Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed that Kyle cycles through the shows he likes. His enjoyment of Blue’s Clues remains fairly constant, but whether he likes The Backyardigans one month and Wonder Pets another is entirely a matter of whim.

About a year ago, Kyle was on a Wonder Pets kick, and I was being exposed to a high level of guinea pig, duckling and turtle antics. Something inside me snapped; I began to consider an alternative explanation for the trio of helpful animals living in their little schoolhouse. What if, I thought, the whole thing is just the fever-dream of a guinea pig who is the test subject of a laboratory experiment?

The notion percolated in the back of my mind for a while and at some point I realized that, one way or another, I needed to get it out. So I sat down and wrote the beginning of a Linny (or Lynny, as it turns out) the guinea pig tale. Not long after I began, the winds of change blew through the International House of Johnson and Wonder Pets gave way to something else and without the regular exposure to Linny, Tuck and Ming-Ming, too, my mind wandered elsewhere and the story was abandoned.

I have no plans to return to the beleaguered guinea pig, but I present the incomplete tale here as a cautionary tale: this is what can happen when the adult mind comes under the assault of children’s television.

“The phone—”

“The phone is ringing,” Dr. Selig murmured. “I know, Walter; I can hear it. Unfortunately I’m a little occupied at the moment. As are you.” He tapped the side of the syringe a few times, then slowly depressed the plunger until a thin stream of clear liquid geysered from the tip of the hypodermic needle. “Besides, that’ll just be Nick calling to tell us they’ve decided to turn down our grant application. Again. Now, if you’ll move your finger just a little…yes, that’s excellent.”

The needle pierced the shaved skin at the base of the guinea pig’s skull and Dr. Selig injected what he suspected would be the final dose of the serum into the little mammal’s brain stem. A moment later, Walter returned the fidgeting rodent to its cage. Returned to the familiar bed of wood shavings, the guinea pig seemed content to sit motionless, peering out at the lab. It would have looked like any of a million other such animals living in similar cages in the bedrooms and living rooms of houses all across the country, were it not for the color-coded nodes that marked the location of nearly three dozen subdermal implants in the rodent’s head, spinal column and appendages.

Dr. Selig stripped off his latex gloves and dropped them into a nearby trash can. “Go ahead and run the connectivity check,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour. I trust you want your usual?”

Walter nodded. “No celery this time,” he said.

Dr. Selig sighed. This conversation was becoming a tiresome ritual. “I’ll tell them,” he said, as he always did, “just like I’ve told them a hundred times before.”

“How hard is it for them to understand that some people like Buffalo wings without celery?” Walter asked, just as indignant today as he was last Friday when it was Dr. Selig’s turn to pick up lunch.

“I’ll tell them,” Dr. Selig said again. “You run the connectivity check.”

The lab ran a predictable lunch schedule, and there was no one more predictable about lunch than Walter. On Monday, everyone brought lunch from home and Walter ate his leftover lasagna cold. On Tuesday, Josh—the lab’s other intern—would run to Happy Burger and Walter would invariably order a bacon cheeseburger with no pickles. Wednesdays meant Dr. Oxley taking orders for Mexarito’s, Walter mangling the pronunciation of “quesadilla” when he ordered. Thursdays were the only days when Walter wasn’t likely to complain about a botched order, as it was his day to venture out to the House of Ming for Chinese food, and he always made sure there was plenty of duck sauce for his eggroll and that his General Tso’s chicken contained no vegetables. Vegetables as a rule were shunned by Walter, but green peppers especially he held in high contempt.

Later in the afternoon, when they sent someone to Dairy Queen for their weekly ice cream treats, Walter would order a turtle sundae with no pecans. Anyone daring to argue that a turtle sundae prepared without pecans was simply a caramel-and-chocolate sundae would be loudly rebuked by Walter, and everyone in the lab had long since learned that it was folly to argue with Walter where food was concerned.

Dr. Selig shrugged off his lab coat, then turned around to survey the lab. Dr. Oxley was out for the day, trying to drum up some more funding in the vain hope of keeping the lab running for another three months. Josh was multi-tasking, as usual, his phone cradled on his left shoulder while he wrote something on a yellow legal pad, pausing occasionally to run a finger over the touchpad on his laptop.

Walter was crouched in his chair, elbows on knees, peering into the guinea pig’s enclosure. Dr. Selig wondered briefly which of the two mammals—the placid guinea pig or the wide-eyed, neurotic intern—was more intelligent, then cleared his throat. “Walter,” he said, pointing to the computer terminal that processed the data feeds from the wireless sensors implanted beneath the guinea pig’s dermis. “Run the connectivity check.”

Walter swung the chair around and began tapping at the keyboard. Satisfied that the intern was following his directive, Dr. Selig left the laboratory, bound for Little Airplane Wings, an establishment that claimed to have “better Buffalo sauce than Buffalo!”

***

An hour later, the guinea pig was munching away at one of the unwanted celery sticks from Walter’s lunch. Though there was no outward indication, the chemical cocktail Dr. Selig had injected was working its magic: simultaneously inhibiting the rodent’s ErbB4 receptors and GABAergic interneurons. The former affected her cells’ ability to process Neuregulin-1, while the latter inhibited expression of parvalbumin, the combined upshot of which was severe, chemically-induced schizophrenia.

Her left eye twitched. An electric impulse was picked up by the sensor implanted near her left eye and a small packet of data was transmitted wirelessly to a nearby computer, where the strength and duration of the impulse were committed digitally to disc, along with thirty-three other data points that indicated other electrical impulses or lack thereof. Her left eye twitched again.

***

“She’s falling asleep,” Walter said, his face so close to the enclosure that his breath fogged up the glass. “Do you think she dreams, Dr. Selig?”

Dr. Selig wiped a dollop of barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth with a napkin and considered the question for a moment before answering.

“There’s sufficient evidence to suggest that she does, Walter,” he said, reaching forward to tap one of the jagged lines marching across the LCD screen. “She’ll be entering her REM cycle shortly, just as you and I do every night. Her sleep patterns are similar enough to ours—including observable alterations in brain activity—that it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that she does, indeed, dream. But you can rest assured that her dreaming, or the fact that she does dream, has nothing to do with what we’re doing here.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Walter, who continued to stare at the guinea pig as he would do for what seemed like hours at a time if Dr. Selig didn’t find something else for him to do. This is what happens when you agree to hire your husband’s empty-headed younger brother, Dr. Selig thought, glancing ruefully over at Dr. Oxley’s empty chair and vowing for what must have been the ten-thousandth time to never again allow a colleague’s nepotism to supersede little things like talent and qualifications. Still, it was Friday, and in all likelihood they’d have to pack up the lab on Monday when Nick managed to deliver the bad news about the grant application and Dr. Oxley similarly reported her failure to find another backer, so where was the harm in letting Walter stare at a sleeping guinea pig all afternoon? It would certainly keep him out of Dr. Selig’s hair.

***

The guinea pig slept, unmindful of the voyeur looming beyond the glass, and she dreamed. On the nearby screen, unwatched by anyone in the lab, the lines that provided a visual indicator of the various electrical impulses in her brain grew more jagged as new neural pathways opened to compensate for those the chemicals had closed. The rodent’s brain behaved in ways no one in the laboratory had predicted. Neurotransmitters that had been disabled by previous variants of the experimental serum were activated again, while those that had been functioning normally only an hour before suddenly went quiet.

***

The alarm went off while Dr. Selig was in the restroom. Walter had no idea what it meant, nor what he should do. He looked to Josh, who was still on the phone. “I have to go,” Josh said quickly. “There’s an animal in trouble.” He fumbled the receiver onto its cradle and crossed to Walter’s workstation. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s the problem?”

Josh, unlike Walter, had been hired based on those two little things Dr. Selig felt were more important than nepotism: talent and qualifications. It took him only a quick glance at the EEG readouts on the monitor to realize that something was going horribly wrong in the guinea pig’s brain. He looked over at the animal’s enclosure; she was sleeping peacefully, the rapid in-out motion of her breathing the only indication that she was alive at all.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Josh said, frowning at the readout. “She should be wide awake and thrashing like an angry badger. When was the last time you calibrated these sensors?”

“Yesterday,” Dr. Selig said from the doorway. He crossed the lab quickly; if either intern noticed that the fly on his trousers was open they didn’t bother to point it out to him. “I heard the alarm. What’s going on?”

Walter stood mute while Josh explained that the guinea pig appeared to be having some sort of neuropathic seizure. “Except she’s not,” he said, confusion clear in the tone of his voice. “She’s just…sleeping.”

“Comatose seems more likely,” Dr. Selig replied, “though these readings certainly don’t suggest it.”

Walter stared at the guinea pig, as concerned about her welfare as anyone in the lab but utterly incapable of doing anything to affect it. He looked at the half-eaten piece of celery, then over to the discarded remains of his lunch, the corner of the styrofoam takeout box poking out of the trash can, more convinced then ever that the vile stalk was not to be trusted. He leaned in close to the enclosure again, oblivious to the conversation going on just a few feet away. He saw the guinea pig’s left eye twitch. Rapid eye movement, he thought, recalling his earlier conversation with Dr. Selig, and again wondered if she was dreaming.

Queen is one of those guilty pleasures: a band whose music is great, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I like.

— Anonymous, during a recent conversation we had about music.

I don’t have any trouble admitting that I like Queen, personally, but I do hesitate sometimes before revealing that enjoy some other musicians and musical groups, like Ace of Base and (gasp!) Yanni. I also like enough of the music from The Backyardigans, a Nick Jr. show that my young apprentice occasionally watches, that I’ve purchased several songs from their repertoire (ostensibly for my son’s enjoyment, though I listen to them when he’s not around).

Some people consider ABBA a guilty pleasure, but so much of my childhood occurred while “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo” were spinning on my dad’s record player that I can’t feel even the slightest bit of embarrassment about enjoying them.1

What makes a guilty pleasure? Why should I (or anyone else, for that matter) feel guilty for enjoying the music of a 70s Scandinavian pop group (or a 90s copycat of a 70s Scandinavian pop group) or a smug, over-coiffed, Greek synthesizer slinger?2

Context plays a big part; the music I’ll readily cop to enjoying depends a lot on who I’m talking to and what sort of music we’re discussing.3 Am I likely to mention that I own half a dozen Enya albums when the musical topic is metal groups? Not terribly.4 That’s not to say I’ll deny owning those Enya albums, mind you—there’s just less of a likelihood they’ll be mentioned in that context than if the genre of the moment is overdubbed, ethereal Irish New Age.5

There’s also the context of the artist or group itself. ABBA is a product of the early 1970s, and everything about ABBA—from their glam-pop sound to their stage costumes and album covers—is a testament to the time period. There are aspects of every decade in the past half-century that are mocked, from the exaggerated Nuclear Family of the 1950s to Free Love in the 1960s and Big Hair in the 1980s,6 but I don’t think any decade is shunned with such socio-fashionistic fervor as the 1970s.7

Then there are individual songs from artists or groups who might not otherwise be considered guilty pleasures. Neil Diamond’s “America” with its bombastic, unabashed patriotism; the saccharine sweetness of “Lovely, Love My Family” by The Roots (produced for another Nick Jr. show, Yo Gabba Gabba!); the sappy sentimentality of Marc Cohn’s “Silver Thunderbird”—all songs that tug at my emotions to such a degree that I often struggle to keep the tears down when I listen to them.8

What else about a genre, group, artist or song might make it a guilty pleasure? What are your personal musical guilty pleasures and why are they guilty?

1. In my memory, my father owned exactly three distinct categories of LPs: ABBA, Bill Cosby and Country & Western.
2. I don’t know that Yanni is actually smug, but he certainly comes across that way. If you’ve ever seen his Live at the Acropolis performance, you may know what I mean.
3. Peer pressure: no expiration date.
4. I may not be likely to mention that I own three Metallica albums, either, as Metallica fans seem to be divided into pre-Load fans and…me.
5. Which, admittedly, is a fairly specific genre.
6. What are the 1990s mocked for, you ask? Mostly Ace of Base and Yanni, I think.
7. Is there any musical genre more scorned than disco? I think not. Nonetheless, I do enjoy a Bee Gees tune every now and then.
8. Yes, I’m destined to turn into the sort of father who is moved to tears by long-distance telephone service advertisements on television. I’m told it’s hereditary.

—Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and The Carpenter” (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There)

There may not be a whole lot of activity here in my little corner of this here series of tubes, but life does not stop when a person fails to update his blog regularly. To wit:

The Secret Lair

The podcast is still going strong, with a new episode appearing every few weeks or so, and a new installment of our webcomic appearing only slightly less frequently. In the most recent illustrated adventure, which I shall henceforth refer to as the Irradiated Arachnid Incident, the side effects of a spider-bite are not what you might expect. Meanwhile, Chris and I managed to convince our wives (yes, there was alcohol involved) to join us in a discussion of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, that book they made into that movie with that one guy. We also sat down with Mick Bradley, with whom we have had dealings in the past, to discuss that most mysterious and misunderstood style of roleplaying, the story game.

Recent episodes of the podcast have featured staff reports from some creative (and incredibly generous) folks we are fortunate to call friends, those being Dr. John Cmar, Jay “Kingfish” Lynn, Natalie Metzger and Ken Newquist. These reports speak of schemes of ever-escalating complexity and crackpottedness, with a smattering of bizarre truth thrown in to blur the line between the real and the surreal.

Game Night

Approximately every two weeks, the gamers descend upon the International House of Johnson for one form of interactive entertainment or another. We’re currently in the middle of a Savage Worlds campaign run by Chris Miller, but last night we took a break from polyhedral dice and roleplaying to rock.

Armed with fake guitars, fake drums and a very real microphone, we took to the virtual stage in Rock Band 2 on the Xbox 360. Four adults and the aforementioned fake instruments do not fit particularly will into the area around our “entertainment center”, but that didn’t dissuade us in the slightest. Some of the songs we rocked out to:

•  ”Re: Your Brains” and “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton
• “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
• “Here it Goes Again” by OK Go
• “Take it on the Run” by REO Speedwagon
• “The Best Day Ever” by Spongebob Squarepants (featuring guest vocalist Kyle Abraham Johnson)
• “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull (featuring Chris Miller on vocals and no one on the fake flute)

After the out-rocking concluded, we gathered at the dining room table for Monty Python Fluxx, followed by Fist of Dragonstones, the latter of which I thought was woefully underappreciated.

Olde Fartz

After a bit of a late-summer hiatus, the Olde Fartz Distance Learning Center is back in session. Our favorite game of late has been Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, though we did return to our roots for an evening of WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos a few weeks ago. There’s also talk of playing some Team Fortress 2 and Dungeon Siege, and P.G. Holyfiend keeps yammering about Sins of a Solar Empire, too. Yammering, I tell you. Enrollment in the Olde Fartz has increased to the point where we have abandoned Skype voice conferencing in favor of a TeamSpeak server. If you’re interested in joining the fun, drop me a line and I’ll take your application to the admissions committee.

Con on the Cob

Last year I managed to attend all four days of Con on the Cob, a local gaming, art and general geek convention. This year, Laura and I only attended on Saturday, but we still had a lot of fun. We both bought new dice (practically a con requirement) and I bought Dominion, an excellent card game from Rio Grande Games.1 We watched a bit of the Iron Artist competition, then briefly fled to a nearby restaurant with Chris Miller and Rachel Ross for dinner, then it was back to the con for a couple of games of Dominion. Next year, I think we’re going to shoot for attending on both Friday and Saturday so we can do a little more gaming and maybe record an episode of The Secret Lair on-site.

Alas, I have no convention photos to share this year, as the battery charger for our Fujifilm Finepix J10 went AWOL right before my sister’s wedding.2 A new charger has been purchased and will hopefully be delivered in time for Hallowe’en costume photos.

NaNoWriMo vs. NaBloPoMo vs. HoNoToGroABeMo

I have no intention of attempting to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days come November, nor will I make any real effort to post at least one blog entry a day in the same time period. On the other hand, I fully intend to shave off my beard on October 31st and then spend a month failing to grow anything resembling a manly face-mane. That’s right, for the third year running, How Not to Grow A Beard Month will return. Mega-kudos once again to The Cynical Optimist for creating and maintaining the website.

The Great Superhero Movie Project

Despite a general dearth of new reviews, I have been watching and rating various superhero movies over the past few months. There are currently 112 movies on the list (with more to be added soon); I’ve seen about 90 of them, rated about 60 and reviewed a paltry 11. Yeah, I have a bit of catching up to do in the review department.

1. Laura and I have played several times since the convention, but the four-player limit means it’s tough to include at Game Night (when we typically have six or seven people). There’s one expansion to the game (Intrigue) with a second (Seaside) on the way, both adding cards and allowing for additional players, so it might just grace the Game Night table someday soon.
2. Did I mention that my sister got married? And we drove to Chicago for the wedding? And that Kyle wore suspenders? And that the bride and groom were joined “by the power of the Internet”? No? I should have. Sorry.

Finished

1. Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow.

   Rating: ★★★½☆ 

2. The Touch by F. Paul Wilson.

   Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

3. Glasshouse by Charles Stross.

   Rating: ★★★★☆ 

4. His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire · Book 1) by Naomi Novik.

   Rating: ★★★★★ 

5. Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Audio; narrated by William Dufris).

   Rating: ★★★★☆ 

6. Lamb by Christopher Moore.

   Rating: ★★★★½ 

7. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Audio; narrated by Simon Prebble).

   Rating: ★★★★★ 

8. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

   Rating: ★★★★☆ 

9. The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (Audio; narrated by Ron Perlman).

   Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

10. WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer (Audio; various narrators).

    Rating: ★★★★☆ 

11. Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison (Audio; narrated by Marguerite Gavin).

    Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

12. The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines.

    Rating: ★★★★☆ 

13. Paranoia by Joseph Finder (Audio; narrated by Scott Brick).

    Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

14. Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout.

    Rating: ★★★½☆ 

15. The Destroyer #14: Judgment Day by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir.

    Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

16. The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks.

    Rating: ★★★★☆ 

In Progress

1. Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Audio; narrated by Bianca Amato).

Not Yet Started

1. Throne of Jade (Temeraire · Book 2) by Naomi Novik.
2. Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman.
3. Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi.

Not too shabby, overall. My peculiar flavor of attention deficit disorder came into play, as I expected it would, and I read or started to read several titles that weren’t on the original list. I also failed to even start a handful from the original list, but maybe I’ll get around to them this fall. Speaking of fall, here (in no particular order) is the 2009 Fall Reading List:

1. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Audio; narrated by Lyndam Gregory).
2. The Devil You Know by Mike Carey.
3. Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
4. Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant.
5. Black Powder War (Temeraire · Book 3) by Naomi Novik.
6. Broken Crescent by S. Andrew Swann.
7. Furies of Calderon (The Codex Alera · Book 1) by Jim Butcher.
8. Fool Moon (The Dresden Files · Book 2) by Jim Butcher.
9. Condemned to Repeat It: The Philospher Who Flunked Life and Other Great Lessons from History by Wick Allison, Jeremy Adams and Gavin Hambly.
10. Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason.
11. The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan.

Let’s review:

• Dora is a short person from a fantastical land who is called upon to deliver an item to a faraway place. On her journey (or quest), she must overcome a number of obstacles and often encounters strange creatures.
• Frodo Baggins is a short person from a fantastical land who is called upon to deliver an item (The One Ring) to a faraway place (The Cracks of Doom in Mordor). On his quest, he encounters strange creatures and must overcome a number of obstacles.
• Dora is accompanied by a loyal companion (also short) named Boots.
• Frodo Baggins is accompanied by a loyal companion (also short) named Samwise Gamgee.
• Dora is often joined by companions of different species: Isa the Iguana and Benny the Bull, to name two.
• Frodo Baggins is joined by companions of different races: Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the Elf, to name two.
• Dora is pursued by Swiper the Fox, a conniving-yet-cowardly thief who wants to steal something she is carrying.
• Frodo Baggins is pursued by Gollum, a conniving-yet-cowardly thief who wants to steal The One Ring.
• Dora is eventually joined by Diego, an animal rescuer who is skilled at tracking and outdoor survival.
• Frodo Baggins is eventually joined by Aragorn, a ranger who is skilled at tracking and outdoor survival.
• Dora must often solve puzzles using words and phrases in another language (Spanish).
• Frodo Baggins was unable to enter the Mines of Moria until the word “friend” was spoken in another language (Elvish).

Of course, there are a few elements of Dora the Explorer that aren’t ripped straight out of The Lord of the Rings…or are there? Let’s consider:

• Dora has a magical backpack that contains whatever object she might need to solve a puzzle or overcome an obstacle. There’s no magical backpack in The Lord of the Rings, but Dora’s backpack sounds an awful lot like a Bag of Holding from the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game (which was around decades before Dora the Explorer), and everyone knows that Dungeons & Dragons is the King of All Lord of the Rings Ripoffs.
• Frodo Baggins is led by Gandalf, a wise old wizard who tells him which way to go and, ultimately, leads him into dire peril. Dora is rarely seen in the company of old men, wise or otherwise. True enough, but she does consult with a magical, talking map that tells her how to get to her destination, typically through waypoints that are fraught with peril (windy bridges, treacherous mountains, and the like). The Map may not be carrying a staff or wearing a pointy hat, but he definitely fills the “magical guide” role. (“Tell Frodo he has to go through the Mines of Moria, over the Fields of Pellenor and up Aman Amarth!”)

I’m sure there will be naysayers; those who call this evidence “circumstantial” or “coincidental” and point out that “Nickelodeon” isn’t really an anagram of “J.R.R. Tolkien”. You know: nutjobs. But to the rest of you—those who can see Middle Earth in the unnamed South American country in which Dora resides—I extend an invitation to show me more. Peel the veil further back to expose more proof. What have I missed? What more is there?

Starring Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Sean Lawlor, Vic Chao, Dean Kreyling, Stephen Blackehart, Mark Hengst and Michael Teh

Written and directed by Jack Perez

Rating: ★½☆☆☆ 

CAUTION: This review spoils the tentacles off Mega-Shark Versus Giant Octopus, but hopefully saves you the trouble of watching it yourself.

Oceanographer Emma MacNeil (Deborah Gibson)1 “borrows” a research submarine to observe the behavior of humpback whales off the coast of Alaska. All is going well until a military helicopter drops an experimental sonar device into the middle of the whale pod. The sonar drives the humbacks crazy, causing them to swim at high speed into the submerged face of a nearby glacier. Entombed in the glacier are a megalodon (henceforth referred to as mega-shark) and a giant octopus (henceforth referred to as giant octopus), two ancient aquatic beasts that were apparently frozen in the midst of a tooth-on-tentacle2 fight several million years ago. As the suicidal whales collide with the glacier face, tons of ice shear off and fall into the ocean, releasing (and, for reasons unknown, simultaneously reviving) the antediluvian combatants.

Oops.

Mega-shark and giant octopus swim off in different directions, leaving MacNeil to wonder whether she actually saw the big beasties or they were a delusion brought about by the powerful sonar device. The oceanographer returns to California, where she’s called in to investigate the mutilated corpse of a whale that has washed up on the beach. Before she can complete a thorough investigation, MacNeil is fired for stealing (and damaging) the submarine.3

Something about the beached cetacean doesn’t sit well with MacNeil, so she sneaks onto the site after dark and manages to retrieve a fragment of tooth lodged in one of the wounds. The fragment is more than a foot long, and it’s not until she teams up with her former teacher, Lamar Sanders (Sean Lawlor), that she is able to identify it as coming from a tooth that is perhaps eleven or twelve feet in length—a tooth that could only have come from the massive mouth of Carcharodon Megalodon.4 Mega-shark.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to MacNeil, the mouth in which her tooth fragment once resided is busy chomping on, of all things, a big ol’ jet airliner. That’s right, mega-shark leaps out of the water (presumably thousands of feet out of the water) to take down a passenger jet that has descended below the cloud cover to avoid turbulence. Mega-shark officially dominates both sea and sky (at least sky that’s over sea), which means humanity is totally screwed.

What is giant octopus5 up to while mega-shark feasts upon fresh whale with a side of passenger jet? Why, attacking an oil rig off the coast of Japan of course! Indeed, the colossal cephalopod unleashes eight tentacles of doom upon the oil-drilling platform,6 leaving only one survivor (Michael Teh) to tell the horrific tale. Dr. Seiji Shimada (Vic Chao) contacts Sanders for assistance identifying the attacker based on a police sketch. Shimada flies to California, where he meets with Sanders and MacNeil, who have acquired videotape shot during MacNeil’s submarine joyride. Comparing the sketch made by the survivor of the oil rig attack with a grainy shot of something moving past the submarine’s external camera, the trio come to the only reasonable conclusion: a giant octopus destroyed the oil rig.7

Meanwhile, the military has completely failed to kill mega-shark,8 and that has Allan Baxter (Lorenzo Lamas) in a cranky mood; not only isn’t mega-shark dead, the warship that was supposed to kill it has been destroyed, and warships are expensive.9 Baxter’s mood isn’t at all improved by the fact that he must now rely on Science to succeed where Big Friggin’ Guns have failed. But does Baxter bother to pick up a phone and ask Science to give him a hand? Of course not; he sends an armed commando squadron to Sanders’ house to abduct the scientists and their fancy brains.10

Sanders, MacNeil and Shimada decide that the best way to deal with the big beasts is to lure them into shallow water where they can be trapped and neutralized. Their efforts to create an effective means to attract the monsters are futile until Shimada and MacNeil duck out for a quickie in the broom closet and, basking in their afterglow, hit upon the idea of using pheromones to lure the creatures into the shallows.11

Pop quiz: How do you know when you’ve hit upon the right formula for your pheromone-based prehistoric critter attractant? Why, when it glows, of course! Vive le Science!

Science accomplished, Shimada heads back to Japan to trap the giant octopus while Sanders and MacNeil use a mini-sub to set the pheromone bait in place for mega-shark. If all goes to plan, the prehistoric predator will be lured into San Francisco Bay, where it can be…well, the plan doesn’t really go into a whole lot of detail after mega-shark is in the bay, really; the scientists insist that the creature should not be killed, but there’s never much talk about how to confine and control a shark large enough to pluck jet airliners out of the sky. It’s okay, though, ’cause there’s just no way things will go according to plan.

Sure enough, Sanders has trouble with the mini-sub’s manipulator arm12 and is unable to release the bait. As mega-shark approaches, MacNeil wrestles with the mini-sub’s controls, trying to knock the bait container free of the manipulator arm. She barely succeeds in time to maneuver the submersible out of the monster’s way.

Perhaps realizing that there’s not a whole lot of plan in their plan, Baxter orders the Navy to open fire, but once again the military’s Big Friggin’ Guns prove entirely useless against the awesome might of mega-shark. This tactic would probably have been more effective with a larger special effects budget. As it was, the underwater shots of mega-shark being buffeted by explosions were so poorly realized that it’s no wonder the monster got miffed and decided to eat the Golden Gate Bridge (but only after destroying another terribly expensive Navy warship).

Shimada uses the Navy sub’s videophone13 to report that his efforts to trap the giant octopus in Japan have yielded results: namely a pissed off cephalopod and massive human casualties. Science, it seems, has failed in a manner most epic.

Crankier than ever, Baxter wants to nuke every giant dorsal fin and oversized tentacle out of the ocean and damn the consequences.14 MacNeil offers an alternative solution: Sharktopus Deathmatch!15 The sassy scientist wants to use the pheromone bait to draw the two ancient enemies together for a long overdue, no-holds-barred grudge match.

Everybody who’s anybody (and there aren’t a lot of those) is already aboard one attack submarine or another, so they agree to used the pheromone bait to lure mega-giant octoshark into the Arctic Circle, where the pair will hopefully resume their Hatfield-Capulet feud and kill each other.16

With mega-shark in hot pursuit, Baxter, MacNeil and Sanders race toward the Alaskan coast to meet Shimada and the giant octopus. Mega-shark must be getting tired, because it’s having trouble catching the submarine despite the fact that it reportedly swam at 500 knots while chasing the pheromone bait into San Francisco Bay.17 Mega-shark eventually overtakes the sub and chomps down for a very special version of Seafood Delight, but not before Baxter, MacNeil and Sanders escape in the mini-sub. When mega-shark turns its baleful gaze18 upon the mini-sub, the trio is saved by Shimada’s timely intervention (and a broadside of torpedoes).

Shimada’s sub is grappled by the giant octopus, and it seems that MacNeil is about to lose her fine-scented lover until the cephalopod’s hatred of all things sharktacular comes into play. The tentacled terror releases Shimada’s sub in favor of getting all up in mega-shark’s gill(s) and Shimada is spared.

In the ensuing tussle, nearly every military submarine is either octopulverized or sharkenated. I give style points to giant octopus for demolishing several subs at once, but then immediately dock it several points for having mega-shark all wrapped up and then sticking a tentacle in the one place you don’t want to stick a tentacle when you’re wrasslin’ a shark. Come on, giant octopus! You’ve had 1.5 million years frozen in a glacier to think about this! I’ve seen your diminutive cousins open a screw-top jar, but you don’t realize that it’s a bad idea to stick your arm in a shark’s mouth? Get with the program!

The prehistoric pugilists sink into the icy depths, presumably to die in one another’s embrace, and our heroes return to dry land. Whatever becomes of Allan Baxter? I have no idea, but I’m sure there’s plenty of glowering involved. As for MacNeil and Shimada, they enjoy a romantic moment on the beach before Sanders barges in with infrared images of whatever beasties they’re all going to have to battle19 in the sequel.

I enjoy a schlocky creature feature as much as—and probably more than—the next guy, and have admittedly low standards when it comes to “The Most Dangerous Night on Television”, but Mega-Shark Versus Giant Octopus was a complete bait-and-switch. It’s a bad film made worse by a cheesy-yet-awesome trailer. Mega-shark attacks passenger jet! Giant octopus destroys fighter plane! Mega-shark eats the Golden Gate Bridge! Everything in the trailer (even Deborah Gibson’s “Thrilla in Manila” line) hints at the sort of ridiculous escapism that makes movies like Snakes on a Plane so much fun. The Asylum20 appears to have thrown most of the budget into the few shots that made the trailer so awesome, leaving next to nothing for the eighty-eight minutes that weren’t in the trailer. Shots of mega-shark—all of which are very clearly computer-generated21—are recycled several times and the submarine interior sets are so sparsely decorated that they bear more resemblance to Shimada and MacNeil’s coital broom closet than anything one might see on an actual submarine. The final product wants to be “so bad it’s good”, but is just so bad.

1. If you’re expecting “Lost in Your Eyes” and “Electric Youth” jokes, you’re going to be disappointed; I’m more of a Tiffany fan.
2. Though octopodes indeed have tentacles, they are typically referred to as “arms”. If you ask me, tentacles are far cooler than arms, so I will continue to take some artistic liberty with the terminology.
3. Okay, let me get this straight: MacNeil works in California and somehow manages, on a lark, to not only make off with a research submarine but take it all the way to Alaska and back without her company sending the Coast Guard after her. Did she also “borrow” a boat to transport the submarine, or does this magnificent submersible actually have the range to make the round trip without a surface support vessel?
4. In fact, C. Megalodon‘s teeth were probably around seven inches long, so this shark is probably a Carcharodon Ultra-Mega-Megalodon.
5. Hmm. Mega-pus?
6. Ganbatte, Tako-Ooki!
7. It’s a fact: oil rigs are considered a delicacy among octopi.
8. It’s not even a little bit dead.
9. Well, real warships are expensive. Stock footage of warships with muzzle-flashes superimposed over the ever-bow-facing guns is probably significantly less expensive. Real warships also have keels; when the camera switches to mega-shark’s-eye-view for the deadly attack, the computer-generated hull of the warship is as flat and featureless as a toy boat in a bathtub.
10. If you must turn to Science, at least hold the scientists at gunpoint while they work. It reminds them that Guns > Science.
11. “You sure smell pretty.” “Eureka!”
12. I’d hate to be the maintenance technician who cleared the mini-sub for operation; his best hope of working around subs again is getting a job as a Sandwich Artist.
13. Surprise! Subs have videophones! Videophones that can be used while submerged!
14. Radioactive seas, massive loss of marine life, blah, blah, blah…Go hug a coral reef, hippie.
15. Technically, she compares it to the “Thrilla in Manila”, but I’d rather watch a Sharktopus Deathmatch any day of the week.
16. It never seems to occur to anyone that either beastie will survive.
17. By comparison, an SSN 21 Seawolf-class fast attack submarine has a top speed of 25-35 knots while submerged.
18. “Like a doll’s eyes…“
19. With Science!
20. The same production company that brought you Snakes on a Train and Transmorphers.
21. The CGI mega-shark is very poorly done, apart from one or two shots that made it into the trailer and perhaps a few seconds of the Sharktopus Deathmatch. I’m okay with a shark that looks fake; I expect the shark to look fake, but not that fake.

A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase.

“He played rubbery with his lips…”

When all is said and done, that phrase may not quite meet the definition of a mondegreen, but it is certainly a profoundly, incredibly incorrect interpretation of a song lyric. Just how profoundly, incredibly incorrect is the interpretation? Well, for starters, I didn’t even get the first word right. Here is the correct lyric:

“You played robbery with insolence…”

…and I played the blues in twelve bars down on Lover’s Lane. The song in question is “Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits (as heard on the Brothers in Arms album) and, in my defense, it features plenty of lyrics that a ten-year-old boy would find unusual if not downright impenetrable. That it took me more than twenty years to correct my ten-year-old interpretation is merely a testament to the power of procrastination.

“You must have had a pasty made out of wax.”

I have eaten countless Cornish meat pies—pasties—in the past thirty-odd years; they were a staple of my diet growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the tale of how my Finnish immigrant ancestors came to adopt them is one I won’t go into here. When I was ten I knew that Dire Straits was a British rock band and that the pasty had its roots in the United Kingdom, so it didn’t seem at all unusual to me that Mark Knopfler would sing about wax pasties. Not unusual at all.

“You must’ve had a passkey made out of wax.”

There was a grand total of five entries in the contest, though I was sure that once the Fabulous Prize was revealed I’d see a flood of new e-mail. Every entry was correct, so everyone who entered had a 20% chance of winning the Fabulous Prize. Having cast the die2 I am pleased to announce that the winner of the contest is Natalie Metzger. Natalie will soon be receiving a copy of Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert.

Thank you to everyone who entered the contest. If you didn’t enter the contest for some reason, leave a comment or e-mail me at contest@kjtoo.com to let me know how I could make future contests (if there are any) more enticing.

1. Kudos to Sam Chupp for pointing me to this.
2. I realize that I’m using this idiom incorrectly, but the winner was chosen by die roll and “[h]aving rolled the die” doesn’t sound as cool. Plus, misusing the idiom fits with the theme of the contest.

That’s just what happened to me yesterday: I found myself humming a tune and I realized that the lyrics I’ve been singing to myself, lo, these many years, are patently ridiculous. A quick lyric search confirmed my fears, as I found I had been singing this song wrong for better than twenty years.1

Such a long-running blunder deserves to be corrected in style, so I thought I’d make a game of it; a contest, if you will. My profoundly, incredibly incorrect version of the lyric is below. If you e-mail me the song title, the artist and the correct lyric by 11:59pm EST on Friday, 28 August 2009, your name will be entered into a random drawing to win A Fabulous Prize.2

Here’s the profoundly, incredibly incorrect lyric:

“He played rubbery with his lips…”

That’s it. That’s all you get.

[Update: 24 August 2009]

Believe it or not, the profoundly, incredibly incorrect lyric above isn’t alone. When I was but a lad, I heard another line of the song as:

“You must have had a pasty made out of wax.”3

Now I knew that couldn’t be correct, so I looked it up in the album’s liner notes and found the correct lyrics,4 but somehow I managed to overlook the whole “rubbery with his lips” business at that time.

[Update: 26 August 2009]

Some people have told me that they are hesistant to enter the contest because they found the answer after searching on The Googles. There’s no rule prohibiting the use of search engines, and even if there were I’d have no way to enforce it. So, by all means, Google away! The first lyric is so profoundly, incredibly incorrect that I would be shocked (shocked, I tell you) to learn that someone had managed to wrangle the answer out of a Google search. The second lyric, on the other hand…

Oh, and check back tomorrow, when the Fabulous Prize will be revealed.

[Update: 27 August 2009]

Is the Fabulous Prize truly Fabulous? That depends on whether you’d like a copy of Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert (Deluxe Edition). I know I would, but I’ve only got the one copy and it’s still in the original shrink wrap.

Here’s the skinny on how you could win yourself one (1) prize of potential fabulosity…

Rules and Instructions

1. The contest is open to U.S. residents only. Sorry, rest of the world, but I’ve gotta pay for shipping and I’m just a poor boy.5
2. Contest entries must be received by 11:59pm EST, Friday, 28 August 2009.
3. Only e-mail entries will be accepted, and you must use a valid e-mail address. I promise I will not spam you or sell your address; I need it only to inform the winner and get his or her snail mail address.
4. One entry per person per day.
5. You must be at least 18 years of age to enter. If you’re under 18, have a parent or guardian enter on your behalf. If you really want to jump through that particular hoop, keep in mind that the song is older than you are.
6. The subject of your e-mail must be “Incorrect Lyric Contest“.
7. The entry must include the following:
   1. The name of the song.
   2. The name of the artist.
   3. The correct lyric.
   4. Your name (or pseudonym), which I will use when I announce the winner. Pseudonyms I deem offensive will be disqualified.
8. Entries must be sent to contest@kjtoo.com.
9. The winner will be chosen at random from all qualifying, correct entries. Lacking a correct entry, I will select a random winner from those entries I judge most correct.6
10. The winner will be contacted on or prior to Monday, 31 August 2009.
11. The winner will be announced on or after Monday, 31 August 2009.

The Fabulous Prize

I have not yet acquired The Fabulous Prize, so I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be, but I can tell you this:

1. The Fabulous Prize will be new. I’m not going to try to pawn off any of my used crap as a prize.7
2. The monetary value of The Fabulous Prize will be somewhere between 10 and 15 dollars. Fabulous American dollars, naturally.
3. If you want to get an idea of what might qualify as a prize, take a peek around this blog; you’ll get a pretty good idea of the sort of stuff I would consider Fabulous Prize material: music, movies, books, that sort of thing.
4. I am not going to feel bad if you win the contest and do not like The Fabulous Prize. If you’re afraid of accidentally winning something you already own or won’t like, your best option is to refrain from entering the contest.

Photo credit: “Unborken” by judemat.

1. That’s a hint; this isn’t a Mylie Cyrus song.
2. Prize may not actually be fabulous, depending on your point of view.
3. That’s “pasty”, as in Cornish meat pie. Not, you know…the other thing. Hey, the pasty was a staple of my diet growing up. Burlesque and strip clubs, not so much.
4. Boy, do I miss liner notes.
5. Nobody loves me. This isn’t a hint, by the way.
6. Or “least incorrect”.
7. Hooray for new crap!

Starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher,  Jordan Christopher, Donald Hotton, Alan Fudge and Uncle Ben Parker.

Directed by Douglass Trumbull.

My mother-in-law is convinced that Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner killed Natalie Wood.

I mention this because it’s a bit of a running joke at the International House of Johnson; whenever Walken’s name comes up (and it does), one of us is likely to say “He killed Natalie Wood, you know.”

Robert Wagner’s name almost never comes up,1 and when it does there’s no mention of his involvement in the alleged homicide.

Laura and I don’t honestly believe that Natalie Wood’s death was anything but a tragic accident,2  but the fact that my mother-in-law is so convinced and is, consequently, so creeped out by Christopher Walken amuses us.

I guess we’re just morbid people.

Brainstorm was Natalie Wood’s final film. When my wife asked if we had anything interesting to watch Saturday night, I said, “We could watch Brainstorm. It stars both Christopher Walken and that woman he killed.”

Yeah. Morbid.

But it worked. She took the bait and we watched the movie. “Ohhhh,” she said when Louise Fletcher’s named popped up in the opening credits, “she plays a good bad guy.”

I think that’s part of why I didn’t like Brainstorm. See, Louise Fletcher—Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; she does indeed play a good bad guy—doesn’t play a bad guy. Sure, she’s cranky and she chain smokes, but there’s nothing at all malevolent about her character. Hell, she’s Walken’s love interest, for cryin’ out loud! Talk about failing to meet expectations.

*Psst! Spoilers ahead!*

I can’t blame Fletcher for playing against type, but if ever there was a movie that needed a bit more malevolence, Brainstorm is it. You’ve got a bunch of scientists working on a device that can record and play back everything a person experiences, complete with all five senses (and the promise of adding emotion and thought to the mix). Of course the military wants it! Of course there are shady back room deals and underhanded tricks and Michael Brace (Walken) is locked out of his own lab, denied access to his work…but none of it amounts to anything.

Lillian Reynolds (Fletcher), Brace’s partner, insists that she doesn’t want the military to use her work to kill people—which, of course, is exactly what they plan to do with it; they create Project Brainstorm based on Reynolds and Brace’s work. Brainstorm contains tapes that, among other things, can cause the viewer to experience psychotic episodes. When Reynolds suffers a fatal heart attack while working alone in the lab, she chooses to record the totality of her own death with the device…and leave it for Brace to view. When Brace begins to view the tape, he starts to experience a cardiac event and intends to modify the device to allow him to view Reynolds’ death safely.

Brace’s boss, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson), forbids the scientist to view the death tape. Brace is locked out of the lab and must use every bit of early-1980s computer technology to get back in, hacking the system so he can view the tape remotely and destroy the lab—along with Project Brainstorm—in the process.

Ultimately, Brace is his own worst enemy. He puts himself in far more peril by insisting on viewing Reynolds’ death tape than anything threatened by the government goons (who plan to arrest him). And why does Reynolds, who was so adamant about ensuring that her technology wouldn’t be used to harm people, record her own death, an experience that she must know could be fatal to anyone who relives it with the device? Why, so Brace can get a glimpse into the afterlife, of course. Well, a 1981 version of the afterlife, that is. Lots of pretty lights and stars and nebulae and more lights that might be angels flying around a brighter light that’s probably heaven.3

Brace, of course, appears to die as a result of this experience, but his formerly-estranged-almost-ex-wife, Karen (hey, there’s Natalie Wood!) brings him back with—what else?—her newly-rediscovered love for him.

See what I mean about the need for malevolence? How about having Reynolds somehow imprint herself on Brace with her death experience, then editing that experience and using it to kill all the military-types who are after her technology? Better yet, have Reynolds imprint herself on Brace’s almost-ex-wife and do the same, leaving it to Brace to figure out what’s happened and stop her? Or just do something sinister with the military application, rather than hinting at it and destroying it so Brace can see a fancy LiteBrite.

So it was the expectation of something more sinister that led to my being so disappointed with Brainstorm. Terson’s motives for locking Brace out of the lab aren’t anything more than a desire to protect his friend. Sure, the government has nasty plans for Project Brainstorm, but it’s rendered almost entirely peripheral to the story by Brace’s insistence upon viewing Reynolds’ death experience. The journey wasn’t nearly as suspenseful as I wanted it to be and the ending was (to me, at least) a major anti-climax.

1. Because Robert Wagner is simply not Christopher Walken.
2. For those who may not be aware of the circumstances surrounding Wood’s death in late 1981, she drowned after falling overboard from the yacht Splendour, on which she had been cruising with Wagner (her husband) and Walken. The coroner concluded that she was intoxicated at the time of her death. Wood’s death was ruled an accident, but some people are convinced otherwise.
3. This is to be expected. Director Douglas Trumbull also helmed Silent Running (1972), which features similarly bedazzling special effects. Between directing Silent Running and Brainstorm, Trumbull supervised visual effects for movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Blade Runner (1981). The visual effects in these films have not all aged well—Blade Runner being a notable exception—but as Chris Miller points out in Episode 0020 of The Secret Lair (wherein we discuss Silent Running) Trumbull and his cohorts were revolutionizing modern visual effects. 

Pages Past

• Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. During World War II, a B-movie actor is hired to play the part of a giant, fire-breathing lizard in order to convince the Japanese to surrender or have a trio of Godzilla-like creatures unleashed on their cities.
• The Touch by F. Paul Wilson. The third installment of The Adversary Cycle tells the tale of a doctor who suddenly gains the ability to heal with a touch. It wouldn’t be a medical thriller if there weren’t a terrible price to pay. This isn’t my preferred genre, but I enjoyed The Keep and The Tomb, so I thought I’d continue the cycle; The Touch isn’t anywhere near as creepy as its predecessors, but it’s a pretty entertaining tale.
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross. In a far-flung future where technology makes changing your gender, race, and even species as commonplace as changing your shirt, and humanity has been through a great Censorship War, Robin wakes with no memory of his past and a killer on his tail. How much of what makes you you is determined by your physical being, your memories, and your relationships with other people? This was really a fascinating read.
• His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire · Book 1) by Naomi Novik. During the Napoleonic Wars, the H.M.S. Reliant, a British naval vessel, captures a French ship and siezes a most unusual cargo: a dragon’s egg. When the dragon hatches and bonds to Will Laurence, the Reliant’s captain must leave the Navy behind for His Majesty’s Air Corps. I love Novik’s writing style and the relationship that forms between the dragon, Temeraire, and Laurence is beautifully executed. This is definitely my favorite book of the summer so far.
• Anathem (Audio) by Neal Stephenson. The audio version of this lengthy tome consists of twenty-eight compact discs and took me eleven weeks to complete. As Chris Miller pointed out to me, Neal Stephenson doesn’t so much write novels as essays stitched together with bits of story. Much time is spent explaining how the world in which Anathem takes place is different from our own, complete with excerpts from The Dictionary (4th Edition, A.R. 3000) that mark the beginning of each of the eleventy-three thousillion chapters. Anathem follows Fraa Erasmas of the concent of Saunt Edhar as he ventures out into the sæcular world during (and after) Apert. And to explain every term in that sentence would require more space than I’m willing to devote to a single bullet point right now.

Pages Present

• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. The Bible doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail where the first thirty years of Christ’s life are concerned, and now Levi (who is called Biff) has been resurrected by the angel Raziel to fill in the gaps. Chris Miller and I will be discussing this somewhat-apocryphal gospel on a future episode of The Secret Lair.
• The Strain (Audio) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Vampires!
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Audio) by Susanna Clarke. Magicians!
• The Way of Shadows (Book 1 of The Night Angel Trilogy) by Brent Weeks. Assassins! (Sorry: wetboys.)

Pages Future

• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Chronal Displacement Disorder!
• Throne of Jade (Temeraire · Book 2) by Naomi Novik. Dragons!
• WWW: Wake (Audio) by Robert J. Sawyer. Artificial Intelligence!
• Dead Witch Walking (Audio) by Kim Harrison.
• Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi. Aliens!
• Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman. Serial Killers!

Finally, here is a fourth list, which may be considered a bonus by some and entirely excessive by others. I have been using GoodReads to track my ever-expanding library and hummingbirdlike reading habits, but there are a number of similar sites and as I become aware of one I can’t help but set up an account and import at least a portion of my books, just to see how it compares to the others. Here is a list of said sites (I don’t claim it is comprehensive, and if you know of another please leave a comment with a link to it.) that I’ve been using recently, in the order I joined:

1. GoodReads. Very well put together. The interface is generally very intuitive, though management of group “shelves” could be enhanced. GoodReads is, unfortunately, ad-supported.
2. Readernaut. My favorite of the bunch so far. Pages aren’t as “busy” as those on GoodReads or LibraryThing and there’s a lot of flexibility around tweaking books (I especially like that I can upload my own cover images). Pages tend to render poorly on some installations of Internet Explorer. Readernaut is not currently ad-supported.
3. Shelfari. My least favorite by quite a large margin. I’m not a fan of the default “shelf” layout and though the add/edit book interface is nice and streamlined, it is also rather limited. Shelfari is ad-supported.
4. LibraryThing. I haven’t played with this one very much, but I do like that there is space for BookCrossing IDs (though it’s been months since I last logged in to BookCrossing) and they seem to pack in a lot of information about individual titles. LibraryThing is not ad-supported, but offers both free and subscription-based models, so I can only assume that the size of my library (as a free user) has a limit.