All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
Over the course of the next eleven days or so there will be about eight duck pictures in the Photo of the Day post.
My apologies. I really have to get out and take some different subjects. I intended to go to a car show but the weather was predicted to be rainy and I chickened out.
Mea culpa!
Princess Sack of Potatoes is enjoying her first pair of roller skates and I guess it triggered this memory. I remember when this was a goofy fun song when I was in grammar school. Ah, those were the carefree days.
What makes America great is Americans, not some global economic think tank idea about “Cosmopolitanism.”
We’re not a group of backwoods rubes crouching in fear of the outside world. What we are, and should always be, are people who care more about the well-being of each other and not the stock portfolio of a multinational corporation that will pull the rug at the first chance of increasing profit shares. This nation’s initials are USA not GDP. The overly misused phrase of collectivism when describing Marxist-style ideologies has woefully made it a dirty word for those of us on the Right-wing to employ. It needs to be reclaimed and utilized often. It is the proper attitude to have for our fellow Americans’ living conditions. We are all in the same boat, whether some are in first-class cabins or third-class.
Are protectionist tariff policies the silver bullet solution that will restore American labor and wage loss woes? Will the Rust Belt be revitalized with a glut of new manufacturing jobs by next year? Of course not. But it’s a start. Prepare for pain and embrace the understanding that it is needed and long overdue. The medicine that cures does not always go down easily. To go down fighting is better than to simply accept the current state of affairs.
Legacy media reporting tries to lead one to believe that tariffs will be the only strategy Trump will use. That is folly and only propaganda for the low-information citizen as they like to call most of us. Stronger tariffs are only one piece of the equation that (might) correct the dismal path we are on.
Things are very wrong with how the game is set up. Many of us know this. The promised results of NAFTA, free trade (Ha!) and WTO platitudes were a siren song that mainly enriched a select few. Brave voices spoke out on this such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. They were right.
It is time for something different and if it takes burning my 401K to the ground so that my kids do not have to be serfs to the worship of an almighty GDP Excel spreadsheet God of Globohomo, then I say burn it to the ground.
“Catch Me If You Can” is the screen adaptation of the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr.; a boy who at the age of sixteen years old impersonates an airline pilot, a medical doctor and a lawyer and steals millions of dollars as he crisscrosses the United States and the rest of the world forging and passing bad checks.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr. a New York city teenager whose parents Frank Sr. (played by Christopher Walken) and Paula are divorcing due to the IRS fraud investigation that has swallowed up Frank Sr.’s livelihood. Rather than acknowledge his parents’ split he runs away. And while trying to survive on his own he figures out how to impersonate adults like airline pilots and forge checks.
Eventually his successful check forging career catches the attention of the FBI’s bank crimes division in the person of Carl Hanratty played by Tom Hanks. But for a while Frank’s dead-heading from city to city on airline flights keeps him one step ahead. But eventually Hanratty learns Frank’s true identity and Frank tries to throw him off his trail by laying low. He impersonates a doctor down in Atlanta at a small hospital. Eventually he tries to settle down with a nurse who wants to marry him. Her father (played by Martin Sheen) is a successful lawyer down in Louisiana and Frank convinces him that he’s not only a doctor but also has a law degree and after (legitimately) passing the Louisiana bar exam he settles in to become his future father-in-law’s assistant prosecutor. But just as the engagement is being celebrated Hanratty shows up and Frank bails out the back window and escapes.
Frank leaves the United States and travels around Europe and elsewhere but eventually Hanratty catches up to him in France and brings him back to America. He makes one last desperate break by escaping from an airliner bathroom through the pipe chase and escaping out of the taxiing plane. But Hanratty finds him when he tries to see his mother and drags him off to jail. He is convicted of grand theft and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
But over the course of several years Hanratty visits Frank in prison and decides the FBI could use his extraordinary knowledge of check fraud. He gets Frank released into Hanratty’s custody and eventually Frank becomes a valuable asset to law enforcement and eventually becomes extremely rich perfecting fraud countermeasures for banks and other financial institutions.
This is a remarkably entertaining movie. I’m assuming a lot has been stretched from the literal truth for the sake of enhancing the plot. But if even a quarter of the things he did in the movie are true, it’s a remarkable story. Frank Jr.’s brilliance as a criminal and a confidence man is contrasted with his search to restore the family life that is exploded in the beginning of the movie when his father’s wealth is snatched away by the IRS and his wife leaves him. The interplay between these two facets of his existence gives poignancy to the story. The ironic aspect is that every Christmas Frank Jr. calls Carl Hanratty to talk and Carl figures out that Frank calls because he has no one else to talk to. It’s a very strange relationship between the two of them but it is effectively portrayed. All the main characters are acted very ably and for once Spielberg directs a picture in a very balanced and well-paced way. I’ll say this movie comes highly recommended.
When I was an undergraduate, I participated in an intensive summer program in Classical Greek language and one of the sections of the course was to read one of Plato’s dialogs (Ion) and sections from the Republic. And that was interesting because after having read a bunch of Plato in translation I always wondered if maybe it lost something in translation. It seemed that the stuff Socrates said was a bunch of nonsense. Maybe if read in the original it would seem less silly. But that summer I was disabused of that hope. Nothing was lost in translation. It was goofy stuff.
All of Socrates intellectual opponents in these dialogs are straw men who are set up to allow Plato to go through his dialectical arguments proving that no one knows anything but Socrates and therefore the world should be ruled by philosopher-kings that have been trained by Plato and his fellow philosophers at the Academy.
Okay, I’m pretty dismissive of the father of Western philosophy. But there really is no other position I can see. But by the same token he is also the man who attracted Aristotle to Athens and thereby brought him to the attention of the world. So, building the first western university did have many positive effects. After all Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s tutor and Alexander is responsible for building Alexandria in Egypt and Alexandria became a great center for learning and science under Ptolemy; one of Alexander’s successors. So, good for you Plato.
Having never systematically studied Plato’s life I read this book to see what incites might be hidden there. Unfortunately, there is not much esoteric knowledge that a scholar can add to the corpus of Plato’s work. Most of what’s there is the common legend and what’s added by conjecture doesn’t really matter to anyone but possibly a specialist who wants to speculate whether the Republic was written in which range of years and before or after some other dialog such as Gorgias.
What I did enjoy was the sections of the book that reviewed the history of Athens and other parts of the Hellenic world in Plato’s time. Plato lived during the end of the Peloponnesian War and the defeat of Athens. He lived under the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. In fact, several of his family members belonged to that regime which he eventually denounced. Of course, the following regime that restored democracy to Athens also condemned his mentor and friend Socrates to death so Plato’s political and partisan feelings were early on buffeted by harsh reality. But the facts of the times are interesting and useful for consideration. Plato’s later dabbling with practical politics when he attempted to convert the notorious tyrant Dionysus II of Syracuse into a philosopher-king is almost farcically unrealistic. The fallout from this attempt should have been enough to single-handedly destroy Plato’s reputation as a practical philosopher but time heals all wounds.
I guess I’m of two minds as to how to recommend this book. If someone is interested in Plato’s work and his philosophical ideas then this book will be of interest. If someone is interested in the very important time period after the end of the Peloponnesian War until right before Alexander the Great there is some interesting insights here. But unless both apply, I think most readers will have to pick and choose through the sections of the book.
For instance, I find Plato’s Theory of Forms utter nonsense. The idea that there is an ideal form of a tree or a shoemaker or a door seems to me the working of the mind of a doofus. Even the idea of the ideal of a geometric shape like a sphere or a cube seems an unnecessary addition to reality. So, the section on this doctrine holds no interest for me. And in fact, I find most of Plato’s philosophical doctrines not very useful for human life. But that’s how I’ve judged most of philosophy. Although Aristotle seemed to have had a more practical view of the world and the things in it. Maybe I should have looked for a new biography of Aristotle. Oh well.
All this Heinlein stuff has me thinking about science fiction. And that’s fine by me. The current political theater between the Trump administration and the various judges trying to block his orders isn’t something I want to provide a blow-by-blow description of. Either Trump figures out a way around these obstacles or he fails. Either way I’ll wait till I can see the outcome.
But science fiction is interesting to me. From my way of looking at it, science fiction is the dominant form of storytelling in American society and has been for well over a century. Now this isn’t what literary types believe. But genre fiction is the dominant form of fiction in this country and science fiction is what fueled the imaginations of young people for most of the twentieth century and still does even in these times of moral rot in the arts.
So, this gives me a chance to talk about my ideas about where science fiction should and will go. And I think the current direction of technological progress will provide the impetus for where the stories will go. Currently I don’t think space travel and advances in biology are the topics that garner our attention. Not to say those things won’t continue to interest people. But currently the real impact of technology on our lives is artificial intelligence. But more than just how far AI will go in replacing humans in various aspects of commerce is what this will do to our society. And more specifically how will humans push back on the people running industry who don’t see this as a problem or at least don’t see it as a problem for them.
Because let’s be clear. Automation of all kinds has been changing our world for hundreds of years. An iron foundry displaces ten thousand village blacksmiths. An automobile factory and a gas station in every village eliminates the need for train stations across the country and all the people who worked on them. Every innovation in technology displaces the human beings who supported the previous version of “how things are done.” But this latest innovation wants to replace the most important attribute of a human being; his ability to think. His ability to create intellectual property.
And that’s a revolution. And I think, that’s what science fiction will want to talk about. Of course it’s been talking about that for decades. On the hackiest level, that’s what the Terminator movies are all about. The machines are going to get rid of us. So are the Matrix movies.
But I think more nuanced portrayals of how AI will affect humanity and how humanity can affect the roll out of AI are what is needed and what will be interesting to people. Now far be it from me to denigrate the fine work that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves have done to enlighten the human population to their imminent danger at the hands of sentient machines. I know that I’m always on the lookout for Austrian bodybuilders sporting gatling guns or déjà vu black cats crossing my path.
But what seems to me to be needed is a way to make AI healthy. Currently, everything about our on-line existence is harmful to us. It’s some combination of anti-social, irritating and stultifying. It’s making our lives worse. And that doesn’t seem to be accidental. It seems to be a feature of the algorithm. It almost seems like an anesthetic meant to keep us groggy and confused.
I think science fiction should be focused on rethinking how this ultimate technology has to be forced to work for the benefit of humans instead of as a rat poison to finish us off. So that’s what I think.
Hmm reording in my preference
Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
Starman Jones (1953)
Time for the Stars (1956)
Farmer in the Sky (1950)
Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
The Rolling Stones (1952)
The Star Beast (1954)
Space Cadet (1948)
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
Between Planets (1951)
Red Planet (1949)
And yes Space Nazis is silly NOW but it was written in 1947 and so is a reasonable period thing. That said it still is a bit of a loser as a story:-) . Have Space Suit is clearly the best of the best. I read both Between Planets and Red Planet, but other than the Venusian Isaac Newton I remember little. For a Heinlein piece of writing that tells me it was unremarkable (although likely superior to many “Hugo” award winners since the early 2000’s)
As to Starship Troopers that is a special case and I need to recuse myself from that judgement. You see it was the first Heinlein I read when I purchased it for 75 cents at a book fair in 6th grade. So I did read it in the time period for a Juvenile. It certainly has many of the Heinlein juvenile tropes with a just out of teenage protagonist (The literary types if they deigned to read Heinlien might call it a Bildungsroman). There is NO sex and perhaps a little romantic/sexual tension.
One might argue that Starship Troopers being an intentional polemic to duty is of a larger import than the Juveniles, and yet Have Space Suit deals with the complexities of who rules and how they rule with Three Galaxies, Citizen of the Galaxy takes on slavery and the fact of people ignoring it for their own profit, Starman Jones deals with the issues of having cheated to break out of an unfair system and the consequences (admittedlythey DO get Deus ex Machinaed out of the way), I can’t say I wouldn’t give Starship Troopers to a young person (Having myself benifitted from it although the powered armor was more of interest than the politics to a 6th grader). And it sits closer to the Juveniles in style and feel than either Stranger in a Strange land or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If I must put it in the Juveniles it goes before Have Space Suit. But as I noted I am biased and one never forgets their first love.
As a separate issue should Podkayne of Mars be in this list. It is an oddball (and not published for the same publisher) but yet other than a female protagonist it certainly fits the mold as well as Starship Troopers.
I had so much fun with the Heinlein short stories that I’m rolling into the Heinlein juveniles. I think many people understandably feel that the juvenile novels may be Heinlein’s best work. I confess I’m of two minds about that. They have different properties and leave room for adult novels to show their quality in a different way.
But let’s see where we can go with these stories. I think I’ll rank them best to worst according to my incredibly sensitive literary faculty.
Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
The Rolling Stones (1952)
Farmer in the Sky (1950)
Starman Jones (1953)
Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
Red Planet (1949)
The Star Beast (1954)
Space Cadet (1948)
Time for the Stars (1956)
Between Planets (1951)
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I’ve left out Starship Troopers (1959) because although Heinlein included it in his juvenile series. I think it’s actually one of his adult stories.
Now my order is obviously idiosyncratic and to be perfectly honest most of the stories are fairly equally good so it’s a very rough sorting. I did put Rocket Ship Galileo last because now, space nazis do seem a bit silly to me. But at the time the story seemed just fine to adolescent me. Maybe depending on the day “Tunnel in the Sky” and “Citizen of the Galaxy” could switch places on the list. And maybe a few other ones too. But let’s go with this.
The only story that I think I can objectively hold up as accurately ranked is my first choice, “Have Space Suit—Will Travel.” I think Heinlein did excel his usual juvenile story here. The protagonist, characters and plot devices are especially enjoyable and I can say even now, a sequel or two in this universe might be a fun read. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll contact the Heinlein estate to find out if they have any provisions for making that part of his intellectual property available to “respectful” collaborators.
I gave copies of all these books to my grandsons as soon as they were old enough to read. I consider them excellent company for growing boys. Just looking at that list of names makes me think of picking up “Starman Jones” or “The Rolling Stones” just to relive the feeling of reading them for the first time. They are each a touchstone to a very happy time in my life when the local library had a whole shelf of these Heinlein stories just waiting for me to read them and move onto the next one.
One other word on these books. Of all the books, I think “Between Planets” was the only one I never reread. I remember it took place on a Venus that was tropical in climate. There was a Venusian named Sir Isaac Newton, I believe, but I don’t remember very much else about the plot other than some kind of interplanetary political intrigue.
So, what is your order of excellence? And what is your rationale? And where exactly do you stand on the “Starship Troopers” question? And what is your opinion on space nazis. Leave your comments in the comments section below.
I am of the belief that voting is one of only two times the government actually asks for your opinion, the other being jury duty. If you don’t vote you shouldn’t bitch about what the government does, since you chose not to express any of your ideas.
I also do not believe that the franchise should be free to all. If you are not a taxpayer, but are voting you are asking the public to cash checks you have no financial standing in. By limiting the franchise to tax payers you reduce the influence of those who do not contribute. I can hear the gnashing of dentures now “What about the retirees?”, they earned the franchise during their working years and should retain it in their “Golden Years”, maybe establish something similar to the 40 quarters to be eligible for SSI, require 3 years of being a net tax payer in order to establish the franchise right. Make everyone “Get some skin in the game” to quote a former President.
For some unknown reason today, I was thinking of Heinlein’s short stories. Heinlein was probably as well known for his short stories as for his novels. I guess my first exposure to this part of his work was when I got a copy of the Green Hills of Earth. And even as a dopey kid I could tell that Heinlein’s stories had a more polished and professional feel to them than many of his contemporaries. His stories of the early days of human space flight sounded as if he had been there. Maybe it was his engineering background. He made something like a lunar construction site sound not only plausible but almost mundane. Dealing with the pressure loss from a moonquake (“Gentlemen, Be Seated!”) sounded like something that you would be reading about in a newspaper story someday soon.
One that captured some of the consequences of subjecting humans to the rigors of Heinlein’s “torch ship” technology was “Skylift.” A pilot runs a virtual suicide mission to reach Pluto with medical supplies in time to save the inhabitants of a research station from a plague. Surviving multiple g’s of acceleration for an extended period is highlighted in this adventure story.
Of course, some of his short stories were of an entirely different sort. One somewhat tongue in cheek story (“And He Built a Crooked House”) purports to describe what might happen if an architect built a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract and then a California earthquake strikes and folds it up. Very ridiculous but I think quite entertaining.
Then there’s one that could have been used for a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode (“They”). A case of paranoid delusion but with a fun twist.
And of course, it wouldn’t be Heinlein without his tribute to robber barons in space, Delos David “D. D.” Harriman and his dream of putting a man on the moon (“The Man Who Sold the Moon“) and then his tragic finale (“Requiem“) when he tried to go there himself. I always thought it was a nice touch using Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph for Harriman.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
I picked six of the stories I think of as vintage Heinlein. I probably could include another dozen if I wanted to make this post overly long. But I’ve included the list of Heinlein’s stories in case anyone wanted to pick their favorites for the comments section. Enjoy.
| All You Zombies | Elsewhen | Let There Be Light | My Object All Sublime | Solution Unsatisfactory |
| And He Built a Crooked House | Free Men | Life-Line | Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon | Space Jockey |
| A Bathroom of Her Own | Future History | Logic of Empire | Ordeal in Space | A Tenderfoot in Space |
| Beyond Doubt | Gentlemen, Be Seated! | The Long Watch | Our Fair City | They |
| The Black Pits of Luna | Goldfish Bowl | Lost Legacy | Poor Daddy | Waldo |
| Blowups Happen | The Green Hills of Earth | Magic, Inc. | Project Nightmare | Water Is for Washing |
| By His Bootstraps | Gulf | The Man Who Sold the Moon | Requiem | —We Also Walk Dogs |
| Columbus Was a Dope | “If This Goes On—” | The Man Who Traveled in Elephants | The Roads Must Roll | The Year of the Jackpot |
| Coventry (short story) | It’s Great to Be Back! | The Menace from Earth | Searchlight | |
| Delilah and the Space Rigger | Jerry Was a Man | Misfit | Sky Lift |