Posts Tagged ‘Big Ups to Neil’
The Greatest Thing You or I or Anyone Has Ever Seen
An amazing piece of street art has brought the famous Chinese terracotta army to life once again – in the form of Lego figures. Wrong-way view here. Via Neil.
Other Game of the Night
An oldie but a goodie: Hatetris. My best is 5 lines; Neil claims he got 7.
A 1 Is Not a 0
Even after their brief reprieve in 2010, the makers of 200x novelty New Year’s glasses still can’t let the magic die. Thanks to Neil for his decade-long commitment to this subject.
Arlen Specter, Holy Smokes!
The implosion of the Republican Party continues apace: CNN is reporting that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic Party. Crazy! Never thought the little guy would do it.
UPDATE: Lots of “Holy Shits!” being dropped in Left Blogistan today over this—glad I went with “smokes” instead. Also, it occurs to me that now Neil and Srinivas have to vote for Arlen Specter. Tough luck, fellas.
UPDATE: But let’s not lose our heads.
The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague’s cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Specter, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We’ve come to know it as the “Magic Bullet Theory.” This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission’s claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you’d have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.
Glasses No More
Neil has been talking about this day since Jan. 1, 2000, and at last it has arrived: today is the last day for the famous 200x novelty glasses.
01/01/09 Never Forget.
Late-Blooming Geniuses
Late-blooming geniuses. Watch for the shout-out to Neil’s old law firm in the first paragraph.
In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
Gerry Canavan 
