Fragments of Horror / Woman Rebel

Issue No. 71

FRAGMENTS OF HORROR – WONDERFULLY CREEPY STORIES THAT ARE AS WEIRD AS THEY ARE ORIGINAL

Fragments of Horror
by Junji Ito
Viz Media
2015, 224 pages, 5.8 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches (hardcover)

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Fragments of Horror is a collection of eight wonderfully grotesque and creepy short stories. A seemingly bright and pretty architecture student terrorizes a family while having a bizarre relationship with their house. A boy tries to hold his body together after cheating on his girlfriend. The number one fan of a novelist finds herself in a sick situation trapped in the writer’s basement. A young woman who just eloped can’t understand why her new husband won’t come out from under his futon covers.

Written by horror manga artist Junji Ito, whose influences include H.P. Lovecraft, the stories are as weird as they are original, while the art is crisp and expressive. What I love is the way these stories, set in modern Japan, are about seemingly normal lives that take a twisted turn into the bowels of darkness. They remind me of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, the ones that start off in a stylish, mid-century modern house or office where sharp-looking people go about their ordinary lives… until a crack in normality suddenly appears, the creep factor sets in, and they enter the twilight zone. My only regret is that there aren’t more stories here, but fortunately Ito isn’t new to the genre and has many other titles that I’ll be picking up soon. – Carla Sinclair

WOMAN REBEL – PETER BAGGE’S GRAPHIC BIO OF THE CONTROVERSIAL FOUNDER OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story
by Peter Bagge
Drawn and Quarterly
2013, 104 pages, 6.8 x 9.1 x 0.7 inches (hardcover)

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When I think of Peter Bagge, I think of his work in Hate or Neat Stuff, both comics about teenage angst and living in suburban malaise. Therefore, when I saw he wrote Woman Rebel, a biography of Margaret Sanger (the woman responsible for Planned Parenthood), I was curious. Once I started reading, it made perfect sense. Discontent, anger, and frustration with the status quo translate perfectly to the life of Ms. Sanger. Margaret Sanger is most famously known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and for her endless fight for women’s access to birth control in the early 20th century. The book highlights key moments in Sanger’s life – it starts with her childhood (she was born in the 1880s to Irish immigrants) and takes us through her early work as a nurse, mother, and eventual activist.

What makes this biography unique are Bagge’s illustrations. His faces, especially the contorted, frustrated ones that work in Bagge’s earlier work (say, on his teenage anti-hero Buddy Bradley) cross over really well. There is a lot of sadness and anger in Sanger’s life, whether it was her mother (who had 18 pregnancies in 25 years) or Sanger herself facing the many smug and misogynistic critics attempting to halt her progress. There is a lot of emotion in this book, the same that made Sanger persevere.

After reading Woman Rebel, I went online to learn more about Sanger and was immediately slammed by my own ignorance as to what a controversial person she is today. Aside from any expected generic criticism of Planned Parenthood, she is described as a “racist eugenicist” and guilty of “black genocide.” Bagge addresses this controversy in his afterword “Why Sanger?” He delves into how she advocated birth control to women of the KKK (that’s right – the KKK – another reason why this book is full of surprises) as well as black women living in Harlem. Bagge gives lots of examples of how her legacy has been dissected over time, and Bagge’s description of her critics is great: “It’s an irony festival!”

Regardless of how you feel about Margaret Sanger’s legacy, this book is an illustrated education into a woman, that as Bagge puts it, “lived the lives of ten people,” and is directly responsible for the access women have to reproductive health care in 2016. The only actual criticism of this book for me is that I wanted more. The book could be twice the length, and dive deeper into more details of her life, because it seems they are endless. – Amy Lackpour

Chemical Experiments

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 142

Best home chemistry lab book Illustrated Guide to Home

Chemistry Experiments

The very best chemistry experiment book for kids is the legendary and long-out-of-print book, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Published in 1960 during the heyday of home chemistry, it was meant to accompany the millions of chemistry kits that were sold each year to typical American kids. You got real experiments with real chemicals. Not like the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain “No Chemicals!”

Among many other things, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments told you how to make chlorine gas from bathroom supplies, hydrogen from flashlight battery parts, and rayon from scrap paper, etc. You can see why it was not reprinted in the decades following because of concerns about safety. I used my copy, which is now worth $200 on eBay, to do all the experiments in the book when I was 12, and went on to build a chem lab in my basement. As many kids did.

You can get a decent free PDF version of the Golden Book on BitTrorrent. Even better, there’s a new great book for home-made experiments, updated for today: the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from the tech publisher O’Reilly. The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is aimed at home schoolers, high school students, and lifelong-learning adults. It is aptly subtitled “All lab, no lecture”

The Golden Book encouraged playing around with molecules, with no agenda beyond demonstrating the power, principles, and diversity of chemical reactions. The Illustrated Guide on the other hand is a basement laboratory manual meant to teach you the basic working principles of chemistry. How to mix a molar solution. How to titrate. How to do quantitative sleuthing. It claims that if you go through all the chapters you’ll be prepared to pass the college-level AP Chem Lab test. You would also be able to work in most laboratories. And of course, you would probably be able to follow most chemistry recipes from the internet, or at least to figure out what you need to make something chemistry-wise.

At the very least, this book should help cure any hysteria you — or your kids — might have about CHEMICALS. Sure, they can be dangerous, like your car. But we are surrounded by chemicals, and the only way to understand their real risks is to mess around with them.

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is a fantastic teacher for chemical literacy. It will show you or your kids how to work with chemicals, and why they are fun. Some of the experiments are visually entertaining. Others are scientifically important. It’s got wise advice about the few bits of equipment you’ll need for your lab. The Illustrated Guide very handily provides substitutions for ingredients whenever possible, so you can work around harder to acquire or expensive chemicals and gear. And it very conscientiously gives proper disposal instructions for substances at the end (the first I’ve ever seen in a chem book). The author is thrifty, using no more stuff then necessary, and always suggesting ways to purchase the minimum equipment.

Other than the hidden Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, there are simply no other decent books for the beginner chemical experimenter. The ones you find in libraries are simply useless trash. The stuff on the internet is haphazard and inconsistent. Follow the instructions here in the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments and you’ll be on your way to chemical literacy. — KK

• Everyone rightly treats strong acids with great respect, but many students handle strong bases casually. That’s a very dangerous practice. Strong bases, such as solutions of sodium hydroxide, can blind you in literally seconds. Treat every chemical as potentially hazardous, and always wear splash goggles.
• MAINTAINING A LABORATORY NOTEBOOKA laboratory notebook is a contemporaneous, permanent primary record of the owner’s laboratory work. In real-world corporate and industrial chemistry labs, the lab notebook is often a critically important document, for both scientific and legal reasons. The outcome of zillion-dollar patent lawsuits often hinges on the quality, completeness, and credibility of a lab notebook. Many corporations have detailed procedures that must be followed in maintaining and archiving lab notebooks, and some go so far as to have the individual pages of researchers’ lab notebooks notarized and imaged on a daily or weekly basis. If you’re just starting to learn about chemistry lab work, keeping a detailed lab notebook may seem to be overkill, but it’s not.
• CHEAPER BY THE POUNDDo not overlook the advantages of banding together with other home schoolers or like-minded hobbyists to buy chemicals in bulk. For example. a vendor may charge $3 for 25g of a particular chemical. $5 for lOO g, and $9 for 500 g. If you need only small amounts of chemicals, you may be able to cut your chemical costs dramatically by arranging with other homeschooling families or hobbyists to order chemicals in larger quantities and divide them among you.The cost advantage is particularly great for chemicals that incur hazardous shipping surcharges. For example, if you order 100 rnL of concentrated nitric acid for $5. the vendor may add a $35 hazardous material shipping surcharge, for a total of $40. But if you order a 500 mL bottle of concentrated nitric acid for $15, the same surcharge applies, for a total of $50. If you divide that chemical with four friends. each of you gets 100 mL of concentrated nitric acid for only $10.
• MICROSCALE EQUIPMENTThe recent trend in chemistry labs, particularly school and university labs, is to substitute microscale chemistry equipment and procedures for traditional semi-micro or macroscale equivalents. Microscale chemistry, often called microchemistry, is just what it sounds like. Instead of using standard test tubes, beakers, and flasks to work with a few mL to a few hundred mL of solutions, you use miniaturized equipment to work with solution quantities ranging from 20 pL (microliters, where one pL equals 0.001 mL) to a couple mL.Using microscale equipment and procedures has many advantages. Microscale equipment and procedures are less expensive than standard equipment and procedures, which is a major reason for the popularity of microscale chemistry. Using microscale equipment and procedures means that chemicals are needed in very small quantities, which are safer to work with and easier to dispose of properly. Microscale also makes it economically feasible to do experiments with very expensive chemicals, such as gold, platinum, and palladium salts. Setup and teardown is faster, allowing more time for actual experiments, and cleanup usually requires only rinsing the equipment and setting it aside to dry.Against these advantages, there are several disadvantages to microscale chemistry. First and foremost, everything is on such a small scale that it can be difficult to see what’s going on. For example, you may need a magnifier to examine a precipitate (or even to determine whether there is a precipitate). Because of the small scale, measuring or procedural errors so small that they would have no effect on a traditional scale experiment can greatly affect the outcome of a microscale experiment.

Best source for chemicals

Elemental Scientific

his is the best source for buying small quantities of chemicals — always a challenge in these days of chemical hysteria. Elemental Scientific will sell to individuals, online, with no paperwork or license needed. They have a very respectable selection of about 300 reagents and compounds. More than enough for most educational purposes, or for most basement experiments. You can purchase all kinds of acids, corrosives, poisons, explosives and dangerous stuff that you can not get elsewhere — but only in small quantities. That’s fine, because a small amount is often all you want for doing experiments, and many chemical supply outfits will sell only larger quantities if they sell to you at all. Elemental also offers glassware, lab equipment, and general experimental paraphernalia. They cater to homeschoolers and hobby experimentalists. If you’ve ever tried to buy chemicals elsewhere you’ll recognize what an incredible resource this place is. Most chemicals will be shipped UPS, but a short list of 18 especially hazardous chemicals need extra hazmat protection, which is an added charge. — KK

Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

Festivo/The Sound of Love/Zester

Recomendo - issue #466

Calendar of festivals

I try to coordinate my travel to exotic places with local festivals that occur at the same time. Trouble is, there’s been no easy way to find out which festivals are happening where. For example many traditional celebrations run on a lunar cycle. So I built a calendar that will show me all the festivals in Asia that are happening on a particular day. Or I can look at the map and see what festivals occur nearby and when. My site is called Festivo. It provides the local festivals of Asia—which are crammed with color, costumes, and traditions—in calendar format. It’s open and free to all, no ads. If enough people (besides myself) find it useful I will expand it to Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world. — KK

The Sound of Love

The website The Sound of Love offers a beautiful way to experience love songs. For four years, the creator collected comments found beneath love songs on YouTube, carefully selecting nostalgic and touching stories about longing, love, and loss. You can read these personal stories and memories here while you listen. There’s also a Spotify playlist featuring all the songs from The Sound of Love. (Discovered through Dense Discovery.) — CD

Wide zester

While I like my thin microplane for super-fine zesting, I use this wider grater from Allwin a lot more. The key difference is its curved blade profile — it really bites into whatever you’re grating. The wider surface area also means you can get through a block of parmesan or a big knob of ginger much faster than with a traditional narrow microplane. — MF

Contain your mess

My husband is the gardener of the family, and this Repotting Mat is his favorite gardening tool. It’s quick to snap together and contains all the soil mess when potting plants. He has two in different sizes. I imagine it would work well for keeping track of small parts too, if you’re working on other projects. — CD

Leak detectors

Three separate acquaintances of mine recently suffered significant, expensive flood damage in their homes as a result of water leaks while they were away. It’s not an uncommon disaster. After some research I settled on the best recommended solution: a set of wireless water sensors from GoveeLife ($100) that emit a loud alarm and send a text/email to my phone if they detect water leaking. I placed the 6 small wireless units below sinks, near toilets and water heaters, etc.—the most likely places to leak. They were very easy to pair with my home wifi and phone app. Downside is that in a few years their batteries will need to be changed. Upside is they really work and in my testing, just a small drip or a millimeter of water will elicit an immediate alarm and text/email message. — KK

Peanut butter hack — use a massage gun

After seeing a video of someone using a massage gun to force every last drop of mayonnaise out of a bottle, I decided to try in on a plastic jar of unmixed natural peanut butter. I pushed the business end of the gun against the side of the jar and marveled at how quickly the vibrations mixed the separated oil with the solids. A week later, the peanut butter remains perfectly blended. Note: I’ve only tested this on plastic jars; use caution with glass containers. — MF

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Book Freak 182: The Let Them Theory

Letting others live their lives will free you to live yours, by Mel Robbins

Get The Let Them Theory

The Let Them Theory is an approach to relationships and personal growth that teaches you how to stop trying to control things you can’t control — especially other people’s behaviors, opinions and reactions. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience and decades of research, Mel Robbins explains that when you let others be who they are and live how they choose, you free yourself to focus on what truly matters: deeper connections, better boundaries, and the ability to channel your energy into growth and happiness for you and others.

Here are four key pieces of advice from the book:

Stop Managing Other People’s Emotions

“You can’t want somebody’s sobriety or their healing or their financial freedom or their ambition or their happiness more than they do. You will be ready for your loved one to get better, way before they are. Which is why you need to remain in control of your response to the situation. You are not dealing with someone who is capable of rational thought or healthy decision-making.”

Let People Show You Who They Are Through Their Behavior

“People’s behavior tells the truth about how they feel about you.”

Focus on What You Can Control

“Every human being is dealt a different hand in life and you can’t control the cards that someone else is holding. The more time you spend staring at someone else, the more you miss the entire point of the game.”

Go First in Building Connections

“Let me be the first to introduce myself. Let Me be the first to say, ‘I’m new here. How long have you lived here?’ Let Me be the first to say, ‘‘If you ever want to go for a walk, let me know. Here is my number.’”

Solo Fliers Surcharge/Virtual Reality Meetups/Goodbye Skype

Nomadico Issue #159

Solo Surcharges on U.S. Airlines

First reported by Thrifty Traveler and then confirmed by others, it came to light last week that the three big legacy U.S. airlines have been secretly charging solo travelers more on some flights. In a clunky solution to their desire to charge business travelers more than leisure ones, they have discounted some flights for two or more people traveling together then charged single ticket buyers more. Nobody has found evidence of this on Southwest, Alaska Air, or the many budget airlines that mostly cater to leisure travelers. So you might want to play around with the number of passengers when searching and vote with your wallet against the ones employing this sneaky move.

Virtual Reality for Far-flung Connections

I picked up a Meta Quest 3 headset a few months ago not because I wanted to play first-person shooter games in 3D, but so I could join my mom and sister for social gatherings when I’m in Mexico and they’re in Virginia. We meet in some virtual world then head off to play cards, miniature golf, or other activities. Last round my niece joined us too. You’re looking at avatars of each other but the sound quality is great, like chatting in the real world. You could also use it to play golf with friends, race cars around a track, “sit together” for a movie, or go to a live concert in the music hall.

Skype RIP

The Skype voice over IP service and my Cheapest Destinations Blog launched the same year, in 2003, and it’s hard to believe now what a game-changer that technology was. It made formerly expensive phone calls free and allowed people on opposite sides of the planet to talk for hours if they wanted. I could give my elderly anti-tech father a real phone number to call that would ring on my laptop abroad. It changed online education, allowed remote workers to keep making deals, and it kept long-distance relationships alive. This article is full of “Skype stories” and as the last person says, “I doubt I’ll ever have any warm nostalgia about Zoom.” (via Jodi E. of the Curious About Everything newsletter.)

Philippines Nomad Visa

This is still a work in progress, with no income requirements set yet, but the Philippines announced they’ll be launching a digital nomad visa good for a year, with a potential to add another year. Besides the hundreds of beaches you could gaze out at from your mobile office, this is a country with a deep pool of workers who speak like native English speakers. It would be a great place to launch or grow a new business without having to arrange meetings with staffers 12 time zones away.

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

The Longest Day of the Future / Django/Zorro

Issue No. 70

THE LONGEST DAY OF THE FUTURE – CHRIS WARE MEETS TERRY GILLIAM

The Longest Day of the Future
by Lucas Varela
Fantagraphics
2016, 112 pages, 7.8 x 10.5 x 0.6 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

On this Earth-like planet, only two corporations exist. One is represented by a pig mascot, the other by a rabbit. Each cult-like corporation produces everything a person could need or want – food, entertainment, housing, vehicles, employment, etc. One day, an alien spaceship crash lands on the planet, disrupting the barely-functioning balance between the rival corporate tribes. This Brazil-like story is told in the form of a wordless graphic novel by Argentine cartoonist and graphic designer Lucas Varela. The art is superb, bringing to mind Chris Ware. I read this twice, savoring every beautiful panel, filled with insanely weird and wonderful robots, buildings, vehicles, and creatures. I can’t wait to see what Varela does next. – Mark Frauenfelder

DJANGO/ZORRO – LIKE DIPPING FRENCH FRIES IN A MILKSHAKE, THE PAIRING ODDLY WORKS

Django/Zorro
by Quentin Tarantino (author), Matt Wagner (author/artist) and artists Francesco Francavilla, Jae Lee, and Esteve Polls
Dynamite Entertainment
2015, 192 pages, 7.1 x 10.4 x 0.9 inches

Buy on Amazon

Is the concept of a Django and Zorro team-up ridiculous? Of course. But like dipping French fries in a milkshake, the pairing oddly works. Django/Zorro is an official sequel to the film Django Unchained and was written by Quentin Tarantino himself along with Matt Wagner, having just completed a run of Zorro comics.

The story picks up a few years after the film, and Django is still working as a bounty hunter, sending money back to his beloved Broomhilda. While collecting one of these bounties, he happens to meet an older Don Diego de la Vega, whose alter ego (Zorro) hasn’t given up his freedom-fighting ways. If you were a fan of the film, you’re going to like this, because it reads like another Django movie. It’s action packed and has some great dialogue, but what I found really special about this is that it offers a glimpse into Quentin Tarantino’s future.

As a huge fan of Tarantino’s work, I was saddened when I heard him announce that he’s hanging up his director hat after ten films. This only leaves two more to look forward to. But if the Django/Zorro comic is any indication of what he plans on doing after he stops directing, then comic fans get to rejoice.

As a special bonus for writers to geek out over, there’s a full script of the first issue included in this collected edition. It’s interesting to see how these two masters of their craft assemble the story that eventually makes its way to comic form. This is required reading for Tarantino completionists, and comic fans alike. Highly recommended. – JP LeRoux

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

What’s in my NOW? — Jim Lord