OK, I gotta point you to this article [Editor’s note: the original article was removed, so I have reproduced it here.] on the American Family Association website by Rev. Mark H. Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina.

Essentially, he says that only Christians are truly capable of being good people; that no matter how generous, kind, loving and benevolent, no matter how free from sin, if you do not Believe then you are going straight to hell. He even compares people who try to do “the greatest good to the greatest number” to Adolf Hitler. I am not making this up–it’s in the third paragraph.

If nothing else, this article is (a) good for a laugh, or (b) an excellent source of logical fallacies for those sharpening their critical thinking skills.

However, it does touch on what I have myself gathered from the evangelicals in the U.S. constantly trying to stick the Ten Commandments everywhere in sight, claiming that it will solve problems with crime or ill behavior. The bone I have to pick is with the idea that morality can only be taught in the context of religion (else why not just post a list of dos and don’ts, or at least use a non-religious context so as to remove the problem of church-and-state). This in turn suggests that without religion, one cannot be moral. The above article showcases exactly that point of view.

For everyone who is interested, there will be a Thai Food Festival this weekend in Yoyogi Park in central Tokyo. It runs from Friday the 9th, to Sunday the 11th, from 10am to 8pm. There will be dancing and various Thai food and crafts. Enjoy!

Today, I introduced my blog to the students of CS100, so I hope to have a lot more visitors to this web page. Welcome, everyone!

OK, let’s hope that was the last time we’re going offline for a while. I still have one domain offline, but at least it won’t affect this blog. One can only hope that these troubles do not occur yet again; if they do, I’m going shopping for a new web host.

Well, my main web host has been jerking things around recently. They’re going through a bit of a transition and have been moving things around, and their method of alerting customers needs serious work, ergo the downtime for teach-japan.com where this blogs photos are stored as well as other issues unrelated to this blog.

This morning I got a warning about shutting down “dynamic” pages, of which this blog might be one, and getting ready to be moved to another server. This means that BlogD.com may be temporarily unavailable for a short time, and may lose a few posts; I might also temporarily lose the ability to post for all I know. Frankly, I don’t know if I *can* shut this blog down, depending on what they mean by “shut down.”

All this is incredibly bad timing–I finally get going seriously on a blog, and my web host chooses this exact time to start going whacko on me. Rrrghh. Hopefully, we won’t miss much–but watch for possible updates on what might have gone missing and where it can be found. Thanks.

April 11th, 2003

The next morning, we woke up and felt somewhat refreshed. The hotel (the Hotel Galicia Palace, a very nice place despite the relatively low price) served a buffet breakfast including scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, fruit, cold cuts and cheese, various breads and croissants. After taking our time and having a good meal, we were in a much better state to see the city.

In addition, the weather cooperated with us nicely; despite a predicted forecast of several days of thunderstorms and rain, we got partly cloudy weather with only scattered rain here and there. So when we started out, it was a rather nice day. My father’s cousins, Mellie, Margot and Maria Carmen, along with their husbands Amelio, Melucho and Chano, who joined us later, gave us a wonderful tour, and afterwards, took us to lunch.

One thing I noted about Spain is that there are quite a few ruins. Even driving on the highways around Madrid, you can spot many buildings in various states of disrepair or ruin, some looking like they’ve been that way for a few centuries; Pontevedra is no different. Some of the major attractions of the city are the architectural remains from 500 years past. The first we saw was the Santo Domingo convent, but soon after and much more spectacular was the Santa Maria Basilica, a wonderful and ornate structure both inside and out. During our walk through this place, Karen quipped that the word “ostentatious” probably came from the Latin “ostentador,” meaning “I think we can cram one more angel in here.” Much more true in what we saw at the cathedral at Santiago the next day. From the basilica it was on to my grandfather’s old school.

A word here about my family history. The Poza clan, it is thought, originated from the Valencia area, and by the start of the 20th century my family line of the clan had settled in the Galicia province, in the town of Pontevedra, at the mouth of a beautiful estuary leading to the Atlantic. Pontevedra is some 50 km north of Vigo, which itself is just north of Portugal. The Pozas had the reputation of being the intellectuals of the town, and though not rich, were relatively well-off. They were also liberal, and were anti-fascist and anti-clerical (the Church of Spain had aligned itself with the fascists).

My grandfather, Papa Hernan, established and ran a school in town that, though small, was very highly regarded. There was one issue he had to decide on, however: whether or not to allow a cleric to teach courses in religion at my grandfather’s academy. In the end, my grandfather decided to do so. The reasons could have been both practical and ethical. Papa Hernan was a great believer in civil liberties, in freedom of religion as well as all the others we now accept; from a more practical angle, however, allowing these courses would help business, as the influence of the church was strong. This did not sit well with the family, however, and caused a bit of a rift.

The Spanish Civil War, however, swept over everything else. When the fascists took over, the Poza family went through somewhat of a Diaspora, those who survived the conflict and its aftermath. Being anti-fascist and anti-clerical, most had to run for their lives and resettled in Mexico and, as in my grandfather’s case, the United States. My grandfather, who had spoken and written openly against the fascists, almost didn’t make it. He was put into prison and would have died, thrown into the back of a truck and driven to the mountains where he would have been shot in a ditch. This was prevented, however, by some of the parents of the students at his school; some were soldiers and guards in the new fascist regime. They respected him to such a degree that they took shifts guarding his cell at the prison, making sure that he was not killed.

Eventually, he was released, but he heard that there were plans to re-arrest him, this time taking him to a prison elsewhere, a place where he could not be protected. So he fled through Portugal and eventually settled in New York, where his family (his wife and four children) followed a few years later.

So here we are, nearly 70 years later, a hundred years after his birth in this town, and we visit the site of that school he ran. It now houses some agricultural ministry office, and unfortunately we were not able to visit inside, as it was Holy Week when we came. Still, it made an impression on me just to be there and contemplate the history that happened there, punctuated nicely by the children in school uniforms playing soccer in the plaza in front of the building.

A little later, we were shown a third-story window that was the apartment my grandmother moved into less than a day after my father was born; we learned a story about it. My grandfather had been taken away by then and so my grandmother was alone with her three children and the newborn. On the day before, there was some kind of water damage in the building. People in the damaged apartment, apparently on a grudge, blamed the Republican family living above and got them kicked out. My grandmother had to scramble to find a place to live on that of all days.

We also saw the sanctuary of La Peregrina, standing tall above a plaza, another of the very old buildings of the city on the estuary. All of our tour so far was in the old section of town, kept consistent with the old styles very well.

After the walk through the old town, we got into our cars and drove out on the peninsula to have lunch at a very nice seafood restaurant. Later, we walked off the meal along the beach, finding shells to bring back home (dad found a good cuttlefish bone for his canaries), and then we took a scenic drive back into town, where we retired for the evening.

— Photos from the day are thumbnailed on the Day 3 Photo Page.

Coming Soon: Day Four: Lunch with another cousin, and the cathedral at Santiago.

April 10th, 2003

So we wake up on time and have a lovely breakfast. The plan is to get out by 8:00, drive to the train station where my sister Karen, her husband Randy, and their two boys Sam and Will are scheduled to arrive at 8:58, then start our drive up to Pontevedra in northwestern Spain (just north of Vigo and south of Santiago).

When we leave the apartment, Vicente and Berta call out to us from the 7th floor window (8th floor by U.S. terms, in Europe there is a ground floor before the 1st) and tell us that we have forgotten the Chorizo and other items that they had packed for us. So Vicente tosses the baggie down and, by startling chance (it seemed highly improbable), the bag gets caught in the branches perhaps 30 feet above us. I get out a Ziploc I have with some lotion and deodorant, which I figure is compact and heavy enough, and toss it up to dislodge the most excellent chorizo. As you can guess, there are soon some toiletries keeping the food company up in the branches. We all have a good laugh, but time is running out, so we leave the industrious Vicente to rescue the trapped items as we leave for other parts. (A sad note: I had a wonderful series of photos showing this sequence of events, including one of the chorizo coming down–and they appear to be lost. Ah, well….)

My father and I navigate successfully to the airport to discover two things: the Hertz rental van we got has a near-flat on the back right side, and my sister’s train is late by three hours (a train worker’s strike somewhere in Spain, apparently). So my father and I take advantage of the time to exchange the rental car at the airport and then go back to Berta and Vicente’s to see if the bags have been brought down from the branches yet. Vicente has approached his 3rd-floor neighbor and convinced him that deodorant is hanging outside his window, and has successfully gotten the chorizo down, but apparently the toiletries are all too happy where they are and refuse to budge. OK by me, the chorizo is great stuff.

We get back to Chamartin Station just as Karen and the gang walk out, and after various small chores and trips, we get it all together and are off to the province of Galicia. We stop for lunch (not the best place we ate to be certain) and carsickness (not necessarily cause-and-effect) along the way, and eventually arrive in Pontevedra; I’ll spare you the details of how Spanish highways do not mark exits or provide directions well, suffice to say we had a few small detours and asked for directions a lot, but by God, we got there.

Then began what we later jokingly dubbed the “death march.”

Understand that we were all traveled out. I had just flown from Japan, had gotten just six hours sleep (four hours the night before), was jet-lagged, dehydrated and felt like I was getting a sore throat. My father, having arrived a few hours before me (though he always upgrades to first class, so he was in better shape), was not in too much better shape–but Karen and her family were the most haggard, having traveled from Paris by train from 7pm to noon, then directly piled into a crowded van for an 8-hour trip–well, you can imagine how everyone felt, especially the kids, who were amazingly well-behaved throughout.

We expected to just meet and say hello to our cousins (children of my grandfather’s siblings and their families), get a quick bite to eat and then get right to bed. But the cousins, being very generous and proud of their hometown, wanted to take us for a bite to eat at one of their houses, just five minutes away on foot, they said. But the cousins decided on their own to take us on the tour of town just then, without waiting for the next day when we planned, and before we knew what was happening, we had taken half an hour to walk in a very roundabout fashion through the streets of the old town. I was exhausted and feeling sick, but was not in nearly as bad shape as my nephews, who despite their good behavior were starting to fall apart. Finally we got through to our relatives that this was not the time for the tour, and at least the my sister and her kids got guided back to the hotel. My father and I were taken then to the apartment, where we found a several-course meal waiting for us. It was lovely, but we really were not in shape for it, especially not the great deal of wine they wanted us to try. Begging off for a phone call from my mother we were expecting (truth), we walked back to the hotel, unfortunately for me, at a frantic pace (we were late for the call).

By the time we got back, I was practically dead on my feet. Things had gone rather unwell that first day and evening. But fortunately, the worst was over, and the trip got very much better from then on.

— Photos from the day are thumbnailed on the Day 2 Photo Page.

Coming Soon: Day Three, where we actually see stuff.

Finally, the photo server has come back online. Day 2 report on the Spain trip coming in a short while.

If you happen to come by this site and no photographs show up, that’s because the server with the photos is down–that’s been happening quite a bit as of late, it seems.

Now, this blog is on BlogD.com. For some reason, if I place the photos on the same domain, this blog doesn’t display them. The only way I can get it to work is to put the photos on another domain of mine (in this case, www.teach-japan.com), and then it works fine.

However, whenever teach-japan.com goes down, so do the photos. Sorry ’bout that. My web hosts say that the server will be back up sometime soon. In other words, who knows?

Well, the trucks are silent, now that it’s past 8pm and has been dark for a few hours… but not before a big parade ending. On top of all the trucks and cars blasting away, one candidate got a dozen kids in festival outfits to parade through every parking lot in the area and down all the streets waving light wands and shouting. Followed closely, of course, by an adult with a portable-yet-large loudspeaker (one the size of a tuba, roughly) screaming political slogans.

Let’s hope that was the grand finale. I don’t know if I could tolerate another day of this….

Finally got around to it!

April 9th, 2003

All goes well, save for the few hours of sleep that night. But I wake up, have a bite to eat, finish packing, and then I am off. I expected to take a larger suitcase, as the luggage allowance I am used to (trans-Pacific) is two times 70 lb. Suitcases. It turns out that to Europe, on Air France at least, you are only allowed one bag, and a limit of 23 kilos (50 lbs.). Seeing as how even my small suitcase is 5 kilos by itself, I repack into the smaller one, but there’s enough room.

So it’s out the door to the bus, then the train, then the express to the airport, then to wait for the flight. At the airport, I try to use the wireless Internet access points they have set up, but it seems that you have to sign up for some kind of roaming service to get on the Internet proper. But I do find out that they have power outlets, and if I bring my charger, I can use my laptop as I wait for my flight without draining the batteries.

The flight goes well–the food is good, and time flies despite the cramped seats. At least Air France has little touch-screen videos on the back of all the seats so you can watch the movies, TV shows or other things at your convenience (on rotating schedules), along with game-playing and the ubiquitous where-is-the-plane-now chart. The couple next to me is from Japan (Koji and Ryoko, newlyweds), and we chat amicably; Ryoko even gives me a nice origami star box, which she made during the flight, for my family in Spain (which they later enjoy).

At Charles de Gaulle airport I have to change planes, and it’s the usual madhouse rush to figure out where you go. None of the flight boards has my flight posted (the main board is about 6 hours behind, in fact), and I am not even sure which gate to go to. When I arrive at the (unmarked, of course) gate which I think is correct, I ask a gentleman sitting in the area if I am in the right place. “I’m so sorry,” I begin, “but do you speak English?”

It is time for my first rude Frenchman it seems, as he looks up at me and, sighing and rolling his eyes as if to say “this is the tenth time I have told you will you just go away you annoying person,” he answers, “Yessss, I speak Eeenglish” (with an “isn’t it obvious, you moron?” attitude), after which I ask and he resentfully tells me that this is where I catch the flight to Madrid. I swear, I am not exaggerating.But it all goes well from there, everyone is lovely and I get to Madrid on time and in one piece.

I expect customs, and was not aware that when I passed through passport control in Paris, that was customs, so I just have to walk out of baggage claim in Madrid. Okay. My father (who preceeded me into Madrid by 4 hours), my aunt Millie, and my very vivacious and gregarious uncle Vicente (married to my aunt Berta) greet me warmly, take me to the car and drive me to Berta and Vicente’s place for the evening. We gnosh on cold cuts, particularly some excellent chorizo Berta got (the Iberico chorizo is the best!). My father and I must get to sleep soon, because we wake up early tomorrow. The plan is to go to our ancestral home of Pontevedra, a 6- to 8-hour drive from Madrid, from early the next morning.

— Photos from the flight are thumbnailed on the Day 1 Photo Page.

One can only pray to a merciful God that these clowns stop doing this by tomorrow. I read on a few other Japan blogs that the election is then, and can only hope that loudspeaker trucking is prohibited on election day. At least, it should be over by Monday. But then, sometimes other elections follow soon after. I hope not.

A few images of the latest offenders parading by, stopping up traffic and barraging all of us with endless noise. Note the trucks with four loudspeakers, like one isn’t enough.

Proposal to any Japanese people reading this: start a movement in which you publicly proclaim that if you hear a politician making noise from a truck, you will purposefully not vote for them.

Please bear with me, the Spain Trip blogs will be coming soon. I am still recovering from jet-lag, am dealing with router problems, and attended the opening ceremony for my college’s new group of students for the year. I hope to get installment #1 out by end of today, and to go through the whole trip bit by bit.

It’s not hard to tell when there’s an election in Japan. You cannot miss it unless you are blind and deaf. No television, radio or newspapers needed–the politicians come to you, and in a big way.

You see, in Japan, politicians are limited in how they can campaign. They can put up posters in only on specially placed boards; they cannot advertise on television, and they cannot go door-to-door. So that, apparently, leaves them with no choice but to ride around in roaming, incredibly LOUD vans with huge loudspeakers on top, as many as four per truck, shouting things like, “I’m Ito Masami! I’m hanging in there! Vote for me!!” I swear. Listen to them yourself, and remember that this goes on all day long, sometimes for weeks, almost without a break–at least in my neighborhood, where there are lots of large apartment buildings.

But that’s not all. They’re not content with driving back and forth at 10 kph (holding up traffic) in your neighborhood endlessly from 9am to 8pm, day after day, drowning out your TV even with volume on high. Turning into your building’s parking lot and driving around it casually for quite some time is not enough, either. No, they also have to stop there for 15 to 20 minutes at a time, get out, and make long speeches right in front of your building.

Did I mention that this can go on for weeks at a time? I do not think that I mentioned that there are several candidates for any one area, and they’re all out there; if one is not annoying you right now, there seems no end to the others who are. Often, two or three will be in your neighborhood at any given time, playing a game of “Who’s Louder And More Obnoxious?”

I really do not know how or why the Japanese people put up with this. We’re not talking about this happening just in the business district, no, this is concentrated in populated areas, with sleeping infants, people just trying to enjoy some peace and quiet at home, and some people trying to sleep in late on weekends (like me, alas). In the U.S., anyone who tried this even for a day would be shouted off the streets and elected out of office so fast their heads would spin. I would MUCH rather have them be on TV all the time–at least then I could turn them off.

I just got back… alas, I was unable to access the Internet in Spain again. Currently I am jetlagged and trying to get myself back on cycle. Over the next several days, I will be posting a LOT about the Spain trip, with many photos. Stay tuned!

Well, here I am in Pontevedra, in the Province of Galacia in Spain. This may be my only chance to blog in while in Spain as the DSL we were going to install at my aunt’s place may not get installed. I am taking tons of photos and will try to log the best I can while on the road, then I will catch up big-time when I get Internet access. Have taken maybe more than 300 photos so far, thought that’s not too hard with a digital camera. The big challenge there is with keeping charged batteries and running out of space on the flash memory cards.

My first day was mostly travel–after landing in Madrid late at night and getting up early the next day, my father and I met with my sister, her husband and two kids and we all piled into a minivan for an 8-hour trip to my ancestral homeland, Pontevedra. Here, we met up with several cousins and their families and got great tours and eating throughout the area. Highlights included the local landmarks as well at the building which housed my grandfather’s academy school, which he ran before being exiled (given the choice of leaving or being killled, that is) by Franco’s people.

Remind me to tell you the story of how Christopher Columbus was really born here in Galicia.

Today we went up to Santiago and saw the cathedral there, a thousand years old and counting, reportedly the resting place of Saint James. We got some great photos. Tomorrow it’s back to Madrid and for some more relaxed sightseeing.

So far, it been great… lots of logs to put in. Sometime soon….

The idea is not new, but it is served up absolutely fresh in this movie: a troupe of actors who did a sci-fi show many years ago as a short-term gig find themselves only able to get work at conventions and computer-store openings (“By Grabthar’s hammer… what a savings.”). Then suddenly, without warning, they find themselves on a real spaceship, with real aliens, fighting real bad guys.

The characters are closely modeled after not just the Star Trek roles, but also by the actors who played them. Tim Allen is the egocentric, washed up ham actor who played the captain. His alien first officer is portrayed, with a delightful deadpan performance, by Alan Rickman (“Give him a hand, he’s British!”). Sigourney Weaver is similar to Star Trek’s Uhura, in that her job is basically reporting what someone else says (“Look, I have one job on this lousy ship. It’s stupid, but I’m gonna do it, okay?”); Weaver’s character throws in gratuitous cleavage. The cast if filled out by Tony Shalhoub as the almost eerily calm engineer (“Hey guys, I just wanted you to know that, the reactors won’t take it… the ship is breaking apart and all that… Just FYI.”), Daryl Mitchell as the navigator who was a kid (can you say “Wesley Crusher”) when the series was filmed, and Sam Rockwell (now starring in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) as the nameless security officer who gets killed off in the first five minutes of the episode he was in (a “red shirt” in Trek parlance).

At one convention, Allen’s character is asked to fight aliens, and thinking that it is just a gig to perform for a private video in someone’s garage, he takes them up on the offer–only to find out afterwards that he was playing captain for real. Excited at the idea of being a space captain for real, he tries to convince his co-stars of his adventures with the “Thermians,” but they think he’s just gone around the bend (“They were Termites, or Dalmations. I can’t remember, because I was hung over”). But soon, they’re all caught up in the action, helping the Thermian race to battle the evil tyrant Saris. The Thermians, you see, received and watched all the TV episodes from Earth–and believed they were all real, even “Gilligan’s Island” reruns (“Oh, those poor people!”). Basing their culture on the “historical documents” of the sci-fi TV show, they find they cannot operate their hi-tech machines well, and so they recruit the “real” space veterans to help them.

The Thermians are played wonderfully as rather awkward, inept squids in artificial human form, with suitably wooden and bizarre behavior. Saris is almost over the top as a villain, with elaborate and quite convincing makeup; you’ll understand when you see him. But the main cast gets credit for playing the Star-Trek-like cast spot on; you can easily believe they’ve been going at it for years as a group. The writing is also perfect, scoring on all the weirdness and well-known detail from TV shows like Trek (“I’m not doing it–this episode was badly written!”). Great care was also taken to define the sharp difference between fantasy and what would be reality: the spaceship sets for this movie were mounted on machines that shook and tilted the entire room so the actors didn’t have to fake being thrown about. And the actors make understandable mistakes, such as when Laredo, the navigator, cannot even leave drydock without scraping the ship against the edge of the dock for a full ten seconds (or more), or the security officer monitoring battle activity (“Hey guys… there’s a red thingy moving toward the green thingy…. I think, I think we’re the green thingy!”)

As a bonus, the DVD includes several deleted scenes, which, in my opinion, should have been left in, and in a bizarrely funny twist, the entire movie, on an alternate language track, was dubbed in Thermian–essentially, 100 minutes of people blabbering in an insane gibberish (“Blooble BEBEBEBE FWING DedleDEE!”). You’d think that it would get boring after just a few minutes, but it took me about 15 minutes to finally stop the craziness–the people who dubbed it really threw themselves into it, matching tone and babbling to the characters and their situations.

Even if you’re not a Star Trek fan, you’ll probably like this movie. If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ll love it.

Between 1970 and 1991, Roger Zelazny wrote a series of ten novels based upon a mythical fantasy world. At first, it was a series of five books, the first being called Nine Princes in Amber, following the adventures of Prince Corwin, who has lost his memory and must struggle to regain his past as well as his position. Corwin and the other princes have special powers, including the ability to move between an infinite number of universes, called “shadows.” The second set of five books, begun in 1985 after Zelazny took a seven-year break, followed the adventures of Merlin, the son of Corwin. This collection, The Complete Amber Chronicles, puts all ten short novels into one, long 1258-page volume.

I am not usually a fan of fantasy; I have read a little of it outside of the Amber series, and found it not to my liking. The Amber series, however, is very well written for the non-fantasy reader, in the same way the Harry Potter books are; that is, they take the story more seriously than the fantasy element, and there are rules and rationales which keep the fantasy from become too surreal and unbelievable. The characters, though cardboard at times, are engaging, and the possibilities suggested by the universe Zelazny has constructed are intriguing to the imagination.

SPOILER ALERT:

Do not read the following paragraph if you wish to remain completely in the dark about the backstory. The following does not take away from the story in my opinion, but if you’re finicky about it, pick up reading in the paragraph after. To read the spoilers, simply select the text of the invisible paragraph (magic!), and it will invert colors and show the text.

SPOILERS:

The basic idea is this: in the beginning, there was only Chaos, where practically anything could happen, and the world had little order or recognizability. This world was lead by a royal family, who were able to harness energies existing in their world to construct spells and devices which would perform tasks they desired. At one point, a man named Dworkin left the realm, found a creature of order outside the realm of Chaos, mated with it, and created the Pattern of Amber. Once created, the Pattern became an opposite pole to Chaos, and between them ranged all the possible universes that could exist, populated by infinite varieties of beings. Dworkin had a son, Oberon, who later took the throne; Oberon, in turn, had many sons, numbering nine by the time Zelazny’s first story begins. By that time, Dworkin had vanished, Oberon had disappeared, and one son, named Eric, claimed the throne. This is where the first book picks up.

OK, START READING AGAIN HERE.

Our main character, not knowing his name or anything else about himself, wakes up in a hospital. Slowly, he discovers more and more about himself, including the fact that he is stronger than most people, heals faster, and is in some sort of undefined trouble. The people at the hospital have been instructed to keep him there under sedation, but somehow he has returned to consciousness and therefore is able to escape.

The opening technique Zelazny uses here–amnesia–works very well for this story. In addition to the standard purpose of allowing the author to fill in the exposition needed in any story (introducing characters, situations and story parameters) while at the same time keeping readers in suspense, the amnesia angle has an added bonus: it allows us, as readers, to slip into the role of this fantasy character before we find out about his powers that would normally place him distant from ourselves. Waking up in the hospital, he thinks of himself as a normal person, and only slowly, bit by bit, finds his special nature, giving us time to grow comfortable with his character before we see him as a mythical member of royalty.

The story quickly turns to intrigue, with family members plotting against family members, with the magic and mystery of the world thrown in for spice. There are secrets everywhere, unanswered mysteries galore, and strange new worlds filled with various people and creatures at every turn. Zelazny takes some basic myths and legends, such as King Arthur’s court, and runs off in a direction of his own. Underscoring it all is (according to many writers) the foundation of fiction: conflict. Even the most trustworthy of siblings seems suspect at some time; as Corwin says at one point, “I trusted him as I would a brother, which is to say, not at all.”

The first five books are quite good, right up to the ending. Zelazny was obviously talked into writing more books due to the success of the first series, and at first, the second series of five novels stands up well. That series follows the adventures of Merlin, Corwin’s own son, torn between the two main cultures of the story, belonging to both, giving his full allegiance to neither. Possessed of greater magical skills and training than his father, he takes us deeper into the method and ways of the powers Zelazny mostly just hints at in the first five books. Merlin’s story begins on the shadow Earth (the place where you and I live, and also where his father started out), where he is trying to figure out who is trying to assassinate him every April 30th.

Like the first set of books, this series quickly gets entangled in character mysteries, plot twists, and of course, intrigue, this time by two sets of relatives rather than just one. And for the first few books, it does an OK job of keeping the quality close to the first series. However, as the story goes on, it gradually deteriorates, and in the last two books, things get harder and harder to accept. Merlin enters worlds too confusing to comprehend, characters completely change course without much reason, and the story jumps around without much cohesion. It is as if Zelazny either lost his skills or his interest in those last few years of writing.

Nevertheless, the story is interesting enough and bears through to the end, and the first seven or eight novels more than make up for the weaker ending of the second half of the ten-book saga. Enough for me to buy this larger volume and read it again, after having gone through my brother-in-laws set of separate books many years before.

——————–

Note: I am backdating these reviews so that they do not appear in the main blog, otherwise cluttering up the end of August too much. This review was written on August 28th, 2003.

This may be my last post for a week or so. I leave for Spain tomorrow morning and may not have access to the Internet until next Tuesday I will try my best to post as much as I can from Spain, with photos if possible. I may even do some backposting, if I have the time. Please be patient, I’ll do my best, but I may be limited by unforeseen technological problems. Wish me luck!

Also, keep in mind that you can post comments back to me. At the bottom of every entry, there is a link for comments. It will open a window in which you can type a message or comment in response; the comment will be viewable by visitors to the page, and each response will generate an email to me. Try it out!

So far, after most of the country has been invaded and many thousands of troops have been going through and seraching uncounted buildings no doubt on special watch for any kinds of weapons stashes, the entire unvieling of Iraq’s chemical weapons holding amount to one holding at an agricultural complex which may be pesticides.

If Hussein is truly the ruthless sadist we hear about (and I don’t doubt that he is), then why didn’t he use any of the massive array of chemical weapons he was supposed to be hoarding as U.S. troops rushed into Baghdad? And why haven’t the coalition forces found more than just some chemicals at an agricultural complex?

One of the major justifications of the war was not just that Saddam had huge amounts of chemical and biological weapons, but that he was also just a few months away from developing an atomic weapon. When are we going to find that particular weapons plant? The Bush administration claimed that it had solid evidence (but never gave any clue to what it was) that this bomb was nearing completion, so one must suspect that they at least had an inkling of where it might be–so why haven’t we heard of the storming of this facility?

Gee, you don’t think that we were lied to, do you? That’s never happened before.