Missing Context

In the September 2024 Reader’s Digest, we have a little aside that is a little incomplete.

The title of the 1970s movie The China Syndrome refers to the idea that if you dug a tunnel through the earth (ignoring the molten lava core), you’d end up in China.

C’mon, man. Who wrote that? Don’t answer; I know it’s someone who was born this century and does not know that China syndrome refers to a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear plant where the core would burn hot enough to descend into the earth. No, not all the way to China, but still, it would be bad. The young person would also not know that The China Syndrome is one of the reasons we don’t have nuclear power almost fifty years later.

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Good Book Hunting, Friday, October 5 and Saturday, October 6, 2024: Davenport, Iowa

As I mentioned, I was in Davenport, Iowa, over the weekend. As it happened, the Source Book Store was only a block and a half from our hotel (and a block from the conference center), so I stopped in there. It’s 5000 square feet of books across several floors in an old building. The proprietor, an older gentleman, said his grandfather started the store 89 years ago in a different location and gestured to a painting of an older man reading a book before some bookshelves. I only looked in a couple of places: Poetry (looking for more early Edna St. Vincent Millay editions), literature, and local history (so that if we attend this conference again next year I can tell my beautiful wife all about Davenport).

Also, if I thought I was safe from a book signing merely because I was several hundred miles away from ABC Books, I was sorely mistaken. The conference did not have many vendors present, but one was a table with a large display from an author.

So I got a couple of his books, too, but not one of each–he had like twenty books scattered among four or five series and one-offs.

At the Source Book Store, I got:

  • A 1909 edition of Old School Day Romances by James Whitcomb Riley. I wonder if I should order more mylar for book jackets just to cover this book (and some others).
  • The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway, his account of a summer in Spain watching bull fights.
  • The River and the Prairie by William Robu. “Do you know Bill?” the proprietor asked. Apparently, the author used to call the book store when he was looking for things, but the proprietor is not sure if the author is still alive.

From author Ben Wolf, I got:

  • Unlucky, a one-off Western.
  • The Ghost Mine, the first book in the Tech Ghost series about an energy mine that has gone silent and the investigation thereof.
  • Winterspell, a cyberpunk dystopian thriller and the start of the series which sounds maybe a little like William Devore’s Earthborn series, the second of which I have around here somewhere.

In all likelihood, I will pick up the Riley book and the history first. As to Ben Wolf’s sci-fi/fantasy books, I still have to get through five or six Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books to get through sometime soon, which might be in the next decade, first.

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Both of Them?

Yahoo Mail down worldwide as users rage over email app crashes

Up until recently, my Sam’s Club membership was tied to my Yahoo! email address from 25 years ago. I guess I could get into it if I really wanted to–if they haven’t turned it off as they oft threatened–but I did not tend to get anything but junk, and a couple years’ worth of junk is too much to sift through looking for something that might have been a real email.

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A Long Weekend

It sure has been quiet here, ainna? Well, gentle reader, this weekend I traveled to Davenport, Iowa, for CornCon 2024, a cybersecurity conference at which my beautiful wife spoke. The conference was on Friday and Saturday, but we rolled up some US highways through the river country to reach one of the Quad Cities on Thursday. And I was too shy to ask the locals what the fourth of the quad is. I mean, I know Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport. But what is the fourth? Bettendorf? Spoiler alert: It was East Moline according to Wikipedia; before East Moline was added, it was the Tri-Cities, and after Bettendorf grew, some people took to calling it “Quint Cities” but that has not become as popular. It also explains why some businesses I saw were named Tri Cities something and one was Quint Cities something.

At any rate, I ended up attending only five of the sessions as cybersecurity, especially at the executive level, ain’t my bag, baby. But I spent a couple of hours walking around the downtown area of Davenport along the river. It’s a nice little city, but it has its panhandlers and homeless like other cities.

On our way to dinner on Thursday night, my wife said it was the return of City Brian. I asked her what she meant, and she said that I was a little more purposeful. Which is I guess her way of saying that I assume a more assertive posture and walk faster in the city. I certainly adopt a “Don’t mess with me, man” attitude. And when she asked if I had my lanyard and convention pass at one point, I pointed out that I had the lanyard looped around my belt and the badge tucked into my pocket because wearing a conference badge outside of the conference center is like saying, “Pick me, some dude!”

You know, I guess that’s a habit of mine where I go, the little local recon a couple of blocks around where I am staying; I did the same when I traveled for business to Chicago in 2022. I just like to know where things are around me, the restaurants and bars, the groceries, the other shops. I also strolled briefly on the riverfront–on late Saturday morning around 10:30, a 5K was finishing up–they must have started later than the ones do down here, which begin at 7am or 8am. A bandshell held a single guy with a guitar and some backing MP3s singing some Dave Matthews songs–that bandshell seemingly had a band constantly, as we could hear them if we stepped onto Brady Street at any time of day or evening. I strolled through a car show, and another singer or band was playing at a farmer’s market down the road. I wandered past the Scott County Courthouse, police headquarters, city hall, and a Federal courthouse on 4th Street. The symphony hall was attached to the conference center, and during one afternoon session on Friday, I heard the trumpet warming up in the hallway outside the theater which had been set up for a gala that night. So it was like a real city, for sure. My wife said it seemed more like a city than Springfield, but that’s probably mostly because the buildings were taller. In the business districts and downtown here, the buildings top out at four or five stories.

Was there a book store a block away? Yes. But you’ll hear a little more about that later.

On Sunday, we attended church in Davenport and then drove over to the Milwaukee area since we were almost there (almost meaning a three hour drive, but that is two thirds of the way). I visited my father’s grave. I visited my 96-year-old grandmother, probably for the last time (which I think every time I see her every couple of years). I stopped in on my half-brother whom I have not actually seen in person for seventeen years (!). I mean, I’ve been in touch with him via text message every couple of months and I did a video call with a couple years (a decade?) ago, but I haven’t seen him since the family reunion in Wisconsin on my oldest son’s first birthday (as it happens, it was his youngest’s first birthday, leading me to wonder if we are only destined to meet on first birthdays). He’s been in Massachussetts and Arizona for most of that time, and the last time I was in Wisconsin, he was moving that day so he didn’t have time to get together. But, still. Seventeen years. Sobering.

On Monday, we drove back from Wisconsin. We stopped in St. Louis for lunch, and I left some flowers at my mother’s grave, which means that I visited both of my parents’ graves on consecutive days which is a feat I am unlikely to repeat. Actually, I wonder if I’ll ever make it home to Wisconsin again.

We made it home safely before sunset last night to find that our boys, left to their own devices now that they’re eighteen and sixteen, did not handle the responsibility very well at all. Which is unfortunate, as it will give us pause in planning other trips without the boys.

So I am back at it. Unfortunately, I did not read a lot on the trip, but I did listen to a lecture series. Stay tuned.

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Book Report: Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe (1989)

Book coverI am not sure why I picked this book up so soon after buying it and thought it would be a quick read. Perhaps because the collection of the complete works of Shakespeare which I have been ignoring on my chairside table starts with his comedies which are rather quick reads. But this book is a history play and one about a monarch with whom I was not familiar. So it was a little slow going, made a little slower by the fact that the characters call each other by their first name sometimes instead of their titles, which are the names that precede their dialog. So it was a bit of a Russian novel in that regard: Oh, Edmund is Kent and vice versa. That sort of thing.

So the plot of the play is that the King, Edward II, wants his pal Gaveston who was apparently elevated from less-than-noble status, and the real nobles think he’s a frivolous wastrel spending all the king’s money (which he gets from them) and diverting the king’s attention from kingly things. So he, Gaveston, is exiled, recalled, exiled again, recalled again, and then civil war breaks out. The king suspects his queen is having an affair with a Mortimer, while she pleads her innocence–come on, who outside of fiction dallies with someone named “Mortimer”? Crikey, I am having BBS flashbacks because one of the people in St. Louis signed himself as Mortimer, but I doubt that he read this play or history. Although it was the 1980s. People were better schooled then. Perhaps he had. But that’s neither here nor there. The nobles do not like Gaveston, so eventually they send him away and recall him, kill him, and then depose the king, placing his son on the throne–to Mortimer’s ultimate ill luck.

The play covers a long actual timespan in history, condensing it into five acts and adding a number of speeches on how much the king likes Gaveston (turned into many, many fine papers about latent homosexuality), the relationship of the king to the titled nobility, and whatnot.

But it lacks a little something compared to Shakespeare. Nothing is really stirring nor memorable except for the easy win of the they’re gay! for English majors in the past. I guess the Wiki says that it’s been staged even in recent past, probably again not so much for the monarch versus aristocracy themes.

I have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which I read in 2020, better.

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Facebook Memories: The Best Refutation to Climate Change

Because so much climate change relies on:

  • People moving around so that they don’t have actual experience year-over-year in the same location;
  • Which allows controlling people and shallow parrots thereof to proclaim “This is the most year ever!”

The fact that it is going to almost be 90 this weekend is not the most year ever as my Facebook memories allow:

It was this warm ten years ago, so 90 degrees in October falls into the range of the possible and not a new extreme.

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Book Report: The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen (2008)

Book coverYou might be asking, “Brian J., why did you pick up a book on golf?” You know, I’m asking myself the same question; after all, I have played maybe seven or eight holes of golf in my life (when Iron Maiden Dave and I hit the local park’s nine-hole course, we abandoned the game far later than the other two guys who wanted to join us to make us a foursome abandoned us). I suspect my thinking was this: I saw Razor Girl by the author which I purchased this summer and thought I should read this book before I read the novel. A “how can you eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” sort of thing. So I picked this book up and worked my way through it with some other books in the interim (which should tell you what I thought of it).

The schtick of it is that Carl Hiaasen, who played a little golf in high school and college with his old man, decides to pick up the sticks (as I’ve picked up the lingo) again in his middle age. Which is about the same age as I am now (so I am pleased to think I am not old). So I guess the theme might be the struggle to recapture one’s youthful glory or or man versus himself in trying to improve on a skill game (at a certain age). But I think the book is poorly executed.

Most of it is a diary of the first 577 days of his return to golf; numbered days (not all 577, just ones where he did golf things) give a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of his golf experience for the day which might be playing a round or buying some new golf product he purchased and maybe tried. These little italicized bits are leavened with longer internally coherent pieces about other rounds of golf he’s played or the golf academy he attended or lessons he might have had. These longer pieces seem internally coherent, as I said, and I cannot help but wonder if they were individual columns or essays placed elsewhere, and they’re unrelated to one another. Case in point: One such essay talks about Hiaasen attending Leadbetter Academy for a day-long seminar, and then a later chapter mentiones playing on a course beside the Leadbetter Academy in Florida without mentioning he’d attended it–explaining it as though this was the first time the reader heard about it. Then, I guess the book feels the need to build to a finish which is bifurcated: Hiaasen plays in a tournament, and Hiaasen completes the book. No fooling; a couple of times whether he would finish the book is questioned and whether he could gut it out after getting discouraged.

So a bit slapped together, and one guesses that the draw is that it’s a Hiaasen golf book. Of course, since it’s a 21st century Hiassen book, it certainly slaps around the boogeyman of the day, George W. Bush. If it was written in the present day, undoubtedly it would be even meaner in its asides about the devil Trump. As it stands, Trump is mentioned on page 129, but only in reference to his rumored 300-yard drives which the author, about the same age, cannot match. A new edition, not that anyone would bother, would not be so laudatory.

So I was not impressed, but I’m not exactly the target audience, which is a golfer who would read anything about the sport and maybe relate to some of the author’s experiences. The title page and dust jacket do not indicate whether one should consider this a humor book or a sports book, but you should consider it the latter.

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The Record Library

As I have finished the last bits of the record shelving I started to build on Labor Day Weekend, I thought I’d show you what the Nogglestead record library looks like after a decade’s worth of book sales and visits to the antique malls ostensibly for “Christmas shopping” but in the “one for you, one for me” mindset.

In the living room, we have lifted the console stereo that I just “repaired” onto the long shelf and the two little emergency wings which I had to add when I discovered right after Labor Day that the shelf was not deep enough to hold the stereo. So I added a couple of little pieces to place along the sides–the console stereo rests on a single “leg” which is a crescent along the front and sides. The back is about a half inch above where the weight rests, so I only had to build for the sides:

I’ve moved the boxed sets except for the Beethoven collection to those shelves, and I moved all the Christmas records onto the shelf (to the right). The little bookshelf to the right has the Beethoven set (not complete, unfortunately) and some miscellany.

In the parlor, the long shelves beside the desk hold most of the collection:

You can see the gap at the back where the Christmas records were. The boxed sets had been stacked in rows in a giant column next to the shelves in the corner. You can see on the desk the albums I recently bought, which I will listen to once before putting in mylar and onto shelves. Beneath the desk you can see the two boxes of records we got from my mother-in-law’s downsizing; we have room for them now, and some room for maybe…. Organizing the records? Someday.

When my beautiful wife took an office for her business downtown, she took a shelf full of CDs with her, which left this wall bare, so I built some shorter shelves:

My wife’s mother’s former records will go here when we unbox them together. I should have enough record sleeves for them. And with that, all of our record library will be shelved finally.

And you are not mistaken, eagle-eyed reader; when my wife gave up her office in town–a nonprofit with which she works has space across the street from her former office where she can work while in town–so she brought the CD tower back, and it’s now in the foyer. Which is an odd place for it as we never (hardly ever) play CDs upstairs even though we have a 100-disc CD changer from back when that was a very big deal. Come to think of it, we hardly ever play CDs at all unless they have audio courses on them.

But records? Aw, yeah, you know we’re hipsters.

How many records is that? you might wonder. To be honest, I don’t even know. I’d have to go back and count my orders for 100-packs of sleeves and then guess from there. A thousand? Fifteen hundred? I honestly don’t know. Ask me again sometime if we get them organized and in a database. But the real question is: Do we have more copies of Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Whipped Cream and Other Delights? I am not sure–we probably have four or more of each–but probably the former which we will get to listen to soon.

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