The economy must still be in the tank...

... if my 14.5 year-old Jetta GL is exactly the kind pre-owned vehicle the dealer's customers are interested in purchasing.  It's probably only good for a couple more years, though that's what we thought two years ago.  Wait, you don't think this might just be bait to get me to buy a new car?  (Shh, not so loud, the Jetta will hear)  

What I don't get is if my car is still reliable, why would I want a new one, even for 110% of Blue Book on the trade in?  Less reconditioning, there probably wouldn't be much left anyway, but given how good this car has been to us, I'd rather let it play out its career on a single team and retire on its own terms.  

The Secret of Kells (2009)

The Secret of Kells is beautiful to watch.  I'm not sure the stories really come together; the Aisling-Brendan relationship is the centerpiece of the movie, but she disappears without a trace once he gets the crystal (though the white wolf appears briefly as he and Aidan make their escape), so I'm left with unanswered questions, mainly what happened to Aisling?  Does Brendan ever think about her?  I would have been happy with a simple acknowledgement of his childhood friendship as he passes through the woods on the way back to Kells.  We don't need to actually see Aisling, I just want to see him thinking about her and looking at and listening to her woods -- maybe he's come to disbelieve that there ever was a wolf girl in the woods and he imagined her, maybe once he's a grown up illuminator of the Gospel he doesn't need any childish paganism any more (though I can't quite accept that :-).  Maybe something like that was there and I missed it, but it seemed like Brendan simply goes back to Kells to talk to his uncle. 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 4 -- spoilers!)

Arrr, ye be warned thar be spoilers below.


Party interactions are important.  In book 1, Riordan uses a Harry-Hermione-Ron configuration, but with Harry and Hermione as the couple.  Grover is simply Percy's best friend, and there's absolutely no tension there, nor between Grover and Annabeth.  This makes the Ron character even more of a third wheel.  In book 2, Riordan swaps out Grover for Tyson as the Ron character, and Tyson works because there's actually tension between him and Percy (who doesn't want to admit Tyson is his brother) and Annabeth (who is uncomfortable adventuring with a monster).  Book 3 begins with Percy-Thalia-Annabeth, which is the BEST combination in the whole series.  This is like having Harry-Harriet-Hermione, only Harriet and Hermione are slightly hung up on a charming and talented young Slytherin who has left the school to be Voldemort's apprentice.  Sadly, we only get this combination for a single chapter, and I can't help but feel cheated.  There's nothing wrong with Zoe and Bianca as characters, but Zoe completely lacks Annabeth's history with Luke and Percy, so Zoe's only tension with Percy is "ew, boys are icky".  ARRRGHH.  Percy-Thalia-Annabeth makes a great book, Percy-Thalia-Zoe is merely a good one.


Silena playing the part of Patroclus to Clarisse's Achilles was a great touch. Making Silena the traitor just doesn't work.  We don't know enough about her to care that she's the traitor, there aren't any clues that she might be the traitor, and it's absolutely inconceivable that she would continue to feed information to Kronos after Beckendorf dies.  It would be trivial to make Annabeth unknowingly be the "traitor" by making a gift from Luke be cursed, and for her to be injured protecting Percy after Percy has revealed his weak spot to her.


Okay, I'm done.  I just wish every author had someone to point out these things before the books get printed.  Not getting more Percy-Thalia-Annabeth chapters is the one thing that really hurts.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 3)

There's also something that bothers me, perhaps more than it should, and perhaps Riordan is unknowingly committing a grievous crime.  See, Apollo is the god-damned god of poetry.  His poetry will not suck.  Riordan owes a huge apology to lovers of verse for the bilge he puts in Apollo's mouth.  Why should we turn kids on to prose that shows such little regard for poetry as to openly mock it?  If you can't write it yourself, then have Apollo quote it.  There are lines already written that can be made to fit any situation.  Percy doesn't have to understand or appreciate it, but those of us who can, should!

All right, back to where Riordan succeeds in coming up with a good overarching plot in each book, the core problem that underlies all of the individual issues above is that the journey is lacking.  We go from East Coast to West in a series of mini-episodes that don't really lead from one to the next or hang together as a coherent story.  When you look back, the events of the book should support one another so that while other events might have occurred, what actually happened seems like a series of natural consequences.

I really did enjoy the series; I mean, it's about the greek gods, so I'm there, and Riordan does get better as the series goes on (Rowling, by contrast, peaks in books 3 & 4, still has room for improvement, but just treads water for the last 3 books).  He begins to hide Grover away as much as possible.  There begins to be connective tissue that ties the episodes together so that I 'm reading a near-complete story rather than a collection of encounters from the wandering monster table.  Percy is less of an idiot.  I actually feel there is finally a moment (on the last page of the penultimate chapter in the last book - oops) which really captures a summer camp aura.


There's also a really nice parallel between Riordan's story of the family of gods that bickers and argues but ultimately has to pull together to face a common menace, and a United States that is currently in the throes of terrible partisan bickering and needs to pull together in order to get back on sound economic footing.  It is heartwarming, to say the least, to read a series by a born-and-bred Texan who is writing with great affection for New York.  You go, San Antonio.

This is a lot more than I ever planned to write about a YA series (and don't think that just because it's YA that it's okay for it to be less than perfect!), but there it is... and perhaps more with spoilers to come.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 2)

Rowling's protagonist is ignorant of much of the wizarding world because he grew up with muggles.  Similarly, Percy has never been taught anything about Greek mythology -- oh, wait, no, he's learned some of it from his Latin teacher at school.  ARGH.  What Percy remembers and doesn't remember from Greek mythology is infuriating.  Percy should know the recorded Greek myths.  It's the unrecorded details of the myths, and what the gods have been up to for the last 3000 years, where he should be floundering.  Athena and Poseidon shouldn't be on bad terms because of a B.C. dalliance; there should be a whole new set of axes that the gods are grinding.  Maybe Poseidon continues to defile Athena's temples every few decades and Percy was conceived in the NY Public Library (a temple to Athena if I ever saw one, and wonderful "MOM!" moment when Percy finds out); maybe Poseidon woos a daughter of Athena every so often because he has a weakness for the smart ones.  This gives Athena an immediate reason to tell Percy in no uncertain terms to stay away from her daughter!  We get a little of the newer grievances with the great prophecy and the agreement between the "big three", but it needs to be consistent and pervasive and there's just so much more one can do with this.

Ron can be a git, but Grover kills every scene he's in.  The name choice is bad enough; Grover should be dead as a fictional character name because it immediately conjures the image of a furry blue monster, but you have to read Grover to understand what a disaster he and all the satyrs are.

Satyrs to Grover: You figured out why so many other satyrs failed to complete our important quest for the last two millennia, but haven't made any progress in the last year.  You have one week to complete the quest or you're grounded. 

Me: Hunh? does this make any sense except as a horribly artificial injection of tension?)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 1)

Harry Percy, Hermione Annabeth, and Ron Grover go to boarding school summer camp with other children who have magic powers an Olympian god as a parent.  During the school year summer, they foil a plot that would bring Voldemort Kronos back to power.


Oi.  Going in, I didn't think that Percy Jackson and the Olympians would lean so heavily on the Harry Potter formula, but I guess the reviews all warned that this was the "next thing" to read after HP.  Riordan definitely succeeds in writing a story whose overarching plot I want to follow to conclusion, but it falls down in several places.


To start, there's the setting.  Both authors need a place where the kids are away from their families (such as they are).  Rowling trades on the English boarding school experience to give us something "ordinary" to hold on to, and by spending time developing their class schedules and extracurricular activities, life at Hogwarts comes to be very real.  Riordan can't send his kids to boarding school; aside from the fact that it would be too like HP, middle-class Americans tend to not send their children to boarding school; the only time we're sent away from home is for summer camp, so it's natural for Riordan's heroes to go there.  Unlike Hogwarts, however, life at Camp Half-Blood is somewhat perfunctory, and only serves as a staging ground for the real adventures out in the wide world.  We're told that they do archery, canoeing, climbing walls, and other typical summer camp activities (with demigod overtones), but we're really only shown Quidditch capture the flag.


Most of Rowling's characters are afraid to say Voldemort's name, so Riordan apes this by having characters be cautious about saying the names of gods and monsters.  This is a hideous mistake, first because "minotaur" is not the beast's name; it's Asterion**.  Second, Riordan applies this rule mostly to shut down conversation about a particular god/monster when the characters get close to something he doesn't want to reveal yet or can't figure out another way to segue out of the conversation.  Other authors, including Rowling, are also guilty of coming up with silly reasons for their characters not to talk to each other about important things, but the inconsistency of the use of the "don't use the names of the gods" rule is particularly galling.  Gah.


** and it's Heracles, not Hercules.  If you're going to use Greek mythology, use all the Greek names.

Burlington, a sort-of bike friendly community

There's a good primer in 7days on how the north/south plan has stalled, though I have to note that:

1. Burlington's "bike friendly" designation was awarded in 2005, technically expired in 2007, and we haven't submitted another application to be reevaluated.  (I actually submitted the application in '05, with a lot of input from Local Motion and Nicole Losch's predecessor)
2. I don't see how the hill on South Winooski is any less of a killer than the one on Battery.  Battery, at least, has better pavement and I feel more confident going down the hill.  I try to avoid both when going up.
3. It would be nice if the article tried to delve deeper into the "why" the north/south plan has stalled.  Is it really simply a problem of bureaucratic red tape and lack of a champion in City Hall?  Could be, but I didn't get a good sense of that from the article.
4. I don't really like to compare cycling in Burlington to cycling in fairer weather cities like Austin, Portland (OR) or Seattle.  Cycling in winter is a tough sell (heck, I don't do it!), but we should certainly be doing at least as well as *Minneapolis* in providing decent cycling facilities. 

Assuming the city council approves the "complete streets" design on Colchester Ave, which received a lot of positive comments, here's hoping that South Winooski and North Ave go next!