James Rising

Saturday Morning Aggregate:

Is it funny that to make the blog post for my Juicing appear at the top of the stack the control is called “Sticky”. Juice? Sticky? OK I am punchy, I guess.
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Long ass night to return to work. 1pm to about 2:30a. Some would call that a 13 and half hour day. It’s not digging ditches but in the words of Darrel Waltrip I am ‘tarred’.
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I was on vacation last week and missed a couple of entries here. Might be the first time I did so. I needed to recharge a bit and move in some different directions. It is working as my output (witness a very lengthy review of the new King novel) has increased in terms of word count. I fear I am guilty of Kurt Vonnegut style. Short and to the point. Good for radio but not so good at a nickel a word. Become verbose, young man.
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We have vacationed in the same spot for 15 years. The last ten of those in the same seaside resort. The management tried to sell off the place as condos and failed to get a single offer. Now they are cutting back to save money. It’s a shame to see a place that was just about heaven on earth, a place we looked forward to all year long, start to tip over into ruin.
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The woman who used to run the front desk became a friend. She really took care of us and we always brought her gifts and such when we arrived. The new twits they have running the show could fuck up a one car funeral. They couldn’t wipe their ass without instructions. Totally screwed up our reservation and could have cared less. In a normal year we would have made our summer and fall reservations and put down a hefty deposit on both. This year, we have other plans. What they are we are not sure at this juncture. They may involve a mouse and a grandson. We shall see.
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The new twits couldn’t empty a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. Love that one. I think I heard it in Maine.
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Coming back into town we managed to time our arrival perfectly with that of President Obomalama. Stuck in traffic after an eight hour drive so he could give a speech is not my idea of the perfect ending to a vacation. We just wanted to get home. Every exit, every overpass, infested with State cops. Does it really work? Could they prevent another Lee Harvey Oswald with all this extra effort and overtime? I doubt it.
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The highlight of our vacation? For sure the Thanksgiving dinner and time associated with same. Spending time with my two younger children and my sister? Priceless. Even a trip to the Ct. department of motor vehicles to fix up some problem was pretty funny. It also pointed out to me that I am very glad I live where I do, and not in large metro (read ethnic) area.
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In the odd circumstance department. A client cancelled an appointment for Tuesday on Friday at about 10am. I laid down to take a nap and another very sporadic client called and took that time. Life is full of examples about how timing is everything. Usually it’s bad timing in our case.
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Thanks for reading. I promise to get a full weeks worth in this week.

It’s a Steve Martin routine and the name of one of his albums from 1977.

For me as a kid growing up in the early 60’s it was far more than that.

Ever push on your eyes to create fireworks? As a youngster in Vt. We didn’t have much entertainment and I was still too young to use my right hand to distract myself, although that would come later and lots.

What you get when you press on your eyes are called “phosphenes”. They result from pressure in the interior of the eyeball, which causes nerves in the retina to fire. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between that and a real image, and it interprets the signals as flashes of color.

The same effect causes you to “see stars” when you’re whacked on the head. The change in pressure causes the nerves to fire.

Scientists have studied this for quite some time, though not quite so boldly as Isaac Newton, who pressed on his eyeball with a dagger to see the pretty colors.

The other ‘entertainment’ for me was getting small.

I could change my reality by staring at a fixed point long enough. The view would flip over to one similar to looking out the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

I found this:

Micropsia
By Gillian Fournier

A neurological disorder in which objects appear small and far away; the subject perceives him- or herself as bigger than usual. Micropsia is the opposite of macropsia, and can be caused by optical distortion, eye conditions, migraines, epilepsy, or psychoactive drugs. Another name for the syndrome is Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

The issue is typically temporary in nature. Sometimes it is caused by epilepsy or Epstein-Barr virus. The main group of people affected by this condition are children between 5-10 years of age.

Example: The patient reports episodes in which the entire world looks shrunken, “like looking through the wrong end of binoculars.”

Yep- that was me. I could do it for hours and it was pretty neat. This popped up too:

Micropsia is a change in visual perception caused by swelling in the corneal areas of the eye. In general, those with micropsia perceive objects as much smaller than their actual size. The condition has also been called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, and the effect is sometimes given the fanciful name of Lilliput sight after the novel Gulliver’s Travels.

Micropsia is usually a temporary condition that can be caused by several factors. Some types of epilepsy have been known to cause visual distortion. The onset of migraine headaches may be marked by micropsia. In addition, swelling caused by the Epstein-Barr virus has been linked to episodes of micropsia.

Children between the ages of five and ten seem particularly prone to micropsia, as well as macropsia, which causes things to appear bigger than they are. These symptoms, which can prove extremely distressing, may lead to panic or severe disturbance in young children.

I never recall being panicked as a young child. I do recall when I was older, in my twenties, having panic attacks where this syndrome would manifest itself. I would get so small that I couldn’t effectively navigate my environment. Couldn’t reach doorknobs, that sort of thing. Now that is really getting small!

03-Lets_Get_Small (2)

Tuesday Review: 11/22/63 A Novel – Stephen King

Full disclosure: I am a fan of Mr. King. I have read everything he has written and seen every movie adaptation and made for TV adaptation (wretched as some of them are) and I even own a T-shirt from his radio station, WZON, when it was a rock station. I am NOT his biggest fan (readers of “Misery” will be glad to know this) but I am willing to believe I am in the top 100.

That said, I know that King has written both good and bad novels. I am not so blind as to not know that some of this man’s prodigious output was probably done, if not for a paycheck, at least for less than Pulitzer Prize hopes. But hey, even John Lennon once said “Let’s write a swimming pool.” King has admitted to (and written about extensively) drug and alcohol addictions when he was writing and I am sure they must have had some influence on his output, good or bad.

The problem with being Stephen King is that he has long ago been pigeon-holed into a genre. Call it horror or science fiction or whatever you want to call it he has, when he strayed from form, been castigated by his critics. Sometimes he has been raked over the coals even when he is at his best. Critics don’t like authors who sell millions of copies. They don’t like authors who have regular output. They don’t, by and large, like Stephen King.

Kings’ previous novels in the last few years, including especially last years “Under the Dome”, which was more or less straight Sci-Fi, have started to show some maturity. Even working in that genre King was showing signs of being more capable than ever before of putting a bit more into the work. A bit of heart, a bit of soul. A big bit of morality.
11/22/63 continues the trend and is a delight to read because of it. Not a delight in that the subject matter isn’t dark and sinister much of the time. But the story is told in such a way that you are left to think about life, the quality of mercy and the human condition. Tall order for a book about time travel.

I have read many, many stories and books about time travel. I have seen all the “Back to the Future” movies. For my money the best serious author to deal with the idea of time travel was Kurt Vonnegut in “Slaughterhouse – Five: The Children’s Crusade” where Billy Pilgrim becomes ‘unstuck in time’ and travels back and forth without control.

But in this case the travel back in time is less a curiosity than it is just something to be dealt with, like an everyday occurrence. This is a strength of King’s by the way. To turn the fantastic and sometimes terrible into something believable. He is very good at it.

Spoiler alert: The story hinges on Jake Epping going back to the 60’s from 2011 to prevent the Kennedy assassination. He meets and falls in love with a girl, loses the girl to a shot by Lee Harvey Oswald but saves JFK. This turns out to not be such a good thing and he has to go back and fix everything again. In the end he reconnects with the girl in one of the books most touching moments, which King credits in the afterward to his fellow writer and son, Joe Hill.

There are monsters in this book. Most of them walk upright and are in the guise of humans but they are monsters, none the less. Oswald is one. Some of his “handlers” are others. Oswald’s Mother is as big a monster as I would ever care to meet. And as Epping travels around the country in his bid to meet his destiny and prevent the events of 11/22/63 from occurring he meets many more.

Another monster is Dallas, Texas. King even admits that some have accused him of treating the city unfairly but both he and I think his characterization of Deep South 1963 was spot on.

What really shines in this novel is King’s ability to breathe life into the characters and to make their lives jump off the page. He has done this before (See Randall Flagg in “The Stand”) but never so well and with so many different characters. Even the bit players in this epic are given full treatments and it marks King for me as a writer headed for a place among the masters.

11/22/63 is a whopper of a novel. It weighs in hardcover 3 pounds and comes in at 849 pages. That said, for me it made a great vacation read. I began it Thanksgiving day and finished it in five days (and nights). Be forewarned. At some point in the last 200 pages you will not be able to put it down. Time it better than I did, for it made for a very late night when I HAD to finish it.

I often find myself wondering when I read a book what kind of film it would make. Movie makers have yet to hit the right note when taking King’s material to the screen. Even the great director Stanley Kubrick lost his way in making “The Shining” which should have been so much better than it was. Most of the King book to film’s are excrement, even those screenplays that King wrote himself. I think the reason for this is that the monsters King writes about are more scary in our heads than even the best director and the most sophisticated special effects can produce. And in many cases his directors and special effects have been far from the best (see “Maximum Overdrive” which King must have done in a daze) and often are so bad as to be laughable.

This novel would be a challenge but could be done. There is certainly enough archival footage that could be manipulated à la “Forest Gump” to make it believable. The real problem, as always, would be casting.

Nicolas Cage as Jake Epping?

Johnny Depp as Oswald?

It would be very interesting.

King On 11/22/63

I have a dispute with the hotel we are staying at.

We have had NO problem with this place for over ten years of two stays yearly. We made friends with the front desk person and she always took care of us.

We have some history here. The last year of my Mother’s life we rented two of these condos side by side and it was a wonderful time. It might be noted that this joint is not cheap, with room rates in the summer 3-500 dollars.

We made our reservation for after Thanksgiving in August and got a confirmation. When we arrived the room had been taken by someone else who rented it for a month. The NEW girl at the front desk was all apologies and stuck us in a room so small that you had to go outside to change your mind. We are not pleased.

Here is the problem – new girl swears she sent an email and called to let us know about the change in September. Nada in my spam filter. No message on my phone. I check my email twelve times an hour (literally).

Questions: Why didn’t she send a snail mail? Why didn’t she try again with email and phone call?

Why was she such a bitch?

We upgraded to a two bedroom after seeing it was open. She has the balls to charge me the difference.

In ten years of staying here twice a year we could have bought a BMW.

We love this place but perhaps we will never come here again.

Sunday Wrap 11/21/11-11/26/11

A look back at the past weeks postings. Many times I forget that people need a little road map to the things that get put up on my blog so this is the best way I know how to catch you up. I sincerely thank you for reading. Both of you!
This week’s offerings are on the electric chair, how I view the spraying of pepper, a look at holiday work on the radio and more more more, Andrea True Dies.

Monday 11/21/11

Blog PostThe chair-and it’s not an easy chair.

Tuesday 11/22/11

Blog Post Back to the future-the 60’s revisited on our streets.