Frankenstein Unwound

Lately, I have been giving a lot of thought to the story of Frankenstein (can’t imagine why).  If you don’t know, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel penned by Romantic Period writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1818. Even if you have never heard of Shelley you are probably aware of the characters from her book as they are indelible cultural icons.  I’ve read the book, twice; most probably because it is such a tedious tome that I’d forgotten most of the detail and in an act of cerebral self-flagellation submitted myself to the punishment once again.

Lore has it (well, it’s probably not so much lore as bragging by the author as she states it as fact in her own preface) that she and her Lake Geneva companions, poets Percy Shelley (husband) and Lord Byron were sitting around one day desperately trying to break the boredom of being God’s gifts to literature when one of them threw out the challenge that they should each write a horror story. The quality of said product is proof enough that writing should never be the object of competitive challenge.

Now most of you will be passing familiar with the general theme of Frankenstein as dozens of movies and countless other cultural references have featured at least the veneer if not the substance of Shelley’s novel.  I was raised on the Universal Studios production released in 1931 starring Colin Clive as Dr. Henry Frankenstein and launching the career of Boris Karloff (credited as “?”) as the monster.  It is an enjoyable movie on two levels: the first being an engaging science fiction/horror thriller, the second for the camp value intrinsic in early film craft.  Basically, a scientist obsessed with returning life to the dead creates a monstrous creature, recognizes his folly, unleashes said monster on Swiss population, things go badly for all involved.  The book is much deeper and devotes many, many pages to both Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster contemplating their respective places in creation and blah, blah, blah. Thank God the movie left out the endless soul searching and focused on creepy makeup and torch bearing villagers.

If you consider yourself an aficionado of English Romantic literature (by the way, Romantic here refers to a European literary movement that spanned the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, not the genre of heaving-bosom fiction featuring Fabio in the cover art… some books should be read, others should be used to start bon fires) you should read Shelley’s Frankenstein.  Then rent or buy the movies Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935-again, Universal Studios) and Son of Frankenstein (1939-still, Universal Studios …work that franchise baby!!!) and have a few good laughs. And if you’re old enough to remember Moona Lisa, bask in the glow of Saturday afternoon nostalgia.  Then, if your hunger for things Frankenstein has yet to be sated, get hold of a copy of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974-Twentieth Century Fox… should have held onto those movie rights, Universal) and be prepared to laugh your ass off!

I trust it is obvious from this missive that I love old movies, particularly from the golden age of Hollywood.  And I hope, that on the occasional week when I just can’t think of anything funny or thoughtful to report about my own life (had you figured that one out yet?), you won’t mind too much if I fill the space with recommendations from the library in my head. “Is that a bookshelf sticking out of his ear?”

How to Plan a Road Trip

For those of you who’ve had the pleasure of reading my travel logs, you know that I am a road trip maven.  It’s been a while (too long a while) since my last trip but having just completed one I thought I would offer those of you un-christened the benefit of my vast experience.

First point of order: A camping trip is not a road trip.  One may camp during the evolution of a road trip, but camping is a discipline of its own.  Preparations for the two disparate journeys are completely different.  I have camped while on road trips; chiefly because camping is somewhat cheaper than a motel stay but also because there have been occasions when day’s end sprang at me with nary a lodging facility in sight.  Yes, there have been the odd occasions when the kind Deputy Sheriffs have informed me and my fellow travelers that sleeping in the town’s central square was not considered polite behavior. More about such experiences in future blog postings.

While I have engaged in road trips with minimum planning and maximum spontaneity, experience and wisdom taught me the value of thinking through destinations and routes.  Don’t get me wrong; I am a proponent of the no reservation, lax timetable approach to highway travel.  But it is very beneficial to the success and enjoyment of a road trip to have at least an inkling of the highways available to reach the chosen destinations. This is particularly crucial when travelling with companions… even more so with female companions.

The most valuable tools in prepping for a road trip are books and maps.  The books are useful in identifying locations of historical events and scientific phenomena; example, the Grand Canyon. If one was just cruising along Interstate Highway 40 without fore knowledge of its existence and approximate location, one would never know they had passed it by.  It is the biggest geologic feature in the Continental United States, and they hid it, well!

Don’t be disheartened thinking a successful road tripper need spend all their time poring over science and history tomes.  Some schmuck has done that for you then written a book easily found in the travel section of Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.  They have clever little titles like, New Mexico, Off the Beaten Path. When people have asked me, “Dale, how do you find these obscure treasures to visit and write about?” I respond, “I read books!”

Maps and atlases (a collection of bound maps, usually related in some way by proximity or subject matter… also available at your local book store) are essential to navigation.  But they are extremely useful for planning as well.  Don’t learn simply how to read a map… learn how to study a map.  Perhaps in some future missive I will conduct a map study primmer, but there is not room enough here.  Let me emphasize, if you know how to study a map and are proficient in internet searching, the world opens up as it never has before.

Navigation frustrates many, especially novice road trippers.  There are five necessities for successful land navigation:

·         Knowledge of where you are.

·         Knowledge of where you want to be.

·         Knowledge of  where both of those locations are on a map

·         Familiarity with true north (if you don’t understand the difference between true north and magnetic north, you are going to spend a lot of time retracing your routes).

·         A watch.

If you don’t recognize the value of each of these, send me an e-mail and I will elucidate.

One can always reduce the risk of getting lost by using a Garmin or other such device.  I use one.  But I use it only as a route tracking tool.  I design my own route (my Garmin came with software that lets me do this on my PC then upload to the mobile device) to ensure I see what I want to see, go where I want to go.  Your GPS device will know where you are.  It will most likely be able to locate and plot your destination.  But letting it build the route based solely on information contained in its database will put you on a concrete ribbon where the most interesting sites are truck stops.  If you study your maps, you will be able find the old roads… and that is your ultimate navigation goal.  It’s where all the interesting things happened.  It’s where all of the interesting cantinas are to be found.

A word or two about comestibles (look it up!): A common rookie mistake is to overload your vehicle with food.  Remember, this is not a camping trip. First: In the modern world of transportation infrastructure, you will encounter very few stretches of roadway that do not offer some sort of convenience store/gas station every thirty to sixty minutes of travel time.  This is important because they generally offer restrooms and your traveling companion(s) will have need of these (especially the women folk… and guys once they get past the age of fifty).  It is customary and an unwritten law in the code of the road tripper to buy something if you are using these otherwise free facilities.  If you need gas, that is good enough.  But someone in your party will inevitably need to pee out of cycle with you petrol purchase rotation.  Unless you are collecting exceedingly badly constructed baseball caps with rude comments, you will buy snacks; no need to load up before you leave home.

Second: One of the major tenants of road tripping is the belief that the best chicken-fried steak (or hamburger, or burrito… name your own poison) is just around the next bend.  So when you make that fateful turn, you don’t want to be full on Slim-Jims.  Also, eschew chain restaurants.  You can eat all the Applebee’s you want when you get home.  Look for the locally owned and operated hash houses and greasy spoons.  Breakfasts are the best opportunity for discovering some epicurean delight of regional origin but all meals should be taken at the most rustic establishment you can find.

Time is your friend.  This next piece of advice is born of many years’ experience.  Do not pack too many miles in a day.  You can beat the land speed record next time you are travelling to Aunt Effie’s house for Thanksgiving.  A road trip is about the journey, not the destination. Along the route, you encounter opportunities for fun and learning that were not indicated in your original trip plan.  Considering the plethora of roads you have to travel in your lifetime, never assume you will pass this way again.  Take the opportunity to bathe in the glow of kitsch tourist traps.  Read the billboards along the way, searching out “The Thing?” or “Singing Caverns”.

To make the journey more relaxing, stop every two hours or so (believe me, if you are traveling with a female it’s gonna happen anyway) and spend five or ten minutes walking around to limber up those legs… toes need blood too.  This is a matter of individual preference, but I like to get started early each day.  There is something peaceful about the long shadows of the morning.  And as your travel companions will likely be droned into sleep by the motion of the car you can take advantage of the quiet time to ponder the question, “Why did I bring these jerks along anyway?”

·         Best afternoon pick-me-up: A&W Root Beer float (or freeze)

·         Best hard candy: Coffee Nips

·         Best state for scenery: Utah

·         Best state for history: New Mexico

·         Best white knuckle highways: Colorado

·         Most unpleasant Border Patrol Agents: Texas

Enjoy your next (or first) trip… and remember, if you need a first-class navigator, I am generally available.

 

The Yellow Dilemma

No, I am not writing about the Maoist movement.  That is the “Red Menace”, not the Yellow Dilemma.  If you indeed thought I was writing about Chinese Communism, you might be just a little bit racist.

The yellow dilemma to which I refer is a question of physics and you know from previous posts that generally I make stuff up as I go along.  If that is your assumption for this offering, you are dead on.  Now, to set the stage:

We all learned back in the third grade that there are three primary colors; blue, yellow and red.  All other colors are the result of these three mixed together in some way, or are shades of the primary colors achieved by adding white (to lighten) or black (to darken).  This was presented in art class as a matter of dogma and no further discussion was deemed necessary.  Applied physics, the academic discipline that truly defines color, was considered too advanced for eight-year olds.

These statements are easy enough to test.  Using any color medium that can be blended (I would recommend liquid food coloring) try this experiment.  Put a few drops of blue food coloring into a glass of water and the result is blue water.  Add in the same number of drops of yellow and the result is green (green is a secondary color).  Food coloring is manufactured in green, but as you can see it is for convenience only as the color can easily be produced using blue and yellow.  The same holds true for orange, which is a combination of yellow and red.  If you doubt this, try any combination of colors and see if you can produce blue, yellow or red.  It is impossible because of their primary nature.

You might ask, at this point, “Dale, why is this so?”  To which I would respond, “You weren’t paying attention to the Aug. 22^nd post, (How or Why?) were you?”  We know that this is not a why question but a how question. “How does the physical nature of light result in one’s perception of color?”  Well, I don’t know… it has something to do with the wavelength of the energy of the source of the photons to which our optic nerve responds.  It is way over my head, but I digress.

Now, to the dilemma:  My dad was an avid amateur electronics buff.  Spare time would find him out in the garage tinkering with some radio or television set abandoned by some previous owner as un-repairable.  His first “new” television purchase didn’t occur until I was thirteen.  While I did not share his talent or passion, I did stand at his shoulder asking why a lot (we now know this was the wrong question) because it was more (marginally) interesting than the homework I was avoiding.  Amid the countless facts I have not retained that he shared with me, one that I did internalize is that a color television produces a picture by illuminating the screen in response to the electronic transmission in combinations of three colors; red, blue and green.

Whoa, Nelly!  Red, blue and green?  That must be a misstatement.  “Dad, you said red, blue and green.  Certainly you meant red, blue and yellow.”

“No son, I know what I said and I know what I meant.  There are three electron guns inside the picture tube (take my word for it youngsters, back in the day televisions operated by streaming electrons at a phosphorous coated screen inside a huge vacuum tube, there were no plasma or LCD TVs) and each gun fires electrons at phosphors that are red, blue or green.  The combination of those excited phosphors creates the colors you see on the screen.”

 At this point you are feeling one of three ways; excited because you sense a challenging mystery, confused beyond belief, or on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness from boredom.  If you are in group three, just let yourself go, this isn’t going to get any more exciting.  You can go on believing what you see when you watch Real Wives of Beverly Hills are the lives of little people who live in your television.

For the thinkers among you, you are probably feeling the stirrings of conundrum.  Let’s pursue this rabbit down the hole and see what kind of cake is on the table.

“If blue and yellow make green, and the television makes only blue, red and green dots (the aforementioned phosphors) how does the television create yellow?” If that is your question, you are a thinker. If your question was, “What time is True Blood on?” you should have taken the nap option. If your question was, “Why does the television make yellow?” I give up.  The answer to that question is between you and your god.

Now, if you expect to find the answer to the question residing in this paragraph, then you don’t really understand the definition of the word, “dilemma”.  I don’t know the answer, and I have presented this query to many people far smarter than I without success, which is why I am writing this in the first place.  So, dear followers (those of you still awake), if you know HOW a television makes yellow with only red, blue and green in its color quiver, I do hope you will write and explain it to me.  If you do, and I can understand it, I will share the seemingly miraculous details with my readers and assign all credit for superior understanding to you.

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This week’s punch line: “Why the long face?”