Will Hines Dot Net

I think you can tell a lot about a writer’s style by what names he picks for his/her characters, things and places.

Philip K. Dick:

• Ragle Gumm
• The Reegs and The Lilistars
• Joe Chip
• Wilbur Mercer
• Substance D
• Horselover Fat

Jonathan Lethem

• Conrad Metcalf
• The Archbuilders
• Everett Moon
• Lionel Essrog
• Mingus Rude

Stan Lee

• Mister Fantastic
• Professor X
• Doctor Doom
• General Thunderbolt Ross

Dan Clowes

• Enid Coleslaw
• David Boring
• Lloyd Llewelyn

Marx Bros. Writers

• Rufus T. Firefly
• Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding
• Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
• Otis B. Driftwood

A beginning improv group

• Jenkins
• Johnson
• Timmy
• Honey

Quentin Tarantino

• Elle Driver
• Jules Winnfield
• Mr. Pink
• Max Cherry

Here’s a fun quote from Sandy Koufax, via baseball writer Rob Neyer, talking about intangibles:

“In the end, it all comes down to talent. You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don’t know what that means. Talent makes winners, not intangibles. Can nice guys win? Sure, nice guys can win — if they’re nice guys with a lot of talent. Nice guys with a little talent finish fourth, and nice guys with no talent finish last.”

So, as most of my friends know, one of the greatest things to happen to NYC in recent years is that Commerce Bank set up machines in the lobbies of their branches that will let you redeem your loose change for bills. I guess this has been true for a while, but I only heard about it about six months ago. You don’t have to be a customer, and they don’t charge a fee, which is what the change-counting machines at Associated Supermarket do. It’s such an unbelievably cool service that I kind of can’t believe it exists, but it does.

Today, I brought in all the change I had accumulated for the last two years. Grand total? $158.40.

That’s a lot of change! I had over a thousand pennies! I was so out of breath hauling this comicaly enormous sack of change through the NYC subway station that I started panting out loud. I got so overheated that the strap of my sidebag left a nice diagnol streak of sweat across my shirt. My shoulder still hurts while I type this, eight hours later.

But it was a great relief!

This entry brought to you by Why The Fuck Do You Type This Stuff? Incorporated.

Go watch 100 awesome music videos on YouTube (via MonkeyBites) – a fun, well-annotated list. Watch them all compulsively! Boogie Down Productions blew my mind.

Kevin was very right-on in recommending Now Wait For Last Year as a good PKD book to read. I LOVE it! Might be my second favorite so far behind Ubik. I should know by now to not doubt Kevin’s recommendations. Kevin’s recommendations in the comic book field alone have turned me onto:

• Hellboy
• Christopher Priest’s Black Panther
• The Tick
• Paul Grist’s Kane and Daily Bugle
• Fables
• Lucifer

He knows his shit! Really, recommendations from your near and dear are the way to go. Here’s the songs that I have been introducted to via Hines Bro Brian in the last 15 years:

• Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana
• Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies
• Bad Reputation by Freedy Johnston
• Ask by The Smiths

Amazing! And my run of reading PKD comes from Eliza, who correctly suggested that I would love Jonathan Lethem.

I am building a “word of mouth” program where friends can come here and suggest books, music and movies for me to absorb. Everyone can rate each others suggestions and comment on it, and the most popular will bubble to the top of the list. Kinda like Digg, but lamer and simpler and built for me.

This morning, I couldn’t find my keys. I spent 25 minutes tearing through my apartment before I found them:They were under my pillow. It took me a few minutes, but I finally recalled a hazy memory from the middle of the night. My cats had been knocking my keys around, waking me up. I stumbled out of bed, half-awake, fished my keys off the floor in total darkness, and clunked back to my bed, where I placed the keys underneath my pillow.

My very FIRST thought when I saw them was that I have developed a split personality, and the other half is hiding things from me. That thought lived in earnest for about half a second. Thank you, Philip K. Dick.

My second thought was that there was a key fairy who had left them under my pillow in exchange for a tooth. I guess that’d still be a tooth fairy. That thought lasted zero seconds, because I didn’t have it.

My third thought was that I was going to be yet again late for work.

My company walked up Hudson Street (this used to say “Avenue” until Michelle corrected me in the first comment — it FEELS like an Avenue) for lunch, and watching the traffic snarl around the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, Erik noticed that the sign for the entrance looked better than you’d expect for the notoriously chaotic and crowded tunnel. It’s a clean simple sign and looks maybe …. nice?

Made me appreciate how hard it probably is to plan anything well in New York. The city is so old, so crowded, so crammed. It never sleeps! So how can you organize it well?

I then wondered… what’s the BEST-planned city in America? I imagine it’s got to be a newer city, and one that had plenty of space to lay everything out neatly. Phoenix? St. Louis? I don’t know. Is there a large American city — or any city — that makes city planners drool with jealousy?

I would like at least 5 comments on this.

I want to apologize to my readers who came to this blog yesterday hoping for an update of how I’m doing plowing through my Philip K. Dick reading list. I can’t believe you all, to a man, restrained from sending an email about it. Here is that update now:

It’s going well.

Also, here’s a fun (if unfair) game to play with summarizing the plots of PKD books:

1) Ubik: After their leader is killed in an explosion, a group of anti-psychics discover that what they thought was reality is not as it seems!
2) A Scanner Darkly: After taking mammoth doses of the brain-destroying drug Substance D, an undercover narc discovers that he has been living a double life he can’t remember — the world is not as it seemed!
3) Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? – Androids have become so much like humans that what you thought was a human might not be what it seems!
4) The Man In The High Castle – In a world where the Germans and Japanese won World War II, a Japanese ambassador in San Francisco briefly enters an alternate reality where the Allies won — whoa, that made the world be not what it seemed!
5) Time Out Of Joint – A man who thought he was living in the year 1959 discovers that the real world is something quite different than what it seemed!

I love them, though. I’m halfway through my sixth one, “Now Wait For Last Year.” I’ll write an unsolicited summary in a few more books.

• If I needed another socially alientating way to waste time, I’ve found it: I updated a wikipedia page. I added the list of characters and the list of landmark stories. I would ask you L&R readers to improve and correct my comments, but I don’t know any.
• This best of Elvis Costello collection is a really excellent sampling of his songs. I tried to make a mix just of EC songs that were not on this collection, and it was very tough.
• I re-read the first few chapters of Mick Napier’s Improvise last night. I think that’s a great book. Excerpt now!
  

  Rules of improvisation. There they are, and they’re in a list, and they look good, and they even seem to make sense. So why am I so snitty about them? Because I don’t believe they work. That is, The Rules do not help one improvise well. As a matter of fact, I believe that they help one not improvise well. They are destructive. And why do I believe this? I will tell you now in excruciating detail.

• My improv group 1985 did a musical set last night, at the suggestion/insistence of member Erik Tanouye. We didn’t practice it, we’re not musical — I didn’t even really know that’s what we were doing until half an hour before the show. But it was terrific fun and I got to play the first 16 bars of “The Entertainer” on piano — the sum total knowledge I took away from 4 years of piano lessons.
• My cats are inordinately disturbed by the sounds of trumpets playing. I played Penny Lane on my computer yesterday, and the trumpet solo caused them to leap off the kitchen counter and scamper under the bed.
• I installed Linux on a spare computer at work (thanks to some advice from Neil Casey). It looks cool, sitting here next to me with all of its text and numbers on the screen. I don’t really know what any of it means.
• I rewatched pieces of Duck Soup last night at 2am. That is a goddamned funny movie.

“Bang” means “exclamation point.” I think this is little-known, anyway. Certainly among non-programmers it’s little-known. So when reading code out loud, if someone says “type if bang dollar sign a open brace” they want you to type:

if !$a {

Cool. Relative to this world, rather.