Category Archives: Popular culture

Feb 06

Smartpost

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I’m obsessive about package tracking, and even more so with my most recent purchase, my long-awaited Kindle. I’ve had a lot of fun on Facebook joking about the circuitous route, although in reality most of the package services use hub-based systems that result in similar long routes.

But the past few things I’ve ordered from Amazon under “super saver shipping” have come by way of a service called FedEx Smartpost. I’ve looked this up, and I’m not sure I understand it completely. It’s a service offered by FedEx Ground by which they pick up packages, drive them cross country, and then drop them off at a postal distribution center, so that the final delivery to the customer is handled by the Post Office.

This would make no sense for you or me – there would be no benefit in sending a package by FedEx Ground from here to Memphis, and then paying for it to be mailed by USPS from Memphis to Cincinnati. For me, as an individual USPS consumer, Shelbyville to Cincinnati and Shelbyville to Memphis are the same price, so I wouldn’t save any money on the USPS portion of the trip by mailing the package to Memphis instead of Cincinnati. Then, after mailing the package to Memphis, I’d have to pay FedEx Ground for its part of the trip. I would be paying twice for the same service. As an individual consumer, I could make out much more cheaply by using only one carrier – let’s say, the US Postal Service – to mail the package directly from Shelbyville to Cincinnati (however the post office decides to route the package is their business, not mine).

But this hybrid service must make sense financially for Amazon, and other such customers, or else they wouldn’t be using it. I’m assuming, therefore, that Amazon and/or FedEx is getting some sort of discount from USPS in return for dropping off large volumes of pre-sorted mail directly at postal distribution centers, saving USPS a lot of work. That discount would have to be pretty steep — more than enough to make up for what FedEx Ground is charging for the first half of the trip, so that the total cost to Amazon is less than it would cost to use either FedEx Ground or USPS separately.

My paternal grandfather, who died when I was about five or six years old, worked for the Post Office. He was head of parcel post at the downtown Nashville post office, which is now the site of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. I wonder what he’d think of this new world of package delivery.

Feb 05

The whole eBible

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I want to put a Bible on my Kindle – I’ve got room for 1,500 books, after all – but I seem to have a dilemma, and it’s a surprising one, given the popularity of the Kindle in the past year or two.

The Bible translations I’d use most often – the New Revised Standard Version, which is used in a lot of official United Methodist literature, or the most recent update of the New International Version – are available for Kindle, but according to the reviews they don’t have e-reader-friendly navigation. There are some other Kindle Bibles that do have good navigation, making it easy to look up a chapter and verse, but they don’t come in any of the translations I like. There are also some specialty NIV Bibles that cost more than I’m looking to spend right now or that are organized in special ways, including the Passages NIV e-Bible that has the readings broken up so that you can follow along with the Daily Audio Bible. As a DAB listener, I may get the Passages Bible eventually, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.

I have ordered a Holman Christian Standard Bible for free; I’ve heard them use that translation on DAB from time to time, although I’m not too familiar with it otherwise. But I really want HarperCollins or Zondervan to get on the stick and create a great, reasonably-priced NRSV or NIV e-edition.
Feb 04

Rod Serling, you got some ‘splainin to do

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The A.V. Club has been reviewing episodes of the original, classic “Twilight Zone,” and this week’s review is something unique: an episode of “The Twilight Zone” hosted by Desi Arnaz instead of Rod Serling.

Sort of.

Serling wrote a script called “The Time Element” as a pilot to pitch “The Twilight Zone” to CBS, but the network wasn’t interested. Eventually, the script ended up in the hands of a producer who worked for Lucy and Desi, and was produced as an episode of “The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse,” an anthology series created and hosted by Lucy and Desi (in this case, just Desi) Desi. The episode was relatively successful, enough so that CBS took a second look at Serling’s proposal.

Here it is, in parts:

Feb 02

Not so mysterious

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This post will contain a spoiler for the classic Jules Verne novel “The Mysterious Island.” In some ways, it’s such common knowledge that it’s not truly a spoiler, which as you will see is part of the point of my post. Anyway, if you plan to read the novel any time soon, I don’t want to be accused of ruining it for you, so just move along.

When I downloaded “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” as explained here, I only meant to test out the Kindle reading app on my smartphone. I figured that, once I had seen how that app worked, I would set the novel aside, and finish it once I got my actual Kindle.

But I have such fond memories of the novel from my childhood that once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop. The free public-domain Kindle version uses the oldest English translation, which is in some places inaccurate and which supposedly cuts out some material; one of these days I’ll spend the money to buy one of the more recent translations, which are supposed to be far superior. But I still loved the novel, and I could not stop reading it, even on my little smartphone screen.

Anyway, while biding my time until this weekend (when my tax refund will arrive and I will be able to order a Kindle), I decided to downolad a second public-domain Jules Verne novel, “The Mysterious Island.” The current movie “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” a sequel to 2009′s “Journey To The Center of the Earth,” is not a straight adaptation but rather a modern-day “inspired by” twist on the story, including, as far as I can tell, some meta references to the novel.

Anyway — and here’s the spoiler — the reason I decided to download “The Mysterious Island” is because it continues the story of Captain Nemo from “Twenty Thousand Leagues.” I thought that was widely known; I’d certainly seen references to it, well, everywhere.

But it turns out that Nemo doesn’t show up until the last 10 percent of the book (thank you, Kindle progress indicator!), and his identity is clearly meant to be a surprise. I sort of wish I hadn’t known ahead of time he was going to show up — but then again, if I hadn’t known it, I wouldn’t have read the novel in the first place.

I have to say, “The Mysterious Island” is inferior to “Twenty Thousand Leagues” in almost every way. “Twenty Thousand Leagues” has four sharply-drawn and memorable characters, and although Verne has a little bit of florid description, for the most part we learn about them by the way they speak and act.

“The Mysterious Island,” on the other hand, is full of Verne telling us — and having the characters tell each other — what great, heroic, amazing fellows they all are. Don’t get me wrong; I like heroes. I like larger-than-life characters. I think we need more of them. But Verne spends more time telling us what a remarkable and amazing fellow Cyrus Harding* is than he does letting Harding be remarkable or amazing. Verne also overpraises Harding’s supporting cast, even though they sometimes give the impression that they wouldn’t know how to boil water without Harding to guide them. Even the dog, Top, is praised as having intelligence and loyalty worthy of Lassie — which would be fine if this were a story about Top, but in this case it’s just excess upon excess. When you have five superhuman characters, a superhuman dog, a superhuman orangutan, and a pirate who goes through a superhuman process of remorse and redemption, and they’re the only characters for two-thirds of the book, it becomes a bit much. And when antagonists finally show up, they’re pretty much faceless non-entities, shooting at our heroes from a distance. That’s not larger-than-life, it’s over-the-top.

The five main characters, plus the dog, are marooned on an island in the South Pacific. Shipwrecked, you assume? Why, no. They use a balloon to escape from a Confederate prison in Richmond, Va., and are blown by a storm southwest across North America and into the most remote region of the South Pacific.

They set about using their superhuman skills to make their island paradise so comfortable that they have no real intention of leaving, except perhaps to go and retrieve their families and bring them back. This takes away the primary challenge and motivation for a castaway story. (In all their chattering about how much they love their island home, they never once mention the absence of the opposite sex, which makes you wonder.)

There’s also a queasy situation as regards race relations. Reading novels from an earlier era is always a balancing act; you have to take them as documents of their own time. But sometimes, the treatment of race or gender becomes so intrusive that it impacts your enjoyment of the novel.

In “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” two of the main characters are Prof. Aronnax and his manservant Conseil. Conseil’s unswerving, completely selfless devotion to Prof. Aronnax, to the point of casting himself overboard at one point after Aronnax falls overboard, sounds a little bit, well, unhealthy to our modern sensibilities, but you’re able to set it aside for the most part. It’s certainly not the only such relationship in classic literature.

Well, there’s a similar master-servant relationship in “The Mysterious Island,” and in this case it’s between Cyrus Harding, late of the Union Army in the Civil War, and Nebuchadnezzar, or “Neb,” as he’s known, a former slave freed by Harding. Neb has the same sort of devotion to Harding that Conseil has to Aronnax, but given Neb’s past, and Harding’s devotion to the Union cause, it seems just bizarre. Neb even refers to Harding as “my master,” at least in the English translation I read, and it gave me the willies. (Perhaps the original French approached the relationship with more subtlety.)

The book is not without its charms, don’t get me wrong, and there are parts of it I enjoyed. But it’s nowhere near the classic story of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.”

*According to Wikipedia, Cyrus’ last name is Smith instead of Harding in some translations. I like the name “Cyrus Harding” better, however, and that’s what was used in the Kindle translation.

Jan 24

Late to the party

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“The Big Bang Theory” was one of those shows that I always thought sounded like it might be funny but which I never got around to watching. And then, when CBS put it up against one of my favorite shows, the ratings-challenged “Community” on NBC, I sort of didn’t want to watch it.

But now, TBS runs reruns of it before Conan, and I started catching the last few minutes of it. And then I started watching whole episodes. So, yes, I’ve now become the very last geek in America to enjoy “The Big Bang Theory.”

Jan 23

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

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I have pretty much decided to take a little of my tax refund, in a week or two, and treat myself to the $79 entry-level Amazon Kindle.

Anyway, noodling around the Amazon site in wishful anticipation, I decided to try downloading the Kindle app to my smartphone, just to see how it works and so that I’d already have a Kindle account set up. A smartphone screen is not ideal for long-term reading (as I will point out in a newspaper column about the Kindle platform later in the week), but it actually works quite a bit better than I anticipated.

In order to have a book in my new account, I went to the list of public-domain classics available for free download. My choice was a simple one: “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne. One of my favorite books as a child, and one I dearly wish I still had, was a terrific annotated edition of this classic. In the margins of the book, the editors would provide helpful definitions and illustrations of the many places and different types of aquatic life mentioned in the book, and would point out passages in which Verne predicted technology that would not exist until decades after the 1870 novel was published.

Anyway, I hadn’t read the book in years, and it seemed like something I’d enjoy revisiting. I started reading it on the smartphone, just to see how it worked, and I’ve gotten about a third of the way through the book just this evening.

I also downloaded the free sample of my own Bad Self-Published Novel, which is available on Kindle. When I get the device, I’ll probably spring for the actual novel, knowing that I’ll eventually get back some of the purchase price. To my knowledge, even though the novel has been available on Kindle since the get-go, I haven’t sold any Kindle copies of it.
Jan 19

A cosmic code name

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I sometimes listen to “The Dead Authors Podcast,” a somewhat goofy enterprise in which Paul F. Tompkins (in character as author H.G. Wells) employs a time machine to interview other well-known authors of the past.  Emily Dickinson was played by Andy Richter, if that gives you any idea.

The podcast is apparently largely-improvised, in front of a live audience, and it can be hit or miss but is sometimes quite funny.

Anyway, the most recent episode featured Matt Gourley as astronomer Carl Sagan. In the course of the conversation, “Wells” and “Sagan” mentioned a legal dispute between Carl Sagan and Apple Computer which some in the audience might have assumed to be a joke concocted by Tompkins and Gourley, despite Gourley’s insistence that it was a true story.

It was, in point of fact, a true story. In the world of technology, internal code names, the names given to software packages or new devices while they’re still under development, and perhaps while the marketing people are still undecided about their actual names, are no longer secret. In fact, they’re often widely discussed in the media. Android 4.0 is well-known as “Ice Cream Sandwich,” for example.

Well, in the mid-1990s, it became widely known that Apple’s internal code name for what would become the Power Macintosh 7100 was “Carl Sagan.” The designers meant it as a compliment, no doubt – a reference to Sagan’s intelligence – but Sagan was concerned that people would think he was endorsing the computer and asked the company to stop using the name. The company agreed, and the annoyed designers picked a new internal code name: “BHA.”

For “Butt-head Astronomer.”

Well, that led, not to a request, but a lawsuit: Sagan accused the company of libel. He lost the early stages of the battle –  satire is not libel, as long as it’s self-evidently satire, and people would reasonably know not to take it seriously. But Apple decided to settle the case anyway rather than continue to fight through the appeals process. The designers then picked their third and final code name for the computer: LAW, for “Lawyers Are Wimps.”

Jan 17

Another thing

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I bought a book from the bargain bin at Walmart the other day; I wasn’t sure if I would care for it, but I really had little choice but to take a look.

The book is “And Another Thing ….” by Eoin Colfer. I’ll review it further below, but first I have to explain why I was skeptical of it, and yet why I absolutely had to buy it.

I was in college when I first read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams, which had been published the previous year. It immediately became, and remains, one of my favorites.

The book started life as a BBC radio serial and was then adapted for a British TV series. Later, it was made into a big-budget 2005 movie, well-cast but clunky. (Still, it has Zooey Deschanel at her most adorable.) But for me, it will always be a series of books. Adams wrote five of them: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” “Life, The Universe and Everything,” “So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish,” and “Mostly Harmless.” He also wrote a short story, “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe,” which was included in a massive volume combining the first four books (and a later, updated version combining all five).

If you’re not aware of “Hitchhiker’s,” it’s a skewering of science fiction tropes with a very Monty Python-like sense of humor. That’s no accident: Douglas Adams was one of only two outside writers to receive a screen credit during the run of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Adams also served as story editor for “Doctor Who” for a few years. I had always assumed that “Doctor Who” helped inspire “Hitchhikers,” but it turns out that Adams had already written the original radio serial before his tenure at “Doctor Who.”

Anyway, the first book, like the radio serial, begins with Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered BBC employee, receiving a bit of bad news. He first discovers that his house is supposed to be torn down to make room for a new highway; but then his friend Ford Prefect shows up to give him bigger, but eerily parallel, news: Ford is an alien, who’s been living undercover on Earth researching articles for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,” a sort of tablet-based encyclopedia and travel book. As if the fact that his best friend is an alien weren’t enough of a shock, Ford tells Arthur that the two of them have to leave the planet as soon as possible, because it’s about to be destroyed by a race called the Vogons in order to make room for a new hyperspace bypass.

They eventually link up with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, narcissistic, outlaw President of the Galaxy; the lovely Trillian; and Marvin, a depressed android. Trillian, nee Tricia McMillan,  turns out to be the only other surviving resident of Earth, having skipped the planet a few months before Arthur – not out of necessity but for adventure.

The first few books are a hysterical romp, and beloved by geeks far and wide. If you’ve ever heard people laugh at the number “42,” as if it were an inside joke of some sort, you’ve run across a “Hitchhiker’s Guide” fan. In the first book, a super-advanced race builds a supercomputer to tell them the ultimate answer to “life, the universe and everything.” The computer answers “42,” and then tells them that if they knew the exact wording of the question, the answer would make more sense.

The fifth book in the series, “Mostly Harmless,” ended [SPOILER ALERT!] on a down note, with the surviving major characters seemingly destroyed in a planetary cataclysm. But Adams regretted the ending, and remarked publicly that he was thinking about bringing the characters back for another book – not unusual in the world of science fiction and fantasy. (Remember Spock dying at the end of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”? And then appearing in a number of “Star Trek” movies after that?)

Sadly, Adams did not get the chance to write a sixth book. He died in May 2001, from a heart attack, at age 49 – my current age, come to think of it.

Then, a few years ago, it was announced that another writer – Eoin Colfer, better-known for young adult fiction like the Artemis Fowl series – had been commissioned, with the blessing of Adams’ widow, to produce a new “Hitchhiker’s Guide” sequel.

I recall hearing that the book had been commissioned, but I don’t think I heard anything about it after that. So I was surprised to find “And Another Thing …” in the bargain bin at Walmart. That wasn’t a good sign. But I knew that, for $3.97, I had to buy the book and at least check it out.

It’s neither as good as I’d hoped nor as bad as I’d feared. There are parts I really liked – and, frankly, I enjoyed the book as a whole more than “Mostly Harmless.” But there are other parts where Colfer seemed to be trying too hard either to imitate or avoid imitating Adams.

Then, the book comes to a screeching, and almost-unforgivable, halt when it shifts away from the main  characters to a side plot involving wealthy Earth refugees trying to start a new life on a made-to-order planet. The nominal leader of the planet is striving to set up a religion – any religion – as a way of controlling his subjects. He ends up contracting  with Thor, the Norse god of thunder, who’s been looking to redeem himself after an embarassing video went viral.

I have no problem with satire of religion, including some projects which friends and family members would think sacreligious, because in the end it’s making fun of human attitudes and preconceptions. John Cleese, last I heard, is a Buddhist, but he once remarked in an interview that it would be impossible to actually satirize Jesus because Jesus would have no flaws on which to base the comedy. “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” reviled during its original release as sacreligious, is quietly enjoyed by a lot of Christians I know because they  recognize it as making fun of us, not Jesus.

But “Life of Brian” is funny. The satire of religion in “And Another Thing ….” is so ham-handed and obvious that it feels the need to keep explaining itself. Douglas Adams was a vocal atheist, but he was also a very funny writer. Even though the humor of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series is gloriously over-the-top, I don’t think Adams would have handled  that same material in such an obvious way.

Still, the book recovers from its detour, and ends well.

I’m still not sure how I feel about it as a whole. Remember above, when I called the 2005 movie “clunky”? Well, I actually walked out of the theater liking it. (Zooey put a spell on me.) It didn’t hold up, however. My attitude towards the book may shift after I’ve let it percolate a bit.

Jan 13

God in the locker room

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I have an essay on my web site, which I occasionally tweak or update, called “God on the Playlist.” It’s sort of a statement of my personal faith.

Anyway, there’s one segment of this essay that, as a jumping-off point to something else, deals with athletes mentioning their faith. I thought that, in light of all the hubbub about Tim Tebow, it might be worth excerpting here, so as to save you from reading the whole essay:

… There has been a thread in popular culture that tends toward annoyance with anyone who talks about their faith. For example, any athlete who is open about his or her faith in locker room interviews opens the door for legions of scoffers.
“As if God cared who wins a football game!” they say. “Doesn’t God – if God even exists – have better things to worry about?”
I have a couple of responses to that.
When I first posted this essay, I wrote that I personally did not recall ever seeing an athlete claim that God wanted his or her team to win and the other team to lose. I have seen many athletes praise God for their athletic success – which is not the same thing.
Since that time, there has been at least one high-profile case in which an athlete seemed to imply that he or his team had God’s blessing. But I stand by my original argument that the vast majority of athletes who mention their faith in locker room interviews are saying nothing of the sort.
It is always appropriate, for anyone in any line of work, to thank God at all times and in all situations. If I had a good day at my chosen profession (or, in the case of amateur athletes, my chosen avocation), I would make no apologies for praising God and expressing my gratitude. That does not mean that I am deluded enough to assume that God prefers my sports team to the other team or prefers me to my individual competitors.
Tennis star Michael Chang put it this way, in another story at the CNN web site written by Blake: “Chang won the French Open in 1989 as a 17-year-old underdog. He was booed by a Parisian crowd when he thanked Jesus for his victory at the tournament’s trophy presentation.
“Chang, who now helps runs a Christian Sports League in California, says he thanked Jesus not to gloat, but to show gratitude.
“‘When I go out there and share my faith, I’m not saying God is on my side and he’s not on your side,’ Chang says. ‘The Lord loves everybody, and the Lord is on everyone’s side.’”
In fact, at many NFL games, Christian players from opposing teams meet on the field following the game for a quick celebratory prayer. These huddles are seldom shown on television – because of this same irrational attitude that any expression of personal faith is somehow tantamount to shoving Jesus down people’s throats. (To be fair, I’m sure the network would be even less likely to show such interaction between Muslim players.)
It is self-evident that these huddles, involving opponents praying together, are not based on the idea that God prefers one team to another. They are based on the idea that praise and gratitude are Christian virtues and Biblical commandments.
Objections to faith in locker-room interviews often include either a direct statement or an implication that “God has better things to worry about than a football game.” At first glance, this is quite a reasonable statement. But the extended implications of it disturb me, and I hear it even from Christians who should know better. The Bible makes it clear that God is aware of, and concerned with, not only the great matters of cosmology but with the most intimate details of earthly existence. The Bible explicitly tells us that God knows about each sparrow that falls from the sky and that God knows how many hairs are on your head.
It may be true that the CEO of McDonald’s does not know whether you ordered a large fries or a medium fries, or whether there’s toilet paper in the men’s restroom at your local McDonald’s. The CEO of McDonald’s would drive himself crazy if he had to micromanage each of the thousands of locations the chain operates around the world. But God is not a CEO. God is deity. There’s a difference. God is capable of attending to both the infinite and the intimate.
God has encouraged us to lift up all our concerns in prayer – anything that is important to us. Some of the things we pray about seem petty, and selfish, and beneath God’s purpose. Some of them are. But the funny thing about prayer is that, ideally, it becomes a dialogue. The more we pray, the better we get at it, and over time our priorities change. The dialogue must start with honesty, and I think that’s why God instructs us to bring all our cares and concerns to the holy throne.
Here’s another way of looking at it: a five-year-old may ask her daddy for a candy bar one day, a pony the next. A sixteen-year-old may ask for permission to stay out late. A woman who’s about to be married may ask for advice, some reassurance that she’s doing the right thing. Those are very different requests, with very different levels of importance. When the daughter is a child, the father may have to say “no” and may not have the chance to make the child understand why. But each request is special to the father, and the father will treasure those requests as precious memories.
The God we learn about in the Bible is infinite enough to have created the universe, but also intimate enough to have a relationship with each one of us, and to care about each of our struggles. As we grow in our faith, and our understanding of God’s plan, we may learn to ask God for more important things than our missing car keys. But God welcomes, and listens to, every request, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.

Jan 11

The Secret Life of a classic short story

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I read an entertainment column this week in which the columnist had to explain to a reader the origin of the name “Walter Mitty” for a daydreamer. The name, of course, came from something near and dear to my heart: the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” by one of America’s greatest humorists, James Thurber.

I have always wanted to give a reading of several Thurber pieces, and I’ve actually practices how I’d do some of the different voices and characters in “Mitty.” It’s one of my favorites.

Anyway, the story was made into a movie starring Danny Kaye, which – according to everything I’ve ever read – Thurber loathed. IMDb reports that Thurber offered Samuel Goldwyn $10,000 not to make the movie. Also according to IMDb, Thurber imagined his friend Robert Benchley when writing the story and thought Danny Kaye all wrong for the part.

Well, I found out from the entertainment column that the movie is going to be remade, with Ben Stiller both starring and directing. I’m guessing Thurber would like this version even less.