This quote from Jack London’s The Iron Heel deserves sharing:
“For never was there such a lover as Ernest Everhard” (62).
Socialists and porn stars have the best names.
Blog
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Homebuilt UHF Antenna for HDTV Reception
Today, Y and I went to Lowes for a few supplies. We recently purchased a Samsung LCD TV, but we don’t have cable (except for Internet). We figured it might be fun to watch real TV (as opposed to Hulu or whatever else might be available), so I did some research on the best inexpensive antennas for HDTVs. Overwhelmingly, I found people talking about “coat hanger antennas.” It was hard to imagine that something so easy and cheap to build could work so well despite the video evidence on YouTube (one instructional video with antenna in action can be found here). Nevertheless, I decided to build one and see how well it works for myself. I used the instructions available from Make Magazine here. However, I decided to follow the lead of some folks in the forums who talked about better results with 12-gauge copper wire, which I used in place of the coat hangers. All in all, it took about 45 minutes to build, and it cost me about $16. And, the results? Now, we have 30 HD channels to choose from (20 come in perfectly–the ones that don’t are from stations further away).
Oct. 21, 2023 Update: Video link removed as it no longer works.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Uncle Woodrow, and World War II
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) tonight for the first time, and one particular passage struck me in its depiction of memory of World War II. At Billy and Valencia’s eighteenth wedding anniversary, the barbershop quartet, the Febs, begin singing “That Old Gang of Mine,” and Billy is assaulted by the pain of memory:
Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords–chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as if he were really being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. (172-173)
I’ve seen this before when I was once asking my Uncle Woodrow Head about his experiences in the war before he succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease.
He told me about the time, prior to the Battle of the Bulge, General Patton inspected his auto group while he was working on the breaks of his jeep. Despite others telling him to snap to attention, he said he had to get it fixed for when they rolled out. Patton’s car pulled up to where my Uncle’s legs were sticking out from under his vehicle. The general got out and told my Uncle that it was men like him that were going to win the war.
He told me about guarding one of the major conferences of the war while manning an anti-aircraft gun with orders to shoot any airplane on sight.
Then, he told me about his friends and the death he witnessed. However, he stopped short and his face took on the “grotesque” that Vonnegut describes in the selection above–the only scene from the book that explicitly invokes memory instead of time warps. The memory of the event overwhelmed my Uncle, a good natured and quiet man who I never before or ever saw again with a face transfigured by a memory so great and terrible that I cannot imagine it.
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Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells
I just sent off my presentation proposal for SLSA 2009, which as the theme “Decodings” and will be in Atlanta, Georgia in November. Since I’ll be teaching and reading for my PhD exams, I decided to dust off a publishable paper to shorten and present at the conference (assuming it’s accepted). In the meantime, I think I’m going to send this essay out to a journal over the Summer to see if they are interested in publishing it as it is or with minor revision. Here’s my abstract to SLSA:
Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells
Jason W. Ellis
The first popular, and widely cited, fictional account of the military tank is H.G. Wells’ 1903 short story, “The Land Ironclads.” The recognized and widely circulated literary publication, the Strand Magazine published Wells’ short story in 1903–thirteen years before the British tank was unveiled to the world at Flers and Courcelette on 15 September 1916 during the First World War’s Battle of the Somme. However, Wells was not involved in the actual development of the tank, but many historians point to Major-General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton as the single person most responsible for convincing the British military to design and commit invaluable war time resources to its development and utilization in the Great War. Interestingly, these two persons–Wells and Swinton–developed a public debate in print and other media, which eventually led to Swinton’s libel suit against Wells, over who was most responsible for the invention of the tank. It is the purpose of this presentation to highlight their public debate, and uncover how the public reacted to these men’s claims. From this very public argument it will be possible to decode the meaning of such claims to invention, and the early history of Science Fiction, which was in part buttressed on imaginative futurology.
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Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Chris Columbus’ Bicentennial Man
Late last night, I finished revising my Bicentennial Man entry for Peter Wright’s The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations (to be published by Liverpool University Press). It was a real joy to dive back into Asimov’s work, because it was through his work that I precariously began my trip into SF scholarship with my presentation on dualism in robot narratives for Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium.
Having just completed Professor Babacar M’Baye’s African-American Literature course, I was able to engage Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” with the history and stories of the African-American experience that were fresh on my mind. I have known for a long time that Asimov’s robots are an allegory for African-Americans, but it was on re-reading “The Bicentennial Man” that I realized how much Asimov’s earlier robot writing culminated in this later robot story, first published in 1976–two and three decades after his much loved early robot stories such as “Runaround” and the R. Daneel Olivaw/ Elijah Bailey detective stories. In fact, I found that “The Bicentennial Man” mirrors the basic structure of American slave narratives, which I go into more detail on in my entry for the collection on film adaptations.
With this rich source material, I was at first resistant to spoiling it by watching the abysmal film adaptation Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams. However, I discovered that for as bad as the film is, there are subtle gestures toward the spirit of the source material. Unfortunately, the film overall pulls the rug out from under the main character’s efforts and successes by erasing the anxiety and hardship Andrew encountered in Asimov’s original story. I don’t believe the audience understands Andrew’s predicament in the film in the same way that Asimov demonstrates Andrew’s precarious situation in the novelette. Nevertheless, the film does have some redemptive elements, which are more fully explored in my entry for the collection.
When I have more information about the publication of the critical companion, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net.
