• I dressed as Teen Wolf, but nobody got it.
• Down By Law wasn’t shot in Tremont, Mr. Hess, but in Louisiana. I’m pretty sure you meant Stranger Than Paradise, which I’ve now ordered from the CPL. The Criterion Collection DVD of Down By Law is, as always, awesome, by the way.
• The UK version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show includes a cut scene at the very end and a remastering of the sound which makes the songs much more crisp and understandable.
• The drive to Akron on 77 is treeriffic in the fall.

Pellegrino Foods Heat and Eat Pepperoni Pizza Flavor Pepperoni Balls are made by Pellegrino Foods from Warren, PA. The only thing I can find out about this company is this antidefamation appeal [pdf]. In any case this item consists of two dinner rolls injected with something approximating pizza gunk. Ingredients include: Potassium Bromate, Thiamine Mononitrate, Mozzarella Cheese Substitute, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Citrate, Sorbic Acid, Sodium Phosphate, Magnesium Oxide, Zinc Oxide, Cyanocobalamin, Ferric Orthophosphate, Pyridoxine HCO, Calcium Caseinate, Tricalcium Phosphate, Disodium Phosphate, Trisodium Phosphate, Calcium Panothenate, Sodium Erythorbate and paprika. All in just 6oz and for $1.30.

It was also inspected and passed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture EST 8575. Excuse me while I go die.

I went over to a neighbor’s house and carved a pumpkin last night, then ended up at Edison’s working on a webpage while I waited for the open mic to start. Edison’s has a rather impressive selection of random beers, and even if they have Guinness on tap, I’m slowly making my way through their random selection.

The first one I had was the Kalamazoo Brewing Company’s Two Hearted Ale. This beer was really hoppy, something I’m not too fond of. Strangely though, I absolutely loved it in this brew. I think it will become a warm-weather favorite for me. It must have been the fish on the label.

I also had a Holy Grail Ale made by the Black Sheep Brewing Company. This beer was quite expensive and not that good. I should have listened to the old man from scene 23.

I made Barb the bartender surprise me for my third beer and received their new item; a porter from the Southern Tier Brewing Company. This one didn’t have the punch of an Edmund Fitzgerald but it managed to do the normal porter number on me. It kinda just slid down my throat in an unassuming manner. I like porters.

And I obviously don’t know enough about beers to review them.

Lately I’ve been running across various things dealing with quantification [via Jack/Zen]and qualification and value. I’m engaged with these thoughts and have been reshuffling and retelling them in order to get closer to… something. The heart of the matter? At least, something that feels right.

Questions I’ve been asking myself include:

• Does everything need to be quantifiable?
• Must everything fit qualifications?
• What things naturally resist quantification or qualification?

The quantification questions are easier to answer, easier to quantify, because they obey their own rules. Asking the question in terms of need is subjective, and therefore a bit disingenuous, but the answer to that question adds context to the question: Can everything be quantified? For me, the answer to both is no. I’m even of the opinion that things that can be quantified don’t necessarily need to be quantified exactly. We can’t avoid measuring and judging; distance, how much salt is in a pinch, whether we have time to eat breakfast in the morning, but when the measuring and judging takes precedence over the experience of tossing a football or baking brownies then quantification is getting out of hand.

Questions like: “How much do you love me?” are bad questions because I think this is the area where quantity and quality start to get mixed up. If the answer to “How much do you love me?” is “Bigger than the universe.” then the quantity question has been answered in terms of quantity. If the answer is “More than warm blankets and hot cocoa on a winter’s day.” then the question has been answered qualitatively. Quality arguments [like the main thread of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] are subjective and therefore slightly different from each other quality argument. Even in groups that supposedly espouse the same set of qualifications there is a lot of elbow room.

Jeff Hess frames a quality argument:

Since the Englightenment the argument has run something like this: Yes, here are fanatics and fundamentalists who committ evil in the name of their god, but that reality should not be allowed to deny the solace of faith to those who do not seek to deny others their freedoms and faiths.

Do you think that argument still holds true, or, as Sam Harris argues in The End Of Faith, is it time to recognize that all faith systems are based on superstition and are inherently damaging to the future of humanity?

This sort of question is a tough nut to crack for several reasons, but the main one I can see is that it takes one set of qualitative criteria [the post-Enlightenment belief in Reason] and sets it against the qualitative criteria of other belief systems. For me at least, this is a question that can never be answered because to me it is apples and oranges. Probably the best explanation of this comes from a MetaFilter comment:

Pure scientific fact is just a meaningless pile of numbers. Scientific theory is just a falsifiable prediction. Humans can’t live on that alone. They can fit those predictions and data into a view of what the world is, who they are, and how those two relate, but that’s a story–that’s a mythology–no matter how you cut it. A prediction about human population dynamics over the next 100 years is a hypothesis; believing that humans are defined and ennobled by the very same faculty of reason that paves the eternal road of progress on which we march is mythology. Not in the sense that it isn’t true, but in the sense that it is unfalsifiable, unscientific, and philosophical. In short, in that it is human.

I’m not trying to create an argument about the veracity of one set of qualitative criteria against another, instead I’m of the opinion that any set of qualitative criteria must be tempered by doubt in the qualifications of the qualitative criteria. This also includes doubt in the qualifications of quantitative data. If you follow me.

Certainty is hubris.

I’m back from a long weekend at the old stomping grounds in South Bend. Friday night I missed Frank Jackson’s appearance at the Literary Café in order to plow through a Golden Domer at the new and improved CJ’s Pub. For those of you who don’t know what the Domer is let me enlighten you. The Golden Domer is a 20oz handmade burger, injected with CJ’s special sauce and spiced with a bit of Lawry’s. It is then smothered with white American cheese, bacon, mushrooms, tomato, onion and lettuce and served with a large pile of criss-cut fries. My buddy Jeremy took a few snaps with his camera phone, and as soon as he emails them to me, I’ll post ‘em here.

Saturday dawned and Jeremy made some breakfast burritos with delicious sausage from Tipton, KS for me and his wife Christy and his baby girl Katie. We then walked to campus, which looks a lot different than it did even a year ago. They’ve been building buildings super fast. We grabbed the necessary steak sandwich from my old Knights of Columbus council’s steak sale and caught the end of Knute Rockne All American [starring Ronald Reagan as The Gipper]. We visited the Grotto, watched the team walk from the Basilica to the stadium, and then went to the JACC where I made a stop by my home away from home while I was in college, the fencing gym. Coach DeCicco was there, and he definitely didn’t know me from Adam, but that isn’t surprising, considering how long he’s been emeritus.

Once we got to the stadium, I grabbed a hot dog and coke as we watched the teams warm up. Then I watched us beat on BYU. After the game and the walk home we got a meat-lovers pizza from Pizza Hut and watched the blithely violent Boondock Saints. Sunday dawned and after Mass we went to Bibler’s and I had my sausage and eggs, hash browns, pancakes and oatmeal before hitting the road back to Cleveland. If I had only stayed a few more days I could have gone to Macri’s, Elia’s, the Mishawaka Brewing Company, and Bruno’s. Alas, I’m cubefarming it again.

Once a month I arrive at work and find the breezeway full of donuts. Seriously. Three large boxes [perhaps three feet by two feet] and two small dozen boxes sit there, taunting me. I can smell their fresh goodness before I even get to the door. Since the latest reorg we’re now also required to put in mandatory overtime through the end of the year. Merry Christmas. The icing on the cake of course, is the fact that I can no longer keep track of BFD while I’m at work, because it keeps getting zero sized replies coming through the firewall. Either that or George has blocked our IP. Granted, I probably shouldn’t surf the internet while at work, but since my coworkers can play solitaire, computer chess, do crossword puzzles or read the PD while at work, I don’t feel so bad. I am also sick of people who drive the speed limit or slower in the fast lane of the interstate. Passing on the inside is legal in Ohio, but often not possible, since slower drivers who actually know what they are doing drive the same speed in the other lanes. I think that covers it. I feel a bit better now.

I am going to a Notre Dame football game this weekend though, and I’ll have the chance to eat at CJ’s again and have the best burger in existence. I should probably try to take a picture of it for FoodGoat.

I purchased Super Mario Bros. 3 [watch someone beat the game in 11 minutes], The Legend of Zelda and Ice Hockey yesterday for my 8 bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I first played a Nintendo soon after it hit the market, on our family trip to Orlando Florida for Disney World and Sea World. I was probably 5 or 6. I remember stopping at an uncle’s house, some sort of kin, maybe a great uncle, I’m not quite sure. Anyway he had a Nintendo. I’d never heard of the Nintendo, and I don’t think I even knew what a video game was. I remember playing Duck Hunt and maybe a little Excitebike and absolutely loving it.

I never had video games growing up, until I saved enough money to buy a Gameboy in Junior High. I did manage to mooch off of my cousins and my buddy Mario [no, really.] who had all kinds of games. The rule was, you got to play the game until you had a game over and then you had to pass it on. This was frustrating for me because the people who actually owned the games were much better and thus got to play much longer. I remember watching my cousin Chris play Super Mario Bros. 3 for 3 hours before he ran out of lives, and little old me would play Tetris for 20 minutes and have to pass the controller.

Eventually I moved into the realms of Playstation, again purchasing it myself, as I’ve done with all my computer games, but the love for Nintendo was still there. My junior year of college, I nabbed a Nintendo and a few games on Ebay and have been slowly building the cartridge collection since. One of my teammate’s houses off campus had an old school Nintendo and Super Mario 3 battles on a regular basis. I even managed to impress them with my amazing jumping abilities. I did manage to acquire a modicum of skill at 8 bit Nintendo over the years, even though I’m no Wizard. Now, I have a bunch of stupid sports games, but I do have Super Mario/Duck Hunt, Metroid [thanks Patrick!], Tetris, Section Z and the aforementioned games. I still need a few key ones though. Double Dragon, Excitebike, Contra, 10 Yard Fight, Final Fantasy and Bubble Bobble. They will be mine, oh yes, they will be mine.

What is your favorite line-up for Ice Hockey? I prefer one fat guy, one normal guy and two skinnies.

When I was nine years old, way back in 1990, Robert Jordan published a fairly large and interesting fantasy novel called The Eye of the World. It was one of a new breed of fantasy story, the mega-giganto-epic, tales that are planned from the outset to exceed the typical trilogy set-up by volumes and volumes. Terry Goodkind and George R. R. Martin join Robert Jordan as the top three super-enormo-epic writers [and probably J.K. Rowling now that I think of it...]. Terry and Robert have another thing in common, they both betrayed their stories in favor of a larger bank account. They’ve both turned their worlds into serial killers, into Stories From The Black Lagoon, things that never seem to end. Each book is around 700 pages. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series was initially slated as an 8 volume tale, but after volume 4 popped out, it was obvious he was getting serious pressure to drag out the tale as long as possible. Now it is set for a twelve volume series. After reading volume 11, I think number 12 is going to be unabridged OED in size, unless, of course, he extends it again.

Jordan’s writing style [and now that I'm quite grown up, I realize he couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Tell a good story, yes. Write, hell no. He's a physicist.] is very detail oriented and descriptive. It got way overblown when volume five came out and instead of skimming over descriptions and travel sequences we started getting details about what each and every character, no matter how minor, looked like, wore, you name it. The plot basically dragged to a standstill and sprouted subplots like a sow dropping piglets. And now he’s stuck like Peter Jackson and the third LotR movie, with tons of ground to cover and not much time to do it. Knife of Dreams starts to get back to the action, but it is obvious that turning to the tale back on course is taking a lot of torque. Ponderous is still the word. I think the end might be in sight though. I’ll be glad, that is for sure. I’m tired of being on this road for 15 years. I’ve really turned away from fantasy novels because of the tendency to bloviate, people imitating Goodkind and Jordan. There isn’t much good fantasy that gets the recognitition that it deserves. Instead the focus is on creating a franchise. Thankfully John Crowley and Patricia McKillip stick to one book stories and write robustly.

I am in search of a part-time job. I would like your suggestions. At this time requirements include:

• Compensation exceeding $8.00 an hour.
• Afternoon/Evening hours only.
• No weekends.
• No food service work.

I have considered:

• Projectionist [requires union membership]
• Gigolo [$8.00 an hour not a guaranteed rate]

What kind of part-time or freelance employment opportunities exist for a versatile young man in the Cleveland area?

I’m currently putting together a couple of websites for pals of mine and have been spending inordinate amounts of time at Lucky’s hashing stuff together. Last night, the shop was pretty busy. An old man asked me some rather biased survey questions, I eavesdropped on a block club meeting, and had a good learning experience talking to Steve Goldberg about Buddhism. Then I promptly disregarded his wisdom and killed a fly. Even if I do good things to attempt to counteract the bad karma I incurred, planting a fruit tree in a pepper patch doesn’t make the peppers any less hot. There are neutral acts in Buddhism, which is an interesting concept to me. Not helping a beggar would be shameful in Christian context, but if you are Buddhist it is neutral, at least you didn’t kick him. I’m sure I’m either getting this wrong or oversimplifying. There is a lot of different wisdom in the world.

I went over to Edison’s for the open mic after Lucky’s closed and wasn’t there ten minutes before Bill Callahan waltzed in. Then Tim showed up, then, a bit later, George. Then, a bit later, Steve again. It was like some sort of impromptu weblogger meetup. I had a new beer: Red Hook which was too hoppy for me. I don’t like hoppy beers.

Internet Explorer is my bane. These sites I’m putting together parse as XHTML Strict and display correctly on Firefox, but look like crap on Internet Explorer. Arg.

There is a burning river running
from this city into my heart. It
coils like a trumpet past
offices full of white noise
and piles of rock like
old dreams. It stirs among
the buildings as a homeless
woman writing poetry and
flickers along the hands of
the hot dog man.
If you pay attention,
soon there will be
a burning river running
into your heart.

And punk rock kids dance
in the light of the water,
holding fast to flames
no one else will see.

Cleveland, 2005

I received a postcard in the mail the other day from Into the Fire, the flick I worked on in NYC a couple of years back. Turns out it showed from September 23 through October 6 at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema on East Houston. I got the postcard post facto. Otherwise I might have been able to force you NYC friends of mine to go watch it. You could have told me whether Sean Patrick Flanery’s performance was as wooden as it seemed from my side of the camera. It is quite creepy to see the sets I worked on through a lens of spectatorship instead of art department mule. Man that was a fun two months. Now I’ve got to scrounge up access to the movie, and find a DVD of it sometime. Maybe I’m credited, but I doubt it. It is getting okay reviews on by the average joe’s at IMDb. Not so good on Rotten Tomatoes. Hell, just Google it, there is plenty of stuff to read…

This morning was the Race for the Cure for breast cancer and my workplace put together a team of folks to participate. I was the only one who signed up to do the run, so it was me running alone, as usual. Apart from the humongous crowd of course. But last night I hung out at the Lit for awhile and watched Mr. Manly Pad ply his trade until Liam showed up. He’s been activated. He’s probably going to end up in Iraq. Well, fuck. He’s in the National Guard and trained for medical supply, but since Iraq needs combat soldiers, he’s getting retrained for “nation building activities.” Since last night was my only night to hang with him while he is in town this weekend, we had a few beers on me. Hopefully he won’t be kept too far away from his year old daughter. I really hope he doesn’t get himself killed. Knowing him, he’d haunt my Guinness.

Then I got up at 7 this morning and biked to Voinovich Park which was like a street fair or something. I had a decent warm-up and was ready to race at the 8:00 scheduled competitive race start time. Apparently they decided at the last moment to just combine the race and walk together so we all stood around for 15 minutes in the rain, feeling our muscles tighten up and get cold. The race started and the first mile or so was a madness of swerving and sudden speed changes, really threw off my pace. My pace didn’t really matter though because there were no distance markers apart from the water at the halfway point, so I had no idea how I was doing. My time was 26:51 or thereabouts. I’m content with that, considering the conditions. The bike ride home was not fun. My hands were numb and my muscles were like little yappy dogs with acid dogslobber. I just got done mopping the floor.

[UPDATE: My $20 better be the $20 that funds the finding of the cure because I'm sicker than dogshit now.]

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #104: Akira Kurosawa’s Shinjû: Ten no amijima.

I was having a discussion the other day about Japanese theatre: kabuki, noh and bunraku, and was recommended the film Shinjû: Ten no amijima [Double Suicide], by Masahiro Shinoda. It is an adaptation of a bunraku [puppet theatre] play, with kabuki acting. I was told it was done in noh style, so I was expecting something particularly austere, perhaps like Mizoguchi’s Genroku Chushingura. I basically went into this movie blind, I’d forgotten [if I ever knew in the first place] that Shinoda was part of the Japanese New Wave, and was prepared for the opposite of kabuki melodrama.

The film/play is about a poor paper merchant named Jihei who has thrown away his honor for a geisha named Koharu. He has sworn to buy her freedom, but instead spends all his dough porking her. He’s got a dog-ugly wife named Osan and two zombie children, a nagging mother-in-law and a father-in-law who was probably oiling his wakazashi when Jihei first came to court Osan. Osan is his cousin, by the way. The lovers swear to elope together and then commit suicide. I’m pretty sure this is because they are being ground between their love for each other and their obligations as members of Japanese society, but seriously, sometimes Japanese honor and etiquette makes no sense to me. After lots of wigging out by Jihei and visits by all the aforementioned parties to wig out at Jihei, he ends up eloping with Koharu, they pork one last time in a graveyard and then he chops her up Benihana style and hangs himself with her obi.

So that’s the plot. How was it shot? Shinoda starts out self-reflexively, with the bunraku puppeteers, called kurago, setting up puppets for Shinjû: Ten no amijima. A discussion of how the cemetary sex should proceed is interspersed with these shots. I’m not sure if it is Shinoda on screen dressed as a kurago [a cinematic pun that is carried throughout the film] but it is definitely his thought being expressed, in terms of fetishism of space and the poignancy of the death scene, which they don’t want to be a typical kabuki death. Once everybody is all set the play part of the film begins, in period, in costume, but with the black masked kurago ominously shadowing and directing the action. This use of kurago is what makes the movie. Their presence is the symbolic hand of the director and the hand of fate, with echoes in my mind of Death in The Seventh Seal. They also serve as reminders that this is based on bunraku, that the actors are not much more than puppets to the will of the director and just about any other function you’d care to ascribe to them. In some ways the actors’ melodrama is necessary to reduce the impact of these still, black-clothed mystery men.

Jumping back to the Shinoda’s fetishism of space. He really pushes the frame in a lot of shots, and uses his misé en scene and shot placement to create rigid senses of entrapment. A wardrobe will split the frame, keeping the actors pressed to one side while a kurago sits at his ease on the other, or a rack focus will reveal a dresser, emptied of kimonos to pay Koharu’s debt, that weighs heavily on Osan. Chaotic set dressing is the norm when rigidity is absent. Smears of paint on a wall, enraged faces painted on walls and floors seem to reflect the emotional states of Koharu and Jihei, while also confusing the eye. The sets could also be disassembled to reveal earlier sets, and there are rotating walls and other hoo-ha to create a wholly new type of immersion. Instead of the viewer being immersed in the story, Shinoda strikes a balance where the viewer can walk in the story, but the characters can also walk outside the fourth wall. For me this is supposed to be a reminder that while this might be a play, shit happens in real life too.

Visually the film is a treat, but the story didn’t do a whole lot for me. The sex among the tombstones did do some pretty good fetishism of space, I guess, but it had a healthy dose of voyeurism along with it with the [more active at this point] kurago sitting around watching the action. The death scene was in kabuki style [or maybe bunraku, which I'm not as familiar with] but didn’t have the [for lack of a better word] glory of a kabuki death. Their deaths didn’t seem cheap either, but full of pathos. It might be worth a watch for cineastes, but probably not your average viewer.

Further Reading: Claire Johnston’s excellent essay. [Although I think her phallic bell might be a bit of a phallacy.]
NY Times review of the Criterion Collection DVD.

Link of the Day: Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Fractals are inherently natural; and nature loves to repeat patterns. This really isn’t a surprise, because everyone knows that there is alot of symmetry [which is a bit different than patterning, yes] in natural objects. It’s like in π where the Golden Ratio [a sort of fractal] can be found everywhere. For years one of my doodling habits has been, unknowingly, an echo of the Golden Ratio. I draw a right triangle and then section it off by drawing a line perpendicular to the hypotenuse from the right angle of the triangle. The result is two more right triangles, which I then do the same thing to. Smaller and smaller and smaller. Another way of describing fractals uses the example of a coastline, if you’re measuring the length of a coastline, the closer you get the longer the coastline becomes. A finite area bounded by an infinite line.

Asymptotes come to mind here as well, and the old saw about a frog jumping halfway to the pond with each jump. He’ll never reach the pond, mathematically speaking, because he only halves the distance remaining with each jump. This is why I can never know anything, despite the fact that I’ve learned so very much in almost 25 years, I’m still only halfway to wherever there is. This might be a very good explanation for why we can’t ever really know God or reach perfection on our own, but I’m way off track at this point.

Branches were the impetus to write this post. So many things branch, and branch the same way, that it gives me the good willies. When I truly realized that there has to be a reason behind the similarity between rivers and tributaries, the branches of a tree, our veins, capillaries and arteries it was one of those minor mindblowing things that only really occur to me when I see something ubiquitous and mundane as if for the first time. The sphere is another reoccuring pattern, from subatomic particles up to planets- rain is spherical, or would be without the work of gravity. This makes me think that size does not matter. Another thought I had the other day, atoms are mostly empty space. The universe is mostly empty space. Science has this idea of dark matter, and they think it must fill the “empty space” of the universe. I wonder if anyone has thought to look in the empty space of atoms.

Chris Coyne has made a mathematical programming language [redundant, I know] that can create beautiful pictures, including some with branches.

I believe that I have now seen every full length Hollywood film that was at least partially shot in Tremont. They are: The Deer Hunter, A Christmas Story and American Splendor. I watched The Deer Hunter last night, it was pretty weird seeing what Starkweather looked like back in the 1970s, before I-490 cut the neighborhood in half. From what I could tell, they just used easterly shots of St. Theodosius’s and an exterior of Lemko Hall. Since I’ve never been inside St. Theo’s or Lemko Hall I don’t know about the interiors. Also, some of the neighborhood shots could have been shot in the parts of the ‘hood that are under 490. I’m still trying to find out where, exactly, the house from A Christmas Story is located. I know it is on W. 11th, south of 490, so maybe I’ll ride my bike over that way today and see if I can spy it out. American Splendor just had some exteriors of Tremont houses and an establishing shot of St. Theo’s. This is probably completely boring to anyone but me. That’s what I get for being a film geek.

So I voted a while ago. The turnout appears to be abysmal. I was the 91st person to vote in Ward 13, Precinct M. I suppose that was expected. I guess in the end my vote counts for more, if less folks show up. Still, I’d rather have excellent turnouts. Getting to my polling place at Pilgrim Church consisted of running a gauntlet of dudes trying to hand me stuff about some candidate or such. I managed to avoid them all by saying I wasn’t going there to vote. Suckers. I know that you aren’t allowed to campaign within a certain distance of the polling place, but I’d rather have a ban on campaigning altogether on election days. Also, Election Day should be a national holiday. If it was, I’d certainly be more inclined to work at a polling place and take the load off of the old folks who should be at home enjoying their retirement. Today I also found out that someone is running against my councilman. I think. I don’t really know what to think about the Cleveland election process. I’ve seen more hotly debated Fair Queen competitions.

Link of the Day: AskPhilosophers

This is a reminder to note the triple stack-flare and sulfur stench emanating from the steel mill on my pollution form once I get home. The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner is speculative environmental disaster fiction, first published in 1972. It takes place in the near future, at the turn of the century, our contemporary; so it is a bit dated, but also eerily prescient in some respects. Brunner’s strength lies not in the technology and material change of his futures but in his understanding of broad spectrum social interaction [See my review of Stand on Zanzibar]. Context is important when reading this book. In 1972 the EPA was barely two years old, no one had any idea about HIV/AIDS, DDT, and defoliants, napalm and even thalidomide had people pretty leery of chemical impacts on the environment. But no one expected digital technology or hyperinflation or peak oil.

Brunner takes the current fears of his time and extrapolates them into future impacts. Environmental sci-fi doesn’t scratch my belly like other stuff, for the most part it never seems done too well [Nevil Shute's On the Beach is strong because of the characters, not the jet-stream borne radiation and Gregory Benford's Timescape is strong because of its firm footing in physics, not the impromptu behavior of biological systems]. The Sheep Look Up does a better job than most, with a constant barrage of impacts that are in your face, or quite subtle. In your face: filtermasks, which just about everyone has to wear to filter out the pollution in the rank air. The Mekong Desert. The abiotic Great Lakes. The dead Med. Subtle: the Japanese businessman who spreads enteritis pandemically throughout the US when he comes for a visit. You only figure that out after you realize the order of the cities that were hit is the same as the itinerary of the businessman. [SARS did this and avian flu could easily do it as well.] The contaminated Colorado water that ends up driving thousands of Africans and Hondurans batshit insane. Most bacteria and viruses and insects have undergone rapid evolutionary selection due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and pesticides and now “shrug off anything but a direct blow with a brick.” Can you say superbugs? The pesticide thing was probably well known by 1972, since the mosquito and malaria populations in Panama went through a similar drastic selection process while the canal was built.

The social side of things seems a bit prescient too. Terrorists attack the United States, sensationalism du jour is the entertainment and media access to government information is heavily restricted. An American city is a disaster zone because of polluted water. Scapegoats and whipping boys abound. The president has a dumb nickname, “Prexy”, and is only available for war-mongering “Why Do You Hate America?” sound-bites when he is not on vacation. Seriously. I can’t make this shit up. The book is too heavy-handedly political, but the writing is good and the build-up of panic is good, even if the moral seems exactly the same as Stand on Zanzibar.

Link of the day: The Legendary Tube Bar Recording.