It's dry again, but something smells fishy

Actually, it smells more like sewer. That's the lovely thing about floods in Iowa. When the water goes away you're left with this nasty sludge full of mud, farm chemicals, pig/cow poop, and sewage, among other things. It smells nasty and breeds god-knows-what...yuck.

That said, I only have to smell it. I don't live in a flooded area so my house was high and dry. I didn't have internet service for a week but that's a very, very minor inconvenience. There's a lot of damage to personal property, businesses, and the University of Iowa campus. Billions of dollars. I can't really complain about a noxious smell since I don't have to replace my entire life.

Now that television is back to normal, and it's summer so the line-up is dull as dishwater, I finally managed to watch Foul Play. A Goldie Hawn-Chevy Chase comedy/suspense/parody/police procedural/espionage film released in 1978. IT IS HYSTERICAL. There are a number of hints paying homage to other iconic films, most notably the scene in Goldie Hawn's bathroom where there might be something behind the shower curtain and the camera slowly moves in on the shower curtain a la Psycho; the soundtrack perfectly mimics earlier thrillers with plenty of "duh-duh-dum" moments (and a theme song "Ready to Take a Chance Again" by Barry Manilow). You must watch this movie, if only for the following excellent moments:
1. The "bachelor pad" scene with the hapless Stanley (played by Dudley Moore) set to "Staying Alive" by the Bee-Gees. Every single tasteless '70s sex cliche is in this scene.
2. The little old women playing Scrabble - they spell "motherf*cker" incorrectly then quibble over whether a hyphenated word was played.
3. Billy Barty as a bible salesman (yes, this is the same man who played the High Aldwyn in Willow). Goldie Hawn chases him out of her apartment with a broom. I would tell you why she does that but it would ruin part of the plot.
4. Chevy Chase's dog is named Chaucer in the movie. (ha!)
5. The "massage parlor" sequence, again with Dudley Moore. Binoculars again.
6. Mr. Hennessey (played by the wonderful Burgess Meredith) and his black-belt karate training vs. the crazy assassin lady; this is very obviously pre-Matrix fighting and it wins for campiest fight scene ever.
7. Mr. Hennessey's curious boa constrictor, Esme.
8. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado plays through the entire last twenty minutes of the movie (the overture is used extensively in the soundtrack); the production is conducted by, yes, Dudley Moore, who does actually manage to look like he is conducting.
9. The "car chase" across town which really isn't a car chase but there isn't a better word for it.
10. The elderly Japanese couple and "Kojak bang-bang."
11. The credits - the opera singers are listed by their Mikado character so not only do you have to know the opera to figure out who played what (and you have to do it by ear), you can't recognize any of the New York City Opera performers by sight because they are all wearing traditional Japanese stage make-up.
12. Best line ever: "You're a light bulb waiting to be screwed."

Go! Watch!

A group of us watched No Country for Old Men at Kat's place; holy god, is that movie awesome - creepy but awesome. The Coen brothers are geniuses (I don't think you can separate them into single entities) and I added yet another movie to my all-time-favorites list. Aside from a great script adaptation (I think Cormac McCarthy translates well to the screen because so much can be said with the camera in his novels) there was a phenomenal cast as well - Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly Macdonald. All perfect (dude, Kelly Macdonald is so awesome that if you didn't already know she was Scottish you wouldn't believe it).

Current book-in-progress: I polished off The Gun Seller which is also hysterical, mostly because it is written by Hugh Laurie (this book is James Bond on acid doing international espionage); still finishing ideas and The Shakespeare Wars (got sidetracked by an unfinished copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel)
Current knitted item: Back to the gray neckwarmer
Current movie obsession: Foul Play! But I need to send that back to Netflix. Got a great queue set up - The Savages, The History Boys, In Bruges.....excellent viewing. I've kind of developed a film obsession lately and purchased 10 Bad Dates with de Niro: A Book of Alternate Movie Lists (let's watch to see the Netflix queue expand even further)
Current iTunes loop: I have discovered that podcasts are free on iTunes, therefore, I have started obsessing over Filmspotting with Adam and Matty

UI Flood Blog

In case anyone needs specific UI information concerning the flooding (lots of things are moving to different performance venues), the UI has created a blog - on Blogger - to keep everyone in the loop.

Water, water, everywhere...

Once again, fifteen years after the last flood, we are having severe flooding in the Midwest. We had a ton of rain, on top of a ton of snow, and all the rivers are expected to crest at higher levels than 1993. It's only going to get worse, too, because we have more heavy rain on the schedule for later this week. I'm fine, my parents are fine, my brothers and sisters-in-law are fine, and the worst any of us are going to have are some pretty insane pictures of high water. However, there are many people who aren't fine and who are losing their homes. New Hartford, which was leveled by an F5 tornado on Memorial Day weekend, has now been evacuated because what was left is all underwater. My brother (the paramedic one) just came in from shift and they closed US218 south behind him because the Cedar River is rising (he works in Waverly and the river runs through the middle of town). I'm in Iowa City and the Coralville Resirvoir is close to running over the spillway at the top (the only other time that happened was in 1993). Pretty much any low-lying area near the river is flooding. This link is to a picture of Lower City Park on the Iowa River; in undergrad I lived in the building (Mayflower Hall) in the lower left hand corner, the little concrete island is a skateboard park which is normally across a two-lane divided road from the 'Flower, the tree-less stripe down the middle is where the Iowa River normally lives, and everything else until you get to the funny round building (Riverside Shakespeare Theatre) at the top of the picture is floodwater. More pictures are available at either the Iowa City Press-Citizen or the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

I might meet the bus downtown so I can see the river looks like today. I'm thinking about bringing my camera and getting some pictures tomorrow morning.

Current book-in-progress: definitely working on finished ideas (because there are only 200 pages left) and The Shakespeare Wars (only 100 pages left)
Current knitted item: Wool smells funny when wet, boo
Current movie obsession: Movies? What movies? I've been glued to the weather report for a week
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday"

Muppets!!!!

Muppet Show Season 3 is finally out on DVD!! It has Fozzie on the cover. Ooohh....must have.

Random acts of life

In the last few weeks, I finished several books, watched almost no television, didn't knit anything, played a lot of Packrat, put together a porch swing, and contemplated revenge on a fellow RA. I've been busy.

I finished The Story of Mankind (1921) edition. I've got about 70 pages to read in the 1972 update and I peeked through the 1995 edition. None of the language has been updated nor have citations been added in any of the later editions, so there goes my hopes (I was really hoping for citations, at the very least, in the 1995 edition). I think if I had a child reading this there would be some supplemental reading and research going on especially if interest was sparked in a particular topic. It was just too much of a storybook and not so much a history book, in my opinion. Next up on the Newbery list is The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, the 1923 winner. I've got an Illustrated Junior Library edition checked out from the Coralville Public Library so I'm ready to go. Here's a list of the vocabulary from the last half of The Story of Mankind:
sturgeon
cipher
serf (which is not defined nearly as well as it should be in the text)
thither
commodity
unscrupulous
parallelopiped
heresy/heresies
mulcted (which I had to look up because NONE of us had heard of it, ever)
Zwingli
abjured
predestination
remonstrance
timorous
Sinn Fein(er)
buncombe
demagogues
tercentenary
obdurate
bumptious
ambiguous
Putsch

I polished off The Host (finally) and was surprised that it took me nearly a month. Each of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books only took a couple of hours. I didn't read them, I inhaled them. However, with The Host I started seeing too many similarities with Twilight and that had me a little disturbed and worried that somehow Stephenie Meyer was a bit of a one-note. The Host does have an interesting premise - a sort of body-snatchers setting with a love triangle/quadrangle (depending on how you count souls and bodies) - but I stalled about 200 pages from the end due to a soccer game (there's a baseball game in Twilight). A slightly predictable ending (never intimate that the narrator is going to die in a first person narrative with nearly 20 pages left in the book) but I really appreciated how SM wrote the necessary exposition into the storyline of the book (i.e. Wanda's "stories") rather than devote pages and pages to it separately.

I also finished Songs for the Missing, an advance copy of the next Stewart O'Nan novel. Never having read O'Nan (Kat staff rec'd Last Night at the Lobster) I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Lurid? Simple? Absurd? Strangely enough, the situation seemed almost mundane, aside from an eighteen-year-old gone missing. It wasn't mundane as in "I'm so bored I can't finish this" but mundane like "this is LIFE, this is what happens when a child goes missing." Other readers compared Songs for the Missing to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which is a phenomenal novel simply for the power of the author's descriptions. There are some parallels, but what was striking to me was that after Kim went missing in the first chapter that was it. No following her until she's grabbed, no struggle, or what the perpetrator did with the car; instead, we stay with the family and friends as they try to find her. The Lovely Bones, being a first-person narrative followed Susie's thoughts as she watched her family and that provided a completely different sense of the action. One thing I really noticed and appreciated throughout Songs for the Missing was the choice of third-person narrative; the narration wasn't truly omniscient and tended to follow one specific character for each chapter (Fran, Ed, Lindsay, JP, Nina). A very thoughtful novel about how time continues to push us forward even when something terrible happens. Eventually you have to go back to work, to school.

In other random life events, I bought a porch swing - yay, evenings on the porch, reading, napping, etc (must get more citronella to ward off the mosquitoes). It was a pain to assemble because apparently it was "requires two adults for assembly" - phoo on them. I did eventually get the assembly done all by my little self.

And we had an RA bugger off last week and not do what the boss told him to do before he left. So I had a panic and a cold sweat on Monday. Turns out he threw his project at a different (new) RA and left her to do the surveillance cultures instead of me, like the boss said he should. I was supposed to take everything over and then train the new RA. Luckily, the new RA is a lab person so figured out pretty quickly what the project was and got Monday and Tuesday finished before I found out that she was on the project. Whew, but the little bastard didn't mention several key things like how to order more product, how to use the spreadsheet on the shared drive so all of us can stay current on the surveillance, or that other units do surveillance, too, and so you should check the patient's records so we don't duplicate testing. FYI, this is the same little bastard I complained about several months ago (he was just up here talking to one of the secretaries - I guess he needs employment for the summer? I vote "no" and think we should just hire someone else who is responsible and doesn't act like the sun shines out his posterior). I've been thinking of very painful things and I hope he comes back in his next lifetime as a roach or something.

And the weather has been really, really crappy lately.

Current book-in-progress: Persuasion, The Gunseller, Lord of the Flies, The Spirit of the Place, ideas (only 270 pages left), The Shakespeare Wars (only 150 pages left) and The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle
Current knitted item: I've been a very lazy knitter....
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine (I haven't watched any TV/movies lately except for the news and weather (strange) so LMS is just sitting in my DVD player, ready to go)
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday" (concert album with a kick-ass riff in the middle of "Gravity")

"The Story of Mankind" - Chivalry

"The knights tried to model their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur's Round Table and Charlemagne's court of whom the Troubadours had told them and of whom you may read in many delightful books which are enumerated at the end of this volume. They hoped that they might proved as brave as Lancelot and as faithful as Roland" (p 160, van Loon 1922).

Aside from the vague use of "they" (does it refer to the knights or the troubadours?) van Loon does not stop to mention who Roland is or note that Arthur and Lancelot are mythic characters. It is entirely probable that a middle-school child in 1921/1922 might have been exposed to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights through a storybook but Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland)? The end of the chapter notes that Don Quixote de la Mancha was one of "the last true knights" (p 161) and, after his old sword and armor were sold, the sword somehow ended up in the hands of George Washington at Valley Forge (and also Gordon in the fortress at Khartoum). The chapter closes by stating "And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War" (p 161). That's a fairly large metaphorical leap to go from a fictional self-styled knight to General Washington to the Great War.

I've been reading ideas, too, and it's very interesting to compare the storytelling style of van Loon, with no citations to back up a statement, with that of a modern historian.

Vocabulary for the day:
superfluous
troubadour

Current book-in-progress: The Story of Mankind, The Host, and Songs for the Missing
Current knitted item: Gray neckwarmer
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine
Current iTunes loop: Sarah Brightman Harem

1001 Books

The NYTimes has an article today reviewing 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - which I've owned since it was published in 2006 (why the times has an article now I have no idea). You can see a picture of the copy I own because that's what Dante is sleeping on (down and to the left). I've always agreed with many of the detractors of 1001 Books. Yes, there are authors with numerous entries (Phillip Roth has seven, including The Breast) and a few of those entries could be cut back to allow room for Milton, Shakespeare, and CS Lewis. There's also a pretty heavy dose of post-WWII fiction; nearly half the list if I remember correctly.

According to the article, Boxall wanted to rekindle arguments about canonicity. Well, kudos to him, I think 1001 Books has sparked disagreements over what properly belongs on that list and what has everyone scratching their heads.

Newbery Vocabulary

Reading The Story of Mankind would certainly improve the average middle-schooler's vocabulary and spelling. For instance:

peregrinations
plutocracy
stevedores
prosaic
guerrilla warfare
alas and alack

Time to start a list!

"The Story of Mankind" - Jesus makes an appearance

In an interesting move, van Loon somehow avoids Virgil and The Aeneid:

"Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome (written 800 years later when the little city had become the centre of an Empire) are fairy stories and do not belong in a history...." (p 91, van Loon 1922).

Fairy stories, huh? I seem to recall that the Greek creation myth got a paragraph as well extensive descriptions of Greek home and city life. Homer gets several mentions as well as a number of Greek playwrights; strangely, van Loon will refer to "new forms" of something (either literature, theatre, government, etc) but not go into any detail about either the old or the new idea.

Jesus puts in an appearance in a chapter titled "Joshua of Nazareth: The Story of Joshua of Nazareth, Whom the Greeks Called Jesus" and this chapter is narrated entirely by two letters between an uncle (a physician) and a nephew (a Roman soldier stationed near Jerusalem). There are no references listed in the book (only a "historical" reading list for children) so my suspicion is that the letters and their writers are fictional. The uncle describes treating a man named Paul (who most probably is meant to be St. Paul the Apostle) and asks his nephew to ask around about Paul and the rumours about the Messiah (apparently the slaves are getting restless). The nephew writes back with a narrative that runs through the events leading up to Holy Week (he visited a Joseph, noted to have been a personal friend of the Messiah, so probably Joseph of Arimathea); the slant is decidedly Roman/Christian and very much cribbed from the Gospels. I really want to get my hands on the new edition because I would really like to see how these sections play out or if there are actual references.

Which brings up a thought: should history be "fictionalized" to make it more interesting to children, instead of just a series of places, people, and dates? I don't think it should be that terribly dry but I think children should be introduced to citations and references as soon as possible. I don't fault van Loon his writing style - it flows very well - but looking back at an eighty-year-old children's history book I think there should be a little more fact and a little less doctrine.

Current book-in-progress: The Story of Mankind and Songs for the Missing
Current knitted item: Gray neckwarmer, two buttonholes down (this thing is kind of ugly)
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine
Current iTunes loop: Sarah Brightman La Luna

"The Story of Mankind" - Prehistory to the Greeks

I'm starting to wonder how different the 1990s edition is from the original. Other than being longer, that is.

The original (and also the 1972 reprint) contain thinly disguised doses of religious history. A good example is Moses - the author skipped the whole Moses-in-a-basket-raised-by-Pharaoh's-daughter childhood and instead has Moses appear back in Egypt (after communing in the desert) to lead the Jews (mostly Jews, rarely Hebrews, never Israelites) out of Egypt to Sinai (he does not part the Red Sea). At Sinai he takes two tablets into the mountains and returns with the word of God on them....gee, I wonder what those are. Anyone with a modicum of Sunday School instruction can fill in the blanks and recognize the Judeo-Christian ideology behind the surface ("Old Testament" gets a mention, too, as well as Noah at one point).

Another strange section consists of two pages on the Phoenicians and the alphabet (the book is a little confusing because the timeline jumps around, i.e. all of a sudden we're looking at a nineteenth-century archaeologist digging for Troy, and the maps are very poorly drawn). Apparently the alphabet was developed by the Phoenicians (who did not want to waste time with heiroglyphs or nail-writing) and passed to Greece and Rome. "The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the heiroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the Sumerians" (p 43). Really? The "wild barbarians" are all our ancestors? Maybe for me (I'm German/Scotch/English and those societies did acquire the alphabet and Romanic/Germanic language as part of the Roman Empire) but perhaps not for someone with Asian, South American, or African ancestry?

Makes me wonder if there was a specific children's audience for whom this book was intended.

1980s "Pride and Prejudice"

I finally watched the 1980s BBC-era Pride and Prejudice miniseries; it's got the same tone and claustrophobic sets as the Zelah Clarke/Timothy Dalton Jane Eyre.

Immediate verdict: I did not like it. I liked it even less than the 2005 motion picture with Kiera Knightley.

Reasoning: I slept on it for awhile and I think it's because Elizabeth (played by Elizabeth Garvie) actually seems mean toward Darcy (played by David Rintoul) rather than prejudiced and offended by his pride. There's a point where she tells him "Save your breath to cool your porridge. I will save mine to [something] my song." And she plays and sings at her Aunt Phillips's evening party which completely throws the timeline off. Actually, there are a lot of timeline issues comparing this adaptation to the book and that is also my second problem. The third problem is that all the girls seem to be of the same age, more like quintuplets, and I seriously thought that the girl playing Lydia looked older than the girl playing Jane and Georgiana Darcy looked just as old as Elizabeth rather than looking much younger. In comparison to both the 2005 movie and 1995 miniseries (with Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth), this production was completely buttoned up and shot almost entirely indoors. The other two productions make use of the beautiful scenery to convey a sense of freedom and space (so problem number four).

Thought-out verdict: I still don't like it - but it did have a nice drawing that unfolded at the beginning of each episode (during the opening credits) that went through the major events of the episode. Kind of like a dumb-show.

The 1995 A&E miniseries is still my favorite.

Current book-in-progress: The Story of Mankind, The Lord of the Flies, The Shakespeare Wars, and Songs for the Missing (an ARC from Stewart O'Nan)
Current knitted item: Gray neckwarmer, two buttonholes down (this thing is kind of ugly)
Current movie obsession: Juno
Current iTunes loop: anything (I got my new iPod so I've been enjoying the ability to listen to whatever I want regardless of whether it was downloaded or ripped from CD - the old one has a few issues with that) and I bought the new Madonna CD (awesome dance tracks)

Things that go "bump" in the ravine

So last night I was watching movies, minding my own business as usual, when a police siren goes off on the highway behind me. This is not uncommon because people tend to speed and so the cops have a field day. What made last night strange is that after about five minutes there were more sirens and then six more police cars pulled off on the side of the highway. There were flashlight beams all over the ravine between my parking lot and the highway. Shouting (couldn't hear what).

Then I heard rustling and thumping coming from the area of the ravne behind the dumpster. The flashlight beams all headed my way. I was thinking the local racoon population was out and about again.

Nope. It was a guy who, I gathered, decided to run from the cops during a traffic stop. I could hear them all swearing at each other by this point. The cops dragged him up my side of the ravine where they were met by a squad car. Turns out the guy didn't want to go back to prison on a parole violation. So he ran. Doofus.

Current book-in-progress: I'm primarily working on The Shakespeare Wars and The Black City.
Current knitted item: Gray neckwarmer, two buttonholes down
Current movie obsession: Finished Becoming Jane, it grew on me (loved the ending), but I still don't like Anne Hathaway as Jane (I just didn't like her in that role, it doesn't matter whether she did her senior thesis on Jane Austen or not); also watched X-Men 3 and I swear there were more questions than answers (loved Ellen Page as Kitty)
Current iTunes loop: Portable Professor "God, Monsters, and Heroes"