Wife is 8 months pregnant now, and we’re closing in on the home stretch.  The baby’s room is almost all put together (I refuse to call it a nursery until plants are grown somewhere else) and we have accumulated quite the pile of things needed to raise a human being properly according to the time that we live in’s “experts.”  Seriously, how did we survive as a race without such necessities as Bumbo’s and Boppy’s.

One interesting side effect is that Wife snores.

And I mean really, really snores.

I’m told this is a side effect of pregnancy, something about sinus cavities yada yada.  I’m not sure of the medical reasoning behind it, but it sounds like she has a cell phone stuck on vibrate up in her skull.  Last night, the snoring was such that it actually was shaking my pillow hard enough to wake me.

She gave me earplugs, but apparently now I also need foam rubber vibration dampners.

This however has lead to my new game, “What Makes the Snoring Stop?”

The game begins when her nose turns into a jet turbine.  My job is to figure out what exactly I can do to affect the volume, timbre, or frequency of the snores.  I win if I manage to stop the snoring before sleeping on the couch seems reasonable; I get bonus points if she doesn’t wake up or remember it the next morning.

Now, I’m probably going to be called insensitive by moms who underwent the same thing.  ”But she’s pregnant!” they’ll cry, “You have to be supportive and understanding of her condition!”  I am!  Didn’t you see that I said I try not to wake her?  And if I do accidentally wake her, and she turns to me and says, “What’s going on?”  I usually tell her, “It’s ok honey, you just won.”  If that’s not sensitive, well, then I’m confused here.

So Wife is getting bigger, but its a funny bigger.  She’s a very small person who is in pretty good shape, so the baby is growing straight out the front of her.  If you see her from behind, you wouldn’t suspect that she’s got a baby-sized apartment growing on the other side of her.  The youngling has decided that its head should be down, its butt should be in one of her ribs, and her feet on the other rib.  This way, when it kicks, it can start breaking two ribs at the same time.  I’m already impressed by it’s efficiency.

I’ve been reading books about what Wife is going through, like “What to Expect When Your Wife Is Expanding” and I realized, “Oh crap, what do I do when the kid actually shows up?  I’m ready for this whole pregnancy thing, but this whole kid thing is not covered in my current reading materials.”

Now I’m reading a book that is both interesting and terrifying.  I’m fairly convinced that everything in my house will be covered in poop, the baby will cry so loud that the neighbors will ask us to move, and I’m going to ruin the environment with 15,000 diapers in the first month.  I will learn all the songs that the Wiggles sing, and Dora will be all over the house.  I won’t ever sleep again, and I might as well just give up on being remotely healthy.

What’s the truth?  Parents, I need to know what I’m getting into.

There’s been a trend growing the last couple years during Christmas that I think needs to stop. It was cute for awhile, but now it needs to go away.

Of course, I’m talking about inflatable Christmas decorations.

Once reserved for used car lots and community festivals/rich parents throwing a birthday party, inflatable decorations are out of control.

They do not make your lawn look good, or make it seem like the owner of the house has an outstanding holiday display. In fact, they do quite the opposite. Wherein hard plastic or wooden decorations have some sense of permanence , inflatable decorations say to the world, “Hey, look what I found on sale last week!”

Truly Griswoldian displays involve many, many lights and many, many decorations made of plastic or wood.  They inspire awe because of the time commitment involved in lighting up your house like an airport runway.  Inflatable decorations, on the other hand, pale in comparison.  If you want me to be impressed with your decoration, try spending more than 15 minutes on it.

It’s the same difference between a bookshelf of books and a magazine rack of Maxim.  The bookshelf says, “I’m awesome and I’m here to stay.”  The magazine rack says, “I don’t really like to read because I get distracted by shiny things.”

If you want your house to look like an amusement park of holiday cheer, don’t settle for the cheap, inflatable version of it.

In fact, here are some basic tenets of yard decoration:

1. Santa did not visit Jesus. Pick a theme and go with it
2. Blue is not a Christmas color, use sparingly if at all.
3. The only acceptable inflatable decoration is a twenty-foot tall Abominable Snowman from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and that’s only because storing that thing if it was solid plastic would suck.  Would still be better in plastic, though.
4. You are not the Wizards of Winter, stop trying to make your lights blink to music.  All you’re doing is giving your neighbors seizures.
5. Net lights are for wimps.
6. Moving things are awesome.
7. Obscure pop-culture Christmas decorations are the best.  If you have a Heat Miser vs Cold Miser battle on your front lawn, you win Christmas.
8. If you have a giant pine tree in your front lawn and don’t cover it from top to bottom with lights thereby making the largest Christmas tree in the neighborhood, you have squandered an opportunity.  You lose Christmas.
9. Birch trees require a red ribbon around them to make it into a candy cane.  Don’t ask why, these are just the rules.
10. If your house is completely dark, I think we should be allowed to egg it like the people who give out toothbrushes on Halloween.

Festivus poles are excluded from this list because technically they’re not Christmas.  Large inflatable menorahs are not exempt, because they still look stupid regardless of your religious beliefs.

And on that note, happy holidays folks!

badmonster house, following the rules

I did not create this list, but a friend of mine compiled it from various sources around the internet.  I think its amazing to have all of these “facts” about Kim Jong Il in one place, you know, just in case he re-incarnates and takes control of the entire world and we have to study up for a test.

1. A former chef said staff had to make sure the grains of rice he ate were the same size and color.

2. He kidnapped two South Korean film directors in 1978 because he thought all the filmmakers in his own country were awful. He was a film buff with a reported collection of 20,000 foreign films. Loved Rambo. He also made a number of short films and one of his subordinates posted them to Funny or Die – which turned out to be a big mistake for the subordinate.

3. When he had to take painkillers after falling off a horse, he made a handful of his staff take the same medication. He also made the horse take the pain medication – and his dogs

4. He imported more than $500,000 worth of Hennessy per year and insisted that things like roast donkey and live lobsters be flown in fresh to his train during travels. He also liked to eat pit bulls – and requested that the finest pit bulls from America be flown in for him to eat. Meanwhile, his people starved.

5. His official bio at various times claimed he was the world’s greatest golfer (five holes-in-ones on his very first round!), could control the weather with his mood, and … did not defecate. That’s right. He never pooped – not once in his life. He was the first non-pooper in human history. And his urine? Well, they say it was gold, pure gold.

6. In 2010 Kim Jong-Il banned the World Cup from being broadcast in North Korea unless the national team won. The communist country’s state-run TV stations were ordered not to broadcast live matches or games involving other nations, with only heavily edited highlights of North Korean victories permitted to be screened. If the national Korean team ever DID lose, he would have them come to his palace, take off all their clothes and lie face down on the palace floors for days. He would “prod them” with a Dear Leader pole once a day.

7. Upset by the lack of film-makers in his native land, in 1978 Kim arranged for two South Korean directors to be kidnapped from Hong Kong and brought to him. They tried to escape but eventually relented, making a string of movies for him including the cult Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.

8. As well as being something of a foodie, Kim knew his booze. According to Hennessy, Kim was one of their single biggest customers, importing $800,000 worth of the cognac every year.

9. Dear Leader was obsessed with Katy Perry. He often danced around his palace singing “I Kissed A Girl”. He sent Perry numerous love letters and sent a North Korean spy team to England to steal her away from Russel Brand. They never made it – and instead defected to Portugal.

10. One of his unofficial titles was The Central Brain. He often said that his brain was ten times bigger than Einstein’s and told sources close to him that President Obama’s brain was the smallest of any leader on the planet.

11. Until North Korea put up an official website in 2003, Kim Jong Il was the only person in the country allowed to have email access.

12. His favorite movie characters are James Bond and Rambo.

13. Kim was born in Russia under the name Yuri Irsenovich Kim.

14. However this is the story that is told of his birth:

• Kim Jong-Il was born Yuri Irsenovich Kim. His official biography states that he was born on a sacred mountain (Baekdu Mountain, the legendary birthplace of Korea’s first kingdom) on February 16, 1942, where his father was serving in a secret military base, attempting to overthrow the Japanese. Further, it states that his birth was marked by a double rainbow over the mountain, a new star appearing in the sky, and, before his birth, a swallow foretold his coming.

15. He wrote over 1,500 books in a three year time-span.

16. He wrote six full operas that are considered by experts to be the best six operas ever created.

17. He began walking at just three weeks old and could fluently speak at just eight weeks old.

18. People the world over receive plastic surgery to try to look more like Kim Jong-Il. His hair and clothing styles are also widely mimicked.

19. His birthday is highly celebrated throughout the world.

20. He had the ability to control the weather and it usually reflected his moods.

21. He invented hamburgers as a way to provide a new tasty food for his impoverished people.

As the day that I will have a youngling to teach the ways of the force draws ever nearer, the problem of what to actually name the darn thing is growing.  The wife and I have differing opinions on what constitutes an “acceptable” name.  She likes names that are “normal” and I like names that I read in a book or saw on in a movie and the character totally kicked ass.  And not just regular kick-ass, but in a totally nerdy, geeky, “LOTR is too mainstream so I went with Firefly” kind of way.

This is where I need your help, people.  If the internet is good for one thing…well, it would be porn.  But if it was good for two things, it would be porn and sharing your opinions with the world in a consequence-free way.

So let me have it, I want your suggestions, both boy and girl.  Put them in the comments.  Email them to me.  Tweet them at me.  Tie them to a pigeon and throw the pigeon at me. Learn semaphore and stand on top of a hill with flags.  What I need is to make the best list ever of all time of awesome names ever for geeks with kids.

Bring it on.

I’ve noticed a trend that, like all things literary, television, and cinematic that I hate, I’m going to blame on Dan Brown.  That might not be exactly fair, but neither was tricking me into reading the “Da Vinci Code”.  Also, “National Treasure.”  That was terrible too.  And every episode of “Law and Order: SVU.”

What I’m talking about are the mystery stories without any mystery, the detective stories with very little detecting, and the cop stories where the killer confesses everything.  The hero might jump through a lot of hoops, but none of them paint a clearer picture.  The only thing answers the question is when the answer is found.  And that’s not life. Let me spin you a quick little tale…

Our hero finds an old manuscript that hints at a secret that’s been repressed by some unknown force, and now that secret is causing the hero’s life to be disrupted.  Things will only go back to normal when the hero finds the answer.  So the hero finds a small clue that indicates maybe who the unknown force is, some secret society called the Brotherhood.  Hero runs away from Brotherhood operatives, staying one step ahead of them and trying to locate the book that holds the answer.  Eventually, there is a showdown, and the hero finds the book, the Brotherhood is vanquished, and all the answers are in this book.

How often in life do you ever find ALL THE ANSWERS?  Never.  You never find all the answers.  Because there isn’t a special book that fixes everything.  There isn’t a suspect that confesses just before the 44th minute.  There isn’t a wise man on top of the mountain that knows the answer to the meaning of life.

I call this lazy writer syndrome, and it annoys me.  This syndrome is responsible for three hundred pages of rising action and two pages of climax.  It’s responsible for an hour and a half of action and ten minutes of plot.  Most of the time, it results in bad pacing and a really terrible resolution because the author doesn’t even care if the solution to the problem makes any sense.

Sometimes I’ve gotten to something I thought was the end, and it’s never been tied up in a bow for me.  I’ve never done something and thought to myself, “now I know the answer” because there is always more.  Now I know that books, shows, and movies have to end at some point or else we’d be reading/watching forever, but good stories don’t have an “end” so much as a “this is the end of what the author is telling you about.”  If the author has created characters worth realizing, then the end of the words is not the end of the story.

I wanted to like this show, I really did.  I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, and with no more Battlestar, Defying Gravity, SG:U, or their kind on television anymore, I had high hopes for Terra Nova, Grimm, and Once Upon a Time.  Grimm still seems interesting, Once Upon a Time better get to the damn point soon, and Terra Nova has already lost me.  And it wasn’t just the terrible acting, oh no.  You’d think that if they were spending bucketloads of cash on this thing, they might have thought about the setup for the whole shebang for more than a minute or two.

First of all, time travel is impossible.  If you believe that everything we have done is one constant and stream of cause and effect, time travel is impossible.  Suppose someone built a time machine and used it to go kill Hitler.  At the instant the person pressed “go” on the machine, the entire current existence would change into a history that didn’t involve Hitler, and if that new version of the world didn’t involve that same person at that same instant going back to kill Hitler, it would never have happened in the first place and thw world would remain unchanged.  If you can’t follow that line of reasoning, try this.

If A happened, then B happened.  If B happened, then C happened.  If C happens, that means A never happened.  If A never happened, then B never happened, and then C never happened.  There is no logical way out of this, and this is why time travel cannot happen.

Terra Nova tried to sidestep this by using the multiverse theory.  That is, the time machine isn’t so much a machine that goes back in time, it just goes to another universe that is similar to ours but isn’t it exactly.  The planet they’re on is very Earth-like, but isn’t in fact the SAME Earth from which they left.  Instead of travelling to a when, they just went to another where.

Alright, for the sake of the argument, let’s assume this is possible, and that rifts in the fabric of existence can transport you to another universe.

But the show claims that they figured out this was possible when they sent a probe through and it didn’t appear in the present, but millions of years old.  They determined that it was another universe, not the same one we’re in now, and therefore neatly sidestepping and time paradox issues. HOWEVER, in in the very same episode, they claimed that the portal is one-way only, and communication back through the portal is impossible, meaning people on Terra Nova cannot communicate back to Terra Regular.

Think about that.

This means that the first person through the portal had no way of telling the people back on Earth, “Hey, I’m ok, I can breathe the air here, and OH SHIT THERE ARE DINOSAURS!  SEND MORE GUNS!”  As far as the people on Earth would ever know, that guy walked into a glowing blue thing, and disappeared.  Instead of assuming, “I bet he got transported into another universe that has dinosaurs!  Let’s send an entire city worth of people through that thing!” they probably would have said something more like, “Holy shit!  He’s gone!  Dude just got vaporized!  Everyone stand back, that thing is dangerous.”

Some of you might say I’m overthinking this, and I am, but that’s what nerds do.  And if you’re making a show targeted at that demographic, the writers better think this through as well.

Fine fine, let’s assume that somehow they knew it was ok to walk into the vibrating rift of blue energy that appeared in the fabric of the universe.  Let’s assume that they knew there were going to be dinosaurs in this new land.

How are their weapons so ineffective?  Dinosaurs are big, they’re not bulletproof.  They killed each other all the time with claws and teeth, yet the show routinely has multiple people pumping hundreds of rounds of machine gun ammunition at them, and it bounces right off.  The cars they drive around look like they’re cobbled together out of leftover scrap metal from Mad Max, and hold up less well in a dino attack than the jeep in Jurassic Park which had leather seating and cup holders.

“But they got transported to a universe with super dinosaurs that are immune to bullets.  Their cars suck because, I don’t know, they just do, ok?  Geez man, just watch the show, don’t analyze it so much.”

I’d love to, but even if I ignore everything I’ve said so far, the show is still terrible.  The acting is currently the worst on television, and this includes Two and Half Men, Whitney, Playboy Club, Charlie’s Angels, and every other piece of dreck that has been cancelled or is about to be cancelled.  The writing is so bad, I think they have about 15 minutes worth of plot they’re trying to stretch out over an entire season, so they just added hours worth of bad animation and “teenagers” who look like they’re in their late 20′s being angsty at each other.  It’s like Twilight but shittier and even more pandering.  And before you think that’s a compliment, I have Twilight at about the same level as anything written by Dan Brown.

I’ll just be sitting here watching reruns until they decide to put some good science fiction on television and not cancel it after half a season.  If Terra Nova airs more episodes than Firefly, I’m going to be pissed.

Recently, a friend of mine’s mother died.  She was diagnosed with cancer and died about a month after.

My friend flew back from New York and stayed with her throughout the ordeal.  He told me about it after she passed, and I was able to make plans to come up and see him.

The drive was a couple hours, and only then did it hit me that I had no idea what to say.  What is the right thing to tell someone who had a parent die way too young?  What are the magic words to make it all better?

Of course there aren’t any, because the only thing they want is their loved one to be back with them, and no amount of words can fix that.

I might not be the best person in the world to offer comfort and consolation, but I’m damn good at making people laugh.  My goal this day was going to be to get him and his family to begin to remember how to smile, how to find humor and joy in everyday.

He and I are about town running errands, and the main one involves getting a bunch of plates and cups from a party supply store for the wake the following day.  We had to take 200 or so of the plates to his father’s friend’s house and run them through the dishwasher.  His father’s friend comes to the door, and I’m instantly afraid for the next couple hours of my life.  Phil is very well dressed, button down plaid shirt tucked into khakis with a belt.  His white hair is combed carefully to the side, and he’s got the grandpa glasses made of a thick plastic. The house is immaculate, every single thing has a place and you can tell there was some decision about which things went into which places.  Two Siamese cats roam the place, but the odor of kitty litter is clearly afraid to appear in such a well-organized place.

Phil is very soft spoken and polite as we load up the first batch of plates.  He offers us some “cheap wine, but its pretty good” and before we know it, we’re two bottles in.  Phil has his black socks and slippers up on the chair next to him, and he’s telling us stories about how meeting the right people in your life can have an profound effect.

The following is a story Phil told as close to verbatim as I can remember:

“I was sitting at the bar, and this woman walks in, and I looked over at her and she looked just like Sophia Loren.  I thought to myself, ‘Man, that looks like trouble,’ and turned back around.  She came and sat down next to me and we started talking, and I had never met anyone like her, she was so interesting and different and I was amazed.

“She mentioned that she liked the opera, and I said ‘Opera! I’ve never met anyone who’s liked the opera!  I can never understand what they’re saying!’ and she said, ‘Oh, I can understand them, I speak five langauges.’

“I told her that I’d really be interested in going to an opera with her, and she said that she’d call me and take me to one.  A couple weeks went be and she hadn’t called, and I was sad because I didn’t think she would remember.  But about two weeks later, she called and said that she wanted to take me to the opera, and that a Wagner was in town.

“So she took me to the Wagner, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, there was a fat guy and a fat lady hollerin’ at each other in some language that I didn’t understand…but man oh many was I glad to have gone there with her.”

That was one of those moments where you have about a million thoughts explode like a flashbulb in your brain, and the whole thing from beginning to end takes one second.

I realized that there was probably a guy sitting in a theater listening to this “new playwright Williams Shakessomething that the girlfriend wants me to go see” and not understanding a word.  There was some guy in ancient Greece listening to the chorus “wail about something or other, who really cares because my girlfriend seems into it.”

I could see these scenes playing in my mind, thousands of years worth of conversations, all saying the same thing.  The people we love and this whole human experiment all means nothing if all these millions of connections between us aren’t real.

There are people in our lives that mean a whole heck of a lot, and the more someone means to you the more you let them change you and lead you to adventures and experiences you’d never find on your own.  I realized that if I didn’t care about my friend, there is no conceivable set of circumstances in my daily routine that would result in me sitting in the kitchen of a sixty-year old former Mennonite half-blasted on cheap wine on a Friday afternoon washing the dishes.

And in that second, I remembered what my goal was for the day, and why I had driven up in the first place.

“Yep, that’s the same reason I watch ‘Gray’s Anatomy.’”

There have been a lot of changes in the last couple months.  The biggest and most important one is that I found out I know how to use a sewing machine.  Oh, also my wife is pregnant (by me) but more on that later.

Yeah, for real, we got a sewing machine from my parents that they picked up at a garage sale.  They asked if I wanted it, I said sure, and they dropped it off while I wasn’t home.  They neglected to tell me the part about the sewing machine being mounted in a piece of furniture that takes up a quarter of the room, or else I may have asked more questions before agreeing to it.

In order to see if I could make things for a small human that I helped create (more on that later) I tested it out.  In a couple hours, I whipped out two pillows, two pillow cases, and a special mat for the dogs to use while sitting on the recliner with vinyl on one side and fleece on the other.  Wife was disturbed by my mad skillz with the needle and thread, but as I explained to her really its building something out of fabric and the sewing machine is my power tool.  Or at least that’s how I justify it.

Let’s see, what else is new…oh yeah!  I decided to put pictures up on the blog!  Up above, you’ll see a link now for Photography which has some of the shots I’ve taken that I like.  I’m trying to get better at taking pictures for when the youngling arrives in the house (more on that later) and I’m sure there will be many pictures taken then.  Cameras are basically big electronic toys now with lots of knobs and buttons, and since they don’t use film anymore it doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars to learn how to do it.  If I take a bad picture, being quick on the draw with the little “delete” button has saved me some embarrassment.

What else, what else….I got a mirror for my monitor so I can see who is lurking behind me.  I recently made a really, really bad casserole that smelled so foul the dogs were hiding.  I took apart an Xbox360 and put it back together.

Oh, that’s right, my wife is teaching first grade this year.  It will be real fun later on when she’s all be from being pregnant (more on that later) and having to chase kids around during winter recess.

Yeah, I just can’t think of anything else exciting.

She’s due sometime between late February and early March.  I’m hoping for a leap year kid and she is not.  I’m also trying to get the kid named as nerdy/geeky of a name as I can without getting the kid beat up by their classmates.  She gets to pick the girl name, and I get the guy name, so I need help folks.  Help me pick a winner.  I need this.

Fellow nerds rejoice, for our time has come.

Never before has there been such mainstream proliferation of our favorite materials and ease as to which we can consume it.

The day they announced the Dark Tower series was going to HBO I thought, “almost there.”  Then Game of Thrones went and got Emmy nominated, and I knew our time had come.  A book series that every fantasy geek on the planet typically places behind Lord of The Rings, yet only those fantasy geeks knew of its existence.

Quick aside: it’s not “Game of Thrones” its Fire and Ice.  ”Game of Thrones” is the name of the first book, but the series is referred to as Fire and Ice.

Even the six-dollar paperback series is getting turned into television runs; if the Dresden Files can be made into a television run, this opens up a whole new realm of nerdery to pop culture.

And of course, the recent run of turning comic books into movies isn’t new, but the whole “trying to stay true to the source material” part is, even if its just lip service to keep the people who wear foam Wolverine claws and don’t bathe regularly from making scathing remarks on forums.

If you are one of the people who finds themselves thinking “hey, I kind of liked that Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones thing I saw, but the Fantasy/SciFi section in Barnes and Noble is intimidating,” you have two problems.  One, you shouldn’t use so many / in your sentences because its confusing; two, you need to take a nerd with you the first time to steer you away from potentially harmful reading material.  If you accidentally pick up “The Innocent Mage,” you’ll probably never recover.

There is something essential to a good series of books or movies or television shows, and that is to have a core group of characters that are interesting and likable.  These characters need to be the common thread through multiple storylines, but often a series will bury its characters under a mountain of minute and unimportant trivialities.

In this bloggist’s humble opinion, there a couple different gateway books you can start off with.

Fantasy
Stories that take place in world long ago, with kings and knights and magic and such.

Lord of The Rings.  Start with “The Hobbit.” End with “The Silmarillion.”  Don’t worry if you skip all the songs they sing the first time through, a lot of people do.  And boy do they sing a lot.

Fire and Ice. This one can get pretty dense, because the story arcs are long and the characters are numerous and belligerent.  And even if you can stick with it, you’ll be disappointed in the ending. Why? Because there isn’t one yet, GRRM is still finishing them.

Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb.  Underrated and nearly anonymous,

The Dark Tower series, just read it all right now before its on HBO and you can be one of those people who says “the books were much better” while tilting your head slightly to the left.  But really, they’re very good.  Trust me on this, just plow through the first book.  It’s there to lay the groundwork, and you won’t regret it.  Added bonus: several of the audiobook recordings were done by Frank Muller before he died, and he makes the words even better.

Magic
More contemporary setting, but magic is still a force in our world.

Harry Potter. Just because you think it’s a children’s book doesn’t mean its not good.  It got incredibly popular for a reason, unlike say, “The DaVinci Code” which was popular for no reason whatsoever.

“The Magicians” is just a book and not a series, so for someone who doesn’t want to invest in reading for weeks this is a good pick. Think Harry Potter graduates and then can’t find a job because post-college life is hard.

The “Dresden Files” are entertaining and fun, and I plowed through the dozen books in this series in a couple weeks.  The prose isn’t as grandiose as Tolkien, but its contemporary and dry and actually had me laughing.  The television series didn’t do a great job capturing the emotion of the books, which I dub “magic noir”.

Science Fiction
Books that take place in a galaxy far away with technology and awesome stuff we wish we had now because Popular Science made it seem like we should have it now.

“Dune.” Don’t be scared off by the movies, because the movies are terrible, terrible things inflicted on humanity (unless you like the thought of Sting in a futuristic loincloth). There’s two parts to the Dune series: the part written by Frank Herbert and those followed up by his son.  My suggestion is to start with “Dune” and read as many as you can by Frank until you get to your “what the hell is he talking about?” breaking point.  Then depending on how into it you are and want to learn more about the other characters, skip to the Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert books.

“Ender’s Game.”  Interestingly, this book was published as a prequel to three other books by Orson Scott Card.  The only problem was the first three books he wrote made no sense, so he wrote “Ender’s Game” to help explain them.  Lo and behold, it ended up being awesomesauce.  So read that book, skip the next three, and jump back in with “Ender’s Shadow.”

This was never intended to be a complete list of what I think is good, this is just a place to start for those who might be interested.  So if you feel like I left your favorite off the list, feel free to throw it in the comments, but be prepared to defend yourself.  Hell hath no fury like a nerd scorned.