A geological team looking for oil in the western desert of Egypt may have discovered the remains of some 50,000 Persian soldiers swallowed up by a sandstorm in the sixth century BCE. The “lost army,” mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, has long been considered a myth, though that hasn’t prevented generations of adventurers from looking for evidence of the soldiers, sent by King Cambyses and (according to Herodotus) last seen at the oasis of Siwa. Maybe George Lucas should take note of this: Indiana Jones and the Lost Army could be a dynamite title for a movie. And, if memory serves, didn’t Robert E. Howard write a poem about Cambyses?
Continuing in this mythological vein, Owen Sheers talks about White Ravens, his retelling of a story from the Welsh myth cycle The Mabinogion. The book sounds pretty good, but I still swear by Evangeline Walton’s retelling of the same story in The Children of Llyr.
Get out your best gray flannel suit and work your way through “Books to Read Mad Men By,” listed by The Neglected Books Page in two installments here and here.
Bruce Lee or Jet Li? All I can tell you is that when I was a kid and The Green Hornet was on the tube, nobody ever pretended to be Britt Reid. Everybody wanted to be Kato. Pretending to use the Hornet’s Sting was a distant second.
“This video is fantastic and highly educational. It teaches you how to whittle your own 19th Century dictionary, using only string, a turnip, and a clamp. But first you have to make your own Linotype machine.”
All you need to celebrate Halloween the H.G. Wells way. (And the George Pal way, and the Oson Welles way, and the Hugo Gernsback way. . .) The image above, incidentally, shows Michael Condron’s sculpture of a Martian tripod in Woking, Surrey, where all hell breaks loose in the original novel. Check here for the New Jersey location used in the radio broadcast.
Interspecies affirmative action, or: A link for those readers who think I run too many dog pictures.
“At times in this movie, I felt like it was making me regress to being a little kid, remembering the simple joy of throwing things, breaking things, building things, making up stories, and also the feeling of being hurt by small things like mom or big sister won’t pay attention to you exactly when you want, so you go hide in your room and feel sorry for yourself. Max has those feelings and then Carol, a wild thing portrayed brilliantly by the voice of James Gandolfini, amplifies them to giant size. He represents the needy side of a kid, the one that feels sorry for himself and gets angry too easily . . . a monster who’s only scary because he’s so emotionally fragile you gotta walk on egg shells around him. They should try that in a Godzilla movie sometime.”
In search of the origins of Bob Dylan’s accent. That clip above, by the way, is “Sugar Baby” as done by His Bobness earlier this month in Portland. Normally, Dylan in concert lifts his harmonica for the same reason a stripper lifts her skirt — it always gets a cheer from the audience. In this version, the harmonica gets some real quality time. And this post celebrates the top ten wonderfully weird Dylan performances, including a duet with Jack White. I particularly like the rendition of “Dancing in the Dark” from the legendary Toad’s Place show.
“I tried writing novels as a young man and I didn’t like my novels very much. And by the way, neither did anyone else. So I went to California eventually to seek my fortune and try and get into the movie business. And I was lucky. I started to make some progress. And then just as I was starting to have stuff produced, the Writers Guild did go on strike. This was back in 1972 or ‘73, I think. And I was sharing digs with a young woman who said, “Well now, since you’re not allowed to write screenplays, you can write that book you are always talking about.” And that book was my fanciful notion of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, in which Holmes met and joined forces intellectually as well as narratively with Sigmund Freud. And there really wasn’t any good reason at that point not to try doing it.”
“Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students’ bedrooms?”
Classic rock album covers reimagined by Eric White. In addition to Rumours, pictured above, White’s show (on view at Sloane Fine Art in New York) includes new takes on Houses of the Holy, Wish You Were Here, Who’s Next, Songs in the Key of Life and Hot Rats.
“My eyesight, as eyesight, is perfectly good. But how the brain deals with what my eyes can see can be pretty ropy. For instance, I might glance down and not see that cup on the floor. If you told me the cup was there, I would see it. However, the brain is filling up the space with something else. But because I come out with words properly used, like apprehension, you think there can’t be anything wrong with this guy.”
Why can’t American conservatives be as smart (or as relatively sane) as their European brethren?
“The big blowhard Michael Moore is a hugely successful left-wing carnival barker in a culture of right-wing carnival barkers, and for that he deserves our admiration. He has, it is true, been caught playing fast and loose with timelines — not a negligible crime. But he rarely stoops to the level on which his rivals permanently reside: He’s obnoxious but not corrupt. He doesn’t spew talking points. He’s out there, on the streets, corralling evidence to support his theses (or thesis — there’s really only one). And he is, point for point, difficult to refute. His new cinematic circus, Capitalism: A Love Story, is the film to which he has been building for the last two decades. It’s sprawling, scattershot, sniggery, and, in one instance, exploitative. It’s brazenly one-sided. But Moore calls questions that no one else in the mainstream corporate media goes near. His other films focused on symptoms. This one tackles what he sees as the disease.”
Here’s your shot at winning a coffee date with a real live Pulitzer-winning novelist. Having spoken with him myself, I can confirm he’ll be worth the bid.
Am I the only one who finds the slang use of “cougar” really unattractive and more than a little insulting to the women it purports to describe? Do we really want to compare Courteney Cox, Demi Moore, and Pamela Anderson to a predatory beast known to leap on people’s backs, crush their spinal cords with a bite to the neck, then eat their faces and internal organs? Last time I saw a photo of Ashton Kutcher, he was looking pretty happy, so what gives with “cougar”? Not that “Milf” is much better. Whatever happened to “Yummy Mummy”? Or “Mrs. Robinson”? They’re dated, obviously, but either is preferable to “cougar.”
“In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson does not yet recognize the power of ‘nice’ as the catch-all term for British near-approval, but he produces one of his little gems in defining the word: ‘It is often used to express a culpable delicacy.’ It may be time to observe that Dr. Johnson, neither by his own definition nor by ours, could ever properly have been described as nice. He lacked culpable delicacy to the exact same degree that he lacked good manners, an easy disposition, a sunny outlook, a helpful quality, an open spirit, a selfless gene, a handsome gait, or a general willingness to put his best foot forward in greeting others. If niceness was the only category known to posterity, we would long since have lost Johnson to the scrofulous regions of inky squalor, for he could be alarmingly rude.”
Is it “goo goo goo joob,” or “goo goo ga joob,” or “goo goo g’joob”? More to the point, where did it come from?
Alexander Portnoy — still sexed up after all these years.
So the Iron Lady wanted to preserve the Iron Curtain. Why am I less than surprised, though considerably disturbed, by this news? What a relief this creep’s viewpoint did not prevail.
If memory serves, I’ve already bought the white album six times: twice on vinyl, twice on cassette tape, twice on CD. So thanks but no thanks. On the other hand, if I watch every installment of this broadcast, I might end up changing my mind.
50,000 Persian soldiers swallowed up by a sandstorm in the sixth century BCE. The “lost army,” mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, has long been considered a myth, though that hasn’t prevented generations of adventurers from looking for evidence of the soldiers, sent by King Cambyses and (according to Herodotus) last seen at the oasis of Siwa. Maybe George Lucas should take note of this: Indiana Jones and the Lost Army could be a dynamite title for a movie. And, if memory serves, didn’t Robert E. Howard write a poem about Cambyses? 
