growing up in black & white

It seemed appropriate to be reading this right now. The Iranian Revolution. The rigged election. The unhappy people and their unwanted leaders.

The parallels!

On lady-judges and weird dudes

As a chess-centric conspiracy sequel to The Eight, The Nine TOTALLY BLOWS. No chess, no crazed races through the desert, and they don't even manage to make every Supreme Court justice a player in some idiotic centuries-old "this chess set has some secrets, k?" cabal. F MINUS.

As a glimpse into the Rehnquist court (and a li'l bit of the Roberts court that just began) it's pretty great. So far it's the breezy feel-good read of the summer! So, on balance, I guess it'll do.

Coming soon: NIXONLAND. (Yes, you should be excited.)

HUGE SPOILER WARNING

They cleansed the taint.

A Grand Guy

This is a crazy, silly little novel about a fat, eccentric billionaire who spends his money in strange and fascinating ways. Getting strangers to eat his parking tickets. Persuading folks to bob for $10,000 dollar bills in a huge vat of blood, feces, and animal urine. Bribing professional actors into walking off-stage mid-act, or professional boxers into throwing their fights in vaguely homosexual manners, like sugary figs. Buying a movie theatre and splicing in scenes of women with prosthetic claws scratching under their skirts. Hiring a pig to be the new CEO of a prestigious ad agency in New York.

Needless to say, it was adorable. 

A bird pooped on me in Tennessee. It landed on my arm. The poop, that is. And there was no running water in the vicinity. So I let it remain.

My good friend Josh Sherman came into town recently, and invited me to a fancy Chicago BBQ along with his mom. It was wonderful. Cajun salmon, soy ice cream, white wine, lots of adult conversation. I felt like a real person. 

But then Josh's mom, a lovely woman with short gray hair, a fellow Northwestern grad, and a total type-A, alpha-female New Yorker, cornered me on the couch and started to pick my life apart. Then I started to feel like a child again. Totally aimless, without hope of direction, dizzy from putting my forehead on the baseball bat and spinning around too many times.

Josh's mom said I needed to read a book. A book about writing and life. She said it had all the answers for a creative soul trying to tough it out, the hard days. I promised I would read it. And now I have.

I love Josh Sherman's mom. I think, at some weird level, she understands me better than I do myself. At least, she always seems to have the right things to say, the right books and articles to recommend, the right advice to impart. And this was no exception. Bird by Bird is a charming, self-deprecating book about what it means to be a writer, what it takes to stay a writer, and how to arm yourself with lots of little tricks and tools to make yourself believe you have what it takes to be, well, a writer. 

Thank you, Mrs. Sherman. Until next time.

Science Fiction Double Feature

First off, let me apologize that I've been AWOL for so long. I don't have a good explanation, other than that I've been reading less, but I've been posting even less than I've been reading, so its not really a good excuse.

This is a book I've recommended to countless people since I read it. This is not because it is particularly well written, or essential, its just pretty damn cool. I'm not much of a non-fiction person, and I'm less of a science person, but I am a science fiction person, and the idea of explaining the real science behind the fiction definitely drew me in. Kaku is a many award winning physicist who seems to specialize (as a writer) in explaining physics to lay people. The focus of this book is sorting the technologies that we have seen and read about it things like Star Trek, Harry Potter, Star Wars, (ie invisibility, time travel, pyschokensis, interstellar colinization, precognition, etc) and countless other sci-fi/fantasy classics into Class I, II, and III impossibilities, and then explaining when, why, and, most importantly, how, they could become real-world realities. Class I impossibilities are the most likely...things we are on our way towards as a society, that the tecnology to create them exists they just aren't cost effective yet, or we are lacking that one essential discovery but are near it (the most likely impossibilities are things like Force Fields and Phasers, which we have small versions of now and should have real working models of in the next few decades, according to Kaku. This may not seem like a big deal, but with force fields would come those flying cars our parents were always promised). Class II impossibilites are things that wont be actualized until our society evolves (this mostly involves harnassing and using way more power than we do) and/or new discoveries that are only suspected are made (like the existence/utilization of things like dark matter and wormholes). These are things like faster than the speed of light travel, time travel, ESP, etc. Class III impossibilities are things that won't be realized for millinea or more, or until currently held laws of physics are disproved. These are precognition and a perpetual motion machine.

Kaku does a great job in explaining these things so that a person who got a C on online physics in high school and never revisited the subject can follow along, as well as tying the real science of molecular and quantum physics to Star Trek. But a lot of the science was still over my head (faster than speed of light travel is currently possible, as long as what you are sending contains no information. this sentence was repeated over and over in various chapters, and i have no idea what it actually means. But as a basic primer on where our society may be headed, technology wise, and as a means of getting excited that our grandkids may be able to become invisible, its a fun read.

Reggie Said he Would Write the Post Himself

Call me pedestrian. I didn't like it. Kevin Reich told me it would take me a day and it took me weeks because it was so mind-numbingly boring. Blah blah blah literary masterpiece, blah blah blah portrait of the modern female, blah blah blah the hours, blah.
2/10

Qualifier: Kevin Reich is more well-read than I, and is probably a better judge of the actual merits of this book.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]