Remembering Mario

No, not Super Mario: Mario Savio.

I never got to meet Mario, but as a student at Berkeley, I lived in a world that he helped shape. Walking through Sproul Plaza almost daily, it was easy to see the impact of Savio and the Free Speech Movement.

Even today, the FSM is remembered at the cafe in the undergraduate library.

Anyway, the linked review from The Nation is interesting, and makes me want to read the book.

Wandering Through History

Today was largely a day off, with free time to explore town. Since we didn't have theater tickets until evening, we spent a leisurely morning at the house, then headed across town to try breakfast at Brother's. The breakfast was okay, nothing really special, but the hot chai was quite excellent and the house-made scones were stellar. Tomorrow we'll probably be back at Morning Glory, mostly because of proximity.

Since we were in town after breakfast, we decided it was time to venture into some of the used book stores. First stop, Book Exchange, which is my kind of bookstore: unpretentious, and obviously staffed by bibliophiles. All four of us had a grand time shopping around, and I think each of us came out with at least two books. I found a Fred Pohl book I was previously unaware of, and another book by Allen Steele. I definitely need to read more science fiction!

Next stop was a pilgrimage to the Dagoba Organic Chocolate outlet, just outside town. Dagoba makes tasty organic chocolate, and they have quite a bit out for tasting. The woman running the tasting room was friendly and knowledgeable, and went out of her way to give us tastes of a couple of things that were not already set out. We bought quite a few bars of different flavors, several of which we were previously unaware of.

On from there to what bills itself as the world's biggest, best-stocked game store, Fun Again. I guess they have a well-stocked warehouse behind the retail section, but the store itself is not huge (though it is very well-stocked). Ultimately we didn't decide to buy any games, but it was fun to look around.

Then across the parking lot to yet another (mostly) used book store, Bookwagon. I thought they had less overall selection than Book Exchange, and not nearly the ambiance, but we did manage to find several more books to buy. My favorite, which I stumbled across on the new arrivals rack, was a copy of John Muir's The Velvet Monkey Wrench. I learned most of what I know about automobiles from Muir's classic "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive," so I've always been intrigued to read his Utopian prescription for living. We'll see how that turns out.

After a brief stopover at the house to rest up and change clothes, we ventured out to dinner. Somehow, after brunch and chocolate tasting, no one was all that hungry, but we knew we wouldn't survive the evening's play without sustenance. So we decided to try Greenleaf restaurant. The food was pretty ordinary, but might have seemed more impressive had we chosen to sit outside, along the creek. The BLT was worth eating, though.

And at last, off to the theater, where Jan and I saw "Henry VIII" at the Elizabethan Stage. It was quite impressive. We had to overcome a little cognitive dissonance, as the early scenes featured Buckingham, who last night was Professor Harold Hill, and Cardinal Wolsey, who was last night's tongue-tied mayor. Of course, this is both one of the joys and one of the drawbacks to a repertory company. It was momentarily distracting, but ultimately fine.

It's quite a staging of the play, majestic and full of pomp. In the end, I suppose the play is really more about Wolsey and Queen Katherine than about Henry, really (though he's obviously an important part). And more than any of the characters, it's about England and the struggle between the Catholic church and protestantism, which would quite literally tear at the fabric of the country for at least a couple more centuries. Of all the Shakespeare histories, this one might be the most complex in that it deals with such recent events at the time of its writing. (Forgive me if all this is obvious; I hadn't read or seen this play before tonight!)

Anyway, some very strong performances here. Wolsey was particularly good in the second act, when he's largely in monologue mode. He had some trip-ups in the first act with dialogue, but really shone in his solo spotlights. Katherine was quite powerful (although I thought he deathbed scene was probably the weakest part of the play). And Henry had his moments. I thought his silent scene during Katherine's speech at her trial was particularly good. He really conveyed a lot by his physical reactions.

All in all, a very worthy effort. We really enjoyed the play, and it hardly seemed to take an hour, much less two-and-a-half!

We ended the evening with a quick visit to Zoey's Cafe for ice cream. Very tasty gelato. I had the mystery rotator tonight, which was a chocolate and marshmallow with coconut. Very yummy!

One more long day tomorrow, with two plays, then we head home Sunday.

Overdue Book Review

I've been meaning to write this up ever since I finished reading it. Life got in the way, as usual.

Anyway, my dear friend Laura Goodin recently got her first story published in a book called Canterbury 2100. As far as I know, the book isn't yet available in the U.S., but Laura was kind enough to send me a copy for Christmas (along with two packs of Tim Tams!!!). So the least I can do is tell you about it.

The premise of the book as a whole is sort of an update on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: a bunch of people making a pilgrimage by train to Canterbury in a post-apocalyptic future (in oh, about the year 2100). The train stops, the passengers pass the time by telling stories.

In this case, each tale is written by a different author, and the whole thing is strung together by editor Dirk Flinthart. He manages to make it all pretty cohesive, which is impressive.

Now, here I have to admit that I have never read Chaucer's stories (though I do own a copy, at the behest of another writer friend who wrote her thesis on Chaucer, and I still plan to read it), so I can't tell you whether Flinthart did a great job of fitting this tale into the mould of the original. But for me, the overall flow worked pretty well, especially considering that there are eighteen different writers involved.

As you might expect from a collaborative effort of this sort, the quality is a bit uneven. The good news is that nothing is bad enough to be unreadable, and most are really pretty good. If I have a general complaint, it is that too many of the tales are written like short stories (as opposed to episodes in a larger tale): they try to have a little twist at the end, and most are too predictable.

I should mention Laura's contribution, "The Miner's Tale," in particular. And not only because she's my friend. Her story manages to avoid the pitfalls I've mentioned above. I resisted the urge to read it first, and instead read it in the flow of the book. Because the story and its characters don't really rely on anything particularly special about the ficton, the story just works. It's a good story about good people trying to do right in a difficult situation. Very human, very nicely written.

Some of the other tales get a bit too tied up in magic and/or religion and/or technology that doesn't quite fit the overall picture. My favorite stories are those like Laura's (and the Doctor's and Hunter's Tales) that are stories about human nature and how the people react to the situation forced on them, rather than being about the situation itself.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, and look forward to reading Laura's next effort. And it made me want to go read my Chaucer. Not right away, but it is back in the queue.

Stunningly Superficial

That's about the best summary of a TV "news" talking head I can imagine.

What's really impressive is that Scarborough doesn't get why he's being taken to task. He keeps saying that he reads the newspapers and Foreign Affairs, so obviously he knows what's going on.

It brings to mind a snippet of dialogue from the wonderful movie "A Fish Called Wanda":

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it! Let me correct you on a few things; Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself!" And the London Underground is not a political movement! Those are all mistakes. I looked them up.

I think it's safe to say that Joe Scarborough is not an intellectual, either.

Update: Purely coincidental, but TBogg used that same exchange as the title of a post on a completely unrelated incident.

In Memoriam

[Updated with link to Commonwealth Club panel discussion.]

I interrupt my postings about my Galapagos vacation with a sad note.

One of the first e-mails I opened when I got back in Internet range was an announcement that a friend had passed away shortly after I left. Rory Root was not a close friend of mine, really more a friend of some of my close friends, but I liked him a lot, and had developed great respect as well as fondness for him.

Highly unconventional (like many of my friends!), Rory was a college dropout who owned and ran a comic-book store called Comic Relief in Berkeley. But to dismiss him as some kind of marginal social character would be grossly unfair. Rory had a passion for comic books and their newer relatives, graphic novels. And he made that passion work for him, building a strong, successful business and a great network of friends. We were all surprised (and proud!) when Rory was invited to speak on a panel at the Commonwealth Club last year (MP3 of that here).

In addition to the very nice postings on the Comic Relief website, there was a very good obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle this past weekend, and a lengthy posting on the Comics Reporter site as well.

The outpouring of stories and memories speaks volumes about the number of lives touched by this kind, passionate, gentle soul. Rory will be sorely missed by many.

I will resume my Galapagos postings, back-dated into May, shortly.

Welcome, Giant Elephant Shrew!

It's always cool when someone discovers a "new" species (although it's obviously been around a long time).

Today, we welcome a new kind of elephant shrew to the party:

Despite its name, the creature, along with the 15 other known species of elephant shrew, is not actually related to shrews.
...
In fact, the creature is more closely related to a group of African mammals, which includes elephants, sea cows, aardvarks and hyraxes, having shared a common ancestor with them about 100 million years ago.

The odd family relations of these and other creatures is one of the wonders of science to me. I recall hearing an interview with Richard Dawkins on NPR several years ago, when he was promoting his book, "The Ancestor's Tale." He was asked what the most remarkable thing was he'd learned in writing the book. His reply was that he found it amazing that the hippopotamus, which he'd always supposed was closely related to pigs, was in fact only very distantly so. The closest evolutionary relative of the hippo turns out to be the whale.

A Storybook Story

I've been meaning to write this for a week or so. *sigh* Life....

Anyway, last week I was relaxing by watching all the special features on the extra DVD for The Princess Bride (Buttercup Edition). I love that movie, have watched it far too many times (and yet somehow, not enough), but hadn't gotten to watching the special features. That was a blast! Gets a little repetitive (it was as if each documentary maker just had to show Billy Crystal snarling out through the peephole in the door), but quite a fun way to spend an evening.

By the way, if you love the movie of The Princess Bride but haven't read the book, you really ought to. It's very funny and well-written, and there is more to the story, including a lot more background on all the characters that explains some of the lines in the movie.

But out of it all, I came across several interesting bits:

• Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes didn't know how to fence before the film (it's an important item for both of them), but both learned and did all their own sword work, which is quite impressive.
• When Andre the Giant was a child in France, he was too big to ride in the school bus, so one of his neighbors who had a big car often drove him to school. The neighbor was Samuel Beckett. (No, not Sam Beckett!)
• Wallace Shawn claimed he had no sense of humor whatsoever, and didn't get the jokes. He said he just played the role in ways that seemed to make people laugh.
  

But by far the most interesting to me was Mandy Patinkin talking about his role as Inigo Montoya, the Spaniard seeking revenge on the Six-Fingered Man who killed his father. Patinkin talked about how he had lost his own father, to cancer, and how Inigo's quest to avenge his father's death somehow became his own attempt to come to grips with losing his father to cancer.

[SPOILER ALERT -- Don't read the following if you haven't seen the movie!]

(Spoiler: You have been warned!) At the moment where Inigo finally exacts his revenge, driving home his sword into Count Rugen, who has offered him "anything" if he will spare his life. Inigo finishes with the memorable line, "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!" Patinkin says at that moment he felt his own kind of catharsis, that for just a moment he had brought his father back to him.

I mention this mostly because that scene and that line have always gripped me. I could sense and share the feeling Inigo was expressing, and had no way of knowing that Patinkin was acting out not just the scene in the story but a scene in his own life drama, which is one I can relate to all too well. That line has always brought tears to my eyes (even now, just writing about it), because there is nothing in the world I have ever wanted so much as my father back.

Maybe writing about it can help me drive that sword home and at least momentarily defeat the cancer that took away my dad. It doesn't dominate my life the way it does Inigo Montoya's, but certainly not a day goes by that I don't think about my dad and miss him terribly. It motivates me to stay healthy and make sure I will be around for a long, long time for my daughter, and it makes me nag all of you to stay healthy and support cancer research.

Live strong.

Like Breathing

Saw a link to this article from the Washington Post today. Short version: Kids don't read. People don't read. This is bad.

The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences:

"We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life."

This hits home, of course, because I come from a long line of book addicts. My house is full of books (kinda overflowing...sorry for those who have to squeeze into the guest room!). We read all the time; all of us.

Anecdote: Last week, we went for a parent-teacher-student conference at our (six-and-a-half year old) daughter's school. One of the exercises in the conference was for each of us to list strengths, challenges, goals, and action plans for our daughter. One of the things that surprised me when my daughter was listing her strengths was that she left out reading. That's probably the area where she excels most, and it could be called her defining characteristic. She's always walking around, carrying a book and reading it.

It occurs to me that she doesn't see this as a strength: everyone around her (at home, anyway) is always reading, too. It reminds me of an experience my wife related, where she was at a class, and people went around the room listing their hobbies. She was surprised how many people listed "Reading" as a hobby. She'd never thought of it as one, though she reads daily, because "it's like breathing, just something you do." It seems it's like that for our daughter, too. We have always read with, to, and around her. We read for pleasure, read for work, just read.

Now, I realize that this is atypical. We read far more than most people. But I also realize we're reading so much that we (and people like us) skew the averages upward. Which makes the overall decline in reading all the more disturbing to me.

So, go out and read a book in public. Support your public library. Support your local bookstores, especially independent ones. Make it visible; make it popular. Carry a book with you so people see what you're doing. Talk about what you read. Especially around young people. They need to know that reading is a Good Thing, and not just in the "taking your medicine" sense. It may not be as easy as watching TV, but it's much more rewarding.

Not What I Wanted to Read

I was thinking this afternoon about a professor with whom I took four classes in my major field (Rhetoric) years ago. I'd been talking about him and one of those classes (Reader's Theater) with my wife the other day, and wondered whatever became of him. I figured (correctly) that he was long since retired.

But I didn't want to know this:

Robert Beloof, a poet and friend to both Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings, died unpoetically in Portland on Tuesday, hit by a Volkswagen van as he crossed Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard on foot. He was 81.

Two years ago. Man.

This part is highly accurate:

“He didn’t make friends unless people were willing to be honest and frank with him all the time,” said son Doug Beloof, a Lewis & Clark College law professor. “My father had no patience for etiquette or pretense or show.”

In addition to Reader's Theater, I studied two terms of oral interpretation of literature (one each of poetry and prose) and an amazing class on symbolism, the last half of which was spent reading Moby-Dick intensively.

I think it's fair to say that those classes shaped much of my understanding of literature, and certainly trained my voice for reading. There is probably nothing I've enjoyed in this life as much as reading with my daughter, and I'm sure a part of that I owe to my training with professor Beloof.

He was an interesting man, apparently rather difficult to get along with. His office was down a different corridor than all the other faculty in the Rhetoric department, for example. At the corner, a hand-printed sign pointed one way as the "hall of light" and the other as the "hall of darkness." I don't think they were just referring to the afternoon sunshine on the west side.

But he was very curious about many things. We used do discuss computers, since he knew I worked with and taught about them, and he figured he should get one to use in his work, particularly writing.

I'm sure if he'd had the chance, he would have come up with some choice words to describe his untimely demise, but he didn't. Alas.

Hmmm. I guess I should read my alumni magazine more carefully, because they ran an obituary for him in November, 2005. I knew only part of this:

Robert, a resident of Berkeley, was chair of the speech department at Berkeley in the 1960s, a period when many universities were converting their departments to study communications. He pushed in the opposite direction, expanding the department to cover more humanities and to use a pedagogy derived from classical rhetoric, which explains why the department is now called Rhetoric.

Good for him! That's a terrific legacy.

Global Warming is Good for You! ...Maybe

I'm currently in the middle of reading Storm World, an interesting work about whether and how global warming and tropical hurricanes interact. It's a good read, though it might be a bit tedious for those not already interested in climate science.

But big storms aside, it appears that global warming is good for some, at least. Brain-eating amoebas are cool, in the abstract. Don't think I want to meet them in person, though.

Things to Do on a Wet Day in Seattle

Continuing on my theme of Seattle tourism, we had Sunday to play with, too. After yet another visit to the Pike Place Market (delicious breakfast goodies from the Russian bakery next to the original Starbucks, called Piroshky Piroshky...cinnamon rolls to die for!) we decided to head over to Seattle Center to maybe go up to the observation deck of the Space Needle. But being a gray, overcast day, we decided that blowing $16 each to look at rain and clouds didn't seem very attractive.

So instead, we decided to check out the Science Fiction Museum. That was a blast. Kind of a pilgrimage, since both of us are lifelong readers of SF, as well as fans of SF movies. We were pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was. We'd been expecting something a little cheesy, maybe over-the-top fandom. But it really was more of a museum, investigating the role of SF and speculative fiction in society (and vice versa). Truly, it's worthwhile, whether you're interested in the intellectual aspects, or if you just want to see the artifacts (like original tricorders and phasers from Star Trek, costumes from Star Wars, first editions of classic SF books, and so on). It was really a fun afternoon, and a great way to get out of the rain.

Did I mention that we finally got rained on in Seattle?

After several hours, we wished we had more time, but I had arranged to meet an old friend and coworker for beers and football, and my wife needed to go to a cocktail thing for the conference.

Short description: Go! It's really fun.

A Very Sad Note

I hate to get maudlin, but this makes me very sad:

Phil Frank, whose cartoons graced the pages of The Chronicle and other newspapers for more than 30 years, died Wednesday only a few days after he announced his retirement because of illness.

Phil Frank and his characters have been an important part of my life for a long time, and I will miss his work. I first became away of Frank and his character Farley back in the 1980s, when his comic strip, Travels with Farley, was nationally syndicated. I loved the way Farley could leave his regular job as a reporter to work for the summer as a ranger at Asphalt State Park. The wonderful bears he introduced at the park, always scheming ways to get food from the tourists, are among my favorite cartoon characters ever. Think Yogi Bear, but with much more complex characters.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the bears are die-hard San Francisco Giants fans, like yours truly.

Years ago, a couple of his bears were made into plush toys. I have a doll of Alphonse, wearing antlers and a t-shirt depicting one of his classic moments, standing next to a "Do Not Feed the Bears" sign in the park, holding a sign of his own that reads, "I am not a bear." My daughter still loves this joke. So do I. (And here is one such bear that recently sold on eBay.)

And no mention of Phil Frank and his work would be complete without a mention of his puns. Between the last frames of his comics, he always put some kind of appropriate pun, and many of his comics featured them, too. One of his books of collected comics, for example, was titled "Fur and Loafing in Yosemite." And once when a guest chef (a vulture from Death Valley, I believe) was coming to work at the bears' restaurant, the Fog City Dumpster, he was unable to bring his own ingredients on the plane, because of the limit of "two pieces of carrion per passenger."

I always respected Phil Frank's decision to stop drawing a syndicated comic because he wanted to be more spontaneous. He could deliver strips to the Chronicle a day before printing, rather than a couple of weeks before printing for the syndicate. This allowed him to produce very timely, local comics, even though it put him on a very tight work schedule.

Although I am deeply saddened by his passing, my life is much richer for having known the work of Phil Frank. I will miss him, but will always cherish the memories he provided.

I must also note that Mr. Frank died of a brain tumor, and chalk this up as yet another of the ways cancer has affected my life. Please, let's all take care of ourselves, and try to wipe out cancer.

Poor Little Rich Kids

I found this article from the New York Times by a link at Infoworld. The gist of the article is that a lot of the millionaires in Silicon Valley (and there are a lot of them) don't feel rich enough. Here's one of the people quoted:

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

Now, look. I know it's expensive to live in the Valley. But really. It's hard to get worked up about this when there are plenty of people living in (absolute or relative) poverty in the same area. The people who clean their offices and collect their trash and such have it a lot harder.

I did find some interesting discussion at Infoworld, too. It goes in a couple of different directions. On one hand there's some feeling that the attitudes of the subjects of the article are misrepresented (which is, in my experience, quite possible), and on another that a lot of these folks are supported by programmers who make nothing off their efforts (open source projects).

In a sense, those both hit the same ethic: some people work because they like to, or at least work on some projects because they like to. I certainly know a lot of programmers who program for money, but also do projects for fun, and often make those available freely. [For a discussion of that phenomenon, the best book I recall is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy. It's a bit dated, though I see there's been an updated edition. Another terrific book that touches on the motivations of engineers is Tracy Kidder's wonderful The Soul of a New Machine.]

[Grrr. Blogger posted this before I was ready!] Update:

The point I mean to make here is that the Times article hits some nerves around here (the greater Silicon Valley). There are clearly a lot of folks who don't know what "enough" is, but there are also plenty of people who are driven by desires other than wealth (and who consequently have plenty of it). It ain't all cut and dried.

History and Choices

History is a funny thing. I was at the ballpark Tuesday when Barry Bonds hit his 756th career home run (and again Wednesday, when he hit number 757), breaking the former record set by Hank Aaron.

On one hand, it was great to be there amongst the excited throng to see an event of that magnitude. Having been there for many of his other milestone home runs (500, 600, 660 and 661, 700, as well as most of the big ones in his record-breaking single season with 73 homers), it gives me a sense of closure to finally see him atop the career list.

On the other hand, the excitement is dulled somewhat by the controversy over whether Bonds might have enhanced his performance in ways that are neither legal nor within the rules of the game.

I don't intend to rehash the arguments here (or even present my own). That's my point: I'm tired of all the speculation and opining and pontification. It has dulled my appreciation of the most impressive sports performer I have ever seen. Whether fueled by illicit activity or not, Barry Bonds has consistently outperformed my expectations of what is possible.

And really, that's why I watch sports: I want to see people do outstanding things, often things that I can't even remotely imagine doing myself. And Bonds has done more of that, on a consistent basis, than anyone I have ever seen.

A good friend pointed me to this excellent piece from the LA Times the other day. I found this passage particularly pointed (emphasis mine):

As a society, we're way too OK with being users. Abusers even. And our multimillionaire athletes, the ones we -- perhaps foolishly -- hold up as paragons of virtue simply because they can run and throw, are they supposed to be different?

Said Hoberman on the phone the other day: "You can't have an enormous development in performance enhancement in society in general and expect the sports world to be immune to it."

It's not only about pharmacy drugs. We want to be able to bash Bonds and head to a surgeon to get a new chin and new lips, so we can fake everyone into thinking we've slowed the march of time. We want to bash Bonds and then drive to a health-food store and load up on non-prescription pills that have us feeling as if we can walk through walls.

I need to go back and reread a novel on this subject called Achilles' Choice, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. As I recall (I read it back in the mid-90s), it wasn't a particularly well-written book (especially by their standards; I generally like those guys a lot), but it deals with exactly the dilemma an athlete such as Barry Bonds faces in what is popularly being called the "steroid era": whether to artificially enhance oneself if that is the only way to be competitive. And of course, it's not just in sports. There are plenty of everyday people using chemicals or other substances to help them perform in their jobs.

All of which calls to mind a quotation my mother sent me many years ago, when she was studying at Oxford for a summer, culled from Samuel Butler's novel, The Way of All Flesh:

What, then, it may be asked, is the good of being great? The answer is that you may understand greatness better in others, whether alive or dead, and choose better company from these and enjoy and understand that company better when you have chosen it--also that you may be able to give pleasure to the best people and live in the lives of those who are yet unborn.

As we evaluate the greatness and achievements of others, it would serve us well to examine them in light of our own choices and our own achievements. What lengths are we willing to go ourselves, and at what costs? And what will we tolerate in others in their/our pursuit of excellence?

The ancient Greeks honored the notion of aristos, or superiority, to the point that one who was the best at something could be forgiven shortcomings in other areas. Check out the Illiad, and consider how many characters (including the aforementioned Achilles) are described as being the best at something, yet display their shortcomings in other areas.

Instead of carping at one man's achievements, perhaps we should be having a larger discussion of virtue, how we define it, and what we're willing to tolerate in the pursuit of achievement.

Buying an Umbrella

Now and then, you just need some art. Or as Pedro Carmichael, Peter Falk's rather bizarre character in the movie "Tune in Tomorrow" put it: "Life is a shitstorm, and when it's raining shit, the best umbrella you can buy is art."*

Luckily, my wife and I have fairly compatible taste in art, and our favorite artist is Robert Lyn Nelson. He does wonderful paintings of ocean life, and pioneered the "two worlds" style of marine art, where the picture shows both above and below the surface of the water.

We used to really enjoy visiting his gallery in Monterey, but he closed it a number of years ago. So we were quite delighted to learn that he opened an art outlet in nearby Pacific Grove this past weekend. And best of all, when we went in on Monday, the proprietor, Jim, had some spare time to take us for a tour of the warehouse, so we got to see lots of great original art. The scans online don't do justice to the real stuff.

Anyway, we ended up buying a print. Won't say which one. You'll just have to come see for yourself!

*In the book that Tune in Tomorrow was made from, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llosa, the quote is "Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." Go figure. Anyway, the book is good, but the movie is very, very silly.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

So it goes.

Bummer. Aside from the obvious success of novels such as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle (my personal favorite), I found a couple of his other works inspirational or eye-opening. I think the first book of his I read was Breakfast of Champions, so I have a soft spot in my heart for it. And the collection of short stories Welcome to the Monkey House has several really good stories. One of them (EPICAC) inspired me as I was writing an oration in high school that ended up being very successful.

Thanks, Kurt. Cruising the blogs tonight, I can see that you inspired a lot of people.

Reading List

Just saw this meme developing over at Pharyngula (a terrific science blog), and thought it would be fun to see how my reading matches up. My guess is I'll be heavier on the SF and lighter on the fantasy, but let's see how it plays out.

Bold means I've read it.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Hmmm. Only 27. And more surprising to me is the number of books on the list I've never even heard of. And then there's the number of books on the list I think are horribly overrated. Oh, well. We can't all agree on everything.

It does strike me that I haven't been reading much SF of late. I've been a bit bogged down in a nonfiction book for a while, and need to get to something lighter.

If you feel like playing, the list is at The News Blog.

Happy Darwin Day!

I seem to recall, once upon a time, when February 12 was observed and celebrated in my home country as the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln (although it was never a national holiday). That seems a worthy thing to remember. Unfortunately for Abe, his birthday fell a bit too near that of one of the other revered former Presidents of the United States, a certain George Washington (February 22). So during the term of office of one of the slimier occupants of the job, the holiday was moved to the third Monday in February, which oddly enough never actually occurs on either Washington's or Lincoln's birthday.

[From looking at the Wikipedia entry on President's Day, I note that Washington wasn't actually born on February 22, either, but you'll have to go read that for yourself.]

This is all a roundabout way of getting to the actual subject of this post, which is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. As a trained environmental scientist (that's my other degree; I also have one in Rhetoric), I have a certain soft spot in my heart for Darwin and his work. You can't get very far in studying the life sciences without encountering Darwin, his theories, and the century-and-a-half of subsequent work that has come from it.

Fairness dictates that I should mention that Darwin's work did not occur in a vacuum. There were plenty of other scientists (notably, Alfred Russel Wallace) who were arriving at similar conclusions at around the same time. Scientific "discoveries" often happen like that, but someone usually gets the credit.

Be that as it may, Darwin is clearly the iconic character in the modern understanding (and often misunderstanding) of evolution. It is fair to say that for many people, Darwin is responsible for them having any notion of the existence of evolution or the mechanisms behind it (As far as I can tell, he did coin the term "natural selection".).

I like the fact that Darwin Day focuses on science and humanity. Any event that can join those two notions is a worthy one in my view.

So, things change, and I guess even holidays evolve. If it's mid-February, you could do much worse than to ruminate a bit on the contributions of Darwin and science.

And if you feel generous, put in a good thought for Galileo (February 15), too. He tried very hard to bring light to a dark age, and was condemned and banished for it. The work that got him banned, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, is absolutely brilliant. It was probably the single most influential science writing I ever read (and I read it in a Rhetoric class!).

There is much to celebrate.

Digging into the Past

My wife and I went away over this three-day weekend, and one of the things I did was reread a book I read long, long ago. It's called "I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally," by Jim Bouton. It's a sequel to his best-seller, "Ball Four." Ball Four was a ground-breaking book when it was published in 1970: a first-person description of a baseball season written by a major-league baseball player who told it as he saw it, including telling a lot of stories that were not terribly flattering about baseball and its players, including some of the biggest stars in the game.

Today, this sort of thing is commonplace, and we're treated to stories of stars injecting each other with steroids in the restroom and such. But 35 years ago, this just wasn't done. Bouton was ripped by many in the business, and arguably driven from the game prematurely because of the reactions to his book.

A year or two later, he followed up with "I'm Glad..." (the title comes from a discussion Bouton had with the sportswriter, Dick Young). In addition to tying up some loose ends, describing what happened during the baseball season after Ball Four was published (his last season in professional baseball, other than a brief comeback several years later). Bouton also described
the reactions of players, management, and sportswriters to his book.

A couple of lines jumped out at me from his descriptions and analyses as being applicable to the current discussions that surround blogging and the traditional press. Here's one bit about writers with pre-written stories:

...a lot of bad things happen when a reporter sets out with a story already written in his head. He is in fact acting as a roadblock between the public and the truth. There's something vaguely sad and at the same time hackle-raising about Marty Martinez, the Astro utility man, coming over to me and saying, "I always said something nice when they asked me about the book, but they never put what I said in the newspapers."

Clearly, a lot of what ends up in print these days is the result of writers already knowing what they want to write, and doing "research" that is a matter of finding material to back them up, rather than doing the research first to find out what's true, then writing based on that. It's true in the "mainstream media," it's true in blogs, it's true in academia. I see it all over the place, and it's lazy, sloppy, misleading, and just wrong. I have somewhat less of a problem with people who at least expose their biases and acknowledge them, but if they won't also acknowledge differing viewpoints, they do a service to no one.

Bouton also quotes extensively from a review of Ball Four by David Halberstam in Harper's, who wrote less about the book itself than about the reaction from the entrenched media toward someone having the audacity to enter their turf:

The sportswriters are not judging the accuracy of the book, but Bouton's right to tell (that is, your right to read), which is, again, as American as apple pie or the White House press corps. A reporter covers an institution, becomes associated with it, protective of it, and, most important, the arbiter of what is right to tell. He knows what's good for you to hear, what should remain at the press-club bar. When someone goes beyond that, stakes out a new dimension of what is proper and significant, then it is not the ballplayers who yell the most, nor in Washington the public-information officers, but indeed the sportswriters or the Washington bureau chiefs, because having played the game, having been tamed, when someone outflanks them, they must of necessity attack his intentions, his accuracy. Thus Bouton has become a social leper to many sportswriters and thus Sy Hersh, when he broke the My Lai story, became a "peddler" to some of Washington's most famous journalists.

This is a story we hear constantly these days about bloggers. Those in the mainstream press lash out at bloggers for being uncivil or for not having their journalistic expertise. Fundamentally, they resent being scooped, upstaged, or proved wrong. But it's nothing new. When a Jim Bouton or a Hunter S. Thompson comes in as an outsider or an amateur and outperforms those who are supposed to do the job, the reaction is rarely (at least initially) to question whether the job has been done right all along, but rather to attack the interloper.

And I suppose it's important to point out that Sy Hersh continues to break the stories that the rest of the press either ignores or hushes up.

Slow Season

Wow. Almost a week has sneaked by without a post. I suppose that's to be expected at this time of year. Many things going on as the holidays swoop by. I don't really know, since I haven't blogged through a holiday season before (though my perception as a blog reader has long been that things are slower this time of year).

I notice that in my absence, Blogger has finally gotten its new software out of beta, and somewhere along the way they've managed to relocate the search bar that was supposed to be at the top of this blog all along. So that's progress.

The primary reason for my absence has not, in fact, been holiday celebrations (although there have been some). Mostly it is the fact that my little software startup company has moved into its first offices, and I've been spending a lot of cycles doing things like debugging the network, chasing phone lines, and learning where to buy lunch in the neighborhood (San Francisco, near the Civic Center, sort of).

So at least some of the time, I will now be commuting to the office, which has its good and bad points. I like the fact that I will get to see my coworkers more often. I regret that I will spend more time in transit, though much of that will be on BART. I believe it will also be easier to get to baseball games, as I will be much closer to the stadium when I am at work.

A secondary reason for my absence from scribbling on the blog is that I've been reading a very long book, Twenty Years After, which is the (first) sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I reread a year or two ago. It's very long, but I'm almost done, and struggling to finish before we take off for holiday visits. Because I really don't want to schlep an 800-page book along with me, just so I can read the last 50 pages or so.

I won't spend a lot of time writing about the book, except to say that it's quite engrossing. Not quite as swashbuckling as The Three Musketeers, which is to be expected, I suppose, with them all being twenty years older. More about politics and the motivations of the characters.

I find that it would probably be helpful to know some French. Even a little. I allegedly studied some Latin in high school, but that doesn't really help here. I've picked up some insight into the idioms in the translation, but it's no substitute for actually understanding the language. One very helpful item in the Oxford World's Classics edition I'm reading is a little two-page map of Paris in the 17th century, highlighting the locations that figure in the story. That little touch is extremely helpful to me, and would have been nice to have when I read (a Penguin Classics edition, as I recall) the first book (or Les Miserables, for that matter). But I'm learning.

Particularly interesting is the way the story meshes with my limited knowledge of European history. I've had a fascination for the 17th century ever since I took a course called Rhetorical Theory and Practice of the 17th Century back in college. It was fascinating to read Descartes, Moliere, Bacon, Jonson, and many others, and learn about them in the context of a century of intellectual upheaval. Cool stuff.

So I haven't been wasting my time, really. I just haven't been sharing very much of it with y'all.