Mike Smith

One Year Later

mike_smith — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:52:55 GMT

Okay, it turns out I forgot to post to Livejournal for exactly a year. Oops.

Real talk, I don't know what to do with this thing anymore. I started up a few tumblr blogs, and adopted a strategy of adopting a specific topic to each one. The problem is that I don't really have anything left over for LJ. I suppose I could use this space for more personal matters, but I've never had much interest in that.

Anyway, I'm not sure it matters much, since I'm pretty sure LJ's traffic has declined considerably. I'll confess to being part of the problem, but I don't think I'll be part of the solution any time soon.

That said, I don't really feel like shutting this thing down. I sort of figured some guy in Russia or that goat would take the decision out of my hands, so I never really thought about how/when/if this blog should end. So this is me kicking that can down the road.

I suppose I should give a status update, if only for recordkeeping purposes. My duties were changed at my job, so instead of doing shift work, I'm working straight days. The only catch is that I have to cover vacations and other absences, which is why I'm writing this at work at 11:45 at night.

The hours don't bother me so much, and there's a certain unpredictability to it, but that isn't bug me either, really. I think what's eating me is that I've gotten a sample of everything this job has to offer. Is this all I have to look forward to? It pays well, but at what point is that not enough? Am I already past that point and I'm unwilling to face it, or am I just looking for an excuse to walk away?

Not that I'm making any decisions right now. My personal goal has always been to make this job last as long as possible, so I'm erring on the side of caution. It's just that Year Four hasn't been quite as fufilling as I had hoped, and that makes me wonder how Year Five will play out.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Dead Trees.

mike_smith — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 07:19:35 GMT

So I wrote this a little over a year ago. I'd finished a big-ass chemistry book, and I was at a crossroads on which book to read next. I've been on a mission to actually read the books that have been gathering dust on my shelf, you see.

Well, about an hour ago, I finished the last of the six, The Chemical Tree, and I'm pretty jazzed about actually completing an entire list of books I had set out to read. It shouldn't have taken this long, but one of them was a physical chemistry textbook where I resolved to work the problems and learn the material in addition to just reading, so that took a long time. And I read some other books in between, so it's not like I was idle. In all, it was like those six books, Theodore Gray's coffee table book about the periodic table, The Casual Vacancy, Death Rat!, Movie Megacheese, A Year at the Movies, and a buttload of Captain Marvel comics. Maybe some other stuff I forgot about, but that's the gist of it.

To celebrate, I'm cooking a frozen pizza and popping in a Dragon Ball Z movie. Probably Lord Slug, because the disc is still in the machine.

I suppose I held off on Chemical Tree for so long because it was so hard to read, and I attributed this to a lack of chemistry expertise. This is probably true, because I found the easiest parts to understand were the ones that covered topics I was familiar with: element discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, parts of Linus Pauling's career, the discovery of oxygen, etc. These are all things I learned about after getting the book, and there's still a lot more to research. In a way, Chemical Tree is more like an index of topics than a history of chemistry in itself. The author was so focused on condensing the material into one volume that he tends to ignore explaining the scientific principles that underlie the important discoveries. By his own admission, he assumes the reader is already up to speed on these things, which is kind of dumb, since a lot of the instrumentation, terminology, and practices of 19th Century chemistry are so obsolete that not even professional chemists would recognize them.

Put simply, a lot of chemical research is done with computers these days, and yet a lot of this book covers work done before electric lights were a thing. I have a vague idea how chemists used to figure out molecular structures, but I don't understand the techniques because I never had to use them myself, and the book doesn't offer much insight. I can research it, but that was kind of why I bought the book in the first place, and it turns out it's really a compass instead of a map. Well, at least I've finished it, so I know where to look when I'm ready to go through it again.

There's still some books to be read, but this is kind of a milestone, and I wanted to observe it. I tend to overlook accomplishments like this, to the point where I'd look back and go "Crap, I've barely read anything for the last few years." Well, I have electronic records that prove otherwise.

Part Seven or "Funeral for an END"

mike_smith — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 16:00:26 GMT

Part Seven.

The last quote from Local Council Administration is about how gifts to the poor still count as charity even if they benefit the rich in the process. I won't miss these fortune cookie quotes at all.

Three Weeks Later...

So, the final fate of Howard Mollison. He recorvered from his last heart attack very well, but this time he's not so lucky. He's stuck in the hospital, still connected to machines, and feeble. I'd call him a pale shell of his former self, but Rowling describes his color as "purple", so we'll go with that. A purple shell of his former self. If he can talk, Rowling doesn't let on.

Shirley visits him daily, which kind of sucks for her because Howard's not exactly stupendous company, and besides, she's still sore about the whole adultery thing, even if she doesn't let on. Does he remember her stalling before she called for help? We don't know. He never mentions it or the EpiPen. Shirley's only real solace is when her son goes with her to the hospital, because he can do all the talking, and escort her in and out of the building, giving her a little more attention and care that she craves. But most of the time it's Samantha who goes along, or she goes alone, and she doesn't care for that so much.

On top of that, Shirley is all alone at her home. She had presumed that Miles would invite her to stay with his family during Howard's recovery, but no dice. Patricia and Melly came over once for a few days, but Shirley hates them, so I guess that's worse.

Shirley's only remaining source of comfort is empty vitriol towards everyone she blames for the incident. The Jawandas for refusing to help Howard in his hour of need. Stuart Wall and Krystal Weedon for distracting the ambulance service. Stuart Wall again, since he confessed to being "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother", although it was actually Simon Price who posted the story about Howard's infidelity, and her own daughter Patricia who leaked it in the first place.

Ironically, the only one left in Shirley's life is Maureen, the woman Howard was cheating with. Shirley would rather visit Howard with her than go alone, and she's found a silent form of revenge in assuming Howard's half of their business, allowing her to needle Maureen about how the deli and cafe are run. The truth behind all of this is that Shirley needs Maureen in spite of her hatred. Without her, there's no one else to talk to.

They talk about the funeral for the Weedon kids, and Shirley relates how she actually saw Krystal and Fats having sex in the bushes. Maureen is taken aback by the knowledge that Shirley saw Robbie in peril and did nothing, but Shirley covers her ass by claiming she was inexplicably worried about Howard, and was too distracted to pay much attention to the boy.

Maureen suggests that at least Howard can take comfort in knowing that the Fields are surely finished now, even if he's too sick to attend the Parish Council.

For some reason, Rowling doesn't bother numbering Part Seven like the others, but we're changing over to Andrew Price now.

Final fate of Andrew Price. His family is moving to Reading, apparently, and this isn't so bad, since the Bawdens are moving back to London, and Gaia wants to hang out with him from time to time. Gaia asks Andrew if he's coming to the funeral, and he agrees just to be around her. But on his way to the service he recalls a long-forgotten memory of Krystal.

Earlier in the book, it was established that Andrew was allergic to peanuts, and the kids nicknamed him "Peanut" when he had a reaction at school when he was little. Fats had given him a marshmallow with a peanut inside of it. Only Krystal Weedon took action when he collapsed. She got help and saved Andrew's life. She would have gotten a gold star for this, except she punched Lexie Mollison the next day, cementing her reputation as a malcontent.

Andrew goes to the Wall house, where Tessa plans to go to the funeral along with Fats. Like I said, Fats has taken the fall for all of the mischief caused by "The Ghost". Andrew's still pissed about this, because that meant Tessa called his dad to apologize, and this led Simon Price to assume that Fats got his information from Andrew. So ultimately, Andrew was blamed and took a beating from his abusive dad. Maybe not as bad as it would have been if Simon had known the full extent of Andrew's involvement, but a lot worse than if Fats had kept his mouth shut. Andrew realizes that Fats truly has no idea what it's like to live beyond a stable, nuturing family.

Tessa and Colin argue over sending Fats to the funeral service. Colin thinks it's just another punishment, and while he might deserve the shame, the fact is that the others at the service would hardly want to see him there. Better for him to stay behind. Tessa reluctantly agrees, and Andrew has no complaints, since he and Fats have nothing more to discuss.

Final fate of Samantha Mollison. She decides not to go to the funeral, since she had little connection to Krystal in life. Instead, she calls her husband, and for once they're on good terms. The crisis of Howard's heart attack brought them together, I suppose. They had sex and she didn't pretend he was someone else or any other sarcastic crap. Finally, she admits that she saw Robbie Weedon the day he died, and she failed to intervene. But Miles isn't judgmental about this at all, and acknowledges that she probably assumed his mother was nearby but out of sight. This impresses her, but it doesn't ease her guilt much.

This inspires her to enter community service. She asks Miles about the Parish Council. Parminder Jawanda resigned, and Howard's on the shelf indefinitely, so now there's an opening. A casual vacanc--OH NO IT'S STARTING OVER!

Miles acknowledges that they won't want another election to fill the open seats, and Samantha suggests that she and Colin Wall could take them. What, really? If it was that simple, why didn't you do this from the beginning?

Samantha hasn't drunk a glass of wine in two weeks. Yep, now she chugs straight from the bottle! But I kid Samantha Mollison. I do. Anyway, she feels rather receptive to the arguments for the rehab clinic in the Fields. So I guess the Fields debate hasn't been settled after all.

MILES: Yeah, we'll just make my wife a councillor, and the guy I beat in the election. Because local politics is like professional wrestling apparently. And that should cover everybody--

SERPENTOR: Not quite everybody, worm!

MILES: Who the hell are you? Why did you somersault through my window?

SERPENTOR: I am Serpentor and this I command!

MILES: What do you command? That I call you Serpentor?

SERPENTOR: I bid you appoint me councillor, thereby restoring me to my rightful title!

MILES: Well, I would, but we're all full up. There were only three open spots, and I just filled them all up-- Holy shit is that?

SERPENTOR: The head of "the farmer", yes. It seems he suffered an unforntunate "accident" this morning while operating the thresher. So, you see, it appears there is a fourth vacancy after all.

MILES: Well, yeah, I guess there is at that. I'll just fill out a new form here... What's your last name, Serpentor?

SERPENTOR: ... um... Is that required?

MILES: Well, I don't suppose it's required. Let me look it up. I can probably just write "N/A".

SERPENTOR: Excellent! Rasputin himself would be pleased!

Final fate of Gav-Kay. Kay and Gaia are gonna head for the funeral when Gavin calls out of the blue. Of course he didn't know the funeral was about to start. He saw Robbie wandering unsupervised that day but has no memory of it. He had to read about his death in the paper. Ever since Mary shot him down, he's been missing Barry Fairbrother, and wishing he could have a beer with him. But he died at the top of the book, and the only other person in town he seems to know is Kay, so he calls her and asks her out for drinks OH NO IT'S STARTING OVER!

Kay hangs up on him and they head for the funeral. They probably say "Girl Power" or something like that. WHY WERE KAY AND GAVIN IN THE STUPID BOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?!?!D:!?!

As it turns out, the paper runs a front-page piece demanding an investigation into the social services handling of the Weedon family, and Kay had to deal with that because the Weedon's social worker got sick again. She wonders if she can find work in London, and maybe it would be better to stay put...? Dammit, the book is ending . I don't care who stays or goes, but make a decision already. We're not gonna have Casual Vacancy 2 to sort these things out.

Final Fate of Fats Wall. Fats watches the funeral procession from home. After Robbie's death, he returned to his parents a broken young man. He confessed to "The Ghost" and every other dirty, low-down thing he could think of, I guess trying to cleanse his soul as much as he could. He's basically a social outcast now, but I think he's too damaged now to even care.

Final Fate of Colin Wall. He was upset with Tessa for revealing that Fats may have been the product of incest. But Tessa explains that he had been slumming for a taste of "real life" and she decided to give him some. Colin seems to bond with Fats over the guilt, shame, and worry he now bears. I suppose that was what separated them in the past. Fats cared about nothing, and he resented Colin for worrying about everything.

Final Fate of Tessa Wall. Somewhat ostracized socially. Sukhvinder had to explain the cuts on her arms to her parents, which meant revealing how Fats had bullied her, which led to Parminder being very upset with Tessa for not doing something about it long ago. Tessa also blames herself for failing to help Krystal Weedon before it was too late. And pretty much all of Fats' wrongdoing is on her head as well. Oh, and she still feels guilty for deceiving the adoption agency and coercing her husband into raising a son he wasn't prepared for.

Final Fate of Sukhvinder Jawanda. She emerged from the river a hero, basically. Everyone in the community sang her praises for her noble effort to save Robbie. For once, she was getting more attention and accolades than her siblings, and her parents don't ignore or dismiss her the way they used to.

There's a dark side to it, but it's mostly good news anyway. The scar on her leg still itches and aches [Insert Voldemort joke here.], and at night she still thinks about hauling the dead boy's weight in the river, and how she was tempted to let him go and save herself. Krystal's suicide hit her hard, but her parents got a counselor for her. She stopped cutting herself after Robbies death. Maybe it was the brush with death, or the far more severe cut she sustained in the river, or the emotional maelstrom of that day.

Not long after, Sukhvinder took it upon herself to raise money for Krystal and Robbie to have a proper funeral service in Pagford. She also went to the Fields to meet with Terri Weedon personally, to explain what they were doing and why they wanted to hold the service there. Terri agreed--as is typical for her--and she even shows up for the funeral.

Okay, quick question: Why isn't Terri in jail? Krystal assumed Terri would get in big trouble just for having heroin supplies in the house. It's been three weeks. Is she clean? What happened to Obbo? Is there any punishment in store for her? Really, though, what can society do to her that she hasn't already inflicted upon herself? They certainly can't take her kids away. Somehow I get the feeling prison would be downright cozy compared to the life she has in her own home.

The book ends with Sukhvinder feeling dissatisfied with the eulogy. The minister glosses over Krystal's actual life, favoring cliches about children dying too young and so forth. So Sukhvinder flashes back to her own memory of the rowing team at an away game. They were really nervous to be at the rival school, but Krystal lightened the mood by horsing around, mooning the other team, etc. They won medals that day, because Krystal overcame the home-ground advantage. Sukhvinder arranged for Krystals medal to be buried with her. I'd like to think someone left a pack of Rolos in Robbie's casket...

The other thing Sukhvinder arranged was for Rihanna's "Umbrella" to be played at the end of the funeral, just like they did for Barry's earlier in the book. Yeah, it was kind of funny the first time, but now it just feels empty. And that's the end.

FINAL ANALYSIS

First, the positives. I'm pretty sure I've said it before, but it bears repeating. The characters in The Casual Vacancy come across as very real. They have strengths and weaknesses that blend together to make a three-dimensional personality. In a lot of cases, the strengths and weaknesses are inseparable. Howard Mollison can't be successful without being ambitious or close-minded. Parminder Jawanda can't be determined and forceful without being spiteful. Fats Wall can't be insightful without being cruel. And so on. You can easily relate to a lot of the characters, if only partially. And the way they interact (or don't) is very realistic as well. Barry's friends barely knew Krystal Weedon, even though he was practically a surrogate father to her. Andrew Price has ties to Fats and Gaia, but Fats and Gaia barely interact for most of the story. I don't know that this is necessary, but it does enhance the realism of the work. It feels like you could drive to this place and see the characters in real life.

And there's some interesting parallels to the individual character arcs. Parminder compared Terri Weedon's drug addiction to Howard Mollison's addiction to food. Despite having little else in common, they basically followed the same path. Howard tried to get everything he wanted, only to suffer a debilitating heart attack, while Terri refused to choose between heroin and her kids and ultimately lost both. Fats bullied Sukhvinder throughout the book, but there's a connection there, too. Fats hurt others while Sukhvinder cut herself, arguably because neither of them understood true hardship or pain. Robbie's death was a reality check for them both. Fats' was profoundly shaken to have his cowardice exposed, and Sukhvinder now sees death as a tragedy instead of a release. I have to admit, it's kind of fun to mull this sort of thing over.

Now, here's why the book sucks.

First of all, it's boring as hell. Realistic characters are one thing, but realistic situations are a trickier thing. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to Samantha Mollison, who barely affects the larger plot at all. Her entire character arc is in her head. She resents her family and marriage, escapes into this teeny-bopper fantasy, drinks constantly, and Robbie's death forces her to come back to reality and act her age. She doesn't do anything. She mopes around the house, she runs an unseen lingerie store into the ground, and she plans a trip to London that never materializes. She thinks and plans, but it never amounts to anything. I strongly suspect that she's only even in the book to serve as a contrast with the less fortunate characters who don't have the luxury of growing old or complacent. She's realistic, but so is an evening spent vegging out in front of the TV. No one wants to read a novel about that. The same goes for Howard's deli/cafe, Gavin and Kay's relationship woes, and anytime Fats smokes. Seriously, Rowling has him smoke a lot. Plenty of real-life smokers go through multiple packs a day, but does anyone read a novel to experience this?

What's annoying is that there are hot spots in the book where you'd expect a lot of compelling drama to go on. The Fairbrother household just had a death in the family, but we barely hear from them at all. Gavin visits, but it's mostly an excuse to get into his empty head. Rowling teased some tension between Mary and her children, but never went anywhere with it. She tells her oldest boy to throw out the newspaper with Barry's posthumous article, because she's jealous of his political work, but he defiantly keeps it, because he wants to remember his father. There's talk of the family leaving Pagford, but that would mean leaving Barry's grave behind. An interesting dilemma, but we never find out what they decided.

And what about Simon Price and Obbo? Rowling just drops these characters altogether. Simon is deflated when he loses his job, but we don't hear from him after he plans to move and get a new one. Unless something incredible changed, he's still a wife-beater, and yet no one takes him to task for this. At the beginning of the book, Andrew Price was just itching for a chance to put his father in his place. By the end, his dad is still giving him black eyes, but that's okay beause they're moving to Reading, where he can hang out with Gaia sometimes. I guess that's realistic. In real-life men can beat their wives and abuse their children and no one ever stops it. But people read fiction to escape from that. Give us a little satisfaction. I really figured Andrew's little brother Paul might be a seething cauldron of rage, and somehow he'd get his hands on a firearm and do to his father what Andrew had only fantasized about. That would be the flavor of darkness Rowling was driving at, but it would also be a resolution of sorts. Instead, the Prices remain in their status quo, they're just moving the entire act to some other town. But at least something changed with the Price family. Obbo appears to have gotten away scot-free, even though he raped a minor. The police presumably found the drugs he left in Terri's house, but did they trace it back to him? Rowling apparently doesn't consider this worth mentioning.

It reminds me a lot of the interviews she conducted after the release of Deathly Hallows. Fans wanted to know what happened to this character or that character, and she was happy to tell them anything they wanted to know. From my vantage, this was bullshit, because if this information mattered, then it should have been included in the text. This was a seven-book series, one that introduced dozens of slimeball antagonists, but only a handful are killed or brought to justice in the actual story. If you hate Dolores Umbridge, too bad, because you'll never find out what happened to her in the books. You have to look up what Rowling said in an interview.

This reinforces my opinion that Rowling is a lousy closer. Maybe she just doesn't understand how important this is, or maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion, but you have to bring it on home. I'm not saying every story or character arc has to have a happy ending, but there needs to be some sort of conclusion where the audience can say "Yeah, that wraps that up pretty well." She got it right with Voldemort. He didn't just keel over dead, we got to see one of the fragments of his soul, withered and helpless, little more than a pain recepticle. It wasn't spelled out for us, but it was obvious that by tearing apart his soul to become immortal, Voldemort had only succeeded in making his death even more terrible than he had feared. So Rowling knows how to deliver the goods. I guess that's what makes it so frustrating when she doesn't.

Now, Howard and Shirley Mollison reflect the Voldemort treatment very well. Howard didn't die, but Rowling created a situation where death might have been preferable to the state he's in. Even if his political agenda goes through (uncertain at best), he can't enjoy it because he's laying in a hospital bed. He was never about agendas, he was about status, and it's hard to be the Big Man when you're in intensive care. In twenty-four hours, he went from throwing lavish parties for himself to barely getting two or three of his family and friends to make the trek out to see him. He may recover eventually, but he won't like the world he finds, where people have moved on and he doesn't command the respect and attention that he used to. Similarly, Shirley is denied the honor of being a Big Man's wife, or even a grieving widow. Howard's unfaithfulness has tarnished their personal relationship, and his stubborn refusal to die means she's stuck with him as he is instead of how he used to be. Where she used to be able to gossip and weild a certain influence, she's basically isolated in her home now, left to stew in her own juices.

And that's all well and good, but were these really the meanest characters in the story? At least Howard's extramarital sex was consenual. Shirley only planned to murder Howard, then quickly abandoned her vengeance when it became untenable. Meanwhile, you've got Simon Price and Obbo brutalizing women with impunity, because Rowling didn't really want to go into that any further. This was probably a conscious decision on her part, but I doubt her reasoning would impress me much.

To zoom out a little ways, I think the fundamental problem here is that this book was advertised with lines like "Pagford is a town at war with itself", and we never actually got the war. I feel like Rowling deliberately avoided any obvious conflict in order to preserve the realism of the scenario. You won't get a screaming match at the Jawanda house because that doesn't really fit how the characters would think and act. But it would have been more cathartic, wouldn't it? Sometimes it's not about being realistic. The closest we got were the parts where Parminder blew her stack in the council meeting, Colin punched Fats in the face, and Shirley decided to stick Howard with the EpiPen. Oh, and when Simon broke his toe as Andrew attempted to defend his mother. A lot more of the book should have been climactic moments like those.

Yet the climactic moments we actually got still fell flat. I wanted Parminder to tap into that rage she'd been carrying for most of the book. Colin and Fats had been getting on each other's nerves for Fats' entire life, so one blow seemed insufficient. I wanted Andrew to be so desperate for an opening that he would grab a fireplace poker and whale on Simon while he dropped his guard to cradle his injured foot. I'm not sure I wanted Shirley to actually murder Howard, but it irritates me that he cheated on her and she tried to kill him, and they both know and they both won't talk about it. There's so much more drama to be had with these characters, and Rowling seems content to punt.

This goes back to an old complaint of mine: Rowling sucks at pacing. Nothing really gets rolling in this book until about the halfway mark. It became very apparent to me that until Barry Fairbrother's funeral was concluded that nothing important was going to happen. Even then, it still took a while to set events into motion. Everything up to the first message from "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother" was just exposition and backstory, and we really didn't need that much exposition and backstory all concentrated in the first 200 pages of the book. It's the same effect that plagued the Harry Potter series, where huge swaths of each book were devoted to pointless routines that a more competent author would have taken for granted. Harry has to buy school supplies, Harry has to arrange transportation to the school, Harry has to attend the first week of classes, Harry has to decide what to do for the Christmas Break, and only after all of that's been settled can we get down to brass tacks.

The result is the same here. Rowling wastes so much space on irrelevant details, that it feels like she has to rush the important parts before the end. I don't even understand that, because I'm pretty sure her publisher would let her write as big a book as she wants. But the solution isn't to make Casual Vacancy 200 pages longer; the solution is to ditch most of the first 200 pages, then devote more attention on the plot development that everyone came to see. Why does everything have to come together at the end of the book? Why can't Sukhvinder's scars be revealed at the midpoint, so the Jawanda family can have more time to react to it? Why can't Gavin break up with Kay at the beginning of the book? It's not like there was a huge buildup to it anyway. But no, this is all crammed together in the back one-third of the novel, where none of it is given time to breathe.

Arguably, the entire premise was flawed. I read about the book after I finished it, and Rowling was quoted as explaining that she started with the idea of Robbie Weedon wandering to his doom, and all of these adult characters would see the unsupervised tyke and make no attempt to save him. The rest of the book was designed to illustrate how that could happen, i.e. what was on the characters' minds that consumed them so utterly that they would ignore a child in danger. I find that hard to swallow. It means three-quarters of the book was just setup for a really depressing punchline. No one wants to sit through that much detail for a good story, so I'd her original idea would have demanded a flashback to keep things moving. Start with Robbie's funeral, flash back to what was going on in the days leading up to it, maybe frame it as a police investigation. At least that way the characters have to reconcile what they were thinking about with what they ought to have done instead.

So what's the moral to all of this? I think there's supposed to be one, but I can't quite grasp it. I think Rowling is trying to use the story to illustrate how society leaves too much to government programs while simultaneously refusing to support those programs. I'll try to explain what I mean.

The bulk of the story is about the welfare of the Weedon family. It starts out as an abstract political debate, but it becomes clear that the Weedon family are at the heart of the matter, and one some level, everyone involved is acting out of some personal opinion of the Weedons, good or bad. Barry Fairbrother's message was that girls like Krystal Weedon have potential, and the only way to nuture that potential is for the government to support the infrastructure that keeps her afloat. That means methadone clinics for her mother, so she can stay clean and keep the family together. That means social workers checking up on Robbie's wellbeing so Krystal can go to school instead of being his primary caregiver.

The argument against that is that these programs are a waste of money because they don't work. Krystal's mom probably isn't fit to raise her son whether she stays clean or not. They give her methadone, but she still pals around with drug dealers and helps them smuggle heroin. Krystal goes to school, but she's a lousy student in terms of both grades and behavior. What's the use? The problem with Barry's political allies is that they don't share his faith in Krystal, so they lack the fire he had for defending her welfare. There's not a lot of "rugged individualism" talk in the book, but on some level it's implied that Krystal would be better off taking matters into her own hands, and finding her own way out of her predicament, using the resources that are already available to her.

And we saw how that played out. The problem is that Krystal could only rely on compassionate individuals to a certain point. Barry Fairbrother could have helped her a lot, but he died. Her great grandmother could have given her a place to stay with Robbie, but Nana Cath died, too. She had a friend who would let her spend the night, but that was about it. Come morning, they'd give her a banana and send her on her way. And they never let her bring her baby brother along with her. Kay Bawden seemed to have some rapport with the Weedons, but she has her own family to take care of, and there's a point beyond which she simply can't be responsible. It's implied that the Weedons' usual social worker, Mattie, is incompetent, but that doesn't mean Mattie doesn't care. One way or another, there's simply only so much she can do.

The only thing Krystal has left to work with is this notion that the government will give her free housing if she gets pregnant, and she pursues that plan so doggedly that she loses the very brother she was trying to protect. Someone might have talked her out of it, or helped her find another way, or at the very least watched Robbie for a couple of hours while she did the nasty in the bushes, but it just never happened. Sukhvinder made a valiant attempt to undo Krystal's error, but it wasn't enough. And even if she had saved Robbie, what then? Krystal would just be back in the exact same precarious situation.

It's implied that Pagford's residents have a newfound compassion for the Fields, now that they've had a taste of how desperate its residents can get. Public opinion of Krystal was pretty low even after she died, but Robbie became something of a symbol of innocence lost. So maybe Pagford changes its tune, or not. We don't know. But it seems that the message here is that you can't stick your head in the sand and assume Big Government or a private benefactor will be enough to protect the Krystal Weedons of the world. Big Government is underfunded, and private benefactors are mortal. The net has holes in it, and its up to all of us to make those holes as small as we can. At least I think that's what Rowling is trying to say. I'm not sure she has any practical applications for that idea. The way I look at it, Krystal had a lot of people pulling for her, and she could have had a lot more and still self-destructed. There's no simple answer.

Well...

There's one simple answer.

RATING: BAD

G'night, everybody.

Part Six, or "Contend in VEIN"

mike_smith — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 16:00:16 GMT

Part Six now.

OK, the quote this time around is about the "Weakenesses of Voluntary Bodies", whatever that means. Turns out they're "hard to launch" and "liable to disintigrate." I have no idea what this has to do with anything.

Last time, Robbie Weedon... died. Howard Mollison... had a heart attack. So he could die. Ironically, the heart attack might have saved his life, because his wife Shirley was planning to murder him otherwise.

I. The cops show up at the Wall household. Colin's paranoia leads him to assume they've come for him, but they're actually looking for his son, Stuart "Fats" Wall, who was getting his dick wet when Robbie drowned in the river. Apparently he ran off when the cops responded to the emergency call. Tessa is shaken by all of this, but Colin is actually pretty copacetic. Turns out his OCD-spawned fears have been preparing him for dealing with actual crises all along. The moral is that mental illness gives you super powers. It made Natalie Portman a better dancer in "Black Swan", and it helps the Joker stymie Batman even though he doesn't have any fighting skills.

Fats doesn't answer his phone, so Colin prepares to search for him on foot, while Tessa contacts his best (only) friend, Andrew Price. Andrew does answer, and he hasn't heard about Robbie's death. Nope, he's just sitting in the kitchen, eating.... toast. Mmm-hmm. It's great with orange juice.

What Tessa doesn't know is that Andrew and Fats aren't very friendly anymore. I guess it started with Andrew's family planning to move out of town, which Fats seems to have taken personally for some reason. Also, Andrew took a job working alongside Sukhvinder Jawanda, whom Fats had been bullying relentlessly. Andrew had tried to stay neutral, but he invariably formed a professional bond, and also with Gaia Bawden, who openly despises Fats' cruelty. Fats has never expressed any jealousy over this, but I assume on some level he feels the girls turned Andrew against him.

When Tessa asks if there's anywhere Fats might have gone, Andrew immediately thinks of the Cubby Hole, a secret place only the two of them knew about on the river. Even estranged from Fats, he doesn't want to divulge the secret, but when Tessa tells him about Robbie's death and Fats' role in it, he decides it's not worth it. They meet up and he takes her to the Cubby Hole's approximate location. I've never understood the exact topography of the Cubby Hole, but it's near the river and difficult to get at, so Andrew decides Tessa will have to wait while he goes alone.

While she waits, Tessa calls Kay Bawden to fill her in, since she had handled the Weedon family's social service case. "But I'm not her social worker anymore," is Kay's reaction to the story. Okay... that seems oddly indifferent. I can see Kay uttering those words in any number of contexts--it is a true statement--but Rowling doesn't provide any context to shed light on her emotions. Does Kay no longer care? Or is she merely explaining why she hadn't been informed sooner?

At the Cubby Hole, Andrew calls for Fats' who replies in an "unrecognizable" voice and asks for a light. Seriously, he's been smoking nonstop for like the last twenty-four hours straight. He smoked at Howard's party, he smoked when he got home from the party, he smoked with Krystal, he smoked while they searched for Robbie, and he'd be smoking now if he hadn't dropped his matches. And sure enough Andrew obliges and hands him his lighter.

Fats asks if Robbie died, and Andrew has to break the news to him. Fats squeals, "piglet-like" says Rowling. I'd say that's an appropriate response. Andrew crawls out of the Hole and lets Tessa know he's found him.

MEANWHILE, AT THE HOSPITAL

VEGETA: I can't believe that jackass shaved my mustache. Now I have to start all over again.

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Rest easy, soldier. You'll grow it back even bigger and better than ever. And thaaaat's and orrrrderrrrrr.

DR. MINDBENDER: Yes, this is truly a dark day for the Mustache Club. But at least Harry avenged us.

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: Yes, how did you defeat him, Mr. Potter?

HARRY: High school physics, Luthor! I'm kidding, actually. I never took physics in school. Also I have no idea what stopped him. I just kept beating the crap out of him until it was over. Also, a dog stabbed Vegeta with an EpiPen, and that may have had something to do with it.

DR. MINDBENDER: Of course. The sudden influx of adreniline upset Vegeta's biochemistry, and the parasitic life form was forced to abandon its host! And once it was out in the open, it was vulnerable! Brilliant!

VEGETA: Wait, so you didn't really save me? You're saying you just kind of stood there while the dog handled it for you?

HARRY: I'unno.

VEGETA: Well done, as usual, buddy.

HARRY: Well, it's not over yet. There's still one last thing I have to do....

II. Parminder and Vikram Jawanda collect Sukhvinder and take her to the hospital to treat the deep cut on her leg. There, Sukhvinder has to undress, and that's how her parents learn about the self-inflicted cuts on her arms. Vikram calms his wife down about this so they can focus on the immediate situation. Later, Sukhvinder recovers on a hospital bed with her parents on either side, stroking her hands. Parminder mentions Howard's heart attack to Vikram, and he's galled that they expected her to come to his aid.

On the other side of the same building, Howard Mollison's family is waiting for word on his condition. Miles is aghast that Parminder refused to help. Shirley says she's not surprised at all, but attacking targets like this is all she really has left to go on. She wants to go home, right the hell now, and shut down the Pagford Website so "The Ghost" can't post anymore dirt about Howard cheating on her. Also, she'd like to destroy that EpiPen she stole from Andrew Price, since the website and the EpiPen would implicate her motive and means to murder Howard.

She tells herself she never would have gone through with it. Then she considers that if Howard survives, he might tell people how she ran to the kitchen before she came back to call for help. So she plans to deny it, and claim that Howard got brain damage or something. Uh-huh...

She sees Samantha and Miles hugging and feels only envy. Shirley wants to be the center of attention, the way Mary Fairbrother was when her man died. "This was not how she had imagined it--" Fortunately, Ruth Price shows up to offer a taste of pity/attention that Shirley longs for, but it's not nearly enough.

Meanwhile, nineteen people work on Howard in the O.R. Down in the morgue, Robbie Weedon's cadaver lays in a metal drawer. No one went with him to the hospital. That's probably because he was dead before the trip. But we get it, Rowling. Howard's rich, Robbie's poor, death is the great equalizer, yadda yadda yadda.

III. Tessa drives Fats home from the Cubby Hole. She offers Andrew a lift, but he declines, probably because he's not in the mood to watch whatever happens to Fats next.

Basically, Fats has broken down to the same level he was at when he was a kid and Simon Price made him piss himself. I guess he hasn't actually pissed himself this time, but he's been missing for a while, so he's had time for that I guess.

Despite her relief at finding him unhurt, Tessa can't conceal her disgust that he ran away from the situation. She coldly recaps what he's done, and then hopes aloud that he did get her pregnant, because it would give her something to live for. She just drives around for a while, letting him simmer in his shame and regret, and then she abruptly pulls the car over. Then she reveals the Secret Origin of Fats Wall.

The Secret Origin of Fats Wall: He's adopted. Well, I think that was established earlier, but Tessa explains that his birth mother was only fourteen. She adamantly refused to divulge the identity of the father. No one knew if she was covering for an underage boyfriend or "something worse". They explained all this to the Walls when they adopted Fats, because they would need to be aware in case he had any mental or physical issues resulting from incest.

This is a huge blow to Fats, although I don't quite understand why. I have a theory, although I don't think it would have occured to Fats quite so quickly.

The theory goes like this: Fats and Krystal are brother and sister. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass. Here's the facts. Terri was sexually abused by her own father until she ran away at thirteen. She met someone soon after and had two children who were later taken away from her. Fats may have been one of those two kids, or he may have been born earlier. Even if Terri Weedon wasn't his mother, it might not matter. His birth mother was from the Fields, and it seems like every other person in the fields is related to the Weedons, the Tullys or both. Odds are pretty good that Fats is much more closely related to Krystal than either of them suspected. Being adopted, he should have considered that possibility before even thinking about having children. Maybe if he was a little more like his adoptive father, he would have.

In any event, there's more Secret Origin stuff. Tessa wanted to adopt Fats, but Colin's OCD would make this impossible. He resisted the idea, wanting to get better before taking on the responsibility. See, what did I tell ya? But Tessa insisted, so he lied about his condition to the social workers, and they adopted. Five nights in, Colin tried to kill himself because he had become convinced that he had accidentally smothered the infant Fats.

I suppose the point of this is that Colin took responsibility, even for crimes and crises that only took place in his head. The thought of killing a baby made him suicidal. Fats actually got a kid killed, and he ran and hid.

In all of this, Tessa also recognizes her own accountability in this mess. She put Colin and Fats into this messed up family situation because she refused to take Colin's OCD seriously, and because she probably thought Fats would be some perfect little angel no matter how he was raised. She starts the car, and Fats says he doesn't want to go back to the Fields. Why would he think they're going there? No, Tessa's taking him home.

IV. Okay, so what happened to Krystal? Well, she kept running along the river, looking for Robbie well after all hope was lost. The police found her and tried to break it to her gently, but she still flipped out and they had to wrestle her into the squad car.

The cops take her home. For Fats, that's an unpleasant situation because it involves a lot of "tough love". For Krystal... well, she was trying to escape home in the first place. When the cops arrive, Terri assumes Krystal told them about the stash of hashish Obbo left in her house. Terri answers the door, but only after dragging the stuff upstairs.

Once she finds out this is about Robbie, she becomes confused, thinking Robbie is with Krystal. But Krystal gets out of the car and approaches the house, without Robbie, and Terri goes apeshit. A policewoman grabs her before she can claw at Krystal's face. This commotion allows Krystal to slip inside the house and lock the door behind her.

Meanwhile, at Kay's place, she and her daughter have it out, and they agree that moving here was a mistake, and they should try to get back to London. Tessa calls about Robbie's death, and Gaia becomes upset at the mere suggestion that Kay could do anything to help the situation. "What about me?" she whines. But Kay invites her to come along, and Gaia agrees. Buuuuuut it doesn't really matter. By the time they arrive Krystal has already found her mother's hype kit and Obbo's bag of heroin. Wracked with guilt, she gives herself a fatal overdose, committing suicide.

And on that cheery note, we'll call it a day.

NEXT: The End.

IN THE WOODS

BARRY'S GHOST: BooooOOOOoooo! Why doesn't it work? I did it just like the stories said! I can't believe I came all this way to find it and it doesn't even work! Why won't it bring me back to life? Answer me!!!!

HARRY: It doesn't work for ghosts, silly. You have to be alive to use the Resurrection Stone. And then you'd use it to summon other ghosts.

BARRY: Who... who are you?

HARRY: I'm Harry Potter.

BARRY: Nice mustache.

HARRY: Thanks. You know, I've been watching you, Barry, and I have to admit, you've become pretty strong.

BARRY: Thanks for saying that, but I'm actually really weak.

HARRY: What are you talking about?

BARRY: I'm dead. I was going to say and do all these things to fix my community, but now I'm gone and they have no idea how to carry on without me. Everyone hates everyone else, and now Krystal's dead. I thought the Resurrection Stone would let me go back and set things right, but it's too late...

HARRY: Are you kidding? I'm really impressed. It takes a real hero to stand by so impotently while other characters move the plot forward around you. I wouldn't say it if it weren't true.

BARRY: (snif) You mean it?

HARRY: Of course I do. Believe me, I know a thing or two about passively laying still while things happen around me. You're a natural at it.

BARRY: But... I didn't double-space my article for the newspaper, and CM Punk died trying to help me. Wait... is that a helicopter?

CM PUNK: Barry! Guess what? There was a helicopter at the bottom of that ravine I fell into! So I'm miraculously not dead!

BARRY: Wow! Really!? That's incredibly convenient! I guess the Stone worked after all, Harry. Harry? Where'd you go?

HARRY: It wasn't the Resurrection Stone, Barry. You did it all on your own. It was your inability to affect anything around you that opened the right doors. Everything just fell into place.

BARRY: Gosh...

HARRY: I'm proud of you, Barry Fairbrother. Stay useless. That's your armor.

Part Five X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV or "Everyone in this book is a horse's ass."

mike_smith — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:00:33 GMT

Last time, on The Casual Vacancy, Krystal Weedon left her three-year-old brother sitting alone on a bench while she went off to bang Fats Wall behind some bushes. Will she get pregnant? Will Robbie Weedon wander off and get into trouble? The answers to these questions... NOW!

X. Or not. Gavin Hughes spots Samantha Mollison walking around, and takes a detour to avoid her. He's gone to visit Mary Fairbrother, you see, and he doesn't want anyone to know that this is a personal visit. Gavin had heard that the Fairbrothers were thinking about moving out of town, but Barry was buried here, so that makes it a more difficult decision. He finally confesses his love for Mary, which is rather awkward since her husband just died like three weeks ago or something. But he was afraid she'd hear it from someone else, because Gavin thinks everyone is fascinated with his dealings. Instead, Mary reveals that she always knew. Barry told her that Gavin had always had the hots for Mary. Wait, what?

Gavin is dumbstruck by this, and he abruptly leaves. Okay, what the hell just happened? Gavin himself didn't know he had any particular feelings towards Mary until about halfway into the book. Hell, I'm not even sure he loves her right now, because I think he was just seeing her as a convenient pretext for breaking up with Kay. Barry thought that Gavin "faniced" his wife, but so what. Barry thought he could save the Fields. Barry thought one soccer game would reconcile Colin Wall with his son. Barry thought he would live to see fifty.

Besides, Mary hasn't exactly told him "no." Is the point here that Gavin is too self-conscious to even hear her out? Or are we supposed to recognize that Mary never had any interest in him and never would? Or is this just to demonstrate just how deep Gavin's apathy goes? His only friend in town was Barry, and perhaps the only reason for that was because he had secret longings for Barry's wife. Take that out of the equation and he never would have returned Barry's friendship, perhaps.

MEANWHILE...

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: So... Super Dumbass 4, eh? I have to admit, I wasn't prepared for this. I wonder how your new transformation will compare to my new hybrid wizard-dumbass body--

HARRY: YOU STOP SAY THINGS NOW TIME FOR BEAT YOU UP!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Astonishing! You're even dumber than I could have imagined! But that still won't help you now that--OHSHITHE'SKICKINGMYASS!

HARRY: U KILL PRETTY BIRD WHO LIVE WITH ME!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Again with the owl? What, did you marry it or something?

HARRY: IT HAVE PRETTY FEATHERS

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Dammit! I'd pictured a more dramatic showdown than this, but if that's the way it has to be, fine! Let this be our final battle! Green lightning attack!

HARRY: ARRRRGGHHHH! GLOWLY DEER HELP NOW!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Ow! I forgot he could do that! Uh... Burt Renyolds Death Ball!

HARRY: HA HA HA HA HA!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: What? It's not working? Burt Renyolds Death Ball! Burt Renyolds Death Ball!

HARRY: THAT ATTACK IS NO WORK! AAAAAAAHHHHH! NEED SWANK MUSTACHE TO DO!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Gasp!

XI. Hungover and dealing with allegations of cheating on his wife, Howard decides to stay home from work. Shirley decides to inform Maureen in person by taking their granddaugher to lunch at their cafe. There, she ruminates on her shame, thinking the entire town has been laughing at her behind her back. In reality, no one else has even seen the anonymous post about Howard and Maureen's trysts, and no one in the book has even mentioned them except for Patricia Mollison, who was an eyewitness. I suppose the real issue for Shirley is the humiliation. Calling out Howard or Maureen settles nothing. So she picks up Andrew Price's EpiPen and takes it with her, saying she's going to put it in the fridge in back. But she has far deadlier plans than that... At least, I'm assuming EpiPens can kill people. Shirley researched them earlier in the book, but I haven't.

See, Shirley recalls how esteemed Mary Fairbrother was at Barry's funeral, and she envies that now. As long as Howard is alive, Shirley is a cuckolded old fool. But if he dies, like Barry died, then Shirley would become a pitiable widow, immune to scandal or mockery. So it's not just about revenge, is the idea here.

XII. Meanwhile, at the riverbank, Krystal and Fats are still bumping uglies. Wait... I just got it. "Uglies" are a euphemism for genetalia, and you would "bump" them together during sex. I never thought about that before. They both planned to make this quick, because Robbie's close by, with only a pack of Rolo candies to hold his attention. And this is the very flaw in their plan, because Rolos are crammed full of caramel, and they didn't give him anything to wash it down. Krystal tells him to wait at the bench, but that works about as well as it did the last time she asked him to do that. At least then he had the candy to keep him occupied.

So Robbie wanders off. And he passes Gavin Hughes on the way. Gavin parked his car some distance from Mary's house because he didn't want anyone to know he was seeing her, but now he's forgotten where he parked. Super. He sees Robbie but fails to recognize the implications of an unsupervised toddler. Instead, he wishes he could go to Kay's place for consolation. Okay, fuck this guy. Seriously. He spent the whole book trying to get away from her, and now he's got his wish and the first thing he wants to do is go back to Shawshank. It never even dawns on him how he'd hate himself for it later, and how his entire relationship with Kay has been an endless cycle of regret. Ignoring the kid is one thing, but what's distracting him from the kid is patently ridiculous, even by the standards of his own warped internal logic.

Robbie moves on and discovers a soccer field, where he encounters Samantha Mollison. She's wandering around regretting her recent conduct around her husband. She sees Robbie, but doesn't find his presence on the field to be unusual, since her own children used to play here in much the same way. Great.

Robbie wanders back to the bushes, hoping Krystal is finished by now, but to his horror he finds no one there. He calls out for Krystal as Shirley Mollison passes by from the other side of the road. Like Gavin, she saw Samantha wandering around, and took a detour to avoid her. She glances at Robbie, but I guess she's too consumed with rage to think clearly. Shirley hears his cries, and this probably reminds her of the sort of derision and heckling she wants to avoid.

Somehow, Shirley comes across the bush where Krystal and Fats are, and is mortified to catch sight of them in the act. I guess Rowling couldn't resist such a moment, but I don't understand. If they never left the bushes, why couldn't Robbie find them? Or did Robbie go to the wrong bush by mistake? I guess he would have trouble remembering his way in a strange town, but the narration could have made that clearer.

MEANWHILE

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Curses! I shaved off my mustache to make me look less Italian, and now it's made me as weak and ineffectual as a Estonian in Lithuania! Who would have thought that my ignorant prejudice would work against me!?

HARRY: AHHHHHHHHH! NOW IS THE PART WHERE MY FIST HITS YOUR FACE HARD

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Wait! I just remembered! If you beat me up, you'll be hurting your friend Vegeta, too! After all, I'm infesting his body!

HARRY: GOOD POINT! BUT IF PUNCH NOT WORK, OPPOSITE OF PUNCH IS WORK.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Aha! Now I've got you! Wait, opposite of punch? What is--OHCRAPNOWHE'SKICKING ME!

HARRY: DON'T WORRY BUDDY! FOOT PUNCHES WONT HURT YOU!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: His.... stupidity! Too intense...! Have to... escape...!

HARRY: THIS IS FOR BIRD! UNH! THIS IS FOR TONKS! GRUH! THIS IS FOR MOMMY! SCHMACK! THIS IS FOR DUMBLEDORE! WAIT. DID ME LIKE DUMBLEDORE. HIM KIND OF JERK IN RETROSPECT! AAAAAHHHHHHHH!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Now, while he's confused... must... crawl.... to safety....

XIII. Sukhvinder is also out and about. She's in a bad state of mind because she saw Fats, who's been bullying her constantly for the entire book, making out with Gaia Bawden, who had befriended her. They were both drunk and Gaia barely even remembers it, and besides, she had pulled away from Fats, vomited, and resumed sticking up for Sukhvinder. But Sukhvinder doesn't know that part, and as far as she's concerned, this is another betrayal. She thinks Gaia and Fats will hook up, and then she'll have to work with two dickholes who defend Fats in spite of his miserable conduct. So, like Gavin, Samantha, and Shirley, she's trying to avoid people right now.

Basically, she plans to take the bus to Yarvil and find some place private where she can cut herself. Then she can return home by 5:30 before her parents miss her. But never mind that shit, here comes Krystal Weedon!

Yes, finally Krystal has realized Robbie has gone missing, and she's frantically searching for him. Fats just stands around smoking a cigarette with one hand in his pocket. I'm assuming it's the back pocket, since that would make it easier for him to keep his thumb up his ass. Sukhvinder immediately goes to cross the bridge, hoping to avoid both of them. But then she sees Robbie in the rushing water.

Before she can really stop to think about it, she calls out to Krystal, then jumps into the river after the boy. And just for good measure, remember that computer Simon Price dumped in the river? Well, somehow it's still floating around, and Sukhvinder cuts her leg on the broken monitor.

XIV. Shirley returns home to carry out her murder plan. Just one problem: he's not in his bed where she left him. She wants to do it while he's asleep ("Justice required a sleeping Howard," although this isn't explained). She finds no sign of him in the kitchen or bathroom either. For a brief moment, I imagined Howard as some sort of fat, old Predator, lurking in the shadows, unseen, waiting to strike.

Shirley worries that Howard has left the house, perhaps to confer with Maureen. She goes to the sitting room to call the cafe and check, but before she gets to the phone, she finds Howard on the floor having a heart attack. Looks like Mother Nature beat her to the punch...

I suppose Howard's only in the sitting room because he had tried to reach the phone himself to call for help. Now he looks to Shirley to pick up where he left off. Instead, she runs out of the room to hide the EpiPen--twice, because the first hiding place must not have suited her--and then she comes back to call for an ambulance.

Ah, but here's the twist. The guy on the phone already dispatched an ambulance for Robbie Weedon. He thinks Shirley is calling about the same emergency, so he reassures her that they're already on the way to "Orrbank Cottage". I guess that's supposed to be where Robbie went in. I hate how the British name landmarks. It takes Shirley a moment to realize that's the wrong address, and she finally calls back to clarify they need an ambulance for "Thirty-six Evertree Crescent". Well at least that sounds like an address. I was afraid she's say "Ruthingford House-on-the-Abbey", or "Fiddlesticks Meadows" or "Windosmir-at-Kentshire." Or "Isengard."

MEANWHILE... ACTUALLY NOT VERY FAR AWAY AT ALL...

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Gasp... gasp... need... help... Got to... find... medical assistance... But only... doctor in town... is brown-skinned... Gasp... pant....

DR. TUBBY: Hi! I'm an adorable dog! Bark bark bark!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Must... get to... Albania... safehouse.... Plan next move...

DR. TUBBY: I see you need medical attention, sir. You appear to be having some kind of allergic reaction! Fortunately, I found an EpiPen in that house over there! I thought I would find ice cream, but there wasn't any!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Allergic...? Wait... don't!

DR. TUBBY: Poke poke poke!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Rrrrkkkk ggggkkkk! Bleah!

DR. TUBBY: Uh-oh! I wasn't expecting this! I'd better prepare to bark really loud, just in case!

VEGETA: Uggggghhhhhh....

VOLDEMORT: Oh no, I've been driven out of that body! Now, I'm just a pile of magical phlegm! I hate when this happens!

DR. TUBBY: Hello there! Are you delicious?

VOLDEMORT: No! Stay back!

HARRY: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH AFTER CAREFUL DELIBERATION DECIDED THAT DUMBLEDORE, WHILE BURDENED WITH SIGNIFICANT CHARACTER FLAWS, WAS STILL A CHERISHED FRIEND WHO DID NOT DESERVE TO BE MURDERED SO CALLOUSLY, EVEN IF IT WAS PART OF A LARGER PLAN HE HIMSELF COORDINATED. FURTHERMORE AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH HE WOULD NOT HAVE NEEDED TO DIE AT ALL IF NOT FOR YOU STARTING SHIT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

VOLDEMORT: Gasp! No! It can't end like this! How could I have miscalculated so badly!

HARRY: DEER-ME-HAH-MAY-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

VOLDEMORT: Noooooooooooooo! Wottaworldwottaworld! (ded)

DR. TUBBY: Hooray! The world is saved!

HARRY: HE CREATED KISS TO DESTROY KISS, AND HE FAILED! ONCE AGAIN SUPER DUMBASS 4 HARRY HAS PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

XV. I suppose Shirley called her son right after the ambulance, because Miles comes running out of the house in his slippers. He tries to phone his wife, and knocks on the Jawandas' door to seek their help. Parminder answers, and to her credit she moves instinctively for her doctor's bag, but then she remembers that she's suspended from work, and she 'can't'. There's no emotion from her in this scene, so it's hard to tell if she's sincerely apologetic or twisting the knife. Let's not forget, it was the Mollisons who got Parminder suspended in the first place. On the other hand, if she weren't suspended, she'd be at work right now, so she wouldn't be so close by anyway. They really need her husband, right? He's the cardiologist. Or whatever. He's the guy who did Howard's bypass surgery, so he's gonna get involved sooner or later.

Samantha happens by, and Miles fills her in. "My God. Oh my God," she says, which I believe marks the first time Samantha had a sincere reaction to anything Miles has said that didn't involve her directly. They hear sirens, but that's the ambulance headed for the Robbie Weedon situation, about a mile off. Let's check in with them, shall we?

Some guy walking his dog dragged Sukhvinder from the river. She managed to reach Robbie, but too late. The dog walker tries CPR for twenty minutes, but to no avail. He's dead.

Back at Howard's place, their ambulance arrives, and the EMTs struggle to hoist him up, so Miles and Samantha have to help. They tell Shirley to accompany him in the ambulance while they follow in the car, but Shirley's not thrilled to be riding along with her husband. I guess this is supposed to mirror Barry's ambulance ride, although I'm not sure what the point is to the comparison.

And that's Part Five. Cheery, no?

Well, it's not gonna get any better...

NEXT: Pagford EXPLODES INTO WA--oh, wait that never actually happens, does it?

Part Five IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, or "Rolo in the Hay!"

mike_smith — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 16:00:46 GMT

IV. It's the morning after Howard Mollison's big 65th Birthday Party. For some stupid reason, Rowling sees fit to perform an inventory on all the characters. So this section is literally just "Here's what they're all doing/thinking this morning."

Even if this were justified, why now? Sure, the events of the previous day were somewhat important. Miles Mollison won the election for Barry Fairbrother's council seat. Everyone got really drunk at Howard's party. Simon Price published an anonymous message revealing Howard's infidelity. Samantha's long awaited concert trip... didn't actually pan out. Uh... Terri Weedon found out the rehab clinic is doomed. I can't think of anything else. But this "calm before the storm" moment doesn't really add up. Unless Pagford is about to be invaded or something. Don't hold your breath.

Ruth Price: Gets up for work, takes a last look at the view from her house, feels indignant that her family will have to move and give up the view to someone else. Ruth's husband beats her, so it's kind of surreal that anything else would bother her. But I guess that's the human condition.

Samantha Mollison: Still asleep, so good job, Rowling. We really needed to see this. Samantha went home and barricaded herself in the guest bedroom. This is probably because she's drunk, hates her husband, and got caught making out with a sixteen year old boy.

Stuart "Fats" Wall: Still awake, having resolved the night before to pull an all-nighter. His mouth is "slightly numb and tingly" from non-stop smoking. I didn't know smoking did that to you. Fatigue aside, he doesn't feel any better than he did before. Apperently he's been wrought with unhappiness and unease, and he thought crashing Howard's party and helping himself to champagne would fix that.

Colin "Cubby" Wall: Wakes up in a cold sweat, having dreamed that he poisoned Barry Fairbrother. Instead of dismissing this as a dream, he begins to seriously contemplate the possibility that he murdered Barry without remembering it.

Tessa Wall: Takes her morning insulin shot. She knows Fats has come home, because she can smell the cigarette smoke from his room. I know he came home because Rowling already provided this information two paragraphs ago. Tessa has nothing else to add to this, except that she wonders how her family has come to this. "Come"? Lady, it's been like this for the entire book. Nothing has changed, except that you were diagnosed with diabetes.

Howard Mollison: Sleepin' like a baby. Yeah, like a big ol' snorin' baby. No, really, he's fat and his snoring woke up his wife.

Shirley Mollison: Having toast and coffee for breakfast. Rowling makes me crave toast. I don't understand it. It's not like she uses the word "toast" in any special way, but something about her characters having toast makes me want some. I'm specifically thinking of a breakfast scene in Goblet of Fire that made me ask for a toaster for Christmas that year. I needed a toaster because I think I got rid of the one I had before because I never used it. Then I got this one, which I still use, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. Rowling makes me think toast is something minimalist and cool to eat for breakfast. She takes me back to my childhood when I would crave toast with the butter melted enough to soak into the bread, but I couldn't articulate this desire to my mom, so I'd just eat it as it came, knowing that every so often the butter would melt to my ideal condition. She reminds me of the anime cliche of a character running late for school, so she has a slice of toast in her mouth because she didn't have the time or presence of mind to eat anything more complicated for breakfast. She reminds me of Pastor Toastman, civilian identity of Powdered Toast Man, clacking away at his typewriter in the service of the Lord. Anyway, Shirley can't enjoy the toast because she's consumed with hatred for Maureen, Howard's business partner.

Gavin Hughes: In the shower, wondering why he lacks the courage to act decisively like other men. I guess this is where he and I part ways. I started out wanting to sympathize with Gavin Hughes, but he lacks resolve. He spent the whole book wanting out of his relationship with Kay, and now that he's rid of her he's still worried about it biting him in the ass somehow. Any other man would balance any regret with satisfaction. His decision may backfire in some way, but at least it's done. At least he can worry about something new from here on. But Gav wants to live in the past, present, and future all at once, and this gets him nowhere.

Kay Bawden: Up all night helping her daughter Gaia, who got sick from all the booze she drank at the party. Gaia spent like an hour throwing up, pausing only to chew out Kay for wasting their time by moving to Pagford on for a doomed relationship with Gavin.

Parminder Jawanda: Sipping coffee in the backyard. She's depressed because Miles won the election, and now she wants to resign from the Parish Council. Her husband is skeptical because she loved it so much, but maybe she only enjoyed councillorinating because of Barry. Vikram suggested they take a trip to The Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. She rejected this out of hand, but now regrets her answer, because Vikram was trying to be kind to her, and because it demonstrates the nasty attitude she's had for most of the book.

Sukhvinder Jawanda: Doesn't want to go to work today, presumably because she worked all last night. Parminder tells her she has to do it, and I'm like fuck you, lady. Your daughter's like sixteen or something, and if she doesn't feel like working on only four hours' sleep that's her decision. Maybe Howard should have considered the schedule before he offered to let minors serve alcohol at a party. Nevertheless, Sukhvinder goes back in the house, and Parminder feels guilty for her harsh tone. "[S]he made a mental note that she must try and find time to sit down with her and talk to her without arguing." What, you mean like right now, maybe? Instead of sending her to work?

MEANWHILE... ABOVE PAGFORD...

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: There you are. I was wondering if you would show yourself... Wondering if you had made the same realization that I did...

HARRY: How did you do it? And why Vegeta?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: It's simple, really. I'm afraid, Harry Potter. Afraid of death. Afraid that I won't be clever enough or powerful enough to prevent it. And so I tore my soul apart, hoping at least one of the pieces would survive. But that wasn't my only plan. Oh, no. Did you know I copied my mind into a robot body?

HARRY: Gasp!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Oh, you don't have to worry about it. It won't activate for another four years or so. By which time I'll link up with it and it won't be a problem. I'm just saying that I didn't leave anything off the table. This particular contingency plan was a favorite of mine, however. I realized it when Vegeta kept appearing in the thick of our conflict. Didn't it seem odd that such a strange being should constantly be underfoot? Some sort of pyjama-clad Muggle who keeps yammering in nonsequitors. Like he's a pastiche of a fictional character transplanted into our own world.

HARRY: Wait, is this about prophecies, or "a mother's true love"? I usually zone out for that stuff.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Dammit, pay attention! The point is he never stayed dead! The Silver Surfer shot him in the ass once, and he died! Then he just came back like a year later, as if nothing was wrong. Then he blew himself up for some stupid reason, fuck if I know. Then he comes back again no worse for wear.

HARRY: So? I mourned my dead owl more than George Weasley. None of this crap makes any sense.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: What the--? Fred's the one who died. How do you not remember that? There's a mnemonic practically built into his murder. "Dead Fred". He's your own brother-in-law, you insensitive lout.

HARRY: Well excuse me. How do you remember? It was one of your guys who killed him.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Because I pleasured myself over his grave, for your information. It's an arcane ritual I use to... Oh, never mind. The point is Vegeta caught my interest because he can die and come back for seemingly no apparent reason. Death is meaningless to him. And why? Because he's meta.

HARRY: Metal? Yeah, he used to go on about that.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: No, meta. As in metaphysical. As in an abstraction from another concept. He's not really part of our world, but a tired joke pencilled in by an outside observer. Like Tom Bombadil, or the narrator from Winnie the Pooh.

HARRY: Like Vic Fontaine from Star Trek!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Sure, why not? These are all fictional constructs that interact with, but don't precisely fit into, the world of the characters. They can't die because they don't technically live in the first place. Now, if you remember from your seventh-year arithmancy coursework, the human mind can be encoded into metaphysical--

HARRY: Dude, I skipped Year Seven because you took over the government and put a bounty on my head.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Oh yeah.

HARRY: Besides, I would have skipped most of the classes anyway to make out with my lady-friend, if you know what I mean. Cha-ching!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Be honest, this is kind of fun, you and me shooting the breeze again like this.

HARRY: Yeah, it's kind of nice.

V. Krystal Weedon eats a banana. Apparently she's never had one before? I'm having trouble with that idea. She spent the night at her friend's place, but they've got plans this morning, so she's gotta go but here's a banana in case you get hungry. That's how it happened, I guess.

Krystal returns home and finds her mom passed out in the armchair. She checks to make sure she's not dead, because this sort of thing has happened before in Krystal's life, but she's alive. Then she realizes Robbie's not with her, so she calls for him, then finds him in her own bedroom, naked. That alone wouldn't be such a big deal maybe, except that Obbo is also in the room with him, and he's at least bare-chested. That's about as far as Rowling explains the situation, and that's quite all right with me.

Obbo says hi like he hadn't raped Krystal less than a week ago, and Krystal panics, grabs Robbie, dresses him, and heads downstairs. She asks Robbie if Obbo did "somethin' to yer", but he just answers "M'ungry."

Krystal demands that Terri explain Obbo's presence, but then she notices the stash Obbo convinced Terri to keep in the house for him. Against Terri's protests, Krystal opens the bag to find hashish bricks wrapped in plastic. This alone would put Terri in jail, but then Krystal also spots Terri's hype kit in her armchair, and she realizes that Terri's been using, too. She hears Obbo upstairs, so she grabs Robbie and leaves. Didn't we do this before? I mean, the situation is obviously more dire, but we've done this before.

MEANWHILE...

HARRY: So, bottom line it for me? You infected Vegeta with your own consciousness or something? And now you can't die because you're made out of html? Like... the green html from "The Matrix"?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Er... yeah, go with that. Basically what we were doing the last time, only now I'm a Super Dumbass on top of that.

HARRY: Wait, so am I meta? Because I'm supposed to be a Dumbass from the Planet Dumbass, too. Something like that. I forget how it works. Also, Vegeta adopted Ginny one year, so I think you're my dad now.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Shockingly enough, I'm actually glad you asked that. Here's the deal: You weren't meta. Not entirely anyway. But that was before. We're in The Casual Vacancy now. So we're both fully meta.

HARRY: What the hell is a casual vacancy?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: You don't want to know. All that matters is that you and I are what Vegeta was to us. If I'm right, it means I've rid myself of mortality, and I'm free to rule the world forever. There's just one thing I gotta do, and then I'll know for sure.

HARRY: What's that?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: I'm gonna have to kill your ass.

VI. Shirley checks the Pagford Parish Council website, hoping to catch another message from "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother". For those of you just joining us, Andrew Price invented the username as part of an anonymous smear campaign against his abusive father. Afterwards, Sukhvinder and Fats each appropriated the name to post similar diatribes against their own parents.

Last night, at Howard's party, Patricia Mollison put in a brief appearance, but left in disgust, mainly because Shirley snubbed Pat's significant other in the invitation. Patricia's a lesbian, specifically a cool lesbian, kind of like Sailor Uranus but probably not as good looking. She drives a BMW and makes twice as much money as her brother the lawyer, and she doesn't mince words like all the other dipshits in this book. Shirley can't bring herself to hate her daughter, but she's clearly relieved that she left the party early and therefore didn't spend the night.

I guess the dynamic here is that Shirley is in deep denial about how she pisses people off. No one in the family seems to object to Patricia being gay, but Shirley makes these passive-agressive slights, like putting "Patricia and guest" on the invitation. This puts "guest" in a foul mood, which puts Patricial in a foul mood, and Shirley just interprets this to mean that Patricia is ill-tempered by default. Miles seemed closer to Patricia, but he took Shirley's side in the matter, so she got mad at him, too. When Howard asks where she went, Shirley just explains that Patricia and her partner got into a fight, so she's probably gone back to patch things up. She omits the fact that she caused said fight, but I'm not sure Shirley even fully realizes her own role in this.

Also notable is that Howard didn't even notice she had gone until he was at the door to his place. We don't even know if he spoke with her at the party. Kind of sucks is all. Of course, this is the same shitty attitude Parminder has shown to Sukhvinder all book long, and yet Howard is the nominal villain of the piece. Go figure.

Anyway, before she left town, Patricia told Andrew Price that she once caught her father getting a blowjob from Maureen. Hours later, Andrew passed this on to his father, because he blames the Mollisons for "The Ghost" discrediting him and costing him his job. This is particularly ironic, since Simon has no one to blame but himself, but Shirley's the one who moderates the website, and she could have acted against "The Ghost" a lot quicker if she'd cared to. Instead, Shirley likes "The Ghost", because so far the character has only skewered people she saw as outsiders and political enemies.

Okay, so we're all caught up? Good. Shirley logs in and whoops! There's a message from "The Ghost", but it says Howard gets blowjobs from Maureen. Just to twist the knife, "The Ghost" adds that Howard's dumb wife is probably the only one in town who didn't know. Uh-oh!

As you might have guessed, Shirley's first reaction is denial. She'd suspected in the past, probably because Howard Mollison isn't exactly subtle. This is a grown man who overeats as a point of pride, who throws birthday parties for himself well into his sixties, who wears a deerstalker decorated with fishing lures while he works, who takes such pride in being the almost-mayor of Pagford that he wears a gold medallion on a chain just in case anyone forgot he's the almost-mayor of Pagford. This is not a master of discretion.

Besides, Maureen practically lives with the Mollisons. She spends all day working alongside Howard, and half the scenes they're in, they're either together or calling one another on the phone. Shirley has even wondered to herself why Maureen is always around, which virtually breaks the fourth wall. And yet she never lets herself make the obvious conclusion, because in her world bad things only happen to people she hates.

Nevertheless, on some level, she must believe it, because it makes so much sense, and because she quickly takes the message down, fearing that everyone else will see it and believe it.

Finally, she wakes Howard up to confront him. She tells him what "The Ghost" said, and instead of denial or outrage, he asks "Where'd he get that from?" Shirley takes this for a tacit admission. I'll go a step further by suggesting that Howard knows exactly where "The Ghost" got it from. After all, Patricia walked in on him in the act, and she was in town the night before. It wasn't like Patricia watched them going at it unseen. Maureen paid her off to keep quiet about it, so it stands to reason Howard must have been aware of the situation.

MEANWHILE...

HARRY: Kill me? You keep trying to do that, and it never helps. Seriously, why not just wait for me to die of natural causes? It'd save you a lot of trouble.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: No, it's different this time. If I'm right, I'm already invincible, but if you're the same as me, then we're both invincible, which means we're in a stalemate. I have to kill you to make sure that I can.

HARRY: What if you can't?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Then this is all going to be really awkward...

VII. Krystal decides her only choice now is to make for Pagford and link up with Fats. Home is no longer an option. Obbo's there and her mother has ruined her last chance to keep the family together. She could stay with friends, but not without giving up Robbie. So she falls back on her desperate plan to get pregnant by Fats Wall, figuring that Fats' parents will offer her financial support, while the local government will set her up in her own home.

I have no idea how realistic this plan is. I mean, it's obviously desperate and full of holes. It might take time to conceive a child, and what do you do until then? And do social services actually work this way? Terri has her own place, so maybe that's how it works. But I have a hard time believing Krystal can just provide a urine sample and move into a new place tomorrow. And would they automatically give her custody of Robbie? Terri's blown it, but she's blown it before, and something tells me the same government that gave her a second and third chance won't act so swiftly to take her kid away. Even if they do take him, what's to say they'll let Krystal have him?

Anyway, assuming the basic premise is sound, Krystal seems to think her best course of action is to knock boots with Fats until everything gets better. With the last remaining power on her mother's cell phone, she leaves a voice mail for Fats.

Meanwhile, Fats is listening to his parents, eating toast (!) as Tessa tries to talk down Colin from his OCD-induced fear that he accidentally poisoned Barry Fairbrother the last time he cooked dinner for him. Krystal calls again, and Fats accepts her invitation to hang out. He still feels tired and lousy, but it's either Krystal or listening to his mother deconstruct his dad's paranoia. I guess I'd feel lousy myself, if those were my options.

VIII. Samantha finally gets up because she has to pee. Miles confronts her, explaining that he sent their daughter to his parents' place just so he could settle things. Ugh...

This is typical Rowling all over. Spend 300 pages setting up an argument, then pay it off so late into the story that it barely matters anymore. They have virtually the same fight they had before. Samantha feels trapped and resentful, and Miles is too embarrassed by her conduct to sympathize. We're supposed to think that her fondling a sixteen-year-old boy is the tipping point, but it doesn't seem to enter into the equation very much. The only slight change here is that for once Samantha feels ashamed of how she's been acting. Defensively, she blurts out that she wrote that anonymous letter to Miles' dad, complaining that Miles was unfit for public office. For some reason, that's the big reveal that shocks and disturbs Miles, as if molesting a schoolboy somehow pales in comparison. Just to put this in perspective, Howard was the only one who ever read the letter, he shredded it immediately because he thought it was a crank, and the only reason Miles knew about it was because Howard happened to mention it to him. Miles was upset about the letter, but he won the election anyway. The letter was so unimportant that I forgot Samantha even wrote it.

Also, Samantha reveals she didn't vote for Miles either. Oooohhhhhh! Sick burn. She puts on a pair of clogs and leaves the house in a huff.

MEANWHILE

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: I think I still have the advantage. I'm a gonzo powerful dark wizard, and I have all the powers of an Ascended Super Dumbass. That trumps that Super Dumbass 3 thing you used to do. This is kind of weird, actually. I can't remember how long it's been since I fought someone hand-to-hand. This should be a real... what do the kids call it?... oh, yes, a "donny-brook".

HARRY: Wait, hand-to-hand? You want to have a fistfight?

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Yeah. I don't even know where my wand is these days. If I figured this right, I won't even need it.

HARRY: So I can just punch you in the face and snakes won't come flying out of your nostrils, and my hand won't turn into a snake and try to kill me.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Right. Totally on the level.

HARRY: And if I kick you in the nuts, you won't explode in to a pile of snakes, then re-form into a giant snake monster and shoot venom at me.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Pretty sure I can't do that anymore.

HARRY: And you can't summon an army of snakes to attack me like Aquaman-but-with-snakes.

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Look, I like snakes. Get over it.

HARRY: I just wanted to make sure... before I used my ultimate form...

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Wait, what?

HARRY: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH--!

IX. On the bus, Krystal fantasizes about motherhood. The government would probably put her in a run-down house in the Fields, but all she's worried about is having locks on the doors and no heroin. Living in the Fields means that Robbie can go to school in Pagford just like she did. She's pretty hopeful that the Walls will give her enough money for a washing machine. Okay we get it, you're poor.

Fats regrets the meeting at once. I guess the issue here is that this time they're in Pagford, and he's meeting her in the vicinity of Howard and Maureen's cafe, where his friend Andrew might see. And Krystal brought her dirty baby brother along, which cramps his style. And she hits him up for money, because she literally can't afford to buy food for the tyke. "Fats made another mental adjustment to what gritty and authentic life meant." Okay, so I'm rapidly getting the impression that Fats equates "authentic" with "poor". Maybe this was Rowling's design all along, but my initial reaction was that he was trying to achieve some sort of ideal sincerity, and he only identified with the residents of the Fields because they were more direct and too desperate to be phony. I understood he was slumming, but I thought it was only part of his half-assed quest for enlightenment, not an end unto itself. So Fats' mental note is something like: "Authenticity means kids eat potato chips and Rolos for breakfast."

It also means doing it in proximity to a three-year-old, because that's what Krystal wants to do right now. Fats is repulsed by this. He considers taking her to the Cubby Hole, a private sanctum known only to himself and Andrew. Now that their friendship is dashed, he sees no reason to keep it a secret from Krystal.

They get to talking, and Fats mentions Gaia Bawden, who lives in town. Krystal briefly considers seeking help from Gaia's mother Kay, but rejects the idea. Kay's not their social worker anymore, and there may or may not be a rule against bugging social workers at home. Besides, she didn't fully trust Kay to come up with a solution that would keep Krystal and Robbie together.

Krystal suggests a stretch of the riverbank near a bridge for their coitus, while Robbie sits on a nearby bench. She simultaneously believes that she can keep Robbie close enough to keep an eye on, and make sure he doesn't see her. Fats isn't wild about the idea, but mainly out of self-consciousness rather than the fact that it's a stupid fucking idea.

Krystal reassures him: "'E won' bother. 'E's got 'is Rolos. 'E won' even know." Even she doesn't buy this, since Robbie has watched their mother get it on in the past, and he's imitated sexual behavior at day-care. Fats finally decides that it would be "inauthentic" not to endanger a child while having outdoor sex in the middle of town, so he reluctantly agrees. Krystal offers Robbie the entire pack of Rolos in exchange for sitting quietly by himself. Seriously, what's Rowling have against Rolos candy? This is like the exact opposite of good publicity.

Robbie agrees to her terms because he's a toddler and he likes candy. He stuffs his face "happily" while the couple take cover in the bushes down the bank.

ROLOS. A WHOLE ROLL OF SMILES.

Krystal hopes to herself that Fats won't make a lot of noise about doing her without a condom. Right, because he's been so responsible up to now...

MEANWHILE

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: No! What the hell are you doing?

HARRY: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: You... you're changing! Slowly... but surely!

HARRY: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH--*!

MR. DOLT RODLOVER: Wh-what are you?!

HARRY: SUPRISE SUPRISE I SUPAR DUMBASS 4 NOW! AAAAAHHHHH!

NEXT: Take a wild guess.

Part Five I, II, III or "Promises to CREEP"

mike_smith — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:55:29 GMT

All right, time for Part Five. This one's pretty big, but look how far we've come already! Just think back to all the... yeah, I don't want to think about it either. Let's just move on.

This time the quote from Local Council Administration talks about how you can make defamatory statements if you can prove that you did it "without malice" and for the good of the public. That reads like a slippery slope to me, but there's probably a good reason it says Local in the book's title.

I still haven't figured out what purpose these excerpts are supposed to serve. The last one was about mental capacity to vote, but the only possible situation in the story where that might apply is the part where Colin Wall voted in the election. Colin has severe OCD, but he's allowed to vote as long as he's sane enough to make it to the poll and back, basically. But no one challenges this in the book. It's not like Colin has to convince anyone that he's of sound mind. Hell, "The_Ghost_Of_Barry_Fairbrother" exposed his psychological issues to the entire town, and no one even seems to care. That's probably because no one took him very seriously to begin with. Sort of like these Local Council Administration quotes. Hell, we've only had one segment of the book so far that even takes place in a local council meeting.

I. Everyone abandons Terri Weedon sooner or later. Her mom left her dad when she was younger, and she didn't even pause to say goodbye. Social workers have come and gone, she had friends in "care", whatever that's supposed to be, but they all moved on with their lives when they turned sixteen. She bore "Ritchie Adams" two children, only to lose them as well. I don't know if social services took the kids away or what. Terri may not understand it herself. Hell, they might have been abducted. The important point is that these aren't Krystal and Robbie Weedon, the daughter and son we actually see in the book. So Terri had at least four kids alogether, but two are unaccounted for. This might be important later. No promises.

Also, someone named "Banger" left her. Maybe that guy is Krystal and/or Robbie's dad? Obbo half-jokingly claimed to be Robbie's father, so who knows? It probably doesn't matter. Nana Cath "left" Terri, although it's more like Terri left her when she turned to drug abuse. Or she's referring to the time Cath died, which isn't exactly the same thing as abandonment. The point of all this is that she's inured to the disappointment of switching from one social worker to another. This is what happens when Mattie comes back from her leave of absence, and resumes responsibility for Terri's casefile. See, Kay Bawden had been filling in for Mattie for the bulk of the novel.

Here's the thing: I've read criticisms of this book, and one of them accused Rowling of trying to pass of a "social manifesto" as a novel. I don't know that this is entirely fair. A lot of fiction has been written in an effort to promote social reform. Vacancy's problem is that it tries a little too hard, and sacrifices good storytelling for social relevance. These Terri Weedon scenes are a perfect example, because Terri never does anything. She just sort of sleepwalks through the novel, dimly recalling her past, appealing to the reader for pity. Maybe this is how an emotionally scarred heroin addict would think and act, but she comes across like a feral child. Focusing on her point-of-view is as productive as examining the character development of a dog or cat. She has no will of her own, and merely reacts to her surroundings.

In this particular instance, the point here seems to be that Kay Bawden actually managed to stimulate Terri's resolve to stay away from heroin. But this was pure happenstance, because Kay was never meant to be Terri's social worker. She was just filling in for Mattie, who doesn't have that same knack for "reaching" Terri. It's implied that Mattie kind of sucks at this in general, but that doesn't matter much. The larger issue here is that Kay made some real progress at an individual level, but Big Government lacks the metrics to see or appreciate that, so the bereaucracy puts Mattie back in place because it's her assignment. The social manifesto of this novel contends this: "Gosh, if only the big shots in charge would pay more attention to this sort of thing, and they could let the Kays of the world help the Terri's of the world without interference."

I have a few problems with that. First and foremost, it doesn't really come across in the story. Terri says and does what Terri says and does. Kay feels optimistic about Terri's progress, and everyone acts like she's gonna hunker down and stay off the heroin for real this time, and everyone (including Terri) seems to give Kay a lot of credit, but so what? There was one part where Obbo directly offered Terri heroin, and she turned him down. Maybe it was because she realized she'd lose her son, or maybe it was because Krystal was there to talk her out of it. But I don't remember anything Kay said or did entering the equation. Rowling has clearly established that Kay is a better social worker than Mattie, but she hasn't demonstrated that this makes much of a difference one way or the other. And yet, she wants me to believe that Mattie's return represents a huge setback somehow.

Terri is really just a prop to illustrate Rowling's opinion, and not much of a character in her own right. Okay, but even on that level I still have a hard time agreeing with Rowling's sentiment. There aren't enough Kay Bawdens to go around, and even if there were, is it really worth devoting one to a walking houseplant like Terri Weedon? Maybe you double up your Kays on another case where you can make a real difference, but the fact of the matter is that you just don't have the resources to save everybody. You have to do the best you can with what you have, but past a point you have to make some hard decisions. If Terri really is a walking houseplant, then she's beyond help. If she's not, if she really has a will of her own, then she's got to make some effort to meet society halfway.

For instance, Mattie tells Terri that the local rehab clinic is likely to be shut down. Mattie acts like this is no big deal, but it matters to Terri because this is one more thing that's leaving her, and she felt like she was getting somewhere this time around. Mattie explains that she can still get methadone from her general practitioner, but that's not as simple as it sounds. Terri "smacked a nurse" at the closest place, so I guess she's banned from there or something. So her GP is listed as Pagford, except her whole family blames Parminder Jawanda for Nana Cath's death. And its far away and she'd have to take the bus and so on. Now, Mattie doesn't understand what all of this means, but if Kay were here, it'd still boil down to the same problem. You either find the bus fare and swallow your hatred for Dr. Jawanda, or you're going to lose your children. Rowling is saying that society needs to give people like Terri as many open doors as possible, and I can agree with that. But sometimes real life shuts doors in your face, and you have to find another way. Forget about the vote to close down the clinic. What if it burned down in a fire? Even if Pagford and Yarvil resolved to replace the facility as quickly as possible, it'd still come down to Terri having to take a bus to get methadone from Dr. Jawanda.

Now, another part of Rolwing's social manifesto might be that Terri is incapable of raising a son, and she's going to lose him one way or another, so all of this rigamorale is just delaying the inevitable. Better to break up the family sooner than later? That's a tough question, and I don't have an easy answer. But Rowling is asking that through Terri, which means Terri is less of a character, and more of an obstacle for other characters to deal with.

Terri explains the situation to Krystal, and Krystal tells her that she has to go to Dr. Jawanda for methadone or lose Robbie. Terri refuses to even consider it, and they argue and Terri tells her to get out of the house. Krystal agrees, but takes Robbie with her. She tries to take him to her usual refuge, her friend Nikki's place, but Nikki's not home, and Nikki's mom won't allow Robbie to stay. So she reluctantly takes him back home. Terri takes Robbie back but refuses to let Krystal back in. Aaaaannnd we're right back where we started. This is why the Terri scenes suck. Maybe they are chock full of social relevance, but nothing gets accomplished.

Terri is glad to be rid of Krystal until she runs low on food and cigarettes, and then she goes through Krystal's bedroom and finds the watch she stole from Tessa Wall waaaay back in Part One. Terri takes Robbie to the store and meets Obbo. She sells him the watch for twenty bucks, and he asks her to store some bags in her house for him for a couple of days. SPOILER: they're full of drugs. Obbo reminds her that the rehab clinic is closing down, and he's pretty smug about it, because I guess drug dealers see rehab clinics as competition.

II. Hey, you know that election? The one the novel was named after? Well, Miles Mollison won. Like 66% to 33%. I guess I didn't care, but I'm kind of surprised to see Rowling didn't either.

Miles' parents congratulate him over the phone, because I guess beating a mentally ill, alleged pedophile by a double-digit margin is a huge accomplishment. I guess I wanted Colin to win, just to see how bad a train wreck it would be, but since we never get any scenes in the council meetings, it's probably just as well.

It's the night of Howard's sixty-fifth birthday party, and I guess now they'll also be celebrating Miles' election win. Samantha loathes all of this, but she's planning to go to London with her daughter Libby to see a Motorhead concert, so fuck all that noise. But wait! What's this? Libby wants her to call her friend's mother on the phone.

Okay, try to follow this. Libby told her friend Harriet about the Motorhead concert. Harriet also loves Motorhead, so she somehow got it in her head that Libby had an extra ticket, and invited her to come with. They had a big fight over this, and now Harriet's mother wants to straighten this "extra ticket" issue once and for all. Very diplomatically, she suggests that Samantha give Harriet her ticket (they'll pay for it, naturally), and Harriet's aunt can escort the girls, because Harriet's aunt and her kids are gonna rock out to Motorhead as well.

Look, let me break kayfabe here. The band in the book is never named, except for its lead singer "Jake". It's probably not Motorhead, it's probably a fictional band that more closely resembles One Direction or something like that. But this entire subplot is a lot more awesome when it's Motorhead. I just imagine Harriet's aunt and four kids enjoying "Ace of Spades", and it puts a smile on my face.

Samantha can't talk herself out of this. She wanted to go to this thing because she's been distracting herself for weeks by fantasizing about Jake--I mean Lemmy. But she can't exactly say so over the phone. Harriet's mother makes it plain: "They'd much prefer to be with each other. And you won't have to crouch down and hife among all the little teenyboppers, ha ha." Bottom line here is that Samantha has no business going, and what business she did have in mind would be weird and creepy to everyone involved.

I'd like to think Libby arranged all of this. She started to notice her mom was super into Motorhead all of a sudden, and that disturbed her profoundly. Harriet may not even have cared about the concert, but she played along because she understood how much of a buzzkill it would be to see Motorhead live and have your mom making an ass of herself in the next seat over. Samantha can have her little mid-life crisis, she can pretend to be a teenager again, but in the real world everyone just sees a middle-aged mother of two, who drinks too much and thinks with her mouth. Outside of her own head, it's just sad and embarrassing.

MEANWHILE, AT THE HOSPITAL

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Ugggghhhh....

DR. MINDBENDER: What do you mean you weren't even on the ballot! You were supposed to register!

SERPENTOR: Have a care, Mindbender! It was you who designed Serpentor to be the ultimate local politician! Running through my noble veins is the blood of a dozen comptrollers, aldermen, and coroners! My victory is assured!

DR. MINDBENDER: But the election is over! No one voted for you because no one even knew you wanted the job!

SERPENTOR: Silence! It is not for you to question the tactics of your Councillor! Yours is only to obey, and to be amazed!

DR. MINDBENDER: All right, whatever... I guess it doesn't matter now that Vegeta has flipped his shit and blew up our clubhouse.

SERPENTOR: Hmmm... indeed. Do you like the flowers I brought you?

DR. MINDBENDER: Yes, actually. I'm not really into flowers, but they do cheer me up. Or that may be the morphine they gave me. Either way.

SERPENTOR: Sniff them well, Mindbender, for soon you will smell only the blood of our enemies. Blood--and revenge!

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: Say.... did you manage to sneak in that bag of McDonalds I asked you for?

SERPENTOR: The line was too long, so I went to Burger King instead. I trust that will be adequate?

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: Hell yeah. Gimme that bag.

NURSE: Hey, he can't eat that in here--!

SERPENTOR: He can and he shall! For this... I command!

III. Okay, this part is really long and really boring. I'm just going to cover it by character instead of a chronological recap.

-Howard Mollison. It's his 65th birthday party. I'm pretty sure he holds the party in the same church as the Parish Council meetings and Barry's funeral. This may be symbolic, but the fact of the matter is that it's the biggest building in this one-horse town. He and Maureen sing karaoke to Tom Jones' "The Green, Green Grass of Home." It's his favorite song, which is weird, since the song is all about homesickness, and I'm pretty sure he's never left Pagford in his entire life. Maybe that's symbolic, but whatever.

-Gavin Hughes. He had hoped Mary Fairbrother would ask him to stay for dinner, giving him a convenient excuse to get out of this party, but she has family coming over, which he interprets to mean that she hasn't told them about him. You might ask what there is to tell, but Gavin is strangely preoccupied with what strangers think about him, even though he has no interest in anything that goes on, anywhere. Without no other excuse, he shows up for the party, only to be horrified to find Samantha Mollison and Gaia Bawden there. This is dumb because Samantha is Miles' wife and Gaia works for Howard, so it's logical to assume they would be there in some capacity. Anyway, he desperately avoids Samantha because she flirts with him when she's drunk, and he hates that. He also worries that Gaia will tell everyone about he dumped her mother for Mary Fairbrother, and that information might reach Mary before he has a chance to tell her himself.

-Andrew Price, Gaia Bawden, Sukhvinder Jawanda. They work for Howard at his deli, so he hires them to serve drinks for his party. They exceed his expectations, since everyone gets really tanked. But after a while, they abandon their duties and just get drunk themselves.

-Stuart "Fats" Wall. Sneaks in and helps himself to the booze. He claims that the entire Wall family was invited, and even though his parents declined, he saw no reason not to come himself. He apparently is on a mission to stay up the whole night, which would make more sense if he was eight. Of course, I suppose staying up all night while drinking is a more challenging task. Late into the evening he makes out with Gaia, which infuriates Andrew. That may be why he did it, although the inebriation makes it difficult to discern motives. Later in the book, Gaia has little to no memory of the event, and she hates Fats anyway because of the way he bullies Sukhvinder.

-Samantha Mollison. Her Motorhead plans dashed, she ends up going to the party with her husband. She wears her Motorhead T-shirt in defiance, however. In no time flat she gets drunk, flirts with Gavin, argues with Howard, and harasses Andrew. At one point she actually makes out with the boy, until Miles catches her and pulls her off of him.

-Newcomer! Patricia Mollison. The estranged daughter of Howard and Shirley Mollison. Turns out she's estranged because she's a lesbian. She's been in a long-term relationship with a woman named "Mel" or "Melly", but Shirley put "Patricia Mollison and guest" on the invitation, which caused a big fight, and so Patricia came by herself. I get the impression she had a sincere desire to reconnect with her family, but she quickly chews out her mom over the invitation, and Miles when he fails to see what the big deal is. To Miles credit, he actually acknowledges Mel as her partner, and seems disappointed that she hasn't joined his sister. Pat soon leaves in disgust, only to meet Adrew, Gaia, Sukhvinder, and Fats outside. Fats admires her car and she explains that she makes twice as much as Miles, but her parents are more proud of him anyway. Maybe because he's a boy, maybe because he's heterosexual, she doesn't get into the "why" of it. Gaia scolds Fats for calling Sukhvinder a lesbian on Facebook, and Patricia takes mild offense at this. Fats is taken off guard by that, but she doesn't waste time arguing with him. She has a few laughs with the kids at her family's expense, then reveals to them that she once walked in on Maureen blowing Howard years ago. Mureen gave her a "fiver" to keep it quiet.

-Simon Price. He didn't attend the party, but sat up all night at home. He might have been waiting for Andrew to come home, or he was just stressed out about his employment situation. Andrew feels something like pity towards him. He also feels angry with Fats, uncertain about Gaia, and creeped out about Samantha Mollison. Together, this puts him in a rare mood to work together with his father. He not only tells him about Maureen blowing Howard, but he shows him how to hack the Pagford website to post the information as "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother." Note that Andrew isn't confessing to the original Ghost message that cost Simon his job. He's merely claiming to have learned how to replicate the same trick.

Now, on the second read-through, I'm wondering if Patricia wasn't counting on all of this. It seemed odd for her to strike up a conversation with a bunch of teens she doesn't know. Maybe she felt like they were the only ones who could relate to her contempt for Pagford. Maybe she wanted to show off her successful life outside of Pagford to the only other people in town who would appreciate it. But she also asked them about "The Ghost", because her mother kept going on about the trouble he's caused. So maybe she heard about this new legend and she deduced what everyone else in Pagford couldn't understand: it was the work of frustrated children.

So she asks about "The Ghost", and coincidentally, she happens to be talking to the three characters who used the name, Andrew, Fats, and Sukhvinder. I doubt she realized how close she was to the truth, but she bitterly acknowledged that her gossip-crazy mom would love the Ghost. Then she tells them about Maureen and Howard, which seems like the words of a cynical woman who just doesn't care anymore. But maybe she was hoping that the kids would spread the rumor, knowing that sooner or later, the Ghost would publish it for all to see. If so, Patricia is sort of like the three kids, except she's subcontracting all the computer hacking stuff.

Regardless, Patricia is now my favorite character, because she hates Pagford and she actually left Pagford, which is a level of agency no one else in the book seems to have. I only wonder why she bothered to come back...

NEXT: Shhhh! It's naptime.

Part Four VI, VII, VIII, IX, X or "A-dead in the Polls."

mike_smith — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 16:00:18 GMT

VI. Okay, so finally, after pages and pages of buildup, we're going to see an honest-to-goodness meeting of the Pagford Parish Council. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not excited about this, but I expected a scene like this a while back, and since then I've been trying to figure out what's taken so long.

It's like this: Several of the main characters in this book have seats on this council. The title of the book references a special election for an open seat on this council. Said seat became open through death, which creates the perception--real or imaginary--that the seat is important somehow. Barry Fairbrother was like John Henry, except with small-town politics instead of driving railroad spikes. He literally didn't stop politickin' till a blood vessel burst in his brain. So much of the plot has dealt with the fate of the cause he championed. So my impression was that a lot of the real plot development would get done in the political arena. Everything leading up to this point was just exposition, so we'd know how all the players are arranged on the board.

But "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother" happened instead. Not a big problem, I kind of liked the twist, but I retained my original assumption. The gossip supplied by "The Ghost" (actually three teenagers acting independently), was a way to throw fuel on the fire. But the fire is the conflict over this Fields issue, and the Parish Council is supposed to be the ignition source. My take was that "The Ghost" would stir the pot for a few rounds, get everyone good and riled up, and then there'd be the same backroom drama I expected, only more personal than before. Great.

And yet, we're just now getting to see the council in action. I find that odd. Not that I looked forward to seeing this, but it's no better or worse than reading about Terri Weedon wandering around in a stupor, or Gavin Hughes being ambivalent, or Samantha Mollison being petty and bored. At least shit would get done in a council session, and most of the important characters would all be in the same place, forced to confront their rivals.

Well, maybe they had a session behind the scenes, and Rowling just declined to show it. No, it says in black in white "The next Parish Council meeting, the first since Barry had died, would be crucial..."

But what about the election? Wasn't the whole point that Howard Mollison wanted to rush through that special election, so he could get an ally installed in Barry's place, thereby making it easier for him to push his agenda? I guess Howard's feeling confident, or this is just smart political strategy. The way this works is he holds a session before the election and introduces Fields-related business. If the votes are there, he doesn't have to worry about the election. If he loses this round, he still has another chance, because if his son Miles wins the vacant seat, he'll have an extra councillor on his side. The book doesn't spell this out, but that's my interpretation. Howard is hedging his bets, whether he needs to or not. Let's explore that a little.

Initially, Howard was pretty confident about his position. He's the "First Citizen of Pagford", which is sort of like being the mayor, except the town is too small to have actual mayors for some reason. Anyway, his primary function is to chair the council, and he has a lot of the "old guard" in Pagford on his side. He was in a pretty strong position even while Barry Fairbrother was alive. Barry's stroke ended the stalemate. Howard's opponents lost their leader and most charismatic and influential member. The empty seat alone gave Howard an opening. The worst case scenario would be if a pro-Fielder got elected to take Barry's place, but that pro-Fielder would still be weak and ineffectual. Indeed, the best the pro-Fielders could muster is Colin Wall, an unlikeable political novice with a severe mental disorder. I'm not making this up. Meanwhile, Howard could nominate his own son, a respected lawyer. So the best case scenario would let Howard reinforce his already impressive stranglehold on the council. And Miles had an excellent chance of winning.

But "The Ghost" shook everyone out of their complacency. In reality, "The Ghost" was just a teenager trying to get back at his dad. Then another teenager copied the same idea, and then a third. The common thread was that all three of their parents were running for, or already serving on, the Parish Council. The pro-Fielders think that Howard Mollison is behind this covert mudslinging operation, and Howard is worried that "The Ghost" will upset his plans. At the very least, Miles is losing confidence, because he's afraid "The Ghost" will target him next, and he's unprepared for this level of personal attack. Howard's wife Shirley is the administrator of the website where "The Ghost" has been posting his messages, so there's at least some concern that she'll be blamed for the slander, which might lend sympathy towards the pro-Fielder camp. Howard hasn't shown much concern for these developments, but he hasn't taken them lightly, either, so here we are.

Well, actually, here we aren't because the council meeting hasn't happened yet. We're with Kay Bawden, Parminder Jawanda, and Colin Wall as they plan strategy for the meeting. This is my first problem, because Rowling had led me to believe that the Parish Council was split evenly between Barry's side and Howard's side, and yet at the eleventh hour it's just Parminder and two civilians. Colin's running for the vacant seat, but he hasn't won anything yet, and Kay only just found out about this issue, even though her social worker job puts her on the front lines. Parminder isn't even sure she cares anymore, and she's the only one with a vote.

Parminder's problem is that "The Ghost", actually her daughter Sukhvinder, revealed that Parminder had been in love with Barry the whole time, and she only supported his cause out of infatuation. The truth is less clear, since even Parminder didn't think she was in love with Barry until "The Ghost" put the thought in her head. Now she's questioning everything, including her commitment to Barry's pet crusade. Is she only doing this out of love for Barry, or hate for Howard Mollison? Either way, is that enough to justify the effort?

Only Tessa, Colin's wife, realizes how weak this movement is. Kay can give them all sorts of statistics, and Colin can claim that public opinion has turned against the Mollison Machine, and Parminder can cling to Barry's fading charisma, but none of this is going to undo the decades of anti-Field sentiment in Pagford. The short version is that the Fields are a housing project started by the neighboring county, and Pagford got saddled with responsibility for it. It's become a slum, and Pagfordians don't like paying upkeep on a neighborhood they didn't want in the first place. The human factor isn't really important to anyone besides these four characters, and none of them have the clout or willpower to do anything about it.

VII. Simon Price was the first "victim" of "The Ghost". I put "victim" in quotes because everything the Ghost said about him was true and he got what he deserved. Disgraced by the allegations that he bought a stolen computer and did side-jobs on company time, Simon was forced to withdraw from the election, then he lost his job. No one pities him much, because he beats his wife and children. In fact, if he hadn't beaten his family, maybe his son wouldn't have created "The Ghost" in the first place. Simon is just about the most despicable asshole in this book, second only to the drug-dealing rapist who sold him that stolen computer. It's a close second.

But hey, guess what? He's gonna get a new job! His brother-in-law apparently has something lined up for him. It's less money and the family will have to move, but it's a fresh new start! That's terrific!

Simon's son Andrew is bittersweet about this news. To be sure, Andrew caused all of this by exposing his father's corruption on the internet. He hated Pagford at the top of the novel, but I'm pretty sure what he actually hates is being trapped in an abusive household. Seeing his father deflated by unemployment may have tempered Andrew's hatred, but the old man's still an abusive asshole. Andrew might miss his friends, except he didn't have very many to begin with, and he and "Fats" Wall haven't spoken much since he took his new job at the deli. Since he started at the deli, Andrew has gotten closer to his co-workers, Sukhvinder and Gaia, but Gaia might wind up moving herself, to the same town actually, so there you go. The moral here is that hacking will solve all of your problems, kids.

As far as Fats goes, he's feeling kind of dissociated with Andrew, between the new job and the possibility of him moving. Fats has been trying to train himself to be a sociopath (at least that's how I see it), so Andrew has been his only real confidant. Losing him is a blow, but at the same time, Fats had been thinking about cutting ties with Andrew in any event, since he doesn't want the weakness of being too attached to anyone. Still, he seems more hurt by Andrew leaving than Andrew is by Fats' display of indifference. Well, Andrew has Gaia to pursue, so that probably has a lot to do with it.

Fats' mom, Tessa, accused him directly of writing the most recent "Ghost" message, the one that revealed Colin Wall is irrationally terrified of being charged with pedophila. He denies it, which is uncharacteristic of his whole "authenticity" schtick. Fats whole deal is that he does whatever he pleases, and refuses to mince words or play down his antisocial behavior. For example, he flaunts his truancy to his parents, which is pretty ballsy since they both work for the school. And yet, this "Ghost" business is his most defiant act of all, and he's not owning up to it. Really, using an alias of any sort is unusual for him, although he was probably just playing into the established "Ghost" character, and didn't give the matter a lot of thought.

Anyway, Fats goes to Krystal's house to have sex with her in her bedroom. I use the term "bedroom" loosely, because her room just has a mattress on the floor with magazine pages taped to the wall in lieu of posters or other decoration. Fats is taken aback by this. He knew she was poor, and that her mother was a prostitute, but actually being in the house, seeing and smelling it for himself, is another matter. Krystal convinces him that she's taking birth control now, so he forgoes the condom. She's lying and he considers that possibility, but siring an illegitimate child in the Fields appeals to Fats. He sees it as an act of manliness his father could never accomplish (Fats is adopted), and he likes the idea of how shocked they'll be when they find out what he's done.

For her part, Krystal plans to use the baby to get her own place, which... may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Desperate, yeah, but I think that's how it works. At least, she thinks that's how it works. You get pregnant, and the government or Fats' parents will set you up in your own house. Don't ask me.

I suppose that's the point of their relationship, regardless of whether Krystal's plan makes any sense. Fats wants to get her pregnant because he wants to hurt his parents and prove he's "authentic", whatever that means. But Krystal embodies the "authenticity" Fats strives for. She wants a baby because she sees it as a matter of survival. They're both using each other, but Krystal is doing it because she thinks she absolutely needs to, while Fats is just amusing himself.

MEANWHILE, AT THE MUSTACHE CLUB...

DR. TUBBY: Gentlemen, the results just came back from the lab, and I--HOLY CRAP WHAT HAPPENED HERE?

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Ughhh...

DR. MINDBENDER: It was terrible... he shaved his mustache... then he beat us all up...

DR. TUBBY: Don't try to talk! You men need immediate medical assistance! I'll start by standing near your hand, so you can easily rub my belly!

DR. MINDBENDER: I... I can't feel my legs....

DR. TUBBY: Shhh! Petting dogs is a great way to relieve stress! Another good idea is to give me pepperoni!

SGT. SLAUGHTER: No... time... you've got to get... reinforcements... Secret member... Only one... who can... stop.......

DR. TUBBY: Does he have pepperoni?

SGT. SLAUGHTER: .... I don't know....

DR. TUBBY: Well I'll just have to take that chance! Away! Woof-woof-woofwoofwoof! Woof!

VIII. All right, the wait is over, it's time for that Parish Council meeting. I'm ready. I'm ready! Ready for some local administration action! Let's do this thing!

Here's the stakes: Howard is anti-Fields. He wants governance of the Fields to be turned over to the larger city of Yarvil, freeing Pagford from the hassle. As it stands they go dutch on maintaining the neighborhood or something like that. Howard's plan is to exploit the recession, and the fact that Yarvil is trying to cut costs. Yarvil wants to close down the rehab clinic in the Fields, which they fund, I guess. But Pagford owns the building, and the lease is up for renewal.

Now--and stay with me here--if Pagford votes against renewing the lease, then Yarvil will have a justification to close the clinic and free up money from the budget. Local drug addicts would still get their methadone, but they'd have to go to other locations in Yarvil or Pagford to get it. Howard's ally on the Yarvil District Council, Aubrey Fawley, has a tit-for-tat arrangement with Howard. If Howard can get the Pagford Council to vote against the clinic, then Fawley will work with his council to transfer the entire Fields to Yarvil's jurisdiction. Everybody wins!

Except heroin addicts. And... yeah, I'm not sure who else loses in this. I don't think anyone in the Fields especially cares one way or the other. Early in the book, it was explained that Pagford's jurisdiction over the Fields allowed a lot of underprivileged kids to attend Pagford's elementary schools, which gave Barry Fairbrother a jumpstart in life, and perhaps it did some good for Krystal Weedon as well. But Barry's dead, and Krystal's well-being is pretty fragile at this point. Let's be honest here, the pro-Fielders are really fighting for an abstraction. Maybe when Krystal's brother Robbie is old enough, he can go to Pagford's elementary school, and maybe he'll have a better life than he would have had growing up under Yarvil's school system. But Robbie's three, he still wears diapers, and he dry humps other kids at the nursery because his mother has sex in front of him.

But to be fair, the anti-Fielders are just against the Fields out of general principle. They think the residents of the Fields are all thugs and addicts, and they don't want to be associated with them, even though they're like miles apart from each other. The only thing tying them together at the moment is the budget, and I don't see anyone in Pagford struggling to make ends meet. Well, the Price family, but they're moving out.

So, in conclusion.... I don't know what the hell is going on here. I'm pretty sure this is an extremely minor issue that's been blown out of proportion because the anti-Fielders are rich and used to getting their own way, and the pro-Fielders are only opposing them out of spite and sanctimony.

But fine. Let's get on with this. It should still be a kick-ass rhetorical brawl... Howard goes to the church hall with his sassy chain that represents his office of First Citizen. He's ready. His wife Shirley is the council secretary or something, so she gets to tag along. Also here is special guest Aubrey Fawley, who wants to see this end of their deal handled in person. Well, he doesn't say that out loud, but I assume that's the idea. And Allison Jenkins from the newspaper is also here. Turns out "The Ghost of Barry" has attracted a lot of attention to the Parish Council's dealings, so Allison smells a scoop. Howard is a little flattered and unsettled by this, which leads me to believe that there's never been a press gallery at one of these meetings before.

And here come the councilors themselves. Parminder is super pissed and storms into the church without exchanging words with Howard. And then there's, uh... Tony! Then Henry and Sheila... possibly. Howard asks for a few minutes to wait for them, but we don't know if they ever arrive. And... uh... that's it. There's sixteen councilors altogether. Howard only expects twelve to show up. We never find out how many actually make it. The only ones we really know are Howard and Parminder, and Parminder is barely paying attention to the proceedings because she hates Howard with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.

Howard lets Aubrey explain the deal to transfer control of the Fields to Yarvil in exchange for shutting down the rehab clinic. A councilor known only as "a farmer" is skeptical about this. Seriously. It's Howard, Parminder, and "a farmer". Maybe if someone had bothered to learn his name, he might be more receptive to one side or the other.

Parminder tries to convince the council that the Fields should remain with Pagford, citing Barry's posthumous editorial. Someone named Betty points out that the editorial was more about Krystal than the Fields, and Parminder loses her temper and shouts while arguing with her. They go around for a while, but Parminder's clearly not swaying anyone. Howard puts it to a vote and the council agrees to convey Pagford's support for redrawing the parish boundary. Actually redrawing the border goes to a higher authority, but Aubrey claims this would help things along.

They move on to the rehab clinic, and Parminder argues that the debate shouldn't be about the clinic's effectiveness, since Pagford only owns the building. They don't fund the clinic's work, so this is purely a matter of whether they want to get a new tenant. That line of attack is useless, since no one likes the clinic and they see this as a way to shut it down. So it spirals into a mostly one-sided debate about drug addiction.

This is where Parminder finally loses it. Howard points out that addicts should just take responsibility for their own lives and quit takin' all the drugs, so they won't be a burden on society. So she responds by comparing the situation to Howard's addiction to food. After all, Howard eats too much, he has all sorts of medical problems, and the taxpayers have to foot the bill because he refuses to take care of himself.

She probably wasn't going to convince anyone with this, but then she goes too far by specifically pointing out Howard's asthma, high blood pressure, and "nasty skin rash", which, as his doctor, she's not supposed to discuss. Frankly, his bypass surgery might fall into the same category, except everyone knows he had bypass surgery a while back.

Because this novel is set in England, and Howard's wife is a stuffy, bitter old crone, she says "Outrageous! Absolutely outrageous!" Then Parminder storms out the door, sobbing "furiously". Betty wants her expelled from the council, and the rest of them are all rabble rabble rabble.

IX. Naturally, the whole episode makes it into the paper, and Allison Jenkins makes sure to connect Parminder's outburst to "The Ghost", although the article doesn't name names. Uh... why? Isn't Britain the world capital of sleazy tabloid journalism? Isn't "who?" one of the five questions reporters are supposed to ask? Parminder has to exercise discretion because she's a doctor. I'm pretty sure Allison Jenkins can print whatever she can substantiate.

Howard confers with his inner circle (read: his wife and Maureen). Parminder airing his dirty laundry has given him a taste of "The Ghost's" medicine. She probably thought he deserved it, since she believed he was behind "The Ghost". Maybe he deserves it anyway, whatever. Shirley filed a complaint with the General Medical Council, but the damage is done. As he sees it, the newspaper's take on the council meeting makes it look like Howard was bullying the pro-Fielders. Aubrey and the District Council aren't happy, and the public perception is that the Parish Council is divided and doesn't speak for their constituents.

The District Council also wants that stupid-ass website fixed to prevent anymore anonymous hackers. Shirley insists that she's dealt with the issue, but she's not being entirely honest. She consulted a nephew of a friend who actually knows about this sort of thing, and he recommended that she scrap the site and get someone qualified to set up a whole new one. She rejected this immediately, since she didn't want to lose control of the site. Instead, she looked up "hacking", an sent out e-mails to all the users, asking them to change their passwords. This is dumb enough as it is, but you gotta figure at least some of the users sort of want "The Ghost" to strike again. It's the only interesting thing going on. So half the people who got her e-mail probably changed their passwords to "password1" or "12345" or something.

Hell, Shirley is "The Ghost's" biggest fan, because he's gone after her husband's political rivals thus far. Even though her husband is asking her to oppose "The Ghost", she's not doing it, and you have to figure her arrogant trust that they're all on the same side is what's behind this. She's certain that her son will win the election and that would make everything else academic. Uh-huh....

Meanwhile, Miles is a lot less confident about his chances. His fears aren't really grounded in anything, but the business with his opponents being publicly discredited has been a splash of cold water in his face. Suddenly he's hyperaware that not everyone in Pagford loves him unconditionally. It's not just losing that bothers him but the possibility of losing. I guess if he had it to do over again he would have stayed out of the race just to protect his self-esteem.

He seeks comfort from his wife, but ironically she hates him more than anyone else in town. She informs him that she's going to have to close her lingerie store and shift to an internet-only business model. She seems frustrated that no one cares about this but her, but it really isn't important. At all. Nothing in this book especially matters except for the deaths, criminal activity, and myriad forms of abuse. Rowling can suspend my disbelief that the Fields Debate matters in some abstract way, but the Final Fate of Samantha Mollison's Bra Store doesn't matter at all. I'm pretty sure Samantha doesn't give a shit about it either, or she would have done a better job running the place.

Miles wants sex to take his mind off his troubles, and Samantha gives it to him, though mostly so they don't have an argument, which might spoil her upcoming trip to London. Fascinating...

X. Oh thank goodness, I'm almost done.

Finally, finally, Rowling gets around to the friggin' election. Actually, wait.

Okay, why is the election being held at this stage of the plot? I had assumed it was designed to settle the Fields issue once and for all, and that was the central conflict of the novel. So shouldn't it be closer to the end? I'm only about three-quarters of the way in.

Well, it doesn't matter much, since this is a really weak-ass affair anyway. Rowling uses the event to showcase all the characters doing the same thing. Parminder collects what remains of her dignity and convinces Colin Wall to join her in voting. Colin is convinced that his campaign is doomed, but Parminder tells him they can't give up. I'm unclear on her exact professional status, but Rowling describes it as "effectively suspended from work". Her boss "advised" her to take time off, though, so I don't think she's officially in any trouble yet. Anyway, in her current state of mind, she's better off.

Miles leaves work to go vote for himself. He reminds Gavin of the election, but Gavin stone cold doesn't give a crap. Miles wants to go to the polls with the entire family, but he's ultimately only able to round up his wife. She leaves both boxes unchecked and simply writes "I hate bloody Pagford" on the ballot.

Tessa doesn't vote. Rowling doesn't say why. I guess I could figure it out for myself. Tessa wasn't too keen on Colin running in the first place, and she's starting to lose hope in their cause anyway, so yeah, something like that. The Prices don't vote either, since they're too preoccupied with moving to Reading. Ruth Price throws out their registration cards, although it's not clear if this was an accident or they decided there was no point in voting if they weren't going to stay. So yeah, this whole FRIGGIN' BOOK is about this stupid election, and half the characters blow it off.

Gavin relents to having dinner with Kay, since he couldn't think of a way to excuse himself. Kay tells Gavin about how her daughter's boyfriend dumped her, but he doesn't pay attention. She asks if he voted, and she doesn't even hear him say he doesn't care. All he really notices is that Kay's suddenly very well-versed in local politics, which means she's becoming rooted in Pagford. This bothers him, because he not only wants to break up with her, but he wants her to move out of town as well. This probably should have been acted upon sooner rather than later, but okay.

Finally, Kay confronts the elephant in the room, and points out that Gavin is completely indifferent to everything. She asks him what he wants, and he finally admits that he's in love with Mary Fairbrother. Kay is astonished, since Barry was his best friend and he's been dead for only a few weeks. Newsflash, Kay, Gavin doesn't care. I'd sympathize with her a little more if she wasn't so delusional. He gets up and leaves unceremonially, and that's that. Seriously, what is the point of having this guy in the book?

But there you go. The most ridiculous thing about this is that on paper, Rowling paid off several plotlines. Parminder blows her stack, Howard's been shaken out of his complacency, the election is done with, Gavin finally left Kay, and Krystal is having unprotected sex. But it all falls flat. It doesn't feel like there's any point to any of this, and the characters will just keep milling about like they've been doing.

LATER...

DR. TUBBY: And that's the whole story! I suspect a being of unspeakable evil has taken over Vegeta's body, and plans to use it to wreak havoc on the Earth! Also, I need my ears scratched, because I have been a good boy. Will you help us?

HARRY: Let's rock.

NEXT: Daughter of Darkness!

Part Four I, II, III, IV, V or "Pale Imitiations!"

mike_smith — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 00:04:08 GMT

MEANWHILE, IN THE DAMN WOODS SOMEWHERE...

BARRY'S GHOST: So you see... your only chance for peace in the life is to make peace with the dead. I'm a ghost! BooooOOOOooooo!

CM PUNK (in horse form): You're?! "You are only chance?" Learn some damn grammar!

BARRY'S GHOST: WooooOOOOoooo... I used the correct woooorrrdd. "Your" and "you're" are homonyms, so it makes no sense for you to criticize my usage of them in speech.

CM PUNK: I'm sorry, I tend to lash out at other people to avoid dealing with my own emotions.

BARRY'S GHOST: Also soooomme people make tyyyyyypographical errors, which may appear to be lapses in grammar. Not everything is a reseaaaaarch paper you knoooooow.

CM PUNK: So what's in this for you, Worm Food? You said you want to help me, but why?

BARRY'S GHOST: Dark times have befallen Pagford, the town I loved in life. Only I, with my affable ways and unerring compassion, can set matters right once more. Our quest is the same. For by raising the dead of your past, so too may I contact the living.

CM PUNK: What, you want to talk to your wife and kids?

BARRY'S GHOST: Who? Oh, no. I want to dictate a follow-up piece to my op-ed for the paper. BooooOOOOoooo. And, time permitting, I want to see if I can patch things up between Colin and his son.

CM PUNK: Okay, one: that's stupid, all right? Two: how the hell are you gonna do any of that?

BARRY'S GHOST: That is why we have come to these spoooOOOooky woods! That which we seeeeEEEEEeeekk is here...

CM PUNK: All I see are trees. And wolves. Oh crap, wolves! And the Creeper!

BARRY'S GHOST: And the Funhouse Robot! R-r-r-ruuuuuuun!

LATER, IN THE ACTUAL BOOK

So now we come to "Part Four". I keep saying this, but I really don't understand the way this book is split up into sections. What made Parts Three and Four so different that they needed to be separated? What criteria is there for putting in the Roman numerals? Well, I'm never gonna figure it out this way. Let's move one.

This time the quote from Local Council Administration, 7th ed., is about "Lunacy". In particular, "idiots" are permanently barred from voting, but someone with an "unsound mind" can vote in between bouts of insanity. At least that's how I'm reading this. Hey, don't look at me, ask "Charles Arnold-Baker", whoever the hell he is.

I. Samantha Mollison's here to waste space and not advance the plot at all. Seriously, the only significant thing that's happened to Samantha since Barry's death was that she began to retreat into an infatuation for her daughter's favorite band. Call it a mid-life crisis, I don't know. I'm pretty sure she also retreats into booze, but I'm pretty sure she was doing that all along. Sam's problem is that she's bored with her husband and his family, but she really doesn't have anything better going for herself. Time was, she could retreat into her lingerie store, but business has been... a-heh... well you might say business has been a real bust lately. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Did you see what I did there? Because busts are...! Well you know what I mean.

Anyway, for the purposes of this review, her daughter's favorite band is Motorhead. Rowling won't identify the band, and frankly it ought to be Motorhead, so I say it is. Samantha is all hot and bothered by the lead singer, and by now she's bought all their DVDs and she's learned the words to their songs. Then she found out that Motorhead is playing Wembley Stadium in "a fortnight's time." You did that on purpose, Rowling.

So now Samantha's big idea is to see the band live, using her daughter as a pretext. She'll buy the tickets, surprise her kid, and go with her on a big trip to London under the guise of a parental escort. And... yeah, that's about it. If she's plotting to find a way backstage to jump Lemmy's bones, we're not getting any of those details yet. Seriously, her master plan is to buy a ticket to a rock show, and... attend it. With her teenage daughter. Scandalous.

Well, on with stuff that actually sort of matters. Miles, her husband, is all stressed out because there's been another anonymous message from "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother." Andrew Price wrote the first one to shame his father out of running for Parish Council, but this time Sukhvinder Jawanda has gotten in on the act to embarrass her overbearing mother, who already has a seat on the Council. Miles is stressed about this for a number of reasons:

1) He's running for Parish Council himself, and he doesn't need this kind of anonymous mudslinging on his mind.

2) While "The Ghost" hasn't posted anything about him so far, his father did receive an anonymous print letter objecting to his candidacy. The letter never left his dad's office, and it made no allegations against him, but it just goes to show that someone out there isn't fond of him, and might use the website to air grievances.

3) His mother Shirley Mollison runs the Pagford Parish Council website, where "The Ghost" has been posting messages. Shirley's been reluctant to deal with the security breaches on the site, but as the administrator, she may be liable for defamatory content.

4) His wife (Samantha) doesn't really give a crap about any of this. Rather, she kind of enjoys watching Miles squrim, although he may not have clued into that.

To Samantha's point, unless Miles has something to hide, he probably has nothing to worry about. Indeed, she'd find him more interesting if he did have a skeleton in the closet, but as it is, he's a small town lawyer running in a local election in a political body headed by his influential father. I was going to write "wealthy and powerful", but Howard Mollison runs a friggin' deli. Hell, he only co-owns the establishment. As much as his enemies try to make him out to be Lex Luthor, he's really nowhere close.

Over to Howard Mollison. Miles has been trying to call him since he found the new Ghost message, but Howard's been busy talking to his wife Shirley. Shirley isn't worried so much about the second hacking incident. No, her main concern is that Parminder Jawanda called to chew her out for allowing this sort of thing to happen again. Shirley left the message up for another forty-five minutes as an F.U. to Parminder, but it doesn't really matter much anymore.

Howard had originally suspected Parminder or one of her allies of posting the first message, the one that got Simon Price to drop out of the race. But that theory's out the window. Maureen stupidly suggests that it must be "someone who knows the Prices and the Jawandas", which would narrow it down to everyone in the book so far. Of course, this is a blind alley anyway, since it assumes that "The Ghost" is a single person.

What else is in the news? Oh, hey! That article Barry Fairbrother wrote right before he died? It finally appeared in the newspaper. I had assumed it was a big deal, since Rowling was putting it off for so long. I started to think she was saving it for the end of the book, where it would be presented in its entirety, and everyone would read it and remember what a Swell Guy Barry is, and how he's nothing at all like "The Ghost". Instead, it appears to have been published about two-thirds of the way in, and the Mollisons are too engrossed in "The Ghost" to worry about the real Barry's posthumous words. They each dismiss the pro-Fields article as unimpressive. I can't tell if they're downplaying the thing to hide their concern, or if it really doesn't matter after all this time everyone worried about it. Thanks for wasting more time, Rowling.

Miles finally gets through to Howard and they briefly discuss the Ghost one more time. I'll give credit here, at least this isn't like in Part Three, where Rowling had multiple characters react to the first message in real time. Here, the Mollisons have all seen the message well before the scene begins, and they're already discussing it amongst themselves. Of course, the flipside here is that having the Ghost come up a second time around is basically a rehash of the same idea. The only new development here is that no one suspects Parminder of posting the first message. Miles explains that Shirley is legally responsible for the website's content, and Howard takes this seriously.

While all this is going on, Gavin Hughes drives by the deli in his car. Howard's so busy chatting that he doesn't notice. I'm not sure he should notice, since it's apparently a coincidence. He's on his way to console Mary Fairbrother, who has reacted to the second Ghost Message about the same way she did to the first. Her son Fergus speculates that it was a different person this time, but Mary is in no mood to examine the situation. Gavin suggests that Howard Mollison might be behind it, but she has a hard time believing that. The cruel thing is that no one's even trying to hurt Mary or her family. They've just been using Barry as a symbol, never considering that he has a family who might be senstivie to this sort of thing.

Fergus has the newspaper with his dad's article in it, but Mary tells him to throw it out. She's still upset that he wrote the article on their wedding anniversary/day he died. Fergus surreptitiously ignores her request, and Gavin is just happy to be alone with Mary without the newspaper in the room to remind him of Barry.

Now that I think about it, is this Gavin's problem with women in general? I ask because Kay's divorced, and as far as I know her husband is still out there somewhere. If a newspaper gives Gavin this much trouble, maybe he's even more put off by answering machine messages and photographs of a live human being. Maybe he started out with a sincere interest in Kay, and the mere existence of her ex-husband is distracting him too much to maintain the relationship.

BARRY'S GHOST: Quick! Let's hide in this hollow log!

CM PUNK: Right behind you! Phew! Do you see 'em?

BARRY'S GHOST: Noooooo.... do you?

CREEPER: Rarrrrrgghhh!

CM PUNK: That's a relief. Wait a minute...

CREEPER: Rarrrrrggghhh!

BARRY'S GHOST: Y-y-yiiiiikes!

II. Parminder's pissed about the new Ghost Message, big surprise. We finally find out what it is: Sukhvinder wrote that her mom was secretly in love with Barry the whole time, and consequently she voted with him on all Parish Council business. With Barry out of the picture "she will be useless as a councillor, because she has lost her brain." That last part's hard to argue, since she's been out-to-lunch this whole book so far.

The ironic thing is that Sukhvinder was just guessing about this. Even Parminder doesn't believe the allegation, and yet she's so defensive about it that it distracts her all morning. With the day off, she makes a trip to the... I don't know, the social services building. They're having a hearing about Robbie Weedon's welfare, and she decided to be there in person instead of just filing a report. She barely remembers the drive to the building, and she doesn't pay very close attention to the conversation at the meeting. When Cath Weedon's death comes up, she gets stressed about that, because there's rumors that Parminder may have caused it.

The meeting itself is window dressing. The people involved just rehash everything we already knew about the Weedons' situation. Terri will lose custody of her son unless she stays off the dope, Krystal's been shouldering the burden of actually raising Robbie, Catherine is dead, which makes things more difficult than they already were, etc. They'd probably have a different outlook if they knew Terri's drug dealer raped Krystal in her own home the night before, but as it is, they're fairly optimistic about the situation.

Kay Bawden thanks Parminder for showing up, and offers to meet with her later about the political battle over the Addiction Clinic, but Parminder barely pays any attention to this. Finally, Parminder admits to herself that maybe she really did love Barry after all. So like I said, the allegation is pretty weak. Is Parminder simply that dishonest about her feelings? Or is she letting The Ghost get to her? Or maybe Sukhvinder is more perceptive than anyone gives her credit for?

ELSEWHERE...

WOLVES: Bark bark bark bark bark!

CM PUNK: Dammit, wolves, you may have paid for your ticket, and that gives you the right to chase after me, but I am pissed off right now, and if you've got any guts, come over here and I'll kick your ass!

BARRY'S GHOST: Wait, there's a rope bridge over there! We can escaaaaape!

CM PUNK: Over their?! What the hell are you saying?

BARRY'S GHOST: Don't worry, I'll cross it first to make sure it's safe!

CM PUNK: Wait, you're a ghost! Aren't you weightless? Why do you even need a bridge?

BARRY'S GHOST: Come on! Hurry!

CM PUNK: All right, I'll just trot right out to the middle and... OHSHITI'MFALLINGIT'SNOTSAFEATALL!

BARRY'S GHOST: NoooooooooOOOOOoooooooo!

CM PUNK: My only regret is not drinking more Pepsiiiiiiiiiiiiiii*

BARRY'S GHOST: NnnnnnnnnnoooOOOOoooooooooo! H-how can I carry on... (choke) alone!

MOVING ON...

III. Simon Price loses his job. His words: "It was take redundancy or we'll sack you." I think that means they laid him off? Whatever. He's sure it's because of the fallout of the Ghost's message, but I doubt he was ever a model employee to begin with.

I'm not really getting a reaction from Andrew Price on this. He posted the original Ghost Message to discredit his father, but did he mean for him to lose his job over it? Is this more than he bargained for, or does it play into his hands? We don't know. Really, he's more worried about the new Ghost Message, the one he didn't write. He can only suspect his friend "Fats" Wall, since Fats watched him post the original message. Fats wanted to imitate the stunt then and there, so it follows that he would eventually try it out for himself. The only question is why he would go after Parminder Jawanda. The only possible explanation is that it ties into his bullying of Sukhvinder Jawanda, and that bothers him...

Anyway, Andrew still has a job working part-time at the Mollison Deli, so he gets up the next morning for his first day. Mostly, he's excited because he'll be working alongside his latest crush, Gaia Bawden, but otherwise I don't see what the fuss is about. For that matter, Gaia has no regard for him whatsoever, so even that's a false hope.

We shift to Howard for no good reason, and learn the Secret Origin of His Enormous Gut. His dad died when he was young, and his mom and grandmother compensated by feeding him too much. Somewhere along the way, he came to see being fat as part of his identity, an indication of his masculinity. So that's why he took it so personally when Parminder suggested he lose weight. She might as well have asked him to chop off his balls. But he's sixty-four, asthmatic, and he's got high-blood pressure, plus he's already had bypass surgery. If I were him and they literally told me to chop off my balls, I'd at least give it due consideration. Actually, I guess I'd put my affairs in order. The point is he's not being realistic about this. He can either be a jolly fat guy or he can live past seventy. No one can make him see that, but I suspect it's because no one has put it to him so bluntly.

Anyway, Howard very gruffly sends Andrew down to the basement to restock supplies. This is important because he's too fat to go up and down the steps himself, and his partner Maureen isn't getting any younger herself. Howard's all-business with Andrew, but he's got a different business in mind with his waitresses, Sukhvinder and Gaia. Well, just Gaia, really. He gives them waitress outfits because he's either really excited to be opening a cafe, or he thinks Gaia would look hot in a waitress outfit. Maureen wears one, too, even though that's kind of silly for a woman her age. Well, that's the impression I'm supposed to get, apparently. I can't see any of these people, and Howard wears a deerstalker covered in fishing lures, so it's not like Maureen is the goofiest-looking person on the staff.

As I've pointed out before, it's ambiguous whether Howard is some kind of perv when it comes to Gaia Bawden, or if he's just counting on her looks to reel in young customers. He needs the help, or he wouldn't have hired Sukhvinder, but something tells me the waitress outfits wouldn't have been introduced if Gaia looked more like Sukhvinder. They go to the bathroom to change, and Sukhvinder is horrified to realize that the uniforms have short sleeves. Sukhvinder cuts herself at night, and she has to reveal this secret to Gaia at the very least. Gaia improvises a plan, lending Sukhvinder her long-sleeved shirt to wear under the uniform, and then telling Mollison that she has a bad case of eczema. Fortunately, Howard isn't as worried about how she looks, as long as Gaia fills out her own uniform.

During all of this, Andrew accidentally walks in on them while Gaia is down to her underwear, but this doesn't seem to go anywhere. Well, I'm sure it meant a lot to Andrew, but still. The "Copper Kettle" opens and the first coffee is free, so they're busy the whole day. Andrew only gets to see Gaia a couple more times the rest of his shift.

The Mollison family shows up for lunch, and Howard comes out to greet them. He mentions having his next birthday in the new cafe, except it's too small. Turns out his birthday falls on the 29th, which just happens to be the same day as the Motorhead concert in London. Samantha explains that she'll be taking her daughter Libby to get their brains rocked out. Miles protests that the election is the day before, and I guess he expected his wife would be there for him. I don't see why he'd want her, seeing as she's always half-drunk and constantly belittling the local political scene. Seriously, at least if she's in London the whole time, people won't think she's passed out on the couch at home.

Maureen asks Sukhvinder about her mother, and she starts to tear up even as she says everything is fine. I thought that was gonna lead somewhere, but I guess not.

Rowling actually uses the words "fizzy drink", which is a British term for soda. I find it odd that I've read seven-and-a-half of her books and this is the first time I've encountered the term in her work. Oh well.

Gaia and Andrew take a break outside, and she asks him directly why Fats is such a giant shithead to Sukhvinder. Andrew explains that he's not a racist, but that's about as far as he understands it. At this point, Andrew would promise to kick Fats' ass if she asked him to. I kind of hope it comes to that. Actually, if anybody kicked Fats' ass, I'd see that as a positive. But it'd have a certain sparkle to it if his only friend turned on him.

Sukhvinder comes out to join them and Gaia suggests that Fats may have posted the latest Ghost Message. Andrew was thinking the same thing, but he points out that "The Ghost" targeted his own father. That satisfies the girls, although it looks like he's not trying to deflect suspicion so much as he's trying to get on Gaia's good side. All he really knows about her is that she sympathizes with Sukhvinder, so he's pointing out that the same thing has happened to him recently. Gaia exclaims, "Bloody hell. People round here are effing mental." Can't disagree.

IV. Over to Colin Wall, who's become even more paranoid now that "The Ghost" has gone after Parminder Jawanda. He passes by the new cafe, too terrified of Howard Mollison to get very close to it, but the point is that he knows Andrew Price is working there. Fats told his parents that he was hanging out with Andrew, so that was a lie. He goes home and heads for Fats' room, where he finds his stash of weed. Tessa tries to smooth things over, but Colin insists on waiting in the room to confront Fats when he returns.

Tess begins to argue with Colin, but it's less about how to discipline their son and more about how Colin is too self-absorbed, and how Tessa is too lenient. Small wonder that Fats is so distant from them both. Maybe he acts out just to get their attention, I don't know. Anyway, he returns home just in time to hear Colin say "I didn't want him at all!" He finds them both in his room, and he freely admits that he was out with Krystal Weedon. His parents want to know if he's having sex with her, but they're too bashful to come out and ask. When Fats is a little too direct in admitting it, Colin loses his shit and punches him in the face. Yaaaaaayyyyyy! I... think?

Fats loses his cool a little and accuses both of his parents of being hypocrites. Tessa finally gets properly upset with Fats, but she leaves the room instead of following through. Fats is surprised to find that the episode has actually upset him, even though he never cared if Colin wanted him or not. Something about him actually saying the words out loud...

He flashes back to a time when Barry Fairbrother invited Colin and Fats to play soccer with him and his own son. Presumably, this was an effort by Barry to get Colin and Fats to bond a little, but just when it slightly started to work, Fats got self-conscious and kicked the ball into Colin's face. The flashback doesn't really reveal anything important. I suppose it's just a demonstration that they at least tried to be family at one time. Now, Colin has struck Fats and said he never wanted him, and Fats finds himself actually hurt by this.

He considers the "authentic" thing to do would have been to punch his dad back, but the moment has passed, and besides, there's better ways to get revenge, or so he believes. Fats boots up his computer and logs into the Parish Council website as "Betty Rossiter". By now, Shirley Mollison has (finally) removed the defunct account of Barry Fairbrother, but she still hasn't addressed the security gap that allowed Andrew and Sukhvinder to access Barry's account in the first place. So it's a simple matter for Fats to hack into someone else's account and change the username to "The_Ghost_Of_Barry_Fairbrother", and boom, we're back in business. I don't know who Betty Rossiter is. She might be another dead user that Shirley never bothered to clear out. There's probably no shortage of them.

So we're doing this again? On the one hand, I'm intrigued by how Andrew Price's scheme has snowballed with all these copycats, and they're collectively doing more damage than any one of them could have done individually. But I find it a little ridiculous that all three of them have pulled the exact same stunt with the exact same level of competency. Sukhvinder is dyslexic, but Rowling made the allowance that she can read and write code a lot more easily than prose; the hardest part for Sukhvinder was composing the message itself. Fats has been cyber-bullying Sukhvinder the whole time, so I suppose this isn't much of a stretch for him. Hell, people suspected him of the last Ghost Message and here he is writing the next one.

Hopefully, this is it. There can't be any more children in the book who could/would pull this off. Krystal Weedon has a gripe with her mom, but everyone calls Terri Weedon a "whore" on a regular basis anyway. Samantha Mollison's kids are virtual non-entities. Besides, she's taking her oldest daughter to see Motorhead, so what's she got to gripe about? Gaia Bawden has an axe to grind with her mom, but Kay's not on the Parish Council. Gavin is childless, and probably not regretting it much. Barry's kids are offended by the entire concept. I guess that leaves Miles Mollison, but he's a little too old for this sort of thing.

Of course, Andrew, Sukhvinder, or Fats could always go back and do this again. Nah, we've only got a hundred pages to go. Surely this is it.

MEANWHILE, AT THE MUSTACHE CLUB...

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Ten-HUUUUT! This tribunal will come to order. Let the record show that the subject of this hearing stands accused of willful defiance of the code of the mustache club. If found guilty, he shall be expelled from our proud organization, and sent home in a ditty bag. An itty-bitty ditty bag.

DR. MINDBENDER: Why would you shave off your mustache? Are you mental?

VEGETA: It made me look too Italian. And you know what they say about Italians.

DR. MINDBENDER: Would you stop being so verdammt racist all the time! I'm a monocle-wearing German mad scientist, and even I'm offended. What's gotten into you, Vegeta? I agreed to defend you at your Mustache Club Court Martial, but you have to help me!

VEGETA: Stop calling me that...

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Vegeta, you are charged with willingly and knowingly shaving off your mustache, as well as refusing to pay your dues for last month. How do you plead?

VEGETA: That is no longer my name, your honor.

SGT. SLAUGHTER: Is that right? Well, let's get the record straight, you little puke! What's your name, fatbody?

VEGETA: You may address me as "Rodlover", sir. Mr. Dolt Rodlover.

V. Back to Shirley Mollison. Miles has communicated to her that she could be held responsible for these anonymous slander posts, but she simply cannot accept this. She's proud of Miles' law degree, but she knows he must be wrong this time. That's basically Shirley in a nutshell. She's proud of herself for running the website, but she denies any responsibility for it.

Besides, since "The Ghost" has been targeting her family's political enemies so far, she rather fancies the guy, and lately she's been keeping a close eye on the board in case he posts again. She feels like Commissioner Gordon, and "The Ghost" is like her Batman, an anonymous crusader who has come to her venue to support her agenda. So when the new post appears, she finds it in short order. And I guess since it goes after Colin Wall, it only supports her image of "The Ghost" as a secret anti-Fielder.

Parminder Jawanda has also been monitoring the board closely, and she calls Tessa as soon as she realizes the latest post is about Colin. Tessa rushes to stop him before he can see it himself, but it's too late.

This one is titled "Fantasies of a Deputy Headmaster", and reveals that Colin lives in constant fear that one of his students will accuse him of molestation. So great is his fear that he has taken time off from his job just to calm his nerves. "The Ghost" speculates that Colin may have actually fondled a student at one time, or at the very least, he'd like to do so.

Okay, so it's like I thought last time. Colin's not really a pedophile, he's just extremely worried about being percieved as one. So once again, "The Ghost" doesn't have a lot of actual dirt. I'm starting to see the dramatic purpose of targeting Simon Price first. Simon actually had a crime or two to expose. And so far he's the only one who's actually suffered any consequences. The point here isn't that Parminder or Colin are as bad as Price. The point is that they saw what happened to him, and they're afraid they're just as bad.

Anyway, Colin seems rather calm, considering what just happened. Turns out he's got OCD, and the specific issue is that he's afraid to walk through crowded hallways at school, because if he accidentally brushes up against a student, he might accidentally do a "bad touch" without realizing it, and he won't find out until the student notifies the authorities. It's not very realistic, but there is a certain logic to it, and that's what makes it so difficult for him to ignore. And his obsession with this takes the problem even further, so that he fears working with underage students might somehow transform him into a pedophile.

So then, Colin immediately suspects Fionna Shawcross, his immediate superior at the school. This is because he felt the need to explain his OCD to her when he took time off to deal with it. That doesn't really hold water. If she's his boss, and she had a problem with him, she could just fire him or take some other, more direct action against him. Tessa, on the other hand, immediately suspects Fats, and she's right. But Colin is too emotionally distraught for her to share this theory.

Meanwhile, Simon Price sees the newest message from "The Ghost" and decides he got off easy. Ruth tries to call Shirley to let her know, but her phone is busy because she's trying to call Howard. I feel like this keeps happening in this book. Everyone's trying to call everyone else at the same time. I wish Rowling would knock it off.

Shirley finally reaches Howard, and reports the latest message to him. After all, Howard was interested in the last two, but this time he's more upset that she hasn't taken it down already. By now, it's begun to dawn on Howard that this is more damaging to him than anyone else. Each individual message targets a different person, but collectively they point to a failure of Shirley to maintain the website, which implies that Howard is behind the whole thing. He very angrily tells Shirley to get the message removed, and she becomes outraged. "[T]hey never raised their voices to each other." Hopefully this won't be the last time...

NEXT: A spirited debate!

Starshoop Trippers

mike_smith — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 15:12:19 GMT

I watched the Rifftrax Live show last night, the one where they did "Starship Troopers". I didn't understand the movie when it first came out, and now that I've watched it, I think I understand it less.

Someone on Twitter objected to the Rifftrax treatment, since "Troopers" was supposed to be a satire to begin with. I had a hard time believing this, but I looked it up after I got back from the theater, and it turns out that the movie is a satire of the book it was based on. The novel presents this pro-military, possibly fascist society, and apparently Robert Heinlein considered this scenario to be a nice place to live. The movie is constructed to make this attitude as campy as possible. All the characters play it straight and love the world they live in, but the audience is supposed to recognize this as a farce.

This hurts the movie a lot. I haven't read the book, so I thought the movie was a faithful adaptation of Heinlein's anti-war sentiments. Now that I know better, it turns out that the novel has been criticized for being little more than a political commentary disguised as a story. The characters are little more than a mouhpiece for the author, and the plot is pretty thin without Heinlein's editorializing. Peter Verhoeven comes along and makes the movie version, but he mocks Heinlein's opinions, which means stripping out the only compelling part of the book.

What you're left with is this wafer-thin plot about an interstellar war fought by ciphers. We never find out what the enemy aliens think or feel about the war, and all of the human characters unanimously agree that the "Bugs" are an existential threat to the human species. The only real twist in the movie is when the humans are defeated in a major battle, because they naively assumed the Bugs were unintelligent. Otherwise, we know nothing about the nature of the war or the relative strengths of the opposing sides. I'm fairly sure the humans are losing, just because they refuse to give the enemy any credit, and they rely on machine guns even though the Bugs can withstand dozens of direct hits at pointblank range.

I don't know if Heinlein's politics would have improved any of this, but the movie's only message is that this is all really stupid, which isn't enough to carry the film. Ancilliary characters are routinely dismembered or killed in gruesome fashion, but when the hero sustains an enormous gash in his leg behind enemy lines, he's miraculously rescued and has his leg regenerated completely. Meanwhile all the other wounded veterans are amputees or cyborgs. When Denise Richards' starship blows up, she only has a nasty cut over her eyebrow, which is absent in the next scene. I'm pretty sure these are intentional jabs at war movie cliches, but they look just as stupid as if they were committed unironically. Neil Patrick Harris wears what looks like an SS uniform, which is supposed to hammer home the Nazi comparison, but it doesn't get reflected in the plot. How is Neil Patric Harris' character like a Nazi? There's no moment of betrayal or catharsis, where a character suddenly realizes that their society has been corrupted. Neil doesn't act differently than he did at the beginning of the film. They do horrible things to the Bugs, but we have no context for this. As far as I can tell, the primary resemblence to the Nazis is the way they overestimate their advantage over the Bugs.

This all reminds me of the latest "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" episode. Anita Sarkesian addressed "ironic sexism", pointing out that a lot of video games will present sexist ideas as a "parody" of their prevalent use in other games. The problem is that a lot of these "parody games" are just repeating the trope, and using self-awareness of the trope to justify it as satire. "Starship Troopers" makes the same mistake. The movie assumes you recognize the tropes it's making fun of, but there's no other substance to it. They saw all these stupid elements in Heinlein's book and other science fiction/war stories, and found them so absurd that they... repeated them all over again.

Peter Veroeven also directed Robocop, and there are some similarities. Both movies present absurdist future worlds, where characters and the media take the absurdities for granted. Both use ultraviolence to parody violence in movies. Both use inane news broadcasts to provide exposition. The difference is that "Robocop" had a compelling story beneath the surface. It also had the advantage of satirizing more relevant situations. "Troopers" basically pokes fun at fascist elements from a decades-old novel. "Robocop" carries privatization to a horrifying extreme, which actually made sense to audiences living in the 1980's. The moral of "Robocop" is that OCP could claim to own the Detroit Police and Murphy's remains, but their cynical attempt to program a cyborg for justice would create the most noble lawman of all. The moral of "Troopers" is that it sucks and it knows it.

I kept expecting the movie to do something with that self-awareness, but no soap. There was an episode of Futurama that borrowed heavily from the themes of the movie, but it ended with an actual twist: Fry learns the aliens he's been fighting are the good guys, and he and his comrades have been the evil invaders all along. "Troopers" could have benefitted from something like this. Even if the characters failed to appreciate the situation, at least let the audience have that chilling feeling of a humanity beyond redemption. But no, the hero saves the girl, Neil Patrick Harris captures a strategically important Bug for experimentation, and that's it. I guess that's what passes for satire. But I'm pleased to report that the movie was still eminently riff-able, regardless.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Part Three VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, or "The Ghost and the Grimdarkness!"

mike_smith — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 04:14:19 GMT

Trigger Warning: I don't really have a good handle on when or where to use trigger warnings, but there's a rape scene in this part of the book, and I'm going to discuss it, so I figure it's only fair I make that clear up front. It's Part Three, Section XI, so the segments before that are fine. Well, relatively speaking...

Fortunately, it's only Livejournal, so no one's even reading this anyway. But in case internet archaeologists are reading this a thousand years from now, because this is the only surviving literature from the 21st century, I just want them to know what they're in for. Also, future historians, I just want it on the record that J.K. Rowling was a terrible author.

VI. As expected, Simon Price has dumped his stolen computer just in case the police come after him. What I didn't expect was that he dumped it into a river. That might be the best way to go. I've never destroyed incriminating evidence before, so I couldn't say whether this is a good move. He certainly couldn't burn it, and anything sneakier would have probably been beyond his competency. The problem here is that it's probably too late. Everyone has seen the message on the Pagford Parish Council website accusing him of stealing computers. And for all Simon knows, someone might stumble across the remains of the computer in the water. I really hope this doesn't happen, because it would be really, really dumb, and totally up Rowling's alley.

Also, this book is set in 2012 or so, and yet this computer seems to be a desktop. I don't think the model has been specified or anything, but Rowling made a big production out of how hard it was to hook up, and when Simon told his son to un-hook everything, he made sure to remind him to get all the cables and such. I know desktops are still available, but it seems odd that Simon would go to all this trouble for kind of computer that's been declining in popularity. Then again, that low demand may have been what made it so easy to steal. And Simon's the kind of guy who steals almost for its own sake. His kids already have laptops, as I recall. But in his mind, having a "family computer" in the living room makes him more respectable, and getting a heavily discounted stolen computer makes him even more respectable, because in his mind all the important people in the world take shortcuts. To him, a guy who doesn't buy stolen goods is a sucker.

All that remains is to pull the accusation from the Pagford website. I'm just gonna call it "the website" now, because it seems to be the only one of any importance in this novel (besides Facebook), and I'm sick of trying to remember the full name of it. Just remember that this is a slapped-together geocities-style affair, primarily used as a bulletin board for small-town governance. Andrew Price was only able to hack the site because it was so badly put together, and the administrator has never had to cope with a security breach of this scale. In fairness, it's not like anyone would have expected it to come up, either.

In case anyone's just joining us: Barry Fairbrother.... is dead. That shouldn't matter to anyone, but he was important figure in his community, and the whole point of The Casual Vacancy appears to be an up-close examination of the Barry Fairbrother-shaped hole in Pagford, United Kingdom. Beyond his personal affairs, the biggest fallout of his death is that it opens up a vacancy on the Pagfrd Parish Council, and a special election is going to be held to fill his seat. Craven opportunist Simon Price sees this as a way to get sweet bribe and kickback money, but his son Andrew fears that their family will be humilitated when the public finally sees what a craven opportunist Simon is. So Andrew hacked the website, exploiting the fact that Barry's account hadn't been deactivated yet. Changing the username to "The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother," he posted an anonymous screed against his dad, hinting at all his crooked business dealings.

So far, all it's gotten Andrew is a fat lip. Simon has no idea who posted the message, but he routinely abuses his family anyway. Simon thinks it's Shirley Mollison, since Shirley is the admin for the site, and at the very least she's responsible for moderating its content. Also, Shirley volunteers at the hospital where Simon's wife, Ruth, works. And Ruth let slip that they recently got a new computer. Furthermore, Shirley's husband is the head of the Parish Council, and her son Miles is running against Simon for the vacant seat. So there's motive, means, and opportunity right there. Of course, Shirley's the one who tipped the Prices off to the message in the first place, but that could have just been her covering her tracks.

In any event, Ruth calls her and convinces her to take the Ghost Message down. Andrew observes his mom's behavior on the phone, and feels more disgust than pity. He's reached a point in his life where he can no longer view his parents in black-and-white. He's always despised his bully of a father, but he's starting to resent his mom for enabling that behavior. She apologizes for him even though he beats her, she tries to talk him out of things when it would be wiser to stay quiet, and she stays quiet when it would be wiser to speak out.

But this is all victim-blaming. Ruth could just as easily loathe Andrew for antagonizing Simon against his better judgement. Andrew fantasizes about kicking his dad's ass someday, but he's not exactly weightlifting or preparing himself for an ultimate confrontation. Instead, he smokes and sasses his father constantly, which frustrates his mom as much as she frustrates him. He doesn't understand why she doesn't just leave her father, but it's never going to be as simple as that. Ruth might just as unfairly wonder why Andrew doesn't come to her aid when Simon beats her. Ultimately, it's a lot easier for them to argue with each other, since they know it won't come to blows.

MEANWHILE, Rowling steals my schtick in order to switch to Shirley Mollison's point of view. I always wished she would do this with the Harry Potter series, but she insisted on sticking almost exclusively to Harry's P.O.V. whether it made sense or not. Now, with no single protagonist, she's got no choice, but it's inconsistent. Sometimes she sticks to one character for an entire Roman-Numeral Section, but this time she's shifting with nothing more than a new paragraph. Anyway, Shirley doesn't even know how to delete posts from the website, so she digs into her notes from that computer class she took years ago. "She did it only becase Ruth, whom she liked, had asked her to; she felt no personal responsibility in the matter."

I suppose that line is meant to demonstrate Shirley's hypocrisy at work, since, as the admin, she absolutely is responsible for what goes on the website. In other words, she's proud of herself for running the thing when it works, but when it doesn't work, that's everyone else's problem. I suppose that fits her character, except that she's extremely fixated on social status, which was why she maintains the site in the first place. To her, it's a way to demonstrate that she's even more impressive than she would be as merely the matriarch of the Mollison family. I have a hard time believing that she isn't just as mortified by this hack as Simon Price. Then again, we're not done with "The Ghost" just yet.

In any case, taking the post down doesn't change much, since others have seen it and won't easily forget. This is Rowling's excuse to shift to Parminder Jawanda, who has printed it out. Ironically, she thinks this is the work of Howard Mollison, just as he suspects "The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother" is the work of Parminder's political supporters.

She takes this up with her allies, Colin and Tessa Wall, over dinner. Tessa is probably the only one even remotely familiar with Simon Price, and she points out that "The Ghost" was likely telling the truth about what a creep he is. Parminder is determined to make this about her struggle with Mollison, and suggests that he'll target Colin next, since Colin is also running against Miles Mollison in the election.

Vikram, Parminder's husband, wonders aloud why Howard doesn't try to get on the more powerful District Council, if he's the cartoonish supervillain his wife makes him out to be. Vikram doesn't follow politics, and maybe that's why Pagford's elite respect him more than the squeaky wheel that is Parminder. She explains that Howard is too tied in to Pagford to want anything bigger, and besides, he has allies on the District Council anyway. In her mind, Aubrey Fawley works for Howard, when it's probably more like the other way around, at least the way Howard would probably see it.

What's probably stressing Parminder out is the whole dust-up about Catherine Weedon's death. I'm still fuzzy on whether Parminder actually did something wrong, but the scrutiny bothers her nonetheless. And on top of that you've got some anonymous informer spilling secrets where anyone can find them.

But Colin's on a whole other level. Everyone in this book is too engrossed in their own problems, but Colin still manages to stand out when it comes to making everything about himself. What might "The Ghost" say about him, he wonders with terror. And this is where I get a little confused.

See, Rowling does a quick flashback to establish what he's so worried about. Before he died, Barry wrote an article about the Fields, a slum that's become a political football in the local area. The newspaper plans to run the article, along with an interview with Krystal Weedon, who Barry had held up as an example of the promise of supporting the Fields community. We haven't gotten a lot out of this subplot, but it's been percolating behind the scenes all book long. Anyway, the newspaper calls up Colin Wall, because he's the principal at the school Krystal (sometimes) attends. Presumably, this was just a routine fact-checking deal, but as soon as Krystal's name comes up, Colin becomes agitated.

"Had he touched her?" is the unanswered question in his mind. He recalls his psychologist telling him not to dwell on these sorts of thoughts, and we learn Colin is taking Prozac to cope with this sort of anxiety. But the thing is, what's Colin really worried about here? Did he actually do something wrong, or is he merely afraid that voters will find out about his crippling paranoia? The problem with Colin is that he's so self-conscious that I can't be sure. All we do know is that he's now convinced that Howard Mollison is out to get him.

I don't know if Rowling is being coy or not. If she is, I have to give her credit for it. If Colin really is molesting his students--so many students that even he cannot keep track--then it's better to drag that revelation out. This book already features drug addiction, spousal abuse, child abuse, and self-harm. If Colin's a sex offender, then it could easily be lost in the shuffle. If he's not a sex offender, then his terror is completely irrational, and that may mean he's got much bigger psychological issues than the other angsty middle-aged people in this book. Colin might be an examination into mental illness, and Rowling is trying to draw the reader in by hinting that Colin's fears may be real. After all, they're real to him,

Of course, the third option is that Colin isn't a child predator or mentally ill, and he's the same Colin Wall we met in the early pages of the book. If that's the case, then Rowling is trying to fake me out. For example, Tessa was recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and she is frustrated that Colin and their son don't seem terribly concerned about it. This is because their son wants to be a sociopath when he grows up, and her husband is too wrapped up in his own minor problems to worry about her major ones. Oh, he was worried when she told him about the diagnosis, but once she explained that it wasn't a terminal condition, he dropped it completely. He is running for office, after all.

So the question is: Does this make Tessa a jerk for expecting sympathy from a guy with much bigger problems to cope with, or is Tessa a jerk for enabling Colin's bad behavior? All we know for sure is that Tessa didn't give birth to their son. The parentage of Stuart "Fats" Wall has been teased for a while now, with no reveal in sight. Did Colin impregnate one of his students? Has Tessa been covering for that indiscretion all this time?

Anyway, the group was originally meeting to discuss Colin's campaign, but the conversation has shifted to their kids getting jobs. Parminder resents that her daughter Sukhvinder is working part-time for Howard Mollison's deli. The Walls don't see a problem with that, since their son appears to have no ambition whatsoever. Parmidner's husband doesn't mind the part-time job becasue he has to admit that Sukhvinder's dyslexia is probably going to keep her from going to college, so she might as well start getting used to the workforce. Parminder doesn't buy any of this. She seems offended that one of her kids is anything less than spectacular at school, and ashamed that she would settle for waitressing when she doesn't need the money. Something tells me Parminder would be equally offended if Sukhvinder mooched off of her for the rest of her life.

I mean, there's two ways you can look at it. You can either be proud of your kid for applying herself, or you can question whether your kid is applying herself in the right direction. Parminder seems to think waitressing is beneath her family somehow, but let's face it, Sukhvinder's in high school, and her grades were bad before she took the job. Apple computers isn't going to be interviewing her anytime soon. I could see Parminder's disapproval if she wanted Sukhvinder to have some other afterschool activity. The rowing team appears to be dissolved for the time being, after all. But a job's a job, and as long as her grades don't get worse, what's the diff? But Parminder seems frustrated with the very idea of Sukhvinder as she is. It's like she expects a fairy godmother to show up and transform Sukhvinder into an MIT valedictorian, and every day that doesn't happen is all Sukhvinder's fault. It's kind of bullshit.

The matter of her working for her mom's political adversary is a little more complex, but let's be honest, there's only so many places to work in Pagford. Parminder sees it as a personal attack by Sukhvinder, or Howard, or both. And hell, maybe it is, but it's also extremely petty of Parminder to assume it off the bat like this. Seriously, Howard's enemies seem to think he's a secret racist or some sort of monster, but he did give Sukhvinder a chance when almost no one else would. Is he really the bad guy in all of this? Fangirls would probably rush to his defense, if only he had a sexier body...

VII. Back in the Price household, Andrew begins to wonder if his Ghost Message was even worth all the trouble. For maybe a week he begins to wonder if it's had any effect at all. But then his dad finally calls to withdraw from the race, due to changes in his "personal circumstances". Andrew is overjoyed to have finally defeated his father, even if no one else knows. Then Simon orders Andrew to spy on Howard Mollison when he works at the deli. He promises to put any dirt Andrew finds on the website as revenge. That's pretty dumb, considering Howard's wife runs the website. Yeah, she runs it poorly, but Simon doesn't understand that. Also, Simon's computer is in the river, so that might slow him down a little.

Andrew thinks the entire episode is over and done with, but he doesn't realize that this ghost business is "the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation." Fuck you, J.K. Rowling. This is your way of saying there's a lot more plot to go, but it rings false when it took this long for that "tiny bubble" to form in the first place. Pagford is supposed to EXPLODE INTO WAR~! any day now. Suuuurrreee it will. Stop promising and do it already.

VIII. Gaia Bawden hates living in Pagford. I don't blame her.

This section is all about Gaia, but there's really not much to be said. She's aware that Andrew Price has the hots for her, but she doesn't care, because she's used to being ogled by boys, and none of the dudes in Pagford and Yarvil compare to her boyfriend from London. She had sex with that guy like four times in a row or something, partly as a going-away ceremony, and partly to protest moving at all. She had a lot of cool friends in London and she still misses them, and the worst part is that she had to lose them all so her idiot mom could move to the boonies to pursue a spineless clod who doesn't even return her affections. None of this is much of a shock. A girl Gaia's age would probably hate her mother for one reason or another anyway, and Gavin's frustrating enough just to read about; Gaia actually has to share the bathroom with him.

Turns out, she's only befriended Sukhvinder as a silent protest of her situation. She noticed Sukhvinder was overlooked and despised by everyone at school, so she started hanging out with her for that very reason. The whole point is that Gaia finds everyone at school useless, so getting closer to Sukhvinder shows the extent of her contempt.

Gaia reveals this contempt to Sukhvinder, and Sukhvinder can't help but envy her. At least Gaia's life used to be fun. She used to have cool friends. And she's still attractive, so even if she turns up her nose at the entire school, half the students are still infatuated with her.

As they walk outside, Krystal Weedon tries to confront Sukhvinder, blaming her mom for killing her grandmother. Coincidentally, one of Sukhvinder's sisters happens along with a posse of boys, and this gives Krystal and her posse pause. I shouldn't have put the word "posse" so close to "pause". That was wrong, and I apologize. Sukhvinder now realizes that Krystal will be out to get her from now on, just like Fats. Not long after, she decides to play truant, seeing it as her only way out of danger. But before she gets very far, Tessa Wall happens by in her car.

Tessa takes her to her office, and Sukhvinder spills her guts about the abortive run-in with Krystal. Something about Tessa's body language bugs Sukhvinder, and she interprets this--rightly or wrongly--as reluctance to pursue the matter. Tessa is sympathetic to Parminder, and perhaps reluctant to deal with a hardcase like Krystal, and maybe she favors Krystal like Barry Fairbrother used to. Also, Tessa's son has been harassing her for years, so that also pisses her off.

Like the Terminator once said, anger is more useful than despair, and Sukhvinder taps into that anger. She suggests that Krystal may have heard about Parminder's role in Cath Weedon's death from Tessa's son. She also informs Tessa that Krystal and Fats have been seeing each other, to Tessa's surprise.

It's not entirely clear what Sukhvinder hopes to gain from this. Maybe nothing. She seems satisfied enough that Tessa is visibly unsettled by these revelations. Sukhvinder seems to be learning how to take out her frustrations on other people instead of cutting herself, so maybe all she wanted was to make someone else have a little taste of her own dread and inadequacy. On the other hand, if Sukhvinder is shooting for the moon, maybe she thinks she can get Fats in trouble simply for associating with Krystal, or for passing along sensitive information when he shouldn't. Or maybe Sukhvinder wants to spread the word around that her mom is under fire. We'll come back to that later.

IX. Disgusted with Miles Mollison's contempt for the Bellchapel Clinic, and also digusted with Gavin's indifference, Kay Bawden stupidly assumes that Colin Wall would be a good political ally, since he's running against Miles on the opposite platform. Kay's a social worker, you see, and she believes that the Bellchapel Clinic is one of the things keeping the Fields community going. I've never fully understood the politics of it, but it's one of the milestones of the Fields debate in the Parish Council. The pro-Fielders want to keep the Bellchapel Clinic going, the anti-Fielders want to cut funding, or cancel the lease, or bulldoze the whole thing. I don't know exactly. The point appears to be that whoever wins the argument over the rehab clinic will secure the fate of The Fields.

Apparently Kay is good-looking enough that when she shows up asking to see Colin for the first time, Tessa briefly wonders if Colin is having an affair with her. This is patently stupid, and Tessa recognizes it as such. Colin is nervous at first, but once he realizes that Kay isn't here to investigate him, he warms up to her very quickly. At last he has someone who's interested in his campaign. The Weedon family quickly comes up, and suddenly Colin is behind Krystal 100%, even though he gave her detention early in the book.

While Kay and Colin discuss strategy, Tessa ponders what Sukhvinder told her. She can't quite wrap her brain around Fats and Krystal being involved, and that bothers her. She also feels uneasy about how she convinced Krystal not to pursue a vendetta against the Jawanda kids. Krystal agreed to leave them alone, but this may have eroded the bond of trust between Tessa and Krystal. For no good reason, Tessa flashes back to when Barry founded the rowing team and convinced Krystal to join up. For various reasons, Barry could get through to Krystal, and Tessa's worried that no one else will be able to reach her the same way. But that's been the trouble all along, hasn't it? Every time a character misses Barry, it's always in a context of Barry being able to persuade others or smooth over uncomfortable situations with his good-natured personality. Barry could fix it, Barry would know what to do, if only Barry were here, etc. etc. etc. Now Barry's dead, and Krystal's actual teachers, guidance counselors, principals, and community leaders are all throwing up their hands and giving up. Even the ones that claim to support her don't seem to know how. Tessa is a professional guidance counselor. It's her damn job to "reach" Krystal, all while balancing that responsibility with the needs of the other students. She's not allowed to abdicate that responsibility and wish Barry was still here to handle it for her. He was only volunteering anyway, so whatever help he provided in life was gravy. His death ends all of that, but it never should have been taken for granted in the first place.

X. Back to Sukhvinder Jawanda. She hasn't told her siblings about her truancy, or that Krystal blames their mom for Nanna Cath's death. That said, she knows her parents will find out, because Tessa explained that she has to let them know. Tessa promised to explain why Sukhvinder tried to cut class, but Parminder is pissed about her getting a job, so you can imagine how well truancy is going to go over with her.

Parminder confronts Sukhvinder about the incident, and she's apparently been pre-pissed from some sort of family matter back in India. Something about a patch of farmland, I don't want to go into it if it's not important. Anyway, the fact that Krystal threatened Sukhvinder is completely lost on Doctor J. She's only focused on the truancy, and she's mega-defensive about the rumors surrounding her role in Cath Weedon's death. Parminder doesn't get it. She doesn't appreciate that Sukhvinder was in real danger. Instead, she seems to think Sukhvinder should have tried to defend her mother to Krystal, as if Krystal had challenged her to a debate.

This is interesting to me, because Parminder is supposed to be sticking up for people like Krystal Weedon because she's from the Fields, right? But instead she's just pissed at Krystal for impugning her qualifications as a doctor. Then you've got Tessa who likes Krystal in theory, until she starts getting involved with her son. And Colin's pro-Krystal as long as she doesn't act out in school or accuse him of any hanky-panky. The Mollisons hate Krystal because she punched one of their kids in kindergarten or something, but at least they're honest about it. And at least they give a shit when their kids are in trouble, which is more than I can say for Parminder right now.

I'm beginning to see why Sikhs aren't very happy with how they're portrayed in this book. As far as I can tell, Vikram shaves daily, so I'm not even sure he's a practicing Sikh at all. Parminder comes off like some kind of "Tiger Mother", which is really more of a Chinese stereotype, but I can't imagine Sikhs would approve of it being applied to them, either. Sukhvinder seems less than committed to the Sikh religion, and Rowling rather simplistically blames this on her learning disability: the Sikh holy texts are difficult for Sukhvinder to read, so she hasn't studied them as diligently as the rest of her family might believe. The implication here is that Western religions are way easier. I find that a little hard to swallow. Certainly, from a social standpoint, it's probably tough being a Sikh in a predominantly Christian culture, but I don't think dyslexia is a barrier to spirituality. I'd like to use Sukhvinder's siblings for reference, since they don't have learning disabilities, but we barely get to know them in the book, so I have no idea how committed they are to Sikhism. The bottom line is that this book really only has two Sikh characters of note, and one of them is miserable and the other one is so tightly wound up she could snap at any minute. It wouldn't be difficult to read into this that Sikhism Doesn't Work, and that's probably what got the Sikh community upset. Rowling probably didn't intend for that to be the message, but it would have helped if there was a more positive portrayal of Sikhism in a third character. If only Barry were here. He knew a cool Sikh from college who appreciated his kids.

Anyway, Sukhvinder goes to bed early. She wants to get out her razor and start cutting herself to deal with the pain, but she has to wait for her whole family to go to bed first, and that's gonna be a while. In the meantime, her frustration leads her to other outlets, and she goes on the Pagford website.

Okay, here's the deal. Andrew learned how to hack from a computer class in school. The technique he used was incredibly simple, and any website worth its salt would have had defenses against it. But it's still a hack. As I recall, the teacher that day probably got way off the lesson plan or something like that. The point is, Sukhvinder was in that same class, and she researched the same trick online, so she can do it too. And while Shirley Mollison had taken down the post by "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother", she neglected to delete the account. So Sukhvinder can exploit the exact same security flaw and do the exact same thing Andrew Price did for the exact same reason. How convenient.

The only real difference here is that Sukhvinder has different dirt to reveal about her mother, and she's brazen enough to use her own computer to do the deed. She knows Parminder won't check her internet history, or even suspect Sukhvinder, because that would require Parminder to care, and that's apparently beyond her. So up goes another message from The Ghost. We don't know what it says yet, but I'm sure Rowling will explain it to us five times, as five different groups of characters discover it independently.

XI. Okay, this is the part I warned you about up at the top. Last chance to turn back. I'm taking a Marty Robbins Break before we do this...

Terri refuses to go to Catherine Weedon's funeral, probably out of shame, bitterness, anxiety, and some other words I'm probably forgetting. Krystal plans to take Robbie to the funeral, but when she realizes that Terri plans to meet up with Obbo, her pusher, she decides to stay, so she can't make sure Terri doesn't get high again.

Obbo comes over and offers Terri some heroin, but Krystal keeps telling her to send him away. Ultimately, Terri declines to accept more drugs, since she's planning to go to bed soon, and it looks like Krystal may have won the day. Thinking Obbo has left, she goes into the kitchen, only to find that Obbo has followed her instead. He rapes Krystal and leaves. The scene is as visceral as it is brief, but I'm not terribly interested in recapping it in that level of detail, so forget it.

Terri comes back to the kitchen and Krystal tells her what happened. Of course, Terri denies it, which is probably a realistic first reaction, but it also plays into her lifelong pattern of denying everything. Krystal shoves her aside in a fit of anger and leaves the house. She doesn't really know for sure where she's going, and I'm pretty sure she's just trying to get away from where she was more than anything else.

Krystal weighs her options in spite of her panic. The police are out of the question, because Terri Weedon basically. I don't know what exactly Terri has to do with not wanting to call the police, but I can believe it. Shortly after the act, she sobbed "I'll tell Mister Fairbrother," without really thinking, and she realizes that her first impulse was to go to him, even weeks after his death. He would have understood, or at least known what to do.

With disgust, Krystal considers the possibility of becoming pregnant by Obbo, and resolves to ask one of her friends about the morning-after pill at the earliest opportunity. She briefly considers Kay Bawden, but as far as she's concerned, telling a social worker would be worse than the police, since it would surely break up the family. And Nana Cath is dead, so no good there, either.

At last she has a revelation: If she were to become pregnant by Fats Wall, the Wall family might set her up in her own place, if only to quietly ensure the safety of her child. Then she could have her brother Robbie live with her and the baby, and they'd be safe from Obbo and from Terri's spiral of self-destruction. The only downside she can see is that Fats would dump her once she became pregnant, but she didn't particularly care about that. Besides, he might be different from most boys, so you never can tell. Krystal becomes convinced that having a baby will solve all her problems whether the father is in the picture or not, and with that settled, she heads for her friend Nikki's place to tend to her immediate needs.

All right, I've been trying to figure out how to interpret all of this, and this is what I've come up with.

My initial reaction was disgust and frustration. We've already seen references to Terri being sexually abused by her father during her childhood. Present-day Terri is a heroin addict on the verge of ruin. Robbie and Krystal live in squalor. Colin Wall may or may not be harassing his students. If he's not, then he may have serious mental health issues, but it's too soon to say. Sukhvinder engages in self-harm to cope with bullying. Simon Price routinely beats his wife and children. And on top of all of that, Rowling decided to add a rape scene to the book? Gee, do you think that's enough? You sure you don't want to add some necrophilia for good measure? Maybe a really graphic car accident or two?

The other thing is that all of the worst stuff happens to Krystal. Barry dies, her grandmother dies, Fats is using her for sex (even if the feeling is mutual), and now she gets raped on top of everything else. Her plan to bear children to escape her hellish life is pathetic, because she doesn't fully realize how little other people care about her. The Walls aren't going to buy her a house, I'm pretty sure of that. Hell, Colin might murder her and dump her in the river with Simon's computer just to keep her from sabotaging his campaign. I'm only half-kidding.

Look, we get it, Rowling, you can do dark. The problem is you can't do it very well. What amuses me about this book is that it stands in stark contrast to the "darker" entries in the Harry Potter series. Books 5, 6, and 7, Harry swears more and characters die off, and everyone fawns over how "dark" the series has gotten. Bullshit. I applaud Vacancy for setting a higher standard for darkness, but like everything else Rowling does, she lays it on too thick. Everyone in the book is some sort of predator, a victim, or an apathetic. The only beacons of light in this septic tank of a novel are the dead characters. I hear all about what Barry would have done and it sounds like it might have been a better story. I'd rather watch someone try to fix this world than Samantha Mollison or Tessa Wall lament it.

On the other hand...

In trying to think of a way to approach the topic of rape, I remembered the novel Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. My dad's a big Clancy fan, and he enjoys listening to the audiobook versions of his work. At one time, I ripped all of his RSR CD's and made a smaller set of MP3 discs, since the stereo in his truck can play those. I spent a lot of time on the project, mostly sorting the tracks so each disc would begin at the start of a chapter. This meant listening to the first few seconds of each track to make sure when the chapters began and ended. During this process, I heard the narrator very professionally utter the words "Chapter Twenty-Four. Rape."

Years later, I actually listened to the book for myself, and found out what the story was behind that infamous chapter. The main plot of RSR is that the Soviet Union instigates a Third World War, nominally for the sake of avenging a phoney terrorist attack, but in actuality the war is a pretext for conquering the Persian Gulf states to alleviate a looming oil shortage. Knowing that NATO will interfere, they employ a grand strategy to cut off supply lines between the U.S. and Europe. This relies heavily on a Soviet occupation of Iceland, and only a handful of American troops stationed in Iceland survive the invasion. So one of the subplots in the book is about three Marines and an Air Force meteorologist who are stuck on Soviet-occupied Iceland. At one point, they come upon a farmhouse hoping to obtain supplies. Turns out a band of Russian soldiers beat them to it, and their commanding officer is in the middle of raping a pregnant woman in the bedroom. The Americans take the house, killing the Russian invaders, and the Air Force officer chooses to execute the rapist on the spot, since there's no due process behind enemy lines. For the rest of the book, the four soldiers take the woman along with them as they try to avoid capture and report Soviet activity to NATO command.

Now, what impressed me about the Iceland subplot was that it was a pretty cool adventure in and of itself. Clancy could have published that portion of the novel by itself and it would have been well-received. Large parts of RSR are used to describe strategy and troop movements, rather than the boots-on-the-ground aspect of the war. Civilians are virtually invisible in the book. The Icelandic woman is one of the few non-military characters, and the only woman of any consequence. Maybe Clancy only did it to keep the plot moving, but he made her into a very strong person. Despite the trauma, despite her parents' death at the hands of the Russians, despite the conquest and occupation of her country, despite being four months' pregnant, she was still able to keep up with the marines as they marched around the countryside on foot. This was partly explained by the fact that she was a local from a rural part of the country, so she was used to that level of physical activity. The soldiers are extremely mindful of what she's been through, even though they aren't sure what to do for her, and their circumstances don't allow them time to figure it out. In the end, they respect her a great deal for being able to handle so much adversity in such a short amount of time. It's a story about the endurance of the human spirit. You want her to go to the hospital and take some time to process everything that's happened to her, but it's just not in the cards. She has to endure another ordeal, wandering around with a bunch of strange men and trying not to get shot at. When they do rest, all the pent up grief and torment starts to come back to her, and she has to deal with that as best she can. But she does endure, and she makes it to the end of the book in one piece.

I think Rowling is going for a similar thing here. Krystal Weedon is the avatar of this whole Fields issue. Some people want to write her off as a loss or foist her onto someone else's jurisdiction, but that's not an option for Krystal because she is Krystal Weedon. In her world, society is fundamentally broken. Her own mother is a liability, social workers are hamstrung by the law, and the law is decided by uncaring, self-absorbed politicians. The few people she could turn to are gradually being wiped out, and bad things continue to happen to her. In spite of all this, she continues on, weathering the storm as best she can, constantly trying to manage the situation. While other characters are giving into despair or revenge, she's still hanging on, despite far greater hardships.

If that's the case, then maybe there's something worthwhile about doing a scene like this. But that's a big "if". At the moment, it feels more like Rowling is just crossing off a bucket list of heinous crimes and social ills. I think the only thing left is child pornography.

Ugh... I think I'm just gonna call it quits for now. Hopefully the book lightens up a little from here, but I'm not counting on it.

NEXT: Episode Four, An Old Dope...

Part Three I, II, III, IV, V, or "Robert Galbraith's 'Duplicity'"

mike_smith — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 13:08:02 GMT

All right, I'm a little unsure about this, but I've had a long talk with my doctor, and he's decided that I'm medically cleared to review J.K. Rowling books.

Wait....

MEANWHILE

MIKE: Are you sure? I mean, my ankle bothers me a little in the morning when I get up. What if reading J.K. Rowling books aggrivates that?

DR. TUBBY: Bark! You went back to work six months ago.

MIKE: Well, yeah... but I get paid to put up with that. Can I at least take more Vicodin while I do this?

DR. TUBBY: I prescribe two hot dogs! One for me, and also the last bite of the one you eat.

MIKE: Ugh... okay.

PART III: Robert Galbraith's "Duplicity".

It might be amusing if I tried to recap the first half the book from memory, but I'd rather just dive in and try to explain things as we go. As with Parts One and Two, this section opens with a quote from some sort of small-town governance handbook. I don't know if it's real or not, and I don't care. It cautions against a resolution with multiple subjects, since this creates confusion. Sort of like how this book is all about one major political crisis, but there's like nine hundred other conflicts going on at the same time. Ugh.

I. Paraminder Jawanda is locked in a desperate political battle against Howard Mollison, over the fate of some crappy neighborhood that blah blah blah. They're both on the town council, leading respective factions councillors. Or senators. I forget how they do it in Wherever-the-hell-it-is England. The drama of this book is that it's a small town, which means bitter enemies must coexist with each other in different aspects of life, since there's only like forty people in this town, and they bump into each other constantly.

For example, Parminder is the local doctor, and Howard is a morbidly obese sextegenarian. So even though she hates his guts, she's aslo requried to examine him carefully while he's nude. I bet that sounds fascinating, so let's check that out!

Hey, guess what it's gross and passive aggressive. What an unconventional approach for Rowling! I'm being sarcastic, you see. Howard's too much of a control freak to simply submit to a medical examination, so he spends the entire time reminding Doctor J that the Bellchapel Clinic is on the agenda at the town council later on. He also informs her that he's writing a piece for the local paper to represent his side of the Fields Debate. This is his reaction to the fact that Barry Fairbrother wrote an article representing the other side of that argument, and he sent it to the paper just before he dropped dead of a stroke. I think it was a stroke. He's dead either way. Barry had been the leader of the pro-Fields council members, but his death has left Parminder to take up his cause.

Okay, this whole crappy plot is starting to come back to me. Barry's death also created an open seat on the council, which is known as a "casual vacancy" in political jargon. If Howard Mollison plays his cards right, he can get a new guy elected who will back his side and break the stalemate. But I guess he's also hoping to contain whatever Barry wrote in his editorial. He asks Parminder if she has a copy of what he wrote, but no one has seen the article, since the paper hasn't printed it yet. I think Barry's been dead for like two weeks at this point, so I don't know what the hold up is. At any rate, Barry didn't share it with Parminder before he died, so Howard will have to write a counterpoint without it.

While this is going on, he takes off his shirt and hoists up his gut so Parminder can check out the rash on his waistline, which is all sore from scratching and chafing and I really don't want to discuss this further. Like every doctor ever, she takes his blood pressure and suggests he try to lose weight. Astonishingly, Howard is offended by this routine medical practice, and points out that he doesn't need to see a nutritionist because he runs a deli for a living. Okay. Now that I think about it, Ronald McDonanld looks pretty healthy for his age. Maybe you learn something when you sell food long enough. Parminder is concerned with his blood pressure, which is too high despite all the medication Howard is already taking for it. He doesn't seem too worried about this, and I'm really hoping this scene is designed to foreshadow Howard's untimely death. This is an interesting dilemma for Rowling, because the only thing she relishes more than killing characters is disappointing me, so it'll be interesting to see which impulse wins out.

Also, Catherine "Nana Cath" Weedon died. I forget it that already happened, or if this is new information. I'm pretty sure she was dying when she was introduced, but there you go.

II. "Wha' d'you wan'?" Oh, good, more cockney eye dialect! That was clearly wha' I wan', and I'm so grateful to have it.

Yeah, we're back to the Weedon family, now that the matriarch of the clan has died. Local junkie Terri Weedon is greeted by her sister, who informs her of their mother's death. Grandmother? I never knew for sure. I always figured there were fewer generations than what was presented. Like Krystal Weedon's little brother was actually her son or something like that.

Anyway, this is Terri's sister Cheryl, and another sister Danielle, is after Nana Cath's house. They agree to prevent Danielle from claiming the entire property for herself, although Danielle has resources like "a landline", and "knows how to fill out paperwork". So it's probably an uphill battle. Cheryl's husband once set a house on fire, though, so maybe they've got a decent chance. You never know how these inheritance battles will play out.

Terri really wants to use heroin to cope with her grandmother's death, but I guess she's fresh out. She feels bitter that Nana Cath cut ties with her years ago over her drug use. And yet, she was on very good terms with her other grandchildren, great-grandchildren, step-grandchildren.... everybody but Terri, I guess.

Turns out this whole section is some sort of Secret Origin of Terri Weedon. I should probably read these things in advance so I'll be more prepared. Did we need a Secret Origin of Terri Weedon? Is she that important to the book? I figured she was gonna die before it was over. Granted, I'm counting on a lot of characters to die soon, but Rowling already killed off Nana Cath and Barry Fairbrother. I was beginning to feel like I was on a roll.

Secret Origin of Terri Weedon: Her dad (Mikey) abused her as a kid, both physically and sexually. Nana Cath visited her in the hospital after her dad threw hot grease at her. Cath took her to her own home, where she was safe, but then her dad came and took her back, beating both women up in the process. Somewhere in all of this Terri's mom left the family, and her sisters moved in with their boyfriends, leaving Terri to face her father's abuse alone. Eventually she ran away at age thirteen, and presumably she got addicted to heroin and turned to prostitution. Rowling put a lot of this in parentheses for some reason.

Anyway, she goes to her pusher's place to get some heroin, but he's not in, and two girls pass by on the street and call her a whore. Fantastic.

Rowling is a Brilliant Writer: In the flashbacks, Terri recalls how she petted and hugged a horse during a school field trip. "I like horses", she told Nanna Cath once. Cath gave her a horse figurine. See? It's symbolic! Horse = Heroin! The guy at the field trip said that the horse wouldn't hurt her. Just like you're feelin' no pain on the sweet, sweet high of heroin! Also: "The smell had intoxicated her." See, the smell of a horse is like a metaphor for using heroin! It's genius no it is not.

III. Gavin and Mary meet to discuss insurance issues! I have to admit, I'm starting to miss the magic boarding school backdrop. Not that they ever did anything more exciting at the magic boarding school, but at least you could imagine a paining rolling its eyes in sympathy.

Gavin is a single lawyer, trapped in a loveless relationship with Kay, who has deluded herself into thinking she can totally make this work through pure force of will. Like everyone in the book, he is incredibly self-absorbed. It's been hinted that he might have some sort of romantic chemistry with the Widow Fairbrother. Mary is also self-absorbed to some extent, but her husband died and the insurance company won't pay out, so at least she has a right to be worried about herself.

Gavin and Kay had a big fight (again), this time over his conduct at the Mollison dinner party. I hate Gavin and Kay, or Gav-kay, as I like to call them in the imaginary tabloid I run in my head. There's never any character development. According to my Kindle I'm 51% of the way through this piece of crap book, and every update Rowling gives of their relationship status is just a repeat of what I already knew. Kay moved to Pagdford with her teenage daughter, and she feels this act alone entitles her to Gavin's undying devotion. Gavin was never worth her uprooting her life, and instead of making the best of her mistake, she browbeats him for her lack of judgement. Gavin could easily get out of the relationship by saying nothing and letting her anger proceed to the obvious conclusion. But he has no spine, and he's terrified that Kay will turn everyone in Pagford against him if he doesn't maintain the relationship. His ideal solution would be for her to just inexplicably vanish and go back to London where she came from, except that's not going to happen. I don't see why he doesn't just pack up and move to London himself, since he's a bachelor and has little to uproot. The point here is that nothing has changed since they were first introduced in the book. Rowling wants me to think that dinner party and the fight that followed was some sort of turning point, or at least and escalation, but it doesn't actually change anything. Kay is too afraid of being alone, and Gavin is too afraid of the fallout of a nasty breakup. I kind of hope he falls for Mary Fairbrother, because that's the only way to shift the equilibrium.

Anyway, Gavin shows up at Mary's place to find her in tears. Remember that time Andrew Price hacked the Pagford website and posted a message under Barry's inactive account? Andrew's intent was to use Barry as a way to anonymously discredit his father, but it looks like he's caused some collateral damage. Mary's seen it, and she thinks someone's playing a terrible prank at her expense.

Gavin pours Mary a drink to take her mind off "The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother". It's not that he's trying to get her toasted, he just wants to get out of the den full of Barry's mementos. Neither of them seriously believe Barry is haunting the Pagford City Council website, but Gavin feels really self-conscious getting so cozy with his dead buddy's widow. As for Mary, the idea of her husband campaigning for the Fields from the afterlife brings up the resentment she had before he died. She speculates that he's up in City Council Heaven, still thinking about Krystal Weedon first and his family second, because he figures his family has people to support them, while Krystal has no one. After all, he spent most of their anniversary writing that damn editorial about the Fields and Krystal Weedon and whatever else. Mary is sick of all the political nonsense, and she's sick of her husband's vacant council seat, and "The Ghost of Barry" reminds her of all of it. This is kind of a shock to Gavin, who always assumed the Fairbrother marriage was flawless. But here's Barry's wife to tell him "He gave everything to everybody. Except to me." Bam.

Huh, well they never do get around to the insurance matter. Mary invites him to stay for dinner, and he readily accepts. I guess this turned out better than I expected. The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother is rapidly becoming my favorite character.

TGOBF: BooooOOOOOOooooo!

MIKE: Oh, for the love of...

TGOBF: Pleeeeaaase! Tell my wife! Pleaaasse!

MIKE: Tell her what? Why can't you just haunt her and save a step? Or post it on the message board?

TGOBF: Tell her.... what I should have told her in liiiiiife! Tell her that... although I never said it directly....

MIKE: Yeah?

TGOBF: The truth is, I always meant to say it to her....

MIKE: Right...

TGOBF: Tell her.... to callllll the newspaaaaaper!

MIKE: What the hell?

TGOBF: Tell her to call the paper and let them know that the article I sent them was double spaaaaaaaaaced! I wasn't sure how they wanted it formatted, so I guessed!

MIKE: Get the hell out of here, Barry.

TGOBF: WooooOOOOOooooooooo!

IV. Let's check in with the Mollison Family, even though we sort of checked in with one of them already, and learned way more information than I really wanted to know. See, Catherine Weedon died yesterday! Maureen, Howard's business partner, heard the news from Doctor Jawanda's receptionist! Yeah, I heard about it, too, because I read about how Howard was there in the doctor's office when the receptionist was talking about it. Maybe Howard wasn't paying attention, or he knew he'd hear the full story from Maureen or his wife in any event. The point is that I read this part already, so I don't see why Rowling has to beat me over the head with it. She's dead. We don't need a reaction from every third character in the book. Even if we did, we already went through this same process with Barry's death. If you're so determined on this course, kill Howard and let's have every third character react to his death, and then repeat the cycle until there's no one left.

Seriously, how did anyone not recognize her when she wrote under a pen name? I'm not saying I would have caught her myself, but it seems to me that she can't help but re-establish information over and over again, as if her readers all have short-term amnesia or something. I took an eight month hiatus and I still remember who Cath Weedon is, and that she was dying, and she chewed out Dr. Jawanda in public not long before she croaked.

Danielle Fowler wants an investigation into Doctor J's culpability for Cath's death. Maybe I lost track somewhere, but I don't know that Doc actually caused anything bad to happen. The Mollisons are thrilled to see their rival scandalized like this, but I'm pretty sure Danielle is just blowing smoke. We'll see. And then we'll probably see a second and third time, as the Weedons and Mollisons separately react to each development as it happens.

Howard's wife Shirley is jealous that Maureen has scooped her on the juicy gossip (it's in the paper, though, so I don't see why either of them would have the inside track). She festers in the kitchen for a while, waiting for Maureen to stop hoggin' the gossip spotlight, but then she sees something important! I'm guessing it's something I already know about.

Samantha Mollison takes this moment to reinforce her spite for everything her in-laws stand for. She hates Shirley, she hates Howard, she resents Maureen for always hanging out with them. This is ironic, because she wonders why Maureen is always around even though Maureen might ask Samantha the same question. At least Maureen seems to enjoy Howard's company. Samantha imagines crushing the entire Mollison estate and chucking it into the sun. Let's just leave that sort of criticism to me, okay?

Yep, they just found out about the post from "The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother." Super. And of course we have to go over this story all over again, even though Mary just explained it all a few pages ago, and even though there was a whole part of the book depicting Andrew Price hacking the website and writing his screed in Barry's name. What really drives me nuts is that we're guarenteed at least one more round of this bullshit, because we need to have Simon Price respond to the allegations against him. Of course, Rowling could just cut to the chase, but no. No, she can't possibly do that. I want to crush this book and throw it into the sun.

Howard relates this information to Maureen and Samantha, and of course he drags it out, teasing the username attached the post as offensive. Samantha guesses "Big-Fat-Cock", which would be an excellent handle for a Casual Vacancy tumblr account, except it's 2013 and I'm pretty sure I'm the last man on Earth who still gives a shit about The Causal Vacancy. Once she hears the actual username, Samantha is genuinely offended, seeing as she rode in the ambulance with Barry as he died.

Miles Mollison wonders if this anonymous busybody might be out to sabotage his candidacy along with Price's, and Howard informs him that he received an anonymous letter the other day that claims Miles is unfit to replace Barry Fairbrother. I vaguely remember that letter being written, but I can't recall who sent it now. Howard thinks it's the same guy who vandalized the message board, since both messages reference Barry in a similar fashion. That's kind of dumb, since the election is for Barry's successor, so any commentary about any candidate would inevitably reference Barry in some way. Samantha suggests that the crank might have a completely separate agenda against Simon Price, but the others dismiss this. No, they're convinced that the pro-Fields faction is behind this smear campaign.

Samantha finds this ridiculous, since this is a family of nobodies in a small town of nobodies, acting like anything that goes on in their little fiefdom is anything resembling a major political scandal. The rest of them are convinced that only and insider could have hacked the website, and Samantha likens this situation to microorganisms living inside an insignificant drop of water. You'd think that when Rowling wrote this paragraph she would have stared at it for a minute, deleted her draft, and started over. I guess Samantha isn't her alter ego. I sort of wish she were.

"Consciously and defiantly", Samantha withdraws from the conversation and ignores them so she can fantasize about hot boys half her age. This is where I lose all sympathy for Samantha. She gets that the Mollisons are gum on the shoe of the world, but she's too self-important to notice that she herself is like a fragment of asphalt stuck to the gum on the shoe. If the Mollisons are puffed-up nobodies, that makes her even less. She dismisses their pointless conversation, but they don't even care if she listens or not, so what does that say about her? She hates them because if it distracts her from hating herself even more.

Samantha zones out for maybe minutes or hours, she isn't sure. Meanwhile, Shirley gets a call from Ruth Price. Everyone assumes it's about the post on the website about her husband, but it's not. Her son Andrew works at Howard's deli part time, and he's allergic to peanuts, so she called to ask if they could store an adrenaline needle in the deli's fridge as a precaution. Somewhat awkwardly, Shirley informs Ruth about the allegations on the website. So yeah, another friggin' round of this crap.

V. Who's ready for another friggin' round of this crap? Simon Price sure isn't!

All right, quick recap of the Price family. Simon's the abusive dad who steals and does under-the-table deals at his job at the printworks. Ruth works at the hospital, and she's simultaneously terrified and flattered by her husband's attention. Paul is their youngest son, and hasn't really been of much consquence, except that Simon frequently calls him "Pauline" and makes other emasculating comments towards him when he's upset. Finally, Andrew Price, the older son, despises Simon, and he's getting big enough and smart enough to do something about it. Earlier in the book, he hacked the Pagford website as the Ghost of Barry Fairbother. This wasn't just a prank to ruin his father's day. Andrew is terrified that if his father runs for public office, the entire family will be humiliated once the outside world finds out what a belligerent little turd Simon Price really is. So he risked sabotaging his dad anonymously rather than endure the slow torture of his doomed campaign.

The flaw in his plan is that Simon would have to find out about the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother eventually, and he would lash out at his wife and sons whether he knew Andrew was behind it or not. As we saw, Ruth finds out from Shirley Mollison, and after she looks up the site to see for herself, she mournfully passes the word along to her husband, figuring that it would be better than letting him find out for himself. Simon hits her twice, so I'd hate to find out what the worst case scenario was supposed to be. She admits that she mentioned their new computer to Shirley Mollison, even though he explicitly told her and boys to keep it a secret from everyone. Paul also mentioned it, and he's furious, even though neither of them told anyone it was stolen.

Andrew tries to defend his mother and takes some blows of his own. He gets a small measure of revenge by dodging a wild kick, and Simon breaks a toe on the fireplace. Well, good. I was kind of rooting for Andrew to take advantage of this opening, but instead, he reminds Simon that the message on the board also accuses him of other things besides stealing computers. That was the point, after all. Andrew went out of his way to include accusations that would be more easily traced back to Simon's co-workers, so Simon wouldn't blame his family. That's all well and good, but Simon was never Mr. Logic in the first place. Andrew should have known he was putting his brother and mother in harm's way with this stunt no matter what. The thing is, Simon would havee probably attacked them all in any event. Certainly, this was going to happen once he lost the election. My guess is Andrew went ahead with the Ghost of Barry message because he had nothing to lose. So be it, but he should have accepted that no amount of spin was going to curb his father's wrath.

Simon finally draws his own conclusion and blames everything on Shirley Mollison. Ruth leaked the computer to Shirley, Shirley is the admin on the website, and Shirley's son Miles is running against him. There's some holes in that theory, but I don't think he could bring himself to admit that his son is smart enough to be the culprit. Besides, this scandal may well cost Simon his job, and that's not exactly good news for Andrew, right?

Angrily, Simon goes into damage control mode and orders Andrew to unplug the computer and come with him. I assume they're gonna bury it in the woods to destroy the evidence? That might not be good enough, but Simon didn't get into this predicament by being smart.

And we're gonna shut it down for the day. The whole Ghost storyline seems to be the catalyst for the "war" I was promised in the publisher's description. Remember that? Well, the battle lines have been drawn for a long time, but this is the closest we've come to a first shot being fired. At the very least, it changes the dynamics a little. Simon Price hates the Mollisons, Gavin's bonding with Mary, and the Mollisons think their established opponents are racheting up their conflict. Swell, except the friggin' book is more than half over. Sheesh.

NEXT: People continue to react to the ghost, and I become annoyed.

A Weekend at the Books.

mike_smith — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 00:59:17 GMT

This week in "Mike Read a Book", I finished off two books by guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not long after the show ended, Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy got into the book-writin' business. I don't think I realized this until several years later, when I started buying MST3K videos off Amazon, and it would start recommending their books based on my purchases. By then, their books were ultra-cheap on the reseller market, so I bought them sometime in 2004 or 2005 maybe, and they've been collecting dust ever since.

Actually, that's not true, because I've moved five times since then. Also, my copy of Murphy's book got some water damage when the apartment above mine had some sort of drain clog and somehow got water all over my apartment. This happened in 2007. Miraculously, both books survived the flood of 2008, and have been taking up space all this time. And I actually made it about halfway through Nelson's book at one time, so I can't say they've just been gathering dust. But I digress.

Both books were about movies, so I found their publication a little bittersweet. There was a time when I felt kind of bad for the crew behind MST3K, because my understanding was that they wanted to move on to do other things, and yet they seemed to keep returning to the MST3K formula. Nelson's book, Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese is a collection of what read like newspaper columns that trash bad movies. Murphy's book, A Year at the Movies, is about how he watched at least one movie a day for the entire year 2001. Not long after these books came out, they reunited with Bill Corbett to start the Film Crew series, which eventually led to RiffTrax. Not to be outdone, several other MST3K alums created Cinematic Titanic. I guess I felt a little betrayed, because if they were just going to do this sort of thing anyway, then why did they end MST3K? This led me to think that they had to cater to the mock-bad-movie fanbase, because they couldn't find anything more lucrative.

Eventually, I realized that it had been several years, so clearly they were doing it out of passion rather than necessity or obligation. Watching some of the bonus interviews on the DVD extras bore this out. The impression I have now was that they didn't think they could take MST3K much further, and it was only after the success of the Rhino/Shout Factory Box Sets that they realized there was still a market for this sort of thing beyond television. If anything, I think TV was all they wanted to leave behind: dealing with the networks, the whole mad science experiment baggage, the top-heavy puppets. The interviews on the MST3K box sets point to a consensus that none of these things were entirely bad, but everyone agrees that riffing on movies is a lot easier to do without them. So at the end of the day, the MST3K staff are a bunch of people who like comedy and like movies, so it makes sense that any project they'd do would tend to lean in those directions.

In that light, the problem with Megacheese and Year at the Movies isn't that they're pale legacies of MST3K. Rather, they're more like failed experiments in the interim between MST3K and the Rifftrax Era.

Megacheese just doesn't work for me. There was a DVD interview where Mike Nelson explains the origin of the book, but I forget now what the deal was. Either he was approached to write a column for a newspaper, which led to a book, or he just wrote the book in one step. It feels like a series of humor columns you'd find in a newspaper, regardless. The trouble is that it doesn't quite ring true. Sometimes it reads like a parody of a movie critic column. Other times it reads like Dave Barry if he happened to focus on movies. I could see a newspaper printing this material, but only because of the name value of the writer. Readers would trust the column because that Mystery Science Theater Guy wrote it, and he knows funny. But it has this stream-of-consciousness thing going on, which would probably confuse anyone who wasn't familiar with the on-screen chemistry he shared with toy robots.

For one thing, he won't shut up about Minnesota. He wouldn't shut up about Minnesota in his novel Death Rat!, but Death Rat! was actually set in Minnesota, so it went down a lot smoother. Death Rat! was a good novel because the reader could basically say "Okay, we're in Minnesota now. Danish people, cold weather, casserole. Now what else have you got?" And he actually had an answer in a compelling story about fame as a fickle substitute for self-respect. I only sort of get the MST3K references to Midwestern culture because they're all from Wisconsin or Minnesota or someplace, while I've lived my whole life in Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois. I'm Southeastmidwest, they're Northcentralmidwest. Iowa is Midwestmidwest. In actual episodes of MST3K, the Midwestern material works because it's used in small doses, and in stark contrast to the bizarre premise of watching bizarre horror movies in outer space. When Nelson uses it in his movie articles, I have no idea what the idea is supposed to be. If he's writing for a Minnesotan audience, he's just belaboring things they're already familiar with. Any other audience would just be bewildered and confused. At one point he compares Bruce Willis to an appreciated, but mechanically unreliable Jeep. He admits that he's taken the analogy too far, but I'm not sure that redeems the piece. What's the point? Bruce Willis is too old to be an action hero? Everyone already knows that.

I suppose part of the trouble is that he's shooting fish in a barrel. One of the things I liked about MST3K was that they were going out of their way to find these awful movies. Some were better than others, but just about all of them were obscure. This was mainly a matter of riffing on movies that were available to the network, but it also developed the flavor of the show. This is probably why I haven't gotten terribly invested in RiffTrax so far. I've watched some RiffTrax work and it's really well done, but the main selling point of the RiffTrax model is that you can finally hear the MST3K guys make fun of big popular movies like Star Wars, and I wasn't really looking for that. They did a Kickstarter a while back so they could do a live riffing of "Twilight". I'm sure it'll be good, but at the same time, what joke can they possibly make that hasn't been beaten into the ground five years ago? In the same vein, Megacheese focused mainly on easy targets. Batman and Robin. Carrot Top. Lost in Space. Maybe Nelson went heavy on the Minnesota material to keep things fresh. At one point, he acknowledges that "Carrot Top bashing" is an "empty sport". Well fine, but you wrote the book, pal. If you're gonna shoot fish in a barrell, own it. He skewers all four of the 90's Batman movies, but doesn't really get into the nuts and bolts of what made them bad. Instead, he focuses mainly on the bullet points everyone is aware of. Tim Burton movies are poorly lit, there's nipples on the costumes, Jim Carrey is terrible, comic book movies are for nerds. Okay, fair enough, but I've seen these movies. Can't you dig a little deeper? Even if Jim Carrey is the antichrist, can you at least attempt to qualify what makes "Batman Forever" worse than "The Truman Show"?

What really hurts the book is that it hasn't aged well. I suppose that would explain why I had so much trouble reading it. Today, you can find this sort of light pop culture commentary on the internet. Cracked.com makes lists of dumb movie things every other day, and I just watched a trailer for the Top 40 Shitty Shark Movies. Hell I write about bad movies myself; I just don't see enough movies to really make it into my "thing". Back in 2000, though, you had to buy this sort of thing in a bookstore. Actually, that's not true, there were movie-bashing websites back then. So maybe it's fair to say Megacheese represents the decline of the notion that you had to go to the bookstore to see a blockbuster movie get skewered.

The point is that this book was published in 2000, which means most of the movies discussed are from the 1990's. I don't think Nelson had any particular criterion for what films to write about. There's even a few 80's movies up for discussion, and he also roasts his own movie, MST3K:TM, which played for about a week in 1996. The first time I read the book about halfway would have been the mid-2000's, when I barely remembered the plots to some of the movies he was writing about. By 2013, I barely recognized some of the names and titles. Ed? Event Horizon? Sphere? The Edge? Judge Judy? When did they make a Judge Judy movie--? Oh, wait one section of the book is mysteriously devoted to television shows. He makes fun of Chris Penn's flagging career, and I barely remembered his brother Sean Penn was a thing that used to matter. He wonders how much stranger Marlon Brando will get, unaware that Brando would die four years later.

The most jarring part is when he describes the plot of "Executive Decision", which involves a planned terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. Nelson doesn't see a downside to the bad guys' plan, because--heh heh!--those clowns in Congress, amirite guys? On my first reading, this made me flip back to find out when the book was published, and I suddenly became very aware of how stark the difference was between 2000 and 2001. Back in the 90's, things were going pretty well for America, and this book sort of represents the complacency of the era. The biggest political crisis was the President cheating on his wife, the only thing we had to fear was a nonexistent Y2K problem, and things like Adam Sandler movies were ironically compared to horrific atrocities. After all, we didn't have any contemporary atrocities for comparison. By 2013, frustration with a do-nothing Congress has salved Nelson's quip a little, but it still can't be funny now that a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. is no longer a hypothetical situation. Well, it is sort of amusing from a gallows humor sort of perspective, but that's as far as it can go. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this book was never meant to be more than disposable entertainment. The idea that anyone would buy the book years later and actually read it years after that never occurred to anyone. Hell, I didn't think it would take me this long to finish. I just had a lot of stuff to do.

A Year at the Movies is a much better book, mainly because it's a much more personal work. Where Megacheese felt like an effort to monetize Mike Nelson's movie-riffing reputation, Year at the Movies is Kevin Murphy's quest to recalibrate his cinematic taste after a decade of working on MST3K. After the show ended, Murphy resolved to go to the movies at least once a day, every day for the entirety of 2001. I'm a little fuzzy on his rules. Television didn't count, but he would bring a Super 8 projector along with him in case he couldn't make it to a theater while traveling. On the other hand, one of the movies he saw in a theater was one of the first digital releases, so maybe he was cool with that as long as it was being projected onto a screen. On the other other hand, he watched a lot of in-flight movies, and commented on how the airline industry was shifting from film projectors to installing little LCD screens for every passenger. I don't know if he actually saw any movies in that format, but he seemed to be behind the idea, so I guess it counts. He only had one lapse in this commitment, when his Super 8 projector broke down and he couldn't make it to a theater in time, so he and his friends settled for a movie on TV. Otherwise, he destroyed his goal, since he was generally able to see at least two or three movies on an typical day. Murphy admits in his book that sitting through that much material was hardly a chore for him, and I suspect he would have been doing something like this anyway, book or no book, plan or no plan.

It's an interesting book, because it tours the theater industry, and how Kevin Murphy feels about movies and life in general. I hate movies most days. I like what I like, but I'd be miserable on a project like this. One of the consequences of Murphy's plan is that he has to watch the same movie multiple times. After all, if he's flying somewhere, he's stuck with whatever they show on the plane. If he sees an IMAX movie, he's confined to whatever's available in the format. If he spends a week at a multiplex, they're gonna have the same fare on Thursday they had on Monday. Actually, this was what I assumed he would be doing for the entire book, because I don't care much for travel either. So if I were to spend a year at the movies, I'd trudge back and forth to the closest theater, seeing every movie they had whether I wanted to or not, and the point of the book would be how miserable this would make me. Reading Murphy's book put me in the mood for a trip to the theater, so I looked up what they were playing this week, and it's "Smurfs 2: The Quickening".

But Murphy's different, and that difference is what makes the book fascinating to me. He not only came up with the idea, but thoroughly enjoys it. He might not relish watching the same movie six times in a row, but he doesn't despise it either. I watched "The Proposal" once and wanted to kill myself. The last time I was on a plane they showed "Ice Age 2: The Quickening" and it profoundly irritated me even though I didn't plug in the headphones and did my best to ignore the LCD monitor. Then they showed it again on the return flight. Kevin Murphy is clearly made of sterner stuff. Or he just appreciates the medium of film on a level I can't comprehend. That makes parts of the book dull for me, because he spends a lot of time gushing about cinematic technique or old projector technology or some other thing I don't care about. But it matters to him, so it's engaging on that level.

That said, I find myself frustrated by his contradicting attitudes. Murphy admits up front that he's a movie snob, a cinemaphile, but he's also got a populist streak. That was one of the things I liked about Tom Servo on MST3K. Both Tom and Crow were robots, so they could be anything at any time and it didn't have to make sense. So in Tom Servo's case, he would constantly flip back and forth. Folksy regular joe to snooty elitist. Demagogue to degenerate. Mature genius to whimpering child. I suppose it's only appropriate that a lot of this was based on Kevin Murphy's personality. Hell, we're all like that in one way or another. We are large, we contain multitudes and all that crap.

Still, his attitudes about movies and the movie industry are all over the map. Early in the book he slams audiences and studio execs who lack the most basic cinematic literacy. But he also has little patience for art show snobs who try to act smarter than they are. He complains about how movie theaters show loads of ads before the main attraction. After all, he argues, he already paid for the movie, and it should begin at the listed showtime. And yet, later in the book he confesses to sneaking in and theater hopping. [PROTIP: It's really easy to get away with it if you're an adult white male.] He's a traditionalist who hates multiplexes, and yet he has to admit that they have really comfortable seats, and the stadium seating makes it a lot easier on the audience. By contrast, the beloved theaters of the old days crammed as many tiny seats into the house as possible, and they only reversed this policy when home video started to cut into their profits. Murphy blames a lot of things on television, even though he's a professional television producer. If you like scratching your head, this is a good book for that.

He complains about the poor quality of concessions in most theaters, and then later in the book he writes about how he routinely sneaks food into the theater. For Thanksgiving, he smuggled an entire Thanksgiving dinner into "Monsters, Inc." The manager came in to adjust the thermostat, saw him setting up his camping table in the front row, and let it slide. Maybe it was because he had his nieces and nephews along for the show. Maybe it was because of the holiday spirit. Maybe it was because Murphy had been watching movies there non-stop for most of the year, so he was far and away their best customer. He marvels at how Australian theaters respect and trust their audiences enough to allow wine into the theater. Well, maybe if you didn't sneak food into U.S. theaters, they'd trust you more. He complains about how sloppy American movie audiences are even though he smuggled a Thanksgiving dinner into a theater. He says he cleaned up after himself, but c'mon. Really? Dark theater, three kids handling food, a lot of it involving gravy? Did he smuggle a roll of paper towels in, too? What's the point of eating that much during the movie anyway? Murphy believes that movies are a public event, and television has eroded that notion to the detriment of the moviegoing experience. Nowadays everyone just acts like they're watching a giant TV screen. For example, I know about one guy who ate an entire Thanksgiving dinner in a theater! Like he was at home! Can you believe it?

I get it. A lot of the shenanigans he pulls are stunts for the sake of the book. I don't think it's a coincidence that the theater-hopping and food smuggling episodes are all set towards the end of the year, when he was probably running out of things to write about. The summer months are devoted to exotic film experiences in other places. He attends some film festivals of varying quality, an igloo theater in Quebec, the world's smallest theater in Australia, and a couple of the last drive-ins in the U.S. So it's not just him doing asinine things to see if he can get away with it. But a lot of the book is Murphy's indignance about being treated like a child, and then he goes out and acts like a child. He rails against the intelligence insulting summer blockbusters, but the very nature of his project requires him to watch all of those blockbusters multiple times. He appeals to his audience to vote with their wallets whenever they have a substandard experience, but he probably single-handedly propped up the movie industry for the year 2001.

When the first "Lord of the Rings" movie opened, he overheard two fanboys complaining about how Tom Bombadil wasn't in it. This leads Kevin to recall his own LOTR fanboyism from when he was in college. He observes that his fascination with LOTR was more about the depth and breadth of the world building, rather than anything else. After college, he got into punk rock, and this led him to focus more on his own life rather than a fictional world. The bottom line is that he can appreciate the Peter Jackson movie as an adaptation rather than a one-to-one reenactment of the book. Yeah, but the Peter Jackson movie sucks. I don't know if Tom Bombadil would have improved anything, but there's a big difference between demanding hyper accuracy and just wanting to see your favorite characters in their own movie. Jimmy Olsen wasn't in "Man of Steel", and I didn't mind that much, but it's not fanboyism to wonder why he's not there. Fanboyism (and fangirlism) is more about unhealthy obsession, which may well describe the need for more Tom Bombadil. On the other hand, it could also describe loving movies so much that you practically live in theaters for a year straight. I'm not throwing stones. I'm the guy who bought a book just because the author played a little red robot on a TV show I like.

The Onion

mike_smith — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:33:51 GMT

I'm not saying I'm offended or anything, but the Onion's "Royal Baby as Lovecraftian Horror" gag really isn't funny at all.

I mean, I get the idea, but they've been hammering on this for the entire pregnancy, and now they've got like six different articles up when they really only needed one for the punchline. It's like a Family Guy running gag except it doesn't end after thirty minutes. I'm worried the Onion will just keep going for the kid's entire lifespan, which means I'll be dead by the time they finally give this a rest.

Yeah

mike_smith — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 03:01:39 GMT

I went to IHOP this morning. No particular reason, I just wanted to celebrate having the day off--H^H^H^H getting called in to work night shift.

This family with small children was in the next booth over. One of them answered a question with "Yeah!" and her grandmother was like "What does 'yeah' mean? Mamaw doesn't understand that word."

The kid was genuinely confused by this, and she wouldn't let it go either. It's like she'd waited years for someone to use the word "yeah" in a sentence, and now she could finally have her moment. Eventually the kid parsed the question and explained that "yeah" means "yes". So the grandmother asked why she didn't just say "yes" in the first place.

This annoys me to no end. When I was a kid, teachers might pull this sort of crap, and only the really dickhole ones, who stupidly believed there was a War on Yes and it could be won by being an uptight asshole about it. Grandmothers aren't supposed to do this. Maybe if you're at church or something, but not at the IHOP in the middle of summer and you're coloring in the placemat while you wait for your pancake with a funny face drawn on it with icing.

What really irks me is that this lady is young enough to know what "yeah" means. She's not fooling me. She grew up with "yeah", because everyone says it all the damn time. It's not like the kid said "charizard" or something that you actually have to stop and explain to grandma.

People, if you listen to nothing else I have to say, don't bust your grandkids balls. Buy them crap they don't need, and accept the fact that they are cooler than you. Everyone will be much better off that way.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Injured? Lawyer Up.

mike_smith — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 09:28:06 GMT

I've been seeing billboards around town lately with an ad for some attorney. His slogan is "Injured? Lawyer up." This seems kind of dumb to me, since the phrase "lawyer up" is often used in derision. Like when someone tries to sue their way out of a relatively simple problem instead of facing it more directly.

I suppose that's unfair, both to lawyers and their clients, but I'm pretty sure it was like that when I got here. Maybe he's trying to appeal to the underdog mentality: Your legal adversary isn't the only one who can lawyer up. But it still sounds disingenuous. He might as well have his billboard say "I'm here to chase your ambulance!" Or maybe, "Need a shyster? Give us a call!"

I find lawyer ads kind of creepy in general, since they tend to make a ham-fisted attempt to relate to anyone who might hire them. I guess they all deal in injury-related matters. There's an ad on TV where a guy says "Let us handle the insurance companies. You have enough to worry about." This is a reasonably good pitch, but it sounds phoney simply because he's saying it on television. Even if I were injured, I'd know he's not talking directly to me. The last time I saw the ad, I noticed the guy was wearing a cowboy hat. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there before. I don't know what that signifies, if anything, but I just want that on the record.

There's another billboard in town where the lawyer is determined to convince you he rides a motorcycle, so if you get in a motorcycle accident, you should "call the man with the bike". I guess that makes sense, except his motorcycle-riding skills don't necessarily translate into better lawyer skill. Yeah, he can relate to you, but you're paying him to represent you in court, so he'd have to relate to you anyway. Now if the judge rode a bike, I'd like my odds a lot better. Of course, I don't ride a motorcycle in the first place, and thinking about this reminds me of a motorcyclist who got killed in a collision not far from my apartment. I guess what I'm saying is that "the man with the bike" kind of deals in a morbid specialty, which undermines how cool he tries to look on the billboard.

Star Trek Into Feckless

mike_smith — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 22:21:19 GMT

Yeah, Superman came out this weekend, so I'm behind on movies.

The problem with this movie is that it tries to cram as many old ideas into a space that really needed a new idea. A short list of stuff they tried to do here:

-Introduce the NuTrek Khan
-Introduce the NuTrek Klingons
-Kirk breaks the Prime Directive to save Spock's life
-Dr. McCoy discovers a cure for death, apparently
-Admiral Robocop tries to militarize Starfleet and instigate a war
-Enterprise is adrift in enemy space.
-In a crunch, Spock can call up the original timeline Spock for pointers

This could have been an entire season of a Star Trek TV show, or several movies. Instead, Into Darkness tries to do all of these ideas in one shot, and so none of them get the coverage they required. Khan really needed a whole movie to (re)establish him as a bitter enemy of the Enterprise crew. What we got felt more like a sampler of the sort of things he could have done if he'd been given a bigger role. They tried to take a shortcut by having Leonard Nimoy vouch for Khan, but that's not how you do it. Villainy is supposed to speak for itself; it doesn't need a letter of recommendation.

More importantly, a lot of what went on in the movie was just recycled material from past versions of Star Trek. That's acceptable, but wasn't the whole point of this reboot to be a little more ambitious than that? It was only a matter of time before the J.J. Abrams Star Trek did its own treatment of the Klingons, but if that was inevitable, then they probably needed their own movie. Even so, they got pretty good coverage in Star Trek VI and big chunks of Next Generation and DS9. What little we saw in Darkness suggests that Abrams really doesn't have much more to add. So why include them at all?

For that matter, this movie feels like it borrowed way too much from the last one. Kirk gets in trouble for being a pompous dick, then Captain Pike is taken out, so he has to take command and save the day. Spock's got a rod up his ass at the beginning of the movie, then he has an emotional breakdown and learns to loosen up a little to work with Kirk. Is this Star Trek XI or XII? Well, apparently it's both. The end of this new movie suggests that they'll (finally) be embarking on their five-year mission in deep space, but I'm pretty sure they'll get recalled back to Earth somehow, so Kirk can learn an important lesson about the burdens of command, and Spock can cry some more.

There's something really artificial about the way Starfleet is depicted in this movie. Scotty resigns, so Kirk makes Chekov the new chief engineer. Plotwise, that makes sense, because he needs someone to take over the post, and Chekov needed something to do. I just find it kind of phoney. Kirk's dialogue with Chekov makes it sound like he's the only other person even remotely familiar with how the engines work, so he's the only one on the ship remotely qualified. Does Scotty not have a staff? Wouldn't one of them be better suited to the position? If Chekov is the best man for the job, then why isn't he part of that staff? If Dr. McCoy resigned, would they make Sulu the Chief Medical Officer? I understand that for all intents and purposes, the Enterprise only has seven actual crew members, but the framework of the story still includes a fairly rigid command structure. At least hand-wave it, don't dismiss it entirely.

Chekov as Chief Engineer wouldn't bother me so much if the rest of Starfleet hadn't been so dumb in the rest of the movie. Khan blows up one of their facilities, so all the brass gathers together in one place to discuss the situation. Kirk realizes that they've exposed themselves to another attack, but you'd think everyone else in the room would have thought of that too. The movie tries to use this to make Kirk look like a rockstar tactician, but it just makes everyone else in Starfleet look like an idiot.

Later on, we learn that Admiral Robocop sought out the Botany Bay hoping to enlist Khan's aid against the Klingon Empire. He eventually realizes how dumb this was, and he spends the entire movie trying to eliminate Khan at all costs. He fires on Enterprise because he's that desperate to kill Khan, and yet he keeps hesitating to finish the job. When Khan boards his own ship, he could just self-destruct it, but no, he stupidly lets Khan waltz up to the bridge and take over. During this part of the movie, Scotty sabotages Robocop's weapons, and he tells Kirk it'll only take them three minutes before they undo his handiwork. It takes at least ten minutes of screen time for Kirk and Khan to get on board, and during that time Admiral Robocop never fires a shot. Also during this time, Dr. McCoy somehow manages to perform delicate procedures on six dozen torpedoes.

Despite the fact that Khan is an infamous historical figure in the Star Trek universe, Spock calls his alternate-self to find out if he's trustworthy. At the end of the movie, when Khan crashes Admiral Robocop's ship into San Fransisco, Spock transports himself down to the city to chase after Khan on foot. Everyone on the ship is totally fine with this, even though he's the acting captain and they have tons of security guys and special weapons on board to help him. Spock doesn't even bother to flag down a car or anything. When he does start to have trouble, Uhura sends herself down to back him up. Again, she goes alone, and the rest of the crew finds this perfectly acceptable, even though it didn't work so well when Spock tried it a few minutes earlier.

I'm not going to pretend that past installments of Star Trek were perfectly consistent, but this movie just couldn't let me suspend my disbelief. The TV shows and movies at least paid lip service to protocol and regulations. There was a sense that Earth was pretty well defended because Starfleet is so powerful and humanity got its act together a long time before. Into Darkness abandons that idea, which might have been daring if it had been handled smartly. Instead, we're left to believe that Spock has to subdue Khan on foot because there's literally no security anywhere in North America that might be able to help him. Enterprise is in no shape to help, but couldn't someone in Nebraska pilot a shuttlecraft over there in a matter of seconds? Are there no cops in San Francisco? Admiral Robocop supposedly made all these preparations for a Klingon invasion but none of them are ready to go when they're needed.

Maybe Star Trek is a victim of modernization. In their attempt to make it look more real, they wound up making it look more fake. The reason Earth was so well protected back in the old days was because they barely ever showed Earth back then, so the writers could make up any defenses they wanted. Similarly, the ships were always so minimalist that you could assume anything you wanted to about them. The Enterprise of 2013 looks a lot more realistic, but it also looks less plausible. This is exposed when the artificial gravity goes out, and crew members start falling down corridors and clinging to guardrails. You'd think a starship would be designed against such hazards. Of course, in the old days they could have never considered weightlessness or turning the set on its side, so the result was that the artificial gravity became the sturdiest thing on the ship. Even if it did go out, you could imagine that the featureless walls of the corridors were specially padded, or they contained forcefields to prevent injuries and allow easy access in emergencies. Abrams' Enterprise is designed like a tricked out submarine, and it handles a crash landing about as well. Appropriately, the ship seems just fine submerged under water, but it'll burn up in re-entry.

Victory!

mike_smith — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:25:16 GMT

On June 10, I finished Albert Cotton's terrible book "Chemical Applications of Group Theory." You may recall me writing about it earlier this year, when I hit the halfway point. So I've already been over why I read it and why it sucks so bad. I don't have a whole lot more to add, except to say that the second half really reinforced my theory that the book needed to be at least twice as long to be a decent textbook.

Cotton wrote the book with little attention to a logical progression of ideas. In Chapter 8 he has exercises that require knowledge of material in Chapter 9. Chapter 9 references Chapter 10, as if assuming you read the book backwards. I knew I was in trouble going into Chapter 11, because it was the last one. There, Cotton tries to introduce crystallography all in one shot, except it's a pretty complicated topic that really demands its own book. So the end result feels like the end to Monday Nitro. "Orthorhombic space groups! Some other guy wrote a book about them, but we can't go into them here! We're outta time! See you next week!" At least it made the exercises for Chapter 11 simple, if not easy.

It kind of reminds me of that Simpsons where the school year ends, and this one teacher stops the kids before they leave because he hasn't finished explaining how World War II ended. I always liked that, because when I was in school, history books generally wrapped up with the Early Cold War, so it made sense for a teacher to be falling behind right around there. I always found it irritating when the textbook didn't quite line up with the school year. High School chemistry texts usually end with a couple of chapters on nuclear and organic chemistry. Important topics, but not really related to the bulk of the curriculum. Those chapters were more like a teaser than anything else, so always assumed the publishers deliberately added them in as filler. Same goes for any history text. They always peter out around thirty years before they were published. Go ask your dad what happened in the 80's. I could understand the fudge factor being built in, but I never liked the uncertainty of ending the class without finishing the book. Is the teacher too slow? Is the book too long? Is the class too dumb? There's not really an obvious answer. I suppose it's really just the result of a one-size-fits-all approach to publishing. Some teachers use the textbook more than others, some school years are longer than others, some classes perform better than others. A successful textbook has to work in all these scenarios.

As for Cotton, my guess is that my professor knew he wasn't that great a writer, which was why he only had us read selections from four of the eleven chapters, and everything else was from a separate book. Not that the other book was so great, but he wasn't exactly the best teacher either. To be fair, I was a pretty lousy student at the time.

Besides, it's not like you can take your pick of great writers with this stuff. The people best qualified to write about these subjects aren't neccessarily good at turning a phrase or illustrating an idea. You have to work with what you're given. Sometimes meeting the other guy halfway just isn't enough.

Anyway, it's done. I've got some other stuff I want to tackle next, but for now I'm celebrating by playing video games. For openers, I dusted off my copy of Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2, which I haven't played since 2010. I had been doing okay at it, mainly because I was unemployed and had time to play it. Then I got a job and I never got back to some of the tougher parts. F'rinsfance there's this one stage where you have to beat Goku, Vegeta, and Trunks on really hard mode with Androids 13,14, and 15. And there's a time limit.

What's great about these games is the tactics involved. I tried to beef up my team and switch them in and out to outlast the CPU, but then I found out about the time limit. So that's when I realized the team was a trap, because the timer counts down even while you switch partners. So finally I realize I have to give 13 all the ass-beating power ups and have him do it solo. Ranged attacks are pointless because the androids can't charge energy like the others, so the only way to win was to punch and kick and nothing else. Took me a few tries to get it down, but it worked dammit. 13 makes his post-fight taunt and says "Mission accomplished, but there's plenty o' other stuff to destroy." And I'm like: you damn right, son.

So it's been a pretty satisfying week.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Physical Chemistry: The Revengeancing.

mike_smith — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:00:36 GMT

So this is something I've been meaning to get off my chest.

Part of the reason I've been slacking off on blogging is that I've been engaged in a campaign to read and comprehend one of my college chemistry textbooks. I mentioned it a while back when I wrote about books I've got ony my reading list last year. It was like, Johnny Cash's autobiography, Mike Nelson's novel Death Rat!, and this one textbook. Well, back in October or so I finally got around to the textbook, then I returned to it in February and I've managed to stay with it up to now, which I'm kind of proud of.

The book is called Chemical Applications of Group Theory, written by F. Albert Cotton. The short synopsis is that you can use certain mathematical concepts to simplify theoretical calculations that come up in chemistry. For instance, the chapter I'm on now is about estimating the energy of molecular structures. This can be done experimentally by synthesizing or destroying a substance in the laboratory and measuring how much energy is gained or lost in the process, but it's also important to be able to predict those figures ahead of time. Fortunately, if the molecule in question is shaped a certain way, a lot of the work is simplified. It's still a bear to do it, but it's the difference between using a supercomputer and me scribbling on a notepad for several hours. There are other practical uses for the concepts, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Quite honestly, the nature of the material isn't really important to what I want to write about here.

The reason I've made this into my latest white whale is that when I bought the text book and carried it around with me in late 1997/early 1998, I couldn't make heads or tails out of the material. I was taking physical chemistry at the University of Kentucky, and the only reason I passed the course with a D is because it was graded on a curve and I guess the rest of the class didn't understand it much better than I did. I don't remember a lot about the class other than my own frustration. The professor specialized in biochemistry, and while I think he understood what he was teaching, I never got the feeling that he cared that much about it. One day he just started telling us about the research he was working on, and since it was biochemistry it didn't have much at all to do with the course. He would knock a couple of points off if you didn't show up for class, and in the spring I would skip the class anyway and take the hit. That was how burnt out I was towards the end of that semester. He was grading on a curve, I wasn't the only one blowing the class off, and everyone else was having as much difficulty as I was, so what difference did it make if I showed up or not? That was the message the chemistry department was sending me: We're not going to help you understand these concepts, but we're not really going to punish you for not understanding them either. The following semester I asked my advisor if he thought I should retake the course for my professional wellbeing, and he admitted that it probably didn't matter, since I wasn't planning to specialize in that direction anyway.

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit all of that, but at the time, I felt like I was fortunate to have even survived that year. I wasn't worried about attendance records or my GPA. It got really rough my junior year, and my priority shifted to just getting through the curriculum and graduating in one piece. I had other tough classes, but at least with those I understood the significance of the material, even if I didn't excel in the course. With physical chemistry, I didn't even understand what the material had to do with anything. I didn't mind smelling like smoke because I felt like I'd been in a fire, so the fact that I didn't get P-chem didn't hurt my pride much as long as I got through it.

But it's not like I didn't try, and that was what bothered me the most. I remember trying to read Chemical Applications of Group Theory in '98, in the hopes that if I just sat down with the book and made a focused effort, I could make sense of the material. And it just didn't happen. Reading it in 2012-2013, I find places I highlighted in 1998, and it takes me back to how frustrated I was on the first run. I knew certain words and phrases were important, but the pattern of highlighting clearly showed that I didn't really parse what I was reading. Part of the issue, I think, was that the course used two textbooks. One was a more standard-issue P-chem textbook that we used for most of the year, and Group Theory was a secondary text that the professor would switch to in certain situations. I'm sure it made sense to him, but to me it seemed completely arbitrary. My guess is that the main textbook didn't cover symmetry or spectroscopy to his liking, so he wanted a supplemental text that specialized in those topics. We were only supposed to read Chapters 1-3 of Group Theory, then part of Chapter 4, and a little of Chapter 10. I don't know why, but this made me nuts. Not that I wanted to go through the entire book, but it just seemed like the professor was pulling this all out of his ass. More accurately, I knew he wasn't pulling it out of his ass, and his lesson plans made perfect sense to anyone except me. What really made it infuriating was that the book might as well have been written in Greek, and if I couldn't figure it out in college, I didn't know how else I'd ever understand it.

I have other regrets, but that's one that's stuck with me, mainly because I possessed the means to rectify it. I kept the textbook all these years. I remember telling my dad in the summer of '98 that I wanted to go back and try to make sense of it now that I had time to do so. I think I wanted to use that summer to do it, like how Batman came back and kicked the Mutant Leader's ass in Dark Knight Returns. It's probably better that I didn't, and I was able to decompress a little instead. Besides, now that I'm actually doing it, I'm seeing how long it would have taken, and one summer wouldn't have been enough. The point is, it's been sitting on my bookshelf, moving with me from one apartment to the next, a reminder of a failure I meant to avenge. I didn't think about it a lot, but whenever I'd sort my books I'd notice it and remember, but I had enough other stuff going on that it didn't bother me that much. I guess I'm only just now getting to it because of a confluence of things. I've got the time, I've been trying to get more organized, and my past bouts with unemployment have convinced me of the need to brush up on chemistry.

And some of this is a shift in attitude from fifteen years ago. I've gone places, done things, established myself. I have a credit in Thunderbolts #9. I wrote a novel where Superman teams up with anime people. I've worked a twenty-four hour shift. Came back from a flood, came back from unemployment, came back from a broken leg. I ran/killed the CBFFA's. I know how to operate an HPLC. Savaging J.K. Rowling books for five or six years has perhaps given me a new perspective on how to approach reading for comprehension. Somewhere along the way I stopped preparing for this stuff and started doing it, being it. At some point it stopped being about redemption and started being about putting the matter behind me once and for all. I can look at my copy of Chemical Applications of Group Theory and it doesn't look like such hot shit compared to what I've seen.

As of this writing, I'm about halfway through the book. A large portion of that first half is devoted to simply introducing the principles at hand. The real meat is in Part II, which is set aside for applying those mathematical ideas to actual chemistry problems. It was rough at first until I recognized that I was reading it like a chemistry book, when in truth it was more of a mathematics text, at least up front. Once I made peace with that, and started taking notes and working the examples alongside the text instead of just reading it and glossing over the forumlae, I made a lot more progress. Enough progress that I now see that the main obstacle of the book is that the author, F. Albert Cotton, was a lousy writer.

I have a sort of adversarial connection to Cotton, like the flashback in "Kill Bill" where Uma Thurman trains with Pai Mei, the invincible old master who despises white American women such as Uma Thurman. She probably hated him privately, but recognized that she needed his training badly enough that she had to put up with him. It's strongly implied in the movie that she managed to impress him enough to win his respect, but she probably would have preferred to study under someone with the same qualifications who wasn't such a jerk. From reading Cotton's Wikipedia page, I get the impression that he was a giant in his field. He was a professor at MIT at the age of 31. I won't go over his entire resume, but it's not like he was just some clod whose name they put on a textbook to make it look authentic. But he's still a shitty writer, no matter how good he is, and that's the hurdle I have to cross if I'm going to learn anything from him.

The main problem is that Cotton wrote his book in a bubble. He's good enough at physical chemistry that he doesn't grasp that his readers probably don't know Thing One about the topic. If you had read an introductory volume first, then his book might make a good second book for digging deeper. As it is, Cotton routinely takes for granted that the student is picking this up without any trouble at all. He would have been wiser to underestimate the reader's intelligence rather than overestimate. Some concepts aren't properly introduced until dozens of pages after he first begins to use them. The discontinuity is incredibly frustrating, and I have the advantage of being able to look up some of these things on Wikipedia. In 1998 I was simply up a creek without a paddle. A lot of the math he covers is stuff that I never learned in college. At all. There's some calculus and matrix algebra in the book, and I knew I was really rusty going in, but at least I'd been exposed to a lot of calculus and matrix algebra at one time. Two things I was totally unprepared for were Euler's formula and the Kronecker delta. Once I looked them up, I realized they were very simple concepts and it wasn't any big deal, but I never learned these in high school or college, and Cotton uses them as if they were universally understood. Worse, he doesn't identify them by name, so it made it difficult for me to grasp that a lowercase delta meant something in particular, or that "exp" meant the number "e" and not some other thing that I never heard of.

There's also a lot of typos in the text. I suppose a lot of math and science textbooks are guilty of this, and no one ever notices, but in Cotton's case it really pisses me off, because I'm making a pretty big effort to understand his book by any means necessary, and part of what I'm finding is that I can't even trust the book itself. I found and downloaded an answer key which was a godsend, except it has a place where someone wrote over one of the answers with a pen to correct it. This was only the first of many typos I've found that make you question whether or not you really get what's going on, or if Cotton just screwed up and put a minus sign where a plus sign is supposed to go. I don't know how textbooks are edited, but it seems to me that you'd almost have to have a guy go in and work the problems for himself to make sure the math checks out. In this case, that clearly never happened. I'm slogging through it, but this goes way above and beyond what could or should be expected of the typical undergraduate. The disconnect here is that Cotton has muddied an already challenging subject with his own half-assed approach to writing, and so the student not only has to learn the material but compensate for the disorganized presentation. It'd be like putting razor blades on flash cards because it's easier for the manufacturer. Isn't the point to make the process as conducive to learning as possible?

I could go on, but I don't want to bog this down with details about the material itself. There's plenty of negative reviews on Amazon.com that make the case better than I could. I doubt anyone ever bought this thing voluntarily anyway. It's either required for a college class or ignored utterly, I imagine. The point is that I'm slowly, surely, inexorably kicking its ass despite the difficulty. I'm only halfway through, and it probably isn't all downhill from here, but I'm at least far enough in to know that it doesn't beat me. I doubt I'll ever have much use for the knowledge gained from this, but at least I can take some satisfaction from the accomplishment.

X Minue One

mike_smith — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:02:06 GMT

Years ago, I subscribed to a podcast that put up old episodes of the radio drama "X Minus One". It was a science fiction anthology that adapted short stories from the genre. From what I've read about the show, it wasn't particularly notable in the history of radio, but the production values are pretty good, and if it didn't have so much 1950's style to it, you could forget that it's a sixty-year-old show.

A while back I made a point of listening to every single audio file on my computer, and I've come to the point where "X Minus One" is about all I have left to cover. On revisiting the podcast, the first thing I discovered was that it did a piss poor job re-presenting the original material. Originally, I assumed that the series wasn't complete. A lot of old "Superman" radio episodes were simply lost over time, and that's not something you hear about much, because so much of the "Superman" series is extant, and radiophiles must see the glass as half-full. "X Minus One" has a different issue, where the series more or less survived, but it's been badly preserved for reasons no one seems to understand.

I learned about all of this on a website that discusses old time radio, Digital Deli. I found the site while trying to figure out what order the episodes of "X Minus One" are supposed to go in. I'm not a collector by any stretch, but I'm trying to keep things as organized as I can, and that means I want to strive for some level of accuracy. Digital Deli's main gripe is that the old time radio community has long perpetuated a canon of "lost" episodes of "X Minus One", which are simply other sci-fi dramas with the "X Minus One" opening and closing sequences tacked on. Since "X Minus One" occasionally rebroadcast its own episodes, it became a common practice for traders and dealers to try to include multiple copies of the same episode as reruns. This has gone on for so long that it's become difficult to separate fact from fiction, and a lot of big shots in the OTR community apparently swear by episode logs they can't substantiate. Having said that, the "certified" archive of episodes I downloaded from archive.org appears to have taken a lot of Digital Deli's critiques to heart.

What I know for sure is that the podcast I subscribed to back in 2009 was definitely guilty of a lot of the schlocky tactics Digital Deli was talking about. Each episode had like five openings before the episode would start. The first was sort of a "stinger", with a soundbyte of the original announcer saying "X! Minus! One!" with some sound effects added in. Then the guy who made the podcast would put in his own thing announcing the episode as "another Humphrey Camardella production". I don't know who Humphrey Camardella is, but his "X Minus One" podcast was filled with plugs and promos for all of his other old time radio podcasts, his OTR website, and whatever public domain tapes and videos he's trying to sell. The point I'm trying to make is that he didn't "produce" diddly-shit, save for his vanity bumper he stuck onto the original broadcast, and no one wanted to hear that in the first place.

So after that you'd think it's time for some "X Minus One", right? Well, that's what I thought, until I listened to the unaltered opening from archive.org. Camardella's version of X-1 starts with a short piano tune, and then an announcer grimly states "There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination." It sounds like something you'd expect from a 1950's science fiction show, so I assumed it was authentic. Well, it turns out it is from a 1950's show, except it's the "Twilight Zone". Camardella must have liked it so much that he sampled the line and put it at the beginning of every single episode of his X-1 podcast. That, or someone else did it a long time ago, and Camardella himself obtained the altered files without ever knowing the difference. I should have known something was rotten in Denmark, because once the Twilight Zone line ends, the honest-to-God X-1 intro begins, and that comes with it's own announcer reading his own ominous copy about how strange and weird the show will be.

The other weird thing about Camardella's podcasts were that he would re-post the same episode two or three times in a row, or get the titles mixed up, or various other idiosyncrasies that made you suspect that he simply didn't give a crap about what he was doing. One time I listened to an episode that turned out to be two hours long--for some reason he looped the same twenty-odd minute broadcast several times. I don't see how you screw up a thing like that, or why you would do it on purpose, but there it was. His worst offense was his constant use of the podcast to plug things. For a while, he would end episodes with this awful Muzak version of "Hard Day's Night", and promote some sort of Beatles-related thing he had going on. First of all, I hate the Beatles, second of all, they have shit-all to do with science fiction radio dramas, and third of all I'm pretty sure if Humphrey Camardella managed to summon the ghost of John Lennon to sing "Imagine", he'd constantly interrupt the performance to try to sell Beatles fans a CD collection of Lone Ranger episodes. As it was, I think all he had going on was an interview with George Harrison's sister or something like that. On occasion, he'd run in-house commercials on the podcast without even framing them around an "X Minus One" episode. I'd get the new episode and it would just be Camardella plugging his site with "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" playing in the background. The dumb thing is that his website just sells the same stuff he put on podcasts for free. Maybe I'm wrong, and his business model makes a lot more sense that I understand. Then again, I just tried to look up his site, and I can't find it, so I'm pretty sure I'm right. Also, I may have discovered that "Humphrey Camardella" is actually two men's last names, like Hanna-Barbera. I think they still sell their wares on iTunes. I found a collection of "X Minus One" with their names on it for ten bucks, but why would I pay for that when they've been giving it away via podcast for years? And why would I bother with the podcast when a less annoying version is on archive.org?

I don't understand how the OTR community works. I'm just a casual fan who was looking for audio versions of Isaac Asimov stories. My guess is that the story went something like this. When radio dramas were actually popular they were seen as disposable entertainment, and no one considered that they'd be treasured by future generations. Some of it survived, a lot of it didn't, and what did last was valued only by nostalgia buffs or collectors. The thing I've learned about fandom is that some fans aren't above distorting the truth to get attention, and I'm betting some asshole spliced together a "lost episode" of "X Minus One" because he knew he'd be a hero for "discovering" it. Digital Deli marvels that anyone would have gone to such trouble for a relatively obscure program, but I know better. It's the obscurity of X-1 that made it such a viable target. A more popular series would have been better documented or at least more familiar. Someone would notice the tampering and cry foul. The other advantage is that you could realistically disguise a "Twilight Zone" episode as "X Minus One". Even if someone recognized the resemblance, you could claim that "Twilight Zone" re-used the script years later, just as a lot of X-1 episodes were repurposed scripts from its predecessor, "Dimension X". Over time, a thick layer of bullshit formed in the OTR community, as the older, more established fans would perpetuate the mythology they had failed to prevent.

Then the internet came along, and the entire model changed. Now you didn't have to pay some "expert" for a complete collection of episodes. You could download them from someone else who already had. With greater availability came greater scrutiny, and perhaps some of these "lost episodes" began to get called out for the frauds they were. Since money didn't have to change hands anymore, the people who could settle these issues needn't have an agenda. Also, age becomes less of a factor. I can imagine some old dork in the 1970's telling a younger fan "Listen, kid, I was there when it happened. End of discussion." By now, everyone who worked on old-time radio is probably dead or dying, and in another generation or so, the fans who listened to it live will be gone too. We've reached a point where anecdotal evidence carries no weight. It's like comic books. I'm not more knowledgeable than some teenager just because I've been reading the comics longer. If the teenager read a particular issue more recently, then he's probably got a better handle on the details than I do. Again, I don't know if this is exactly how it went down in the OTR community, but I'm betting it's pretty close to the mark.

The moral, I suppose, is that the truth will out. Bullshitters can only obfuscate a matter for so long. Eventually everyone with an agenda dies and the historians suss out the facts. Information can be lost but objectivity can be gained. This is a scenario where technology improved a situation instead of creating some dystopian nightmare. Mid-20th Century radio failed to document itself properly. Late 20th Century radio fans had to stumble in the dark to make sense of it all, and 21st Century technology made it possible to shed some light on things. In a sense, the whole thing serves as sort of a rebuke to the fearmongering themes of a lot of "X Minus One" episodes. It seems like every other story was about robots taking over, or alien infiltration, or human nature leading to our own undoing. The reality is that in the far flung year of 2013, mankind just likes to carry phones in our pockets and use them to look at cat pictures.

Organizer

mike_smith — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:50:38 GMT

Yeah, I've neglected Livejournal lately. Sorry about that.

Lately I've been trying to get all my ducks in a row. I started this project back in 2011 when I decided I should get my entire music collection sorted on iTunes and listen to every track to make sure it's all in tact. After that I started cleaning out my paper records, shredding documents I didn't need, and scanning othere I did need but not necessarily as a hard copy. In the midst of that I broke my leg, but I returned to the task in February and now my big file bin has been reduced to a couple of folders.

Books and DVD's are the other thing I want to hash out. Not so much that I want to get rid of them, but I want to read/watch them all at least once so I can say I did more than just store them in my apartment for no discernable reason. This all stems from an embarassment I've experienced each time I've moved. I carry all this crap from one place to the next, and decent-sized chunks of it are things I don't even need. Or if they're thing I do value, i haven't actually enjoyed them yet, like I've been stockpiling entertainment in case the Boredom Apocalypse happens. If I hadn't relocated so many times in the 2000's I don't think this would bug me so much, but it does. Well, it did, I shod say. Past tense because I've made a lot of progress in the last year and a half. My apartment isn't just cleaner, it's easier to clean because there's less clutter to rearrange.

Of course, now the trick is figuring out where to stop, or what to do next. I'm not great at declaring victory. What's been on my mind though is organizing my time better.

I do shift work. The upshot is that I only work two or three days at a time, then I get two or three days off to take care of the stuff I couldn't do on the work days. The downside is that I often find myself completely usless on my days off. Either I'm wiped out fromtrying to readjust my sleep schedule from nights to days, or I give in to the urge to sleep and spend the entire time taking naps. The pattern I've noticed is that I get kind of depressed and unmotivated for a few days, then once I'm in the middle of a two-week run of days or nights, I feel a lot better. This may be due to my caffeine intake, but I think a lot of it is that I've been trying to brute force my circadian rhythms. I'm not even sure that's an actual thing, but I still say I'm on to something.

My eureka moment was when I wome up at midnight Thursday, and I decided to watch some MST3K DVD's until I was tired again. I did this because I made it a point to catch up on all the box sets I'd bought over the last few years. Somewhere in the middle of "Codename: Diamondhead" I remembered that I actually like these shows and that was why I decided to watch 'em. I watched a bunch on Wednesday, too, but it felt more like a chore. Maybe they were just bad episodes, but I think I was just in the wrong mood. It felt like a chore because I made it one. Thursday morning, instead of going to bed, I switched over to playing WWE '13, which I'd been meaning to do for months but never got around to. Same thing. It was a line item on a mental to-do list, but once I started playing it I remembered this was fun. I feel kind of dumb spelling this out, and maybe it speaks to how messed up I was mentally. I've been trying to get shit done with my free time, but a lot of days I'm just too worn out for anything serious, so I've been laying around feeling frustrated. But I'm not too tired to play video games, and that's a great way to kill time without sleeping or doing something that requires a lot of thought. I spent an hour kicking Brock Lesnar's ass to avenge the New Age Outlaws, and then I watched more MST3K's. I went to bed around seven p.m., woke up around three a.m., and I felt great. I still do.

The key, I think, is not to get so stuck on any one activity that I get burned out on it. I should probably NOT watch MST3K or play WWE '13 when I get my next couple of days off. I'll do something more productive now that I'm sleeping when I'm supposed to. Then when I switch back to working nights, I'll break out the PS3 and rot my brain until I'm readjusted. There's details to work out, but I think this going to work.

Somewhere in all of this is me writing on LJ more regularly, so there's that.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Working Stiff

mike_smith — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 02:06:33 GMT

I haven't updated in a long time, because once I could walk again I sort of blew off a lot of other stuff. I spent the first week after my surgery just pacing around, for example.

I moved back into my own apartment and returned to work at the beginning of February. Initially, I was concerned with how my leg would hold up on the job, and how long it would take me to get back into the routine of my work. Fortunately, it's gone very well. I re-remembered how to do the work on my first day back, and I've been able to keep up about as well as I had pre-injury.

That said, I think I need to set up a follow-up appointment to make sure everything's okay. I've been slacking off my PT exercises since I came back to work, but now that I've re-acclimated to the job, I need to figure out whether I should still be doing PT, or what kind to do. Also, I've been getting reacquainted with aches and pains that bugged me from before I broke my leg, and I should probably address those, too.

Mostly, I find the comeback refreshing. Things that irritated me at work before don't seem to matter as much now. Not much changed while I was away, but the few changes I have noticed have been for the better. The safety guy we hired late last year appears to be settling into his position, because we've got new flammable cabinets and eyewash stations. Well, new to me, anyway. I don't know how badly we needed these things, but it's nice to know it matters to someone whether we have them or not. When I've trained new hires, I always tell them that things may seem a little inefficient around here, but we've made a lot of progress since I hired on back in late 2010. So the nice thing about being gone for 3+ months is that you get to see the same rate of progress applied instantaneously.

That's... pretty much it, I guess.

Post-Rumble.

mike_smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:19:51 GMT

Jim came over and we went back to my apartment to watch the Royal Rumble. The big complaint about the show was that it was "too predictable". I'd respond to these complaints directly, but I don't have a wrestling-themed tumblr. While I don't have a good name in mind for a wrestling-themed tumblr, I think the bigger issue is that I wouldn't know what to write about on a regular basis. I'm usually pretty cool discussing wrestling on the internet about six times per year.

Anyway, I really liked the show, and while I found the finishes were kind of easy to see coming, that didn't bother me much. It's sort of like how an amusement park ride basically ends with you slowing to a stop and everyone gets off the same way they got on. No one complains that it was "predictable". It's the middle that counts. The end only matters in that it has to live up to the quality of the middle. Maybe I did see the finishes coming, but what I didn't forsee was whether or not the show would suck, and I was pleasantly surprised. It's like I told Jim. The thrill to ordering a pay-per-view lies in having no idea if this will be a classic or a train-wreck. Vince McMahon's got three hours to kill and he owns the promotion. If he wants to strut out to the ring and jerk off for entire night--literally jerk off, I mean--then he totally could. I could turn off the TV, but he's still got my money. I could demand my money back, maybe even get it, but he still "got" me. The Royal Rumble is a slam-dunk proposition, but if he decided to sabotage it, no one could stop him. You won't know for sure until you order it, or wait till it's over and read the results.

Anyway, it was a forgone conclusion back in July that the Rock would win the WWE title, and John Cena would earn a shot at said title by winning the Royal Rumble, and this would set up a WrestleMania XXIX rematch of their WrestleMania XXVIII encounter. There were other directions WWE could have gone, or other ways to make Rock/Cena II happen, but this was the most obvious one and for whatever reason they decided to just go with that instead of teasing the audience or getting cute about it. Personally, I find that refreshing, since it often seems like WWE spends too much time and energy trying to outsmart their audience instead of putting forth the best value possible. I'd rather be entertained than surprised. As I recall, last year's WrestleMania was the biggest grossing Mania in years, maybe ever. They'd be stupid not to try to cash in on a Rock/Cena rematch, especially if both guys were going to be at the show in any event. WrestleMania XXIX might not break any records, but I bet it'll still make a lot of money, and that's ultimately the point of this stuff. Rock vs. Cena part III would probably be pushing things, but we're not there yet.

This time of year, the interesting thing to do is to try and figure out what the rest of the WrestleMania card will look like. This is the other reason I find the "too predictable" complaint dumb. For a lot of fans, half the fun is trying to see around the corner. If you spend all your time speculating on future cards and outcomes, sooner or later you're going to get a few right. That isn't them being predictable, that's you being right, so enjoy it. Anyway, I haven't been following wrestling super-closely since I broke my leg, but I'm gonna try to guess at the rest of the WM29 card just based on what I've heard. I'll assume there's gonna be eight matches and they'll either put the US title or the IC belt on the line, but not both, because I have no idea.

1. WWE Championship: The Rock (c) vs. John Cena. I guess WWE could back off this idea in the next two months, but that'd be pretty dumb, since it's already in the fans' heads that it's bound to happen. I mean, if the Rock gets arrested on child pornography charges or something, they can improvise something else, but otherwise this is locked in.

2. World Heavyweight Championship: Dolph Ziggler (c) vs. Alberto Del Rio. All right, now we head into Fantasy Booking Land. Dolph won the Money in the Bank contract back in July. The gag is he can cash in the contract any time he wants and get a World title match. Traditionally, the MiTB winner waits until the champion just got beat up or otherwise appears vulnerable. Dolph's been kind of hard to figure out this time around, because he's a show-off. Arguably, he only entered the competition for the MitB contract just to say he won an eight-man ladder match. Having the contract, he didn't need to bother entering the Royal Rumble to win a title shot, but he explained that he planned to win the Rumble, win the WWE title at WrestleMania, then somewhere in between he'd win the World Heavywight Championship and unify the titles. He didn't succeed, but the audacity of his plan was impressive enough. I liked Dolph Ziggler before this, but at the Royal Rumble, I finally understood him. Unlike other Money in the Bank winners, he's not looking for the ideal opportunity to win a title. He's looking for a way to leverage the situation to puff up his own ego. So cashing in his contract and winning the title isn't enough.

So here's my idea. Somehow, some way, Dolph wins the World title without cashing in his contract. He'd be the first man to ever do this, which is impressive in itself. From there on, the contract is merely insurance. If he loses the belt, he has an automatic rematch in his back pocket, which is a great bad guy maneuver. But that's not his plan. His plan is to retain the title until after July, when they hold the next Money in the Bank competition. At that event, Dolph's contract expires, and he becomes the only Money in the Bank winner who never used it and still won the title anyway. Now he's not only the champion, but he's lapped everyone else in the race.

Now, whether or not he accomplishes this is immaterial. All that matters is that this is his arrogant motivation for defending the title at WrestleMania. Del Rio just wants to beat him so he can get his belt back. I could stick any babyface in here, but Del Rio's the current champion, and he only recently turned face, so Ziggler vs. Del Rio is a guaranteed fresh match, and both guys are over and talented, so it'd be awesome. And Del Rio looks like he's going into the match at a disadvantage, because Dolph could use his contract to get an instant do-over if he loses the title.

3. The Undertaker vs. CM Punk. This seems to be the rumor going around. It's not certain that the Undertaker will come back at all for this year's Mania, but if he does show up, he'll need an opponent, and CM Punk's probably been shut out of the main event. Fortunately, if you fight the Undertaker at WrestleMania, you're not only back in the main event, but you can upstage the other main-eventers by beating him to end the Streak. I don't know what the Undertaker's 2013 status is, or if there's someone else lined up to face him instead, but I could easily see Punk wanting to do this to salve his wounded pride. The last four WrestleManias have presented the Undertaker's Streak as a sort of hyperchampionship, so if Punk breaks the Streak he not only surpasses the WWE title he just lost, but he also demonstrates his superiority to the Rock and Cena in one stroke.

4. Triple H vs. Brock Lesnar. I kind of wanted to see Undertaker vs. Brock, but the wind seems to be blowing towards Triple H instead, and unless something changes this is probably more likely to pass. Brock broke Triple H's arm back in April 2012, then he destroyed him at Summerslam 2012, and Triple H has barely appeared since then. Presumably, the idea is that he finishes eight months of soul-searching and stakes his career on one last match against Brock. This probably shouldn't be a Reitrement match per se, but the understanding should be that if Triple H loses, his body and spirit will be too broken down to continue. On the other hand, I could see Brock demanding a retirement stip just to demonstrate his position in the matter. Brock doesn't have anything to prove. Of course, the bigger issue is that even if Triple H wins, he's been winding down his career since 2010, and he really has nowhere left to go.

5. WWF Tag Team Championship: Team Hell No (Kane and Daniel Bryan) vs. Intercontinental Champion Wade Barrett and U.S. Champion Antonio Caesaro. I'm just spitballing here. They set up a pretty cool rivalry between Team Hell No and Rhodes Scholars, but they just did that match at the Royal Rumble, and there really isn't another team for them to fight. I guess the Prime Time Players would be a smart choice, but I like my idea of teaming up the B-champions and having them gun for the tag titles for their own glorification. Personally, I'd rather they unified the IC and US championships, but that's not likely to happen, and this is the next best thing. And it makes an interesting contrast, where a dysfunctional team has to prove their worth against two very successful loners.

6. Triple Threat for the WWF Divas Championship: Kaitlyn (c) vs. Layla El vs. Natalya Neidhart. I'm pretty sure these are the only women left in the Divas division. Maybe Alicia Fox, so if they want to make it a four-way, I'm all for that. The WWE has never taken its women's division seriously, yet they insist on putting at least one meaningless Divas match on every PPV. Curiously, the 2013 Royal Rumble had no Divas match, and I suspect it's because they don't have enough PPV-caliber Divas left to use. This is because in 2012, a bunch of the Divas left the company. Kelly Kelly took time off and just never came back. Beth Phoenix gave notice while she was still the reigning Divas champion. Then they put the belt on Eve Torres and she turned around and did the same thing. Somewhere in there, the Bellas also left. I forget if one of them was champion when they decided to leave. I suppose each of them had their own reasons for leaving, but the pattern sure makes it seem like the Divas have stopped taking WWE seriously, just as WWE never took them seriously.

Now, the ones who are still left are at a crossroads, because this is their golden opportunity to get the spotlight now that all the others are gone. Thing is, if the others left while they were in that spot, is it really such a good spot to be in? Given a lack of Divas, the WWE seems to be faced with a dilemma between booking the same six Divas matches at every show, or having no Divas matches at all in order to keep the six possible matches fresh. Personally, I think WWE should play into this whole Fall of the Divas concept and make this WrestleMania Divageddon. They fight for the championship in one big free-for-all, and then they all disappear, never to be seen again.

7. Rey Mysterio vs. Sin Cara. WWE's wanted to do this Rey/Sin Cara match for years, just so they can have all the fans wear masks at WrestleMania, thereby breaking the record for most masks work in one place. Something like that. The only problem is that Rey's been out for most of the year due to injuries and/or personal problems, and Sin Cara has been sidetracked with botched spots and everyone being down on him for said botched spots. Oh, and I think he got injured too maybe? They both came back for the Royal Rumble, but I'm pretty sure that was just to remind the audience that they exist. Godfather came back for the Royal Rumble, but that was mostly because he could get thrown out in two seconds without hurting himself. It's a feel-good comeback, not a comeback where he goes on to be in a big match at WrestleMania. At this point, I seriously wonder if Rey and Sin Cara are in the Godfather's category now.

Anyway, knowing WWE, they've probably lost confidence in either guy, but they'll still do the match anyway because they want to break the record. This attitude will result in the whole thing getting screwed up, and I wouldn't be shocked if the fans lose interest and fail to wear masks to the show, thus defeating the entire point. I'm cool with Rey vs. Sin Cara and the whole mask record thing, but you can't just do it, you have to promote it right. Since 2011, they've treated Sin Cara like dogcrap and Rey's biggest career highlight has been a ninety-minute title reign. Why would anyone over the age of nine want to wear either guy's mask right now?

8. Randy Orton vs. Sheamus. Hell if I know. I heard there was talk of turning Orton heel and he and Sheamus haven't fought in a while, so let's do that. Presumably heel Orton can find a way to make Sheamus want to kick his ass.

Pre-Show: Miz vs. Big Show. I just remembered these are the only halfway important guys left.

Marvel Captain Marvel Jr.

mike_smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 02:57:22 GMT

I expressed an interest to Jim a while back for reading Peter David's run on Captain Marvel. Fortunately, he had already collected the entire series, and I broke my damn leg, giving me time to read the whole thing. I finished them Sunday night. Now my plan is to read the entire run of Quasar he put in the shortbox with them. I think this was mostly for filler purposes, but if I finish them, then I can just give him back the whole box when he comes over to watch the Royal Rumble with me. I don't want to have like thirty-two issues of Quasar still at my place waiting for me to finish so I can give them back at a later date. Of course, this presupposes that Jim wants them back in the first place. It's probably more like the trampoline bit from the Simpsons.

MIKE: Hey, Jim, I brought back your Quasar comics--

JIM (w/shotgun): You just keep on driving.

MIKE: ...

Quasar kind of sucks, but on the other hand, he's a nice way to cleanse the palate after reading Captain Marvel v.6, in which Peter David seems hellbent on making the main character as unlikeable as possible. I haven't read much of Quasar yet, but early in his series he's bummed out because he's got a bright future in S.H.I.E.L.D., but he's not cut out for combat. Most comics would have the main character lose a job because they failed miserably or had a rotten attitude or some other stark character flaw. Wendell Vaughn's big hang-up is that he makes A minuses instead of A's. When he rents an office for his new business venture, he meets a lady on the elevator who cries because she blew an interview for a secretarial job, and he offers her a position in his own firm, even though the ink hasn't dried on his lease. He's too nice. She's dressed like she went to a rock concert on the moon, and speculates that maybe her inappropriate attire cost her the job. Wendell tells her he thinks she looks just fine. Sometimes you do more harm than good with that sort of attitude. Maybe it would hurt her feelings, but I think she needs to understand that red-and-white cowboy boots and a miniskirt give the impression that you're not taking the interview seriously. Then again, Wendell wears a Quasar costume in public, so maybe he wouldn't know the difference.

Nevertheless, it's kind of nice to see Quasar play it straight after reading PAD bend the superhero paradigm over backwards. Captain Marvel v.5 was a lot better than I expected it to be, and the first six issues of v.6 were really compelling stuff. Genis-Vell goes nuts trying to refine his Cosmic Awareness, and he can't handle all the emergencies and crises he senses, so he just throws up his hands and becomes an enormous dick. It's a genuinely scary reversal of his successes as a novice hero in v.5. The problem is that you get to the end of that arc, where you'd expect him to get a handle on the problem and turn things around, and he's still crazy.

From there on, Genis goes around acting like a holier-than-thou big shot. He freely admits he's insane, and somehow he's invincible even though he didn't used to be back when he was a good guy. A lot of it just boils down to PAD doing the same schtick he's used elsewhere, where someone tries to argue a morality issue, and the other guy acts like a big smartass about it. There was an issue of Supergirl where Supergirl tried to stop an alien from devouring corpses on a battlefield, and he the whole moral was that she was the asshole for trying to stop him, because logic or something. Genis plays the same twisted game, only the guys he messes with are other assholes, like Thor during his "Lord of Asgard" period, a mass murderer who survives his own execution, and an alien head of state who happens to be a very ham-fisted metaphor for George W. Bush. Then you get to the issue where various interstallar powers hold a summit to figure out what to do about Captain Marvel, and he declares that he's going to wipe them out because his Cosmic Awareness tells him that they'll eventually join forces and wipe out everyone else. Who am I supposed to be rooting for, exactly?

Finally, Genis' mom steps in and stuff happens, and the big reveal is that he was never crazy to begin with, he was just too immature to handle his Cosmic Awareness, so he retreated into the whole "crazy" role to excuse himself for abusing his power. So they put him on trial and he gets sentenced to-- No, wait, don't be silly. They don't do a damn thing to him. The dumbest part is that PAD ends this "intervention" story arc with an ambiguous finish. Captain Marvel only said what he thought they wanted to hear, so maybe he really was crazy and perhaps he still is? Or not? Maybe?

I had hoped the next story arc would settle that matter, but it's completely dropped. Genis goes on a pretty neat quest in the future, and then he gets back home to find out his book's been canceled. This gives Peter David a chance to do one of those dumb meta-stories where the characters break kayfabe and talk about their comic like they knew it was just a story the whole time. Rick Jones complains that he'll never get de-bonded from Captain Marvel now that the book's been axed, so the cosmic powers-that-be do a last-minute rewrite to wrap that up. That's not my cup of tea, but okay, it's a fair enough way to end a series on short notice. But if they were gonna do that, why didn't PAD settle the whole insanity question, since that was the one constant through the whole run?

See, the reason I was interested in Genis-Vell's career was because right after his solo book was canceled, he joined up with the Thunderbolts. Fabian Nicieza never spent a lot of time explaining his motivations in the pages of New Thunderbolts. It was mostly taken for granted that he had a lot of past mistakes to make up for, and he thought joining a super-team on Earth would help redeem his public image. I think he would have sought out the Avengers except he happened to show up on a day when the Avengers were disbanded and the Thunderbolts had just made their return to New York. I see now that it was a pretty seamless transition. Beginning in #19, Captain Marvel set up an HQ for himself and planned to take requests from anyone who contacted him with a call for help. The only problem was that no one called in because he'd spent issues #1 through 18 terrorizing the universe. So it makes sense that when he shows up in New Thunderbolts #1 he's taking matters into his own hands, because his only other choice is to sit in his base and stare at his phone.

What he got out of the Thunderbolts was what he deserved. Atlas beat the piss out of him in New Thunderbolts #1, the Swordsman slashed his throat in #10, and Baron Zemo killerized him in Thunderbolts #100. At one time, Genis was fated to marry Songbird and have kids with her. Hey, look at my user icon, then say "Not any-moo-oo-oore!" That's the cover of the issue right after Genis gets killed. It should have had a blurb on it that read "Sorry 'bout yo' damn luck."

I felt bad for Genis back in the day, but now I see this was him getting back all the bullshit he dished out in his solo run. It's not like the Thunderbolts hated his guts or anything, but they were still the instrument of his demise. He conquered two planets, made Rick Jones kill himself, played headgames with a whole laundry list of people, threatened genocide on a galactic scale, and then he says sorry and everyone lets it go. Maybe when Peter David's writing the book, but when he joins the Thunderbolts he has to pay the dues. Just like how Hawkeye had to go to jail for a while and Jolt had to get shot and Moonstone got lobotomized.

So I think that's why PAD's run got cancelled. In the final issue, he suggests that the readers got bored with Genis' unpredictability, but I dug the unpredictability just fine. My beef was that I never got a solid finish to the insanity storyline. Is he or is he not insane? Will he be held accountable for his actions? Genis liked deconstructing the Shi'ar Empire and Thor and everyone else who crossed his path, but for some reason David never seemed interested in putting Genis himself under the microscope, and I think that was what the character arc called for. If PAD wouldn't do it in Captain Marvel, then someone else would, and it turned out to be Fabian on Thunderbolts.

I still think his death scene left plenty of room for him to make a comeback. Now that he's done some penance for his "insane" period, Genis is ripe to continue his journey to becoming a better person. All he needs now is someone at Marvel to bring him back.

Deshi Basara

mike_smith — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:55:39 GMT

I had my surgery last week to remove two of the screws from my leg, and now that that's done I can finally put weigh on my right foot. So I've been away from the internet for the last few days because I was super-busy with my new hobby, walking around my parents house for no particular reason.

When you break your leg like I did, they have to use screws to put the bones back together, and two of those screws were used to connect my tibia and fibula to one another. I believe this was the reason I couldn't put weight on the foot, although I'm still a little unclear on this. I had gone to the hospital last week expecting to only get one screw removed, and I didn't know which side it was on. All I know is that if I had tried to walk around with those two screws in my leg, there was a risk of the screws breaking, which I'm sure would have complicated my recovery. Really, since the screws are made out of titanium and my bones are made out of stuff I managed to break recently, I'm pretty sure the screws weren't the items to worry about. Anyway, it's done, and the only metal left in my leg is secured to just the tibia, so I'm able to walk.

The only problem is that I'm walking around in a walking boot, which is not exactly the most comfortable footwear ever made. I can walk pretty well barefoot, but the doctor wants me to use the boot, so I do. Around bedtime, I pace around a little barefoot, though, because I want to stay accustomed to that. Walking with the boot is probably safer, but it's like walking with a bunch of crap wrapped around your leg. You can't flex your foot and so you have to stomp around and put all your weight on your heel. Actually, I guess that makes it like walking on a peg-leg. Thing is, when you've been confined to a walker as long as I have, it's still pretty great. I can walk to the kitchen and carry stuff to the table in one shot. Who cares if it looks awkward?

My concern is that using the boot all the time is impeding my progress with physical therapy. The PT has been all about getting range of motion back, and the boot restricts range of motion, and I'm wearing it for most of the day. It seems to me that the best way forward is walk without the boot at least some of the time, since that would provide the same sort of motions the PT exercises do. But maybe my doctor doesn't know how far along I am with PT, so he thinks I need the boot because I'm not ready. And maybe I'm not ready, and he knows exactly where I'm at. I've got another appointment next week, and hopefully that will be the day he takes me off the boot and I'm basically on my own, but I kind of feel like I could have done that last Thursday. So I've got about a week and a half where I don't know if I'm making progress or marking time. In the long run, I guess it doesn't matter, but I feel like I've finally got some control over my recovery, and I want to make it count.

On the other hand, my strategy of walking on the boot a whole lot seems to have paid off. Up to today, my heel has hurt each morning when I get out of bed. The pain dies down after I've been walking around for a few minutes, and then it's fine until I wake up the next day. I had the same pain in the butt of my palms from using the walker. It's like they decompress overnight and you have to reacclimate when you get up. Anyway today I got up and had no heel pain at all, which is good because the heel's kind of supposed to put up with that sort of constant use.

Right now, I'm trying to get back into driving. My car has been at my apartment for most of my convalescence, but my parents went to get it the weekend before my surgery. Trouble was, the battery had gone dead. We jumpstarted it, and made it home, but even the 45 minute drive wasn't enough to recharge it, so when I tried to practice with the car last week it was dead all over again. This weekend we got a trickle charger to plug into the wall and fix it that way. Hopefully it's fully charged as of today. My dad got it to start before he left for work this morning, but we've gotten it to start before. I should be able to practice on it at least, but the battery may still need to be replaced.

The thing about my car is that my dad wanted to go to my apartment on his way home from work and drive it around periodically so this wouldn't happen, but I told him not to. I let him do it once back in November, and that was it. So he thinks this battery issue proves he was right, and I guess it does, although I don't think driving it for five minutes every month would have been enough to save it. I didn't want my dad going out of his way to mess with a car I had no immediate use for. It was enough to have him checking my mail every couple of weeks, and I only went along with that because I barely get any mail, and it was less hassle than setting up a forward with the post office.

My assumption was that the car would be fine despite two months of inactivity, and except for the battery I seem to be correct. The problem I have with my dad and cars is that he knows just enough to worry me, but not enough to be specific. What I mean is, he knew we needed to drive the car around every so often, but he couldn't tell me exactly why. Well now we know it's because the battery slowly discharges whether you use it or not, and it relies on the engine running to recharge it. But I'm pretty sure he was more concerned about fluid levels or vague details like that. I think he was more worried about someone breaking into the unattended car, which is dumb because I leave it there all the time anyway.

I'm not going to sit here and say "I meant to do that", but I'm not horribly upset by this outcome. Instead of a vague unease from my dad, now I have the facts: If you leave your car sitting long enough, the battery will run down, but everything else seems to work fine. I know how to deal with that, and the worst case scenario is that I have to reset the clock. I'm coming out of this situation armed with new experience, so I'm better off for playing it out this way.

But I'll never make my dad understand that. Case in point, he is convinced from riding in my car that one of the tires has a "knot" in it. He can't tell me which tire, he won't tell me what a knot is or what the risks are, and he hasn't given me anything more to go on. What I do know is that we drove several dozen miles without incident. But he expects me to take my car into the shop and make an ass out of myself asking them to check for a problem I don't understand. "Uh... hi, m-my daddy says I have bad tire. I not know which one. You make good-good?" No. I'll handle it my way.

Having looked it up, I see that this is damage that results from hitting the tire against curbs, which gives me an idea of what to look for and where to look, so I can settle this on my own. The operative term is "look", because it's supposed to be like a blister on the surface of the tire. My dad, on the other hand, hears knots, because he's Daredevil, the Man without Fear. The thing is, he's pretty good with this stuff, and he's probably right, but he never wants to show his math, and that's what drives me nuts.