Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Weeaboo. Japanophile. However you want to call it, that is the kind of topic we have today. Deep down inside, I know I have a not-thoroughly-examined curiosity for Japan. For its history. For its weird stuff. For its animation — not all of it. Sometimes for its printed artwork: the manga. The Japanese comic book industry has put out so many ‘manga’ since the war ended that it would be preposterous for me to say I like most of them. That’d be like a Japanese guy saying he likes American greeting cards.

A manga! A blog publication milestone! The first of its kind to be reviewed on the blog! I had mentioned Astro Boy a few blog posts ago. Tezuka’s mechanical boy was one of the first — a cheerful little robot rocketing out of a post-WW2 Japan. A product of Japanese know-how. Now with a tempered heart. One to better withstand imperialist urges.

The manga we’ll be talking about today is not as old as Astro Boy, or most of Tezuka’s career. Still, the manga we’ll be talking about today is ancient for a contemporary manga aficionado — which is most introverted high schoolers these days. And boy, there are a lot of them in the graphic novel section of Barnes & Noble.

A lot of teenagers. And rows of manga books. The Japanese section easily dwarfs the shelf space catered to the ‘Western’ graphic novels at that store. The ‘non-manga’ side is almost entirely made up of just Marvel, DC, and a few from Image or Dark Horse. Among the Japanese section, there are...

Seeing as how the fredlambuth.com blog is basically a poorly planned, meandering memoir with an obviously unreliable narrator, let’s get down to brass tacks. Richard Milhous Nixon. With only a face a mother could love. I found him peculiar-looking from the get-go. A character that could be easily caricatured. The jowls. The nose. The eyebrows. A figure like that cuts an indelible image. One that can be easily identified among the cartoon depictions I’d see in the pages of MAD Magazine. (I read those often in my childhood.) This figure got to be memorable because he is a one-and-a-half-term U.S. president!

Choosing Dick Nixon as a blog topic is not an editorial that charters this blog’s espoused politics. (That has already been done. It’s anarcho-syndicalism for life!) On this blog we will not have a Dick Nixon to kick around—unless he ought to be. He is far from my favorite president. I know he did plenty of things that call for a good kicking. However, he is far from being my least favorite guy to hold the top political office of the USA. What I’d like to make clear is that we will not be championing Nixon here. Despite his efforts to appear tough on Communism, and… umm… his groundbreaking work in… getting himself elected to office? What was it that Nixon was proud of achieving? That thing with China?

No, Nixon is the subject of this blog post because of his inescapable presence in my childhood, adolescent, and adult psyche. He’s a face you do not...

It has been a few months since I reviewed a big nonfiction book here on the blog. There is a lot of book reading going on with me lately. Honest. You’ll have to take my word for it. Big fat nonfiction books. The kind that take weeks to finish. It should take me less than a few weeks for each of these, but the books are eventually getting finished. To bring myself to dig into these kinds of books feels like a war of attrition. More than I’d like to admit. I know once I actually put the book in my hands, letting go becomes just as hard as picking the book up. These deep books are a drag on the time management of my personal cybernetic systems.

The book we are talking about today was pretty good. It’s called The Rise of The Machines by Thomas Rid. Published not too long ago, so these machines mentioned in the title have been rising for over seventy years, or so says this author. The subtitle of this book is A Cybernetic History. This added subtitle aids in the discovery of this book when using a web search. When you ask a web search machine for the title of the book, the subtitle gives you extra search terms to filter past the third Terminator film. Guessing from how most web search engines want to steer you when searching for this title, T3 is the most popular one.

I found this book to be pretty good. The book entertained me. To me, a seasoned veteran of reading about cyber-whatever-you-can-think-of for decades, fiction or nonfiction—I found the book...