December 19, 2008
I dream there is a sparse crowd in a theater watching movies of old magicians. In the audience is Chanin, my magic mentor from my teen years. I am amazed that he’s still alive, as he must be in his hundreds by now. I try to talk to him about his salt trick, but he is more interested in his nursemaid. When we leave the theater we use vampires as a mode of transportation. We climb onto them and ride them to Borgo Pass, where we have to make a transfer.

July 6, 1999
I dream Gail and I show up after having missed a day at our editing jobs. Oddly enough, we find a very relaxed place with no stress and nobody seems to care that Gail was absent. To satisfy the authorities, my boss asks Gail to write on a piece of paper that she had mono. We wind up in an entertainment environment in which a production of Dracula is playing. Dracula is about to terrorize a group of hand puppets who are in bed together. I recognize this, of course, as the original Bela Lugosi version of Dracula. Then they run an old Three Stooges short made with replacement stooges after the originals all died.

June 13, 1999
I dream I am a modern-day Van Helsing working in the last minutes before sunrise to destroy Dracula, who is played by Kelsey Grammer. Grammer has to get back to his coffin and my associates and I have to kill him. Through my palm sized computer-communicator I see that Grammer is trying to con one of them into transforming him back into a human instead of destroying him with stake and garlic. I tell my associate that Grammer is lying; he’s trying to fool you and what you should do is load Grammer’s head with bullets.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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No writer is quoted more reflexively than Shakespeare, which is too bad, because Will’s best lines not only repay close attention, but often demand it. Take the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Spoken like a true courtier, which is what Polonius is — a temporizing careerist whose summum bonum is survival. He is also a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” as Hamlet — uncharitably, but accurately — calls him after impulsively running the old duffer through in Act III.

It seems safe to say that, for Polonius, being true to yourself means nothing more than giving top priority to your own self-interest. My guess is that, in Polonius’s view, everyone is out for himself, and that this defines the extent to which anyone can trust anybody else — which is to say, hardly at all. It is a supremely cynical outlook, and how exactly it ensures against being false to anyone else is far from clear.

There is another play in which the notion of being true to yourself figures: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. When Peer visits the trolls, the troll king explains that the difference between humans and trolls is that while, among humans, the maxim is “to thine own self be true,” among trolls it is “to thine own self be — enough.”

But how do those differ, really? In both cases, the standard remains … yourself. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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I didn’t do as careful a job tracking the books I read this year as I did last year, but I think the below covers it (they’re listed more or less in the order I read them — I sometimes read more than one at a time). The list is about as long as last year’s; it seems that these days I read only 22 or so books a year. I used to read many more books each year, but I guess that was back when I didn’t have papers to grade or an online magazine to run or a child to play with. I hope next year the list will be a good deal shorter, since that would mean I’m spending more time writing my new novel in 2009 — I tend not to read fiction when I’m writing it.

Anyway, I hope your 2008 in books was a good one, and I’d be interested to hear what you thought about any of the below, if you read any of them (most of them are not new books). And do you keep track of what you read each year? I just started doing that the last couple of years. Since I’m asking questions, what was the best book you read in 2008? The worst? 

One of the below was really, really, bad; a few were not very good; a few were disappointing; a few were relatively painless and easy to get through, if unremarkable; a few were interesting enough even if not as good as they’d been hyped up to be or even if flawed in some major way; and a few were memorable and well worth reading. How’s that for specificity?

1. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories by Susanna Clarke

2. I, The Jury, a novel by Mickey Spillane (I wrote about it here)

3. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

4. Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley

5. The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing by Scott Stein
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I just discovered that Facebook has a breast controversy.

According to several news sources, the social networking site deletes photos of women if they are breastfeeding… or is it that their babies are breastfeeding?  Okay, I’m a bit confused on the verbiage, but Facebook is not confused about the Terms of Use.  If you have a Facebook account, you agreed to the Terms of Use, which includes the provision that “photos containing a fully exposed breast” are subject to removal from the site.  No caveat for when the breast is being employed in a mammary fashion versus the Girls Gone Wild display that was certainly the impetus for the rule in the first place.  And thus, controversy.

[Read more →]

Tags: on the law, technology by Jason Sterlace
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Michelle, you’ve got the right idea … and I am speaking from experience. Do everything you can to convince your mom to move into the White House with you. I know she’s super independent and also wants to give your family some space to be a family — my parents said the same thing — but who really needs that much space? Don’t let her get away with it. Her moving to her own place near the White House just won’t be the same as you all living under one roof.

My parents moved in with us back in June and, honestly, it’s been fantastic. I never have to run out to get milk or eggs. I get weather updates every morning so I know how to dress myself and my kids. I change 50 percent less poopy diapers. I no longer need to feed the goldfish (although I wouldn’t expect mom to walk the new puppy coming your way; however, she may be willing to walk with one of the girls as they walk the new puppy). I get to sleep in every once in a while because my kids go down to my parents and bug them to get breakfast going. When my husband needs to work late I can still go out for a coffee to catch up with a friend. When my husband doesn’t need to work late we can put the kids to bed and then catch a 10 p.m. movie without worrying about a babysitter. Every once in a while my mom will cook (and it isn’t half bad). Plus, there is always someone to get my daughter off of her school bus when my husband and I are at work.

OK, so maybe some of my benefits won’t exactly translate to things you will get (or need) from your mom. However, what you will get is a comfort that is immeasurable. Knowing that there is someone else you trust, implicitly, living in your house is the unspoken benefit. Someone else there that will help keep your kids grounded and guide them when you and Barack get pulled away. Someone to read them bedtime stories when you are not around. Someone for the girls to talk to when they need the love that only a parent or grandparent can give. And I am not sure how Marian is with sweets… but my kids always know they get a little something extra for dessert if grandma is in charge.

So, to Marian, mother to the first-lady-elect and grandmother to two adorable girls about to transition into an entirely new world, move in to the White House. Your family needs you — and besides, you will get as much out of the next four years as they will. Just ask my parents.

Tags: family & parenting, politics & government by Amy Boshnack
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The father of history is a man named Herodotus, a Greek writer who lived in the ancient times before the birth of Alexander the Great or even Richard Nixon. Herodotus has been called the first “historian” in that he made it his business to write down the story of mankind as best he could with the available information in the 4th Century B.C., which was way before Google or Wikipedia.

As a result Herodotus has been referred to, even by some of his contemporaries, as “the father of lies.” His chief sin seems to have been a willingness to report popular lore alongside verifiable fact. For instance, during the reign of the Persian king Cambyses, the evil and murderous son of the first Persian conqueror, Cyrus, Herodotus wrote that a Babylonian journalist threw both his shoes one after another at the most powerful ruler in the world during a farewell press conference in Baghdad. 

Centuries later scholars of antiquity doubt if such a preposterous event could have taken place in such a heavily guarded and hyper vigilant venue as a close quarters photo-op by a universally unpopular and commonly detested foreign monarch in occupied territory.

Clearly Herodotus was just making this stuff up. And so, undoubtedly, will our current technological state-of-the-art Geek historian — You-Tube-Us — be rejected by future generations who will be expected to believe that the President of the United States was dodging hurled shoes like some kind of Whack-The-Mole video game.

Puh-LEESE! We all know how this kind of “live” video can be digitally enhanced, altered or completely fabricated. Will we expect intelligent life forms 2,500 years from now to believe that that was a a real event featuring the actual United States President, George W. Bush, grinning that infuriatingly guilty grin of his, ducking those Iraqi soles last week?

Tags: politics & government by Clark DeLeon
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I have wealthy cousins — men — who judge others by the shoes they wear. When I was a teenager, I remember hearing one of them advise that you could tell if someone was really rich by looking at his shoes.

Shoes were the last thing I was thinking about when my grandmother died on Christmas day, 2006, two days before her 95th birthday. We were at my aunt’s, just starting her Christmas party for family and friends, when my father’s cell phone rang with the news from the nursing home. I was just finishing my first deviled egg. [Read more →]

Tags: fashion & clothing, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein by Scott Stein
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December 21, 2008
I dream I am attending some kind of professional conference that is held in a public park. The keynote address is about to be given from the top of a pyramid shaped tower/building. The building is very crowded, but they have speakers set up so you can hear from anywhere on the grounds. Suddenly, just as the speech is about to begin, the pyramid transforms into a huge amusement park ride that looks like a windmill. The people on the pyramid are thrown upside-down and spun in various directions. People are amazed at this new innovation, and I am delighted because a) it is magical-looking and b) I am not on it.

June 11, 2000
I dream I work as an attendant on a tower of death ride. My one job is to look for problems and push a panic button. At the end of the day, I am dropped off at a mall/arcade near my house and I run into my brother, Dan, who is trying to impress a young lady. The young lady instantly takes a shine to me. I charm her by using my foot as a puppet.

October 21, 1998
I dream I awaken on the floor of a garage on the edge of a seashore amusement park. My brother and I look for an attraction called “The Murder House,” a dark ride that you can only find by going through laundry rooms and maintenance areas until you come across a creaky old service elevator made of dark, rotting wooden slats. Other people seem to know of the ride, too, and we all go onto this elevator and press “down.” The elevator descends to a frightening, awful level filled with wailing demons that reach through the wooden slats and fondle us. The demons are genuine, and I am so scared that my brother promises to sue the amusement park for me.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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A former bandmate of mine went to engineering school, then scuttled the guitars to write heavy metal with…actual heavy metal. Ground Control Magazine has a great video interview up with him now showcasing the sounds of doom and apocalypse he is able to wrestle out of his huge drone machines. It’s that rare circumstance of something totally unique being created, a pairing of uber-smarts and primitive roar.  

Tags: music by Shawn Macomber
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A Saudi judge has refused to annul an arranged marriage between an 8-year-old girl and a 47-year-old man on the grounds that the mother, who requested the annulment, did not have legal custody of the child. The father gave the girl to the man to pay a debt.

I was ready to launch into a rant about how slavery is apparently legal in Saudi Arabia and maybe would have taken a shot at those cultural relativists who argue that, given how flawed America and its history is, we have no right to judge other cultures by our Western standards. But then I read this sentence in the CNN article and understood that there was nothing, really, that needed to be said beyond the facts:

The judge did ask for a pledge from the husband, who was in court, not to consummate the marriage until the girl reaches puberty…

Tags: diatribes, his & hers by Scott Stein
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