Baboon Palace

Official Friend of the Palace Ben made this. It’s funny and awesome!

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I like Heather Havrilesky. She’s one of those writers with such an inherently funny, relaxed voice, she could make pocket lint sound interesting. She could write about data warehousing applications and it would be like taking a shower with an angel. I’ve been reading her TV column in Salon for years, even though I don’t have a TV and hardly ever see the shows she writes about. Her blog posts fill me with envy at their casual brilliance and wit.

My job involves writing about data warehousing applications, which mostly means I have to think up a lot of synonyms for “clicking” (eg. pressing, selecting, choosing, activating, and so on.) It can be kind of deadly, so one thing I do to amuse myself is whenever I’m writing a section where I have to describe logging in or creating a user or whatever, the generic username I create is “Bob Dobbs” (or “bdobbs”), the Church of the Subgenius’ messiah of slack. It’s my little inside joke; I’ve been doing it for years. Once I noticed another technical writer using “John Zorn” (”jzorn”), so I guess I’m not the only one.

I know it’s a trick; it’s not really casual brilliance. Heather’s, I mean. No doubt she works super hard to write as well as she does, and I’ve tried to pay attention. I recently looked up a couple of her old posts about the writing process:

Use your critics for good, not evil. Some say you should kill your inner critics, but I suspect you have tens of thousands of critics in your head, many of whom are the authors of that “amazing insightful and amusing shit” of which you speak. Kill the critics and you mute your own voice. Instead, herd those critics into a bar and get them drunk. Send some of them to the grocery store and see what they have to say. Tie some up and make them eat nothing but black olives and watch nothing but movies starring Mel Gibson for an entire week. Make some of the others read your bike trip notes. What do they think about your experience? Do they think you’re a shriveled-up little poser? Their thoughts should be included in your bike trip journal, or else your voice will be far too self-censoring and blandly positive to be remotely interesting. If half of you hates you, you’d better let that half have a voice, too, or you’ll wind up with a very small, weak, fake-sounding voice in your writing, with the implied, muffled, angry voices hidden just out of sight, but not disguised enough that the reader can’t see them. Readers enjoy writers who admit to every side of themselves, who can see around things. Readers dislike feeling that a writer has blind spots and defensive stances.

This other one is what I was originally looking for. It’s quite long and mostly aimed at someone who wants to be a professional freelance writer, but it also has a lot of great general advice on what makes for interesting writing:

5. Nurture an irrational overconfidence in yourself and your ideas. OK, so you don’t want to just be a capable writer, you want to be a brilliant writer. In my opinion, writing talent is one part mimicry, one part bluster, and one part original perspective. Capable, less-talented writers only have the mimicry part mastered. They mimic - I don’t mean that they directly copy other writers, although some do. I mean that capable writers write by digesting volumes of decent writing and then attempting to form sentences similar to the sentences they’ve read. This is part of what any writer does, mind you, but it’s the only thing on board for the capable, not-incredibly-talented writer.

Now, the vast majority of writers, ranging from capable to good, have both the mimicry and the bluster down pat. In other words, most writers are just overconfident hacks who know how to mimic and know how to silence that internal voice of doubt when it comes up. They choose to believe that they’re good at what they do and that they have something to say, something to share with the world. They build their skills by writing a lot and reading a lot, and they build their confidence by telling themselves that they’re just as good at writing as anyone else in the world. Some of these writers, for example, like to talk about the fact that Dave Eggers is overrated. That’s one of their favorite subjects. Dave Eggers makes them feel very confident in themselves. They try not to compare themselves to Jonathan Franzen, on the other hand.

The thing is, Dave Eggers may or may not be overrated, but he definitely has the three elements of a brilliant writer: 1) mimicry 2) bluster, and 3) an original perspective. Maybe Eggers’ books have included lazy chapters that ramble and go nowhere, but when he’s on, like he is in the chapters of his novel/memoir that deal with his parents’ death, it’s quite clear that he has talent as a writer. He’s a capable writer, first of all, which means he’s a capable mimic. He’s also got loads of confidence, which is crucial. And finally, he has an original perspective. He’s full of weird ideas, he has an odd take on things, he’s very sensitive but very defensive - all elements that happen to add up to really solid, entertaining, original writing.

The Max Headroom Pirating Incident occurred on Sunday November 22, 1987 and is an example of broadcast signal intrusion.

WGN
The first occurrence of the signal hijack occurred during WGN’s 9:00 News. During Bears Highlights in the Sports report the signal was interrupted by a video of swaying black and white lines and a person wearing a Max Headroom mask. There was no audio. The hijack was stopped after only 20 seconds when WGN switched transmission from the Sears Tower to the John Hancock Center. The incident left sports reporter Dan Roan flustered.

WTTW
Later that night around 11:15pm during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode Horror of Fang Rock on WTTW, the signal was hijacked by the same person. It was the same video that was broadcast during the WGN hijack, but this time there was audio. The person in the Max Headroom mask interrupted the broadcast, saying “He’s a freaky nerd” before laughing and stating “This guy’s better than Chuck Swirsky!”. The person continued to utter strange phrases including a Coke advertising slogan (Max Headroom was a Coke spokesperson at the time), humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo (pausing midway to say “I stole CBS”), before finally undressing below the waist and was spanked by an unknown woman with a flyswatter before the masked person cut off his transmission. It was over in about 90 seconds. The pirate was never caught. WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker because at the time there were no engineers on duty at the Sears Tower. Also, the station’s master control center was unable to contact its transmitting equipment remotely to switch the STL (Studio To Transmitter Link), unlike their counterparts at WGN-TV, who were able to thwart the intruder by switching their John Hancock Center transmitter STL remotely within seconds.

WTTW and WGN join HBO as victims of broadcast signal intrusion. There has not been an incident of this kind since. The incident was reported on CBS Evening News.

A movie version of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is in production. Cool!

I finally watched Tony Takitani, a movie based on the Haruki Murakai story of the same name, (You can read the story here.) I was a little disappointed, just because the script followed the story almost word-for-word. The vast majority of the film consisted of nearly static shots, narrated in the third-person throughout. In several scenes a character would look into the camera and provide a line of third-person narration. It was beautifully shot and acted, but the style was sort of alienating; overall it felt “told” instead of presented in a more self-contained way. This effect was probably enhanced by the fact that it’s in Japanese with English subtitles, creating yet another textual layer between me and the action on the screen.)

It’s not safe for me to leave my apartment. On Sunday I stepped on a plastic bottle-cap carelessly left on the road, skidded out and completely wrecked my other ankle in a fully embarassing sidewalk bail-out. According to the doctor at my neighbourhood clinic (who I’m quite familar with by now), it’s a worse tear than the last one, which sounds pretty bad because the last one he said was about as bad as he’s seen. Still, it doesn’t appear quite as gruesome as before, although there is still a significant amount of hemorrhaging. We’re all very concerned. “That hemorrhaging has me concerned,” he said. “If it’s still painful to walk on after ten days, come back and we’ll X-Ray it to see if you’ve detached a tibial bone.”

It’s probably nothing, I said, I’m just a bleeder. “You are a bleeder,” he agreed.

* Title stolen from this hilarious simultan post.

I’ve finally started reading Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami’s novel. I bought a copy about five years ago, just before I crammed all my belongings into my car and drove out West. It was one of the books I left packed in a box in my dad’s shed. The box later migrated to my brother’s house, where it resides to this day, for all I know. After hearing somewhere that the protagonist spends a portion of the book reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, I decided to cash in some of my Amazon gift certificate on it. Whenever I read a mention of Magic Mountain, I get a little chill. Norwegian Wood is the second book I’ve read in past month that explicitly references it; the other was Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.

I spent about a year reading Magic Mountain. It’s an enormous, dense tome and after nearly every page I’d find it resting on my lap as I stared out the window at the pigeons and reflect on whatever had struck me that day. The story revolves around Hans Castorp, a young man visiting his cousin at an exclusive sanatorium in the Alps for patients with tuberculosis and other lung ailments. He is soon diagnosed with suspicious-looking spots on his lungs, and his two-week visit expands to fill seven years. During his stay he dabbles in botany, painting, and charity. He falls in love with another patient, and receives a philosophical education from the discussions between Settembrini, the humanist man-of-letters who spends his time preparing his contribution to a project called The Encyclopedia of Human Suffering, and the semitic Jesuit theologan, Herr Naptha. Thomas Mann knows how to write character: all of the forty-plus patients and doctors at the Bergdorf Sanatorium are quirky yet plausible, vivid and distinct without overwhelming the story.

Towards the end of the summer, the events on Magic Mountain began to sharply mirror particular events in my own life. It was kind of freaking me out, actually. When I came down with a strep infection, then so did Hans Castorp. When I went hiking in the mountains to try and shake myself out of a lethargic, bitter funk, also then did Hans. It was spooky.

I’m glad I didn’t get around to reading Norwegian Wood before Magic Mountain, because a major portion of the former directly draws on the theme and setting of the latter. I’ve just got to the part where Toru goes to visit the girl he’s in love with, the tragic, inscrutable Naoko, at a sanatarium in the moutains near Kyoto. The parallels between the Bergdorf and the Ami Hostel are quite apparent already. It definitely adds a lot to the experience to have that frame of reference.

Now that I think about it, I’ve had really good really good luck with the books Murakami refers to; I think I picked up Stendhal’s The Red And The Black because a character in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World read it.

Subtle “The Mercury Craze”

“What would you give in order to get your hands on the utmost in luxury blood?” I love Dose One’s lyrics and I love this album.

Man Man “Banana Ghost”

From another one of my favorite albums this year, Man Man’s Six Demon Bag.

Cornelius “Gum”

The new Cornelius LP, Sensual, isn’t really grabbing me the way Point did. Sensual sounds a lot more minimal and cerebral, more experimental, while Point had a more accessible lush pop energy to it. Still good though, and “Gum” is my favorite song on it at the moment.

Maybe it’s just my seasonal depression talking, but I find that during the dark Vancouver winter nothing beats kicking back and watching seven consecutive hours of television.

This weekend I rented the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica, and I’m now in the middle of season two. If you had told me a month ago that I’d be heavily invested in this show, I would have called you some kind of insane crazy person and probably rolled my eyes at you and your obviously sub-adequate taste in televisual entertainments. Boy, would I have been (uncharacteristically) mistaken!

This (third) season is shaping up to be a real humdinger, despite last week’s disappointing filler/budget-saving episode. An episode without Gaius Baltar is like a day without sunshine (aka. a day in Vancouver.)

“You know man I’m getting really tired of your holier-than-thou attitude. You think you’re so fuckin’ Godly. I almost like you better when you’re backsliding…”

“How many times a week do you pray?”

“Lots. I pray lots.”

“And what does God tell you?”

“What does God tell me? He tells me that you’re a dick!”

I get a lot of comment spam here, usually five to ten a day that get through the filters and whatnot. Not a hideous amount, but still a pain in the ass. Normally it’s the usual suspects (and for fear of triggering keywords I won’t describe them here), but today I got a great piece on last year’s post The War Against Christmas: Is It A Quagmire?, that I thought was worth sharing for everyone to mock. Here’s the text:

Thanks for keeping the spirit of Christmas alive. I’ve been fighting on the Best Buy front on the war on Christmas with an original song that seems to be generating lots of interest.

As you may know, Best Buy banned the use of “Merry Christmas” in their ads this year. It caused me to wonder what kind of an Inn Best Buy would be if it were an Inn, and not a department store, back in Bethlehem when Jesus was born.

That’s pretty wacky as is, since you could hardly accuse this blog of keeping the spirit of anything alive. We’re more in the spirit-crushing business around here. Anyways, the best part is the linked mp3 protest song, which I just know is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the night. Check it.

UPDATE

Holy mamma! This guy’s songs are awesome!

More here. I don’t want to reward spammers, but wow. I can’t pick a favorite! Every song is crazier (and hence awesomer) that the last.

The drinking water here has been a bit sketchy since that storm blew in off the Pacific last week. The massive rainfall stirred up all this junk in the tapwater, making it turbid and brown. Right now we’re clocking in at around 24 nephelometric turbidity units (NTUs), well above the Canadian Drinking Water Guideline’s recommended 1 NTU. There have been fistfights outside CostCo over bulk bottled water. Can you believe that shit? I wonder how these people would behave in a genuine crisis.

But it’s not a big deal; it’s just minerals, sediment, organic matter and such that got washed into the reservoirs. I’ve been showering and brushing my teeth and doing my dishes without problems. Really, this is just a little taste of how most of the world lives. Do you know how thrilled people in China or Iraq would be if their tapwater was only a little bit brown and cloudy? They’d be pretty fucking happy.

During the summer of 1995 I worked in the tupperware mines near Sault Ste. Marie. There were six of us to a team. We would single-file down the narrow mineshaft with our pickaxes and helmets to blast the tupperware out of the solid granite of the Canadian Shield. The first guy in line would pry a piece loose and hand it back to the guy behind him, who would pass it to the guy behind him, and so on until the last guy in line (which was me), who would would scramble towards the surface and toss it on the pile.

We had to be fast because on the way back up we’d all begin to wheeze and cough, from the tupperlung, the Betty Crocker lung. But hacking and choking towards daylight we realize, shit, we’ve gotta go back, we forgot the lid! You gotta get the lid, the whole thing is fucking useless without the lid!

It was a shitty job, but worth it, you know? For the leftovers, for the meatloaf and the stew and the tuna salad. How are you going to carry your tuna salad without tupperware? You can’t put that shit in a bag!

So next time you’re bringing your lunch to work with you, give a thought to the brave souls of Sault-Ste-Marie, wheezing from the tupperlung, the Betty Crocker lung, who made it possible.