Monthly Archives: May 2006

May242006

Tomorrow Is Towel Day


Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

I haven’t read Douglas Adams’ brilliant and genuinely funny sci-fi parody novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in years, but I still remember large passages of it — no doubt because my memories have been fortified by hearing them dramatized in various media formats over the years. Still, I can’t say that I remember chunks of any other books I read in high school, and that is probably reason enough for me to pass along the news about this somewhat silly gesture of tribute to Adams, who left us unexpectedly five years ago. I think Doug would’ve appreciated the absurdity of people carrying around towels in his honor…

(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s book, listened to the radio show, or seen the TV series or last year’s rather disappointing movie, you may be wondering about the significance of the towel. Go below the fold for the explanation…)

Continue Reading…

spacer
May222006

Recovered Warbird

If WMD-shaped computers don’t make your pulse race, how about tales of lost airplanes pulled from watery graves?

Lake Murray B-25

The photo above shows the remains of a vintage B-25 bomber, one of those lumbering old birds that I love so much, recovered from South Carolina’s Lake Murray. More photos can be found here. A little googling reveals that there was an Army Air Corps training base near Lake Murray during the war, and several of the lake’s small islands were used for target practice. B-25s saw a lot of action during World War II (most famously in Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor); several of them apparently ended up on the bottom of Lake Murray due to training accidents, although the exact number is disputed. This particular aircraft was recovered in September of last year.

Here is a page that provides a good overview of the Tokyo raid, B-25s over Lake Murray, and the salvage of this particular plane. From this page, you can go to a detailed news article on the salvage, and here is another, more extensive collection of photos.

In this day and age, when there are no blank spaces left on our maps and it seems like everything of interest has already been discovered, invented, or marketed, it thrills me to know that there are still treasures like this waiting to be found and people who want to go looking…

spacer
May222006

Today’s Distraction: The Atomic PC

Hey, kids — sorry for the long period of radio silence, especially after the big build-up I delivered for my planned “Talkin’ Books” week. I had — and still have — some major ambitions for that topic, but unfortunately Real Life last week wasn’t very conducive to ambitious blogging, or much of anything else, either. The short version: my load at work has been heavier than expected (I was told things were due to start slowing down for the summer; as Wayne and Garth might say, “shyeah…”), my allergies have been fearsome (the tissues around my eyes were so swollen and dark on Saturday that I looked as if I’d lost a bar fight), and I just haven’t had anything left to give at the end of the day. So rather than dragging my sorry rear-end home and blogging about books until bedtime, I’ve been dragging my sorry rear-end home and sitting insensate in a darkened room with a cool, damp cloth over my face.

I’m hoping to get around to some of the book-related posts I’ve got in mind later this week, but in the meantime, here’s a little something to take the edge off your Simple Tricks jones:

Continue Reading…

spacer
May162006

The Idiots Rule

Okay, the following is a bit of a departure from this week’s Talkin’ Books theme, but it’s so in line with my general philosophy that I thought it bore immediate repeating here. From a blog called Hooptyrides comes the Idiots Rule:

Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.

–Mr. Jalopy

Yep, that about says it all…

[Ed. note: Actually, on re-reading the source of this quote I see that the original entry was actually “Idiots Rule,” not “The Idiots Rule.” That puts a slightly different spin on things, doesn’t it? Oh well, I still agree with the sentiment…]

spacer
May152006

What’s at Your Library?

To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time but haven’t gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you’ve already seen it somewhere.) It’s a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a network of some 53,000 libraries around the world. According to the intro copy, the list — which is updated annually — comprises “the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the ‘purchase vote’ of libraries around the globe.”

As you can probably imagine, the list includes all the usual canonical titles that you think of when you hear the word “classics,” but there are some surprises. One of them appears right in the top 20, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. (Hint: I’m talking about number 15…)

Continue Reading…

spacer
May152006

Talkin’ Books

I’m thinking I’d like to talk this week about a subject that tends to be somewhat neglected in public discourse these days: books. As I understand it, there was a time in America — probably that fabled mid-century period following World War II and preceding Watergate, when architecture was googie and kids still respected their elders — when books were the major driving force of our popular culture, not movies or television or the as-yet-uninvented Internet. The controversies that office workers debated around the water cooler, the fictional characters that everyone knew and loved like their own flesh-and-blood friends, originated on the printed page, not the silver screen. I think it’s pretty obvious that those days are far past us now. It isn’t that books are irrelevant or that people don’t read anymore — I personally believe those claims are overhyped and just a tad hysterical, and if you don’t believe me, walk down to your local Barnes and Noble store sometime and ask yourself how this place could stay in business if people were no longer reading — but the cultural emphasis has definitely shifted away from the oldest of our media. Where once the movie version of a best-seller was considered the spin-off product, now it’s more like the pay-off that everyone is really interested in. The book often seem to serve as a warm-up for the featured act. Further, the movie is most likely the version that will be remembered in the future — do you know anyone who’s actually read The Godfather? I didn’t think so. The book has become the ancillary product now.

Continue Reading…

spacer
May122006

VHS: What’s It Good For?

I love the DVD — the clarity of the image, the supplemental materials, and even the physical object itself. It’s such an elegant thing, a small, shiny silver disc that costs relatively little and takes takes up minimal space on my sagging, overloaded bookshelves. Even so, I was a late adopter of the format, and I haven’t entirely given up watching my old videotapes, either. My reasons for this insanely masochistic behavior are largely economic. You see, I have a huge financial investment in the outmoded VHS format, and I just can’t bring myself to flush all that money down the toilet just because there’s something better on the market, at least not all at once. I’m also philosophically opposed to our society’s wasteful paradigm of planned obsolescence and throw-it-all-away-for-the-latest-and-greatest consumerism; even though I always give in eventually, I hold out as long as I can before I upgrade. So, curmudgeon that I am, I keep on watching those inferior, deteriorating cassettes. But I also have to admit I’ve also got a kind of sneaky nostalgia for VHS tapes, especially the ones I recorded myself. I don’t think younger folks, who have been awash in home entertainment of increasing quality since they were born, fully understand what it was like to be able to bring home a movie or record something off TV for the first time ever, or why someone would still want to look at one of those horrible, lo-rez anachronisms today when there are so many flashier alternatives.

For the kids in the audience, Lileks explains:

Continue Reading…

spacer
May122006

Presenting The Robo-Garage!

The Girlfriend was quite taken with something I showed her yesterday and thought I needed to share it with my other loyal readers, so here you go, the very first Simple Tricks and Nonsense Reader Request:

Autostadt Car Towers in Wolfsburg, Germany

You’re looking at a 20-story-high, automated car-storage facility built by the Volkswagen company in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Click the photo to enlarge it.) It’s apparently part of an automotive theme park where, among other things, you can buy one of the new cars stored in this tower. After you place your order, the robo-garage retrieves the requested car and brings it down for you without any human intervention. All very high-tech and futuristicky. Reminds me of the factory scene in Minority Report. Wild stuff.

Credit goes to Boing Boing for bringing my attention to this, as well as Boing Boing’s source for this item, The Cool Hunter. Click here for a couple more photos of this amazing (if gimmicky) monument to the car industry…

spacer
May102006

New Sub-categories

Why, yes, I have blogged quite a bit today, thank you for noticing. Work was a little slow and I kept finding more interesting things to think about. It’s been kind of fun, actually; I imagine my day has been similar to what the pro bloggers experience. But the Day of the Blog is winding down now, and I’m tired. Time for bed.

I’d like to leave you with one final note before I call it a night, though. FYI, I have added some more sub-categories to help you find entries on specific topics. Under Film Studies, you can now go directly to all my movie reviews, my various Star Wars-related ramblings, and my tributes to those in the film industry who’ve passed on, if you’re into any of those things. I’ve also created an “In Memoriam” sub-category under The Glass Teat heading, which comprises my entries on television (the name comes from a Harlan Ellison book I’ve got kicking around the Bennion Archives somewhere), but I haven’t populated that one yet, so don’t expect to see anything there for a day or two. Oh, and I’ve also added an “Egregious Corporate-speak” sub-cat, just as I’ve been threatening to do. I don’t know if you folks in InternetLand really find the entries about proofreading all that amusing, but it amuses me to catalog the linguistic wreckage I come across during my day job. It lets me vent about them, anyhow.

I’m planning to add a number of other sub-cats, too, including one on all the memes and Internet quizzes I enjoy doing, and maybe one to collect my references to Star Trek. If you have any suggestions for additional ones you’d find useful, just leave them in comments below.

And now, to bed. Good night, all…

spacer
May102006

Silver Linings

If you’ve been hanging around this blog for a while, you know that I was less than happy with the way the last presidential election turned out. However, as Andrew Sullivan points out, being on the losing side isn’t always a bad thing:

…Can you imagine how battered a president Kerry would have been by now? He’d be stuck with Bush’s Iraq mess; he’d be constantly told he’s Neville Chamberlain on Iran for doing exactly what Bush has been doing; he’d be ruthlessly attacked by the Hannity right over Teresa, immigration, gays, and any other cultural issue they could exploit. And the GOP would have escaped the responsibility for their fiscal insanity, while Kerry took lumps for raising taxes. As a matter of principle, I do not regret endorsing Kerry. My decision was based on the manifest incompetence and unconservatism of Bush. But in the sweep of history, it is fitting that Bush, for the first time in his entire life, actually face the consequences of his own recklessness. It is also important for conservatives to see up-front what abandoning limited government and embracing fundamentalism leads to: the collapse of a coherent conservatism. There was a silver lining in Bush’s re-election: the unsentimental education of conservative triumphalists.

spacer