More Money Than Sense

Does your dog hate being left out of the trendy, and incredibly expense, oxygen therapy fad? Do you have a fat bank account and all the common sense of a retarded Belgian hamster? Then get out the plastic, ring up the AirPress company and order the O2 Dog oxygen therapy system.

And don't be put off by thoughts of canine claustrophobia or the fact that O2 Dog looks suspiciously like AirPress's Dog-in-a-Can, Pickle-a-Poodle, and Terrier Time Capsule.

Insult to Injury

BBC headline:

JK Rowling, the new Roger Bannister

Great. Not only does Rowling crank out crappy prose to make far more money than I do , but she can run the four-minute mile as well.

Cuisine Confusion

In his Commons Confidential diary for the BBC, Nick Assinder reports that at the Bush/Brown summit the Prime Minister Mr. Gordon Brown was served at dinner roast tenderloin of beef, mashed potatoes, sautéed green beans and peas with smoked bacon and mint followed by a dessert of brownies with caramel and vanilla sauce.

A photo accompanied the entry with the caption,

Gordon Brown has been served traditional US food

And this is the image:
Apparently, the BBC imagines that "roast tenderloin of beef, mashed potatoes, sautéed green beans and peas with smoked bacon and mint followed by a dessert of brownies with caramel and vanilla sauce" is indistinguishable from a sloppily made and what looks like ice-cold double cheeseburger.

You'd think they'd at least have rung Gordon Ramsey for a fact check.

H. G. Wells, Call Your Service

President Bush off on another mission in time & space

The Guardian breaks new ground as it publishes a story on President Bush's "torture" policy that must involve the fourth dimension or something (emphasis added):

The report criticises the Bush administration's approval of practices which would be illegal if carried out by British agents. It shows that in 1998, the year Bin Laden was indicted in the US, Britain insisted that the policy of treating prisoners humanely should include him. But the CIA never gave the assurances.

That's what I call impressive; Bush is so powerful that he's able to implement policies three years before he took office.

Monday Maintenance

I may not be posting on Monday as Chez Szondy is entering the 21st century and the satellite broadband is being installed. That means I'm going to be busy dealing with workmen, pointing out where holes can be drilled, and reconfiguring network connections.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, as they say.

Big Five Update

Thanks to everyone who wished my daughter a happy birthday from all of us at Chez Szondy and especially from Emma.

Everything went off without a hitch yesterday with the kids not only enjoying a treasure hunt and a fairy tale tea party, but a couple of surprises came our way when Emma's godmama showed up from LA for the party and our neighbour brought over her pony to give the birthday girl and her guests rides. Said birthday girl was so over the Moon that she was in overload mode by the time her uncle presented her with her first two wheeler. A well-stocked adults-only ice bucket meant that the parents were taken care of and even Carl the Cattle Dog had a good time, though he is now regretting stealing so many cucumber sandwiches and pieces cake.

Now Daddy gets the fun of spending the next couple of days doing dishes.

Share & Enjoy

The New York Times looks at "Mertz"; a robot capable of developing a personality and is "designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it."

Why bother, you ask? Because,

(I)f Bill Gates is right and the robots are coming, they should be designed in a way that makes them fit most naturally into the lives of ordinary people.

I'm sorry, but we've been down this road already and I think we have a pretty good idea of where it's really headed.

And if you don't like it, please contact the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Big Five

It's my daughter's fifth birthday here at Chez Szondy, so I'm off for the rest of the day to ride herd on a load of insane kindergarteners.

There will be cake, however.

First They Came For The Smokers...

BBC headline:

Obesity 'contagious', experts say

Now that the spectre of secondhand fat has been raised, can the same draconian measures leveled against tobacco be far behind?

Evening the Odds

Leave it to the French to bend logic until it breaks as President Sarkosy explains why his country is helping Libya to build nuclear power plants.

"Nuclear power is the energy of the future," he said. "If we don't give the energy of the future to the countries of the southern Mediterranean, how will they develop themselves? And if they don't develop, how will we fight terrorism and fanaticism?"

The president added that if the West considered that Arab countries were "not sensible enough to use civilian nuclear power", this would risk a "war of civilizations".

Aside from the fact that Libya already has plenty of oil to produce power, that Colonel Gaddafi is as flaky as a box of corn flakes, and that he has a track record of trying to get his hands on WMDs, if there is even the remotest chance of a "war or civilisations" wouldn't be prudent to forget appeasing our enemies in favour of making certain that they be kept as far from getting nuclear weapons as possible?

But then France wouldn't have anyone to surrender to.

Maybe When They Finally Bury Him...

BBC headline:

Fidel absent as Cuba celebrates

Would it were so!

Sebastian Haff, Call Your Service

From the BBC:

A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors.

Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.

According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.

Of course, the fact that Oscar took out large insurance policies on each of the patients had nothing to do with it.

Darlington Cowed

Durham police are warning residents of Darlington to stay on the look out for a crazed, psychopathic, killer... Heifer.

In other news, rampaging ant-eater still at large.

So Near, Yet So Far

From The Register:

US wants trucks mounted with frikkin' laser beams

I was so disappointed to learn this wasn't about commercial haulers.

And The Green House Gas-Emitting Horse You Rode In On!

From the BBC:

People are being told (by the Energy Saving Trust) to wear jumpers instead of relying on patio heaters, in an attempt to cut carbon emissions.

What people are telling the load of miserable busybodies Energy Savings Trust cannot be posted on a family-friendly site.

Robokitty

And now from NEC and Futaba Industrial Company comes the Hello Kitty Robo. It has face recognition, voice recognition, chats, plays games, and hunts for Sarah Connor.

It also costs $6300 dollars and as my daughter's fifth birthday is coming up, I'd appreciate it if nobody told her about the thing.

Firing the Potter

Anti-Spoiler Alert: Though I'm talking about the latest and (Please, God!) last Harry Potter book, I am not going to make any startling revelations about it. Okay, one: I managed to stay awake. Barely.

I don't care for young Potter, but my beef isn't with the innocent fan. Rather it is with those who put J. K. Rowling on the same shelf with far better writers and call the Potter books "classics" or who think writing for children excuses bad writing. That does not, however, mean that the books cannot be enjoyed for what they are on their own merit. If you enjoyed and love the Harry Potter books and if they speak to some part of your soul that no other book has, then more power to you. I would not dream of criticising your pleasure.

I am not a Harry Potter fan. That function at Chez Szondy is taken up by my wife, who regards J. K. Rowling's series about the schooldays of a young wizard as a charming and magical coming of age tale that is worth reading over and over. I see the books as an overheated and transient cultural phenomenon that in half a century will be looked back upon as the turn of the millennium version of the literary hula hoop.

But if I dislike it so much, why did I slog through seven books and five (and counting) films? Three reasons. First, I take an interest in my wife's hobbies. Second, it is a major phenomenon and is worthy of study as such. And third, it is such a jaw-dropping example of bad writing that it is actually fun to read a Harry Potter book while growling and waving an imaginary blue pencil over the page. It helps even more if you have the cardboard cutout of Mike and the 'bots that comes with the MST3K DVDs to prop up in front of you while reading.

Since there aren't any decent Internet connections to the bottom of sealed coal mines, I'm assuming that you already know who Harry Potter is, the basic rules of Quidditch, the essentials of the House Elf Question, Voldemort's hat size, Hermione's Swojollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.

Sorry. Fell asleep at the keyboard.

I'm no going to give away the plot of the last book, if you haven't ploughed through it yet. I'll leave it at saying that if you've read the last six, you've read this one. Like all except the first book, which, as a work by a then-unknown, was the only one properly edited, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (wretched title) is a 200 page story crammed into 750 pages. Chronicling Harry's final journey to his confrontation with Voldemort, he must look for things. And then he has to look for other things. And then he has to look for still other things until it becomes less like a quest and more of a scavenger hunt. Along the way there are the usual deductive leaps that wouldn't have been tolerated in an old Batman TV script, the maddening tendency of characters to withhold vital information for no good reason other than that the book would be over in one chapter if they didn't, and Rowling's inability to resist the temptation to over egg the pudding at every opportunity. To this is added a climax that is less a battle royal than old home week. If you encounter any surprises here, it's because you've seen dramatic possibilities that went over J. K. Rowling's head and can't believe that she missed them.

It is stunning that after seventeen years, seven books and so many pots of money that you'd think she could afford to take a class or two, J. K. Rowling is still such a staggeringly bad writer that she couldn't scribble her way out of a paper bag, though it would be fun to see her try. She has no love or command of the language, handles adverbs as adeptly as a vampire cooking with garlic, spends most of the later books frantically back filling the gigantic plot holes and inconsistencies left by previous books, has the pacing of a wheel-clamped glacier encountering a sea of treacle, must have bought her cliches at a wholesale warehouse, rips off bits from Star Wars (And the bad bits at that! Read the last book and try not to shout "Obi Wan" at particular moments), makes her characters act in particular ways because It's In The Script, has no concept of dramatic necessity, and, unlike proper writers, such as P.G. Wodehouse, Rowling does not have the logic or discipline needed to keep a complex plot together. And on top of this is her infuriating habit of having her characters constantly talk about what they're going to do, talk about what they're doing, talk about what they did, and then tell someone else what they did-- all the while punctuating it with Harry's impenetrable, indecisive whinging that makes Hamlet look like Howard Rork.

About now I can hear the standard rejoinder that "it's only a children's book," to which I reply that so were the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien-- except that the latter knew that writing for children is no excuse for writing badly. Indeed, Lewis believed that writing for children is harder than writing for adults because you have to write as well as you would for an older audience while taking into account a child's lack of experience and vocabulary.

But mentioning Tolkien and Lewis in connection with Rowling is like bringing the Portland Vase to a flea market. Rowling pales to insignificance when compared to Tolkien, Lewis, Grahame or Carroll (not to mention Terry Pratchett)-- all of whom can not only craft a sentence and understand pacing, but actually sat down and thought their mythical worlds through so they are consistent and plausible rather than a hodgepodge of cute but contradictory ideas (i.e. wizards use steam trains, but don't understand brakes) that mesh together like iron filings in a Rolex.

Even Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels are better than Rowling. Heinlein had his own faults (don't get me started), but he understood the word "duty", the importance of self-discipline in maturity and always saw the man inside the boy. He also knew how to craft a tight, economical plot and if he erred it was in being too logical in his thinking. Rowling could have done with a strong dose of Heinlein to counter her perpetual vacillating. I would have loved to have seen a Heinlein "old man" character giving Harry a kick in the backside or pointing out to Mrs. Weasley (and Rowling) that sixteen-year old "boys" die in battle more often than she thinks. There is even a little argument over a sword in the last book that Rowling takes what seems like a hundred pages to (unsuccessfully) conclude, but which Heinlein would have resolved in three paragraphs by having Harry coolly pointing out that neither he nor the other person has legal title to the article in question, so the point is moot.

Rowling's shortcomings is brought home most tellingly in the Harry Potter Films. I saw the latest one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, last week and was impressed by how superior it was to the book. Inside that bloated tome was a simple little story that had been buried under a mass of distraction and trivia. The script writers took an 870 page doorstep and trimmed it down to a lean two-hour film. Characters, subplots, quidditch matches, and all those annoying enchanting details were chopped out like dry rot from a hull and to the betterment of the finished product. What struck me was not how much better the plot flowed with so much taken out, but that the script writers could have taken out even more and trimmed the film down to ninety minutes that would have raced by. The basic plot was a compelling little tale of the power of friendship that needed no embellishment. The only real gripe I had was that in the final battle I kept expecting Voldemort to tell Dombledore, "Now the circle is complete." If Rowling understood what a blue pencil is for and had been ruthless in killing her literary babies, she might be almost readable.

Still, the Harry Potter books are more than books, they are a cultural phenomenon that has a life of its own. Harry Potter the fictional character may have come to an end, but Harry Potter the franchise has at least two films and a theme park left to go. In thirty years he may be swallowed up by Disney and enter the modern pantheon with Mickey Mouse and Finding Nemo, but will the books survive? Physically, of course. There is such a glut of Harry Potter novels that you could build a replica of the Great Wall of China with them. As nostalgia for aging fans, yes. There will be Potterheads to join the Trekkies and their ill-begotten kith and kin. But as beloved classics of children's literature that will endure? I sincerely doubt it. There are too many good books on the shelves for them to compete with and when the flashbulb of Pottermania dies down, the strong, steady glow of the Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Swallows and Amazons, and the Chronicles of Narnia will long outshine the cheap bulb in the Authorised Collectibles-Edition Harry Potter^TM plastic wand with Snitch-Seeking Action (Made in China, batteries not included).

Potter Update

Despite the demands of my four-year old daughter and babysitting the neighbour's furry ball of energy that they call a dog, yours truly has won the Chez Szondy Harry Potter book-reading race.

Opinionated rant about the Harry Potter series to follow shortly.

Potter Break

The latest Harry Potter books have arrived, so entries will be a bit light today. I'm not a fan of the books (quite the opposite, in fact), but the wife and I like to make a race out of reading them with spoiler rights going to the winner.

Canada on Mars

From Canada.com:

B.C. robotics firm lands Martian contract

Now that is what I call an aggressive foreign trade policy.