Something snapped when I saw that bird picture. It looks like my Dad had a similar experience. I bet you did too. The series of heartbreaking photos capturing a generation of pelicans whose deaths are just the opening salvo in a slaughter of untold proportions unfolding on the Gulf Coast.

It’s of little significance when compared to the American slaughter of Afghans and Iraqis, but it’s still something. It’s something to consider that if the oil keeps gushing till August or December, as they’re saying now, that maybe every single beach in the world will somehow be impacted by the endless stream of our greed for petroleum. This isn’t something esoteric about the future, ten, twenty years. Not even as debatable as global warming or the extinction of species. It’s the end of beaches, coastlines, oceans. For as long as the potential for something like this exists, unchecked, it has every reason to happen repeatedly in the future, until we’ve nothing left to show our children but the few sickly animals we’ve salvaged for zoos, or perhaps the handful of species considered lucky enough to save for ritual slaughter and consumption.

It’s to this end that I’ve made manifest the first thing that struck me when I saw the outstretch-winged pelican, how closely it resembled the flag of its home state. And so I am presenting five new designs of Blue Pyramid Merchandise, not as opportunism so much as an outlet for outrage. I feel better knowing that I’ve been able to convey what I feel in something simple, and that someone else might take small solace in the power of this harnessed anger.

For as has been clear from Duck and Cover lately, clear from anyone thinking carefully about this issue, it’s not about BP. It’s not about the particular company or group of individuals who made this one incident happen. It’s about a system, a way of life, an approach to the Earth and its contents that is innately unsustainable and always has been. The sooner we realize that all drilling is wrong, that all oil companies are doing ill, the sooner we can stop the nonsense of trying to ream one scapegoat while we sow the seeds of tomorrow’s disaster.

Zim-Zim the Mayonnaise Man

News of a new set of brackets, namely that involving APDA’s 2010 National Championship if it were a 64-team single-elimination tournament, is forthcoming sometime early tomorrow.

Click the above to become a fan of this site which, if you’re here, you already enjoy!

This is certainly no reason to join Facebook if you haven’t already, but it will make your enjoyment of the BP a little more streamlined if Facebook is a big part of your life in the status quo. I will be updating every time there’s new content (why did I sign up to do this again?) here, including D&C strips, blog posts, quizzes, updates, and so forth.

Plus, this is clearly the gateway to the long-awaited Blue Pyramid Facebook quizzes, which have been in the works for a long time, but might actually come to fruition once the BP has a fanbase to launch from on Facebook.

If the entire Internet is going to take place on Facebook in the future, the BP might as well be part of the picture. So click away! See you on the ‘book…

For the unfamiliar, this is an aggregate effort to rank the best books of all-time as viewed by my friends and other visitors to the Blue Pyramid. This remains one of the most popular elements of the BP and generating this much interest about books surely is unlikely to hurt an aspiring author.

This update, I decided to tack on a little extra, so I ran some numbers about the Top Authors on the Book List as well, done up with some snazzy but small pics. No matter how you slice and dice the stats, it’s hard to underestimate the overwhelming impact Harper Lee had with one 300-page volume. With 494 total points, not only is she the sole and dominant place-holder of the top book of all-time, but her single tome puts her 5th in aggregate points for all authors. Only Tolkien, Shakespeare, Orwell, and Garcia Marquez could beat her, needing an average of 6.25 books each to do so.

The late great J.D. Salinger is well represented as well, checking in as 10th author of all-time on the whole and 4th in quality-per-book for those with more than one volume on the List. Surely this is helped by the fact that not one of the 89 submitters includes Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction among their 25 best.

A late list I considered adding but didn’t, mostly for fear of making this project too onerous to update (I do it less than once a year as-is), is a list of top books that none of the 89 submitters consider their all-time favorite. What’s remarkable is how many of the very highest regarded books still escape the #1 slot for anyone. Most impressive among these is 1984, which is 2nd place all-time despite receiving zero first place votes. I wonder what it says that these books are so widely regarded, but no one would take them as their only choice to a desert island…

1. 1984, George Orwell, 2nd overall
2. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 9th overall
3. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien, 10th overall
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 14th overall
5. Night, Elie Wiesel, 17th overall
6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, 20th overall
7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 21st overall
8. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 22nd overall
9. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien, 23rd (tied) overall
10. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 25th (tied) overall

Of course, on the flip side, no fewer than 21 of the 89 first-place-vote-getters (a full 24%) are unique books, appearing on none of the other 88 lists. So there’s probably something about the process of picking a favorite that’s more likely to make it unique than the average book.

But today I got a new one – totally unprecedented. Something that almost reminds me of my meeting-people gimmick of challenging them to come up with an original play on my name as they’re digesting its similarity to a word they use daily. It is presumably from someone in China… while the e-mail address is inconclusive, the hold on English and the sentiments expressed are not:

date Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 10:21 AM
subject what’s problem with your quiz?

To whom it may concern,

Today I took a “what country are you” quiz on your web and it says I’m the country Taiwan… Huh?? when did Taiwan become a C-O-U-N-T-R-Y???!!!! WTF with your web????

Taiwan has always been a part of territory of China!!

Taiwan is only a province of China!!!

Don’t ever forget this!!!

SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME ON YOU :-(

If only they’d used a couple more exclamation points, I might really never forget this. Although I highly doubt they expected me to record the verbatim transcript of their e-mail. Here’s your shot at immortality, friend.

The Internet is so liberating.

Speaking of the Internet, the big meme going around Facebook is to find your “celebrity doppelganger” and make said person your profile picture. I am hardly so cavalier about said picture, but I was reading the best article about David Foster Wallace since his death the other night, so I figure he might have to do:

Of course, that may just be the most authentic celebrity who looks like me, or the person I’d most like to be compared to. After all, we all know that reality shows have produced the people who really look the most like me:

No matter how much long brown hair they grow, though, none of these people ever seem quite as thin as I am. Ah well.

In the meantime, hi, how are you?

We made it to the Bay Area on Friday night for a whirlwind meet-up at Mario’s La Fiesta in Berkeley with a bunch of old friends and co-workers. Then we drove over to Tracy that night, down to Fresno Saturday morning, and have been holed up with the Garin Clan ever since, mostly still unassembled until later this week. I’ve been editing about as much as I can stomach, finally over the halfway point for chapters (51%), but still with about 60% of the pages to go. The later chapters are (apparently much) longer, although there’s one exceptional chapter that helps throw that off, and hopefully won’t require much editing.

New Year’s Day distribution to volunteer readers is looking less likely, but is still sort of the optimistic goal. I’ll keep you (probably excessively) posted.

The only other real news to report from this relaxing tenure with my manuscript and Em’s fam is how heartbroken I was to miss the foot-plus snow in Princeton that came the day after we flew away. The odds are overwhelming that it will be the largest winter storm in Jersey during our two years living there, and while getting snowed in and having to delay this trip would have been less than ideal, editing by the heater between frolics in foot-deep snow is just about my idea of the best living ever. I still can’t think about the storm without getting this gut-turning sadness. As I told Emily, I just don’t think I’ll ever really be happy until I live somewhere like Minnesota or Nevada City or Buffalo or Siberia for at least a year or two, where snow is so commonplace and expected that I don’t have to cling to every prediction and forecast, but can instead have confidence that it will abound. Suffice it to say that had I been born in such an environment, I think I would be a lifelong optimist. Snow makes me that happy.

I hope you’re as happy these holidays as I am in snow. Once I’ve sent out PDF’s of my fully edited tome, I will be too.

Here’s my result:

You’re Jane Eyre!
by Charlotte Bronte
Epic in scope and vision, you like looking at your own complete history. That said, your complete history is pretty much crazy. You seem to be followed by suitors, craziness, fires, and incredible turns of both good and bad fortune. Through it all, you persevere while maintaining adherence to your own somewhat middle-ground moral code. While you have confidence that everything will work out in the end, you sometimes wonder if it’s worth it along the way. Oh sweet sweet Jane.
Take the Book Quiz II at the Blue Pyramid.

Go take it now! Tell your friends!

I guess it’s not technically a relaunch if the quiz was never down, but it’s a good opportunity to, as they say, “take it again for the first time.” The images represent the fulfillment of the original vision I had for them over five years ago when the quiz launched, which was to be state-shaped cutouts of the state flag, rather than outlines that featured the flag in awkward partial locations.

An example, with my current state (one of the better images, if I do say so), is here:


You’re New Jersey!
You don’t just live in the suburbs, you define the culture of all Surburbia. You drive everywhere you go, love to eat at diners, and pretend to have a garden. While everyone knows that your house was built on a toxic waste dump, you do your best to hide this information and keep referring to those mythical gardens. Driving on a road without paying for it was a revolutionary experience you once had that you still think about all the time. You owe the Mafia so many favors that you’re thinking of renaming yourself Sicily.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve also added the full complement of merchandise available on the now-prodigious Cafe Press site, just in time for the holidays. So if there was ever an old design or description you were looking for on a shirt or a mug, now’s your chance.

And while you’re out and about looking at links and holiday cheer, there are some of you who might not know about my Mom’s latest sock doll project, Buttons and Socks. There’s some pretty neat stuff available there too, all hand-sewn by my very own mother. I mean, can you turn down a face like this?:

I thought not.

Now if I can only get the pumpkins down from this page and start writing again, I’ll really be in good shape!

Windows XP… it’s fine. But it’s got nothing on those older systems and is demonstrably worse in all ways not relating to processor speed or some underlying aspect of the hardware running it (which, frankly, has nothing to do with operating system). But you can’t run Windows 3.1 or DOS on a modern machine and expect it to run today’s software. Because instead of making sure Windows 3.1 was compatible with web browsing, they just replaced it with lousier versions of the system, so-called “upgrades”, culminating in the colossal disaster known as Vista.

I have often railed against CD’s, which are infinitely inferior to tapes. While CD’s are pretty much falling by the wayside in the face of pocket-sized infinite MP3 players, I maintain that the loss of sides of an album is one of the great failings of our modern musical world. It’s hard to argue with the infinite-players, I guess, but it certainly seems like a mix loses even more luster than it did when it became sideless by being marginalized to a “playlist”. It just doesn’t reflect the same craftsmanship.

Microsoft Works was always better than Microsoft Word – the view of the screen made infinitely more sense and a work one was writing could actually fill the whole screen. The toolbar was more intuitive. And I could go on and on. (Don’t even get me started on cell phones vs. landlines and the collapse of the telephone conversation – that’s a whole dissertation topic in itself and of course something with which I do not play ball.) The larger point is that in feeling a need to “upgrade” things, people most often screw them up. Whether they are too beholden to overpaid consultants or just feel like something isn’t fresh enough unless they keep tweaking it, they just futz with things until the charm that made them enjoyable in the first place is wholly eradicated.

If you’re wondering what all this is really about, I “upgraded” my WordPress account today. While the needling little exhortation to upgrade had been gracing my screen from about the third week after my initial installation (October 2007, as you may recall – hard to believe it’s only been two years in this format), I had found nothing compelling about the request until I read a nasty little article about worms today. WP basically tried to make the case that my blog would be overrun with malware and garbage if I failed to upgrade, then drew all these weird analogies to vitamins and surgery. It being almost 3 in the morning and me not having yet settled into my writing groove (I have a streak of over a week going, but tonight may break it), I was particularly susceptible to the idea of not having to mortgage days of my writing life salvaging 800 days worth of posts. I gave in.

I was an idiot. I should have known how much I would hate the new WP “upgrade” system, because I’ve already seen it at The Mep Report, the other place I blog from time to time. The look and feel of the interface is all wrong, too antiseptic, too institutional. It’s like blogging on a hospital wall. And now it’s what I’m doing. Right now. Blech.

I mean, it’s not like the old WP system was the greatest thing ever, but it at least had some color and contrast and an intuitive layout. This looks like an unending billboard for the random people who design add-ons to WordPress. In a hospital. A poorly designed hospital.

And there’s a running word count. Not a fan. I make a point of only checking my word counts on fiction after I’ve wrapped up for the night. The running count is like being forced to look at one’s watch every second of a passing class. It’s just too much awareness of exactly what’s going on. It breeds self-consciousness and competitiveness and even potentially bad writing because one is focused on the number and not the content. Yargh.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually, all of it, even the stupid word counter. But it’s a bad sign when all I want to do with the rest of my waking overnight hours is figure out how to find a theme editor for the freaking blog-posting format of the blog. That’s not only a bad sign, it’s a meta-bad-sign. In a poorly designed hospital with billboards.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go back to manually editing my blog in Notepad. Almost.

The rains have been sweeping through, often hightailing it on the back of even stronger winds. Today is the first really chilly seeming day and I can already envision the crispness of my breath emerging as the barracks become even more depressing and the walls seem even thinner. Already I’m starting to wonder when we should start moving stuff away from the heater so we can be prepared.

And yet there’s the anticipation of October that seems even more exciting on the East Coast, what with the promise of leaves changing and falling and eventual snow. This is what I’ve missed so dearly, the real seasonal change that is present in most of the world but sorely lacking in the Bay Area. A change in the surroundings that matches the internal perceptual change of the time. People do better with external confirmations of their internal understanding.

Which, I guess, is why I revel in the visualization present on the page. So there you go.