I just discovered an album on iTunes Music Store that I do not believe I will buy, though I confess I wouldn’t mind listening to it once or twice. It’s called “When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You’d Hear” and it features some very odd tracks:

• CSN&Y’s song “Ohio”, performed by Devo.
• Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey”, performed by Don Ho!
• AC-DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”, performed by Leslie Gore!! (With a certain amount of flair, I might add, though it’s a far cry from “It’s My Party”.)

Wow.

And here’s a piece that claims that Peter Jackson hasn’t given us the authoritative The Lord of the Rings movie treatment, but only an interpretation of Tolkien’s book; and that (with the cost of special effects continuing to decline, and the quality of those effects continuing to increase) there will be remakes every twenty years or so.

Considering that Jackson was not the first attempt to bring The Lord of the Rings to the big screen, it’s hard for me to disagree.

Here’s an amusing take on the Arts and Arts funding; for me, the payoff comes in the very last panel. (Via Peeve Farm.)

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a representative of Penguin Books
(Penguin Books! How cool is that?)
whether I’d like to review a new science fiction novel by Nick Sagan, son of
the famous Carl Sagan. It sounded interesting, so I said OK. My only
concern was that the book was a sequel to Sagan’s first book, which I’d
not read. He responded by sending me both books, for
which I am truly grateful.

I admit I opened the book with some trepidation–Sagan has a famous name,
sure, but can he tell a story? Turns out he can, and with style. He
begins with the hoary-but-effective plot contrivance, the man with
amnesia. Our hero wakes up, injured and alone, and unable to remember
where he is, how he got hurt, or his own name. Bits of memory begin to
creep back as he explores his surroundings–his quite remarkably outré
surroundings. He lives in a house shaped like a cathedral, complete with
gargoyles; he is served by nightgaunts; his name, apparently, is
“Halloween.” And it’s almost certain that someone is trying to kill him.

Meanwhile, a global pandemic is raging, and people are dying in vast
numbers. The killer is a virus called Black Ep, it’s invariably fatal,
and there’s no known cure. Worse, it has an incubation period of years,
and is highly contagious, so virtually everyone on the planet has it. A
small team is working against time on a scheme to defeat the virus and
preserve mankind from extinction.

And how are these two disparate plot elements related? Therein hangs
the tale, which I won’t spoil for you.

As I say, Sagan’s a good storyteller; he kept me interested and turning
pages, not an easy feat with four kids in the house and the Olympics on
TV. If I have a complaint, it’s that there’s little here that I haven’t
seen before. Even if he built the story from familiar parts, though,
the resulting edifice still has a number of striking features and
surprises, and there are a number of absolutely images. I particularly
enjoyed it when Halloween throws a luau and has nightgaunts in Hawaiian
shirts passing out the drinks and canapés. And if I’m occasionally
reminded of Roger Zelazny, or Greg Bear, or even
Stephen King, I suppose that’s no bad thing in a first novel.

August is shaping up to to be the month with the least number of books read and reviewed since I started putting reviews on-line seven-and-a-half years ago. It’s partially because I’ve been putting a lot of time into Snit, partially because of the Olympics (remember them?), but mostly because I’ve been otherwise occupied…..playing video games.

Yes, it’s true. If I were a member of the Truly Literary Blogosphere Establishment, I’d probably have to turn in my badge and my tie tack; fortunately, my deep and abiding love of genre fiction has saved me from such a humiliating fate.

And the game I’ve been playing recently is an RPG called Dark Cloud 2, which, frankly, is almost too goofy for words while remaining an enjoyable game. Computer games aren’t known for having deep, complex, satisfying plots, but this one is silly beyond the conventions of the medium.

You start the game as Max, a kid who likes to build things. He’s the son of the wealthiest man in town, but he prefers to spend his time doing odd-jobs for Cedric the inventor. You live in the little town of Palm Brinks, which has been completely shut off from the outside world for some years now. No one knows why, and no one really seems to care, and somehow life goes on–with a pretty good standard of living, needless to say. Heaven knows where all of the manufactured goods come from.

Anyway, a circus comes to town. A circus comes to town? But Palm Brinks has been completely shut off– Oh, never mind. A circus comes to town, and the ringleader, an evil-looking clown with an evil-laugh, is after a red stone that Max wears on a chain around his neck. Max is forced to flee into the sewers (you knew there’d be sewers didn’t you? You haven’t played this kind of game much if you didn’t expect sewers) where you have to fight for your life against sewer rats, frogs, evil mincing clowns, evil balloon-headed creatures, and a variety of stranger things. You’re armed only with a small pistol and your trusty adjustable wrench, which by the way makes a really good club.

After you leave the sewers, you discover that the reason Palm Brinks has been cut off from the outside world is that the outside world is almost completely destroyed. And then you meet a red-headed girl named Monica, who wields a great big sword and a magic armband, and has a blue stone that matches your red stone. Whoa. Plus, she’s from the FUTURE. Wow! Plus, she has a pony-tail that goes down to her knees, and looks really cute in pumpkin shorts. Woo-hoo!

Pumpkin shorts? That’s what the game calls them. I don’t see anything pumpkin-like about them, myself.

Anyway, Monica tells you that the future isn’t what it used to be; somebody’s been changing things in the past to destroy the future. She’s come back to fix things, and she wants your help. Fixing things, it turns out, involves the restoration of “origin points”. You go to the place in the Past (that is, in Max’s era) that matches a place in the Future, and then you build houses, persuade people to come live in them, and so forth, so that everything that’s needful is there for it to develop into what it’s supposed to be in Monica’s time. As you do this, you can travel to and from the Future and see how things are working out. And really, you have to do this–the reason you pick the places to restore that you do is because there are people in the future whose help you need who won’t exist unless you restore their places.

In the meantime, you spend a lot of time fighting your way through dark forests, deep canyons, sea caves, and who knows what all, slaying fearsome monsters, collecting the raw materials you need to do your building, and levelling-up your weapons. That’s right; the game system is a little odd. In most RPGs, your character gains endurance, strength, and so forth as he or she gains experience. In Dark Cloud 2, it’s your weapons that gain experience. At the moment, for example, Max is wielding the dreaded Poison Wrench and a machine-pistol called Star Breaker, while Monica has a claymore.

Oh, and occasionally you have to go fishing. And sometimes you have to play golf. No, really. When you’re not indulging your photography hobby, which is essential to completing the game.

You fight a variety of weird monsters, including Auntie Medusa, the Weird Old Spider Lady, a variety of walking skeletons and elemental spirits, vicious moles, walking plants, pirates, walking fish, tree creatures, golems, elephants, dragons, the Rainbow Butterly, weird robot things, and dog statues, among other things. You meet a variety of odd people. You go many odd places, and get to listen to lots of awful nonsense about sages.

It’s a Japanese game, of course. Monica the cute redhead should have given that away; every Japanese video game I’ve played has a cute redhead, though usually she has pigtails that stick straight out to the sides instead of a ponytail.

It’s a fun game, though, and I’ve been enjoying it–even if I’ve been fast-forwarding through some of the dialog because I don’t want to try to explain it to the kids, because it’s so doggone goofy.

Anyway, I’m about halfway through. I’m trying to fit in some books, though. Wish me luck.

If The Lord of the Rings is about resisting great evil in one fell
swoop, the Lord of the Isles series is about coping with one
damned thing after another. Through to Drake’s excellent storytelling we
get to come along for the ride, and a fun ride it is.

The world of the Isles consists largely of ocean, with a ring of largish
islands (think England rather than Hawaii) that extends from the tropics
on the south to the cold regions of the north. At one time the Isles
were united under a single king, and it was in that time that
civilization in the Isles reached its zenith. The united kingdom fell
apart a thousand years prior to the beginning of our story, but the
memory of that Golden Age is so strong that even now the lords of the
island of Ornifal style themselves “King of the Isles”.

The kingdom fell after the death of Carus, last King of the Isles.
He was approaching the island of Yole with his warfleet (the Duke of Yole
having rebelled) when the Duke’s wizard sent him and his warfleet to the
bottom of the ocean. The Duke of Yole was thus saved from having to
fight Carus’ army, but he didn’t live to enjoy it; the forces raised by
his wizard inadvertantly sank Yole and all its inhabitants beneath the waves.

It seems that every thousand years, the forces of magic are strengthened
for a time. Hedge-wizards become strong; great wizards become strong beyond all
imagining–and beyond their own understanding. The Duke of Yole’s wizard
saw that he could drown Carus, fleet and all, but the repercussions were
(one presumes) rather a surprise to him.

This increase in magical power has two effects. First,
dark-lord-wannabees come out of the woodwork. They have great ambition,
and great power, but usually little experience. Second, powers dormant
for a thousand years awaken, and endeavour to forward plans which might
span millenia. Neither effect is particularly conducive to peace for the
Isles and their inhabitants.

Enter Garric-or-Reise, the son of a tavern-keeper in a small village on
the island of Haft, and the lineal descendant of King Carus. He’s given
a medallion by his father, a medallion that commemorates the coronation
of Carus himself. And after he begins to wear it, he finds Carus
speaking to him, first in his dreams, and then later in his waking
moments of abstraction. Carus has knowledge of politics and warfare and
royal courts and hand-to-hand combat to share with his descendant; and
also the wisdom that comes from 20-20 hindsight and a millenia to reflect
upon one’s own failings. Garric brings his own contribution to the
party; he’s big and tough, full of peasant common sense, and thanks to
his father, once a court functionary, he can read and is thoroughly
grounded in the classic authors. He’s no dummy, which is a good thing,
for Garric’s task is to reunite the Isles so that
they can stand together against the forces of evil, whatever they might
be.

That’s the premise of the series, and it’s a surprisingly good one.
There’s no single Dark Lord to defeat; Garric must deal with both the
purely human troubles of courts and politics and ambition, and also the
myriad magical threats to the Isles. As a result, the series is nicely
open-ended–each book deals with one cosmic threat, while advancing the
story of Garric and his friends. As I say, it’s just one damned thing
after another.

Garric isn’t alone, of course. There’s his friend Cashel, the shepherd.
Cashel’s a big guy–the sort who’s so wide he looks short until you get
close and realize you’re looking up at him. He carries a metal-shod
hickory staff, and when he starts to spin and swing it he becomes the
nearest thing to an immovable object you’re likely to run into–unless
it’s an irresistable force you’re in need of. He’s not too quick
mentally, our Cashel, but he’s got his head on straight, he always
does what he thinks is right, and his instincts are usually correct. Oh,
and he’s only half-human. It’s not entirely clear what the other half is,
but it makes him almost impossible to defeat.

Then there’s Cashel’s twin sister Ilna, the weaver. She’s smarter than
Cashel, and colder than Cashel, but just as concerned with doing the
right thing, as she sees it. She’s a master of her craft, and thanks to
a mis-step in the first book of the series she can weave patterns that’ll
turn your head inside out if you look at them. She’s interested in
Justice, is our Ilna, and she definitely makes Mercy look good.

And finally there’s Garric’s sister Sharina, who compared with her
brother and his friends is almost refreshingly normal. She’s just
strong, mentally tough, able to take care of herself in any situation
(you learn how to do that, growing up in a tavern), and she has the most
amazing knack for making friends when she needs them. (I do not mean
that salaciously; she and Cashel are a definite item.)

If the books have a fault, it’s that there’s a bit of a formula to them.
In each book, you know that our heroes are going to be faced with both
political and magical problems. You know that the magical threats are
going to appear to be coming from several different sources, but they are
all going to be linked together in the end. You know that several of our
heroes are going to be in some way translated to other magical
worlds/planes/eras, and have to find their way back home. You know the
bad guys are going down, especially if Cashel is facing them.

And yet, even with all that, none of the books has repeated the pattern
exactly; and the latest book, Goddess of the Ice Realm, has a
truly chilling twist at the end–no pun intended. Seriously.

When I read the fourth book, I thought the series might be on the verge
of becoming tedious–but I admitted at the time that I’d read it while
afflicted with a bad cold, which might have affected my opinion. On
re-reading it, I think that on the whole it was better than I first
thought, but still a little silly. The new book is better, and I’m
looking forward to the next installment.

Ian links to an on-line quiz on Greek Mythology on which he scored 6 out of 10. Yours truly got 10 out of 10, which I attribute to several causes.

First, as a youth I steeped myself in the myths of Ancient Greece (really, I did. I can picture the covers of the books I had even now). I haven’t paid much attention to them in the last 25 years or so, but some things you never forget.

Second, it was a multiple choice quiz. Even if I didn’t know the answer to a particular question, some answers just seemed more mythological than others. There’s one about how a chariot race was won by a clever ruse, and one of the four just seemed a little more worthy of being remembered than the others.

Third, Ian seems to have (inadvertantly, I’m sure) saved the URL of the quiz in such a way that it preserved his answers. You might want to fix that, Ian…..

Since my initial post about the iTunes Music Store, I’ve bought a few more tunes. Since there was a fair amount of interest the first time, I thought I’d list them.

Jump, Jive and Wail, by Brian Setzer. Me, I like the Louis Prima version, but Jane likes this one.

Pink Cadillac, by Bruce Springsteen. This one is just fun and silly, and man, it goes.

I’ll Make A Man Out Of You, from the Mu Lan soundtrack. This is another pick of Jane’s, but it’s a darn good scene, I have to admit.

Don’t Bring Me Down and Mr. Blue Sky, by Electric Light Orchestra. The first brings back memories of high school dances; as to the latter, it’s the closest Jeff Lynne ever got to recording a Beatles tune, and it’s fascinating to see just how close–and how far–it was.

Tusk, by Fleetwood Mac. I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan, particularly, but this one is just so delightfully weird. And anyway, Jane spent a year-and-a-half at USC.

Bad to the Bone and Who Do You Love?, by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. There was a time when I got really tired of George Thorogood, but even then I liked these two songs. We’ve also got a recording of Bo Diddley singing Who Do You Love?, which is arguably more authentic, but Thorogood’s is the version I heard first and know best.

The Battle of New Orleans, by Johnny Horton. I needed this to counterpoint The Battle of Camp Kookamonga, by Homer and Jethro.

Dixie Chicken and Let It Roll, by Little Feat. Let It Roll is the one I went looking for, but I ended up getting both of them.

Born To Be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride, by Steppenwolf. ’nuff said.

Something in the Air, by Thunderclap Newman. They made one album, and had one hit. I used to have the album; this is the hit. You’ve probably heard it, and don’t know it by name.

Let’s see. I’ve finally finished Drake’s Lord of the Isles series (for the time being; there’s a new volume due out in November), so I’ll probably post a review of that tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve been riding around in my new car, working on Snit, and watching the Olympics.

We watched about half of the opening ceremonies before we fell asleep last night (pretty cool), and I’m watching Bob Costas blather on (competently, I’ll admit) as I type. The best TV commercial of the Olympics that I’ve seen so far was the Budweiser ad last night with the Clydesdale in the field, dreaming of pulling the Budweiser wagon–and I think I’ve seen it before.

They’re profiling a 16-year-old swimmer named Michael Phelps at the moment; he’s incredibly happy because he has a Cadillac Escalade like the ones the rappers drive. Hmmmm.

He’s fast, though–he just won the Individual Medley–and set a new world record time to boot. He was ahead of everyone else for the entire race. Another American named Vendt took silver.

Update: Yet another outstanding Budweiser ad–this time, it features a donkey who dreams of being a Budweiser Clydesdale. (He even tries wearing hair extensions.) Very, very cute.

Update: The U.S. Men’s Gymnastics team is turning in some really good routines all the while having some nasty problems. Apparently two of the team members were told just two days ago by the head judge that their high-bar routines weren’t going to be scored the way they had thought–to get the scores they’d need to medal, they’d need to change them. This is huge, as they typically practice their Olympic routines for at least a year prior to the event. What I want to know is, why was the scoring changed at this late date? So far there has been no word on that.

Update: Back to swimming, and it’s nearly 11PM. Time for bed.

Update (Sunday): Interesting. The high bar judge who devalued moves performed by three American gymnasts three days prior to the competition is Japanese. The team that’s in first place after the first rotation (just ahead of the American team) is…Japanese. I don’t say that the judge’s ruling was motivated by a desire to see his country’s team beat the Americans–but to date, I haven’t heard any explanation for the change, either. Apparently, the three gymnasts affected by the ruling used the moves at the last two World Championships without comment from anyone.

About 3 or 4 weeks ago, my husband and I made the decision to pull our
14-year-old daughter out of school and teach her at home. Not lightly or easily
either, I might add. We made up long pro and con lists, talked to
homeschoolers in the area, looked at the local school’s curriculum for high
school and counted the cost, literally. We debated, argued and reasoned with
each other. Then we gulped and decided to give it a shot. That’s when the
discussions really began in earnest. Then we had to think about exactly how
do you homeschool a kid in high school and do a good job. And what is good
job anyway? Are grades important? What is important? Yikes!

Fortunately, homeschooling has been around for a long time and going really
strong the last 20 years or so. There are a plethora of books out on the
market, most of which I either own or have read. Many are tales of happy
homeschoolers blissfully teaching their kids the love of learning. Bleh.
Most espouse their own favorite “approach” to homeschooling. They range from
a “unschooling” with no defined structure at all to classical schooling with
a prescribed 4 year cycle of learning. None of them is a perfect fit for my
daughter. So I am picking and choosing.

One book that is incredibly helpful in some sort of method is the
mother/daughter collaboration, [btitle “A Well Trained Mind”]. They outline a
Classical Approach based upon the grammar/logic/rhetoric sequence outlined
in an essay by Dorothy Sayers on education. The premise is that you start
children out learning about history/science/literature with the ancients and
move in a 4 year sequence thru modern times, repeating it for the entire 12
years of school. Each stage of the cycle has its own learning objectives;
facts come first, then logical analysis, then synthesis into a personal
opinion. Latin is begun early on, in 2nd or 3rd grade, with modern languages
added in after the basics of Latin are learned. Readings become
progressively more advanced as the child grows and matures. Writing
progresses until the child is doing a long thesis in the senior year of high
school. There is a great deal of emphasis on writing to learn and
independent study on the child’s part in the later grades. Especially
helpful, the authors outline books to use if you choose or programs that are
well-written with homeschooling or school resources listed as suppliers of
materials. If begun early on, this whole book would have been my guide to
teaching my daughter.

Unfortunately, I have gaps to fill and skills that need teaching before I
could begin this method as written. I have, however, gleaned a few useful
items. We’ll be studying Latin rather than a modern language for now. With
my daughter’s language deficits from her learning disabilities, having a
solid base of word roots will help her enormously and the program I found
teaches English grammar very well. I will follow the general idea of a
history cycle with Western Civ, American History, 20th Century History and
Civics/Government. She’ll be doing the note-taking and-book outlining they
suggest, keeping notebooks by subject and reading many of the works outlined
in the text, if in an abridged version. I am using the math program they
suggest, published by Saxon and based upon an incremental direct-instruction
method of learning math.

We did have one hurdle to get over mentally before we made the decision.
It’s the big question that homeschoolers get about socialization of the
children. Will a kid learning at home be as well socialized as a peer in
school? My husband and I struggled with this. It’s a tough one.

On the one hand, being around other kids may teach them valuable skills for
getting along with people. I am a little dubious about that one, especially
after my son came home from kindergarten proud as a peacock because he
learned to play “smear the queer” on the playground that day. It’s a form of
dodge ball, in case you are wondering. But there are some useful skills
learned about give and take in having friends your own age whom you see
daily. On the other, there is peer dependency and “the looking glass self”
mentality where kids define who they are based upon who they are with. In
high school, that gets really scary with things like drugs, sex and
rock-and-roll out there.

In the final analysis, I agree with the authors when they say “in this age
of endemic family breakup, teaching your high schooler to live peacefully in
a family is probably the most important feat of socialization you can
accomplish.” That made a huge amount of sense. Family life is the heart of
life as I see it and living well in the family is almost a key to a
fulfilling life no matter what your occupation or work is. And my sister,
ever good with the advice, pointed out that the last time she was in a room
full of people exactly her own age was at her last class reunion. She also
reminded me, the wretch, that neither of us went to prom so my daughter
won’t be missing anything there either.

It’s going to be a journey for all of us. I am frantically reading books
trying to put together a Western Civ course that will challenge her and
still teach very basic skills. I realize that this won’t always be rosy.
There will be times when I want to chuck the whole thing and send her off on
the bus to let someone else deal with because I want to wring her wretched
little neck. There will be times when I want some time just to myself
without having to go into the bathroom to get it. There will also be times
when we get to giggling together over something or decide to take a break
and go for a walk. We plan on taking good weather days off rather than snow
days. Why not stay home and learn when the weather is yucky and go for a
horse ride or to town on a nice day. We’ll see.

Docendo discitur
— Seneca (One learns by teaching)