Go Poppa, Go

Not Poppa Neutrino. Photo: State Library of New South Wales

All right, so you've all heard the tale of how Poppa Neutrino crossed the Atlantic in 1998 in a homemade raft ... What's that? You haven't? Man, is this what's meant by "a liberal arts education" these days? Well, I'm certainly not going to tell you the whole tale. But picture this: Poppa Neutrino himself -- that 65-year-old perpetual wanderer, his wife, some family, a friend or two, and at least one dog -- on a raft jerry-rigged out of scrap wood, Styrofoam, sailing and putt-putting across the north Atlantic. Along the way, they run into a Russian freighter amazed enough to stop and share food and gasoline. As the freighter pulls away, the Russians take photographs, and the captain, who's not a native English speaker, says, "'Thank you for your show to the world ... We'll show the world this floating radish.'"

The radish made it to Ireland.

Fast forward to 2004. Neutrino had built another plywood'n'Styrofoam raft that looked like a tree house, maybe, but not a seagoing craft. Neutrino told Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker, "I know you see this raft trip as my wandering off to the horizon and maybe into oblivion." But he saw it differently.

I see it has having a club in each hand and spikes on my feet and saying, "Now, you bastards, now I'm coming after you."

--The Crossing, by Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, June 27, 2005, pp. 69 -72.

Bertie Wooster on Deaf Adders

"Once more I had the sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold and hard ... and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have felt after their session with the deaf adder. I can't recall all the details, though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is often this way, I believe, with deaf adders."

--P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, p. 39.

Ambrose Bierce's Iconoclast

One of my favorite definitions from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is this one:

Iconoclast, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reëdify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."

John McPhee on the Ambivalent Glories of Using a D9 Cat

From John McPhee's Coming into the Country, pp. 235-239. Ed and Stanley Gelvin are Alaskans who are panning for gold circa 1974:

They had a little Ranger -- a diminutive tractor, like a Cub Cadet -- which they had used to like purpose when they built a cabin on the Charley River years before. Ed cut the Ranger in half. They flew it to the mountains, and he welded it back together. The backhoe before long followed, and when it was at last reassembled they scooped into the center of a stream. Bedrock was eight feet down. Even at six, they panned the colors they had hoped to see.

They had intended to spend the whole of the following season ranging with the backhoe around the claims they had made, trying out pieces of seven miles of streams, but early results were so encouraging that they sharply foreshortened the tests. To put it conservatively, a pay streak appeared to be there, and what was needed now -- since the backhoe was just a fifty-seven-hundred-pound shovel -- was a means of moving gravel in a major way. The Caterpillar Tractor Company produces the eponymous Cat in seven sizes -- styled D3, D4, and so on to D9. Most gold miners use something less than the largest, but the Gelvins -- forming a partnership with two friends in Fairbanks -- decided to go all the way. The supreme Cat, twenty-seven feet long, eleven feet high, with a blade of fourteen feet, could sweep forty yards of gravel before it -- possibly a hundred dollars a shove. Ed Gelvin went to Los Angeles to shop for a used D9.

With his partners in Fairbanks putting up the money in return for a half interest in the claims, he paid forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars for a ten-year-old machine -- D9, Series G. In the fleets of general contractors, it had spent its lifetime ripping raw California land, making freeways, and preparing building sites on beaches and deserts. Who, watching it there -- clanking, dozing, wheezing, roaring, grunting like Pete the Pig -- could ever in farthest-fetched imaginings have guessed where it would go? It went to Seattle by train, and by barge to Whittier in Prince William Sound. There the Alaska Railroad picked it up and took it to Fairbanks, where, in early April, a lowboy hauled it up the dirt road north. Forty miles from Central, the haul stopped -- blocked by the still unbroken winter snows. The road had been smothered since October. Ed Gelvin, who was observing from the air, landed on the road and with Stanley put the blade on the Cat. The weather in a general way was warming. Snow was melting. Ice was beginning to rot. If the D9 was going to move up frozen stream beds and climb into the mountains, it had to keep going now. If the road was closed, the Cat would open it.

When Stanley Gelvin was a small boy and did his elementary-school work by correspondence from the kitchen table in Central, he was from time to time required to draw a picture. When the choice of subject was his to make, he always drew a Cat. He operated one before he drove anything else. Now, with a Cat all around him, he knew where things were. He sensed like an athlete the rhythm of the parts -- the tilt cylinders, the blade-lift arms. A good Cat skinner is a Cat mechanic, and from the torque converter to the sun-and-planet gears, he knew what was making the moves. 'I know what's inside the thing -- everything -- and what makes it work. My father knows how the stuff goes together, too. If the thing needs work, we do it.'

The snow-obscured road leading on toward Central was -- even at its best, in summer -- a tortuous trail. In several high places, it traversed the flanks of mountains as a fifteen-foot shelf with no rail of any kind and a precipitous plunge on the outboard side. On the last of these mountain passes, twenty miles from home, Stanley encountered drifts that were thirty feet deep. To keep going, he had to bite into the snow, doze some to the brink, send it avalanching down, then turn and bite some more -- all the while feeling for the road, feeling with his corner bits (the low tips of the blade) for the buried edge where the road stopped and the plunge began. A D9 is in some ways the most difficult Cat to operate. 'You've got so much iron in front of you can't see what you're doing.' It is also his favorite size, because it is so big it does not bounce around. This one weighed a hundred and ten thousand pounds. Its balance point was ten feet back of the blade. Repeatedly Stanley moved the blade eight feet over the edge. He knew where it was. If he had gone off the mountain, he would have raised one fantastic cloud of snow. Instead, he trimly dismantled the prodigious drifts and dozed on down to Central.

To the pads of the track Ed Gelvin welded ice grousers. They would keep the Cat from sliding. They were small pieces of steel, protruding like hyphens from the tracks. Ed and Stanley had built a steel slick plate and a steel sluice box, and Ed had rearranged them as a huge loaded sled -- eight feet wide and twenty-four feet long: I-beams, H-beams, three-sixteenths-inch plate. He had made a thousand-gallon fuel tank. It was full and on the sled. Here and there, he slipped in snowshoes, gold pans, a two-hundred-amp generator, a welding tank and torch. Finally, he secured to the top of the load a plywood wanigan -- that is, a small hut, with three bunks, propane, and a cupboard full of food. The rig, composed, weighed about twelve tons. When it was hooked to the D9, Stanley left for the mountains.

He crossed low terrain at first. His mother rode with him. His father hovered in the air. Then he changed passengers, taking on a friend named Gary Powers, and they began to move up Woodchopper Creek. His altitude at the start was nine hundred feet. The highest point on the trip was well above four thousand. They travelled five days, fourteen hours a day. There was plenty of wind. The highest temperature they experienced was zero. They stopped to cut their way through trees with a chain saw (fearing to doze them because the wanigan might be crushed). The Cat fell twice through rotting ice. With no difficulty, it climbed out of the water. There was some luck in the conditions, but not much. With less ice in Woodchopper Canyon, Stanley might have been stopped. But successive overflows on the creek had built the ice thickness in places to thirty feet. Nearing the head of Woodchopper, he moved the Cat slowly up a steep slope of ice, slid back, crept again, slid back, and thought for a while he wouldn't make it. Without the grousers, the big rig would have been stopped, but they held just enough, and gradually he crawled out of the head of the creek -- only to move into snow so deep the D9's steel tracks spun out. Stanley thought it wise to stop for the night. For one thing, all this was happening in a blizzard. Next day, the sky was clear, the air colder, and Stanley moved on a contour, through the deep snow until he found an uphill route. Steadily, he climbed ridges, sometimes in little snow, sometimes in seven-foot drifts. At one point, the going was so steep that he disengaged the sled and tried first to clear a trail. 'I knew that ridge was too steep to go over, because it was almost vertical. So I went around to the right. Without them ice grousers, the machine would have slid sideways and straight to the bottom as if it was on skates. Gary was scared to death. I went real slow now, and slipped some, and then went down to a dead crawl. I had it idled as low as it would go. I went on half a mile or so. When I saw it was possible, I went back for the sled.'

Landing on skis, his father would fly him out, and the D9 would sit idle in the mountains until summer. Meanwhile, there was one last ridge to cross. 'One side was sheer, and the other had deep snow and was very steep. It must have been forty-five degrees. A guy could have maybe gone around one side -- if you'd left the wanigan, dug the snow, and plowed a road. But I didn't want to make a horrible-looking mess. I moved slowly up. The track did spin a bit. I couldn't go straight up. It was too steep. I couldn't go sideways too well. I couldn't go back, because I had the sled. I'd have been afraid to back down. You can cut a road into the side of a mountain if you want to with a Cat like that, but I just inched up the thing, and over. I didn't want to dig up the country.'

Transit of Hardship

In the 18th-century, scientists were trying to measure the passage of Venus across the Sun. If correctly measured from multiple places on Earth, one could then work out the distance to the Sun and other planets. However, these "transits of Venus" only happen "in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more." So when the first of a pair of such transits came around in 1761, scientists from all over the world set off to take measurements.

Many suffered disasters of various kinds, but among the unluckiest of these observers was a Frenchman named Guillaume Le Gentil:

Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit -- just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.

Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next ransit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began to pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds.

Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

--from pp. 54-55 of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

How to Get Published

Today's homily proves that word-of-mouth is the best way to get your book published -- it even works if your book doesn't exist. Case in point: a hoax perpetrated in the 1950s, when a radio DJ named Jean Shepherd encouraged his listeners to go into bookstores and ask for a fictitious book. He gave them an invented title -- I, Libertine -- author, and plot outline ... and he sent people into the streets to talk about it.

Somebody decided that it made sense to publish a book fitting its description, because noted sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon wrote it, and you can get it here. And here's a brief entry about the hoax and a link to an MP3 of Jean Shepherd recounting the whole hoax (verrry slowly) on the radio in 1968.

UPDATE: I now see that Boing Boing posted about this, which is sort of like being scooped by the New York Times.

Muriel Spark Sparks

I've been re-reading Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent and discovering (after an interval of perhaps 20 years), that it's not at all the sweet confection I remember it. Or rather, it is full of all those sharp edges Spark is known for, odd word choices and original (or just plain odd) ideas.

First, an example of odd word choice. The narrator, speaking about her name, "Fleur," says:

"Not that I looked bad, it was only that Fleur wasn't the right name, and yet it was mine as are the names of those melancholy Joys, those timid Victors, the inglorious Glorias and materialistic Angelas one is bound to meet in the course of a long life of change and infiltration; and once I met a Lancelot who, I assure you, had nothing to do with chivalry."

Um, a long life of ... infiltration? This reveals, I believe, the narrator's view of herself with regard to others. Like Spark, she is a writer, and seems to view others solely as exhibits, opportunities to plunder for her art. Still, it's a bizarre word to see in this context, and it takes a while for it to make any sense.

And here's an example of an idea I found striking:

... [W]hat I found common to the members of Sir Quentin's remianing group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes.

I've never decided on an attitude about people's flaws, whereas Fleur appears to have considered the question and come to a point of view. True to life or not, I find it fascinating whenever I encounter a character or author who seems to have consciously arrived at an opinion about something which I've left unexamined. (Since I leave a lot unexamined, this isn't difficult.)

UPDATE: Here's a couple more instances where Spark inserts material into her story that, well, stands out:

He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn't such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm ... had a private printing press on which they produced "the usual form of contract" to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author.

"Personal espionage" is an odd phrase to begin with (one must take a moment to decide that "espionage" alone wouldn't have done, because it would have connoted a shadowy network of hirelings, but it's a pause a reader shouldn't need to make use of), but what's odder about the phrase is what it says about the narrator. In the course of the story, it becomes clear (or seems to) that the narrator's publisher and several other people are conspiring to suppress her first novel. In these circumstances, one can imagine why she might be driven to "espionage," though it's never made clear when she might have done this, or why she bothered. One is left with the suspicion that our narrator is paranoid and sneaky, and Spark intended this. What she seems to have had in mind was a roman à clef in which she modeled the ruthlessness that had been necessary to her own development as a writer.

Here's a short passage that hints at this:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

At a minimum, it seems to reveal her narrator's self-centeredness; it's a tempting leap to assume the same was true of Spark herself.

John McPhee on Stopping Volcanic Lava

In 1988, McPhee published a two-part essay on what was the only successful human intervention to divert flowing volcanic lava (to that date, at least - don't know if this has changed): a battle waged in 1973 by Icelanders to keep lava flowing out of a new volcano from filling up a key harbor. They did this by spraying the flowing lava with water. Cooled lava formed hard walls, which would direct, to some extent, new lava flows.

And if that sounds easy, it wasn't. McPhee is clear that the victory was equivocal -- though they saved the harbor, they lost much of the town (buried under many feet of new, cooling rock); many inhabitants fled the island, never to return; and in many ways they were just plain lucky.

There are some amazing descriptions though, of what it was like to be up on top of the flow, working on a thin skin of barely-cooled lava with pipes, hoses, and bulldozers amid clouds of steam-fog, while being pelted with falling ash (think hot pea gravel that can cut skin and leave burns) and lava "bombs" -- just-solidified rock with molten cores that often exploded -- falling around them that sometimes weighed as much as a third of a ton.

A large part of these operations -- including, eventually, the coordination of the pumping crews -- was directed by the Icelandic fire chief of the American base at Keflavik ... This was a slender man of deceptively mild aspect, vaguely professorial, appearing like a genie through his own pipe smoke. He sometimes wore a uniform, with stripes that suggested military rank, but he was an Icelander, not a soldier, and in any case, no width or number of stripes could ever have conveyed the status he acquired on the island. Sent by the Civil Defense to help in the emergency, he quickly assumed command of one unit after another, until his de-facto rank had outflown eagles and was far into the stars. His name was Sveinn Eiriksson, but no one much used it. On Heimaey, in the battle, he was known universally as Patton.

--From John McPhee's "The Control of Nature: Cooling the Lava." The New Yorker, February 22, 1988, p. 51, later collected in The Control of Nature.

The essay was originally published in two parts, in the February 22nd and February 29th issues of The New Yorker. The second half is much weaker than the first, as the narrative falters and McPhee includes random anecdotes that appear to be taken straight from his unedited notes. (Hard as it is to imagine, somebody at The New Yorker fell asleep at the wheel.) Reading this piece reminded me that as much as I admire McPhee for his restless curiosity, and the way in which he's able to make the unusual, obscure, and mundane interesting and educational, he's not a very good editor of his own work. The guy blurts it onto the page, shapes some of it, and then he's off to the next assignment. That said, I'll keep reading him -- I rather welcome his periodic eruptions.

Joan Didion Skewers George Herbert Walker Bush

Recently, I posted a great metaphor describing Joan Didion's style, which reminded me how much I love her work and inspired me to catch up on some of her recent essays. So here's a lengthy quote from her work. If you're not familiar with it, you should know that she has an abiding fascination with how public narratives are constructed by politicians, policymakers, and influential people -- narratives that usually are seriously disconnected from what she has called "observable reality." She particularly likes to see the way this works when it comes to American foreign policy, which is frequently developed, as her essays invariably reveal, in an alarmingly offhand way, without concern for its human impact or "collateral damage." While the story below is not an example of foreign policy in its highest sense, it betrays a self-centered obliviousness that does not recommend itself for diplomacy, and which is all too common:

In August 1986, George [Herbert Walker] Bush, traveling in his role as vice president of the United States and accompanied by his staff, the Secret Service, the traveling press, and a personal camera crew ... working on a $10,000 retainer paid by a Bush PAC called the Fund for America's Future, spent several days in Israel and Jordan. The schedule in Israel included, according to reports in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, shoots at the Western Wall, at the Holocaust memorial, at David Ben-Gurion's tomb, and at thirty-two other locations chosen to produce camera footage illustrating that George Bush was, as Marlin Fitzwater, at that time the vice-presidential press secretary, put it, "familiar with the issues." The [personal camera] crew did not go on to Jordan (there was, an official explained to The Los Angeles Times, "nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs"), but the Bush advance team in Amman had nonetheless directed considerable attention to improving visuals for the traveling press.

Members of the advance team had requested, for example, that the Jordanian army marching band change its uniforms from white to red. They had requested that the Jordanians, who did not have enough equipment to transport Bush's traveling press corps, borrow the necessary helicopters to do so from the Israeli air force. In an effort to assure the color of live military action as a backdrop for the vice president, they had asked the Jordanians to stage maneuvers at a sensitive location overlooking Israel and the Golan Heights. They had asked the Jordanians to raise, over the Jordanian base there, the American flag. They had asked that Bush be photographed studying, through binoculars, "enemy territory," a shot ultimately vetoed by the State Department, since the "enemy territory" at hand was Israel. They had also asked, possibly the most arresting detail, that, at every stop on the itinerary, camels be present.

-from Joan Didion's "The West Wing of Oz," in Political Fictions, pp. 60-61.

How Holy Ole Cured His Back Problems

From a 1951 history of Seattle, entitled Skid Road.The mayor under discussion was a passionate orator, and nicknamed "Holy Ole" (yes, it rhymed).

[Mayor Ole] Hanson was working in Butte, Montana, in 1900 when he injured his spine; doctors doubted that he would ever walk again. But Ole's hero was Teddy Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had conquered illness by exercise. Hanson bought an old covered wagon and rigged up a combination harness and sling, which he fastened to the rear of the wagon; it enabled him to walk behind the prairie schooner. With his wife driving the wagon Hanson trudged along behind. He walked the seven hundred miles from Butte to Seattle and reached the Sound country physically fit.

From Murray Morgan's 1951 Skid Road, pp. 203-204.

How Weapons Physicists Feel About Atomic Explosions

Speaking about working conditions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory circa 1987, one physicist described how things used to be:

And there was a great deal of adventure here in those days. ... With atmospheric testing, the way you collected samples was by climbing in the back seat of an air force airplane and taking off and having filter papers on either wing, and after the bomb goes off and you have a lovely mushroom cloud, then in an hour or so you make a quick pass through the cloud and expose the filter papers and collect samples and bring those back to the laboratory. . . . I thought that sounded absolutely wonderful.

--Quoted on p. 47 of Hugh Gusterson's 1996 Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War.

Honey, What's this Hanging in the Refrigerator?

From Craig Schuhmann's Oregon Fishing, p. 64:

Of all the stink-bait recipes for catfish I was privy to learn about, this one stands out as the king:

Find a locker plant that will let you have a set of beef lungs with the windpipe still connected. Hang the lungs up by windpipe, then pour fresh blood into the windpipe. When the lung is full, hang in a cooler until blood coagulates (leave in the cooler for 24 hours). After 24 hours, take the lung out of the cooler and slice it into cubes. (Because of its consistency, the lung absorbs the blood.) When you put the slices on the hook, the bait will stay on the hook, but the blood will still bleed out, re-liquefying in the water.

Well, sure, everybody knows that. But where do you get the "fresh blood" to pour in the lung?

Say Cheese

Chances are, you've seen the amazing black-and-white photos of Sebastião Salgado. He had stunning photos in The Atlantic about three years ago, of shipbreaking in India, and he is arguably the most famous photographer in the world. A recent profile of him in The New Yorker illuminated his working method, and the depth of his concentration. I was particularly struck by this passage:

His intensity, when working, could inspire a kind of shame in one's own lack of stamina, and in one's willingness to read and gossip rather than at all times commune with the scenery. It was like visiting an art gallery with someone able to study a single portrait for a full afternoon. In contrast to Salgado, the rest of us took photographs that seemed to be a kind of defense against the unease that can creep into our response to the sublime -- a shield against the guilt attached to not knowing how to fix one's gaze on something spectacular that one will never see again.

--"A Cold Light," by Ian Parker, The New Yorker, April 18, 2005, p. 157.

Putting the "Extra" in "Extraordinary"

One of the best Christmas presents I ever received was given to me last year by my wonderful wife: The New Yorker magazine on DVD, every issue ever printed ... except that it's always about a year behind. I love the magazine but don't subscribe because I know I can't keep up with it, which is silly because it's fairly easy to keep up with 50 issues a year compared to catching up on 80 years of back issues.

Anyhow, this explains why I'm only just now reading a 2005 article by Richard Preston called Capturing the Unicorn. The thing is an unintentional catalog of the extraordinary. First, there's "The Hunt of the Unicorn," the seven tapestries "woven from threads of dyed wool and silk, some of them gilded or wrapped in silver, around 1500" and owned since 1937 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are "the most beautiful tapestries in existence," are "among the great works of art of any kind," and "their monetary value today is incalculable." They were moved in 1998 from the Cloisters to the Met itself to be cleaned and repaired. (I'm thinking art heist movie -- are you?)

Second, the linen backings, which had deteriorated, had to be removed, performed by a team at the Met "using tweezers and mangifying lenses." And just so you know, these tapestries aren't small: they're 12 feet tall, and some are 14 feet wide. Did I mention there were seven of them? Preston estimates it probably took about seven years to make them. Imagine trying to take off the backings without harming them. (Would you be nervous? Naah, I didn't think so.)

Third, the Met's chief photographer has a goal of making a "high-resolution digital image of every work of art in the Met's collections. The job will take at least twenty-five years ..." Nothing like having a goal. Anyway, her team had to photograph the tapestries in sections. It took two weeks and the images filled over 200 CDs. The plan was to stitch the images together in Photoshop.

Fourth, when it turned out the images couldn't be stitched together, two mathematicians, Gregory and David Chudnovsky, came to the rescue. The pair are brothers and "insist they are functionally one mathematician who happens to occupy two human bodies." Preston refers to the two as "the Chudnovsky Mathematician." They took the CDs from the Met (yes, there was a predictably hilarious incident where one of them accidentally left a whole bag of the CDs at the grocery store) and fed the data into their home-built supercomputer ... but couldn't stitch the images together at first. Why? Because a tapestry is not a 2-D object, but a 3-D one. The warp of it changed shape over tme, responding to changes in humidity and heat. Hour by hour, as the photographers worked, it expanded and contracted, its edges shifting slightly, and "the gold- and silver-wrapped threads changed shape at different speeds and in different ways from the wool and silk threads." On top of this, the photographers had placed a sheet of paper underneath the sections they photographed, and as they moved it, they stretched the tapestry slightly, making it ripple. All of which added up to a heckuva math problem.

Solve it the Chudnovsky Mathematician did. Now the Mathematician is working on a supercomputer for the US government that "will contain two million processors and fourteen thousand hard drives. It will use two and a half million watts of electricity -- enough to power a few thousand homes. Two thousand gallons of water per minute will flow through [its] core ... to keep it cool. If the pumps fail, it will melt down in less than ten seconds."

Sorta puts our own puny ambitions into scale, don't it?

The Literary (Un)Scene

Literary innovation isn't dead yet -- because it's undead, I guess. In the September issue of LOCUS, I was fascinated to read about author Laurell K. Hamilton, whose new book, Danse Macabre, is an instant hardcover bestseller. Seems she's got 6 million copies of her work in print (with no help from an Espresso Book Machine) because she helped create a new subgenre: paranormal romance. Evidently, "almost 20% of romance novels sold in 2005 had some paranormal content." Who'da thunk?

He Ain't Heavy, He's My (Rental) Brother

This past week, I was browsing articles I'd furled a while back, and ran across a fascinating story that The New York Times ran back in January. It seems that significant numbers of young Japanese are retreating from normal life, sequestering themselves in their rooms -- often for years at a time. They do come out, of course, for food and other necessities, but for the most part they don't socialize, not even with their families. They spend their time in their rooms; many of them play video games, listen to music ... and not much else. Most are male, but some are female. The Japanese word for them is hikikomori, which is translated as "withdrawal."

Obviously, they couldn't sequester themselves this way if their families didn't support them, but family culture in Japan is such that many families do. The shame of asking for help is huge, too, as it is felt that it will reflect on the parents. Yet the problem is large enough that a social service system has grown up around them. Agencies employ young men and women to serve as "rental" brothers and sisters, who go the the young person's home and try to engage him or her, much as a social worker might do here in the States. They'll keep this up, week after week, for up to a year before they move on to other youth. The ones they succeed in engaging go live at the agency, in a dorm with other hikikomori. There, they have the opportunity to obtain job skills and so forth, with the aim of reintegrating themselves into normal life. Some make it; some don't. (One rental brother kept going back to the house of one young man for 10 years -- and finally broke through. The man graduated from university, is now working and, we are told, vacationed in Spain last year.)

The most common explanation for their withdrawal appears to be a fear of failure. The pressure on them to do well -- in school, on exams, in the working world -- is intense, and as Japan's economy has changed for the worse, so have their chances of security. In response, they hide away.

Check it out for yourself. It's worth it.

We're Guerillas - We Don't Floss Our Teeth

Sorry to spoil the punchline, but there's no better headline. From the Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1987:

"Duemling said a contra doctor requested 60,000 containers of dental floss and thousands of toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste to start a major dental care program for the contra troops and their families.

But contra military leaders said few Nicaraguans use dental floss and questioned whether the department should have filled that part of the order.

'We're guerillas,' one said. 'We don't floss our teeth.'"