Are You A Record Breaker?

If you’re anything like me, you spent some period in your life thinking that The Guinness Book of World Records was the coolest book ever. It wasn’t a book that was ever assigned in school, and it didn’t even need to be read straight through! It’s a book that folks keep going back to for fact checking, to get ideas of crazy things to try, or just see what wacky fact you can find to impress your friends with. And those pictures! The man with the beard of bees. The guy with the long fingernails. The tallest, shortest, fattest, fastest, highest—Guinness had it all (and still does). We’re all familiar with the Guinness Book. But do you know how it came about, how it has evolved over the years? What does it take to get IN to the book? Getting Into Guinness: One Man’s Longest, Fastest, Highest Journey Inside the World’s Most Famous Record Book won’t get you any closer to breaking a record yourself just by reading it, but reading it just might inspire you to try.

Larry Olmsted takes a multi-pronged approach in his (unofficial and unsanctioned by the Guinness people) look at Guinness. He chronicles the humble beginnings of the book as a marketing ploy for the beer company (yes, that IS where the name came from) to help settle bar bets and arguments in pubs all over Ireland and Britain to its current status as the world's best-selling copyrighted book. Along with this history, Olmsted talks about the evolution of the book itself, how categories and focus have changed over the years, and about some of the most unique records and record breakers. Some of the most interesting chapters recount Olmsted’s own attempts to set and break his own records—one for golf, and one for marathon poker playing. One of the final chapters recounts dangerous Guinness pursuits, some of which have now been retired as records, or banned entirely. Alas, the rules officials seem to be working with their own special logic when it comes to “too dangerous”. While tug of war, kissing cobras, and “youngest” anything (surgeon, pilot) are no longer considered, categories like keeping planes from taking off with your bare hands and dangling poisonous snakes from your mouth are still ok. The appendices at the end of the book are fun to read by themselves, and quite interesting. Olmsted details some of his favorite records in one, and another is a timeline of the book and its evolution, from its conception in 1954 to the company’s February 2008 sale to the same company that owns rival Ripley’s Entertainment (of Believe it Or Not fame). Recent years have seen more of an emphasis on celebrities and on color photographs, but even in its earlier years, Guinness evolved by putting more emphasis on human achievements (rather than mechanical or natural world ones), because that is what people wanted. And people always wanted more! From copycat books to television shows all over the world, Guinness World Records has reaches most corners of the globe. Arguably, the Guinness Book and accompanying television shows featuring record breakers and record attempts were the beginning of what we know today as reality TV. But you might be most interested in the chapter about what it really takes to get your name into the book. Olmsted details the process of applying to break a record (or having a new one accepted), all of which must be done through the Guinness web site, with further communication occurring via fax. He gives some helpful hints, though there will never be a guarantee that your record will be approved (or broken by someone else first!), and even if it is approved, and you achieve your goal, only about 10 % of records are actually published in the book! You might be particularly interested in checking out the new Guinness Gamer’s Edition. Getting Into Guinness is a fun read whether you just want to learn more about the history of the book and the people involved in creating it and making it famous, or if you have a special skill that you think just might make you a record breaker yourself. Start growing those fingernails now!

Tough Little Canadian

Seems like a good time to talk about Wolverine, as his movie is going to be leading off the imminent season of summer blockbusters. Star of movies, cartoons and pretty much every monthly comic Marvel produces, there's not much doubt that he's the most popular super-hero around. Why? I figure it's got a lot to do with the fact that he's about the toughest thing around, though his life has basically been one horrible, torturous loss after another (and nothing makes a better hero than fighting on when things are at their darkest). That and his claws. People really seem to love those claws.

With the movie in mind, I encourage you to have a look at Weapon X (by Windsor-Smith), which was the very first attempt to attribute some kind of origin to the little Canadian. Part of his appeal, no doubt, was the fact that his past was steeped in mystery, and this story cleverly reveals a little, but not too much. What we have here is basically the tale of the nefarious Weapon X project as it carries out a grim experiment on this feral mutant which, in the end, goes horribly, horribly awry. You get tantalizing snatches of Wolverine's background and the full explanation of the admantium bones and claws so central to the character's mythology. The art, by the way, is appropriately sinewy and gritty and recalls Windsor-Smith's early work on another savage hero, none other than Conan the Barbarian.


While you're at it, have a look at Wolverine: Origin (by Jenkins and Kubert). This one went much further back and examined Logan's earliest life, covering not only the discovery of his mutant powers, but also the secret of his relationship with archenemy Sabretooth (also appearing in the movie) and explains why Wolverine has a soft spot for red-heads.

The movie script delved deeply into both those books for inspiration. But, if you're looking for the best Wolverine story out there, that's got to be Wolverine Volume 1 (by Claremont and Miller), which collects his first solo miniseries from 1982. This is two superstar creators (Claremont made the X-Men what they are today and Frank Miller, well, between Dark Knight Returns, Sin City and 300, I can't imagine you don't know who he is) working at the absolute height of their talents. Wolverine goes to Japan and winds up tangling with the deadly Ninja clan known as The Hand, as well as a beautiful assassin who maybe friend or foe, or even both. This truly shows Wolverine off at his best, when he was still cloaked in mystery, when his tough, noir-ish voice-over felt fresh and crackled with menace. This has got a seriously brutal final battle, which powerfully reflects the character's dark nature, and it has a last panel that will make you shake your head in surprise.

Right, so, there's your Wolverine. Next month, the the subject of the movie I'm most excited about this summer: Star Trek.

Interview with Joshua Mowll, creator of Operation Storm City

If you were intrigued at all by my post last week about Operation Storm City, go check out the interview I just did with the UK author/artist behind the series, Joshua Mowll.

He was also kind enough to send me some cool images from the book, too--which you can check out in the Q&A--like this schematic of a zoridium bomb:

Maximum War Game

I don't normally read manga. I'm 55, okay? But I had to. I mean I had no choice. This manga is different. It's about go.

Hikaru No Go features a boy who finds a go board while exploring in the attic. The go board is possessed by the ghost of an ancient Japanese go master (Go is the national game of Japan. At Gobase, you can study games of today's masters, and games dating all the way back into the 1700s, as well!).

Hikaru learns to play from the ghost. Only Hikaru can see him, and Sai (the ghost) still loves to play.

I love this game. Anyone who enjoys games of strategy and tactics, such as chess, should learn to play go, IMHO. At the Chess and Go program at the local library, some of the regular players taught themselves the game by reading this manga series or watching the anime. But learning the rules is just the start, as Hikaru finds out. To play go well, you have to keep playing. As the series progresses, Hikaru gets better and better.

So how is go better than chess? Well, first, it's a game about conquering territory, much more like war than just capturing a king. And second - while a chess board has 64 squares, there are 361 points on a go board. There are way more possibilities to consider, offensively and defensively.

Try the manga. It's quite fun. And if you want to pursue go, Janice Kim's Learn to Play Go series, reviewed here last June, is an excellent introduction. I also like the four-volume series, Graded Go Problems for Beginners, though I haven't made it past volume 2 yet. I just have too much to read, you know?

How to Properly Stunt Your Growth

While I recognize that April is National Poetry Month it also happens to be the month that begins with one of my favorite non-holiday holidays: April Fool's Day. Is there anything more delicious than planning and pulling off that perfect prank, that preposterous practical joke? It seems such a shame that there's only one day a year dedicated to (mostly) good-natured frivolity; after all, they repackage Halloween candy as Christmas candy, and as Easter candy, and even in "fall colors."

But I think the problem is that it can be difficult to come up with the perfect stunt to pull off in a given situation. Putting a vacuum cleaner under someone's bed and waking them up with it instead of an alarm clock (as I did this year) doesn't work at a party, and similarly you can't pin a glass of water to the ceiling with your elderly aunt the way you could with younger sibling. Wouldn't it be great if someone could collect hundreds of these sorts of things, illustrate them in an amusing cartoon format, and present them in one volume with an index so you could look up the exact stunt you are looking for when you need it?

Ta da! I present you with Sam Bartlett's collection, The Best of Stuntology. Like the subtitle says, 304 pranks, tricks and challenges to amuse and annoy your friends.

I think the word "friends" is key here because you really ought to know who your audience is before performing some of these nifty little numbers. Some people have a lower tolerance for the absurd, where others just don't appreciate humor at their expense. It's too bad, because I do think at times like the world has lost it's sense of humor, and if only people could laugh (and laugh at themselves) more then maybe things would be alright. Then again, I'm not so sure how I'd feel if someone convinced me to try and catch a quarter in a funnel tucked into my waistband so they could pour a drink down my pants when I wasn't looking. I'd like to think I would laugh if someone could convince me to draw a moose with my eyes closed and tricked me into sticking my finger into peanut butter when I got to the "tail."

But Stuntology is more than pranks, as its name implies, and there are plenty of stunts that don't embarrass or otherwise deliberately set out to cause grief or hard feelings. Many, in fact, are participatory fun. One can, for example, engage in a conversation where each side only gets to say two words per sentence. Good fun. Not easy. Takes practice. Or you could dealing with some other annoying aspects of life via stunts. Say you've got a telemarketer on the phone and you can get past your immediate response to just hang up. Why not tuck your tongue between your teeth and lower lip and attempt to have a conversation until the person who called gives up in frustration?

One of the great things about this collection is the portability of the stunts. Of the stunts that require props, few involve items not commonly found around the house. It is entirely possible to keep a mental storeroom of a dozen or so stunts that you can perform at parties or while visiting other people's houses. No need to buy fancy gewgaws at the joke or hobby shop (or online), simply show up and become the life of the party!

The pranks are single-page mini comics and Bartlett's illustration style has a playful naive quality, filled with rubbery pranksters and patsies who convey the full range of emotions. And without being explicit, one can gather from the response of the cartoon victims what a prankster or stuntologist can expect - no claims of "but I didn't realize you'd get upset" will be accepted.

The Best of Stuntology
Pranks, Tricks & Challenges to Amuse & Annoy Your Friends
written and drawn by master trickster
Sam Bartlett
Workman 2008

We like to be fair. Most of us learned fairness on the playground and around board games. Fairness is further reinforced by our educators and schools, and then by the media which often tries to report “both sides” of a controversy. We hold these values dear. When I taught composition to freshman college students, the most commonly used sentence was “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.”

And of course I have to agree with this sentiment. I like fairness and I value open-mindedness very highly. But when fairness is exploited at the expense of truth, it’s time to re-evaluate. Being fair and open-minded does not mean giving equal weight to all ideas, it means giving proper weight to ideas based on the strength of the evidence and arguments supporting them.

I suspect that people, including school board members and educators, who consider Intelligent Design (or other variations of creationism) as an alternative to the theory of evolution mean well and are acting only in the interest of fairness and open-mindedness. But they are doing themselves and their students a great disservice. It’s like proposing the ideas of the Flat Earth Society as an alternative to the Spherical Earth Theory.

Jerry Coyne, in Why Evolution is True, complains that the story of evolution has not been told often enough or well enough, and that it is simple ignorance, even among scientists, of the extraordinary wealth of evidence in support of evolution, that leaves people susceptible to creationist ideas. The truth is that Intelligent Design proponents ask some intriguing questions of nature, the answers to which are anything but obvious (How could an eye evolve? Or a wing? How does a cow-like creature transition into a whale-like creature?). But what is largely unknown is that evolutionary thoerists have asked the very questions and come up with answers for them, answers that agree perfectly with the fossil record and with what evolutionary theory predicts. People simply need to be aware of all that evolutionary theory has allowed us to learn about the natural world.

The evidence Coyne outlines is vast and can leave no doubt in the reader that species evolved through natural selection very much as Darwin first established 150 years go (Happy Anniversary, Origin of Species!). Using the theory of evolution, scientists have repeatedly been able to predict the existence of extinct species and then have been able to find examples of those creatures in the fossil record, nearly exactly where the theory predicted. The power of selection has been clearly demonstrated by plant and animal breeders, who, in the course of a few thousand years, have been able through artificial selection to create chihuahuas, blood hounds, and great danes from a single species of wolf. Native American farmers bred corn from a species that resembles crab grass. Certainly these examples show the potential for modification through selection that exists in living species. What’s more, natural selection has been observed in real time in nature—on the Galopogas islands, finches responded to tougher seed husks by developing larger beaks in a mere ten years. Furthermore, natural selection and speciation have been demonstrated in the laboratory. In one experiment, new species of bacteria emereged in a laboratory environment in only weeks . Given all of this evidence, it becomes much less difficult to believe that the forces of natural selection, applied over hundreds of millions of years, could create the diversity of life on this planet and even lead ultimately to human beings.

Coyne never lays out exactly what the ideas of Intelligent Design and other creationists are. Rather he answers ID proponents and creationists point-by-point in passing as he lays out an airtight argument for evolution.

What is most valuable in this book, though, isn’t its excellent argument, but rather Coyne’s illumination of the myriad ways in which evolution has worked on species, the fascinating adaptions that have developed (some of them blatantly unintelligent), and the clever and dedicated science that explains our natural world. Any threat to that kind of knowledge demands a defense.

Not science, but science fiction

Via boing boing, science fiction affects the mainstream in all sorts of unexpected ways:

1. Robotics. This is probably the most well-known of these, since Isaac Asimov is famous for (among many other things) his three laws of robotics. Even so, I include it because it is one of the only actual sciences to have been first named in a science fiction story (”Liar!”, 1941). Asimov also named the related occupation (roboticist) and the adjective robotic.

2. Genetic engineering. The other science that received its name from a science fiction story, in this case Jack Williamson’s novel Dragon’s Island, which was coincidentally published in the same year as “Liar!” The occupation of genetic engineer took a few more years to be named, this time by Poul Anderson.

3. Zero-gravity/zero-g. A defining feature of life in outer space (sans artificial gravity, of course). The first known use of “zero-gravity” is from Jack Binder (better known for his work as an artist) in 1938, and actually refers to the gravityless state of the center of the Earth’s core. Arthur C. Clarke gave us “zero-g” in his 1952 novel Islands in the Sky.

The list continues at the Oxford University Press blog.

Grifter's Game -- Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime, #1

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year. (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.) Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining. They make me happy. If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the mid-50's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed. So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order.

Grifter's Game was the first Hard Case release. It was originally published in 1961 as Mona. It's about con artist Joe Marlin, who's been pulling the old check-in-to-a-hotel-and-stay-for-a-while-before-taking-off-without-paying scam. It's an easy way to stay comfortable, well-fed and well-hydrated, but it's much easier to pull off if you're carrying expensive luggage when you check in -- hotel clerks are less likely to ask for money up front that way. So he steals some suitcases.

Which turn out to contain a large amount of uncut heroin.

And then he meets the wife of the man who owns the suitcases.

And falls in love with her. And she with him. And so the husband has to go, one way or another. Leading Joe Marlin to say, "I don't know whether the kiss was a sign of love or a bargain sealed with lipstick instead of blood."

I've read quite a lot of crime novels. And watched lots of film noir. So the set-up was a familiar one. The first thirty pages -- where Block sets the stage with Joe scamming rich women and hotel clerks -- seemed so familiar that I almost got up and started going through my recent reads to look for another book with that same situation. Almost.

But even after I hit the point where I was totally and completely positive that I hadn't already read the book, I kept waiting for the situation to play out as I expected it. Because crime novels where A GUY KILLS FOR THE LOVE OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO TOTALLY HAS THE MADONNA/WHORE THING GOING ON don't usually end well for the guy. But then I started wondering if maybe this story was going to be different -- and right up until the last few pages, I really didn't know which way it was going to go. I had no idea that Lawrence Block was so tricky.

Apart from the trickiness of Lawrence Block's from-left-field-I-totally-didn't-expect-it-and-I'm-going-to-be-thinking-about-it-for-a-good-long-while plot twist, I loved the details about Joe Marlin covering his tracks -- like switching license plates on a car before stealing it -- and I loved Joe Marlin's musings about memory, the emotional baggage that comes with murder and about how the moments that haunt you aren't necessarily the ones that one would expect. He's not a quipping cold-blooded killer by any means, which made the last quarter of the book especially effective.

Though I'm very familiar with Lawrence Block's name, I'm not all that familiar with his books. That's going to change.

(cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom)

Book Review- The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
"In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?"

Now, yes, this book is from a girl's point of view, but I still think that boys would appreciate this book. It's got zombies in it and some great, well written heart-pounding scenes throughout the book.

Ryan's debut is simply remarkable; it is a gripping, post-apocalyptic tale that's hard to put down. Mary is such a well-written, multi-layered character and it's so easy to get emotionally invested in her, eagerly turning the pages to read more of her story. This book is about much more than zombies, which in turn makes it more than just a run-of-the-mill horror zombie novel. One of the things I enjoyed about this book was that everything had already happened- in the small amount of zombie books I've read so far, they seem to be more about how the infection starts and spreads, and how people cope with it and try to fix it. In this story, the infection has already spread and no one has been able to stop it, just protect themselves from it in being within their enclosure. And, in the end of the novel, the infection has still not been stopped. Nothing is tied up neatly in a bow at the end; sacrifices have been made, tons of lives lost, but it's not all bleak. At the end, there is still a sense of hope, of perhaps something better to come. I am excited to read the sequel when it comes out.

This is Not a Game

Dagmar is in trouble. Just after finishing an assignment from her multi-millionaire boss she takes a well-deserved vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia. Overnight the city is wracked with political instability, riots, fires and unrest. Stranded, with no way to leave and her Blackberrry and only a few dollars to her name, Dagmar waits for a private security company to mount a rescue operation.

Dagmar does have one other resource to call upon. As gamemaster for an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) she has a network of people around the globe plugged into their computers looking for clues about the next ARG and how to solve it. With a few emails to people who know people she eventually is spirited out of the city thanks to the gamers that find her peril just another puzzle to solve.

After returning to the States, Dagmar's problems don't get any smaller. She is being pressured by her boss, Charlie, to run the biggest flashiest game yet with a giant budget and even bigger expectations. She calls upon and old friend, B.J., to help her knowing he and Charlie hate each other. And then a mutual friend, Austin, is gunned down in the parking lot.

Juggling the game, B.J.'s true motives, Charlie's secrets, and an investigation into Austin's murder using the gamers around the world Dagmar finds herself in her own high-stakes contest. She is running out of time to figure out if she is a puppet-master or only a pawn in This Is Not A Game.