muffinlabs.com

Deploying to Engine Yard via Ruby

colin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Recently I’ve been playing with using Goldberg for Continuous Integration. CI is great, and what is also great is having a setup to auto-deploy to our Engine Yard staging server when all our tests pass. This isn’t fully implemented yet, but I do have the deploy to EY working. I had to reverse-engineer the command-line script a bit to get this working. Here is how it’s done for posterity:

12 Years of a Bad Idea

colin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

A couple of weeks ago, I randomly noticed that I bought my first personal domain name – jerkvision.com – 12 years ago on March 27, 2000. That domain isn’t really live anymore – it redirects to muffinlabs.com, but once upon a time it was my personal website, and it looked a bit like this

(I heart the Wayback Machine)

At that point, it was just static HTML, nothing special. I was actually a little surprised to realize that I hadn’t had my own personal domain earlier than this. I guess that before that, I stuck to my old RPI website, and maybe one or two random places where I might have had a website.

Anyway, this was right around the time that ‘web blogs’ and blog engines were gaining popularity, and over the years I’ve tried a bunch, including:

Movable Type
Wordpress
Drupal 4, 5, 6, and 7

And a couple more I can’t even remember.

And now I’m switched to Jekyll, a slightly different system which generates a static site from a collection of files that you maintain by hand. It’s a little hackish, but it’s definitely coder-friendly, and it gives me a few things I was looking for – mostly decent comment management via Disqus, a speedier website, and the ability to make random pages without too much effort.

Also, although I like Drupal enough, I also like trying new stuff, so here goes.

Excellent Birds

colin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Happy Friday

Total Recall: The Musical

colin — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

I had been thinking about Total Recall the other day (loved this movie as a kid), and I came across this:

The people who made this have a crazy list of musicals and other cool stuff on their site.

Speaking of Books Not Worth Reviewing...

colin — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

If you enjoy thorough book reviews of books not actually worth reviewing, then I highly recommend B to the F, a blog which is reviewing the novelization of Back to the Future in exhaustive detail. It’s great!

How God Made You

colin — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call “Books That are not Worth Reviewing” – This time, it’s How God Made You – a Catholic children’s book from 1960, written by psychiatrist Robert Odenwald and illustrated by Mary Reed Newland.

I hesitated for some time before writing this review, although it definitely meets the requirements of a Book Not Worth Reviewing. Mostly I felt the need to be sensitive about faith – I was raised Catholic, and while I’m not one anymore, I know plenty of people for whom faith is very important.

Then one day, a leading candidate for the Presidency of the United States insulted forty-five million Protestants.

I decided at that point that I was probably over-thinking this, and that it was probably okay to critically review a book of Catholic dogma. So I finished my work and here it is.

There’s long history of art tied to spirituality and the religious experience. In the western world this is mostly based on Christianity, and historically this means a lot of art by Catholics, based on their faith. There’s no shortage of awesome art out there.

And then, there’s How God Made You. This book is targeted at young children. It was written by a Catholic psychiatrist and illustrated by a writer of Catholic books for children and adults alike. The process was overseen by a supposedly gay cardinal. It does not meet any of the definitions of great art, or even of memorable art.

Robert Odenwald

The author of the book was Catholic psychiatrist Robert Odenwald. His 1952 book Psychiatry and Catholicism got a mention in a Time article called Psychiatry for Catholics. In the 1950s, it was an open question whether it was okay for Catholics to engage in psychotherapy, since the Church claims the ultimate responsibility to care for the souls of its parishioners. Pope Pius XII addressed the Fifth International Congress on Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology on April 13, 1953 to settle the issue in the favor of psychology. I was surprised to learn that this was ever a problem.

The book was published by PJ Kenedy and Sons, publishers of the Official Catholic Directory, and it seems like Odenwald may have had an agreement to write a series of books for them, because he also wrote How You Were Born and Your child’s world from infancy through adolescence.

Odenwald also wrote The Disappearing Sexes in 1965, a year before he died. Here’s a Kirkus review of it: > Dr. Odenwald, a psychiatrist (Your Child’s World- 1958) deplores the fact that the Vive la Difference between the sexes is not only dying out but destroying the general structure of family and morality. Certain aspects of the equalization of the sexes are to be observed through the dominance of the female, the disappearance of the male and the prevalence of the homosexual. Women, not so much working as earning more money; the pill and the new sexual freedom (we feel he overvalues the effect of the pill as a liberating influence); etc. are part of this talk-think piece. Sometimes the think aspects seem controvertible: do parents really want children as a status symbol in more cases than realized? does “more often” than admitted, a working mother take a job to “improve her bargaining position” at home? is the “unpopularity of breast feeding” (what supports this contention?) a sign of the new defeminization? Dr. Odenwald draws much of his material from currently popular literature, Vance Packard, Jeff Stearn, Betty Friedan as well as his own consultation room and most of these charges against the whole laxity of our culture, the stridency of the female, the slackness of the male, have been leveled before. In any case, it’s a rebuttal of the mystique.

Obviously, this book was written a long time ago, but you can see the mindset at work here – a resistance to change, to feminism, and to the equality of sexes, all wrapped up with a compelling title. Of course, you would expect that from an observant Catholic of the time who had a contract to write dogmatic books. And many of the themes of The Disappearing Sexes are clearly echoed in How God Made You.

Mary Reed Newland

The book is illustrated by Mary Reed Newland, and although the art is not great, everything I’ve read about her suggests that she was a very nice and well-respected person. She spent most of her life in Monson, MA, a town not too far from where I live, which is probably how a signed copy of this book ended up in a local library book sale a few years ago. She also wrote a history of Monson, and apparently spent a lot of time reading to children at their local library. She passed away in 1989.

If you spend time searching, you’ll mostly find mentions of her books, or of speeches she gave to different communities about faith. Newland wrote over a dozen books, almost all about Catholic doctrine or the stories of the Old Testament. Her two most famous books are How to Raise Good Catholic Children, and The Year and Our Children: Catholic Family Celebrations for Every Season, both of which are still in print. She also wrote The Saints and Our Children – here’s an excerpt from that book.

There’s also a bunch of copies of a story she wrote about Halloween in Catholic history. Which seems like a fairly hilarious attempt to co-opt the day for her faith, but it’s an interesting essay.

While searching, I also found several blog posts from random people talking about her positive influence in their life. I ended up feeling like she was a very nice woman who is really bad at illustrating – but more on that later.

Cardinal Francis Spellman

This book, like many books about Catholic dogma, has a ‘Nihil Obstat’ and ‘Imprimatur’

The “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed.

In the Catholic Church an imprimatur is an official declaration by a Church authority that a book or other printed work may be published.

The person in charge of issuing the imprimatur is the ‘Censor Librorum’

In the Roman Catholic Church, the Censor Librorum is an ecclesiastical authority charged with reviewing texts and granting the nihil obstat. The Latin Censor Librorum translates as “censor of books.” While the title may suggest the function of suppressing books critical or otherwise unpopular with the Church, this is not the function of the Censor Librorum. Rather, it is the responsibility of the Censor Librorum to review texts for doctrinal accuracy. A text that is doctrinally correct (that is, does not contain any statements that contradict Church doctrine) but portrays the Church or Church officials in a negative manner must still be granted the nihil obstat.

For this book, the Censor Librorum was Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York and sometimes referred to as the Pope of the USA. He is probably the first person I’ve mentioned in a book review who has an FBI file.

There’s a lot of crazy articles out there on Cardinal Spellman. The most notorious article, “Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy” was published by Michelangelo Signorile in 2002. In it, he calls Spellman “one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history”. Is that true? I have no idea. No one in the church has ever gone on the record about this, and there’s no real evidence to support it other than secondhand stories. However, there are a lot of those sorts of stories.

Spellman was a strong supporter of US involvement in the Vietnam War – he advocated for involvement in the 50s. He was such a hawk that he apparently baptized bombers, and at a prayer breakfast at the White House, he encouraged LBJ to “just bomb them”. His hawkishness was so out of step with the Vatican that he was chastised by the pope. His attitude about Vietnam was caricatured by artist Edward Sorel:

However, that poster wasn’t published when it was made in 1967, because Spellman died just as it was finished, and Sorel decided it wasn’t appropriate to publish it.

The Book

The text of this book can be summed up in a few sentences: “Hey kid, would you like to know how you were made. Well, God did it, through your parents. Nice, eh?”

But this book is really about the illustrations – the horrible, horrible illustrations. Many of them are woodcuts, which is undoubtedly a very demanding art form. But not all of the illustrations are woodcuts – some are simple drawings, there are lots of weird patterns and backgrounds and style shifts.

The worst thing is hands – they are terrible!

There’s also some really weird poses here and there:

My favorite illustration is this progression of people – children at the bottom, high-ranking clergy at the top – but what’s the SCUBA diver doing here? And why do clowns rank higher than nuns? That’s fucked up.

Also, speaking of hands, Mr SCUBA appears to have some sort of lobster claws for appendages.

Of course, some of the illustrations are quite nice. Here’s one more or less dedicated to inquisitive children wondering about the stars:

When reading the text, it’s clear that this book expects as little thought as possible from the reader. It starts with a basic summary of straightforward Catholic dogma, with the description of all life coming from seeds. God created everything. He made the universe, then plants, then animals, and he did it all for people. Then, he made Adam and Eve, and they made babies. Then those people had babies, etc, etc, until there’s a lot of people here. All those people can someday be happy with God in heaven. So, it’s the standard story of Creation.

After this comes the “hey, children are curious about stuff” section. “You wanted to know about the sun and stars”, etc. Now, you probably want to know about where you came from. The book continues the seed analogy – you were a tiny seed, carried inside your mother’s body “under her heart”. Look, here’s a picture of what that tiny seed looked like when it was in your mom:

OK THEN.

While you were growing, your parents picked your name from their list of favorite saints. Oh, and your dad made you a bassinet. People were happy when you were born, and after a few weeks you were baptized.

But, backing up, I hope to hell your parents were married!

Obviously, there’s nothing here you wouldn’t expect out of a book of this nature – after all, if this book was published today it would probably look almost exactly the same. But there’s some odd things as well. The book insists that:

You were probably born in a hospital as many babies are. A hospital is the best place for a mother and a new baby. In a hospital they have all the comforts they need.

Was there a crusade against hospital births in the 1950s? If so, it’s news to me. Then, there’s a similar admonition about how mothers should breastfeed their children. This is actually a very interesting page:

You may already have noticed that boys and girls have different bodies. Their bodies were made different by God, for the purpose of having babies.

(emphasis mine)

Does the author assume that only boys are reading this book? Are girls reading the book, but are automatically second-class citizens? There’s no indications anywhere in this book that it is only for boys. In fact, in other places it talks about growing up to become mothers or fathers. This is all about defining roles – mothers should stay at home and feed their children, because God says so. This page also relates directly to Odenwald’s later book about how feminism is destroying America.

There’s also this earlier page about gender roles:

I’m sure that most of this page was basically true at the time, but it must have felt strange to read this book if your life deviated at all from the apparent norm. In fact, this book is full of awkward pictures of white people who follow very traditional roles in every way. And it is those roles, and not some notion of ‘how God made you’ that resonate throughout the text. This book is a perfect example of where Catholicism (and society as a whole in America) was in the 1950s – stuck between the traditional roles of the past and the modernization that was inevitable.

Anyway, I scanned the whole book, so here it is for your enjoyment:

If a copyright holder has a problem with that, please let me know and I’ll take it down.

LEGO and Gender

colin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

This is interesting for the history as much as for the excellent analysis of what’s up with LEGOs these days.

Dungeons & Dragons, the next version

colin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Decent article in the New York Times on D&D and its history and future. Apparently there’s a new version in the works, again, hopefully with a lot of fan input.

Here’s a fun line about all the rules fragmentation (mentioned in this very blog when I reviewed What is Dungeons & Dragons?):

A result, said David M. Ewalt, a senior editor at Forbes and the author of a forthcoming history of Dungeons & Dragons, has been a fractured fan base. The game is a group activity, he said, and playing together is tricky when players use different rules. “Imagine trying to organize a basketball team, if the point guard adheres to modern league rules, but the center only knows how to play ancient Mayan handball.”

via @peterbebergal

UPDATE Here’s a story on IO9 that discusses the assorted versions of the game in detail.

The Umbrella Man

colin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Nice short documentary from Errol Morris about The Umbrella Man, the man who was standing in Dallas on a beautiful day with an open umbrella when JFK was shot.

For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

Aliens on Ice

colin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

This is pretty amazing, a re-enactment of Aliens – ON ICE:

It’s Friday night and Aliens on Ice is set to premiere in ninety minutes. You wouldn’t know it: the ice is currently occupied by two hockey teams battling over a puck. The stands are packed with screaming fans. Austin may not be a winter sports town, but you wouldn’t know it from the vibe in this room.

Anyone who has seen Aliens can follow what transpires over the next 70 minutes or so. It’s James Cameron’s film on fastforward…and caffeine…and possibly cocaine. The show captures the little details and turns of phrases that fans will know by heart and cast makes creative use of the ice, never standing still when they have to. Ripley’s confrontation with the board that accuses her of destroying the ship from the first film is transformed into humorously blunt exchange, with every party involved skating around each other in menacing circles. The colonial marines searching the seemingly abandoned colony of LV421 becomes a showcase for humorously clumsy figure skating. The subtle relationship between Ripley and Hicks becomes gloriously unsubtle when the two share a brief little spin together on the ice.

These guys may not be professional skaters, but they’re not bad. Not bad at all. They’re certainly not afraid of the ice and they’re not afraid of taking risks. When they do stumble, they play it off beautifully and keep moving. They make the “on ice” part of the show look effortless until they make a mistake and then it becomes a newly improvised joke. Using expert skaters as the aliens is a truly inspired choice and seeing the aliens literally skate circles around the clumsy humans is a genuinely thrilling experience.

Public Art of Amazon Reviews

colin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The art and humor from the UC Davis pepper spray incident has certainly made the most of an otherwise awful event. There’s no shortage of photoshopped photos:

A lot of people have helpfully reviewed a variant of the pepper spray on Amazon.

I casually used this product to try to disperse a small band of non-violent campers who had locked their arms together. Although initially it seemed to be effective, it took two applications! The worst part is that the next day they multiplied exponentially! Now what?

There’s a long history of subversive product reviews on Amazon, and it is a weird and growing form of participatory public art. Way back in 1999, mock reviews of Monica Lewinksky’s tell-all book made the news. Back then, there were a lot of questions about how it was even possible for Amazon to let these reviews appear on their site. Shouldn’t they be doing a better job of scanning them and removing ‘unacceptable content’? But people continued messing with the system, and Amazon was forced to stop anonymous reviews and they probably had to implement some other protections as well.

The best reviews of this genre on Amazon are without a doubt all from Family Circus books. This is where there first concerted effort to subvert the review system started, and I think it is where the best work lies. For example, check out the reviews for What Does This Say?, a collection published in 1995:

Proustian introspection with Munch’s visual conundrums, July 29, 2002

Yeats once wrote, “None other knows what pleasures man/At table or in bed.” Bil Keane, however, seems to have found in his latest ‘Family Circus’ opus a treasure-chest of pleasures for each and all of us. There are some who chafe at the seeming repetitive themes within Keane’s major works; I would respectfully submit that all great stories are about life and death, love and loss, fear and triumph. If not Keane, then so go Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Callimachus, too, for good measure. It is not originality that spawns thought and wonderment; it is the vessels of those themes (Billy, Grandma, Barfy, PJ) that inspire and enlighten.

Keane, as carrier of these vessels, reminds us of a truth so eloquently immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” In ‘What Does This Say’, it is clear that the tome achieves the latter, with gusto and aplomb.

Happiness, November 10, 1999

There is a certain sadness one feels in remembering happy times: turning over the last page of a good novel, and reflecting over the wonders we have just experienced, the characters who have become our friends; discovering old pictures, seeing ourselves in the halcyon throes of youth, silly smiles on our innocent faces; the plangent last notes of a Chopin nocturne, the theme, growing softer and softer now, floating across the room to rest against our face like the rhythmic breaths of a peaceful, sleeping lover. I don’t know how: but Keane captures this feeling, this happy sadness - “Oh heavy lightness,” as Shakespeare put it. Billy romps around the yard. He runs all over town. His parents are in love. His family is love with itself, each unto each. Can our lives ever be like this? Perhaps not, but we can watch, watch ever single day, and wrap ourself in that happy sadness. And maybe forget, if only for a little while, the way our lives really are, the way they have to be: our heavy lightness. Thanks, Bil Keane, for that, and thanks to Amazon for letting people express themselves. Thank you all.

There is a long history of mocking Family Circus that predates the web. Dysfunctional Family Circus was originally a series of small booklets published in the late 80s/early 90s in San Jose. Apparently they managed to remain anonymous until recently, when they went public after the death of Bil Keane. They succeeded largely because they were anonymous – it’s hard to shut down a publishing operation when you can’t find the publishers:

When we had boxes of professional looking 12- or 24-pagers, we left handfuls of them of them in public places around San Jose and the valley. Our influence was Jack Chick, the Chino-based comic-book evangelist whose millions of free pamphlets still turn up like lint at the Laundromat…

We knew what we were doing was semilegal, if that. We weren’t just skirting certain sacred rules of copyright, we were making jokes about always uneasy subjects like molestation and incest. For some odd reason, this is the first direction a nihilist humorist takes when disfiguring cartoons about a blameless family.

In an 1999 article for Gettingit.com, David Cassel interviewed Seth Friedman, then editor of the zine roundup Factsheet Five. Friedman said he expected lawyers coming out of the woodwork when he saw the Dysfunctional Family Circus booklets: “We were kind of surprised at the time to hear that there was no legal action coming down. I think the anonymity of it really helped.”

The booklets were published for a couple years until the creators moved on to other things. Then in the mid 90s someone else started up a Dysfunctional Family Circus website (that link is to an archive of the site). It ran for a couple years, and people submitted captions for 500 panels. Eventually it was shut down by a request from King Syndicates – and an apparently amicable phone call between the person running the website and Bil Keane himself. A lot of people were really angry that DFC agreed to shutdown, since it seemed like an acceptable form of parody. Plenty of archives are still available on the web.

Ostensibly, Amazon expects reviews to be pertinent to the product, but any filtering they do is either very basic vulgarity blocking, or it is based on actual requests from the manufacturer of the product. So some of these reviews have been removed, but others have lived on, as seen in this reply to a snarky review of I Had A Frightmare! > As wonderful as this review is, it makes me sad to think about how similarly sarcastic reviews used to be deleted by Amazon–about this very book, in fact – when some of us wrote them in the early 2000s. But, hey, yours is better than mine was anyway, so more power to you.

The world of Amazon product reviews is its own very bizarre ecosystem. As you flip through them, eventually you find the Top Reviewers page. And you’ll find Harriet Klausner, who reviewed 24 books today – so far! Her grand total for reviews is almost 26,000. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, was listed as one of the “top 15 web generation’s movers and shakers” in Time, and there is an entire blog devoted to attacking her reviews – which seems fair, since she’s reading books at a ridiculous rate, and quite possibly plagiarizing reviews.

You have to wonder why anyone would become a prolific reviewer on Amazon. It seems like the main motive is to become a member of the invite-only Amazon Vine program, where Amazon sends you a couple of items you choose each month in return for your reviews of those products. The program has been criticized all over the place for probably being a little too shadowy and underhanded.

Here’s some other Family Circus books with good reviews:

Pick Up What Things?
Daddy’s Cap Is on Backwards
What Does This Say?, archived elsewhere.
Some copies of reviews snagged before they were removed from Amazon.
An Archive of Family Circus Reviews from all over the internet.

There’s also funny reviews on Amazon for speaker cables, the famous Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, a book called Hgiyiyi (written by jjjj), and don’t forget Birth Control is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and also Robbing God of Priesthood Children!!.

You also have to wonder why Amazon allows such bullshit products to remain on their site. The speaker cables are particularly heinous, since no one is going to spend $8500 on a cable, especially after reading the mocking commentary. I assume that Amazon figures the funny fake reviews are driving as much traffic as the good actual reviews.

In a twist on this idea, here’s the story of people subverting a McDonalds question and answer site in the UK with some pretty awesome questions.

SOPA is bad

colin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

SOPA is bad, that’s not exactly a shocking opinion. Dreamhost (where I do all my personal hosting) has a really good blog post about it:

Failure to comply with this would result in web hosts like DreamHost being treated as if we are assisting in a crime, even if our only involvement was acting unknowingly by registering a domain name for a customer. Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even get a say in the matter if we receive a notice to remove a domain. We would be required by law to remove the entire domain immediately and notify you, the customer, after the domain has been taken offline. This could include disabling things like email, jabber, or other supportive services because the law states that domain services must be removed, not just the site, and not just the alleged infringing works!

Neon Indian: Hex Girlfriend

colin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

via NPR, pretty cool video from Neon Indian playing in a totally empty venue:

Neon Indian | FOR NO ONE from FOR NO ONE on Vimeo.

Namey - A Random Name Generator

colin — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Recently, I had an idea for a project where I wanted to be able to create random names for people on the fly. It’s a fictional schedule for a fictional cable channel, the Not Lifetime Movie Network. Some of the movie titles needed random names. I dug around, and found a few name generators out there, but none of them had an API, or available source code, so I ended up making my own. This quickly turned into a classic project – I spent maybe an hour or two writing some code to generate a list of fake movies, and ten times longer coming up with a generic library for random name generation. it went something like this:

But when I was done, I had Namey – a website where you can quickly generate some random names, as well as an underlying library written in ruby. It uses files generated by the US Census Bureau for the 1990 census to generate whatever sort of name you would like. You can pick a gender, specify if you want a last name or not, and if you would like a common name, rare name, etc.

The data itself looks a lot like this (in fact, this is the data):

JAMES 3.318 3.318 1
JOHN 3.271 6.589 2
ROBERT 3.143 9.732 3
MICHAEL 2.629 12.361 4
WILLIAM 2.451 14.812 5
DAVID 2.363 17.176 6
RICHARD 1.703 18.878 7
CHARLES 1.523 20.401 8
JOSEPH 1.404 21.805 9
THOMAS 1.380 23.185 10

So, the government is big on ALL CAPS. Also, there’s no punctuation, so O’Brian is OBRIAN. I’ve done a bunch of massaging to the data - names are mostly in proper case, with apostrophes where it’s fairly obvious, but I’m sure I missed some.

For nerds, the code is open source and available on github, so you can fork it and play around as much as you want. As I worked on this project, I developed certain goals:

Write a decent Ruby gem to generate random names – this is the bulk of the project
Build a website which can use it – see http://namey.muffinlabs.com/
Play with Twitter’s bootstrap library – I built the website with it. It’s pretty cool!
Generate a Javascript API layer in between. If you wanted to, you could pull the JS onto your own site and generate random names. Still working on this part.

In short, by the time I’m done, I intend to have a ridiculously overbuilt system for generating random names.

Supertrain!

colin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Assault on Mavis A

colin — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call “Books That are not Worth Reviewing” – This time, it’s the “nautical thriller” The Assault on Mavis A, written by Norman Stahl and published in 1978. Of all the books I’ve reviewed, few have had as little information available online as this book. There’s no real review of it, and very little information at all, other than pictures of the books for the copies available on eBay and elsewhere. And yet, someone thought it was worth translating into both Swedish and Norwegian. This book fits the definition of a Book Not Worth Reviewing perfectly. It has no apparent worth or value, and since no one else is talking about it, I intend to review it here in great detail.

Norman Stahl got his start working in advertising. He was creative director of Ted Bates Worldwide, working on ads for Pepsi, Dodge, HBO, and apparently he worked on this famous Palmolive ad:

According to the book, Stahl is a pilot, “an avid follower of air racing,” he lives on Long Island, and this is his first book. After publishing this book, he wrote two other novels. As little information as there is for Mavis A online, these other two books have even less data – I have found no reviews at all. Towers, charts the history of two families in NYC. The Burning Man is a thriller involving a KGB sleeper agent posing as an adulterous priest. I sure hope I didn’t pick the worst of the lot for reviewing!

He also co-wrote A Fellowship of Valor: the Battle History of the United States Marines, which looks like a very well-regarded book.

I found my copy of this book at the Montague Bookmill, and bought it for 99 cents. Judging from the bookplate, they got it from “The Young Men’s Library Association”, which is the name of the library in Ware, which has a fairly random history.

Roughly speaking, this is a book about the hijacking of the largest oil tanker built, and an attempt to crash it into the largest oil rig ever built. It’s a “naval thriller” involving a big slow ship and a stationary target. It’s not exactly Tom Clancy, or even Under Siege. Here’s the summary from the inside of the book:

For thirty terrifying hours in the heart of a wild North Sea storm, a handful of doomed men fight a war for the solvency of the West.

The key to British survival is Mavis A, an immense oil platform fueling an entire economy. Bent on destroying it are the hijackers of the supertanker American Enterprise, a third of a mile long and the greatest mobile structure ever built by man. From the moment commandant Dominic Quinn and his desperate handful of IRA guerrillas seize the Enterprise until they steer its million deadly tons at the towering legs of Mavis A, history swings in the balance.

The relentless battle demands every ounce of courage and ingenuity from the opposing forces. On the American Enterprise, Quinn must control not only his own band of hand-picked killers and demolition men, but the captured crew of the supertanker, including the beautiful, lonely woman who plays both sides. On Mavis A, the fists and brilliance of platform master Noel Cullenbine must deal with the murderous subversion of Scottish nationalists who have infiltrated the crew, and with the final defense of his critically damaged platform.

The Assault on Mavis A builds in tension with every page, finally exploding in a climax as mighty as the forces at work within its narrative.

That’s a pretty thorough summary of the book – I should stop right now!

This book accomplishes the thankless task of taking a moderately interesting concept, and turning it into a story that is dull, overly complicated, and at times utterly vulgar and disgusting. There’s a certain amount of excitement via killing and violence, and yet most of the book is about a fairly slow ship moving toward an immovable target without any conflict at all. There’s some sex, but it’s definitely not sexy – more on that later. It definitely doesn’t live up to the billing on this alternative cover to the book:

There’s a lot of overwrought prose, like this bizarre sentence from the opening of the book: “Like many of the insignificant, the North Sea has a vile and dangerous temper.” This doesn’t even make sense. In what way is the North Sea insignificant? The North Sea has played a critical role in European history for the last 600 years. Stahl is clearly an amateur historian, but his love of adjectives goes way too far here.

Between the liner notes, and the helpful maps and diagrams included at the beginning of the book, there’s basically no point in actually reading this novel. BUT I DID.

The Tanker!

The Rig!

The Map!

The first character introduced is Noel Cullenbine, platform master of the Mavis A, newest and largest drilling platform in the North Sea. A ridiculous amount of oil has been recently discovered in the North Sea, which is fortunate because England’s economy is in utter shambles. We’re told in detail how smart he is:

The mind of Noel Cullenbine had been kept prisoner by the community, like the body of a queen bee. What was in his head was simply too valuable to be left in his own care. He had been a child wonder - a Mozart of science. At the age of seven he had been brought to Edinburgh, at the university’s request, to be studied by wondering professors. While his railway-engineer father and seamstress mother fretted in a hotel room the phenomenal ability of their only son to retain, process, organize and transmit information astounded his examiners.

By the age of eighteen Cullenbine had grown to feel that he was unable to touch any thing that breathed, and to try and save himself as a man he rebelled. He disappeared from the university […] and drifted to work in the oil fields. Here he found the first task he’d ever loved: the brutal challenge of wresting from the earth a running treasure, the energy stored by a hundred million years of suns. He had felt its power beneath his feet as he now felt the shock of waves, and ever since he had wanted to unleash and command its power.

At first he had been content to work, to learn and to make his way slowly up through the lowest backbreaking, limb-crushing jobs. But within a year he yearned to multiply his energies and to be a leader […] He was a foreman in the toughest fields of Mexico and Texas by the time he was twenty-four. The Limey, as the other workers called him, commanded hard men by becoming a walking terror.

He punished with his voice, which was loud, metallic and abrasive when he raised it. He punished with his fists, which were ridged with knuckles so massive that they might have served for models of a gladiator’s glove. And he punished with his scorn. It shot out of his eyes like venom; men who felt it once would perform wonders rather than face it again.

Now, just past forty, Cullenbine needed all these savage talents as the operating boss of Mavis A. Brilliant, computer-nurtured plans flowed into operation largely because of the fists and tongue of this spectacularly effective man.

So, we’re told he’s smart, and we see some examples of that, but mostly what he does through the whole book is yell, and bash the shit out of people.

Opposing him is IRA commandant Dominic Quinn. Quinn has a plan to ruin England – he will hijack a supertanker, and crash it into Mavis A. If Quinn succeeds, England will be devastated, and Ireland will be liberated. As part of his plan, Quinn has built a luxurious brothel in the fictional Irish seaside town of Coltry Bay, which is basically a “geological miracle” cooked up just for the book - an incredibly deep yet isolated bay where huge oil tankers dock all the time. Quinn plans to lure a crew into the brothel, hijack a ship, and go from there.

Quinn has managed to lure Will James, one of the junior officers of the American Enterprise – which without a doubt is the best name ever for an oil tanker – with free sex and food. Once he has enjoyed “the bone-white nakedness of Mariclare Brady,” the first thing he wants to know is “how a brothel, even one so fine, was able to use the tightly controlled company frequency of Petromarine to call the American Enterprise at sea. Or how the call went unentered in the radio log” – but Mariclare distracts him before he asks – “James saw only the wide blue eyes locked on his. He did not in time perceive it as the blinkless gaze of a hunting cat, nor feel the paw upon his back.” Yipes.

Quinn watches as James and Mariclare eat in his lavish dining room, which supposedly cost 100,000 pounds to build, with Waterford chandeliers, a chef from a famous London Hotel, and a string ensemble with performers who “would have been recognized by name at New York Lincoln’s Center.” Sounds nice.

He introduces himself to James, and immediately he has the advantage – James has clearly been enjoying himself, offers his thanks to Quinn, and now Quinn is able to lean on him to insist that the rest of the officers of the American Enterprise should be invited into port immediately. In fact, he’s got a list of them in his hand to make sure he’s not missing anyone. James doesn’t really like the sound of this, so he’s reluctant. Mariclare speaks up briefly, and blurts out that Quinn knows a lot about ships – he clearly didn’t want this known – so he asks her to leave. James was raised to be polite, so he stands up as she goes, and Quinn tells him “You’re very polite to your whores.” James doesn’t really like to hear a woman called that:

The young officer did not like this contempt for the receptacle of his sacred seed. “I suppose a man in your business must have that attitude.” It was the noblest defense he had ever made of a woman.

They argue for awhile until Quinn tells James “you do understand that you are not pimpin’, if that’s what’s on your mind? Your friends will pay nothin’. It is their good will I want.” James says that he’s been very well-paid, and Quinn replies “As many a pure lad in the twenty-six counties is bein’ paid on a front-parlor couch at this exact minute. The cunt is always buyin’. Fur coats, food, security, husbands.”

James thinks he notices something a little strange about Quinn, and he accuses him of being gay – “You’re a homosexual, aren’t you?” – and he’s right. Quinn is a gay IRA terrorist. And although James is Catholic, and has been feeling some level of guilt for extramartial sex, “He had been brought up to believe that the power of a boy who had never missed mass was God-given and illimitable over Jews and homosexuals.” Always nice to have a firm belief structure to back up your double standards.

Quinn cures James’ reluctance to call the ship by forcing him to watch the kneecapping of a supposed IRA traitor. Pretty soon, James has made his call and invited the officers to the brothel. They almost all head into Coltry Bay except for the Captain and First Officer, who stay behind to take care of the ship.

Quinn needs more than a luxurious brothel to pull off his plan. He also needs a team of crack operatives, but there must be a shortage in the IRA ranks, because he stages not one but two prison break-ins. The first is to retrieve an IRA member from a prison hospital where he is actively dying of tuberculosis, and the second is to rescue a bunch of other people from a jail in Belfast. The sick guy is rescued solely for the task of holding his finger on the trigger of a bomb while the other prisoners are rescued – a decent example of the over-complication that happens in this book. During the escape, the bomb goes off, killing a bunch of guards.

The freed prisoners include Molaise Mullins aka “The Dropper”, an IRA demolitions expert, who violently rapes a prison guard with a billy club once he is released, and is smart enough to notice that everyone rescued has experience with boats. I could write a bunch about the rest of the prisoners, but it would take up way too much of this review, and it wouldn’t be worth it. I will mention that one of them is a former priest turned gunman – Father Costello, and another one is named Paddy – Stahl has a short supply of Irish names and stereotypes.

Meanwhile, on Mavis A, Cullenbine is worried about attacks on his rig, and he is describing the issues to Colonel Lustgarten and his aide Captain Zamke, two Germans who work for the fictional “North Sea Security Services.” They have flown in on helicopters on an inspection tour of company rigs – right before a giant storm comes through that will conveniently isolate them for the next few days.

Zamke, the younger one, is particularly uninformed about the platform, so this provides a convenient opportunity to spend a few pages talking about the weaknesses of the oil rig – notably, there are no blowout preventers, so if something bad happens to the platform, a lot of oil will be released into the North Sea. Also, half of the crew is Scottish, and none of them like England. As it happens, a couple of the Scots are in cahoots with Quinn – this book takes place during a period of high Scottish Nationalism – and they have a bomb in place to disable the radio on Mavis A and wreak havoc in general as part of the plan.

Cullenbine and his boss Magnus describe the potential catastrophe if something happens to Mavis A:

“Not only will this destroy England financially, it would be utterly devastating for the whole planet. What it adds up to,” Magnus said, “is that we would greatly damage the ability of the world to feed itself over the next fifty years.”

Cullenbine talks about the danger of an oil spill:

As if that isn’t enough, if there’s an accident, oil will rush out of the wells because there aren’t any blowout preventers – does that ring a bell? “We might have installed choke valves below the sea bed, but they’re often troublesome, and given Mavis’s extra strength and other precautions we’ve taken, we thought it more efficient to do away with them. That’s a mistake that will need to be corrected someday. We were thinking too much about nature and not enough about men.

There’s not a lot of point in criticizing the thought process of fictional characters, but this statement would be ludicrous in a book published today, especially given the history of oil spills in the last 25 years. If this book was published today, the company would just have to say they were cheap, or cut corners to increase shareholder returns, or they’d just be assholes.

The Germans are interesting characters because they are emotionally detached from the events of the book – they clearly don’t care what happens beyond an almost academic interest in doing their jobs. Lustgarten was a General in World War 2, and he doesn’t like the British very much. He “allowed himself the moment’s luxury of savoring this thought” when discussing the catastrophe that would be a successful attack on Mavis A. And he seems to be grooming Zamke in his own image.

In some ways, they serve as some sort of vaguely detached chorus. They work for the English, but they certainly aren’t pro-England. They spend the early part of the book researching possible attacks, studying news reports, and making connections between the hijacking and Mavis A. And they discuss all of these events as sort of a detached summary of what is going on. And all the time that they are trying to learn what is happening, they are sitting on Mavis A, in the middle of a huge storm, and they serve as the only connection between the two sides until the end of the book.

Back in the brothel, the officers of the ship are enjoying themselves, until Quinn has them dragged naked into his office, and tells them he needs help hijacking their boat. Of course, he doesn’t tell them the actual plans – he tells them that the plan is simply to hold the ship ransom. They’ll sail around in the North Sea until they get their money, then escape to Libya. And what’s strange about this is that they seem pretty happy to comply. It’s one thing to be kidnapped and have your boat hijacked, and something else to be excited about it. But, Quinn basically convinces them that they’re going to have a great adventure and have a story to tell their whole lives.

Quinn felt a thrill like a fighter who had struck a perfect blow. He had hit the Americans precisely square and true. Using only his tongue, he had turned the frightened captives into comrades. The spirit of mischief and adventure – always underrated as a shaker of events – had hold of them; he could see it plainly in the sly grins that they exchanged, first with another and then with him.

What stories they would live to tell. Days or weeks in the hot eye of a watching world. Poking a stick in the eye of their millionaire bosses and not having to pay for it. Jesus, they might have pulled this off themselves. Libya. So long, straight world; sorry, tired wife and girlfriend.

Toss some booze into this last bit and it’s like a Raymond Carver story set on an oil tanker.

While all this happens, First Officer Owen Browne is watching a storm brew on the American Enterprise when his wife calls him from their quarters. Browne is a careerist who wants to move high in the company. He’s a good sailor, but he considers his Harvard MBA to be more valuable, and he’s very open about his desire to leave the boat and get a management position with Petromarine – the company which owns the American Enterprise. Ethel is very attractive – she “had the blond good looks of the high-school cheerleader she had once been. Her nose was tiny, her breasts were large, and the stylish wire-framed glasses that she was never without made her enormous brown eyes bigger yet.” But her relationship with her husband is strained, mostly because of his career drive.

Ethel has been on the ship for two years, travelling along with Owen. She’s the only woman on the boat – since the American Enterprise almost never docks in a port, no one really wants to stay on it voluntarily. And since Owen is really only concerned with his career, he doesn’t even take shore leave or vacations. But having Ethel on the boat is a source of tension for the crew. “Being the only woman on a big ship that sailed for months without shore leave made Ethel the sole subject of intense sexual focus, and she was not unaware of it… Only her husband seemed unaware of her sexual presence.”

Ethel convinces Owen to get a little kinky, and gets him to have sex on the bridge of the deck. But oops! – they’re caught in the act when the terrorists and crew return.

The Captain of the boat quickly learns to appreciate Quinn. “Captain Cody had taken a grudging liking to Dominic Quinn… Above all, Cody admired people who made things happen swiftly.” He seems to understand that he doesn’t have too much control over the situation, so he focuses on getting the ship moving. “They roused the general-purpose seamen that they needed and ordered them to their posts.” – This book has enough characters, but this is literally the only mention of non-officers on the crew.

There’s a fairly mushy paragraph about the boat departing:

To a man who has made a life of sailing, the departure is the climax, the voyage itself is anticlimactic. Every man on the bridge felt the same deep tremor as the water widened between ship and shore. The vessel so dwarfed even the tallest structure in town that it almost seemed as though they were slipping away on a safer solidity than the shore itself. Cody was commanding immeasurably more wealth, power and structure than had Nebuchadnezzar in Babylonia. Standing behind the captain, Dominic Quinn felt that his Kalashnikov assault rife was as powerless as a broomstraw against the juggernaut under him.

I don’t even know what to say about this. That is some extremely overwrought prose – Stahl does enjoy flexing his writing skills.

With the boat underway into the North Sea, very little happens for a big chunk of the book. The middle of this book is really muddled, with extra characters and plot points that are largely unneeded. The Dropper spends awhile wiring the structure of the boat to explode, and the crew doesn’t really seem to mind. The big storm they are sailing through gets bigger and bigger. The American Enterprise doesn’t have any trouble with it – if anything, it’s helping them to hide. But somehow, a plane from “IMAPO” – the Intergovernmental Maritime Anti-Pollution Organization – spots the tanker, and figures out that it is off course. The IRA folks are all shocked to see it flying. IMAPO hunts down polluters, but mostly exists in this book to mock bureaucracy, and to serve as confirmation that Mavis A is the probable target of the attack.

We learn a bit more about Quinn, who is in love with Roland O’Driscoll, one of the IRA terrorists, but nothing ever happens. “Quinn didn’t try it much anymore. He had never succeeded in twenty years, and by now he knew he never would.” O’Driscoll is terrified of drowning – he watched his brothers and fathers drown in a storm when their fishing boat sank – so maybe it was a mistake to bring him on a mission where you plan on crashing a ship in the North Sea, but Quinn hasn’t told anyone other than Dropper his whole plan yet.

Eventually, the officers of the ship realize that Quinn is lying to them about his plan. The hijackers haven’t made any demands yet. They haven’t announced that they hijacked the ship, or even stated any intentions. Browne and Cody predict that they are probably planning to scuttle the tanker in the North Sea, which would be bad enough – and they haven’t even figured out about the oil rig part yet. They decide to try and detonate the bow storage tank of the tanker – it doesn’t have any oil in it, but the gasses left behind are highly explosive, and we learned earlier in the book that this was a constant concern. If they can cause an explosion, the ship will take on water, and hopefully start dragging on a shallow point in their course, which should disrupt the terrorist plans.

Browne volunteers to ignite the tank, all while griping about his marriage – it’s pretty dangerous, whoever does this will probably die in the explosion. “Oh I’ll do it. It’s a chance to move up faster – one way or the other.” But they decide to wait for a little while before trying something that desperate.

While they wait, it’s time for a very awkward dinner with the officers and the terrorists. There’s a nasty argument where Ethel, angry with her husband, comes to defense of the Dropper. Suddenly, he is smitten with her, as we learn in this strange passage.

The Dropper’s heart opened to Ethel. For the first time he looked at her directly. In all, he was a good-looking man… In another place, he would have taken the time to fall in love with her. She had the look of his sisters as children, lifted laughing and dripping from the kitchen washtub by his mother.

This is just a weird bit of writing. The Dropper is attracted to Ethel, but what do his looks, or his naked siblings, have to do any of with that?

While the Dropper decides to seduce her, Owen freaks out after the argument and tells Ethel to remain locked in her cabin. “She had changed sides.” In their cabin, Ethel takes triple a normal dose of sleeping pills, but then accepts a visit from the Dropper. He basically proposes marriage, and reveals the full plan to destroy the boat. They start to have sex, and then Ethel pukes all over him and passes out. We are left to ponder what happened next. Basically this book is full of unsexy sex.

Meanwhile on Mavis A, they’ve figured out that they are a potential target of the American Enterprise. They discuss the possibilities and whether it is even feasible to shut down the rig and make it safe for a collision. But the rig isn’t built to deal with this sort of disaster – there’s no valves or blowout preventers on the sea floor to shut down the wells. Cullenbine does the math and figures that if they shut down the rig, it will take up all the time they have until the American Enterprise might get there (naturally), and that it would probably cost 10 million pounds to repair the damage. That’s a little too much for management to handle. Even though Cullenbine warns that “If that oil starts pouring into the ocean, half the people on this planet might have to start looking for someplace else to live. Like Mars.” they decide to wait until they have decent confirmation that they are the target before shutting down the rig.

Meanwhile, we get a lot of details about the problem of prostitutes being smuggled onto Mavis A – and they’re not for the faint of heart.

Cullenbine has banned liquor and women on the rig. He makes a big show of dumping booze over the side whenever he finds it, but it definitely still exists on the ship. And women are also a problem

Then there were the women. Usually they were the toughest, nastiest whores that the slums of Glasgow could breed. They had to be in order to endure the round-the-clock demands of six hundred hard and lonely men. There had been one girl who had been forced to give herself up for medical attention… the cause of her injuries had not been brutality, but simple wear. As overuse made her performance more and more painful and reluctant, the desperate men had wildly bid up the price of the act. One tool-pusher had given her two hundred pounds for a single act, and here greed had been so great that the had ignored her pain until she had finally fainted and slipped into shock.

I almost stopped reading the book at this point. This is really unpleasant. If you’re still reading this review, go chug a beer or at least go stand outside for a minute and catch your breath. Ok, here goes, let’s finish this.

Cullenbine has trouble finding women on the ship. They are hidden behind false walls, in makeshift expansions, etc. The two prostitutes currently on the platform, Sadie and Gail, are housed in a tiny chamber buried below the sea floor in one of the legs of the rig. They’re 19 years old, and have spent five months in this 8x10’ cramped chamber ‘serving’ sixty men a day. The ventilation is terrible, it’s hot, humid, mildew is growing everywhere, and there’s barely any light. There’s just enough room for two beds. The room hasn’t been cleaned in three weeks, the chemical toilet is almost full, and there’s not enough water to bathe.

Some other details gleaned from the book:

There’s a twenty-minute limit.
They have each made over 80,000 pounds.
They each have a boyfriend in the crew.
“No group activities, even though the girls had thoughtfully established a rate for it.”

For all the details in this section, and I left many out of the review, the prostitutes exist in the novel largely to give Cullenbine something heroic to do after he has a melee involving 40-pound wrenches. That’s right, a fight between two men wielding wrenches that weigh forty pounds. Cullenbine decides that he needs to shock some discipline into the crew.

The inactivity forced by the storm made all the jobs facing Cullenbine more difficult. The men would be drunk, lethargic and reluctant to return to their cold, bone-tiring work… It was desperately important that he pound a new sense of discipline into his men. Were there any shortcuts? He had lashed out at them so many times that he had lost some of his ability to shock. But he’d find a way; he always did.

So, he puts on his hard hat, safety glove, boots and a sweater, so that he is “formidably armored for violence.” Then he sounds a general alarm to get the crew to congregate in one place, and he picks a fight with one of the Scottish terrorists aboard.

“Forty-pounders,” McArdle said. There were gasps and some low whistles. A challenge to fight with the huge forty-pound wrenches was usually a challenge to the death. A refusal to accept meant a trip off on the next helicopter for anyone, including Cullenbine. Forty-pounder fights did not last long; the first man able to bring the jaws-end into solid contact had his win. A blow to a limb caused the kind of bone damage that required wiring, steel pins and surgical shortening. A smash to the torso destroyed organs; kidneys and spleens had to be removed in rags; livers could never be fully repaired; intestines burst and lungs collapsed. Blows to the head were near-decapitations and instant death. Such losers were dragged to machinery-packed areas where making the physical damage appear accidental could be stage-managed.

Quick facts about these Scottish terrorists – there are five of them aboard, and they have a bomb rigged in the radio system of the Mavis A to detonate it at an opportune time, so that they cannot call for help after the crash. They’re monitoring all radio communications so they can act as quickly as possible. They are also well-armed. Cullenbine has identified the five of them as troublemakers, although he doesn’t realize the extent of it. He has considered firing them, “but they were in thick with the union stewards, and he didn’t need any more labor problems.” Quick tip – a good way to avoid labor issues is to NOT USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOUR STAFF CONSTANTLY.

Even though Cullenbine is such a good fighter, he loses the fight. At one point, McArdle traps his head in the jaws of his wrench and twists until he Cullenbine falls to the floor. But while all this is happening, Magnus decides to send out a radio message that they might be under attack, so the Scots blow up the radio tower, and things devolve from here. During the distraction, McArdle forgets Cullenbine for more important tasks, so he survives, and recovers remarkably quickly.

The Scots destroyed the radio but not the radar, so they try to get that next. There’s a brief siege which ends when there’s a huge gasoline explosion, killing the Scots. And now it’s obvious that Mavis A is in trouble, so Cullenbine locks the crew in legs of rig to force them to cap the wells. During the chaos, a heavy pipe falls over the hatch to the chamber that the two prostitutes are hiding in. They’re trapped! Luckily, their boyfriends convince Cullenbine to use his brains to rig some cables to clear the pipe, and they escape from the leg just in time. After this, they disappear from the book, never to be mentioned again.

Browne tries to get to the front of American Enterprise to cause an explosion, but instead he’s washed overboard in a fight with a couple terrorists. Meanwhile, Ethel is raped by the Dropper and two of his friends, and when she finds out about her husband, she decides to finish what he started. She fights her way through stormy seas to the front of the boat, breaking bones in the process. She drops a grenade into open tank, cries out “Owen”, and dies in a big explosion.

The plan works somewhat – the explosion knocks a big hole in the ship, and it drags on the seafloor a bit, and slows down, but it’s still headed toward Mavis A.

The dramatic conclusion of the book is certainly one of the oddest things I’ve ever read, and it includes:

A low speed collision between oil tanker and rig
The slow realization that if the terrorists back up the tanker and separate it from the rig, it will totally wreck Mavis A
A drawn out firefight between terrorists with AK-47s and rig workers, led by Cullenbine, and the Germans, armed only with skeet-shooting shotguns.

The ship crashes into the rig! If they can back it up, the rig will be loose and probably it will be bad! But before this happens, Cullenbine hooks onto the ship with a big crane so that it can’t move. Cullenbine and his team on Mavis A randomly discovers some skeet shooting shotguns. A skeet-shooter vs. AK-47 firefight might seem like a mismatch to you, and you would be right. The prostitutes’ boyfriends get shot right away, and it’s not looking good for Cullenbine’s team.

But they are pretty smart, and manage to pick off a bunch of terrorists. Lustgarten retrieves an AK-47 and uses it to execute two of the terrorists – which does not endear him to anyone at all. Unfortunately for him, he’s shot dead right after this. Do Nazis believe in karma? Funny line about one of the terrorists here: “His features were twisted with hatred, and he had terrible hairless brows.”

In the last moments of the fight, Cullenbine is trapped in the shack that holds the skeet-shooting supplies, and he kills the Dropper with the trap-thrower itself – death by clay pigeon to the face.

Meanwhile, Quinn has assigned the task of exploding the American Enterprise to Roland O’Driscoll, the man he loves, who is afraid of drowning – but Roland shoots Quinn and himself rather than face death in the icy seas. And, mercifully, that’s the end of the threat. It seems like Stahl forgot a couple of the terrorists at the end of the story, but there’s not a lot of point in quibbling over plot points now. WE HAVE SURVIVED TO THE VERY LAST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK!

Anyway, the damage to Mavis A was minimal. In the closing chapter, repairs are already underway, the American Enterprise has been towed off for repairs, and in many ways it sounds like things are returning to normal. In an interview, Cullenbine expresses respect of the terrorists, saying that he admires their plan. Meanwhile the next attack is already being planned by another IRA leader hovering overhead in a helicopter.

It is safe to say this this book has very little lasting value, and it definitely wasn’t worth reviewing. At the same time, it’s sort of terrifying that this book hasn’t been discussed more on the Internet. I picked up my copy of the book not long after the Deepwater Horizion disaster, and the idea of a terrorist trying to damage or destroy an offshore oil platform is both plausible and scary. And it doesn’t need to be half as complicated as the plot of this book. I found myself wondering if the government ever asked Stahl his opinion of this scenario. After all, they’ve employed help from writers with almost no credibility at all.

Stahl continued to write and found success working for Lou Reda Productions, a company which produces a huge amount of content for A&E and The History Channel. Some of his work has been nominated for Emmy awards. Judging from this New York Times profile of him from 1998, he has had a lot of success and clearly enjoys what he does. Because as weak as this novel is, there are moments where the writing rises out of the muck a bit, if even for just a sentence or two.

Stahl dedicated The Assault on Mavis A to “People Who Stick,” and I’d like to do the same thing for this book review. Anyone who persevered to the end of this review is truly dedicated the concept of Books Not Worth Reviewing. Thanks!

Chatterbot Updated

colin — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

I’ve just pushed a new version of Chatterbot with a few main changes:

When doing searches, it no longer includes retweets. I struggled with making this change but eventually I decided it makes sense. Several people have told me that they are annoyed when they retweet something which triggers one of my bots. And I can tell from watching the logs for my bots that people who RT someone else don’t really expect anything to come of it. So, no more retweets by default. You can still include them explicitly by adding ‘include:retweets’ in a search string.
A nifty new chatterbot-registerscript, which will walk you through the Twitter authorization process, and removes the need to generate any sort of config file yourself. In fact, you don’t even need to create a bot first – the script will output a skeleton bot for you once the authorization is complete.
A new script with some pretty basic reporting. Run chatterbot-status to get some output of recent tweets from your bots, and totals for the last 1/7/30 days.
Some other cleanup and bug fixes.

Deceptikon - Broken Synthesizers

colin — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

This is great:

(via Create Digital Motion)

A Simple WMECO Outage Page

colin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Those of you who live in the Pioneer Valley know that we have a decent amount of power outages. Our power company WMECO has a nice outage map -- but that's a big page to load when you're looking on your phone -- obviously your computer isn't working in a power outage. Also, for me anyway, the map doesn't load on my android phone. But even if it did, I would prefer a light page -- a list of towns with outage information is enough for me.

WMECO's map uses jQuery to hit a couple ASP pages on their servers to pull the outage data. I reverse-engineered the calls, and re-did them in PHP. This was actually a pain, mostly because using curl in PHP is new to me, and ASP is really particular about the parameters it wants. Anyway, here's my short and concise outage page, and below is the code used to build it.

Neon Indian

colin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Good Stuff:

Why Restaurant Websites Suck

colin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Very interesting article on Slate about restaurant websites and their utter awfulness:

Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can't afford to pay for good designers, that they don't understand what people want from a site, and that they don't really care what's on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant.

Pinball Number 12

colin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

WOW

Joy Formidable - Buoy

colin — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Today’s track:

A New Mister Rogers Show

colin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

So, this happened:

This morning, at the Television Critics Association’s Summer Press Tour, PBS announced the launch of production for DANIEL TIGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD, a new animated multi-platform series inspired by one of the most beloved PBS classic television series, MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD. The new preschool series is an animated version of the original Neighborhood of Make Believe in which a four-year-old Daniel Tiger is the star of the show who talks directly to the home audience inviting them in to his world. The first television series produced by The Fred Rogers Company since MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD, DANIEL TIGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD will launch in Fall 2012 on-air on PBS KIDS, along with a robust website, including free, interactive games for kids, online resources for parents and teachers, and other cross-platform content.

There’s some more details on this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette blog.

And here’s (I assume) Daniel Striped Tiger:

Right now I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I love Mister Rogers, and since it is his company producing this show, I would hope it is really great. On the other hand, Mister Rogers Neighborhood is as close to perfect children’s television as you can get, and I would really rather just see PBS showing more of it. My kid will probably be too old for this show by the time it finally rolls around, but in the meantime we’ll keep watching Mr Rogers episodes whenever we can.

Rorschmap

colin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

rorschmap is pretty awesome:

Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said.

The word “kaleidoscope” is derived from the Ancient Greek καλ(ός) (beauty, beautiful), είδο(ς) (form, shape) and -σκόπιο (tool for examination)—hence “observer of beautiful forms”. It was invented by Sir David Brewster in 1815-17. Brewster was also active in the development of the lighthouse; both things were byproducts of his researches into optics. The light, refracted, serves both beauty and safety, both aesthetics and cartography.