When Everyone Is Equal

"When I was your age, television was called 'books.'"

- The Princess Bride

Reporter Justine Wettschreck wrote about her experience of the Junior Great Books program yesterday, and I thought I would chip in with my own impressions.

Essentially, Junior Great Books was a program in which the "gifted" readers in a grade school class would read a story and then get together to discuss it under the supervision of a teacher. The stories were, I think, somewhat above grade level, but they were all pretty easy reads (at the time I was plowing through Shakespeare and having a crack at Milton, which I couldn't get into at all then but learned to appreciate in college).

Many of them were quite memorable. "The Gun Without a Bang," by Robert Scheckley, for example, illustrated the limits of even the most wondrous technology created for destruction. "The Veldt," by Ray Bradbury, had a twist ending that managed to take me, a very cynical and serious child, completely by surprise. Completely. "Mateo Falcone," by Prosper Merimee, a story about honor, impressed me with the utter strangeness of some people's notion of integrity.

In retrospect, I'm surprised by how violent most of the stories were. There was one about a kid who shoots his brother to death, for example, one where a dad murders his child and one in which people got eaten by lions. But they were good stories, and the violence certainly wasn't any worse than what one would see on the news or in movies. And the stories were literary, not trashy. Each had a point and each was meant to be thought-provoking.

The one that captured me, swept me up and made me perpetually wary ever afterward, however, was "Harrison Bergeron," by Kurt Vonnegut.

In "Harrison Bergeron," everyone is not created equal. Everyone is made equal, by law, which is enforced by disrupting smart people's brain waves, forcing athletic people to wear weights that slow them down and having pretty people shave their eyebrows or wear uglifying prosthetics.

Everyone is equal, and it is a nightmarish dystopia. And when someone challenges that equality, the story ends in shocking violence and worse.

So many things in "Harrison" are worthy of discussion: the concept of equality, the question of what fairness means, the government's role in an individual's life, and the importance of memory. 20 years after I read it, I can't remember what we discussed, but I still remember the end of that story. More appalling than the violence that came immediately before it was the stillness and peace at the end.

If you haven't read "Harrison Bergeron," I recommend that you do.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/10/2010 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: books, children, education, entertainment, guns, literature, news, science fiction, violence

Remaking Greatness: Tron, Karate Kid

The new Tron movie trailer came out recently.

Note that the new Tron movie, due to hit the big screen on December 17 this year, is not a remake.

Instead, Tron Legacy seems to be a sequel to the original 1982 Tron, and even has some of the same characters. Sometimes these sequels made long after the originals do well, and other times it probably would have been better for everyone if it had never occurred to anyone to make them.

Given the visual look of the new Tron movie (click the picture for the official website), I'm hoping that if nothing else, it's visually compelling enough to be worth watching. I still enjoy the visual look of the first Tron movie, though the special effects are of course fairly dated.

In other news, the new Karate Kid remake is taking some flack because it features kung fu rather than karate. No, karate is not the same as kung fu, just like China is not the same as Japan. This article questions remaking such recent movies and wonders if it's really necessary to have a new Karate Kid, or a new Clash of the Titans.

I'm glad they chose to make a sequel of Tron rather than remaking it.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/09/2010 at 2:39 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: clash of the titans, entertainment, karate kid, movies, news, remakes, tech, tron, tron legacy

Go Jump in the Lake

The swimming pool at the YMCA is supposed to be open today.

I am absolutely thrilled, because as expected, I hardly exercised at all when the pool was closed. I don't understand how you gym rats can stay so dedicated and keep on going to the gym every day, but I admire your willpower! I only went once and did some stationary biking.

Then I realized that I would have to do twice as much laundry if I went to the gym every day.

I've missed swimming, though. I haven't slept as well, I haven't had as much energy and my sleep schedule has gone goofy again. I feel flabby, and worse, I feel like eating all the time. It is not good.

But happily, it's over! The pool awaits, I have a fresh clean swimming suit and I'm so excited to go back!

Note: The water is warm and the pool smells lemony fresh! (They probably cleaned the glass railing or something.)

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/08/2010 at 4:04 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: fitness, health, swimming, ymca

Bear All at the Library

For decades my parents have threatened to lock me out of the house and skip town, and today, after plenty of fair warnings, they finally did.

(They tell me they'll be back in an hour, but I have my doubts.)

So instead of hanging out at their house, I'm sitting in a comfy chair at the library, right in front of a giant window. It's a little distracting, but it's fun watching the little kids go by, chasing each other, delivering Girl Scout cookies or avoiding the perfectly clear sidewalk in

order to stomp on the crunchy snowdrifts.

Some things never change. The boy across the room is reading a Berenstain Bears book I might have read when I was little; we seemed to have an endless selection of them and I went through them like messier children went through tissue paper.

The boy seems to have a much better attention span than I do, though, and isn't looking up to watch the semi trucks and tractors go by. Shouldn't a child have a shorter attention span than an adult? And mine continues to get worse with age. By the time I'm 90 I probably won't be able to finish a sentence, much less a paragraph. No doubt this will be a relief to everybody else.

Other things do change. I'm typing on a laptop that weighs a lot less than the previously mentioned child, and it's connected to the internet. When I was the boy's age, we were impressed by computers with colored monitors and fought to finish assignments first so we could get one of the three copies of Oregon Trail.

Now I can sit here in the library and work on stories and look up the Berenstain Bears, as well as doing more traditional "library" activities--reading newspapers, browsing through magazines or wandering around the bookshelves.

Today I learned about the newest member of the Bear family, Honey, who was born in 2000, long after I'd stopped reading about the popular children's series by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The first book in the series was written in 1962, and now there are more than 300 of them.

Of course, these things are nice to know but they're fairly trivial, too. What's important, though, is that when a little girl in a pink sweater and pigtails walks over to me and points at the Bear family, I can tell her who they are, and maybe when she's learning to read, she'll remember the Bears on my screen, and pick out a Berenstain book.

Because sometimes things don't change, even when they do.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/05/2010 at 5:00 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink

Tags: books, entertainment, kids, library, work

Melllllllting!

After what seemed like an eternity, some of our snow is finally melting.

Of course, this has its downside. It's turned into snirt, the combination of dirt and snow that looks really unattractive and still manages to hide all the grass. But I don't think anyone in Minnesota really objects anymore, simply because it's so good to see the giant snow piles shrinking.

I'm sure it's also improving safety, since you can actually see over the huge piles of snow at the end of your driveway and at intersections now, and the ice is melting from the slick slippery sidewalks too.

I rolled my window down on the way to Jackson today, just to get a bit of fresh air. This is a testament to how long this winter has felt, because I normally hate fresh air. It's like sunshine. That stuff'll kill you, man.

But after what felt like seventy years of winter, the sunshine and fresh air feel like heaven.

Sure hope it stays!

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/04/2010 at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: fresh air, snow, weather, winter

Why the Internet Will Fail

From a now-hilarious 1995 Newsweek article:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete.

There are quite a few other, equally giggleworthy quotes in this article, but it just goes to show you how difficult it is to predict the future. The one thing it seems you should never do is assume that the level of technology will remain static.

Contrast this with "The Space Merchants," which predicted product placements and other intrusive advertising back in 1952, but also predicted we'd terraform Venus. Still waiting on that part, I guess.

Edit: Forgot to mention, saw this at BoingBoing.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/01/2010 at 2:40 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: articles, books, business, internet, media, news, newsweek, online, opinion

Getting a "Life"

I made a wonderful discovery a few days ago on Hulu: they put up both seasons of Life, a cop show that was on NBC. It's about a detective who is framed for murder, goes to jail for 12 years, and then returns to work after being exonerated and paid a huge settlement. So it's a standard-issue mystery show, with an overarching plot arc.

I've gotten through the first half of Season 1 already, and I'm enjoying it more than I did when it was on television because I have more of a sense of continuity this way.

If you haven't seen the show, check it out. It won't be on Hulu forever.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 2/26/2010 at 11:07 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: entertainment, nbc, procedurals, television

The Integrated Life and Being Late for Work

I don't consider myself a workaholic.

But...

I wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm clock and put on my glasses, and then I usually drag out the laptop, blearily, to check the Daily Globe's website. I read all the comments if at all possible, delete any spam or otherwise inappropriate postings (of which there are remarkably few), and then I fuss a bit over where things are on the homepage, often checking the number of views for the day to see what's popular before I rearrange. That's the nice thing about visit-tracking; you can tell what people are most interested in reading.

Then I check my work email and delete or categorize my google alerts (there are usually 10 of these every morning, most of them from the Daily Globe's site, a few from Reprint and then one or two Worthington-related links from other sites), and answer any urgent emails. If there are weather alerts, I try to put those up as quickly as possible so people know to drive carefully or just not to drive at all (if it's bad enough).

Then I check Facebook, starting with my own friends list (feel free to add me if you like). Since I graduated from JCC in 1999, many of the people on my friends list live in the Globe's coverage area, and sometimes I catch news from reading people's status updates. After my friends list, I check the Globe's Facebook page, which now posts links to news stories throughout the day, just to make sure there aren't any comments or questions I need to reply to. Usually there aren't, but you never know.

Lately, I've been peeking at the Globe's Twitter feed every morning too, and of course I check Reprint and Shiny for comments.

All of this means about half an hour of fiddling with work stuff before I even start to get dressed, and at least a few times all this work has caused me to be, well.

Late for work.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 2/25/2010 at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: daily globe, facebook, technology, twitter, website, work