Monthly Archives: September 2009

The Masonic Colossal Family Fun Book of Puzzles and Adventure Stories

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The power cable for my iBook stopped working, and because my iBook is old and broken down, it took 10 days to order in a new power supply. Ten long days. So with no internet, no way of playing DVDs and not even that crappy game with the Incan marbles, I had to find other stuff to bide my time. I turned to the magical world of books.

I started with the most magical book I could find – Dan Brown’s new tome, “The Lost Symbol”, though I kept thinking of it as “The Da Vinci Code II” and, perhaps more accurately, “The Masonic Colossal Family Fun Book of Puzzles and Adventure Stories”.

Basically, Robert Langdon, hero of “The Da Vinci Code” is back, and this time he’s, um, wandering around Washington DC solving puzzles, encountering the mysteries of the Masons, and generally being on the run from the CIA and the freaky dude with the tattoos.

It is not without its charms, and that’s what I shall focus on here.

Everyone likes solving puzzles, and the book includes many:

  • The one with the numbers in the grid (not Sudokus!)
  • The one with the letters in the grid.
  • The one with the symbols in the grid.
  • The one with the “maths is fun” grid.
  • The one with the anagram (Remember those? We learned about them in “The Da Vinci Code”!)
  • The one with the severed hand.

Some of my friends, who are quite smart and read books by authors such as “The Japanese guy who wrote the one about the wood from Norway”, well, they frown upon Mr Brown and his novels. “Boo!” They complain. “His writing is crap!” But I’ve always been all about having a well-rounded cultural experience. If you read something like “The Lost Symbol”, then won’t the better novels you read be just that much sweeter in comparison? How can you rank something five stars out of five if you’ve never had a one-star experience?

Besides, it’s much more fun reading a novel knowing that its style can be aped as easily as this:

Chapter 385

The New Zealand Parliament’s Executive Wing is popularly known as “the Beehive” and “the jewel of Molesworth Street”. It stands rotundly like a panopticon of politics, its marble floors, stainless steel mesh panels and translucent glass ceiling a gleaming symbol of democracy and competitively priced catering.

It has been criticised over the decades, and yet it is still used. Every day, the everyday men and women of the Government travel its tastefully carpeted hallways, on their way to making the laws that indeed create the buzz of the Beehive.

And it was in one of these hallways that Langdon found himself stooped over the severed tonsil of a maintenance worker. What sick mind did this? And what sick message were they trying to send?

At one point, Langdon phones his publisher, desperate to get hold of a person’s phone number, to warn her that some shit is going to happen. Even though Langdon is all desperate, his publisher hassles him for taking so long to write his new book. Just like Dan Brown took ages to write “The Lost Symbol” in real life! “Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors,” the publisher thinks to himself. Yeah, just don’t forget who feeds you.

There a plot twist based around a clue-pun on the original meaning of the word ‘sincere’. “…Langdon now understood that Dean Galloway was sending Peter a code. Ironically, this same code had been a plot twist in a mediocre thriller Langdon had read years ago.” That’s so meta it’s almost as if the novel itself is sentient.

For an author who has had two previous works turned into major motion pictures, Dan Brown has surprisingly put in a few elements that seem to be virtually unfilmable.

For example, Sato, the CIA director is described as being 4 foot, 10 inches tall, “bone thin with jagged features and a dermatological condition known as vitiligo, which gave her complexion the mottled look of coarse granite blotched with lichen”, and with a lady moustache and a manly voice due to throat cancer. She gets to deliver lines like , “You boiled the pyramid[?!]“ That’s either an Oscar for Best Actress or Best Animation.

And then there are the scenes in the totally dark room. Part of the action takes place in a lab in the Smithsonian, located in the middle of a pitch-black bunker. Like, totally dark; a complete absence of light. Of course a chase scene takes place there, so how would that be filmed? In Dark-o-vision, is how.

Page 10 refers to “the moko scars of the modern Maori” in its lesson of tattooing throughout the ages. Yay! NZ!

There’s a plot twist, where [redacted] is revealed to be the [redacted] of [redacted]. (There is also redacting in the story). Well, by the first time the character of Zachary was mentioned, I thought, “Oh, I bet Zachary actually turns out to be that crazy Mal’akh fellow.” And I was right. Oh, whoops, I forgot to redact the names in that last sentence. Sorry.

And there’s an amazing part in the book where it appears that the freaky guy with the tattoos has drowned Robert Langdon. I thought this was a totally brilliant move on Brown’s behalf – a classic “murder your darlings” situation, like Janet Leigh’s early demise in “Psycho”. No more Langdon! The story would have to be wrapped by that Katherine woman, right? How brave! Except it turned out Langdon wasn’t dead. He’d been drowned in scientific breathable liquid and was very much still alive, to go on and solve the puzzles.

Fuck you, Dan Brown. You boiled the pyramid.

Things to do in Hamilton when it’s dead

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Hamilton’s spent a lot of time and money trying to convince the country that it is quite interesting and not boring. In the ’90s its city motto was “Where it’s happening”, then later “More than you’d expect”. Then, due to not being able to come up with a decent replacement slogan, they just went with “Hamilton”. Or Hamilton because it’s all on in Hamilton.

So just went it looked like people would start believing that it was, in fact, the events capital of Aotearoa NZ, the coach of the South African rugby team revealed that the Springboks would not be coming to Hamilton in advance of their game because “there is nothing in Hamilton”. Instead they heartbreakingly opted for fun in the sun in the Gold Coast.

But while Surfers Paradise is warm and has a beach, it’s still a bit of a pantswagon. And as Hamilton is a pantswagon too, perhaps we should pay closer attention to the list of the top five things to do in Hamilton, as reckoned by the Hamilton City Council.

Visit Hamilton Gardens.
The Hamilton gardens are quite nice and also world class, both of which are important in this modern world. You can pick your favourite garden and rent it out for your wedding or civil union ceremony. There are a couple of statues of Egyptian gods that were twice defaced by outraged Christians, but you don’t have to have your wedding near those if you don’t want to.

Feed the animals at Hamilton Zoo.
If you’re old, like me, you’ll know this as the Hilldale Game Farm, which brings on a feeling of mild nausea. Hamilton Zoo is an adequate zoo, but it’s hilly (waaaah, I don’t like walking up hills) and if feeding the animals is the best a zoo can offer a visitor, something is wrong with society in general.

Take a walk round Hamilton Lake.
Lake Rotoroa is quite nice. In the ’90s Boney M played an outdoor concert there. I didn’t go, but my friend did and she reported that some crazy lady was yelling at her group for daring to stand up and dance, blocking her view of the stage. “Sit down! We’re trying to watch the Boney M’s!”

A night out on Hood St.
Hood Street, which was immortalised in Katchafire’s 2002 song Who You With is part of the messed-up downtown ghetto of restaurants and bars down the south end of Victoria Street. The only place actually worth visiting down Hood Street is David’s Emporium – one of those wonderful shops that sells lots of stuff that you didn’t realise you needed until you just went and bought a dozen of them, like notebooks with goggle eyes.

The Waikato River Trail.
If you walk along the segment that goes from the Cobham Drive bridge to the Wellington Street Beach, there’s a fitness trail, with all these wooden and metal obstacles to hurl yourself over, through or around. Then when you’ve finished you can go to Hamilton East KFC.

I’m just surprised that the list has left out all the interesting things that Hamilton’s rich and vibrant downtown area has to offer the visitor. Oh, wait…

Wind, rain, Phoenix

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Football or fußball or soccer is a game that’s always lingered in a distant corner of my life with really being anything that I’ve paid much attention to.

In fact, my knowledge of football can be summed up thusly:

  • Manchester United.
  • David Beckham.
  • “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby.
  • The Hillsborough tragedy.
  • Hooligans.
  • That time in the early ’80s when the All Whites did quite well.
  • Gary Lineker.
  • Sven Goran Erikson.
  • Ulrika Jonsson. (That’s enough – Ed)

I’ve had a vague New Year’s resolution this year to watch more sport. So far all this has meant was seeing a cricket game back in April, but when one of my workmates announced she was organising a group outing to a Wellington Phoenix game, I jumped at the chance to get more sport in my life.

So I showed up to Westpac Stadium with the group and we quickly moved from our allocated seats over to aisle 22, for this is where the rowdy Yellow Fever supporters sat. This was, I was told, where all the fun happens.

Spectators

I soon learned that football is reasonably easy game to follow: you have the ball and you need to get it in your goal and also stop the other team getting the ball in their goal.

It’s also quite hard to score a goal, and I like this. Not that I know anything about rugby, but it seems that in that game, you can score points by hurling the ball over pretty much anything. But because it’s harder in football, when a goal is scored it’s just that much sweeter.

And football is about crowd chants; proper chants, not just Exponents lyrics.

There’s the “Wellington is wonderful” chant (“We’ve got the wind, the rain and the Phoenix”) to buoy the spirits of the team, and then things like the mysterious “She fell over! She fell over!” chant to diss the South Australian visitors.

Actually, on the subject of Wellington being wonderful, it really is great that not only does Wellington have a professional football team, but the stadium it plays at is conveniently in the city, right next to the train station.

The big highlight of the game was The Goal. Yes, there was only one (the final score – one-all) but it was just a brilliant moment. Everyone got up and yelled and cheered and waved their scarves in the air. I also waved my newly purchased Phoenix scarf, and discovered that my voice goes all squeaky when I yell.

Goal

But in between the goal and the near-misses, I was surprised at how graceful football is. The way the ball sometimes flows between the players, bouncing from head to head, shooting from leg to leg. Oh right, that is why they call it the beautiful game.

I left the stadium, wandering off into the cold spring night, no longer a stranger to the appeal of football, and indeed feeling seduced by its charms.

Scarf-wearing