TED videos should be banned. Forever.
That’s Right… A Science Fiction Musical Western Starring Gene Autry….
Shame On You, Clearwater
NO PLACE TO PEE IN CLEARWATER
How cities should handle homeless people camping in public restrooms is an enduring urban question. In Clearwater, Florida, officials think they’ve found a solution: Just weld the all the bathroom doors shut. Faced with vagrants loitering around Crest Lake Park, the city sent crews out to seal off all the restrooms in a strike mission that’s baffled even non-homeless park-goers. One father told ABC News that he now had no place to potty-train his child, and wondered ominously where the loiterers were peeing now. A homeless man complained, “They’re trying to make it as inconvenient as possible, to get you out of town.”
But the authorities are sticking to their guns, reasoning that the parks restrooms were perpetuating the problem of homelessness. For that reason, they also cut off the power to a park in downtown Clearwater, because disheveled-looking people were charging their phones there.
From The Atlantic Cities
Spines
Doctor Who And The Loch Ness Monster
I read a dozen Doctor Who novelizations long before I ever saw a single episode of the actual show. My sister, who lived in England for a bit, told me about it and when I was in the third grade, I purchased novelization from a booth at a science fiction convention in Norfolk, Virginia.
Initially, the only novelizations available were a series of ten books published by Pinnacle. Nine of the ten were based on episodes featuring the Fourth Doctor, the inimitable Tom Baker (though one, the first one I ever read, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, was actually a Third Doctor story on television).
I am re-reading a bunch of these.
Today, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.
Like a lot of novels, it was written by the producer who managed the show that particular season (and either wrote or had a hand in writing many of the scripts). As you can imagine, that person might have been busy, so yes, these are just dashed out novels. So stylewise, it’s pretty minimal. You read them because you’re fan.
The actually read a bit lit scripts, with occasional internal musings by the characters, as if the writer suddenly remembered that this would be read and not seen on the screen. So the style is your basic, propulsive pulp style – which is just fine with me, by the way.
When broadcast, it was called The Terror of the Zygons, which was just silly, because no one knows who the Zygons are, whereas ‘Loch Ness Monster’ is a pretty recognizable brand name, so it made sense to rename it when they got the chance.
You can tell this was done early in the Fourth Doctor’s career, both by the presence of Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith as companions (who were holdovers from Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor) and by the fact that, stylistically, it is a Third Doctor style alien invasion of earth story. Otherwise, it’s got a kind of 1950’s paranoid style sci fi feel to it (body snatchers, mists, unstoppable monsters).
I was a big fan of monsters as a kid and I love the Loch Ness Monster (I still sort of believe it exists, mainly because I want to believe) and I’m glad that, even after the Zygon conquest is thwarted, the monster (a Skarasen, which is a sort of giant Zygon milking cow/killing machine) goes back to Loch Ness and lives happily ever after.
Incidentally, I purchased this book with a gift certificate I won as a ten year old after being named co-winner of a costume contest for my awesome dragon costume that my mother made for me (with an awesome tail with a surprisingly complicated system for attaching it while also allowing it ‘play,’ i.e., to swing about in imitation of Godzilla destroying Tokyo).
Weekend Reading – The Greats
A Country Doctor
Thursday Morning Staff Meeting – You Could Learn A Lot From A Funeral
This Is Simply Wrong
The Devils Backbone Brewery has a beer called ‘Belgian Congo Pale Ale.’
I don’t know if this is a new beer or if it’s been in my grocery stores for years and I just didn’t notice.
But, it’s quite simply offensive.
The Belgian Congo was the scene of some of the worst and most depraved and shameful excesses of western colonialism in Africa. Quite simply, it was a horror show of genocide and slavery.
‘Pale’ northern Europeans came into the Congo and raped the land and its people (in many cases, quite literally raped).
Unless there is some political message I’ve missed (and please let me know if I have missed one), Devils Backbone has needlessly honored a terrible time in history and a crime against humanity.
Biblion & Black Poets
When my lady friend and I were visiting my sister and her youngest daughter in Lewes, Delaware (a favorite weekend getaway spot for Washingtonians) this past weekend, we wandered into downtown Lewes, I saw, catty corner from where we were waiting for niece and her friend to join us, Biblion: Used Books and Rare Finds.
I was so excited to see such a pleasant looking bookstore, the immediately ran to it in such a way that my friend and my sister were convinced that I had seen an old friend (or so they told me later; it would explain why they waited so long to look for me – they wanted to give me time to chat with my presumed friend).
Bibilion is not a particularly large nor widely stocked bookstore. They opt for clean lines and neatness over stacks upon piles of books up to the ceiling. But the selection is good and well curated. Most books tended to be priced at five dollars, which is, perhaps, on the high side, but well within the pale for a decent paperback in good condition.
I nearly purchased Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but while looking through their small poetry section (it’s a mixture of poetry and drama and mostly contains editions of individual Shakespeare plays), I saw Black Poets, an anthology of African American poetry, edited by Dudley Randall.
My knowledge of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance is limited, but that being something I wanted to fix and since Black Poets has a nice selection from Harlem Renaissance and the book also being just $2.50, or half of what A Room of One’s Own or costs (and, indeed, half of what most every book I picked up cost), I bought it.
Inside were half a dozen poems by Frank Horne.
Haven’t heard of Frank Horne? Don’t feel too bad. Neither had I until that day.
In his non-poetic life, he was an optometrist, occasional adviser to FDR, and an official in the U.S. Housing Authority.
Letters Found Near a Suicide (selections from which – or rather ‘letters’ from it – are included in Black Poets) is, I gather, his most famous poem. And it’s very good. But all of his stuff was good, and more startling for being so completely unknown to me. The forms are a little old fashioned, but the way that they are used to convey and deeply political message is very well done.
the coffee philosopher 