Memories of Celtic Stone

One of the first years I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival I picked up the eponymous first cassette from the band Celtic Stone. I do not remember what year it was, and even though I was a latecomer to the CD bandwagon*, the fact that I was buying a cassette should give us some idea; lets put it somewhere around 1985 or 1986. I bought the tape because while listening to the band I heard a tune which was familiar to me from stories my mom would tell me about playing with her maternal grandfather (my mother’s mother’s father). He used to bounce her on his knee and hum a song to her, a song to which she did not know the title, or even if there was one. As it turns out it was "The Irish Washerwoman." Little did I know what buying this tape would do to my taste in music.

I loved this tape. When I was younger I was not allowed to listen to a lot of music, as I have previously discussed here, however I always loved music and, oddly enough, encouraged to be musical. Much like books it fires my imagination; I am, quite literally, able to lean back, close my eyes, and let it carry me away. This tape was one of the first experiences with folk music that did not involve Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Kingston Trio, or Simon & Garfunkel and thus opened my eyes to a whole new world of sound, one which I was allowed to listen to. It is because of that tape I tracked down Gary Coover’s brilliant “Shepherd’s Hey” program on KPFT and Gary built on these twelve songs, introducing me to bands such as Battlefield Band and the Chieftains, but I am getting a bit ahead of myself here.

I listened to that tape over and over and over. I particularly loved "Little Beggarman", "John Barleycorn", "The Irish Washerwoman/Swallowtail Jig", "Do You Love an Apple?", and "Two Magicians". Sadly eventually my love for the tape led to its demise and I was not smart enough to have made a copy. It has been years since the tape went the way of the Dodo, and it was something I missed whenever I would get in one of my Celtic music moods.

From time to time I would try and track down the tape again, checking in the used music stores and searching on-line. The only thing I was ever able to find was a webpage which indicated the band was defunct. I was bummed. Clearly I would not be able to replace this cassette in my collection. This resulted in a half-formed business idea where I would track down the masters and covert them to MP3s which I would then offer for sale either via on-line delivery or on a CD you could customize with your selection of tracks from our library. (Imagine my chagrin when far more industrious people would make this idea a reality to the tune of a couple of dollars profit.)

Eventually Celtic Stone passed into the realm of fond memory and was destined to stay there. Until last week. While wandering the XMarkstheScot.com forums somehow I managed to come across the homepage for Marc Gunn’s Irish & Celtic Music Podcast. After a bit more clicking around I decided to run my old search for Celtic Stone again and this time I hit paydata. The fourth entry down on my Google search was for the Celtic Stone page at some site called CDBaby.com. I listened to a couple of the samples from the CD to make sure I was getting the songs I so fondly remembered and when it became clear that I was getting at least some of them, I went ahead and plunked down my $17.22 for the CD.

This was Thursday so I was very pleasantly surprised when it arrived today. Although most of the tracks are not the ones on the tape I cherished into oblivion I spent the afternoon listening to the CD over and over and over again and it was good.


* My first CD player was the CD ROM drive my dad gave me for Christmas during my first year of college and my first CD was Battlefield Band’s Anthem for the Common Man.

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Bonus Stuff

Because I am all about the extras I thought I might put some samples of Celtic Stone's work on here for you. By richt-clicking here and selecting "Save Link As..." you can download "Do You Love an Apple?" and by right-clicking here and selecting "Save Link As..." you can download "Two Magicians," which, to be honest, is one of the filthiest songs I have ever heard. Enjoy!

Funkywood Jamz! - Big in Japan

Since I am all about giving back to my readers I have added a little something special to the Opaite; a little something I like to call Funkywood Jamz! This little Flash object lets me stream tunes from my super-secret internet headquarters right into your house and so, from time to time, I will be changing up the mix of songs I am brining to you, the masses. When I change the songs I will post the play list here and talk a little about why I chose each song or something along those lines. Now let us begin our first journey into sound in a mix I like to call my Big in Japan Mix.

1. Tonight, Tonight, Tonight – Beat Crusaders (and in English)

I discovered this band while browsing in the Tower Records in Shibuya, which did not suffer the same fate as the other Tower Records in the world and thus is still open (and a pretty bad ass record store.) This is the first song off their CD titled, appropriately enough, “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.” So far all of their songs I have heard feature lyrics in English, making it easy for us gaijin to follow along and the couple of YouTube clips lead me to believe these guys would be a blast to see live, so much so that I am considering planning my next trip to Japan with the intent of getting to see them in concert.

2. Cutey Honey – Koda Kumi (and in English)

I found Koda Kumi when someone posted her video for Shake It! to one of the bitorrent sites I used to frequent. In the next couple of sentences I am going to try to convince you that there are more reasons for me to listen to Koda Kumi however the reason I got into her stuff is because she is a full-blown hottie. After watching the video a couple of times I found myself humming Shake It! which falls firmly into the realm of hip-hop, and decided to seek out some more of Koda’s work and the very next thing I stumbled on was her recoding of the theme song for the live-action version of Go Nagai’s classic anime and manga. The only reason I included it here rather than use Shake It! was that I thought the sound of Cutey Honey worked a bit better with these other songs.

3. Stereo Nights – Takkyu Ishino

I pulled this song from the second entry in Sony’s Japan for Sale series of sampler CDs in which Sony pimps various Japanese artists to the dirty American devils. Takkyu Ishino also has tracks on volume 3 of the series and volume 1 of the Japan Not For Sale samplers. His music harkens back to the synth-pop of the ‘80s, a sound which I enjoy to an almost embarrassing degree. (The fourth volume of the Japan for Sale CDs, now being sold by Tofu Records, which I believe is a Sony imprint.)

4. Black Out Fall Out – Polysics

This song came from volume 3 of the Japan for Sale series and is included because it falls into the same vein as the above song.

5. Sunday People – Supercar (and in English)

With this song I wanted to pull back from the frontiers of electornica and get into more traditional guitar-driven pop/rock. This version of the song comes from Japan Not For Sale Vol. 1 however it is also available on their first CD titled Three Out Change.

6. Shangri-La – Denki Groove

Enough of that rock crap, lets make this first entry in the soon-to-be-legendary history of Funkywood Jamz FUNKY. That’s what Denki Groove brings to the mix; that and another shot of Takkyu Ishino. This track was also liberated from Japan Not For Sale Vol. 2.

7. World Wide Love Song – Lab Life

And here, in Lab Life’s "World Wide Love Song", we find a pretty good middle ground between synth-pop and guitar rock. Sadly I am not able to find anything about the band Lab Life, so all I can tell you is that this track comes to you from Japan Not For Sale Vol. 2 (apparently I liked this CD a lot) and is also available on the bands CD World’s End.

8. Goodbye and Good Luck – the brilliant green

I wanted to slow things down here at the end of the “mix” and I am a sucker for bands where the front-man is a woman therefore this track from the brilliant green. Seeing as how they made Time’s list of top contemporary acts from outside the U.S. (what a pretentious sort of list to have floating around, btw) along with groups like U2, Radiohead, Ziggy Marley, and Portishead, my taste in music can’t be that off. This is yet ANOTHER track from the overused Japan Not For Sale Vol. 2 but also appears on the trio’s eponymous freshmen effort.

9. Love, Do You Remember? – Mari Iijiima (as Lynn Minmei)

This is for all the otaku out there! When my fascination with all things Japan was in its larval stages one of the few sources of Japanese pop culture that was available to me was a pirated copy of the movie Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, more popularly know in the States as Macross Summer ’84. Minmei sings this song during the climactic battle to save humanity and for a young boy the battle scenes were pretty awesome. Since I have always been into music I tried to make a soundtrack for the movie by connecting a tape recorder to the audio outputs on the VCR. It was a crap recording but I wore it out from listening. There is no way I could put together a mix of J-pop and not include at least one song from that tape. Incidentally this version is pulled from the three-disc Macross: The Complete collection.

10. Big In Japan – Alphaville

Now if any of the regular readers are in the least bit surprised to find this song on here please let me know in the comments. I will dispatch a team of monkeys to beat some sense into you in the near future. This song is here for the joke and because I honestly like the song.

That’s it for the inaugural edition of Funkywood Jamz!, which, in case you are curious, is also what I named my iPod. Check back in a few weeks when I offer up more music with pretty bad commentary. Until then keep on rockin’ in the free world!

McPimpin'

Originally I was going to make a joke about my high school mascot, McDonalds, and the fact that I am curvalicious, but then I decided that all I really wanted to say here is that I look DAMN fine in a kilt*. Interested in one of your own? Check out XMarkstheScot.com an online community which I recently joined dedicated to the wearing of the kilt. Tell 'em James73** sent you!

* And considering how much I paid for the thing I sure as heck better!
** Aren't I terribly original with my online names?

BOOK REVIEW - Wolf of the Plains

Wolf of the Plains
Conn Iggulden
HarperCollins, 2007
458 pages

Hey kids guess what? Today I am serving up ANOTHER book review featuring the work of Conn Iggulden For those of you keeping track* that makes three out of the eight books I have read this year, which is 37.5%, and 1,569 of the 2,898 pages I have read so far this year, or 54%. Considering the kudos I have given his books recently and the fact that they compromise over half of the pages I have read so far this year (and we are just sixty-six days in) I think it is pretty clear that I like Conn Iggulden’s books. Perhaps more than is healthy. Let’s get to it, then.

Wolf of the Plains is the first book in a series spanning the career of Genghis Khan, beginning with, conveniently enough, with the birth of Temujin, as he was named, in the depths of a storm. Iggulden handles the circumstances surrounding Temujin’s birth in a short prologue before delving into the meat of the book. This books basically covers the time from when, at nine years of age, Temujin was taken to the Onggirat tribe to work in his future wife’s tribe until he reached manhood. While Temjuin’s father was returning to his tribe he was poisoned by Tartars and died, leaving the tribe without a leader and Temujin and his brothers without a father. Rather than accept a boy as leader, the tribe abandoned Temujin and his family to their fate.

I do not think it is a spoiler to point out the fact that Temujin survives the harsh Mongolian winter and begins to build a following. The novel culminates with Temujin leading the warriors of several tribes against the Tartars, cementing his reputation as a unifier of the Mongols and opening the door for his empire to be born.

To be honest I am not sure what praise I can heap on this novel that I have not already given to Iggulden’s previous works. I find all of his characters to be distinct individuals, even when they dip into the realm of cliché, and I have found that I tend to prefer his versions of characters over others. I enjoy his prose to a truly ridiculous degree and while I am reading his works I am able to envision the action in my head and this makes his books very difficult for me to put aside. Suffice to say that in Wolf of the Plains Conn Iggulden has served up another fascinating, and Twinkie-free, take on history, and this time a history with which not too many people have more than a passing familiarity. I highly recommend this book if historical fiction is something you can read.

* If anyone out there is actually keeping track of this sort of thing please stop. It takes creepy and obsessive to a whole new level of uncomfortableness and when I can say that, well, damn.

Feed Issues

According to a recent comment there are some issues with my Atom feed. Since there are not a lot of settings I can monkey with I went ahead and set up a site feed through Feedburner.com. If you read this blog via a feed then you may want to remove it and resubscribe via the handy links to the right.

Ignore the link way down at the bottom of the page which says Subscribe to:. I am trying to remove that from the template but I have yet to figure it out.

Finally would someone let me know if this problem has been fixed? Thanks!

YouTubesday: Hockey Fights!

Welcome to the inaugural YouTubesday post here on the Opiate. These posts will combine my love for lame word play (the title) and the wonder that is YouTube. Now without further gilding the lily and with no more ado* I present this weeks YouTubesday:

HOCKEY FIGHTS!

Every person out there loves hockey whether they know it or not, and judging by the NHL television ratings and attendance number there are a few of you cretins out there that have yet to figure this basic fact of life out for yourselves. For those of you who have not attended a hockey game you are really missing out. There are few things that can compare to the sheer excitement of a good hockey game. Well played hockey is a thing of beauty but well played hockey is not what keeps the knuckle-draggers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Canada filling stadiums and, let us be honest with one another, us slightly more evolved people as well. We are all there in the hope that there will be a fight. It is with that in mind that I present the following bits from YouTube.

First up is a nine-and-a-half minute clip of brouhaha from a recent Ottawa Senators/Buffalo Sabres game.



That's right. From time to time even the goalies drop the gloves although that is rarely a good fight. Continuing on we have five goalie-on-goalie battles.



The more astute out there might have noticed that the second fight in the above clip featured Ray Emery, one of the goalies involved in the first battle royale. Of course the best fights are when the goons are allowed to go at it as in this clip wherein Rob Ray and Donald Brashear go at it.



And then every so often you have to fight off the fans.



Tie Domi is one of my favorite players and I agree with his policy on the manner in which the Flyers fans should be treated.

Finally there are hockey fights that just do not last long enough.



I hope you all enjoyed this first installment of YouTubesday. If you did leave an encouraging comment and I might dig up more clips for your viewing pleasure next week.

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* The first person to guess which movie I stole this line from will get something spiffy, like a beer.

BOOK REVIEW - Emperor: The Gods of War

Emperor: The Gods of War
Conn Iggulden
HarperCollins, 2006
517 pages

I am going to let you in on a little secret. When I blow off a day of work bets are I am going to spend that day reading. That is certainly what happened this past Monday when I managed to plow through the 517 pages of the final book in Conn Iggulden’s excellent Emperor series. I did not experience the same issues starting this book which I encountered with the third book in the series, Emperor: The Field of Swords which I discuss here. I attribute the problems I had getting into the third book entirely to the amount of time I took between completing the second and beginning the third as Iggulden is one of those writers I find compulsively readable.

This book begins with Pompey reading the Senate’s declaration which makes Caesar an outlaw and finally ends with Caesar’s death at the hands of Brutus and his co-conspirators, ironically in a theatre bearing Pompey’s name. Between those two events Iggulden shows Caesar’s ascension to the pinnacle of power in Rome, his improbable victories against Pompey’s forces in Greece culminating with his victory on the fields at Pharsalus. Even his first encounter and subsequent affair with the legendary beauty Cleopatra are encapsulated in these 517 pages.

To be completely honest I am not sure what I can say about this book that I have not already said about Iggulden’s other works. If you enjoy Roman history at all, or just historical fiction in general, then I cannot recommend this series enough as a very interesting take on Caesar and his times. Perhaps the greatest recommendation I can give this book is to point out that out of the books I have read so far this year two of them have been by Conn Iggulden and I started reading his Wolf of the Plains as soon as I put this book down. (And I am almost done with this book as well.)

BOOK REVIEW - Knots & Crosses

Knots & Crosses
Ian Rankin
Orion, 2005
226 pgs.

The Mystery/Thriller aisle is not part of the bookstore I frequent when looking for more books to add to the ever growing stack of things I plan to read some day therefore even though I have heard of Ian Rankin and his John Rebus novels we had a very casual relationship. You know the sort of relationship you might have with another regular at a bar you frequent or the clerk at your usual gas station, you recognize one another enough to share a nod and a smile whenever you see them but that’s about it. Then I found myself stuffed full of fish and chips standing in Waverly Station confronted by a display of all of the Inspector Rebus novels. Being there in Edinburgh, the character’s very own city, and being the person I am I had to buy one of the books, the first one if it was there. Guess what? It was and now you get to read all about it.

I plowed through this book with almost disturbing speed, polishing it off in an evening of reading. This is not by way of saying the book is bad, in fact I quite enjoyed the book and will be stopping by Murder By the Book tomorrow after work to see if they have more of the Rebus novels published by Orion (they have a very nice design, matching spines and all, and I am OCD about that sort of thing.) At first glance two-hundred twenty-six pages does not seem like enough time to get to know a character and see him through a mystery, the brevity works just fine in Rankin’s hands. In this book the mystery merely serves as a framework for Rankin to hang scenes which illuminate the character of John Rebus, a character which I had expected to be the clichéd hard-drinking, divorced police detective. While he was these things in the story, Rebus is more than just the sum of his clichés and I found myself genuinely liking the guy and hoping he comes through everything.

As for the plot itself, which centers around the kidnappings and murders of four girls from wildly disparate backgrounds, it is fairly clear that this was Rankin’s first mystery and this is where having such a short novel worked against him. There is not enough time for Rankin to distract the readers with red herrings and ultimately meaningless characters, therefore you know that every place and person has some importance to the main thrust of the novel. This being the case I figured out the culprit fairly quickly after he was introduced and, to be honest, this is not something I am usually any good at doing. However since the novel is more about Rebus’ character and less about the mystery this did not detract from my pleasure at all.

All in all I really enjoyed this novel and I am looking forward to both reading more of the Inspector Rebus books and meeting Ian Rankin when he is in town signing books in a few months. I might even make a concerted effort to be all caught up on the Rebus novels by the time he gets here, although I doubt I will succeed.

BOOK REVIEW - Neither Here Nor There

Neither Here Nor There
Bill Bryson
Perennial, 2001
254 pgs.

There are times where I have to struggle to get involved in a book, even books I have been looking forward to or books I end up falling in love with (the first and third entries in the Emperor series spring to mind here.) This book was not one of those; it grabbed me from the moment I opened it and quickly became difficult for me to put down, which may have contributed to more than one excessively late night of reading. As I finished the book I tried to remember if I had ever heard of Bill Bryson before, I have a pretty good memory for this sort of thing, and I could not recall having heard of him before. This surprised me as Bryson is exactly the sort of writer I enjoy reading; sarcastic and a bit full of himself without coming off as an egotistical ass.

This book chronicles the author’s journey across Europe during the winter and spring of 1990. His travels begin with a thirty-hour bus ride from Oslo to Hammerfest, arguably the northernmost city in the world. The purpose of this visit, in the depths of winter, is to see the Aurora Borealis because, lets face it, that far north in January there is not going to be too much else going on. He then returns home to England and begins planning his trip which begins in Paris. Bryson spends the rest of the book traveling throughout Europe, visiting recognizable places such as Rome and Amsterdam, and more obscure destinations such as Sofia and Liechtenstein, even visiting Yugoslavia before the Serbians turned into dicks and decided that Croats and Bosnians were only good for target practice. The journey ends with the author sitting in an open-air taverna in Istanbul, gazing across the Bosphorus at Asia momentarily debating whether he should continue his travels or return to hearth and home.

I picked up this book in a fit of searching for inspiration for a travel destination for later in the year, and if this is what you are looking for from this book then, as the kids say, your mileage may vary, however if you are just looking for a very enjoyable read, then this is the book for you. The very first thing I noticed about Bryson, besides the fact that he is insane enough to travel in Norway in January, is that he is unabashedly American despite having lived in Britain for the better part of twenty years, which is refreshing these days. The stereotype of boorish American tourist is such that when I have been traveling I have had friends advise me to try and “blend in” with the locals as much as possible, because a six-foot-three white guy can really disappear in a crowd in Japan and South Korea. (Apparently I did it so well in Scotland I was accused of being Canadian, eh.) The second thing I noticed, and this is what convinced me I need to read the rest of his books, is he has a very sarcastic wit to him that, if you know me at all, will know I appreciate. It seemed like every page had little gems on it which I wanted to share with you. In fact I was compiling a list until I ran into these paragraphs in the chapter about his visit to Austria wherein he encounters then-president Dr. Kurt Waldheim:

A lot of people aren’t sure of the difference between the offices of chancellor and president in Austria, but it’s quite simple. The chancellor decides national policy and runs the country, while the president rounds up the Jews.

For readers unfamiliar with Waldheim’s “interesting” past Bryson quickly fills in a rough outline including the fact that Waldheim joined the Nazi Student Union two weeks after the declaration of Anschluss and rose to a rather high rank in the Nazi machine and supervised the removal of something on the order of 40,000 Jews from Thessaloniki. After filling the reader in Bryson then says:

Austrians should be proud of him and proud of themselves for having the courage to stand up to world opinion and elect a man of his caliber, overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar, the he has been officially accused of war crimes, that he has a past so mired in mistruths that no one but he knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.

“Damn,” I thought while reading that, “Way to tell ‘em Billy.” Then I paused for a moment and checked to make sure he was still talking about Austria and Waldheim.

The Road Not Taken

I recently purchased the uber-dork Buffy the Vampire Slayer box set and have been working through the seasons. Over the weekend I watched the end of season 3, in which Buffy and the gang deal with demons, vampires, Faith (mmmmm….Eliza Dushku) and, oh yeah, the end of high school and all that entails. Watching the cast deal with things applying to and selecting colleges, taking the SATs, prom, and all of the other things which lead up to graduation made me think of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way lead on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

From Selected Poems of Robert Frost published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

It did not take a minute of reflection for me to know why I these episodes brought this particular poem to mind. For me college represents the road not taken even thought I attended the University of Houston for two years after graduation.
If I remember correctly UH was the only school to which I bothered to apply. I will tell people a variety of reasons for this decision but ultimately I think it has more to do with laziness and apathy than anything else. That is not entirely true. There is no way I was going to go to Texas A&M since it seemed like half my high school was going to go there and I wanted something different. As I sit here typing away I am well aware of the irony that attending A&M would have been a much larger change than UH.

Although I was living in the dorms, UH was close enough to home to where I would go home most weekends. Going home on the weekends did two things. First it removed me from much of the social life of the school, and at UH there was not too much of a school=centric social life to begin with. Second it allowed me to continue hanging out with most of my friends from high school. Ultimately going to UH allowed me to prolong my high school years for another two years.

There were some positive experiences at UH. If nothing else I met Rob who has turned out to be one of the best friends a guy can have. But in the end all UH ended up being was an extension of my high school experience rather than the new experience college should be and therefore college remains my road not taken. I took the easier path. And my single largest regret.

Moody

I have been in a strange mood, which I typed as “moof” three times in a row before getting it right, the last few weeks. It is difficult for me to describe this mood. I have been a real bear around the office for no real reason and have been very solitary when I have not been at work. I suppose anti-social would be the best descriptor for this mood but there is something else there. I want to say wistful but I am not certain that is the right word. Wistful, for me, carries the connotation of longing for something specific and I can not think of a single thing for which I am pining, except, of course, the fjords, perhaps a bit nostalgic in a melancholy sort of way but not wistful for anything in particular. Then yesterday my iPod, the appropriately named funkywoodjams, spat out this collection of hits from the ‘80s:

• Rosanna – Toto
• Since Yesterday – Strawberry Switchblade
  
• Heat of the Moment – Asia
  
• The Warrior – Scandal
  
• The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades – Timbuk 3
  
• When I See You Smile – Bad English
  
• Lost in Your Eyes – Debbie Gibson

An odd bit of serendipity.

Pardon the Mess

When moving back into these digs I converted the Opiate to the new version of Blogger as well as changed the template. Besides making the format of the blog a bit easier to work with, this broke the Blogger for Word plugin. This sucks for me since I write the VAST majority of my blog posts in Word and clicking on the Post button was so easy. Now I either have to cut and paste from Word into Blogger’s editor, which means I then have to manually remove all of the superfilis HTML tags which Word crams into each document, or I upload the post to Google Documents and post it from there. A process which also requires the manual editing of extra HTML tags. All this is to say that if you see some rather fantastic formatting, it is because I suck at manually editing HTML in the Blogger editor and please bear with me as I wrestle with this thing.

BOOK REVIEW - Just A Geek

Just A Geek
Wil Wheaton
O’Reilly Media, 2004
267 pgs.

Once in a while a book will come along and just kicks your ass. This ass-kicking can wear many different guises, however it most often manifests itself as the book validates something you were thinking or feeling. For example I know several people who claim to have had a fundamental shift in their world-view as a result of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club but I believe what they went through was more of a revelation than a revolution. In this case Fight Club demonstrated there were other money-grubbing yuppies out there who toed that fine line between artistic self-loathing and emo therefore it was okay for these people to feel the way they had always been feeling. Nothing about their core character changed, the book just gave their feelings validation.

This is the experience I have had over the past several hours as I plowed through Wil Wheaton’s collection of autobiographical sketches Just A Geek. For those of you who do not know him, Wil Wheaton may be better known to you as TV’s Wesley Crusher or Gordie in Stand By Me (he was also in the MASSIVELY underrated Toy Soldiers), and while the True Hollywood Story of teenage Wil is not the subject of this book, I doubt Just A Geek would exist without those experiences. In Just A Geek Wheaton shares experiences from a few years of his life with the reader, years in which he struggles to (re)define and center himself and his life, although it is plain that during the events he relates, Wheaton was unaware of what was happening to him.

For me this book was compulsively readable, so much so that I finished the book in one sitting and it is almost 5AM as I write this review. I am not certain why I bought this book (it was crammed in an Amazon.com order with the uberdork edition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a few Shakespeare plays which I am re-reading) I have been aware of wilwheaton.net and wil wheaton dot net in exile for a couple of years now but, for whatever reason, I have never really been engaged by the site. I suspect this has more to do with what I was looking for than what Wil was offering, after all I knew he was an entertaining writer as I enjoyed his short-lived column in one of the Dungeons & Dragons magazines. I know it was not because I have some fannish obsession, either pro or con, with the character of Wesley Crusher. To be completely honest, despite my abiding love for most things Star Trek, I did not watch too much TNG when it first aired (particularly once they got Troi out of her space cheerleader outfits and Yar was no more.) I suppose it was reading Wheaton’s savagely funny commentary on several TNG episodes on TVSquad.com which convinced me to get his book and thus the revelation.

What did reading about the travails of TV’s Wesley Crusher reveal to me? Well, it is difficult to quantify (plus I am starting to get a headache) suffice to say Just A Geek served to validate how I have been feeling about my own life and, more specifically, where I am currently mired creatively. This book really spoke to me and I would encourage you all to read it as it has everything you need. A hero’s journey straight out of Campbell (Joe, not the soup you philstines), porn stars, Monty Python quotes, Trekkies, and roughly the same number of f-bombs I will use at work tomorrow. Enjoy!

BOOK REVIEW - The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot

The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
Bart D. Ehrman
Oxford University Press, 2006
188 pgs.

Since Bookstop did not have Emperor: The Gods of War I decided to console myself with a couple of other books on The List. In this case they were Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell, which is the third in his Saxon Stories series and the book we are about to tackle. I have previously read, and reviewed, Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and thoroughly enjoyed it, therefore several of his other books ended up on Christmas list. (This was done with a small sense of irony but more in the hope that my mom, who feels the need to give me something with a Christian every year, might select a book or two from this list. It didn’t work.) This is the one I was most interested in as I had read the National Geographic article about the recovery of the Gospel of Judas and I wondered what this gospel would reveal about Judas.

Rather than restrict himself to a discussion of the text of this new gospel, which I imagine would quickly become boring for the average person, Ehrman makes this book about how the gospel changes our perceptions of Judas, Jesus, and the origins of Christianity itself. Of course, presuming his audience has only a Da Vinci Code inspired knowledge of some of the early non-orthodox Christian beliefs, he has to begin by putting down a foundation of basic knowledge on which he can then build. Through the second, third, and forth chapters he does just this, exploring what we knew about Judas from the early gospel traditions, then the later gospel traditions, and then what we knew about the Gospel of Judas before the document was found. In the next chapter he discusses the circumstance of the discovery of the Gospel of Judas and how it came to be restored, which is an interesting story in and of itself (at least to a history/archaeology geek like myself). Ehrman then starts to deal with the contents of the Gospel of Judas itself. He does this with a very high-level discussion of what is in the Gospel and then digs a little deeper into his discussion of how this Gospel relates to Gnosticism and how it relates to our current knowledge and thoughts about Jesus, Judas, and the other apostles. Finally Erhman wraps up the book with three chapters titled “Who Was Judas Iscariot,” “What Did Judas Betray and Why Did He Betray It?”, and “The Gospel of Judas in Perspective.” Here he flings the gates of the discussion as wide as he can while walking the reader through the steps he takes to boil down what we “know” about these subjects to the most probable facts about the subjects.

Once again Ehrman has provided an illuminating look at Christianity. While reading this book I really felt like I was listening to a lecture by Ehrman rather than delving into some musty academic text and found myself thoroughly enjoying the experience despite the subject being, lets be honest, not very exciting. Like with Misquoting Jesus, I cannot recommend this book enough if you happen to be interested in an intellectual discussion of historical Christianity.

BOOK REVIEW - Emperor: The Field of Swords

Emperor: The Field of Swords
Conn Iggulden
Dell, 2006
594 pgs.

Both of the previous books in the Emperor series, The Gates of Rome and The Death of Kings, have been thoroughly enjoyable reads in which Iggulden tells the story of the rise of Julius Caesar. As with all the books in this series Iggulden has to cover quite a bit of historical ground the end of Caesar’s posting in Spain, his election to consul, his conquest of Gaul, and ends with the line, "As the sun rose, the veteran legions of Gaul crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome."

I honestly do not know what to say about this book. While Iggulden’s prose is enjoyable, it is his characters which really make the book worth reading. He has a knack for telling the reader everything they need to know about a character in one scene without making the character feel like a sketch or a cliché. It is because of this, more than any other factor, that Iggulden has become one of my favorite authors, so much so that I have dispatched one of my minions friends to Britain to fetch me Wolf of the Plains, the first book of his new series about Genghis Khan. (Of course he, my minion friend, will tell you he went back because it was his mom’s birthday, and we should allow him to cling to this thin fiction, but we all know the truth. Okay, back to semi-serious stuff.) The only room for improvement that I see is in how Iggulden constructs his narrative. Between some chapters there will be significant jumps in time and there is nothing to indicate these shifts except for a throw away line early in the chapter, which can, at times, be disorienting. In the end this is only a minor quibble which does not detract from my enjoyment of the book.

The best way I know how to recommend this book is to tell you that I read the almost 600 pages in about a week and once I was done I immediately went to the bookstore to pick up the final volume in the series, The Gods of War. (Sadly they did not have it yet somehow I still managed to spend over $40 at the bookstore.)

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When I read the following quote I thought it would make the perfect tageline for a movie trailer:

“From this day, all tribal disputes are ended. Let no Gaul kill one of his people when we shall need every sword against the enemy. When there is dissent, use my name,” Cigento said softly, “Tell them Vercingetorix calls them to arms.”

Too bad Vercingetorix looses in the end.

BOOK REVIEW - A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
James Shapiro
Harper Perennial, 2005
394 pgs.

In this book Shapiro proposes to show us that while Shakespeare’s plays have endured for centuries, Shakespeare was addressing issues which would have been as present in the Victorian mind as terrorism and Iraq are to the modern American. Shapiro chose to examine the year 1599 because it marked a crucial year in Shakespeare’s development. Besides the fact that this was the year during which the Globe, the theater which we learn to associate Shakespeare with in school, is founded, it was also an exceptionally productive year for Shakespeare in which he wrote Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Hamlet and Julius Caesar are perhaps two of his most widely read plays, by virtue of being required reading on curricula across America, all four of the plays demonstrate a shift in Shakespeare’s writing.

Shapiro structures the book around the four seasons, winter, spring, summer, and autumn, tying each play to the season in which it was written or first performed. This puts Henry the Fifth in the Winter, during which Shakespeare had a conflict with the other, perhaps more prominent Will, in the Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kemp, the troupe’s clown. Before this point it had been the practice for the clown to perform a jig or two at the end of the play. These jigs were often bawdy and Will Kemp is reputed to be one of the past masters of the jig, but more importantly the jig gave the clown the last word rather than the playwright, something which, I imagine, stuck in more than one writer’s craw. In the larger world the English were facing a crisis in Ireland which was so much on the public mind that it seeps into the play in the most unexpected ways. In one of the early versions of the play when the French Queen greets Henry, whom she has not met, she says, “So happy to be the issue, brother Ireland, / Of this good day and of this gracious meeting” (5.2.12-13). However it is believed this is not a slip of the Queen, but rather of Shakespeare’s pen. An error which most modern editors quietly correct.

These are just a couple of the examples, as poorly related as they may be by yours truly, which Shapiro uses to show the reader how topical Shakespeare’s work was for the audiences of his day. If you have any interest in Shakespeare then this is a book you should definitely find time to read.

Pro-Choice

Abortion is not a subject that I spend much time thinking about. I know where I stand on the subject on both a public policy front (it should be legal with as few impediments as possible) and a personal front (I think it is morally wrong unless there is significant danger to the mother) and, lets face it, I am certainly not having enough (any) sex for it to be a concern. The one opinion I have about abortion which I tend to share is the frustration I feel about the public debate about abortion. We all know the two sides of the debate are never going to agree and yet everyone throws so much time, money, and effort into this abyss. I wonder what we could accomplish if we took all those resources and focused them on something we can fix, like children living in poverty, or the number of people living without adequate health care, anything but abortion.

Like I said, it is not something I think about much because I know where I stand and I really feel it is an issue best left between God, the mother, and the father. Then today I saw this post on Ragnell’s Written World (which, by the way, is a superlative comics blog wherein Ragnell takes on a lot of women’s issues in comics and the age old question of which Green Lantern has the nicest butt (Soranik Natu)) which put into words how I feel about many things the religious right would like to have legislated, but particularly abortion. Ragnell’s point is that by being pro-choice she is, in effect, in favor of a person being responsible for their own decisions. If abortion is outlawed then it is easy for a woman to shrug her shoulders and say, “Well, I have to have the baby.” She has no choice and therefore has the opportunity to foist off responsibility for the consequences of getting pregnant on society. Of course she still has to deal with the consequences, but by removing her choice to have an abortion, you move her from being an adult making adult decisions to a victim of circumstance. Go read the write up from Ragnell. She explains it far better than I and while you’re there check out the rest of her blog. While I regularly just about wet myself with the offerings from Campbell, Church, and Sims, Ragnell’s writing often forces me to think about issues in a much larger context and she is worthy of your attention.

BOOK REVIEW - The J Curve

The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall
Ian Bremmer
306 pages
Simon & Schuster, 2006

The description on the front flap of the dust cover says, “What Freakonomics does for understanding the economy, The J Curve does for better understanding how nations behave,” and, quite frankly, this is one of the most accurate sentence-long summations of a book I have ever read. Just like Freakonomics, The J Curve is a fascinating and illuminating read.

The central question that Bremmer intends this book to answer is, “How can we better understand the natural processes that erode the power of authoritarian regimes and nourish open governance?” As he indicates in the very first paragraph of the Foreward this process is important for us to understand in this age where political instability in one nation, or even within a small region of a state, can lead to a myriad of nightmare scenarios including regional economic instability and nuclear terrorism. He goes on to point out that this understanding is critical to formulating more effective foreign policy.

The center piece of Bremmer’s method of answering this question is the titular J curve. Basically Bremmer’s J curve plots the stability of a nation on the Y axis and the openness of the nation on the X axis. This curve, which resembles a check mark more than an actual J, has states with authoritarian regimes, such as North Korea and Cuba, on the left side of the curve and states with open societies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom on the right side of the curve. States will move along the curve from the right, a closed but stable society, through a period of decreasing stability but increasing openness, and then on to a period where both stability and openness increase. Movement along the curve is not exclusively from left to right with some states making moves to open their society and thus move to the right of the curve, however in the resulting instability the state then cracks down and moves back to the left of the curve.

After introducing the J curve model, Bremmer then walks the reader through several different examples of states at various points on the curve, beginning with three states which are on the extreme left of the curve, Cuba, North Korea, and pre-invasion Iraq. All three of the states are reasonably stable and closed to outside influences, even to the extant that the regimes will behave in a manner which causes the world to continue to cut them off and therefore propping up the current regime. This is particularly the case with North Korea, however Bremmer points out several instances where the Castro government has, during thaws in the U.S. stance towards Cuba, done things to force the U.S. government to resume a hard-line against Cuba.

Bremmer then discusses Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, three states which are on the left side of the J curve but are slowly moving down the curve with increasing instability and increasing openness. Russia is one of the states which moves back and forth on the curve. As the society starts to open up to democratic processes it dips towards instability. This makes the powers that be nervous which leads them to rescind the reforms, reverting the society to a more closed state. This was graphically illustrated in the Russian government’s reaction to the incident in Beslan where Chechen rebels took several hundred school children hostage.

Bremmer then takes the reader step-by-step through states which demonstrate the two other major positions on the J curve. The depths of the J curve are exemplified by Yugoslavia, a state which disintegrated once it reached the nadir of the curve, and South Africa, a state which successfully made the transition from the left side of the curve to the right side of the curve. He then discusses three states, Turkey, Israel, and India, which are currently on the right side of the curve which face critical decisions in the next few years which could have serious consequences for their stability or openness. Wrapping up the book Bremmer discusses the question of China, which is a special case where their stability and openness are not necessarily directly linked.

This book was a very enjoyable and surprisingly quick read considering the subject matter and I highly recommend it to any person with an interest in the rise and fall of states in the post Cold War world.

New Years Resolutions

1. Go to the gym twice a week and improve this mark to three times a week by August.
2. Cook something new at least once a month but try to do it twice a month.
3. Read a book every two weeks and write a review for every book I read.
4. Deposit at least $100.00 out of every paycheck into my credit union savings account.
5. Complete the first round of JAS Houston language courses.
6. Work though The Artist’s Way.
7. Finish at least two writing projects this year that are NOT poetry.
8. Write three posts a week for the Opiate.

I might have thought of some others however I can't remember them at the moment. Eight is certainly enough to get things rolling. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, #5 has already gone by the wayside. I emailed and called JAS Houston and never heard back from them before the start of classes this past week. I'll have to check out another way of learning Japanese.

So Is This Thing Still On?

It appears that my one-month hiatus to write the marginally okay American novella turned into two months and some change. First I have to admit that I have, to a certain extant, enjoyed the break. While I love writing, I was starting to feel like writing for the Opiate was a chore. To be completely honest writing in general had become a chore.

Towards the end of October I was really pumped about NaNoWriMo. I expected the end product to be, lets face it, crap, however I did expect there to be an end product. Guess what? There wasn’t. Well, that is not entirely true, at the end of the month (I punked out about halfway through) I had about ten pages of material. Mind you this material is four or five two-page starts on several different ideas rather than one project. Apparently I was rather scatter-brained while I was trying to work on my novel and I could not discipline myself enough to work on just one idea. I am a little disappointed in myself, but we all have these creative ups and downs.

Once November was over I made several attempts to begin writing for the Opiate however the words just would not come. I justified this by telling myself I was busy with holiday stuff (and I was) or I excused it by blaming it on some girl problems I experienced (more on that particularly bad weekend later). The fact of the matter is that I was burned out. I did quite a bit of thinking about various creative projects which have been floating around in my head for varying amounts of time and I wasted a HUGE amount of time in front of the television.

In the end I wasted about two months. I should have been writing anything rather than doing the creative equivalent of sitting on my duff but c’est la vie. There will be no more crying over this particular milk spill. It is time to look forward. I am well-rested after a week and some change in Scotland as well as inspired. We will see what comes of that. First thing out of the gate is going to be a list of my News Years resolutions. Usually I am pretty terrible with these things, however I think I might be better this year. We will see.

Happy New Year and welcome back. Thanks for reading.