My employee discount is causing all of my money to run away.

"Anon" (tjsielsistneb) 10/18/2013 at 11:27 • Filed to: None

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Though there's no quicker way to my heart than through italian v12s and textured paperbacks.

CalzoneGolem > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:29

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451 is one of my all time favorites. Never read Howl's moving castle but I did see the movie.

MonkeePuzzle > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:30

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Howl's is a book? Is it manga or whatever, or a legit novel?

edit: was it written pre or post movie?

are there other ghibli movies as books?

willkinton247 > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:30

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Catch 22 is my favorite book out there. Best bit?

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mdiocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
....
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said, "Amen.
......
"The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we could grab with both of them," he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in front of the A & P as he waited for the bad-tempered gumchewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty look. "If the Lord didn't want us to take as much as we could get," he preached, "He wouldn't have given us two good hands to take it with." And the others murmured, "Amen."
Major Major's father had a Calvinist's faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone's misfortunes but his own were expressions of God's will. He smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey, and he thrived on good wit and stimulating intellectual conversation, particularly his own when he was lying about his age or telling that good one about God and his wife's difficulties in delivering Major Major. The good one about God and his wife's difficulties had to do with the fact that it had taken God only six days to produce the whole world, whereas his wife had spent a full day and a half in labor just to produce Major Major. A lesser man might have wavered that day in the hospital corridor, a weaker man might have compromised on such excellent substitutes as Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C Sharp Major, but Major Major's father had waited fourteen years for just such an opportunity, and he was not a person to waste it. Major Major's father had a good joke about opportunity. "Opportunity only knocks once in this world," he would say. Major Major's father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of a long series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second. The fact that he had been born Major Major Major was a secret known only to his father. Not until Major Major was enrolling in kindergarten was the discovery of his real name made, and then the effects were disastrous. The news killed his mother, who just lost her will to live and wasted away and died, which was just fine with his father, who had decided to marry the bad-tempered girl at the A & P if he had to and who had not been optimistic about his chances of getting his wife off the land without paying her some money or flogging her.

On Major Major himself the consequences were only slightly less severe. It was a harsh and stunning realization that was forced upon him at so tender an age, the realization that he was not, as he had always been led to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named Major Major Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had ever heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned, disposed, as they were, to distrust all strangers, especially one who had already deceived them by pretending to be someone they had known for years. Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one. He grew awkwardly into a tall, strange, dreamy boy with fragile eyes and a very delicate mouth whose tentative, groping smile collapsed instantly into hurt disorder at every fresh rebuff .

He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his father and his mother, and he honored his father and his mother. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other check on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery or coveted his neighbor's ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never even bore false witness against him. Major Major's elders disliked him be-cause he was such a flagrant nonconformist.

Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school. At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual. He majored in English history, which was a mistake.

"English history!" roared the silver-maned senior Senator from his state indignantly. "What's the matter with American history? American history is as good as any history in the world!" Major Major switched immediately to American literature, but not before the F.B.I. had opened a file on him. There were six people and a Scotch terrier inhabiting the remote farmhouse Major Major called home, and five of them and the Scotch terrier turned out to be agents for the F.B.I. Soon they had enough derogatory information on Major Major to do whatever they wanted to with him.

The only thing they could find to do with him, however, was take him into the Army as a private and make him a major four days later so that Congressmen with nothing else on their minds could go trotting back and forth through the streets of Washington, D. C., chanting, "Who promoted Major Major? Who promoted Major Major?

Anon > CalzoneGolem 10/18/2013 at 11:31

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I never have heard a bad thing about 451. I hear that the book is quite diffrent from the movie, though I don't know if that's a good thing, I loved the movie!

Anon > MonkeePuzzle 10/18/2013 at 11:34

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No it's a novel. A lot of anime is based on novels. Spice and Wolf for example is a seventeen book long novel series, though I'm holding out on reading that until all of the books are released in english.

Anon > MonkeePuzzle 10/18/2013 at 11:36

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Addressing your edit. It was made before. Not to my knowledge, Miyazaki just really loved the book.

CalzoneGolem > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:37

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I think a lot of the imagery in the book is way beyond what the movie was capable of showing at that time.

MonkeePuzzle > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:39

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I know Ponyo is meant to be based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, so I guess a lot of it is just interpretation of classic fairy tales

Anon > CalzoneGolem 10/18/2013 at 11:39

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There's a 451 movie? How would they even do that? From what I understand a lot of the book is symbolism that can really only be understood in the context of words.

J. Walter Weatherman > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:43

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Catch 22 is the best book ever.

CalzoneGolem > Anon 10/18/2013 at 11:46

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Yeah haha I thought that's what we were talking about

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt006039…

Gamecat235 > J. Walter Weatherman 10/18/2013 at 11:47

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I cannot contradict that statement.

desertdog5051 > Anon 10/18/2013 at 12:05

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Never read the book. Only saw the movie. Now I will have to go to the library and get it.

J. Walter Weatherman > willkinton247 10/18/2013 at 12:09

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That part is an absolute classic.

I think this passage is just about one of my all-time favorite exchanges in any book (I linked it instead of copying here, because it is a bit long). I absolutely lost it at that part the first time I read the book.

The Hamster > Anon 10/18/2013 at 12:17

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Catch-22 hurt to read. I mean literally hurt. I read the following passage and was laughing so hard I was balled up on the floor, unable to breath, tears streaming down my face. My mother opened the door to see what was wrong. I tried to describe what was so funny...but unless you'd read the book, you just didn't get it.

"He studied every floating object fearfully for some gruesome sign of Clevinger and Orr, prepared for any morbid shock but the shock Mc Watt gave him one day with the plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled mercilessly along the shore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, his naked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt's senses dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away.

"Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softest tsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane's engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson's two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view."

TSLA > Anon 10/18/2013 at 14:19

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I bought Catch-22 to read last summer. It was a good book... well the first two chapters at least... need to find some time to finish it up.