Day 148: The Lost World

The Lost World by Michael Crichton.  ISBN: 9780788737251 (audiobook).

There was a description of one of the characters that was ever so familiar to me.  Kelly (one of the kids) was describing her thoughts about getting R. B. (another kid) to do something, particularly something impulsive.  The gist of it was 'Any change in plans always bothered him, he would grumble and argue if pushed, he had to make up his own mind.'

Gee, who does that sound like?  Why, it sounds like my dear fiance, Dan Walker, of course.

That man is so hard-headed and stubborn about his schedule and changing it that it's remarkable I get him out of the house at all.  Granted, because I am possibly even more hard-headed and stubborn I have forced him out of this on more than one occasion.  I also think it's hilarious to jerk his chain, and this is one major way of doing it.

Danny has a somewhat mild case of Asperger's.  He's very high functioning, he's even what you might call charming in polite company.  He does have serious problems identifying proper inflections in voice; this means my caustic wit and sarcasm is often lost on him so I have frequent intellectual affairs on him with Kyle B and pretty much anyone else who thinks my mind is a sexy, sexy beast.  What can I say, I have needs, one of them being the general acceptance and appraisal of my awesomeness.

Let's just say even though I love Danny, I will never be able to understand him.  I especially won't be able to understand his brother who has the crippling version of Asperger's (his empathy unit is beyond broken).  Danny is probably someone who would end up forming a new small splinter group during prehistoric times, particularly when times were relatively flush and there was little to lose and a lot to gain by breaking off from a large tribe.  He's one of the people who would either leave or lead, because he does have that bit of charisma, but he also thinks so differently that he would likely see advantages and learn new skills before someone else.

For instance, he can pick up languages like crazy.  This is something I cannot do, no matter how hard I try.  I can learn to read new languages somewhat easily because my visual recognition is pretty good and I have a good understanding of root words (I was a Phonics learner, it's true), but Danny can speak and read, and he can often figure out languages with little to no instruction.  It makes me think that these learning "disabilities" were necessary in early times, and have only become obsolete as we become more and more globalized.  Even Danny's brother might have had a place in a less globalized world, granted it probably would have been somewhere along the lines of provoking/slaughtering enemy tribes, but there you go.

What will we do with all these people whose brains are genetically wired differently from ours?  It seems like a waste to ignore their unique talents just because their social skills tend to be less than stellar. 


The best review I've seen on this is from the now defunct blog, Prehistoric Pulp.

Day 147: The Lost World

The Lost World by Michael Crichton.  ISBN: 9780788737251 (audiobook).

I've gotta say I love Michael Crichton.  Not so much for the pseudo science, although that's part of it, and I definitely like the imagination used in bringing monsters to life and the semi-plausible ways in which to do it.  But that's only part of it.  I think I really like his writing because he raises some excellent moral quandaries about the place of science in terms of our humanity and what certain scientific abilities mean for us.

One of the quandaries presented in The Lost World is the debatable debate on whether or not extinct animals that have been resurrected would actually count as animals.  The idea being that they are technically constructs, created outside of their original time and environment: they no longer have any context in our world.  Crichton poses that this would open up genetically revived species to be used in absolutely horrific manners for product testing and likely many other things I can't even think up because I'm not scientist or a sadist.

While I think this line of reasoning probably wouldn't be followed through, I can definitely imagine pharmaceutical companies, etc. raising from the dead our extinct Cro-magnon relatives and touting the advances to be made, if only we can ignore the fact that these beings might feel pain.  Even if they aren't used for medical exploitation, they would be used for exploitation nonetheless if they were raised from the dead.  How many of us wouldn't want to go to a Jurassic Park to see the giant lizards walk?  To know what we were not meant to know and to see the awesomeness of animals we can only imagine.

But then, wouldn't that take away some of the awesomeness of these creatures?  I think there is so little left in our world that is truly amazing and awe-inspiring.  Let's let the dead rest, and keep our wonderment of the unknown.  It's too hard to respect and fear and be amazed by something you're willing to put in a cage or inject with cancer cells.

The best review I've seen on this is from the now defunct blog, Prehistoric Pulp.

Day 146: The Lost World

The Lost World by Michael Crichton.  ISBN: 9780788737251 (audiobook).

This was another audiobook I planned to listen to on the way to/from ALA.  I feel like you guys got cheated out of a really great story in the war between me and The CD Player, so I'm going to treat you to a little story from my childhood.  Technically this is a story about the movie, but since that was my first exposure to the work, let's call it "fair" and I'll make two other posts about the book to make up for it.  

The movie came out during my parents' divorce in 1997.  At that point we were on Guam, a strangely exotic place to be going through a rather hideous stage in one's life.  I was at my fourth school, having just that year transferred from the off-base F.B. Leon Guerrero Middle School* to the newly developed on-base Department of Defense school.  Which makes it sound like we were all being trained to be secret agents, but it was much less cool than that.

For whatever reason, I did not particularly like this school, mostly because it was in a cinder block building that was one part strip mall and one part prison.  At the time I was being 12/13 and dealing with my parents' divorce the best way I knew how and with little to no guidance from anyone else because I was stuck in a brand new school without any friends at a time when I probably needed them most.  What does this have to do with a movie about dinosaurs, you ask?  Shut up and listen, whippersnapper, this is my story!  I'm gettin' crotchety in my old age.

During recess one day I was sitting in the corner in the sunlight, reading, and some prepubescent boys wanted to play Wall Ball.  Wall Ball was the phenomenon on Guam where you would throw a blue racquetball ball against a wall and people would try to catch and hurl it back at the wall, ad nauseam.  For some reason they chose to do this against the wall where I was sitting rather than one of the many other walls they could have chosen in the courtyard.  When I asked them to stop, they didn't.  I continued reading and they started aiming the ball at me.  It wasn't so much that the ball would hurt if it hit me (although it did): it was the principle of the matter.  The fact that the teachers were blatantly ignoring this behavior pissed me off even more.  When the ball finally did hit me, I chased down a couple of the kids, cuffed the ones that were slower than me (being a reader I was not prone to speed), and then proceeded to shriek about how they were assholes before walking off campus towards home.

My house was probably about a mile away from the school.  I had probably gone maybe a quarter of a mile, seething all the way despite the beautiful, calming view of the Pacific Ocean on my left, when my mother pulled up in her car and told me to get in.  I didn't want to at first, I just wanted to be angry, but I didn't have anywhere to go but home, and then she said something I never thought my mother would say to me: "Get in the car, we'll go to the movies."

My mother may not have be the best parent in the world, and she's probably made more than her fair share of mistakes in raising me, but if I had to choose moments for a list of Top Ten Things My Mom Did Awesome, that would be number one.  It was pretty much just what I needed at that moment, to sit in the dark and be distracted by the amazingness of CGI dinosaurs (which were still pretty new back then) and Jeff Goldblum's mediocre acting.  I definitely didn't need a huge judgment or a lecture from someone who had been ignoring me for the last six months or so (with good reason, since my dad was being a big baby and an even bigger asshole).  

So even though I can't tell you what the movie was like in comparison to the book, it will always hold a fond place in my heart.  Oh, and during the first one, I totally spilled Diet Coke all over myself when the T-Rex foot dropped from nowhere.  My dad mocked me terribly, so in that way the second movie was much better than the first.

Do you have any memorable movie-book related experience, readers?

*Which hilariously has the same website as it did when I attended it.  If you want a bit of a 90's flashback and a peek at my old days, clicky. 
**As a side note, Happy 120th birthday to H.P. Lovecraft.

The best review I've seen on this is from the now defunct blog, Prehistoric Pulp.