So, I’ve held off posting about insane stuff in Cincinnati (my hometown) for a while, since my dad gave me a some flack about it, but I’ve just got to share this one…

On Monday a religious organization called Answers in Genesis will open a $27 million Creation Museum just 25 miles south west of downtown Cincinnati. The museum will focus on telling the story of the universe’s origins from a biblical perspective. Here’s a CNN story on it:

The Cincinnati Enquirer has also has devoted a huge section of its web site to the Creation Museum story with photos, videos, and ranting letters from both sides.

The cultural battle lines are clearly delineated these days. More power to my old buddy Randall as he stands in line Monday morning to pay the $20 admission, snap some awesome photos, and rain down some of that old fire and brimstone he picked up while studying biology at the University of Cincinnati.

This is an entertaining, quick read.  The plot is interesting, and so are the insights into the life of the 15 year old autistic/obsessive boy named Christopher, and how his mental capabilities relate to his family and the world around us.  The story is told from the boy’s perspective with little diagrams and pictures, making it fun to read.  Christopher loves math and science and wants to be an astronaut.  He decides if it will be a Good Day, Quite Good Day, Super Good Day, or a Black Day depending on how many red or yellow cars he sees.  He can’t eat food that is brown or yellow and he can’t eat food if it touches on his plate.  He won’t hug anyone and he hates being around people.  He calms himself by sitting alone in a closet and doing math problems in his head.

Christopher writes this story for his teacher.  He writes it like a mystery story, starting of with the murder of his neighbor’s dog.  As he starts to ask questions to his neighbors, we see that he has trouble relating with them and many everyday things are difficult for him.  He notices all words and signs but has trouble putting them all together to understand their meaning.  He doesn’t like jokes and expressions that are fancy ways of saying something that can be stated simply.  As he investigates the murder, he finds letters from his mother that his father has hidden from him.  These letters help Christopher understand more about the world and he starts on a journey that is big for him, but would seem ordinary to most people.

The best thing about the book is seeing how Christopher thinks.  He is such a great character.  Everything revolves around logic, numbers, signs, and words.  He loves animals – his pet rat and the dog that is murdered, but when it comes to people, he just can’t deal with them.   On his adventure he carries his pet rat in one pocket and a Swiss army knife in the other.  When a stranger approaches he opens the knife in his pocket and is ready to fight.  He gets very anxious around people.  The numbers and the logic are safe for Christopher but they imprison him.  He makes up logic games like the Super Good Day and Black Day car game to try to believe that life follows some kind of logic.  As the story unfolds, we see that his parents have created a difficult environment for him, even though they try to do the best they can.  And we see how our culture tends to make people crazy.

I wish there was more depth to the book.  Maybe there’s not because it is told from Christopher’s perspective?  We have the mystery and then another mystery that unfolds, and a manic adventure, but there could be more complexity woven into the story, or maybe more development of some of the other characters.  Christopher does seem to be very much like his father, and it would be interesting to see more details about his father’s life and their relationship.

This morning I was cruising into work listening to KALX and I heard them play the most awesome rap song I’ve heard in months. “Pleasanton” by White Mike is a humorous story about what it’s like to live in Pleasanton (a bedroom community suburb of San Francisco). The lyrics are funny and true enough to get and suburban kid to ponder his surroundings and the beat is funky enough to get a city planner dancing.

The whitemike.com has a link to listen to a sample of Pleasanton(featuring Big Cam) from White Mike’s CD called “Famous”, but the link seems to be broke. There is also information about the album on CD Baby.

I’m what you might call a “television-hater”. I spend significantly more time watching bizarre, 1980s, Finnish, music videos on YouTube than I spend watching Survivor, so please take my television analysis with a grain of salt. Despite that disclaimer, I have enjoyed watching a fair number of episodes of Grey’s Anatomy (a light drama about a hospital in Seattle), but the more I watched something started subtly irritating me about the stories and eventually I couldn’t stand watching it any more.

I couldn’t really figure what it was until Alessandra Stanley hit the nail on the head in a TV review from today’s New York Times. Here’s a quote:

It wouldn’t matter, since the show is admittedly over-the-top escapist fantasy for women, except that it is troubling that even in escapist fantasies, today’s heroines have to be weak, needy and oversexed to be liked by women and desired by men.

She goes on to wrap it up with:

People complain that hip-hop stars use obscene lyrics and lewd music videos to demean women. Sometimes, so do even the most bourgeois women’s television shows.

Spot on! Now we need to talk about the unflattering portrayal of women in bizarre, 1980s, Finnish, music videos…

When you have a baby your reading habits are going to change dramatically in short order. I bid farewell to my lofty, existential days of cracking Kierkegaard and dabbling in Dostoevsky. O.K. maybe I didn’t read much by them but their names work well for alliteration. Regardless… a few weeks ago Christine and I found ourselves waist deep in baby tracking field guides. While Happiest Baby on the Block and Your Baby’s First Year Week by Week are super helpful at teaching rookie parents like us things like which end to put the diaper on, they can make you a little weird in the head if used as 100% of your daily literary intake. We needed to have books on hand that were fast, fun and irreverent, so we took action, supplementing the bookshelf in Claudia’s room with books of short stories, magazines, and some books that were mostly pictures. In the end we had The Dog Lover’s Companion to California, the January and March issues of Harper’s, issue #13 of Afterall, Amphigorey Also, the April issue of Dwell, a book of short stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had left over from college, and the guidebook from the Fundacio Joan Miro. Yes… we are total yuppie, geeks from hell. This stuff was great but we needed more, so we headed over to Cody’s on 4th street (because the one by our house is closed now). Christine picked up a book by Stanislaw Lem and a couple others (that she’ll probably write about here soon), but I had a different author in mind.

When looking for advice on what a parent should read, I took a page from the ultimate resource for parental know-how, my mom. She loves Tom Robbins. I remember her and my dad blazing through his books on childhood vacations to the Outer Banks and I dug Jitterbug Perfume and some others when I was a little older. My parents were visiting Berkeley a few weeks ago and we briefly talked about Robbins’ Neo-Romantic, pseudo-psychedelic, faux-philosophical stories about wondering inanimate objects on our way to see the Fishtank Ensemble at The Freight and Salvage.

That was is it. I had to pick up one of his books at Cody’s. Thumbing around on the shelves I came across one I had never heard of before called Wild Ducks Flying Backwards. I opened it up and saw that it was a collection of short writings dating back to the 1960s. Ambrosia! This was exactly what I was looking for, perfect, bite-size, ten page chunks that fit neatly between baby feedings and unloading the dishwasher. When I opened it up and saw that it included Robbin’s tribute to Terence McKenna (who I used to be obsessed with) and that the book opened with a quote by Erik Satie (who I am currently obsessed with), I beat a quick path to the cash register.

I was not disappointed in the least. With around seventy individual writings organized into sections for “Travel Articles”, “Tributes”, “Stories, Poems, & Lyrics”, “Musings & Critiques”, and “Responses”, it was perfect for non-linear, late-night, parental reading. Even the introduction is awesome as it slowly slips into a smart-assed jab at a stereo-typical Tom Robbins reader. The travel stories were probably my favorites. He uses all of the vivid and gently demented descriptive firepower from his fiction to tell tales of his encounters with surly hippos in Africa and a giant, pink, art-deco hotel in Florida. His tributes hipped me to wonders of people I had never heard of like Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh and people who I had never cared about like Debra Winger. The back-handed tribute to Ray Kroc (the founder expander of Mc Donalds) was rad. The part about naming the sandwich the “Big Mac” instead of naming after the other Mc Donald brother had me snickering. His film script treatment called “The Tower of St. Ignatz” err.. towered in the book’s fiction section with a charming “Boy meets girl. Boy impregnates girl. Boy happens to be girl’s high school science teacher. Boy and girl get caught up in a strange, voodoo-powered, love octagon with a washed up rock star, giant antenna-building, salty, old sailor and his extended family, while tracking down a tabloid executive in the Caribbean to sell him photos of an impossible, scientific phenomina”-type of story. In the musings section Robbins gives the best definition of art that I’ve ever read and he ends the collection with his response to the question “What is the Meaning of Life?”. I won’t spoil it, but it does of course involve beer.

In summary, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards totally kicks ass. Go buy it now. I have to get off the computer because it’s 3:00AM, Claudia’s stirring, and the Phillip K. Dick Reader beckons.