July 2006 Archives

Don't let the title of this slim volume make you discount the information contained in it. A Manual of Writer's Tricks, by David L. Carroll, is full of great ideas for making your non-fiction and fiction writing more interesting. It also points out common pitfalls to avoid. I've re-read this several times over the years and get something new out of it every time I read it. Excerpt:

When you're stuck for an ending, go back to your beginning.

When stymied for a way to end your piece, g back to the first line, the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter, and reread it several times. Since opposites tend to meet in some mysterious way, you will often discover that the ending is somehow logically implied in the beginning and that your very first ideas somehow also contain a logical conclusion.

$9.97 at Amazon

It's grapefruit harvesting time at my house, and our tree is loaded with big, fat, sweet grapefruit. I can eat six a day and still be hungry for them. In the past, I used a broom handle with a metal hook (this weird implement came with the house when we bought it) to knock the fruit out of the tree, but the handle wasn't long enough to reach the fruit at the top, and when the grapefruit hit the ground the peel would crack open, spilling precious juice on the ground.

I finally got around to getting a fruit picker like the one shown here. It's very easy to grab the fruit and pull it off the twig. The fruit falls into the basket, safe and unsplit. I think I'll use it right now. $30.99 at Amazon

It's well-known that printer companies make most of their money selling inkjet cartridges. I pay about $30 for a color cartridge, which contains a few millimeters each of yellow, blue, and magenta ink. It's a rip-off.

I no longer buy ink cartridges. Instead, I buy refill kits. They cost about $20 and come with enough ink to refill a cartridge at least six times. It's fun to inject the ink, and even more fun to save that money.

Hewlett Packard feels so threatened by refill kits that they attack it on two fronts. They run ridiculous ads on the radio warning people that non-HP ink will smear, making critical information such as driving directions and boarding passes impossible to read. How often does that happen?

Worse, HP's printers also record the unique ID stored in a chip in the printer cartridge, and once the printer determines the cartridge is empty, it will insist it is empty even if you refill it. How evil is that? To get around this barricade, I keep two old color ink cartridges in a desk drawer. After I refill a cartridge, I insert and remove the two old ones, one at a time, and then insert the refilled cartridge. That's because the printer can only remember the IDs of two cartridges at a time. How long will it be before HP puts more memory into their printers, making this trick unworkable? $20.99 on Amazon

The man-made world is complex, and the way things work is usually a big mystery. But after reading David Macauley's ingeniously-illustrated The New Way Things Work, you'll see that many of the complicated machines and systems around you are based on fairly-easy-to-understand principles.

David Macauly, an architect and former junior high school teacher uses whimsical but light-bulb-over-the-head inducing illustrations to explain the principles behind toilet tanks, automatic transmissions, ball point pens, bookbinding, musical instruments, nuclear energy, digital computers, holography, batteries, can openers, and dozens of other everyday things that make modern life so pleasant.

There's a lifetime worth of education between the covers of this 400-page book. Every time I open it, I feel a deep respect for the unknown geniuses of the world who have made things so wonderful for us fat and lazy consumers. $23.10 on Amazon

Now that we are in the middle of summer, flies have moved into our house, expecting to foul our food and bump clumsily into lampshades. But as I explained last year, with the Amazing Bug Zapper, they don't stand a chance. These things are like TiVo -- you don't know what you're missing until you have one. $7.45 on Amazon

I was prepared to be disappointed by the Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang concert that my wife's friend was dragging us to. Not because I'd heard anything bad about the kids' band (in fact, I'd never head of them at all until the day before we went to see them perform) but because I have disliked every kids' band concert I've had the misfortune of attending since my kids were born. And my kids have ended up being bored, too.

Thankfully, Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang were funny, and clever and lively. Their sly humor appealed to me, especially in songs like "I Don't Think I Like It" and Selfish Shellfish. My eight-year-old daughter doesn't like them because they aren't cool enough (she liked the Fall Out Boy show I took her to see), but my three-year-old and I know better. The are extremely cool. $11.99 on Amazon

I forgot how much fun it is to rifle through a stack of 12-inch LPs to select music. iTunes is a wonderful music management system, but it's so darn cold and mechanical. I came across an application that brings back the fun of browsing for music. It's called CoverFlow, and turns your iTunes library into a stack of LPs that you can flip through. It grabs the cover art already on your hard drive, and then goes online to find as much missing cover art as it can.

According to the Readme file, CoverFlow is a "tech demo" that will stop working September 31st. "There may or may not be a new version out by then." I hope there is one. I'll pay for it! Link

Who would have imagined that a book about children being choked, strangled, smothered, drowned, poisoned, stabbed, immolated, and frozen could be funny? when Edward Gorey does it, as he did in The Gashltcrumb Tinies, it's downroght hilarious. This little hardbound book is an A-Z of unfortunate child deaths, told as a running poem. I read it to my 8-year-old, but not my 3-year-old. I don't think my 3-year-old will be ready for it when she's 8, either. She is the more sensitive of my two girls. $9.00 on Amazon

Palookaville creator Seth is one of the best comic book artists alive. His thick brushed line, masterful use of limited color, and superb sense of composition are matched only by his ability to tell a story with a wit and economy that are deeply satisfying. I've never been disappointed with anything Seth has done, and Wimbledon Green is no exception. This satirical look at the comics industry, and the people who collect comics is packaged in a gorgeous hardbound volume with gold print.

The surprising thing is that Seth never really intended to publish this comic -- he drew it as a series of vignettes in the pages of his sketchbooks. Ironically, it might be Seth's best work to date! $12.95 on Amazon

Charles Burns' incredibly precise style of illustration, with heavy use of black, is perfect for this 352-page graphic novel about a sexually-transmitted virus that causes grotesque and unpredictable symptoms in the teenagers who contract it. Some people have complained that the plot is weak, but I was fascinated by the characters and their relationships. Truth be told, I'd like this book even if it didn't have a creepy face-mutating virus in it, because the rebellious teenagers provided plenty of amusement. The spookiness and dream quality of most of the scenes don't really have much to do with the virus. They're about the weirdness of adolescence, and Burns captures it wonderfully. $15.72 on Amazon

When my 8-year-old daughter got a case of poison oak, I went to the drug store to buy a tube of Zanfel, a poison ivy and poison oak soap that is purported to get rid of the urushiol oil that causes the itching and blisters. I'd heard good things about the stuff. People claim it stops the itching instantly. When I got to the drug store and saw the price tag -- $40 for a one-ounce tube of soap -- I hesitated. That's a lot of money for such a tiny container. I bought it anyway, figuring that if it didn't work I could ask for a refund.

I got home, squeezed a 1.5-bead on my wet palm and rubbed my hands together until the stuff formed a gritty paste. I then rubbed the paste on my kid's legs for about three minutes. She told me the itching was gone. The rash even looked like it had subsided. By the end of the day, the itch had resumed, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been earlier. One more application did the trick. The stuff is worth the price.

Note: Zanfel doesn't get rid of poison oak if you have a systemic case -- that is, if the urushiol has gotten into your bloodstream or lymph nodes. You can tell you have a systemic case if you keep getting new blisters al over your body. You need to go to a doctor and get a shot of steroids to take care of that. $39.95 for a 1 oz. tube

In Searching for Paradise, author Thurston Clarke travels to about a dozen islands all over the world, including the one on which the sailor who was the basis for Robinson Crusoe was a castaway, as well as tropical and even arctic islands. He visits these microcosms as an attempt to discover what the allure of living on an island is (the medical term is islomania). He never fully answers the question, but it doesn't matter. The book is both thought-provoking and marvelously escapist.

Excerpt:

San Juan had no venerable government buildings, historic churches, or large buildings. Everyone looked to the sea for their living, depending on the lobsters that could bring twenty dollars in a Santiago restaurant. A century before, the islanders had simply tossed chunks of goat meat along the shore and attracted swarms of lobsters. The lobsters had since become more scarce and it was agreed that if they ever disappeared, so would San Juan. Meanwhile, it was as silent and lonely as a community of six hundred people could be. Lights twinkled at dusk, but the only people about were children gathered in a bar to watch the owner burn warts off his daughter's knee, and a half dozen adults enjoying a favorite evening ritual, watching the red hummingbirds drink nectar from bell-shaped yellow flowers. When night fell, the streets emptied, except for a boy kicking a soccer ball through the supports of a gong, the island's only fire alarm.

I ate cold lobster, alone, in the Villa Green, surrounded by polished wooden sideboards and wall calendars, and listening to the click of a pendulum clock. I read in the hotel guest book about "life-long ambitions fulfilled," bird-watchers who had "come for the hummingbirds but found so much more," and the joy of the world's most traveled disabled person to find himself, at last, on "the famous island of Robinson Crusoe."

$19 on Amazon.com

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) The only reason I ever looked at old romance-themed comics as a kid was to see the pretty girls. The stories were usually awful. Recently, Marvel comics began re-issuing its vast library of romance comics with a delightful twist -- the scripts have been rewritten as biting satire. One of my favorite writers, Paul Di Filippo, wrote a great script in the August 2006 issue called "Love Me, Love My Clones."

Maybe Marvel can do the same thing with its old western and monster comics next! Link