Category Archives: Thought of the Week

Once-weekly posts on whatever nonsense crosses my mind.

Not his best work?

I have a confession to make, and I feel I should give you due warning that it could cause you great distress. You may even have thoughts of striking me down dead. But, I have to be honest with myself, and with the world, come what may.

I came to a realization the other day, and it saddened me greatly, but I could not deny it, and I am slowly having to come to terms with it. It happened while reading to my son before bed. It happened while reading to him, reading a story we have read before, and one we will probably read again. It occurred to me, in mid-sentence, and I have not yet the heart to tell him.

The book is Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

The realization is – wait for it – I don’t like it.

Horror upon horror.

I feel ashamed to say it, and my head is hung low even as I write this. But, there is no denying the truth, any more than there is denying that Quentin Blake is a far better illustrator than Joseph Schindelman, the brute who savaged our edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with his unwieldily and terrifying scratches:

Please allow me to earn some redemption by saying that there is nothing wrong with Roald Dahl. He was a staple of my childhood, and my imagination would be far duller without his delightful tales. I love The Witches, The BFG, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, Danny, the Champion of the World, and – my particular favorite – The Twits. But, with the sole exception of his autobiography (which doesn’t really count, I feel), not one of them was ever a sequel. Not one. Except…

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

What happened? I will admit to enjoying the story as a young child, but really only because they got to go into space, which crossed over to my other imaginative inspiration. I somehow knew, deep down, that it was inferior to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and, despite looking at it longingly on the bookshelf, would somehow always find something else to read instead.

Now, as an adult, I think I am beginning to understand why. Every one of Dahl’s stories is filled with wonder, amazement, impossibility, humor and terror, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is no different. So what is? In a word – the characters.

For comparison, let’s consider the BFG. In this book, there are two main characters, Sophie and the BFG (Big Friendly Giant). However, there are a whole host of support characters, including nine other terrifying giants, an army general, and of course, the Queen of England. Each of these characters has a singular personality, and stand out among each other. Even the Queen’s butler, Mr. Tibbs, is haughtily obedient to the BFG (thinking to use a pitchfork and a sword for his eating utensils).

In some ways, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the epitome of this – five distinct characters: Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt (hee-hee), Mike Teavea, and of course, Charlie. Greed, rudeness, spoiling and obsession are all treated equally (and equally reviled). It is simple, brilliant, and insightful.

But consider now Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It picks up directly from where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory leaves off. Almost directly, in fact. Yet that first book really needed no continuation. The image of Charlie’s poverty was painted so vividly at the beginning of the book that the very thought that he would live for the rest of his life with Willy Wonka in his chocolate factory is enough to satisfy even the most die-hard “happily-ever-after” nut.

Instead, we end up with a book that has no new significant characters, and in fact, far fewer significant characters than its predecessor. The four disgusting children are gone; we are left with Willy, Charlie and Grandpa Joe. Mr. and Mrs. Bucket are never fully developed, and the three remaining grandparents feel wooden by comparison.

And what of the new support characters? The President of the United States is a bluffing halfwit, presided over by his nanny, Mrs. Tibbs. This could have been humorous, yet the dialog falls flat. The army general is reduced to a one-line buffoon (“blow it up!”), and the astronauts, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, feel like space-age Stooges. I will admit the Vernicious Knids gave me quite a fright so many years ago, and continue to do so to this day. But what does it say that the best character in the book is an alien?

So I am left reading a book that, while my son enjoys still, I sadly do not. And perhaps I am most disturbed by what feels like a loss of childhood innocence more than anything else. How could my favorite author let me down so? How could he not have known that, forty years after writing the book, the children who grew up with it would look back one day and fail to see that magic? How dare he.

I still love every book Mr. Dahl ever wrote, and I will continue to enjoy Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, for all its flaws. Every artist has a work that is their favorite, and one that is not. So it is that with great pain I must admit that this book is not his best work.

May Charlie Bucket rest in peace.

What it takes to create an ePub book

Well. As you might have gathered, I am trying to write a book. A series of books, as it happens, about a fantasy world called Erâth, in which a young boy named Brandyé comes to save all of creation from the forces of darkness.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I’m not very far along, but I like to pretend that my book is a “real” book, and since I don’t have a printing press, an eBook is a pretty nice alternative – it looks just like The Lord of the Rings (except they inexplicably used an unreadably small font), and even has a pretty cover made all for me by my iPad.

But, creating the ePub file was not so easy.

Oh sure, Pages has a pretty cool Export to ePub feature which actually works remarkably well. But it wasn’t working well for the chapter breaks and table of contents, so I set out to find a way to make it perfect. Here is what it took:

1. 24 hours of soul-crushing frustration.

2. 77 test ePub files that didn’t work.

3. 2 applications that didn’t work.

4. A 30-day trial of Adobe InDesign.

5. A crash course in Adobe InDesign.

6. 11 cups of tea.

7. 18 cups of coffee.

8. No sleep.

9. An iPad to look at all the awful books InDesign spat out.

10. An iPhone to play games on while the iPad was syncing.

11. Sonata Arctica’s “The Days of Grays”.

12. No sleep.

13. An obsessive-compulsive desire to make the damn thing work.

14. One single, final, readable eBook that ACTUALLY. BLOODY. WORKS.

And that’s all there is to it! Good luck!

Is it better to have a leaking washing machine, or no washing machine?

My ingenuity has failed me.

After spending nearly five hours trying to repair my own washing machine, I’m giving up. It’s almost midnight, I have dishes to do, and I have to be up early tomorrow morning for work. Never mind that it’s daylight savings and I’ve scored myself an extra hour.

What’s so frustrating about this endeavor – as indeed so many like it are – is just how close I came to success. I first noticed our washing machine leaking about a week ago. At first it seemed tolerable, but once great pools of water were on the floor by the time the spin cycle was done, I figured something was pretty much definitely up. My first reaction was to buy a new one. Who cares if it’s another $500; this one’s twelve years old, had its day, and now we move on.

But as day after day came and went with with either no laundry or very dirty laundry, I began to think, what the hell – maybe I can do this myself. So home I came from work tonight, bent on getting this damn thing working or die trying.

Well, I’m not dead, but I sure feel close to it. I began with a bit of Google searching, and found the user manual for the machine (helpful as they’ve been to us, the washing machine manual is the one thing our landlord didn’t leave us). It was great – it told me how to take the whole damn thing apart, and put it back together again. This was too easy, thought I.

The first sticking point was the agitator, which turns out to be the tall pillar bit inside that swishes your clothes around. The nut holding this in was at the bottom of a six-inch shaft, and nothing I had would fit in there to unscrew it.

No problem, I thought. I know what I’m looking for; time for a late-night trip to Home Depot. It took me a while – it wasn’t clear where the screwdrivers were (it turns out I was looking for a socket wrench anyway), and when I did find them, almost none of them were long enough. Taking a gamble, I picked one that seemed about the right length, but still small enough that I could walk out of there without feeling like a plumber (or plumb idiot).

I took my shiny new tool home, and lo and behold, it fit! I had the agitator out in a jiffy. Underneath this plasticky piece of machinery was the never-before seen bottom of my washing machine – you know, that place where all the pennies go. There was this weird, black, greasy shaft poking up (I haven’t touched it, don’t want to know what it’s for), and, pinning the inner tub (the white tub with all the holes in it) were four more bolts.

Well hey, guess what? They were the kind that my brilliant new socket wrench could handle! No way! I socked my wrench onto these nuts, gave them a good twist…and nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. Not the tiniest bit of movement.

Stumped, I considered what this meant. Clearly, I ought to be able to remove these bolts with my socket wrench, since it fit them so perfectly. Well, thinking back to my old physics lessons, perhaps I simply needed more torque. This meant I needed to find something with a right angle and a long handle that could fit into the square end of my socket wrench’s attachment.

I scoured the basement. We’re quite lucky – our landlord (whose home this used to be) had left us a wealth of tools in the basement (no socket wrench though, of course). At first I came up with nothing. Disappointed, I looked again, deeper. This time I found something that I thought might work. I’m still not sure what this thing was originally intended for, but basically it’s a small steel bar in an ‘L’ shape, with a slightly tapered square end on either side. If I fit one of the ends into the socket wrench attachment, the other end would give me plenty of force to apply to the stubborn nuts. I brought it over to my washing machine, tried to insert the thinner end of this bent metal bar into the socket wrench attachment…to find it was around 1/2 a millimeter too wide. Gargh!

Not yet defeated, I scoured the basement yet again, and this time came up with a file. Ah-ha! I could file down the end of the steel bar, and it would fit. Then I would have those bolts out, oh yes. I filed. The bar got thinner. I stuck it into the wrench attachment – it fit! A great heave and groan, and the bolt started to turn. I had done it!

I quickly removed these last four bolts, the only things standing in my way. Placing them safely to one side (I, still naively thinking I have this under control and our fixed washing machine will be cleaning my clothes before dinner was ready), I gave a back-wrenching heave on the washing machine tub…

You guessed it. Once again, absolutely nothing happened (well, I pulled my back, I believe). Agitated, I consulted my manual. “Remove the four nuts, pull the tub out of the machine.” Sure. I tried again, thinking perhaps I’m just not as strong as I thought I was. Still nothing.

I began frantically trawling the web, trying desperately to see if there was something I missed. Lots of people, it seemed, had these problems. Some appeared to have solved them, but rather unhelpfully forgot to post exactly how they got it to work. I tried again, and again. Over the course of two hours, one can of WD40 and more sweat than I’ve shed in a year (I’m a little ashamed to admit that), the most I had managed to achieve was to slightly twist the inner tub out of alignment with the outer tub.

Great, I thought. If I can move it – even such a tiny bit – maybe there’s still a chance. The problem is, by now it’s getting late, I’m worn out, and my hands are raw from pulling and pushing and straining at this damn thing. So finally, I give in. I’ll put it all back together, and at least I can have clean clothes, if not a clean floor.

And here’s where the big problem suddenly occurred to me. By shifting the inner tub out of alignment with the outer tub, I suddenly found myself no longer able to insert the four bolts (the ones that had given me so much trouble) that held the inner tub in place; their holes didn’t line up. I began tugging and pulling harder than ever before. Now, I was moving the outer tub with the inner tub, and the holes simply would not realign.

And so, finally and wearily, I gave up in despair. So close to success, I was thwarted by what should have been the simplest step. I still feel there’s something I was not told. A screw, a bolt, a lock of some kind that, had I removed it, would have made the whole thing work.

But I couldn’t find it.

I couldn’t do it. I tried to fix my own washing machine, and failed. It doesn’t feel that good; my evening was gone, my hands hurt, and to top it all, I’m now left with a washing machine in pieces that won’t do anything, leaking or not! The machine defeated me, and I’m left feeling quite inadequate. Plus, my wife will be angry now for going to bed so late. And hammering. And cursing.

So now I’m going to do the dishes (the sink still works, thank goodness), slink into bed, and wake up way too early to go to work, aching all over.

And tomorrow night, we’ll go buy a new washing machine.