To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Tam remarks on the UN resolutions on the Libyan government and says:
As a side note, I was completely unaware that whether a government is “legitimate” or not is up to the UN Security Council…
She says she’s going to have fun with this For some of us, the laughter represents actual hysterics.
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Marko Kloos, a science fiction writer with two munchkins of his own, links to a Wall Street Journal piece about writers looking for places to write that don’t have wi-fi:
The whole world is hankering for faster Internet access. Then there’s novelist Adam Langer, who does his writing in the low-tech Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights.
“Not only do they not have Wi-Fi,” said Langer, 43, author of “The Thieves of Manhattan.” “They don’t have any usable outlets, so I have to be incredibly focused because I don’t have a ton of time on my MacBook battery.”
Langer isn’t alone. The Hungarian Pastry Shop’s wall of framed book covers, each by authors who typed amid the cafe’s din, is testimony to the growing appeal of Internet-free spaces.
Gone are the days when a café with good enough coffee, a lax policy on lingering and an open Wi-Fi signal made it the perfect spot for writers to work. With infinite temptations just a mouse click away, many writers are seeking out an increasingly scarce amenity in a wired city: disconnected workspaces.
Frankly, the problem is one of self-discipline. Of course, as the pot, I call the kettle black, but just because I lack self-discipline does not mean I cannot recognize the same in others.
Actually, I have just started toting the laptop to the Bread Co. (which these strange people call “Panera Bread”) now that I have the youngest in a little school program that takes him for 2.3333 (repeating) hours a day, two days a week. Given that I live 20-30 minutes away from the school, it doesn’t make sense for me to come home, so some logic I used to trick my wife compels me to stop there to drink cappuccino, eat pastry, and tap out some words.
You might have noticed some longer pieces appearing here every now and again. That’s why.
I don’t need to look for a place that offers me no wi-fi. I just don’t connect to the network. I have my laptop set to not connect to any wireless network it finds automatically. Ergo, it will tell me the Panera Bread wireless network is klaxoning its SSID at a frequency that only alarums my laptop, but I dismiss the button and then get to clacking at the keyboard.
All right, it’s not so much self-discipline as it is a touch of low risk threshold. I don’t trust wireless networks I don’t control. So I wouldn’t touch it anyway. Also, note I sit with my back to the wall in the coffee shop. Okay, that’s less paranoia and more the realization that it reduces the glare on the screen from overhead lights. But some people who conduct their business on the laptops in the Bread Co. exasperate me. In full view of everyone, they’re typing away on corporate documents and then they go for a refill without password protecting their machine. I had the brief urge to change the Facebook status of a local here on Thursday, someone whose name is at the tip of my fingers because he’s the sales rep for a memorable company and he participates in the local group on LinkedIn. But I digress.
So far, the change of scenery and the compressed time frame has really focused my effort. I open a couple things in tabs on my Web browser before I leave since I will want to just read while I chomp on a cheese pastry and as an eyebreak from writing. Then, I have two pieces in mind I want to work on: a blog post of some sort and an essay/article. I can flip between the writing things and the dwindling number of browser tabs for about an hour and forty-five minutes.
This week, I’ve dropped about 1600 words each day on two blog posts and an article (about blogging). A couple weeks ago, I tapped out an article about software testing that I’ve already placed with a British magazine. I reminded that same magazine that it was holding onto another piece I submitted a year ago, and bam! Suddenly, I have two forthcoming publications. This writing thing seems so easy sometimes.
When I’m disciplined, which means when I am in an area with wi-fi that I don’t trust. And, more importantly, a time and a place where I’m focused on writing.
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My latest attempt at bumper sticker zeitgeist:
It’s available at CafePress, of course.
Buy one for your Democrat friends, if you have any left.
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I’ve read an article on CNN.com about how Japanese residents are beginning to voluntarily absent from Tokyo, the largest city in Japan. The Tokyo metropolitan area is about 30,000,000 citizens, roughly one in four of Japan’s. I mention this because that rather blows my mind. Imagine if one in four Americans lived in New York City. That’s crazy dense.
But the article got me to thinking: What would a Japanese diaspora look like? Imagine that the nuclear problems that result from the earthquake/tsunami are worse than the authorities know or as bad as the most fevered anti-nuclear-power activist can nightmare up (some speculation from someone who might know). Suppose it renders part of Japan uninhabitable, and 40,000,000 or 60,000,000 people need to relocate, many of them outside the Japanese islands proper. What would that do to the world?
Personally, I would hope that the United States would throw open her doors to accommodate as many of the displaced as possible. It would be a great humanitarian gesture, and we would get some new citizen-track people with ingenuity, productivity, and excellent anime skills. Of course, it would cause a couple issues. It might weird the immigrants out completely to live in our heterogeneous society. They might be inclined to enclave up and make little Tokyos wherever they landed, but that happens enough now anyway. It would bump US population substantially, and we’d want to ease them into our population and society as we could. The illegal immigrants from Mexico and their advocates would raise holy kiri, of course, but a great natural disaster warrants one-time consideration that escaping from failed states and faltering economies does not. If we’re going to get cityscapes that match Blade Runner, great Japanese inflow would shortcut it. On the other hand, having all the anime companies stateside would probably make Steven Den Beste’s downloads faster, which might decrease his number of Hot Air Green Room posts further.
Where would they go elsewhere in the world if they did not come to the United States? Australia? China? Korea? Southeast Asia? South America? Europe? Africa? Any large, homogeneous influx like this will radically alter the composition of whatever nation or nations took them in. What would 500,000 Japanese do to the UK? What tensions would arise if 1,000,000 Japanese moved into the Pacific regions of Russia?
An American nuclear meltdown or whatnot would not cause great outflows. Our country is wide and not densely populated. Force everyone in New York City to move out of New York City, and you could spread them across New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maine, and a lot of us would be none the wiser. But in Asia, blocking off a small portion of habitable land will displace a lot of people.
All speculation aside, I’m more sanguine than this as to what will happen when the Japanese get those nuclear plants cooled down. But I do like to speculate for speculation’s sake. There’s a novel or series of novels in these questions.
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The term localvore is becoming big among the hippie-dippie set. Hey, I’m not knocking growing your own food–I recently uprooted my family to move to a locale where I have more room for my own gardens–and I’m not knocking supporting local farms and local gardeners who participate in farmers’ markets and roadside stands, but you’ve got a whole content industry providing books, Web sites, and even a newspaper column here in Springfield that does nothing but promote how much better local grown produce is than something grown somewhere else in the world and transported to your local grocery store.
I mean, hey, I support buying local produce when it’s fresh and cheap, but there’s no actual moral imperative to do so.
But for some people, it is a MORAL IMPERATIVE! because it’s good for the planet or something. Better for the planet than what the bourgeoisie is doing, anyway.
How many of those hectoring locovores drive Toyota Priia and listen to European techno on their Chinese-made iPhones? I’d like to see the Venn diagram on that.
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Bill Would Ban Human Cloning In Minnesota
But until a similar bill passes in Mississippi, we cannot be safe.
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Now that I am all Going Grant, I’ve also decided upon a personal scenting strategy. Well, no, that makes me sound more metrosexual than a man named Cary could stand. I’ve not started using body washes or gels; it’s still simple cake soaps sold at 36 for $5 at the warehouse store and $1 shampoo for me. I have started dabbing on a little cologne, though, since I have quite a chemistry lab of little vials of it as I recently discovered as I unpacked a little bin underneath the sink. And I wonder: has any man ever used a complete bottle of cologne?
Continue reading “Revisiting Cologne”
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They’re putting another bridge over the Mississippi River to help Illinoisianitians escape. They want to call it:
Missouri legislators want to name the next Mississippi River Bridge the “Jerry F. Costello-William Lacy ‘Bill’ Clay Sr. Veterans Memorial Bridge.” The costs associated with naming the bridge after those two local congressmen would be paid for by private donations.
Hey, I have an idea: Let’s just call it the Pork Barrel Bridge.
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I hope you like The Executioner series. As you might know from previous entries, I do. So my wife bought me 47 of them for my birthday, which means I’m probably going to read a lot of pulp paperbacks this year and next.
This is the 11th entry in the series. The long-running characters are getting established, and the history which will be referred to in the future happens now. The plot? Uh, Mack Bolan goes to San Francisco, meets an attractive woman who may be an ally or an enemy, shoots up some mafioso, and searches his soul.
That being said, that’s one aspect of the early Pendleton entries in the Mack Bolan series: Mack Bolan has a certain depth, in that he questions what he’s doing, his mortality, and his morality a bit. The books often start out with a juxtaposition of an epigraph from a known (at that time) poet and an epigram from one of Mack Bolan’s war journals. So they do try to include a little depth beyond just the gun porn and explosions. That really elevates pulp in my estimation.
A good, quick read that thematically embraces good versus evil, somewhat reflectively.
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In a slug leading to a review of the film Battle: Los Angeles, someone talks about a film he or she has not seen:
Remember ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ‘District 9,’ Independence Day,’ and ‘Cloverfield?’ The war against aliens went better in those movies.
The Somali are from another planet? Really?
The review itself, written by someone who has presumably seen Black Hawk Down, does not make the mistake the slug does.
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The man on the radio says the island of Hawaii is about to get hit by a tsunami.
Wow, how is it going to hit the Big Island and miss Molokai, Maui, Oahu, Lanai, Kaiau, Niihua, and Kahoolawe?
In other news, just yesterday, I learned the names of the major islands of the state of Hawaii to bolster my trivia knowledge. Just in time for this quip.
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To recap: A young drifter goes into a Starbucks and grabs the tip jar off the counter. A customer follows him to his car, altercates a bit, and gets hit by the car as the young drifter and his Bonnie lass leave. The customer dies.
The customer’s family sues because tip jars are an obvious target for deadly larceny.
It alleges that Starbucks “did not employ security to prevent the perpetration of such crimes” and that it “invited the act of perpetration of said crime” by having a tip jar.
Hey, why not? If Congress can mandate any decision, why cannot the courts determine that anything that can be stolen must be defended by armed security under the penalty of litigation?
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This is a 3-In-One Volume, as the dustjacket indicates, which means I might have screwed myself as far as the absolute metrics are concerned. This is the 21st book I’ve read this year, but if I’d read individual novels and whatnot, I’d be on 24. But such is life. When I read The Green Mile, someday, I’m going to take advantage of just that.
Meanwhile, this is the first book of G. McDonald’s that I have read in seven years (the last, apparently, was Skylar in Yankeeland). I read a lot of McDonald when I was in high school, back when I read a lot. These books were much fresher then, about ten or fifteen years old. Like me. But he was one of the big three Mc/MacDonalds (Ross and John D. being the others). But Gregory was the lesser of the three in output and ultimate popularity.
The books are the first three in the Fletch series. The first was made into the Chevy Chase film, albeit with some elements altered to make it more cinematic. Strangely, I like the film a little better, as it ties some things up better. In it, an investigative reporter for a newspaper goes undercover on a beach to find out the source of its drug traffic. As he does that, millionaire Alan Stanwyk hires Fletch, in his drifter disguise, to kill Stanwyk, who claims to have a fast-moving cancer. Fletch investigates both lines and solves them, but the two plotlines are parallel and only slightly converge at the end in an unsatisfying demideus ex machina. The movie ties it up better.
In Confess, Fletch, Fletch visits Boston from his recent residence in Italy. He’s seeking some paintings stolen from his fiance’s father. The father has disappeared. The father’s third wife follows Fletch to find out where her paintings are. And someone is murdered in the apartment Fletch borrowed for his stay on the night he arrives. Inspector Flynn, another McDonald character, gives Fletch enough lead to investigate the murder as well as the stolen paintings, and Fletch resolves both. These plotlines resolve a little better.
Fletch’s Fortune finds Fletch blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of journalists at a national convention where the primary target, a newspaper magnate, is murdered. Fletch investigates and solves the crime.
It’s an interesting throwback, the investigative reporter. Remember when they were relevant, briefly, in the 1970s and early 1980s? Remarkable.
A good read; I tore through it, relatively. I have at least one more McDonald on my shelves–a Flynn novel–and need to revisit McDonald’s other works as well. If that’s not enough to get you to consider it, nothing is.
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I know it’s all the rage among conservatives and libertarian types these days to “Go Galt,” that is, to not work as much as you can since the more you work, the more the government takes from you in taxes and basic humanity. It’s too late for that: a couple years back, even before the election of the current president, I absented myself from the work force mostly as I became a consultant and, as time elapsed, more of a stay-at-home Dad than a consultant. So I’m not in the employment numbers anyway, and if I went Galt, our house would be two-boy-induced-rubble in a matter of hours.
But I wanted to go somewhere alliterative. If not Galt, where? I decided to Go Grant.
Continue reading “Going Grant”
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I sometimes make other people uncomfortable, and by uncomfortable, I mean I creep them the hell out. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because of incidents like this:
Today, I’m watching my child play with the train set in the church-run preschool corridor when one little boy tells one of the teachers/attendants about his twin brother’s cast for his broken finger, which covers the urchin’s complete hand.
Then she turns to me, the only adult in sight, and relates the story of how when she was a child, her sister was goofing off when their parents were gone and managed to knock her thumb out of its socket and jam it up into the hand itself. I agreed that it sounded painful, but the first chit-chat, small-talk comment that came to mind as I stood there, leaning against the cinderblock wall in my beaten old black trenchcoat and holding my black fedora, was:
With a thumb you can dislocate on command, you can slip out of handcuffs easily.
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I don’t know why Andrew Hicks’s name popped into my mind tonight. But there it was.
Back in the late 1997s, I encountered his “A Year in the Life of a Nerd” series of posts where he talked about being a teenager in a western St. Louis suburb and then going to Mizzou. As fast as a 14,400 BPS modem and an AOL account would let me, I ran through the whole set to that point.
So once his name popped into my head, I did an Internet search, and lo! The Andrew Hicks World Wide Web Extravaganza, those years in the life of a nerd, have been republished as a blog, by a fan no less. Frankly, I don’t think any of you would do the same for me.
Meanwhile, now over 30, Andrew Hicks is a daddy blogger in Springfield…. Illinois.
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Last night, the HGTV television program House Hunter featured our home in Old Trees, Missouri (Still available! Cheap!).
We haven’t lived there in a year and a half (sellers ready to make a deal!). Right after we moved out, we had the entire top floor painted. Then, when we changed realtors, we had the house staged, so it’s full of furniture that’s nicer than ours (and which is not charged monthly, thankfully). The porch swing, mounted on a frame instead of hanging from the porch roof, is in the backyard now. My garden, which I tore out of an asphalt driveway with a sledgehammer, a pick, and a shovel, is gone; it’s a patch of grass now.
So it’s our house, but it’s different enough and distant enough that it’s not acute. The only things distinctly ours are the stepladder tucked into the main floor laundry (along with a large supply of light bulbs and 9-volt batteries to keep the rooms lit and the smoke detectors from beeping–one thing that made an unused home seem more unused when we were looking was the unrespiting bleating of abandoned smoke detectors) and the cherry tree in the front yard which should produce a pretty nice crop this year.
I do miss a couple things from the house. The next-door neighbor was often available for a hey,-how-are-you that would turn into a 40 minute chat. We could walk out the front door and walk everywhere. We could sit on our front porch and watch the neighbors walk or drive by (we could even talk, no matter what the “highway noise” complainers, and there have been many) say (loudly).
If it would have aired earlier in the winter, I might have been more wistful. But now that the spring is tipping its hand, the benefits of this house in the mountains are tugging at my sleeve. I spent part of yesterday morning cleaning out our inherited burn pile for an eventual rose garden and in building up a raspberry patch with peat and soil. Later today, I might pick up a couple of fruit trees for the orchard. Also, even though the Springfield murder rate more than doubled last year, it rose to 7. Total. In St. Louis, that’s called a weekend.
It was a strange experience, and a bit exciting, and ultimately the couple who were “considering” our house said mostly nice things about the house. Maybe it will spur some interest in that house so we can finally unload it and get to saving money and thinking about the future.
Also, I’ll need to remember that stepladder.
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This is a particularly timely book, as I am now staring at 40 myself and am getting started on my 2/3 life crisis as we speak. I’ve read Barry for 20 years, ever since that Dave Barry Borrowed Book Staining Incident of 1989. So I know how the next 20 years of Dave Barry’s life are going to turn out. Strangely, I also know how both of Dave Barry’s parents died by the time he was 40, too. That’s all very meta, of course, unrelated to the text, but lately I’m really sticking on when a book was written, where I was at the time, and where I and the author might have gone since. But you’re not here for that. Well, if you’re reading the review and did not get here from a Hong Kong Google search for Dave Barry Turns 40 book report, you might be here for that.
At any rate, this book talks about getting older back in an era when 40 was older. Now that the Boomers have come along, though, they destroyed the concepts of “older” even as Dave Barry makes fun of them here. You’ve got your bits on relationships and marriage, your parents and kids, and your body’s changes.
Dave Barry’s humor is topical, and (I haven’t read his recent work–when did the blogs all stop linking to him?) the pieces talk generically about politicians without (too much) asserting that one side is better than the other. That’s a nice respite. Although given the halcyon era we’re dealing with–B.C.–maybe I’ll discover his work changes in the 21st century. I hope not.
Recommended, of course.
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Instapundit links to this quiz, which I took. I scored 3/20, which makes me only 15% manly.
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This book is the source of the Charles Bronson movie of the same name (soon to be remade with Shia LeBouef, no doubt). I have it in the movie tie-in mass market paperback and have picked it up a couple times without actually reading any of it until recently.
It’s a Cold War era spy thing with a twist: The Soviets placed hypnotically controlled deep-cover agents across the country with programmed orders to destroy bits of infrastructure. In the decades since their insertion, they’ve become model citizens who don’t even know they’re Soviet agents until a coded message delivered via telephone activates them. A failed coup in the Soviet Union sends a dissident to America with the complete list of these agents and their code phrases–the Telefon book–to seek revenge on the Soviet Union by creating embarrassment or worse. So the Soviets send in a world-wise, cynical secret agent who likes the ladies. When he reaches America, he cuts ties with the local KGB operations to keep himself free of interference and of control. As he hunts the dissident, his superiors start to question whether he can do stop his target or if it would be easier simply to kill all the sleeper agents and their agent-in-place.
A good book, not as tense as a Clancy novel, paced okay prosaically but the action plays out over months where many days the Bronson-agent spends in his hotel watching the news because he has no current leads. Given the nature of the author’s history, he probably had insights into what real intelligence work was like. But, as I said, it paces and reads well.
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