Mother Bear Protects Her Young

Those cubs look pretty cute going down the waterfall but mom isn't amused. She can really move fast too.

Wisconsin Brats Now Dumping Ground for Junk Food

Well, no one nuked Grundhofer's Old-Fashion Meats from orbit so now the idea of putting junk food in brats has crossed the border: we now have brats made with Sprecher Root Beer.

Lucky Charms brats, here we come!

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Looking at a bio of Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi I see that he has a degree in mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Physics. He sounds like an erudite gentleman and his novel, The Quantum Thief, certainly reflects this. In the simplest terms, this book is a pulpy detective story with a lot of Phildickean reality bending and some heavy duty world building.

It begins with Jean le Flambeur in prison. But not just any prison. Indeed, he is in the Dilemma Prison and right from the get-go Rajaniemi 's background is evident as le Flambeur is serving his time acting out game theory against copies of himself. One day he is sprung by a woman named Mieli and they steal away in her ship, the Perhonen (sounds Finnish to me), which is sentient. In fact the ship has a personality which is alternately snarky and salacious.

Mieli, it turns out, is acting in the service of her goddess and towards something called the Great Common Task and she needs le Flambeur's help. While Mieli's ultimate goal is shrouded in mystery, their mission takes them to a Maritan city called Oubliette. There le Flambeur seeks out his past when he had a different name. He has forgotten it but his former self has left clues.

With Mieli and le Flambeur on their way we are introduced to a detective on the Oubliette named Isidore Beautrelet. As he solves the mystery of the murder of a chocolatier, the reader learns about the odd yet very rich world that is the Oubliette. It is a place where time is used as currency. You have an allotted amount of time to live in your "normal" body and, when your time runs out, your "gogol" or your soul is extracted and put into another body, a "Quiet", which does the menial labor that keeps the city running. People can communicate non-verbally by exposing their gogols to others and regulate this exposure by using "gevulots" which are akin to privacy settings on a Facebook profile. Indeed,

Beautrelet is hired by a wealthy man whose time is almost op and will be moving on as a Quiet soon. The man is throwing a going away party but learns that le Flambeur will be crashing it in order to steal something of value. And so le Flambeur and Beautrelet are on a collision course. Along the way we learn that all is not well in the Oubleitte with various factions working against one another and a civil war on the horizon. Beautrelet works with The Gentleman, a Tzaddikim which is a group of vigilantes that protect the citizenry against gogol piracy. The Tzaddikim are in conflict with the Cryptarchs who run the city and seek to control the citizens.

The Quantum Thief is a very dense novel. le Flambeur's story is multi-layered as there is his adventures with Mieli as well as his quest to recover his past. Mieli has her own motivations which remain obscured, for the most part. Beautrelet's tale brings in the detailed and often times confusing world of the Oubliette. I give Rajaniemi lots of credit for refraining from having characters give Gogol for Dummies type of lectures to the reader. On the other hand, I feel he could have done a better job in getting the reader up to speed on his concepts. If you stick with it, you'll eventually get the gist but I think most readers will be stuck with at least some confusing reading. The story also gets credit from me for beginning as a tale of individuals and their private quests to encompassing the politics of a whole world. It was a joy to read how Rajaniemi shifts the focus from two characters to their roles in the middle of grand stratagems playing out on a large scale.

The Quantum Thief had a vaguely Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? feel to it with a future private eye and the Oubliette having a dystopian air about it. Here Mercerism is replaced with an overlay of Internet concepts brought down to the personal level – the gevulots, etc.

Overall this is a wonderful book but I have to admit that it did get confusing and a bit frustrating trying to piece together the world that Rajaniemi has created. It is an interesting one, to be sure, but it takes a while to get one's bearings in it. Some passages read like Rajaniemi is writing for fellow mathematicians and physicists which can be off-putting. But, if you stick with it and re-read some passages it will eventually become clear. Or at least as clear as the author is willing to make it.

Rush @ Marcus Amphitheater, 4 July 2013

(Photo from jsonline.)

I went with a couple friends last week to see Rush at Summerfest in Milwaukee. It had been just over 23 years since the three of us saw the band for the first time at Alpine Valley and on the drive east I played a recording of that very show. With us was the 9 year-old daughter of one of my friends and on the way there she proclaimed that “Subdivisions” was her favorite Rush song. She also gave us her exegesis on the lyrics to “Force Ten”, another favorite of hers.

It was her lucky day because the band opened with a solid rendition of “Subdivisions”. Despite being 60 or nearly so, Alex, Geddy, and Neil showed no signs of slowing down. Having dispatched his tubular bells, chimes, and triangle to storage, Peart seems to bring more and more drums along with every tour and they all get used. The first set continued by tapping into the rich back catalog of songs from the 1980s (post-Moving Pictures) through the early 90s. “Force Ten” was much more powerful than its studio incarnation and included a bit of jamming to boot. Fans of Power Windows were treated to three songs from that album. A raucous “The Big Money” seemed more relevant than ever with Wall Street escaping prosecution for taking down the world economy, the LIBOR scandal, etc. It was joined by the deeper cuts “Grand Designs” and “Territories”. Roll the Bones was represented by “Bravado” with its haunting chorus and the instrumental “Where’s My Thing?” which featured the first of three drum solos.

The years 1982-1991 are generally considered something of a low point in Rush’s history. Lifeson moved away from heavy riffing and instead went for more textures. Synthesizers came to fore and influences from New Wave to reggae moved Rush’s sound away from its heavy, Led Zeppelin influenced beginnings. While I had heard and loved songs like “Tom Sawyer” and “The Spirit of Radio”, I really got into Rush just after the release of Hold Your Fire and so have a real soft spot for their mid to late-80s stuff. Power Windows, Hold Your Fire, and Presto are very different albums compared to 2112, A Farewell to Kings, and Moving Pictures, but they are still excellent. Geddy Lee’s bass is still playing melodic parts, Neil Peart’s drumming remained anything but simple, and Alex Lifeson’s guitar work was perhaps a bit subdued but it still gave the songs muscle and filled out the sonic palette. Songs like “Mission” and “The Pass” have a certain beauty and emotional resonance that were only hinted at in something like “Entre Nous”.

The Clockwork Angels String Ensemble took their seats at the back of the stage for the second set. Here the bulk of their latest album, Clockwork Angels, got an airing. Clockwork Angels is a great album which combines the heavy riffing of the band’s early days with their later melodic sensibility. “Headlong Flight” and the title track were full of manic energy that belied all the grey hair and wrinkles while “The Wreckers” and “The Garden” were slower and more reflective. The former’s sweeping choruses and the latter’s more delicate, sparser instrumentation were perfect vehicles for the strings. The ensemble were able to find spaces in the songs which probably would have been filled by synthesizers in the past but they added a more epic and organic feel here.

The strings stayed for a couple more 80s tunes, “Manhattan Project” and “Red Sector A” as well as “YYZ” before heading offstage. The set ended with “The Spirit of Radio”. It didn’t take long for the guys to come out for an encore which ended up being two: “Tom Sawyer” and an abbreviated “2112″. “Tom Sawyer” got the crowd singing. Oddly enough, I didn’t see any air drumming near me.

Before the intermission, Geddy Lee announced they were going to take a break because they were old. But you wouldn’t know it from their performance. Well, Lee can’t hit those high notes quite like he used to but, otherwise, it was a lengthy show – nearly two and a half hours and full of energy. The band looked like they were having a good time and, much to their credit, they featured a good chunk of the new album which it highly deserved.

 

I Say We Nuke Grundhofer's Old-Fashion Meats From Orbit. It's the Only Way to Be Sure.

Leave it to a Mud Duck.

Some goofball in Minnesota has taken to making gummi bear brats.



It's bad enough that we have gyros brats, sun dried tomato and feta brats, and all the rest of that crap but these...these sound thoroughly disgusting. What's wrong with salt, pepper, marjoram, and nutmeg? Grundhofer's Old-Fashion Meats indeed. Gummi bears are just so old fashioned.

And did you notice the grape Kool Aid brats? Good lord. This place needs to be nuked from orbit before adding children's junk food to the respectable bratwurst becomes a trend and we end up with Snickers brats.

You Mud Ducks need to keep this shit on your side of the border. Walker should call out the state militias and deploy them along the Mississippi with extra reinforcements in St. Croix county.