As you prepare to dissolve the last chalky bits of 2005 in the solution of your choice, remember to spare enough thinking-matter for the Quizlathon of January.
You may choose to invigorate yourself by observing these photos of the beautiful people.
And now I'm off to pick up Rory and Jane for a couple of days of Snail-Wombat gallivantery.
Happy Calendric Turnover, dear reader. See you when it all feels weird and new.
Here's the last Wombat File Friday Quiz of 2005. When we start the New Year, it'll be all about the heart-exploding suspense of the Quiztacular. Don't miss out. We suggest you concoct a fake illness and take the whole month off of work, so that you can really focus. Now, on to this disappointing end to a dreadful year in quizzery:
The daughter of Dwight Whitney Morrow and Elizabeth Cutter Morrow was born in 1906. In 1933, she was awarded the Cross of Honor by the U.S. Flag Association, and in 1934 the Hubbard Gold Medal by a much more well-known society. She received honorary degrees from her alma mater (Smith College), including a Doctor of Letters in 1970.
In 1938, her book Listen! The Wind became one the the top-selling nonfiction books of the year. In 1955, her book Gifts from the Sea was the bestselling nonfiction title of the year.
What was the married name under which she became famous? Bonus question: what was the subject of her (less popular) book published in 1939?
First correct answer to comments wins a holiday phone call from Jesus (as getting a phone call from Santa sounds offensively secular to us). No Googling or outsourcing your guess to some shadowy organization of "trivia answer farms" in Laos. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.
When, at the eleventh hour* the MTA sends out a singularly ill-informed spokesbot to sullenly inform the city that the Authority's "fair offer on the negotiating table", if you live in Brooklyn you can pretty much give up hope that you won't be looking to hitch a ride into Manhattan come the cold, cold dawn.
Under orders as I am to report in if possible, I'm expecting to learn first-hand just exactly what kind of traffic-snarl hell the various inbound arteries will become.
If it were even ten degrees warmer outside, I'd be very seriously considering walking. It's only 6-7 miles as the crow flies, I think. But I'm not a crow, and that'd mean leaving pretty damn early. I may walk home, though. I walked home during the blackout, but we lived a mile closer to the Manhattan bridge and it was a nice day in summer. The bike is currently nonfunctional, so it's not an option, which is too bad. It would be a chilly ride, but doable.
I do live close enough to one of the designated carpool pickup points, so that's my destination in the morning. Before I get to bed, I will note this: after a certain horrific event about four years ago, the city and its complex transit system got back to functioning almost immediately. The leadership looked for solutions and recognized that for a metropolis as big as this, the price of paralysis is overwhelming. I don't know who is right -- or more wrong -- in the dispute between the MTA and the Transport Workers Union. My sympathies in general are with the workers, but there's a lot I don't know about what the various turns in the negotiations have been, so I try to keep an open mind.
But: the political appointees of the MTA answer directly to no one who lives in the city. And they've shown an appalling disconnection from their responsibilities here that is reminiscent -- albeit on a smaller scale, and with different inflections -- of certain governmental responses to recent natural events. Worse, the governor -- who should answer to the voters, but whose base is not chiefly among the multihued straphangers of Gotham -- has been a distinctly ghostly figure during this crisis.
And the Mayor, who at least enjoys a bully pulpit if not actual power over the Transit Authority, has done nothing but deliver finger-wagging about lawbreakers, reminding us that the constitutionally questionable Taylor Law forbids strikes by state employees.
The TWU may be righteous in their grievances, or they may be overreaching and hubristic. But those in management -- and those elected to manage the managers -- have given riders no reason to believe they've done what they could to put the brakes on this runaway train. Forgive the idiot metaphor -- I'm off to bed.
*actually the second iteration of the eleventh hour, but who's counting?
Despite our fears that we'd be spending this surprisingly lovely morning begging to join a carpool and thereafter trapped in an endless line of vehicles trying to crowd onto the Manhattan Bridge, the transit strike has been if not cancelled, at least postponed. Which means that today's Quiz, in all of its half-baked goodness, can go on. Here we go -- short and sweet, like your host:
Gene Autry, Jonathan Winters, and Burt Reynolds have all been recorded (with varying degrees of commercial success) narrating the adventures of what fictional hero?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a scratch 'n' sniff druid. No Googling or IM'ing Burt -- we all know about his chat-addiction, and we've got to all pitch in to get him through this rough period and back to work, or we'll never get to see that Cannonball Run prequel trilogy we've been waiting for. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
Yes, yes, I've been alluding to this for weeks, now. Yet no information has been forthcoming, and December now reaches the halfway mark. Yet, last year's invite-only festival of lollygagging and goldbricking was already well underway by this time.
"So, hop to it, monkey-boy", is what I hear you (or the red lectroids inside my head) saying. Not so whip-smartly, there! Y'see, now that we're deep in the mire of the so-called holiday season, the Wombat realizes that some of you may in the coming couple of weeks actually be flying hither and yon to visit loved ones or trusted business associates.
So, after careful deliberation and a shot of Old Overholt, the editorial staff has decreed that this year's factoid festival will in fact be next year -- that is, in January. That's right: get your frontal lobe fired up for the 2005/2006 Wombatfile CranioCarnival. Some vital information about this very nonvital event below:
Now that we have that out of the way, I can attest that there will be a Friday Quiz this week, and possi-probably one on December 23rd. But the Quiz will take Dec. 30 off, in preparation for the grand combat to come, and because of houseguests.
1. Get really grand idea about making crispy oven-roasted greens from friends who rave about how nutridelicious it is to cook kale/collard greens/mustard greens this way.
2. Get method of preparation over the phone. Don't write anything down.
3. Invite friends with children over for an early dinner, so that as you attempt brand-new-never-before-attempted recipe you are maximally distracted by hi-intensity toddler action (this phrase should echo as in a low-budget television ad for a monster truck rally).
4. Serve drinks. Have one yourself.
5. Realize that in the midst of all the serving of drinks and having of one yourself, you're running a little behind on getting those greens into the oven. Preheat oven to 400, but turn it up a bit because hey, it's an old oven, and you need it to get hot quickly.
6. Toss the greens with the garlic and olive oil and put onto foil covered pans. Wonder, for a split second if perhaps they really look a bit too oily. Don't think about the question of whether or not the smoking point for the extra-virgin olive oil you're using isn't perchance a bit too low for this recipe.
7. Put the pans in the oven. Get distracted by the toddlers, the rest of dinner, the conversation, and the cocktail now mostly consumed.
8. When the smoke alarm goes off, don't think "Perhaps the greens are burning." Think, "Silly smoke alarm! You always go off whenever I cook. Off with you for the duration." Remove battery.
9. When the smoke has become noticeably acrid, go into the kitchen, open the oven and hastily close door. Turn off oven. Decide to deal with disgusting charred greens later.
10. Apologize to your guests and hope that the rest of the meal makes up for the lingering smell of smoke.
11. In the rush to get the rest of dinner on, forget that you've left the greens in the oven, and absent-mindedly (or perhaps cocktail-mindedly) turn the knob to "broil" in the belief that perhaps you'll use the broiler to melt the cheese.
12. When an alternate way of melting the cheese presents itself, forget to turn the broiler off.
13. When everyone's eyes are tearing from the "lingering" smell of the smoke from before, realize that in fact you are re-incinerating the greens and that fresh clouds of white unbreathability are issuing from the oven.
14. Wonder why the smoke alarm is not going off, and then remember.
15. Curse the day you were born.
16. Throw open all the windows to the frigid December night. Apologize profusely to your friends, who must now eat dinner in a freezing, carcinogenic hell.
17. Bid them goodnight and go to sleep.
18. Wake up, throw open all windows to air out the apartment and leave for the day.
19. Return in the evening to discover that your apartment (which is always too cold anyway and warms up very slowly) is an ideal temperature for the long-term preservation of dairy products. And that it smells as much like a just-doused campfire as it did the moment you left. Which is to say, very much.
20. Close the windows. You have now Uncozified Your Home.
Like the snow which has blanketed Manhattan, so our brains even now turn into a repulsive, icy Friday mush. Which means that it's time for another waste of precious minutes...
What's that? A question from the balcony? Yes? Will there be details of the 2005 Pagan Solstice Quizathon? Indeed. When? Patience, my pet!
Now, on to today's no-brainer.
In 1970, the two bestselling memoirs of the year (both of which were among the year's biggest nonfiction bestsellers) were both from authors whose native language was German-- one born in Germany, one born in the U.S. One has been the answer to a Wombat File quiz of the past.
Who were the two authors?
First correct answer naming both posted to comments wins a carob Krampus. No Googling or paging through your cherished old printouts of quizzes past. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
As with so many years past, so many of the best books I read this year were not, precisely, books of this year -- either they appeared elsewhere long ago, or in England a year ago or more.
This attempt at a least seems rendered further specious by the fact that the quality of my memory is distinctly cheeseclothesque these days, liable only to trap and hold the things you don't want to wind up in the soup. With that in mind, here is a soggy bouquet garni of reading from the past twelvemonth -- with a couple of significant items noted that were not published in 2005, or anywhere near to it, but finally brought to the Wombat's attention during the year.
No links to internet bookstores. Given where I work, I want neither to appear a company shill nor do I love suggesting alternatives, what with the hand that feeds the Wombat and all. So, repair ye to your customary merchant.
Recently I've been drawn to tales of fugitives, doomed outlaws, etc. Bryan Burrough's tommy-gun-toting history Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (published last year in hardcover) was one of the most informative books about all of those famous "gangsters" one has heard about but never really gotten the details on -- Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker gang...the details wind up becoming overwhelming, but there's a lot of fascinating demystification along the way. What it really exposes is how inept and out-of-its depth the FBI (as well as the nascent state police forces) were in the 1930s. There was no such thing as national law enforcement. Hoover didn't even want his agents to carry guns until they were forced into it by the heavily armed gangs.
Also on the running-from-the law tip, Christopher Sorrentino's novel Trance, which very lightly fictionalizes the Patty Hearst kidnapping and her resulting life as a fugitive with the SLA is highly enjoyable, emotionally potent, and nails both atmosphere and the cultural smolder around Watergate (or so says this doofus, who didn't really notice anything as tenebrous as a political climate until Reagan landed like sunnily smiling bomb in 1980). The obvious comparison is to Don Dellilo, but Sorrentino has a surprisingly light touch, and his "Alice Galton"/Tania (interestingly, he fictionalizes Paty Hearts's name and some others, but not the SLA's adopted monickers, including the one Hearst used) is one of the most sympathetic characters of the year.
Zadie Smith's On Beauty didn't make me fall in love with her characters in the way that I did with White Teeth (a novel I'm happy to admit had many flaws, and one I loved wholeheartedly nevertheless), but it kept me riveted all the way through, and if I couldn't find myself liking Howard Belsey much at all, that didn't stop me from being fascinated by his self-destructive trajectory. Lots of improbabilities, partial exposures, and easy escapes. But lots of brio, lots of getting much of the angst and appeal of academic life exactly exactly, and lots of just wanting to read one more page.
I think that Saturday, by Ian McEwan, deserves a spot on this list. I go back and forth about how I feel about the novel's climactic set piece -- its sense of stage-managed cultural passion play seems hard to ignore the more I revisit it in memory, and suggests that some of the criticisms of the novel's mechanical effectiveness might not be far off the mark. But again and again through the book -- which wrestles, not incidentally, with an incredibly thorny issue, that is: how do have a character in a novel coherently articulate more than just vague emotional tones about the current state of international politics? -- I was struck by passages of extreme and concise beauty, images and figures of speech that were fresh and invigorating. I blush to say I can't quote any of them for you, and I don't have a copy of the book at hand. But I remember encountering them. And I remember as well the compelling description of neurosurgery itself, and I love fiction that takes you into another person's highly involved expertise, and does that magic trick of convincing you that you're seeing it yourself, from the inside. For that alone, Saturday ought to rank up there as one of the best.
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes -- available in a month or so in the U.S. -- simply a cracking great read. Deeply suspenseful, almost painful to read at times (Barnes renders George's persecution with a placid inevitability that is literally heartbreaking). I'll just add that I think that this is the most fully satisfying work of fiction I've read this year.
However, we'll see how I feel after I'm more than a hundred pages into Europe Central, which is without question the best thing -- so far at least -- that I've read from William Vollmann (note: I'm a neophyte when it comes to Vollman's output: I've only read three of his previous novels and a collection of his shorter pieces. So, my estimation should come with a large asterisk). But so far, this historical-novel-in-stories manages to balance dozens of voices; an encyclopedic familiarity with the nations, political personalities, movements, generals, assassins, etc. that were caught up in the violence of the thirties and forties; a sense of chilling dread that pulls you along like a horror movie unfolding; and Vollmann's insistent and powerful personification of the social and political forces that drove the world into nightmare. I can't put it down, and that's not something I often say about his work.
Finally, this year I was introduced to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, a four-book series -- published in the early 1980s -- that instantly makes that slender list of works which are great "science fiction" or "fantasy" (in this case, something of both, or maybe one in the guise of the other), and are also simply monumentally powerful fiction. Blake, DeQuincey, Melville, Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, LeGuin, and Borges all either come to mind or are clearly part of Wolfe's constellation of influences. My next reading project (after finishing Europe Central) will be to look up some of Wolfe's widely-praised short fiction.
And after that, I'll be trying to lay hands on (among others) John Banville's The Sea, George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, and the Mary Gaitskill novel everyone is telling me I should read.
Note: aside from the above, the Wombat disliked many, many things it read in 2005. But I'm practicing a positive-news-only perspective, in hopes of procuring future work from the Pentagon or other government agencies looking to get the good news out there to the public.
More on the year-end Quiztacular Quiztaganza to come soon. Meanwhile, here's today's straight-from-some-headlines-you-might-have-missed noodle-fryer.
This government program, known briefly as the FPC, has been doing one particular thing for two decades, under funding through an arm of the Department of Energy. One senator wants them to knock it off: he's so mad about it that he's worked to cut all funding for this program. The man in charge of the project itself says "I guess I am flabbergasted... what we do is just math. Math can't hurt you."
What does the FPC do? For bonus points, what industry association has named this senator "legislator of the year"?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a Keatstronix 5000 Truth-Beauty Calibrator (note: does not work with Windows XP). No Googling or calling the secret 800 number for Cheney's Energy Task Force HQ (located in the now hollowed-out Devil's Tower). One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.