The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great; Steven Pressfield; 2004

It takes an act of courage to write a fictional novel about Alexander III of Macedon.  He's a historical figure with an enormous body of scholarly writing devoted to him, so you will be under close scrutiny as to the "accuracy" of your fiction; at the same time, the historical records are sparse and conflicting, and many of Alexander's exploits that can be agreed upon in the ancient sources would strain credulity without corroboration, and so the need for any fictionalization seems merely a matter of filling in the gaps with some guesswork.


To write a fictional novel about Alexander III of Macedon in the first person is, ultimately, an act of foolhardiness.  Alexander's generals, all brilliant military men, would be difficult enough to write in the first person, and he was their superior as tactician, strategist, politician, and leader, as well as a consummate horseman and ferocious fighter, with a keen interest in architecture and engineering.  Mitt Romney would have a better chance of channeling the thoughts of a son of illegal immigrants.


Pressfield bravely attempts the impossible anyway, and further compounds this initial error by making his protagonist unchanging.  His Alexander claims to have learned nothing of strategy and tactics since the age of ten, and his character does not waver over the course of the book.  This is boring, and a deadly sin in a first-person account.  Interestingly, Pressfield's novel does contain a character who undergoes a spiritual transformation: Telamon, one of Philip's men who helped to teach a young Alexander what it meant to be a soldier.  He might have done better to make Telamon his narrator, both as a character who does grow and change, and as one whose voice he could believably assume.

2012 Colchester Triathlon

It looks like I'm riding
a toy bike

Yesterday was the 28th annual Colchester Triathlon, and my third.  This year, I had a road (touring) bike instead of my hybrid, pictured right (purchased from vtsportsimages' smugmug account).

They've posted the results in PDF format, so it will take me a little while to get it into my preferred spreadsheet format, but it's clear that:

1. the road bike made a huge difference, beating my previous cycling best by 5 minutes (instead of being passed left and right, I was only being passed left),
2. the low lake levels shortened the swimming leg relative to last year, and
3. my conditioning could be a lot better (28 minutes to walk/run 5k is too slow)

Next year: improve my overall conditioning so that my legs aren't dead at the start of the bike/run transition, and so that I spend less time walking in order to get my breathing/heart rate under control.  I should be able to get to 1:20:00 "just" doing that.


UPDATE: spreadsheet up

The Dread Hopewell Gazebo

It must have been at least 20HD.  We knew to beat a hasty retreat before it woke up.

Midway through our driving tour of the Midlantic states, we found ourselves face-to-face with the dread Hopewell Gazebo.  Maybe if we had come armed with the handy map that is the first result of googling hopewell gazebo, we would have been prepared to face it.

Peter Parker, vlogger

I have the Onion in my Reader for the headlines, and at first I simply chuckled at "Economically Healthy 'Daily Planet' Now Most Unrealistic Part Of Superman Universe" and moved on.  Then I realized that any new Superman story would probably be improved if Perry White were a semi-fictionalized Arianna Huffington, though Perry, at least in the movies, seems like a nice guy, and from what I read of Huffington she'd be a better model for J. Jonah Jameson... oh. And then I realized (probably about six years later than I should have) that any new Spiderman story would be vastly improved if Peter Parker blogged video of Spiderman's exploits.  Video is now cheap, blogger is free, and he'd simply turn on the ads to make a few bucks.

Death by falling

We finally saw Up with the kids, and aside from being a great movie with strong themes of love, loss, grief, and moving on, and employing a wonderful metaphor of how Carl's house, and the baggage that goes with it, literally weighs him down, it also features the Death By Falling of the main antagonist.  While appropriate for this particular movie, I hope that Pixar doesn't slide into this Disney trap.


With help from the repository of all knowledge, I compiled the following list of villain deaths** in Walt Disney Animation Studio movies. 

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Queen; DbF
2. Cinderella; Dragon Lucifer, the cat; DbF
3. Sleeping Beauty; Maleficent; sword in the heart
4. The Great Mouse Detective; Ratigan; DbF
5. Oliver and Company; Sykes; DbF (assisted by train impact and drowning in Hudson river)
6. The Little Mermaind; Ursula; bowsprit in the heart
7. Rescuers Down Under; McLeach; DbF
8. Beauty and the Beast; Gaston; DbF
9. The Lion King; Scar; eaten by hyenas after falling (Mufasa also DbF, assisted by trampling)
10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Frollo; DbF
11. Mulan; Shan Yu; pyrotechnics
12. Tarzan; Clayton; hanging assisted by fall
13. Dinosaur; Carnotaurus; DbF
14. Atlantis: the Lost Empire; Rourke; crystal slash to arm(? I haven't seen this one, so am going by the Wikipedia description)
15. The Princess and the Frog; Facilier; dragged to underworld 
16. Tangled; Gothel; old age (with gratuitous fall thrown in)

I count falls involved in the death scenes of 11 of 16 villains, and it's only the last 10-15 years that they've really starting to move away from DbF as the preferred method of removing the hero as the agency of death.  






** I'm ignoring the existence of the Black Cauldron, and discounting the rat in Lady and the Tramp and the Titans in Hercules.  I also haven't seen Treasure Planet, and can't figure from its Wikipedia description whether there is a villain.

If I could go back to 1970 and make a single mandate to car manufacturers...

... it would be to require fuel efficiency gauges in all vehicles, and let American competitiveness do the rest.  Who wouldn't be doing their damnedest to maximize their mpg if it was right in front of their face, and you could immediately see that what you drove and how you drove directly affected that number?  (okay, probably a lot of people, but fewer than now)  

Someday, I want full bars all the way across the top, but that would require a very, very long downhill stretch.

Maybe they're getting a beer on Church

FlowingData linked to this cool post on mapping the relative number of "beer" versus "church" tweets.  Chittenden County in northwest VT is a splash of bright red churchiness in a sea of New England blue beer.  Is this because we're ultra-religious in the People's Republic of Burlington, or because the pedestrian shopping and dining center of our fair City is the Church Street Marketplace?  I'm going to guess... the latter.

The Son of Neptune; Rick Riordan; 2011

No snarky blog post titles for this one.  The Son of Neptune is proof that, even if Riordan isn't necessarily a better writer, he has mastered the art of writing the same book over and over in slightly new and entertaining ways**.


Moreover, this book is special because it's the first one that Sarahmac, Connor, and I each read for the first time, in order, within a couple months of one another so that we could talk about it... The Lost Hero doesn't quite qualify because by the time Connor read it, I'd forgotten Leo and Piper's names and most of the plot.  Given that Connor started the school year struggling to read those abominable Henry & Mudge books, seeing him pick up and breeze through Riordan's series several months later has been a joy.


Part of the trick, I think, was finding the right series to start with.  In Connor's case, Henry & Mudge have idiotically simple plots (this is a kid who enjoyed the Lord of the Rings at 4, and we've read it to him once a year since), so he needed to discover the Magic Treehouse series as something that was both easy enough for him to read and interesting enough to be worth reading.  Then it was "Heroes of Olympus", and now we just need to find the next book.


** this isn't a skill to be sneered at; Riordan is much better at it than Eoin Colfer (if you're barely out of college) or Terry Brooks (if you're my age), for example.

W.E. (2011)

I see why the critical reception was unanimously poor, but it's not like W.E. was unwatchably bad.  The flipping back and forth between the present day and the 30's just doesn't really work because I don't feel a real connection between the two Wallises.  Perhaps the movie just needed to have been made by the same people who made The King's Speech, as part of a series of movies about the House of Windsor.

Big Bess! Parliament!

Elizabeth Tower is too stuffy.  I hereby nominate "Big Bess" as the official nickname of the clocktower.  There's probably a gender studies paper in this story, about how a famous phallic symbol has discovered after 150+ years that it's actually a girl.  Now let's get Chevy Chase in a sound studio ASAP to update his lines.

VSO summer festival tour

With the Vermont Mozart Festival shutting down before the start of last summer (a sad end to a 37-year run), we went through severe concert picnicking withdrawal, so we made sure to go to the VSO's summer festival tour this year.  In particular, we saw the concert at Jay, which was the first time Jay had hosted a VSO summer concert in 40 years (wow), and a couple folks in the audience remembered the last VSO concert there.

It was a fun program, but storm clouds gathered over the mountains throughout the first half, and the skies opened up just as they were finishing the Funny Girl medley** and, as it was now 8:30pm and we had an hour and a half drive home with kids who normally went to sleep between 8 and 9, we decided to head home.  Still and all, it was a good concert, and while the venue wasn't bad -- there is a hill so that everyone has a good view of the orchestra -- it made us appreciate Shelburne Farms all the more***.

Also, since Jay is a bit of a drive, we made a day of it and went to the Pump House**** before the concert.  For a park with serious space constraints (3 of the 4 slides travel outside the building in order to extend their runs without increasing the space that needed to be enclosed), it was fun, with Finn declaring we should go back to the water park "nextday" and Connor needing 5 hours at the park before declaring he was bored.  It was a good day all around!


** sign of the times: Sarahmac noted that she now hears Lea Michele's voice instead of Barbra's when the instrumental parts of Funny Girl are played.

*** Ravinia in Chicagoland has the great virtue of being on the Metra line, but Shelburne Farms is right on the lake.  Shelburne Farms' only weakness, really, is the scrum of cars trying to leave at the end.  Oh, if only there were a commuter train line running through Shelburne and a shuttle from Shelburne Farms to the station so that concertgoers could leave their cars at home.  (note: there is such a line potentially available; but the commuter part was squelched in 2003 before it really got started)


**** my basis for water park comparison is a 20+ year-old memory of Waterworks (now Breakwater Beach) in Seaside Heights.  I haven't been to it in its Breakwater Beach incarnation, so I have no clue why the slides at a NJ water park seem to be MA-themed.  It must be because NJ has no revolutionary era history to draw upon.  As for the Pump House, I could wish that canned music wasn't being blared through the speakers, but really, the music wasn't as loud as the regular noise of the workings of an indoor water park.  I would go deaf or insane, and possibly both, if I had to work there.  Thank goodness it's not as crowded on a beautiful summer day as it apparently is during the winter.