Comparing the Relative Adorability of Different Cuddly Mammalian Brains

The best thing I heard all day: While walking around in the Mutter Museum, a girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen, looking at jars of brains, declared to her parents, "The dog's brain is actually kind of cute," then gasped and emphatically added, "Aw...but the cat brain is even cuter!" It's true what they say. Some people are cat brain people, some are dog brain people. (This same girl was thoroughly grossed out by the wax models of skin infections and informed her parents that she would "just die" if she ever had one of those. "Well yes," I thought, "depending on the severity of the infection, you just might.")

So far, the vacation's been fanatastic. I had lunch with my father yesterday, followed by a latte at a coffee shop called La Colombe. It's kind of hipster, kind of yuppie, and they have great croissants. So I spent the afternoon in there, reading and writing, and then struck up conversation with a guy named Fred, who teaches art at one of the Quaker schools around here. Then I went to Rittenhouse Square and read until the afternoon mosquitoes (who, surprisingly enough, are far more vicious than the midmorning mosquitoes) gave me reason to leave.

I finished reading The Encyclopedia of the Dead yesterday. All in all, I was disappointed with it. My biggest problem with it stemmed from this: It's a book of short stories in the vein of Borges, and, although the stories were generally well-written, often times they were too long to really keep my interest past the initial few pages. For example, the title story "The Encyclopedia of the Dead" is about a book that records the lives of every person who has ever died, since its conception, in striking detail. Where Borges would have explored this idea for six-to-ten pages (and would have explored it thoroughly and beautifully, so that the reader would not be left feeling that his six-page story had gypped them out of some vital information) Danilo Kis explores it for twenty-something pages, going into the extreme details covered in the entry on one person. Consequently, he lost me.

Worse still is "The Book of Kings and Fools," which is about the life of an antisemitic pamphelet. The story explores the results of the pamphelet's wide circulation, its effect on the ideas of people like Hitler, Stalin, and others, and its origins as a work of satire during the reign of Napoleon. In places, this story is very interesting, but it's thirty pages long and much of that feels like filler. Also, it hops back and forth in its narrative tense, from present to past and back again, without warning and without apparent purpose, which made it very hard to follow.

Borges' great gift was his ability to use an economy of language to explore a complex idea in a relatively short space. Where Danilo Kis does this, his stories are excellent. But too often the stories in The Encyclopedia of the Dead fell into a kind of narrative babble, which made me care less about the ideas he was exploring, less about the characters he was using to explore them, and less about the story as a whole than when the last page would come.

Alright. Now on to a few links.
I found Johnny Theremin on Neil Gaiman's site. It's a project based on his July 26th journal entry, in which someone told Neil that he needed a chapter summary. Immediately. The rest followed. Apparently, a fan put up a site for the Johnny Theremin story. I know I plan to submit something. Just as soon as I'm done with everything else I need to finish writing and revising.

I found out about the Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping through an article in the New York Times Magazine. To quote the article from an episode in a California Starbucks:

Enter, from the parking lot, Reverend Billy.
He is 6-foot-3, impossible not to look at in his white suit, clerical collar and dyed-blond pompadour. He is also not a real minister -- he is a New York-based performance artist and activist named Bill Talen -- but it generally takes people a minute or two to figure that out, and this confusion over the exact derivation of his authority is the space in which he thrives. ''Hallelujah!'' he shouts through a white cardboard megaphone as he bursts through the door. ''This is an abusive place, children! It has landed in this neighborhood like a space alien! The union-busting, the genetically-engineered milk, the fake bohemianism! But we don't have to be here, children! This is the Good News!''

It makes me proud to be an American. The complete text of the article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22BILLY.html. You may need a password, so let me direct you to www.bugmenot.com.

And finally, my roommate discovered a while ago that automobile names are a lot funnier when you tack the word "anal" on them as a prefix. I happen to agree. But my roommate, not content just knowing that some automobile names can be made funnier this way, but wanting to find out which automobile name is funniest when the word "anal" is added, set up a Web site to find out. It's at www.analautos.com. You can find a list of all automobiles, arranged by maker. I try to delude myself into thinking I'm an adult and an intellectual, then something like this comes along and I have to concede that I am neither.

Sorry about the lack of hyperlinks in the text today. My dad's laptop doesn't support them for some reason, so we have to go manual for now. I'll correct them as soon as I can.