Stratovania

Halloween is over, but I still have some spooky stuff to write about. Last Saturday, Beth and I went to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park on Coney Island, as it was the last weekend in the year the rides were running. We went on the Wonder Wheel, the Spook-A-Rama, and the Phoenix, the last of which is a small, slow roller coaster. They did have some Halloween decorations up, including a building entrance shaped like a zombie head.

I also always enjoy when rides have murals with seemingly random things in them. Like, this was what was in the back of the bumper car enclosure.

I get the cars and the car model, but a football player, Captain America, and the Statue of Liberty? If it's a patriotic thing, then why does the Statue look like she's been injured?


In the evening, we saw Weird Al at Carnegie Hall, with Emo Philips opening. This was the first time I'd ever been there, and I didn't even practice, just took the subway. It was the same kind of tour as the last time we saw him, with Al and his band playing mostly his original songs. They pulled out a few unexpected ones, like "Velvet Elvis" and "Good Old Days." When introducing "One More Minute," Al talked about how they performed it on network TV back in 1986, and the network insisted on censoring the line "I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue," which already doesn't make sense, but then they made it much worse by just bleeping the word "tongue." "Skipper Dan" is based on a time when the guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland mentioned his failed acting career, but Beth wondered after the show that it might have been awkward for Weird Al to just go on rides without being hassled. Maybe he went in disguise. For "Nature Trail to Hell," an appropriate choice for Halloween, he did the organ part on a midi accordion. Both "Craigslist" and "Albuquerque" were extended, the former including a long bit of free-form nonsense in the part about his being on a phone call with his mother. I know there was something about the snakes rising up, a phrase Al has used before. "Albuquerque" not only had more kinds of doughnuts and the band playing the beginning of the song again after the part about the narrator losing his train of thought, but also an apology for using the word "hermaphrodite." He said that, in that context, it was just a medical term. While Al generally manages to avoid problematic humor, he does have a tendency to use some mildly offensive words presumably just because they sound silly, particularly "midget" and "albino." And in the song, a later line refers to the hermaphroditic person as a man. "Dare to Be Stupid" was performed with a lounge arrangement. For the encore, there was a cover of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," then a mostly-acoustic medley of "Amish Paradise," "Smells Like Nirvana," "White & Nerdy," "Word Crimes," and "Yoda," the latter including the chant. This is the best of the pictures I was able to take from our seats in the back row.


We visited Tavie and Sean on Sunday, and watched some Halloween stuff, or actually rewatched it in my case. You can see my thoughts on revisits to The Halloween That Almost Wasn't and Return to Oz here. After that, we looked at a house in Flatbush that really went all out on Halloween decorations (well, I guess the owner went all out, not the house itself, although you never know during the spooky season).

We didn't do much on actual Halloween, aside from watch a few other things. We voted yesterday, and today we saw The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre.

It's closing soon, so Beth bought tickets for it. She saw it before years ago, but I've only seen the 2004 movie version, although I did hear my dad's CD of selections from it a lot as a kid. It's a very impressive show, complete with a lot of lighting tricks and pyrotechnics. Although it wasn't really intentional that we saw it on Halloween week, I guess it's sort of appropriate, even if the version of the Phantom in the musical is much less monstrous in appearance than in other takes on the character. He's presumably somewhat supernatural as well, although I guess that's kind of ambiguous. A lot of his tricks are based on mechanics and stealth, but he did curse Carlotta. Or maybe that was psychosomatic. Still, if he has the ability to control minds to some extent, maybe Christine wasn't entirely in control of herself when she went down into the sewer with him. Otherwise, she comes across as kind of absurdly naive. I've heard, probably mostly from Beth, that there's a certain contingent who think Christine should have gotten into a relationship with the Phantom and who don't like Raoul. What did Raoul even do, aside from being upper class? She compared it to people who hate Cosette in Les Miserables, although it's not like Eponine was a serial killer. I remember reading a quote from Terry Pratchett, who wrote the Discworld equivalent of the story in Maskerade, that the message of the musical is that you can get away with murder if you're charming. I might have to read the original book; I understand it's not very long. If I do, I'll probably do a bit of comparison and contrast.

Speaking of spooky music, there's one short piece that I've heard over and over again in different contexts, but never knew what it was called or the original source. For instance, I remember hearing it in elementary school music class with the lyrics "We are here to scare you-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo." Anyway, it's called "Mysterioso Pizzicato," and it was originally used in silent film scores as a theme for villains. I thought of it recently because I was looking up the music to Wizards & Warriors, which uses it as the boss theme.

If I were to refer to a giant, you'd have a pretty good idea what I mean, right? Or would you? While giants are all big and humanoid, they vary in a lot of ways. Some are only slightly larger than normal humans, while others are truly huge. Goliath's height is given in different versions of the Bible as "four cubits and a span" (about six and a half feet) and "six cubits and a span" (about nine and a half feet). The Nephilim are said in the Book of Enoch to be 300 cubits (about 450 feet) in height. The Gigantes and Hecatonchires were presumably large enough to move mountains. Most of the Norse Jotun didn't seem to be much bigger than humans or Aesir, but their ruler Utgard-Loki had a glove that Thor and his companions mistook for a building, and the primordial giant Ymir must have been planet-sized. When a creature can vary from eight feet tall to positively Himalayan, they're probably not all the same species, are they? Then again, using scientific terminology for beings that couldn't really exist, as the Square-Cube Law means a human frame that big would collapse instantly, might not be the best idea.


So what about ogres? As far as fairy tales go, I don't know that there's a whole lot of difference between giants and ogres. Well, that's not entirely true. It's more that there doesn't HAVE to be a difference. A large being that's basically humanoid but with grotesque features that eats regular-sized humans could be called either a giant or an ogre. The thing is, however, that some giants of mythology and folklore are friendly, helpful, intelligent, and even beautiful. Ogres pretty much HAVE to be mean, ugly, and dim-witted, or they wouldn't be ogres. I guess they could be considered a subset of giants that are less human than their fellows. The Wikipedia page says that the term dates back to twelfth-century French, and gives several possible derivations.


There is, perhaps, even more confusion over trolls. These creatures of Norse mythology are often more or less interchangeable with giants and ogres, but other traditions say that they are essentially human-sized dwellers of forests and underground caves. Trolls are generally considered to have magical powers, and in some parts of Scandinavia, the stories told about them were similar to ones about fairies in other parts of Europe. Modern popular culture still provides several different takes on trolls. The Scandinavian folk tale of the Three Billy-Goats Gruff makes its troll a ravenous creature that lives under a bridge and is easily fooled, which would make it not all that different from your typical ogre. But we also can't forget the troll dolls that gained popularity in the early sixties and have enjoyed occasional resurgences since then. I remember them being big in the mid-nineties, when I was in high school. These trolls are hardly ogrish brutes, but instead cute creatures with brightly-colored hair. Tolkien's trolls are large and uncouth humanoids that turn to stone in the daylight, a trait that he probably took from tales of the Norse dwarves. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series expands upon this idea of Tolkien's by having trolls made of rock, and saying that they freeze up in the daylight because they can't handle the heat. Their silicon-based brains are similar in operation to computers, so trolls in warmer areas tend not to be very bright. Sunscreen and devices like the cooling helmet Sergeant Detritus wears have enabled trolls to function more smoothly in cities. Oh, and for what it's worth, the term "troll" for an Internet agitator presumably comes not from the monsters but from the fishing term, although it works pretty well with both definitions.

Since it is Thanksgiving, I feel pretty much obligated to write something related to the holiday, but it can be hard to come up with ideas. I could always say what I'm thankful for, but that's a bit trite, isn't it? So what is Thanksgiving actually about? Sure, it's about feeling grateful, and about how English pilgrims couldn't have survived without the help of the Native Americans, whom they eventually killed off through war and disease. But more than that, it's a harvest festival, and such occasions are known throughout the world. It's actually a bit late in the year when compared to other harvest celebrations, but George Washington sometimes declared days of thanksgiving in December. It was Abraham Lincoln who made Thanksgiving a national holiday and set it in November. Regardless, seeing as how it's intended to honor the harvest, we can perhaps say that the people who insist on calling it "Turkey Day" are actually right in a way, because it's about food. Many holidays are, really.


One item that tends to be associated with Thanksgiving in this country is the cornucopia, or horn of plenty. This is actually a quite old symbol, which Wikipedia informs us dates back at least as far as the fifth century BC. Back then, it was commonly associated with Amalthea, the goat who suckled Zeus in his childhood. The Romans would later depict it as a property of Fortuna, the goddess of...well, I think you can figure that out from her name. Christians also use it, although some evangelicals think horns are of the Devil.


The cornucopia probably appears in some fairy tales, but I can't think of any examples offhand. I do remember a story about a magic grinder that could produce any food, and ended up filling the entire ocean with salt. Tales involving objects that can produce unlimited amounts of something often extol the dangers of not giving them specific instructions. Two of my favorite fantasy series definitely used cornucopias in particular. In Ruth Plumly Thompson's Handy Mandy in Oz, one of Nox the Ox's golden horns produces whatever the person turning and removing it asks for. The term "cornucopia" isn't used, but the literal translation "horn of plenty" is. And in Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith, Tiffany Aching receives a cornucopia. If I remember correctly, it would obey instructions, but only if given in Ephebian (the Discworld equivalent of Greek).

countblastula had a meme up about which authors he'd read the most books by, and that seems like a pretty cool activity. I'm actually not sure who my top author would be, though. L. Frank Baum would definitely rank pretty highly, and I've read most of his fantasy, but surprisingly little of his other works (no Mary Louise or Boy Fortune Hunters, for instance). Terry Pratchett would also have to rank up there, as I've read every Discworld book plus Good Omens. There are times when I read more by series than author, although if I like one series, I'll sometimes branch out into an author's other work. Let me try for a Top Five:

1. Terry Pratchett - 38 - Thirty-seven Discworld books (including the young adult ones), plus Good Omens (co-written with Neil Gaiman, but I'm counting it anyway)

2. Piers Anthony - 32 - All of the Xanth books except the latest one, which I'm working on now.

3. L. Frank Baum - 28 - Fourteen main Oz books, Queer Visitors from Oz, Little Wizard Stories of Oz, Mother Goose in Prose, The Magical Monarch of Mo, Dot and Tot of Merryland, American Fairy Tales, The Master Key, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Enchanted Island of Yew, Queen Zixi of Ix, John Dough and the Cherub, The Sea Fairies, Sky Island, Policeman Bluejay

4. Ruth Plumly Thompson - 24 - Twenty-one Oz books, The Curious Cruise of Captain Santa, The Wizard of Way-Up and Other Wonders, Sissajig and Other Surprises

5. Douglas Adams - 8 - Five Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, two Dirk Gently books, and The Salmon of Doubt

Actually, I think there might be some authors of Oz apocrypha (Chris Dulabone, for instance) in between the fourth and fifth, but I don't feel like counting those up right now. And I could easily be forgetting something.

The use of the term "undead" to refer to certain sorts of monstrous creatures might well have originated with Bram Stoker, who applied it to vampires. The actual definition of the term is a bit vague, so some types of beings sometimes count as undead and sometimes don't. Werewolves are sometimes grouped in with the undead, but I don't think they were originally, as there's no real connection between turning into a wolf and acting alive after death. Legends of vampires and other monsters eventually merged with those of werewolves, however. While Dracula's most famous alternate form is a bat, the novel clearly states that he could also turn into a wolf. The common ideas of lycanthropy being communicable and its victim becoming indestructible unless killed in a very specific way (silver being one popular killer of both werewolves and vampires) turned the werewolf into a sort of undead being, but not all modern werewolf stories hold to these concepts.


Zombies are very popular these days, although I'm not entirely sure why, as they have no real personalities. I guess there's a certain appeal to mindless grunts, though. Zombies are sort of like Goombas from the Mario series, or the Foot Soldiers from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and video games. There are millions of them, and even though they're pretty dumb and not too hard to defeat individually, they just keep coming. And there isn't a whole lot of guilt involved in killing people who are already dead. The idea of zombies originates in Voodoo, and is thought by some to be based on the results of drugs. As voodoo zombies are said to be under the control of a sorcerer, I suppose they pretty much have to be mindless drones. I have seen attempts to give personalities to zombies, with my personal favorite being Reg Shoe from the Discworld series, who spends his spare time campaigning for rights for the undead. Can Discworld zombies, who have their own minds, often hold down steady jobs, and seem to achieve their undead state due to determination rather than magic, truly be considered zombies in the traditional sense? Maybe not, and there are a few lines in Reaper Man that suggest even the characters realize this, but "zombie" has come to be a pretty generic term for the animated undead. If you want to get technical about it, "revenant" is a more generic term for a reanimated corpse. There's also the lich, which developed by way of Dungeons & Dragons into a person who became undead by choice, and retains his or her original mind. I've seen it suggested on an Oz mailing list that the Wicked Witches of the East and West, kept alive only by means of their magic, could count as liches, but that might be a bit of a stretch.


I believe the idea of mummies as undead monsters originated with horror movies. While mummification was presumably intended to preserve the body for a person's journey to the next world, I don't know of any indication that the ancient Egyptians thought the bodies themselves would come back to life. The embalming process does add a certain amount of flavor to the zombie concept, though. And speaking of classic horror characters, I'm not exactly sure how to categorize Frankenstein's monster, who was brought to life through a scientific process, and was quite capable of human thought and emotion despite his hideous appearance.


Finally, we come to ghouls, and if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, they were originally demons from Middle Eastern folklore. They're known for eating the flesh of dead bodies (and apparently sometimes living ones as well) and taking the forms of the people they eat. The idea that zombies eat flesh as well was presumably borrowed from ghoul stories, and George Romero played a major part in popularizing the idea of reanimated corpses eating human flesh. I think it makes more sense for demon to eat bodies than for a revenant to do the same. Do zombies even have functioning digestive systems? Oh, well. As long as the rules are internally consistent and your vampires don't sparkle, you can pretty much do what you want with these undead monsters in your own fiction.

One common archetype in folklore and mythology is that of the trickster, an often comic figure who breaks rules in order to achieve his (or her, although tricksters are predominantly male) own ends. Tricksters vary in their conception, with some being fairly harmless practical jokers, others playing tricks in order to achieve a greater good, and still others being downright malicious. While tricksters tend to be intelligent in their actual tricks, they are often seen as generally foolish in other respects. The idea of tricksters has lasted over time, still being quite prominent in modern media, especially in cartoons. Some animals, like foxes and rabbits, are commonly shown as having the personalities of tricksters. Among others, Reynard from French folklore, Brer Rabbit, and Bugs Bunny all fit into that role. One of the most famous mythological tricksters, however, is the Native American figure of Coyote.


There are actually several tricksters in Native American lore, with Coyote being the most significant in the Great Plains and parts of the Pacific coast. The Raven is also a major trickster character in the Pacific Northwest in particular, with deeds like the creation of Multnomah Falls sometimes attributed to either one in different Wasco stories. I've seen other myths with the Rabbit as a trickster, and even one with a crafty Sandpiper. Coyote seems to be the best known character in Native American mythology, though. His character can be quite different from one myth to another, but he's often shown to be a shape-shifter, and to have had powers to alter geography. He's been credited with slaying monsters (sometimes from inside their bodies), creating mankind, bringing fire to humans, and inadvertently making death permanent. For a trickster, he's sometimes shown to be quite easily tricked himself, and not unlikely to make a fool of himself.


One of the nastier tricksters in classical mythology is Loki, a giant who joined the Norse pantheon at the invitation of his friend Odin. Some myths show Loki as a willing helper of the Aesir, as when he helps Thor to retrieve his lost hammer, and accompanies him to the land of the giants. Others, however, have him trying to spread discord among the gods, and I have to suspect that he might just be someone who takes whichever side would be more fun for him. The last straw as far as the Aesir are concerned is when he is responsible for the death of Odin's son Baldur. As punishment for this, Loki is bound with his son's entrails under a poisonous snake. His wife Sigyn manages to catch most of the snake's venom in a bowl, but when she empties the vessel, the poison drips down onto Loki and makes him cause earthquakes. The story has it that he will remain bound until the time of Ragnarok, during which he will fight against the gods and end up dying. Like Coyote, Loki is a shape-shifter, sometimes even taking female form, and once becoming pregnant with a foal after turning into a mare in order to distract a stallion.


In Western Africa mythology, the most prominent trickster character is Anansi, a god who is sometimes portrayed as a spider, and has a lot of the same traits as tricksters in other cultures. One of the most significant Anansi tales involves his capturing various dangerous animals in order to purchase the very concept of stories from his father Nyame, god of the sky. The story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby is thought to have originated as an Anansi story in which the god himself ends up being tricked. In Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Anansi (who goes by the name "Mr. Nancy" while in the United States) plays a major role, and relates a particularly smutty story about his stealing large testicles from a tiger.


Greco-Roman mythology has several figures who fit the trickster model. Perhaps the best choice would be Prometheus, whose role is somewhat similar to that of Loki in Norse mythology. Like Loki, he was a member of an enemy tribe (in this case the Titans instead of the giants) who defected and helped out the gods, but also went against them in some significant situations. The two most important are both occasions of his helping out mankind at the expense of the Olympians, once tricking Zeus into not taking the best meat in sacrifices, and another time stealing fire for humans (as Coyote is also said to have done). As punishment, he was chained to a rock, and a vulture would eat his liver (which, seeing as how its bearer was immortal, would automatically regenerate) every day; but he was eventually freed by Hercules. As my fellow Terry Pratchett fans probably know, Discworld had its own version of that myth, with Fingers-Mazda as the thief of fire and Cohen the Barbarian as the hero who rescues him from bondage. But getting back to the actual Prometheus, unlike with the other tricksters I've mentioned, I don't know any stories of his ever becoming the butt of the joke. That role might, however, be fulfilled by his slow-witted brother Epimetheus, through whom Zeus punishes all mankind by means of Pandora and her box (which was probably actually a jar). Hermes is also sometimes portrayed as a trickster (as, for instance, when he stole Apollo's cattle during his childhood), while Loki's role of sowing discord is attributed to Eris.

Since suegypt requested a post on seven-league boots, I might as well tackle them now. Fantastic literature is full of shoes with magical transportation properties, including Hermes' winged sandals, Jack the Giant-Killer's shoes of swiftness, and the Wicked Witch of the East's Silver Shoes. Seven-league boots, however, are a particular kind of magical footwear that, in one stride, will take the wearer...well, seven leagues, which is the same as twenty-one miles. Why this distance? Well, the Wikipedia article suggests that it was traditional for a horseback messenger to change horses every seven leagues, meaning that was the only time that their boots would touch the ground. Certainly an intriguing idea, but this could easily be one of those origin stories that everyone repeats but that turns out to most likely be bunk, like "Ring Around the Rosie" being about the plague or "the whole nine yards" having something to do with machine guns. Anyway, seven-league boots make appearances in several European fairy tales, and still show up from time to time in more recent literature. There's a pair in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, and Howl's assistant Michael tells Sophie that a single step will actually only take a person three and a half leagues. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series plays on the idea of seven-league boots, saying that they're no longer in use by the wizards there because of the strain that walking seven leagues at once will put on the human body, particularly in the groin area. I think I'll stick to magic carpets, thank you!

Video game characters tend to be much harder to kill than real people. Well, harder to kill permanently, that is. Real people don't tend to die simply from touching turtles, but they also don't have extra lives or the ability to save the game. Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time actually gives an interesting idea as to how saving games might work in a somewhat more realistic (albeit still magical) setting, with a yeti that can record the state of its life at some point, and then regenerate in that condition after dying.

In addition to saving, role-playing games tend to include magical items and spells that can bring your characters back to life. The prominence of such items varies somewhat, with World Tree Leaves being rather rare in the Dragon Quest games, while Phoenix Down is all over the Final Fantasy series. Also interesting is that the DQ series actually has the party dragging along the coffins of fallen members (although they were replaced by blob-shaped ghosts in the earlier American releases, which really didn't make too much sense), while the FF games merely say that they've fainted or "swooned" or something. FF1 might well be the only one where you can't revive fallen characters simply by staying at an inn. And Chrono Trigger and Mystic Quest have slain characters coming back with one hit point after the battle ends (provided the entire party isn't wiped out). But the main question I have is why, when people die for the sake of the story, someone can't just give them a Phoenix Down? I mean, okay, I can see Tellah wearing himself out by casting powerful spells, but why does a sword in the back do in Aeris for good when being stabbed and shot at usually only does a minimal amount of damage? It's never all that clear. Neither is why the characters don't get any weaker when they lose hit points, at least in all the games I've played.

Speaking of death, this might well be the end of the weekly video game posts. That certainly doesn't mean I won't still be addressing video games on this journal, but I've pretty much run out of ideas for the time being.

The next stop in my ongoing reviews of XTC albums is English Settlement, apparently a favorite among the general public, but not really of mine. That's not to say it's bad, just that I think there are other albums with better overall song quality. Oh, well. It was originally released as a double album, and the earliest American releases cut it down to a single by removing some of the songs. The cover of this album features the Uffington White Horse, which can be found in the chalk hills near Swindon, and has become somewhat of an iconic image for the band.



Interestingly (at least to me), Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men reveals that the Discworld has its own version of this horse in its own chalk country. Anyway, on to the individual songs.

( Let me off of this English roundabout. )

I haven't had quite as much time to read recently (and I've been spending a lot of the time I HAVE had on the computer), but I've still finished some books in this new year.

The graphic novel adaptation of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic - Although I believe Sir Terry Pratchett isn't too keen on graphic novels (I remember reading a chat transcript where he said Detritus the Troll was probably too intellectual to enjoy them), some of his books have been adapted into the graphic format, and this take on the first two Discworld books wasn't bad, and was quite faithful to the book. There were some cases where good jokes from the text didn't work so well when brought over into the comic format, but they mostly kept in the scenes that would translate while leaving out the ones that wouldn't. The weirdest change was the removal of Trymon from The Light Fantastic, instead making Galder Weatherwax the villain of the piece, but it honestly didn't affect the story that much. And while the drawings weren't quite up to Paul Kidby's level, they were quite accurate, and I liked some of the artist's interpretations of weirder characters (like the iconograph imp).

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde - The first book in the Thursday Next series, which was recommended to me by rockinlibrarian. She must be particularly fond of stories about transportation between the real world and the worlds of literature, since she also suggested I read Inkheart. While that book's real world is more or less our own, though, Thursday Next's is one with cloning of prehistoric animals, time travel, vampires, and militant defenders of particular authors or literary devices. It's sort of a combination of mystery, science fiction, police procedural, parallel-Earth fiction, and a bit of fantasy. The only other book I can recall reading that combined so many different sorts of plots and genres was Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams (which also involves a famous work of literature being changed, in that case Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, while it's Jane Eyre in Fforde's book). The odd mix sometimes seemed to be overreaching a bit, but it was coherent and engaging, and I'll probably read more of this series.

The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander - I'd had the Prydain series recommended to me as far back as elementary school, but I didn't actually read any of them until now. Maybe the fact that I found Disney's adaptation of The Black Cauldron rather unmemorable (about all I remember from it is Gurgi) contributed to my reluctance to read the books. I don't know. Anyway, I think the book was a bit slow-paced for such a short volume, and the characters initially came across more as archetypes than individuals. They did grow on me as the story progressed, though. I liked Eilonwy all the way through, and Fflewdur Fflam was amusing. Taran was kind of annoying, but I guess that's why he has to go through several more books of adventures before becoming High King (at least if the spoilers I've read are accurate {g}).

I also checked out The Annotated Brothers Grimm from the library, but that's not exactly the kind of book that's suited for reading straight through. I might have to add it to my Amazon wishlist, though.

Also, if I may briefly switch to a topic that doesn't involve books (at least as far as I know), check out this new Neko Case song.