Brain Candy #25 - "It Was A Dark and Stormy Night..."

Literary-oriented Mensans will likely be familiar with Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. He is considered a minor Victorian author by some, a truly awful one by others and a misunderstood one by others still. The "Awful" school holds the most sway of late; mostly because a bad writing contest is named for him. The web site celebrating all of this is at www.bulwer-lytton.com.

There's a lot to look at here. There's a history of Bulwer-Lytton, that includes some rather interesting facts. For example, the Bulwer-Lytton estate, still owned by the family, was used by Tim Burton as "stately Wayne Manor" in the movie "Batman". Bulwer-Lytton was an active politician and was both a member of Parliament for a total of 24 years and and the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858-1859. He was also the editor of New Monthly Magazine. One of his last books was The Coming Race, written in 1871. Besides being a precursor of 20th-century science-fiction, this book had a rather pronounced influence among a faction of Hitler's SS, who styled themselves as superior beings along the lines of the book's Vril-ya. The Vril myth created by Bulwer-Lytton (or is it older? - Does anybody know?), has inspired a large number of unusual individuals and behavior since then. Search "vril" on a search engine like www.google.com to see what I mean.

The infamous "dark and stormy night" line came from his book "Paul Clifford", published in 1830. As one correspondant points out, this was not a comfortable time for Bulwer-Lytton; he needed money rather desperately, and need might have triumphed over artistic considerations in this case. A number of correspondants have noted that Dickens' style in many of his works is not much better. Personally, I agree. Anyway, if this interests you, the first chapter of "Paul Clifford" is available for your reading enjoyment on the site.

There are many examples of bad writing from the contests ("Lyttonys", they are called). There is also a fairly new section of bad first lines from other writers like Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer. Even if you're not much into literature, I think you'll probably find something worth your attention at this interesting site.

The next site is in the same spirit, although it is distinctly different in character. Although I might be wrong, I suspect that you've all heard about the Darwin awards. Just in case you haven't, they are given yearly to "the individual(s) who remove themselves from the gene pool in the most spectacular fashion". One of the better Darwin award stories I've heard involved a man, a lot of helium balloons and a lawn chair; I believe that Bob Crawford first told me that one, and thus acquainted me with the Darwin awards. Anyway, the official Darwin award site is at www.officialdarwinawards.com/index.html. Accept no substitutes!

I know, there is a certain amount of incorrectness involved in laughing at these stories, but they are very funny. The site contains previous year's winners, and also has many, many submissions for this years' awards. Some are unconfirmed and some are classified as urban legends, like the guy that hooked rocket boosters to his car and took off into the desert. Literally. It didn't happen. Oh well.

I get suggestions from time to time. ECOM member John Zastawnik told me about "The Particle Adventure". It's at pdg.lbl.gov/cpep/adventure.html. I haven't had a chance to check it out closely, but after a quick visit, it looked worthwhile to me. Go there to find out more about particle physics and how the universe REALLY works. As a side note, I've found a lot of web sites about esoteric physics; I guess that physicists are naturals when it comes to web publishing. By the way, if you have any recommendations on sites of interest, forward them to me at catbar@compuserve.com.

There's one other site this month that you might find interesting. Go to cc.ysu.edu/~awowens/media.htm. The title of the site isn't awe-inspiring; it's called "Media Sites". What you'll find here are a bunch of links (nothing else) to various media-related sites. I don't even know who the author is. Since the domain name indicates Youngstown State University, it's no surprise that some of the links are local. What I found more interesting are the links to national broadcast and national cable sites. Some of these links can be a bit hard to find using search engines. To have them all in one place like this is nice. Why? Catherine and I almost never watch TV, but we hear about programs from time to time that we wish we had seen or at least taped. TV Guide and the newspaper listings are just too dense to navigate if you aren't planning to park yourself in front of the TV, but just want to know if anything interesting is coming up in the next few days. The web sites of most of these channels have program schedules that are easy to scan quickly. A few minutes a week visiting the sites of your favorite channels might increase your TV viewing, but it will be shows you want to see. If this site interests you, I would advise you to save a local copy of it. It looks like the kind of site that might be a class project or a temporary page, and therefore could disappear at any time.

That's it for now. Keep searching!