Sorry Dan, Happy Birthday

I was late wishing my brother a happy birthday on my own site...sorry dude. I was supervising this view that day:

And I don't even know how my phone took this picture (it wasn't deliberate...).

Love you brother; the omission wasn't personal.

2000 Apart

The days blur by and I'm wearing a tie. Some days are hot, but most are pleasant and beautiful. Riding a bike through South Central gives you perspective...

While spending a few minutes staring at my computer instead if working on something I found a folder in my photos partition on this laptop. The title made me look through it: "Comic covers". I remembered for various reasons having pulled out various comics and taken their pictures--I think one even showed up here.

As I looked through the six pictures, it looked like two had the same number. Upon closer inspection, they were exactly two thousand photos apart (due to the sequential numbering scheme of my dying camera). 

Specifically, IMG_6962.jpg:

and IMG_8962.jpg:

The first is a classic story starring Batman. It is set in London at the time of Jack the Ripper. The Wayne's here are transplanted to mid-to-late nineteenth-century England, get gunned down, and young Bruce grows up into the Batman in grimy London instead of grimy Gotham decades later. This was one of the early stories that spawned the Elseworlds line of high-brow What-If style stories that DC finally started ripping off from Marvel.

One other cool thing about it is it is a very early piece of work by artist Mike Mignola, right as he was starting to define his own style. He grew to stardom with his Hellboy creation and subsequent films starring the son of Beelzebub.

The second comic is my favorite single issue story for a super-hero comic so far. I've spoken about it before: corrupted Superman destroys all the heroes in the DC Universe, except for Batman, who's about to gun him down with the kryptonite bullets Superman gave him for this very purpose. You'll have to read it to find out how it ends...

Finding time to get to this blog is tough; you guys know. 

Thanks Dan for the list of Bronson movies...let me know what the best obscure one is...

Charles Bronson - Ultimate Badass

Things have changed... I just acquired (through the magic of the interweb and my extreme use of 'Home Row') ten Charles Bronson films.  I might have to change my previously mentioned post and go to either a longer format, or a list for each film.  It would be hard to pick just one moment from the ten films I bought... I mean... look at it this way...

What's your favorite part of:

1. Ghostbusters
2. Airplane!
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. Terminator 2
5. Goodfellas
6. Godfather
7. A Clockwork Orange
8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
9. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10. Jaws

One is an absurd number.  Just ask Charles Bronson... the only man to use a pump action 12 Gauge shotgun in a car... at point blank range.. and not get blood all over himself.

Can't get any more badass than that.


The Youngest

Science can ruin your life

That is a true statement.  Just ask George Robert Price (but you had better call either the Ghostbusters or Beetle-breakfast).  He was a Renaissance Man of Science... Manhattan Project, Biological Chemistry and a professor at Harvard...  How weird.

It was his own science that did him in... and, as I am still working my way through his biography, I will say this about him: He seems like someone who had it all together, but carved his own throat out with scissors while in a great depressed state.

Nice, right?  And to think of all the ladies he could have had...

So this Price fella... he worked for sometime at Harvard, about two years or so.  He worked with a lab that was linked to the Manhattan project.  Other scientists wrote papers with him.  But fuck all that... it can be found on Wikipedia (as well as that sweet ass photo).

What I'm reading right now, or attempting to as it was written by a bunch of chimps it seems... is a book titled The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman. See, what this book details, and what Price found out, is that we are all programmed.

Here is an analogy: I am more genetically disposition to help save my brother's life (Patrick) in a hairy situation than to save a perfect stranger's life.  Price came up with a mathematical equation that represents the reasoning behind this.  And because of this genetic predisposition to put my genes on the line to save my brother (whom, by genetic certainty, has genes very similar to my own) I am subconsciously making a choice to make a sacrifice but also carry on my genes.

Seems legit, right?

Again, it would be time to ask Price...  Oh, wait.  We can't.  He's dead, you see.  It really fucked him up... ruined his life.  He left his wife, left his kids, no longer working with IBM or Argonne Labs (the Manhattan Project folks...) he moved to Britain.  

Price felt bad after all... he came up with this equation that proved there was no reason people were actually nice.  It all comes down to this... when you are farther away genetically from another person you are less likely to help due to this.  Want to donate a quarter to that man playing the saxophone on the street? Sure, go ahead...  Now, picture yours truly... an unshaven, un-showered Daniel out there... on the corner. I'm pretty sure it isn't a quarter in the case.

See?  His OWN science ruined him.

I might post more if I can get through this damn book... I'm fifty pages in and the main person was finally mentioned.  Really hard to get into a book about a guy when he isn't really in it.

But, here is a really cool quote from it:

"This was quite an idea, for the very essence of Darwin's theory, as he declared in The Origin of Species was that 'every complex structure and instinct' should be 'useful to the possessor.'  Natural selection could 'never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each'  And yet it did."

It's funny... that was mostly quotes from Darwin, with the writer filling in the gaps... but the equation and theory that our man Price came up with proved Darwin had only HALF of the picture.

Pretty sweet.

And now, I must go... 

More research is needed on next post.  I also might try and get through this book.  When I get to the equation, Pat, I will let you know.

Sherwood (the youngest)

Another Roadside Distraction

With as much stuff as I have going on right now, because of my South Central commute, I'm able to keep up some kind of reading schedule. Most of the time on the train I'm reading sports coverage on my phone, the trashy New York coverage that I liked so much while living there.

But the occasional book catches my attention, and right now is one of those times.

A few notes:

• This is another Douwntown Long Beach Dollar Bookstore discovery.
• This turned out to be Tom Robbins' first novel, and was published in 1971(!!!). I had no idea that Robbins was publishing that early--I always figured him for later that at least Gravity's Rainbow.
• This is, maybe unlike Trout Fishing in America, an actual Sixties touchstone/icon.
• It it pretty good; obviously from Robbins (if you know his work, like Murakami, you can tell who's writing it is); and it is nearly distracting me from my studies.
• I painstakingly wrote this post during a break in the action on a loaned iPad.

I say "nearly" because I'm not spending time at the house reading. 

Good stuff.

I'll report back later on this summer when I finally get a chance to finish it (I know you're both waiting with baited breath).

Dan, go for it! I haven't read the draft, but I'd love to read the post!

My Kind of "Pulp" Reading

What does it say about me that I choose the following book as my own kind of personal pulpy, trashy, cotton-candy like reads?:

The Night Lives On is the 1987 follow-up to Walter Lord's own 1955 A Night To Remember.

That's right: for me, quick "trashy"reads are non-fiction sequels to other non-fiction work.

In my defense, Walter Lord is an awesome writer and the two books are as fascinating and exciting as they are quick to devour.

When I was laid up on the couch I bought a copy of A Night to Remember for a penny plus shipping, it being the century anniversary for the Titanic disaster and I'd read an article about it.

Here they are together:

Walter Lord was born in 1917 in Baltimore. As a kid he rode on the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship, and became nearly obsessed: how could something that immense sink? What would it look like and sound like and feel like? He majored in history, got a job writing copy in New York and wrote in his spare time. He interviewed as many survivors as he could convince to talk to him in the early 50s, while also pouring over transcripts of both the American and British hearings on the wreck

The result, published in 1955, is A Night To Remember. One thing that Lord introduced to the general discourse about the Titanic event was that he didn't paint the storyline through a prism of class. He described each person's reaction to the striking of the berg and the ensuing two hours through the prism of their own cultural understanding of their status.

That sounds wordy and doesn't convey how novel the idea was at the time, but in essence, the book reads like a newspaper article. And it comes in at just under 200 pages. And it's gripping as hell.

The book is still considered one of the most important accounts and resources on the sinking, and we're going on 60 years. There was the movie of the same name produced in 1958 with Lord's assistance, and even James Cameron had Lord hired on as an expert during the filming of his monster from 1997.

So, why would Walter Lord be inclined to write a follow-up?

The Night Lives On was conceived in the months after the discovery of the wreck in 1985. Lord wrote in the opening chapter of the book that he didn't think interest was that high on the Titanic wreck, that was until he got six calls for interviews in the first few weeks of the discovery.

A Night To Remember has some before and after material, but is mostly a minute-by-minute retelling of the night from every angle available.

The Night Lives On has more epilogue type stuff; more of the night of the "rescue" ships that would be on the scene the next morning; addresses the discrepancies in the different accounts; attempts to objectively look at every facet through its own context of the time; and still is an exciting book.

Taken together, they're just over 400 pages of doomed excitement.

At our downtown Dollar Bookstore I've found copies of both regularly in the chaotic paperback section. I've been thinking about buying them all up and sending out sets as gifts.

The Cabin needs a set for sure.

Happy 2014!

I haven't been posting to really anything for a while...Holly had the baby, and now Simon is a member of the clan. Corrie and I went out and did our own special brand of crazy shit, and lived to tell the tale.

I have a few ideas I want to put here, but now is not the time. I only have two things at the moment--besides wanting to make show off that we had 36 posts in both 2012 and 2013 (an average of one post a month for each of us!):

Here's a WTF? picture from Cambodia:

And here's an awesome poster; if the language is nearly too coarse, the messages resonates with me: