Caught in the Middle by Richard Longworth

Today Detroit is perhaps as well known for its ruin porn as it is for making cars. Along with other Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Flint, Michigan, and Dayton, Ohio, it is notable for being part of the Rust Belt. Manufacturing left these cities and many of the residents followed shortly thereafter. These urban centers have seen large percentages of their residents move out with Detroit and Cleveland having lost more than 50% of their population since their peaks in the 1950s. Industries moved first to non-union states in the South and then to Mexico. More recently jobs have migrated across the Pacific to China and India. The latest iteration of globalization hit the Midwest hard. So what is it doing to adapt?

Richard Longworth attempts to answer that in his book Caught in the Middle. He hails from Iowa and is a former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. These days he is a Senior Fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs where he advocates for the Midwest as it struggles with globalization. Caught in the Middle combines his reporting acumen with his love of his native region into what is part admonition and part plea for the Midwest to begin moving into the 21st century.

He begins by defining the Midwest. For his purposes it encompasses Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, all but the southern tip of Ohio, Indiana from Indianapolis northwards, the upper 75% of Illinois, the northern half of Missouri, all of Iowa, and some easterly bits of Nebraska and Kansas. We're talking America's great agricultural heartland and the cities that built the 20th century. Longworth spent a couple years driving around this area talking to people and examining how cities and states are adjusting to the new global economy dominated by multi-national corporations that work 24/7 and the Internet. What he found makes for some very depressing reading.

Longworth visits small towns that are really struggling after the factory that used to be the area's biggest employer left. For example, Maytag bailed on Newton, Iowa and Ball left Muncie, Indiana. Many people in these towns are depressed after having suffered layoffs and taking jobs that pay a lot less than they were previously making. Young people leave for big cities while Main Streets have lots of empty shop windows. In rural areas family farms struggle while corporate mega-farms dominate.


Many Midwestern cities were essentially one trick ponies. When foundries and factories left or became modernized, they ran into serious trouble. Longworth describes cities like Flint and Gary, Indiana as basket cases. On the other end of the spectrum is Chicago which he describes as a global city that went from being the hog butcher to the world to the financial services provider to the world. Chicago adapted whereas most Midwestern cities have not.

Longworth finds that most Midwesterners don't understand why their way of life is changing. Many are simply nostalgic for the region's industrial past while others blame NAFTA despite jobs moving to China doesn't have much to do with it. Some states and towns hold out for industries which will never return. Formerly all-white towns are now having to deal with non-white immigrants. He also found that, in an economic environment where having a college degree is a big leg up, many Midwesterners are apathetic towards education. The Midwest used to innovate and adapted to industrialization. Today that spirit is gone.

The picture here is quite gloomy but Longworth offers some solutions. He offers that the Midwest is well positioned to lead in areas that will drive the future economy. For example, we have lots of brain power here that is on display at the Big Ten universities. Also, we've got an agricultural background. Longworth thinks the region can strike it big in agricultural technology, biotech (i.e. – developing new medicines and treatments), and alternative energy. But the problems are many. He makes the Midwest out to be Thomas Franks' What's the Matter With Kansas? writ large. We're essentially too conservative. We cut funding to our schools, including our universities. He also advocates for some radical ideas such as letting smaller community colleges educate first and second year students while the universities would accept juniors and seniors. This would allow the big institutions to focus more on research.

Longworth is also very critical of state governments. Not only do they waste money in essentially bribing companies with tax breaks, they impede economies because, in today's world, state lines are obsolete. For instance, he notes that the region encompassing southeastern Wisconsin, the Chicago area, northwestern Indiana, and southwestern Michigan is an urban/economic entity unto itself. In addition to anachronistic 19th century boundaries, Longworth takes the states and other public entities to task for not collaborating. Regionalism is the order of the day for him. Universities pursue research independent of one another. States fight one another tooth and nail for every bit of funding and job. Yet, he argues, no one state can compete on the global market alone. Iowa cannot compete with China.

While reading the book, I asked myself, if it's cheaper to produce widgets over in China or move your tech support to India, then what is going to stop cancer research, solar power research, or research on the genes of onions from leaving this country? I don't mean this as an argument against investing in these things but Longworth seems to be putting his eggs in a small number of baskets. Then again, perhaps that's just economic life these days. Nothing is safe and just about everything will be done or made more cheaply in some developing economy until everyone on Earth is part of an industrialized society.

I guess I'm just not sure how much effort Longworth thinks states should be putting into these emerging technologies. He talks of the good old industrial days when factories were everywhere. Can we expect the same? I'd think not as we're talking about industries that likely won't have much use for people with nothing but a high school diploma. So are we to abandon rural areas and small towns not in orbit around a big city? Resources aren't infinite and we'll have to make decisions on how to utilize them.

As far as Wisconsin goes, the Dairyland doesn't get a whole lot of nods in contrast to Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana. Mainly he talks about Madison and Milwaukee, which is not surprising. Madison is usually mentioned as an exception to the "Midwest is going to hell in a hand basket" rule and also as a global city. (This is mainly due to the UW.) Longworth notes the deep segregation in Milwaukee along with its failing schools. But he also notes that the city is part of Greater Chicago and quotes the president of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce as saying, "What Chicago does has more impact on us than what the state government does…We're definitely tied to the Chicago economy." And Milwaukee along with the Racine and Kenosha areas account for 35% of Wisconsin's economic output. While the southeastern part of the state is tied to Chicago, the northwestern part is tied to the Twin Cities.

This is worth noting because it occurred to me that Longworth is like the anti-Scott Walker. Longworth suggests high speed rail to link Midwestern states whereas Walker 86'd its expansion in Wisconsin. In order to meet the demands of a knowledge economy, he advocates for investment in education. Walker has cut state aid to schools at all levels. Longworth wants Midwestern states to work while Walker seems to view our neighbors as our enemies, at least Illinois. Having been Milwaukee County Executive Walker surely knows how connected Wisconsin's largest city is to Chicago. But rather than looking to the biggest city and biggest economic engine in the Midwest for common cause, Walker has Rebecca Kleefisch cold call small businesses in Illinois while he bad mouths that state's taxes. Banding together with other Midwestern states may not ensure a future for Wisconsin in a global economy but, with Walker, that option doesn't even appear to be on the table. (Recent news exasperates the situation: funding for a biotech center here in Madison is drying up while venture capital in the state as a whole has decreased.)

Caught in the Middle was, for me, a good introduction to the situation the Midwest finds itself in and it was nice to see the region get some attention for a change instead of the usual focus on the coasts. I found myself nodding my head at his call for institutions and municipalities within the Midwest to cooperate but was a less swayed by his plan for the region to zero in on emerging technologies. Not that this is necessarily bad but I'm unsure just how comprehensive he feels his plan to be. While I suspect he thinks of it more as a rough guide than an exacting road map, his emphasis on urban areas leaves me wondering just what he thinks the government's role should be in promoting his plan. Longworth's push for moving the Midwestern economy towards biotech and whatnot sounds a bit elitist, at times. No matter how much money is put towards education, not everyone can do research in solar energy and stem cells. I don't have a problem with reorganizing the Midwest's economy in the direction Longworth promotes but I think more discussion needs to be had about those who cannot be a part of it. We have to ask how jobs can be created that aren't in these glamorous, bleeding edge areas as well.

Otto Preminger's Missing Hippie Masterpiece in Madison

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir posted a list of the "10 greatest 'missing movies'". These are films that were never completed, never saw the light of day, or were promptly thrown into a vault after a theatrical run. Among them are Jerry Lewis' infamous The Day the Clown Cried which features the star as a clown at Auschwitz entertaining the kids before they become victims of the Nazi's Master Plan and what is likely the Holy Grail of cinephiles, Orson Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Not making the list was Otto Preminger's Skidoo.





While Hollywood was not shy about jumping on the hippie/youth culture bandwagon in the late 1960s, I was rather shocked to learn several years ago that the director of The Man with the Golden Arm and Porgy and Bess had done so. For this escapade he recruited the likes of Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney, Carol Channing, and Groucho Marx in his last role.

Gleason plays a retired mob boss who gets out of the pokey only to go back in so he can off a snitch. Channing plays his wife and she lets a bunch of hippies crash at their pad. Marx plays God who likes a toke now and then. I've never seen the film but it is available via, shall we say, extra-legal means. From what I can glean off the Interwebs, Gleason accidentally ingests some acid in prison and hallucinates the Green Bay Packers playing naked while Channing does a musical number. In the end, everyone convenes on God's yacht.





Knowing about this odd footnote in Preminger's career, I was surprised the other day to find out that the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research has art director Bob Smith's concept art for the film and I got a chance to see some of it.

There must be some kind of magic bus in the film because there was a blueprint for a psychedelic tie-dyed one amongst the papers. I also saw drawings, which were more like storyboards, of Gleason in prison. Most of it was just him in his cell but one bit was this polychromatic mish-mash which was presumably for his trip (see above). Far out, man.

The WCFTR also has 16mm film of an interview with Preminger about the movie at a press conference. Presumably this is some kind of proto-EPK.

So if you're researching Otto Preminger or Hollywood's reaction to late-60s youth culture, head over to the WCFTR. If you're simply curious about it, make up some story about a project because I believe the materials are available only to researchers.

Where's All the Protest Art?

The AV Club recently gave us "Total recallin’: 11 worker anthems for Wisconsin’s summer of recalls" which included but one anthem by Cheeseheads - “Imperial Walker” by Milwaukee's IfIHadAHiFi. This got me wondering: where's all the art inspired by the protests this past spring, the recalls, etc.?

The men who hold high places are fucking things up badly so aren't the artists supposed to be forging their creativity in the crucible of union busting, train denying, CEO ass kissing, and education slashing? I'm not expecting everyone to have a turnaround time like Neil Young had with "Ohio", but I just thought there'd be more of a reaction from creative types than I've witnessed.

I don't doubt for a second that artists here in Madison (and elsewhere) have responded to the events in Fitzwalkerstan in their endeavors but where are the fruits of their labors? Do I just miss them? I recall hearing about some songs released when the protests were going on but that trend has apparently died out. I believe there was an exhibition of photos at the Overture Center with a labor or union theme not too long ago. So where's Broom Street Theater's take on all of this? I go to coffeeshops occasionally but have yet to see art relating to the protests. Hell, maybe I just go to the wrong cafes. When was the last time a local muso wrote a song about unions or how heinous Scott Walker is? Has Fabu written a series of poems about the events here?

Granted, I'm a pretty middlebrow kind of guy but I think I pay a fair amount of attention to what's happening in Madison's art scene. To me, it feels like all the energy from tens of thousands of protesters dispersed at some point in a big exothermic POOF! and went back to iPods or Glee or whatever it is that people do these days when they're not protesting.

A Murderous Procession by Ariana Franklin

When we left off with Grave Goods, highwayman Scarry vowed revenge on Adelia for offing his beloved Wolf.

It is now a couple years later – 1176 – and Henry II is looking to marry off his daughter, Joanna, to William II of Sicily. Our heroine, Adelia, has settled down in Shephold with her daughter Allie and her cadre of confidants from the previous books: her old friend Mansur as well as the newer ones, Glytha and Ulf. Sir Rowley, Bishop of Saint Albans, shows up to inform his paramour that King Henry II has ordered her to join the procession taking Joanna to Palermo. Since it is a journey of many months, Allie will be left behind in the care of Eleanor, much to Adelia's chagrin.

Along for the ride will be Excalibur, found in Grave Goods, which will be William's wedding gift. For the trek, it will be hidden in a rather plain wooden cross. Joining the usual cast is Captain O'Donnell, who will be doing the sailing, Captain Bolt, the naïve Father Adalburt, the Bishop of Winchester, and a host of pilgrims. And of course Princess Joanna will have a band of ladies in waiting and Dr. Arnulf, her personal physician.

As the band makes its way across the northern parts of France that are part of Henry's kingdom, mysterious accidents start befalling its members. At first Adelia's horse inexplicably gets its mouth around some ragwort which necessitates it being put out of its misery. The situation quickly gets more serious as we move from equine poisoning to murder. While staying at a monastery, a group goes hunting for a particularly nasty boar with the end result being that Sir Nicholas Baicer's lifeless body being dragged along by his horse. It is assumed to be an accident at first but Adelia's investigation proves otherwise.

A Murderous Procession has its pluses and minuses. On the good side, I enjoyed how Scarry is revealed to be one of the members of Adelia's group. Since he was donning a costume when they last met, she doesn't know who to look for. This adds a lot of tension and also frustrates our heroine because she is usually the one sleuthing and finding answers but here she is impotent. We learn about Scarry via italicized asides in which he has imaginary conversations with his dead lover, Wolf, and strikes a deal with someone to obtain Excalibur. I got the impression that Franklin was trying to draw parallels between Adelia and her nemesis but the book is too lightweight to really imbue them with any meaning. Scarry has lost Wolf while Adelia has left her daughter behind and, as per usual, Sir Rowley is not with her very long. Each pines for a love not present. Both deal in death, though from opposite ends of the spectrum. These comparisons are find but don't really illuminate the character of Adelia for the reader; they don't tell us anything new.

Having Sir Rowley separated from Adelia is par for the course but she's not been without her daughter since the first book in the series. Isolating her is not a problem but Franklin isn't able to make up for the lack of interaction with her kith and kin. Allie, Glytha, and Rowley are all absent which leaves Mansur but Adelia has precious little conversation with him. Adelia is basically swept up by a river of events and merely floats downstream. Again, I don't have a problem with Franklin putting Adelia in the position but she doesn't bolster the story to make up for the loss of interaction with familiar characters. Scarry has his imaginary conversations with Wolf and Adelia has her own internal dialogues which mainly deal with her feelings towards Sir Rowley. But these asides don't have enough heft to fill in the hole left by isolating Adelia.

The book ends with a cliffhanger which suggests the next volume would bring back some of the missing characters and resolve some issues. Unfortunately Ms. Franklin passed away earlier this year and I have no idea if she completed a fifth volume in the series or not. It would be a shame to end the adventures of Adelia Aguilar on this disappointing note but, even if there is no manuscript in the wings, the Mistress of the Art of Death novels have been a blatantly fun read full of charming characters and engaging mysteries.

We Sow the Seeds 2011 Edition

Despite the lack of rain and my poor watering schedule, the garden is getting by OK this year. We have got lots of raspberries. I need to get on top of things here if I want to eat them because the kid is good at turning them into smoothies.





The tomatoes are doing pretty well. I'm looking forward to making my first batch of pico de gallo of the season.





Unfortunately my chilies aren't doing the greatest but they're still bearing fruit. Look! A baby Bell!





I will also have a stash of jalapenos and cayennes by summer's end.

Langdon Street Is About to Get More Crowded

It looks like Langdon Street is about to get even more crowded as Lamers Bus Lines has announced new routes for Madison: Green Bay to Madison; Wausau to Madison; La Crosse to Madison; and Dubuque to Madison. These apparently start in two days. And next month Lamers will be offering service between Madison and Milwaukee. According to this article, the Wausau bus will drop passengers off "downtown, including at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus" and the idea is that "Each Lamers Connect route will connect with the others using a 'hub' concept in Madison that allows for connections among all communities served by the three routes."

So let's see here. Badger Bus has 10 daily buses at the Union, although I'm sure some of those arrive, sit around for a bit, and then head back to Milwaukee. Van Galder has 9 buses leaving the Union for Chicago every day and Megabus has 4. Greyhound has a few and now we add 5 more over the course of the next month. There will be no room on the north side of Langdon for anything else pretty soon. Even Metro buses will have to be diverted at this rate. Was Langdon built to withstand the weight?

While it is certainly nice to have more bus service here in town, the whole intercity bus scene looks to be a messy patchwork. Megabus stops at the Union and the Dutch Mill Park & Ride as does Van Galder. Greyhound, unsurprisingly, stops at the Union and apparently has something resembling a terminal in DeForest along with a stop where you cannot purchase tickets but I don't know where it is and their website doesn't say. Perhaps this is the North Transfer Point. Badger Bus utilizes the Union, Dutch Mill, and the sidewalk across the street from the former site of their bus depot on West Wash. And now Lamers will be at the Union and apparently another site as yet unknown. With the potential exception of Greyhound, the current bus stops aren't particularly well-connected to Madison Metro (and, by extension, the airport.)

I understand that the curbside pick-up model is the cat's meow these days and that intercity buses are making a killing on medium-distance routes. Remember when Badger Bus announced it was closing its depot? A company rep said, "Oh, well the new Union South will have space for buses." Then a UW rep called bullshit. So, if there is to be a bus depot again here in Madison, it will surely be taxpayer funded. Once Gov. Walker 86'd passenger rail for Madison, all talk of a bus terminal ended. Perhaps we need to talk about it again. At the very least, we can talk about finding a stretch of curb for busses which retains its proximity to campus and downtown but is also more connected to Madison Metro.

Montgomery: Past & Future

Montgomery is a city on the move. Birmingham is still the largest city in Alabama but it has been bleeding people for a while now and has only a few thousand more people than Montgomery, which has been gaining population. (Birmingham has a much larger metro area, though.)

Downtown Montgomery is a nice mix of buildings old and new. Of course I was interesting in the former. Like these.







A couple things stood out to me as we wandered around on Saturday morning. The first is that, for a city whose history in wrapped up in buses, I didn't see any. In fact, I didn't see a single one the whole time we were there. Not downtown, the north side, nor the south side. Very weird. Secondly, downtown was pretty empty. There were cars parked everywhere but the streets could have been used to shoot a post-apocalypse movie. I had hoped it was because it was 95 fucking degrees out and everyone was proving to be sane by remaining in air conditioned luxury but The D's dad, Henry, said that it's usually dead on Saturday mornings. However podunk Madison may be, at least our downtown has people milling about on Saturday mornings, farmers market or not.

The D, Henry, and I went for a walk early in the morning while the kids were still asleep. We headed down to Riverfront Park. The Alabama River winds through town and was how lots of stuff got shipped back in the 19th century. Unfortunately we neglected to bring a camera and, when I went back later to get some snaps, the riverfront was closed due to a private party being held there.

A riverboat was docked at the waterfront. You can grab a ride on the Harriott II and have dinner as you cruise down the Alabama River. There was also a band shell on the shore and the Montgomery Biscuits' stadium, a AA minor league baseball team, was just up the hill. The old train station was also there.





I'm not sure when the last train stopped there but I do know that Amtrak stopped servicing Montgomery in 1995. A sign at the park noted that steamboats would dock here and unload cotton. Henry added that they also unloaded slaves. There was a tunnel that ran from the shore, underneath the railroad tracks, and up to Commerce Street. It was odd to think that I was walking where slaves once did. I was just a tourist but they headed up to what is now Court Square to be auctioned off.





Once the kids were awake and fed, we all went over to the Rosa Parks Museum. We passed by Court Square where slaves were sold. Today it's a nice area with a large fountain.





If you ever find yourself near Montgomery, do go to the Rosa Parks Museum even if you hate touristy things. It is well worth it. No cameras were allowed but I think the sign stopped no one but us.

You start by entering a big room with three large video screens mounted on the walls up by the ceiling. A video prologue plays which gives you some background on the city at the time and ends with the narrator intoning something like "…until that fate day in December." Then the lights come back on, a door opens on the far wall, and you're ushered into the next room.

Here a replica of a bus from c.1955 is along one wall. The windows have been replaced by video monitors and the incident from 1 December 1955 is reenacted. Rosa Parks gets on the bus and more passengers board at subsequent stops. Then the bus is full and finally the moment arrives. Bus driver James Blake tells Parks to move to the back but she won't budge. He calls the dispatcher and the police eventually arrive to take Parks to jail. It was a really neat and immersive display.

When it finishes, you wander into the other rooms which have lots of enlarged photos and descriptions of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which followed Parks' arrest. The bus system lost lots of money as blacks carpooled and rode in taxis operated by fellow blacks. Displays chronicled the activities in Montgomery but also the legal fight that led to the decision in Browder v. Gayle which ended the discrimination on the city's buses. And of course there was plenty about how all of this became part of the larger civil rights struggle led by Martin Luther King.

It was a very intense place. While 21st century certainly isn't perfect, it is rather amazing to, in a sense, get up close and personal with segregation (at least of the legal kind) - something that seems so distant yet is very recent. Sure, it was 50+ years ago but some of The D's family I had met the night before had lived it. The experience proved to be a bit too moving for The D who was brought to tears.

To compound the whole sense of being surrounded by history, I walked outside after the tour only to realize that the incident on that bus happened on the street right there before me. It was an awe-inspiring feeling. I haven't asked but wonder how much the kids know about Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. Kids being kids, they seemed to have only a modicum of interest in Montgomery's history. It's to be expected when cable TV and junk food are just down the street. If Jim Crow laws and the whole struggle are foreign enough to The D and me because of our ages and the fact that we're denizens of the Upper Midwest, then it must be positively ancient history millions of miles away to the kids. I wonder how much Civil Rights history they've learned at school…

The D remarked that Montgomery had changed a lot since she was last there. Henry said that the city fathers specifically went out to change the city to keep its young people there. This was exemplified by The Alley, what looked to be an old warehouse that was converted into an entertainment mall featuring bars and restaurants with lots of outdoor seating. One restaurant there seemed to capture what I perceived to be going on in Montgomery: change to keep up with the times but at a typical Southern pace.

I can't recall the place's name, but it was a casual joint where you could grab a burger or a healthier wrap along with a cool drink and ice cream. They had a small but respectable selection of microbrews including Sam Adams (I was surprised to see it featured here as well as the Memphis airport. Who knew it was so big in the South?), Magic Hat, and Atlanta's Sweetwater. But it is the only restaurant I've been to where the number of clerks taking orders and manning cash registers was inversely proportional to the number of customers waiting in line. As soon as there were six patrons looking to place an order, the second register was abandoned. But that's the South for you. Things get done but at their own pace.

Going Down South

A weekend down in Montgomery, Alabama for The Dulcinea's family reunion promised being something of a stranger in a strange land but also lots of barbeque.

Our flight out of Madison was uneventful and we had a fairly short layover in Memphis. We stopped in at the Blue Note Café which offered smoking at the bar and BBQ. I was surprised to see that Sam Adams and Yuengling were prominently advertised there. And so I had my first Yuengling.





It was their Traditional Lager and, while it hit the spot after a flight and a brief exposure to the ungodly hot weather outside as I disembarked the plane, I was underwhelmed. It was nice and crisp with a malt base accented by just the right amount of hops, the malt wasn't sweet enough. It was flat with no depth. The BBQ was better. Blue Note Café serves BBQ from Interstate which I gather is one of the big names in Memphis with a good reputation. I had the pulled pork sandwich. The meat was tender and nicely smoked and the sauce was a very pleasant surprise in that it had only a hint of sweetness. It was tomato-based as I'm used to but was over on the savory side which I enjoyed greatly. A nice way to lose my Memphis BBQ virginity.

A short plane ride later we were in Birmingham where I grabbed car, turned the AC on high, and headed down I65. We got to Montgomery a bit later that we'd hoped and found our hotel. I discovered that it was right next door to the Hank Williams Museum.





I never did wander inside but it's on my list for the next trek to Montgomery.

We met up with The D's dad and drove over to the house of one of her aunts on the north side. I'd told the kids to be prepared to have their cheeks pinched and I think they were ready. (It had been some 8 years since they'd seen this side of the family so they were sure to get pinched cheeks and hear "Look how you've grown!" many times.) I parked the car a few houses down but you could hear the party from there and see a driveway full of people.

Now, The D comes from a big family. Her father is one of like 12 kids which means that, in addition to several aunts and uncles, she's got about a million first cousins. I received tons and tons of hugs from lots of people and feel bad that I can only remember a pitiful few names of all the people who welcomed me with open arms. Since The D keeps in such good touch with her family (/sarcasm), some mistook me for her ex-husband which forced me to explain that I was the new model. But no matter. Everyone's spirits were high.

We had missed most of the grilling action, although there were a few turkey burgers and hot dogs to be had. However, two propane burners were cranked on high heating two pots of oil. Right on time for the fried fish. Martha made sure we got some fresh pieces. Cousins Nyrone and Shawn live in Memphis and gave us a standing invitation to visit with the promise of BBQ, music, and whatever else the city offers. I chatted with one of The D's aunts, Georgia Mae, for a while. She looked to be in her early 70s but revealed that she had just turned 83 a couple months before. I am hoping that The D inherited the youthful gene. Georgia Mae heard that Des was going to get his learner's permit in a week and spent some time trying to convince me I needed to buy him a car. Luckily I was able to fend her off.

My belly was quite full by the time we headed back to the hotel and I considered my first introduction to The D's family a success.

Soda Fountains on the Rebound?

The NYT published an article earlier this week about how a handful of soda fountains have recently sprung up.

A small group of modern soda jerks (they wear the term proudly) are trying to change that. Places like Blueplate, the Franklin Fountain in Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain are leading a revival that is bringing up-to-date culinary values — seasonal, house-made, ripe, local — to ice cream sodas, sundaes and egg creams. In the process, they have unearthed forgotten, delicious and possibly risky flavors like sassafras, phosphoric acid and teaberry, and have brought back taste combinations worthy of the most avant-garde chefs.

The pictures on the site look mighty tasty. Nothing like homemade ice cream, rickeys, and phosphates.

I can't remember the last time I was at a soda fountain. When I was a boy my family used to head to the Buffalo Ice Cream Parlor in Chicago at Irving Park and Pulaski. I even managed to find some photos of the place.







It closed in 1978 when I was 5 or 6 and the building was torn down to build a gas station which now has the reputation of being one of the most expensive in the city. Photos of their menu from before my time can be found here and here. (Notice the Chop Suey.) If memory serves, I usually went with chocolate shakes and phosphates.

A Date With the Green Fairy at Great Lakes Distillery

While on a recent trip in Milwaukee I took a tour of Wisconsin's oldest maker of shine - Great Lakes Distillery. Founder Guy Rehorst and his crew have been making fine spirits there since 2004.





The place was steamy and pretty packed when we got there. The Dulcinea and I were accompanied by our friend Pam and Pam's daughter, Neko. There is a bar that serves cocktails right by the entrance and an adjacent wall lined with bottles just waiting to be bought by some thirsty souls. We signed up for the tour and the adults paid $5 for a tasting flight. There were also some shelves with t-shirts as well as bitters from Milwaukee's Bittercube and a small selection of cured pork from Bolzano Artisan Meats.





Small distilleries by definition don't have that much for you to see. You've got some tanks for mashing, a distiller, and then barrels for aging. Oh, and some kind of bottling area. Since you're not walking very far and there is only a modicum of things to see, hopefully you'll get an interesting tour guide. And and Great Lakes Distillery, we did.

He explained how Prohibition killed off Wisconsin distilleries and that GLD is now the oldest in the state even though it went into business in 2004. There is a small display of old bottles from Milwaukee's distilling past as well as an old home distilling unit. After explaining how it all works, he went into some detail about the various spirits they make and their histories. For example, he dispelled the notion that vodka was originally made from potatoes. The drink goes back to at least the 1400s in Poland and the tuber is a product of the New World. And unlike vodka and whiskey, rum is made from sugarcane.

At the tap, he explained that the first thing you get when distilling is acetone. Due to prohibitive costs, however, they do not sell locally grown, organic nail polish remover. After a time you then get your booze followed by the essential oils from whatever your ingredient is. The potable stuff comes out at 195 proof so it is watered down, aged, flavored, etc. after it comes out of the spigot.





At the aging part of the place there were barrels and more barrels. Bourbon was aging in charred oak barrels; rum was there too. Plus a few labeled "Bierschapps". This is their Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit just waiting for autumn to arrive. Apparently some folks from GLD were imbibing adult beverages with some of the crew at Milwaukee's Lakefront brewery when one of them piped up and said that GLD should distill some of Lakefront's Pumpkin Lager. A test batch was done using the beer and it was promising enough that they gave it another go but this time they used some of the beer that had not been hopped.





With the tour done, it was off to the tasting area. Our $5 got us five tastes.





Not being a big vodka drinker, I found theirs to be alright. It was pretty smooth but I'm one of the last people on Earth to consult on what makes good vodka. However, I did like the Citrus & Honey vodka. It had a nice citrus tang and a mild honey sweetness to it. The gin was very surprising. While the typical juniper berry pine flavor was there, it was balanced with more botanicals giving it a very sharp herbal flavor. It tasted very fresh, if you will. Oddly enough, the Kinnickinnic Whiskey wasn't much to my liking, although I'd definitely try it again. To my palate, it tasted overly woody in a bad way. Like my tongue got slapped against a board as opposed to gently licking it.(?!) I liked the rum a lot and it is named after Roaring Dan Seavey, the only man to ever be arrested for piracy on the Great Lakes.

And then there was the Green Fairy. Absinthe got a bad reputation in the early 20th century due to poor research and an abundance of Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning and was banned here in the States in 1912 with the chemical thujone from wormwood being blamed for sending people into psychotic rages. Absinthe was given the green light again in 2007 when the ban was lifted. GLD makes both traditional green absinthe and a red variety made with hibiscus. We sampled the green.

The older I get, the more I like the flavor of anise. GLD's version was very tasty with the licorice flavor but there also a herbal quality to it that gave the drink a very clean flavor.

Here's one of them demon wormwood plants:





With the tour over, we headed to the bar. I had a Bare Knuckle Boxer which was Roaring Dan's Rum along with juices of lime & grapefruit, and some simple syrup. Very tasty and highly refreshing. Pam had the red absinthe which was also very good. I liked the addition of hibiscus.

If you're a connoisseur of spirits, a tour of the GLD is a must. But even casual consumers of spirits will enjoy it. You learn a little bit and get to enjoy some fine drinks. The staff there was very friendly and willing to take on any and all questions. I found out that Wisconsin now has seven distilleries. I didn't know at that AEppelTreow now distilled. They make brandy and a sorghum spirit. A big surprise for me was the existence of Lo Artisan Distiller up in Sturgeon Bay. It was found by Po Lo, who is Hmong, and he makes a Hmong rice spirit called Yerlo which supposedly has a nice jasmine aroma. Sounds good to me.

Meet Sprecher's New Summer Seasonal: Summer Pils

While I first heard about Sprecher's newest beer, Summer Pils, weeks ago, I haven't been able to find it here in Madison. Granted, I've not scoured the city's liquor emporia but recent visits to Woodman's and Star proved fruitless. Luckily I spent last weekend in Milwaukee and made a trip to Discount Liquor where I bought a bottle of the stuff.

It should be no surprise that Summer Pils, a Czech style pilsner, is Sprecher's new summer seasonal. With its introduction, I believe the brewery has shuffled its seasonal release schedule. If memory serves, it replaces the Irish Style Stout which was surely around for St. Patrick's Day. Looking at their seasonal release schedule, it says that the Oktoberfest is available starting in July. Who are these people drinking Oktoberfest in July when it's 90 degrees outside?

As you can see, Summer Pils pours with a big head that lingers and is a pleasant dark straw color. My nose found a biscuit aroma along with a nice herbal bouquet courtesy of the Saaz hops. I had just mowed two lawns prior to quaffing this stuff and it was remarkably refreshing. The malt profile is not very strong. What there is of was very smooth – almost buttery. However this was overtaken as the hops quickly come to the fore. Here they impart a spicy/grassy flavor that leans towards the floral in the finish.

Junk food pairing: While I drank this stuff as part of a regimen to cool down after working outside, I suspect that Summer Pils would pair well with some Asian rice cracker snack mix.

A Curious Cat

Hey! Whatcha got dere?

The Tree of Life

For all the hype about Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life and its interlude of cosmic creation, fans of his previous work need not worry: there are shots where the camera wades through seas of grass and holds fast to images of natural beauty.

The movie begins with a quote from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Later in the film the O'Brien family is at church and the sermon is about this very same book. Perhaps The Tree of Life is a meditation, of sorts, on its themes. My understanding about the quote above is that Job was a pious fellow who endured many tribulations. When he and his friends start debating why the righteous suffer, Yahweh speaks the above in his own defense, i.e. – "Hey, I created the universe and know what I'm doing. You mere mortals, on the other hand, simply cannot understand."

We then witness a red-haired girl playing out on what I presume is the farm where she lives. There's a beautiful field of sunflowers and the girl holds a goat and traipses amongst cows. The film then fast forwards to the 1950s when the girl has become a woman – Mrs. O'Brien. She and her husband have three sons. Another flash forward takes us about 10 years into the future. Mrs. O'Brien receives a telegram stating that one of her sons has died. Mr. O'Brien gets a phone call as he stands on an airport runway bearing the same sad news. These scenes stick out for their lack of diagetic sound. Instead the characters' face stand out against an aural backdrop that is a quiet rumble, like an organic rendition of cosmic background radiation.

Yet another flash forward brings us to today with Jack O'Brien, one of the three sons, all grown up. He lives in a nice home with a pretty wife and works in a big, flashy skyscraper (I believe this is Houston). Jack is distracted and most of these sequences are basically him wandering the halls of a modern monolith looking worried and pensive. At one point he is talking to his father on his cell phone. He apologizes and admits that he thinks of his departed brother every day.

In addition to playing with diagetic sound, the film has a lot of voiceover narration which mainly consists of the characters taking up the role of Job and saying things like "I give you my son" and "Where were You? You let a boy die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good? When You aren't." But there's another bit of voice over that sets up the plot. Mrs. O'Brien intones "The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow."

But before this makes sense, Malick treats us to, if not the ultimate trip, then the penultimate one. We get to do what Job didn't: witness the creation of the universe. There's no Big Bang here but neither does everything appear in the snap of a deity's finger either. It's a flashback of epic proportion where giant clouds of gas spread and planets condense out of them. It's a slow, lingering procession but eventually galaxies form, including the Milky Way, and our home, Earth. Moving from lava flows and oceans to the microscopic world of nascent life. And then there are dinosaurs. A large one sits helpless with large gashes on its side. Half a world away another smaller one lies injured in the shallows of a river. It is powerless as a predator comes in for the kill but the coup de grâce is never delivered.

Most of the rest of the film consists of flashbacks to Jack's childhood in Waco, Texas. Mrs. O'Brien is a gentle, loving mother; she is grace. Mr. O'Brien, while not without affection, is rather stern. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" could be his motto. He is nature. Nature, a voice over tells us, is egotistical and ostentatious while grace takes the weight of the world on its shoulders. Jack and his brothers are almost smothered by their demanding father. He insists they do things his way and that they address him as "Father" and not "Dad". Mr. O'Brien flies into a rage at the dinner table one evening when Jack disobeys him. Mrs. O'Brien can only look on and shelter her youngest son. When Mr. O'Brien leaves town on business for a stretch, the boys feel like they've had a yoke lifted from them. They are finally able to enjoy themselves and take the opportunity to engage in some low-level mayhem like breaking windows and taping a frog to a model rocket and then launching it. Even Mrs. O'Brien seems relieved as she runs and plays with her sons.

Mr. O'Brien is not a completely unsympathetic character, however. He is a good musician but was never able to parlay his talent into a career. Instead he works at a factory and does some inventing on the side. Unfortunately he is unable to get patents or sell his ideas to anyone else. He wants what's best for his kids and for them to succeed where he has failed.

While this part of the film has a linear narrative and is character driven, it's not without its WTF moments which segue into the enigmatic ending. In one scene Mrs. O'Brien is out in the yard and she dances in mid-air, levitating a few feet off the ground. It's like she's an angel. This is appropriate in the sense that the character isn't defined by dialogue or plot but rather by the smiles and hugs she gives her children and the mercy she bestows upon them, something Mr. O'Brien is unable to do.

At the end, the 50-something Jack is seen wandering a desert and then finds himself on a sandbar where he meets his family circa the 1950s. His dead brother is also there. It's unclear whether this reunion happens in an afterlife or in Jack's mind. The final sequence contains some scenes that take place in the wood-paneled attic of Jack's boyhood home. I was reminded of Twin Peaks in one of them because a young Jack(?) is playing there while a very tall, thin man looks on – just like when the giant appears to Cooper and warns him that Annie shouldn’t enter the beauty contest. Carl Jung also came to mind with his dream analysis whereby – I hope I have this right – a house in a dream represents the dreamer. If memory serves, the basement represents the repressed, if I may borrow a Freudian term here, or the unconscious pains while the attic is reflects happier thoughts. Jung also wrote a book called Answer to Job about the problem of evil in the world.

A Jungian connection here? Probably not. But The Tree of Life is so opaque that people are going to be reading their biases and experiences into the film more than they do with films that are easier to understand. I know that when I thought about the concept of grace here, I thought about St. Augustine's conception of it because I've been listening to medieval history lectures lately. My admittedly very limited understanding is that Augustine felt that grace was purely something bestowed by Yahweh and not something to be earned. It doesn't matter how good and pious you are, the Creator's rationale for handing out grace is, like the problem of evil, unknowable. The whole thing is a lottery and you won't know if you've won or not until you die.

However, Malick implies that grace can be earned. Mrs. O'Brien is clearly associated with nature at the beginning of the film but that changes. Plus there's the voice over line about choosing it. At the end, it's as if she finally receives it on that sandbar. She is ecstatic when Jack's brother is resurrected and thanks him by kissing his arm. This refers to an earlier scene where Jack dared his brother to put his finger in front of the barrel of a BB gun. Jack pulled the trigger and later kissed his sibling's arm in a goofy display of asking for forgiveness. Was Mrs. O'Brien asking for forgiveness? Can Jack really bestow grace or is the ending just a dramatization of his wishes?

There are many other bits of the film which beggar explanation. What are the dancing lights that bookend the movie? How about the sunflowers? We see them early on during the flashback to Mrs. O'Brien's childhood and a shot of them is shown just before the final one of the lights. At the boy's funeral, a pastor tells Mrs. O'Brien "He's in God's hands now" and she replies with something like "He should be in my hands." (I hope I'm not confusing this with similar scenes in both versions of The Killing.) This would seem rather ungraceful.

How about that dinosaur which seemingly showed mercy? Perhaps grace isn't a divine quality after all and is instead something imbued in all of life. On the other hand, it could be that it is a divine quality but the Creator put a little spark of Himself in all living things rather than hoarding it all.

As for the cosmic creation sequence as a whole, it does a few things, not the least of which is to act as a cinematic Total Perspective Vortex where you get a 20-minute glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation. The universe is big. Really big. And we humans are the tip of a tiny leaf on a small branch of a huge tree. Set against it, the O'Brien family drama seems totally insignificant yet Jack's childhood is paramount to him. This sequence also tugs at the nature vs. grace dichotomy. If you've seen Malick's previous films, you know he loves nature so I find it difficult to believe that he's really promoting grace here. Witnessing the grandest story of all wherein a vast universe comes into being and on one planet of billions and billions you have some life forms is, to me, a mighty blow struck in favor of nature. (Add to this the sound of waves heard from beneath the surface which plays during some of the family scenes.) The film seems to say that grace, if it even exists, is beyond our ken. Nature is all we have. But rather than viewing it as a consolation prize, just look at it – it's amazing. Beyond that, it is us and we are it. In this sense, the visuals of the film contradict that line of narration. Just because some nuns say something doesn't mean it's true. Nature is not necessarily selfish and ostentatious or it may be those things but much more.

The Tree of Life doesn't have much in the way of answers. You can't watch it on Blu-ray frame by frame and find answers hidden away which, upon being revealed, will explain everything. (Although it would be helpful in finding motifs such as when jump cuts and when certain sounds were used.) In a way it's more like a palette than a finished painting. The viewer has to do some work here. Malick doesn't have the answer to life, the universe, and everything but he offers some ways to think about the question. We witness the laying of Earth's foundation yet we still do not understand.

Cartesian Method: Surco Peruvian

Last week I met up with the Eating in Madison A to Z crew, Megan from Madison Street Eats, and a gentleman whom I found out was co-worker. We had assembled to sample the food from a cart or two that were mysteriously absent from Library Mall that day so we engaged in a culinary diaspora. I hit the Surco Peruvian cart and had this, aji de gallina:



(Thanks to Nicole for the snap.)


An expert on Peruvian food I ain't with my having eaten at Inka Heritage a couple times being about it. One thing I've noticed is the chow down there isn't particularly spicy as opposed to the way we think of everything south of the border. Aji de gallina is a chicken stew served over potatoes with a side of rice so you drown in starch gluttony. Turmeric gives the sauce its color while its rich flavor surely comes from chicken stock and some kind of mellow chili paste. And those are raisins perched atop.

The stew was not spicy and Surco provides a trio of hot sauces for all your mouth-burning needs. A yellow one, which I did not sample, was mild, green was medium, and red the hottest. The latter two both added a nice kick as well as flavor which was sharp and contrasted with the stew nicely.

Wim Wenders Goes 3-D

German New Wavers are going 3-D. First it was Werner Herzog and now Wim Wenders with his latest Pina, a documentary about the work of modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch. Looks pretty funky.

The CNN of the Civil War

William Rabkin and Steve Ecclesine got fed up with how Civil War history is presented to lay audiences and decided to make it more accessible. So they created a Civil War-era cable news show called The Mason Dixon Report.

May 24, 1861 from ron schneider on Vimeo.

A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America by Saul Cornell

A couple weeks ago the Wisconsin legislature was busy trying to figure out exactly how to change the laws so as to allow residents to carry concealed handguns. One option being bandied about was to have gun-toters apply for a permit and receive a modicum of training before having it granted. The other goes by the Orwellian name "constitutional carry" which means that no permit would be necessary. This is justified in the minds of supporters because the Constitution has an amendment relating to guns which includes the phrase "well regulated" and somehow for these people saying that the government can regulate something really means it can't.

So I availed myself of the opportunity to read Saul Cornell's A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America. Cornell is, according to his publisher, "Professor of History at Ohio State University and Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute. An authority on constitutional history and especially on the Second Amendment, he is the author of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America and editor of Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect?" In the book, Cornell lays out some prescriptive measures but this comes at the conclusion of the book. The bulk of the text is not polemical in nature and is instead history written for the layperson.

His thesis is that 21st century Americans don't properly understand the Second Amendment ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.") as it was intended. Today we have the individual right interpretation as espoused by the NRA and many others which sees the right to bear arms as something conferred upon individuals. On the other end there's gun control advocates who normally take a collective rights stance on the Second Amendment. Here the idea is that the amendment is about states regulating militias, not about the rights of individual citizens.

But Cornell argues that the amendment confers what he calls a "civic right". It's probably not the best term out there, however, but until we get a really lengthy German word that covers its meaning, we're stuck with it. I say it's not the best description because it entails a right plus an obligation/duty/responsibility, namely to serve in the militia. As one can imagine, many in late-18th century America were very weary of standing armies. Even those that weren't had to concede that, well, our country didn't have any. Hence militias. And while there were disputes about the exact roles of Congress and the states regarding them, there was little disagreement that most white males had to be in them. (Quakers, for instance, were exempted.) This is what Cornell means. The right to "bear arms" was tied up in a Gordian knot with the duty to serve in the militia. This wasn't about owning a musket if you wanted to, you had to own a musket. Furthermore, you had to show up at muster when called and you had to put your life on the line if asked to do so. As you can see, neither of the two most popular views today incorporate the notion of compulsory participation in the common defense.

It's not that keeping arms for individual self-defense was unheard of, but that idea was part of the common law heritage American inherited from England. Cornell notes that the earliest state constitutions were devoid of any language protecting the right of keeping arms for self-defense. Plus there were exemptions for Quakers. You wouldn't need to exempt conscientious objectors if bearing arms was a right for individuals to exercise or not. Cornell references the responses of Massachusetts towns when considering their constitution. It referred to keeping and bearing arms for the common defense but not for self-defense yet there was a great paucity of comment on the issue with only a couple towns bringing up objections to the omission of keeping arms for the latter purpose.

The book also abounds with court rulings stemming from incidents involving people taking up arms. In 1813 Kentucky passed a law restricting concealed carry. (And Louisiana enacted an even stricter law later that same year.) The law was challenged and the state's supreme court ruled in 1822 against the laws saying that the Second Amendment encapsulated an individual right. Furthermore it stated that this right could not be regulated. After the decision was handed down, the Kentucky House went ballistic. (Ahem.) It issued a stinging rebuke of the court's ruling which lectured the judges on the historical meaning of the Second Amendment – i.e. – it pertained to militias & the common defense. Kentucky would eventually modify its constitution to nullify the court's ruling.

I appreciated not only how A Well-Regulated Militia demonstrated the general understanding of the Second Amendment's meaning in the late 18th/early 19th centuries but also that it gave time to dissenting views. At no time in our history has there been a consensus on what the amendment meant. There have always been those who see it as conferring an individual right while Anti-Federalist types saw it as guaranteeing states' rights. Regarding the latter, militias were seen as protectors of liberty and a check on the federal government. A small minority thought that guaranteeing the right of militia members to bear arms was an acknowledgement that states could openly and violently rebel against the federal government when it became tyrannical. More common was the idea that, when a tyrannical federal government ordered militias to do its bidding, they could provide a check on its power by refusing to bear arms in its service. Entangled here are also many disagreements over who has what kind of jurisdiction over militias.

Cornell cites the U.S. Supreme Court's 1876 ruling in United States v. Cruikshank as a watershed moment. "The Supreme Court's ruling endorsed a limited states' rights conception of the Second Amendment and pushed aside the civic conception of the Second Amendment that had dominated mainstream constitutional theory since the adoption of the Bill of Rights…After Cruikshank, the Second Amendment would be understood to be a limit on federal power to disarm the state militias."

Many arguments from this country's early days became moot as police forces were created and federal legislation in the early 20th century wrestled control of the militias from the states. We were moving towards standing armies. At this point, the Second Amendment seems to have been in limbo. SCOTUS declared it was about the rights of the states and their attendant militias but they no longer had militias.

Cornell cites the SCOTUS ruling in United States v. Miller (1939) as being the genesis of our modern gun control debate. Here the Court ruled against an individual interpretation of the Second Amendment and instead fused "elements of the traditional civic conception and the states' right view that had emerged at the end of the 19th century." Apparently the wording of the decision left it open to some interpretation and the legal theory about the Second Amendment which was in vogue at the time was developed by Lucillus A. Emery, the chief justice of Maine's supreme court, in an article published in 1914 in Harvard Law Review. His was the collective rights theory which stated that the Second Amendment applied to those who "bear arms in military organizations" – the new National Guard created by the federal government. This essentially made the Second Amendment an anachronism, a relic of an age before organized police forces and professional armies. Emery's ideas and the individual rights view would become the antipodes in the modern debate over gun control.

In his closing Cornell attempts to rescue the civic meaning of bearing arms as both a right and a duty. He laments "the precipitous decline in the ideal of civic participation in American culture", a culture in which most people hold an individual rights view. But rather than amending the Constitution to extirpate that annoying bit about militias, Cornell suggests we use it in situ as a basis to "transform public culture." It seems that the goal of this atavistic endeavor is to reinvigorate the notion of civic obligation and he offers mandatory public service for youth as a starting point.

Cornell adds that, in addition to having lost the idea of civic participation, we have also abandoned the idea of well-regulated liberty. This was repeated earlier in the book a few times when he noted various jurists, politicians, &c commenting that there was a distinction between a well-regulated militia and an armed mob. He is taking aim at the NRA and the prevailing individualist view of the Second Amendment. I got the impression that Cornell accepts (as opposed to endorses) an individual right to gun ownership. This being the case, he lays out some potential regulations such as mandatory gun insurance to close off the book.

A Well-Regulated Militia lays out a strong case that the prevailing view of the Second Amendment for the first 100 years of our republic was that of a civic right to bear arms coupled with a duty to serve in state militias. This puts the lie to claims by proponents of today's prevailing views that theirs is the original intent of the Second Amendment. I also found the book interesting because it demonstrates that gun control and the meaning of Second Amendment are issues that have been with the United States from the start with a multiplicity of views on them that have morphed over time.

His prescriptive conclusion is perhaps the weakest part of the book. While there's much food for thought and I agree with a lot of it, I wish he had argued more forcefully against the prevailing individualist view. In addition, I think he would have been more persuasive had he explained better exactly why civic obligations and well-regulated liberty are desirable. He seems to say that they could heal divisions among Americans brought on by conflicting views of the Second Amendment and move citizens in a more virtuous direction. This argument is a bit nebulous and I'm unsure if these goals are desirable in and of themselves or more proximate. A discussion for another book.

For more on the subject in the same vein, check out Nathan Kozuskanich's essays "Defending Themselves: The Original Understanding of the Right to Bear Arms" and "Originalism, History, and the Second Amendment: What Did Bearing Arms Really Mean to the Founders?".

Here is Cornell on C-SPAN talking about A Well-Regulated Militia.



Postscript: Cornell has a long row to hoe in convincing people not only to be more virtuous, but to simply accept his conclusions about what the Second Amendment has meant through history. A Well-Regulated Militia was introduced as an historical authority in the case of Parker v. District of Columbia which was heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. His view did not prevail. Instead the individualist view did and was affirmed in 2008 by the SCOTUS in District of Columbia v. Heller and again last year in McDonald v. Chicago.

Flying the (Un)Friendly Skies

Having done a spot of flying last weekend, I am pleased to say that I didn't have any troubles with the TSA and they now have a nice picture of me naked taken by one of those scanner hoolies. The Dulcinea got her back swabbed for explosives but, luckily, it came up negative. Honestly, the agents were very courteous.

I feel badly for those who do have run-ins with the TSA and its screeners. Take the 95-year old woman who had to have her soiled adult diaper removed so she could be thoroughly searched. Or Amy Alkon, an advice columnist, whose pudendum and labia were given a thorough search. The same goes for all the people in this video.



Meanwhile screeners somehow missed four chef's knives.

While I personally am not a fan of Rand Paul, I think he (mostly) hits the nail on the head here.



I was especially pleased to see him take TSA head John Pistole (whose banal TSA message is broadcast over airport PAs every few minutes) to task for his comment that traveling via plane is a privilege, not a right by quoting Supreme Court justices. Paul also brought up the point that the TSA has had nearly 10 years of practice yet they don't seem to have gotten any better at making flying any easier.

David Cronenberg Returns

David Cronenberg's latest - A Dangerous Method - is due later this year. From IndieWire:

In the film Keira Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, a patient who is admitted in August 1904 to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich where she came under the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). The two developed a relationship—that some contend turned sexual—much to the chagrin of Jung’s mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The “dangerous method” the title likely refers to is also known as “the talking cure” (which was the working title of the film and same name of the Christopher Hampton play on which it is based), which layed out the first steps of psychoanalysis pioneered by Freud in which patients talked through their symptoms.

I'm not expecting any heads to explode in this film but will settle for Keira Knightley getting spanked for she is a very naughty girl.

Source Code

I was looking forward to Source Code because I was impressed with director Duncan Jones' flawed but enjoyable Moon which took its sci-fi seriously. The blurbs that I read before the movie's release only heightened my anticipation. How did it live up to them?

The film opens with aerial shots of downtown Chicago which slowly become shots of a commuter train out in the Arcadian exurbs. Out of blue we cut into one of the cars where we witness Jake Gyllenhaal's character awake suddenly. He is disoriented and anxiously looks around the car. Across from him is the winsome Christina who begins chatting with him. Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens who has no idea why he is on a train nor who Christina is or why she is calling him Sean. Stevens stumbles about as the train makes its last stop before the terminus at Union Station where passengers board and disembark. It gets moving again and, just as a freight train whizzes by on another set of tracks, a massive explosion rocks the car and a ball of fire engulfs everyone.

Stevens wakes up again but this time he is strapped in a chair inside what looks like an aging lunar landing module designed by R. Buckminster Fuller. On a small video screen is Goodwin, as played by Vera Farmiga, decked out in a military uniform. She attempts to orientate Stevens to his surroundings and inquires about what he encountered on the train. For his part, Stevens has tons of questions. Where is he? What's going on? And can he contact his father? His insistence proves to be discommodious enough that Goodwin consults with Dr. Rutledge and get permission to explain some of his circumstances to him.

Stevens is on a mission. His service in Afghanistan is over and he has been reassigned to something a bit closer to home. A terrorist planted a bomb on a Chicago commuter train and now plans to explode a dirty bomb downtown. "Source Code" refers to a new technology whereby a person's consciousness can be injected into the memories of another individual. Rutledge explains that, after someone dies, the human mind retains an afterimage of the last eight minutes of a person's life. In this case, Stevens is running around in the final minutes of the life of one of the passengers on the train – Sean. His mission is to find the bomb and then uncover the identity of the terrorist who, authorities have ascertained by checking cell phone records, was aboard the train concurrently with Sean, for at least a stretch. And so Stevens is sent plunging back into those final eight minutes aboard the train over and over in search of the terrorist so his identity can be reported back to the real world where authorities would put the kibosh on his little dirty bomb stratagem.

The first thing anyone who enjoys the science half of science fiction will notice is that Stevens' time plundering Sean's memories don't make any sense. If Sean had no idea where the bomb was, how can his memories hold the location of it? How can Stevens have a conversation with a fellow passenger that Sean never had? There is clearly something more afoot here than making a withdrawal from the memory bank.

Back in his module, Stevens convinces the sympathetic Goodwin to lower the veil of secrecy a bit more and reveal that his helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. The injuries he sustained were severe so he was brought to the Source Code folks after it was determined that his brain's layout was similar enough to Sean's to go venturing inside. The train and the space capsule are both products of the old brain in a jar mental exercise.

Despite being upset at this ontological revelation, Stevens carries on and eventually figures out who the terrorist is. He relays his identity to Goodwin and people are once again free to shop the Magnificent Mile. Rutledge had promised Stevens that, upon completion of the mission, he would let him finally die peacefully. Goodwin finds out that Rutledge has no such intentions and so she easily succumbs to Stevens' plea for another eight minutes in Sean's memories so he can save the passengers on the train. He feels that his actions can have an effect in the "real world". On his final sortie, Stevens apprehends the terrorist, disables the bomb, speaks to his dad one last time, and sends an e-mail to Goodwin will the all the relevant info. With the eight minutes over, Goodwin gives Stevens what he wanted – peace – by pushing the big red kill button on the console of the iron lung-like device that his torso resides in.

Goodwin gets the e-mail (or was that a text message?) on her mobile device. However, this Goodwin exists in another reality where the bomb never went off on the train. Likewise, Stevens and Christina live on in some alternate reality where they get to wander around Millennium Park and check out The Bean as he lays down a flirtatious "Do you believe in fate?"

While I am willing to suspend my disbelief to the extent that I'll accept Stevens' ability to extract the location of a bomb from a set of memories that include no such thing, I'm not willing to let the ability of Source Code to create alternate realities willy nilly off the hook. There is very little in the film to justify this. We get some foreshadowing during the sequences when Stevens is removed from Sean's memories and finds himself back in the capsule. They have a whooshing sound over a brief menagerie of images that go by very quickly, one of which is The Bean. But Ben Ripley, the screenwriter, justifies the whole alt reality bit by dropping the Q-word as Rutledge explains his pet project. Invoking quantum physics is like a get out of jail free card. All that strangeness and spooky action at a distance means that logic can be thrown out the window. Here one consciousness entering the memories of another somehow orchestrates the collapse of waveforms in a Deepak Chopra symphony thusly creating new realities. Or something like that.

Besides this, the film wastes the potential of its conceits. Running around in someone else's memories, creating alternate realities – there's a rich thematic vein here that is never mined. Instead these concepts are drafted into the service of an elaborate ruse to ensure that the love interest here comes to fruition and everyone is able to live out a happy ending. What a waste. Such concepts are better suited to films that place the emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. I wish the film had taken fewer pains to get the viewer anxious about whether or not Colter and Christina would live happily ever after and more about, say, memories and how we use them to construct our lives.

Part of my reaction to Source Code could be explained by the fact that I read a wonderful defense of Andrei Tarkovsky's films in which the author took on Dan Kois' claim that they're boring. Perhaps I was just in the mood for something a bit more cerebral, a film where the images on the screen themselves have intrinsic value beyond helping move a story along from one action to the next.

As for other elements of the film, I've got to say that the music was really overwrought. Right from the get-go it was in your face and melodramatic. Absolutely nothing subtle about the soundtrack. It's doesn't try to nudge your emotions in a certain way, it throws them in a locked box and shoves them wherever it pleases. On the good side, I will offer that I appreciated how most of the film took place in a confined space, namely either the space capsule or the train car. Precisely because so much of the movie takes place in such spaces, I sat there waiting for the events on the screen to tackle Stevens' interior states more intimately. I'll add that I thought the acting was really good and single out Jeffrey Wright's Dr. Rutledge. The character was pretty stock – a single-minded scientist who has no time for emotions – but I thought he chewed the scenery just enough to make his character fun to watch.

Source Code is not a horrible movie but I was disappointed. It would be grossly unfair of me to expect Duncan Jones to film the next Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, for a guy who loves putting his characters into confined spaces and all the metaphors that entails, I feel that he doesn't know quite what to do to really get inside a character's head. Like Inception, Source Code takes its sci-fi premise but fails to run with it. The intriguing elements of the story remain premises and foundations for cliché.

Finally, An App I Can Get Behind

If I had an iPad, I'd definitely get this "living book" edition of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland".

It has tons of features in addition to the basic text of the poem. They include a video of Irish actress Fiona Shaw reciting the poem plus multiple audio readings, various drafts of it, and annotations aplenty. The reader can skip around the text and move into and out of any section at will, jumping between text and recitation. Also helpful are videos of various literary types giving their takes on the work. Pretty slick.

It'd be neat if Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon got this kind of treatment. That'd take a lot more space, however, but I'm unsure if this e-book is installed entirely on the hard drive or whether it grabs content from the web dynamically.

Student Shows Up to Exam in Period Costume

This is great. A college student in Canada showed up to his medieval history final in armor.

The fellow student, who goes by the profile name “Mastadufus” on Youtube, had decided to write his final exam for medieval history garbed appropriately in a set of armour he’d cobbled together, piece by piece, over the past three years.

And on his way out, the student was greeted by a bemused exam proctor who quipped, “You know you lose your knighthood if you fail, right?”

The True Cost of Gasoline

This little video dovetails nicely with a recent read of mine, Oil on the Brain.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

I bought a copy of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War after reading that Ridley Scott was going to be directing a film adaptation of the story. I'd never heard of it but found out that it had won many prestigious sci-fi awards back in the mid70s such as the Hugo and Nebula. Having finished the book, I can understand why Scott sought it out. Like Oliver Stone, Scott likes his lead characters to be masculine. Even his female main characters have traits that are traditionally thought of as being the province of men.

Haldeman served in the Vietnam War and this book is in a sense "Vietnam in space". Considering this, there's not a whole lot of combat. It is, perhaps, more about being a veteran than people shooting at one another. On a side note, I take it that the novel has seen a few different iterations with various editors exorcising parts of the book for whatever reason. The author's note of the version I read notes that it is the director's cut, so to speak, with all the bits previously taken out having been restored.

The Forever War is the story of William Mandella who is conscripted into military service in 1997. By this time mankind has discovered collapsars which are like wormholes that allow travel between them in no time at all. You pop in one and end up at another one light years away without any time having elapsed. Shiploads of colonists were sent out traipsing through the collapsars until there was a Gulf of Tonkin incident - one was pursued by an alien ship and destroyed. This happened in the constellation Taurus so mankind's new enemy was the Taurans. Unlike during Vietnam, here draftees are the best and brightest. Mandella has a degree in physics, for example.

As I noted above, the story here isn't so much about fighting, although there's some of that, but rather about isolation which I can imagine many a Vietnam veteran felt. Jumping through collapsars causes time dilation so soldiers may be gone for only a short spell relative to them, but back on Earth decades, if not centuries, have elapsed. Each time Mandella goes out to serve his planet, he returns to find that humanity has changed and left him behind.

The world of The Forever War begins with things quite different than our own. Men and women serve together in the armed forces, even in combat, and the opposite sexes are allowed to do some serious fraternization. We follow Mandella and his fellow recruits through training which involves getting used to wearing some funky space suits that allow them to survive in the incredibly harsh conditions on planets that are near collapsars.

Curiously enough, though, the first combat Mandella sees takes place on a rather verdant planet. At first the troops encounter strange creatures with green fur and three legs. After dispatching a few of them with lasers, it is determined that they are simply local fauna. Eventually a Tauran base is found and the real shooting begins. The enemy prove to be easy prey.

After his first tour, Mandella finds himself back on Earth but many years have elapsed since he was last there. This middle section of the book was excised back in the 1970s because of its pace. While definitely slower than the rest of the novel, it really ratchets up the isolation factor. Mandella barely recognizes the place. People need bodyguards, the government advocates homosexuality as a way to deal with overpopulation, food is scare, et al. This break in the story has a vibe similar to Children of Men. It's little wonder that he reenlists. More collapsar jumps and another combat mission later, he finds himself commanding a platoon and that all of the grunts are homosexual. Despite the odd instance of portraying some gay men as being very effeminate, Haldeman no doubt gets a lot of credit for creating a world where homosexuality is normal and, furthermore, is not detrimental. Penis-vagina coitus is considered gross and babies are created outside the womb.

The Forever War's closing chapters detail Mandella commanding what amounts to a suicide mission to a planet where his soldiers are to build a forward base and then wait for reinforcements. This is the best part of the book because it combines combat with our hero at his most isolated, both physically and mentally. By this time, Mandella is something of a curiosity being one of the last heterosexuals still alive and many under his command are heterophobic. Late 20th century English is archaic so he has to learn the latest dialect. He's also separated from his love, Marygay. To pile Pelion upon Ossa, he's out on a distant planet with no way to call for immediate backup should the Taurans attack with overwhelming numbers. And they do.

Things look pretty hopeless and Haldeman piles it on by first letting the soldiers linger for a bit. They get the base constructed and then sit around waiting for an attack. When it finally comes, there's a tense build up as it slowly becomes apparent to Mandella that he and his soldiers are badly outnumbered. They prepare to make their last stand.

Any book described as "Vietnam in space" is bound to sound like a relic of the past – something that speaks to a particular time and place. While Haldeman's experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War are on display here, The Forever War that transcends that conflict. Just look at the news. George Bush's War on Terror has been continued by Barack Obama and we have troops engaging in hostilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen. Eight years after it began it feels like a forever war. Beyond combat, this is a story about a man becoming isolated from kith & kin, society, and perhaps himself. It's not a happy story but war isn't happy and neither is its aftermath.

Dear MillerCoors

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf

A fellow geek recommended Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks to me and so I dutifully procured a copy. A book by a geek about being a geek sounded interesting.

Gilsdorf was 12 years old when his mother suffered an aneurysm. She went from being a rather care-free spirit to a figure the boy and his siblings called "Momster", who was prone to tantrums. This was the late 70s and the geeky neophyte discovered a cadre of like-minded outsiders and turned to Dungeons & Dragons as a means of escape from life at home where the Momster might be having a fit or needing the physical assistance of her children for her quotidian activities. His late teens brought other things into his life such as girls and the first pangs of adulthood and freedom. Gilsdorf abandoned his geeky ways and went out to make his way in the world.

After turning 40, he stumbled upon his stash of D&D books, maps, dice, &c. It brought back memories and placed him in a position where he had one foot in the past and one in the present. Gilsdorf was having a mid-life crises a bit earlier than normal. Struggling to find direction for his future – was he ready to settle down? – he embarked on a journey into his geeky past. Unlike other geeks and freaks in a similar moment of crisis, Gilsdorf had the luxury of a book deal which meant, not only was he able to travel across the States in search of kindred souls, but he had the funds to boldly go to foreign countries.

The result of his journeys (both around the world and in his own mind) are laid out in the book. Part of it concerns Gilsdorf returning to his geeky roots and trying to sort out the discommodious process that is aging while another part is travelogue. Somewhere in between the twain meet.

He begins by flying across The Pond to hang out with a bunch of fantasy freaks – the members of the Tolkien Society. As a geek myself, I appreciate how Gilsdorf punctuates his personal quest with history and sympathetic, but not uncritical, profiles of other geeks. For instance, we learn about Tolkien himself as well as about the genesis of The Lord of the Rings. Gilsdorf even stops in at the tavern that Tolkien and his fellow writers frequented only to find it has modernized itself a bit too much for his taste.

Gilsdorf is a bit Tolkien fan so he also makes a trek to New Zealand to see where the films were shot. But most of his destinations are closer to home. He hits Dragon*Con, for instance, as well as the Lake Geneva Gaming Convention, a smaller con that tries to be the opposite of GenCon. This chapter lays out the history of D&D but it also gives Gilsdorf a chance to do some ranting. Gilsdorf likes to impose his conception of geekdom on others and so traditional pen & paper RPGs are superior to video games because they allow players to flex their imagination, be social, &c. I take his point but there are times when he makes this argument that he comes across as an old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. Fortunately he doesn't do this too often and the book is much better at showing the great diversity of geeks.

Ranting about how old school RPGs are superior is a minor gripe in comparison to how Gilsdorf tends to transpose what he gets out of gaming onto his fellow geeks. It seems that the simple concept of gaming, reading fantasy/sci-fi, being in the SCA, &c purely for fun escapes him. He spends a lot of time in this game of circumlocution where he avoids the idea of geeky activities as just being fun in the same way some people find playing tennis enjoyable and instead is constantly trying to apply pop psychology to people to find out what they are escaping from. Not everyone had a traumatic childhood as he did yet he assumes that, if you have the same or similar interests as he does, then you are running away from something. You're avoiding reality instead of possibly adorning it with games, stories, and activities that you simply like.

I found this particularly annoying because I most, if not all of my gaming friends, enjoy D&D, computer games, or whatever on their own terms. It's not about running away from a dysfunctional family or from some societally sanctioned notion of manhood. It's just that we find them fun. Gilsdorf seems to think that because D&D played a certain role in his life it plays a similar role for everyone who plays it. A lot of the time it seems that he's seeking validation. "These people spend weekends reenacting medieval battles so it's OK for me to game" or "Tolkien said it's healthy to retreat into fantasy occasionally so my love of his books is fine". There were times when I was reading when I thought to myself, "Dude, grow a set of cajones. You're 40 years old so it's time to finally be yourself without asking others for permission." He spends time arguing that gaming and the like aren't childish, that they're perfectly suitable for adults yet he seems stuck in a childish mode.

For me the strength of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is the peeks it gives into the variety of geeks out there and the history of their chosen obsessions. Some people like to join the SCA and reenact life as it was hundreds of years ago while others enjoy cosplay. There are those who play video games while others stick with pen & paper RPS. (And some love both.) I found the chapter about the folks building a castle in France using the same methods they did hundreds of years ago to be extremely interesting. It's a project that will take decades to finish just like it did in the days of yore. But it goes beyond geekery and fantasy into the realm of rejecting modernity in one way, shape, or form.

I have to admit that the denouement was a disappointment. He writes: "I know I don't want to play Dungeons & Dragons regularly again. I don't want to become a World of Warcraft addict, either. I can't say for sure I'll never read Lord of the Rings again, or see the movies. I probably would. Nor am I certain I'd never go back to that spot on Mount Victoria to dig up the figurines." What is significant here is that there's so many negatives here. He says what he doesn't want and what he's unsure of so what about something positive like "I do want to play D&D occasionally"? Rather than asserting his geekiness and listing positive changes, he hedges his bets and sits on the fence.

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks works well as an introductory taxonomy to it titular subjects. The reader will learn about their passions and find that they are interesting people. Gilsdorf writes well about them with stories that range from amusing to poignant. However, the author's own journey is less interesting. At times it takes a back seat to the taxonomy and is brought back only briefly as if to remind us what this book is really about. But more often his story is pathetic, in the literal/Greek sense, because a 40-year old who is seemingly unwilling to be himself deserves pity.

Dragon Turds

Dragon turds may have a scatological name but are very tasty. To my knowledge the term refers to stuffing chili peppers with whatever trips your trigger, wrapping them in bacon, and then cooking. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of jalapenos, stuffed them with cheese and chorizo, wrapped them in bacon, and baked. They turned out well, unlike most of my photos.





While incredibly tasty, I can't say that they are for those on a diet or for people trying to maintain clean arteries. Be sure to use thinly sliced bacon because the thick stuff A) is impossible to use as a wrap and B) takes forever and a day to cook. I wish I had a smoker to cook these puppies with as that would add a whole other layer of flavor. That and I don't like using the oven during the summer.

Still Life With Cat

Our cat discovered the joy and comfort of the empty fruit bowl on our table this morning.

Ice Warrior Hang Out Discovered on Mars

Somebody call Dick Hoagland! Some guy checking out pictures of Mars on Google Earth believes he's stumbled upon a bit of Martian architecture.





But now an American 'armchair astronaut' claims to have discovered a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet - by looking on Google earth.

David Martines, whose YouTube video of the 'station' has racked up over 200,000 hits so far, claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day.

Describing the 'structure' as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape.

"I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I'm just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it."

First there was a face on Mars and now there's Ice Warrior condos.

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross

With The Jennifer Morgue Charles Stross threw his network administrator-cum-secret agent Bob Howard into James Bond mode for a fun romp that left me trying to pick out references to scenes from those films. (Yeah, I've never read any Bond novels.) With The Fuller Memorandum Stross moves Howard away from parody and into a heart of darkness. It's like The Empire Strikes Back of the series, if you will.

It is a few years on from the events of The Jennifer Morgue and the book opens with a rather disturbing prologue:

This is the story of how I lost my atheism, and why I wish I could regain it. This is the story of the people who lost their lives in an alien desert bathed by the hideous radiance of a dead sun, and the love that was lost and the terror that wakes me up in a cold sweat about once a week, clawing at the sheets with cramping fingers and drool on my chin. It’s why Mo and I aren’t living together right now, why my right arm doesn’t work properly, and I’m toiling late into the night, trying to bury the smoking wreckage of my life beneath a heap of work.

Yes, Bob married Mo, which I suppose makes him slightly less of a poindexter. But more importantly, this sets the dark tone of the book.

Bob is sent to the Royal Air Force Museum on what he assumes will be an easy task of removing malevolent forces from an old plane. Things, however, don't go exactly as planned and an innocent bystander is obliterated. This really throws Bob for a loop as he'd never killed anyone who wasn't a demonically-possessed cultist or otherwise evil person bent on bringing mankind towards a hideous fate. Curiously enough, Bob has something he has never encounter before at The Laundry – a boss who is sympathetic and stands up for her underlings. Compounding the sepulchral ambience, Mo returns from an assignment in Amsterdam that likewise was a big Charlie-Foxtrot. However, it involved cultists ritually murdering children, including one whose head was severed. Believe it or not, the book actually lightens up a bit after the charnel house that is the first few chapters with such happy things as the imminent end of the world.

After Bob is attacked by a Russian zombie, The Thirteenth Directorate is brought into the picture. TTD is Russian counterpart of The Laundry and one of its field directors, Panin, is loose in London. Panin "invites" Bob for a drink and inquires about the status of the "Teapot", about which Bob has no clue. Oh and Angleton, Bob's boss, disappears along with the titular file. But he leaves behind a list of documents for our hero to investigate. These give the story of Baron Ungern Von Sternberg, a vicious Russian warlord of the early 20th century. One of the documents is a letter from the Baron's hand which describes the weird changes one of his men, Evgenie Burdokovskii, underwent after reading some eldritch tomes. But how do all these things fit together?

As with the previous books in the series, Bob and, in this case, Mo are essentially tasked with saving the world. But The Fuller Memorandum is much bleaker than previous efforts. If it wasn't enough for them to have missions go wrong and send them into despondency, Stross throws in some hideous extras. For starters, we learn about the origin of Mo's osseous violin which involves victims screaming for mercy as they are sacrificed by an accursed luthier. Later on in the book Bob is kidnapped by – who else? – cultists who make him the center of a heinous cannibalistic liturgy. This is a bleak tale indeed.

Personally, I enjoyed the doom'n'gloom of The Fuller Memorandum. While I'm not sure that it's fair to say that Bob and Mo hit the depths of perdition, it did feel like they came awfully close. This was a welcome change from the super agents defeating evil and living happily ever after. I liked how Stross chose to give background and deepen the mystery via various memoranda and descriptions of photographs from Laundry files. It should also be said that the prime mysteries here – the nature of "Teapot" and the identity of the cult leader – are pretty obvious. You won't get to the last chapter still pondering these things.

My major complaint is how Stross deals with Mo. Unlike previous stories, she is a lead character here and gets plenty of pages devoted to her. This is a good thing as she makes a nice complement to Bob. Plus she's a badass with a violin made of human bones that, when played, does away with all sorts of grotesque beasties and nasties. The problem is that Stross makes her out to be a bit too much like Bob, especially the dialogue. She lays down too many nerdy bon mots that are indistinguishable from Bob's. Now, when she goes to have her violin looked at, Mo was take-no-crap, don't-fuck-with-me serious and this is a delightful contrast to her husband's more awkward demeanor.

Every Laundry Files novel has Bob going off on tangents. Up to this point they've generally been some exegesis about Linux or a complaint about The Laundry's bureaucracy. Here Bob digresses into what I'll hesitantly label more existential territory with philosophies for living which include Venn diagrams and a reminder of how pitiful we humans are in contrast to, say, the Elder Gods. I'm ambivalent about these passages. In one sense, they're understandable in that The Fuller Memorandum is a much darker novel than its predecessors and Bob suffers some awful traumas so getting all serious and questioning life is normal. However, they do tend to drag on and they are written like all of Bob's tangents, i.e. – with lots of sarcasm and Douglas Adams-like asides. Perhaps if Stross had just written them a bit differently so that they weren't near total mirrors of his IT tirades I'd have been able to appreciate them more.

It remains to be seen if Stross will write any further adventures of Bob Howard. If he does, then great. If not, so be it. He's had a good run. As a swan song, The Fuller Memorandum, while having its flaws, hit the right notes in porting the despair and insanity of H.P. Lovecraft into the realm of urban fantasy.

Werner Herzog on Colbert

"Statuettes way beyond Baywatch with breasts..."