The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

11 Great Children's Book Titles or Terrible Band Names

If there actually is a child chapter book or band named after any of the following, I stand behind my opinions.

111 Minute Book Covers: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Speed composition of a book cover for C. S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia (if numbered correctly).

Assets are "Tambako the Jaguar's" CC licensed photograph of a lion from Flickr, and Henningklevjer's CC licensed cloth weave texture from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Charlemagne and Mona Lisa Solid.

Under 111 minutes? No, but with the template established, the rest of the series should go faster.

Click image for 300dpi.

YouTube Captioning: Strawberry Sex by Ken Hirai [Official Music Video]

Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.

Retired Addiction

William Gibson's Zero History (uncorrected proof)

William Gibson's new novel, Zero History, will be published in September. Confessionally, I read the first few chapters of Pattern Recognition without being drawn in, nor did I read Spook Country. Zero History seems to share a universe with these two, perhaps even complete a cycle of sorts. It's a brilliant piece of fiction, magnetic on the page, sharply observed, deeply witty and driven by an oddly ambiguous sense of peril. What becomes clear reading Zero History is that William Gibson never stopped writing cyberpunk: The real world simply caught up with him.

Here are a few short passages:

* * *

"How is she?" Milgram was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he'd explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn't. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis's eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he'd never learned.

* * *

"...What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omnipresence, that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces.... Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility, a kind of psychic tactical equipment, that he had installed during training. The Army put him through schools, that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters."

* * *

"Were you ever a model?"

"No," said Hollis.

"I was," said Merideth, "for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That's the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you're seventeen, even when you've no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week 'pocket money.' That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn't afford an Orange Card for the MŽtro. I walked everywhere. I was in Vogue, but I couldn't afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That's the way it works, if you're just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity, in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional."

"Modeling?"

"Fashion. ..."

Retired Addiction

Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great

[Emphasis from original. Ellipses mine. Page numbers refer to the first edition Twelve Books hardcover.]

These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.... We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness. (7)

As for consolation, since religious people so often insist that faith answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends. In any case, the critics of religion do not simply deny that it has a painkilling effect. Instead, they warn against the placebo and the bottle of colored water. (9)

[Quoting John Stuart Mill:] "He looked upon [religion] as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard or morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful." (15)

It assures them that god cares for them individually, and claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god. (74)

In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. (110)

It was not until after the Second World War and the spread of decolonization and human rights that the cry for emancipation was raised again. In response, it was again very forcefully asserted (on American soil, in the second half of the twentieth century) that the discrepant descendants of Noah were not intended by god to be mixed. This barbaric stupidity had real-world consequences.... The entire self-definition of "the South" was that is was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. (179)

But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago, are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time. The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error. Most of humanity, throughout its history, has dwelt under a form of this stupefying dictatorship, and a large portion of it still does. (212)

In order to be a part of a totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform and carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment--"for their own good"--of those who transgress? The sexual element is probably decisive, in that the dullest mind can grasp what Nathaniel Hawthorne captured in The Scarlet Letter: the deep connection between repression and perversion. (232)

[Quoting Blaise Pascal:] "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie."
("The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid.") (253)

Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent.... Modern vernacular describes conscience--not too badly--as whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking. (256)

Paine's Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state. Almost all of the American founders died without any priest by their bedside, as also did Paine, who was much pestered in his last hours by religious hooligans who demanded that he accept Christ as his savior. Like David Hume, he declined all such consolation and his memory has outlasted the calumnious rumor that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end. (The mere fact that such deathbed "repentances" were sought by the godly, let alone subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based.) (268-269)

The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concept of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. (283)

Best Sellers

Just time this week to check in on the Times Best Sellers List...

Five Underused Horror Tropes

And properties that make interesting use of them.

1. Frankenstein Creations: Powerful, perhaps immortal confusions of once-dead human parts reanimated by Dr. Frankenstein's (always) secret method. Not to be overly confused with James Whale's 1931 film with its constricted, single-location plot, dim bolt-necked creation, and memorable use of Nicola Tesla-inspired electrical equipment as the (revealed) method of cell reanimation.

Franken Fran: A manga series about a loveable but somehow unmistakeably monsterous patchwork girl who inhabits a mansion full of equally bizarre creations, "helping" people as she sees fit, and awaiting the return of her creator.

2. Dopplegangers: Classically, a mute apparition of oneself that appears to warn against impending danger.

Arcana: Another manga, slow to start, in which a girl matching no missing person's report is found by the police, and by her ability to see ghosts proves useful in investigating a series of brutal murders.

3. Former Tenants: Beings who inhabited the Earth long before humans, and who want their world back.

The short stories of H.P. Lovecraft: Lovecraft lived in the era when man was pushing into the final dark corners of the map. His dominant theme was a fear that the dark corners would push back. The double-switch Lovecraft plays in "At the Mountains of Madness" is particularly impressive. (Cthulhu, despite his fame, is a relatively minor player.)

4. Sirens: Beautiful female creatures, often with the aspects of seabirds, who lure men (and women?) to a watery death with an irresistable song.

There is a Japanese survival horror videogame series called "Siren," but it appears to have very little to do with the western myth.

5. The Motif of Harmful Sensation: Related to the siren, a broader term for the idea of a piece of sensory input that can cause a physical effect on the victim. (Well explained in the finest deleted Wikipedia article I've ever come across.)

BLIT: David Langford's remarkable short story revolves around the discovery of a class of images that "crash" the human brain, killing anyone who views them.

India, Nationalism and Archaeology

East Asian cultural blog A Man With Tea muses on the implications of a request by the Archaeological Survey of India for the return of certain art objects in the British Museum.

On paper, at least, India under the Raj wasn't the single nation "India" as we know it today, but a massively fractured series of kingdoms and micro-nations. (Think of the Warring States period in China, or Italy until the late 19th century -- but cloned many times over.) Each was (in theory) independent, though deeply linked with the others through trade and treaty. Each (in theory) had its own arrangements with the British. In practice they were vassal states to a virtual vassal state ("India") of Britain.

In ethical terms, there is a difference between taking advantage of a period of unrest to loot art objects, and taking things with the permission of whomever is in charge of the place where the artifacts are located. (In some cases, like Boston's Japanese art collection, the items were literally being discarded during a period of unrest, and would no longer exist if some foreigner hadn't taken a shine to them. VERY tricky.) Obviously leaders change, and by the standards of democracy virtually no leader from the past would now be considered "legitimate" -- but that's applying modern ethics to the past. Modern ethics are a modern technology.

Indians are wonderfully legalistic, and I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't try to make a case for having the items returned. But Indians have a bad habit of building a convoluted case and then BELIEVING it too. I'm afraid that what this probably comes down to is nationalism, and that's something that I, personally, have no truck with.

Panorama: Off Route 17

Union, ME.

Stitched together in Hugin from eighteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.

Retired Addiction

Current Addiction: Dimitri From Paris's Cruising Attitude album

I can't quite manage to not get happy listening to "Merumo." Slick, stylish and fun "faux jazz" in the '60s orchestra style. John Barry on a bender.

111 Minute Book Covers: Paradise Lost

Speed composition of a book cover for John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Assets are a photo of Michelle Webster from a shoot we did in March, and Ivan Tortuga's public domain image of a moth from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Zdenek Gromnica's InfraRed and Gerard E. Bernor's Bambi Bold.

Under 111 minutes? Close.

Click image for 300dpi.

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