1912’s Greatest Hits

Here’s something interesting. Last year right around this time, one of the better online literary distractions involved looking up the bestselling books on the day of your birth. This week John Scalzi took a look at the top sellers from 1912, a hundred years ago (and anyone who thinks they might want to get a crack about my birthday in here, just skip it).

Off the top of my head, 1912 sounds like it might have been a good year for books. And, in fact, that year saw Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and the original German edition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. But popularity doesn’t necessarily speak to a work’s status as a classic, or any powers of endurance at all, as it turns out. The bestsellers of 1912 are as follows:

1. The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter
2. The Street Called Straight by Basil King
3. Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
4. The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Davies
5. A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson
6. The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright
7. The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester
8. The Net by Rex Beach
9. Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
10. Fran by J. Breckenridge Ellis

As Scalzi points out, none of the ten titles or authors are exactly household words, even if you have a relatively geeky literary household. I recognize Stratton-Porter’s name—I’m pretty sure I had her A Girl of the Limberlost on my shelves when I was little, though I wasn’t very predisposed to reading anything with the word “girl” in the title. The rest of them, though, not so much. Which is definitely potentially depressing from a writer’s point of view. If best-seller status doesn’t confer any kind of relevance through the ages, then what does? Scalzi says,

I understand the temptation is to try to write something that will speak to the generations, but, look, in 1912 they hadn’t even yet invented pre-sliced bread. If you aim for being relevant to the future, you’re probably going to fail because you literally cannot imagine it, even if you write science fiction.

These books are all still in print in one form or another, many as public domain eBooks—now that would be a fun reading challenge for someone to take on—and a large number of them in large print, presumably for those readers who remember them fondly from days a little closer to their publication. But as he helpfully points out, we’ll all most likely be gone in another hundred years anyway. Although as readers and reviewers it’s always fun to second-guess the canon, as writers it’s our job to just… write.

If you must aim for relevance, try for being relevant now; it’s a context you understand. We can still read (and do read) Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dickinson, and I think it’s worth noting Shakespeare was busy trying to pack in the groundlings today, Cervantes was writing in no small part to criticize a then-currently popular form of fiction, and Dickinson was barely even publishing at all, i.e., not really caring about future readers. In other words, they were focused on their now. It’s not a bad focus for anyone.

What’s interesting, if you think about it, is that as often as not it’s genre that tends to hang in. You have the thinkers for the ages who’ve maintained, sure—your Thomas Manns, your Bertrand Russells—but also, if we’re looking at that same year, a heavy dose of Westerns, mysteries, and adventure stories. Not to mention, regarding pretty much any year you pick, YA and children’s literature. Endurance is a funny thing. You never know—another century from now, in whatever forum has replaced blogs, the same debate will probably be going on. “Oh sure, Freedom,” opinionmakers of the future will say. “It had its moment in the sun, but it was no Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

(Photo is Three Girls Reading, artist unknown, 1912.)

Like Fire

Why 50/50 T-Shirts Are Preferred

The T-shirt has been a popular choice of warm weather garments since the 1950’s. Early T-Shirts were used as undergarments and still are but have become much more popular as an outer garment. Movie stars including Marlon Brando helped make 50/50 shirts popular and they have continued to thrive.

Modern T-Shirts

T-shirts have become quite common and can now be seen everywhere. They are very versatile and can be worn for many different reasons and feature many different styles. They can be worn loose or close to the body. They are made a lightweight breathable material that promotes comfort. They are relatively inexpensive and because there are so many options they are available for mass ordering. This is why many companies will make them the company uniform. They are comfortable and versatile, and can also feature a company logo.

Styles

T-shirts feature a variety of styles and logos. They can have short sleeves, long sleeves, pockets, crew necks, the list is endless. In addition to style the colors that are available are also quite extensive. This makes them a desirable product because they are able to feature company colors. Print and logos are also available for T-shirts which can aid in identifying the wearer such as a uniform on a construction site, or help advertise. The ability to print logos or quotes allows the wearer to express themselves more so than a uniform option.

Safety

T-shirts are also used to comply with safety standards as well. Instead of wearing bulky vests or name badges that get in the way, the same can be accomplished with comfortable, wearable, t-shirts. Construction workers, for example, work in the heat, a t-shirts gives them the breathability but also helps distinguish the fact that they are a worker and can even identify them. The t-shirts meet the American National Safety Institute in regards to standards both the long sleeved and short sleeved choices. They can also feature reflective strips to make the wearer much more visible.

Materials

Most t-shirts are made from cotton, polyester, or both. Generally they come as a knit fabric and have the ability to stretch. The combination of cotton and polyester creates a soft material that doesn’t shrink excessively. These qualities make t-shirts versatile and easy to fit to different sizes. Thread for the shirts can be made of different materials as well. Some t-shirts even use monofilament as thread which can be uneasy on the skin. The collars are typically reinforced in order to help keep their shape and strengthen the stress points on the garment.

Manufacturing

Due to the simplicity of design, ANSI safety vests are fairly easy to fabricate. Sometimes companies will use a tubular design to decrease the number of seams needed to sew. Machines can mass produce t-shirts and keep the cost relatively low. Companies and governments set quality standards for t-shirts including number of stitches per seam, how the collar lays against the body and many other small things most people don’t think of. Labels are placed on the t-shirt with information about the origin of the shirt, washing instructions as well as the material the shirt is made of.

Open Letters Monthly, February 2012

I’m not sure what Punxsatawney Phil did this morning, but something tells me we have at least a few more weeks of winter left, no matter how mild it’s been this far. So to carry us through at least the next four, we have the February issue of Open Letters Monthly. February may be known as the F-month around here, but this issue holds a bounty beyond expletives:

Greg Waldmann gives us some political commentary on the post-Florida incarnation of Mitt Romney 3.0 and reviews Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor.

There’s a little something for the middle of the month (you know what day I’m talking about): Jessica Miller on Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books fame.

And poets, and poetry! Stephen Akey takes a bittersweet look at Wallace Stevens; Austin Allen discusses Philip Larkin, who—yes—once wrote a poem about a unicorn (take that, mum and dad!); Maureen Thorson reads Kate Schapira’s two new books of poetry: How We Saved the City and The Bounty: Four Addresses; and Fani Papageorgiou gives us an original poem, The Drifter.

There’s fiction: John Cotter on Eli Gottlieb’s dark “crackerjack thriller,” The Face Thief; Craig Dowd with Tom Piccirilli’s American noir Every Shallow Cut; Christopher Urban on Tom McCarthy’s reissued early novel Men in Space; and a review from Paul Griffin of Ayad Akhtar’s fine and serious debut novel, American Dervish.

And life stories: Steve Donoghue on W. Mark Ormrod’s excellent new biography of Edward III; and Victoria Olsen on the sad tale of Virginia Woolf’s secret sister (and William Makepeace Thackeray’s granddaughter) Laura Stephen.

Irma Heldman thrills to Chris Morgan Jones’ The Silent Oligarch and reassures us that “glasnost did not, as feared in some circles, spell the end of spy fiction.”

Andrew Ladd writes about the discomfiting fascination with writing about bullfighting.

In Open Letters Weekly, Steve Donoghue beams up Greg Cox’s Star Trek, The Rings of Time.

OLM talks to sculptor Megan Heeres, creator of this month’s cover piece, Home Alone, on, among other things, her passion for papermaking:

I love that paper can be 2D and 3D – that it is this super ubiquitous material but it also can be alarmingly elegant. It has religious (holy books, Joss paper) and socio-political (money, contracts), and quotidienne (butcher paper, toilet paper) connotations. I love that I can begin with this somewhat slimy, icky mass of paper pulp and create a considered composition.”

A Quiz for Black History Month, was enlightening (and I did well)—and thus fortified, shall slog through the rest of this short and not traditionally sweet month. I invite you all to do the same.

Like Fire

Figuring Out How To Add American Pasport Pages

Those who do a great deal of traveling, whether for pleasure or for business, will eventually learn how to add U.S. pass port pages. Most of these procedures are carried out through the mail, although if people have travel scheduled in the short term, some orders may be completed in person. Travelers may either process their documents on their own or employ the services of a professional expediter.

Less Then 4

Travelers who have fewer than four pages left in their books should apply for additions. Applying for additions involves paying the appropriate fee, mailing the current passport and mailing Form DS-4085. Form DS-4085 displays the address to which people should mail all materials. According to the State Department, travelers should mail these important documents using a secure envelope. Also, travelers should pay for a traceable delivery method that will ensure that their materials are delivered on time to the right location.

Appointments

U. S. Citizens abroad who need to travel within the next week may apply for additions at their consulate. Depending on the practices of a particular consulate, applicants may obtain an appointment over the telephone or online. When they go to their appointments, travelers should bring a current and valid passport along with Form DS-4085. Fees may be paid by credit card, local or American currency. Most consulates handle transactions by mail but if travelers are in a hurry, then they may be able to make arrangements to pick up documents from the consulate.

Only 3

Offices will not add more than three additional pages. If applicants already have three additions to their book, they will have to obtain a new passport. In addition to mailing the appropriate fees and form DS-82, applicants should include a signed and written request for additional pages if they travel extensively.

Bio-metric Document

If travelers need new passports, they will receive biometric documents. Biometric documents contain a chip that uses radio frequency identification to transmit a digital signature and a chip identification number or added security. With a central government database, this information is stored and connected to appropriate identification information for the document holder.

Service Available

For busy travelers, a passport service will be able to expedite the process. Services guide applicants through application steps and handle all processing. Services are particularly handy when travelers need to have documents expedited. With many services, added pages may be obtained in as few as one to ten business days, depending on when the applicant needs to travel.

Verification

Travelers should take precautions before paying a American pasport renewal service. If travelers decide to use a service online, verifying the telephone number by actually calling the number is crucial. Also, before committing to any single service, travelers should compare the costs and the turnaround times that different services offer to ensure that they are getting the best deals.

The Top Five Reasons Aliens Have Not Met With us Yet

There are many reasons that we may not have received radio communications or a visit from aliens yet. While the Drake Equation satisfies the idea that life is in fact common in the universe, it is also spread out very far and possibly brief in nature, possibly explaining the fact why we haven’t met an aliens species yet.

They are too far away, and we haven’t been listening long enough

This is considered a big reason we haven’t come in contact or received communications from another intelligent species. If optimistically we were separated from our nearest intelligent neighbour by ten thousand light years, it is entirely possible that we are never going to meet them unless faster than light travel is developed. This may not be possible and there is no known method of doing this presently. Radio waves also travel at light speed, so for the very short amount of time we have been transmitting information (50 years or so) there is almost zero chance anybody would be aware of our existence.

They are at different technological levels to us and cannot communicate

The idea of sending out radio signals runs on an assumption that aliens are actually attempting to receive radio signals for more than a short amount of time. It is known that our communication methods are evolving, and such signals may become extinct in our own society eventually.

Aliens exist in some sort of post-human state

Well, not post human but post-alien. A technological discovery may have occurred that allowed all minds to leave the human body and be downloaded onto a computer where they live in some form of digital bliss. Perhaps they have entered some kind of ethereal realm and are pure thought only. It is possible that we cannot even comprehend the communication other species in the universe may be using.

They are here now and watching

There are a few ideas surrounding this one. The first is that the governments do have contact with them but it’s a big secret being kept from everyone. The other is that they are here now but undetectable to humans and simply observe us. Another idea is that the Earth is some kind of Zoo, set up in a synthetic reality. All of these ideas provide good fodder for conspiracy theorists around the world.

They don’t want to talk with us

It is entirely possible that a spaceship or probe did come into proximity of us in modern times. Perhaps it probed out internet and downloaded thousands of lolcats, demotivational posters and various other internet memes. The aliens then cast harsh judgement on us and turned away in disgust, looking for a better group to make contact with.

This article is written by a blogger for one of the best accounting firms in Perth. The views expressed are the authors opinion only and provided for entertainment purposes only.

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Sci Fi Bloggers

Top 10 Arcade Games of All Time

Let’s face it, you can’t go to the seaside without hitting the arcades whilst you are there! From retro arcade games to more recent releases, we love them all! Of course some are better than others and when you don’t have much pocket change to spare, you will no doubt want to play the best of the best. For a list of the top ten arcade games to look out for just keep reading;

Street Fighter III 3rd Strike

It was obvious this beauty would make it onto the list. It’s a game which has becomeso popular that national and international tournaments are regularly held to crown players champion of the 2D beat ‘em up world!  The game is a lot like other Street Fighters but with a twist. You can only use one super art move per match, giving the game an edge which no other Street Fighter has. With a mixture of drum and bass music, smooth 2D visuals and unusual Street Fighter characters mixed in with the classics, it’s easily one of the best fighting games of all time!

Time Crisis 2

Namco’s rail shooter popularized the genre and is ultimately the daddy of all rail shooters out there. It paved the way for co-operatively played rail shooters and was fuelled with adrenaline throughout its entirety. If ever there was a shooter you needed to look out for, this is it!

X-Men

Just how many other arcade games out there will allow you to play through a game with five other friends! X-Men is an extremely fun game which lets you play as any of your favourite X-Men characters and has that old retro feel to it which we all love.

Pacman

It doesn’t matter how old it gets, this game will always be one of the best! It’s a simple concept of dodging the ghosts to collect the little white dots, yet it’s probably more challenging than any game released on the Xbox 360! It would be a crime not to include Pacman in this list.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Whether it’s the old Sega Mega Drive games or the new ones, if you see this speedy blue hedgehog in an arcade you better get yourself to that machine! Being Sega’s mascot and influencing the platforms games of today, Sonic is easily one of the greatest video gaming characters of all time! Without Sonic, video gaming just wouldn’t be the same.

Metal Slug

Before there was Call of Duty, there was Metal Slug! A game which is very much like Gunstar Heroes but with a much darker edge to it. It might not have the best graphics in the world, or bring war to life, but it does have awesome music combined with explosions pretty much everywhere!  Imagine a 2D Commando and you’ll pretty much have the exact  interpretation of what Metal Slug is.Final Fight

Take Guy from the Street Fighter Alpha series, put him in a side scrolling game which is very much like Streets of Rage and you have yourself Final Fight! With its big chunky animated graphics and fantastic 32bit music, you can’t help but fall in love with this game.

King of Fighters ‘94

You can’t have a top ten list without mentioning one of the best fighters of all time! The King of Fighters franchise has been around for many years now and it was King of Fighters that combined Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury together into one big fighting frenzy. Of course all of the King of Fighters games deserve a play, but the reason I mention ’94 is because it’s the originator of the series!

Alien Vs Predator (Capcom edition)

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eBooks and university presses

CIVIL WAR BOOKS and AUTHORS

Harris: “LINCOLN AND THE BORDER STATES: Preserving the Union”

CIVIL WAR BOOKS and AUTHORS

Mario Vargas Llosa and the Sort of Book You’d Sacrifice a Sandal For

A few months ago my wife and I spent a day on Isla Colon—one of Panama’s Bocas del Toro islands in the Caribbean—where three different men asked if I wanted marijuana. When I told them no, they’d ask the obvious follow-up question: coke?

We decided to move to Isla Bastimentos, a smaller island usually described as “away from it all” or, worse, “tranquil.” What this means is that Isla Bastimentos would’ve been quite tranquil indeed if our hotel hadn’t fired up the bandsaw every morning at eight. It also means that there’s not much to do except walk around, swim, and read—which isn’t so bad at all, except that we were out of books, and our hotel’s book exchange specialized in titles containing the word “shopaholic,” James Patterson books, and German-language novels.

So we did some hiking. One morning about an hour into a hike, we saw a sign signifying that we would find a coffee shop just a fifteen minute walk down a small trail. The sign didn’t say anything about the trail just sort of disappearing in the grass, about the creek we had to ford, or about snakes. It also didn’t mention that it would take much more than fifteen minutes. I hadn’t planned for this sort of hike, and I was wearing sandals—good sandals though, Rainbow sandals. But at one point the trail was so steep and muddy that I tore through the strap of my right sandal and had to hobble the rest of the way in the mud and woodchips with one bare foot.

It’s still mystifying why someone would put a coffee shop on top of a hill in a jungle on an island. What’s even more mystifying is that here in the jungle was a coffee shop that wouldn’t be out of place in Seattle. They had organic chocolates, homemade pastries, and honey-mint lemonade—all at Seattle prices.

But the real treasure was the coffee shop’s book exchange. In the past few weeks of our trip I’d only been able to obtain books like Super Freakonomics (interesting enough but strangely forgettable), Jim Cramer’s Confessions of a Street Addict (fascinating in roughly the same way as Dante’s Inferno), and a collection of essays purportedly about Russian literature that actually turned out to be essays about a grad student’s life experiences studying Russian literature (not quite the same thing).

This book exchange on the hill had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl. But we hadn’t brought any old books with us, and it violates book-exchange rules—really, the only book-exchange rule—to take a book without replacing it. So we hiked down the hill to a small roadless village, where the one store in town sort of miraculously had a limited selection of sandals. I bought a nice pair of size-ten Aguila sandals for .50, which later turned out to be a women’s size ten with a subtle pink-and-green color scheme.

A few days later we gathered our mediocre books and again hiked up to the coffee shop on the hill. My Aguila women’s sandals held up quite nicely. I traded my book of grad-lit essays for Tom Sawyer and our no-longer-necessary Costa Rica travel guide for a paperback copy of The Bad Girl, complete with spots of black mold on the lower half of most pages. Since we were in Latin America, it seemed fitting to start with the Latin American book by one of Latin America’s most famous authors.

Mario Vargas Llosa is probably most famous for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He’s also famous for running for president of Peru in 1990, and also for punching Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face. Neither of them ever said what the punch was about, but it seems pretty clear why Latin America’s second-greatest novelist would punch Latin America’s greatest novelist in the face.

But the reason Mario Vargas Llosa is famous for any of this in the first place is that he writes great novels. I had read three of Mario Vargas Llosa’s books before—Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversation in the Cathedral, and Who Killed Palomino Molero?—and the main thing they had in common is that they were great books set in Peru. So that’s what I expected from The Bad Girl: a good book set in Peru.

The Bad Girl at first seems like a great writer blowing off steam by doing a bit of genre fiction. It’s a romance about a nice but boring guy who falls in love with a flighty girl, a girl who makes him feel alive but is also completely unhinged. Sounds familiar, right? This sort of female character has appeared in enough movies that it’s almost archetypal, and we even have a great name for it, courtesy of the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin: Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls are terrifying. What’s terrifying about MPDGs is that you get the sense you’re supposed to like them, that if you’re a guy you’re supposed to think it’d be pleasant to date them or whatever. Can you imagine being in a long-term romantic relationship with Natalie Portman’s character from Garden State? Terrifying.

But Mario Vargas Llosa is a great writer, and great writers don’t pretend that you should like Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Mario Vargas Llosa doesn’t bully you into feeling a certain way about any of his characters, actually. I still don’t know how I was supposed to feel about the Bad Girl—Mario Vargas Llosa never really reveals his authorial feelings. He just gives a full portrait of the characters, makes them as human and understandable as possible, and then steps back and says: what do you think?

I thought the Bad Girl was an awful person. Just terrible. I didn’t particularly care for her pursuer either. But one of the brilliant things about the book is that the story works even if you despise the characters. Their romance is interesting, and what happens to them is rewarding and realistic, like what would’ve happened if Garden State had covered another forty years and shown what it’d be like if a guy actually tried to hash out a real existence with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t be a lifetime of skinny-dipping and stuffed animals.

It turns out that it’s not really fair to classify the Bad Girl as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The key feature of a MPDG is that she isn’t real—she couldn’t exist outside of a fictional world where her only purpose is to buoy a depressed man. And the Bad Girl is real, as terrible as she is, and the romance she’s a part of ends up being much truer and more nuanced than a standard genre story. When a Nobel-caliber author takes a standard romance and gives it Nobel-caliber thought, you get something rare: actual wisdom about how to love another person.

Mario Vargas Llosa won his Nobel Prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Though this seems to describe more political works like Conversation in the Cathedral, it applies just as much to The Bad Girl. Love is a structure of power, one of the oldest ones, and “resistance, revolt, and defeat” is the perfect description of the romance in The Bad Girl—actually, it’s probably the perfect description for a lot of romances. I imagine that The Bad Girl might be helpful to someone else, someone who might need some romantic guidance. So even though we pretty much destroyed the book carrying it across Panama, I’m still going to hand it off to another book exchange, even if they won’t give me anything in return.

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How To Proceed When You Have A Stolen American Passport

A passport is an official document issued to a person to identify its owner as a citizen of a particular country. Its elements include the name of the person, nationality, age and sex. It also includes a photograph of its owner as this is the one sure way to describe the document holder. This is why it’s so important to handle a stolen pasport properly.

Stolen In Your Home Country

Perhaps you have planned an extensive trip abroad and as you are packing you realize your passport is nowhere to be found. This is devastating. Search your house and all previous luggage, however, if you suspect your passport may have been stolen, then you must report it. By reporting it to the proper officials you can red flag it if it’s used, this way no one else can use your documents. This is a very important step in the process of replacing a stolen passport.

Abroad Loss

Unfortunately passport theft is quite common. There are many tricks that gypsies and thieves have up their sleeve when it comes to obtaining wallets, money, and even passports. If you find that you are in a foreign country and your passport is stolen, then you need to report it to the nearest authorities. A passport acts as a permission to be in a certain country, at any time you can be asked to provide documentation stating permission to be in the country. If you cannot provide this, you can be arrested and held until the situation is sorted out. By reporting it you can avoid that problem and it will red flag the use of your passport to prevent someone else from using it.

Stay Calm

It is important throughout this ordeal to remain calm. Staying calm will allow you to think clearly and process necessary information. This way you can properly speak with authorities and fill out all replacement paperwork with a clear head avoiding mistakes that can delay the process.

Report It

You can report it missing by phone or by filling out a special form at an agency or at the government offices. You can find the contacts online to report your missing item. Should you find a passport of someone else, you can also ensure that they get it back by mailing it to any Passport Agency.

It’s Cancelled

Once reported stolen, the passport is then invalidated. This will prevent anyone from using it. You must be absolutely sure that it is stolen before reporting it, otherwise, if found, you have an invalid passport. Then it is time for a pasport renewal .