What I'm Reading: Complete Peanuts, 1983-84

The Complete Peanuts is a noble project to publish every strip of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, from its inception in 1951 to its final panel in 2000.  It's a gargantuan undertaking, and a new volume covering two years is issued every six months.  The project is now nearly finished, having reached the mid-1990s, but I'm a little behind and have only reached 1983-84.  I've reviewed three previous volumes of the Complete Peanuts, the 1977-78 volume here, the 1979-80 volume here, and the 1981-82 volume here.

This one seemed to have fewer long-running arcs than previous volumes, although Schulz does try something I haven't seen before from him. After Peppermint Patty fails her grade, her dad decides to take her to Paris for the summer as an educational trip. Throughout the summer, the other characters receive a postcard from her perhaps once or twice a week, usually featuring a humorous picture of Patty in front of the Eiffel Tower or sitting in a cafe or something similar. Sprinkling these strips throughout the summer actually produces a nice little rhythm. At the end of the summer, she returns but, suffering from jet lag, keeps waking Marcie and Charlie Brown up with phone calls or house visits in the middle of the night. Back in school, her old desk produces "ghost snores" even though she's not sitting there any longer, frightening the teacher into moving her up to the proper grade.

There's another sequence near the beginning of the book that I remember well from reading the Peanuts reprint books when I was a kid. Sally expects a Valentine's Day card from her Sweet Babboo, Linus, though he has no intention of sending her one and makes that quite clear to her. When the holiday passes without receiving a card she is heartbroken. Charlie Brown feels he has to punch Linus to avenge his sister's honor, but doesn't really want to do it because he knows how delusional she is. Instead, he holds out his fist and asks Linus to run into it. That produces this result:

When I was eight years old, that was the height of humor. Okay, it's pretty funny now, too!

One thing that detracts from this volume is an excessive reliance on strips with Spike, Snoopy's desert -dwelling cousin. The Spike strips are rarely funny or interesting (although there is one sequence that produced a contender for my Bleak Peanuts feature). Unfortunately, Spike is a permanent fixture in Peanuts at this point.

This is late Peanuts, still well-done but not as sharp as the earlier years. This volume is more for the completist, which I guess I am. For a general reader who just wants to read some funny Peanuts strips, I would turn to one of the volumes from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: Mess Around

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little Sixteen, Dancing in the Streets, Night Train, Rock'n Me, Pop Muzik, Girls, Girls, Girls, Fire Down Below, Truckin', and Everywhere That I'm Not.

Today's song is Mess Around by Cage the Elephant. I had this on the radio the other day and noticed it had a few cities called out in the lyrics. This is the most recent song on our list, by a long way. It hit #2 on the US Alternative Chart and #16 on the US Rock Chart in 2015.

It's not real complicated lyrically, as the line between verse and chorus isn't clear and all the parts are repeated a few times with little change in the words.

Ahhhhh, oh no
Ahhhhh, oh no
Ahhhhh, oh no
No, she don't mess around
No, she don't mess around

Oh St. Louis, California
Blue eyes, yeah she's comin' for ya
Land of Mary, Charm City
Oh lord, wish she was my baby
You know she'll drive you crazy
Yeah she's coming for ya
No, she don't mess around
No, she don't mess around


The reference to Charm city in the Land of Mary is clearly Baltimore, Maryland. I think at one time that city's nickname might even have been used sincerely.

So the cities in this song are

Baltimore

California (OK, not a city, but we'll add it anyway)

St. Louis

_______________________________________________________________________

And here's the master list:

Notes: The cities that have been mentioned most often are New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, at least in the United States, are Cleveland, Kansas City, and Seattle.

Atlanta x3

Baltimore x3
Boston
Buffalo
California

--(northern) California

Chicago x2
Dallas

Detroit x2

Ft. Lauderdale
Houston
Las Vegas

London

Los Angeles x3

Miami
Moline

Munich

New Orleans x4

New York City x5
--Queens
Nova Scotia

Paris x2

Philadelphia x4

Phoenix

Pittsburgh

Raleigh

Richmond

San Francisco
--Berkeley

St. Louis x2

Tacoma

(heart of) Texas
Tokyo

Vancouver

Washington, DC x2

What I'm Reading: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

One might think I would hardly have to describe Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's been done so often in the movies that pretty much everybody knows the concept. Yet, I think the book itself is probably not read very often, so I'll just give a quick rundown.

The lawyer Mr. Utterson is troubled by a will he has made for his friend Dr. Jekyll. The will provides for a certain Mr. Hyde to take over Dr. Jekyll's entire estate in the event Jekyll is missing for more than three months. Mr. Utterson is afraid that this Mr. Hyde has some sort of blackmail material on Dr. Jekyll, and his fears are intensified when another acquaintance tells him a horrible story about Mr. Hyde. The friend himself witnessed Mr. Hyde stomp directly over a young girl on the sidewalk, and only when the friend and the girl's family confronted and threaten him did Mr. Hyde attempt to make restitution--by providing the family with a check signed by Dr. Jekyll.

The more Mr. Utterson investigates, the more troubling the case becomes. It seems Jekyll and Hyde have a close relationship--but what can the well-known surgeon Jekyll have in common with a street thug like Hyde? After Hyde is implicated in a murder, and Jekyll disappears, Utterson and Jekyll's loyal butler, Mr. Poole, break down the door to Jekyll's lab and learn the awful truth.

One thing that struck me about the book is that it is not clear whether Mr. Hyde has a different personality from Dr. Jekyll, or simply a different body, allowing Dr. Jekyll to carry out behaviors he's always longed to do. According to Dr. Jekyll, Hyde isn't held back by the feelings of conscience that restrict Jekyll from acting on his basest impulses. Yet, Jekyll also admits that he has long has terrible urges and even acted on them from time to time, though never enough to satisfy him because full indulgence would cost him his reputation. (These urges are never really specified, though apparently Nabokov thought they must be homosexual in nature. That's an appealing idea, but I don't know how well it fits, because the crimes we do see Hyde engage in are crimes of violence.) It's clear we can't really trust Jekyll's account of himself. Thus it remains ambiguous whether Hyde is truly a separate persona, or merely Jekyll with a foolproof disguise.

The book is so short and easy to read, and such a touchstone in our culture, that I'm going to make up a new category for it called No Excuse books, joining my existing Shortcuts to Smartness book category. These are short but important books that no educated adult has an excuse not to have read, except they haven't gotten to it yet. (I'm also going to retrospectively add the Epic of Gilgamesh to this category.) It's also fun to read! It's a tense story with true horror elements. I'm not sure what took me so long to get to it, and I highly recommend it.

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: Everywhere That I'm Not

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little Sixteen, Dancing in the Streets, Night Train, Rock'n Me, Pop Muzik, Girls, Girls, Girls, Fire Down Below, and Truckin'.

Tonight's song is a fairly obscure New Wave song from 1982 by the San Francisco band Translator. According to Wikipedia, this song was a hit on college radio stations at the time but failed to appear on the main US chart. I know it due to its inclusion on one of my numerous 80's New Wave compilation discs. It's quite a catchy tune, and adds a big international city to our list. I'll give you the whole first verse and chorus:

I thought I saw you, out on the avenue
But I guess it was just someone
Who looked a lot like, I remember you do
'Cause I thought I heard your voice

In a bar making a choice
But, no, it was just someone
Who sounded a lot like I remember you do

'Cause that's impossible, that's im
That's impossible, that's imposs
That's impossible, that's impossible

'Cause you're in New York but I'm not
You're in Tokyo but I'm not
You're in Nova Scotia but I'm not

Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not
Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not

And the cities we can add to our list this time out are

New York

Nova Scotia (yes, I know this is a province and not a city)

Tokyo

_______________________________________________________________________

And here's our master list as it currently stands:

Notes: The cities that have been mentioned most often are New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, at least in the United States, are Cleveland, Kansas City, and Seattle.

Atlanta x3

Baltimore x2
Boston
Buffalo

(northern) California

Chicago x2
Dallas

Detroit x2

Ft. Lauderdale
Houston
Las Vegas

London

Los Angeles x3

Miami
Moline

Munich

New Orleans x4

New York City x5
--Queens
Nova Scotia

Paris x2

Philadelphia x4

Phoenix

Pittsburgh

Raleigh

Richmond

San Francisco
--Berkeley

St. Louis

Tacoma

(heart of) Texas
Tokyo

Vancouver

Washington, DC x2

What I'm Reading: Roundup

You Can Date Boys When You're Forty The latest humor book by Dave Barry. My wife received this for Christmas, but I started reading it and had to borrow it. Barry brings his absurdist wit to topics like when his daughter can date (see the title for the answer), the differences between men and women, grammar, and his recent trip to Israel.

One good chapter, very relevant to my situation, is "How to Become a Professional Author." It includes the good advice to "plant yourself in front of your computer and perform the difficult--and lonely--task of writing a letter to a successful author asking for free advice. This is the only known way to succeed as an author." Good idea! I'll get right on that.

Art Ops A new comic series, written by Matt Brundage and drawn by Mike Allred. Follows Art Ops, a secret organization devoted to keeping art safe, which is a difficult task as (unbeknownst to the average museum-goer), art has a tendency to come to life and jump out of the frame when nobody's looking. After a slow first couple issues, the most recent one really picked up, with the Statue of Liberty rampaging through the streets of New York, the Mona Lisa joining a punk band as lead singer, and the guy in the Scream painting trying to scare little children. Mike Allred is a master of art that is somehow simultaneously cartoony and realistic. Not sure how he does that. The writing on this series is a little beside the point, you should really get it to see Allred's beautiful work.

Rat Queens Another comic series, this one written by Kurtis Wiebe. It bills itself as "Sass 'n' sorcery," a fitting description, as it's basically a game of Dungeons & Dragons played by your most smart-ass friends. The Rat Queens are a group of four lady adventurers who like nothing better than killing monsters, collecting treasure, and drinking, drugging, and romancing until the morning light, quipping all the while. It's an open question whether their quasi-medieval town, Palisade, sees a net benefit from their monster killing or a net detriment from the cumulative damage of their partying.

This one ran for a while starting in 2013 but then disappeared from the stands for a few months. I believe the artist had some sort of personal crisis but Wiebe has found a new artist and it's recently started up again. I find that issue to issue the quality can vary quite a bit, but overall it's a great read.

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: Truckin'

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little Sixteen, Dancing in the Streets, Night Train, Rock'n Me, Pop Muzik, Girls, Girls, Girls, and Fire Down Below.

Tonight's song is Truckin' by the Grateful Dead. It was released in 1970 and only reached 64 on the US charts, though its a well-known song. In fact, I expect a lot people thought this would be one of the first songs I did for this feature. Its lyrics describe the misfortunes that befell the band during their extensive touring in the late 1960s. And for our purposes, they reference a number of cities, including some cities we don't otherwise have on our list.

Here are the first verse and chorus:

Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.

Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans;
New York's got the ways and means; but just won't let you be, oh no.

And a later chorus goes like this:

Truckin', up to Buffalo. Been thinkin', you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin' on.


So the cities for our list are
Buffalo
Chicago
Dallas (finally gets a mention after eight songs)
Detroit
Houston (same as Dallas)
New Orleans
New York

_______________________________________________________________________

And here's our master list as it currently stands:

Notes: The cities that have been mentioned most often are New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, at least in the United States, are Cleveland, Kansas City, and Seattle.

Atlanta x3

Baltimore x2
Boston
Buffalo

(northern) California

Chicago x2
Dallas

Detroit x2

Ft. Lauderdale
Houston
Las Vegas

London

Los Angeles x3

Miami
Moline

Munich

New Orleans x4

New York City x4
--Queens

Paris x2

Philadelphia x4

Phoenix

Pittsburgh

Raleigh

Richmond

San Francisco
--Berkeley

St. Louis

Tacoma

(heart of) Texas

Vancouver

Washington, DC x2

Revenge of Scary Movie Rankings

I have previously ranked horror movie here, here, here, here, here, and here. I know this is not the normal time of year for a horror movie, but this week was my daughter's turn to pick for our weekly family movie night, and she wanted to see Gremlins! After some explanation of how scary it would be, she and my son still wanted to watch it, so...

GREMLINS (1984)
I saw this in the movie theater when it came out and I remember my younger brother had to leave early with my dad. Too scary for him! Even at the time, I remember I found something about the movie dissatisfying, and seeing it again as an adult, I believe that thing is that the movie does not know what it wants to be.

At the time, I believe it was marketed as a scary movie appropriate for kids. Notice my parents took my brother and me without a second thought. Steven Spielberg's name was featured prominently on the movie posters, along with a cute little critter! But there are two or three scenes with real gore, a bizarre creepy story one of the characters gives in the middle (which also mentions there's no such thing as Santa Claus), plus lots of pretty scary (for kids) scenes. This is not a good kids' movie.

But neither does it work as a straight scary movie. Too many cute parts, and not nearly enough real thrills for a teen or adult audience. Nope, not a good scary movie.

What I think the movie is really going for is black comedy. A couple unlikable characters meet ironic demises, and that creepy story I mentioned is so over the top I think it's meant for laughs. Plus, the gremlins themselves are presented as malevolently mischievous, rather than outright evil. But again, having to appeal to kids undercuts the black humor. It can't show any of the characters as truly despicable, so their deaths feel undeserved. Actually, one of the town's unlikable characters we meet early on (an ambitious and callous young bank executive) doesn't show up again later, making me wonder if his death scene was cut keep the movie rated PG.

In the end, Gremlins is mildly entertaining and well-made, but muddled in tone. Let's run it through our ranking system.

Story/Plot/Characters--Characters are two-dimensional but do have some thought put into them, dialogue is decent and sometimes even clever, plot is coherent, pacing is effective. (3 points)
Special Effects--A little dated now, but for it's time quite good, if not state of the art. (1.5 points)
Scariness--Some parts will be scary for kids, but nobody over the age of twelve will blink an eye. (.5 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness--No. Here's where the tone works against the movie. The cutesy kids parts ruin any tension or atmosphere.  (0 points)
Total=5 points


______________________________________________________________________________
Here's the master list of horror movies I've rated so far, and let's also add to it the color ranking I use with the comic movies.
Green=excellent  Blue=pretty good  Black=Okay  Red=avoid

Day of the Dead (1978)=9.5 points
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)=8.5 points
Frankenstein (1931)=8 points
King Kong (1933)=8 points
Village of the Damned (1960)=8 points
Night of the Living Dead (1968)=7.5 points
Jaws (1975)=7 points
Night Creatures (1962)=6.5 points
Phantom of the Opera (1962)=6.5 points
The Thing (1982)=6 points
Gremlins (1984)=4 points
Man-Thing (2005)=4 points
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)=3.5 points
The Wolf Man (1941)=3 points

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: Fire Down Below

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little Sixteen, Dancing in the Streets, Night Train, Rock'n Me, Pop Muzik, and Girls, Girls, Girls.

Tonight, let's do Fire Down Below, a song by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. It was released as a single in 1977 but didn't chart very highly. I'm not sure why not, it rocks pretty well and is one of my favorite songs by Seger. For our purposes, the chorus has a number of cities that aren't usually mentioned in rock songs, so we'll be adding several new cities to our list.

Here's how it goes:

It happens out in Vegas happens in Moline
On the blue blood streets of Boston
Up in Berkeley and out in Queens
And it went on yesterday and it's going on tonight
Somewhere there's somebody ain't treatin' somebody right

So the cities we can add to our list are

Berkeley

Boston (finally gets a mention after seven songs!)

Las Vegas

Moline (this is a city in Illinois, in case you didn't know, and one of the cities in the Quad City area on the border with Iowa)

Queens

Note that two of these cities, Berkeley and Queens, are suburbs or parts of larger cities. On the master list below, I'll list them with their parent cities.

_______________________________________________________________________

And here's our master list as it currently stands:

Notes: The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, as least in the United States, are Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, and Seattle.

Atlanta x3

Baltimore x2
Boston

(northern) California

Chicago

Detroit

Ft. Lauderdale
Las Vegas

London

Los Angeles x3

Miami
Moline

Munich

New Orleans x3

New York City x3
--Queens

Paris x2

Philadelphia x4

Phoenix

Pittsburgh

Raleigh

Richmond

San Francisco
--Berkeley

St. Louis

Tacoma

(heart of) Texas

Vancouver

Washington, DC x2

Ranking Spectre

I previously ranked some of the James Bond movies here. Last night my son and I saw the latest movie, Spectre, in the movie theater. so I thought I would add it to our list. This is an interesting Bond movie as in retrospect, the four movies starring Daniel Craig create a self-enclosed tetralogy, separate from the other previous Bond movies. This is the concluding chapter and provides an actual resolution to the tetralogy.

Since the Bond movies are formulaic and their quality is based on how well they fulfill the formula, I created a little rubric to rank the Bond movies, with several categories a movie can get points in. Most of the categories award 2 points if the movie is one of the top 3 Bond movies, and 1 point if it's in the top 6. Here are the criteria, with a maximum of 14 points available:

Story/Plot--2 points--Is the plot coherent and logical? Are the stakes high?  (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Action--2 points--Are the stunts exciting? The car chases thrilling?  (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Villain--2 points--What's a Bond movie without dastardly villains and their henchmen? (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Setting--2 points--The Bond movies are all about exotic locations. (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Gadgets, Vehicles, Lairs--2 points--What's the cool stuff?  (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Bond girls--2 points--The ladies, oh yes, the ladies. (2 points, top 3; 1 point, top 6)

Sean Connery or Daniel Craig?--1 point--These are the best Bonds (no need to debate) and get an automatic extra point if appearing in the film.

Musical theme--1 point if in the top 5

Spectre
Story/Plot--A little incoherent, but providing a meaningful resolution to the Daniel Craig Bond tetralogy puts it in the top 6, and pushes Thunderball out of the top 6.  (1 points)
Action--Overall only so-so, but a great, breathtaking opening scene in Mexico City puts it in the top 6, and pushes Goldfinger out of the top 6. (1 point)
Villain--Blofeld, as played by Christoph Waltz, is not quite top 3 but definitely top 6, and pushed Live and Let Die out of the top 6. (1 point)
Setting--I don't know, much of it is in typical London, the Rome scenes are okay but the Tangier scenes are basically just desert. Doesn't rank. (0 points)
Gadgets, Vehicles, Lairs--Not so heavy on the gadgets, a nice car but not too special, lairs are pretty generic. (0 points)
Bond Girls--I think Bond's main love interest in this one, Madeleine Swann, ranks as one of the better Bond girls of all time. Plus earlier in the movie, Monica Bellucci plays the widow of an assassin who Bond seduces (the widow, not the assassin). Top 6, and knocks Skyfall out of the Top 6. (1 point)
SC or DC? Craig, +1
Music--Forgettable (0 points)
Total: 5 points

Rejiggered points for other movies:
Goldfinger (-1) 9 points
Live and Let Die (-1) 5 points
Thunderball (-1) 5 points
Skyfall (-1) 6 points


And, here are the updated results:
1) The Spy Who Loved Me, 12 points
2, 3, 4) Goldfinger, Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, tied with 9 points
5) Skyfall, 6 points
6, 7, 8) Thunderball, Live and Let Die, Spectre tied with 5 points