30 Days to a Better Man, Day 23: learn a manual skill

I heard back from the volunteer agency I wrote to on Day 20. Turns out they've shut their operation down for a few months due to "staff changes," whatever that means. They'll put me on the list and get back to me once they're up and running again. Doesn't bother me. This gives the weather time to get nicer.

Wipe that look off your faces, maggots. "Yes, I love winter, but I am not willing to take wounds for it, as I am for summer." John Holmes (slightly paraphrased).

Anyway, on to Day 23.

Manual skills are something I am severely deficient in. I was always the type of boy who drew or scribbled instead of building things (with the exception of Lego sets, of course). I'm rubbish with cars. I've helped my pop replace oil, brakes, shocks, and even entire engines, but left to my own devices the most I can do is change tires and check fluid levels. And I know zilch about carpentry, metalwork, wiring, plastering, bricklaying, tiling, or anything else construction entails. I can disassemble and clean guns and paint eaves like the dickens, and that's about it. I'm a whiz with jigsaw puzzles, but that's of little practical value.

So I set out to rectify these shortcomings. I chose to familiarize myself with basic home wiring. I've never so much as touched a length of copper wire in my life. I hovered in the background while our one-armed electrician upgraded our electrical system in California (with his assistant giving him a hand). Even in my twenties, I have a tendency to view electricity as some kind of benevolent spirit that inhabits the walls and breathes life into table lamps and computer screens.

I sat down and went through the entire course on doityourself.com. It was full of helpful hints, useful tips and even a little glossary of terms. Some of it I was already marginally familiar with—you have to know what amperes, circuits, and circuit breakers are if you fly airplanes—but some of it was almost incomprehensible. (Roughing in? Knock out a tab? Pigtail the hot wires together?) I had to pause frequently to look up things like junction boxes and fuses, just to make sure I knew how they worked.

Regardless, I like to think that I know my home electrical system a little better now (even if the voltage levels are different in Korea). I know what the colors of the wires mean, at any rate. When I'm back in the States and my wife and three kids run to me and ask me to install a light switch or a ceiling fan, I feel as though I'll be able to do it (with judicious help from that website). I might even get brave and install track lighting along the driveway at some point. I feel like a better man already.

Keep scanning for Day 24.

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 16: create a budget

This is something I've desperately needed to do. My finances have always been the weakest link in my life. I keep receipts, but they wind up in a big Ziploc bag (or worse, an untidy heap) in a drawer somewhere, unsifted and disorganized. I don't keep track of how much I spend per month, so what I have left over before and after payday always comes as a complete shock. As such, while living in Korea, I've probably been spent a bit too much money on things that don't matter: pipe tobacco, whiskey, sushi, and overpriced appetizers served up by rude Bulgarians. This is a hell of a way to run a railroad, particularly since I have some rather large expenditures in mind when I get home to the States: marriage, children, an instrument rating and a commercial pilot's license, among others. Jeez, you'd think I'd be better at this. My sign is Libra, after all.

So, to amend this reprehensible state of affairs, I set aside today to create a budget, as per the instructions on The Art of Manliness's website. I won't go into too much numerical detail. Telling you how much I make (or worse, how much I spend) each month would be indiscreet. I'll just say that I followed the directions to the letter: I determined my monthly income, totted up all my fixed expenses, and set a goal for the variable ones. I had to get Miss H's help with some things. Since her school is renting out this apartment for us, most of the utilities come out of her paycheck (except for Internet, which I pay for). We split the difference each month. We also try to limit Costco runs to once per month, 'cause everything there is so danged expensive. We've been eating out a bit too much, too. But anyway: Miss H worked up a lovely utilities spreadsheet for me, and using it I managed to come up with a number. It's what I should have left over after all expenses are said and done (barring incidentals and fun) and I'm going to try to stick as close to it as possible.

(I was tempted to use Mint, which is what the author of the AoM article recommended. But something tells me it won't work as well with Korean won as it will with American dollars. I think I'll wait until I get back to the States to get into web-based budgets and spreadsheets.)

Now the only hard part's going to be keeping track of my monthly expenditures — although, thanks to the bank books that are so popular here in Korea, my checkbook balances itself. I'll just have to remember to glance at it every month and make sure I've stayed in the black.

And now you must excuse me. I have to go see if I have enough wiggle room for a new iPod Nano. I want to grab one before I head off to Hokkaido. Please loiter around for Day 17. 

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 1: define your core values

A natural consequence of my life as an autodidact was the realization that, in addition to improving my mental capacity, I could stand to improve other aspects myself as well. Man does not eat of the Tree of Knowledge alone. There's a lot about me that could use some work. I'm in horrible shape, for one thing. And the term "emotional health" makes me, a red-blooded American man, think "Ewww, cooties." I could definitely use a shot of confidence, too. I've written hundreds of thousands of words and haven't gotten a single novelette published.

So! To that end, I hit upon the idea of doing Art of Manliness's Be a Better Man in 30 Days challenge. Why not? It can only help, right? Another year has gone by. It's January 1, 2014. I have once again realized how much of a lazy slob I can be, and how lacking in the most basic manly competencies I am. It's time to take matters in hand, and this challenge is just what the doctor ordered. I'm twiddling my thumbs at home for the entire month of January, and this will dovetail nicely with my writing-and-exercise regimen. The benefits are twofold: I'll be shouldering a new challenge (which has become a hobby of mine recently) and I'll take a delightful romp through the well-trod but classy Garden of Manliness. Classical manliness, none of this Billie Joe Armstrong skinny-jeans-and-eyeliner emo crap.

I understand, of course, that no Internet article can tell you how to be a man. But it can give you some handy tips on how to run your life, which if followed can improve the average man's mental, physical, financial and emotional well-being. If I take some of these lessons to heart, this challenge will make me more independent and confident in my doings, give me a more versatile skill set, impart clarity and certainty to my beliefs, and make my life just plain simpler.

This, then, is Day 1: Define Your Core Values.

I've been messing around on AoM for some time and they have a plethora of useful, timely, relevant, well-written and pithy articles. I agree with their judgment that manliness is a lost art, and much effort should be put into bringing it back. I've actually attempted a few of the items on this list already (and some of them I've already done), but not this one.

The main idea behind this challenge, as AoM states, is simple:

When I look at photos of men from my grandfather’s and even my dad’s generation, I can see a sense of purpose in the eyes of those men. Yet when I look at men today, I often don’t sense that kind of steely focus. Instead, I see dudes who are just sort of drifting along whichever way life pulls them. 

I’ve heard a lot of men my age complain of a sense of shiftlessness. They don’t have the drive, purpose, and ambition that our forebears had, and they feel adrift.

And this isn’t some sort of cranky old man observation about “kids these days.” Several books and articles by sociologists back up these observations.

There are numerous factors why men are just sort of drifting by today. Changes in the economy and societal shifts in regards to gender are definitely two major factors. But, let’s be honest. There’s not much a man, let alone a man stuck in neutral, can do about these things. So, today we’re going to focus on something that we all have the power to control: our core values.

I used to be a drifter. I was indecisive, dissolute, hedonistic, and lazy. I was just sort of coasting along all through my early twenties. I wanted to travel, I wanted to write, I wanted to fly, but I didn't have the drive to accomplish these things, or even a clear idea of how or when I would do it.

Today, I've learned better. I'm still indecisive, dissolute, hedonistic, and lazy, but now I actually care enough to do something about it.

I followed the directions outlined in the article and I came up with some ideas for core values, scribbling them down in one of the trusty notebooks scattered about my apartment. I'm putting them up here because I need to have accountability. I would like you, dear readers, to call me on anything I've put down which is weak or vague or unworthy. Censor me, if you will. Cherish the opportunity, for it shan't come again.

Without further ado, reproduced here for your consideration, are my core values: 

     1. CONFIDENCE. The lack of this has plagued me my whole life. It's kept me from leaping at opportunities that I would have cherished: submitting short stories and travel articles for publication, dancing with pretty girls, shouldering new responsibilities at work, acting in school plays, volunteering at magic shows and carnivals, and taking helicopter rides, to name a few. (That is correct: at the age of six I chickened out on riding in a helicopter. Me, the future pilot.) Confidence is hard work, but it's infinitely rewarding. I learned that when I got my pilot's license. When I first started flying, I was deathly afraid of screwing up and crashing. Overcoming that fear and becoming a more proficient flier made me more confident man. I'll never forget that feeling of triumph. Nowadays, even if I'm not sure I can do something, I give it a shot anyway. When I'm afraid of something, I have to challenge it. I have the confidence to pursue my goals, voice my opinions, and stand against the liars and fools. 

     2. HUMOR. An odd one, perhaps, but this has been a core value of mine ever since I was a kid. It's how I got through high school. Making people laugh was the only way I knew to get noticed, to be remembered, to be somebody. Subsequently I discovered just how genuinely good it felt to make people laugh or just crack a smile. Humor puts people at ease, smooths over conflicts, breaks the ice, and brightens a dark day. It's been my constant companion, even if I don't do it right all the time. 

     3. INTEGRITY. This is where I'm the most deficient. I am the most dissolute bugger ever. For the past five years I've promised myself that this year, I'll get in shape. Every year I continue to sit around on my duff and eat horrendous food. My natural inclination toward hedonism and Epicureanism have undermined my attempts to be healthy and get in shape. It's not just the physical arena that needs improvement, though. I often promise people (or myself) that I'll be more assiduous in my habits or more careful about my words, and then I'll turn around and commit the same old sins. I can be ill-tempered, impatient, selfish, hypocritical, immoderate, lazy, excoriating, insulting or just downright cruel at times. No more. A true man, in my opinion, does what he says he's going to do. And he only says he's going to do it once: he doesn't keep making the same promises over and over. Less talk, more action — consistent action. That shall be a clearly-defined value of mine from hereon out. There's nothing more satisfying than saying something and meaning it — and then living by it.

   

     4. GROWTH. Perhaps the most general of my values. There's a lot that falls under the label of "growth." It encapsulates all of the above values, for starters. I want to become more confident, more humorous and more consistent. Beyond that, though, I want to be smarter. I want to learn about the stuff I don't know about, fill in the gaps in my brain, continue by never-ending quest for knowledge. More importantly, I want to be wiser. At 27, I've experienced a few of life's lessons and learned them well; some of them I'm only just coming to know. Others surely await in the dim and unknown future. I want to be the kind of man that laughs at hardship and strives harder in adversity. I must learn to be kind to the unkind, forgiving to the unworthy, and temperate in all things. I want to be stronger (mentally and physically), funnier, kinder, and more discreet. I want to sharpen my skills, hone my mind, sculpt my personality, reflect upon life itself. I believe in being true to myself, my home, my relatives, my friends, my loved ones and my upbringing — to have that integrity I mentioned above. But I believe in the journey also. I hope I never stop learning to write, to fly, to be a human being.  

 

     5. LEGACY. Values are not goals. They are not something you strive for, nor boxes to be filled in, nor items to be scratched off a list. They are values: adamantine beliefs which I hold and cleave to. And I believe, firmly, that I have a job to do here. There's some karma that controls my destiny. I have a purpose to fulfill (and fulfilling it will be very fulfilling). That purpose, dear reader, is not my personal contentment. I used to believe it was, but I've come to know better. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said (emphasis mine), "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." There you are: my job is not to be happy, but to be a useful man, not a waste of space. I hold Emerson's words in my mind every day. The purpose of my life is to live well and make a difference. What difference? Will I reinvent the wheel? Cure cancer? Bring world peace? Champion a new age? Well, no. Probably not. I don't want to, either. I'll leave that to the dreamers and the eggheads. I'm just a humble geek and inveterate hack writer. All I want to do is write a bunch of books that make people laugh, cry, smile, scratch their heads, and wonder about the true nature of humanity and the Universe we live in. That's all. If some post-human race from the year 10,000,000 A.D. finds one of my sci-fi novels in a time capsule, translates the barbaric chicken scratch on its wood-pulp pages, and is somewhat amused by the comradeship and high adventure within...then my time on Earth wasn't wasted. 

That's it. Five core values. They have been defined for your reading pleasure. AoM says you're not supposed to have more than five, and I concur. Five's a goodly amount. Any more and you start to forget what you stand for, and making correct choices becomes more difficult. It wasn't hard to think of these. I've been mulling them over for quite some time. Perhaps I've known them all along, and had to put words to them to understand them completely. I'm glad I did.

So there you have it, readers! The things I stand for. Are they satisfactory to you? Suitably explained and outlined? If so, then the ball is in your court. Don't accept any more of my pathetic excuses. If I say I can't do something, or make a poor choice, call me on it. Use my own values against me. Delineating them is only half the battle; living up to them is the other. I'm going to try to do that for the rest of this month...and beyond. Tune in tomorrow for Day 2.

Oh, and Happy New Year.

a rocky start

That's something of an understatement. I'm sure there've been whitewater rafters who've had a less rocky than I have.

First of all, I got hit with a double-whammy when I arrived. My predecessor left her position one month before the semester ended, so I was dumped into the middle of her courses with only her notes to go on. Then, a scant month later, the new semester began: and with it, shorter (and more numerous) class periods and an entirely new set of textbooks. These materials took a while to learn (in fact, we're still receiving training on them, six weeks after my arrival). Add in two weeks' worth of jet lag, an apartment that was filthy when I moved in, a month-long wait for my first paycheck, technical difficulties with my Internet and bank account, and the absolute hell of being without my other half, and you'll begin to understand what I've been going through.

Honestly, it seems as if some new catastrophe rips across the landscape every week. First my passbook didn't work (a sort of checkbook which is inserted bodily into the ATM machine to withdraw cash; automatically balances itself!). Then my check card, when it came, was also inoperable. Both these crises necessitated trips to the bank to explain my problems in pidgin English, and fill out more forms. My Internet was installed successfully. But then I left the router unplugged overnight to prevent the other tenants from siphoning the unsecured network. The router reset itself. I had to call the service provider, KT (which fortunately has an English help line) and sort that mess out. I also got a cell phone this time around. I procured one in decent shape from a coworker, but I had to drag one of my Korean colleagues along to the shop so he could translate for me. I felt rather embarrassed, but at least there were no miscommunications or screw-ups.

Things at work have been hectic as well. I've forgotten how easy it is to accidentally breach cross-cultural etiquette in Korea. My original schedule for this new semester gave me eight classes on Thursdays. This is a full load, which management would rather avoid. So I spoke to my supervisor about it. I was informed that the class had been changed, and amended my schedule properly. However, because I failed to double-check the new master schedule I had been given, I didn't realize that another of my classes had been changed as well (from Thursday to Tuesday). As a result, I wound up missing it. The students just sat around for 45 minutes. This created quite a stir. I was ranked out publicly in the staff room. The remedial class was slated for Thursday, which meant that, for one day only, I really did have to teach eight classes in a day (exhausting). Compounding the matter, the Korean supervisor chose to call me on the carpet at the very moment when I was collecting my things for my next class, which would begin in less than 90 seconds. I could hardly give him my full attention while I was scrambling around gathering pens, markers, an eraser and textbooks. He interpreted my behavior as flippancy and disrespect, and reported me. I was not disciplined, but the incident has remained a black stain on my time here nonetheless.

Things were not this complicated the last time around.

Last time I just moved into my apartment, bought some food, went to work, learned how to teach, got a router installed, and spent one glorious year whooping it up in K-Land.

I'd like to say something inspirational and hopeful here, but I can't think of a blessed thing. It's a glorious, cool, breezy, sunny spring day (with scattered clouds), and a wonderful moist smell in the air from the day-long drizzle we had yesterday. I need to tidy up this apartment before the KT repairman arrives. He's installing a new router (one with an actual password on it). Then I think I'll take a nice stroll over to the other side of Jungang Park and try to find this street market everyone's been talking about. And flirt with Miss H online a little bit. I'll let you know how it all works out.

The Postman signs off.

Who Goes There?

...is the title of a marvelous science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was first published in 1938 under Campbell's pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, in Astounding Stories. In 1973, it was voted, quite justly, into The Science Fiction Hall of Fame by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

For once I cast my lot with the majority. Who Goes There? is, without doubt, one of the finest science fiction stories ever written. All the elements are there. Campbell's story has a fantastic plot, a spine-chilling premise, is scientifically sound, and makes a very pertinent point about human nature.

You've probably never heard of it, though.

What you have heard about are the three movie adaptations they made out of it.

The Thing From Another World, in 1951, starring James Arness...

John Carpenter's 1982 remake of that, called simply The Thing...

And now this, supposedly a prequel.

[Ahem]

I'd like to share some thoughts with you about books, movies, and what gets lost in between.

Adaptation decay (blithely defined here) is what you wind up with after a particular work of fiction has progressed from print to movie to video game to novelization and wherever else along the way. Similar to photocopying a photocopy, the process is a piranha swarm of human input and rewrites and creative vision...which inevitably skeletonizes the source material, and results in something that bears little to no resemblance to the original work.

And that is exactly what's going on here, to my unending disgust. Campbell's immortal work is, once again, going to Hollywood's chopping block to be packaged and marketed to the masses.

This is nothing new. The same thing happened to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot; H.G. Well's War of the Worlds and The Time Machine; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth; and, to an egregious degree, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. (George of the Jungle anyone?)

The reason I'm squawking now is because I can't stand to see yet another of my favorite sci-fi stories debased in this manner.

Who Goes There? is an excellent work, one that stands on its own. A bunch of American scientists holed up in an Antarctic research base stumble across an alien spacecraft buried in the snow. Their picks and mattocks are inadequate for the task, so they decide to blow the ship open with thermite. They don't realize that the alien craft is made mostly of magnesium; it goes up like flash paper. However, encased in the ice nearby is an alien life form. MacReady, the expedition' s meteorologist, surmises that the ship must've crash-landed in Antarctica millions of years ago, when the continent was just beginning to freeze. "The Thing" somehow survived the crash of its ship, stumbled out of the wreckage, and was immediately frozen solid.

Well, it doesn't stay frozen for long. The team chips the creature out of its ice grave and transports it back to their base. It thaws and awakes. The humans discover the alien in the dog kennel, and the huskies viciously attacking it. As they watch, the alien begins to change, assuming the form of a sled dog it had recently devoured. The men quickly kill it. With increasing paranoia, Blair (the biologist) theorizes that the Thing is able to absorb and imitate any organic creature by reshaping its own cellular structure. The Thing can either devour its victims or infect them like a virus. More than that, the monster can somehow telepathically absorb the target's memories and personality as well, rendering its mimicry absolutely airtight. Realizing the implications of this—that not only dogs, but humans themselves can be infected, and that any member of the team may already be an imitation—Blair has a nervous breakdown and is confined to a maintenance shack.

MacReady and the rest of the team have a gay old time trying to figure out who's who...

I won't spoil the ending, but you'll love it.

How Campbell could've written something so perfect, so suspenseful, so thrilling, so disturbing, and so sinister (particularly in 1938, when the scariest guys around were Nosferatu, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera) is beyond me. But he did. And his story remains one of the most pivotal, influential and downright horrifying of the genre.

Freddy Krueger doesn't scare me. Jason Voorhees can't faze me. Face-hugging, chest-bursting aliens aren't that bad. Werewolves, vampires and witches just leave me underwhelmed. The Thing is the only creature that's ever truly scared me.

So how did Hollywood portray my ultimate monster?

They turned him into a plant.

Seriously. The plot of the 1951 movie was that an intelligent form of plant life crashed in the Arctic (not the Antarctic) and started sucking the blood out of the researchers stationed there, like some kind of fungoid mosquito. They finally killed it with an electrical discharge.

Puh-leeze.

The 1982 remake was perhaps the most faithful adaptation, but there were still some glaring discrepancies between book and film. In The Thing, a Norwegian research team found the creature first, and got massacred in the most gruesome way possible. The first our heroic American team hears of it is when a couple of half-mad Norwegians burst into their camp in a helicopter, throwing grenades and shooting assault rifles at an innocent(-looking) sled dog.

Things rapidly go downhill from there. MacReady is a helicopter pilot instead of a meteorologist, but he still plays a major role. The Thing is...quite gruesome. Perhaps even more gruesome than he is in Campbell's original story. In fact, the movie was universally panned for its gruesomeness. But I still liked it enough to get it on DVD.

And now the new film is coming out. Like I said, it's supposedly a prequel. It portrays the battle the Norwegian team has with the original creature, before the Americans find it. Although, for some reason, the Norwegian team has some Americans along with 'em. I guess the movie producers just don't believe that an American audience could root for a bunch of Norwegians in an Antarctic research base fighting an alien monster without Mary Elizabeth Winstead riding along as eye-candy.

This is adaptation decay. There wasn't a single Norwegian in Campbell's novella. Hollywood put a Norwegian camp into the story in 1982. Now, in 2011, they're doing a movie whose setting was lifted from another movie. It's a film based entirely on a preceding film. None of Campbell's original characters (except for the monster itself) made it into this 2011 release. It's a film based on a film based on a novella. A photocopy of a photocopy.

A complete piece of crap, in other words.

The movie industry is notorious for this blasphemy. The producers are past masters. They take a perfectly good story, and instead of adapting it faithfully for the silver screen, they choose to adapt it remuneratively. They mutilate, bowdlerize, varnish, cheapen, and over-simplify (all in the name of "mass-market appeal") until we're left with a shoddy,  unintellectual, action-packed, sensationalist, overblown, mutated excuse for a film, devoid of plot, theme, symbolism, statement, or any redeeming feature whatsoever.

I don't know why Hollywood does this. That green stuff called money is probably the reason. Part of me likes to believe so, anyway. But in the blackest shades of night, in my most horrifying nightmares, the eldritch abomination called the Truth rears its ugly head. The producers and screenwriters in Los Angeles probably think Americans like this tripe. It's likely they believe that most Americans couldn't digest the deep thoughts and intellectual horror of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, so they dumbed it all down and repackaged it as a cheap horror film (three times!). Tinseltown has become so accustomed to truncating, abridging, censoring, simplifying and regurgitating the best works of fiction that it's become ingrained on the industry's consciousness that Americans like these dull, trite, recycled hack jobs.

Why do studio executives believe this nonsense? I'm not sure. The truth of the matter should be self-evident: that moviegoers prefer a well-shot, well-acted, thoughtfully scripted, original film with practical special effects instead of a CG-filled gore-fest. But then again, human beings have a long history of believing strange things. They believe that aliens seeded the Earth with life. That dinosaurs coexisted side-by-side with human beings. That Dave Mathews can sing.

In short, I believe that the 2011 adaptation of The Thing is yet another hackneyed, money-grubbing, unfaithful and unnecessary waste of digital film; that it should never have been made, or even conceived; and that all discerning and tasteful movie-goers should boycott it with a vengeance.

That's if there are any discerning and tasteful movie-goers left, anyway.

I solemnly swear that if ever I became a successful sci-fi novelist, I will jealously guard the rights to my works. As long as I live, I will never allow Hollywood to get its vile, shameless, mass-marketing hands on them. Because I know what will happen.

The stories, my stories, characters I created lovingly, plot lines I slaved over, villains I kicked around, concepts I nurtured from birth...they will come out of the Gilded Mulcher looking like this:

Nuh-uh. Not happening. No way.

one Briton, one Scot, and one Irishman

A poor attempt at satirizing a George Thorogood tune, I know. But I didn't want an awkward title. I was going to originally call this "a few of my favorite Scotsmen" but then I thought the English and the Irish would get ticked off (and the Welsh would probably feel that way, too, but I've already talked about them, so they haven't got a leg to stand on). If nothing else, I'm a fair man. So I said, "The heck with it. I'll do what I do best: a play on words." I thought since I'm heading to the U.K. in LESS THAN A WEEK (grooooooooooooooooovy), I'd pen a little article about some of my favorite people who are from around there. There's quite a few. I mean, I have favorite people all over the world. Miyamoto Musashi, in Japan; Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Russia; Montezuma, in Mexico (just for the name); Hypatia, in Greece; and Leonardo da Vinci, in Italy, just to name a few (and NO, I don't like him because of that stupid Dan Brown book). But I've always been something of an Anglophile. You remember how I said I'm on a secret mission to impress British folk? That's part of it. Plus it's hard not to appreciate a country where some of the world's greatest writers, poets, rock-'n'-rollers, explorers, and pirates—all folk I admire intensely—originated. So, in alphabetical order:

England - H.G. Wells
Occupation: Writer I agonized over this decision, believe me. There are a great many English authors who made the final round. But I had to go with the ultimate. H.G. Wells, the first and greatest science fiction author, deserves far more recognition than he's gotten. (Jules Verne was Wells's contemporary, and that Frenchman wrote some excellent sci-fi too, but he was a little heavy on the description.) In all seriousness, I believe that Wells's grave should be platinum-plated. Statues of the man ought to be put up in temples, and his works fired into space on rockets for publication on a galactic scale. The reason Wells deserves such accolades is this: even now, over a hundred years after he wrote his stories, many many years after his death, the man still has the power to scare the sweet bejesus out of us. Honestly, even the dumbed-down, abridged version of The War of the Worlds I read as a kid spooked me something righteous. (The creepy black-and-white illustrations helped.) Horrific aliens fire space capsules from Mars to Earth, pop out in their unstoppable war machines, fry everybody in the vicinity, and proceed to subjugate humanity with laser beams, poison gas, and aircraft. Come on, how scary is that? It's a timeless theme, one that's been done and redone over and over again. But Wells did it first. Don't forget that the mere radio broadcast of this story, done by Orson Welles in 1938, threw the United States into mass panic. Wells's works were oddly prescient, too. The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, long before laser beams, poison gas and flying machines were anything more than, well, science fiction. In TWOTW, Wells predicted tank warfare (his visions of walking tripods armed with guns presaged the rolling war machines on the battlefields of the Great War), chemical weapons, lasers, and airplanes (not to mention space travel), and correctly anticipated, with his usual anthropic cynicism, that such inventions would be put to military use. Unlike a lot of science fiction today, Wells's actually had a point. Ol' Herbert made excoriating observations about human nature, civilization, and society in his books. The War of the Worlds used his invading army of Martians to satirize British imperialism, which had reached its peak at the time of the book's publication. In creating a technologically superior alien race, wholly without conscience, which readily subjugates those judged inferior, Wells showed up the theory of social Darwinism as the rich and privileged of Western society were applying it to society. Wells also hinted darkly at the implications and results of total war by having his Martians attempt to utterly destroy the infrastructure and population of planet Earth. As deep, observant, insightful, incisive, and thrilling as TWOTW is, my favorite book by Wells is one that no one else has ever heard of: The Island of Doctor Moreau. The gloves come off in this one. A shipwreck survivor lands on a tropical island where dwell an enigmatic doctor, his alcoholic assistant, and a race of strange half-men, half-animals. The castaway, named Edward Prendick, first believes these strange creatures to be men, surgically altered by Moreau into beasts; but he later finds out that the reverse is the case. Moreau is a vivisectionist, and through a process of painful trial and error, he has transformed mindless beasts into a travesty of humanity. These half-beasts talk, make primitive tools, walk upright, build houses, cook, even have a religion of sorts. But the beast inside them refuses to be quelled. Infractions are common. The beast-men occasionally lose control, kill animals for food, suck up drink, run wild, break the Law which they have established among themselves. Constant surgeries are required to keep them tame. Moreau, like a vengeful god, summons these transgressors back to his lab, its name whispered among the beast-men: "The House of Pain." All hell breaks loose when a particularly vicious specimen escapes the laboratory and runs wild on the island. The beast-men revert back to beasts, the protective compound burns down, and Prendick is forced to live like a beast himself, hunting and fishing, fighting off the savage and horrific inhabitants of the island, trying to build a raft and escape. Escape he does, but he is never quite the same. He now sees the primitive in the eyes of every man he passes on the streets of the civilized world. He understands now just what a thin line separates the rational, sentient human being from the ravening monster, the savage, the primal thing lurking in the hearts of humans. With The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells simultaneously reinvented the mad scientist archetype, skewered the callous, sinful, bestial side of Victorian society, and wrote a chillingly good piece of science fiction. For writing some of the most intelligent and meaningful essays on humanity, and couching it in some of the most creepy, engrossing and masterful science fiction on the planet, H.G. Wells is my favorite English person. Well, aside from Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York, that is.

HONORABLE MENTION: Cuthbert Collingwood (Admiral of the British Navy, noted for his service in the Napoleonic Wars and his association with Lord Nelson; biggest Geordie hero besides Brian Johnson); Queen Victoria (grandmother of Europe, come on); Emma Watson (enough said); Douglas Adams (galactic hitchhiker); Gertrude Bell (explorer extraordinaire); Sir Tim Berners-Lee (without whom I would not have a blog, nor an Internet to write it on); John Cleese (and the rest of the Monty Python bunch, including Terry Gilliam, who's American, and Terry Jones, who's technically Welsh...but John's my favorite. Silly walks, dead parrots, albatross, argument clinics, "and now for something completely different"). And, of course, no list of awesome English folk would be complete without that king of renegades, the eminently quotable, fantastically witty, hard-drinking, hard-fighting bad boy, the Man Himself, Winston Churchill.

Ireland - George Bernard Shaw Occupation: Playwright I love this guy. I really do. A wit to rival Samuel Johnson, and facial hair to blow Mark Twain, Santa Claus and Friedrich Nietzsche out of the water. And, kind of like H.G. Wells, he was something of a misanthrope. But he was a smart-ass on top of it, which is the best of both worlds. He was primarily a playwright, and used his characters as his own personal mouthpiece, dispensing various ribald pearls of wisdom unto the unwitting world. You should have heard some of the things that came out of this guy's mouth:

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…"

"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"Lack of money is the root of all evil."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"Democracy is a device that ensures we will be governed no better than we deserve."

"The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation."

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
Shaw made one observation that both I and Robert Kennedy have used as a personal slogan:

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
Or here, read this one. Here I am, calling Shaw a misanthrope and Wells a cynic, and then Shaw goes and sets me straight:

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
And wait! There's more. Here I am giving George some blog love, paging through some quotes of his, and I find this. It seems as if Shaw knew I was going to be writing a blog post about him:

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

The best Shaw quote in recorded history, though, is this one, in my opinion:

"We should all be obliged to go before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."
Shaw tickles me pink. Nobody's got the guts to say stuff like this these days and (a) really mean it, and (b) not care what anybody else thinks of you for saying it. Shaw never cared about that. He didn't think much of politics, nationalism or public education, and he made no secret of it. Yeah, sure, he was a Socialist. But he spoke his mind, wrote plays, novels, articles of all sorts, was an amateur photographer, won the Nobel Prize and an Oscar (both of which he hated), and penned most of his best works in a tiny, movable shack in the corner of his backyard. Those are all things I can identify with. For being an intelligent and prolific writer, a curmudgeonly philosopher, an eminently quotable sage, and an opinionated cuss, George Bernard Shaw is my favorite Irishman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Bram Stoker (inventor of one of the coolest literary villains of all time, Count Dracula); James Joyce (rewrote one of Homer's epics, setting it in the modern era, and was even gutsy enough to include a clinical description of the sex act, which got him banned from every bookstore in the Northern Hemisphere); Frank McCourt (rough life, good writer); Gráinne Ní Mháille (better known as Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen); and John French. Don't know who John French is? Well, I'll tell you. He was born in County Wexford. I never met anybody from County Wexford I didn't like. (Heck, I never met anybody from County Wexford, period.) Mr. French emigrated to England (Liverpool) and married Louise Woollam, a local girl. Their daughter, also named Louise, grew up and married a local bus conductor named Triple-H—ha ha, no, really, his name was Harold Hargreaves Harrison. Harold and Louise settled down in Liverpool together and, in 1943, they had a little boy, who they named George Harrison. That is why I love John French.
Scotland - John Paul Jones
Occupation: Badass Uh, hello? John Paul Jones? Honestly, do I even need to explain this? He's every American's favorite Scot (well, except for anybody wearing a kilt). I don't care if he was a dropout. I don't care if he was a deserter. I don't care if he flogged one of his sailors to death. I don't care if he only joined the Continental Navy just to get a piece of the English. None of that matters. The guy was awesomeness incarnate, and probably would've had to hire somebody to carry his balls around for him if he didn't have the steel backbone to hold them up. He got his first naval command when the captain and the first mate of the ship he was on (the John; origin of the phrase "on the john") caught a fever and died. Most people would've been scared stiff by being thrust into a command on the open sea like that, but not Jones. He went and piloted the ship back to port, and the John's grateful owners made him the master and gave him a cut of the cargo. He buddied up with Benjamin Franklin while in France in 1778, and the two of them apparently joined a frat together. Imagine the secret handshakes they must've put on while John Adams and stood nearby and rolled his eyes. When France formally allied with the United States that same year, Jones's new ship, the USS Ranger, became the first American military vessel to be saluted by French forces. Jones got a nine-gun salute from a French flagship as he was heading out to England to terrorize British shipping. Then the Ultimate Act of Bad-Assitude took place. While in command of the USS Bonhomme Richard, running wild in the North Sea off the coast of England in 1779, Jones was engaged by the 50-gun British warship Serapis. During a rare lull in the battle, the British commander yelled across, "You blokes had enough yet?" "Are you kidding, asshole?" Jones shouted back. "I haven't even started in on you sons-of-bitches yet!" This quip is commonly edited in high school history books to read "I have not yet begun to fight!" Rock on, John. For being a feisty short guy, beating the heck out of British shipping during the Revolutionary War, having consistent problems with authority, inspiring the stage name of Led Zeppelin's bassist, and pursuing one of the most colorful and versatile naval careers of the 18th century, John Paul Jones is my favorite Scotsman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Alexander Graham Bell (can you hear me now?); John Shepherd-Barron (inventor of the ATM); Mungo Park (explorer with a cool name, first Westerner to explore the Niger River); Bon Scott (AC/DC's original front man and one heck of a vocalist and bagpipe-player); Angus Young (best guitarist EVER); John Ross (admiral and Arctic explorer); and Ian Anderson (latter-day minstrel, prog-rocker and musician more worthy of the term "poet" than any rapper who has ever lived, or ever will). And now, I'd like to leave you with another of my favorite Scotsmen.

THINK WITH YOUR DIPSTICK, JIMMY!

Phase B1 complete

I've passed the written test for my private pilot's license.

for lack of a better word...

I'm not going to get much editing done on my novel tonight, I can already tell. I've gotten through Chapter 6, and I'm pleased to report that (to my eyes) Chapters 2 and 3 look largely all right. Chapter 4 might need a little maturation, like bourbon in a cask, plus some trimming and cleaning, like an oil lamp. Chapters 5 and 6 are holding my interest nicely. Perhaps I need to make the foreshadowing and inferences within them a tad more subtle. We'll see what that nice editor says. Like I said, I'm scared of that manuscript. It's like a hedge animal in a topiary that's still a bit rough around the edges, and I'm the gardener. Only the hedge animal is alive, like in The Shining. If I do it wrong, it'll tear me to pieces. Maybe I'll get to it after I finish this post. Yeah, maybe. Anyway, on with my story: I would not hesitate to assert that my brain is my most precious possession. Why, I couldn't do a thing without it. I've painstakingly trained it over the past 23 years to recognize obscure words, create fictive universes out of thin air, process abstract thought, make complex plans (and duly disregard them), precisely order my every thought and action, and conjure up vivid images of naked women at my command. However, I've lately become concerned that my vaunted mind has reached the peak of its performance, and is beginning to backslide. It appears, due to some disturbingly frequent occurrences, that my brain is no longer developing or smartening. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of these disquieting phenomena is my increasing inability to remember an appropriate word. When I'm speaking in an erudite manner (as I usually do), I will suddenly discover that the ten-dollar word I desperately need to bring the whole thing off eludes me. I've come up against these situations before, and my mind has never failed to supply me with a suitable and almost-as-erudite substitute. These days, I'm afraid, my brain merely fills the verbal gap with the first word to come to mind. And that word, usually, is anything but suitable. Consider the following example. Some months ago, before I left Korea, I was over at my friends' apartment. Adam and Elaine were my two English coworkers, and we'd often get together after work for dinner and a beer. I readily admit to being a little buzzed that evening. Somehow or other, we got to talking about plant sex. That is, botanical reproduction. Specifically, flowers. (I must've introduced this topic by saying something like 'You know why [wind-pollinated] flowers are so cool? Because they reproduce by spraying their genetic material all over creation.') Having successfully tripped through an entire lecture on anthers, and stamens, and sporangia, and pistils, and all that horticultural pornography, I was nearing the climax. I was in fine form, too. "So the male flowers open up, and if the wind is right, then all of the—" It was at this point that my mind failed me. I faltered suddenly. I couldn't remember the word "pollen." It utterly escaped me. This was infuriating. I desperately needed that word to finish what I was saying. But that mattered little to my stumbling synapses. So while my brain was fumbling with an ulterior way of expressing the idea of male genetic material, my mouth prudently opened and said "—jizz—" Two things happened in the next split-second which I don't need to tell you about. A & E burst out laughing and I, though chuckling good-naturedly, went red. I'd never said the word "jizz" before in my life. I hated it. As a rule, I dislike any crass slang term for biological processes or material. (Watch, everybody's going to post one in the comment box now.) Sometimes I have difficulty saying the word "sperm," even as it relates to whales. So to up and say a word like that, out of the blue, when my brain knew at least five other ways to say it which were more intelligent and highbrow...that was disconcerting. This happens to me more frequently than I care to admit. I'm not sure what I can attribute it to. It's a bit early for Alzheimer's to be setting in, and I wouldn't have thought the relatively small amount of drunkenness I've dabbled in would do the trick. It's exasperating, whatever the reason. And puzzling. Dumbfounding. Nonplussing. Bemusing. Befuddling. Confusing. Confounding, even. Well, maybe I haven't lost the synonym game yet.

the Pretentious Vaunter

Over the course of the last few years, I've gradually come to suspect something unpleasant about myself that I can't wholly dismiss. I'm a great deal less intelligent than I like to think. Want an example? I recently got into a grammar-quiz competition with a college friend. The rules are simple. She sends me, either by e-mail or text message, a word picked at random from a dictionary. If I know the word, I send back the definition. If I don't, I take my best guess. The original purpose of the game, as stated by my friend, is twofold: she gets to be dazzled by my reputedly impressive vocabulary, and she also learns the meaning of a few words herself. The score currently stands at 1-3. I knew the meaning of one word ("descry") while the definitions of the remaining three words ("foofaraw," "titivate," and "convivial") abjectly defeated me. As such, this pastime has served a second purpose, likewise twofold: it has simultaneously shown me that I (a) don't have nearly as many words in my vocabulary as I have loudly and proudly proclaimed in the past; and (b) that, while I understand the connotation of many uncommon English words, I am increasingly unable to articulate their literal denotation. There once was a time, back during my homeschooling days, when I could rattle off word definitions like I'd swallowed Merriam and Webster. Now, either because my reading and writing habits have gone into a decline in recent years, or because I have allowed myself to become mentally lazy, or because I drink too much—those days are gone. I forget words I used to know (and cherish) and find it difficult to properly and eloquently verbalize the meanings of others. In short, I'm a pretender. A fake. A phony. A fraud. A charlatan. I claim to be a wordsmith, a grammarian knowledgeable of bizarre and unusual diction, and yet I'm not. Heck, I only vaguely know the meaning of most of the words I routinely use in conversation or print; I certainly don't understand many of their roots, proper usage, or (as previously mentioned) even their literal definition. I have forgotten most of what I learned in ground school in the spring of 2008, and with my flight physical (and therefore, my first flying lesson in over 16 months) drawing nearer, I am frantically paging back through all of my pilot's textbooks to try and rebuild the dike. Most of what I read I remember, but had wholly forgotten in the meantime. Another, more painful example is my recent dismissal from the newspaper I worked at. I simply wasn't intelligent enough to get my mind in gear, learn lessons the first time, quit making stupid and obvious blunders, and write the way I was supposed to write. This is neither the first example of such bumbling idiocy which I have exhibited, nor will it be the last. This worries me deeply. If my vaunted literary prowess—hell, my mental prowess in general—is crumbling now, what kind of state will it be in when I'm forty? Fifty? Eighty? I don't want to wind up one of those cranky, senile old buggers who harangues everything in sight, can't remember the names of his grandchildren and is a burden to his friends and family. I'd sooner be shot dead, or ground up into fish food. Even more terrifying is the prospect of Alzheimer's disease, the only form of dementia I truly fear, which will rob me of my precious memories and my formerly reputable vocabulary. That is, I'm sad to admit, the main reason I'm going to such trouble to write in this blog and keep up a daily journal, so when the Alzheimer's hits, I can thumb or click back through the pages and remember all the cool stuff I've seen and done. Call it a fatuous superstition. I may not even remember that I kept a journal when I have Alzheimer's, for all I know. But just in case... The suspicion that I am gradually turning stupid—or have always been stupid—has been gnawing at me for some time, and is beginning to prey upon my mind and heart. To someone who values intelligence higher than almost anything else in this world or the rest, this new mental trend is anathema—agonizing torment. I've built my reputation and my life on learning, on knowing things nobody else does, on having a tremendous vocabulary, on retaining vital information that will serve me later. And now, it seems, a plug has been pulled somewhere in my brain, and all that which I have mentally striven for is leaking slowly away...or worse, might never have been there in the first place. I am ashamed at my lack of cerebral rectitude, and deathly afraid that my friends and family might find out just what a jumped-up, pretentious nobody I really am—as has already begun to happen with this grammar-quiz game between my friend and me. I almost wrote "between me and my friend." I'm doing it again.