A priestly friend of mine handed this title to me with a smile after he read and enjoyed a short story I wrote that carries the subtitle, “A Parish Drama in Three Acts”. I wrote the story on a whim, a dare-suggestion from a friend, and found the exercise unexpectedly delightful. Its focus on small-town politics and family/church drama evidently led my associate rector to think of The Adventures of Reverend Samuel Entwhistle, a farce of sorts set in a mid-1950s Episcopal church. It would be difficult to think of a tighter niche than “audience for 1950s Episcopal church politics”, but as it happens I am a resident of that tiny domain. I love small-town character dramas, and I’ve read part of the Mitford series which has an Episcopal church as its setting. The Adventures of Reverend Samuel Entwhistle see the aforementioned Reverend accepting the call to a larger parish than his own, one that provides a handsome rectory that has no less than five bathrooms. His acceptance letter declares that he looks forward to bathing in a different bathtub each night of the week, cleanliness being next to godliness. Unlike the modern penchant for setting murders and such in cozy settings, here the antagonists are a normal part of the ‘cozy’: they are an overweening choir director, a crucifer who holds the Cross in a strange way that makes dramatic sense to him; other people in the church who have not found an arcane tradition they would not die on a hill for, and bishops trying to impose new Sunday School curriculum on the church. As you might guess, it’s faintly absurd, almost like Max Shulman were trying to write with something stricter than a G-rating. It’s sweet in its way, too, especially for someone like myself who likes the midcentury setting, but as mentioned this has an extraordinarily niche audience. Quote one of my coworkers: “So the entire audience for this book is basically…you.”
Yes, Sulu wears his hair long in the text. It’s for a girl.
By the Great Bird of the Galaxy, is this really only my second Star Trek read for 2025? Star Trek: The Entropy Effect is, despite its modern cover, a 1981 classic TOS tale that plays with the chaos of time travel. Weeks into a taxing assignment to study a singularity which has appeared and is blocking the “space lanes”, the Enterprise receives a message to report to a nearby planet: the priority is “Ultimate”, meaning Kirk has to order the Big E away in the middle of observations, much to the dismay of Mr. Scott and to the “Stoic but secretly SEETHING” Mr. Spock. When the Enterprise arrives, they find that they’ve been diverted for nothing more than a prisoner transport, which confuses and irritates all parties concerned. What they don’t know is that they — and time — are being manipulated, to tragic results: the death of Jim Kirk. When Spock realizes that there’s skulduggery afoot, he and McCoy secretly hatch a plan to go back into time and root out the problem. The overall result is an entertaining novel that entertains by accident: while the story is certainly thrilling, there’s some curious characterization and general weirdness.
Readers may start suspecting something is going on under the hood when the Enterprise reaches the planet and learn that their prisoner is a physicist with a specialty in temporal mechanics. This is not a field anyone respects, and he’s regarded as a bit of a kook — but he’s been convicted of killing several people despite Spock remembering him as a mild-mannered professor and compelling mentor. Time travel, you say? And oddities happening like one character insisting he saw Spock on-planet days ago, long before the Enterprise had been diverted? Because this book was written ‘early’ in the Trek canon — only a decade after the show went off the air for the first time — there’s some interesting characterization. This is the book that gave Sulu his first name, Hikaru, and it goes into some other background information that I don’t think has ever been revisited: we also get a sense of Sulu’s ambition, the ambition that will later take him to his own command. McCoy and Spock’s characterizations are captured quite well, I think. On the downside, the off-beat characterization creates some unrealistic drama when some space cop is able to create serious friction between Scotty, Spock, and McCoy — through some means that are patently ridiculous. The execution of time travel is a little strange, as well: at one point McCoy is desperately stalling for time while, in real time, Spock has transported into the past and is trying to carry something out. That’s effective for drama, but I don’t know if it makes sense from a temporal mechanics view. Of course, since no one has built a time machine, who is to say anything?
This was an enjoyable, if sometimes strange, old-school Trek tale.
All Systems Red is a fun action-mystery thriller in a SF context. Our narrator, as the series title “Murderbot Diaries” might suggest, is not quite human. Murderbot is instead a robotic-organic construct that prefers humans see it, or him, as a robot: that way he’s left alone to watch recorded TV dramas in his head when not monitoring feeds and shooting bogies as need shooting. Unlike most constructs, though, Murderbot is rogue: at some point he hacked his “governor module”, the bit that forces him to respond to orders, and has been keeping this secret to avoid being disassembled for parts, or worse – “fixed”. Murderbot as he styles himself, is a security unit: his whole function is to crush, kill, and demolish. We find out through the text that Murderbot hacked himself not to give him leeway to get rowdy, but because sometimes conflicting orders diminished his ability to function. Although I enjoyed the story, Murderbot didn’t seem like an ‘other’ – unlike Shelli or Seven of Nine, whose cognition and verbal expression hint at their being different, and to a lesser degree R. Daneel Olivaw. (I say lesser because Olivaw was literally trying to pass as human for most of his lifespan and did fairly well at it.) I could see continuing in this series, as it made for fun reading.
I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
I saved this post for today (instead of yesterday or the day before, when I’d finished reading it) because of the prompt: “other life forms in SFF”. This is also why I was thinking of Murderbot and the lack of a sense of “other”. One of the enduring aspects of SF, I suppose, is the freedom it gives writers and readers to think about life and its expression. Sometimes this can take physical form: Andalites were extremely interesting to me in middle school because of their bodies, and the thought that K.A. Applegate had put into their world. Andalites were, of course, cool as hell: they almost look like centaurs but had powerful scorpion-like tails armed with a scythe, and then eyes on stalks that allowed them a broader perspective.
Often aliens are used to explore human culture. Star Trek did this a lot with some species transparently standing in for human civs (the TOS-era Klingons being Space Russians, something Trek leaned into when they had TNG Worf raised by a family in Minsk). My favorite Trek species, though, are the Cardassians. While they were originally conceived as villains with fairly elaborate makeup, Deep Space Nine really fleshed them out. It gave us Cardassians who were people, not merely antagonists: we saw Cardassian scientists, shopkeepers, poets, etc. What’s more, Cardassia itself had a history — a high-arts culture being stressed to the point of death by famine and environmental disruption, then replaced by a mire militant order. DS9 did wonderful things with the Cardassians, like exploring personal and national guilt: in one memorable episode, a man pretends to be the equivalent of Rudolf Hoess so that he can stand trial and force Cardassia to admit its sins. It’s machine intelligence, though, that I find the most interesting — especially when its sentience is debated. Daniel Suarez’s DAEMON did this incredibly well.
We’re the Cardassians you can’t keep up with.
In SF-related news, I watched Dune, Part Two last night. This picks up with Paul and Lady Jessica in the desert with the Fremen, and struggling with their respective fates. I’m not going to do a “Reads to Reels” post because it’s been too long since I read Dune proper, but I was riveted by the movie. I’d only planned to watch half of it last night, but wound up staying up long past my bedtime to finish it off. Well, mostly: I may need to rewatch the last twenty minutes or so just in case. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep toward the end because when I woke up Amazon was playing some TV show that featured a man approaching John Wilkes Booth and offering him help. May have to look into that. To quote Leonardo DiCaprio, — “You had my curiosity, sir, but now you have my attention.”
Coming up in SF Month: I am reading Star Trek: The Entropy Effect and just picked up an Amazon first reads with a SF background, including a virtual world like that of The Oasis or Husk.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? All Systems Red, Martha Wells. An action-mystery short novel featuring a sarcastic robot helping colonists on another world.
WHAT are you reading now? The Nazi Seizure of Power, though that will be a slow burn. I started reading For Cause and Comrades, an examination of soldiers’ motives in the Civil War as evinced by their letters, on Sunday — but I will probably focus on the Nasties and SF for now.
WHAT are you reading next? Possibly Double Star by Robert Heinlein, or Star Trek: The Entropy Effect. The latter supposedly opens with Spock seeing Kirk murdered on the bridge of the Enterprise!
“The bridge really can get along without you for a few more hours.” “I realize that, sir. However, when I began my experiment I psychophysiologically altered my metabolism to permit me to remain alert during the course of my observations. I could return my circadian rhythm to normal now, but it does not seem sensible, to me, to prepare myself for rest when my presence may be required when we reach our destination.” Kirk sorted through the technicalities of his science officer’s statement. “Spock,” he said, “you aren’t saying you haven’t had any sleep in six weeks, are you?” “No, Captain.” “Good,” Kirk said, relieved; and, after a pause, “Then what are you saying?” “It will not be six standard weeks until day after tomorrow.”
The prompt for today is “short stories, novellas, etc”, which brings Asimov to mind immediately. As I’ve mentioned before, finding Asimov via his short story collections was my tipping point into being a Science Fiction Reader, as opposed to someone who read stories that sometimes involved aliens or space travel. I seriously used to say that I wasn’t an SF reader, I just like Star Trek. In 2008 or so I tried an Asimov collection and fell head over heels in love with Asimov as a writer. I wound up not only devouring all the collections my library had, and those my university library had, but buying boxes of Asimov books off of ebay just to fish out ones I hadn’t read and donate the rest to goodwill. The only other SF writer I’ve read many short stories from would be Ray Bradbury, and it is my intention to read something by him this month.
Related: “Ten Stories by Isaac“, a post I did sharing ten of my favorite Asimov stories. They’re not all SF.
Today’s treble T is ten random picks from bookcases. Well, alrighty then. But first, a Tuesday Tease!
“I do think of it as a person,” Gurathin said. “An angry, heavily armed person who has no reason to trust us.” “Then stop being mean to it,” Ratthi told him. “That might help.” – ALL SYSTEMS RED: THE MURDERBOT DIARIES, Martha Wells
Random books? They’re coming, they’re coming….but first, prompt 3 from the SF Month Challenge: discoveries from past SF months! Last year I introduced myself to Becky Chambers’ writing, and found I enjoyed both her “Wayfarers” series and her more contemplative solarpunk Monk and Tea novels. Those were easily the highlight. And now, random books from my shelf. To mitigate bias, I enlisted silicon assistance. There is some semblance of order in most of my collection: I have shelves of Asimov, two shelves of European history that also have German/Spanish/French language learning materials in it, three rows of pop science, several rows (and columns) of Star Trek novels, and so on. There are also shelves where it’s absolutely random.
And now, some random books. Now………it is hard to be truly random, so I divided my bookcases into 10 (later, 14) zones and asked chatgpt to roll the dice.
Zone 1 Enough Already, Scott Horton, a history of the war in Afghanistan and an exhortation to get out.
Zone 2: The Voice of the Master, Khalil Gibran. …huh. Don’t think I’ve read this one.
Zone 7: City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction, David Macaulay. This is a children’s nonfiction title that was discarded; I rescued it and shoved it in immediately in front of my Harry Potter shelf, right after The Houses We Live In: An Identification Guide to the History and Style of American Domestic Architecture.
Zone 9: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Physical Sciences, Isaac Asimov
Zone 10: Greenlights, Mattthew McConaughey. I haven’t read this one. Be a lot cooler if I did.
Zone 11: Star Trek Deep Space Nine #22: Vengeance, Dayfdd ab Hugh. Klingons try to take over DS9 while Sisko, Kira, and Dax are all traipsing around the Gamma Qaudrant. I have mentioned this one a few times on the blog; perhaps I should re-read it. I am fairly sure my copy is old enough to run for president at this point.
Zone 12: A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Wilhelm Roepke. The German title of this translates to Beyond Supply and Demand, and the book as a whole argues for a ‘social market economy’ in which the virtues of capitalism are balanced by communitarian values or needs.
Zone 13: Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World
Zone 14 Oh, this is part of my Star Trek DVD collection. ST DS9 season 5 if you’re desperately curious. I didn’t realize how many stray DVDs had snuck inside my bookcases.
My physical holdings are OVERWHELMINGLYnonfiction with the exception of Star Trek. Over time I intend to replace my ebook Wendell Berry books with physical copies, but that will have to wait until I have more room for such indulgences. If I had included my Ottoman that’s full of books, or the trunk of books in my bedroom closet, more fiction would have appeared… though mostly YA titles!
When checking Amazon for the Old Man’s War series, I noticed a new short story series created by Amazon. I’ve read their FORWARD and WARMER collections before and figured this might be fun. Unfortunately, this skewed more toward the level of WARMER than FORWARD, as I only enjoyed a few of the pieces and even one of those was confusing.
“3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years”, John Scalzi
If you could be a tourist in the past, where would you go? Personally, I’d want to visit North America prior to the arrival of humans from the Bering Strait, so to witness the megafauna at the time. Pity it would probably eat me. “3 Days” takes us to a world where time travel is possible, but with limitations. Nothing we do in the past shapes our timeline, and there are only three opportunities to come back — windows that open three days, nine months, or twenty seven years from departure. When a tourist goes back into time, they are free to do whatever they like: kill Hitler, flirt with Napoleon, try to introduce a tank into the Punic Wars and see what happens. Some perish in the times they visit; others find out that if you kill a painter in 1920s Vienna, you’ll find yourself arrested for murder, not hailed as the savior of western civilization. “3 Days (etc)” at first seems like it’s just entertaining readers with the premise, but then delivers a twist.
For his sake, I hope he was indeed eaten by his preferred dinosaur. It would be terrible to plan one’s own death between the jaws of one of the most fearsome predators to live, only to trip up and be consumed by something less majestic.
Except for that one client who traveled to another reality expressly to walk up to the younger alternate version of themself and punch them square in the teeth. The client did not explain themself to their other version. They did not explain themself to the organization in the debrief afterward. But I never did see a client happier with their experience.
“Making Space”, R.F. Kuang
An infertile couple finds a child in the woods looking like he’s escaped captivity: what they don’t realize is that their frustrating, suburban world is Eden to a child who comes from a far less hospitable future. Aside from the main character’s compassion for the child, this wasn’t particularly compelling and I hated the way the story developed.
“For a Limited Time Only”, Peng Shephard
A salesman named Russ works for an ad and product placement company with a twist: it can send people small amounts back in time to manipulate markets and help its clients steal a march on the competition. Most of the story is about character drama, though — Russ witnessing two of his friends’ relationship fall apart, and experiencing ups and downs with his own daughter. Because of the nature of his work, though — constantly moving through time — sometimes his daughter is two, sometimes nine, etc. Sometimes one friend is dead, sometimes alive. Although the story wound up being compelling, the temporal ‘jumps’ are so chronic and often unannounced that I was often confused.
Oracle has two main departments: Past and Futures. Including Vik and me, there are probably fifty employees in Past, and I have no idea how many in Futures, other than Theresa. Most of them, we’ll never meet, because they haven’t even been hired yet.
“A Visit to the Husband Archive”, Kaliane Bradley.
Unique in these stories, “Visit” has a double premise: the media is thrown into a confusing world where many characters appear to be chronic amnesiacs, doing manual labor and living in a brief window of ‘now’ surrounded by mental fog. As the story progresses, we learn about an extraterrestrial element that also involves time.
“All Manner of Thing Shall Be”, Olivie Blake
I…I don’t even know how to start with this one. We have some eccentric personalities living in a house together who all transform into some kind of flesh-eating ghouls at sundown, and time is also involved. Not enjoyable, aside from this quote:
There was a trend going around on the latest app—ingenious, really, the way someone had built the algorithm to do the work of a million, perhaps even a billion psychic vampires; the way it could drain the life force from anyone and yet still continually feed, its prey returning willingly for more. In another life, Esther thought, or perhaps in a century or so, when she tired of her educational ventures, she might look into the neurology of it all, though presumably by then everyone would be permanently slumped over, comatose save for the dim blue light of their insatiable devices.
“Cronus”, P. Djèlí Clark
A short story set in an alternate history where segregation in the United States never ended, and people are comically hateful. There doesn’t appear to be one point of deviation: instead, several “switch” moment in history, like the Brown v Board of Education decision and Jackie Robinson signing on with Brooklyn, don’t activate. As the story develops, we realize that a time travel tourism company has been used to alter the past — but memories from the original timeline keep surfacing and causing problems. The main character, Annie, is contacted by a resistance group who want her to use her position as a clerk at the company to help.
All of these were 38 – 48 pages and readable in one sitting.
Well, so ends October! In Alabama cooler weather finally began drawing near, though it’s rare for it to come inside and take a seat so soon. The cold actually kicked the door down last night: it’s 38 (3 C) at present. I’ve been going to work in my cardigan but this morning I’ll have to bust out my coat for the first time since March! It was an odd month on the blog, with a mix of history, SF, and some weird alt-history/SF tales. Personally, the month was hit and miss, with one highlight being my suddenly making progress on a short story I’d been picking at for close to two years. (I say short: it’s ~14500 words now and I’m stalled on the critical final section.)
It is my intention to finish the survey next month. I have a book on zombie bugs I’d intended to post for Halloween, but got distracted.
The Unreviewed
Starry Messenger is an unusual piece, more of a collection of thoughts of how to apply scientific thinking to everyday life and issues — like debating vegetarianism or gambling. I kind of miss Tyson: I used to listen to his StarTalk Radio podcast, but he has comedian co-hosts for pop culture appeal, and they’d just make the show obnoxious. It was an OK way to pass the time, but frankly rather forgettable.
The latter three were all found at Fair Oaks Books, Selma’s indie bookstore. I had planned on getting the Wendell Berry release, but my lady-friend suggested that I not, so that’s something to look forward to in December, I think.
Coming up in November….Science Fiction!
Several blogs are hosting a “SciFi Month” month, which will include a series of prompts to respond to for the month, and the first prompt is to share our SF TBR for the month! These are some possibilities:
(1) Maybe Becky Chambers. I’ve checked out one of her titles several times this year but haven’t actually committed to it; it’s next in Wayfaring Strangers.
(2) More Ursula le Guin. I read her The Dispossessed but keep meaning to tackle The Left Hand of Darkness.
(3) Delta-V, Daniel Suarez.
(4) Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
(5) Check on John Scalzi to see what the next Old Man’s War book is.
(6) I’ve been told Ramez Naam is Suarez-like, so I may try his Nexus book.
(7) Maybe some Heinlein? I’ve read a few of his works (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc) but none of his Lazarus Long titles.
(8) The Duke of Calladan, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson. A Dune prequel novel about Duke Leto. I know I’m supposed to read Dune Messiah first, but honestly the whole space jihad-genocide thing isn’t that attractive.
(9) John Carter of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read a third of this last year when I was doing Science Fiction Book Bingo, and may revisit it just for temporal variety.
(10) All Systems Red, first in the “Murderbot” stories. Both Amazon and ChatGPT tell me I would like this.
Now, readers who have been with me for a while know perfectly well that I won’t complete this list, that it’s perfectly plausible that I’ll read something and then go off on a completely unrelated tangent — but I’d like to at least match last year’s SF Month mark of six books. We’ll see! Are you joining in this year? There’s plenty of room on board.
Rush Hour 2, 2001. I watched this a few times back in the day, but it’s been fifteen, twenty years I’d say. I remembered it for three things: one, a ridiculous fight scene in a massage parlor in which two men fight off a small army of Triad goons dressed in short bathrobes and towels; two, the female actresses, and three, a hysterical exchange between detectives Carter and Lee after they bump into one another after a long separation in which Lee believes Carter was killed during an explosion.
Carter: Who died, Lee? Lee: You! Carter: Detective Yu? Lee: Not Yu, you! Carter: Who? Lee: You! Carter: Who? Lee: Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?! Carter:Don’t nobody understand the words that are comin’ out of your mouth!
It reminds me of a “Who’s on First” routine starring George W. Bush. There are many plot oddities, like a Secret Service dude ordering an LAPD detective who is on vacation to go back to the States, and said SS dude telling a Hong Kong special inspector that he’s off the case. Also, there’s the fact that Ricky Tan, who is supposedly the former partner of Lee’s father (also an inspector) looks a decade or so younger than Lee. On the bright side, it was nice to see pre 9/11 airports. Jeremy Piven has a minor but very memorable role as a Versace salesman: he was later a major supporting member of Chasing Liberty. I also appreciated that the Netflix version includes outtakes and bloopers, like “Daaaaaamn! He ain’t gonna be in Rush Hour 3!”
Chasing Liberty, 2004. Mandy Moore plays the American president’s daughter, who feels smothered by her SS detail and decides to ditch them while in Prague; she flees with the assistance of Matthew Goode, who unbeknownst to her is a plainclothes SS man. Believe it or not, this is a rewatch for me, and a rewatch many times over back when I was younger. As someone still in his teens but moving quickly toward young adulthood, I loved the idea of going on this spontaneous adventure across Europe – seeing beauty, meeting interesting people, finding what was real. There were a lot of perks in the movie, too: I greatly enjoyed the actors who played the principal SS men, especially Jeremy Piven, and Mark Harmon features as the president. This film was also my introduction to Matthew Goode, who I later enjoyed in Imagine Me and You – and then much later, Match Point, The Imitation Game, &c. There are some great minor characters in this like Scotty MacGruff, who makes a habit of slapping Six Million Dollar Man stickers on things. We can rebuild him! We have the technology! The story is fairly absorbing: Goode and Moore’s characters fall in love, which is a big problem for Goode given that he’s basically deceived her and he’s in love with his boss’s daughter.
McGruff: Hey, chilly-willy, Squabblers, take a few of these on your solo travels then. Ben: What are these? Six-Million-Dollar Man stickers? McGruff: These stickers are my contribution to the global community. Everyone I meet gets a handful. Your job: post them up! Pound one on a door, slap one on a kiosk, place one on a postbox, wherever your life may lead you. Anna: And then what? McGruff: Then, nothing. You forget about the sticker, you move on. One day, maybe you’re a little down in the dregs, and all of a sudden, there it is! The corner of a window, the door of a subway, the side of a telephone booth, one of the stickers. And it puts a smile of your face because you know you are not alone in the world; we’re all connected. Ben: Wanker.
Morales: No, no, no, let me ask you something, Weiss. Do you actually get women like this? I was really curious if there were actually women out there in the world who walk by the construction lunch break which is your very personality and say: “Oh, yeah, please. Baby, give it to me. Give me some of that hard hat, right here, right now.” There are actually women like that? Weiss: A couple.
36 Hours, 1964. A rewatch for me, though it’s been over a decade since my late friend Al Benn first introduced me to it back in 2011 or so. In this movie, a senior American military officer wakes up in what seems to be a U.S. Army hospital in 1950 after supposedly spending several years in a coma. The medical staff fuss over him and soon begin asking curious questions about what he remembers. Specifically: D-Day. Where did the troops land? How many were there, bitte? …Bitte? Ach, du lieber!
Where Eagles Dare, 1969. Broadsword calling Danny Boy! This is a crazy-fun WW2 spy thriller in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton blow the hell out of a bunch of Nasties amid twist after twist. (Quote Clint Eastwoood: “Major, you’ve got me as confused as I ever hope to be.”) It’s also probably the WW2 movie I’ve watched the most times: I had a VHS in high school and loved it. Mind, at the same time I was also playing Commandos and Medal of Honor….
Office Space, 1999. A many-times rewatch: I’ve been watching this film on and off for ….20 years. It’s a black comedy about the inhumanity of office work, I suppose? Lawrence remains my favorite character. (“Hell, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothin’, man. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he don’t do ____!”)
Elephant, 2003. A psychological drama based heavily on the Columbine massacre, a failed bombing turned shooting that has become the …iconic? …school shooting. The film is unusual in that it’s not a straight movie; this isn’t a 9/11 movie or a Pearl Harbor movie where we’re seeing characters Do Things and Change the Plot. Instead, we’re observers, with the majority of the film being tracking shots. These shots are often from behind the character, like we’re following them, and the intent is to…”experience” a Columbine-like event not as a movie, but as if it were happening to us. Accordingly, most of the film is watching characters do routine stuff: one guy is walking around campus taking photos for his film project, a guy has come to school late because his dad was drunk and he had to make arrangements, etc. And then….what happens, happens, and it’s an abrupt change.
The film creates ambiguity by moving the setting to autumn Oregon (instead of spring Colorado), and having its characters not be named after the two RL cretins, and there are ups and downs. I was glad it included the failed-bombing aspects (the IRL guys planned to blow up the school, then use their guns to sweep survivors coming out of the doors), but it did play to the contemporary narrative that the perps were poor widdle socially abwused loners who lashed out. In reality, one of them was a popular sociopath and the other was played like a fiddle by the sociopath, but given how quickly this movie came out that’s forgivable. I watched it for the director and the interesting perspective shift, buuuut I was also a middle schooler when Columbine happened and part of me was interested in seeing how they portrayed….that time as far as fashion and such. I know that’s weird, but I also rewatch Scream for nostalgia, so there you are. (…I watched Scream around this same time. Don’t tell my parents, they’ll never let me go over to Tim’s house again.) My only complaint is that the school was weirdly dark: some corridors look like they have no lights on at all. I don’t know if that was an artistic choice or not, but a lot of the dark areas did wind up being shooting galleries.
Somebody pay the light bill, honestly. Locker combinations were hard enough with GOOD lighting! (fun fact: the dialogue at this moment was “Oh, I’m going to the dark room to develop some shots.”)
Killing them Softly, 2012. A crime drama set during the financial crisis that preceded the Great Recession, but dealing with underworld financial issues instead. Ray Liotta’s high-stakes poker game has just been hit, and since he hit it himself a few years back, he’s the chief suspect. Who really did it was John Sacrimoni, who hires two losers (including Ben Mendelsohn as a bizarrely convincing dopehead) to do the dirty work for him. Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini are called in to find the guys and knock them off. This will be made slightly easier by the dopehead running his mouth. I watched this largely for Gandfolini, but if I had any doubts the presence of Liotta would have sold it. It’s a strangely paced movie: with 30 minutes left and little accomplished, Pitt and Gandolfini are sitting around drinking Scotch and talking about old girlfriends. It culminates in Obama giving his victory speech in 2008, which has a couple of levels of interest that I won’t get into because of spoilers.
Scream, 1996. Do you like scary movies? This is the kind of gory film I’d never watch today, but because I watched it in middle school (at a friend’s house, illicitly), it now has this strange nostalgia power that overrides everything. This film, for whatever reason, prompted me to try writing for the first time, and in middle school I had an entire three-ring binder filled with “horror” stories, with antagonists like ghosts and mutant spiders. One was about the wreck of a luxury train called The Titan (no points for guessing the inspiration given the context of the late 1990s) and I distinctly remember using a new vocabulary word, “gregarious”, to describe a character. Anyhoo, if you’ve been living under a rock for thirty years, this is a parody of slasher films that is “meta” in its delivery: characters are aware of slasher film tropes, including the killer who enjoys taunting their victims with them It’s dated and I love it for that: “Let me ask you this: what are you doin’ with a cellular phone, son?” I also love Matthew Lillard’s character acting in this: he was both charming and psychotic. It’s worth noting that this parody of horror films was the first time I’d ever seen a horror film – soon followed by I Know What You Did Last Summer.
I like Matthew Lillard’s acting in this entirely too much. (Language.)
“It’s the Millenium. Motives are incidental.”
The Rainmaker (1997). In 2000 or 2001, in creative writing class, this movie was my introduction to the works of John Grisham. It was also my first time seeing Matt Damon and Jon Voight, and it had a great soundtrack. (It wasn’t my introduction to Danny DeVito — I’d already seen Matilda.) Damon and Voight both pull off believable Southern accents. “Sworn in by a fool, and vouched for by a scoundrel. I’m a lawyer at last.” I’m amused by how much of the dialogue I still have memorized. This remains a wonderful movie: LegalEagle rated it an A+ for legal accuracy, and it’s completely compelling from a viewer’s perspective — the characters, the drama, and the writing all hold up. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it’s the one Grisham adaptation that really sticks in memory, while others — A Time to Kill, Runaway Jury — have mostly faded, aside from odd details like learning the word indigent from The Client. I’d rate this as possibly my favorite legal movie: not as funny as My Cousin Vinny, but a genuine David vs. Goliath story that helped shape my reflexive mistrust of corporations. It also stands out for showing the trial from soup to nuts — something no other Grisham story or adaptation quite managed.
Truth and Treason, 2025. A group of teenage German boys is inspired to begin creating circulars against Hitler in the early 1940s. The author of them is exposed when another document he’s written bears the same tell-tale typewriter defect as all of the circulars have. Although the leader is forced, under torture, to expose his colleagues, in the end he makes a brave decision that saves his soul if not his body. The movie is based on the true story of Helmuth Huebener.
The Firm, 1993. Probably my first Tom Cruise film and quite possibly my first Gene Hackman. Think I watched it in the very early 2000s. Not a great adaptation of the novel, but I enjoyed revisiting it. The Firmwas my first JG book, but as mentioned Rainmaker was my first JG movie. A young lawyer (Mitch McDeere aka Tom Cruise) receives an unbelievable offer from some boutique firm down South – only to realize that whoopsie doodle, this is a mob firm. Gene Hackman is prominent, as is Ed Harris – I’d forgotten Ed. He plays a real jerk, an aggressive FBI agent whose treatment of Mitch is no less bullying than the Mob’s. Amusingly, Paul Sorvino – who played Paulie in Goodfellas – appears here as a mobster. Whaddya wanna guess the wiseguy’s name is Paulie? (IDMB suggests his name was Tommy, like he was funny. Funny how, like he’s a clown, like he amuses you? Like he makes you laugh, like he’s here to amuse you?)
The Chamber, 1996. Christopher O’Donnell plays a young lawyer (Adam) who is trying to get an aged man (Gene Hackman) adjudicated guilty for bombing a Jewish law firm and killing two children off the death penalty. The twist? Said old man, Sam Cahill, is his granddaddy. Accordingly, he’s dealing with not only his soul-haunting questions, but the fact that his father killed himself and that his aunt who has tried to escape family history deep in the bottle. The book version of this was one of the single-most thought provoking books I ever read in high school. I’d never thought about the death penalty then, as a teenager, and Grisham really made me start pondering it. Decades later, my inner jury is still not settled: I appreciate both libertarian and Catholic arguments against it, but I also have a pretty firm conviction that human predators ought to be addressed accordingly. One thing that leapt out to me immediately is a historical error: Sam claims to be a fourth-generation Klansmen, which is nonsense on stilts juggling three balls of flaming lunacy given that the first Klan was gone by the 1870s, the second Klan didn’t begin until the 1920s where it was formally “revived”, and after it imploded groups calling themselves the KKK didn’t revive until the 1950s or so. There are a few other quirks (historical, gun mechanics, the most ludicrous attempt at portraying a ‘klan rally’ since O Brother Where Art Thou), but that’s moseying into digression. As a moral drama, it still succeeds wonderfully: Adam having to learn who his grandfather was and wrestle between his desire to know Sam and his repugnance at Sam’s racial bitterness and bigotry – and the growing third factor, the very real premise that Sam wasn’t the man who planted the bomb. Rewatching this – I think this is only my second time? – made me appreciate the late Hackman’s acting chops all the more.
“Why would the FBI want to hide information from a case that’s thirty years old?” “You in Mississippi, now. The land of secrets.”
The Client, 1994. TOMMY LEE JONES! …also there’s a plot about a kid seeing something he shouldn’t have and being harassed by the state because the Mob was involved. All I remember is that Sarandon’s character is a fan of Led Zeppelin and that “indigent” means “poor”. Not sure when I watched this for the first time, but it was probably the early 2000s. The kid, Mark, becomes a pawn between the Mob and the State because he witnessed a lawyer with Mafia ties killing himself. The bad guys here are evil-league-of-evil evil, and I found myself wondering if they’re this bad in the book. (It’s been a long time since I read it.) On the bright side, there’s the aforementioned Tommy Lee Jones, and “Ruth” from Fried Green Tomatoes, otherwise known as Mary Louise Parker. Tig from Sons of Anarchy plays a minor mook here.
The Pelican Brief, 1993. This film had Julia Roberts, and that is the most I can say. The movie is basically a prolonged chase scene that was an enormous downgrade from the character-centric JG movies preceding it. This may be the first time a Denzel Washington movie has bored me to sleep multiple time. Stanley Tucci was also present, but he had hair and that was disturbing. My first Grisham movie that’s NOT a rewatch!
Deliverance, 1972. Burt Reynolds looks weird without his mustache. While I’ve watched the “Dueling Banjos” scene many a time (let’s ignore the fact that it involves one banjo and one geetar), I’ve never seen the movie. The night before Halloween, though, seemed appropriate for a ….murder-thriller set in some Appalachian backwoods? Anyway, a buncha soft-handed city boys decide to take a canoe trip down a river ‘for it’s dammed up and lost, and in their high-handed approach manage to annoy the locals who commence to murderin’ them, because what’s the difference between an insurance salesman and a Yankee at the end of the day, right? One interesting scene for me was the song played at the end of the Atlantans’ first day: while some of the lyrics are shared with the traditional song “Rye Whisky”, the tune is very different – much more melancholy – and the lyrics as a whole diverge. Features a disturbingly un-moostached Burt Reynolds and a sadly moostached Jon Voight. There’s a disturbing scene when Jon Voight was trying to take a young buck who was barely a button-head in velvet. Talk about disrespect for nature. (Deer season doesn’t start until bucks have developed their antlers more fully and have shed their velvet.) Anyway, this gets disturbing. I do appreciate the wailing cicadas, though it confused me as to the seasons when combined with a late spring/early summer buck. Another small appreciation is the power of the river, and its role in the movie. There’s an interesting overall theme in this movie on civilization and savagery….and on how quick our primal instincts overturn one for the other.
“You can’t judge people by the way they look, Chubby.”
“It’s true what you said, Lewis. There’s something in the woods and the water that we have lost in the city.” “We didn’t lose it. We sold it.”
E.T. Home! Home!
E.T., 1982. A small boy discovers a marooned alien in his back yard and befriends it…only to have to rescue it from G-men. This is very possibly the first non-cartoon movie I watched as a kid, around age five or six or so on VHS. I’ve watched it maybe once since, and I figured since it has a Halloween scene, why not watch it on Halloween? If Die Hard can be a Christmas movie, E.T. can be a Halloween movie! Watching this as an adult, I’m impressed by the practical effects and sound design: seeing E.T. get left behind and managing to understand its desperation and pain works. Some parts have….aged: Elliot’s brother wants to go to Halloween dressed as a terrorist, making me wonder what the stereotypical conception of a terrorist was back then. The arrival of the G.Men in hygiene suits is still intimidating, even if close up they look like astronauts doing Darth Vader breathing impressions.
Zero Day (2003). A Columbine-inspired found footage documentary, in which we witness two friends with violent fantasies collude and plan a school shooting. What makes Zero Day so utterly disturbing is the nature of the production itself, the “found footage” approach: the film is presented as a series of clips taken from consumer video recorders, some purposely filmed by the future shooters as a record for the future, some simply documenting their lives as-lived. We get a sense of the boys as people, with utterly normal social circles and lives, though they do have resentments toward certain parties at school. One such person is “Brad Huff”, a jerk jock whose house they pelt with rotten eggs after arriving at his home to find his SUV nowhere in sight. The found footage is eerily weird, with expect amounts of outtakes, muffed lines, and “teenagers mugging for the camera” that you’d expect. It avoids the poor widdle buwwied story completely: we see two teenagers with unhealthy interior lives and an uncanny awareness of how they’d be perceived afterwards ratcheting each other into a course of destruction, where they will escape a world and a school they hate by turning it into a bloody mess. Zero Day is far more unsettlingthan Elephant for its approach, though I will admit to being partial toward found footage.(See my affection for The Blair Witch Project, which continues to disappoint my film buddies.) The acting is uncanny across the board.
My political biography began during the War on Terror, when I developed strong feelings about foreign intervention and the military-police surveillance state. While reading Howard Zinn in my college years, I was astonished and delighted to learn of a US President standing up against corporate interests and thwarting their attempt to take over Hawaii in the name of the United States. Although his efforts were later rendered moot when another president bowed to imperialism, I still appreciated them. The man? Grover Cleveland. I’ve been wanting to read a proper biography of him for some time now, and when I stumbled on this in a used bookstore, I picked it up immediately. While it’s not quite what I was looking for – being more politically than biographically oriented – it did whet my appetite for reading more about the man.
The Last Jeffersonian introduces Cleveland as a man who was asked to step up to run for president in an hour when the Democratic party had lost its way. Castigated as the party of secession and rebellion, they’d been out of power for decades – but Cleveland, a man who had established a history for clean, fair governance both as a mayor and a governor, seemed to be the man to give them a fresh start. This introduction is important to the concept of the book, because the author is writing it in a day when the Republican party was rudderless as well: Obama had swept into power offering charisma and vision, and the best the GOP could offer was..er, Mitt Romney. Walters largely uses Cleveland’s legacy in office to critique other executives – chiefly Obama, given the looming election, but to lesser degrees the Roosevelts, McKinley, and FDR. Given that the book is not that large to begin with (~200 pages), this political sidequest may frustrate those looking for a pure biography.
When the book is focused on Cleveland, though, it’s quite interesting. Because it’s not a strict biography, Walters makes the choice to organize it by theme rather than chronology. There are chapters on Cleveland’s deportment, his domestic policy, his approach to finance and foreign policy, and so on. As mentioned, Cleveland had an interesting history as an executive: he began as the Mayor of Buffalo in 1881, graduated to Governor in the mid-1880s, and ended up President. His public slogan and private motto was that “A public office is a public trust”, and Walters argues that Cleveland lived up to this with zeal at each level. Coming from a family thick with preachers, Cleveland was a man convinced of the value of virtue, especially for those serving in public office. Because this is my first Cleveland biography, I have to take these claims with a grain of salt: these early chapters were nearly hagiographic. I was more interested in the chapters on monetary and foreign policy: here, facts largely tracked with what I knew, and I think Walters was successful in explaining the significance of the gold-vs-silver debates of the late 19th century in both public policy and the economy.
Walters describes Cleveland as Jeffersonian for good reason: he earned a reputation in both municipal and state politics for vetoing bills, whether to void unnecessary spending or prevent expansion of state power. This did not make him popular, especially when he denied a bill that would pay for seeds to assist farmers who had lost some of their stock: direct assistance was charity to be practiced by the people in themselves, not through the government. He appears to have largely honored the maxim, that government is best which governs least. There were exceptions, especially when it came to corporations: Cleveland was instrumental in creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads, though the author notes the ICC quickly grew oppressive in its own right. Perhaps his finest moment, though, was trying to keep the Stars and Stripes free of the imperial stain and pushing back against the proposed annexation of Hawaii.
This was an interesting read: Walters is definitely writing for those strongly sympathetic of Jeffersonian ideals, and he draws on libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul in his analysis of monetary policy. That’s particularly relevant for this political period given that it was the “Ron Paul Revolution”: Paul was building a huge following at the time, and connecting to the anti-tax, anti-spending elements of the older Republican base. As we know, that’s not the way the political winds blew: instead of getting a Jeffersonian, we’ve gotten a Jacksonian.
I’d intended to post this list earlier in the week for the Top Ten Tuesday freebie, but couldn’t remember the name of the book I was using, Alabama Mortality Schedule (1850, Seventh Census of the United States). I stumbled on this years ago and was immediately mystified (and sometimes amused) by the listed causes of death. As you might expect, there are a lot of diseases that are now treatable, and a great many causes of death that were unique to a more rustic age — falling from horses, being crushed in a cotton gin, and “entangled in plow gears” (yikes!). Amid the whooping cough and drownings, though, there are some causes of death that are….unusual.
Old Live Oak Cemetery Selma, Alabama
(1)“St. Anthony’s Fire”. That sounds like an epic way to die, but it appears to be poisoning via wheat infected by fungi.
(2) “Milk Leg Fever“, which is the strangest way to describe a blood clot I can imagine.
(3) “Teething“. Teething? According to the University of Leeds, it was common in The Olden Days for people to attribute deaths by fever or such while a toddler was teething to the teething process itself. Oral health was serious back then: Red Gum, or gingivitis, is also listed as a cause of death. See? Flossing is important.
(4). “St. Vitus Dance“. A vernacular name for “Sydenham’s chorea”, an inflammatory response to strep. So named because its symptoms included bodily jerking, and people prayed for relief to St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancers. Must have been an old traditional name, since Alabama has never had a huge Catholic population.
(5) “Gunard Deply”. If you’ve ever done genealogical or historical research prior to the 19th century and dealt with handwritten sources, or typed transcriptions of handwritten source texts, you may appreciate the…er, creative variety of how names, etc were taken down by census takers and the like. “Diabeetus”, “New Monia”, and “Dysenterry” all appear in this book, for instance, indicating that Wilford Brimley may have been older than we knew. There’s no telling what Gunard Deply is, but ChatGPT guessed that it might’ve meant “General Debility”. If you think that’s too vague for an official Cause of Death, please know that this book also includes “Old Age”, “Complications”, and “Liquor” as causes.
“She hath done what she could.” The wife of one of Cahawba’s notorious drunkards. The New Cemetery, Old Cahawba Archaeological Park.
(6) “Dirt Eater”. It is a ….thing…that some southerners, black and white, eat white clay. I’ve even seen bags of white dirt being sold in gas stations. One journalist who investigated this described the taste as “fresh rain on a hot day”. Evidently some people have a taste for it, just as some people can’t eat cilantro because it tastes like soap. (I am not one of these people, thanks be to God.) Strikingly, this is not a one off, but appears every so often. It’s a bit sad to have an insult hurled at one’s corpse as the official cause of death.
(7) “Complications”. Yeah, we’ve all had that that kind of weekend. Also see “Intemperance”. I’d possibly add “Mortification”, which often follows intemperance and its complications, but evidently in the 19th century that referred to necrosis or gangrene. (Relatedly: “Gravel” referred not to being stoned to death, but to kidney stones and related issues.)
(8) “Gen’l Derangement”. I’m sure there’s a story behind this one, as with “Spinster”.
(9) “Worms”. I’m guessing we’re talking tapeworms and hookworms, not Tremors type worms. According to the University of Arkansas, parents who believed their children had intestinal worms sometimes accidentally poisoned them with snake oil products — not the only case of someone dying of the cure. One strange entry in the book, “corrosive sublimate”, proved to be mercury poisoning as a treatment for syphilis.
(10) “The King’s Evil”. Tuberculosis in the lymph nodes! Back then TB was referred to as “consumption”, a handy fact if you ever want to impress a Civil War reenactor.
Check out more strange deadly diseases over at CSI: Dixie’s “Graveyard of Old Diseases“! You can also check out mortality schedules for yourself over at Ancestry, and read about the background of their creation here.
While some of these names are amusing, and digging into what they meant proved to be both fun and stimulating, it was a stark reminder of how dangerous a place the 19th century frontier could be. There were sad stories I could glean from the data here, like an entire family who drowned together, or the constant spectre of infant mortality. Even so, there was humor to be found — from the absurd causes listed for some, to the census takers’ glimpses of humanity as they wrote in question marks behind listed causes they couldn’t understand.
Reading Freely 