The Stepford Wives; Levin, Ira; 1972

This is simultaneously terribly dated (the feminist protagonist has issues with masturbation?  really?) and yet still relevant because of the antediluvian misogyny that continues to pervade our society.  Even more importantly from a reader's perspective, the pacing is perfect and Levin hasn't written a lot of B.S. just to fill pages, so it's a quick read.  Hooray for writers who know when to stop!

I haven't seen any of the film versions, and don't really have an interest in seeing them, much as I might have liked Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the the Sundance Kid.

Note: published on 4/25/2013, backdated to when I finished reading the book.

The Girl Who Played with Hornet Castles in the Air

Interestingly, the original Swedish title is only the same in English (translated, of course) for The Girl Who Played with Fire; the first book translated as Men Who Hate Women and the third as The Air Castle that Blew Up.  I actually prefer the English titles because they lend a sense of consistency to a series; these are "the girl who..." books in my mind.


I actually liked the latter two books better than the first; or perhaps, my reading experience was better because I was ready for them to simply be fairly well-written crime thrillers, populated with cartoon-y heroes and villains, with some awkward bits that the editors should have caught** and without any deep thoughts*** -- something about the reviews of the first book/movie led me to think that it was more than that.  To be clear, Larsson definitely succeeded, in the sense that I was sad upon finishing the third book because there aren't any more Salander stories to read, and I stayed up late in order to finish each of the last two books.


** Figuerola is a 6 foot tall former near-Olympic quality gymnast?  Even coming after the slightly ludicrous natures of Lisbeth's mind, Niederman's physique, and Blomkvist's sex appeal, this was hard to swallow.  I also disbelieve that no one from the police went to interview Palmgren in The Girl Who Played with Fire.  That's a little bit too incompetent.  Lastly, the "mystery" of Berger's stalker is disappointing because there are no clues as to who the perpetrator is.


*** I can applaud Larsson's stance on discrimination against women without having learned anything new from it.... though perhaps something to talk about.  Blomkvist is a complicated character in all this because he is presented as someone who by their words and actions is someone who doesn't hate women in a series filled with men who hate women... and yet, he is a terrible husband and father.  Paradoxically, the only two women in the series that he actually has a socially well-defined duty to love and support are the two he does his best to ignore.

Ondine (2009)

Ondine is about a modern-day Irish fisherman (Colin Farrell) who pulls a woman out of the water in his nets.  Just a few minutes into the film, I had the following questions:

1. Was Neil Jordan watching Splash one night and thought, "What if we made this a drama instead of a comedy?"  Nah, probably not.  Jordan probably grew up with selkie myths.
2. Given that Neil Jordan is the director, will Ondine turn out to actually be a guy selkie?
3. Why in Zeus's name did Oliver Stone think that Farrell could possibly play Alexander?  Sigh.  I think this every time we watch a movie with Farrell in it; even Veronica Guerin.  Fortunately he's up to the task of playing a kind-hearted but not-so-bright guy in this film.  In fact, he's great!

In the end, and all in all, this was a good little film.  I didn't like some of the camerawork, and I don't quite believe Syracuse's bender, but the girl who plays Annie grows on you and Bachleda actually knows how to swim and does a nice butterfly stroke in one scene.  This would be 7 of 10, and I can't quite bring myself to give it 4 of 5.  Netflix, give me more granularity!!

The Kübler-Ross Model of Driving

On days when it's sunny and reasonably warm and we're running on time, I like to bike Finn to preschool.  Otherwise, I drive.  I usually take 127 because that way I'm not driving past the high school while all the kids are arriving for the day.  127 is a small limited access highway that ends at the intersection with Manhattan Drive, at which point it becomes Park Street and becomes residential -- 25MPH, speed bumps and everything.  Often enough I hit the red light at 127 and Manhattan.  Now, ideally once that light turns green, the lights at Park and North Street, Park and Sherman, and Battery and Pearl (Park becomes Battery) should be timed so that drivers doing the speed limit should get green lights, especially since the vast majority of traffic is going into downtown, not out... but they're not.  So on a bad morning while I'm the first car waiting at:

1. 127/Manhattan. "All right, you probably just got unlucky last week and the lights aren't specifically timed against incoming traffic, and today they'll be green going in."  
2. Park/North St. "I can't believe this light turned yellow 3 seconds too soon for me to make it through the light!  The guy in the lane next to me made it, but that's because he gunned it to 40!  What kind of moron times the lights so as to encourage people to speed in a residential zone?!"  
3. Park/Sherman. "Okay, so we're stuck in this light, too, and it also turned yellow just a few seconds too soon, but if I can just calm down we'll get through the next light and be home free heading to preschool."  Meanwhile, of course, there's a load of traffic coming off North Avenue onto battery so we end up behind a line of cars at
4. Battery/Pearl. "What's the point of taking 127 if it's not any faster than North Avenue?  At least on North Avenue I can help prevent people from speeding by actually doing the speed limit because it's 1 lane in each direction.  Ohhhh.... this line is never gonna make it through and I'm gonna sit through a second round of this light."  But it doesn't, and I can then get on with Acceptance.

Please note that this is about a mile of road and it's usually about 10 minutes each way to Finn's school; 15 on a bad day.  This is why I telecommute and I took the train while living in Chicago.  ;-)

To migrate to Google Sites or not?

Before Picasa was ready for prime time, I started leasing the macreutter.com domain and put up a personal website, hosted at goDaddy, mostly in order to share photos with the family (and especially with the grandparents once Connor was born).  I wrote some crappy custom PHP so that all I really had to do was dump photos into a folder and FTP them to the site and it would display them as a photo album. 


However, Picasa (and YouTube for videos) is now a valid competitor to my homegrown solution and may be easier to maintain "indefinitely", so if I start using Picasa exclusively for online family photo albums, I'd no longer need all that space on the hosted website, so perhaps I could use Google Sites to host the rest of the (fairly spare) macreutter.com website.  This would cost less (the ~$40/year is pretty negligible, but I could promise to spend it on friends' video games or something), *but*:

1. I'd have to migrate everything to Google Sites, which is mildly time-consuming, but more of a pain because they don't support CSS stylesheets.  You can hack around it by putting style information within elements, but to me that violates the whole freakin' point of having a stylesheet.
2. Did I mention they don't support CSS?!

I re-upped the webhosting for a year a couple months ago, so I've got some more time to decide, but I'm leaning more and more towards Google Sites, despite the lack of CSS.  There will be fairly few pages on the family website, and they will change rarely.  The material that will change/update will all be on Picasa/YouTube/Blogger, so the migration may be my Christmas vacation project...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

Two pages into the prologue, I knew that the film would not measure up to the book.  These few paragraphs tell me far more about Henrik and Morell than the corresponding film scene, in about the same amount of time (reading vs. viewing).  Not an auspicious start for comparison, and only gets worse as all sorts of interesting details are left out of the film, presumably for lack of time.

But rather than catalog all the problems, let's focus on one of the most glaring mistakes the filmmakers made.  In general, the cast is good, and Rapace's Salander looks more like a real person to me than the Salander described in the book, but I feel sorry for Nyqvist because the filmmakers have miswritten Blomqvist's character.  Nowhere is this more evident than when he goes to recruit Salander.  In the book, Blomqvist is charming and talks his way into the apartment; he brings bagels and makes coffee; he tells Lisbeth that he knows she broke into his computer but comes off as interested rather than outraged: he *makes things easy*.  In the film, he practically forces his way into the apartment, is confrontational, threatens her with his knowledge of her breaking into his computer, and practically demands she make coffee.  Needless to say, he didn't bring bagels.  The real Lisbeth Salander would have taken a golf club to the film Blomqvist's head before they ever got to Hedestad.

This isn't to say that I don't have reservations about the book.  Far from it.  Upon watching the film, my first question about the first scene with Bjurman was "why doesn't Lisbeth tell him that she's a PI for Milton Security instead of lying and saying she makes copies and coffee?  That would make him back off."  Given how well she pushes other people away, this doesn't make any sense, so I was hoping that something in the book would explain this for me.  Page 166 of the paperback says, "She did not know why she had lied, but she was sure it was a wise decision."  That explains everything.  The author decided he needed Lisbeth to act out of character in order to contrive the salacious subplot.  Whee.  Why have her lie at all?  It would be far simpler, and actually in character, for her to refuse to answer his questions and have Bjurman come to his own incorrect conclusions.

Also, I have no idea why Harriet does not confide in Henrik.  By 1966, he has already shown a fondness for Harriet and a willingness to help (having extracted Cecilia from an abusive relationship).  Henrik is not immediately available on the day she disappears, but it's for an obviously good reason.  Why wouldn't she approach him immediately after the emergency on the bridge is over?  Or in writing shortly after fleeing Hedeby?  Or even a few years later once she's started a new life?  Oh, right.  Harriet needs to be unreasonably uncommunicative in order for there to be a story.  Boo.  I don't think there is an easy fix for this one.

Still and all, it was a pretty good book.

Old Testament Social Services

Connor was interested in Moses, so we read Exodus to him.  The King James version of Exodus 2:1-10 states:

2:1 And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. 2:2 And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child,she hid him three months. 2:3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. 2:4 And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.
2:5 And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. 2:6 And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. 2:7Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? 2:8 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother. 2:9 And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. 2:10 And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.

I never noticed this before, but the government(1) paid Moses's mother for the "simple" act of raising her own child(2).  Does this make her the first welfare queen?  Or did the King James translators have a radical socialist agenda?  ;-)


(1) I'm assuming that Pharaoh's daughter's pin money comes from Pharaoh, whose money comes from taxes/tributes assessed on the people he governs.  


(2) Yes, technically, in the eyes of the government she is being paid to be wet nurse to a child that will be treated as the son of Pharaoh's daughter.  It wouldn't be the first or last time the government was wrong about something.

All the King's Men Who Hate Women

Finally got around to reading Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer prize-winning novel.  We netflixed the movie** a couple years ago and it's a pale, poor ghost of the book. The book's dialogue is excellent throughout, which makes a certain sense because it was originally conceived as a verse play, and there are some passages that are wonderfully written:

Tom Stark, a sophomore, had made quarterback on the mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the numerous new speedways which bore his father's name.  Fortunately, a highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered the wreck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt, flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp.  Beside the unconscious form of the Sophomore Thunderbolt lay another form, conscious but badly battered, for in the big yellow expensive sport job Tom had had with him a somewhat less expensive yellow-headed sport job, named, it turned out Caresse Jones.  So Caresse wound up in the operating room of the hospital and not in the swamp.  She obligingly did not die, though in the future she would never be much of an asset in a roadster.

There is a lot packed into a few lines here; telling you just about everything you need to know about Willie Stark's son, his relationship with his father, the character of of the state police, and a taste of that time and place's view of the role of certain young women in society.


There are unfortunately many other times when Warren gets in his own way.  One of many possible examples that starts off well, giving great insight to Jack Burden's mind:

I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person.  In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly."

but this is immediately followed by:

Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned [..blah blah blah..].  Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire [..yadda yadda yadda..].  Or so, I recall, it seemed.

Which undermines the original comparison.  Choose a single simile, Robert!  You might argue that since the book is written in first person, this kind of waffling is in Jack Burden's character.  I don't consider that a good excuse for ruining a good paragraph.  Of course, it's also entirely possible that the stuff that drives me crazy when I read All the King's Men is a stylistic thing that was considered good writing back in the 40's; maybe it's like how I can't stand how Olivier does Shakespeare.  I still want to go back in time with Ezra Pound's blue pencil and trim all the fat out of this.  The casual misogyny is also distracting (pretty much every woman gets the same treatment as Lois and the yellow-headed sport job), but at least I know that's a product of the era.  

Aaaand, speaking of casual misogyny, Sarah finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just before we saw the movie last week.  I should probably hold my tongue until I've read the book, but... this is basically a perfectly good mystery/thriller*** EXCEPT that the entire subplot with Bjurman doesn't work at all in the movie and (according to Sarah) is far more graphic than the book.  Who is this being filmed for?  

** the 1949 version; we have some standards, here.

*** though seriously, Nazis? isn't there some form of Godwin's law that should go into effect here?  maybe the trope isn't as trite in Sweden as it is in the U.S.; he gets a mulligan, I guess...