Getting Getting Things Done Done

If you are, like me, a disorganized schlub, the last time you received formal instruction in "study skills" was fourth or fifth grade. Life was simpler then. We had workbooks that had blanks to fill in, book reports to prove we actually read something (in 4th grade I put a Paul Gallico novel on my reading log. I'm sure now my teacher had me dead to rights), TOPS cards to let us practice math with story problems. Instead of looking at girls you could run around the track (capped at 6 laps). You could even accidentally jam a pencil in your hand and get the lead stuck in there until you're almost 30.

But I digress.

Outlining and time management didn't really stick in there, and so for the next fifteen years, in and out of school, I managed to avoid learning it. I would write 10-page research papers over a weekend, and stay up real late playing video games before finals.

Not knowing this skill killed me for years and years. I can say this with perfect hindsight. I was good at times, just never as good as I could have been (valedictorian good? we'll never know).

I just never knew how bad off I was until I got to Amazon. Here I finally started to see that I had to do something or I was going to drown in minutiae and errands.

Thus, Getting Things Done by David Allen. I finished it recently and it's been a huge eye-opener and relief. The basic point is that your brain has a limited ability to focus, and when you haven't solidly nailed down your commitments and the projects that are important to you, they consume your focus with worry.

Instead you need to feel comfortable that every loose end in your life has a concrete action tied to it. The loose ends could be as complex as buying a house or as simple as writing an email. The point is to think ahead a little bit and figure out how easy the single next step would be to move that loose end forward. Then you have lowered the barrier (activation energy? A little chemistry there) to actually doing that thing.

Best of all, when there are less loose ends in your life, you get peace. You feel like Augustine, who could say truthfully that if he discovered Armageddon was coming tomorrow, he would still go hoe his vegetable patch today.

There are many ways to run a system like this, with a bunch of lists of things to get done. For me, a program called Shuffle made my phone even more indispensable. It's simple, but it does all I want it to in terms of organizing tasks and integrating with my calendar.

Any system you use to get organized? Tell me now, before I turn 30.

Adventures in Media I

I'll try to put my adventures in media all in one place, so you can skip them if you like.

The Prisoner
Where have you been all my life? Seriously, I am glad I ran across this last weekend. I haven't finished them all, but this is my kind of show. It's creepy, surreal, inventive, epic.

It's strange because I recognize a fair portion of the motifs from a Simpsons episode where Homer is taken to a sinister island because, as Mr X, he publishes an internet rumor that shows that he knows too much. The constant drugging, the replacement of number 2, even a cameo by the star.

You can see it on demand if you have Comcast. They provided all the episodes as a teaser for the AMC remake miniseries (looks like 6 episodes, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen).

If you have been waiting for an excuse to buy a Blu-Ray player, it looks like they've remastered the entire series in surround sound, and since it was originally filmed in 35mm, in high-def as well. It's coming out tomorrow at my fair employer.

Anna Karenina
In the words of Apu, "Mmmm... that's some good adultery!"

I have been rereading the epic novels of my youth lately. Dune held up, no surprise there. The Belgariad actually suffered a bit on my reread, somewhat to my surprise. The Eye of the World, also surprisingly, remains pretty cracking good.

And then there's Anna. My copy is twelve years old now and it's a bit the worse for wear. I have to retape the preface again because the pages have ripped off and are falling away from the binding. The page edge is covered in transferred ink from fingers and hands that rested too long on the words. It's got six colors of ink on the pages. By any standards, I've defaced it beyond recognition.

What keeps me coming back? As I've grown, I've found this novel growing with me. Now that I'm a family man with a young son, the pressures and paradises of married life stand out more starkly to me in Anna. I continue to see myself in her and Levin.

Anna escapes from her bourgeois life into a more dangerous one. For that much, she has to be admired. The part of us that cries out for more than the world around us must be listened to. But what we escape into must be carefully decided. Anna's passion and lack of wisdom leads her down a dark road, but it could could have been otherwise.

Thom Yorke at the Orpheum
Thom Yorke, the lead singer/songwriter of Radiohead, has been touring with a rock band, including longtime producer Nigel Godrich on keyboards and Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. They are performing Yorke's solo material, including The Eraser album in its entirety, Radiohead B-sides and some new songs.

The new stuff will require some more listening (read: it's difficult, live)... but what they are doing to The Eraser is really fascinating. A somewhat methodical, bleeping and blooping "apocalyptic dance" album is transformed into wild rock.

I picked up the mp3s for one of the shows, so if you have trouble finding them, let me know and I'll post them.

Meanwhile, here is a study in contrasts. This is "The Eraser", the first song on the solo album, from the album, from a solo performance, and from this latest one with the band.


Album version


Live at Latitude Festival, solo


Live at the Orpheum, with the new band

The end of all things

I have been reading and watching a lot of media about the end of the world and death lately.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. Rated PG-13 for violence. As promised, this was a story about the preservation of human knowledge by monks in the wake of a nuclear war. The war was blamed on intellectuals, politicians, and scientists, so a kind of pogrom was carried out against them, ushering in a new dark age. The story picks up centuries later, as humanity begins waking up from the nightmare. The book is bittersweet, as is any story of history repeating as tragedy and farce. A Hugo winner, a thinking person's book, a true classic. Highly recommended.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard. Rated PG for adult themes. This is the play that focuses on two minor characters from Hamlet, staying with them when the action moves elsewhere. Hamlet is larger than life; this play is kind of the same size. I still remember the first time I saw this live, in 1997. I've read it and seen it many times since. I think it was just time again. It's about being lost, and about living without a sense of meaning. It's about what you lose by wandering around and doing as you're told. There are many possible interpretations, of course. It's witty and brilliant. Read it yesterday.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Rated R for nudity, language, violence, disturbing images, adult themes. This is the only comic ever to win a Hugo award, the only graphic novel on Time's list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century. It was trailblazing in many ways, and it's as epic a tale as you will ever read.

It's set in an alternative America where superheroism was briefly in vogue, but has since fallen out of fashion. The world's only real uber-man, Doctor Manhattan, was created in a nuclear accident. He has control over matter, time, and space, and allows himself to be pressed into service as America's Doomsday Device, Missile Shield, and Blitzkrieg all in one. He ends the Vietnam War victoriously, but the tensions of the Cold War, the specter of nuclear annihilation and the end of the world still hang over the story.

For all that, it's an unforgettably human story, with complex characters. And a metafictional extravaganza that embeds an entire pirate horror story in parallel with the action. And the best ending ever. It's heartwrenching, and so rereadable, even the writer said he had to read it several times to catch all the details the artist put in.

And then there's Six Feet Under, and I haven't really brought all this together yet... but I'll get there.

And now a fun post on books

I've read a lot of books since I last wrote here. I only have time for ratings, capsule summaries, and recommendations:

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. Rated NC-17. After the extinction of humanity, an obsolete courtesan-bot takes up with a clandestine group of butler bots to prevent the reintroduction of humanity to robot society, which threatens its collapse. Read more for Charles Stross completeness than other motives.

The Sharing Knife vols 1 & 2 by Lois McMaster Bujold. Rated R. A pregnant farm-girl takes up with a grizzled ranger over twice her age. They fight zombies and meet each other's families. Good, but not as amazing and complex as her earlier work.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Or How We Found The Bishop's Bird Stump At Last by Connie Willis. Rated PG. Historians from the late 21st century upset the space-time continuum and go through hilarious hijinks in Victorian England to set it to rights. One of the funniest books I have ever read. Hugo and Nebula winner. One hundred percent recommended.

Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King. Rated R. A werewolf enters a New England town with predictable results. Gorily told and illustrated. Read for Stephen King completeness. Pass it by.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. Rated PG-13. A sea captain, Jack Aubrey, and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, sail the high seas in search of adventure and the glory of the British crown. Amazing authenticity of detail and language, funny, at times thought-provoking, complicated vocabulary, plot with long continuity, and of course sails, cannons, pirates, Napoleon, and Lord Nelson. Incredibly addictive. The first part of an eighteen-part series.

I probably missed a few there, but I have lost the records of my reading.

Up next, Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, which called the market collapse early, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, more Aubrey-Maturin novels, and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller and Anathem by Neal Stephenson, both of which appear to be about monks preserving the remnants of Western civilization in the post-apocalyptic wake of a nuclear war.

Keeping it quick

• I've been continuing with Okami. It's very entertaining.
• I biked out to the library on Saturday. I got a few more CDs and those books, then read Stephen King in an easy chair. I headed out just as a thunderstorm was moving in. I had a good time, a little peaceful spot.
  
• I finished Christine. I won't spoil the ending. King got back to form, it is way better than Cujo. But I have a feeling I'm about to see a ton of books (along my chronology, I've got from 1983 till 1989, Misery) that are King working out metaphors for the damage his drug abuse was doing to his family. I don't think it's exactly transparent, but it definitely colors my reading...
• I put up the books I'm reading on my whiteboard at work. I'm kind of relieved to be able to erase Christine when I get in tomorrow, because I have a coworker named Christine and it must have looked a little strange.
• Up next, still doing The Way of the World by Ron Suskind. I also have a Stross book that eluded me, The Jennifer Morgue, which is more "James Bond meets HP Lovecraft". And I picked up the start of a newish series by Lois McMaster Bujold that I just hadn't gotten around to. The series is called The Sharing Knife, and the first book is called Beguilement.
• I watched the Star Wars CG film The Clone Wars tonight. It ends a little abruptly, and for all the exposition, it is actually a little tough for me to locate it in context in the storyline. The graphics were great, the dialog was ok if a little obvious at times. It was mostly fun as a chance to get out with Chuck, who is a guy I know via Sarah's friend Laura (his wife). We should do stuff like that more often.
• I loaned Chuck a few Bujold books: Cordelia's Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, and The Curse of Chalion. Here's to another addict! I had no clue until recently that he reads fantasy.
  
• A dude named Mark (no forwarding address) commented on the last post. I do not know if I consider his comment particularly edifying or not. And my comment back is not so great.
• My basic argument is this: we want a president who will respect the rule of law. The last eight years have taught us how valuable that would be. Whether you agree or disagree on this issue or that issue with the president, you can rest assured that the president will preserve the laws that we have by proxy all agreed upon. The president will not attempt to shirk his responsibilities under the law or rewrite them by illegal action or inaction. The president will not play cowboy politics with people's lives.
• And the president will not torture people, even our enemies. The president will not attempt to move prisoners to so-called law-free zones like Camp X-Ray or give them law-free status like "enemy combatant". I think it's plain that what our soldiers are not allowed to do by the Geneva Conventions, even in situations of extreme duress like "under enemy attack in combat zones", our spies and politicians should not be allowed to do in well-appointed offices in cold blood, before they go out for cocktails and cigars with their lobbyist buddies and friends in the press.
  
• Like I told Mark, the United States needs a moral compass. We need a sense of mission untainted by what the devilish have done in the name of America. For me, torture represents a clear line to draw, and it is just as obvious that John McCain is not willing to draw it.
  

Media redux

• I think I need to start properly italicizing my book/movie posts. Not following the convention has finally gotten to me again.
  
• Nobody told me Bridge to Terabithia was like it was. I wonder what parents took their kids on opening weekend, only to find out what it really was. For the record, I think it was pretty good, but I'm not sure yet if it was cheating. And the book is probably better...
  
• We watched Dan in Real Life once again. It slays me every time. There is an amazing economy of motion. It's hilarious. It's true. Steve Carell is the man.
• I finally finished The Pearl. I wish people would make their critical Prefaces into Postfaces so there are NO SPOILERS BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS. When you are flipping through trying to find page one, these are the worst possible things to stand in your way. They are like the soundtrack preview just before the DVD main menu. In the immortal words of Frank Costanza:

"HeyHeyHey ComeOn ComeOn! I haven't seen it yet!"

"It doesn't have anything to do with the plot."

"Still, still. I like to go in Fresh."

• So I will not ruin the story. It was exquisitely written. I don't think I've read or heard any Steinbeck since Ms Backen read us Of Mice and Men in the 8th grade. I've never read The Grapes of Wrath, is that unbelievable? Like Stephen King, I am now looking forward to reading the rest of his oeuvre, starting again with Of Mice and Men, which I bought at the library sale.
• Speaking of Mr King, the last we left him, he was writing himself into a book ostensibly about a rabid dog killing people indiscriminately, which I read as a book about his drug addiction destroying his family, and he had republished his long stories in Different Seasons, which contains not one but three stories made into movies. Now he's back on his ground in my opinion, writing in 1983 about a loser teenager named Arnie Cunningham, and his beat-up Plymouth, Christine. I had seen the trailer, so I knew this was about a car gone horribly wrong. I was expecting Cujo with a chrome bumper, I have been pleasantly surprised. And as always, when King is at his best, he isn't doing allegory. He is doing a story that is somehow weightier than its logline. Sure, it's about a demonic car (50 pages in, all signs point that way). But it is about a lot more than that.
• I snuck into the hold line and scored a copy of The Way of the World, by Ron Suskind. Ron Suskind, if you'll recall, wrote two extremely important books about the Bush Administration. I wrote about The One Percent Doctrine earlier, which was an examination of something like the inner workings of the war on terror, and The Price of Loyalty, which was about Bush's domestic policy as seen through the eyes of Paul O'Neill. The only reason I haven't read very far is that I always seem to be about to eat something when I think of reading it. It's brand new and I don't want to get soup, condiments, or salty snack remains on it. From the news reports, this is the book that contains a fairly detailed account of Tahir_Jalil_Habbush_al-Tikriti, an Iraqi intelligence official, forging a document alleging false links between al-Qaeda and Iraq at the request of the Bush Administration. Let me say that twice: in order to prop up support for the then-underway invasion of Iraq, fantasists at the White House planted a document in order to retcon the justifications for the war. And he has the transcripts to prove it. But it also seems to be about the post-9/11, post-Bush future that we will collectively create. I am looking forward to both that future and this book's treatment of it.
• Sarah and I just freed a bunny. It fell down a window well by our basement. It was scared, and would not climb up a piece of lattice we stuck down there. So, I climbed into the window well with a cardboard box, cornered the bunny and got it to go into the box, then lifted it out to safety.
• I had a total score at the library and checked out Okami, a Nintendo Wii game. (I also found a klezmer band interpreting unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie: Wonder Wheel, by The Klezmatics, but if I talked about every great CD I found at the library, this would turn into a great CDs from the library blog. An improvement over the current content...) It is tiding me over until Spore comes out on September 7 (at which point, all bets are off).
• But what a game. In Okami, you are Amaterasu Okami, the Shinto goddess of nature. (Shinto being a nature religion, this puts you at the top of the world.) You have been incarnated as a white wolf who, one hundred years ago, beat back the eight-headed dragon Orochi and sealed it in the Moon Cave, saving the world. Now, Orochi's prison has been unsealed, and the evil miasma of its presence wreaks devastation across the land of Nippon. Your mission is to use the power of calligraphy to restore the natural beauty of the environment.
• This is an older game, having previously come out for Playstation at least, but it really shines on the Wii. The game cries out constantly for you to manipulate it with the power of your brush. Trees bloom, lily pads sprout, boulders slice in half as a result of your drawing. You feed the animals so they love you and restore the land (and also, on a somewhat heart-tugging level, because you are Mother Nature and that's just what you do). The mythology was foreign to me, but it's note-perfect, completely consistent. The dialogue is well-translated and human.
• And the graphics are unreal. Every screen seems like a work of art. It's cel-shaded and fulsome, filled with falling cherry blossoms and stylized splashes. It takes up Japanese iconography, where a few lines represent a mountain, or the blazing sun is the familiar circle surrounded by stripes. The ink, due to the Wii remote's sensitivity to distance, feels like it's dripping on the screen. There are countless little details in the characterization, the landscape... even the menus are full of little touches.
• If anybody asks you if video games are art, tell them to try Okami. It's not just great fun (if a little linear, but like you care, what a story; be prepared for it to be extremely Japanese though), it's over-the-top beautiful. The most interesting thing about its beauty, though, is that so much of it is derived from the interactivity. This wouldn't be nearly as good as a story about Okami, or a movie. The whole point of the thing is that you are the one reshaping and renewing the world, everything responds to you.
• Work has been going pretty well. We are finally coming to the end of our cycle. We're actually in pretty good shape on my portion of the project (I was in charge of a decent-sized piece that I and approximately one and a half people have been working on), so I'm starting to look past what we've got and think about what's next. The delivery ate up a lot of my summer break, so I'm hoping the fall will be relaxing and rewarding for the family.
• My son is back in preschool, so Sarah has more time on her own. I think it is making her think useful, deep thoughts about the future. Whenever she is free to be herself, even for a few hours a day, these ideas bubble up. I am excited for what the future holds as well...
• PS, the bullet points seem to work, so I might stick to them for a while. They help me pretend I am just jotting things down, not inserting 500-word video game reviews into the middle of What I Did Last Week.
• PPS The coolest Olympic thing I have seen so far is the badminton final. That guy was totally amazing.
  

Spore arrives

So, I've been on about this for a while. Spore is a game coming out in September that will unleash unparalleled creativity on an unsuspecting gaming populace. It's the game of life, where you pass through successive generations designing yourself, from bacteria to creature, from sentient being to civilization. You model animals, cities, buildings, vehicles, flora in amazing detail, and then, through the magic of Will Wright and his team, your creations come to life. Then, through the magic of Will Wright, they will populate the galaxies of other players, a galaxy with millions of worlds that you can visit, eventually, in your species' spaceship. It is an unfinishable game.

Today a demo of just the creature creator went online. It is completely free to try, and you can construct the crazy animals that will fill the game. Get it here. Repeat, GET IT. Your jaw will hit the floor. Your kids will love it. You will love it. Your dog will love it.

It is a little nerfed; there is a $10 version with all parts and options enabled, which I am certainly buying as soon as they make it to stores (Thursday, I think). You need a halfway decent computer to run the software, but if you've bought in the last couple of years you should be fine (the specs for Vista are pretty fricking ugly though).

If you'd like to see some of my ridiculous creations, they will start filling in here. So far, only ballicus curius has made it to the internet. But I've done a couple more that should be on the way. And let me say, before you even start playing, you can spend hours just making animals.

This is one of the more amazing pieces of software I have ever seen. The technical challenges involved in turning J. Random Player, with help from the computer, into a successful 3D modeler were apparently astounding. I've been getting chills.

Sorry I've been out of the picture. It has not been for the best, but it's that kind of season in life. My software should be done with main development this week, though, so I may be able to take my foot off the gas pedal by next week.

Sarah is in Utah visiting friends and family, with Alex, so I have been all alone in the house. It is very strange. But I have been studying computers and doing whatnot.

My high school's ten year reunion is in a couple of weeks. In some ways, I am sorry not to be able to go. I haven't seen some friends in ages. I don't know why, but lately I keep thinking I will meet some friends to read books with. There is a guy at work who has been interested in my dive into Charles Stross lately, but it's not the same.

So, for the record, Charles Stross is an amazing speculative fiction writer. I read Singularity Sky, which is about as good an introduction as you could get to the Singularity (disparagingly, "the nerd rapture", when we create an AI that can bootstrap itself into godlike intelligence, or alternatively when we create nanomachines that can convert base materials into the stuff of our wildest dreams). Whether you believe all the theories or not (and I am inclined not to), it makes for a great story.

He also wrote a great near future story called Halting State, essentially about a world where the internet is very closely intertwined with real life, as in virtual reality layers that are based on the place on earth you are standing right now. So you could put on your VR goggles and be in a whole new world, essentially. So the story goes, what amounts to a bank in World of Warcraft 3.0 is robbed by a band of orcs. Then a group of hackers and forensic investigators is brought in to figure out what happened, on behalf of the country running the bank. It's hilarious, and I can't give away the terrific story. You should read it right away.

I had another book by Stross about a tech journalist who falls into a brave new world, like a curious shadow of Earth, called The Hidden Family, first in a series. It is great so far, as is Iron Sunrise, the sequel to Singularity Sky.

Sometimes I get like this with an author and I want to read all their stuff, as much as I can find. So far I've done it with William Gibson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neal Stephenson, and Shusaku Endo. Stross is another one of those.

I'm also trying to get further in Godel, Escher, Bach. Every time I check it out, though, someone reserves it right behind me. I am going to break down and just buy it soon.

Hard at work

Well, I've been working hard lately. It is close to delivery time at my work. On the bright side, that means I'm just about the end of my first shipping product. In other words, I was working on this software when it was barely a twinkle in our customer's eye, and my water just broke.

It's been a great experience. I've been getting better with Emacs and the shell, and with a lot of C++ over the last five months. Working with the team and a larger existing code base has also been enlightening. I've found it just takes a while to get up to speed with how things are organized, and the project's standard ways of doing things. I wish I'd had my TAGS file in Emacs months ago though. (It basically finds the proverbial needle in the haystack of code files for you.) Learning to give and take with my teammates and come up with mutually beneficial designs has been great too.

Now, we're working overtime. I am glad that we don't do 50 to 70 hour weeks for most of the year. This is really wearing, it's reminding me of grad school. I get about one day off per week at the moment. We're fortunate enough to get paid, so Sarah and I are probably taking down another credit card or two this month.

Hemingway slipped to the back burner as I read some Isaac Asimov this week. He's a giant in the sf field, writing many well-loved novels. Foundation, which is about the a society whose future has been mapped out by a psychohistorian, is a real classic. There's Nightfall, which is about a planet where night only falls once every couple of millennia.

And there are robots. Asimov coined the word "robotics" and wrote some great stories about them. I finished rereading I, Robot again, which is a collection of short stories about the first robots, and the three laws of robotics. They made it into a movie, I hear, but it was more "inspired by" than "based on" the stories in this book. It's charming and rereadable, and it even has a female lead. Pick it up, 100%.

I also read the first in a trilogy (Robots of Dawn, maybe?), which was a robot murder mystery called The Caves of Steel. It posits a human race, thousands of years in the future, on an overpopulated Earth, that has crowded into massive biodomes, made yeast products the main nutrition, regulated everyone's employment, and started to replace human workers with robots. Although humanity has space flight and has colonized other planets, the agoraphobia and xenophobia of the remaining earthlings is keeping a lid on the society, living out their lives in caves of steel. And that's just the setup. This is a fine, fine book. Its point-of-view feels alien to us air-breathing, outside-enjoying humans, just as it should. The main character's outlook on robots prefigures some of our current obsession with illegal immigrants stealing American jobs, and our mistrust of foreigners. There are some great moral themes as well. This is highly recommended. It might make more sense, though, if you read I, Robot first.

I've been working my way through C++ Coding Standards, which is a list of 100 pithy dos and don'ts by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu. Sutter is the chair of the ISO C++ standard committee, and Alexandrescu is an expert on using C++ to do template metaprogramming (for libraries). Now, in some ways, C++ is a pig, and this book is like the lipstick on the pig. It's testimony on the complexity of the language that a book like this, which is almost completely language-specific tricks, had to exist. But there's another way that C++ is like a pig, and that is that it is liable to eat your foot if you try to ride it, and poke you with its bristles. And this book is like a saddle for the pig, for those of us forced to get on and put that pig through its paces. And, for what it aims at, it's a terrific book.

Ok, I just ran across this video, and it's too cool. This is just one more thing I love about computer science:


Change of subject. We bought a scuba diving game called Endless Ocean. It is very low impact as far as difficulty goes, but it is beautiful and mellow, like interacting with a screen saver.

Last, we preordered Wii Fit from Amazon while they were still taking orders. It arrived yesterday, and boy are my arms tired. Yes, they were weak, but still. The thing, for those of you who don't know, is an exercise game packaged with a balance board, which can sense your weight, center of gravity, balance, pressure, however you want to think of it. It is about one third game and two thirds exercise tool, with yoga and strength training as well as balance games and aerobics. It tracks your weight and activity, and tells you how weak you are. Sarah and I both got a good workout from it. In fact, I'm going to spend the next few minutes working at it again. It offers few advantages over the gym, but it does have one killer feature: the privacy of your own home. And, it does all the tracking for you, and it's fun.

Catch-22 and Different Seasons

I finished Catch-22 this week (and today I went and picked up the sequel, Closing Time). It's a great, great book. The later chapters are poignant and funny (the thing with Doc Daneeka is probably the saddest), and the ending is great. I don't know if I would've been prepared for it in high school. Or rather, I don't know if I would have been unprepared. It is the kind of book that catches you with your pants down and knocks you on your butt.

It is an over-the-top satire of the vagaries of war (unfortunately, probably not very over-the-top) and the illogic of bureaucracy and war in general. It is also a really good example of how the language of the story can become the story on some level. It wouldn't have been nearly as forceful without stuff like this:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No, then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there is a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

I would've gotten jokes like this, sure, but I don't think I would've groaned as much. The narrator of Catch-22 accepts all they see and say, something like Huck Finn. As I've said before, I wasn't good at standing outside the narrator's head. It's not that I had to be hit over the head with things, but I felt like I had to see things like the narrator did in order to understand the point of the story. This put me at a disadvantage with the unreliable narrators of modern fiction.

Anyhow, reread this if you haven't seen it for a while. It was great. I don't remember a single boring page. Sex, violence, language, and philosophy warnings.

I resumed my Stephen King program. I think I'm up to 1982 or so. I checked out Christine (which I think is about an evil car), and Different Seasons. Different Seasons is about as long as a paperback, and contains four short stories/novellas/novelettes/whatever. Three of them have been made into movies (and I'm not sure about the fourth). They all seem to have minor links between their characters.

The first one was "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption", which was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman took the main roles). It was a great story, just as touching as the movie. It surprised me how much of the language from the story had survived into the movie. Most of the important incidents made it too. Looking back at the movie, I see why they added and changed what they did: somebody had some real brainstorms for the movie. But there are no substantial differences in the feeling of the thing. Make haste to read the story and see the movie.

The second one was "Apt Pupil". Once, I read that good vs. evil is a hoary old conflict for a plot to do. Instead, you should do something closer to good vs. good; that is, oppose characters who want conflicting things for their own good reasons. There are a lot of reasons to do it: the characters will be more realistic, the conflict will be more meaningful, the story will be less predictable.

"Apt Pupil", on the other hand, is pure evil vs. pure evil. It's about a kid who becomes fascinated with the Holocaust and the concentration camps, then recognizes an old Nazi living in his town. Instead of turning the Nazi into the cops, the kid coerces the Nazi into telling him every gory detail. And that's just the beginning of the story. Everything spirals down from there. In a way, I couldn't wait for both of them to get their comeuppance. But it gets pretty horrible along the way.

It was made into a movie with Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro, but I don't think I really want to see it.

Next up in that one is "The Body", which got made into Stand By Me, a movie I might have seen snatches of, but now can't remember.

I also got The Old Man and the Sea. It was on the shelf near Joseph Heller's books. I don't think I have ever read a whole story by Hemingway, much less a novel, so this is another big classic for me.

So many classics, so little time.

Book action

I read Smoke and Mirrors, another short story collection by Neil Gaiman. There are a few stories that will definitely stick with me, and more that are pretty forgettable. The Cthulhu ones were pretty good, and there's a great murder mystery set in Heaven, prior to Satan's rebellion.

I started Catch-22 on a blustery day at Denver's City Park Lake. I've never read it before. I was in the shade most of the afternoon, working on the first hundred pages or so. It finally got so cold between the tree and the wind that I moved a couple of benches over to the warmth of the sun. I felt much better while I was there, and I developed a nasty sunburn.

Catch-22 is a funny funny book.

The Baroque Cycle finally finishes

Well, it was quite a ride. Quite a ride, indeed. But I finished the Baroque Cycle, the 3000-page (in hardback! It's something like 8 paperbacks) historical novel set in the days of Newton, science and calculus, currency, and the beginning of the modern world.

If you haven't been following along, the story revolves around three larger-than-life characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Newton's schooltime chum and doer of deeds; Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, a kind of bloody-minded adventurer, beggar, and explorer; and Eliza, the woman Jack loves, a master of markets and influence. Behind the scenes, they create the atmosphere in which the greats of the era get things done.

What surprised me most was the lengths to which modernity depended on Newton's project to create a money system that could be trusted. He spent half his life on a project I hadn't even known was important. I used to think that Newton's best years were behind him when he went to work at the Mint. This book certainly put it in perspective for me.

I don't know how to describe it exactly. At the beginning of the book, the world is very chaotic and new. By the end of the last volume (titled The System of the World), Newton and his generation have created systems, and even in a way, systematic knowledge. Newton and Leibniz divide the world between them, all else is technology, that sort of thing.

I watched the modern world come into being, while caring about the poignant and hilarious adventures of this motley crew (and there's a cast of hundreds to care about, if you can). It's hard to believe that so much could get packed into one story, but somehow it did. And it definitely played hard and well as a counterpoint to and illumination of our modern times.

Plus, Monty Python jokes, including an absolute howler in Volume III.

I will definitely need longer to digest it, but it's been an amazing trip. I've been reading these for months, and I haven't appreciated all the subtleties, I'm sure. If you have several weeks to devote to one work of fiction, this would take you to great places. I feel like I can finally get back to reading three books at once, which is more like normal mode for me.

My only quibble is this: I know that the story takes artistic license with the events of the period. So I now have more fictional knowledge about the Baroque era than real knowledge. It's like Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell, which gave me fictional knowledge about Jack the Ripper. So, now that I'm interested in this stuff, I'll have to read a great deal of history. No doubt some fictional knowledge will always be mixed in from now on.

Also like Alan Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, this series is for adults only. I don't actually worry too much about kids reading for the sex, violence, disturbing images, language and adult situations. They're never going to make it past the superb language, the hunks of world knowledge inserted by the author, and the thinking they'd have to do to put it together.

Five Stars.

Google takes over the Internet

Let me bring you up to speed.

Ok, that's not exactly hyperbole. While Google has been essentially the most popular first click on the Internet, it has done so as an honest broker. It has said that pages sink or swim in its search results on the basis of algorithms, not favors for favors. It is a road sign on the (sigh) information superhighway, rarely an offramp or destination.

There are some exceptions. Google has steadily built a stable of productivity applications: Gmail, Gcal (the calendar), Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets (think Word and Excel, less powerful, but collaborative). They also own some content, like Youtube (and Google Video), and of course Blogger.

You can find the bleeding edge stuff at labs.google.com. Google 411 is a fascinating example. You can call a toll-free number from anywhere, 1800 GOOG 411, talk to a robot, search for a business by type, then get connected to the business without putting down the phone. The whole service is always free.

Why is Google doing Google 411? No, no, it's not just to put regular 411 out of business, which it totally would if anyone knew about it. There's a much awesomer reason to do it. While you talk to the robot, your voice data is being collected to train speech recognition algorithms. They're trading information so their robot can listen to you. It's not much of an invasion of privacy, really (if you called real 411, you'd be telling a person what you were looking for anyway). You can even block your caller ID before calling in, if you're paranoid.

Last week, Google stuck a program out there that allows you to use their office products even when you're offline, and seamlessly resyncs your data when you regain your internet connection. Google Docs and Spreadsheets are now competing directly with Microsoft Office...

Trust me, they are doing stuff there you could not imagine.

Until now. Google's system scales better than anything else out there; the amount of data they use and process is mindboggling, and they've created several unique tools to analyze it all efficiently. This week Google opened up its internet infrastructure (in beta), allowing people access to their application servers, Google FS filesystem and BigTable databases. It's called Google App Engine.

They're allowing 500 MB of space free, and a generous amount of bandwidth per month. The level of use they are allowing is free into the future, three applications per person. If you want more space or page views, you'll pay Google some amount of money.

Chances are good that the next great internet application, the next Facebook, will be written on these servers. And best of all, it takes 90% of the thinking out of hosting internet applications. It is Internet programming for the masses, in Python. It costs nothing just to go make a cool project that anyone in the world can see. A lot of budding young programmers will do just that. And Google will buy that awesome application that already runs on their infrastructure, along with the programmers who wrote it.

I decided to be a budding young programmer. To go with my Emacs and Unix obsession, I'm getting back into Python by fooling around with it to do processing for my Netflix prize data. And of course, I'm on the waiting list for the Engine... internet programming is a somewhat hairy world. I am taking my baby steps through Unix first, then onward.

I am on the home stretch of The Baroque Cycle. It's been just about perfect. I'm on the last 200 pages (out of 2500 or so). I'll be sorry to see it go. But, there's a new Neal Stephenson novel coming out in the fall, so I'm right on time. I've also never read Catch-22, so I got that from the library.

Same Mistakes

Another song is up, in the Music by Dan sidebar to the left. If someone cannot access these songs, please let me know. I have been hosting them on a pages.google.com account, which I would not expect to cause any problems.

I seem to be able to do about one recording per night, but of course my nights are not always free.

This song is by Jon Brion, an amazing musician. He does a lot of film scores nowadays, including I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is how I first heard his name. He also produced Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" album, along with Kanye West's "No Registration". On top of that, he has a standing gig at Largo, acoustic club par excellence.

It's my third crack at the song (and there were about fifteen takes on the bridge vocal). Be glad the first ones are not on the internet. I don't know why I love this song so much. I think I like how it sneaks up on you. I like how the chorus is always the same but is constantly changing interpretation. I like the power of memory, the remorse, the chance to start again, the conflicting emotions.

The main guitar effect is distortion, but pretty clean unless I play just loud enough to break into fuzzy. I saved the settings for further study. The clean sound is just a little chorus. Not much to it really. I was a little surprised that I could play it high as a little lead and low as a little bass. This guitar effects pedal is so cool.

Overall, I think this song sounds a little fuller and better than the other ones. Also, it's louder. I need to consider going back to balance volume levels for all the songs in the player. Or just make enough songs that the old ones kind of fall off the bottom ("retire").

I am getting up to speed on the Netflix prize. The idea is to improve on the Netflix movie recommendation engine. You're basically given ratings for 17000+ movies by about half a million Netflix users, then told to predict their ratings for other movies. First prize is ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Yearly prizes of $50000 for the current leader.

There are many other people kicking around ideas. I think I will do it as a hobby at first, then slowly become obsessed with it. It is machine learning and data mining, and I have been trained to hack my way through such jungles.

I am two-thirds of the way up Mt. Baroque Cycle. The Confusion was, once again, well worth all 800 hardback pages. It is made for people like me (hackers who like history, science, romance, and tales of derring-do). Not for kids, but it is for you. The last volume is The System of the World. I'm starting it tonight.

Finished Quicksilver; McCain

So, I've been way off the map, stuck in the 17th century with Neal Stephenson. But I finally finished Quicksilver after weeks of reading (maybe more than a month, an eon in my reading life). The phrase "tour de force" gets thrown around a lot these days... "Entertaining"... "Thought provoking..." "Hilarious..." "Absorbing..." "Tales of the ruling class intersect with the exploits of Vagabonds. Lofty science turns into slapstick on a dime. Depressing realism gives way to explosive alchemical experiments." I don't know how to blurb this book. It would probably be rated R or worse as a movie, with sometimes graphic violence and sex. It's everything from beautiful to vulgar. But it's amazing.

Here's McCain vs. McCain, an editorial in a flagship conservative newspaper that came out a few weeks ago. It was a somewhat transparent attempt to prevent McCain from gaining the Republican nomination, in the runup to Super Tuesday. It didn't work, because the Republican field was not strong this time around.

Vince gave a pretty backhanded description of McCain on those lines:

McCain walks a line somewhere between pandering and probity. I actually find this a welcome difference from the complete groveling of the other Republican candidates toward the pop conservative issue of the day.

McCain also contrasts well with President Bush, who shamelessly colors all history and lies profusely without any apparent guilt.

Of the Republicans, McCain is definitely the statesman of the bunch.

This is a dictionary-worthy example of damning with faint praise.

To understand how I feel about McCain, you'll have to take a trip back in time to the 2000 campaign. Ron Suskind, profiling Rove in 2003, puts it about as succinctly as anyone could:

As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.

McCain, having endured these attacks on his family and his reputation, turned around and made common cause with these people, going so far as to say he'd accept campaign advice from Rove this time around... hugging President Bush while hating his guts...

It is only the most personal example of many sellouts by McCain. He is a media darling and is portrayed as a moderate, and he's the Republican nominee. I wonder, though, since we essentially have 3 moderates left in the race, whether people will not vote for the real liberals and moderates instead of the somewhat clouded record of McCain.

Life 1, Dan 0.

Well, it's been a while again.

My mother-in-law came to visit. Alex had really been missing his Mimi. It made all of us miss Sarah's family in Utah. Everyone wanted to be back together again. We took a nice trip downtown to The Tattered Cover (one of the better bookstores in the state, so I'm told).

Alex is enjoying a lot of Sesame Street characters now, especially Elmo. We've been getting him books and watching the show more. He's learning to count from them. In one particular show, The Count is out, so Ernie fills in for him. However, after Ernie finishes counting, there's no melodramatic thunder or lightning flash, so Ernie has to do his own effects. "Eight... Nine... Ten! Ah ah ah! ... Uh... THUNDER! LIGHTNING!" Now when Alex counts, he says it and we say it. It really cracks him up.

He can also do most of his alphabet, and he's up to subject-verb-object syntax. Of course, it's stuff like "I love Elmo" and "I play soap", but it's been a marked improvement.

Sarah and I have been pleased to find a church. Check it out at www.missionhills.org. Personally, they had me at Caedmon's Call concert (a Christian band, that plays acoustic and world music). One of Alex's classmates goes there with his family, and after the mom found out from Sarah that we were still church-hunting, we figured we'd give it a try. For the past couple of weeks, we've enjoyed their service. There is a young married people-type sunday school class during the second service, so we'll try that next time.

It has been a bit exhausting trying to live without that kind of community, without meeting people regularly. The best I have done is bonding with the guys at work. Our families and faraway friends have been valuable in this respect.

My dad turned 49 yesterday, and we spent a very pleasant conversation on DDR, memory and the neural networks of the brain, his new classroom, and such. I gave my DDR setup to my mom. It turned out I couldn't play it after Alex went to bed because it was too noisy, so there was no good time to work out. Mom is going to town on it, getting Bs on songs. My cousins Riley and Shay come to stay with my parents, and it turns out that the best babysitter is DDR. They're about... I want to say 10 and 8, but that might be wrong. Anyhow, Dad reports that tiring them out has become very easy because they play the dance game 3 hours a day during their visits... this boggles my mind.

Dad always wants us to come back to Seattle. He hasn't had a crack at his grandson yet, but they miss us too. I suppose if I got the right offer, I could see it... Sarah wants to get settled here so Alex can go to school and life stays a little predictable, though, so it would have to be a pretty big improvement on the status quo.

I finished another Discworld book by Terry Pratchett. This was #2, The Light Fantastic. It is almost pointless to tell you the plot. However, it's just great for what it is, which is humorous fantasy satire with a playful philosophical nugget at the core.

I also ripped through V for Vendetta the comic, once again. I basically read it all in one sitting. It is hard to read the glib protestations of V now that he was 'liberating' Evey without a bit of a chill. The point of the story in general is that the proper answer to tyranny is violence, that violence can be a tool of the liberator who the government calls the terrorist, and that destruction, not conciliation, is the proper response to this. Along the way, V kills instruments of the state, but also causes, directly or indirectly, the deaths of many more people. His motives are also very murky, in that he is not just carrying out a program of asymmetric insurgency, but also prosecuting a vendetta. He is a serial killer, but he is the hero of the story. The story in the comic books is violent, but not very gory. Aside from the somewhat goofy storyline where the AI computer controls the country, it is very powerful. So, once again, I strongly recommend you read it.

Quicksilver, a historickal tale of science and piracy set at the dawn of the Age of Newton, has been going really well. It is insightful, and big somehow, and rollicking hilarious. It shines a light from a very interesting angle on our contemporary situation. It came from an unexpected quarter, written by a science-fiction author of high distinction. It's bawdy and violent and ludicrous, but also amazing.

I finally got started learning GNU Emacs. World beware.

Also, Arc, a new programming language has hit the web. I am following this development with great interest. This is the goal: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html

Music thingy

As you may not be aware if you don't actually visit the front page of the blog (seriously, people, RSS; feed readers; look it up), I stuck an mp3 player on the top, to the left. I figured out that as a dude with a Google email address, I have 100 MB of free space available for me to upload files or make web pages at pages.google.com. I don't know if there's a bandwidth cap, but the way these things work is, if enough people start hammering your website to download your music, the website can become profitable through text ads. So I'm not worried for the time being.

Don't Need Anything is the first song in there right now. It's the finale of an anarchist musical, or so I hear, by the lead singer from Toad the Wet Sprocket, but it has also made a great lullaby for Alex that I've sung many a time. Please forgive my nonexistent mixing ability, as well as the stray bad note here and there.

The second song is what you get when you stick a drum machine with a looping chord progression on one track, and then a guitarist comes back from the dead and plays the guitar like a zombie and clicks through the presets on the pedal while recording on the other track. It's also what you get when you hand a crappy lead guitar player a multi-effects pedal. If we shadows have offended, etc., etc.

I often record random noodling onto the computer, just like writers will warm up by writing random stuff. Most writers, however, have the good sense not to publish theirs. I am also listening for sweet music in the middle of noise, and once in a while a riff will be useful to me later.

All the sounds on both songs come out of the one pedal, which may be of some interest to you if you've never thought about how guitar effects work. What the pedal does is simulate more complicated setups where each step performs a different transformation on the audio signal coming through. You can get almost anything out of your guitar if you can come up with the recipe. I haven't even experimented with creating my own effects yet, so stay tuned.

I finished a few books. It's pretty hard to talk about Spook Country, the latest novel by William Gibson. His previous novel was one of the best books I've read in a long time, so that bar was set pretty high. Gibson's book was a very interesting take on what kind of world we are living in. The various characters move in and out of worlds that are invisible to common perception. The idea is that these things are in their infancy, though, and might become just as real, if not more real, than our quotidian existence. So there are spies and surveillance as well as virtual reality and real world articles tagged with metadata (spimes). The funny thing about this kind of book is that it's not exactly extrapolative science fiction any more. To get the sf thrills and sensawunda, you have to think about where all this is going. In a more traditional sf book, the author would just show you. I thought it was thought-provoking and entertaining, but I don't think I would call it moving, like I would some of his other work.

I also read Dies the Fire by SM Stirling. Dad bought it for me while he was here. This is a story of America (really, Oregon) after an apocalypse: in a flash, causes TBD, electricity and gunpowder stop working for good. Then, tons of people die because they don't know how to survive (and they're stuck in urban areas). The book tells the story of the survivors, who get medieval and communal in a hurry. It was a very interesting idea, and was pretty well thought out. One thing I always wondered about The Stand was what would happen when the food ran out (years after the end of the story). Which it would. This book goes there. It revolves around food in a way that really surprised me. Change of subject, one of the main characters is a Wiccan. I didn't know much about their religion (except the really basic stuff you pick up here and there), so I was interested in the window on that culture. It's not a classic book, but it's fun (if at times a bit gory and sweary).

And I finished another one by the master, Philip K. Dick. What's he the master of? Well, writing like Philip K. Dick, for one, that's why they named an award after him. I guess he's the master of mind-bending, of reality confusion, of paranoia, of the low and untidy corners of society. This one was called Lies, Inc. (originally, The Unteleported Man). Dick wrote this in a fertile period, when he wrote ten novels in two years.

In the story, a dystopian Earth is overpopulated, and attempts at colonizing the solar system have essentially failed. Light-speed ships exist, but only one habitable planet has been found. Then comes the invention of instant teleportation. A channel from Earth to the colony planet opens, and people start going to the colony planet. The only catch is that it's a one way trip. There's no way back to Earth.

A neurotic man who owns a light-speed ship starts to suspect that something is rotten in the colony, that a powerful conspiracy is controlling the colony for its own purposes, and decides to spend 18 years traveling to the colony in his ship, so he can return and report on its true nature. Even before he leaves, he is essentially hallucinating. And when he gets there... well, you'd just have to read it. I haven't taken acid but I feel confident that the experience was set down in print in this book. And it only gets weirder from there.

The setting, the characters, the language were top-notch, and I found the resolution very well done, very fair. It cleared up the book a lot, but I have a lot more to reconstruct as far as what was actually going on while I was reading the craziness. I even started rereading it from the beginning. I don't know if I'll go all the way again, but it certainly commanded my attention. Nothing very graphic, except for the drug trips, call it adult themes and disturbing images. Definitely worth your time, if you turn pro when the going gets weird.

Up next, an sf parody by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #2, The Light Fantastic), Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, and Mt. Baroque Cycle. Oh, and Lord of the Rings. I'll be busy.

It's been a busy couple of weeks

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! My family has been visiting in Denver: Mom, Dad, and Rachel. We have been busy not being busy: going to the bookstore, playing Nintendo together, going to movies, eating my dad's cooking, and generally having a great holiday.

I read The Hobbit, which you should also read, and I got some great book recommendations for my dad. I'm ready to scale Mt. Baroque Cycle soon, and some more Gene Wolfe, Lord of the Rings, and more!

The most interesting part of the week has been family devotional time. Mom came up with it. All of us will have taken a night, through tomorrow. We've talked about whether God is fair, how we should worship a child-God, about the difficulty of prayer and church discipline. I will try to get to these in blog posts.

Dad wants me to create a book-group-creating/management web site. My cursory investigations have not yielded a similar service on the internet.

Cheers to all of you!

Start of book reviews

I was going over my reading record in the blog, and I think I must've either missed tagging some things with "books" or not talked about all that I did read. For instance, The Stand isn't on there. There are only 34 books! On the positive side, only four were rereads, so I tried to spread my wings a little this year. If you want to go back and check them, just click on the "books" tag at the bottom of this post.

There's a lot of science fiction and fantasy, some classics, some religious stuff, some Stephen King, and other miscellany from databases to math to poker.

It should go without saying that I'm soliciting reading suggestions. And I really should get a reading group.

This probably interests about two people in the entire world, but here's the list I found for 2007 blog-posted books, earliest to latest:

Left Hand of Darkness
Bujold: Brothers in Arms, Memory, Mirror Dance
The Shining
How Much for Just the Planet?
The Knight, The Wizard
V for Vendetta
The Biggest Game in Town
Understanding Comics
From Hell
Database in Depth
Freakonomics
How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
Aspects of the Novel
Walking On Water
Girl Meets God
A Sort of Life
What's So Amazing About Grace
Audible Neil Gaiman
Cujo
Charmed Life
The Power and the Glory
Night Shift
The Gunslinger
Till We Have Faces
The Color of Magic
Starship Troopers
The Language of the Night
The Man in the High Castle
Lord of the Flies
Journey Through Genius
Fragile Things

Checking in

My reading of Lord of the Flies was somewhat tainted by knowing how it ends. It's the model UN episode of The Simpsons, so I knew the plot from start to finish. It was still a very impressive book. I had to take several breaks from reading it because it was just too depressing, but it was very good.

One thing I wondered as I read it was whether this thing was written deliberately to provide fodder for critics of various schools. It is almost impossible to avoid reading it as an allegory; I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I used to think that true understanding of a work of fiction involved teasing out the allegory. Now, not so much.

In between Lord of the Flies sessions, I finally found Neil Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things under a car seat and finished it off. The end of the book is a kind of post-quel to American Gods, another book I recommend highly. A story about The Matrix that was written when the movie came out. One about a society of gourmands that has eaten absolutely everything under the sun. A touching one called "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" about a shy kid who meets some very strange girls. A very funny one about a writer who lives in a gothic Halloween world who tries to overcome the stigma of writing contemporary literary fiction. All of them start out normal enough, then go a little bit crazy, magical-realism style.

I also finished Charmed Life, which was very entertaining. Today, I dove into the next one in the series, The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant.

Somehow I worked in time to "finish" Super Mario Galaxy. This is a charming game, a flagship for Nintendo. They hit every note just right. Mario is running around in the stars, visiting all kinds of planets. Some have normal gravity, some are very very strange. They have themes, like "" The plot is the Mario plot (Bowser kidnaps the princess, you go save her), but everything else was fresh and exciting. There was some great camera trickery involved, with Mario walking around on the ceiling a lot. The music was brilliant. Bee Mario is probably the cutest thing they have ever done. And beating the Robot Bowser level in Toyland felt like a real accomplishment. The first half of the game was easy enough, but the second half, which I am just starting, looks to be pretty hardcore. I say "finish" because even over the course of my rental, which was most of three evenings, I only got through half of the levels.

I got a wireless keyboard and mouse at Target this weekend. I hope to use it in conjunction with the Wii to surf the web from my couch. Stay tuned.

I've got that William Gibson book to read, and I have that end-of-year book sum-up to get to. I hope the early December days are treating you well. Sarah should have some exciting pictures up of the house decorated for Christmas soon...

Happy Thanksgiving

I hadn't looked at my Amazon recommendations in a while, so I was a little unprepared to find that many of the book recommendations it found for me were things I had recently checked out from the library or read using the reference libraries available through work. The tool basically predicted the future based on my past reading events. The one that was the weirdest was that it recommended The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, and that was the first Dick novel I've ever read. A little spooky.

My first turkey: Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe was idiot-proof and amazing. You brine the turkey overnight and then roast with apples, onions, and herbs stuck in the cavity. It was moist and delicious, mission accomplished. The only thing that went wrong was that I bought too small a turkey. I won't make that mistake again.

I finally finished Charmed Life, (Diana Wynne Jones) which was quite good. The eerie similarities to Harry Potter continued to the end of the novel, which cements my opinion that it is basically source material for the series. I mean, two thirds of the way through, someone starts insisting that they not call the enchanter Chrestomanci by his name, to avoid summoning him, but instead call him... wait for it... You Know Who. Capital letters and all.

We had a nice Thanksgiving cooking together. Sarah's sweet potatoes were just divine, and even though the turkey was small, our little family of 3 barely got through a quarter of it. We have lots of leftovers. We did the wishbone, said what we were thankful for, and watched football while peeling potatoes. These were practically my only requirements for a successful day. Then we all fell asleep at 4:00. It was our first Thanksgiving away from everyone's relatives, but Sarah and Alex did videoconferencing with the Utah fam (with iChat; we are also set up to do it over Skype, but other programs are possible) so they got their fix.

There are some great poems about being thankful, so I will just let one take over. But first, I am thankful for life and love, for wife and son, for food and song, for walks and books, for every short, eternal day.

Welcome Morning

Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.