A Wrinkle in Time

I've lost faith in a lot of the things I believed in as a child.

I stopped believing in God and Santa Claus decades ago and on bad days I don't even believe in myself.

But I still believe in a Wrinkle in Time.

It is my desert island book. It's the book that reminds me that there is still goodness in the world.

The 2003 movie was pretty bad, but I approached this version with tempered enthusiasm. Jennifer Lee had been the screenwriter for Frozen, so that was encouraging.

But I really don't understand how she managed to miss the meaning of the book so completely. It's one of the few properties about which I'm still sentimental and they messed it up so badly that I was just short of actually angry.

I guess I'll open with what I liked about the movie.

THE GOOD

Meg Murray: Meg is probably white in the book, but that whiteness isn't essential to her character, so I don't have any problems with the change. Storm Reid (who has a great name) does an outstanding job with the performance. I'd go so far as to say that she's the best part of the film. The idealized Meg with straightened hair was a good scene, and I don’t think it would have had the same punch with a white girl in the role.

The scenes with baby Meg and her dad were really cute too.

Red: He was a departure from the character in the book, but I thought Red worked pretty well. The bit with the sandwich being literal sand (instead of just tasting like sand) was a bit on-the-nose for my liking, but affably evil characters can be frightening in a way more obviously evil villains aren’t and he’s a good contrast to the capital E Evil of the IT. The puppet metaphor went on a bit too long, but it wasn’t bad conceptually.

The IT: This is another change that more or less worked. Calling the adversary “IT” works in a novel, where you can see the capitalization, but it would lead to confusion in a movie already populated by Whos, Whiches and Whatsits galore.  Adding the article in front of IT is a small change, but I would argue that it’s almost a necessary one for clarity’s sake. Also, the weirdo psychedelic brainscape was a little ostentatious (like the rest of the movie), but a.) at least there was no glitter and b.) IT as described in the book (a slightly oversized brain on a dais) probably would have looked silly on screen.

Enfolded: I liked the recurring motif of things being present but hidden from sight because they’re enfolded. The visual of the paper fortune teller works and the set-up more or less pays off. I thought they were going to use it to illustrate a tesseract, but they didn’t, and that seems like a missed opportunity.

Some good scenes: The montage of misery on the earth was a truly well-composed sequence.  Ava DuVernay does a great job with the quiet, human moments, and those moments should have served as the core of the movie, but they were lost in favor of spectacle.

The Bad

Mrs. Whatsit: "Now, don't be frightened, loves," Mrs. Whatsit said. Her plump little body began to shimmer, to quiver, to shift. The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man's, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it's not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least.

From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry.

Hold that image in your mind. The book cover at the top of the post can serve as a useful reference. Go back and read it again if you need to. I didn't see anything describing a flying piece of asparagus with Reese Witherspoon's chin, but that's what we got.

It's nice to see Archibald is still finding work after Veggie Tales.

I want everyone to know that Lily is the one who came up with asparagus joke.

Mrs. Who: Her distinguishing trait in the novel is that she speaks in quotations. They dispense with that about a third of the way through the movie, at about the point where she wore a bustle while running through flowers who were also running.

She loses additional points for quoting Chris Tucker. What’s the matter, couldn’t they get the rights to wubba lubba dub dub? Mrs. Who quotes Chris Tucker and the attribution, “Tucker, American” is longer than the quote. Ugh. Listen. I understand the desire to be topical, and those kids today (shakes rake at them to warn them off my lawn) aren’t going to understand the provenance of a quote by Blaise Pascal. But this is barely even a catchphrase.

Mrs. Which: I was nervous about Oprah Winfrey in the role because I thought her presence would prove distracting because she's one of the most famous human beings in the world.

I was wrong. She was even more distracting than I had feared because she was one hundred feet tall and covered with glitter.

The Titans have breached Wall Maria. 

In the movie, she says, "Trust nothing." Do you have that  Fox Mulder "I want to believe" poster hanging on your wall, Mrs. Which?

Give me that old-time religion: I'm not religious myself, but Madeleine L'Engle's particular brand of Christian Universalism serves as the core of the book.("All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.")

I don't think it can be removed without changing the story fundamentally and you certainly can't just rip it and continue on with nothing in its place, as was done here. The movie is empty inside.

The Writing: It's often just bad. "She's evolved beyond the need for language." "Charles Wallace doesn't live here anymore." Seriously? Even children's cartoons know they can't get away with playing that line straight anymore. Calvin disappears almost completely for the final twenty minutes of the movie. We were joking that he'd be calling for the other characters on Camazotz during a post-credit sequence.

Crappy Mentors: A Wrinkle in Time served as an influence on my Doctor Who story, Forever Fallen. I also loved the Doctor's relationship with Ace because he could solve her problems for her easily enough, but instead, he helps her become the version of herself capable of solving those problems. That same dynamic is at play in the book, but the movie features mentors that neither like nor respect their charges and it just doesn't work. What's the point?

The Happy Medium:  Zach Galifianakis plays the medium as a gymnast/soothsayer. Kudos for playing against type, but not an interpretation that grounds the movie, is it?

Walk like an Egyptian

Charles Wallace goes down like a chump: In the book, Charles Wallace goes into IT’s grasp willingly, because IT has promised him that the location of his father is in there and he believes he’s strong enough to pull himself out once he’s in there. Pride is his fatal flaw and it’s this overconfidence that gets him.  In the movie, The Man with Red Eyes takes control of Charles Wallace by reading from his second-grade math homework.

I’ve touched on this before, but love is the theme of the book. Meg is poisoned by doubt, but she knows as certainly as she knows anything that Charles Wallace loves her. Her mother loves her. Her father loves her. They love each other and despite her doubts about other things, Meg knows this. The Mrs. Whatsit of the books loves her.

"Mrs. Whatsit hates you," Charles Wallace said.
And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, "Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that's what she told me, that she loves me," suddenly she knew.
She knew!
Love.
That was what she had that IT did not have.
She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and her mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's.
And she had her love for them.
But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love. But she, in all her weakness and foolishness and baseness and nothingness, was incapable of loving IT. Perhaps it was not too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.
But she could love Charles Wallace. She could stand there and she could love Charles Wallace. Her own Charles Wallace, the real Charles Wallace, the child for whom she had come back to Camazotz, to IT, the baby who was so much more than she was, and who was yet so utterly vulnerable.
Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you.

Movie Mrs. Whatsit’s opinions on Meg range from disgust to disinterest. Why is she even there if she feels this way?

What I’d like to see is a more or less straight adaptation of the book as an animated film by studio Ghibli. Hayou Miyazaki can helm it the next time he comes out of retirement.

Grrr...So bitterly disappointed in what we got.

Heaven

Kurt Vonnegut was an ardent an atheist as I am. However, his description of heaven as a place where "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." is the truest fact a human being has ever written.

A tale of Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

I was going to post about our weekend, but Jen went ahead and wrote the post that I was going to write. (There are two Jens in this story. The Jen I am married to is Jen Classic and the one who came to visit us is Kenobi Jen.)

The weekend started on a bleak note. The services for Nick, my friend and old boss, were on Friday night, and I headed over to the funeral home right after work. It was tougher than I had been expecting. Funerals are never easy, but the thing that really chokes me up is when the departed is surrounded by the things they loved in life. For Lily's grandfather, it was a picture of her. For Nick, it was Halloween napkins and comic book stuff. I don't know why that saddens me like it does. Maybe it's the juxtaposition, or the knowledge that they will never be around to enjoy the things they loved. I don't know.

I always think of a line from Slaughterhouse-Five that reminds me that we'll always have the memories of the people who are gone.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

So I said my goodbyes to Nick.

After that, the happy part of our weekend began. As the title suggests, it included Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

Our original plan was to head to the PA Ren Faire, but it turned out to be a bit further away than we had thought, and it was pricey to boot. So we settled on something almost as fun, but much less expensive.

Jen Classic, Kenobi Jen and I all went out for Indian at the place that had catered Lily's culture night. They were pretty decent. To hear Kenobi Jen tell it, she lives in some kind of post apocalyptic wasteland and subsists on gruel and and whatever roots she can forage. We all enjoyed the meal. Oma came to drop off Lily halfway through and we had an impromptu round of My Little Pony trivia. Kenobi Jen claims, over at her blog, that Lily won the contest, but that's just bullshit. Only Bill Clinton and Batman know more about My Little Pony than I do. I happen to know that she was hopped up on goofballs when she wrote that post anyway.

We returned home and watched some Gravity Falls. I stayed up a little later to play some of the new XCOM game. I loved the old one and while the new one didn't retain everything I loved about the old one, I don't think it has a single element that I don't enjoy tremendously.

Then we woke up in time to go the local Farmer's Market. Lily was moaning about going, but I don't know why. There are always a million dogs there and she gets to pet every single one.

After that, we headed to SteelStacks for their Oktoberfest and Wiener Dog Races. Jen Classic noticed that there were some people watching the races from a sparsely populated gallery, so we made our way up there.

Here's a picture if you think this was some elaborate troll about wiener dog races.

Apparently, too, wiener dogs are known by some other name sometimes, but I'm not one of your highfalutin' professors of dog-ology, so I couldn't tell you.

Then we went home and had some falafel and couscous and watched a little Avatar. Lily had a bit of tantrum, and while that's always embarassing, I'm sometimes kind of of grateful for it too, so my friends don't think we have this perfect little child.

Kenobi Jen was supposed to show me a good Matt Smith episode, but she was unable to find one, so we skipped it for now. Lily went to bed and got a bedtime story from all three grownups. Jen and Jen and I played a little Taboo, which was fun, (We didn't have the buzzer, so we just took turns reading off the cards) and we watched some Freaks and Geeks and I remembered why I fell in love with the show.

On Sunday, we went to Jen's church. She had a meeting before the service started, so Kenobi Jen and Lily and I walked around a local cemetery. Lily read three paragraphs of rules off the sign before losing interest, which is about two paragraphs more than most people.

We were at this particular service because it was their annual blessing of the animals. Because this was a Unitarian Church, in addition to the usual cats and dogs and birds, parishioners brought shoggoths and byakhee and mi-go. Somebody even brought Ghroth, but he had to stay out in the foyer.

It was a pretty fun visit. I'm glad that Jen was able to make it to see us.

Hard Questions

I'm watching a show called The Secret Life of the American Teenager on Netflix with Jen. I can't decide if I like it or not. On one hand, it's got Molly Ringwald. On the other hand, it's got all the nuance of a very special Blossom. So I don't know. It is occasionally pretty funny though. The gist of the first season is that after after this one time in Band Camp, fifteen year old Amy becomes pregnant. The rest of the series deals with the fallout. The other main character, Ben, falls head over heels in love with her.

I like Ben because he's so painfully earnest. Do you remember the first episode of How I met your Mother, when Ted tells Robin that he loves her on their first date? Ben's like that, but with fifteen years less maturity.

And I do feel a certain kinship with him because of that. I had a crush on Jen from almost the first moment I met her. She kissed me before I kissed her, but I'm the first one who said "I love you," about a week after we started dating. And she wasn't ready to say it back to me then.

But Jen's always been more mature than I am. We started dating in her final year of college, and this was before email was truly ubiquitous. So we sent a lot of letters back and forth. I remember telling her that I wanted to hold her and comfort her and protect her from the world. And Jen said that she didn't want to be protected, that she wanted to experience everything the world had to offer.

And she was right. She usually is about these things. I like to think my heart was in the right place, but she is my peer and it's not my place to protect her from anything. And this brings us to the current day. My stepmother's father passed away last night and I had to tell Lily.

We've had deaths in the family since she was born, but she was too young to understand them. We had visited my great-aunt in the hospital shortly before she died. Lily gave her a stuffed animal "So you can be happy after I leave." And Aunt Mickey died and Lily didn't ask about her again. (She didn't ask about Tigger either, which was fortunate, because it was destroyed along with the rest of Mickey's stuff.)

This ties back with what I had said earlier about wanting to protect Jen and her rejection of that. I'm not the kind of dad I thought I would be. I want to protect Lily, of course, but that's secondary to the role of teaching her to protect herself.

I always try to be honest with her. I think it's the worst betrayal you can make against your kids not to be honest with them. That's not to say that there aren't questions that I'm not ready to answer. ("I like this episode of Avatar." "Me too, Lily." "Daddy, what do you look like naked?" (Pause) "Same as I do now, just with no clothes.")

I've often compared myself to ELIZA, the proto-chatterbot therapist, and I'll not infrequently respond to her with "What do you think?" and "Why?"

So I went into her room and asked, "Do you remember Nana's dad?"

Lily: Yes. Why? Did he die?
Me: Yes, he did Lily.
Lily: (Pause) Is her mom still alive?
Me: Yes, she is.
Lily: That's good. She won't be so lonely.

She looked like she was going to cry, but didn't. She didn't know him very well, but she knows Nana and she loves her, so she was sad for her. She said that she wants to go to the cemetery and put eight flowers next to his stone. I told her that sometimes people leave pebbles on top of the stones to let other people know they've been there. She suggested maybe that we should build a crown of pebbles on top of his stone, so Nana will laugh and not feel so sad.

Science is Real

The highlight of our weekend was a trip to a local science expo. It had a bunch of local exhibitors, including Lafayette College, which had a sign that was not printed out, but rather lettered with black magic marker, which didn't exactly scream "prestigious engineering school" to me.

Lily posed in front of a dinosaur made out of balloons  and someone dropped a balloon-cage model of graphene from the ceiling around kids.

"We are the tiny dinosaurs!"

There were even some non-balloon-related activities. One was at a booth from the Da Vinci center. Kids could put a cube of dry ice into a genie lamp and deliver some water via a pipet, and the vapor would come out of the nozzle. I thought that was pretty neat, but the woman talking to her called it an "experiment".

That kind of bothered me, because I do try to speak with precision and part of the problem with the debate over global warming is that the general public uses "Theory" to mean something very different than the scientific community and the differences in understanding between the two uses has allowed Creationism a lot more traction than it deserves.

I think They Might Be Giants said it best:

"A scientific theory isn't just a hunch or guess--it's more like a question that's been put through a lot of tests."

I can't find the book right now (which is the story of my life), but I think it was Carl Sagan in his excellent book, "The Demon-Haunted World"  (Though it could also have been Richard Feynman's biography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!") that an exhibitor with thousands of dollars of scientific equipment who does a gee-whiz presentation isn't really performing an experiment, but somebody who flicks a light switch on to see if it works is.

And let's back up a bit. The books I mentioned aren't scientific works. They're for popular consumption. But they do make some of the most eloquent and compelling arguments I've ever read for the use of critical thinking in everyday life. Back when I first started dating Jen, I looked through one of her textbooks. Now Jen comes from more of an educational background and I come from more of a scientific one. I criticized the book because I thought the concepts were oversimplified, and she rebutted that it was for kids, and the purpose wasn't to provide an exhaustive education on the subject, but to expose them to it, give them a grounding and cultivate that sense of wonder. And as is so often the case in our relationship, Jen was right.

So that's the purpose of the Expo, and I'm not going to criticize DaVinci too hard for that flub. It was a little bit sloppy, but talking to a five-year-old isn't writing for a peer-reviewed journal.

And I'm pleased with Lily's sense of wonder. She really tries to figure things out. Her grandmother bought her a little dolphin-headed grabber from a local store the other week. And Lily was looking at it one evening and suddenly exclaimed that she had figured out how it worked, and proceeded to explain it in breathless detail. "There's a wire attached to the handle inside and it pulls on the rubber band, and that's hooked on the other end on the inside of the mouth..."

In Chapter 2 of  his excellent book  "Why People Believe Weird Things" Michael Shermer recounts the story of a dig with Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana:

The initial stage was "getting the fossils out of the ground; the second was to look at the fossils, study them, make hypotheses based on what we saw and try to prove or disprove them"..."Paleontology is not an experimental science; it's an historical science," Horner explained. "This means that paleontologists are seldom able to test their hypotheses by laboratory experiments, but they can still test them"  How?

In 1981 Horner discovered a site in Montana that contained approximately thirty million fossil fragments of Maiasaur bones, from which he concluded "at a conservative estimate, we had discovered the tomb of ten thousand dinosaurs"... The hypothesizing began with a question: "What could such a deposit represent?" There was no evidence that predators had chewed the bones, yet many were broken in half, lengthwise. Further, the bones were all arranged from east to west—the long dimension of the bone deposit. Small bones had been separated from bigger bones, and there were no bones of baby Maiasaurs, just those of Maiasaurs between nine and twenty three feet long. The find revealed more questions than answers. What would cause the bones to splinter lengthwise? Why would the small bones be separated from the big bones? Was this one giant herd, all killed at the same time, or was it a dying ground over many years?

An early hypothesis that a mudflow buried the herd alive was rejected as "it didn't make sense that even the most powerful flow of mud could break bones lengthwise ... nor did it make sense that a herd of living animals buried in mud would end up with all their skeletons disarticulated." Applying the hypothetico-deductive method, Horner formulated a second hypothesis: "It seemed that there had to be a twofold event, the dinosaurs dying in one incident and the bones being swept away in another." Since there was a layer of volcanic ash a foot and a half above the bone bed, volcanic activity was implicated in the death of the herd. Deduction: because the fossil bones split only lengthwise, the damage to the bones came long after the event that caused death, which might have been a volcanic eruption, especially since volcanoes "were a dime a dozen in the Rockies back in the late Cretaceous." Conclusion: "A herd of Maiasaura were killed by the gases, smoke and ash of a volcanic eruption. And if a huge eruption killed them all at once, then it might have also killed everything else around," including scavengers or predators. Then perhaps there was a flood, maybe from a breached lake, that carried the rotting bodies downstream, separated the big bones from the small bones (which are lighter), and gave them a uniform orientation. "Finally the ash, being light, would have risen to the top in this slurry, as it settled, just as the bones sank to the bottom." What about the baby Maiasaurs? "Perhaps the babies of that year were still in the egg or in nests when the volcano erupted, or perhaps nesting had not even begun." But what about babies from the previous season who would now be juveniles? Horner admits "that nobody knows for sure that these dinosaurs would have produced young each year"

Even in the first stage of a dig while fossils are being released from their rocky shroud, the hypothetico-deductive method is constantly applied. When I arrived at Horner's camp, I expected to find the busy director of a fully sponsored dig barking out orders to his staff. I was surprised to come upon a patient historical scientist sitting cross-legged before a cervical vertebra from a 140-million-year-old Apatosaurus and wondering just what to make of it. Soon a reporter from a local paper arrived (apparently a common occurrence as no one took notice) and inquired of Horner what this discovery meant for the history of dinosaurs. Did it change any of his theories? Where was the head? Was there more than one body at this site? And so on. Horner's answers were consistent with those of the cautious scientist: "I don't know yet." Beats me." "We need more evidence." "We'll have to wait and see."

That's what each of us in our own way, Jen, me, the people from Da Vinci, are trying to teach Lily. If something doesn't make sense to you, don't give up! Keep poking at it until it does.

And on Saturday, right after the show, when Jen was taking care of something and Lily and I were taking a walk, Lily was examining her Pez dispenser and she started telling me about how that worked. I'm happy that she really wants to understand the world around her, and when faced with something she doesn't immediately understand, she doesn't throw up her hands and say "Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can't explain that!" but instead  starts working on an explanation that matches what she sees. 

I think Lily's been doing this just because she has a kid's natural curiosity about the world. Jen thinks she's been doing it because I've been encouraging it and she likes the attention it brings. Which one of us is right? I don't know yet.

We need more evidence.

We'll have to wait and see...

Happy Holidays

I've been doing my part in the War on Christmas. I never understood the rage among certain people when they are addressed with that phrase.

I always said "Happy Holidays" when I worked retail. I didn't know what someone might be celebrating and that way I covered all my bases. I'm an atheist and have been for a long time, but I like Christmas. I exchange gifts. Look, I even got my wife a hula hoop.

She was so surprised!

I was raised Christian, and most of the people in my personal life are also nominally Christian, so I tend to wish people a Merry Christmas these days.

(Though there is one woman at work who is so aggressive in her hatred of the phrase "Happy Holidays" that she'll try to get store clerks fired if they say it to her. I always go out of my way to wish her "happy holidays".)

It's weird seeing these people standing up to defend their right to shout Merry Christmas. I mentioned in an earlier post about this guy online taking a brave stance by speaking out about Nazis. Sure, gutsy for 1942 Berlin, but today, not so much. And likewise, white middle class Christians aren't an oppressed minority. Nobody's trampling on your rights by wishing you happy holidays.

Pictured above: Not you

Political correctness has never been anything but a straw man. Are there people out there who really believe that we atheists descend into an incoherent rage when someone wishes us a Merry Christmas? I'll grow mildly aggravated if someone says "I'm praying for you" as a deliberate provocation, but mostly I accept Christmas wishes in the spirit they were offered.

A Burns for All Seasons

I was going to call this post "A Book BURNing for All Seasons", but I thought the reference in the title was already pretty obscure. (Except to Greg: "Boo-urns! Boo-urns!")

So, the Dove World Outreach Center, the little church with the Orwellian name, plans to burn a copy of the Qur'an on September 11th. I'm not sure why, but I think it's something along the lines of "sending a message to those who attacked us".

The President has asked them not to proceed with the burning, asking the pastor to listen to his better angels and saying "You know, part of this country's history is people doing destructive or offensive or harmful things. And yet, we still have to make sure that we're following the laws. And that's part of what I love about this country".

I've criticized Obama for too tepid a response on any number of things, but I think this is exactly the right proper way to act. He hasn't mobilized the National Guard, he hasn't urged Congress to make the act illegal. He has said, as one human being to another, "Dude, it's not against the law, but don't be an asshole."

I'm a fairly strong atheist, but I manage not to be a dick about it, so I get along fine with most people of different faiths. I think it's abhorrent that someone wants to burn the Qur'an, but when you start banning distasteful activities for nebulous public safety reasons, that's a slippery slope.

Every now and again, the issue of a Flag Burning amendment comes up and every time, I remember what Rep. John Conyers said about such a law, that it "elevates a symbol of freedom over freedom itself,"

I don't know if Voltaire originated the quote or merely credited with popularizing it, but "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

I'll leave you with a quote from A Man for All Seasons:

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get at the Devil?

Roper: I`d cut down every law in England to do that.

More: "... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

.

Memento Mori

My Grammy's sister-in-law, the woman I called Aunt Mickey, passed away at about 4:30 yesterday afternoon. We had visited her in the hospital on the 14th, and I'd been meaning to call about checking in on her, but there was always something to do, so I never got around to it. The nurse called my Grammy to say that Aunt Mickey was in bad shape, and then called again before Grammy could even leave for the hospital to tell her that Mickey was gone.

We don't know if there will be a service yet. She's being cremated and her family lives out in Texas. She was 94 years old and refused the surgery that would have prolonged her life, so this wasn't really unexpected, but the speed with which she went was surprising.

I'm sad that she's gone, but I think 94 years, that's a good run, right? And then I think of Neil Gaiman, "You get what anyone gets - you get a lifetime."

I feel sad for my Grammy. In the past forty years, she's seen her huge extended family dwindle away to nothing. I have an unusual last name and if you google it now, it seems all that you get are obits.

In the Farewell to Arms, Hemingway says, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Grammy says that he's not going to let this get her down, but she been so strong for so long that I worry about how much more of this she can bear.

The other person about whom I have concerns is Lily. She gave her little stuffed Tigger to Mickey "So you can be happy after I leave." She doesn't think much about Mickey and would probably not bring her up unprompted, but when she was talking about sleeping over at Grammy's, she thought that they would need three beds, because she was under the impression that Mickey lived with Grammy. I don't want her thinking that a hospital is a place where people go to die.

I'm torn. On one hand, as an atheist, there are certain things I can't say to comfort her. But my father has already indoctrinated her with the idea of heaven where Jesus is up there playing with her dead hamster. I don't want to have an exchange where I say, "Lily, I have some sad news. Aunt Mickey has died." "Is she up in heaven with Jesus?" And then what? "No, she's just dead"? "This is the really real world and there ain't no coming back"?

So I'm tempted to just not bring up the topic. But then I think of A Minor Variation by Billy Joel, with its line, "No way to win when you've already been forgotten." I think of Roy Batty "All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." I believe the best way to honor the dead is to remember them. I liked Aunt Mickey a lot, and it just seems a betrayal of that to forget about her just to make my life a little easier.

I'll remember her here for a little bit while I consider what to do.

Mickey was those people who reach equilibrium early, and looked much the same at 60 as she did at 90.

They would visit my grandparents right up until their various medical issues prevented it, and I was always knew when they were in town by the KEN - MIC vanity plates on the car parked outside the house.

I always loved looking at the black and white pictures of my Grammy and Pop and Kenny and Mickey from the 50s and 60s, looking young and slim and healthy, with all the Mad Men area accoutrements littering the photos, the fancy standing ashtrays and Kenny's thick rocket scientist glasses, the same ones he'd wear 50 years later.

I think, as a compromise, I will hang these few words here, and when Lily is old enough, she can return to them and remember.

Everything I need to know, I learned on Tralfamadore

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Listen: No, he hasn't.

I mean, Jesus Christ, how hard is this to understand?

I bring this up because whoever wrote the wikipedia entry about Slaughterhouse-Five seemed to think it was a book about time travel and aliens, even going to the length of editing out any mention of alternate interpretations.

I first encountered the book in high school, and read it and didn't see what the big deal was. Then I found it again as an adult and thought that it was the saddest thing I had ever read.

Here is this boy, shipped off to World War II. He sees horrors that he can't understand, but he survives and returns home and settles down and forgets about it. But he can't really forget, and when his wife dies, he simply goes very quietly insane, because that's the only way he can make sense of anything any more. He doesn't want to live in a world where his wife is dead, so he creates one.

Hemingway said: "The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills - it kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave, impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry."

Vonnegut said: "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

I was thinking of Issac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut lately. We don't seem to have a lot of high profile atheists any more. We've got Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers and both are pretty awesome, but they don't shape a generation like their predecessors did. Meyers has a reputation for abrasiveness. I like his blog and I thought something he wrote was particularly illuminating:

Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says "Bless you!" after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they're all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don't rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It's just not right...There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don't all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

We were talking about Mister Rogers in a previous post, and I can't think of a more unlikely pair than a mild-mannered Presbyterian minister, and a famously prickly atheist but you know, they're both saying the same thing here. If someone is telling a destructive lie, it is your responsibility to stand up and point that out.

By the way, I know your path has been tried and so, it may seem like the way to go. Me, I'd rather be found trying something new.

Shout out to The Offspring! I like the Offspring. Probably one of the few things I'd agree on with all of my brothers. And even if you're not a fan, who doesn't love listening to them providing the soundtrack during a good game of Crazy Taxi?

I'll return to the Offspring in a minute. In apparently unrelated news, somebody who works as a contractor for my company was on Jeopardy! on Tuesday night. I told Lily that he was one of my work friends. (He wasn't, exactly. He was actually a contractor who occasionally works with my company and is apparently kind of a jerk, but that was more information than she needed.) She was intrigued and wanted to know how real people get on TV.

She knows that most of the stuff on television is pretend, and I touched on this with Ancker in the comments section of a previous note, where he said "God and prayer = bad. Dreamcatcher to catch bad dreams = good. Got it." and my reply read in part "I don't see any benefit to saying "THAT'S NOT REAL!"

And I don't. I don't want to give her sharply delineated lines of what is possible and what is not at this age. The last thing I want to do is throttle her sense of wonder right out of her. Just the same, there are certain pernicious beliefs that I don't want to encourage. (And nothing fills me with more NERDRAGE!!! than someone shutting down debate on some aromatherapy cures cancer/Atlantian crystal healing fantasy with the "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" line from Hamlet. Some things are just plain bullshit) But on the whole, just because she doesn't have the exact same ideas about how the world works as I do, it doesn't mean there's a problem. To paraphrase the philosophers in the Offspring, she's got to go make her own mistakes.

Anyways, I told her that real people get on TV the same way videos of her get on the computer. Somebody makes a movie of them with a camera and then that movie is played back on the TV. She had no follow up questions, so I guess that was a satisfactory answer.

But who knows? I once heard a story that applies to this. I thought it is was a really apt analogy, and I copied it from from wherever I originally read it.

Elmar Schmeisser, who practices Shotokan karate, has a great image that relates to this problem. Picture the task of learning a martial art as the process of carving a cube into a sphere. In the beginning, you have few corners, and they are easy to see. As you cut off those corners, you create a whole bunch more corners. From the perspective of the intermediate student, there comes a time when all you can see is corners; your ability to spot the flaws in your technique increases much faster than your ability to correct those flaws. At the same time, a beginner looking at you may see a close approximation of a sphere; they're not good enough themselves to see the flaws in your technique, while you may be ready to give up because you feel you're getting worse instead of better. (Paraphrased from a thread on karatethejapaneseway.com )

Sometimes, parenting seems that way. But usually, it's pretty good. And we've got a lot of time to get it right.

Apocalypso

I could have gone with It's the End of the World as We Know It for a music-themed end-of-the world title, but I thought that was too easy.

I have two friends named Jeremy (Frederick and the Lord), each of whom who have worn eye-patches in LARPs. One of them is cool and the other is not. I always leave this ambiguous so each can think that he is the cool one.

Frederick was home alone (Ahhhh!!!) for the weekend, so he invited some friends over. I was the only one who could make it, so I headed over after work on Friday. We got some food to eat at the local pizza joint, and settled down to watch "Bender's Game", the Futurama movie where Bender is institutionalized after going insane when playing Dungeons & Dragons. It never rose to the transcendent awesomeness of Futurama at its peak, but it was pretty fun, with lots of gaming in-jokes. Favorite lines: When Fry sees Bender has lost it because of role-playing, he falls to his knees and wails "When will young people learn that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" doesn't make you cool!", "I know not of this "Bender"! I am Titanius Anglesmith, Fancy Man of Cornwood!" Honorable mention to Rosie the Robot Maid, receiving therapy in the HAL Institute for Insane Robots: "Everything must be clean. Very clean. That's why the dog had to die. He was a dirty dog. Dirty. Dirty. Also that boy Elroy. Dirty. Dirty."

I watched while Frederick played some Red Dead Revolution and then we both killed a bunch of zombies in Left 4 Dead 2. The plan was for Dave to come over after he was done with his patchouli-fest, but Frederick left his phone upstairs when we went back down to watch another movie and Ancker texted him, but not me at quarter past two, so we missed that entirely. The text was only to say that he couldn't make it, so I don't feel too badly.

We wound up watching the Book of Eli.

SPOILERS FOLLOW, so Frederick, don't read until you've seen it all the way through.

The gist of the movie is that a lone wanderer (Denzel Washington) is transporting a mysterious book westward across a post apocalyptic wasteland. I have an enormous amount of respect for Mila Kunis, as she's a non-native English speaker who now speaks the language better than I do, but she just seems miscast for this movie. Gary Oldman plays a crime lord with his characteristic restraint and understatement and Jennifer Beals has it going on as Mila Kunis's mom.


S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S





Plot Twist One: Eli is blind.

Post Twist Two: The book he is transporting is the bible.

There are hints to both early on and I do think they are both handled pretty well. I knew about the bible, but I was almost a third of the way through the movie before I figured out that he was blind. Denzel does a good job of selling it, but not over-selling it.

It reminds me of Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury, where the lead character was also a blind badass. I think Blind Fury did a better job of remembering that its main character couldn't see. Hauer's Nick was amazingly competent, but still blind and had difficulties with things that you and I would take for granted. My favorite scene is at the end, where Hauer is dueling with a hired gun. He's lost his sword cane, and his sidekick throws it to him. "Catch, Uncle Nick!" The cane flies through the air in slow motion, and Hauer reaches for it, but misses it by yards. Contrast this with BoE, where Denzel Washington has such an acute sense of smell that he's picking guys off a rooftop with a handgun.

That said, I think it's still more realistic than the revelation that he's carrying the very last bible in the world. I'm an atheist and I've been calling myself one for years, but I still own three or four bibles, and Jen has several of her own. Before I started looking into this, I had assumed that there were millions in circulation, but after looking into it, it looks like the number is closer to Billions. I really find it less of a stretch that a blind man could fight his way across the continental United States than the possibility that we would ever get down to just one bible. (There's a line that Gary Oldman gives about the fact that books were burned in the past, in an effort to justify this, but the first scene we see with Eli, he's scavenging from an undespoiled private home. Since almost every household in America has at least one bible, I just can't buy into this.)

I find it a little bit...I don't want to say offensive, so let's say naive, that the lessons in the bible are ones around which society can be rebuilt. There are some good messages in the bible, but there are also a lot of horrifying wickedness passed off as good advice too. And the culture was different then, and the books of the bible are by no means all bad, but I wholly reject the assumption that it is needed in order to lead a moral life or to have a functioning society.

And while we're on the subject of post-apocalypticia, I came across my new favorite song: "We Will Become Silhouettes" It's a cheery little upbeat ditty about life after a nuclear holocaust. When I first saw it the video, I thought it was from the 80s, the era of incomprehensible music videos and nuclear paranoia, but apparently the album is from in 2005. If Tim's brother ever gets a cell phone, this is totally going to be his ringtone. It's neat, and will be joining Seasons in the Sun and I Will Never Forget on my playlist of songs that sound happy, but really aren't.

We fell asleep at about four in the morning, then we got up and went to Tic Toc for breakfast. I was a little sad to see that they are no longer actually twenty-four hours, despite pasting that claim on their placemats and on the large sign outside. Ah, well. Sic transit gloria mundi.