Burt Wetanson and Thomas Hoobler. The Treasure Hunters (1983)

     Burt Wetanson and Thomas Hoobler. The Treasure Hunters (1983) Humans hunted by aliens, a tired cliche, maybe. In this young-adult fiction Wetanson and Hoobler do a good job of putting a new twist on it: The Hunters have psychic powers, which they must not use. But one of the humans, Billy Miller, a teenager with self esteem and girl problems, is on the verge of the Discovery. How he learns of his powers, and why the Aged Master decides he must be initiated into their full use, forms the backbone of the story, which  is a pretty straightforward quest. The perils and encounters are well enough told that they ring true, but the characters are explained rather than shown. As SF, the book rates a solid ** (2007)

Gary Larson. Bride of the Far Side (1985)

     Gary Larson. Bride of the Far Side (1985) Larson’s genius is finding the mundane in the bizarre and the bizarre in the mundane. Animals, alien life forms, the stereotypical monsters of the movies, all have the same concerns, worries, and ambitions as ordinary suburban human beings, whose secret desires and naive common sense lead them into lethal choices. Two alien kids with three eyes each taunt a school chum wearing glasses as “Six eyes.” A Viking opens his lunch box, and complains that his wife has given him a tuna fish sandwich. A man and his boy watch riff-raff (lounging smokers and streetwalkers) displayed at the zoo.
     I like Larson’s drawings a lot. **** (2007)

Garrison Keillor. We Are Still Married (1989)

     Garrison Keillor. We Are Still Married (1989) I know Keillor’s breathy, hesitant, ruminative style of story telling from NPR’s The Prairie Home Companion, and that voice sounds in my imagination when I read these pieces. Keillor’s trick is to combine the mundane with the bizarre, the everyday respectable life with the occasional escape into the disreputable. He tends to melancholy, a gentle nostalgia for the good things of life which we will leave behind when we die, but that should be enjoyed while we still can. And while he never delves too deeply into his character’s or persona’s motives, he hints at depths that we can barely perceive, let alone understand.
     The title story illustrates this nicely. A couple, Earl and Willa,  becomes the subject of a reporter’s investigation into the effects of the death of a pet, Biddy, their dog. But the dog recovers, and Blair’s presence alters their relationship, so that Willa becomes an emblem of the ignored, taken for granted, oppressed wife, and makes her mark in print and on TV. Yet in the end they reunite, not because Earl changes, but because Biddy gets sick again, and Willa wants Earl’s company. Earl “takes her back”, with no recriminations, no demands. They get two new dogs, and soon, when spring breaks up the ice on the lake, things “will be as if none of this has ever happened.” Which is of course not true, since Earl has changed despite himself. Most of all, he has accepted Willa as she decides she wants to be. That, I suppose, is why they are still married.
     Good book. *** (2007)

Sue Grafton. ‘D’ is for Deadbeat (1987)

     Sue Grafton. ‘D’ is for Deadbeat (1987) A client wants Kinsey to deliver a check, but stiffs her for the fee, and then turns up dead. He had been put away for vehicular manslaughter, having killed five people while driving drunk. Kinsey suspects murder, and when the dead drunk’s daughter hires her to investigate the circumstances of her father’s death, she soon uncovers enough evidence to confirm the suspicion. The case unfolds with the usual twists and turns and secondary murders, but with less edge than the previously narrated ones. Grafton also eschews the near-death confrontation with the murderer, which was getting to be rather too formulaic for my taste. She reveals a talent for characterising even the walk-on parts, and has been allowed to leave in the mood-setting descriptions of weather and scene that her editors truncated in previous books. This combination makes for a more satisfying read than the earlier ones, despite its lack of tension. **½ (2007)

Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle (1996)

 

Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle (1996), which is, that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the one place where they can do the least damage, management. Adam’s  analysis of what ails the modern bureaucracy, public or private, is accurate. The net effect is therefore quite depressing. The main difference between public and private money wasters is that the former are called to account, since the (privately owned) media love to show up government’s sins. But they downplay or ignore the same events when perpetrated by some privately paid idiot. But there’s only one wallet: We pay for all money-wasting mistakes and thefts, public and private, one way or another. (That’s my principle).
     Management is a necessary evil; it’s a direct result of the size of the enterprise. The larger an organisation, the more effort it expends on managing itself. (That’s my principle, too). Hence the largest enterprises, governments and multi-national corporations, suffer from the same inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and inertia.
     Then there is the inefficiency of the market, which responds to people’s desires rather than to their needs. The reason is of course that we, as Adams points out, are all idiots. I wonder if he’s aware of the Greek derivation of the word. In ancient Greece, an idiot was a man focussed on his private concerns instead of participating in public life. We now live in a culture that not only thinks this is an OK attitude, which would be bad enough, but believes that self-centredness be the essence of a free, democratic society, which is not only absurd but appalling, and in the long run destructive.
     I enjoyed the book for its wit, its pithy style (Adams is a natural aphorist), and for its hapless central character, Dilbert. But that pleasure's a high price to pay for a depressing insight. *** (2007)

Update 2013: After serving on the Blind River District Health Centre Board for several years, I’m convinced that bureaucracy is a side effect of size. Smaller organisations are more effective, and therefore more efficient, because most management can be done in ad-hoc meetings face to face, and because the teams are small enough to be able to change as needed very quickly. Also, everyone can have a pretty good overview of the whole operation. Size is wasteful, but it feeds egos.

Edited 2023-04-29

Robin Butterell. Miniature Railways

     Robin Butterell. Miniature Railways (n.d., between 1964 and 1967) Butterell has compiled as complete a listing as he could of all miniature railways open to the public at the time of writing. Many of the lines were privately owned and no doubt disappeared when their owners moved or died. The pictures are well done. He includes a map locating the lines in relation to major cities, but more detailed maps would have helped. An interesting record of what was. I wonder how many copies still exist, as such reference works are rarely kept once their information gets too much out of date. ** (2007)

John H Clarke on guitar

John H. Clarke plays guitar, acoustic and amped. Great stuff. Visit his website or his YouTube channel. His own compositions are strongly influenced by the Spanish music he plays. Recommended.

Centrifugal Brain Research

Ever wonder who comes up with those crazy amusement park rides? Well, wonder no more. They are of an experiment in neurology. Purpose: to explore the effects of gravity on the brain. The rides provide variable acceleration, and everybody knows that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity proved that acceleration and gravity are the same. So the next time you ride one of those groovy monsters, you're not only scaring the hell out of yourself, you're also contributing to science. Be happy!

Death Star destruction was an inside job. Really!

The destruction of the Death Star was an inside job, part of a plot to reinstate the Skywalker family on the Imperial Throne. See this this video proof. Pretty convincing, eh?

Bill Watterson. The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (1989)

     Bill Watterson. The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (1989) A collection of full colour Sunday comics. Watterson uses colour as subtly and skilfully as he uses line. A wonderful commentary on childhood, adulthood, Life, the Universe, and Everything. 42! **** (2007)

Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) & The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

     Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) Davies’ wit and sharp satirical observation makes this a book to enjoy. He is practising his style. Most of these paragraphs are very well formed, with exquisite sentences. Occasionally, they end with Marchbanks’ side of the response to his comments, most of them unflattering to the ladies whom he presumably regaled with his wit. The comments provide an indirect portrait of the still stuffy and narrow views of the respectable Ontarian, on which Marchbanks honed his wit. This social conservatism has moved West. The stereotypical Albertan now espouses the morality of the mid-20th century Ontarian, and suffers from the same urge to impose it on the rest of the country. I found myself eager to read selected passages aloud, an urge that Marie accommodated with her usual good grace. She even laughed at some of Davies’ passages. This copy is a first edition, but without wrappers. ***

     Robertson Davies. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) This volume too, is a first edition, but a second printing. In this earlier volume, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second one. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit). Although there have been changes for the better since the 1940s, sixty years later we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed. The blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children’s sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand. Update 2013: Families can now claim a deduction for music lessons and the like as well.
     Marchbanks’ struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become much more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn’t, therefore, become better. There’s more to the good life than creature comforts.
     The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions). He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences appear to be lengthy to the eye, but not to the ear. (Davies writes for the ear, a rare skill and even rarer ambition). But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. “If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another.”  “New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto.” “If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be.” *** (2007)

Les Kozma, ed. Along These Lines (2004)

     Les Kozma, ed. Along These Lines (2004) The Canadian Northern Society has collected both oral and written history of the Edmonton - Camrose - Stettler - Calgary line, along with some of its branches. Kozma has done a nice job of arranging these. He begins with an account of how the CNoR Society came into being. We now take specialist historical societies for granted, but when they decided that they could and should preserve and recondition Meeting Creek station, such societies still had carried an aura of the quixotic and impractical.
     It’s a book to dip into, not to read, and like many such local and personal histories has more meaning for family and friends than for the casually interested rail fan. A grad student, however, could make much of the details mentioned in passing or assumed as general knowledge. The history of the railroad worker hasn’t been written. This is good documentation for such a book. The photos are reasonably well reproduced, but a few too many betray their origin as low-res scans of the originals. A map would help immensely, and its lack is the only serious fault. I detected no typos, which indicates careful editing. ** (2007)