I've Got 95 Theses and the Pope Ain't One

Just check out that architecture in the background!

www.95thesesrap.com


Also, I saw a play called The Living the other day. I reviewed it on an official blog I write for for Carleton, and since the review's in keeping with the book review theme of this blog, I thought I'd post a link to it here: The Living

It Takes a Village...

Don’t get me wrong; the Princeton Review is a delightful website. I’m not exactly shopping around for colleges anymore, but it’s fun to look up Carleton every once in a while and feel smug about our rankings. “Happiest Students,” “School Runs like Butter,” “Best College Radio Station?” We’re doing well. But Princeton has gotten one thing wrong. The last time I looked Carleton up, what to my wondering eyes should appear? “Campus environment” is listed as “village.”

Sorry, Princeton, but Northfield is no village. I’m not sure how you’re calculating this, perhaps with numerical population cutoffs or something. But the term “village” brings to mind something from 16th century England, which Northfield most definitely is not. Here are some other reasons Northfield is not a village:

• We don’t have a well.
• We do have electricity.
• Last I checked, the area is 100% vampire and mad-scientist free.
• On a related note, Northfield residents to date have never destroyed anything with torches and pitchforks, dangerous or otherwise.
• We have street intersections with stoplights. Really, we do! They’re out by the highway.
• No witch trials.
• If Northfield were to be cut off from the rest of the world, our population is high enough that we run no risk of inbreeding problems.
• Main Street isn’t Main Street, it has a name. It’s called Division.
• I can walk down Division Street and run into people I don’t know.
• If Northfield is a village, where, pray tell, is the village idiot?
• Never witnessed a tractor going down the center of town.
• Economy does not revolve around the growing of corn and soybeans. Wait…

The things you find on Wikipedia...

Dinococcus radiodurans is a kind of bacterium whose name means "terrible berry that withstands radiation." How cool is that?

I wish my name meant "terrible berry that withstands radiation."

Tigana

"This is one of those stories in which the very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart."

Said the review on Amazon.com. My own impression was something more along the lines of meh. I'd give this book maybe a 3 or a 4 on the Richter scale, you know, the sort of earthquake that rattles the windows a bit, and people who felt it can talk about it for the next day or two (I'm from California originally.)

The premise for the book is really a pretty cool curse. While King Brandin is conquering the western half of the Peninsula of the Palm, his son dies in battle in Tigana, one of the Palm's greatest provinces. Brandin extracts revenge from the Tiganans by obliterating the province's name. Nobody from outside of the province will be able to hear it when the word "Tigana" is spoken. Pretty sweet, huh?

Unfortunately, the book is marred. I can see where the Amazon reviewer got the "very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart." Every two or three pages, it seems, some character or another is falling passionately in love, railing at the injustice of the Tigana curse, getting his or her heart broken, having a life-altering revelation, or getting brutally murdered. It all adds up to I can't believe any of these characters, and believe me, there are dozens of them. And Guy Gavriel Kay finds it necessary to tell us the life story of all of them, in lengthy backstory.

Here's an example of the histrionics these characters get into:

"Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. In the wizard's eyes hatred and terror vied for domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointed it at Alessan in a gesture of violent negation."

Alessan had just bound the wizard to his will using some very old magic. How about shock? Disbelief? No, Erlein pitches a hissy fit before he even learns the stipulations of his binding.

I quit about halfway through, after the third or fourth unnecessary sex scene. I did, however, skim through the ending out of curiosity. There is an impressive casualty rate on a par with Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which probably would tear me apart had I actually cared about any of these people. Okay, I cared about Tomasso. But he doesn't play an active role after about the first fifth of the book.

I'm sad to say that this book is better than most of its brethren. Kay is original in that his story is set in an upside-down wannabe medieval Italy instead of wannabe medieval England, some of the characters are (gasp!) gay, and there is no clearly definable Dark Lord. But how can I trust an author who uses the phrase "river of tears" in a non-facetious manner?

St. Olaf College – Fact or Fiction?

Most of us accept The Legend of St. Olaf College without too much undue reflection. It is Carleton’s shadowy sister college, located in a remote corner of Northfield that can only be accessed by car or Love Bus. But how many of us have ever actually been to St. Olaf? Is it possible we are being hoodwinked by the Northfield Chamber of Commerce? What sort of a small town has two colleges in it? Skeptics suspect some conspiracy, while believers protest St. Olaf’s existence. My aim in this essay is to bring a critical voice to this debate, pointing out some major landmarks of the issue without leaning too much to either side.

The reputed location of St. Olaf College is conveniently difficult to access. It is said to be found on the top of a hill in the furthest recesses of Northfield. One cannot walk there. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried, one afternoon when I didn’t have too much work to do. I got about halfway up the hill before it started getting dark and I had to turn back or risk getting eaten by werewolves.

Many people have reported glimpsing … something … out the windows of the Love Bus on its circumnavigation of the town. Just for an instant. A place, with strangely attractive stone buildings that all match. It is evocative as well as college-like in appearance. These visions are probably the original source of the St. Olaf legend. Nobody I’ve spoken to has actually gotten off the bus at this location, however. They were all on their way to the Target.

I have one final point to make about the location of St. Olaf. How is this region of Northfield supposed to be humanly habitable if it is so far from the Econofoods? It must be a difficult existence for the people who live there, or else they all have cars.

The tradition of St. Olaf college goes deep into Northfield’s history. It is almost as cherished a tradition as the Jesse James day festival, though the latter has a great deal more founding in historical fact. To this day, local shopkeepers put signs in their windows inviting St. Olaf students to come in and buy the merchandise! It seems to be roughly analogous to putting a bowl of milk out for the fairies so they won’t go on the attack. The definitive website dedicated to the legend of St. Olaf can be found at www.stolaf.edu. The site is exhaustive, covering everything from a speculative class schedule to school history and even maps of the grounds. There is no way of knowing how much of it is made up, of course.

The most compelling piece of evidence, and what has gotten most of us convinced at one point or another, is the Ole sightings. Of course, the sightings always happen in circumstances that are hardly conducive to making the people involved good eyewitnesses. They generally happen in the dead of night and involving the heavy use of alcohol. It’s been said that it’s the alcohol itself that attracts them, as it doesn’t exist in their home dimension. They are strange, strangely beautiful beings. Inevitably the police get involved when such a sighting occurs, but by the time cameras have arrived, the Oles have vanished.

St. Olaf College: cold, hard fact? Or just a fancy of the townies that deserves to join the ranks of the Fountain of Youth and the Loch Ness Monster? I’ll leave you with the testimony of an anonymous freshman who claims to have been abducted by Oles:

“I mean, I don’t even remember what I was doing that night, so it could have all been a hallucination, you know? But it felt so real. I was just coming out of a Sayles dance with some of my buddies. It was one in the morning.

“And they were there. They were… they were… they’re not like us, all right? Hypnotic. They took me into their vehicle. I – I remember flashing lights, white in the front and red in the back. They took me to this place where there were more of them. I wasn’t scared. That was the weirdest part. They kept talking to me in this language I didn’t understand.

“And then … I don’t really want to talk about the part with the probes.”

[Here the freshman is silent for a while to compose himself.]

“When I woke up I was in the Arb. I have no idea if any of it really happened or not.”

Damn it, Frodo!

This guy lives right behind the door in the Benton House library:

He's a cardboard cutout, but from the corner of one's eye, it looks suspiciously like a four-foot-tall person with a sword is lurking in the corner. Every time I go in there I think I'm going to get knifed. What is he doing in our library, anyway? Isn't he supposed to be out saving the world from a particular ring?

Grizelda is on iTunes!

I didn't even know you could do that, but the Podiobooks website said that anybody could upload a podcast to the iTunes directory. That's pretty cool.

Grizelda's still as free of charge as ever, though.

CAPTCHA is a Voight-Kampff test

I can’t pass the little squiggly-letter test on the Internet. You know how these work: when you’re trying to log into a high-security page on the Internet or post a comment on a blog, the computer will give you a series of messed-up letters in a box and you have to type in what the letters say. It’s supposed to prove you’re a human being and not a computer program trying to spam the site. Humans are smart enough to figure out what the letters are, but computer programs aren’t, right?

Yeah, right.

I tend to get bogged down in minutiae when faced with one of these. Take a look at the following example:



Is it not debatable that that word could spell either “pctding” or “potding?” The p and the t have holes in them; maybe the second letter is actually an o with a hole in it, cleverly disguised as a c. The word might even be “pording,” you never know. And so I guess wrong and the computer gives me back a snippy little message that I have to try again, with a new set of letters that are no better.

There is clearly only one reasonable explanation for this. I must be a replicant and don’t know it.

(Image courtesy of alatissian.com, who apparently makes these sort of things.)