To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Dude, your variable name is showing up in the subject line.
If your replica watches are of the same quality as your QA, I’ll pass. Besides, I have a real watch, I don’t need a bracelet with numbers and hands painted on, thanks.
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Blogs are getting a lot of pixel inches out of an essay entitled I Can’t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can, which plays into an Instapundit narrative about the loss of traditional male skills. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I know how to do a number of things that my father can’t do. These include:
So there you go. Maybe I do lack some basic skills required at the root level for survival, but I have mad skillz to mindlessly enjoy the fruits of an increasingly fragile modern civilization.
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China says U.S. warning on toothpaste irresponsible:
China has branded a U.S. warning against using its toothpaste as irresponsible, saying low levels of diethylene glycol (DEG) were not harmful.
“So far we have not received any report of death resulting from using the toothpaste. The U.S. handling (of this case) is neither scientific nor responsible,” China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement posted on its Web site over the weekend.
This from a government who thinks bumping an electronics surveillance plane is responsible piloting.
In some quantum universe, this is one of the beginning shots in a war between China and the United States. When its exports collapse because the Chinese Administration of Quality Supervision (motto: Good Enough For Government Work Is Good Enough For Everything) doesn’t actually stop the country from exporting poisonous substances as consumables and customers die, China’s economy collapses. To save face amongst its preening ruling elite, the country makes its desperate gamble for Taiwan and thar she blows.
Part of my gift as a writer and a paranoia shidoshi is the joy of extrapolating the worst possible scenario from a bad press release.
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If you’re driving around looking for something, it’s good to have a marker to know where to turn:
Since this sign is in Old Trees, the historic suburb in which I live, it’s possible that we’re looking at an historic no parking zone that tourists might want to visit.
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Here’s a little personality test for you:
If you look at that and think, “Wow, couldn’t they have said that with a single no parking any time sign?”, you obviously are one of those people who see the world in black and white, in parking and no parking. You cannot wrap your mind around the shades of grey, the layers of nuance between No Parking Any Time and No Parking Here To Corner.
But then again, not everyone can go to college and get a ::sniff:: humanities degree.
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If you want a preview of next weekend’s Good Book Hunting segment, John Sonderegger identifies the primary target.
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Instapundit linked to a list of Top 10 Great Ways to Save Water. This list was useless to me for the most part because it was geared to water wastrels in the first place. Criminey, here’s the list:
Holy cannoli, that’s a lot of advice for the hoity-toity types with swimming pools and landscaping and/or water features on their grounds.
You want to conserve water? Here’s the MfBJN list for you, short form:
Now that’s advice the rest of us can effectively ignore.
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Reader’s Digest hyperbolically identifies 25 Products That Will Change Your Life.
The list includes:
And twenty-one more such things which will alter the very fabric of our existence and cause city planners to redesign their New Urbanist projects.
Unfortunately, they’ve only changed my life by removing the couple minutes I spent skimming the article. At least I got a blog post out of it.
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This morning, while out taking the morning constitutional with my boy, we stopped at an Old Trees coffeeshop for a pastry and caffeinated beverage. In the sofas by the window, four of the eight Republicans in Old Trees had gathered, even though we know we should avoid grouping in one place because we’re easier targets.
Because let’s face it, Old Trees is not a Republican enclave. The upper six figure and lower seven figure houses often sprout INSTEAD OF WAR, INVEST IN PEOPLE and NOT IN OUR NAME signs more frequently than dandelions in the lawns and many cars still bear Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers or the resulting sour grapes quotes like “So Many Republicans / So Few Jail Cells.” But the group was out in force, speaking loudly and excitedly. A partial transcript follows:
Fred Thompson. Fred Thompson. Fred Thompson. Fred Thompson. Rudy Guiliani or Fred Thompson. Front runner in 30 days. Fred Thompson. Ronald Reagan. Fred Thompson.
As I predicted. A candidate Republicans can embrace without asterisks.
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This post is getting a lot of hits for Jessica Cutler today, apparently because she just filed for bankruptcy.
Which helps traffic since I’m not posting anything much this week.
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Of course, this work was originally entitled De Commodis litterarum atque incommodis before Renée Neu Watkins translated it for us. I picked this book up over a year ago at the Carondolet YMCA Book Fair for fifty cents. Even though it’s only 54 pages, it has taken me this long to power through it.
Apparently (the introduction tells us), Alberti wrote this tract early in his Renaissance career as a scholar because his wealthy family was begging for him to produce something to justify his existence as a freeloading scholar. This is his defense of freeloading: in it, he outlines that someone dedicated to books should seek only the higher knowledge and truth within and should not expect to get chicks, money, power, or reknown. Let’s face it, a real scholar hits the books for 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, in ill-heated Renaissance apartments wearing rags–because all of the scholars meager moneys go into books.
The book reads as though it was written by any stereotypical scribe from a fantasy novel, but it was written by a young man romanticizing the hair shirt he’d chosen for his wardrobe and trying to lower his family’s expectations. The prose is flowery and meandering, even where the text continues to say that the author is glossing over many things and is getting back to the point.
Still, the rhetoric comes from a different time, where arguments are advanced by reason without the intrusion of actual data points (although Alberti offers anecdotes, often at hearsay distance, to illustrate) or invective (which is the contemporary practice).
The book did not give me any advice on how to wean myself from book abuse, and it was my 50th book completed this year. I obviously need help.
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Skydiver killed when parachute fails
I mean, if the death was immediate.
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Mo. Man Burns Books as Act of Protest:
Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero’s Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October” and Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn’t even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.
He certainly drew attention to his store, which probably boosted traffic, and that, ultimately, was his point. But Wayne is a foolish wastrel.
Not that I am paranoid, gentle reader, but I do have a plan B for my extensive library. Not only do the books have excellent insulation properties, but they are a handy fuel source for fires should civilization collapse.
It’s not that I expect civilization to collapse that abruptly, but should it do so, I’ve got the books.
You can probably guess what Plan B is for the cats.
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Oh, sorry, no; since it’s a bad thing for a particular woman, society should perhaps take extra steps to not do it: Texas woman on death row still represents rarity:
A neighbor in a suburban Austin neighborhood appeared to be the perfect babysitter for Eryn Baugh’s infant son and his 2-year-old sister.
“She’s the most sweet, endearing person in the world and put forward this good Christian front,” Baugh said of Cathy Lynn Henderson, who lived two blocks away. “She could sell snow to an Eskimo.”
But just weeks after Henderson started working for the Baughs, 3-month-old Brandon was dead and Henderson had fled the state. The infant’s body was found buried 60 miles away with his skull crushed, wrapped in his yellow-trimmed white blanket and stuffed into a box that previously held Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.
Henderson, 50, is set to die in less than three weeks for the 1994 slaying that made her one of the most hated women in Texas. She would be just the 12th woman among the nearly 1,100 convicted killers executed since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977.
Where are the people who complain about the fact that most corporate structures at the top favor men? For consistency, shouldn’t the underrepresentation of women on death row also be protested?
Silly boy; those who protest in their hearts of hearts often misquote Emerson: A consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
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Oh, no; a dispute over a sizeable sunken treasure find could derail the EU and cause Spain to send a vast armada–both of its remaining warships–up the Thames in an all-out war to break the backs of the English sea dogs: Deep sea treasure trove launches trans-Atlantic dispute:
Odyssey has insisted it found the wreck in international waters in the Atlantic but has kept the exact site secret, but Madrid suspects the ship was discovered in Spanish territorial waters and a Spanish newspaper reported the vessel itself belonged to Spain.
“What we’re seeing here is a presumed incidence of plundering,” First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said Friday.
Spain opened a probe into the exact location of the wreck last week after the culture ministry became suspicious of the circumstances in which the cargo, worth an estimated 400 million dollars, was found.
Yeah, Spain, who probably minted the coins from stolen Incan or Aztec gold, is on record accusing the American treasure hunting company of plundering. But that’s apparently how it goes in 2007; any possession that was previously owned by someone from another country belongs to the previous owner as long as it’s old.
Bonus additional snark: Iranian officials also claim that the Odyssey was in Iranian national waters and regrets missing the opportunity to seize it.
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This book is another Joe Pike book (like L.A. Reqiuem, I think). As you know, gentle reader, I have read and reported upon all of Robert Crais’s work on this blog. I started out liking him with his early stuff, but later got a little bored with the “World’s Greatest Detective” schtick of Elvis Cole. Crais must have, too, since he’s veered off series, mostly, with some of his other books, but many of them set in LA return to Cole and Pike.
This book centers on a bodyguard gig that Joe Pike, the Hawk to Cole’s Spenser, gets. He brings Elvis Cole into it, of course, but most of the book is from Pike’s point of view, with flashbacks interspersed and other characters getting their chapters to show their emotional evolution.
Pike has to guard a Paris Hilton knock off who’s in danger of getting knocked off after accidentally hitting a Mercedes on an after-club drive. The Mercedes contained two local real estate developers and a gopher for a South American cartel. The girl goes into protection, but someone inside is tipping off the bad guys, so a consultant goes way outside and gets Pike. Pike determines the best way to prevent anyone from harming the girl is to kill those persons first.
As a matter of course, lies are told to the protagonists and are investigated. The layers of the onion are peeled back, resulting in a climax that explains why I keep getting Google hits for robert crais republican.
A decent book, but Crais relies on a certain familiarity with Cole and Pike and might just play too much with shifting point of view.
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I must have bought this paperback more than a decade ago, probably during college or immediately thereafter. It’s been hanging around, and I’ve even tried to start it once or twice before, but I stalled out before passing through the narrative frame (introduction of Marlow relating the story while on a boat in the Thames). This time, though, it was the time to read it, and I made it through both the novelette (“Heart of Darkness”), the short story (“The Secret Sharer”), and the introduction/critical materials (and in that order).
“Heart of Darkness” is only 120 pages, but it’s dense Victorian English. As some of you know, the movie Apocalypse Now was based on this work, and the three or four nights I spent reading it seem shorter than watching the movie. The plot varies in that Marlow is going to meet Kurtz, and Martin Sheen is going to kill Marlon Brando. So one almost wants to comment on the differences in the plot and how, thematically, the producers of the two works were talking differently and speculate as to why. But I have a real job, almost, so I won’t waste too much time on it. I did get some of the thematic points of man versus himself at the same time as man versus nature and man versus primitive man. More than half the story spends its time getting up river, and the appearance, retrieval, and death of Kurtz happen very quickly, so if I find a hardback copy of Conrad’s work, I would welcome an excuse to read it again.
“The Secret Sharer” is shorter and more straight forward, although the first pages set the scene and don’t jump right into the action. However, I kind of got the point here, too.
Then I read the critical essays and the introduction to learn a little more about Conrad and such. Wow, I hearkened back to my university days with the critical essays, which were people saying in nonfiction what the author meant in his fiction. The essays confirmed some of my takes on the stories, but my goodness. Somewhere in the world, people make a living explaining largely underread literature to each other and to their students. I am glad I didn’t stick in the academy.
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This weekend didn’t really yield any good book fairs, but I got some books anyway. We started the day by hitting some garage sales that boasted books. In 2007, a garage sale apparently boasts books if it has two books, one of which is a self-help book and the other is a microwave cookbook from 1987. However, Christ the King church was boasting a deal that you could get anything you could fit into a grocery bag for $1.00. I couldn’t find a bag full of books I wanted, but I found three that looked interesting, which left room in the bag for a Kodak Brownie movie camera circa 1966 and a Molecular Visions Organic Model Kit.
We did survey a “book fair” at the Book House, a used book store I vowed some time ago to avoid since it was pricey and smelled of incontinent cat. Since, it was a book fair, though….
Well, it looked as though the “book fair” was regular Book House stock with a tarp tent outside. I guess some bit of it went to charity. I actually had three books in my hands before realizing that the books were priced as marked, and that roughly-used Dilbert book really was supposed to cost $7.50. I looked around a bit, but didn’t get anything; Heather picked up one book. We decided to go to Patten Books up Manchester and tell Mr. Patten we were there buying because we had been to the Book House looking. But he wasn’t in; however, five John D. MacDonald paperback originals that I didn’t own were, so I dropped $15.00 and change on them. Patten also had some later Gor books, as he often does, but I’m not far along enough to drop $20 on a paperback just yet. Maybe in a couple years.
So here’s our take:
Titles include:
Heather got a book entitled The Great Compromise. Brownie and model kit not depicted.
So I was a bad boy by price ($16 for 8 books!) but a good boy by number, as I only increased my backlog by 8.
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When presented with a story like this:
A truck driver hauling more than 17 million bees was killed in an accident on Interstate 55.
I am torn as into which direction I want to snark.
Do I wonder Is this part of the great bee assassination conspiracy that’s killing all the honey bees, or do I wonder Whom will the bees sue? and make a list that includes the truck company, the makers of the guard rail, the family of the dead truck driver, and the makers of Honey Nut Cheerios just because General Mills has deep pockets?
The possibilities are endless.
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As you know, I bought Tarnsman of Gor and this book so that I would have read the first pentagor of the John Norman fantasy series before I lit into the last half of the first 10. Here, I read #2, the Gor book for 1967 (although my copy is a later reprint with cover by Boris Vallejo).
In this, Tarl Cabot returns to Gor after seven years on Earth to find his home city of Ko-ro-ba destroyed and its citizens scattered–including his father and his love Talena. He also finds himself in unheralded armor, meaning he’s an outlaw. He ends up going to Tharna, a city where women rule, and leading an uprising.
The book is the weakest of the first five, clearly a setup for the longer story lines that took place after the first one succeeded. Still, it’s short and it’s still a neat piece of fantasy. I articulated to my wife that good fantasy is very different from suspense/crime/mystery fiction in that when you want to find out what’s coming next, you really don’t have any idea. These books are like that; they contain enough detail into the world that you know Norman isn’t making it up as he goes, but as you go, you’re learning something about the setting and the laws that govern it. You really can have a sense of wonder you don’t get from other kinds of fiction.
So I’m ready for the sixth book in the series one of these days.
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