Dylan, at the zoo yesterday: “If you see a lizard sitting on a branch, and it can change what color it is, it’s a communion!”

Random thought. Does anybody know when General Mills breakfast cereals switched from the industry-standard box top (“To Close — Insert Tab in Slot”) to their current, simpler design (“To Close, Push Tab Under Here”)? The current design is immeasurably better, mostly because it’s simpler to produce (no slot perforation) and kids can’t rip the slot open at either end. And it’s elegant: “We never needed a slot here at all!” it trumpets with every bowl. So how come no other cereal companies are using the new boxes? Kellogg’s box tops look the same as they did 25 years ago.

I know, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it struck me this morning over my cereal that this was the perfect telling example for some Blink-style book about the virtues of simplicity. Easy Does It: How the Simplest Solution Is Always the Best One, by Malcolm Gladwell. Somebody go write it.

Blogging about The Onion’s mystery Men on the Street the other day started me thinking: what about the “People on the Street” in other, even more famous photographs?

In most famous news photos, it’s not an issue. The guy with glasses holding up the “DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN” edition of the Chicago Tribune? Well, that’s Harry Truman. The pumped-looking gentleman towering over a supine Sonny Liston? His name was Cassius Clay. And that’s…the rest of the story.

But not every iconic news photo subject is so well-known. For some of them, the decades of fame/notoriety must change their lives substantially. There was even a fairly successful movie last year on the topic.

Some of them are internationally famous, yet still unknown. For example:

This protestor was actually chosen as one of Time magazine 100 most influential people of the 20th century…and no one knows his name, and (given the tragic fate he either befell or would befall if he announced his identity) probably never will. (Anyone remember the other nameless entry on Time’s list?)

Like the weirdos who write into newspapers fraudulently confessing to be serial killers, dozens of aspirants have claimed to be the kissers in this famous V-J Day photo, many in response to a 1980 Life magazine article in which one Edith Shain came out as the nurse. This guy has been kissing strangers for years on the strength of his claim–including, he says, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts! Sounds sort of skeevy to me. (“If I told you I had a beautiful body in 1945, could I hold it against you?”)

What about the two Little Rock teens seen in this famous school integration photo, the hateful Hazel Bryan and the stoic Elizabeth Eckford? Wikipedia to the rescue. This gaping wound in our national psyche was, it turns out, healed in 1997 by–who else?–Oprah Winfrey. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says a repentant Bryan was finally able to apologize to Eckford, but I’m a little skeptical. Was Bryan’s humble pie motivated by racial enlightenment, or was she, a Southern girl of the 1950s, merely mortified at her forty years caught in the spotlight while committing the ultimate sin of being un-ladylike?

The name of Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother was unknown until Florence Owens Thompson revealed her identity to the Modesto Bee in the late 1970s. Her photo had changed public and government awareness of the plight of the Dust Bowl poor, and even inspired Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but had she seen a penny? She felt exploited, especially because, she said, Lange never even asked her name.

National Geographic didn’t make the same mistake. In 2002, they tracked down Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl whose striking green eyes have made them a jillion dollars over the years and, the article implies, paid her off and promised never to come back…in return for one more interview, of course.

In the Internet age, of course, an Edith Shain or a Florence Thompson wouldn’t have stayed silent for long. Witness this recent Slate article, in which a New Yorker calls “Liar liar pants on fire” on a stupid Frank Rich column about 9-11 callousness. Nowadays, Edith Shain could kiss and tell on MySpace. Hazel Bryan would be insisting on her blog that her mouth was just twisted somewhere between the syllables of “You go, girl!”

What famous photos of non-celebrity celebrities did I miss? Suggest your favorites on the message boards. (All photos above are copyright the respective rights holders, of course, and are used only for non-commercial–nay, scholarly–purposes.)

Dylan’s such a picky eater I can’t believe he hasn’t starved yet. Last night while we were clearing the table:

Dylan: Sort of thank you for dinner, mom.
Mindy: Why “sort of” thank you?
Dylan: Because it was sort of yummy.

Ray Hamel just e-mailed me to ask if I could explain why I look so much like a young Harry Nilsson. Eh, I’m not really seeing it. Any white guy with big ears, a bad haircut, and a J.C. Penney suit would look like that.

Speaking of trivia authors (Ray, not Nilsson), I’ve been meaning to plug Robert Jen. I don’t know his PDA quiz game Triv, but he was kind enough to send me a set of his Trivia Why’s books. I see their striking gay-pride covers sometimes on Google’s Book Search, but it turns out the content is really nice too. Solid multiple-choice trivia of varying difficulty, laid out sort of like Trivial Pursuit cards. Two very nice formatting things I hadn’t seen before: first, each question is followed by the answer to the corresponding question two pages previous. It sounds complicated, but all it means is the answer to each question is always one page-flip and no eye-movement away.

Secondly: Robert must be the only person in the universe to actually update his trivia as it goes out of date. Question 1,332 in volume 4 is about David Thompson as the runner-up to Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game. I flipped to the insert at the front, and sure enough, there it was: “Kobe Bryant scored 81 points for the Lakers against the Raptors on January 22, 2006.” You probably haven’t seen these in stores (I think they might be self-published, or something close thereto) but they’re worth a peek and a purchase on-line if you miss those big high-volume quiz books of yore. And don’t want to wait until next spring for mine.

My new favorite link is this page collecting scans of the annual Gasoline Alley “autumn walk.” I had no idea Scancarelli still did this–how are his 115-year-old characters still walking at all?–but the early strips will convince you of the quiet genius of Frank King even if, like me, you grew up studiously skipping Gasoline Alley on the comics page.

While poking around the J! Archive yesterday morning for my post about imaginary quiz show errors, I happened to see the Final Jeopardy! question from last Friday’s game.

He had the year’s bestselling novel a record 7 years in a row with 7 different titles, ending in 2000

I thought that was pretty funny. Why? Because as that show aired last week, the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was beginning its Friday night festivities. Last year, as part of those very same festivities, I ran a little quiz-bowl event at the tournament. And question #13 on my quiz was

According to Publishers Weekly, what author wrote America’s best-selling novel every year from 1993 to 2000, with a different novel every year?

So the one-year anniversary was obviously just a wild coincidence, but did Jeopardy! rip me off? Not at all. My problem is, my sense of what makes for good trivia was shaped, as a kid, by the Jeopardy! writers. So now we’re hunting the same game: trivia that’s specific, unexpected, figure-out-able. There’s a finite number of Final Jeopardy!-worthy trivia questions in the universe, and we’re both after them.

I’ve heard other fans of the show say this, and it’s totally true: sometimes I’ll be reading a book or article or something, and I’ll see a sentence and just know: “That’s going to be a Final Jeopardy! question someday.”

I was a lot more interested in this when I was still on the show, obviously. Around that time, I read something about how Mattel was going to have Barbie break up with Ken and start dating some Australian boogie-boarder doll named Blaine. Like someone with perfect pitch, it was as if I could see that sentence in a different color on the page. It’s just felt like a Final Jeopardy! And then it was! (Unfortunately, it was a Final Jeopardy! during a Teen Tournament game, or something, so I didn’t get to play on it.)

That’s why, when people ask me for Jeopardy! tips, I just say, “Watch the show.” You’re not just testing randomly chosen objective knowledge. You’re also being tested in how well you can psychoanalyze the people writing the questions.

Congratulations to Tyler Hinman, who made it a three-peat yesterday by winning the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Schedule and travel considerations meant I couldn’t make it out to Stamford to defend my rookie title, but…wait a minute. By definition, you can’t defend a rookie title. Never mind. Ray Hamel tells me the contest, a Stamford, Connecticut fixture, is moving to Brooklyn next year, which I imagine is a pretty seismic shift for competitors, like the Kentucky Derby relocating to Tennessee or something. But it also ups the odds that I’d be able to make it back one of these years.

Mr. McFeely just arrived with a big bag of mail, so let’s take a look.

Hi Ken.

Our book club is discussing Brainiac this month. I am in charge of leading the discussion and providing the treat. My question for you is, what are some of your favourite treats? Did you have a favourite snack while competing on Jeopardy?

Wow, that’s an unusually dedicated book club. They only eat author-approved refreshments at each meeting! I think the last book club get-together we hosted before leaving Salt Lake City was for Mrs. Dalloway, and I didn’t even think to ask Virginia Woolf what her favorite snacks were. (Fun trivia fact: she liked Payday bars and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.)

Jeopardy! jitters were a pretty good appetite killer for me, but I do remember eating quite a bit of greenroom pineapple. And a chocolate doughnut or two. I don’t know how that combination will go over at book club, but thanks for asking!

Next letter:

Tonight on Jeopardy! there was an “answer” on the show which I know for a fact was incorrect. It went something like: This person is a native Mississippian and wrote “Dispatches from the Edge” while reporting on the huricane.

(Reply: Who is Anderson Cooper.) Problem: Anderson Cooper is NOT a native of Mississippi. He was born in NYC in 1967.

I believe that Shepard Smith may be a native Mississippian.

Someone made a terrible error and I cannot find where to send this info. Can you forward it for me? Thank you.

Over at the Jeopardy! message boards, they love this kind of newbie post. But I think this is the first one I’ve received personally.

Two things that always strike me in this kind of plea: first, the dire urgency. “There was a mistake last night on Jeopardy! that didn’t affect the gameplay whatsoever! I can’t believe there isn’t a hotline straight to Alex Trebek’s desk so I can tell him off!” I wonder what tragedy these distraught viewers think would engulf us all if they don’t get their nitpick aired.

Secondly, the “mistake” is universally misremembered. Surely if this viewer could find my website’s e-mail address, she could have found the J! Archive, which reports that the question was actually

Anderson Cooper, a Mississippian’s son, started writing “dispatches from the edge” while covering this 2005 disaster

As you can see, the answer was “Katrina,” so Anderson Cooper’s state of origin was roughly as important to the clue as, well, Shepard Smith’s was. Which is to say, not very. More to the point, the pointed phrasing of “Mississippian’s son” seems like it would be hard to confuse with “This person is a native Mississippian.” (The Mississippian in question seems to be Anderson’s father Wyatt; mom Gloria Vanderbilt is a New Yorker through and through.)

The funny thing is, this is the end result every single time someone spots ths kind of “mistake.” They themselves introduce an error into a perfectly correct clue, and then go to great lengths to research and trumpet said error. It’s so odd I wonder if there’s some Freudian explanation for it.

If nothing else, it makes you wonder how reliable eyewitness testimony usually is at trial.

Mindy’s parents are in town this week, so we’ve been showing them a bit of Seattle.

Dylan on the Space Needle: “I see my favorite building!  I’ll give you a clue.  It’s shaped like a needle, and it’s a decoration for space.”

Dylan on Mount Rainier: “It’s not erupting again today.”  He sounded pretty disappointed.

If you’re listening to NPR in a couple hours, you’ll probably hear me on Talk of the Nation.  Gotta run.

A couple little–but tough–puzzles I came up with while lying in bed last night. (They’re meant to be original, but both seem like pretty obvious ideas, so apologies if anyone’s seen these before.)

1. What’s the significance of this list of words, in this order?

WAGER
FINERY
SPRINT
TALLY
VENT
UNDER
DEWATER
GEARED

2. Old McDonald words are English words that have only five vowels–E I E I O–in that order. Can you name three such words? (There are many more than three, but I think the cutoff for common words is right around three.)

Edited to add: Readers have now answered both questions in this thread over on the message boards.

Andy Saunders, in the midst of his heroic Tuesday Trivia grading last night, forwarded me this question from reader Kristin:

When you agree to be on Jeopardy do they gently suggest, advocate, insist, etc. that you NOT bet to tie? Especially betting to tie on more than one occasion.

The reason why I’m asking: Jeopardy was something my father and I enjoyed watching together and he was a highly competitive person. His theory about Jeopardy was “if you can beat a guy one day, you can beat him the next.” He never understood (and to this day, I don’t either) why contestants don’t bet to tie more often. Since it means losing money for Jeopardy, I always assumed they had a line item on the waivers saying you weren’t allowed to do that. Just curious! Thanks.

Jeopardy! doesn’t give you any guidance on ties whatsoever. The only gameplay-related thing that the show encourages you to do, without requiring it, is to play the categories in top-to-bottom order. Other than that, all matters of style, strategy, etc. are left to the players.

Scott Weiss played for the tie last week, but despite Jeopardy!’s PR fluff about the 25-million-to-one odds of this freakish astronomical alignment…it’s not really that unlikely a scenario. Scott didn’t have any particular strategy in mind. He says he just thought it would be cool to do something unique on Jeopardy! He’s a puzzle and game maven, and evidently more of a love-of-the-game kind of a guy than a David Madden-style cuthtroat competitive. (I guess I’m somewhere in the vast middle there.) In the heat of the moment, it appears not even to have entered his head whether the tie would be good for his game performance in the long run.

As you know, if you saw last night’s show, there’s an argument to be made that his magnanimity figured into his loss. Against random challengers in his first two games, Scott had one lock and one big lead; by playing for the tie on Friday, he ensured a rematch with the players who gave him the best run for his money. On Monday, he still outplayed them and only lost because of a sensible guess on a tricky Final Jeopardy, but it’s also true that, if he’d had a lock game, it wouldn’t have mattered. Would he have had the lock against newbies? We’ll never know.

Kristin’s dad’s argument–that you should always play for the rematch–has two problems. One is the huge amount of luck in any Jeopardy! game. If someone played you close enough to tie, that means they were, maybe, one Daily Double or Final Jeopardy away from beating you outright. Who’s to say they won’t get that little lucky edge in the rematch? Even more important is the comfort factor. Assuming you’re the returning champ, those people tied you when they were still dealing with stage fright and rookie buzzer skills. Do you really want to see how much better they get after you relax them with a nice ice-breaking tie?

Beyond sheer nice-guy-ness, the only strategic argument for the tie is a game-theory one: maybe your competitors, awed and newly rich from your generosity, will return the favor for you in the rematch. Like Porter Hall says repeatedly while tearing up the marriage certificate in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: “Maybe you’ll do something for me someday.” I actually think the returned favor is pretty likely (no one wants to look like an ungrateful jerk on national TV, not even the most type-A of Jeopardy! contestants) but it only comes into play if the rematch is a possible-tie scenario, which is possible but not probable. So that pro is dwarfed by the two cons, above.

And that’s why I never played to tie: it struck me as a losing proposition. (I wouldn’t have advised any of my competitors to do it as a favor for me, either.) But there are plenty of other tactics that, though they might have increased my odds of winning, I avoided, just because they struck me as annoying (trash-talking, Daily Double hunting, playing the clock) so who knows. It’s not all about the win on Jeopardy! But if you feel you’re playing well…it should mostly be about the win.

From my e-mailbox:

I started reading your book, and put it down because you used the generic feminine twice in the first 15 pages. Don’t do that! It breaks up the flow of the reading. If you want to agitate for feminists, do it privately.

Even if you’re not a feminist, there are already four ridiculous things in Cranky 1950s Man’s e-mail. One: that you should stop reading a book the second you disagree with exactly two words. Two: that two pronouns in a 300-page book constitute “agitating” for anything. Three: that there even is such a thing as agitating for a cause without telling anyone, and four: that books should, at all costs, protect readers from the author’s point of view.

But using the “her” instead of “him” just makes it hard to read you.

(If you are an Eisenhower-era Man.in a Gray Flannel Suit fresh out of a time machine.)

Use the generic masculine, like all good writers do.

Actually, every style guide that I’ve ever used, including Chicago, my style guide for Brainiac, has discouraged the generic masculine for decades.

Nobody even notices when you do this, which is exactly the point. Readers should notice the jokes, not the syntax.

Okay, so our correspondent seems to have some issues with women that go beyond mere sentence construction. But let’s leave aside the straw-man part of this argument (feminine pronouns are hard to read because they fill me with a blinding rage!) and boil it down to somethng more sensible (feminine pronouns are hard to read because they distract the reader from the subject). Is that valid?

I guess to some degree I’m sympathetic to the notion, because I remember looking for pronoun-free ways to recast those sentences, and couldn’t find one I liked. (If anyone cares, the feminine generics are the Jeopardy! contestant on page XII and the Gen-Y quiz show fan on page 4. The rest of the book has no more pronoun game that I’m aware of.) The first case follows a common gender-bias strategy by alternating genders, using a generic “he” contestant alongside the “she.” (I hope my cranky reader gives me a little credit for putting the “he” contestant first in the alternation, just like God intended.) I believe the second “she” is the relic of another alternation, but her male counterpart was easier to rewrite pronoun-free, so out he went.

I’m not the militant gender-bias-avoider that Grumpy Man probably thinks I am, but I’m aware of the problem. I think it was a Douglas Hofstadter essay that first pointed me toward the disturbing findings of a 1972 experiment at Duke, in which groups of students were given two versions of a textbook, one with gender-neutral phrasings and one without. The students of both genders who read the gender-biased version were markedly more likely to picture the subjects of the text as male. In other words, the generic masculine is not generic. It makes readers think the generic sentence object has a penis, to the tune of about a 30-40% margin.

This result is huge. Empirically, gender-neutral writing allows your readers to picture your subject as man or woman or neuter, as they prefer, while this guy’s beloved generic masculine often forces them to picture the subject (the baby, the valedictorian, the soccer coach, the CEO, in my case the Jeopardy! contestant) as male. But that’s dumb. The vast majority of all Jeopardy! games since 1984 have featured both men and women as contestants. Leaving politics aside, wouldn’t it be more accurate for the writing to reflect that?

(Hoftstadter is also responsible for this funny essay, which satirically asserts that “white person” should be a generic term for persons of all races, analogously to the way the generic masculine is used.)

When you think about the problem this way–generic male language measurably excludes female readers–my correspondent’s plea goes from sounding sensible to sounding ominous:

Nobody even notices when you do this, which is exactly the point.

(My italics.) In other words, the idea that the universal representative of the human race should always be a man is so basic in our society that most readers let it go unchallenged. The equally-sensible reverse–making the generic representative happen to be a woman–provokes angry letters. Even if you just do it twice.

That kind of status quo isn’t something to enshrine.

Babies looking human is all about neck muscles. If they can hold their heads up, it doesn’t matter how weird-looking they are: they will start to look like people and not like Jell-O. This is Caitlin looking adoringly at Dylan (out of frame, left).

Dylan just came in to ask me, “Can we get Caitlin up?” Uh, no. When mommy’s at the gym and the baby’s asleep, you don’t mess with success. Why would we wake her up? “So we can look at her!”

My old pal Jeff Ritter, Jeopardy! publicist, has been trying to alert people all week to the never-before-seen occurrence on Jeopardy! tonight. Warning: it’s not the kind of amazing event that will be showing up in headlines and YouTube tomorrow, and Great Game Show Moments clip specials for the next decade. This is not the Price Is Right boob-slip (or whatever the nearest Jeopardy! equivalent of that would be). It’s fanboy trivia. But if you’re a Jeopardy!-ite like I am, and the show’s not pre-empted tonight for basketball in your market, you might want to set your TiVo.

It looks like I’m going to be on Talk of the Nation next week, for a piece on how the dumbing-down of game shows is emblematic of What’s Wrong With America, or something. The only problem is I have virtually nothing interesting to say on this subject when I’m not superfluously hyping Brainiac, on shelves now. Feel free to suggest talking points on the message boards. The sign of how good your idea was will be whether or not I shamelessly steal it on NPR next week.

From the Never Put Anything Embarrassing on the Internet Or It Will Hunt You Down file:

My friend Zach just sent me an Internet Archive link he tracked down to the second website I ever “designed,” almost a decade ago. It was pretty lousy, even back when it was live and all the graphics still worked.

The site was for CS103, a BYU “Introduction to Programming” course that was, in theory, supposed to be taught via on-line tutorial. It turns out that on-line tutorial is a really ineffective way to teach Pascal to a bunch of humanities majors, so I was among the students that got hired to “TA” (in effect, teach) the class. Like the students, we had almost no oversight from anyone, so we just did whatever we wanted. Like spend an entire week making those graphics at left on the main page, for some reason. Or, in my case, write made-up bios of the other TAs and offer the students extra credit for producing Pascal-related haiku. Or, in Zach’s case, flirt with the students.

If you poke around that site, you can also find a link to the first site I ever designed, for BYU’s International Cinema program (at the time, the most extensive foreign-film screening program on any US campus). It was basically a fansite, though BYU later started hosting it. And later ripped off the design without paying me! Can you name all the movies on the main page? The links don’t work (stupid Internet Archive doesn’t like mapped images) but you can see the rest of the site by typing in URLs directly. If, you know, you were wondering which Iranian films BYU was screening in 1999.

Bored yet? Tomorrow: my high school yearbook pictures scanned and uploaded!

Mindy and I have an game of Hangman ongoing, in dry-erase marker, on our bathroom mirror. Last night, the game had this elegant pattern:

E _ _ E _ _ E _ _ E _ _

I guessed ‘X’, hoping to eliminate words like “expectedness,” and got a little hangman head for my troubles. So what’s the word?

(If you don’t see it, just type “e??e??e??e??”–it’s even fun to type!–into OneLook.com. In the 1980s, I used to have a big, cumbersome British hardcover book to do this kind of word lookup, and you couldn’t even choose for more than one letter. I love OneLook.)

One great thing about the Internet age is you can find the right person to credit with absolutely everything. Nobody toils making anonymous breakthroughs behind the scenes anymore. You can find the name of anyone who ever did anything, immediately.

In the 1930s, movies used to credit about a dozen performers and as many behind-the-camera names. Today, if you stay in the theater until the end of the movie, you’ll see as many as a hundred cast members credited, thousands of possibly Asian-skewing CGI artist names, every composer of every song in the movie, even if it’s two bars of “Happy Birthday to You” or “Theme from The Andy Griffith Show.” Then go home and see the IMDb contributions to the movie that the credits missed: actors and agents and proud parents sending in every uncredited bit their little star has ever done. You were “Man in bar (uncredited)” in White Chicks? That’s awesome!

Francisco Tarrega composed the waltz that became the annoying Nokia phone ring. Ben Hirsch invented Turtle Wax and the chocolate-covered banana (possibly with the same ingredients, as you know if you’ve ever tried the frozen bananas at Disneyland). Evans F. Carlson, USMC introduced “gung ho” into English.

So why is it, in the Age of Free Credit, that I can’t find out who The Onion’s American Voices head shots really are?

American Voices (formerly What Do You Think?) is The Onion’s comedic man-on-the-street feature. Three times a week, three head shots are selected from a rotating gallery of just six photos, given a different name and occupation, and placed above funny/clueless commentary on one of the day’s news events.

I’ve been looking at these people for years. I can picture them more easily than I can some members of my extended family. There’s Walrus Mustache Banker, Harried Housewife, Joe Sixpack, Balding Middle Eastern Guy, Career Woman, and Skeptical Black Man. But who are these people really? Do they know they’re famous? Did they sign over their likeness rights willingly to The Onion? Were they tricked with a vague/misleading release? Or are they professional clip art models?

I want one of these people outed on someone’s blog as their high school chemistry teacher. Or I want a light weekend newspaper piece on how Area Man’s friends keep telling him he’s famous in something called “The Onion,” whatever that is, but he’s looked into it and doesn’t really get it. They’re not really “Tyler Milham, Systems Analyst” or “Anita Waldron, Bricklayer.” They’re out there, somewhere, and they have names, and their pictures are seen by more people every day than mine, by a long margin.

They need to step up and take a well-deserved bow.

Update! A helpful message board poster suggests that the Google search “six people” onion “man on the street” would have led me to this page.

Dylan was spelling words to himself in the car on Saturday. “Ouch is an O-W and a C-H.” (Thank you Electric Company.)

The the discovery that warned my heart: “And if you put them the other way, it says ‘Chow’!” Aahhh, his very first wordplay!

Let’s see if I can eke one more day’s blogging out of the conversation on literary spin-offs. A message board poster pointed out the phenomenon of an author rewriting his or her own works from a different character’s viewpoint, but the only suggestions so far were two genre authors: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow series and apparently some unpublished Stephenie Meyer book.

In trying to think of other examples (mostly to prove it wasn’t just LDS authors or genre authors using the device) the only books that came to mind were kiddie-lit that I haven’t read for decades. Fans of John D. Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books probably remember that Me and My Little Brain takes place in parallel with The Great Brain at the Academy, though I don’t remember too many retellings of the same events. A more memorable example is Mary Stolz’s minor classic The Bully of Barkham Street, which is actually a retelling of her much-less-read A Dog on Barkham Street. The ambitious twist of Bully is to retell the first book’s events from the viewpoint of the villain, a swaggering neighborhood bully, and in the process make him much more interesting and sympathetic than his victim, the original protagonist. (Incidentally, Stolz just died a few months ago.)

So, given that this is a pretty sophisticated, po-mo device, why can I not find examples outside of 1960s children’s books? Somebody suggest some with a better pedigree.

From the Five Years Too Late file. Seen yesterday on the back of the DVD box to 2001’s All the Pretty Horses: “Also enjoy Matt Damon in DOGMA!” Right, Miramax–anyone who liked All the Pretty Horses will totally be into Dogma.

I was sort of surprised to see yesterday’s post about spinoff novels raise some hackles in fanfic circles, of all places. In my mind, nothing that I wrote had anything to do with fanfic.

Yesterday, I said that I was vaguely suspicious of the recent publishing boomlet rewriting classy 19th-century novels from another character’s viewpoint. Beyond the fact that they both appropriate another writer’s universe, the salient characteristics of these novels, and the motivations behind them, are completely different from those of fanfic.

Novels like Grendel, March, Finn, etc. trade in the novelty of seeing familiar literary events (centuries-old cultural touchstones, usually) from a surprising point of view, often making a pointedly modern commentary on historical foibles. (Oz is a repressive patriarchy, Pap is an alcoholic not a drunk, etc.) This kind of irony/novelty is totally absent from most fanfic I’ve looked at, which is usually a straightforward homage to a favorite genre work, written in a crude approximation of the same style, and flavored only by the author’s wish fulfillment fantasies regarding said universe.

Wicked-like novels, I said, were often pretty good individually, but I was dubious about them as a trend. Fanfic, by contrast, is the exact opposite: generally unpublishable, but harmless. If you write fan fiction, you’re not asking a general audience to put up $24.95 to read your cannibalized work, or take it seriously in a literary sense. You’re just enjoying a quirky hobby. You’re heavily invested in your personal theory about Voldemort’s horcruxes, or you think Xena and Gabrielle had all kinds of flirtatious adventures that syndication never showed, and you want to share your contributions with like-minded nerds. Maybe a character suspiciously like you gets to interact with Commander Riker or Mr. Darcy, or whoever. Fine, nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t mean you’re writing in the vein of Wide Sargasso Sea (or the Gospels, as one message board poster yesterday claimed).

Fanfiction authors: go about your business! Ron and Hermione may never make out and the Justice League may never meet the cast of Quantum Leap without your help! I wish you the best with it.

Despite all the talk about spin-offs lately around here, there’s one kind I’ve missed completely. Has anybody written the trend piece on lazy alternate-POV spin-off novels?

Like all respectable authors, I get my highbrow publishing news from the same place, I’m sure, that you do: Entertainment Weekly’s “The Must List.” Reading EW last night, I noticed that their recommended novel this week is Jon Clinch’s Finn. Finn is apparently a retelling of the events of parts of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but this time–finally!–it’s told from the point of view of Huck’s drunken Pap! Just like Mark Twain must have secretly intended.

I don’t follow fiction all that closely, but it sure seems like there’s a steady trade in these things now. Off the top of my head, I can think of Ahab’s Wife, The Wind Done Gone, Lo’s Diary (Lolita’s POV), and probably a few dozen cannibalizations of the corpse of Jane Austen. I think some of these led to lawsuits. (Note to authors: do your incestuous “retellings” of novels in the public domain!)

(I’m leaving aside the “what-happened-next” trend [born in Scarlett, probably, but beaten to death by lots of nice ladies who really like Jane Austen] and genre-”universe” pastiches like new Dune novels, Lovecraft-werk, Sherlock Holmes meets Tarzan, Hester Prynne, and Uncle Vanya, etc. Those sort of annoy me too, but I think the Rashomon other-character thing is a different kind of crime.)

Lazy blogger gadfly caveat: I haven’t read any of these books. Some may be good or great. Finn has been quite well reviewed, for example. This isn’t a takedown piece of any particular book. But the fact that this is actually a legitimate subgenre now seems a little odd to me. What’s next, Mary Poppins secretly lusted after by the banker dad? Don Quixote narrated by the bemused windmill? The Stranger from Mom’s point of view? (Suggested first line: “I died today.”) Look, you’re an author. Didn’t you get into this to invent characters and worlds and watch them come to life? Why crib from someone else’s plot structure instead of organically developing your own? At least the “what-happened-next” unwanted sequels have to imagine new events and create unbounded chronology. Why risk the collisions when your characters meet Austen’s or Melville’s and aren’t quite as ingeniously drawn, or even talking as authentically? Why trade in the smug pats on the back the reader will give him/herself when he/she recognizes a reference from the cannibalized work? C’mon, that’s not art. You’re writing a novel, not a Dennis Miller monologue.

Okay, you’re a Twain fan, we get it. Maybe the best way to pay tribute to your hero would be to create something radically new and wonderful, just like he did. Twain wouldn’t have setted for “clever.”

I’m also concerned that this trend is part of the rise of high-concept one-sentence pitches. For books to sell in today’s Malthusian market, they need the crutch of some marketable hook or brand. Readers won’t be buying your book because they’ve heard about the memorable characters or graceful prose. They’ll make it a best-seller because you’re parasitically dangling off of someone else’s well-established seal of quality–Nabokov’s or whoever. “Hey, your mom likes Anna Karenina–let’s get her this. 4:20 from Sevastopol, it’s Anna Karenina from the train’s point of view. She’ll like that. Cross Mom off the Christmas list.”

Before this trend was a trend, I actually sort of liked it. 1966 gave birth to the first two works of this kind that I can think of: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (spoilers: a minor character from Jane Eyre, it turns out) and of course Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (whole different po-mo thing). Those came out the very same year, so I doubt there was any cross-pollination. But in 1966 it was something new and fun–unless anyone can point me to earlier antecedents. (Readers?)

It’s not new and fun anymore. Now it’s the worst kind of gimmick: the well-used one.

Tomorrow: I rewrite this post in the huffy POV of aggrieved Finn author Jon Clinch! Just think of all the new nuances you’ll see! Imagine the self-congratulatory frisson you’ll feel when seemingly unrelated events foreshadow or dovetail to reference something you remember from the first time you read it! Sheer genius. A

(Edited to add: many readers have noted that I should have mentioned Gregory Maguire’s  Wicked, which probably sparked this little boomlet when it became a best-seller in 1995.)

Some napkin math over the weekend convinced me that I need to be writing 75 trivia questions a day to get The Big-Ass Trivia Book (title not approved by Random House) done by its deadline.  Ugh, it’s a marathon and a sprint.  So things have been pretty hectic around here.  But I did take a few minutes to update the About Ken page on the site.  For the first time, I now have two children!

I also added an event to the Appearances page.  Back in September, someone from Bellingham, Washington, contacted me about an annual trivia fund-raiser they’ve been doing for almost a decade up there.  They were nice and it was close and a good cause (community literacy) so I said yes.  If you’re in Whatcom County, I’ll be helping out with the trivia bee and probably signing some books the night of April 13.

Back to the trivia aversion therapy.

Literally minutes after mentioning The Enlightened Bracketologist in yesterday’s post, the mailman dropped off an author copy of the book.  It’s a square, handsomely designed hardcover, which I wasn’t expecting.  Each 32-”team” bracket is a double-page spread, which means I probably had more room for commentary than I thought.  (Mine is one of the least wordy entries.)

Beyond its argument-resolving and -starting capabilities, Bracketologist also functions as a modern-day Book of Lists.  I really enjoyed the brackets of Long Songs (over 10 minutes: Television’s “Marquee Moon” wins), Signature Sportscaster Calls (“Do you believe in miracles?”) and Film Deaths (Psycho, duh).  I’m also flattered to see that a bracket idea I suggested (James Bond Gadgets) made the final cut, though written by someone else.  I got pushed back to the game-show ghetto despite my many brilliant suggestions.

Weirdest choice: “Train in the Distance” is apparently Paul Simon’s best song.  Go ahead, hum a few bars, I dare you.

Bracketologist goes on sale today.  I don’t get a penny in royalties, but it’s still a pretty fun little book.

Three things that might be entertaining you this spring:

1. In the final pages of Brainiac, my friend Earl calls up to ask if we want to go to a Wilco show with him, so it’s only appropriate that he would be the one to email me over the weekend about the Internet “listening party” on Saturday night for Wilco’s forthcoming album Sky Blue Sky. (The link for the stream was here, but the player’s gone now.) Any Wilco fans expecting something as noise-laden as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or as stark as A Ghost Is Born are in for a surprise. Sky Blue Sky is as intimate-sounding as the latter album, but is so straightforwardly poppy and melodic that it reminded me more of 1999’s Summerteeth. I don’t know if future sneak previews are in the offing before May, but if you’re a fan, keep an eye on wilcoworld.net. (Nonesuch, May 15)

2. The Circle, Jafar Panahi’s gripping, subversive film about the plight of Iranian women, got a pretty wide U.S. release, but it’s been over a year since his latest movie, Offside, made its Berlin Film Festival debut, and American audiences still can’t see it. (Unless, like me, you rented the British DVD.) Offside is about a group of Teheran women who, one and two at a time, try to sneak into Iran’s World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain (soccer games in Iran are men only) and get corraled by police. If you’re not used to the simple rhythms and life-like pacing of Iranian cinema, stay far far away, but if you know what you’re getting into, this is a surprisingly funny, approachable movie. Suggested title for American audiences: Bend It Like Burqa. (Scheduled for release here in the Great Satan by Sony Pictures Classics, March 23)

3. The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything operates on a simple idea: can NCAA-style brackets be used to determine the winners in every conceivable category of human endeavor, from punctuation marks to chick flicks to sports rivalries? Well, I have no idea, since Bloomsbury hasn’t sent me my author copy yet (I contributed a bracket where game show catchphrases go head to head) but it sure sounds like fun, right? This will be on shelves tomorrow, but if you’re completely desperate today to know what my winning Game Show Catchphrase was, remember: Borders pays badly and their employees can be bribed. (Bloomsbury USA, March 6)

Just kidding about Borders. Oh, in reference to the photo in Friday’s post, Dylan just asked Mindy, “Did you take that picture of FedEx and H and your block?” Heh, “H and your block.”

Mindy noticed during a Costco run yesterday that our nearest FedEx is next to an H&R Block and vice versa.

I wonder if they did that just for me.

Actually, if you squint, you’ll see that they’re not quite next to each other. There’s a “3 Day Blinds” in the way. (Oooh, 3 Day Blinds. I have all their albums.) I wonder if 3 Day Blinds also hires 70,000 seasonal white-collar workers a year. For the big blinds rush every year when, uh, Daylight Saving Time ends.

Stolen from Wikipedia: what does this map represent?

You can give up and check it out in its original context, but it’s figure-out-able if you give it a minute.  Looking closely will prevent wrong guesses.

Speaking of maps, Strange Maps is one of my favorite blogs and I don’t think I’ve ever linked to it before.  The map of Flash Gordon’s Mongo a few months ago is what first hooked me, but a few weeks ago, I loved seeing the Eisenhower interestate system drawn as a not-to-scale subway map.

In fact, I just now noticed that, a few weeks ago, Strange Maps used a world map swiped from the same Wikipedia entry from which I grabbed the above.

Small world.