It's the Least Wonderful Time of the Year

The holiday season.  Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, HumanLight, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Eid al-Adha, Boxing Day, Feast of Stephen, Soyal, Yule, Life Day.  Phooey.  Flummery.  I suppose humbug would be traditional.  In my line of work it means that my time and energy are at their greatest premium.  So this is my annual announcement that you will hear less from me than usual.  I'll try to surface for air from time to time, but don't hold your breath.  Enjoy your holidays.  Bah!

The Day it Rained Whale

Forty years ago today . . . this happened.



This may be the best news story ever broadcast. November 12, 1970, the Oregon Highway Division reasoned that the best way to move a dead whale would be to use dynamite. It went about as well as you might expect.

As the Blogoshere Turns

I really don't like Jar Jar Binks and I've never seen the appeal of cartoons designed to look like Legos, so it's saying something that the Video O' the Week is a Lego cartoon featuring Jar Jar Binks.  It's another great post on Electronic Cerebrectomy.

Fast Paced NBA Action!

It's where amazing happens! No, wait a second . . . I meant to say something dull, like "60 years of honoring great American books." If you're like me you are all a-tingle for the National Book Awards. Or perhaps I'm tingling because I forgot to take my medication this morning. Either way, you want to watch The Totally Hip Book Reviewer break down this year's finalists. No, seriously, you do.

Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper!

By no means is Dust and Shadow the first time a Sherlock Holmes pastiche has pitted the great detective against Victorian London's most notorious villain, Jack the Ripper, but it is certainly the best I've read. First time novelist Lyndsay Faye did a wonderful job of writing in the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle while cranking up the pace for the jaded modern reader.

I am by no means a ripperologist (a rather grim historical specialty), nor would I qualify as a Sherlockian, but I have some familiarity with the crimes and I have read the canonical stories a few times. I'd say that Faye folded Holmes into the Whitechapel case seamlessly, using the proper Watsonian narrative style. And I loved every minute of it.

Which really is something of an accomplishment. We know that when Holmes is trying to prevent the next murder he is doomed to failure, because we know the history. The next crime will take place because it did take place. Yet we are carried along with the adventure, wondering what twist will be put on the facts, what insights Holmes will have into the identity of Jack.

Faye gives us the Watson and Holmes that we know and love. If I have any quibble it is that Holmes seems to show a good deal of sympathy toward the story's principal female character, which is a role usually assigned to Watson; but then she was an impressive woman. The characters, familiar (Lestrade is particularly well drawn) and unfamiliar, are engaging. The setting, often a very important part in these stories, is vivid. The crimes themselves are gruesomely fascinating. Enough of the details are revealed to horrify, but not enough to sicken.

One of the things that makes Jack the Ripper such a good subject for fiction is the fact that the murders will forever remain a mystery. It frees writers to come up with any solution they wish. The solution here works and the ending is satisfying. This is a Guaranteed Good Read for anyone who likes a mystery, especially a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Invaluable Advice

Very short book review here of a thin volume published in 1965 and written by that eminent expert in proper behavior, Miss Hyacinthe Phypps. I was attracted to the book by the illustrations of that illustrious illustrator, Edward Gorey, but I must say I was was quite taken by the wise advice that Miss Phypps provides for the eponymous subject of the work, The Recently Deflowered Girl. A variety of delicate social situations that a recently deflowered girl might find herself in are described, and the offered wisdom never fails to be sound. What, for example, would you say if you had been deflowered by an elevator operator, a famous crooner, or a Chinese detective? Do you know the proper response if you find that you have been deflowered in a Moroccan palace, on a cross-country bus, or at a séance? Of course you don't. But you would had you read this book. And you would surely have found the drawings by the wonderful Mr. Gorey to be helpful and illuminating. In a time when such advice is sorely needed I am gratified that this volume has been republished.

Be Seeing You

A friend of mine has a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. That means that when he was a kid his vision started to deteriorate. By the time he was a teenager he was “legally blind.” That meant that he would never drive a car and never do the things he had dreamed of doing just a few years before. It also meant that he would continue to lose his sight. Every year it would be just a little bit worse, until his vision would be gone completely. Years would pass, decades would pass, but there would be no light at the end of this tunnel. Only tunnel.

So I'm pretty excited by this news out of Germany that scientists have developed an implant that could give my friend back some of his vision, possibly enough to read. We do, perhaps, live in an age of miracle and wonder.

For the Children

You've probably heard that phrase before. We have to do this, “for the children.” We must ban that, “for the children.” Those who would censor, restrict, or regulate always say it is “for the children.” When my state attorney general, Martha Coakley, helped draft a law to regulate naughtiness on the internet, it was “for the children.” Never mind that it was an unconstitutional infringement of the
First Amendment (a federal judge recently said so when she struck it down). When Tipper Gore got warning labels on CDs, it was “for the children.” When Joe Leiberman tried to regulate computer games, it was “for the children.” Smashing rock 'n roll records, banning pinball, burning Harry Potter books, it's all “for the children.” As Robert Heinlein wrote in “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.”

One of the earliest moral panic episodes of the past century was the “great comic-book scare.” In his excellent book on the subject, The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu gives us a history of comics in the 1950s, the men and women who made them, and the panicked, duped, self-serving, or just downright venal people who destroyed the industry.

Mr. Hajdu writes a good history of comics, delving into the lives and personalities of their creators as well as their social milieu. At first I thought this might be off of the main point of the book, the censorship of comics. Often in pop-culture histories the writer will take extended sidetracks into parts of the story that are fun to read and write about. While I enjoyed these section of the book I had, in my mind, judged them to be a minor flaw in the narrative structure. But I was wrong. By laying down a solid (and very interesting, especially for a comic book fan like me) foundation describing the writers, artists, publishers, and their work, it put many of the arguments of the anti-comics forces into a context that demonstrated the wrongness of their position.

Some may be surprised to read about what a big issue this was at the time. Public comic book burnings were held all over the country. Local censorship boards sprung up across the map. Congressional hearings on the subject were broadcast on live television. Major newspapers like the Hartford Courant wrote editorials calling for an end to the comics menace. Fredric Wertham's infamous comic-bashing book The Seduction of the Innocent was a bestseller. Publishers and newsstand owners were threatened with prosecution, years before the CBLDF was even imagined. It is a remarkable story.

I'd call this a must-read for any real comics fan and a good read for anyone interested in American history, pop-culture, art, or witch trials.

Trivial Hoot Fifteen

Hoo, it's been a long time since I've been in a question posing mood. We just watched the second episode of Sherlock here and noted that it echoed the canonical Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” in that Holmes cracked a code. In the original story it was a substitution code with stick figures replacing letters. The question then: what was the first letter that Holmes figured out? This should be elementary for even the most casual Sherlockians.

As always, the first person to give me the correct answer gets an ephemeral hoot and gets his or her name added to our list of Steely-Eyed Missile Men.