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Archives for February 2007

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Audiobook)

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Bill Bryson, in my opinion — for whatever that is worth — is the funniest writer in America. I’ve read several of his books now, and all them keep me laughing, sometimes out loud, which is a rare thing. Few books make me laugh at loud. And it’s over the simplest things, really. I distinctly remember laughing so hard at one point during In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s travel book of Australila, that I was literally crying. The story was of how Bryson had fallen asleep in a car as a family drove him around some city in Australia, giving him a tour. That doesn’t sound like fertile comic soil, I know, but Bryson had me rolling, let me tell you.

His most recent book, a memoir of his growing up in the fifties in Des Moines, is no less hilarious; although this one is slightly more sentimental since Bryson is talking about personal experiences and those most near and dear to him. Turns out Bryson’s parents were both writers also, journalists for the Des Moines Register, a prominent paper in its day. His father was in fact one of the greatest sports writers of his time, according to Bryson, and I enjoyed those bits of the book in which Bryson recounted great moments in sports history that his father was privileged enough to witness and write about.

I also enjoyed those parts of the book that explained what life was like in the fifties, a time that’s obviously foreign to me. Before listening to this book, all I knew about the fifties was what I had learned by watching the movie A Christmas Story, that narrated, campy film from the eighties. So maybe that’s why, in some places, this book felt like A Christmas Story. The individual stories were different, of course, but in some instances the reader could have replaced Bill Bryson’s name for that of Ralphie, the title character of A Christmas Story. The two seemed almost identical: somewhat nerdy, obsessed with sex and comics, forced to eat gross food. Even the peripheral characters seemed the same. The stern, heartless teacher. The school bully. The scatter-brained mother. The father with eccentric behavior. It all felt very familiar.

But I didn’t mind. It had me fascinated throughout.

Bill Bryson read the book. Some people don’t like his reads, but I do. I’ve listened to several of his books this way, and I think it works very well. Bryson has such a dry wit and teddy bear of a voice that you can’t help but like the guy. He’s completely unintimidating. Like a cool college professor who you bump into at some coffee and who, over cups of hot chocolate, must tell you the all about the funniest thing that happened to him that morning. And because Bryson’s stories are always funny, you’re more than eager to pass the day, sitting at his feet.

And the man can write. He makes language seem so effortless, so breezy. I sit and listen in awe. Some of it, is brilliant. A kind of easy going conversational prose. I’ll try to imitate the best I can for the rest f my life, I assure you.

So get this book. Or better still, get the audiobook. Listening to it is like meeting Bryson in person and becoming the closest of friends. And he, with all those memories and experiences, is an entertaining friend, indeed.

16 Blocks on DVD

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16 Blocks has a brilliant premise, and when I saw the trailer I was so excited by it that I thought I might actually go out and see this movie at the theater. We go to the theater so rarely that this was high praise indeed. Lucky for me, I didn’t pay ten bucks to see it at the local multiplex. If I had, I would’ve have been extremely annoyed and perhaps even demanded a portion of my money returned.

16 Blocks stars Bruce Willis as an aging, creaky-kneed, alcoholic city cop who’s given the routine assignment of taking a criminal witness (Mos Def) from his prison cell to the city courthouse 16 blocks away to testify in a murder case. What neither Willis not Mos Def knows is that hit men have been hired to wax Mos Def in route and prevent him from ever reaching the witness stand. And that’s only beginning. Turns out there are dirty cops involved (naturally), and before we know it, Willis and Mos Def are runninng from the very people who should be protecting them.

With the exception of Mos Def’s nasaly voice, the first hour of this film is excellent. The scene in which the hit men strike while Willis is buying a bottle of booze is classic cop suspense. I loved it. And Lauren did as well.

But then, three quarters into the film, the situation becomes so implausibly stupid, that the entire movie pops like an over-inflated balloon. And what was so annoying about this gaping whole in the plot is that it could have easily been resolved. I mean, the answer was right there in front of us. Why the director and writer insisted on “the bus scene” (and you’ll know what I mean when you see it) still mystifies me. It was so utterly stupid and out of character that I actually laughed. Well, first I got angry; then I laughed.

After that, I couldn’t get back into the film. And the alternate ending, which thankfully wasn’t included in the film, was so headache-inducing stupid that I couldn’t understand why’d they’d even include it as an option on the DVD. It was like saying, Here, look how stupid we almost were.

Maybe they included it so we’d say, “Well at least they didn’t put THAT in the film.”

Which is too bad, really. Bruce Willis was great. This could have been a great movie throughout, but it wasn’t. It was a bummer.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

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I became a fan of Neil Gaiman after reading American Gods, which may be the best contemporary fantasy novel of the past several years. It won the Hugo Award when it came out and became a bestseller, launching Gaiman into the mainstream. I’ve since read a few of his other novels and enjoyed them immensely, though I don’t care much for his ghost stories, not because he doesn’t tell some goods; I just don’t like ghost stories, written by anyone.

And there are quite a few ghost stories in this, Gaiman’s most recent story collection. There are also some mind-blowingly cool stories, as well, not to mention an American God novella, which is worth the price of the book alone.

The only story in the collection that I had read previously was A Study in Emerald, which is a freaky twist on traditional Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It also won a Hugo Award winner, if I’m not mistaken. And it’s also quite possibly the best story in the bunch. I also enjoyed:

How to Talk to Girls at Parties
The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
Bitter Grounds

You can skip How Do You Think it Feels? since it contains a briefly pronographic sex scene, which will only btoher you afterwards.

There’s also a story set in the universe of The Matrix entitled Goliath. Gaiman was commisioned to write it before the movie was released in an effort to promote the film. Good stuff, whether you’re a fan of the Matrix (like me) or not.

And I got a kick out of the poetry, particularly The Day the Saucers Came. Funny and fun.

All in all, Fragile Things shows how vivid and broad an imagination Gaiman has. His writing is brilliantly simplistic. If you enjoy short stories, this is a must read.

Leave Your Cheerios at the Door

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At some point in time — I’m not sure when — the makers of Cheerios got together and met in their big conference room down at Cheerios headquarters for an emergency Cheerios meeting.

“We’re not selling enough Cheerios,” said the boss man at the head of the table.

“Yeah,” said his kiss-up underling. “He’s right. We’re not selling enough Cheerios.”

“All these sugar cereals are chipping away at our market share,” said the boss man. “They’re eating us alive.”

“No pun intended,” said the kiss-up, chuckling.

No one else laughed. Cheerios is serious business after all, and no one really liked the kiss-up anyway.

The boss man continued. “We’ve got to be inventive, people. We’ve got think outside the cereal box. Cheerios with milk isn’t enough anymore. We need to increqase demand by giving consumers new uses for Cheerios.”

“What about Cheerios as a party mix?” said one man.

“No no,” said the boss. “Chex owns the party mix angle.”

“What about putting Cheerios in recipes?” said a woman. “You know, like Corn Flakes does.”

The boss man grimaced. “Cheerios Chicken Suprise? Please you’re making me nauseated. Think different, people. Think uncharted territory.”

“What if we encourage little kids to glue their Cheerios to the pictures they draw in pre-school?” said a woman.

“Now that’s an idea!” said the boss man, beaming. “Somebody write that down.”

And somebody did.

“What about dry Cheerios?” said a shy little man in the back.

“Dry Cheerios?” asked the boss man.

“Yeah. Like in a little baggie or something. Parents could give it to their kids in places where they can’t take normal food. Like at church.”

The boss man rubbed his chin thoughtfully, a glimmer of hope twinkling in his eyes. “Cheerios at church. Yes, you may be on to something there. Parents are always trying to shut their kids up at church. What better way to do that than to stuff their little mouths full of Cheerios?”

He snapped his fingers and pointed to a sharp nosed man by the door. “Wilson! I want a press release written to every parenting magazine in America. Tell ’em Cheerios is now the official children’s food of every religion in the world.”

“But can we say that, chief?” asked Wilson. “Don’t we need the religions of the world to agree to–”

“Do it!” said the boss man, and Wilson scampered from the room.

“Kowolski,” continued the boss man, snapping to a tubby man in a bowtie. “Call every mother’s organization this side of the moon. Tell them how Cheerios can turn their irreverent little rascals into perfect little angels.”

Kowolski was no idiot. He hopped to it without so much as a word.

And soon everyone in the room had an assignment, rushing here and there like a cluster of bees, writing to the press, calling the Today show, testing the Cheerios capacity of a Ziploc bag — all while the boss man sat smiling in his tall leather chair, confident that he had once again pulled the flailing Cheerios box from the brink of extinction.

Since that fateful day, children everywhere have been dipping their sticky little fingers into sandwich bags the world over to grab a handful of dry Cheerios. And while they may not be perfect little angels while they’re doing it, they are at least quiet for a few moments, much to the delight of their exhausted parents.

So you can imagine my shock when the bishop of our ward recently asked parents not to bring food for their children into sacrament meeting.

Surely he doesn’t mean Cheerios, I thought to myself.

“And that includes Cheerios,” said the bishop.

I couldn’t believe it. I was dumbstruck. Could the Church still be true? Can we go on without Cheerios during sacrament meeting?

But no, I told myself. I wouldn’t allow my faith to be shaken — although I did for a moment wonder if this was one of the signs of the times, like the moon turning to blood.

The bishop smiled pleasantly. “Some of you may be wondering why the bishopric is making this request.”

Darn tootin’, I thought.

“Well, since the chapel is a special place where the Spirit of the Lord can dwell,” the bishop said, “we’d like to keep it as clean as possible. We know this may be a change of habit for many of you, but our hope is that by removing food from Sacrament meeting children will be more focused on the speakers and the Spirit present.”

I couldn’t argue with that. That man was talking sense. I heard what he was saying.

I also heard what he wasn’t saying, which was: (1) food is a distraction that inhibits children from participating fully in sacrament meeting worship. And (2) food is messy.

Personally, I think he’s right on both counts.

Let’s face it. Kids aren’t the most delicate of eaters. Only about 70% of the food they attempt to put in their mouth actually gets there. The rest ends up on their clothes, the pews or the floor.

And we’ve all seen what happens to Cheerios that fall on the floor. Try as you might to pick them all up, some are going to escape your notice. And those, inevitably, are going to be stepped on and ground into the carpet. Thousands of tiny Cheerios particles squashed into the floor of our meeting house. At that point, you’re only hope is a powerful vacuum cleaner. And that’s not going to come around for five days or so, at the earliest.

And the same can be said for saltine crackers and Pepperidge Farm fishy crackers and Ritz crackers and any other type of cracker you fancy. Or cookies. Or Fig Newtons (which aren’t cookies in my book, so don’t even go there). Or granola bars. Or candy bars. Or whatever.

I’m ashamed to admit that we have even given apple slices to our children during sacrament meeting. Yes, noisy, crunchy apple slices. In retrospect I don’t know what we were thinking. Apple slices, like carrot sticks, are obnoxiously loud foods that could disrupt the people immediately around you, not to mention a beast to clean out of the carpet should somebody step on one.

Some dear friends of ours have always followed this rule. They never gave food to their children during sacrament meeting. It just wasn’t done.

“Sacrament meeting is barely over an hour,” my friend said. “Children can go without food for an hour. They do so all day. Why do we feel the need to feed them during sacrament meeting?”

I was nodding along as he told me this. It made perfect sense, after all. But then my family and I went to sacrament meeting the following Sunday, and our kids started asking for a snack. Giving them one, I realized, was much easier than trying to explain to their hungry little eyes that the rule we had been living by was, in fact, wrong and that we would not, in fact, be eating during sacrament meeting anymore. Such news would not go over well. So I stuffed an apple slice in their yappers and went back to listening to the speaker.

But all of us eat and drink during sacrament meeting, you say. We all partake of the sacrament.

And I’m glad you brought that up, because the sacrament ordinance may be the best reason for not having food for our children during sacrament meeting.

Consider the child who eats snacks during sacrament meeting. When the bread comes around, he’s going to consider it a piece of bread, a bite of food no different from anything else he chomps on during the meeting.

Now consider the child who doesn’t eat during sacrament meeting. When the bread comes around, there’s a better chance of him identifying it as special. He’s going to think, “Wow. we’re not supposed to eat during sacrament meeting, and yet everyone eats this bread and drinks this water. Perhaps I should pay more attention to this.”

And even if he doesn’t think that exactly, he’s at least going to be curious and perhaps ask questions. And what parents wouldn’t want their children showing an interest in the sacrament ordinance?

As you can see, I’ve come around to the bishop’s way of thinking. Children who aren’t crunching on carrot sticks are more likely to realize that sacrament meeting is a special time. They’re more likely to feel the Spirit and, as a result, develop a hunger for spiritual things instead of physical, lightly sugared ones.

How far should this rule go, you ask? Does it include sippy cups as well? And what if the sippy cup has a spill-proof top and is filled only with water?

And what about babies who need bottles? Are we going to keep babies from their bottles?

When we start asking these questions, I think we miss the point.

The spirit of the law is clear. Children can worship on Sundays just as much as adults do. Sacrament meeting can and should be just as special a time to them as it is to you and me — so special that even snacks would be considered an interruption.

Now, am I so naive to think that kids without snacks will suddenly lose their wiggles and sit arms crossed, reverently listening to the speaker. Of course not. But it can’t hurt to try.

At the very least, our abandoning Cheerios will send the head honchos down at Cheerios headquarters into another Cheerios emergency meeting. And I don’t know about you, but I’d be interested to see what those geniuses think up next.