Seattle's Passive-Aggressive drivers!

The Word

In case you don't want to click on the photo, this drivers has taped a 5x8 index card to the back of every headrest, and to the dashboard in front of the passenger's seat, saying:

• Wear your seatbelt if under 27
• Don't comment on my driving
• Don't comment on the smell, except for Forest
• Don't distract me

Now that's the ultimate in Seattle passive-aggressive treatment of friends and family.

I have to wonder about the age restriction. And what does he mean by "Forest," capital and all?

Cynicism comes easily these days...

This morning on the train, I sat across from a signficantly heavyset woman who was feeding her toddling child breakfast. The breakfast consisted mostly of yogurt, which is a pretty good breakfast to get into a toddler, although this was one of those high-sugar varieties. The kid also had a sippy cup full of water, and she was drinking it readily.

Then the mother took out her breakfast: A Starbucks grande caramel frappucino (410 calories, 13 teaspoons of sugar, 15gms of fat), followed by two Pizza Hut fast-food breadsticks (280 calories) slathered in ranch dressing.

I try not to be cynical. I really do. Maybe that's not her usual breakfast; maybe it was an emergency buy on her way out the door. Certainly my own breakfast wasn't much healthier today, since I had my own on-the-go buy of drip coffee (55 calories) and a fast-food sausage sandwich (460 calories, 10gms saturated fat), too.

But it was the badge she wore that caught my eye. A "guest pass" from a local charity food bank. Not "volunteer" or "staff." She spent at least ten dollars on breakfast, but she's headed into the city, and sure enough, she got off at the stop where the food bank is headquartered. With her guest pass.

I'm still trying not to be cynical.

Johannes Cabal, the Detective [book, review]

Johannes Cabal: The Detective is the follow-on book to Jonthan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer. Cabal is the necromancer of the title, a psychopathic little man in the pale, blond tradition of Elric or Dexter, obsessed in his own little way, like Victor Frankenstein, with uncovering the secrets of Life with a capital L, and woe betide those who get in his way. Necromancy is a condemned subject, and those who practice it are summarily executed, but Cabal isn't interested in raising armies of the dead or extracting obscure secrets, so he doesn't understand why people dislike him. Still, as so many people seem to want to shoot him he's gotten better at shooting back. As he himself puts it, he is a scientist "in the ongoing march of humanity from protoplasm to— I don't know, to be honest. Something slightly better than protoplasm would be a start."

I haven't read The Necromancer, and I didn't need to. Howard has written a wonderful little steampunk adventure with its own rules of science, magic, and the universe at large, as Cabal is arrested attempting to steal an obscure book on Necromancy from a library in some obscure Teutonic princedom-turned-republic, has a thrilling escape, and winds up on a quasi-zeppelin luxury liner fever-dreamedly mixed with the SHIELD helicarrier circa 1988, on which murders, assaults, and intrigues lead our anti-hero into a quagmire of personal and political webs. He meets a charming old foe who becomes something of an ally, and an excellent foil for conversation and quippery.

Quippery is at the heart of this book. Howard has a problem: he never met a cliche' he didn't like, and he'll use them at the drop of a hat. I winced, repeatedly, as expressions and metaphors long drained of vitality, much like Cabal's subjects, meandered across the page. And yet, if you forgive Howard his laziness, you'll get past them all for a rollickingly funny story about a high-functioning and brilliant psychopath working his way with relentless logic from one end of a conundrum to the other. Conversation is wicked, pointed, and hilarious; Cabal's own thoughts morbidly precise and smile-inducing.

Aside from cliche's, Howard occasionally head-hops without much warning. His book is rife with anachronisms, as when Cabal raids several morgues clearly run by men much more modern than the clothing, language, and setting imply. But these are actually quibbles. It could have been a much more precise book, I suppose, but it would be hard to imagine the precision necessary to all the fun it provides.

Re-watched part of Iron Man 2 last night...

Say all you will about Iron Man 2, which was a pale specter of the first film, but the scene where Downey is trying to find his father's hidden mystery, the one his father couldn't build because the tech didn't exist yet so he hid it in plain sight, illustrates something essential about Tony Stark.

The scene where Downey is trying to figure out the puzzle, where you can see him struggling, if you're a geek of the mathematical persuasion you can feel along with him as the microneural circuits exploit their own plasticity and grow in new directions. The eye-rolling, distant look, the hand scrubbed over the face to create highly localizing distracting stimuli because you desperately know you need or it something inside your head is going to break, Downey captured that high-functioning ADHD/Asperger's look gorgeously.