We watched the pilot of Awake last night. (Free download on iTunes!) I follow a number of TV critics on Twitter and all of them have been waxing rhapsodic about this show, so I definitely had to check it out.

Having watched it, I know why they really like it. And unless something changes drastically in the next episode — not even the next couple of episodes, but the next episode; welcome to the reality of TV these days — I can also tell you why it’s doomed.

Awake is the story of Michael Britten, a homicide detective who was in a car accident with his wife and son. Since the accident, his life has split: he spends one day in a world where his wife lived and his son died; then he goes to sleep at night and wakes up in a world where his son lived and his wife died. You can tell which world he’s in because everything is either tinted very slightly green or very slightly red. There’s no mention of what happens if he takes a nap.

That, right there, is why this show is doomed.

While watching the show Darin said, “I got it. It’s Life On Mars meets Traffic. And the main character’s the one who actually died, right?”

I said, “That’s the most popular theory.” I’m not ruining anything for you there; if you look at Alan Sepinwall’s blog or Ken Tucker’s blog, everyone’s guessing that Michael Britten is the one who died in the car crash. It’s kind of like the trailer for The Sixth Sense: the kid says “I see dead people” as he’s staring at Bruce Willis.

“I hope they’ve come up with something better than that then,” Darin said.

The viewing audience has seen more hours of narrative storytelling than were available in the entire history of the world up until a few decades ago. If you present the audience with a puzzle, they’re going to try to figure it out, and they’ve had lots of practice. If you make the solution an easy and obvious puzzle, they’re going to say, “Seriously, that’s all it is?” Because one viewer might be stupid, but collectively they’re pretty damn smart.

So, at the very least, you have to give them a fun ride until you get to the conclusion.

The two most obvious shows to compare this to are Life On Mars and Lost. Both of which dealt with fairly heavy issues (c’mon, a plane crash! these people’s lives were complete messes! how were they gonna survive!) — as I joked when I watched it a number of years ago, Life On Mars really did have the most feel-good ending ever! — and they had puzzling situations that may or may not have resolved to viewers’s satisfaction.

But. But.

Both of them also had a sense of humor.

Which Awake sure as hell did not during the pilot. Oh my God, it was so somber and dreary. Everything was so serious. It was like an entire symphony played in a minor scale. Newsflash: Nobody wants to tune into a show that’s a damn downer in every way every week.

I kept thinking about the scene in Lost where things go terribly wrong with the dynamite, and it’s both shocking and sad, because a character we liked got killed. Later, when Hurley says, “You’ve got some Arzt on you,” it’s both tragic and hilarious. We’re not happy the guy is dead, for crying out loud, but that line was funny.

A guy sitting in not one but two therapists’ offices (newsflash: therapy sessions are a lot less interesting than writers want everyone to believe) being somber and upset about the fact that he’s either a)living in two universes or b)deeply schizoid without acknowledging the humor of the situation is just a turn-off. There’s got to be something else on TV to watch, and what do you know: the entire oeuvre of drama ever is available to us now.

The pilot does give us one intriguing question — both therapists mention something about the accident that Britten knows wholeheartedly is false. So that makes the ride a little more fun. Depending on how we get through the rest of the TV we’ve got stored up, we might watch the second episode.

But if it doesn’t give us some emotional tone other than “Wow, complete bummer” and it doesn’t deal with (and dismiss) the idea that maybe the solution is simply that Michael’s dead (because your audience is smart, dammit), I’m not coming back.

Paul Rudd works in an unspecified business in Manhattan. His wife, Jennifer Aniston, is making hard-hitting documentaries about penguins dying in the Antarctic that she’s trying to sell to HBO. They buy a “micro-loft” (which is real estate code for a single room about 10×10. Then their life falls to pieces (Rudd’s office gets busted by the FBI…but apparently a major federal crime takedown doesn’t affect him at all), they head to Georgia to live with Rudd’s brother, the seriously over-the-top Ken Marino, and they discover a commune in the Georgia countryside with an assortment of wacky characters.

And when I say “assortment,” I do mean “one of each.” Like there was a checklist.

We saw Wanderlust last night and I remember so little of the movie this morning I’m only writing this to remind myself I saw it. The movie is 98 minutes (feels slighter) of “wacky” stereotypes about 1)Manhattan, 2)hippies, 3)Ken Marino. Manhattanites pick their uber-expensive lofts by location of their favorite coffee joint! Vegans secretly long to eat meat! If you let loose for a while, you’ll find yourself…but not too loose! Because that will cause problems in your most serious relationship!

The whole movie was so thin. I think it was an excuse for a bunch of friends to get together and have someone pay them while they do stupid shtick.

It probably didn’t help that Jennifer Aniston does nothing for me. She’s so bland and uninteresting on-screen. She has no chemistry with Paul Rudd (their characters are supposed to be…married? really?) and she has no chemistry with her off-screen boyfriend Justin Theroux.

This movie also has the most full-frontal nudity (male and female) I’ve seen in a while. In this day and age of the Internet and anything you do on camera lives forever, so why did they do this?

Actually, there’s a lot about this movie that makes me feel like it was probably written at least ten years ago. There are long bits with an Atlanta news station. (Spoiler alert) Rudd and Aniston find happiness by becoming small-press publishers in Brooklyn. Except for Paul Rudd’s iPhone and a GPS unit, there’s no technology that didn’t exist at least ten years ago.

Feel free to pass on this one.

You’ve probably heard about the remark presidential candidate Rick Santorum said recently about Barack Obama:

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.”

Let’s assume Mr. Santorum is quoting Mr. Obama correctly. Mr. Santorum himself has a bachelor’s, law degree, and MBA, for what it’s worth, so it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think a college education is snobbery. This quote tells us a lot about Santorum’s vision of the future.

With all the brouhaha of late over the factories in China building our electronic gadgets (almost all of our electronic gadgets, not just the one brand name that we hear over and over again), what seems to get lost a lot of the time is that while these factory jobs are mind-numbingly boring with long hours and living on in corporate dormitories, they are a huge step-up from second-rate factories (which aren’t getting the big inspections and Nightline specials), which are themselves a huge step-up from the backbreaking rural agricultural work that would be most of these workers fate without these factories. This isn’t to say I want to work in this factories or I want you to work in them; just that they are, in fact, relatively better than the alternative.

Thirty to forty years ago China was fighting for its right to live in the Middle Ages (no, thank you, Mao and the Gang of Four), and now it’s  pushing forward as fast as possible to live in the future. China doesn’t want to be the land of manufacturing, it wants to be the land of innovation.

The Chinese government’s latest five-year plan emphasizes the need for long-term investment in research and development, to shift China from being “factory to the world” to being an innovation-driven, knowledge and service economy. The Chinese understand that being an innovative brand-owner like Apple or Nike is much more profitable than being an original equipment manufacturer. They have Japanese and South Korean examples such as Sony and Samsung to follow. The five-year plan also calls for doubling the percentage of gross domestic product from creative industries. Young people born after the “opening” in 1989 are leading vibrant arts and fashion scenes in the major cities.

Their vision of the future is quite different than Santorum’s.

Here in the US, we have lots of types of jobs: we have agriculture (by and large this is all BigAg stuff now; family farmers are a convenient myth), unskilled labor (mostly going overseas), skilled labor, and what Richard Florida calls “the creative class.” The creative class are the people who companies fight over to hire and retain. They’re the innovators, the people who are not just cogs in the machine and who can’t just be replaced by a warm body.

In Flight of the Creative Class, Florida analyzes why certain places have attracted more than their fair share of the creative class — and what other places have to do to get them (and keep them). He argues quite strenuously that the US, particularly post-9/11, is going out of its way to discourage innovators and creators from coming here.

You may have heard about two British travelers recently denied entry to the US after they tweeted about coming here to “destroy America.” If you have a choice of two relatively equal destinations, and one of them denies entry to people who have made jokes on Twitter, you might just decide to go to the other one.

If that happens too often, people who have a choice of places to go to stop coming to ours. In which case, we’re massively screwed, because a huge reason the US has continued to be so successful is because it has welcomed immigrants and innovation. It’s welcomed the strange and offbeat. These days, when other countries ratify gay marriage and our government refuses to recognize those marriages as legal, where do you think those married couples are going to go?

(The creative class, by and large, has learned to think around corners, because they put a and b together and get wxyz. If you belong to a minority outside the mainstream, like gays or Jews or ethnic minorities, you learn to think around corners a hell of a lot faster than people who live happily in the middle of the stream and think that’s the only way to be. Which is why it’s important for the creative class to know how we treat our minorities.)

I like all of the stuff by Florida I’ve read, by the way, like Who’s Your City, which comes up with a reasonable explanation for why, in the age of the Internet, you still live in Silicon Valley if you want to do computers and you live in Milan if you want to do fashion and you live in New York City if you want to do finance.

InThe Great Reset, Florida compares the current depression to immense economic upheavals of the past — the Great Depression and the Long Depression of the 1800s — and asks if we can’t learn something from those difficult, society-changing experiences and apply it to what we’re going through right now. Each of these economic disasters led to a fundamental shift in how we worked and lived, and he is fairly certain we’re in for this now as well. If we can prepare, we’ll be that far ahead of the game.

When Kansas or Texas or (insert name of state here) seriously starts arguing about teaching creationism in schools, I joke that “there’s another state of kids who won’t be competing against my kids for spots in college!” Only it’s not a joke. We can either teach our kids to face the future with an ability to handle complex scientific thoughts, or we can stick our fingers in our ears and chant “La la la” a lot. Everyone who thinks the second one is a great vision of the future, please identify yourselves so we can make sure not to involve you in any of the grownup discussions.

When politicians talk, they are telling you about the future they think about. What kind of society they think we should aim for. What kind of people are going to meet the challenges of the post-2008 depression. The general theory behind getting a college education is that the person has learned enough about a variety of subjects — history, math, literature, science — that they can understand what’s going on around them. The object isn’t to burden students with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, even though that’s definitely one of the side effects. I agree wholeheartedly there isn’t anything you can learn in college that you can’t learn elsewhere. But one of the things college is supposed to do is expose you to people and ideas you might not otherwise run into in your own insular little world. So that you can learn to put two or three crazy, unrelated ideas together…and create a new innovation.

The future is hard and scary and unknown and nothing is a given. You can dig in and work, or you can give up and pretend it’s all going to work out if we just hunker down over here and don’t let scary foreigners in with their scary ideas.

When Rick Santorum refers to a dream of a well-educated populace as snobbery, it tells you something about what he sees.

Monday morning I was sitting in bed, reading the news on the iPad, when I felt a pain on my left side. Not a sharp pain. Much more like the pains I used to get when I was younger and my chest would constrict and I would have to take very deep breaths to expand the muscle.

I ran some errands and then I went to the gym to lift weights. My chest felt fine…except when I lay down to do the chest press. Mind you, actually doing the chest press felt fine — in fact, the pain went away when I did lifted the barbell. When I was just laying there, though, the pain intensified.

Weird.

I made dinner (fish fillets, cheesy orzo, and salad). We watched Buffy. I went to bed. The pain was worse, but I figured a good night’s sleep would help.

At 3am, I woke up with some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I’ve had two babies. A couple of times I actually felt my heart beat arrhythmically (not the first time I’ve felt that — my heart can be a little weird), but combined with the pain it was terrifying. Getting out of the bed was excruciatingly painful. I wondered if I should drive myself to the ER. I decided that wondering if I should go to the ER without waking Darin meant I still thought I had a choice in the matter, so I dug through the medicine cabinet, found some five-year-old Vicodin, and went back to bed.

In the morning the doctor’s office told me to come in immediately. The doctor asked if I was having shortness of breath, and I said the problem I was having with breathing was that it hurt to expand my chest, not that my breathing was impeded in any way. Then she asked me if I’d been on a plane recently (“Um…early January?”) or if I’d had a cold recently (“Nope”). The nurse gave me an EKG. The doctor read it and said, “The good news is you haven’t had a heart attack. The bad news is your heart is really angry about something, so I’d like you to get a CT scan.” The nurse scheduled the scan for me at a local MRI/CT place.

On the form the doctor had written “Pulmonary embolism?” The question mark did not reduce the anxiety I was having.

The top of my list of errands was: go to AAA, tell them I’d bought a new car, ask what rates they were going to offer me. But I didn’t feel much in the mood. I sat in the AAA office and did searches on “embolisms.” After a few minutes I decided that my current insurance would cover the new car until I could work out the messy details and headed home, had some lunch, and waited for my appointment.

CT scans are slightly different than MRI machines — you’re not totally encased in a scary coffin (I’m not claustrophobic and the MRI machine scared the crap out of me), but you’re inserted in this giant tube that whirls around you. The technician puts a catheter in your arm to inject you with the fluid that shows up on the scan. You have to hold your breath. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience all around.

When I got on the table I told the tech I needed help lying down. He asked me when the last time I ate was, and I said, “About an hour ago.”

“You have to fast for this. We can reschedule.”

“Can you find out if that’s true?” I asked. “Because I really need this test done today.”

The doctor in charge said I could do the test, but I should have a basin nearby in case I tossed my cookies. Then the tech said I needed to raise my arms above my head. I couldn’t do it. Raising my left arm was incredibly painful; letting it drop by my head felt like someone was knifing me in the side. He tucked a pillow under the arm so it wouldn’t have to drop all the way back. We did the test and at the end the tech had to lift me off of the table. Had I really gone to the gym and done my full workout on Monday? I could barely move.

I called the doctor’s office an hour after the test. Then an hour and a half later. Still no word. The pain in my chest was much, much worse, possibly because of the whole left-arm-over-the-head thing. The nurse finally called me back at 4:30.

“The scan was clear,” she said. “We’ll phone in a prescription for Vicodin.”

“Could you ask the doctor to look at it again? Because I am having the worst pain of my entire life.”

She said she’d call me back.

She did and said the doctor was absolutely certain about the scan. Chances were very high I had a pleurisy (an inflammation of the lungs), the kind of thing you usually get when you have a cold.

This pain was much worse than I could remember having from a chest cold. “Is there anything else could it be?” I asked.

The nurse said if the pain continued I would have to come in again and run some more tests. Awesome.

I went to the pharmacy, where I got my five dollar bottle of Vicodin pills (which might have greater efficacy than the five-year-old kind). The pharmacist had to give me a consult, so she could explain how to use it and what to be cautious of. “Any questions?” she asked.

“Yes. Why is this drug considered ‘fun’? I’ve taken it before, I don’t get get why it’s fun.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “It just puts me to sleep.”

We got Chinese takeout last night and I took my drugs. Generally painkillers don’t work for me (which is why I never think to take them), but I could definitely feel the difference when I took the Vicodin. We watched Buffy and then the series premiere of Angel, and I remembered how much I didn’t like Angel as a character on Buffy, but loved him on his own show.

There’s a scene where Doyle explains why he’s there helping Angel, and his speech includes a recap of everything we know about Angel’s life.

“Why is Doyle telling Angel stuff he clearly already knows?” I asked the kids.

“Because viewers might not know about it,” Sophia said.

“That’s what I was going to say!” Simon said.

My kids are awesome.

After that I went to bed, which was difficult because moving too suddenly brought the pain back. I woke up in the middle of the night and took more Vicodin.

This morning the pain has lessened a great deal. If it had felt like this yesterday, I wouldn’t have called the doctor in such a panic. I’ve taken my Aleve (the Vicodin can wait until I’m sure I don’t need to operate a car). And I am really grateful I have access to such great medical care when I need it.

Not a few times yesterday I wondered what I would have done if I didn’t have insurance. Or if I’d been afraid of being fired because I was going to miss a day of work. Heck, lots of employed people are experiencing the joy of no health insurance. I’m guessing I would have put off a visit to the ER until I’d been sure I was dying. And if it had been a pulmonary embolism (which you need to deal with immediately), I probably wouldn’t have gotten that far.

Our society needs to figure out what our priorities are.

I know, I’m probably biting off more than I can chew here, but what the hell.

1. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.

This goes double if you’re going to post as “Anonymous.”

The only possible exception to this: you are whistle-blowing on some egregious, illegal practice that you can’t possibly own up to in real life. In that case: run for the hills, because tracing where a posting originated is as simple as asking Google, “Hey, where did this originate?” (You know Google saves every search made from every IP ever, right?)

2. If you link to it, you own it.

If you offer up a link to something on your blog, on your Twitter feed, or as a Facebook status, you are advertising that you agree with the opinions found therein, unless you very specifically call out that you are disagreeing with it. (NB: if you are a professional comedian — i.e., someone would recognize that you are funny consistently and over a long period of time, not necessarily that you’re getting paid — you can get away with “sarcastic agreement” as your disagreement mode. Only professional comedians.)

Way back in the early days of the Web (when this blog had already been around for several years, nyuk, nyuk) there was a political blogger named Instapundit. I haven’t heard about him so much any more; don’t know what he’s doing, don’t care. But his shtick was to link to something foul, infantile, or race-baiting and then say

Interesting.

When called on how he was clearly promoting these things, he would say, “Oh no no, I just thought it was an interesting point of view.”

In a word: bullshit.

He wanted to link to inflammatory crap without putting his name on it.

If you link to it without commentary, you own it.

The only possible exception to this: you link to a major media site, such as the New York Times. In which case, we probably know why you’re linking. Be a good Internet citizen and add a little commentary so we know where you are with this, okay?

3. Don’t read comments.

Seriously. There’s nothing to be gained from this. There are people who have nothing better to do than sit around all day and argue nonsense from behind a fake name. There are people who are paid to sit around and post garbage. Don’t participate.

There are two exceptions to this:

1. Horace Dediu’s blog Asymco. That blog has one of the most respectful and curious set of commenters I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t hurt that Horace is bringing his A-game with every post. You can disagree with him…but the usual Internet set up of “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge!” just looks like the lameness it is on Asymco.
2. My blog.

Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard to figure out. We have all seen this photo:

An all-male panel testifying before Congress on birth control. An all-male panel that doesn’t include one doctor. When Democrats proposed women to be on the panel, they were told the women weren’t “qualified.”

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Rick Santorum’s biggest financial backer — and in the world of big-money politics, this means this guy has bucks, which in the US means he has power — “joked” that women should use aspirin as birth control.

“You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” Friess said on MSNBC. “The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

Women, mind you, need to be the ones to say no. And if they don’t, well…it’s all their fault, isn’t it?

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The Virginia state legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. From the article: “There is no evidence at all that the ultrasound is a medical necessity, and nobody attempted to defend it on those grounds.” No, this is all about women being forcibly penetrated for no medical reason — under Virginia state law, the very definition of rape.

During the floor debate on Tuesday, Del. C. Todd Gilbert announced that “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” (He has since apologized.) Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert’s statement “is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue,” recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” (I confirmed with Englin that this quote was accurate.)*

They had already made the decision.

They made the decision once, and so therefore their bodies are now fair game. Women should only be allowed to make one decision in their entire lives, and then men will tell them what to do from then on.

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Senator Scott Brown, apparently trying to prove he’s not really from Massachusetts, cosponsored a bill “would allow employers and insurers to limit specific health care coverage, including contraception, based on religious or moral objections.” And yeah, Obama let the conservatives go to town on that one for a while before knifing it to death, because this election year kabuki is stupid. Lots of people have made jokes about “What happens when an employer decides on Sharia law for their employees?”

How about a much easier scenario than that, guys? How about when an employer decides that an unmarried woman who gets pregnant is clearly a whore and refuses to cover her medical bills unless she gets married?

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An entry on Alternet asked, “Do Conservatives understand how the female body works?” What the hell? Why are you even bothering to ask? The Republican/conservative mindset is that women are things that exist only to serve male needs. They’re not intelligent enough to know what they are, or what they want, or what’s good for them. Only men know enough about this stuff to testify, right?

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Twenty years ago I read that the entire war on abortion was no such thing — it was a war on Griswold v. Connecticut. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s the Supreme Court decision legalizing contraceptives. You know, because there was a time they weren’t legal.

And damn if that analysis hasn’t been proved to be correct over and over and over again.

We know that conservatives could give a flying fuck about actual pregnancies. They don’t want access to birth control (which, let’s face it, is framed solely as a woman’s problem here), they don’t want to fund medical care for the mothers, they don’t care about the psychological care of mothers who are pregnant unwillingly, they sure as hell don’t care about those kids once they show up in the world. So, if they don’t care about the pregnancies, the mothers, or the kids, why on Earth are they putting so much time and energy into making sure women get pregnant and stay pregnant?

Because if women don’t have control over their own bodies, they have no control over their own destinies. Yes, it is that simple.

Their actions and words are very clear: They want women to be second-class citizens, dependent on whatever help and ministrations men decide to bestow upon them.

Why do they want this? Well, it’s fun to have power over people, I guess. It’s reassuring to know that you’re superior simply because you happened to be born with a penis instead of a vagina. There’s no surprise that religion is strongly featured in a lot of these stories: Christianity and Islam have extremely strong anti-woman components to their theology, and regarding half the human race as, well, subhuman isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

We live in a scary time where nothing is assured, and having control over another person is kind of like having control over your own life, I guess.

Who knows where this shit comes from. But this is what they want, and they are saying it OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Listen up.

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All of these political moves by conservatives are a lot easier to understand if you follow this simple rule:

Whenever you hear the phrase “family values,” substitute the word “patriarchy.”

There’s an even better quote I am reminded of when I hear these Republican proposals

“The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

– Maya Angelou

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One of the main reasons we’re getting this deluge of bullshit now, of course, is that the economy is looking up. The Republicans have nothing — they can’t even wave the banner of gay marriage anymore. So they’re going straight to their book of greatest hits.

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And by the way, can we stop making jokes about all-female panels debating men’s health insurance access to Viagra? Women being pregnant and men getting erections are not equivalent. Let’s stop pretending they are.

I had the best history teacher in high school. Her name was Jean Murphy (actually, her name was Mary Jean, but she only ever went by Jean) and she loved teaching European history and music and choir. And the way she taught history was simple: she taught us the version that concentrated on sex. Abelard and Heloise! Henry II! Henry VIII! Christ, most of the Wars of the Roses and the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War and do not even get me started on the House of Habsburgs!

Yes. She taught European history-as-sexfest to a bunch of freshman girls at a private all-girls Catholic high school.

I have no idea how much of it was true, but man oh man, do I remember a lot of it.

There is something to teaching the fun stuff, because you just might interest people enough to find out the other stuff.

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A couple of days ago I saw this incredibly hot movie trailer:

I remembered seeing the book in the bookstores. (You know, when I still went into them.) It seemed to be the ultimate expression of what Terry Rossio calls “Mental Real Estate” — concepts we all know and are familiar with, turned on their heads just enough to intrigue us. Lincoln! Vampires! Lincoln being fearsome when it comes to vampires!

But I liked the trailer (because I am a nut for over-the-top action movies, always hoping they will have a coherent plot line), so I got the book and read it.

(Yes, I bought this book and immediately read it. I have hundreds of unread books on my Kindle and iPad that have sat there unread for a long time. Hundreds. I’m not saying that pricing your book at free guarantees I’m not going to pay much attention to it; I’m just saying there’s a strong damn correlation along that way of thinking.)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith is what I call an “all-in” book — the author took his premise (that Abraham Lincoln was a secret vampire hunter, and that a major force behind American slavery was the needs of vampires) and Grahame-Smith went all-in on it. There is no winking to the audience, there is no “I know this sounds kind of stupid, but just go with it” passages. World War Z by Max Brooks is another “all-in” book — you are either along for that ride, or you give up early on. The conceit is that the author of the book in the present comes across Abraham Lincoln’s secret diaries and decides to write the definitive biography of Lincoln in regards to vampires.

That is how the book reads: a deadly serious biography of Lincoln, with descriptions of the time period and excerpts from the diaries, that describe everything from life on Indiana to floating down the Mississippi to butchering the horrible vampires that are preying on the people. No sparkly bits here, people, no really-cute-vampires-with-a-soul. No, these are monsters and Lincoln is going to put them down.

There are a couple of serious missteps: I read three passages relatively close together (I read fast) that were all dream sequences. (And that was before we get to the famous “the President has been assassinated” dream Lincoln had.)

The difficult thing about this book is the obvious slavery/vampirism metaphor. The obvious way of looking at this is that the entire concept of slavery gets cheapened by making it a vehicle for vampires to thrive. And, I guess that’s true.

However.

I was reminded of Jean Murphy while reading this book. Two reasons why:

1) It’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s job to teach you history. I’m really sorry if you didn’t know this stuff ahead of time. He wanted to write a fun, crazy novel, and he succeeded, and he managed to get lots of info about the real Abraham Lincoln’s life in there. He does a very good job of making all of the details about the time period feel true (hey, how ’bout that Presidential bodyguard, eh?). So, as a readable history novel: good job, Grahame-Smith.

2) If this book gets one person interested in that time period, whereupon they discover that all this shit is true, it just didn’t involve any fucking vampires, it involved real flesh-and-blood humans doing this to one another then, you know, WINNING.

Because that’s actually where the real sense of dread comes in. Yeah, all of the over-the-top let’s-kill-these-fiends stuff is a lot of fun. The bad Photoshop jobs (sorry, they looked terrible on the iPad) are fun. But the descriptions of slave auctions and slave quarters and that half of the country was willing to fight the other half so that they could own people are all true, and you realize: this shit actually happened. And it doesn’t take a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the very name of which makes readers groan) — you can sucker readers in with Vampires! and bitch-slap them across the face with Not Really! LOL!

If they don’t get to the point where they realize, OMG, this is all real (except for the vampire parts), well… that’s not going to be fixed by one pop novel.

I wonder how many student term papers have talked about the vampire influence on the Confederacy.

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You want to know the tidbit that’s really stuck with me from this book?

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas dated the same chick.

Okay, it was called “courting” and wasn’t the same thing at all, but…

I’m still that high school freshman, apparently.