They’re on to me

I check the BBC News – Wales site so often that I got asked to do an opinion survey. Clearly, they’re on to my frequent cruising for another piece of gold from the Absurd/Alliterative Headline Department. Soon, I’m sure I will be recruited to join their elite ranks.

Meanwhile, the story labeled ‘Strong winds wreck campsite tents’ was the number one Welsh news story on Wednesday. Really, you guys? That was number one? You had nothing better to read about?

And there was Anger over exploded garage mess. I should think so!

Nice bit of alliteration here: New reef brings surf safety fears.

And last but not least, somebody call Arnold Schwarzenegger. Skynet is being built in Britain.

BBC Headlines: Monkey Brains/Robot Arms

Credit to Martin Roberts, who found and alerted me to the ‘Monkey’s brain controls robot arm’ story AND video on the BBC science page right now.  I can think of nothing better than bringing together the monkey and the robot in this incredibly awesome way.  

If the Ricky Gervais podcasts were still going on, I’m sure that would make it into “Monkey News.”  

BBC Headlines: Cake Poison Woman

I’m sure when Carlos Santana penned his magnum opus, “Black Magic Woman”, he never imagined that I’d be sitting at my desk humming the tune to the BBC headline about the “Cake Poison Woman.”

I’ve been following her saga since April 2nd, when I learned that the Cake poison woman pleads guilty. (Please note the picture of the cake in question, plus the caption which informs you that “blobs of the poison are clearly visible in the cake.”)

Well, today our long transatlantic nightmare finally comes to a close. “Poison cake woman spared prison”! Hurrah! Details are here.

Sadly, no more pictures of the cake in question and its little green blobs.

BBC Headlines: The Beavers are Back!

Of course, front and center, there’s a cute-cat-in-Japan article. Millions are dying from famine, natural catastrophe and senseless civil war all over the place, but it is the cat conductor on the railways that matters!

Fancy dress man ‘killed by punch’. At first, I thought it was the drink punch, but no, it is the throwing-a-fist punch. The worst part? He was dressed like a Ghostbuster.

Try to say this one quickly five times: Barbecue embers sparks grass fire.

Science probe for space pistols.

Beavers to return after 400 years. Um…where have they been all this time???

BBC Headlines: Pet Skunk Stink & Dead Fly Case

One of my favorite things to do online is a quick perusal of the BBC website for its more unusual (read: absurd) headlines. For some reason, they stick to a very strict 5-6 word headline limit, which can result in some strangely cryptic and brilliant headlines. I started this years ago when a friend of mine got me hooked on it, but recently I started keeping records of the best ones from each day. I’ve just been sharing them with two coworkers, but it seems like it is time to keep them as a part of my blog. Thus, we’re going to start the “BBC Headlines” label and throw it open to the general public.

Before I get into the headlines of this week, though, let me show you why this is worth doing. Here are some of the “best” ones we’ve found recently:

From April 7th, an example of their commitment to alliterative effect: Drug dog suspended for duck death

From April 18th, about a queer smell coming from Germany: Pong in the air is Euro-Whiff (My coworker and I actually put this to music, so we can sing the line “pong in the air is euro-whiff..” Its quite catchy. Credit: Meghan Roe)

From April 23rd, an example of the wonderfully cryptic tone in the 6-word style: No sex for all-girl fish species (Credit to Martin Roberts for that one.)

I’ve often speculated that there are some disgruntled, underpaid journos at the BBC who come up with these headlines as a way to mitigate the mind-numbing boredom of covering the local news. I like to call them the Alliterative/Absurd Headlines Department. Whenever there’s a story about a drunk man cutting off his pet snake’s head or an inflatable pig going loose at a concert, they send it over to the A/A HD in order to get a 6 word piece of gold out of it. Let us enjoy their daily work….

Recent headlines:
Hairdresser loses dead fly case. (Not the tragic story of a loss of a box full of dead flies as you might imagine. Credit: Martin Roberts)

Council kicks up pet skunk stink. (They love the smell so much, they just kept kicking it.)

Paint chemicals ‘may harm sperm.’ (On the main page, this head line is “paint chemicals may hit sperm,” which I think adds a little something more, don’t you?)

Bus drivers take saliva samples. Ok, with all due respect to the BBC, you guys could have done so much better with this one. The article mentions that they get ‘spit kits.’ C’mon guys, that one was ripe for a headline! Like: “Bus drivers armed with ‘spit kits'” or “Spit no more on the bus” or something. The Absurd/Alliterative Headline Department at the BBC is definitely phoning it in on that one.

Cybrids – the new slave race?

There’s an interesting editorial on the NY Times Olivia Judson blog about a bill in the U.K. approving the fusing of animal and human DNA into “cybrid” embryos. I pointed it out to a coworker yesterday and her only response was, “What, like a new slave race?”

For some reason I found that hilarious. Slave race = laugh riot, I guess.

I’m still looking for a roommate, so anyone wandering here as a potential roommate I suppose will find out that I’m a book nerd, and I’m a relatively bad blogger. Listen, kids, I did start blogging in 2001! It was just on this super oldster-site called Opendiary.com and I kept my diary there pretty private. It still exists, I still occasionally throw a post up there, mostly because of the community of 2 dozen or so people that I care about. I went through that whole early-20s Overshare/TMI experience online back before you could end up writing an article in the NY Times magazine based on your blogger status (like Emily Gould has done for this weekend). Back then, all you got when you overshared online was an occasional moment when you got asked by a reader of your site.

But those days are over now! I’m just gonna write about books’n’stuff. I am just now catching up on all the Best of 2007 books I couldn’t read because of grad school, and I have to admit: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao totally deserves the praise it received. I was so moved I actually cried at the end, and that happens only .000001% of the time in my black, scarred book-reviewer heart.

I have an assignment for BUST magazine I’m now working on (which is, groan, a memoir about religion), but then its back to working my way through the 2007s, as well as taking a crack at the syllabus for my fall seminar.

The One Page

I feel like I have too many internet sites to log into and update — Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Blogger, Gmail, etc. There needs to be some sort of merged site with all these features — I think Facebook is trying to achieve that, but who knows how long that one will be viable. Will we just become internet nomads, roaming from social networking site to social networking site, as popularity rates rise and fall? Is any of this productive or just useless chatter, filling up space in the void and really going nowhere?

If I’m going to be an internet gypsy, I’m going to do it Stevie Nicks-style — leaving draped shawls and dove feathers in my wake, ya’ll. I’m singing a song that sounds like I’m singing, ooh baby, ooh, I said ooooooh. (Sorry, brief seizure/Edge of Seventeen moment.)

For bookish people, the internet is now a reality, and day by day, more and more of us realize we have to make peace with it and learn to use it. This video from Dennis Cass pretty much sums up how many of us are feeling right now — I gotta do what? Seriously? Ok, ok. I’ll frickin’ Twitter, man. I’m going to be all up in yo’ Twitter grillz.

The Art of Getting Into Trouble

I’ve been having such a tough time this past spring semester — I’ve been sick basically since mid-March, and it has affected my work, my writing and my personal life in ways I never even thought possible.  Wonderful, good things have also happened, and I’m trying to remember that and not let the bad define everything.  In pursuit of that, I dug up this commencement speech that a friend of mine passed on to me 10 years ago, when I was just a wee young speechwriter for a politician in Tennessee.  I find this helps me focus my energy right now:

The Art of Getting Into Trouble

(Delivered by N. Hobbs, May 1968, as a commencement address at the Peabody Demonstration School, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN)

Life is highly problematic and what you become will rest in no small measure on the kinds of problem situations you get yourself into and have to work yourself out of. It is exceedingly difficult for a person to take thought and alter the quality of character and direction in his life. However, he can choose the direction he would like his life to take and then put himself deliberately in situations that will require the evolution of himself toward the kind of person he would like to become.

It is deep in the nature of man to make problems for himself. Man has often been called the problem-solver, but he is even more the problem-maker. Every noble achievement of men — in government, art, architecture, literature, and above all, in service — represents a new synthesis of the human experience, deepening our understanding and enriching our spirit. But each solid noble achievement creates new problems, often of unexpected dimension, and man moves eagerly on to face these new perplexities and to impose his order upon them. And so it will be, world without end. To know a person, it is useful to know what he has done, another way of defining what problems he has solved. It is even more informative, however, to know what problems he is working on now. For these will define the growing edge of his being.

We sometimes think of the well-adjusted person as having very few problems while, in fact, just the opposite is true. When a person is ill or injured or crushed with grief or deeply frightened, the range of his concerns become sharply constructed; his problems diminish in scope and quality and complexity.

By contrast, the healthy in body and mind and spirit, is a person faced with many difficulties. He has a lot of problems, many of which he has deliberately chosen with the sure knowledge that in working towards their solution, he will become the person he would like to be.

Part of the art of choosing difficulties is to select those that are indeed just manageable. If the difficulties chosen are too easy, life is boring; if they’re too hard, life is self-defeating. The trick is to move oneself in the direction of what he would like to become at a level of difficulty close to the edge of his competence. When one achieves this fine tuning of his life, he will know zest and joy and deep fulfillment.

Getting back on the horse

Life has made book-blogging a little untenable the last few months. I’ve just started my MFA at the New School, as well as a new job, and there is hardly any time to stop and reflect on the reading I’m doing.

But I’d like to try and record some thoughts about my fall reading list. I’m in a literature seminar called “War, Politics and the Modern Novel”, and I’m already three novels in and considering topics for my first critical essay for the class. The first two novels we discussed were Dostoevsky’s Demons (or, to some, The Possessed) and then Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. I wasn’t able to finish the Dostoevsky because it was summer reading, and I’m a first-year student, although I hope to go back and get into it. (I read the first one hundred pages, and like any casual reading of Dostoevsky, found it puzzling and wonderful.) I did get the Conrad completed, and we’re in the midst of discussing that in class.

For me, the first part of that book was excellent — the moral struggle of Razumov over his anger with Haldin, his desire for vengeance, and his qualms about betraying a fellow student. I really felt Conrad created such a believable and moving story, and the ending was so thrilling. However, the rest of the novel failed to recapture that sense of sharp poignancy. Part of it may be a generational issue — a 21st century reader is well acquainted with the tropes of spy thrillers and many of Conrad’s plot features have been exhausted in books, television and movies. I’m sure to his contemporaries, Conrad’s story was far fresher than it feels to me now.

What I really appreciated was Conrad’s use of doubles — a constant in his work apparently. I loved that certain pairs of characters illuminated each other and cast certain qualities in relief, either from similarity or contrast. I might have to check out Lord Jim and consider writing my essay on Conrad, but I’m still not sure what I want to do.

We’re in the middle of The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth this week. For some reason, it reminds me a bit of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — that multi-generational quality, perhaps. But I’m still not far enough into it to have much to say just yet.

When good sci-fi goes bad

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me: I start reading a science fiction book, particularly something supposedly “classic” from the 1940s to the 1960s, and I get so excited about it, because the story and the characters are both interesting, and then…and then, the Big Idea of the book takes over, and the novel goes downhill.

I was halfway through Philip Jose Farmer’s The Unreasoning Mask, when the didactic Big Idea of Farmer’s novel took over, and the characters and the story took a decided (and much regretted) backseat. It is as if the writer somehow feels the story of these characters in this particular time is not enough — that he must supplement it somehow with these grand pronouncements and a “solution” to the nature of the universe or some huge revelation about space/time travel, human nature, or insert-your-own-Big-Idea-here. It culminates in the undoing of a lot of potentially good science fiction novels, and results in a big sigh of disappointments, nearly every time, from me.

Farmer’s novel had a really great opening — a space ship captain, a former Muslim turned atheist, steals an artifact from a planet they’ve visited, and the artifact just happens to be considered the “god” of the people he took it from. In attempting to outrun the pursuing aliens, who want their god back, the captain and his crew also encounter a massive, planet-killing force which seems somehow tied in with the stolen god. Sounds interesting, right? It was, until about two-thirds of the way through, when it gets trippy and explication of the Big Idea takes over for the story. You can tell this happens when dialogue — the main character Explaining The Nature of the Universe — takes over for the actions and details of the plot.

I’ve got maybe fifty pages left, and I don’t even want to finish it. I’m sick of the lecture.

The main thing science fiction genre writers need to learn is that the story itself is sufficient. Place us in the world, show us some of what you’ve got, but you don’t need to explain everything to us. A little mystery is just fine with a reader, even preferred. That moment in science fiction, when the writer seems to say “ok, now, let me tell you how it is” — that moment just induces a groan from the reader.

Ah well, on to the next one.