A Tale of Two Brandons: Mull

Given how long it took me to finish writing the first blog post on Brandon Sanderson, I might as well start writing the second now too.

This blog first got started when Joy left for a couple months to take care of my grandmother, be pampered by my family in her first pregnancy, and give me more time to write my dissertation. During that time, I wandered the library at Cornell and picked up a book called Fablehaven. I was spellbound and couldn't sleep until I had devoured it whole. I introduced it to Joy as soon as I could. We bought each of the books in the series as soon as they came out, have mentioned our enjoyment of them together several times, and were sad to see them go. We also read the Candy Shop War together, which Joy didn't enjoy as much but was still good. I finished reading the first book in his new Beyonders series this week, which is what got me back to writing about the two Brandons again.

Brandon Mull clearly writes for a younger crowd than Sanderson. The stories are much less gritty, less dark, more moralistic (complete with family home evening discussion questions in the back to get your kids thinking about the right and wrong choices the characters made). Hence, I've been sharing Mull with Joy and not Sanderson.

Mull comes up with unique magical/mythical worlds with their own sets of coherent rules. His young characters generally act their age (unlike, say, *coughtwicoughlightcough*). The last 100 pages or so of each story is in the no-putting-down zone, and I already mentioned how much I loved the first Fablehaven book. His characters are believably fallible, which so many authors forget, and they do a fair share of flailing about trying to figure out what to do next. I got emotionally attached to some of the outcomes and went around for over a year hoping that I was right about a prediction. (I was! YES!!) All that, and I'm a sucker for time travel, which we get just a teeny bit. The primary villain is interesting and complex.

He doesn't manage to do much character development. There is some. In Fablehaven there are two main characters, and both grow in book 1, but only one of them grows in the rest of the series, which is a real pity. In fact, it was my main disappointment with book 5, realizing how little Kendra had grown and changed since discovering courage in book 1. Her brother who has to deal with choosing if, when, and how to break rules constantly gets all the cool toys, the cool adventures, (the plot-altering disasters), the comic-relief sidekicks (who are a scream), the big questions to ask, and gets to do things solo while Kendra is always protected by someone else because she never blossoms into the full sense of her powers. Never. :(  She just radiates light. Pff. In what would be a spoiler if it weren't blatantly obvious in the last book (you are duly warned) her final romantic interest is a unicorn. Come on! Gag! At least we aren't seeing a whole new library section devoted to unicorn romance.

That said, his secondary characters are wonderful. I want to see spin-off series about several of them. Even if they don't grow, they are intriguing and I really wanted to learn more about each of them.

What I'm Reading

It took me a year and a half, but I finally finished Fire in the Bones, the biography of William Tyndale, the fellow who translated 90% or so of the King James Bible. It's written by an LDS author, so there are numerous comparisons to the language of the Book of Mormon and how Joseph Smith was influenced by Tyndale's work and life. One quote from Tyndale rings out particularly strongly in that regard as he complained to the clergy:

Morover, seeing that one of you ever preacheth contrary to another; and when two of you meet, the one disputeth and brawleth with the other, as it were two scolds; and forasmuch as one holdeth this doctor, and another that ... so that if thou hadst but of every author one book, thou couldst not pile them up in any warehouse in London, and every author is contrary unto another. In this great diversity of spirits, how shall I know who lieth, and who sayeth truth? Whereby shall I try and judge them? Verily by God's word, which only is true. But how shall I that do, when thou wilt not let me see scripture?

Joseph writes similarly about the contentions in his day even with the scripture in the common tongue, learning from James 1:5 that the one place we can find such answers is from God Himself in prayer. Fire in the Bones is really an outstanding work and strengthened my testimony of the Bible.

Now I'm seeing about getting through Neal A. Maxwell's last book, enjoying some religious poetry, maybe renew my Nibley studies. Without Friday Forum to prepare for, I may have a bit more latitude to play around.

--- ECONOMICS ---

For my birthday, my parents got me Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About it? (2007) I've read the first 50 pages or so [a quick read] and am impressed by one of the viewpoints he tries to establish. Rather than seeing the world as 1 billion rich and 5 billion poor, he divides the world as 1 billion rich, 4 billion getting there, and 1 billion stuck in poverty. He then describes four of the reasons a country might get its people stuck there (conflict, natural resource curse, landlocked, and I haven't gotten to #4 yet) and promises to cover a bit on how to get out. He does a good job of not sticking too firmly to his one hobby horse thesis, puts in a lot of good caveats, and has surprisingly nice things to say about different factions in the development industry. It's backed by a long list of impressive research (cogent caveats by Easterly here and here.)

Frederic Bastiat's Economic Sophisms (1845) isn't about putting forward new economic ideas, but playing economic journalist to some that were old back in the 1800's when he wrote. He casts trade protectionism as pursuing the theory that scarcity is wealth. And it is - for sellers. As buyers, we want everything to be plentiful, easy to find and purchase, and cheap. As producers, we want all our inputs to be plentiful, easy to find and purchase, and cheap. As sellers, we want the thing we sell to be scarce and as expensive as possible. Any trade protectionist argument is based on one form or another of the notion that restricting production and purchasing is good: fostering us vs. them mentalities, protecting the environment by scarcity, preventing a very poor person (or multiple of the same) from having a job in order to preserve a middle-class job of "ours"... .

Frederich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) was written from a unique perspective: someone who lived through the Nazification of Germany saw the same signs in England and wrote to warn that the growing tendency toward central planning was the start of the road to totalitarianism, whether fascist or Marxist. I'm planning a future summary of his better points in another post ... once I've finished it. It seems highly topical given renewed efforts to put our financial, auto, and health industries under government control. Speaking of which, I finished Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and have been meaning to get some of his points out here also. Have to get to that.

I've also been poking around in Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Democracy, and Socialism (1942), which is interesting in that it is written to socialists, starting with a quite flattering discussion of Marx (that's as far as I've read). To borrow the summation from Wiki: "Schumpeter's theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism's collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and eventually destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy. “If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently,” he wrote, “this does not mean that he desires it."" Sound about right so far, anyone?

--- FUN ---
The family book these days is Harry Potter 5. It's fun introducing these to Joy. As we drove to Connecticut and back, we made it through 150 pages or so. Reading it immediately after #4 helped me see Harry in a much more sympathetic light. The first time through, Harry's perpetual outbursts of anger bothered me and made it my least favorite of the 7. Now it makes perfect sense: the boy needs a therapist, bad. Not because he's crazy, but a lot has happened and he needs a place to talk it out with someone who isn't about to start yelling "Heir of Slytherin!" "Half-blood!" "Kill him!" Poor kid.

After the disappointing movie of Mansfield Park, I picked up the book to rejoice in Ms. Austen's writing. Every night for a while I would regale Joy with another superbly crafted paragraph the movie had butchered. But then I started in on White Banner by Lloyd C. Douglas, the fellow who brought me such joy (and a talent show act) with his autobiography, Time to Remember. I haven't gotten very far, but it's very thought-provoking.

Oh yeah, and I'm reading cookbooks to find some more recipes we can make on the South Beach Diet. So far, we've added succulent fried eggplant (Emeril) and fried zucchini (Low-carb cookbook Joy got me for my birthday), ginger chicken (SBD book), and New New Orleans pasta (Emeril). You really need a bunch of cookbooks. The SBD cookbook is mostly about salads: make this chicken, serve in a bed of lettuce; fry the eggplant, serve on another lettuce.... The low-carb cookbook is all about eggs and frittatas (never tried those before - Joy loves em, and they're simple and flavorful). Emeril uses more seafood than we do, but if we cut the BAM down by half, the creole seasoning is magnificent for cooking anything....

Next up: The Candy Shop War by ... that guy who does Fablehaven. [google google] That's it, Brandon Mull. Eat a sweet, get a superpower. Sounds like fun.

Miscellany: WiiFit and Books

We have had our WiiFit for 50 days now and actually used it about 40 of those days (-7 Sundays and a few sick days). The WiiFit is a glorified scale ... but it's actually not that reliable. My weight will fluctuate by over 4 pounds from one day to the next! Up 6, down 5, down 2, up 3.... This makes it difficult to rely on it to tell us how much we weigh. What we put a little more faith in is the overall trend. For both of us, it's slightly down, but not by an incredible amount.

We enjoy the aerobic workouts most, Joy on step aerobics and I like it's boxer and the step aerobics. We have a regular challenge to see who scores best on the steps. "I'm ahead again! I got like 629 or something like that!" Hmmm, the bar is raised again. They also have some comfortable yoga stretches, some strength training exercises, and I enjoy the balance games.

The WiiFit also tries to calculate your BMI (body mass index) which is your weight in kg divided by your squared height in meters. The idea is that a person at 22 is ideally healthy. The problem is that the weight that would give us a 22 is NOT our ideal weight! For me, it thinks I should weigh 150 pounds. Now when I weighed a mere 196 right after my mission, I had a handful of people telling me I was unhealthily thin. My nutritionist says my actual ideal weight is 215. That's because I have a lot of muscle and other lean mass. Joy has a similar miscalculation, though hers isn't as large a miscalc as mine.

So we have a way to fool the Fit. I calculated the height of a person who would have as their ideal weight our ideal weight. We created two new characters (mine is named Alter Iigo) who we then claimed are that tall. So the Wii thinks I'm 6'11 and tells me I am merely overweight rather than grossly obese. The Wii stays alive longer that way.

The important question, though, is whether or not the WiiFit has helped us exercise more. The answer is yes. Before I started walking to campus every day, about half of my exercise was done on the Fit, and most of that wouldn't have happened without the ease of having it in my house. "I'm kind of a funny exerciser. I feel guilty/selfish if I spend too much time exercising. But the Wii helps me feel like I have permission to exercise, and I LOVE to be healthy. So I'm enjoying it. I especially appreciated when Derrill figured out we could do the free form step aerobics faster than it counts and it would still count our paces. Then you can go as fast as you want."

"I really like jackknives. It's my favorite ab exercise, and I learned it on the Wii. One thing I really like, since I have a baby, is that it will let you log in 5 minute increments. And you can add exercise you do outside of the Wii.

It is anticipated that it will be of the greatest help once the snow is here "and even on days when it's too hot in the summer."
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Joy and I finished reading Fablehaven books 2 and 3 together, interrupting The Wishsong of Shannara to read them both. We loved them! Joy's greatest complaint about them is that Book 4 isn't out yet. I don't much care for the teenage love interest (Gavin) that was introduced in Book 3 for the lead female (Kendra). I'm secretly hoping that he's really an enemy so she doesn't have to be with him.
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Projects completed:
We moved our bed to the other side of the room. Granted, this is about 6 inches, but in the process we took everything out of the room, cleaned it thoroughly, and then re-constructed the bed on the other side of the room to reduce the chance of mold formation on the outer walls. We also moved the couch away from the outside wall for the same reason, which meant moving two bookcases as well. "It wasn't a major clean up of the garage, but it took us some time."

We had a plumber here to fix the emergency water shut off valve that didn't shut off anything.

I still need to install some more insulation under the trailer where we thought there had been a leak, and there's a VERY LONG list of projects that have been on my honey-do list for months.

"And then we're going to be sending away our computer." The laptop has been waxing old. Dell has kindly offered to examine it to see what other damage they can do, so we may not have the internet in our home for the next week or two. "Given when our service contract ends and how many times we plan on being out of town with it, it makes sense to have a thorough check of it done."
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Dates:
We went to Watkins Glen to tour the falls and leaves. Hyrum loved it, bouncing up and down the whole way in his frontpack. (It would be a backpack, but it's on my front.) Our date to the third game of the World Series last night was canceled due to rain delay.

Joy bought us a second Wii Remote (Wiimote) "and Derrill soundly whooped me in all of the Wii Sports. Good for him." I hear tell if I keep it up, she'll challenge me to boxing, cause she knows I won't him a woman. "I'm pretty good at that, aren't I?" You are quite engaging to watch.


This is Joy hidden behind a waterfall at Watkins Glen. The light was fading pretty bad and the flash doesn't seem to have done much. Oh well. Go to W.G. and behold the back side of water!

I'm only young once...

... but I can be immature forever.

The sign on the blow-up air castle fun house bouncing toy thingy at the Groton fair last week said that ALL AGES were welcome. So Joy and I took turns climbing in. My original entrance to the play area required a mighty leap to hurtle me through the small opening, but I made it. On my back way through the obstacle course (with a less subtle entrance, pictured to the left) a preteen girl looked at me there among the 7-11 year olds and cried in shock, "You're an aDULT!"

"Yes," I replied calmly, laying on my back, trying to squeeze between two balloons. "The sign says all ages."

"Really?" she asked dumbfounded.

"Yeah. Really."

She didn't know what to make of me.

Perhaps she didn't know that it is one of my life's goals to be open to interpretation:
Hyrum would certainly agree that I am open to interpretation. I don't know that people who only knew me at church or school would think that I am open to interpretation (though some of the folks recently who have seen the gleam in my eye when they say they enjoy playing games but are disappointed when everyone else just wants to talk might guess it). After all, people from my home ward admit that I was never a deacon - too serious and mature. But I'm not so worried that OTHER people think that I'm open to interpretation, as I am that I feel that I am.



Today ... I am 30.



I am very happy to be 30. I have a wife who loves me. I have the most adorable baby (though I leave other parents free to think otherwise). And I have a job. In fact, tomorrow I stop being a full-time student ... for forever. I was sitting back in church, listening to the talks on the importance of family, feeling very, very satisfied with life. This was a nice, new kind of feeling.

It's hard to get in a good birthday celebration on a Sundy-day, so we partied Friday, there being a church meeting in Owego Sat'dy.

Joy and Hy let me sleep in before having a yummy, hearty breakfast. Then we started the treasure hunt. Joy had hid my presents around the house and instead of her usual poem-based clues to help me find them, she this time sent me on a trail of documents on the laptop that would end in clue pictures. The pictures were way zoomed in - like to show the dust particles on a box! - and we played 20 Questions to help me figure out what in the world I was looking at. Then I get to search there for the gift. The most difficult ones were pictures she took of things she couldn't actually see: like the gift hidden above and behind the bathroom mirror. Let me see if I can find one for you....

Behind the mirror, outside under the stairs, and inside our luggage with Hyrum's clothes.

One of the more devious things she did was to take some of my books (fantasy, comic, and game strategy guides) with her on errands over the last two weeks and set up long winding paths throughout the books (Go to page 365 ... go to page 89 ... go to page 284 ... go to page 136 ... go directly to jail ...) with the final page of the trail telling me a computer file to resume the chase.

It took about 4 hours to find my presents. It took more than 2 weeks for her to prepare it all. I was pretty tired by the end, but eager to find out what it was I had gone searching for. Joy and my parents were very generous, and got me a wonderful variety of fun things to watch, to play and to play with, to wear, and to read.

So far, I've cracked open the second Fablehaven book, played the SimCity Societies tutorial, eaten some chocolate/pb smidgeons, worn my new Jesus tie, spent a couple hours playing Mannheim Steamroller and Jon Schmidt songs on the piano, and listened to the Princess Bride soundtrack. I have a feeling Tchaikovsky will be making an appearance tomorrow at work (and for months to come), with the Fraggles, VeggieTales: Jonah, and some Star Wars music (from Grandma) joining the party in the weeks to come. The stars say there will likely be a Wii game in my future (from the other grandma, though her card hasn't arrived yet).

Hyrum got me two cute Mickey outfits to put him in. Hyrum tends to get Mommy cartoons for him to watch.

As soon as the packages were opened, Hyrum got up from his nap and we drove down to Vestal to ... Chuck E Cheese's! I haven't celebrated my birthday there in a good 20 years. My brother or I sometimes would elect to celebrate there back when we lived in LA. This place was a bit smaller - one room instead of three or four - and I could swear I heard Mom in the back of my head saying "oooooookay" about my choice. In all honesty, I gave Joy several choices of venues, like miniature golfing.

This is how Joy tells it: You said Chuck E. Cheese's first. And then, oh, well, we could also do it here or there as afterthoughts. Why, as your dutiful wife, would I choose the second best?

*chuckle* I like her. She went online and got coupons for us. She also called around to see if there were slides for adults, and Vestal claimed to have a slide that kids of all ages could use, while Syracuse said theirs were only for kids, and Syracuse wasn't going to give us a show but Vestal would. So the Vestal franchise won. Their slide turned out to be a bit too tight of a fit for either of us, though (see crawlway above). I made a valiant attempt, reciting, "A bit of a pinch/But if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch."

Now back in my day, they had kid-sized robotic Chuckee (before he was Chuck E.) and friends' heads set up over a large crawl space with swiss-cheese style holes so kids could run around under the robots during the show. At Vestal, they had a robotic Chuck - who would've fit right in with the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland - and eight television screens in sorry need of tuning. They blared out some happy birthday and summer time fun music to help the 7 year olds be happy and the 6 month olds cry and scream. It was the first time Hyrum evidenced stranger anxiety. The bored guy/gal/mouse in the Chuck suit was less impressive.


On the other hand, Hyrum is really learning to reach out and try to get a hand on our food. Here he is trying to get Mommy's drink and discover the ways of the straw.

We had our chicken and bacon pizza, then went in for the rides and games! My favorite was the Star Wars game that takes you through the Luke Skywalker trilogy, blasting everything in sight. I ALMOST defeated Vader - one more hit and I would've ... probably taken his place, so I don't know if I should've beaten him or not. Joy had a lot of fun riding their 3D jet ski game, "where you actually sit on a jet ski kind of thing," she enthuses, and it registers when she jumped on it and such.

The ski ball was a penny pincher.

They have a roller coaster simulator where two people can strap in and be jolted about to the video monitor as if you were on a roller coaster. Hyrum enjoyed watching Mommy on the smaller version of the toy. (That's the expression on his face watching her.) We rode together in the big kid version.


The cool thing (which I'm informed is not unique, but was new to us) was a machine you reclined on where the seats would vibrate and slightly tilt while a very large screen with large speakers in front of you showed a more exotic 3D roller coaster. We agreed that the haunted mine was probably the best - complete with Indiana Jones style boulders and a lava demon. The ice caves and toy store were also very fun. According to my photographic memory, it was called Mad Wave Motion Theater.

For about $20, we got pizza and some 4 hours of games that netted us enough tickets to get a tootsie pop and a laffy taffy. But we had a BLAST. It was a lot of fun.

Then today I got to play the organ and so I did my renditions of Kolob and Praise to the Man for pre- and postlude respectively. :D I loved it.

Happy birthday ... to me!

Oops. I can't end the birthday post without talking about my cakes. We're in search for the perfect brownie recipe again. We had thought we might have found it for a while, but we're less and less enchanted with it. Joy made me a thing of brownies with marshmallow in them last week (not bad, but not perfect), and we got a couple pre-boxed styles (shock! gasp!) to try out and compare: Girardelli chocolate and caramel vs. Betty Crocker triple chocolate. The official taste off with be later today. The triple chocolate brownies have been decorated by my lovely and gracious to resemble a diploma and we will blow out a candle or three with lasagna.

Joy has really put a lot of work into my birthday. I appreciate it. It's been very fun.

I'm discovering one of the nice things about Facebook: random people (better put - unexpected people) wish me happy birthday. The first one outside my family to do so was some guy I met at the ATHGO conference last month. I really appreciated the note from someone who said she had been looking forward to wishing me a happy birthday at church ... and then forgot. :)

Happy birthday ... to me!