the basic problem with the analysis which blames the Mahanists for the failure of the offensive in the war.

That problem is that the war isn't properly dividable in a binary fashion between the early war of fluid straight-up battle and the later war of positions and sidle-by-the-flanks. Rather, the timeline lends itself more clearly to a trinary division - an early-war reliance on Mahanist prepatory entrenchment on the Lee and McClellan and Halleck model, followed by a post-Seven-Days devolution into open-field butchery, then a bottom-up reversion to form & the introduction of a mature, integral, truly tactical system of entrenchment, starting in fits and starts among the troops during the Chancellorsville and Tullahoma campaigns, through Culp's Hill and Chickamauga and Mine's Run, and adopted near-universally in the parallel 1864 overland campaigns.

Thus, this new introduction of entrenchment was not a theoretical child of the Mahanist school, but rather an echo of the discredited corpse of Mahanist theory, cobbled together as a battlefield invention of desperation & the survival instinct. Obviously, I'm getting a lot of this from Hess's first volume on field fortifications, and I'm now greatly looking forward to the other two projected volumes, regardless of Hess's over-reliance on extraneous narrative.

Most of my other responses to Griffith are mere echoes of what I thought when I first encountered Nosworthy's re-formulation of Griffith's ideas - that the psychological quality of the bayonet as a shock weapon is a valid and interesting idea, but that to also denigrate the psychological value of entrenchment as a counter-tactic to the weapons of shock is a damned double standard; that an increase in range of half again or even double, is no improvement to be spat upon, and that Griffith's own figures take a great deal away from his would-be anti-rifle-musket revisionism; and that almost nobody is giving as much attention to the Petersburg siege battles as I suspect is necessary to properly develop the role of entrenchment and riflery in tactics.

If anyone has any suggestions for books on the Petersburg siege & the tactics thereof, I would be greatly appreciative. I know that there's that book on the ANV sharpshooters corps, and I'll probably have to read it, even though it seems to give off that "Victorious [Confederate] Arms" odor which is so familiar from WWII petty historiography. I have hopes for the second volume of Hess's work on field fortification, too.

Went out to see a local blues band called "AAA" or "Triple A" play at Zeno's with Fred & some of his friends. The band was pretty good, and I wasted some dosh on a few pints. They have lambic on tap at Zeno's, which is great & all, but good lord is it expensive. The Woodchuck is almost reasonable, though. I was commenting that the lead singer/guitarist of the band sounded kind of like Randy Newman, and then another singer came up to the microphone and launched into Louisiana 1927, which made me laugh. Believe it or not, but it was the first time I had heard it actually played, and not just quoted as lyrics in a blog or livejournal for political points.

I ended up being a Civil War bore at the table, talking about Harsh & the Maryland campaign with a friend of Fred's, a fiddler & science teacher named Andy. We got on the subject because I had a library copy of Griffith's Battle Tactics, and I started in on the whole Jamieson/McWhiney-Griffith-Nosworthy thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. After having finished Griffith over the weekend, I've come to the conclusion that I was being too harsh on him, mostly due to my having encountered all of his ideas in one form or another in Nosworthy, in the wrong chronological order, as it were. I imagine I'll be equally, and equally unfairly, hard on Freeman when I get around to reading more than a few pages here & there of his Lee biography or Lee's Lieutenants, having read Nolan & Connelly & Wert taking apart poor Freeman in books printed in the last thirty years, with all the advantages of hindsight & new research.

Went down to look at the rubble yesterday evening. Who would have thought the old man had so much brick in him? A two-stories-tall pile of broken wood and tumbled brick, with iron frames sticking up out of the pile where the interior had been reinforced around archways. The pile was still on fire in two separate places below the surface of the rubble, and the whole town smelt of old-wood smoke.

It was still smoking this morning as I made my way out of town.

Dimitri noticed my meandering about Griffith, and comments that he reads Griffith as he would a fellow blogger or essayist - presumably for unique viewpoint rather than strict scholarship? I suppose that could work, but I had seen Griffith cited as a specialist, not an advocate. Ironically enough, Jamieson & McWhiney, who *are* cited as advocates for Attack and Die, are somewhat more restrained in their rhetoric, laying aside that book's last third-worth of peculiar racial theorizing.

I suppose I'm saying that I didn't expect Griffith to come across as this much of an... autodidactic crank. Eh, maybe it's the exaggeration of unmet expectations at work.

I'm not coming away from Battle Tactics of the Civil War with a greatly enhanced impression of Paddy Griffith. His basic campaign analysis is exceedingly naive, in a rather Centennial style, and he's building a number of his arguments on those naive judgments. I just hit his section about West Point's origin as a French-style engineering academy, and suddenly there's this violent anti-French-engineer outburst spilling out all over the page. He seems to think that Jomini is in opposition to the French military conservative trend, whereas Nosworthy was insisting that Jomini represents a reactionary re-interpretation of the "Napoleonic" military revolution, a re-arrangement of the mobility and offense-oriented reforms of the late eighteenth century into a modern version of the old posts-and-depots system with a hipper rap.

Gah, now I've gone and confused myself. But nothing Griffith is saying about Dennis Hart Mahan matches what everyone else says about him, nor does it match what little I've read of Mahan himself. Griffith seems to think that Mahan is aping the French engineers, whereas everyone else (especially Hess!) says that Mahan's entrenchment mentality was an indigenous American response to large, unpopulated backcountry & American manpower-shortages.

Ugh. I haven't figured out how to properly hide the cuts, or only invoke them when I want them invoked. As a stop-gap, those little plus signs are the minimum footprint I can leave & still have the show/hide feature working. Yes, I suck at html - this surprises you how?

The rubble was still smoking this morning as I left town, BTW - at least they cleared the intersection of Water & High Street on the southeast side, enough to allow through traffic via the Rt. 144 bypass through town.

Hmm. Now that I've sort-of figured out this posting photos thing, I'm thinking about borrowing somebody's digital camera & doing some architecture-blogging. Maybe next week. There's a lot of cool stuff around town I haven't really dwelt on here, because I was a technical idiot in the photography department.

It'd be nice to get some images of the neat old buildings scattered around town. You know, *before* they burn to the ground from faulty wiring or petty arson.

These photos of the Bush House fire are by Ben Hauger.








One of Ben Hauger's more spectacular shots.

Ben Hauger's full set of photos of the Bush House fire are here.

You can see photos of the original here, at the Bush House's website.

These are photos by Jason Gullickson of the Bush House fire. It's a total loss, from all accounts. This is the first time I've ever figured out the image-posting end of Blogger, so sorry if this is a little crude.

Update - the CDT has now gotten an article with photographs up.

These photos of the Bush House fire were taken by Jason Gullickson.

Images.

For every new building the developers put up in State College and its suburbs, another old one goes up in smoke in Bellefonte. We're State College's Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Hmm. The WTO has ruled that the European Union's anti-GMO policies are bullshit. While I agree that this is the case, and am happy to see those bio-luddites take one in the rhetorical chin, I'm not generally fond of the WTO and its international busy-bodyism. The only upside to this act of transnational interference is that it's in the service of giving a much-earned beating to a bunch of transnational busy-bodies who make a policy of such programs of interference.

Someone just came in from the Bellefonte YMCA with his car lightly covered in dust, and he says that the walls are collapsing & downtown is covered in dust and soot. Doesn't sound like they'll save the building. What doesn't collapse will probably be ruined by water damage.

Well, this will definitely test the hypothesis that central Pennsylvania has gotten past its historically well-earned reputation for racism as the Alabama portion of "Pittsburgh & Philadelphia & Alabama in between". Scranton dropped out of the Republican primary race, leaving just Swann & some nobody whose name I can't remember thirty seconds after having read it somewhere - Jim Panyard? Apparently the Steelers victory parade in downtown Pittsburgh was the last straw, and Scranton decided to pack it in.

Go, Swann.

I thought the change in smoke from yellow-brown to dark grey was a good sign, but Jay just came in from driving through town to work & said that the Bush House was gouting sparks & flame high enough to be seen from Rt. 550 on the other end of town. That's not good - my apartment is uphill & upwind from the fire. On the other side of a church and a funeral home, admittedly, so I don't think there's much of a chance, but you never do like to hear the words "sparks" and "upwind" associated with your domicile.

The Bush House on the corner of High and Water Streets in the heart of Bellefonte is on fire. Looks like one or more of the rooms of the hotel on the upper floors caught fire. There's a pretty impressive tail of smoke obscuring the water gap & most of the northeastern arm of the Bald Eagles from my office window. I freaked out when I first saw the fire-trucks, because Ben Hauger's apartment building is right across Water Street from the fire, but it didn't look like a flamer or sparker, so it probably won't jump buildings now that most of the fire companies in the county are on the scene or arriving.

This could be a significant problem for those of us who are prone towards walking along roads with their noses stuck in books. If the hybrid is actually that quiet at slow speeds - and I'm faintly suspicious of this story, given the lack of statistics or tangible studies quoted - then they could be quite dangerous to those of us who just don't pay attention to what we "see" while on foot. I don't quite see why they don't use electronic imitations of "road noise" to fake the aural footprint of a real car, but then, I've never really understood why cel phones don't do the same with the "yelling" problem caused by folks used to landline phones.

Via Micky Kaus.

Idly looking at the weight charts this morning, I suddenly realized that I hit my targeted weight this morning. For some reason, I had mis-remembered the target by four pounds. I start transitioning to a "maintenance diet" starting midweek.

Woohoo!

Small Pink Mouse solved the Den Beste mystery for me - he's blogless for the time being. I'll have to keep an eye on dotclue for updates.

I'm reading Paddy Griffith, and he says something interesting in the introduction to Battle Tactics of the Civil War, to the effect that Stephen Crane & others talking about the Civil War in the Victorian generation introduced new & modern ways of thinking about war. In effect, Griffith argues that the sense in which the American Civil War was a "modern war", not in the tactical or strategic sense (he calls Sherman "medieval", which I think is rather a mistake, in that Sherman's attitudes are more Thirty Years War than War of the Roses) or even technological sense - but rather in a narrational sense. Even the organizational techniques of mass conscription was an innovation of the 1790s.

Griffith says that the introduction of mass literacy & mass authorship & the modern postal & newspaper culture transformed the way that Napoleonic carnage was interpreted & felt by a newly egalitarian culture. The impersonality and the sense of futile butchery was not, in this view, a novelty to the American Civil War, but rather a novelty to society, which was directly encountering the horrors of Napoleonic war via the torrent of letters and newspaper accounts flooding home from each new abbatoir.

Some years I seem to be more hostile to pop culture than others. Is it just me, or is the spectacle of Harrison Ford violating the corpse of Dr. Seuss for the NFL kind of... tacky? That, and the Franklin/Neville "Star-Spangled Banner" was just plain bad. Oh, and the Rolling Stones have been horrible self-parodies since at least the early Eighties, and probably before - I generally haven't paid that much attention. Can we get Sir Paul back?

Yay, Steelers.

New Energy Currents at Winds of Change. The article on towerless & high-altitude wind turbines is the most mind-melting item this time around. I just have this mental image of ten tons of windturbine coming unmoored & hurtling at terminal velocity from 15,000 feet into rush-hour traffic or something else more like a bad Michael Bay action scene than what I normally expect of reality.

Boy, was Tower of the Future a major disappointment. Saki Hiwatari's Please Save My Earth is a great, skiffy romp, a reincarnation soap-opera with a bunch of likeable and flawed characters. She has a reaccuring problem with talking-heads and the usual Japanese inclination towards woolly-headed, abstract idealism, but the manga works on a visceral and emotional level. PSME is one of my regular buys, and I haven't regretted a volume so far. I wish I could say the same about Hiwatari's Tower of the Future, which is some sort of minor-key later project of hers which CMX started publishing a few months back with almost zero fan-fare. Now that I've read the first two volumes, I can see why they weren't talking about it.

Basically, the story is about an only child named Takeru, who's supposed to be imaginative and a dreamer, and how his mother dies & he finds out that he has a bastard older sister. There's some sort of skiffy fringe about a little kid named Zen, but by the end of the second volume Hiwatari hasn't even come close to explaining what that's about except that Zen's trying to get the hero to hook up with the nominal heroine, who's barely been introduced as of that point.

Now, I say that Takeru is supposed to be imaginative, but his dreams are really tedious - the worst kind of RPG-style and-then-this-cool-thing-happens-for-this-airy-reason fantasy-plotting crap. He doesn't come across as particularly geekish, or charming, or even particularly gangly or awkward. He's just a dick. A passive-aggressive, selfish, unlikeable, undistinguished teenaged dickhead. He treats everyone around him like shit, and even his own motivations are poorly established & worse-expressed. Even when his victim-saint of an older sister shows up, the story doesn't really pick up, as she is, as I said, a walking stereotype of offended, vulnerable, abused virtue. And she's got a silly name - Hojyu? Honju? Something like that.

At any rate, I gave it two volumes, nothing happened, the page count was short, and I've got better things to do with my manga money. Dropped.

I ran up against my physical limitations yesterday when I tried jogging for a bit instead of just walking. I could do the running without tiring, but I quickly hit the edge when I started breathing heavily. Or, at least, trying to breath heavily. There just isn't much depth to my wind anymore - I couldn't get that deep swing-intake of air necessary to keep going for more than three hundred yards or so.

I'm not coughing or anything, or wheezing, or suffering in the usual asthmatic ways, but there's just no lung capacity to spare for anything more than a short sprint.

Damnit.

Finally saw Casablanca last night. As someone once said after reading Hamlet late in life, "why, it's nothing but a series of quotes strung together!"

Oh, and objectively? Bogart is a damned strange looking leading man. And I don't see the point of Ingrid Bergman. I was put off by her character asking about the "boy playing the piano", Dooley Wilson, who was twenty-one years older than Bergman, and in his late thirties at the time of filming. Talk about the attitudes of an age dating its cultural products...

Watched the state of the union speech, and accidentally missed the Shield. Wow, Hillary Clinton is kind of scary these days, isn't she? There was this horrible, glowering rictus on her face every time the cameras cut to her for a reaction shot. She makes Nixon in his prime seem like a paragon of hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie.

If the more optimistic and sunnier-dispositioned candidate almost always wins the presidency, then the Republicans would have to nominate the reptilian Gary Bauer in order for Sen. Clinton to charm her way back into the Oval Office. Or maybe not - Nixon managed to win against the Happy Warrior, didn't he?

My new landlord does not, like the last one, have a convenient downtown office with a convenient mail-slot in the door for off-hours deposit of the rent-cheque. I'm a cheap bastard, and getting cheaper, so the prospect of wasting a stamp on the monthly rent fills my newly-saved soul with the fear of financial fire & brimstone. The secretary of the old landlord is cousins of some sort with the new landlord, and has indicated that she'll collect cheques if I insist, but this is kind of a slap-dash way of doing things, don't you think?

Wonder if I can talk the new landlord into doing Paypal? Eh, I guess not. Not unless I want to pay the transaction cost - steeper than I thought, really. 2.9%? What could keep a businesswoman from just sticking with personal accounts, which seem to be free?

I got a circular this morning from a friend requesting I sign this petition to the Centre County Board of Commissioners against the introduction of no-paper voting machines, and requesting a transition to an optiscan system. While I have no real brief against electronic voting per se, I'm willing to see ground given on the subject in the interest of raising the general level of public trust in the voting system. If you live in the county, please consider signing the petition, not because the "Republicans[Democrats/Naderites/Bolivian Revolutionaries] are going to steal our votes!", but because you'd prefer a calmer political climate, with fewer unnecessary sources of irritation & distrust. Thank you.

Huh. Histories of the Rotary conventions. Looks like the Con has been as big as an average Rotary's for the last four years or so.

Via one of James Lileks' American Motel pages, which are intermittently very funny, when they're not pegging the nostalgia meter up into the mid-eights.

That new set of apartment buildings going up in downtown State College on the old Ambassador Building lot across from the Lutheran church is looking more and more elaborate as they get past concrete-blocks-and-girders to fiddling around with facades and such. When it's done, Beaver Canyon is going to be steeper and more oppressively city-like than ever. The only gap left will be that preposterous ground-level for-pay parking lot in front of the Cinema 5, stuck right in the middle of downtown like a rotted-out socket in the middle of a bright white smile. Multi-story parking deck construction in five, four, three, two...

But seriously, the construction boom in the county has been pretty impressive. I'm kind of surprised that traffic hasn't been worse than it has been. If the owners of the Academy lot & their peers have their way, once the construction companies wrap up their projects in State College, there's still a good chunk of work in the outer county to absorb the surplus labor & workforce. Unless, that is, some sort of credit crunch brings everything to a screeching illiquid halt. We'll see. Given the number of properties for sale around Bellefonte, I'm still wondering who or what the developers expect to fill that new semi-high-rise *with*.

Yesterday was rainy and miserable for most of the day, with a single one-and-a-half-to-two-hour break in the weather, as a trough between fronts ripped the clouds asunder & left Bellefonte basking under an unexpectedly warm winter sun and a clear blue sky. I, like half the town, took advantage of this break in the weather by getting out & walking all over town, prior to stomping out to the strip-mall on Bishop Street to pick up some dinner. I mis-gaged the timing a bit, and got caught in the next front for about a half-mile of wet misery, but was able to scurry back to the apartment in another, brief lull around sun-set.

Strange weather for January. Winter decided to hang out with its Polish cousins on the Ukrainian border this year, I suppose.

Hmmm. The owners of the old Academy property that burned down last year are looking to rebuild. There's a sign out on Spring Street with a picture of a five-story apartment building & promising "high-end condominiums". This is not a tony neighborhood, mind you - the Academy was full of low-income housing rentals, and the rest of the neighborhood isn't in much better shape. In fact, you can find at least two partial ruins within a block of the Academy, partial ruins which look fully occupied. There's been some renovation going on up the hill on Allegheny Street, but it's still about as cracker as you can get on this side of Bald Eagle Mountain. Looks like Lifegate Baptist moved into that stone one-story across the road from the Academy's old driveway. I'm not sure you *can* gentrify that sort of neighborhood, but I suppose it's possible they're trying.

Hrm. Just as I started seriously cutting back on my personal spending with an eye towards a radical savings plan last fall, the economy went into the tank in a big way. Er... oops?

h/t Jonah Goldberg @ the Corner.

Update: or... not so much. I'm confused. A drop in governmental military spending is responsible? How mind-warping.

Lesson for the night: never play three-handed, no matter how much you don't want to waste a trip out to Patton Township, or how long you've been playing with folks. When your luck is out, your luck is *really* out playing three-handed.

OK, I guess I do have something to relate. While I was stomping and sliding around campus Monday night, I marveled at how things change when you're not paying attention. That construction out on the old Lot 80 is wrapping up, and there's much less in the way of parking deck than I really expected. All the big, open spaces of the campus of my memory have been filled in with vaguely modern brick buildings of mysterious purpose and dubious provenance. There's another building where the old parking lot for North Commons used to be. What do students do for parking on campus any more? There aren't nearly enough parking decks to make up for the lost spots, if I'm calculating properly.

Well, I take that bit about all the big open spaces being gone. The big, empty, le Corbusier-ish lot around the bunker-esque Smeal College of Business building is still empty, except for a few straggly little trees which look like they were planted Oct. 2004 at the latest. Is this an expression of the power and influence of the Smeal College of Business, that it can defend its space against the encroachments of endowment-driven hyperconstruction, or a reflection of the disinterest of the said endowing alumni in putting their names on new buildings for the colorless Smeal College of Business?

They haven't started building anything on Old Main's lawn, have they?

Some days you don't have much to say. Except that it's a strange but amusing world.

ht Doktor Frank, INDCJournal.

Holy shit! A blog commenter and an alert librarian uncovered a hobbyist jihadi planning on branching into actual terrorism in Dayton. The librarian reported the jihadi's browsing patterns, and the commenter was recruited via fora messages & email by the jihadi, who thought he was a fellow would-be maniac. Just some random cashier in a podunk town in the Western Reserve.

Went out again before color-up at Bar Bleu - Monday nights just aren't clicking for me, looks like. Oh, well, at least it isn't a cash game. I went walking on campus afterwards to kill time, and found ten guys playing a half-dollar ante game up in Findlay Commons in East Halls - fifty dollar minimum buy-in. I don't suck, but that's about five times over my current comfort-level, and I definitely don't have the confidence to blow fifty or sixty bucks on a single sitting. While I was on campus - I had promised to pick someone up off the last flight into University Park, and had hours to kill - I took the opportunity to get a new "Resident PA" library card at Pattee. The circulation desk ladies boggled at my 1990 student ID, then quickly ran through the process of cutting a new card. I guess they've given up on photo IDs. Had time to run back into the stacks and borrow a bunch of books which I'd been looking for in the county library system & not finding - Griffith's Battle Tactics of the Civil War, McWhiney's Attack and Die, Hennessey's Return to Bull Run, and Cozzens' book on Iuka & Corinth while I was at it. The late fees have gotten truly fearsome - $3.00 a day after the due-date or recall-date.

I had taken a pile of books I've never finished reading & manga I had gone sour on down to Webster's to see if I could get the piles out of my increasingly cramped apartment, & maybe get some extra money. Mostly paperback novels, crap trade paperback histories, and old manga like flipped Peach Girl, Battle Royale, Eden, Here is Greenwood, and random detrius like a Grisham novel or two or an extra volume of Parasyte that I accidentally double-ordered. I would have been happy with $100, cash, & wouldn't have bothered taking back anything at $50. They gave me a cheque for $250. No wonder used books are so pricey these days. It's all going towards buying inventory!

I'm here at the Con's yearly January committee-conference, aka "ComCon". It's a great SMOFfy retreat-type kind of event, and I'm enjoying myself immensely this year. The game show folks get in some practice Friday night by running a version of the game show they put on for last summer's convention proper, and I ended up being one of the participants. I don't know if the questions have gotten easier recently, or if I'm more alert these days, but I got a lot of mockery from the crowd for claiming at first that I wasn't good at trivia, and then winning by a good margin. The questions are (mostly) multiple-choice, and I've always tested well on multiple choice.

Managed to scrape together a pretty good fifty-cent cash game in one of the free suites, ran until 3:30 AM. I guess the exercise-and-diet regimen is working, because I had tons of energy & could have gone until six. I did pretty well, too - I may not be a good poker player yet, but I'm approaching fair-to-middling, which is good enough for the level I'm playing at, I think.

Oh, the work? My department is running on rails these days; I just have to talk to the comptroller about supply orders, and maybe check in on the membership cap discussion, and maybe talk to the chief of staff about replacement staff for the folks who inevitably get bored with the work. Lots of turnover in Registration.

Ye gods, Red River is just so damned old-fashioned. It was published in the mid-Nineties, but it looks and reads like something from the late Sixties, complete with constant over-the-top gape-jawed reaction-shots ala Speed Racer.

Dude! Cool article about a pristine meteor crater site, known as "Wabar", deep in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, which Beduin lore holds (falsely!) to be the divinely-destroyed city of Ubar. Why falsely? Apparently because the site post-dates the Koranic story of Ubar by at least nine hundred years, and it might be less than two hundred years old. That, and they've found the actual site of Ubar hundreds of miles away. But the crater site itself is apparently a deeply cool place in and of itself, regardless of the lore. The details of just how inhospitable the location is - "On our weeklong third expedition, furious sandstorms destroyed our camp twice, and the temperature never dropped below 40 degrees C, even at night" - sound almost like tall tales.

Link via Rantburg.

Damnit, where has Chizumatic disappeared to, now? He said something about moving servers, but I thought there'd be a pointer to the new address for at least a few days in between, so's I could transfer my blogroll link over at my leisure. " Where have you gone, Steven Den Beste? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

The list of classic science fiction which I've never read is about as long as your arm. Among those lacunae is the original War of the Worlds, although I seem to have some childhood memory of reading a kidification of it once, or possibly just fragments which I was too young to really retain at the time, like those copies of Gulliver's Travels and the Travels of Marco Polo which I stumbled through uncomprehending at too young an age while staying at my grandparents' farmhouse for the Christmas season.

Anyways, a friend surprised me with the gift of a collection of H.G. Wells stories "as originally published", so I cracked it open & read the War of the Worlds in between doing my mid-week laundry. It's much better-written than I really expected of H.G. Wells, whom I mostly knew from his technocratic enthusiasms, weak-minded secular socialism, and credulous fellow-traveling endorsement of the Bolsheviks. The story is full of atmospheric detail, never treats the human interest as wall-paper or a distraction, and is strikingly well-paced and active for what, in my ignorance, I had thought of as a "literary" book. The ending was surprisingly affecting, and aside from some rhetorical and structural details which betray the book's pre-modernist origins, it holds up remarkably well for a book which is well into its second century. It's by far a better story than any of the cinematic or radio adaptations made of it over the years. Although the latest Spielberg version was as close an adaptation as I had been told it had been, the original novel was still much better-paced, less sentimental, and more honest in its plotting and action.

The one glaring fault of the book is something that I suspect gets regularly purged from more modern versions of the novel, part of that whole "as originally published" deal, I suppose. There's a nasty and harsh episode of anti-Semitism square in the middle of the book, as we join a small group of refugees attempting to cross the North Road in full London-evacuation-panic, and the protagonist's brother attempts to save a "Jew" from being crushed under the wheels of what seems like a half-dozen carts across the course of three pages. The "wretch" in question is depicted as a wild animal, crazed and grasping after his gold even after his back is broken & he lies dying in the panicked highway, and bites the hand of his would-be saviour. I mean, this is some of the rawest prejudicial bigotry you can get without descending into actual hate. The book was published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, and I can't help but wonder what the politics are of such a leftist as Wells indulging in this sort of rank Jew-baiting at the very moment when Western political anti-Semitism was at its peak on the Right.

Pretty good essay on the book here, btw. Says a lot about Wells' use of geography and rhetoric to slowly build an effect which multiplies the impact of the action of the story, better than I could explain it, I think.

Nothing quite like walking into a restaurant and getting stared at by the entire wait staff in a row, like you're some kind of freakjob for wanting to *eat* on a Sunday. When asked what was going on, one of them, with a "duh!" expression, said "why aren't you watching the game?" Turned around, and the TV by the entrance was playing the Pittsburgh-Indianapolis game. Whoops, forgot it was on.

Oh, BTW? Don't order a burger at Outback assuming that it'll be lighter than the other monster meals. It isn't; in fact, it might be a heavier meal than the twice-as-expensive steaks or pasta meals. Enormous burger, and way, way too many fries. Pretty good, though. Dave yelled at me to stop closing my eyes while eating, and I told him I was just enjoying the calories.

I just spent a few minutes checking out tax filing status on gambling winnings. Why? Because I had a better night than usual at HiWay Pizza, and it was the championship night for the series. Apparently they weren't kidding about a serious prize for the final winner. Having read over the W-2G instructions, it looks like my winnings are not *quite* serious enough to qualify for filing. Please correct me if I'm mis-reading that webpage, but it *looks* like the minimum reporting amount is $600 per wager. Now, this is an insanely high minimum reporting requirement, and it totally excludes the professional poker players who make their living at the $10-$25 tables in the real casinos, but if it means that I don't have to do the paperwork on my (by IRS standards, modest) one-time free-tournament windfall, I'm all for it. Meanwhile, this sucker is going straight into savings, you betcha.

Oh, yes: WAAHOO! What a night to catch fire!

Huh. There's noise to the effect that Suncoast Video is deep-sixing its manga section, due partly to the termination of their relationship with book distributor Ingram, and partly to a serious downsizing of Suncoast/Mediaplay itself. I guess it was fortuitous that I chose this month to shift heavily to pre-ordering through my local comics shop, wasn't it?

Nooo! Damn you, reviewer-pirated spoiler-mines! Every year, one of the shows I follow gets the first four episodes of the season shipped out to the critics, and every year, some nameless toad passes his or her set to the peer-to-peer types, and suddenly the intarweb is alight with universally-known spoilers three episodes ahead of what I've seen. This time, it's Battlestar Galactica. I didn't need to know that I will not spoil anyone else, go elsewhere for your fix!

Oh, man, it's beautiful outside today. That mass of warm air over north Texas I was just looking at on the Jan. 7 QC charts is blowing overhead right now, with sunlight, warm temperatures, and seriously blustery winds. I nearly got blown over while walking around the lower industrial park a few minutes ago. It's more like late March than mid-January out there.

I fear that I'll be even more gnomic and inaccessible in the next year, as I pare back my presence in the world with an eye towards Scroogedom. I spent the weekend watching old anime & reading a book which the rest of the blogsphere was talking about four years ago - Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

Koba the Dread is more valuable as a literary tract than true history - it's not really scholarly in the accepted sense. But Amis, as a novelist of stature and talent, knows how to turn a phrase, and does a rapping good job at manipulating & magnifying the metaphors & similes of the various scholars which he summarizes - Conquest, Tucker, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, etc. I have to admit that I've never read the Gulag Archipelago, or any of the other primary or secondary works on the Russian catastrophe, so I'm not exactly the best of audiences for this sort of thing.

But I teared up at the end, when Amis discusses how his infant daughter, in a fit of terrifying tears, was nick-named by his household after a Russian prison, and that nickname stuck throughout her childhood: Clio, named after the muse of history, became Butryka, the least of the Soviet hells. Ahh, I'd have to quote a dozen paragraphs to reproduce the effect. I've seen Amis quoted enough as it is. If you're curious, read the book.

I put in a three-month order for over two dozen manga volumes at the 'Swap last night. This is something in the way of a test of their discounting and ordering service. What I'm hoping for is that this will result in fewer fruitless drives around the county looking for manga, and a slightly cheaper per-volume cost. What I'm fearing is an increase in delays and general irritation. What really sticks with me, once I listed off everything I was planning on getting for a three-month period, and laid it all down next to each other on a sheet of paper, is how large of a fraction of my income goes to this sort of thing. It's essentially eaten up the overwhelming majority of my entertainment budget.

While ambling through the SuperWalMart on North Atherton yesterday evening (having waxed greatly wroth upon finding that the Comic Swap had closed early on their alleged new-comics-day for the third week in two months - #$%!, and thus possessed of a sudden and unwelcome surfeit of free time prior to the night's poker session), I came upon this. How mind-warping!

Witold Rybczynski's taste in McMansions is not quite perfectly wrongheaded. The seventh slide in his presentation, of a pseudo-Queen Anne house from Pacific Heights, CA, shows a house which is not totally repulsive, and he's got it properly included in his set of four "good McMansions". But of the other three, and the four McMansions he cites as offensive to the eye - my god, what have they been putting in his pinot noir?

The fifth slide, the first of the "good McMansions", shows a sprawling, psychotic white mess of a house, with an overbearing centre-line and a frightening overbite, as if the facade was shifting forward in preparation of an impending collapse, or as if a recent earthquake had pancaked a missing second floor in between the oversize gables and the compressed, hunched first floor. The sixth slide is of a melange that rather looks like an A-frame molesting a mock-Tudor. The eighth slide, of a pseudo-Georgian misfire with a disturbing roofline which looks as if someone had hacked holes in roof on either side of the central building, is not quite as horrifying as the other two, but still! Yet, in each case, his commentary is laudatory and admiring. Incomprehensible.

Now, I'm not saying that his four "bad McMansion" examples are much of anything one way or the other, but in comparison with his favorites, they're models of balance, proportion and calm. The fourth slide, with the house with a brick facade and a vinyl side, is a bit of an aesthetic bodge, yes, but in comparison with House Overbite? I think not!

The whole line of argument - that the oversized houseness of the McMansion is inherently bad in aesthetic terms - is, I think, a particularly foul case of class snobbery hiding within the cloak of "good taste". Rybczynski complains quite a lot about the lack of coherent "style" in his "bad McMansions", but why should new buildings be perfect photocopies of decades-old or centuries-old housing styles? The houses he savages are well-proportioned and to scale. The houses he prefers are monstrous and alienating. I rather suspect that Rybczynski prefers that the inhabitants of designed buildings be alienated from their domiciles. Well, nuts to that!

Sigh. You know, my great-grandfather died in a coal-mining accident. Crushed by a runaway coal car, my grandmother said. He had gone back to the mine after letting his sons take over the family farm in West Newton.

I bought Lincoln's Wrath on a whim on the way down to Florida last month. I'm kind of regretting that impulse buy, and not only because I paid retail for something Amazon's selling at over a 30% discount. It looked interesting because I've not read as much about Civil War civilian politics as I would like, and the book's emphasis on the interaction of newspapers and politics in the Civil War and the antebellum really grabbed my attention, despite the rabble-rousing histrionics of its subtitle, "Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels, and a President's Mission to Destroy the Press".

It's been a tough slog. I've started the book twice so far. The book covers a lot of angles which are novel to me - the exact nature of the publishing contracts which represented the financial connection between the era's publishers and their client-politicians, the economics of the printing trade, some of the alliances between politicians and publishers other than Seward and Weed - and that's all fine and great, and highly welcome. What's not so welcome is the quality of the prose, or rather, the appalling lack thereof.

I'm not sure whether years of exposure to the rather minimal writing abilities of the small-town editors and publishers who produced their research material have stunted the authors' sensibilities, or whether the authors' inherent indifference to the rhetorical proprieties rendered them more likely to survive a long term of exposure to the subject matter and emerge on the other side of the ordeal with the raw material for a book-length treatment. One rather fancifully imagines the project beginning with one writer, driven mad and incoherent by his extended exposure to the non-Websterian horrors of small-town Democratic partisan prose, and a much-put-upon publisher attempting to salvage the project by inserting a (presumably) sane collaborator to shape the mess into a publishable manuscript, only to have that academic ringer driven mad in turn by his secondary exposure to the figurative necronomicon of the commonwealth's own mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, John Hodgson and his Jeffersonian.

I guess I'll keep cracking away at it, but this is history in a rawer form than I'm really comfortable with.

Budgeting for the next few months of manga purchases, taking into account the new manga club promotion of the Comic Swap of State College... boy, do I spend a hell of a lot on comics. Enough so that if I want to keep to an overall budget, I'm going to have to essentially cut out my DVD and book purchases, or at least cut them to a bare minimum.

BTW - the deal from the 'Swap is a straight one-free-for-ten-purchased stamp-card offer. Apparently they're leery of another storefront-and-a-Diamond-wholesale-discount competitor springing up in the county. It's enough of a benefit that I'm planning to shift the vast majority of my purchases to them for three months & seeing how it works out.

If I understand the substance of this argument, then they're saying that because advertisers chase page real estate instead of advertising transactions, that online advertising will capture at best half the business which once went to the periodical market. It sounds like they're confusing method with goal, but what do I know? I would just assume that in a scarce market, more dollars thrown at less real-estate would result in more expensive real estate. I suppose it's possible that advertising isn't subject to the laws of supply and demand, but really, I'm stupid enough that I'd naturally assume that the object of supply scarcity in this equation would be attention, not the ads themselves.

I just finished doing two things: signing a lease with the new landlady, and plotting out a two-year budget that takes that new lease into account. Man, I usually don't indulge in that sort of wishful thinking. $200/month in food costs for the foreseeable future? Well, I guess it's a goal...