Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

Anne’s Carrot Cake

This started life as the carrot cake recipe from _The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook_, Revised Edition. And then Anne tweaked it. Heavily.

h1. Carrot cake

h2. Ingredients

* 2 ^1^⁄~2~ cups spelt flour (all-purpose flour is acceptable)
* 1 ^1^⁄~4~ teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 ^1^⁄~4~ teaspoons cinnamon
* ^1^⁄~2~ teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
* ^1^⁄~8~ teaspoon ground cloves
* ^1^⁄~2~ teaspoon salt
* 4 extra large eggs
* 1 ^1^⁄~4~ cups light brown sugar
* ^3^⁄~4~ cup granulated sugar
* 1 ^1^⁄~2~ cups coconut oil (melted)
* 1 ^1^⁄~2~ cups walnuts, toasted and chopped
* 1 cup raisins
* 2 pounds carrots, washed and grated (use a food processor, seriously)

h2. Recipe

# Make sure the oven rack is in the middle position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
# Lightly coat a 9×13 cake pan with butter then line the bottom with parchment paper.
# Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt together in a large bowl and set aside.
# Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a *very* large bowl until frothy and the sugar is dissolved, 1 to 2 minutes with an electric hand mixer.
# Continue whisking the eggs and sugar as you add the oil, until the mixture is completely emulsified, about a minute.
# Gently whisk the flour mixture in until there are no streaks left.
# Stir in the carrots, walnuts and raisins. This will be an upper body workout.
# Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
# Bake until a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, assume a minimum of 50 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through baking.
# Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack, about 2 hours.
# Run a paring knife around the perimeter of the pan, invert the fake onto the rack, peel off the parchment paper, then invert the cake again onto a serving platter.

h1. Icing

h2. Ingredients

* 8 oz cream cheese, softened
* 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
* 1 tablespoon plain yogurt
* ^1^⁄~2~ teaspoon vanilla extract (you can be liberal here)
* 1 ^1^⁄~4~ cups confectioner’s sugar

h2. Recipe

# Blend the cream cheese, butter, yogurt and vanilla until combined, 5 to 10 seconds.
# Add the confectioner’s sugar and continue to blend on low until smooth, scraping the bowl as needed, 15 to 30 seconds.
# Spread icing on cooled cake.

Black Sabbath press conference video

There’s really not much of particular substance here, but I just wanted to call out that when you see the table with Sabbath and Rick Rubin, against all odds, Rick Rubin is the oldest looking guy there.

Treat your cast-iron right…

and it will be kind to you.

Sheryl Canter has “a very specific technique for seasoning cast iron cookware”:http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/ that is supposed to produce amazing results. Like all the best techniques, it’s grounded in science rather than hearsay.

But don’t take her word for it–Americas Test Kitchen tried her technique, and found that after treating a cast-iron skillet based on her technique, you could send it through a commercial wash cycle–with degreasing agent–and the finish was undamaged.

Our three cast iron skillets–one of which belonged to my great grandmother–are used so consistently they live on top of the stove; we basically never put them away. We use our stainless steel pots for soups, basically, but cast iron for everything else. This does present me with the small problem of taking them out of circulation to season them well.

Mind you, I have my eye on a Le Creuset Dutch Oven some day. Enameled, but still cast iron.

Stanley Fish’s Life Report

I understand Stanley Fish is a controversial character. I don’t rightly know why–I gather something about academic politics and maybe being on the wrong side of people who like to call other people fascists or something–and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t concern me.

What I do know is that I find “this essay he wrote about the things, in retrospect, he wishes he had placed more importance upon during his life”:http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/my-life-report/ to be compelling stuff.

Kim Kardashian

Oh, pop culture, why would I care?

In fact, I don’t–other people’s marriages are of interest to me only to the extent that some people are unfairly excluded from it on the basis of their sexual orientation–but this does seem an opportune moment to make an observation.

Kim Kardashian’s mockery of a marriage seems to me less about the failure of morals in a liberal society–a subject upon which I would not be surprised to hear many pundits bloviate in the coming days—and more about the allure of money and the type of action to which its pursuit often leads. Kim Kardashian was simply doing what was necessary to make sure she was one of the 1%. It seems worthwhile to consider whether others, too, might have fallen into immoral behavior in its pursuit.

Thor

…was never one of my favorite characters. Still, I had read some favorable comments about the movie, and Hell, it was directed by [-Henry V-]Kenneth Branagh, so it should be OK, right?

I think Kat Dennings was probably my favorite part of the movie, really–cute, sassy and way more interesting than either Jane Foster or muscle-boy.

Yeah, that’s right, the two-dimensional sidekick was way more interesting than the main characters, who managed roughly 1.5 dimensions.

Hell, The Destroyer–which had no lines and did nothing other than blow things up (though it did that magnificently)–was more interesting than our ostensible focus.

Oh, well. I guess I’ll watch–and, I suspect, dis–Captain American next.

Children of the Sky and Snuff

Two of my favorite SF novels are _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_, by Vernor Vinge. So when I heard several months ago that there was a sequel to the first being released this month, I felt both excitement and deep trepidation.

My experience of the book, _Children of the Sky_, falls somewhere in the middle.

In a way, I guess you could say the scope of all three books has been narrowing–[_A Fire Upon the Deep_] being a no-holds-barred Space Opera, _A Deepness in the Sky_ being a first-contact novel, while _Children of the Sky_ is a political thriller that happens to have aliens. It does a good job at what it is, but I found myself missing the sense of wonder that the first two books provoke in me even after numerous readings.

I enjoyed it enough that it’s not going to go into the pile to be donated to the library–and these days I’m getting pretty darn ruthless about putting stuff in that pile–but I suspect that if I went out and bought a new copy of _A Fire Upon the Deep_ (which I kinda need–the old one’s getting pretty worn), in 10 years, it will probably show more evidence of use.

Before that, though, I read _Snuff_, Terry Pratchett’s latest.

I am sad to say that this is the first Discworld novel in the last 15 years that I haven’t wanted to re-read almost immediately. Like _Children of the Sky_, I don’t intend to get rid of it, but I feel like it’s relying overmuch on my love of the characters to make up for a plot that seems a little lacking in originality–it feels a little like the bastard child of _The Fifth Elephant_, _Thud!_ and _Unseen Academicals_, and I think the result is a little tepid.

In my heart of hearts, though, I know some of my dissatisfaction stems from the fact that I realize that this book or the next book or the one after that is likely to be his last, and I want one last Granny Weatherwax novel. For me, she and Sam Vimes are the emotional core of his cast of characters–both people who are so desperately suspicious of themselves that being good often seems to make them angry–but she hasn’t been center-stage since _Carpe Jugulum_ in ’98, and I have that childish desire to see her again.

My Chai recipe

I knew that I had posted “my” chai recipe at some point in the past, but when I found it, I discovered that it was an old version. Time to update it, especially since as I’ve been getting more and more requests for the recipe of late. Something about cold weather.

The single biggest difference between the version I posted before and this one is that I’ve been using rooibos (aka redbush) tea for the last several years. This started because I was making it for a bunch of yoga practitioners, some of whom had sworn off caffeine. The unexpected benefit was that 1) rooibos is very tasty, and 2) unlike black tea, rooibos doesn’t get bitter if you steep it more than a couple of minutes. This means it’s possible to steep it for a long time and make a strong tea that stands up well to milk or milk-analogues.

Also, you can have it in the evening and still expect to get to sleep.

Since I sometimes make huge batches for 20 or 30 people over a weekend, but mostly batches to last Anne and I a week, this recipe is more concerned with proportion than amount (hence quantities below denoted as 4x or 2x, rather than 4T or whatever). Starting out, if you’re working with a gallon of water, x = 1 heaping tablespoon. If you’re working with a quart of water, x = 1 heaping teaspoon. Over time you’ll probably discover that you prefer certain things to be a little stronger and others to be a little weaker. I rarely even measure anymore, I just eyeball it. So don’t worry about it too much.

h2. Ingredients

4x loose rooibos tea
4x peeled and sliced ginger
3x whole cardamom, crushed
3x cinnamon, crushed
2x whole cloves
2x black peppercorns, crushed
1x star anise, crushed
vanilla bean

For the vanilla bean I use about half a bean for a gallon of chai.

h2. Preparation

Bring all ingredients to a boil in a pot appropriate to the amount of water you’re using. Put a top on it, and turn down low enough that it’s just simmering, and let simmer for 30 minutes. Turn off heat, and if possible, leave it to steep overnight with the cover on. Filter and store.

I generally use this in equal proportion with milk, frothing it with the steam wand on my espresso machine—the frothiness is a nice complement. It works just as well if you whisk it in a pot as you heat it up, it’s just more work. I’ve drunk it with cow’s milk, almond milk and soy milk, all of which go well with it.

As always, slacktivist has a way with a turn of phrase…

bq. This is the sort of inhuman behavior that clarifies that, regardless of what five Supreme Court justices may say, corporations are not people. They have no soul to save, no body to incarcerate, no heart to break and no ass to kick.

“Also includes graph as to why the 99% might be justified in being a little peeved”:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2011/10/25/no-real-than-you-are/.

10 years gone

“Ars Technica”:http://arstechnica.com/ has “a retrospective about Windows XP’s long life”:http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/ten-years-of-windows-xp-how-longevity-became-a-curse.ars that I found very interesting.

Until reading it, I couldn’t have told you when XP was released. I was out of the Windows biz by then—all of my personal work machines had been running Linux for two or three years by that point, and I had given up all but the most peripheral contact with Windows when I left the University of Miami in ’99.

Still, I did have some dealings with it. We eventually replaced Anne’s Gateway laptop running Windows 95 with a ThinkPad T40 running XP in 2003 or so. Even though it’s some 8 years old we still have it, and it still has XP on it. For the longest time I used it to play World of Warcraft on XP, though it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done that—at this point I just need to wipe it and dispose of it. But it still runs.

And thinking about it, I have to say, XP was pretty darned stable, and something resembling svelte. Whenever I have to use Anne’s current Windows 7 machines, I’m always amazed at how slow such powerful machines can be made to run. XP even on much older hardware is surprisingly snappy.

In retrospect, though I would never have wanted to use it as my primary OS or anything, I have to admit that XP was actually a pretty good OS.

The Hunger Games

Yeah, so I started it on my fathers Nook while we were visiting with them in Panama City, FL, early last month. When we got home, I put it on my list of things to get at the library, and then prepared to wait.

However, the Sunday morning yoga class I teach has also taken on something of a book-club character—really, I guess you could say it’s taken on a circle-of-friends character, as we often end up talking about one thing or another, books and food are just persistent topics.

Anyway, someone offered to loan me the first book, but I was in the middle of a stack of things that were coming in from the library, so it sat for a few weeks, and then I got the new Terry Pratchett novel for my birthday, so that got precedence.

Last night I made the mistake of picking it up just before bed, and didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours. And then picked it up over coffee and oatmeal, and was late getting to my desk. And then finished it over lunch.

I guess in some ways it reminds me of _Ender’s Game_, which isn’t an entirely positive association for me. It’s compulsively readable, that’s for sure. And I’ll probably borrow the other two from my source…but they’re certainly not books I see myself ever wanting to actually own.

Stations of the Tide

I have a hard time even describing this book. I guess it reminds me most of something Gene Wolfe might write. You come to distrust the narrative, feeling it’s leading you astray even as it tells you the truth.

I don’t know that I would recommend it, and I don’t know that I would re-read it, but it was worthwhile to have read the once.

BSG S1:E3 – “Water”

What do you do when you don’t remember what you’ve done?

There are real incidences of people committing murder while in a somnambulistic state. Can you imagine what that would be like, to wake up and find that you’d done something you had no memory of, that you would never have chosen to to? Even in the world of BSG, your first thought would not, could not be, “I must be a Cylon.” To doubt your own identity at that level seems unthinkable. In a way, I think Boomer (and the Chief) don’t go quite crazy enough.

I didn’t like the bits when Boomer was on the water patrol. It wasn’t clear to me what the mechanism in operation—seeing the somnambulism was less convincing than seeing the aftermath as at the beginning. The whole business with the explosives on the Raptor was confusing, though with it there, I would have expected her, like Galen, to realize that this was evidence that perhaps she wasn’t responsible.

It’s interesting to see that at this point it was still easy to think Tricia Helfer was just eye-candy, spouting out weird lines about God. I don’t remember it being until later, maybe “New Caprica” or thereabouts that she really started to show that there was depth there.

The interplay between Laura and Adama is adorable, even knowing its ultimate melancholy outcome, and the rockiness that lies ahead.

The tension between Baltar and Starbuck was great. I don’t remember offhand whether they ever actually sleep together, but that was certainly a great setup for the idea.

BSG S1:E3 – “33”

Way to ratchet up the tension.

If the second half of the mini-series seemed like a little bit of a let-down (and I’ve not yet got my commentary on it up, so this is a spoiler), this first episode of the actual series kicks things right back into high gear.

Even if I find it implausible that the Colonials are able to even pretend to function after 130+ hours, medicated or not, the actors do their considerable best to give the impression that these are people who are beyond even working on autopilot. Even the best of them have moments of staring off into nothingness as their minds are unable to keep going.

Oh, the characters. The writers seemed to understand them well, and figured out ways to show who they are without hitting us in the face with it. Kara’s confrontation with Lee that looks like it’s truly going to spill over into violence until they both burst out laughing. The look on Laura’s face when at they end, she gets the news that a baby’s been born. Adama’s sadness and forgiveness when Dualla admits she doesn’t know if a ship checked in before they made their jump.

Tigh…I wonder if they were already planning to make Tigh one of the “Final Five”, because he (as with Boomer, who we already know is a Cylon) is shown here as having extraordinary endurance. He actually seems to enjoy it.

Finally, I had forgotten how weird things were with Baltar and Six right from the get-go. This episode seems to be setting up the idea that the Cylon’s god is very involved and present–and yet, it could all be coincidental.

The truth isn’t always what you want it to be.

So, there’s this video going around of Al Franken (whom I truly admire as one of our more sensible-seeming Senators[1]) taking Tim Minnery–who services in some sort of capacity with the anti-gay Focus on the Family organization–to task for misrepresenting a study about the correlation of the well-being of children and the type of family they come from.

Now I support same-sex marriage, and *love* to see bigots of all stripes get schooled, but I’m not sure Franken is necessarily right on this one.

Specifically, if the study defines a “nuclear family” as a married couple—and you can hear Senator Franken use the phrase “who are married to one another” at 1:59, when he says he is reading the definition the study uses—then Minnery’s interpretation is at least legitimate, and perhaps even more correct: because same-sex couples are not allowed to marry in all but a scant handful of states, they are going to be excluded from the “nuclear family” category in almost all cases.

There may be more to it that’s not in this clip, but in this case, I’m not sure the evidence as portrayed holds up to scrutiny.

fn1. Many years ago, Anne and I were seated at a table adjacent to his in a restaurant in Harvard Square.

Getting a good copy of the org-mode refcard on two-sided Letter paper

Dear lazyweb,

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my printer, but here’s what I had to do to get a good print of the org-mode refcard onto Letter paper. From within the org-mode sources, I did:

bc. make doc/orgcard_letter.tex
cd doc
tex orgcard_letter.tex
dvips -O “-.5in,.25in” -t letter -t landscape orgcard_letter.dvi

This got me a .ps file that seemed well-centered on the page. To print it, I did:

bc. ps2pdf14 orgcard_letter.ps
evince orgcard_letter.pdf (print, duplex flipped on the short side)

I probably could have done (using lp directly, but since I was also using evince to eyeball the layout first, it was easiest to do it from there):

bc. lp -o sides=two-sided-short-edge orgcard_letter.ps

Continued hilarity in Transformers reviews…

“This one”:http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/07/driving-your-brain-off-a-cliff-transformers-dark-of-the-moon from Tor.com:

On it’s 3D-ness:

bq. Weirdly, because it’s exactly the same as a normal Michael Bay movie, the 3D camerawork seems almost understated, because there’s none of the usual “wooooooo, look at the threeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-deeeeeeeeee” foolishness. It actually makes his visual compositions a little more legible; being able to see what’s going on in a Michael Bay action scene is a novel experience, even if what you’re seeing confirms your prior thesis that what’s going on is giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

And the coup de grace:

bq. This should not be confused with my thinking Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a good movie. It’s absolutely, categorically not. Calling it a movie is giving it too much benefit of the doubt. Michael Bay is engaged in a parallel medium, using all the equipment other people use to make movies, but creating something that bears only cursory resemblance to actual cinema. It’s a mechanism for stealing the brain’s car keys, forcibly duct-taping the pleasure center’s accelerator pedal to the floor, and sending the whole nervous system flying toward a cliff. While on fire. It’s very possible to enjoy oneself in such a state, but it’s equally possible to feel assaulted.

The funny thing is that I actually now, through a total accident of, “What, that’s an open-box you have that’s an upgrade from the TV I wanted?” own a 3-D TV. Not that I have any intention of actually using this feature, but it’s there.

BSG S1:E1

This is some insanely taut storytelling, and while it tries to be clear what is happening at any moment–it’s only about the jump cuts during space battles, which is probably an appropriate place to do that–it’s happy to wait until later to reveal to you the implications of what you saw. Which I regard as a good thing–not assuming your audience is stupid is still refreshing.

As an example, we see Six on the space station, seemingly destroyed, and then we’re shown the same person with Baltar, and although we get that this is a signal that she is probably not one of the good guys (not to mention the incident with the baby–which I still can’t decide whether to interpret as mercy or as the equivalent of pulling the legs off a spider[1] just to see what happens), they’re happy to wait half an hour to let us know that they can upload their consciousness–and we’re *still* not told whether the one on Caprica is the same one as on the space station.

Even the bits that could easily have seemed like off-the-shelf parts–I’m thinking of the exchange between Apollo and Commander Adama after their photo-shoot, where the rift between them starts to become clear–still resonate because the writers hold back You understand that Lee holds his father responsible, and you think you understand what happened, but still much is left unsaid–we’re not given any sort of infodump, even though they still didn’t know if they were going to get anything more than a miniseries at this point.

And, the actors are just so damned good. The moment near the end of the first half, where Lee explains to President Roslin that “Apollo” is just his call-sign–Mary McDonnell gives him this fleeting smile before telling him she knows who he is, it’s just amazing. The entirety of Gaius Baltar’s performance is so wonderfully…slimy. And the moment when Tigh decides to sacrifice people to put out fires is chilling…the way he hesitates, but finally acts without remorse.

Interestingly, knowing in advance how it’s all going to come out, Adama’s speech at the decommissioning ceremony for the Galactica seems to point to everything that the series ends up being concerned with–the responsibility of a creator toward his creations. They take a circuitous route, and I’ll be curious how well Ronald D. Moore actually holds to it over the long term, but it might actually be that they set out their ideas here, first thing.

fn1. I have never done this, if only because I find spiders way too creepy to want to be that intimate with. But the replicants systematic destruction of a spider toward the end of _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ has always haunted me.

The funniest line out of a movie review I’ve read in a while…

From “a review”:http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/28/transformers-dark-of-the-moon-review/ of _Transformers: Whatever the Subtitle Is_ on “Bleeding Cool”:http://www.bleedingcool.com/

bq. The main action of the film revolves around the good guys slowly coming to understand the monstrous improbability of the villains’ plan while Bay smashes all his action figures together and makes the smaller ones say annoying Jar Jar Binks stuff.

Heh.

TV on the Radio

So, I posted about my feeling that “pop music today was a retread of stuff that wasn’t even the best there was the first time around”:/2011/05/13/the-pop-music-of-my-youth-isnt-getting-rehashed/. I got some pushback on that, to the effect that I, being over 40, would have to be an exceptional specimen to appreciate music that wasn’t of my youth, and of course I thought things might sound like other stuff, but that was just a natural consequence of having listened the first time around (tell me if you think I’m mischaracterizing your argument, Chet).

(That South Park “did an episode making pointed commentary about this very thing”:http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s15e07-youre-getting-old a week or three later was hilarious–and I’ll have you know I’m not just a cynical old bastard.)

Still, I will hold up as a counter-argument to the suggestion of simply rampant old-fogeyism, my growing infatuation with _TV on the Radio_.

I first caught them on Saturday Night Live, actually, which is funny since these days–you guessed it–I mostly complain about SNL’s music choices, because, seriously, Ke$ha? I’m *not* supposed to sneer at her?

Anyway, I probably ordered the CD from Amazon the next, day *despite* the fact that “the sound on the performance wasn’t all that great”:http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/02/tv_on_the_radio_23.html. Here was a band that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.

Still it sat in the music collection until about six weeks ago when I finally got loading of my flac-encoded music collection onto my iPod working (the price of using Free Software is that sometimes you have to write the damned patch yourself), and that was among the first album I listened to, doing nothing but listening–stretched out on the floor with a pair of headphones on, in fact.

Holy Shit, it’s brilliant.

From the opening moments of the weird lurching beat of “I Was a Lover” to it’s creepy falsetto-chorus lyrics and the looped horn samples that sound so incredibly mournful to me, I was hooked. It is noisy and discordant and has moments of spine-tingling beauty that hit you out of nowhere, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard.

I hate Cook’s Illustrated

OK, so that’s not actually the whole story.

In fact, I *love* the magazine _Cook’s Illustrated_. I learn all sorts of stuff, they have great recipes, good reviews–on all technical fronts, it’s a winner.

But there are few organizations that make me regret being their customer as much as _Cook’s Illustrated_ does. In fact, I can’t think of any. Charitable solicitation annoys me, but I’m not their customer, so it’s sort of a different thing.

Anyway, I seem to get a lot of calls from _Cook’s Illustrated_, and getting telephone solicitations annoy me. I subscribe to the magazine, and I actually look at the little cover offers they include with my subscription, so the only outcome of calling me to let me know about some offer they’ve already informed me about is to waste my time.

Let me propose an Iron Law of Customer Service: if you want my money–whether you are a business or a charity or what have you–you must respect my choice, if I articulate it (as I did on the phone a few minutes ago, and again on a web form on their web site just now), that I do not wish to be solicited. If you do not offer me that choice, then you are indicating that you do not respect me as a customer, and that you feel you can patronize me as you see fit–in effect you feel that I should have no say in the quality and structure of our relationship.

I do not care to be patronized, and I will do my level best not to do business with an organization that does not respect me, and, ultimately, I always have a say in the quality and structure of our relationship–though the only choice you may give me is to have no relationship at all.

Now to see if _Cook’s_ was being truthful when they said they wouldn’t call me again.

The God Engines

I guess you could say this was my “rebound book” after the heavy commitment of King’s _Dark Tower_ books. As it is a novella, I suppose it really just constitutes a fling, which seems about right.

John Scalzi goes all omniscient-third-person–which is a departure from the “Old Man’s War” series, which is basically everything of his that I’ve read– on this tale of betrayal. It’s a fun, fairly light read. You can infer all sorts of Deep Thought About Religion if you so choose, but I think that might be going a little far.

And that’s the end of my current spate of library books, though I have two more waiting for me to go pick up. Perhaps this afternoon.

Finishing The Dark Tower

Well, I guess it’s technically not finishing it, since there’s now an 8th book on the way, scheduled for next year. And I may well read that when it comes out–checked out of the library, of course–but the seven books I read were obviously the main story.

I appreciate the first four books a fair amount. In part, I suppose, because they were the four that still felt…_lean_. The first two because I don’t think he’d yet gotten into the habit of writing long books. The third book starts to get a little piggy, but as I was still getting immersed in what’s going on, I didn’t find it as noticeable. By the time I hit _Wizard and Glass_, the text is perhaps a little more Stephen King-y (which is not necessarily a negative, in my view, but it’s a marked contrast to the first two books)–though I think even _Wizard and Glass_ may have been reined in by the fact that he was, in many ways, working in a genre that was not his own.

_Wolves of the Calla_ was a bit of a slog. The only part I truly found compelling was the story of Father Callahan. The rest of the books…I liked them fine. I know some people were annoyed with the (non-)ending of the story, and others were annoyed with King injecting himself into the narrative (literally, rather than figuratively), but neither thing bothered me particularly.

In fact, as I write this, I’m realizing that I’m really very rarely annoyed with books or music or movies or what not any more. They are what they are, and I may like them or not, but it seems silly for me to wish such a thing to be other than it is–annoyance, I think, being a manifestation of that wish .

Anyway, as is always the case with King, it’s the characters that make the difference. If you don’t develop some affection for them, you’re not going to make it through the text, but if you can find a way to love them even a little bit, they’ll carry you through to the end. It wasn’t like Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, where, as I finished the last book, I pined to be able to read another and another and another. But I didn’t feel like my two weeks worth of reading had been ill-spent.

Kick-Ass

It had slipped my mind that last weekend while Anne was out of town, as part of my Festival of Dubious Movies, I also watched _Kick-Ass_.

In its comic-book form, this was the title that finally made me realize that I mostly don’t like Mark Millar’s writing. It’s not sarcasm-over-a-layer-of-caring like Warren Ellis (_Transmetropolitan_). It’s not dark and compelling like Frank Miller in his heyday (_Elektra: Assassin_, _The Dark Knight Returns_). It’s not dense like Alan Moore (_The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_), or deep and beautiful like Neil Gaiman (_Sandman_). It’s not convoluted and mystical and self-referential like Grant Morrison (_The Invisibles_, _Doom Patrol_). It’s not clever (even if it never quite delivers) like Brian K. Vaughan (_Y: The Last Man_, _Ex Machina_). It’s really just middle-of-the-road superhero comic stuff–the sort of thing that Geoff Johns (_Green Lantern_) or Brian Bendis (_Avengers_) do, and do pretty well–but with a big old helping of *super-violence*.

Mark Millar is the comic book world’s answer to Alex from _A Clockwork Orange_. I don’t even bother to look at anything he does anymore.

Anyway, I did watch the movie, and actually kind of enjoyed it. Yes, it was absurdly violent, but some of the details they changed from the original gave it more humanity, more empathy, than the comic book ever displayed.

I wouldn’t want to spoil things for anyone, but the comic book chooses to make Big Daddy’s death a result of pointless bad choices on his part. At a certain age, I probably would have thought that much more impressive than I do now, but now it just seems cruel, and all it brings to the story is a sheen of nihilism that I find banal and unattractive.

Have I mentioned that I don’t find Mark Millar worth reading?

It’s still not a movie I would care to see again, or really recommend, but it’s not actively *bad*. And Nicholas Cage finally found the part he was born to play: a knock-off Adam West portraying a knock-off Batman. It’s at least as weird as his performance in _Vampire’s Kiss_.

I just don’t understand

Insane Clown Posse would be just another act that I didn’t care for–in a world littered with them–except for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Just watch the apparently legitimate “informercial” for the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos:

(Incidentally, life must be rough for Vanilla Ice).

And then compare to the Saturday Night Live “Kickspit Underground Rock Festival”:http://www.hulu.com/watch/113213/saturday-night-live-underground-festival

“Everybody gets pitchforks!”

Ah, humanity.