And, by the way, do you know how hard it is to fix marble? That you would have to basically replace everything damaged here? Even if I was immortal and unbelievably wealthy– thus, having both the time and money to do it– I would be supremely peeved at the damage done to the steps of the dais, never mind how stupid the dais and thrones are. (That part of the fight isn’t in the clip, but you can see part of it at 1:50 in this featurette. I know, I have too much time on my hands right now. At least I tell you how to cut to the chase with the video.)

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Having said that, I love Jimmy Fallon too and these spots he does are hilarious. Here’s the one on Snickers Ads:

Check out more at Robert is Bothered.

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So, stay tuned.

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Yes, I couldn’t wait. My pre-ordered copy should be delivered to my house today, but I’m overseas, so I still bought it. Check out the covers for the UK edition, including the “adult cover” on the right.

(Harry Potter y los santos de la muerte is the rumored Spanish translation title.)

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In the only love story he ever attempted, “Kiss Me Again,” he had written, “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

The moral at the end of that story is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”

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And most importantly, I always find myself smiling when I read Vonnegut. He was snarky before we knew what to call it.

The NY Times article says how some dismissed him as a “comic book philosopher.” Well, if that’s not the voice of a great American novelist, I don’t know what is.

Check out this post from September 2005 about when he was on the Daily Show. Video clip included.

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Note the copycat version of video sharing: Viacom’s replacement for all those video clips pulled after the mother lawsuit against Google over their YouTube clips. It’s not a bad reproduction of YouTube functionality in terms of letting me embed this clip here or pass around the URL, but I certainly don’t get my pick of clips, which I suppose is part of the point, but also the ultimate price. Case in point: again on The Daily Show, Larry Wilmore and John Oliver did a great piece last week on the proposed N-word ban in New York City. The piece quickly made it onto YouTube and was subsequently taken down due to copyright complaints by Viacom, but it wasn’t in turn made available by Viacom on the Comedy Central site. As a result, another brilliant combination of comedy, journalism, and social commentary is lost in the endless bowels of cable TV history, only to be re-experienced or heard of again by the lucky re-run watcher. Are you happy Viacom?

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Like E.F., there are a lot of common things out in there in the world that we’re all aware of, but don’t have real words or phrases to capture them with so we can refer to them in our daily conversations. The Meaning of Liff, aside from being terribly amusing, manages to capture a lot of those things, whether the word be adjective, verb or noun, made-up or real:

AINDERBY STEEPLE (n.)
One who asks you a question with the apparent motive of wanting to hear your answer, but who cuts short your opening sentence by leaning forward and saying ‘and I’ll tell you why I ask…’ and then talking solidly for the next hour.

BODMIN (n.)
The irrational and inevitable discrepancy between the amount pooled and the amount needed when a large group of people try to pay a bill together after a meal.

YARMOUTH (vb.)
To shout at foreigners in the belief that the louder you speak, the better they’ll understand you.

For the American reader, it may feel a little strange– the book was written by two Brits, Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) and John Lloyd (who also worked on parts of the radio series of The Guide and produced all four Blackadder series, another favorite of mine), and its contents have a markedly British tone. (Of course, I opted for the authentic UK edition, shiny and new, shipped over from the UK.)

In any case, for those who love words, even made up ones, and being able to sum up the daily idiosyncrasies of life, you should take a look.

Get a random meaning of Liff

*And as my co-worker said of Jack Tripper, “he had such a 70′s f*cking haircut, I just wanted to punch him in the face.” (No offense to John Ritter, God rest his soul. Despite probably being best-known for playing Jack Tripper, he did a lot of other work that I thought was much better and certainly induced less E.F.)

I love Kurt Vonnegut and here’s another example of why I love him.

The best part of this? Vonnegut’s commentary on how good America is at democracy– after 100 years, you have to let your slaves go. After 150 years, you have to let your women vote, etc.

Just as Jon Stewart says about his own life, Vonnegut’s book helped make adolescence just that much more bearable. I’d rather forget the person who introduced me to Vonnegut, but I’ll never forget Vonnegut and his books. I absorbed his books throughout high school and have probably read almost everything he’s ever published. He introduced me to satire and black humor and that you could somehow find a balance between science and religion and that you could find fault with man to the point of utter disappointment and pessimism and yet still be a humanist.

I just picked up his newest book A Man without a Country. More hilarious insight ensues.

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For example, when they discover Willy Wonka and his crew attempting to link up with Space Hotel “USA,” the Chief of the Army exclaims, “Let’s blow them up first, crash bang wallop bang-bang-bang-bang… Come on, Mr. P… Let’s have some really super-duper explosions!” And as they try to figure out who is in the great glass elevator, the Chief Spy plays a game of twenty questions and he leads the President into coming up with his own crazy conspiracy theory as to who these people are and what they are trying to do. More insanity ensues and let’s not forget Miss Tibbs, the Vice President, who also happened to be the President’s nanny. She’s constantly seen having to guide him along and actually sings a song where she laments the fact that she helped the idiot become president.

The book was originally published around 1972, but it’s strangely and frighteningly appropriate for 2005.

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Downloading comics: threat or menace?

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In hopes of evening out the DC-centric book, I also picked up Ronin Ro’s Tales to Astonish which focuses more on the life of Jack Kirby and, by extension, Stan Lee. To be honest, not as well written, but still an interesting read if you want to learn about how Marvel and some of Marvel’s most famous characters came to be. Next up at some point will probably be The Comic Book Makers, written by Joe Simon, one of Kirby’s early collaborators, a co-creator of Captain America and the first editor-in-chief of the company that would become Marvel, and his son Jim Simon (who has also worked in comics).

There’s so much hype around comic books again lately with the success of movies like Spider-Man and X-Men, but I’ll say this– I wonder how many people realize how profoundly comic books and the comic book industry have affected popular culture? Think about how many movies, television shows, and more are based on characters that were born over forty, fifty, sixty years ago. The stories in those cheap paper books would go on to shape filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but, more importantly and among other things, how generations of people would think about good, evil, and all the shades of gray in between. And within the industry itself, it’s a sometimes inspirational, sometimes tragic story– they were, for the most part, poor children of immigrants, struggling kids from the streets, who received little credit or compensation but, in the end, gave birth to an industry that pervades every corner of our culture and our lives. The overarching theme of the aforementioned books, rightly so, is how these comic book artists and writers came to create such incredible, such magical, such wonderful things, but received so little compensation or credit and in many ways, we continue to do this in the back of our minds as we make fun of geeky comic book collectors and fail to realize how much the comic book industry has influenced business, art, literature, culture and, in general, our consciousness.

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I started reading the Lemony Snicket Books a few months ago because I was having trouble finding any good books to read and, instead, had been reading the Harry Potter Series over and over again (thank God– JK Rowling has finally announced the next book will be out in July 2005). So, somebody recommended the LS series as methadone to my HP addiction. On the surface, while the two series may seem alike– bad things happening to orphans who can do extraordinary things– the similarities don’t go much deeper than that. It’s like saying the Lord of the Rings series is the same kind of story as the Harry Potter series just because they both involve magic, wizards, and the search for an enchanted object (the ring in LOTR, the Sorceror’s Stone in the first HP book). Oh, and they both have elves. But anybody who knows about both of them knows that only a layman would think the two series are the same. That’s why when Richard Harris passed away, it didn’t necessarily make sense to have Ian McKellen replace Harris in the part of Dumbledore.

In any case, after watching the new LS movie this past Friday, I went back and reread the first three books in the series. There were a number of changes when they went from book-form to movie-form, but for the most part, the key parts were there and like most firsts in a series, most of the movie was spent establishing the characters– the Baudelaire children, Count Olaf, and Mr. Poe– and the universe they live in. And while the movie only covers the first three books, it does touch on plot points that appear later in the series, introducing the pursuit to find out exactly what VFD is and its relationship to the Baudelaire family, Count Olaf and Lemony Snicket, a mystery that soon takes over the main plot line of Count Olaf constantly trying to steal the Baudelaire fortune.

But after re-reading the first three books, I find myself wanting to interrupt Snicket’s narration to ask some questions. Yes, of course, this is a children’s novel and so there are crazy characters like Uncle Monty (real name: Montgomery Montgomery) and his reptile room, Aunt Josephine and her fear of almost everything, and of course, most fantastical of all, Count Olaf with his many disguises and weird acting troupe. However, as I read along, I asked myself the following questions:

1. Where is child services in all of this? Mr. Poe is the executor of the Baudelaire estate, but he is not in social services. If children are actually being adopted by a new legal guardian, family or not, isn’t child services usually involved? And until they find the next of kin and a suitable home, aren’t the children supposed to stay in a foster home, not the home of their parents’ banker? And when they are placed into a new home, aren’t there regular visits by child services to check in on the new situation and upon satisfactory inspection, only then can the children be legally adopted by a new guardian? Granted, the state of child services in our society is not perfect, but Mr. Poe seems to be managing the welfare of these children with wreckless abandon.
2. Doesn’t Count Olaf have a criminal record or something that can be used to identity him other than that one long eyebrow and that stupid tattoo on his ankle? I mean, have you people heard of fingerprints, DNA, anything? Maybe if the Baudelaires lived in California, they could arrest Count Olaf, collect his DNA, and then let him walk on a technicality. Maybe then next time, Mr. Poe won’t be so stupidly fooled by an eye patch and a peg leg.
3. Here’s another one– Aunt Josephine is afraid to turn on the radiator, cook with the stove, and open doors using doorknobs, but even if all she has is cold cucumber soup all the time, doesn’t she eventually have to chop up the cucumbers with a knife, a blender, a CuisineArt, something?
4. Why are these children never in school? They spend some time at a prep school later, but nobody seems to be interested in sending them to school, although you are required to attend school until the age of 18 by law.

Of course, some of these questions become irrelevant because you have to remember the universe in which the LS series exists– that is, not a specific one. There’s no specific time and real world location indicators in the books. For example, in the HP universe, the wizard world exists in the same universe as the Muggle world– we know the Dursley’s live in Surrey and the fifth book is predominantly set in London where the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix and the Ministry of Magic are both located. And while Hogwarts was founded thousands of years ago, we know that we’re in relatively modern times because the characters mention how Muggles make up for not having magic by inventing electricity, computers, and the like. Moreover, while Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade and all of that are exclusive to wizardkind, there is occasional overlap– Harry takes the Underground to get to Diagon Alley for the first time and Platform 9 3/4 exists in a magical space that lives inside the real life King’s Cross. When there are the Azkaban escapes, the Ministry of Magic notifies the Muggle Prime Minister. And finally, while magical creatures like centaurs, house elves, giants and veela exist, humans are the dominant creatures. In LOTR, there is very little relation to the “real world”– the universe exists in Middle Earth in an alternate time frame and there are a number of different species populating the universe, only one of which are men. But, when you first pick up the LS series, look at the illustration, and begin reading, you start to think that these unfortunate children are British and live in London somewhere in some distant past. Certainly, the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies certainly add to this tendency. After all, if the Baudelaire orphans are such precocious children– Violet with her inventing, Klaus with reading and nearly photographic memory, and Sunny with her superhuman biting ability and strength– and such horrible things happen to them as they are pursued by an evil Count, they must certainly be part of the British Empire in the same way poor orphaned Harry Potter is. Apparently, orphan services have historically had problems in Britain– Oliver Twist was British. In any case, this assumption about the setting of this series carries over into the film’s cinematography, set design, wardrobe, and casting, especially with Jude Law appearing (but always partially concealed much like Home Improvement’s Wilson) as the narrator, Lemony Snicket himself. But no real-life locations are actually ever mentioned– all the places in the stories have names like “Lake Lachrymose”– and most references to real historical events, like World War I, are made by the narrator in one of his many humoring digressions.

But I digress.

The point is that the Baudelaires could live anywhere at any time and as such, there are no guarantees about how the child services works, how inheritance works, how mandatory education works, etc. It’s not so much a suspension of disbelief that allows us to believe that the children would be forced to work in a sawmill, but the idea that since we don’t know where or when they are, we don’t know if child labor laws actually exist. I mean, they pay their workers with coupons and feed them chewing gum for lunch. We’re not dealing with normal people here, folks.

Many questions similar to mine are asked in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, but are not answered, except in a cryptic collection of diary entries and the like. And although each book’s storyline becomes a little formulaic and predictable– the second a new character is introduced, you set to work figuring out how they are related to Count Olaf– but the teasing is nevertheless well done and the mystery of VFD and the hope that there will be some relief for these children is a compelling one that keeps you reading through the series. Sometimes though, as I discovered when I went to reread the first three books, you just want to tell Mr. Poe to quit being such a cock up, Uncle Monty to quit worrying about his herpetology career, and Aunt Josephine to sack up and quit being such a pussy.

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From my experience, fan fiction writers (along with their other fan culture counterparts) have always existed in this underground realm, exchanging stories via homemade zines and now, thanks to the Internet, via chat rooms and the Web. And thankfully, most of the time, The Powers That Be in the entertainment industry usually just look the other way. While most of these works are considered “derivative” and ride the fine lines between fair use, parody, satire, and flat out copyright infringement, they are usually expressions of deep love for the originating works (not to mention the original producers responsible for those works) and drive the growth of a deeply committed fan base that, in the end, only strengthen the success of the original television series, movie, etc. The first recognized fan fiction grew out of fan love for “Star Trek” and despite what some may consider prurient use of Star Trek characters and storylines as slash fan fiction embraced the homoerotic subtext between Kirk and Spock, I would certainly argue that the Star Trek franchise has only had greater success and sustained the test of time better than any other franchise thanks to the “derivative” work of its dedicated fans.

But how strange to see a formally, officially published version of what could only be called fan fiction! Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened– lots of entertainment franchises publish “supplementary” books, like reader guides for the Harry Potter series or the young adult novels for “Smallville.” But these, along with Quinn Brockton’s Queer as Folk books, are somehow christened and blessed by The Powers That Be and allowing them to, get this, make money off of the derivate work that thousands, millions of devoted fans have been doing underground and for free for decades! Now that’s capitalism. Too bad we can’t lift the stigma, not to mention occasional litigation, placed on the other “rogue” fiction writers who were not so lucky to have made a quick buck on their love and dedication to the actors, artists, and characters that visit our homes and grace our television screens every week.

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So, in any case, I’ve got book piles lying around my apartment now and sometimes I forget the weird collection I’ve put together over the years. Take a look (click for the whole picture):

But a book doesn’t have to be rare or old or even hardcover to be a great gift. If it’s something you’ve already mentioned before, when someone gives you a book, it shows that he remembers. He noticed. Whether it be a passing statement of “oh, I want to read that new book that just came out,” or a long diatribe on the wonders of a particular series: “God, I remember how much I loved the Chronicles of Narnia and got lost within it’s pages for hours…” He was paying attention and that’s what’s special. But that’s true for any gift, I suppose.

However, if it’s a book your gift-giver has chosen for you, loves himself and just insists that you read it, no matter how skeptical you are, you should embrace it and realize that if your gift-giver is as much a lover of books as you are, this gift is not just a $5 paperback (or the $25 hardcover, for those who are extravagant). It’s an attempt to give part of himself. He wants to share the experience you can get from reading those few hundred pages because it was special to him and he wants it to be special to you and he wants to have been the one who made that experience possible. (In some ways, it’s really quite sexual.) And if you love that book just as much as he does, you can keep it on your shelf and it will be a constant reminder of who brought you to that little sliver of experience that’s shaped you somehow, much like how that person probably went on to shape you and influence your life in other ways. For better or for worse.

A guy I was once involved with on and off for years during a very critical portion of my developmental years gave me two books: a copy of Cat’s Cradle that was never returned to whatever public library it came from and a copy of A Clockwork Orange (store purchased, I believe). Now, if you’ve read either one of these books, you can imagine how disturbing, or at least eye-opening, they might be for, say, a 13 to 15-year-old girl. And their darkness and strangeness captured that relationship pretty well and in the same way that relationship opened up my eyes to many things as a young woman, those books were the beginning of a serious trek onto more Vonnegut, more dark humor, more dark subject matter, more dark experiences… just more. I have to say that period of my life shaped me in a lot of ways today, but ironically enough, while I have copies of those books sitting on my shelf right now (right next to each other), they are not the original ones I received as gifts so many years ago. Instead, they have been lost in the constant moving around since then, from dorm room to dorm room, from apartment to apartment, and have been replaced with fresh copies from the store without the inscriptions in the inside covers to mock me. Those books have been lost along the way in the same way that boy/man was lost along the way, but the experiences still hold on somehow. If they didn’t, why would I be telling this story in the first place? I rarely ever look at those books compared to all of my other ones, but they’re always there, kept safe and sound as a key part of the background of my home and my life.

So, next time someone buys you a mass market paperback, don’t think of it as a cheap gift or some kind of reading assignment, but as a gift of potential experience passed from your gift-giver to you so that you might share something special. Just between the two of you.

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As much of a technophile as I am, I will admit that I don’t think I’ll ever switch to ebooks. Aside from the fact that I can take a book anywhere and read it anytime without the aid of a computer or other secondary device, there is something to be said about the physical artifact of books. I’m the kind of person that almost always buys a copy of a book I want to read and keeps it on my shelf for years and years to come so that I can have it as a reminder of the joy and experiences (no matter how vicarious) it gave me and to come back to it time and time again. I have no qualms about reading a book over and over again and I’ve still got my old middle school and high school copies of everything from The Outsiders to Childhood’s End to Invisible Man. And as I look back at those books, I can’t imagine wanting to live in a world with only ebooks. Maybe I’m stuck in an old paradigm, maybe I’m too attached to the physical, but I can’t help enjoying the deeper memories associated with those books, re-reading handwritten inscriptions inside an old paperback or remembering when I was obsessed with Vonnegut and would carry around The Sirens of Titan or Mother Night and get lost within the pages. I’m a sucker for it all and while I suppose there will probably come a time where ebooks will become the standard, where we will let go of the burden of paper and print, but I’m not so sure we should.

(And by the way, no matter how old you are, you should pick up the Lemony Snicket books. Although filled with a series of unfortunate events, they’re still lovely.)