New Year, Old Traditions

Every New Year's Eve, family dinner and mass are par for the course, possibly fireworks, too. Over at my neck of the woods, the "festivities" get a little more colorful as the seconds tick away into the New Year:

Hang grapes on every door in the house. Well, maybe not every door, but surely the ones that are major entryways. I've grown up believing that this has something to do with having a good harvest for the year (read: future success). Growing up, my dad would take care of preparing the little clear plastics that would encase each grape; now that we're old enough my brother and I are the two man wrecking crew that do all the work. Incidentally, we used to keep the old shriveled up grapes the new ones replace, which tends to be exactly as disgusting as it sounds.

Eat twelve round fruits. One for every month in the year. For this reason, thanks to my mom, we're always fully stocked with all manner of fruit during the New Year. This makes for very colorful edible decor around the house. Unfortunately, try as I might, no one has agreed with me that cookies should qualify as fruits, despite the fact that they're round.

Jump up and down with a container of old coins. Right at midnight. When I was younger I thought there were three things going on here. First, the jumping up and down was supposed to help one grow taller in the year to come. Second, the coins were supposed to invite prosperity. Finally, jumping with the coins was supposed to generate noise in lieu of noisemakers. Speaking from experience, I can say that a.) I obviously did not jump nearly enough in my younger days, b.) I have no idea if it works but I'd rather assume it did, and c.) yes, it does make quite a bit of noise.

Run around the backyard with an upturned umbrella. My personal favorite. We each go one round out back (which isn't too large an area, mind), holding the upturned umbrella above our heads. In theory, the umbrella is supposed to catch all the good luck falling from the skies after midnight, for which reason we make it a point to use the largest umbrella lying around the house as we can find. When the last of us is done with his or her run we keep it upturned and try to close the umbrella without tipping it over.

Incredibly, our neighbors have been polite enough not to spread nasty rumors about those lunatics next door and their strange antics. I suppose that's as good a start to the new year as any.

Comics and Graphic Novels of 2006

As far as I'm concerned, I will remember 2006 as the year I got back into comics (for the nth time), for better or worse. Taking stock of the year's haul:

Independents (More or Less)
Daisy Kutter: The Last Train	Kazu Kibuishi
Flight (Vols. 1-3)	Kazu Kibuishi (ed.)
Herobear and the Kid: The Inheritance	Mike Kunkel
DC Comics
Batman: The Long Halloween	Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Batman: Dark Victory
Batman: Haunted Knight
DC: The New Frontier (Vols. 1 and 2)	Darwin Cooke
Identity Crisis	Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales
Superman for All Seasons	Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Superman: Godfall	Michael Turner, Joe Kelly and Talent Caldwell
Superman/Batman (Vols. 1-3)	Jeph Loeb, Ed McGuinnes, Michael Turner and Carlos Pacheco
Teen Titans (Vols. 1-5)	Geoff Johns, Mike McCone and Tony Daniel
Steampunk (Vols. 1 and 2)	Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo
Planetary (Vols. 1-3)	Warren Ellis and John Cassaday
The Witching Hour	Jeph Loeb and Chris Bachalo
Marvel
Avengers: Disassembled	Brian Michael Bendis and David Finch
New Avengers (Vol. 1)
Daredevil (Vols. 2, 4-7, 9)	Joe Quesada, David Mack, Brian Michael Bends and Alex Maleev
House of M	Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipel
Inhumans	Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee
The Sentry
Spider-Man: Blue	Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
X-Men: The New Age of Apocalypse	Akira Yoshida and Chris Bachalo
Astonishing X-Men (Vols. 1-2)	Joss Whedon and John Cassaday
New X-Men (Vols. 1-3)	Grant Morrisson, Frank Quitely, Igor Kordey and Ian Van Scriver
Decimation: X-Men	Chris Claremont, Salvador Larocca and Roger Cruz

Honestly, there's a good chunk that's forgettable (and how!), but by and large I enjoyed most of the stuff on the list (I'd better - they cost a pretty penny!). I would like to think that I've already gotten this out of my system, though 2007 is looking to be an interesting year for comics as I type this...

Books of 2006

By way of accounting for the books I've read this past year, to the best of my recollection:

Christine Aziz	The Olive Readers
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward	All the President's Men
Bryan Burroughs and Mark Helyar	Barbarians at the Gate
Ray Bradbury	Fahrenheit 451
Lillian Jackson Braun	The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
	The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern
Raymond Chandler	The Big Sleep
Jasper Fforde	The Eyre Affair (A Thursday Next Novel)
	Lost in a Good Book (A Thursday Next Novel)
	The Well of Lost Plots (A Thursday Next Novel)
	Something Rotten (A Thursday Next Novel)
	The Big Over Easy (A Nursery Crime)
Franklin Foer	How Soccer Explains the World
Tim Harford	The Undercover Economist
Nick Hornby	A Long Way Down
Steven Johnson	Everything Bad is Good for You
Gregory Maguire	Wicked
Ayn Rand	Anthem
Laura Joh Rowland	Shinju
	Bundori
Kurt Vonnegut	Cat's Cradle

The tally: twenty-one books, mostly light reading. Not bad, but short of my usual target of twenty-six for the year. Hopefully, next year I'll do better in terms of number, content and type.

It's the Day after Christmas...

...and I'm severely jet-lagged. I've spent the past two days drifting in and out of consciousness whenever I'd find myself on a (relatively) horizontal surface.

Mercifully, this hasn't taken anything away from the holiday festivities. The food, as only mom can make, has been excellent, and the presents have still been something to await with eager anticipation - both the giving and receiving, of course.

Personally, I've seen my share of the loot dwindle over the years, as godparents and aunts and uncles inevitably realize I'm not as cute as I looked as a child, and friends invariably fall out of touch with the passing of time. This year's stash included a couple of video games (from my brother who, bless him, has decided to give me as many reasons not to graduate as possible), a new wallet (bestest gift ever!), and the chance to spend another Christmas where it matters the most.

In the grand scheme of the universe, I feel like the luckiest person alive.

Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

The great thing about home: someone's always happy to see you.

Wouldn't You Know It?

Well, it looks like I was able to get that picture of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree before flying home, just as I'd hoped.

Signing off from New York. Will be posting next from home, sweet home.

Furlough!

Thus, another semester and 12 credits are officially over.

Frankly, I'm burned out. Well, to be more precise, I've been burned out for the better part of the past two and a half weeks, at least. A little too much X! T! X! Inverse! necessitated spending most of the semester jumping from one requirement to the next with the minimum of studying in between. So this is going to be a much needed break.

(And if you understood the econometric reference right there, maybe you need a break, too.)

Just counting the hours until I get to fly home for the next three-odd weeks. I swear, it can't happen soon enough.

Flight

Comics are many things, but they are ultimately a means of telling stories, limited only by the imaginations of the artists that work behind the scenes. In this regard, Flight is an interesting compendium that showcases the strengths of comics as a storytelling medium.

The simplest way of describing Flight is to say it is an off-the-beaten-track title by talented artists simlarly under the mainstream radar. Beyond that, it is difficult to pin down exactly what Flight is about for the simple reason that it is an anthology about anything, everything or nothing in particular. When the first installment came out, it seemed the featured stories derived their theme from the banner title, as many of them did in some way involve flight or flying. But this may have been unintended, merely coincidental at best. Indeed, it might be more appropriate to think of Flight as a collection of "flights of fancy" allowing its contributors to tell stories that might otherwise not have seen the light of day had they not been collected in this fashion.

The casual reader may find Flight vexing. Each of the three books released to date contain collections of largely unrelated short stories - about twenty or so of them anywhere between four and twelve pages long - that cannot be more different from one another. This is true in both substance and form. Some stories are lighthearted while others are dark; there are stories that border on science fiction and fantasy, and others that focus on the real and perhaps otherwise mundane. Each of these is presented in a very distinctive visual style, and in many cases there are pages and panels on end that do not even contain a single word of text. Hence, readers accustomed to graphic novels that flesh out an overarching story and prefer their comics presented in a consistent art style may find themselves out of their comfort zone with Flight.

Yet those looking for something different will find that Flight has plenty to offer in spades. In this respect, the title's diversity is precisely its strength. Like any anthology, some stories and artists will curry readers' favor more than others. But the best stories are those that are either framed as modern day fairy tales (such as Jake Parker's The Robot and the Sparrow or Joanna Carneiro's La Sonadora) or are presented such that they can only be described as animation in print, usually by those who have worked as either animators or storyboard artists for animated productions (Michel Gagne and Justin Ridge come to mind). At the very least, Flight will expose readers to a slew of talented artists to watch out for in the future, such as Kazu Kibuishi, who does not get enough credit as Flight's editor and art director, on top of his own wonderful contributions to the anthology.

Indeed, those who pigeonhole comics as "superhero-saves-the-world" entertainment will find little of that in Flight, despite its fair share of the unusual and the fantastic. But they will find a host of other things besides that are equally entertaining. Those interested in checking out what Flight is all about would do well to drop by the series's official blog, or maybe pick up a copy of the second volume (the one with the cover in black, as pictured above), which arguably has the best to offer of the three installments available today. It will be well worth it, if only to see these creators' imaginations take flight.

Fast Food Folly

Part the First: Failure to Communicate
SERVER: Can I help the next customer?

BRIAN:Yeah. Can I have a Number 7?

SERVER: Do you want the meal or just the sandwich?

BRIAN: I want just the meal.

SERVER & BRIAN: ...

And after a split second, during which we stared at each other - the server ostensibly wondering what the hell I said, and I giving the image I have of myself in my mind's eye a smack on the head - it finally sunk in and I got my meal.

Proving once again that, in my unguarded moments, I am capable of saying some pretty stupid things.

Part the Second: Asking the Stupid Question
After a month-long renovation, the latest addition to my neighborhood McDonald's was a selve-serve beverage station.

This is the reason why the following server's question baffled me after I ordered a meal: "What drink would you like with that?"

It took every ounce of effort I had not to bite back with some witty retort. I mean, when all was said and done, I'd still have to be the one to get my own drink.

The place may have gotten an upgrade, but apparently the people still work according to the old operating system.

Wiimote Hacks

Over at Wired, Chris Kohler has put together a very good read on the burgeoning hacks that have been attempted on the Wii, specifically on the Wiimote. As expected, these mostly involve finding other uses for the Wiimote, in the sense of making it work with other gadgets, and in other cases of finding alternative ways to operate the controller (those who haven't heard about how candles can replace the Wii's sensor bar, you'll learn about it here).

By itself, it's quite an interesting read, and the links and embedded video peppered throughout the article just make it that much more entertaining. I highly recommend checking it out.

O Holy Night (By Way of Studio 60)

The jazzy trumpet rendition of O Holy Night featured on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip can be viewed on the show's website and is available for free MP3 download. I've heard that people from places where the show isn't airing yet can't access some of the site's content - and thus can't watch the most recent episode online - but hopefully the download will at least work. After all, 'tis the season.

What's interesting about the arrangement is that it was performed by victims of Hurricane Katrina as a tribute to New Orleans. That, and the fact that it's actually quite good, make it a worthy addition to anyone's holiday music library.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree!

This is the story as I understand it:

Because the holiday season is in full swing, the folks at Seattle's Tacoma International Airport decided to get into the spirit of things and put up some decorations, among which included several Christmas trees. Upon noticing this, a rabbi brought to the attention of the airport management that the airport should also have Hannukah symbols on premises, and expressed the desire to add a menorah (or two) to the display by, according to some accounts, threatening a lawsuit to that effect.

In response, the airport promptly had the trees taken down, which set off a brief flurry of (unwanted) publicity and equally impassioned reactions from all sides concerned.

I must admit: the Catholic schoolboy in me finds this bizarre on so many levels. But what I find most peculiar about the entire incident is how so many people (and the principals in particular) have missed the point completely: that the "Christmas tree" really has little to do with the religious celebration of Christmas. In fact, it's probably as secular a symbol for the holidays as one can find, despite the many vocal objections of aggrieved Christians that the Christmas tree is part and parcel of Christmas.

(It is tempting to think that Santa is an even more secular symbol, but this is only partly true. It should be pointed out that children have been known to pray to Santa as if he were God, which I suppose to the eyes of a four year-old comes pretty close. In contrast, I doubt there has been anyone who's actually prayed to a Christmas tree. But I digress.)

To some extent, this is perhaps just than another example of the American penchant for political correctness and litigation gone awry. But more than that it is also a sad commentary about how, even in a multicultural society such as the United States, very little is really understood about how different cultures work, sometimes even by those belonging to the culture in question.

I gather that the Christmas trees at Tacoma are back up and on display again, much to the satisfaction of travelers, airport personnel and even the rabbi that set these events into motion (who never in his wildest dreams meant for any of this to happen, it appears). I can't help but wonder, though, whether it's just a matter of time before some other misguided push for political correctness or equality of this-or-that rears its ugly head. It wouldn't be too difficult to imagine, for instance, some nut protesting that Rudolph gets far more play than the other reindeer.

I pray my Christmas tree that doesn't happen anytime soon.

In Other Wii-related News...

No sooner had gamers gotten their hands on the Wii that reports began spreading around the internet of flying Wiimotes and the damage they have caused to people and property. While Youtube is a popular repository of the video evidence, a much more amusing record of Wii-related maladies can be found on Wiihaveaproblem.com.

Personally, I think the pictures and write-ups are hilarious. The real winners are the shiner some guy inadvertently gave his girlfriend and the one shot of a Wiimote sticking out of a tv that it inadvertently impaled. I also appreciate the fact that the site keeps a running tally of the damage toll reported so far, which I would suppose is grossly underrepresented.

Mind, while I concede that the danger is very real, I am also of the opinion that people get into these situations by being a tad overzealous when they play. At best, these are really just accidents that can be avoided.

767 Fifth Avenue

Apple Computer's flagship store on 5th Avenue and 58th Street. Actually, this is just the façade and entrance; the store is really underground.

Open 24/7, it exists to satisfy that urge to buy an iPod at 4am should the spirit be so moved. Dropping in is as close to a religous experience as any devoted Apple fanatic can have: the store has every currently available Mac product, accessory, or related software on display. Between the accessible demo units and the knowledgable staff who live to answer customer questions (and can close sales just as quickly), this is definitely the Mac user's Mecca.

Kiwi!

I first came across the video below on Oldmanmusings.com nearly a month ago, but it's still worth sharing. It's quite an ingenious little story that should teach us that making our dreams come true doesn't just take a lot of effort. It's also a matter of perspective.

Not to mention the fact that Kiwis make for some deranged characters. But I digress.

Those who want to download the video can do so on the website of its animator, Dony Permedi.

Enjoy!

Speed(y) Reading

A few books for those in search of something quick to browse through:

Anthem is perhaps not the best place to start with Ayn Rand (that honor would have to go to Fountainhead, in my opinion), but it does have the benefit of being perhaps her shortest novel.

The themes touched upon in Anthem are much the same as those in her other works: the celebration of individualism and the dangers of communal society. Set in a post-cataclysmic future, the story is about a man called Equality-72521, who lives in a society where individuality is not just frowned upon but is in fact criminalized. There is no "I" in this society, there is only the "We". There is no such thing as individual achievement; instead what is important is what society as a whole deems is important. There is no such thing as vocation either, as a person's pursuits are determined by what is dictated by a council from on high. It is, in short, very much like the polis that Plato describes in The Republic, right down to the mating rituals that ensure that the identity of one's family members remains forever clouded in mystery.

Against this backdrop, Equality-72521 is different. Actually, he dares to be different, and the story recounts his attempt to overcome these limitations on a journey of self-awareness. It is journey in which he discovers who he is, rises above the depths to which he has been damned and (we hope) brings society to task for the ultimate injustice of robbing people of their individuality.

Given the book's length, Ayn Rand is able to successfully depict the world that she would have us believe exists. However, as in her other novels, there is a tendency for the narrative to proselytize and become preachy. Still, it is an interesting and thought-provoking book. Beware of the centennial edition, though, as it is only half as long as it seems. The manuscript is printed twice: the latter half of the book is a reproduction of the original British publication, with the author's handwritten comments and revisions.

* * *

I've never been the literary type and haven't otherwise been moved to give Kurt Vonnegut's work a try. But having read Cat's Cradle, I can see why he is held in high esteem. I've resigned myself to the fact that Vonnegut generally and Cat's Cradle more specifically are probably on the periphery of my literary comfort zone; to my mind, the book is akin to a cross between Catcher in the Rye and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, two other books just beyond my tastes. Notwithstanding this, Vonnegut weaves a tale that is both unusual and absurd enough to actually be entertaining.

In what will perhaps be the worst summary of a Vonnegut book, allow me to describe it thus: it is a satire about modern civilization and its science, its religion, its politics, its people. The story follows a writer intent on authoring a book about Franklin Hoenikker, the father of the atomic bomb, and the day the bomb was dropped on Japan. In the process, he gets in touch with Hoenikker's children, each of whom have in their possession some very dangerous piece of technology. As it happens - as it was meant to happen - the lives of the writer, the Hoenikker offspring, and the precepts of an unusual religion are inextricably intertwined and may very well decide what happens to humanity altogether.

The book itself is unabashedly cynical, but its sensibilities are right on (or maybe that's because I'm a cynic myself). While the story generally meanders along for perhaps half the book, it does come together quite nicely towards the end, though the ending is arguably a bit perplexing. In terms of form, the writing style and exceedingly concise chapters make for easy casual reading. Where content is concerned, the book is actually much deeper than it seems, and much of the book is devoted to introducing readers to Bokononism, a religion of untruths and calypsos that, in spite of itself, is perhaps the most original and insightful set of precepts to have seen print in a very long time.

In all, Vonnegut puts it best: "Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either."

* * *

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a book for book lovers, if anything because the premise is too good to pass up: what if the reading of books were made illegal?

Indeed, this bit of social commentary depicts a futuristic society where a concerted effort has been made to destroy all available books, executed by firemen who burn the offending materials, the homes of those suspected of owning them, and occasionally the owners themselves. The protagonist, one Guy Montag, is such a fireman who turns fugitive after his secret library, composed of few books he has been able to save from book-burning excursions, is discovered and set on fire. Hence the title of the piece: 451 degrees fahrenheit is supposed to be the temperature at which book paper burns.

At once akin to but less severe than George Orwell's 1984, it is fairly obvious that Fahrenheit 451 is an out-and-out critique of censorship. Beyond that, however, it is also a tale of the dangers of modern life: the desire for convenience, conformity and comfort. Indeed, in the book's context, the former is inseparable from the latter. As the story progresses, these themes take on a life of their own and are arguably pushed to their logical conclusion - and make a lot of sense. There is also a certain timelessness to this tale penned in the 1960s, given its eerie parallels to the present-day and the various media that have supplanted the discipline of book-reading (for many of the same reasons identified by Bradbury).

Ooh...Pretty Colors...

A three dimensional scatterplot of a regression line. The yellow spheres are the observed data.

For those in the real world who don't speak economics or statistics (i.e. normal people), a regression line depicts the effect that changes in independent explanatory variables have on a dependent variable. This particular regression line is a production function: the rate of change of output (lQ) is the vertical axis, while the rates of change of capital and labor (lK and lL, respectively) are what cause output to change. Obviously, a three-dimensional plot is only possible when there are at most three variables in a model (two independent, one dependent).

As the title of this post suggests, this plot isn't necessarily anything meaningful. Economics is funnier that way.

The plot was made using R, open source econometrics software at its best.

The Lighter Side of Graduate School

Lately, my brother's been sending me links from PHD comics, an online comic strip that depicts, with painful accuracy and tongue in cheek, the travails of life in graduate school (and perhaps the academe in general). In fact, the title of the comics says it all: PHD doesn't stand for doctor of philosophy; it stands for "piled higher and deeper".

I think any grad student can relate to that.

James Bond is Back: Casino Royale

I've never been a big James Bond fan, but Casino Royale is positively the best Bond film to have come out in years. While faithful on the whole to the franchise's legacy, this latest Bond film does enough with the tried and tested formula to bring 007 front and center in the new milennium. And it works.

For all intents and purposes, Casino Royale is a reboot of the 007 franchise. Past Bond films have followed the secret agent in his prime or later; this one, however, follows a James Bond newly promoted to "Double-O" status: brash, arrogant and therefore very, very dangerous. More importantly, the plot elements have also received a facelift apropos of this post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. Yes, Bond is off to save the world again, hot on the heels of a dangerous financier of terrorist activity. But to bring him in, 007 has to bankrupt his target in a secretive high-stakes game of poker (hence, the movie's title).

What could be more hip than that?

While the action and suspense in the film are just about par for the course, what makes Casino Royale actually quite good is the fact that it brings out those qualities that make Bond the quintessential secret agent. The movie is about charm and finesse and sophistication; in short, everything that 007 should have in spades. In my opinion, the more recent Bond films (as much as I think Pierce Brosnan fit the bill perfectly) have lost sight of this, with stories that make it harder for the audience to suspend their disbelief and easier for them to roll their eyes after one ridiculous plot twist after another.

For this reason, much of the credit must go to Daniel Craig. By way of comparison, Daniel Craig's James Bond is one part Jason Bourne and another part Ethan Hunt - and, yes, that's a good thing. Like past Bonds, Craig manages to inject his own brand of charm into 007. But he succeeds in also making the audience believe that James Bond is actually quite dangerous; ruthless, even. Perhaps solely because of his ability to carry the role, the movie acquired an air of severity lacking from the more recent 007 offerings.

And then there's Eva Green as Vesper Lynd. Two words: absolutely stunning.

If there are any complaints to be had about the movie, two would come to mind. The first is that unlike in previous installments, there are fewer gadgets featured in the film. For the most part, this is a good thing: I think any rational person would have to concede that the more recent Bond films had become a trifle ridiculous in the spy technology category. Yet at the same time, there's nothing more painful than to teased by 007's Aston Martin for a good portion of the movie only to have the car in play for the shortest and most insignificant amount of time.

The second by-way-of-letdown from the movie involves a short section towards the end that I cannot help but refer to as "frolic on the seashore." Those who've seen the film will know what I mean. While the entire sequence did fit (sort of) in the grand scheme of the story, it was undeniably the only blemish on an otherwise well crafted script.

Nonetheless, Casino Royale is a 007 installment whose time has come. It injects new life into one of the most successful movie franchises in history. In the process, it makes everything old about James Bond new again.