Dodger; Terry Pratchett; 2012

It was only upon opening the book that I realized it wasn't a Discworld novel.  By page 50 I still didn't understand why it wasn't a Discworld novel, but soldiered on until the end so I could definitely say that Dodger would have been better served as a middling Discworld novel than middling, name-dropping, generic pseudo-historical fiction.  It has its moments, favoring the reader every so often with a good line, but... I'm sticking to the post-Hogfather Discworld books from here on out. 

Nate Silver is a Frequentist / No He's Not!

Going through the Reader backlog and enjoying Wasserman and Gelman debate on whether Nate Silver is a closet frequentist or whether he's consistent in claiming to be a Bayesian while taking steps in his analyses that could be considered frequentist.  The comment sections are important to this discussion.  

I have to admit that I'm less interested in the philosophical underpinnings of one's data analytic methodology and more interested in what works.  That means I should probably give up my MS/ABD in Statistics and go sit with the engineers, but really, I find it more interesting that while the mainstream media is hailing Silver as a hero and data analytics godling, there are a number of people who are angry (jealous? Republican?) about it.

Brave; 2012

My snarky desire to comment that it was too soon to remake Brother Bear** in the Scottish Highlands is at war with my natural bias in favor of redheads is at war with the sneaking suspicion that my agreement with the gender politics behind the movie*** is affecting my judgement of its artistic merits.

But what the heck; I really liked Brave.  So did the kids.  In fact, it's now my 4th-favorite Pixar movie, after The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up, roughly in that order.


** or maybe that it was too soon to do another remake of Brother Bear, since the plot of The Princess and the Frog is also "be unwillingly transformed into something non-human and learn about yourself", though really we should probably consider all three of these remakes of The Emperor's New Groove... but not quite Beauty and the Beast, because Belle is the main character and she has no idea there's any hope for Beast's salvation?  Likewise, Arthur is willingly transformed in The Sword in the Stone... but then, is Brave different from The Emperor's New Groove because Merida isn't the one who undergoes the animal transformation???.  In any case, why the heck has Disney suddenly gone animal transformation crazy in the last twelve years?

*** I'm all in favor of normalizing stories with heroines that don't get married right away and are perfectly happy.

Fictional significant others

Deadspin has revealed that an important storyline from this year's college football season is a hoax (since I don't care about college football, the first I read of it was on G+).  To me, the real story here is the list of  media outlets that didn't bother to fact check the girlfriend's existence, including (taken from the Deadspin post): 

South Bend Tribune
Sports Illustrated
New York Times
Fox Sports
New York Post
ESPN
CBS (CBS This Morning)
College GameDay
Los Angeles Times

The crux of the matter here is "storyline".  This was a story that Manti Te'o could sell to media outlets because it was a story that the media outlets could sell to their consumers.  And, because it was profitable to tell this story, one wonders if that had any bearing in the gross negligence (bordering on complicity in the hoax) shown by the media outlets.

Continuing to shoot their credibility in the foot, ESPN's report on the Deadspin post glosses over the possibility that Manti Te'o was in on the hoax, spending a single sentence on it, and instead devote four paragraphs to Reagan Mauia's mistaken belief that the fake girlfriend actually existed.

No HOFers

The BBWAA did not elect anyone to the Hall of Fame this year, thus providing plenty of fodder for the baseball blogs until spring training.  Perhaps the best and most complete entry I've seen on the whole issue is The 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, Version 3.0, but to me, the biggest shame is that Lou Whitaker is no longer even on the ballot to have a chance at being voted in with Alan Trammel.  A pair like Trammel and Whitaker is rare; we all know Tinker and Evers (and Chance), but Trammel and Whitaker were even better. 

Kenny Lofton only received 3.2% of the vote, which is a shame if you consider him to be the 8th greatest CF of all time...  I have a hard time getting around his poor playoff numbers, and he had 438 postseason plate appearances, so no small-sample problem here.  Worse, while I had primarily remembered him as part of all those Cleveland teams that fell short in the postseason, he was also a part of the Giants team that lost the last two games of the 2002 WS, the Cubs team that lost the last 3 games (two at home) of the 2003 NLCS, and the Yankees team that lost the last 4 games of the 2004 ALCS.  In a sport as superstitious as baseball, you gotta conclude that poor guy is cursed.

Rogue Dragon; Avram Davidson; 1965

Another Nebula finalist.  This starts off with a great description of a dragon hunt, eventually gets lost and muddles through the middle, and then ends tolerably well.  Paul Brooks' Amazon review from 2 years ago excellently explains what went wrong, I think.  Now I want to read the original 58-page story... still, at under 150 pages for the entire "expanded" novel, the filler isn't too painful.

Rogue Dragon also has the following contribution to the Annals of Bad Editing [my comments in square brackets]:

The loft lay at the top of a teetering old tenement deep in the festering slums of Old Drogue.  Below, illicit win was made from wild grapes, and unlicensed tobacco cured and sold; the [there?] was an inn - de facto, not de jure - which kept no register of those who found cheap if uncertain slumber on the rag beds of it's [aaaarrgggh!] frousty [spelled with the alternate "frowsty" on a later page] floor; an entire establishment of ladies officially if not all actually young, who failing any gainful skills above a certain level, got their living by the use of such passive skills as lay beneath it; and a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase.

There are plenty of typographical errors in this edition, but in addition to the typos, this passage is a beautiful example of when to kill your darlings, or, at the very least, turn some of those semi-colons into periods.

Lastly, the back cover 2009 IDW paperback declares "Was Avram Davidson the Greatest Fantasist of the 20th Century?  Very likely."  

WAT

You could make the case he's the best fantasist I'd never heard of before working through the Nebula finalists list, but better than Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and Stephen King (who are mentioned by name on the back cover), not to mention that guy who wrote about those short people trying to get rid of some oppressive jewelry?!!?  I hear he was pretty good, too.  Hell, if we want to talk dragons in an SF setting, I may have guilty-pleasure enjoyed Dragonriders of Pern more than Rogue Dragon.

The Genocides; Thomas Disch; 1965

Another notch on the list of Nebula finalists.  I recall liking 334, but have no notes other than that it earned a place in the annals of bad editing:

On page 92 of the Gregg Press Science Fiction Series of Thomas Disch's 334, he talks about changing the value of c in a parabola

y = x^2 + c

in order to change the width of the parabola.

Oi.  I also read On Wings of Song some time ago, but don't recall much about it except that I didn't particularly like it.

The Genocides isn't bad.  He has a good premise and manages to tell most of the story from the POV of his characters without dropping into "god view" to explain what the heck is going on; unfortunately, his primary characters are so unlikable that I feel relief, rather than remorse, at the prospect of the end of the world.  We need someone to root for, even if they're doomed!**  Still, there are some good bits, and at under 150 pages, it's a relatively small gamble of your time.  This paragraph was my favorite (page 30 of the 2000 Vintage Books paperback edition):

They had lived these last three years in the safe-deposit vault in the basement of the First American National Bank.  Their precious store of scavenged cans and jars was still locked in the safe deposit boxes, and the canary was probably in his cage in the corner.  It had been a very cozy home, though there were few visitors and they had had to kill most of those.  Such luck couldn't last forever.

** I'm pretty sure I'm "supposed" to root for Orville, but I can't.

Total Recall (2012)

The end is not entirely satisfying, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed the Colin Farrell Total Recall more than the Arnold version (it's been 20 years and I only saw it once).  In wondering why they would choose to remake this film, we decided the original bar was set low enough that they decided they had a better chance of surviving comparisons to the original than, say, the remake of Sabrina**.

In comparing Farrell to Schwarzenegger as the protagonist, I can't help but think of Shortpacked!'s "False Equivalences" Batman.

I also can't help but notice that Our Hero needs to "escape" from a powerful, confident, competent woman to a woman who is competent enough to "deserve" him, but still needs him to save her, take the lead when they're escaping from the bad guys together, wake up first when their car crashes and carry her back to his apartment, etc.

** it's still astounding that someone believed you could swap Hepburn, Bogart, and Holden for Ormond, Ford, and Kinnear. 

There's a half-inch of fresh powder out in the intervale (and still gently falling)...

... and I've got meetings straight through to 3pm.  The perks of having opinions that people at work seem to care about are interfering with the perks of telecommuting.

The Case of the Future Einsteins

This came home in a flyer from school.  I am delighted to have the opportunity to sign my kids up for an enrichment program that has an inappropriate apostrophe in the title of the program.

To be fair, typos happen, but I suspect foul (English) play.

The Now of "Eat In / Carry Out"

One of the many billboards we passed on the PA Turnpike trumpeted a Dunkin' Donuts that had "Free Wifi / Drive Thru".   My first thought was that the ad didn't make sense because these attributes don't stack (if I wanted free wifi, the drive through service is of no interest, and vice versa), but quickly realized this is simply how you now advertise that customers can choose to dine at leisure or get a meal on the go at your establishment.