ForcedPerspective

Unintentional Forced Perspective

Sarah — Sat, 12 May 2012 00:13:03 +0000

A mishap at the state’s government television studios appears to have brought out Olympia’s largest and smallest fire fighters.

April Reading

Sarah — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:26:42 +0000

Dar, volumes 1 and 2, Erika Moen
This will be the first of many entertaining books I bought at ECCC. Gene had recommended her work, and it is indeed delightful diary comics with some nitty gritty talk about sexuality and sex (and even messier, love). The series ends with her moving on to work on fiction, so let’s all look forward to that. Three stars.

Strange tales II.
Just read Kate Beaton’s pieces and she’s great as usual! Four stars.

Nano House : Innovations for Small Dwellings, Phyllis Richardson
9780500342732
Skipped the architecture text, enjoyed the pictures of innovative tiny houses. Three stars.

Planesrunner, Ian McDonald
Overall, a good book. First in a series, excitement, parallel London, math, intrigue, and good cooking. I did have to write an extended screed about the things I didn’t like about it in order to write a positive review. These complaints may be unique to only me, since the reviews are pretty unanimously positive. Someday you may see that screed. Three stars.

Johnny Wander 1
Johnny Wander 2
The deceptively simple and evocative art plus the humor in daily (artistic) life combine to make one of my absolute favorite webcomics. I recommend the collections, though there are some strips from the web that didn’t make it. Four stars.

East Dragon, West Dragon, Robyn Eversole
Have I already mentioned how much I like all of the action going on in Scarry’s Busytown? All of the great detail and more is in Scott C.’s illustrations in this book. Enjoy it on your own or with a kid. Four stars.

Zombie in Love, Kelly S Dipucchio
Another one illustrated by Scott C. This one demands to be read aloud and the moldy hero is delightful. Also: worm pals in bow ties for the big dance. Four stars.

Science Ink, Carl Zimmer
A collection of science tattoos, explanations of the science behind them and why they are important to the person sporting them. Proof that the science field is brimming with intellectual passion. Do read Mary Roach’s foreword and marvel at its rat underpant diagram. Four stars.

Follow Your Art, Roberta Gregory
Gregory knows how to travel (though has more trouble sleeping away from home than I do) and shares stories and some useful info I will be storing away for future trips (apparently I may need to visit the towns in Spain and Sweden she went to). Good stuff. Three stars.

Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified US History,
Mia Partlow & Michael Hoerger
Get your conspiracy theories right, dudes. A for premise and illustrations, F- for checking your data and spelling. Boo.

TigerButtah, Becky and Frank
Good job recreating (on a very small scale) the look and packaging of a Little Golden Book, but the story isn’t anything to be thrilled with. Two stars.

Bigfoot, Pascal Girard
The same cheeks-burning evocation of awkward teenitude that made me love Freaks and Geeks. Ohhhhh. The memories. Three stars.

Yet another crazy spam target

Craig — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:20:23 +0000

The traffic for johnsmithsvt has dropped off considerably in the last few years, mostly replaced by “elliott”, weirdly enough. This week, though, a new bizarre spam target entered the ring: idlok4.dlqvr. This has the added curiosity of being addressed to a domain that gets just about no mail. Spammers’ ways remain a mystery to me.

The Poetic Mixmaster

Sarah — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:13:33 +0000

From the delightful book by Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (which I highly recommend for other food history and home ec history nerds like me), a poetic mixer interlude:

“Back in 1940, while [Gertrude] Stein and [Alice] Toklas were living in the country house where they spent the war years, a package had arrived from Chicago. Samuel Steward, an American writer they had befriended, had decided to send them a Mixmaster. ‘Gertrude had said she liked things that went around–gramophone records, whirling grouse, eggbeaters, and the world,’ he wrote later in a memoir. ‘The Mixmaster seemed like the perfect gift, a useful to Alice as well.’

Stein and Toklas were ecstatic. ‘The Mix master came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful and the literature so beautiful, and the shoe button potatoes that same day so beautiful and everything so beautiful,’ wrote Stein. She ended her letter, ‘Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix Master.’ Ten days later she wrote again: ‘Day and night Mix master is a delight….Now Alice works it all alone and it saves her hours and effort, she can write a whole advertisement for Mix master she is so pleased.’ Toklas was using it for everything she could think of, including spoon bread and mashed potatoes. Then disaster–Toklas dropped the bowl, and it shattered. Stein begged Steward to send a replacement:’…you see you can use other bowls but they do not twirl around in that lovely green mix master way and when they do not twirl their contents instead of staying down rise up and spill and therefore the mix master will have to be a mix master still.’ Steward couldn’t send a new bowl until 1945. He also sent new beaters, for Stein reported that the originals ‘got busted.’”

Song of Ice and Fire (so far) Review

Craig — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:38:05 +0000

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons; Martin. Yes. This series has been around for so long, and I have been only peripherally aware of it, so when I saw the four-volume paperback boxed set at Costco, I thought “Hey, I guess it’s complete; why don’t I just pick up a set?” Only to find later that not only is there a fifth volume recently released, but there are two more books to come. And each of the last two has taken more than five years in the writing! If you have seen the books, you have seen that they are not thin, either: each is in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. So I hope that by the time I retire, I will be able to have the last volume beamed into my brain by whatever device Microamazoogle has created for that purpose, and that the embedded ads don’t give me a stroke.
But on to the books themselves. I like them. They do not have break-neck pacing (as you might expect just from the page count), but they did keep my interest (volumes three and four do suffer somewhat from middle-game syndrome: you have all these pieces to get into place for the end game, and it’s hard to keep all their movements vital and involving). Martin does a good job with more point-of-view characters than one customarily sees, though I think I could do without the fanciful naming he introduces in (I believe) volume four.
In some ways, Martin is the anti-Tepper here: where Tepper’s characters are sometimes tiresomely black or white, Martin’s are almost all shades of grey, and in many ways that was refreshing.
Now let’s hope that the success of the TV series is enough motivation to get the last two books out (and not so much motivation that the series expands again).

Modern Age Meditation: Smiles

Sarah — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:05:16 +0000

Try an experiment in dialing down the fight or flight overload of anxiety, looking at smiling faces. Tell your brainstem that you’re not in danger and the other apes accept and protect you.

Smiling faces from Flickr Commons. Watch for a while and relax.

Cool, Calm, and Contentious Review

Craig — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:18:29 +0000

Cool, Calm, and Contentious, Markoe. Non-fiction. More personal than most of Markoe’s previous essay collections and correspondingly darker, if no less humorous.

Light Fantastic Review

Craig — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:14:05 +0000

The Light Fantastic: A Discworld® Novel, Pratchett. Yes. This is the most order-sensitive Discworld® novel I have yet run into, so I wouldn’t recommend starting with it. Closely follows The Colour of Magic. An early work in the universe, I feel like it gives hints of what the scope might have been without yet having realized the scope of what it ended up being.

Moving Pictures Review

Craig — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:56:27 +0000

Moving Pictures: A Novel of Discworld®, Pratchett. Yes. This is not one of my Pratchett supplier’s favorites, and it did strike me as a bit labored. It didn’t help that there were many, many typos (including, I believe, at least two occurrences of “vocal chords,” not apparently for playful effect). Still, not horrible.

Your comment spam of the day

Craig — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:40:30 +0000

I won’t approve the comment, since if you wanted some trendy headphones with the brand of a highly influential hip-hop artist, you would find them in your own way, but this is some of the best comment spam poetry I have seen in a long time:

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