Holding On

Finished a very good book today called Holding On : Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes by David Isay and Harvey Wang. Isay travelled around the US for three years (around 1991-93) interviewing these people, and Wang took their photographs.

I only found out about this book because I saw the obituary of Robert Shields in the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a guy who took diary-writing to an extreme, and he is featured here along with many other wonderfully unique individuals.

Miles Mahan is the creator of Hula Ville, a dusty theme park on the edge of the Mojave Desert. His inspiration came from a wooden cutout of a hula girl he salvaged from a Hawaiian restaurant in 1955.

Father Louis H. Greving is continuing the work of Father Paul Dobberstein who began building a Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. The grotto consists of eight caves connected to one another by stone paths and winding stairways. The entire structure has been covered with millions of tiny shards of stone and shell pressed into concrete and arranged into intricate patterns and pictures depicting scenes from the life of Jesus Christ.

Dewy Chafin and his mother, Barbara Elkins handle serpents (chiefly rattlesnakes) in their small church in Jolo, West Virginia. Scientists have not figured out how more of these people do not die from their occasional snakebites.

Jim Searles is the President of the Brooklyn Elite Checker Club. All the members are in their seventies and eighties, with minds sharp as tacks from their passion for checkers.

Dugout Dick Zimmerman was a hermit who settled in a remote Idaho cave. People came by and told him they wanted a cave too, so he began excavating other caves, so now he rents caves for two bucks night. "The rooms are surprisingly pleasant, even cosy. Each has a wood-burning stove made from a trash can, and a box-spring mattress. The more deluxe rooms have an old school-bus seat fro a couch, and an empty icebox in which to hang clothes.

Stanley Killar from Klamath Falls, Oregon is a record collector who has collected so many records his house is buckling under the weight.

And that's only a handful. There are 43 more. This book is so wonderful. It's one of those books that is hard to quit reading. Each profile is from two to six pages, so it's very easy to read 'just one more'. And it's the kind of book you will go back to, maybe when your life seems grim and robotic, depressing, or utterly meaningless. Books like these show us that it's never too late to get a life.

Modern Teens

Teen girl 1: "You know [points to teen girl 2] Marie's pregnant?"
Teen boy 1: "Who to?"
Teen girl 2: "Don't know."
They all laugh.

Overheard on train from Wollongong to Kiama (by Pauli)

East West 101

Watching new Aussie TV shows can be a disappointing experience. It's even worse when you are Australian. Naturally we want our own productions to be good, not to suck.
A new sitcom on the ABC debuted recently, it was called The Librarians. I didn't even make it to the end of the first episode it was so lame. I wanted to like it because my friend who works in the library at work told everybody to watch it that night. But it was terrible, and I was glad my librarian friend never got around to asking me what I thought of it.
On the other hand, a new Aussie detective show popped up on SBS five weeks ago and it's excellent. It's called East West 101. The focus is on two Sydney detectives. One of them is Detective Zane Malik, a Muslim who became a cop after watching his father get shot in the head in a bungled grocery store hold-up. The father survived but with serious brain damage. The other is Detective Sgt Ray Crowley, whose son has recently died from a drug overdose. Crowley has a problem with Malik, since Malik no doubt reminds him of the Lebanese smack dealer who was responsible for selling Crowley's son the hot shot that killed him.
Anyway, each episode deals with a separate new case that is solved by the end, while Malik's and Crowley's issues develop from episode to episode.
The show is top class and essential viewing.
Next week is the final episode of the six-episode season. That seems damned short to me, for a TV series. What the hell? Oh well, that's life. The best things are always over too soon.

Can't Read Swedish :[

Another of my NY resolutions was to finish reading the Kurt Wallander novels by the excellent Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Two days ago I finished the eighth book, and there's only one more to read: Pyramiden, which is a collection of five short stories that deal with Wallander and his early years as a cop/detective. To my dismay, I found out this afternoon that this book has not yet been translated into English. So that's one of my resolutions foiled already.

Hope it's not a bad omen for the year ahead :[

Paging Mr Don Shula

The daily quotation on my Collins desk calender today is from Don Shula:

"Success is not forever and failure is not fatal."

That's not a bad line, I suppose, though I doubt Mr Wilde has much to worry about, but who the heck is Don Shula?

The name sounds Hawaiian.

NY Resolution Fantasies

Happy New Year! to all my readers. One, two, three... Yep, you're all here. Good.
Anybody got any New Year resolutions? I'll bet you have been asked that before already, maybe more than once, and maybe you're sick of it. Or maybe not. Maybe you've got some good ones this year and wanna tell everybody. Well tell ME, go on! That's what the Comments button is for, after all.

As for me, quitting smoking is out this year. I'll continue smoking six or seven a day. I have tried quitting, but the fact is I enjoy the damned things too much.

Another one is... You can guess this one, it's not hard! That's right, writing in here on a more regular basis! OK stop rolling around the floor laughing your arses off. I know it's funny (like wishing for world peace), but it's true! I look back at how much I managed to write in 2005, something like half a million words or whatever it was. It sure felt like it. And they couldn't have been all bad. OK, mostly, but not all. Anyway, the main thing was how great I felt after writing a lot of that stuff. There may have been some delusion as to the quality some nights, but the main thing was that I felt like I had done something. "Something" meaning something more than eating or sleeping or watching TV. Or playing video games.

Plus, it's cool when somebody likes something you write. Even if it's only about your obsession with a woman who reads a book as she walks to work.

Anyway, either you know what I'm talking about or you think it's a load of self-indulgent bullshit. Of course, the latter may be true. But who cares? What the hell is wrong with a little self-indulgence anyway? Nothing, that's what.

That's all for now. More resolutions tomorrow! Maybe!

Rogue Galaxy 60h02m12s

This morning at 2:00am I finished Rogue Galaxy. It was a big relief to finish it. The final boss battle was a very long and sometimes frustrating multi-part affair. I died once about twenty minutes into it because I didn't use healing items fast enough. A dumb mistake on my part that very nearly caused me to hurl the controller at the wall. It was about 1:00am but I didn't feel like I could sleep until I finished the damned thing, so I re-started. The whole thing ended up taking an hour and a half, although that included some long cutscenes.

The game didn't need to be so long if you ask me, since parts of dungeons were cut-and-pasted over and over in order to make the game longer, which often made them a chore to get through.

In summary, and sad to say, the game did not live up to my expectations (Level 5's last game was the excellent (and even longer, by the way) Dragon Quest VIII).

Although I don't regret the time I spent playing it, there's no way I would bother re-playing it. However, for JRPG fans it's definitely worth playing, with many enjoyable elements (for example the fast and fun real-time battle system, the high quality animation, and the character's Special Attacks, for example Kisala's Deadly Stench attack where she throws the smelly old sock - oh how I wish I could bring her in the next time my boss throws a tantrum).