cloudmonkey

DREAMS
&
IDEAS

Monday, January 21, 2002

Did you know that Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers, writer/director/producers of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, writes poetry? Yep, he recently published a collection of poems called The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way. They are exactly as funny as you'd expect them to be—think of a tag-team match with Ogden Nash and Dr. Seuss on one side, Charles Bukowski and Edgar Allen Poe on the other.

Here we have Dr. Seuss vs. Edgar Allen Poe.

O! I love my mental garden;
It's so snug and sans souci;
I can sit there sipping cocoa
'Til they wheel me in for tea.

It's a place where pretty birds chirp
And the afternoon sun shines,
And the grillwork on the fence is
Quaintly interlaced with vines.

O! I love it most right after
My electroshock program
When I linger, nodding, trying
To remember who I am.

(Excerpted from "The Mental Garden")

And in this limerick, Ogden Nash gets a headlock on Charles Bukowski.

She did not date in Early Cretaceous,
Being spikey, cold-blooded, pugnacious;
And then how many males
Go for vulva with scales
And vaginas so clammy and spacious?

I don't normally read much poetry, but this book is great. Read it aloud to someone you like to make laugh.

Buy The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way from Amazon.com

Discuss

Saturday, January 19, 2002

Read a new interview with Tim Powers. He tells how he develops the ideas for his weird historical fantasies and offers some hints about his next novel.

With enough research I'm sure you could write a Powers book based on Disneyland -- what had the land been used for previously, what's up with the buildings that have a Western-frontier north face and a Tomorrowland south face, what goes on at night after they're closed, what's with these tunnels, etc.

Discuss

The Planiverse: Computer Contact With a Two-Dimensional World by A.K. Dewdney, originally published in 1984, is finally back in print.

Like it's classic predecessor Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot, The Planiverse is about a two-dimensional world and its inhabitants. But where Abbott uses the two-dimensional inhabitants of his world to introduce concepts of the fourth dimension (and incidentally to satirize Victorian Society), Dewdney concentrates on the implications of two-dimensionality on his world and its inhabitants.

In The Planiverse, we follow Yendred, pictured above, as he travels the two-dimensional planet Arde. The physics of the Planiverse, the geography and ecology of Arde, and the architecture, biology, and sociology of the Ardeans are all worked out in great detail.

Just as our Earth is a mass of rock pulled into a sphere by gravity, so Arde is a mass of rock pulled into a circle. The Ardeans live on the outer edge of this circle. When two Ardeans meet and want to pass each other, one lies down on the ground allowing the other to climb over. Houses are built underground; Ardeans passing by simply walk over the closed door.

Dewdney covers everything from fishing boats to cities to space stations, and his many illustrations make it all easy to visualize. If you enjoyed Flatland, you'll love The Planiverse.

Visit A.K. Dewdney's homepage.
Buy The Planiverse at Amazon.com.
Buy Flatland at Amazon.com.

Discuss

Monday, January 14, 2002

You could easily spend hours browsing The Tree of Life— "a multi-authored, distributed Internet project containing information about phylogeny and biodiversity." The goal of this project is to include information about the entire diversity of organisms on Earth, past and present, linked together into a single evolutionary tree.

This is a huge project, so not all the twigs and leaves of the Tree have been filled in yet. Even the incomplete areas provide useful links to related websites, however.

Check out the otherworldly finned octopods. You haven't seen these on any Jacque Cousteau special!

Discuss

Thursday, January 10, 2002

Christopher Moore has announced his latest humorous-fantasy-novel-with-a-wacky-title: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal [pre-order at Amazon.com].

You can read the first chapter on his website.

The first time I saw the man who would save the world he was sitting near the central well in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth. Just the tail end and the hind legs were visible on the outside; the head and forelegs were halfway down the hatch. He was six, like me, and his beard had not come in fully, so he didn't look much like the pictures you've seen of him. His eyes were like dark honey, and they smiled at me out of a mop of blue-black curls that framed his face. There was a light older than Moses in those eyes.

"Unclean! Unclean!" I screamed, pointing at the boy, so my mother would see that I knew THE LAW, but she ignored me, as did all the other mothers who were filling their jars at the well.

The boy took the lizard from his mouth and handed it to his younger brother, who sat beside him in the sand. The younger boy played with the lizard for a while, teasing it until it reared its little head as if to bite, then he picked up a rock and mashed the creature's head. Bewildered, he pushed the dead lizard around in the sand, and once assured that it wasn't going anywhere on its own, he picked it up and handed it back to his older brother.

Into his mouth went the lizard, and before I could accuse, out it came again, squirming and alive and ready to bite once again. He handed it back to his younger brother, who smote it mightily with the rock, starting or ending the whole process again.

I watched the lizard die three more times before I said, " I want to do that too."

The savior removed the lizard from his mouth and said, "Which part?"

If you don't want to wait to experience Chris Moore's quirky sense of humor, try one of his other books. My favorite is Coyote Blue [buy at Amazon.com], in which the Native American god Coyote turns an insurance agent's life upside down.

Discuss

Tuesday, January 08, 2002

An exhibit of pooping figurines at Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, California has drawn the ire of the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights. The thirty five pooping figurines include Santa Claus, the devil, nuns, and the pope.

"Artists. California. Alcohol. That's a bad mix," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights, said in a press release from the New York-based group.

Read the whole story.

What's amusing is that these pooping figurines have nothing to do with California. They are caganers, figures that have been used in nativity scenes in the predominantly Catholic Catalonian region of Spain for hundreds of years.

Typically the caganer squats semi-hidden in a corner or behind a tree in the nativity scene. The idea is that he's fertilizing the ground and ensuring the well-being of the family for the coming year. Putting the caganer in the nativity scene is supposed to bring good luck. Learn more about caganers.

You can buy caganers online. Caganer.com has a nice selection including devils, angels, and nuns.

Discuss

Thursday, January 03, 2002

Discuss

Wednesday, January 02, 2002

This photo shows all that remains of an attraction in an abandoned amusement park on the hill of Montjuic in Barcelona. My wife took it from one of Montjuic's aerial cable cars. The park is mostly empty now and overgrown with weeds.

I especially like the devil face.

I suspect many items from the park found a new home at La Fira (The Fair), a Barcelona nightclub my wife and I enjoyed. (Here's a listing for it in English and here's one in Spanish that includes a picture of the entrance.) The place is crammed with items taken from antique amusement park attractions: funhouse mirrors, painted signs and posters, creepy wooden dummies and automata, bumper cars and ride gondolas for seating. There was a set of scary, two-foot-tall mice that I wanted to take home. The overall effect was dark and creepy like a carnival in a Ray Bradbury story.

Barcelona has another amusement park on Mount Tibidabo. Originally built in 1899, it still has rides dating back to 1910-1920. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to see it. I was especially disappointed to miss its Museo de Automatas (Museum of Automata).

Discuss