Book
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Synopsis
The history of “the only rock we eat,” and how finding, producing, and transporting it has shaped economies and governments from pre-history to the modern day.

Pros
Extremely well-organized, with short chapters presented in chronological order describing how a particular region and a particular group of people were affected by salt during that time. Keeps the subject interesting by using personal stories wherever possible. Exhaustively researched, throwing together travelogues, personal accounts, recipes, and descriptions of scientific breakthroughs and production techniques, along with the geography and descriptions of economics, governments and trade routes you’d expect from a history book.

Satisfied my trivia requirement in the first few chapters — e.g. the words “soldier,” “salary,” and calling the Celts “Gauls” all derived from words for salt. Answered a question I’ve been wondering for years, but was always too lazy to look up: what are those weird geometric pink and brown pools in the south San Francisco Bay? (They’re salt ponds). Manages to follow tangents like the development of tabasco and the creation of Israeli resorts on the Dead Sea, without straying too far from the main story.

Cons
It’s still a book about salt. The book spends so much time talking about salted cod and Basque salt producers, that you can’t help but feel like the author cribbed a lot of the material from his earlier books. Reading the book kept making me crave weird food and games of Civilization. The subject inspires a ton of terrible cliches and puns in book reviews.

Verdict
The highest compliment I can give to any documentary or history work is that it reminds me of James Burke’s Connections series. Despite the quote from Anthony Bourdain on its cover, Salt is more than just a food history book; it really does feel like an extended episode of Connections with a fixation on one particular topic. You get a real sense of the epic history of salt, and you can understand how something that is now so common could have once been scarce enough to influence the outcome of wars and the success of entire civilizations.

Anybody who’s been reading this blog for a while knows two things:

1. Every year or so, I try to redesign everything.
2. It always ends up being a ridiculously laborious process and it always ends badly.

I guess there’s also 3. I need to get out more.

This most recent time, I decided I wanted to avoid squeezing my usual Impenetrable-Wall-of-Text posts into a tiny space, or at least keep from having people wandering in and being scared off by the avalanche of words. Plus I wanted the recent comments and the list of stuff I’ve been looking at around the web to be more accessible.

That led to the last “green & brown paper” version, which sucked for various reasons. This version sucks slightly less.

I’m sure there’s a lot still broken all over, and I haven’t even tried the thing on non-Safari browsers yet. Let me know via e-mail or comments to this post if something is hopelessly broken. And be aware that I’m planning to keep adding and fixing stuff, until I get frustrated with it all again.

I’m always hearing people (sometimes it’s me) complaining about a TV or comic series, saying, “They’re making it up as they go along!” Most of the time, I don’t see the big deal about that — they don’t have everything planned out? Cool! It means they’re “nimble,” right? But sometimes it gets awkward.

This week’s episode of “Lost” was called “The Shape of Things to Come,” and it felt like they had to saw a few of the rough edges off before they could get everything to fit with The Shape of Things That Have Been Coming So Far. There was a lot of awesome stuff going on, and the episode itself had a solid story. But it also felt like they had to prune out a few characters instead of following through on them, and that they suddenly decided which of the two dozen storylines they were going to run with.

Everything else is a spoiler:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d been looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, since I’m a fan of “How I Met Your Mother,” and Knocked Up was one of my favorite movies of last year. I wasn’t disappointed; the movie’s hilarious, and I’d recommend it to just about anybody.

Anybody who’s not in my immediate family, at least, since the movie continues the trend of Judd Apatow-produced raunchy romantic comedies. This one is the most bipolar of the ones I’ve seen — the plot is about as straightforward as a romantic comedy gets, but the scenes and language are about as explicit as an R rating will allow.

Everything I’d read and heard about the movie makes a big deal about the scene at the beginning where Jason Segel appears naked; after seeing the movie, you’ve got to wonder what all the fuss is about. The camera keeps cutting away quickly, not for artistic effect but because there’s only so much they’re allowed to show, and the scene on the whole feels oddly truncated, like you get the idea of how awkward and pathetic it was supposed to be, but it doesn’t carry through. Besides, every major character appears naked — you don’t see as much, but everybody’s got a scene or two having sex with somebody else, in all kinds of positions, filmed from all kinds of different angles.

But the movie’s goofy, oddly romantic, mostly good-natured, and overall, sweet. It doesn’t even have the edge that Knocked Up has; it’s got a simpler, be-comfortable-with-yourself-and-you’ll-find-happiness mentality. You have to like Segel’s character to like the movie, but it’s not that difficult. He’s not just one of the crass, horny losers of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin or worse, the execrable Superbad; he’s a big, goofy, earnest and kind-hearted guy disguised as one of those losers.

It struck me as a lot more daring and exposed to put on a rock opera about Dracula performed by puppets, than it was to appear on screen naked and sobbing. Ultimately he just comes across as a guy who’s comfortable with himself — laugh at him if you want to, but more likely than not, he’s in on on the joke.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters got a ton of attention from videogame sites around its release last year, as well as from the critics. It’s all deserved; it’s just a great movie.

Of course, to appreciate it to the fullest, you have to have spent a good bit of the 80s in front of an arcade machine, but it’s not the geek-core exploitation of nostalgia that I expected it to be. As it starts out, you think you know where it’s going — an hour and a half of “look at the funny videogame geeks!” And there is plenty of that. But as the movie spends more time with these people, the condescension and mockery fades away, and a genuinely compelling story develops.

Story’s the key word here; nobody’s going to accuse The King of Kong of being objective. They might as well superimpose a halo around Steve Wiebe’s head and show Billy Mitchell surrounded in hellfire. But it’s masterfully edited: gleefully manipulative without making you feel like you’re being manipulated. It’s a classic story filtered through 8-bit nostalgia, the plot of every other 80s movie superimposed on an 80s pasttime. You’ve got a comically arrogant champion as your villain and the straight-shooting challenger coming out of nowhere as your hero. And the movie keeps the right tone throughout, letting you laugh at the characters as much as you get caught up in the story.

Now I’m glad I didn’t see it in the theater, because the DVD is the way to go. They add a few updates on the big rivalry, and more importantly, include interviews done for promotion of the movie as well as extended interviews deleted from the final cut. Those give you the sense that the movie’s not entirely mean-spirited or purely manipulative, and remind you that the people involved are passionate about these games, but can still laugh at themselves.

Plus, it’s got a gallery of art from I Am 8-Bit, including a Donkey Kong painting by Steve Purcell. And the DVD has an alternate cover by Scott Campbell of Double Fine. The version I saw was a rental, but I’m going out to buy a copy as soon as possible to support the movie.

I’ve gotten back into the Homestar Runner site lately. It’s pretty cool; y’all should check it out. Especially the new toon they put up today. No, seriously, check it out. That’s about as cool as videogame promos get.

This one is good too:

As is the teaser, which was released on April Fool’s Day:

In case I’m being too subtle, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is coming out pretty soon, and I’ve been working on one of the episodes. It’s pretty cool to get to work on it, if only because it continues my career trajectory so far. Which has been like:

ME: I’m a really big fan of some thing.
A COMPANY: Would you let us pay you to work on a game based on some thing?
ME: Sure!
Exeunt omnes.

The only downside, and I hope I can say this on my blog without getting in trouble, is that the licensors are kind of jerks. Not the Chapman brothers; they’re pretty cool — it’s those Videlectrix guys. They’re all “Hey look at us we made all these games that were kind of popular over a decade ago!” and expect to just coast on everybody’s nostalgia. Wake up, fellas — those games stopped being popular for a reason. (Plus, they’re totally mishandling the Trogdor license).

But yeah, the guys who make Homestar Runner are pretty cool, even though they seem like the kind of people I hated in high school, because they’re good at everything they try to do, and don’t make a big deal about it. Plus, it’s nice to see somebody prove that you really can make a living doing what you love doing; the only caveat is that you’ve got be really good at it.

They’ve been very closely involved in the making of the games, which is great for two reasons: first, they just get videogames; and second, I doubt anybody other than them could come up with the stuff on their site. The Homestar cartoons are one of the only things I can watch and think, “how did anybody even think of that?”

But the site can be kind of intimidating when you first see it. There are millions of in-jokes and running gags — you don’t need to recognize everything to think they’re funny, but you still get the vaguely uneasy sense that there’s more going on than you’re aware of. To get everybody started, here’s my five favorite Strong Bad e-mails:

dangeresque (dangeresque, too?)
flag day (Strongbadian national anthem)
lady fan (Tweesercize!)
comic (the first Teen Girl Squad)
crying (the one with Li’l Brudder)

And okay, groan, even though it’s been totally played out, there’s dragon for all you lame internet fanboys.

EDIT’D: No wait, I forgot. My favorite of all the Strong Bad e-mails is kids’ book.

Where is that from?!?

At some point in the distant past, there was a commercial, or a TV show, or music video, or something, where a guy ends saying “Word to your mother,” and then his mom comes on and says “That’s me. I’m his mother. Word to me.”

I can’t remember where it’s from, and for some reason it’s driving me nuts. The Googles do nothing.

Is this what Generation X senility is going to look like?

Book
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Synopsis
A collection of letters sent from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, advising the younger demon on the best ways to tempt a human soul away from Christianity to become food for Hell.

Pros
Brilliant concept, with a ton of potential for satire. Has one moment where Lewis really takes advantage of the concept, and the effect is both darkly comic and shocking. Several passages have real insight into the human condition, in particular our capacity for self delusion, and our pointless fixation on novelty. Gives a good description of how The Seven Virtues interrelate, and how easily and subtly they can be corrupted into one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

And despite its fantastic concept, it ultimately conveys a very mature and modern conception of corruption and Hell: not just as a cataclysmic turn to evil, but as the gradual and almost imperceptible decay of the soul. Where the final punishment isn’t just torment, but being cut off from light, robbed of potential, and ultimately consumed.

Cons
Doesn’t really work as satire, since it’s clearly Lewis’ voice throughout — the end result doesn’t feel like an author inhabiting an evil character, but just as if he’d taken Mere Christianity and done a simple search-and-replace and negated most of the verbs. As a result, you don’t get a real sense of what Lewis is saying for much of it; you’re too preoccupied trying to do multiple reverse-translations in your head to get at the real message.

Has the same worldview as Mere Christianity: that of the conservative, white man living in the UK during World War II. Constantly takes a dismissive view of women, overvalues patriotism and automatically equates it with “courage,” and is repeatedly scornful of non-traditional values or really anything “modern.” (With frequent warnings that his views will be dismissed as “puritanical” or prudish, which come across more as being defensive than genuinely self-aware).

An additional piece, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” is included with this edition of the book. It was written long after the letters, it has its own introduction by Lewis, and it’s just awful. While the Letters read like the work of a clever and imaginative man who’s got genuine, universal insight combined with some quaintly outdated values, the last section just reads like an embittered crank writing a letter to the editor of the local paper. It’s a conservative, almost libertarian, political rant disguised as having spiritual relevance.

Verdict
I’d thought that this would be a companion for Mere Christianity, but it turned out to be more a rewording of that book, with more specific examples. It’s more imaginative and clever than Mere Christianity, but also more difficult to read because of its attempt to be “satire.” And it’s a shame that “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” is included, because it leaves you with a negative impression of the whole book.