Foma*

A Tale of Two Stadiums

2012-02-24T15:44:00.002-05:00

At the Democratic National Convention in 2008, demand to watch Barack Obama give his acceptance speech was so large that they moved the event to Denver's Mile High Stadium.

Today Mitt Romney held a major campaign speech at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan and had trouble papering the event to fill 1200 seats.

Draw your own conclusions.

When Ted Met Sally

2012-01-10T08:00:00.002-05:00

This week in Sally Forth, Francesco Marciuliano is exploring what would have happen if Ted and Sally had never met. He is also exploring other counterfactuals on his Francesco Explains It All blog.

But some things are fate. They just might not have happened as we imagined them. Here is my version of When Ted Met Sally.

Without Sally, Ted would have been drawn deeper and deeper into his neuroses.

And without a stabilizing influence, Sally's business instincts would have had no limits.

But somethings are meant to be, no matter how dark and twisted.

And they lived happily ever after.

BooksFirst - July to October 2011

2011-07-25T20:03:00.024-04:00

Books Bought
Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton
Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton
The History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
Packing For Mars by Mary Roach
Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Dr. Harry Lodge
Blackout by Connie Willis
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
All Clear by Connie Willis
God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette
Air Conditioning In Summer And Winter by Richard E. Holmes

Books Read
Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton
Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton
How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
Bogmail by Patrick McGinley
The History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
Packing For Mars by Mary Roach
Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Dr. Harry Lodge
The Cut by George Pelecanos
God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette

Comments

I have become a bit of a Wil Wheaton fanboy which is odd since when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on I hated his Wesley Crusher character. But I was far from the only one back then. I was aware of his blog and that he had become a minor internet celebrity but I never though much of it. Then he started doing guest shots on The Big Bang Theory. And then I discovered The Guild and his Evil Leader character.

Wheaton is a very persistent cross promoter and I started reading some excerpts of his and ended up ordering his memoir Just A Geek on the Kindle. It details his post ST:TNG career and the struggles of trying become a Somebody Again instead of a Has Been. Repurposed from his blog, the tone is uneven and it's frequently repetitive, but it's a fascinating insight into the Hollywood system particularly if you read just between the lines a little.

The centerpiece of the book is his visit to a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. This tale gets a fuller telling in an earlier shorter self-published memoir Dancing Barefoot which sells on Amazon for about nine bucks. It was here I started feeling just a little rolled. I'm not sure why the digital version of a book a quarter the length costs nearly as much. But I guess when you are Wil Wheaton you deserve the money.

I spent two weeks in Ireland on vacation. During that time I was also reading How The Irish Saved Civilization. This book focuses on the days of early Christianity where a newly literate population embraced the knowledge of both the Church as well as ancient Greeks and Romans. Their illuminated manuscripts are some of the greatest cultural contributions of the Celtic relationship.

Part of the unique aspect of this place and time was the relative isolation Ireland. The island had never fallen to the Roman Empire and was not under the direct influence of the popes for a hundred years or more. It had time to develop its own traditions. The book also details the ultimate overshadowing of Ireland by Europe as it consolidated authority.

And important aspect of the book from my point as a tourist was that it added a lot of perspective to my travels. As I visited places like Cahill and Glendalough where there are remnants of these original communities. But the greatest thrill was going to Trinity College and seeing the Book of Kells, the manuscripts created around 800 CE in Iona, Scotland and later in Kells, Ireland. The contributions of these early Irish Christians is an important part of not just church history but of western civilization.

A book I had read about 20 years ago was Bogmail by Patrick McGinley. Rereading it while in Ireland gave me a new perspective and added depth to the experiences. Set in Donegal, an area of Ireland I didn't visit, it tells the story of a pub owner who kills his bartender for seducing his daughter. Obviously it's a comedy.

I recognized a lot of he characters and the locations or at least the archetypes. A lot of the slang and odd geographic features unique to Ireland were also a lot more understandable. The story itself includes a lot colorful folksy characters. The town is united when a newcomer decides to take on the silk collar priest for ulterior motives. Meanwhile the booksmart but clueless local police chief begins investigating the murder.

The story unfolds in ways you don't expect as the history of Tim Roarty is unpeeled like an onion.

Not to give away any spoilers but the titular drinks in A History of the World in Six Glasses are beer, wine, spirits, tea, coffee, and cola. Each chapter traces the origin of the beverage as well its impact on global trade. Beer and wine are buried in the distant mists of history and arguably the start of civilization. The section on spirits covers some of the time and territory covered in How The Irish Saved Civilization where knowledge is kept in the hands of a few. Tea and coffee were non-alcoholic beverages which fueled commerce and expanded exploration during the Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery.

The final chapter is interesting in that it is not so much about a genre of beverage but the company of Coca Cola in particular. While cola as a beverage niche is important, the worldwide expansion of Coke tells the history of the 20th century with the drink as a proxy for the United States.

I have seen books on all these beverages being sold as stand-alone tales and they each probably merit them, but this book as a high level overview is fascinating because is shows different perspectives. And has a history of civilization and not just drinks, it gives plenty to lap up.

While in a book store in California I ran across a shelf of books by Roddy Doyle, an award-winning Irish writer. I finally settled on one titled A Star Called Henry with the titular hero being an Irish revolutionary . It's an oddly told first person story with Henry being a young street urchin who spends his live on the periphery of the more famous historical characters.

Henry's father was a thug bouncer who became an assassin. Henry follows in his father's footsteps but in the service of the IRA. He takes part in the Easter Monday uprising and then gets sent into the country to form guerrilla groups. The plot points as narrated by Henry are so over-the-top as to barely survive suspension of belief. Along the way there is a love story with a woman rebel even more zealous than Henry, unfinished business with his father, and insights into the Ireland of a hundred years ago.

The prose is lyrically beautiful and borderline poetic. The phrasing and cadences capture the soul of the country. It's a rather idiosyncratic book but it makes for a wonderful look at an era I had hitherto known nothing about.

Mary Roach is one of those non-fiction writers who seems to delight in tackling off-beat topics and treating them in a light-hearted but thorough way. Her book Bonk (reviewed here) was an amazing look inside the world of sex research. In Packing For Mars, she puts the space program under the same scrutiny. I've read several books about space exploration, most famously The Right Stuff, but rather than tackle the personalities, she takes on the logistics.

In particular, she focuses on how the various bodily functions. She asks the questions most people would be too embarrassed to ask or perhaps even too naive to even think off. She covers eating, sleeping, drinking, pissing, shitting, and fucking, the last being largely hypothetical. It's all done with a minimum of smirking but also a great deal of wit.

This book needs to be read by anybody whose childhood ambitions ever included astronaut. It will dissuade you. I'm not sure I'd ever get past the Vomit Comet zero-gee training. Space travel comes off as extremely messy and inconvenient. It's a wonder that anybody puts up with it.

The level of detail is fascinating. There is so much going on in so many ways that the general public is completely unaware of. The non-linear narrative does muddy the timeline a little and too much effort is spent sending the reader forward and backward in the book. But this a great breezy but informative read.

Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge was recommended in a blog post by Neil Gaiman. He credits the book with helping him lose a lot of weight and become fitter. After reading the book, I suspect that the incentive of chasing after his new bride, former Dresden Doll Amanda Fucking Palmer, had more to to with his motivation to become trimmer than any particular piece of advice in this book.

The book is squarely aimed at older upper-middle class men, not suprising since it was written by a retired lawyer/motivational speaker and a gerontologist. They more or less alternate chapters with lots of pep-talking point with chapters filled with pop physiology. The advice is generally very broad and vague. Their one Big Idea which is stretched across the entire book is that men over 50 must work-out six times a week, four 45-minute heavy aerobic workouts and twice with weight strength training. Not bad advice, but hardly earth-shattering.

The rest is even more common-sensical. In addition to the Exercise More trope, they touch on Eat Less, although in much less detail. And in perhaps a blow to the trophy wife industry, the recommend guarding and strengthening your existing relationships. They note that loving support is as important as anything else.

Perhaps it's because of the narrow focus of the target audience but the book reeks of upper middle class privilege. In order to kick-start the fitness program, they recommend taking anywhere from one week to a month off to go on a sport related vacation. Sports they seem to be particularly fond of include downhill skiing and spin classes. The one piece of advice I have taken to heart is to buy good gear. That I can use as a rationalization for lots of things.

There is nothing wrong or bad with the advice, I just wish parts of it hadn't been so glib.

I have Baco Number of two from George Pelecanos and recently read The Night Gardener so it was with some enthusiasm that I waited patiently for his new novel The Cut. This was to be the first in a series of novels featuring a recurring character who works outside normal legal channels.

In particular, the advance publicity material and the early reviews mentioned strong resemblances to John D. McDonald character Travis McGee. And the parallels are strong. Both Spero Lucas and Travis are former soldiers who now recover possessions for people in exchange for a the titular cut of the recovered value. Forty years of hard-boiled writing have even lowered the going rate from 50% to 40%.

But beyond the initial concept, the resemblance is much less striking. Travis was more of a tarnished knight in tin-foil armor while Spero is a more morally ambiguous fellow. His first case in on behalf of a jailed drug dealer who is concerned with missing deliveries, not a case the resident of the Busted Flush would have touched with a ten foot lance. Pelecanos's take is much grittier as he delves into the familiar (to him at least) underworld of petty crime bosses and crooked cops.

The writing is very breezy and fast paced, approaching Stephanie Plum reading levels. And the plot seems a little light and padded. But it pays off in some nifty action sequences and a clear if nuanced moral tone. I don't blame Pelecanos for going for the reliable income stream a series character affords, but these are tough tricks to pull off when characters are multi-dimensional. There are only so many epiphanies one can pull off before appearing to be a little slow on the learning curve.

Still, I look forward to future installments in this exciting new series.

In my BooksFirst posts, I include audiobooks, particularly if they are unabridged. Two of the best ones I have heard lately were Bossypants written and read by Tina Fey and the similar book by Colin Ferguson (both reviewed here). I really wish that was the format I had chosen for God, No! by Penn Jillette. The talking half of magician duo Penn and Teller, Jillette is a force of nature and a famous atheist. I have been reading his work since he had a column in the back of PC/Computing in the 1980s. I also thoroughly enjoy his rants on the Showtime series Bullshit! even if I don' always agree with his point of view.

God, No! reads like it was dictated into speech recognition software between flights in airport lounges and it very well may have been. You can almost see Penn gesticulating wildly with every paragraph. The book is ostensible a treatise on atheism but it rarely makes a very serious inquiry as Jillette sees his positions as so self-evident that they don't need further explication. He is more inclined to digress off into shaggy-dog stories and anecdotes about his rather hedonistic (but substance abuse free) lifestyle.

The structure of the book, if there is said to be any, is loosely based around an atheistic reformulation of the ten commandments. However, it is really only the first several commandments he has any serious complaint with. He does not come out in favor of murder, theft, or lying and he is vaguely ambiguous about adultery. However, idol worshipping and holy days do incur his wrath.

Don't get me wrong. The book is drink-snortingly funny. The wild tales of his debauched life make Hunter S. Thompson look like a Sunday school teacher. It just never goes anywhere. And it really needs to be heard in his own voice. Get the audiobook or wait for the movie.

I rarely mention books I have bought but not read. But one book will never be read cover-to-cover. In a blog entry on libraries destroying old books, she mentioned that her grandfather had written a book on air conditioning back in the 1930s and that is was available on e-Bay. I checked and it was and it was priced for only $10. Since this represented some sort of odd confluence between my professional life and my pop cultural obsessions, I had to have it.

The book was actually the revised 1951 second edition of Air Conditioning In Summer And Winter by Richard E. Holmes. Just thumbing through it, it all looks very familiar. The basic fundamentals of HVAC haven't changed much in the last sixty years. I actually have a couple of other old textbooks including a vintage book of thermodynamic steam tables and an old PE test prep book that used to belong to my grandfather.

I did twitter Linda Holmes (@nprmonkeysee) to tell her that I bought the book but that I wasn't a stalker. And I guess that was a bit stalkerish. But it's a cool book to have and a nice addition to my collection.

BooksFirst - May-June 2011

2011-07-01T01:14:00.004-04:00

Book Bought
I'll Mature When I'm Dead by David Barry

Books Read

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'll Mature When I'm Dead by David Barry
So Long and Thanks For The Fish by Douglas Adams
Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

Comments

Not to be confused with the Natalie Portman movie of the same name, The Black Swan is a rambling philosophical discourse on the nature of chance, particularly highly unlikely events which have a disproportionate impact on the world. Much like the Improbability Drive which is in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, impossible things seem to happen much more often than anybody expects. Anybody except Nassim Taleb. He has made a fortune in the past decade putting his money and the money of his clients where his mouth is. He does this by assuming that conventional wisdom is neither. His major beef is with economic models which assume very nice Gaussian distributions based on highly massaged data which is far from regular or predictable.

I decided to read this book as a companion piece to A Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea by Joel Achenbach (reviewed here) since the Macando Oil spill is often cited as a 'black swan' event. It can be debated whether the event truly qualifies but it does illustrate one salient point. When you operate by extrapolating rules the apply in one set of conditions way beyond their range of applicability, you are courting disaster. The Japanese earthquake and the subsequent nuclear disaster also illustrate (again and again) the folly of men.

The ideas in the books are astoundingly thought provoking. They are the sort of paradigm shifting revelations that will color how you look at the world forever. Unfortunately, Nassim's prose style leaves a lot to be desired. Obviously erudite and far better read than I ever will be, he casually drops in obscure philosophical references as everyone is familiar with them. He also uses a lot of oblique parables and metaphors that bewilder as much as they enlighten. It took me well over a month to slog through the book but it was well worth it. Few ideas are truly world-changing but the black swan concept is.

For a palate cleanser after a deep philosophical work, you could do worse than Dave Barry. Part of a Miami Tropic alumni mafia that includes both Joel Achenbach and double Pulitzer winner Gene Weingarten, Dave Barry is the rock star (good band name or not)
of the ensemble.

As the forward describes, I'll Mature When I'm Dead (hopefully and oblique Warren Zevon call out) is a collection of newspaper essays that have never been published. For most writers, a book-length collection of columns is a vain attempt to get a secondary revenue stream from work the writer has already been paid for once. In Dave Barry's world, he can't be trouble to actually bother with the day job, so he goes straight to the bestseller's list.

Freed from the constraint of space in a fishwrap, he is able to expand his usual range, mostly hilariously. There are some sidesplittingly funny sections in here, particularly about male-female relations and child-rearing, althoug I did catch him recycling one anecdote. Less successful are his stretches outside his established oeuvre of booger jokes and non-sequitor exaggerations. In one chapter he tries to make light of his attempt with Gene Weingarten to crank out a thoroughly mediocre film screenplay, proving once again that Hollywood is so ridiculous it is beyond parody. That incident is in fact a little disingenuous since itcompletely ignores the fact that Barry has already been responsible for one astoundingly bad Tim Allen (SPOILER ALERT) bomb.

Dave Barry is a known quantity and it is good that he isn't coasting. This book is every bit as good as any of his previous works even if it is a bit uneven.

It is much to my shame that I have never read all five books in the no longer increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy. I was not very impressed by the third outing so it was with a bit of trepidation that I took on So Long And Thanks For The Fish. But rather than getting a chaotic whacky mishmash, I found the book to be surprisingly tender and bittersweet. While there are some slapstick events, most of the book revolves around Arthur Dent mysteriously returned to Earth and his romance with a woman who has vaguely psychotic memories of its destruction.

There is a much smaller subplot about Ford Prefect but it is rather perfunctory and does not tie in well with the main plot. It’s as if Adams was performing some sort of contractual obligation, which based on the Wikipedia article on the book, he was.

More of a return to form is Mostly Harmless, the last Hitchhikers book written by Douglas Adams before his premature demise. Arthur Dent is back in space, at least for a little bit before he lands on a backwater planet to live out his life in obscurity until events again intrude.

Ford Prefect in a parallel plotline is up to his old tricks and doing so hilariously. And in between are various other characters, old and new and alternate. Conspicuous in his absence except by reference is Zaphod Beeblebrox who generated much of the frantic pace of the earlier books. The new character, Arthur’s daughter is never quite able to overcome her role as a plot Macguffin to become fully realized.

There is a lot of philosophical noodling going on under the hood here about reality and destiny and free will and the nature of existence but it goes largely unexplored. There are a lot of missed opportunities to get deeper but these quickly get short shrift.

Having finally finished the entire trilogy and insisting on never reading the sixth volume written by Eoin Colfer gives the chance to muse on the series as a whole. What becomes clear is that the canonical version of the series must be the radio series. The first two books which are clearly the best have the strongest connection to the source material. The latter three books are all interesting in their own right but none fulfil the promise or purpose of the first two. Many sequels are judged harshly as just being rehashes of the original story, but in these cases, the latter Hitchhiker books just seem to have too big of shoes to fill.

Deja View

2011-06-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

Part of the joy of travel for me is taking photos of the places I go. I realize that the world really doesn't need any more shots of the Eiffel Tower and that mine stands no chance of being better in any discernible way from what professional photographers with far better equipment than I have done.

But there is still an air of creativity I like to linger on to. My shots may not be original but they are original to me.

An artist named Corrine Vionnet has turned other people's photos into art. She has rummaged through photobanks like Flickr and collaged pictures of world landmarks in a unique way. She superimposes hundreds of photos over each other. The results are hazy dreamlike montages. She takes concrete images and turns them into impressionistic memories.

A series of 23 of her images can be found here. I haven't been to every place in her gallery but I was shocked with how many I have. And how do my photos stack up against the collective soul of the photo taking public? Here are some examples:

We nearly missed the Brandenburg Gate on our visit to Germany last summer. Our tour guide had some last minute disruptions and asked us what we still wanted to see. We ended up taking a nice leisurely stroll along the path of the former Wall to arrive at the gate. It was the day of a World Cup match and the locals were streaming to an outdoor festival with video screens. The streets were alive with a united Berlin and I cannot imagine events that would force a scar down the center of such a beautiful city for so long.

The Colosseum in Rome is an amazing contradiction because of both how much of it is left and how much is gone. I was amazed to learn that after the fall of Rome, the ancient monuments of the city were used as an open air quarry for centuries. many of the gorgeous Christian churches have this ancient center of lavish entertainment in their roots.

There is no more iconic geological formation representing the American West than the Mittens in Monument Valley. But I imagine only the hardest core of fans of old westerns know where they are. Part of my trip last year to Arizona was planned to deliberately brush into Utah to see this area. The local Navajo tribes have done a wonderful job of making this remote area accessible while still letting its natural grandeur speak for itself.

Tienanmen Square is fraught with symbolism, both for Chinese Communists who are the current stewards to this enormous palace in the center of what was once the largest city on Earth as well as the freedom advocating protesters who have used this center to bring attention to their own struggle. Now the plaza is regularly patrolled for demonstrations, but unrest may someday return.

Every time I see the Golden Gate Bridge I marvel at how such a utilitarian piece of engineering can blend in so well with the surrounding natural beauty. The sheer challenge of such a structure demands awe and appreciation.

London has so many iconic views, but perhaps Big Ben is the best emblem of a Victorian sense of monumentalism and lavishness of detail which may never return.

Even older than the ruins of Rome or the pyramids of Egypt is Stonehenge which shows that our combined eagerness to build things and to look at the heavens predates the written history to explain what fascinates us so.

And finally, the Eiffel Tower is perhaps the most iconic structure in the world. There is a certain majesty which demands attention.

I guess my humble takes pale against the weight of thousands of others. But these photos are my memories of what I have found graceful and beautiful And if others have taken inspiration of the same views from the same locales so be it.

Easiest 'Where Is Yellojkt Now?' Ever

2011-06-23T01:34:00.001-04:00

Not to be too arch or beat around the bush, but I went to a baseball game tonight. Can you guess where?

Bourbon Trail Day 2

2011-06-21T21:23:00.010-04:00

The second day of my Bourbon Trail Tour in Kentucky back in April had a very ambitious itinerary. We had stayed in a bed and breakfast in Lexington because that was very close to the three distilleries seen on Day One as well as Woodford Reserve which we couldn't do on Sunday.

From there we had to dash over to Bardstown and finally south to Loretto before heading up to Louisville for the night. It was a lot of driving which kept the tasting to a minimum, but here is what I remember from the day:

Distillery	Woodford Reserve	Heaven Hill	Makers Mark
Giant Conglomerate Which Actually Owns The Distillery	Brown-Forman Corporation, the same people who own the much larger Jack Daniels in Tennessee, which is also technically a bourbon but sold as Tennessee Whiskey.	Private family owned business which brands more than a dozen different bourbons including Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Henry McKenna	Fortune Brands which among many, many other liquors owns the much bigger bourbon brewer Jim Beam.
Photo Of Me Doing Something Silly
Grounds	In a heavily wooded hilly area deep, deep into horse territory, Woodford Reserve is a boutique small batch distillery specializing in the rustic traditions. While the distillery was rebuilt on the inside in 1993, the building dates to 1838 and they look it.	Heaven Hill is large sprawling area filled with storage rickhouses on a breezy hilltop. The grounds are decorated with whimsical sculptures made from bourbon barrels.	Maker's Mark is way, way out of the way. It's over 45 minutes from Heaven Hill and it's all narrow country roads. The site was built as a tourist destination and it shows. All the buildings have a distinctive black and red decor.
Pre-Tour Movie	Fifteen minute movie emphasizing the age of the distillery and the old-fashioned techniques used.	We missed the movie so we could catch a tour that was just starting, but by now they were all looking the same.	They dispense with the movie, instead the original family house has been converted to a museum with all sorts of interactive exhibits.
Production Area Tour Bourbon is made by malting and then distilling a mixture of grains which must be at least 50% corn. The distilling process also has odd arcane rules.	The only tour to charge money, it costs $5 to take the standard tour. The production area is all vintage style equipment including cedar fermenters and pot stills.	After a massive fire in 1996 which destroyed the distillery and several warehouses to the point the nearby river caught on fire, production was moved into Louisville, so the actual distillery can't be toured.	The production area is very polished with lots of copper and brass but they don't let you get close to much except the giant fermenting vats.
Storage The other crucial definitive aspect of bourbon is that it MUST be barrel aged in virgin white oak for at least four years.	As a small batch distillery, they have only one storage warehouse and it is just as vintage as the rest of site. The warehouse is just as old as the distillery and the rails they use to move the barrels between the two are very cool.	The landscape is littered with warehouses and the smell of the "angels' share" is overwhelming. Since the tour basically consists of just the warehouse it is very detailed with examples of the ramps and lifts that used to be used to move and rotate the barrels until modern machinery took over.	Most of Makers Mark is stored in off-site warehouses that litter the road as you drive up but they do have one display warehouse with a lot of tools and paraphernalia on display.
Bottling and Labeling Bourbons would all just be fancy brown booze if there weren't cool labels and improbable stories about the founders for the fancy shaped bottles.	They were upgrading the equipment when we took the tour so it was closed but on a previous visit I had seen them empty a barrel into the trough for the small batch mixing.	While bottling and labeling are done on site, it is not part of the tour.	Bottling is done on site but was not in production the day we were there so they skipped it.
Tasting There is no reason to go to a distillery if you aren't going to get to sample the goods.	Since they really only have one brand, the sample is just one shot of the bourbon. That's pretty chintzy for a five dollar tour. They do have ice to add and bourbon balls to sample. The gift shop also has a sandwich bar where you can buy picnic supplies to take or eat on the grounds. Surprisingly it was one of the few places which sold food. It seems the local laws often don't allow that.	The tasting room seats about two dozen people and is in the shape of an enormous barrel. The tasting consists of two premium bourbons including an 18-year-old Elijah Craig which was the second best bourbon we had. The tour guide gives a very detailed and entertaining talk about the enjoyment of a fine sipping bourbon. It really evokes the genteel snobbery of bourbon drinking.	The tasting room is one corner of the gift shop with a large bar and seating area. Kids (and there were a surprising number of them on our tour) are kept across the room. They sample Makers Mark and the specially flavored Makers 46. Since it was near Derby time they also gave a shot of their mint julep flavored special edition which was awful.
Gift Shop	As the official bourbon of the Kentucky Derby, they had all sorts of Derby related special edition bottles. They will also emboss or engrave bottles for you. Most of the accessories for sale were very high end.	The gift shop is right outside the tasting room and is Disneyesque in its displays and merchandise. They had a very wide array of the brands they sell including some very expensive special batches. Also a lot of different bourbon flavored foods and sauces.	Lots of branded merchandise. Since their 'mark' is the wax sealed top, they have a special area where you can wax your own bottle (and that's not meant to sound dirty) but we didn't see anybody doing it.
Tour Highlights There is a lot of repetition to the shpiels and patters from each tour, but they each do a good job getting across what is unique about their brands approach to making a product which is rather tightly defined.	The most vintage of the distilleries, if not really the oldest, it gives a good feel for the original methods and systems used. Definitely the most picturesque production area. They even have a cat who has the run of the plant.	While the warehouse is very generic, the tour talk was one of the better ones and the tasting talk really helps you appreciate fine bourbons.	The place is out of the way but worth the extra drive just for the overall picturesqueness. Personally I use Makers Mark as the dividing line between mixing bourbons and sipping bourbons. It's upscale but not wildly pretentious.
More Photos	Woodford Reserve	Heaven Hill	Makers Mark

A business junket which included a tour of Woodford Reserve was what inspired me to take the entire bourbon trail and if you can only visit one distillery, this would be the one to go to. But each of the others has its own merits as well. I wish Heaven Hill had more to their tour because the knowledge of the guides and the tasting experience was the best of all the stops. This is all getting me thirsty.

Women of AfterMaximEllen

2011-06-12T18:33:00.002-04:00

You would not think the readers of Maxim magazine, typically hormonally flush and barely literate young men, and of AfterEllen.com, a lesbian entertainment site, have much in common but they do. They both appreciate incredibly hawt women. Each annually publishes a list of the hottest 100 women in the world.

The Maxim list typically includes a mix of movie and television stars as well as a bevy of models the normal person would not be familiar with unless they kept scrupulous records involving the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

AfterEllen's list tends to be more eclectic. The typical Maxim reader is not going to get that worked up over Rachel Maddow (#22) or the lesbian twin sister folk-rock duo Tegan and Sara (#12 and #11 respectively. The do have the courtesy of noting the 28 or so women on the list which are officially 'out' as bisexual or lesbian so readers know when to get their hopes up. Although hope can spring eternal.

So as a service to the lesbian-friendly but testosterone laden community I have painstakingly combed both lists and compiled all the overlaps between the two. In order to rank them I have added their place on the Maxim list with the AfterEllen count to come up with the PanSexualHotnessQuotient (PSHQ). So without further ado here are the hottest women regardless of the equipment you are wearing.

Rank	Hottie	Maxim	AfterEllen
16	Zoe Saldana	37	93
15	Sofia Vergara	29	82
14	Emma Stone	42	68
13	Lindsay Lohan	38	67
12	Emma Watson	69	33
11	Anna Paquin	68	23
10	Scarlett Johansson	14	71
9	Megan Fox	17	50
8	Evan Rachel Wood	31	36
7	Jordana Brewster	11	49
6	Sarah Shahi	24	28
5	Naya Rivera	43	1
4	Natalie Portman	8	35
3	Lea Michele	28	10
2	Mila Kunis	5	19
1	Olivia Wilde	16	5

So Olivia Wilde is the woman that cranks everybody crank. Just in case the name does not mean anything to you, here she is in her best known movie role as Hot Tron Girl Who Lounges Sexily On A Sofa.

So I will be looking for more from her in the future. Or perhaps looking for less.

The Women Of Weiner

2011-06-02T10:07:00.034-04:00

There are many angles to the latest news scandal about how Congressman Andrew Weiner allegedly sent a college co-ed a photo of his semi-turgid member underneath his underwear. Now the actual origin and vector of that photo will be Zaprudered for weeks to come, but one interesting point was made by recent college co-ed and Washington Post humor blogger Alexandra Petri about the composition of Rep. Weiner's twitter followees.

And of the 200 people @RepWeiner follows on Twitter, a surprising number (well, more than zero, at any rate) do seem to be what might be termed nubile out-of-state houris.

Deciding to not take her word for it, I conducted my own independent investigation. Here is a smorgasbord of the people Weiner finds interesting.

Representative Capps is a coworker and colleague. Nothing out of line here.

Another fellow congresscritter. Arguably cuter. And single.

A CNN anchor. A guy has to stay informed. Who cares if she's a newsbabe? It's the quality of the reporting that counts, right?

An up-and-coming journalist. Makes sense to have some friends in the Fourth Estate.

A New Yorker. Possibly a constituent. You have to keep up with the common people.

I gotta dispute the 'body of a trucker' description. She seems pretty cute and at least she's a New Yorker.

Another New Yorker. Who cares if she's in the fashion industry and blazing hott?

A woman with a strong opinion on an important issue.

Another political junkie. One who wears really cute hats.

A lot of enthusiasm, but it seems to be mostly for the internet start-up she's associated with as evidence by this tweet elliptically referencing the current kerfuffle:

I'm pretty sure I only have room for one Brooklyn Weiner in my life...@DoSomething CTO George Weiner. Follow him @GeorgecaWeiner #15minutes

Now we are moving into some dangerous territory. There is no obvious connection to politics or New York but she does rock the brainy glasses.

At least we are back to politics. Incidentally, Lady Fox Fyre's twitter feed is invite-only and she only has 30 followers, so our congressman is in pretty select company.

A college student from Pennsylvania. Tsk, tsk, these are the sort of follows that get you a reputation, Andrew. Ms DeVinney does have this to say:

I normally TRY not to generalize but anyone who thinks Weiner sent a picture from his TWITTER is an idiot. GOP care about something real.

At least she is a college professor but there is a little bit of a come hither tone in the profile.

A cutie with this to say as well:

Poverty, education, healthcare, corporate greed, & Snooki's car accident. Seriously, there are way more important things to report about.

Another invite-only feed, but once you have 'kitten' and 'X' in your handle, there some innuendo going on.

An anonymous woman with no profile photo but a twitter handle that is brainy and sexy.

When it comes to suggestive handles and profile photos, it doesn't get more risque that this.

And once you have hearts and a call-out to Anaïs Nin in your profile description, a line has been crossed.

Perhaps I'm following the wrong track. Maybe the issue shouldn't be who Weiner would like to tweet his wiener to, but who would appreciate such a tweet.

Weiner and Stewart are actual friends so it seems odd that he follows the gay parody twitter feed rather than the real thing.

Not sayin' a thing.

If you are tweeting crotch shots as a constituent service, this would be the place to send it.

Only because when you are discussing Weiner, there is a legal obligation to make a Boehner joke as well.

From this rather prejudiced and selectively organized sub-list feel free to draw your own conclusions. But, please, please, please, do not stalk these otherwise innocent bystanders and by all means don't try to frame any outspoken congressmen by faking a junk shot and framing them as the recipient.

Obama Watches Glee

2011-05-04T11:05:00.006-04:00

This photo:

Made me have this reaction:

Which raises another important question, since Obama is a government employee, does he have to contribute to the White House coffee fund?

Finally, do not skip the funniest 'Situation' Room meme mash-up ever. Make sure to scroll through them all.

BooksFirst - February-April 2011

2011-05-01T21:19:00.010-04:00

Books Bought
A Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea by Joel Achenbach
Bossypants by Tina Fey (audiobook)
American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson (audiobook)
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickesn (audiobook)

Books Read
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Troll Bridge by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
A Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea by Joel Achenbach
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Final Crisis by Grant Morrison

Books Heard
Bossypants by Tina Fey
American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson

As a follow-up to my annual Just Read More Novels Month, I gave myself the challenge to read all of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in less than one month, and that month happened to be February. I did make the challenge, but only just barely. The novel is nearly 1,000 pages long and is a sweeping science fiction world with tons of new jargon and concepts. But I did make it and I'm glad that I did.

The central conceit of the alternate world where Anathem is set is that science and math and many other forms of learning are restricted to monastic orders. They have a complicated hierarchy based on how extreme their isolation from general civilization is. But then inexplicable events start happening and the order of the world that had kept civilization from self-destruction for three thousand years begin breaking down.

The first hundred pages of the book are tough slogging as the reader has to piece together the social structure and the relationships of the characters. And then the roller coaster ride begins. Each chapter unfolds a little more and an epic journey begins. This is classic world-buidling science fiction at its best. The only rough point is that there is a poorly handled romance that runs beneath the main plot line. These monastic scientists seem to not do well with the ladies despite their co-ed enclaves.

Other than that, everything in this world ties together. It is tightly plotted so that events and casual conversations tie into events later in the book. There is also a great deal of philosophical noodling going on. It helps to know enough to figure out who the Anathem world analogues are to our philosophies and philosophers, but it's not entirely necessary. Just be prepared to have your thoughts provoked on this wild ride.

As a palate cleanser I picked up Troll Bridge a "young adult" novel which looked like a modern update on the Three Billy Goats Gruff story. I love that story. I used to re-enact the story with gummi-bears with the troll (me) eating lots of gummi-goats.

In this version of the story, the goats have been replace by a boy band suspiciously similar to the Jonas Brothers. While this is a clever concept, it's never really exploited well. Instead the plot riffs on some other much less known fairy tale about dairy princesses and and deals with trolls.

Jane Yolen is a well known children's author and Adam Stemple is her musician son. While I assume his role is to add lyrics for the band in the book, the overall effect is a disjointed mess. I just wanted to hear some clip-clopping across the bridge and I end up with fiddle playing evil foxes and trolls stupid even by troll standards.

Joel Achenbach is a star reporter at the Washington Post, and while he doesn't like me saying so, he's their best reporter who has never won a Pulitzer. And in a world where Gene Weingarten has two that is a major oversight.

One of his many beats is natural disasters of all kinds. He has written for National Geographic about the Yellowstone supervolcano caldera and covered Hurrican Ike for WaPo from Galveston. He spent much of last spring and summer (with Stephen Mufson and others) covering the disaster which was the BP Macondo Oil Spill. For months he translated the lingo and the technology of the oil well drilling business for all of us wanting context and information.

He has leveraged his research into a book which in his glorious trademarked understated style is titled A Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea. Rather than delve into the minutia of the crisis, he gives a broader big picture of the players and the forces at work. After the initial tour de force you-are-there account of what actually happened that fateful night, he focuses on the interplay between BP and the government. While both parties wanted the oil well capped, there was a lot of tension between the groups. Achenbach has captured the interplay between the dirty fingered roughnecks of the oil industry and the ivy tower Whiz Kids of the Obama administration riding herd on them.

One of my obsessions during this crisis was the ongoing circus sideshow about how much oil was actually flowing. BP had a clear fiscal interest in either never finding out or doing there best to minimize the estimate. Portions of the book do go into the wrangling over how and what was released to the public.

The narrative has a crisp fast-paced tone. Achenbach lucidly tells a polemic-free tale of people banding together to solve a crisis which had many fathers. Perhaps the one weakness of the book is that it eschews finger-pointing and blame-placing. And maybe it truly is too early to resolve those issues. But the book is a good clarion call about how we need to have better responses in place so that future crises such as the post-tsunami nuclear event in Japan can be more effectively dealt with.

I recently watched the film version of Ghost World costarring a young Scarlett Johansson as a bored teenager dealing with the bleakness of modern existence. To get a better feel for the story, I read the collected graphic stories the movie was based on.

The movie has a stronger narrative arc than the comics which have a bleaker angstier feel. The pages just drip with disaffected ennui. The stark black and white graphics are particularly good at evoking a moody sterility.

Most surprising to me was how few Ghost World stories there are. The actual stories don't even take up half of the super-sized Special Edition which I read. The remainder is extra material as well as the movie shooting script which I did not read. Clearly the characters of Enid and Rebecca resonate and feel very real.

For quite a while the comic book universes have been goosing sales with epic multi-issue Event storylines where everything as you know it is overturned. One of the most recent of these in the DC universe was called Final Crisis, which I suspect is a little disingenuous since crises are part of their stock in trade.

Once again an evil force threatens to destroy multiple universes and only the combined might of Every Hero Ever can stop it. Part of the fun of these over-the-top exercises is playing trivia in trying to identify all the odd cameos. And this one meets that and more. For example, Black Lightning who I had never heard of gets nearly a whole issue to himself. Part of the fun is trying to figure out if the more obscure characters are just forgotten trivia items or ones invented solely for this story.

For an epic storyline to succeed it has to wreck major havoc and changes which won't be retconned out the next issue. In the case of Final Crisis, the major change seems to be the return of the Barry Allen Flash who met his end in the granddaddy epic story Crisis on Infinite Earths about thirty years ago.

Other than than that the rest of the seven issues seem to just be an exercise in excess. Once the universe has been nearly destroyed dozens of times earlier, it's just hard to work ups some suspense over yet another Final Crisis.

Perhaps the best way to enjoy a book by a comedian is to listen to the unabridged audiobook by the author and there is no better example of this than Bossypants by Tina Fey. While the words are hilarious, her inflection adds miles. Roughly autobiographical, it details her rise from summer drama camp fag hag to the star, writer, and creator of the most inventive sitcom on television.

Along the way she peppers the story with sidebar stories and digressions which all seem to be about the hurdles women still have to face in a post-feminist working environment. This quiet undertone of rage permeates the book. She talks about her time with Amy Poehler on the Second City tour bus and the disgusting sanitary habits of the Saturday Night Live male writers.

The book is perhaps a little guarded. There is as much she leaves out as she puts in. In some cases, such as the childhood attack which left her permanently scarred, she says she won't talk about. Other events she just doesn't mention at all like cutting Rachel Dratch from the cast of 30 Rock.

It's a rollicking hilarious book and well worth listening to in her own words.

Another hilarious comedian with a memoir is Craig Ferguson, the Scotland born and recently naturalized host of The Late Late Show. Contrary to Tina Fey, there seems to be nothing Ferguson is not willing to air. He narrates every drunken binge, bad acid trip, and ugly relationship break-up he ever had. At some point the tales of his bad behavior become a little tedious, but that all makes his decades of sobriety all the more amazing.

The rough narrative is about his youth in Glasgow as an aspiring punk rocker and the transition to stand-up comedy which leads to his becoming a minor star in Great Britain before breaking into the US market as the foppish jerk on the Drew Carey Show. The book is alternately funny and maudlin. As a writer, Ferguson is overly fond of the adjectives 'farty' and 'wee', but I will attribute that to his Scottish background.

As the title American On Purpose attests, the undercurrent of his book is his long-abiding and deep love for all this American. Throughout he talks about his love of our freedom and opportunity. After all, in a country where Craig Ferguson can become a late night talk show host, anything is possible.

Windshield Replacement Reading List

2011-04-22T09:35:00.005-04:00

For reasons too complicated to explain, I find myself in the Fort Wayne, Indiana branch of a major autoglass replacement chain. Here are my reading choices:

Guns and Ammo - April 2010
American Rifleman - 5 issues, July 2009 through January 2010
Handy - 3 issues, Aug/Sept 2009 through Dec 2009/Jan 2010
Car and Driver - April 2011
Family Circle - August 2008
Woman's Day - March 2009
Fort Wayne Living - Nov 2010-Jan 2011
Fort Wayne Business People - 2 issues, February and March 2011
Planning Your Wedding, 2011 supplement to Fort Wayne Business People

Bourbon Trail Day One

2011-04-18T21:55:00.006-04:00

For my spring break vacation this year I decided to head towards Kentucky and learn all I could about bourbon as I hit as many distilleries as I could find and talk my wife into enduring. Since I knew they would all blend together like a fine whiskey I knew I has to post some notes while I still had distinct memories.

Distillery	Buffalo Trace	Wild Turkey	Four Roses
Giant Conglomerate Which Actually Owns The Distillery	Sazerac Company A privately-held and family-operated alcoholic beverages company with headquarters in New Orleans	Campari	Kirin Brewery Company of Japan They kept telling us that Four Roses is the top brand of bourbon in Japan
Photo Of Me Doing Something Silly
Grounds	Gorgeous rolling pastures on the way in to a quaint but kinda crowded working area. It's a little surprising how free visitors are to wander around.	A huge complex sprawling all over the landscape. The area is so big that a tour van is needed to get around to the different areas.	Done is Spanish Mission style, the building look less like an industrial plant than a overly busy Mexican style resort.
Pre-Tour Movie	Ten minutes going over the distilling process in a theater room decorated with old-timey equipment.	A five minute show in a stuffy gallery overlooking the mash pots featuring the ancient brewmaster and his son who has been waiting for dad to keel over for 30 years so he could get a promotion.	Fifteen minute film in the tasting area which was surprisingly informative even after two previous distillery tours.
Production Area Tour Bourbon is made by malting and then distilling a mixture of grains which must be at least 50% corn. The distilling process also has odd arcane rules.	None. To see the production area, you have to take the Hard Hat Tour which requires reservations days to weeks in advance.	Wild Turkey has just built a brand-new shiny state of the art building with double the capacity of its old plant. I mean brand-new. They were still paving the roads to it and painting the stair railings. Most everything is looked at through windows but they do let you up close to the fermenters to stare in.	The most up close and personal tour. The aging equipment is front and center and you can reach out and touch nearly everything.
Storage The other crucial definitive aspect of bourbon is that it MUST be barrel aged in virgin white oak for at least four years.	Since they don't let you see the production you linger a long time in the warehouse which is very interesting in its own right. The rows and rows of barrels are mind boggling and its fun reading the dates and labels on all the barrels.	The Wild Turkey warehouses dot the landscape like 2001 monoliths. The one you tour goes back to the 1880s and smells like it too. It overlooks the recently abandoned original factory so it is also a great photo op.	The bourbon is barreled, aged, and bottled at a different site, but they do have photos of their single story warehouses which they claim result in more consistent flavors than the seven-story behomoths of their competitors, which oddly have two warehouses on Four Roses grounds.
Bottling and Labeling Bourbons would all just be fancy brown booze if there weren't cool labels and improbable stories about the founders for the fancy shaped bottles.	You are allowed to wander up and down the filling station line while about a dozen employees process and fill the small batch specialty bottles. They are friendly and fun. While we were there they spilled about half a barrel of aged bourbon all over the floor.	All the bottling is done at the main corporate bottling plant in Arkansas. You can see the giant tanker trucks leaving the site.	Also done off-site. But from a branding perspective there are roses everywhere.
Tasting There is no reason to go to a distillery if you aren't going to get to sample the goods.	They let you taste the "white dog" or unaged undiluted moonshine before it becomes sellable bourbon. They then let you taste a small batch and a single barrel variety but not the super-aged expensive stuff. They also have a bourbon cream which makes Baileys taste like haf-and-half.	They let you try any two of six flavors. My wife and I mixed and matched to get four total. The most interesting was the super-sweet American Honey style.	Four Roses only sells three varieties, an 80 proof blended, a 90 proof small batch, and a 100 proof single barrel. You get to taste all three and the pours are generous. For four bucks you can keep the tasting glass.
Gift Shop	They had buffaloes on everything imaginable and a few things unimaginable. A lot of trinkets and geegaws and even food, but surprisingly little booze. We got a bottle of the bourbon cream since that isn't sold nationally yet and a case of bourbon jam for gifts.	The gift shop tour center is an old-fashioned building all off on its own with lots of tee shirts edging towards the trashy side. For gifts I got two sets of three packs featuring their premium brands.	Four Roses had the classiest selection of accessories and books. The small bottles of the the Small Batch were a little pricey but nice.
Tour Highlights There is a lot of repetition to the shpiels and patters from each tour, but they each do a good job getting across what is unique about their brands approach to making a product which is rather tightly defined.	As a mid-sized distillery this had a nice mix of folksiness and scale. They people were all super-friendly, but the Hard Hat Tour really needs to be less hard to get.	The size of this operation is stunning. It is a huge operation closer to an oil refinery than a moonshiner's still. And the contrast between the brand new factory and the rickety old warehouses is intriguing.	For getting an up-close look at the process this plant can't be beat. Not only is this the most intimate tour, the equipment has a great patina to it.

You can really learn all you ever need to know about bourbon and any one of these tours but each had a cool unique aspect which made glad I went to each one. Plus the samples are always nice.

BooksFirst - January 2011

2011-02-26T20:16:00.009-05:00

Books Bought
The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Kindle)
The Complete Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (Kindle)
Penrod by Booth Tarkington (Kindle)
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (Kindle)
Tears Of A Clown by Dana Milbank

Books Read
Penrod by Booth Tarkington
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
Zero History by William Gibson
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Life, The Universe And Everything by Douglas Adams

Books Heard
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Comments

To get National Just Read More Novels Month off to a brisk start I quickly read Penrod, a short novel by Booth Tarkington that I had bought for the Kindle because Roger Ebert tweeted that it was only 99 cents, presumably because the book is in the public domain. Penrod Schofield is the titular boy who has a series of adventures from about a century ago. Splitting the historical space between Tom Sawyer and the Our Gang movies, this is the small town America that everybody always gets so nostalgic for.

The adventures which are fairly episodic with no real narrative arc do overlap and have recurring characters. The hijinks are humorous and only center around Penrod trying to pull something off on somebody. He scams his way out of a dance class recital. He tricks the town dandy into drinking an awful concoction. He third wheels the wooing of his sister's suitor only to have the same happen to him by the younger brother of the girl he is sweet on.

Also indicative of times in which the tales are set, there is some casual racism which would be deemed offensive by today's standards. But the two neighbor African-American kids hold their own and the primary antagonists in the stories are class-based, not ethnic. There is some bullying which is the closest the stories get to something of contemporary concern. Still, the stories are sweet without being cloying and an interesting window into the mores of the past.

I am a huge fan of Carl Hiaasen and deliberately saved up Star Island for NaJuReMoNoMo. With twelve novels and three 'young adult' books under his belt, Hiaasen is the reigning master of the whacky-Florida genre which he practically invented. Star Island casts its sights a little wider with the main character being the publicity double of a troubled singing starlet. This allows Hiaasen to ridicule the celebrity industrial complex as well as the usual excesses of South Florida.

Cherry Pye is a talentless barely legal singer whose primary occupations are scoring guys and scoring drugs, often simultaneously. Her Dina Lohan-ish mother in deep denial about her daughter's destructive behavior is self-aware enough to hire Ann DeLusia to make public appearances when Cherry can't. When a sleazy-by-even-paparazzi-standards photographer decides to snatch Ms Pye and gets Ann by mistake the usual Hiaasen hilarity ensues.

Part of the problem with the story is that it is impossible to outflank Hollywood on the crazy side. Cherry Pye who is an unholy amalgam of Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan doesn't even approach some of the better known real-life rocketing off the rails actual celebrities habitually indulge in.

And it wouldn't be Hiaasen if there weren't whacky minor characters. Perhaps indicating how often he has gone to the well, The Former Governor Known As Skink shows up suspiciously conveniently a few too many times. A bodyguard with a weedwhacker prothesis seems like a refugee from a far grittier Elmore Leonard novel.

And despite the general low intellectual level of all the characters, even the smart ones keep doing ridiculously stupid things just to keep the plot churning along. The book is far from bad, but like Cherry Pye's stage act, at points Hiaasen seems to just be going through the motions.

My other must-read this month was the third installment in William Gibson's Bigend saga, Zero History. The history in this case being that of Milgram, a character from Spook Country (reviewed here). Also returning is Hollis Henry, the punk rock frontwoman turned writer. The macguffin in this novel is a brand of clothing so cool you have to be invited to be allowed to wear it.

Set mostly in London with side excursions to Paris, the novel follows the trail of trendsetters and fashion forward hipsters. As with most Gibson novels, the heroes are up against forces they can barely even recognize let alone deal with. While that adds to the suspense of the novel, the Big Picture never gets revealed to the end. And even then it's a little tough to fathom who did what to whom and why.

But that is hardly the point. Gibson is a master of imagery and he doesn't fail to impress here. Like Bigend's suit which is too blue to view on a computer, Gibson's prose is too poetic to describe. There is a mood that pervades the book.

I have seen just about every version of a Jane Austen novel filmed in the last quarter century, but inexplicably I have only read Pride and Prejudice. To remedy the situation, I dove into the similarly alliterative Sense and Sensibility. While not as famous as its sibling, the tale of the Dashwood girls as they make their way in society is perhaps more encompassing of the times. Set about a hundred years before Penrod, the world of English society seems so much more foreign. The culture of manners and thinly veiled civility is astoundingly different from contemporary society.

The enduring appeal of Austen owes as much to her rapier wit as it does to the romantic storylines. The rationalizations John Dashwood must engage to pauperize his step-mother and half-sisters viciously funny. And the various matrons who serve as the gatekeepers to society are always delightfully daffy. While the romantic outcomes are not hard to discern to even those who haven't seen several film versions, the twists and setback are ever so entertaining.

It has been over twenty five years since I read Pride and Prejudice and I am resolved to pick up the pace so I can complete the Austen oeuvre in less than a century.

I have been flying far more briskly through a more modern quintet of books, having finally completed Life, The Universe and Everything, the third novel in the rather inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. (See my earlier reviews of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe here.) The forward of the book gives some history of the series and casually inserts that this volume is the one with no connection to previous radio or television versions and it shows. And not to its favor.

Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect (who I now realize is a pun completely lost on my American model) and Zaphod Beeblebrox once again save the universe, this time against the robots of the planet Krikket. And while I assume that greater familiarity with the peculiarly British sport of cricket would make the humour funnier, it's not an effort I'm willing to endure.

The plot is flimsy and arbitrary even by Hitchhiker's Guide standards and the enduring geek culture touchstones are few and far between. I invested in the Kindle version of the complete series because the cost was less than the three book I still had to read purchased separately. Let's hope that wasn't money wasted.

I am a big fan of Larry Niven and less so of his frequent collaborator Jerry Pournelle. I saw the both of them a few years ago at Balticon and watching them in person revealed a lot about how their personalities mesh in their writing style. Niven is the Idea man and Pournelle is the story guy. However, for the most part, I don't know who did what for Inferno, their update on Dante's trip through Hell.

In this version, cynical agnostic science fiction writer Allen Carpentier awakes from a premature accidental death to be met by his guide through the underworld. The conceit of the book is that Allen keeps trying to interpret the theology of Dante through the prism of science fiction tropes.

And like how Dante populated his Hell with the people he hated in real life, Niven and Pournelle take the time to take a few potshots as well. While not named, Kurt Vonnegut is abused for his inventing of satiric religions as well as for his refusal to embrace his reputation as a science fiction writer. In Vonnegut's defense, he famously said that the problem with being put in a drawer marked 'science fiction' is that so many critics mistake it for a urinal.

Vonnegut at least gets off easier than L. Ron Hubbard who is encased in a much deeper circle. Published in 1976, some of the politics and science discussed in the trek has not traveled well. The Cold War harangues about missile defenses seem quaint now, although to their credit, a space shuttle disaster episode was prescient.

The theology, however, is timeless and did pique my curiosity about the original, just not enough to make me want to read it.

Another audiobook I picked mostly for its ability to be listened to in a single business trip was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Told in the first person through a teenager who is clearly on the deeper end of the Autism Spectrum (although that word is never used in the book), Christopher is a high-functioning math and science savant with negligible social skills. When he stumbles across the murdered dog of his neighbor who accuses him of doing it, he seeks to find the real killer.

The real purpose is to show him interacting with his neighbors and teachers as well as dealing with the loss of his mother from two years earlier. What he finds in his inquiry pushes him well out of his comfort zone both physically and emotionally. While not wholly medically accurate, the writing style is a tour de force with a peculiarly precise narrative style full of idiosyncratic repetitions and phrasings. The character's understanding of math and science seems very accurate and illuminates much of his thinking and acting.

Guess The Golden Globes

2011-01-17T06:56:00.011-05:00

I've been snickering at the phrase 'Golden Globes' since Drew Barrymore wore this dress way back in 2006. Last year I featured Mariah Carey and Christina Hendricks. But this year the amount of pulchritude on parade defied definition. So to see how many of you keep your eyes on the prize, I have developed the Golden Globes Quiz. Just match the celebrity with her hooters and you can declare yourself the master of the red carpet. Maybe next year I will do quiz where you have to guess the celeb by the size of their shoes. Naaah.

1. Halle Berry	a.
2. January Jones	b.
3. Sofia Vergara	c.
4. Christina Aguliera	d.
5. Eva Longoria	e.

And just to double down on the silliness of this post, this year we also have the Baby Bump Division. Match these preggers celebs with their belly.

6. Natalie Portman	f.
7. Jane Krakowski	g.

Just leave your guesses in comments or give your own fashion advice.

BooksFirst - November December 2010

2011-01-02T21:21:00.000-05:00

Books Bought
40: A Doonesbury Retrospective by Garry Trudeau
The Accidental Billionaire by Ben Mezrich
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

Books Read
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
Googled by Ken Auletta
Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Books Heard
At Home by Bill Bryson
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk

Comments

Back in October, I saw The Social Network, the movie about Time Magazine Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg. The movie is based fairly faithfully on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezerich, the author of Bringing Down the House, a book I had previously enjoyed. Since the screenplay was by Aaron Sorkin, I also wanted to see what he brought to the screen which wasn't in the book. Based on just the plot, the two stories cover most of the same timeline and events although sometimes in different order. In particular, the book is far more narratively linear than the movie. Also, the invented dialog is more explicitly noted in the book and lacks those Sorkin oratorical flourishes.

The basic theme is still intact. Zuckerberg is a driven brilliant Harvard undergrad who sees the outgrowth of some of his programming pranks as being The Next Big Thing. Along the way, he crosses the likes of the Winklevoss twins, a pair of preternaturally preening wealthy and connected scullers who come off as not too bright and easily duped. Their conflict with Zuckerberg highlights that even in the rarified air of Harvard, there are hierarchies and cliques.

Another major character is Eduardo Saverin who provided initial funding for Facebook but got eased out in favor of Napster cofounder Sean Parker. Saverin was a major source for the book, but he is not portrayed completely sympathetically. He was clearly far less dedicated to Facebook in its important gestation period than Zuckerberg as well as Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, who are essentially ignored in this telling of the Facebook origin story.

The book is fast-paced and breezy even if does take a lot of short-cuts with the story and relies perhaps a little too much on reconstructed events. But it is still a thrilling read full of fascinating details about the personalities that built the world's most popular website.

A far more journalistic approach is taken in The Facebook Effect. David Kirkpatrick had a ton of access to Facebook and its employees and it shows. The first three chapters cover the same territory as Accidental Billionaires. Despite the shorter length of this section, it has a greater level of detail and covers the events in slightly greater verisimilitude. Reading both books back to back causes some mental whiplash as the same incidents are told slightly different ways.

The middle section of the book covers the phenomenal growth of Facebook and the growing pains of the website. Each change in the interface created its own problems and controversies. But as Kirkpatrick explains, after initial protests, users accept them and go back to mindlessly updating their statuses. The book also details the financial deals that financed the rapid expansion and how Zuckerberg fought to maintain as much control as possible. During all this the site remains very much the product of its founder. His views on how and what a social network should be drive the company.

Where the books fails is when it tries to paint the bigger picture. While privacy issues are discussed, they tend to get brushed off. And while there is a lot made of the cultural revolution Facebook is causing, it all seems a little glib and shallow. There is a cheerleader aspect to the hype about how Facebook is changing the world. The book reads just a little too much like Zuckerberg friended Kirkpatrick.

Far more nuanced is Ken Auletta's corporate biography of Google, The Next To Latest Big Thing. Google is obviously another game-changing website created by fanatically dedicated college students. Also enjoying astounding access, Auletta subtitles Googled as "The End of the World as We Know It". He makes the strong case for Google being a transformative technology which has shaken entire industries. Being an ink-stained wretch, Auletta focuses particularly hard on how Google is redefining the landscape of media companies with search commoditzing news and internet ads supplanting traditional advertising.

A lot of time is also spent describing how the culture of the company affects the philosophy of the products and services. It's a very warts-and-all look at the company. The three leaders of the company, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as CEO Eric Schmidt, have distinctive personalities which drive the company. A major observation which I have noticed anecdotally is a reliance on technology. Here is a company that is based on the supremacy of the algorithm. The Google faith in formulas drives both the search engine and the ancillary projects.

Despite being only a year old, the book already shows signs of being dated and being overtaken by events. Facebook, which recently overtook Google in pageviews, is only mentioned in passing. Much is made of how AdSense revolutionized advertising by paying on a per-click basis while The Faebook Effect credits the micro-targeting scheme used by Facebook as being far more valuable to advertisers. Also, the possible impact of Google's Android cellphone operating system was largely hypothetical at the time of printing, but has been one of the major tech stories of the past year.

But of the three tech-related books in this wrap-up, Googled is the most detailed and nuanced. While it sometimes strays from Google itself, it does a much better job of explaining the impact, both for good and otherwise, of a website which truly has changed the world.

Also trumpeting the transformative effect of technology on society is Little Brother by tech evangelist Cory Doctorow. Written to a young adult audience, this short and quickly paced novel envisions the aftermath of San Francisco under the jackboots of TSA thugs after a 9/11 style terrorist attack.

The protagonist is Marcus Yallow, the world's most capable teen-aged hacker with skilz that would make a Heinleinian hero look like a bumbling incompetent. After being unreasonably detained by the cardboard evil federal agents, he starts a techno-based underground resistance movement. From there he takes on the evil government and wins the girl and saves the world. Oops, spoiler alert.

The book is prone to long stretches of exposition on both technology, real or imagined, and a particularly Randian information-wants-to-free political philosophy. Even for a book aimed at the teen market, this book is astoundingly nuance free. Everybody is either a brilliant individualist or a tool or a dupe or worse. The book is patronizing and superior both at the same time. Doctorow is proselytizing to the pews.

Another book that has been made into a movie is the Scott Pilgrim series. Really six separate graphic novels, it tells one continuous story of Scott Pilgrim as he fights his girlfriend Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends. But the boyfriends are just a narrative framework for Scott to go on a journey of self-discovery. He has to learn how to be an adult. And he makes a lot of mistakes as he does it. Along the way he faces down his ex-girlfriends as well.

Bryan Lee O'Malleypeppers the book with really interesting minor characters who are often more interesting than the titular hero. The books are also mockingly self-aware and the Canadian setting is nicely used. My favorite book in the series is Volume 4, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, which he does humorously and with great bravado.

As a graphic novel it has a clean sharp style. It's got great stylized flight scenes and some surprisingly moving effects. My one quibble is that Kim and Ramona look just alike enough to be confusing. I haven't seen the movie, but my gut instinct is that Michael Cera can't possibly be as cool as the print version of Scott Pilgrim.

It's been a while since I've listened to audio books but I've had several long car trips recently so it was time to get back in the groove. I had previously listened to Bill Bryson's Thunderbolt Kid, so I gave his new book, At Home, a go. The conceit is that Bryson uses items and rooms around his house in the British countryside as taking off points for various long essays about the inventions and innovations of the last couple of hundred years.

Being a British country home, the stories tend to be rather Anglocentric with lots of looney English lords and eccentric nutballs. In fact, Bryson describes how the Church of England's method of appointing parsons and vicars all but guaranteed that a good many of them would be totally off their rockers. A lot of the little historical tales focus on events from the 18th and 19th century when England was at the top of its game when it came to both conspicuous consumption and harrowing class division.

And life in The Isles which is perhaps meant to come off as charming and whacky ends up looking rather Hobbesian (in the philosophical sense, not the imaginary stuffed tiger style), that is to say nasty, brutish and short. Bryson offhandedly exposes a lot of hypocrisy inherent in the age. Which makes me wonder how future light-hearted essayists are going to portray our manners and customs.

While traveling this summer some of my companions could not get enough of Pygmy by gonzo novelist Chuck Palahniuk. So when I saw his latest novel, Tell-All, at the library and snatched it up. It really wasn't what I was expecting, but it was mesmerizing none the less. Told from the point of view of a longtime employee of a mid-twentieth century film idol who makes Elizabeth Taylor look both sane and monogamous, it is a jazz-like riff on fame and power. I say 'jazz-like' because the book is full of all sorts of verbal themes and repeated phrases, each a little different from the previous one.

For example, the narrator Hazel "Hazie" Coogan starts many chapters with a list of jobs she is NOT, despite the fact those are clearly things she does. Another rather psychedelic running motif is the derring-do of Lillian Hellman which starts out ridiculously absurd and then get even more implausible.

The tell-all being told is about aging film actress Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton who is constantly manipulated by Hazie. There is an odd co-dependence between the two that ultimately becomes very twisted when a new suitor for the multiply married Miss Kathie appears on the scene.

Palahniuk is an amazing prose stylist with absurd imagery and astoundingly precise wit aimed at even the incidental elements, but something tells me this isn't his best work. Still, I am dying to read more to get a better feel for this very deranged and delightful author.

National Just Read More Novels Month 2011

2010-12-28T21:31:00.010-05:00

It's hard to believe it has been five years since the first ever National Just Read More Novels Month (or NaJuReMoNoMo for the abbrevophillic) and it has grown bigger every year. Celebrated every January, it is devoted to the appreciation of fiction. Just in case you are new to it or need a refresher, here is this year's version of the official rules:

Must Be A Novel. Works of fiction only, please. Memoirs, non-fiction, how-to books, and Doonesbury collections, no matter how thick, don't count, no matter how obviously fictional.
Memoirs Aren't Novels. No matter how made up the story, anything ostensibly true isn't a novel. This used to be known as The James Frey Rule, but is now called the Decision Point.
Start and Finish in January. I guess if you got some cool books for Christmas, Hanukkah or some other gift-giving event and jumped the gun, you can't be blamed. But I only count books I start and finish within the 31 day window.
Re-reading Doesn't Count. Try something new. Read something by your favorite author or try an entirely new author. This is a great chance to cut down on the height of the nightstand stack.
Have Fun. Nobody is grading you or paying you or judging you. Read what you like and like what you read.

Last year we started the Facebook group, which anyone can join. It has several dozen members and it just keep growing.

This year NaJuReMoNoMo is expanding to Twitter. Anytime you finish a novel, just tweet about it with the hashtag #NaJuReMoNoMo.Someone will be curious enough to try to figure it out.

In the past, people have claimed to not have enough notice about the start, so I am posting this a few days early so you can clear the decks and get those novels ready to be read at the stroke of midnight on New Years. It only takes one novel to declare yourself a winner.

As always we have a fine selection of badges and logos which can be downloaded from Photobucket or just swiped from this page.

And have a great month of reading.

Yes, Virginia

2010-12-24T22:45:00.003-05:00

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

These photos were taken of the window displays at the Macy's on 34th Street and Herald Square in New York City. The full set of photos can be found here.

Why I Hate The Facebook BBC 100 Books Meme

2010-12-21T04:13:00.006-05:00

There is a meme (in the 'internet silly game' meaning of the word, not the Richard Dawkins 'fundamental idea of civilization' meaning) going around the internet and on Facebook in particular which goes something like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here…

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not.) Feel free to add comments too.

It has even become a Facebook app where you can click off your list and then compare yourself to your FB friends. I have grown to despise this list on several levels. Every time it circles around, I hate it even more. Here are but a few of the reasons:

The BBC had nothing to do with the list. The closest the BBC has come to doing a list like this is their Big Read from 2003 which has many, but not all of these books on their list. The Big Read was a write-in poll to determine Britain's best loved book. The Lord of the Rings came in first, followed by Pride and Prejudice. No quibble there. But this is not that list.
The actual list is from a UK Guardian listicle published in 2007 titled "Books you can't live without: the top 100". I guess whoever started this as a meme thought the BBC had a greater Appeal To Authority.
There is no explanation of how this list was compiled. If there were a companion article in the Guardian explaining how it was arrived at, it has been lost to the internet. With no methodology it's just a random list of books.
Nobody EVER said most people have only read six. Not the Guardian, not the BBC, not anybody except whoever unleashed this meme on the world. This is a frustrating gimmick meant to raise the interest of the reader and make them feel good they are better than 'most people'. In fact, it is a particularly low bar. If you survived high school you are likely to have doubled that number.
The list includes series as single works (Shakespeare, Narnia, Harry Potter, The Faraway Tree). If The Little Prince counts as one, why do you have to read the entire Bible?
There are also individual books in these series listed separately, such as The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and Hamlet, thus double counting them.
The quality of the list is astoundingly uneven. There are some real stinkers that made the cut. Some of the dreck that made the list I have read (The DaVinci Code) but there is no way anybody is ever convincing me The Five People You Meet In Heaven should ever be read by anybody.
It's an odd, odd list. A good chunk of it is traditional Western Canon full of Dead White Men (plus Jane Austen and the Bronte Sisters). Another part is childhood favorites, that is if you were raised by a nanny in a English manor house. And another big chunk is contemporary middlebrow 'serious' literature like you find on the 3-for-2 table in any BigBoxOfBooks. There is just no theme or rhyme or reason to the hodgepodge. The list is both too broad and too specific.
There are books I have never heard of on this list. I spend a lot of time in bookstores. One of my favorite games is to find the back-to-school or summer-reading-list table and see how many I have read. I usually do pretty well, but I have never run across Swallows and Amazons. Wikipedia tells me it is the first book in a British series that dates to 1930. News to me.
The list is getting increasingly tattered. I've seen a couple of sub-variations of the list with different books substituted. The current version, even the one that has become a Facebook app, has a lot of misspellings which have crept in from going too many times through the virtual Xerox machine. A list with the authors' names misspelled is just embarrassing.
There is no Kurt Vonnegut on the list. This is a serious omission. Given the very British roots of it, it's understandable that it is highly Anglo-centric, but any list of a hundred anything without Slaughterhouse Five on it has no credibility.
Memes just annoy me. But that is a rant for another day. Of particular help to me in building up a steam of hate for this one was a very good entry on the PurpleCar blog entitled How Do Memes Start? A Case Study: 100 Books in Facebook.

And in case you think this is all sour grapes, I have read 27+/- (depending on how you count things and how good my memory is) of them, which is perfectly respectable. But at my rather languid reading pace nowadays, my time is precious and I'm not going to go 'birding' just to increase my score on a particularly vapid Facebook meme. I have enough unread books in my house to last me at least five years and maybe ten of these books on the list are somewhere in the to-read pile, but I'm probably not getting to them anytime soon. I read what I want to read because life is too short.

Far more interesting to me is this list which really is from the BBC of the books people claim to have read but really haven't. I've read three on that list. No, nine. Yes, it's nine.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Stupid Top 100 Book Memes: Harmless Fun or Pretentious Annoyance?

Updated 8:15 a.m.: Changed the title.

Where is Yellojkt Now? - Internet Edition

2010-12-20T18:27:00.004-05:00

Judging from the rather meager posting rate on this blog, one could assume that I have taken a long hiatus from blogging, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth. As a recent study suggested, actual real blogging is on a mild decline but all sorts of quasi- and para-blogging sites are booming. So rather than focusing on the flagship of the Foma* blogging media empire, my increasingly deficit-disordered attention has been frittered away on all sorts of side endeavors. Here are but a few of the places where you can find my nuggets of wisdom:

FourSquare – One of the features of my blog used to be me taking photos of places I go on business and then asking readers to guess where I am. FourSquare, the stalker-friendly social network has made that pointless. Now I am constantly updating with all the bizarre, obscure, and/or mundane places I find myself on my travels. So if you really care, you would already know that I have eaten at Blue Hill in New York, crossed the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati and had ice cream at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport Amy’s. My little mindtwist on the site is that since everything is done on the honor system, I like to check into places I really haven’t been to. For example, I am the mayor of Clark’s Gun Shop in aptly-named Remington, Virginia despite having only set foot in there once. Also, if you see me check into a strip bar like The Cheetah in Atlanta, I’m just messing with you. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Gawker/Wonkette/The Awl – I started reading Wonkette back in the Ana Marie Cox days right as the Washingtonienne story broke. Ana is long gone (although I still hang on her every tweet) and Wonkette was unceremoniously set on an ice floe by Gawker Media only to thrive and form its own unique community and ecosystem. Similarly, several Gawker alumni formed The Awl as the anti-Gawker to prove that Nick Denton is a good person to have as a former boss. They regularly post some of the most thought provoking and intriguing stories, plus lots of videos of bears. As for the mothership, despite their recent password fiasco (which did snap me out of my lazy ways), I am still a faithful reader of the revolving door stable of writers at Gawker. I recently did some brand consolidation, and I am now known as Pop Socket across all three websites. What that does for me other than build a stronger case against me at salary review time, I don’t know.

Twitter – Twitter is the crack cocaine of micro-blogging. Quick hits, a short rush, and an empty queasy feeling of regret mixed with a hunger for more. Increasingly this is where I publish my non sequitur bon mots and random links rather than constantly annoying the insular circle of folks on the Achenblog. It’s also the clearinghouse for all my other social network postings since they all make linking to Twitter just a little too easy.

Tumblr – The newest addition to the Foma Media Empire is my long dormant Tumblr account. Tumblr tries to bridge that Goldilocks range for when a Tweet is too short and a full blogpost is too long. As my energy level for my way-too-long posts (this one as an example) wanes, I may be putting more and more here. One feature I am moving off of Facebook is my Inexplicably Popular Photo item where I post a picture from my Flickr photostream which shows a sudden above average level of viewing for no apparent reason. The 'no apparent reason' eliminates all views of cheerleaders and Glee cast members on the grounds they are highly explicably popular.

Flickr – Speaking of Flickr, this is the culprit starving the most time away from my limited but seemingly far too available internet time. I had developed a serious backlog in posting photos from my most recent vacations. I have finally gotten all the way though the 2009 road trip in Big Sky country and am now focusing on organizing the ones from the Spring trip through the desert Southwest. I’ve got to get caught up because I just got back from Puerto Rico with several hundred pictures and I have trips to Kentucky Bourbon country and Ireland planned for this year. I suspect both of these places will be outstandingly picturesque.

Facebook – In all trend pieces about the death of blogging, Facebook is usually named as a prime suspect. My beef is that since Facebook is a closed system, anything posted there has a very limited readership. I would like to think that the Google-driven masses who stumble onto my blog are looking for something other than pictures of Miranda Cosgrove naked, but the stats don’t bear this out. Still, my ever decreasing chance at internet fame is contingent upon being discovered by someone somewhere. I’ve just read a few books on Facebook (reviewed here) and they keep making a big deal out of the fact that Facebook requires the use of real names. I hope the master algorithm never realizes that one Yellojkt Yellojkt is a pseudonym. My account under that name predates the one under my real name which I keep up as a ruse to fool my spouse and old high school friends (a demographic with a good bit of overlap). So if you haven’t ‘friended’ my online avatar (which frankly, is far more interesting than the man behind the mask), feel free to do so.

Dishonorable Mention:

Formspring – I’m a sucker for getting an account on every silly platform that comes out, mostly to prevent claim jumping on the highly desirable ‘yellojkt’ user name. I discovered Formspring through my just-graduated-from-college niece so this is clearly something cool with the kidz. The format is round-robin questions and answers. Other members ask you questions and your answer is posted on your page. So without a critical mass of people in your circle to ask you question, it’s mostly crickets chirping. Sara Benincasa has parlayed this into a schtick and an artform, but I just don’t see these catching on even with as much time on my hands as I seem to have.

BlatantCommentWhoring: What social media takes up your time?

Top Five Greatest Hits

2010-12-16T21:40:00.000-05:00

Hopefully this is the first of many new list style posts I am going to be sprinkling into the blog. The Top Five motif is a blatant rip-off of the lists from High Fidelity as well as a nod to A Little Night Music which frequently features really great mini-lists.

Greatest hits albums are usually blatant rip-offs of long-time fans while also being a cheap and dirty way to sell records to casual fans who don't want to plunk down a lot of money to buy the full catalog of an artist just to get the popular songs. But some greatest hits collections buck the trend and become worthwhile albums in their own right. So here are:

The Top 5 Greatest Greatest Hits

5	Tori Amos Tales of a Librarian. Tori is an eclectic artist and a lot of her deep album cuts are kind of inaccessible. The most fantastic part of this album is that the songs aren't arranged chronologically or alphabetically, but by Dewey Decimal number. Now assigning these numbers is a bit arbitrary but I love the idea that someone went to the trouble. It's a clever idea studiously implemented. And the picture on the cover is just so hot.
4	Madonna Immaculate Conception. A good greatest hits package gives you something that any individual album can't deliver. In this case, a career spanning overview provides a perspective on the chameleon-like Material Girl which is best seen from a distance. The songs are all truly hits, including the songs added just for the album. In one disc you really get why she dominated music in the 80s.
3	Jimmy Buffett Songs You Know By Heart. The official subtitle for this album is "Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hit(s)" with the parentheses being a great winking acknowledgment that Buffett is the world's most successful one-hit wonder. While he has put out over a dozen studio albums and several more compilations since that one, it is still the primary disc to have for potential Parrotheads. Got to any Buffett show and you are likely to hear nearly every song on this album, that is if you are sober enough to remember them.
2	Eagles Their Greatest Hits. Arguably you only need three Eagles albums. Greatest Hits, Hotel California, and The Long Run. All the rest is filler. Early Eagles albums are a little sleepy and indulgent. Their Greatest Hits puts together a group of songs that set the stage for one of the most significant albums of the 70s. Worldwide, it has sold 42 million copies and is the only album to give Michael Jackson's Thriller a run for its money, saleswise. Conversely, Greatest Hits 2, put out after just two additional studio releases, is one of the most cynically money-grubbing releases of all time.
1	ABBA Gold. Abba was a singles band. At best. They only had one number 1 hit in the United States but they were a huge success everywhere else in the world. I recently listened to the 33-1/3 book series (review here) on this album and the author explains the reasoning behind using a greatest hits album as career retrospective. The claims, probably correctly, that this album by collecting all of Abba's international hits it reclaimed the Swedish power pop band's reputation and triggered the decade long Abba-tastic nostalgia trip. If there is any one greatest hit album everyone should own, it is this one.
Dishonorable Mention	Foreigner Records. The worst greatest hits albums are those that include live re-recordings of the original songs instead of the album cuts or singles versions. And no violation of this rule is more egregious than the live version of 'Hot Blooded' on Foreigners first (of several) greatest hits albums. Not only is it live, it is terrible. After listening through the other nine tracks, the final song is just fingernails-on-a-blackboard off-key. I mean my version is better. The inclusion mars what would otherwise be a perfectly respectable collection. I have no idea what they were thinking except to give their fans some sort of sorry "Fuck you."

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Feel free to quibble.

Virtual Thanks

2010-11-25T08:16:00.001-05:00

This year I am most grateful for all the friends I have met through the internet. As unlikely a method as it is, I love that there are so many interesting people I would never have the chance to become friends with if we were restricted to mere spatial proximity. It's a large, large world and anything which can connect people in so many ways is something worth cherishing.

Most surprising to me is the wide of variety of people I have met. Rather than just finding shodows om my own interests and tastes, I have met people with an infinite variety of backgrounds and perspectives. I want to thank each and every one of you for enriching my life and broadening my horizon.

BooksFirst - September-October 2010

2010-11-03T20:21:00.007-04:00

Books Bought
Zero History by William Gibson
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
Don't Vote by P. J. O'Rourke

Books Read
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Hella Nation by Evan Wright
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Commentary

There may only be three books on the listfor the past two months, but they fill be with a huge sense of accomplishment. I have been nibbling away at Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver Cycle for nearly two years now and I got determined to finish it off. The final volume, The System of the World, takes place in 1714, a few years after the events that end Confusion. All the players are in and around London where most of the action takes place, if by action you mean endless set-pieces about currency and wealth and philosophy. The focus of the book is on Daniel Waterhouse, now and old man dragged into intrigue concerning destabilizing England's currency. This takes him into contact with his old roommate Isaac Newton, guardian of the Mint by day and mad alchemist at night. Also involved are Jack Shaftoe and Eliza and the dozens of minor characters they have accumulated, including future kings and queens.

Stephenson is playing a long game here. While there are certain phantastical elements at play, much of it is swashbuckling historical fiction. The slightly anachronistic style is tough to keep up with for over 2000 pages and certain verbal twitches just become annoying after a while. While any historical era can be seen as pivotal when viewed in the right light, the case for the early 18th century is made subtly but very strongly. There were a lot of different elements at work in that time.

Overall, the trilogy is to tour de force but Stephenson is a writer seriously in need of an editor. The exciting parts are amazingly gripping but the meanderings can be tedious. This is all just churlish nitpicking on a work which truly earns the word 'epic'.

Hella Nation is a book which came highly recommended by my dad and our tastes don't always overlap much, but he raved so much about this book I had to move it to the top of the to-read pile. Evan Wright got his start in 'journalism' as the movie reviewer for Hustler magazine and it flavors a lot of the book. Perhaps a third of it relates directly or indirectly to his years on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry. What is clearly a sleazy industry at all levels is captured with just a hint of winsome affection.

But the stronger pieces are the pure character studies where Wright captures the some of some peculiarly American subculture whether it be professional skateboarders or white supremacists or combat soldiers. The subjects are never patronized or ridiculed but always shown full-figure, warts and all.

The writing has a slightly Hunter Thompsonesque gonzo feel but seems to be more in line with the early writing of Tom Wolfe before he became an old man telling kids to quit hooking up on his lawn. There is a passion and compassion found in each of the rather oddball subjects he features.

Perhaps no book not involving precocious British wizards has gotten as much hype as Freedom. Jonathon Franzen even made the cover of Time as if he were a politician or rock star. The book itself is very good even if nothing could possibly live up to the rather elevated expectations. Like his earlier near-Oprah selection The Corrections it focuses on a rather dysfunctional family with widely divergent personalities. And while the characters and situations in Freedom are completely different from the ones in The Corrections, there is a certain familiarity and lots of easily drawn parallels.

I checked this book out of the library where it had a rather long waiting list meaning that I had exactly three weeks to get through all 560 pages. I set myself a pace of 30 pages a night and easily rolled through it. And while the plot and timeline do meander, by the end there is a clear concise satisfying if not wholly happy ending. In this respect, Franzen has more in common with Stephenson than most people would notice. Franzen works at a much closer level, but much of what they both do is the same. Small points have large meanings and everything connects to everything.

There is a lot of sex in Freedom. Underage sex, non-consensual sex, adulterous sex, make-up sex, even passionless sex. But none of it is prurient. There is always something else going on. The sex is always about more than just sex. Indeed, everything is about something else whether it be a bird sanctuary or a rock song or a war profiteering business deal. As for 'Freedom', well, let's just say that it means having nothing left to lose.

Rally For Inanity

2010-10-29T09:10:00.004-04:00

If you are going to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall tomorrow, make sure you have a witty erudite sign to wave in front of the cameras. If not, just use this one:

You can download a printable pdf version by clicking on the image below:

I hope to see all my fellow radical moderates there.

Mini 500

2010-10-10T21:03:00.004-04:00

While the Ramblin' Wreck Parade is one of the premiere events of the Georgia Tech Homecoming weekend, another activity has gotten more recognition as the result of a PSA being aired during Georgia Tech ACC football games.

While that video involves some Hollywood magic, the real race is just as bizarre. Teams are given an unassembled stock tricycle which they have to put together and paint. The teams consist of four riders and three in the pit crew. Here is the team from my son's fraternity with their tricycle:

The racers have to push the tricycle around the course. The most common posture is to put one knee on the trike seat and push with the other leg.

Although some people take fancier poses.

The other common technique is to sit on the tricycle backwards and push with both feet.

The race is between 10 and 15 laps of Peters Parking Deck which is easily a half mile around. This takes an enormous toll on the trikes and the riders. Wipeouts are frequent.

The front tire in particular is prone to blowouts and many trikes run on rims.

As the tricyles fall apart beyond repair, the teams just give up and resort to silly stunts.

Or just run around with the remaining parts.

The event draws a huge crowd and I was far from the only photographer grabbing pictures of the racers and wrecks.

Eventually someone comes up with enough laps to win. I have no idea if this team won, but there sure are showing some enthusiasm.

For lots more (perhaps too many more) photos of all the wackiness, check out the Flickr set. And if you are ever in Atlanta for Georgia Tech's homecoming check out the race itself.