Non-bestseller books of spring

If you aren't into books about war, corrupt politicians, oil, intelligence [or lack thereof], Iraq, Islam, the Atkin's Diet, the Chicken Soup series or some variation on the theme of horseracing ala Seabiscuit there are precious few new books to interest or excite. One bit of good news is that Tom Wolfe's upcoming novel has finally been given a title and a publication date.

Tom Wolfe has a title for his next novel - "I Am Charlotte Simmons" - and Farrar, Straus & Giroux said it'll publish the book in November.

Wolfe's last novel, "A Man in Full," came out six years ago. There was an 11-year gap between that one and his classic "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Wolfe said his new work grew from his poking around several college campuses.

An article on Wolfe's book and his research for the story.

I spent a little while combing through about a dozen publisher's upcoming books and it looks like it's going to be a slow summer for good books.

• New Words ~ New words from the OED.
• Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion ~ Looks interesting since he coined so many new words and new uses for old words.
• Language Death ~ Coming soon to a language near you.
• The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusion ~ But the question is, will the skeptic's believe the definitions? :)
• Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 ~ Apparently the first of a series, this book is getting rave reviews from even the most snobbish of American History academics.
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World ~ An empire revealed as far more civilised than history has previously led us to believe.
• River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West ~ The story of the man who pioneered the moving picture.
• I am Charlotte Simmons ~ The new Tom Wolfe college novel is finally due out in November.
• Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air ~ Now this book looks really interesting as the author attempts to tell you how to identify things on the ground from the air.
• City Walks: Paris: 50 Adventures on Foot ~ This is a brilliantly simple concept since seeing a city on foot is the best way to get to know it and the 50 walks on cards are terrifically portable. A great idea for other cities.
• Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets ~ A very entertaining travelogue through the undergound :)
• What's in a Name?: Origins of Station Names on the London Underground ~ Should be full of useless but interesting facts about the underground station names.
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ~ A new David Sedaris book of collected essays.
• Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America ~ A history of the modern space age frozen dinner.
• Perfection Salad : Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century ~ Victorian women who revolutionized food preparation but were forgotten by history.
• Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking ~ The author studied at the Sichuan version of the CIA and produced this book from what she learned there. I keep fantasizing that I'll cook more often instead of just getting take-away.
• Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America ~ A man, an addiction, a charleston chew and a typewriter.
• Bicycling Science : third edition ~ A new edition of a classic.
• Position of the Day Postcards ~ Priceless.
• Buzzin' Fly Vol. 1 ~ Ben Watt of Everything But The Girl returns with a new album on a new label.

27 Apr 2004 at 1:12, Helsinki

The scenery is here, wish you were beautiful

I'm a big fan of Martin Parr and I was lucky enough to get a boxed copy of his retrospective postcards last year. Parr is an avid collector of postcards himself and has published several collections of them which have been reissued in paperback recently: Boring Postcards USA, Boring Postcards and the new Bliss : Postcards of Couples and Families collected by Martin Parr.

I have a small collection of postcards I've found over the years and wonder what people will make of them in 50 years. The postcard is one of the most underappreciated art forms, especially nowadays with email and 'e-cards' making people who take pen to paper and lick a postage stamp a rare breed. Postcards of hotels and motels and restaurants and diners are fascinating in their composition, their optimism and the message they attempt to convey to the present as well as to the future. And they are fun to collect as well as being an easily concealed addiction that doesn't require frequent dusting. American Postcard Art has quite a nice assortment of postcards to browse if not all that unusual or ecclectic. I've also been an active participant in the postcards for mom project since I think it's a pretty fun idea to have people from all around the world send your mother postcards with recipes and comics and whatnot on them. I'd love to see the collection put up online after they decide to end the project.

A fabulous book recently published by Nemo, Terveisiä Kaikille! Postikortteja Suomesta, is filled with wacky and weird technicolour postcards from all around Finland from the 1960s through the late 1990s. [I will note here that the book is only 12euro down at the main post office shop while they last.] I'm hopeful that there might be a forthcoming volume of older cards as well. There are no drive through trees, no carhenge, no jackalope or world's most giant pecan postcards but that can always be fixed. There are, however, plenty of reindeer as you head north. Finland would be a perfect place for the world's largest reindeer or most gigantic bit of salmiakki. What about a Rye Palace fashioned after the legendary Corn Palace?! :) Build it and the postcards will come. I've been putting off a visit to the Korttien Talo [house of cards/postcard museum] up in Hämeenlinna, a city about 50 miles north of Helsinki, until the weather warms up a wee bit more and the castle and other attractions have longer opening hours.

27 Mar 2004 at 15:56, Helsinki

Books of Spring

Since last October, I've not bought many books. A few here and there have been interesting, but not enough to fill my Amazon shopping cart to purchasing fullness. Overseas shipping isn't cheap even when it's via slow boat so I have to balance the ~$120 [including shipping] price point where the tax people become interested with the level of my desire. Spring always brings new books to reel in my interest and my wallet though so I thought I'd list the ones that have caught my eye so far this year. :)

• The Confusion
• Little Children ~ Fantastic author who is one of the few who make me believe that fiction is not a lost art.
• The Radioactive Boy Scout : The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor ~ I read the original short story about this in Harper's and it's an engagingly good story if a bit of a sad tale about modern family and society.
• After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American System ~ This author wrote about the Fall of the USSR back when it wasn't popular. His words are worth reading and thinking about.
• Poplorica : A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America ~ Putting fads and pop culture into historical context.
• The Great Game : The Myth and Reality of Espionage ~ An ex-CIA agent picks apart modern spy fiction which should prove to be very entertaining.
• The Linguist and the Emperor : Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone ~ The Rosetta stone was an immensely important historical find and was the key to the later decipherment of the heiroglyphs.
• Word Spy : The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture ~ A compendium of Word Spy words.
• New Words ~ New words in the OED which should be really riveting reading.
• The Elephants of Style : A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English ~ Cute pun in the title and an ambitious topic.
• Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York ~ Subways will be the place where humankind goes when the surface of the planet is no longer hospitable.
• Lonely Planet St.Petersberg City Map
• A Traveller's Companion to St.Petersburg ~ If I litter the house with enough books about St. Petersburg, Jarkko might really get the hint that I intend to go with or without him later this summer. :)
• Prague Pictures : A Portrait of the City ~ Excellent writer and a city I'm curious about.
• Postfix : The Definitive Guide ~ I'm still a Sendmail devotee but Postfix has begun to tempt me into switching.
• Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition ~ The 1st edition was good and if this one ever makes it into production it might still be up to date by the time it's printed.
• The Camera ~ A classic.
• The Negative ~ I'm seriously considering building my own darkroom.
• Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs - Ansel Adams ~ I'm not interested in landscape photography but this should be filled with techniques I'm not aware of yet.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective ~ The Ur-Photojournalist.
• Here and There ~ NYC street photography collection.
• Leica: Witness to a Century ~ A history of Leica which should be interesting.
• Wanderlust ~ I loved the postcard series so this promises to be good.
• Potsticker Chronicles : Favorite Chinese Recipes and Family Fables ~ Looks interesting for the stories behind the recipes as well as dishes the less culinary might be able to make.
• Baking Illustrated: A Best Recipe Classic ~ Cook's Illustrated are the best cookbooks anywhere. I didn't go into food chemistry, but if I had I'd want to work there. Baking chemistry is fascinating
• Global Warming - Laika and the Cosmonauts ~ Strange yet cool Finnish surfer punk music.

16 Mar 2004 at 15:53, Helsinki

The Confusion

The Confusion is almost here. Amazon UK has a 1 April release date and Amazon US has a 13 April release date, but it's coming soon and I'm eager to continue reading the saga. The UK book jacket artwork is so much more colourful and interesting than the rather plain US edition. I've often wondered why there is such a tremendous difference between many US and UK book jacket designs, especially when there isn't really anything in the title or the design that might offend.

9 Mar 2004 at 1:01, Helsinki

Just a little bit of history repeating

Stephen Bury is the nom de plume of Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. I found a copy of the little known The Cobweb on Abebooks a while back and purchased it since I enjoy his books. The Cobweb reads like a novel written yesterday, not 10 years ago. It's a novel about the last war in Iraq, the intelligence people who have information of potential terrorists acts on US soil, and the people in politics who cobweb them into inaction. While the novel isn't brilliant, it is a fun read and is a fairly good analysis of how people with good information and intentions at the lower levels of the FBI and CIA couldn't stop, and likely still can't stop, terrorism.

Hennessey laughed ruefully. "Your problem with this Iraq thing is that you've got tangled up, unwittingly, with people who long ago decided it wasn't sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them--for the greater good, of course. This is currently the most common character flaw in the Washington establishment--attempts to be Machiavellian by people who lack the talent, the panache, to pull it off. So here you are, good old Clyde Banks, desperately trying to deal with this very real problem here on the ground, and it's as if you're in a nightmare where these fucking bush-league Machiavellis listen to what you're saying but don't really understand."

"That's pretty much what it feels like," Clyde said, frowning at his corned-beef hash and nodding his head.

"You and I know that something is going on in Forks County, and we would like to do something about it," Hennessey said, "but between the two of us are about ten thousand of these people who are too busy looking down their noses at us to actually grasp the problem and take action. You must know that taking action is looked down upon, Clyde. This is the postmodern era. When events come to a cusp, we're supposed to screw our courage to the sticking place and launch a reanalysis of the eleventh draft of the working document. Actually going out and doing stuff in the physical world is simply beyond the comprehension of these people. They're never going to do anything about the Iraqis in Forks. Never."

Politics is the definition of putting a good face on raw selfishness. An organisation will always fail when the personality, feelings or agenda of one or a few people are more important than the mission of the organisation.

18 Feb 2004 at 13:30, Helsinki

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

From the how-did-I-miss-this-book department is an utterly fabulous treat, ella minnow pea: A novel without letters. Considering all the linguists I know and how efficient Amazon is at pushing books in my direction, I am at a loss to explain how or why we all managed to escape reading this book and immediately buying a copy for everyone we know. I got lucky when the editor of the English edition of the local paper suggested I go and get a copy from Akateeminen.

The story is in a similar vein to Thurber's The Wonderful O as it is a lipogram told around the familiar pangram 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. It is one of the most brilliantly clever books I've read in years as it combines cunning linguistics with political allegory in a epistolary novel. Language lovers must get this book. I need to go find a hardback copy so it can find a proper place next to my old, but dignified, copy of The Wonderful O. :)

18 Jan 2004 at 13:11, Helsinki

Less is More

American marketing and commercialism is a well-oiled machine that produces the world's best consumers. George Carlin has a bit in one of his more recent works where he talks about choice and how grocery stores may have 80 different kinds of mustard to choose from but the US still only has a 2-party political system. The perfect storm of consumerism meets meaningless choice leaving the shopper distracted in an infinite loop while more important things, such as a totally corrupt government, pass without notice.

When I showed Jarkko's mother around the giant grocery store I used to shop in back in Boston, the first question she asked was how I found the time to navigate all the aisles and choose which products I wanted. It was an astute observation, one I didn't have an explanation for other than I had grown accustomed to the ever increasing size of the US grocery stores for a decade or two. The market was small when compared to some of the larger ones with book stores, video rental, liquor stores, dry cleaning and other services included under the same roof as the groceries; shrines to the meaningless choice culminating in the final, "paper or plastic?". Shopping often left me so drained that asking me which kind of bag I wanted evoked only a blank stare or my asking the clerk to choose for me.

One of the things I like most about Finland is that the groceries are small and while there may not be 80 or even 8 kinds of mustard to choose from, I am not constantly taxed to ponder the differences between 5 brands of French Dijon vs. 4 brands of Dijonnaise. I've been known to stare at the wall of yogurt but aside from that I am happy to have enough variety without a deluge of mostly similar products to pick from on the usual shopping trip. If I want something weird or unusual I can always walk over to Stockmanns and wander aimlessly for an hour. If I want Cheez-its and M&Ms and ginger Altoids, I have family send me care packages and savour every morsel which is a welcome change from having anything and everything available at all times. Less choice is liberating.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz is a new book that explores the problem of how so many choices we are forced to make every day can leave us far less happy than what the Citizen Consumer mantra promises. The Wal*Mart shoppers of America won't read this book nor will they stop buying all the stuff they can fit into their carts, but I am finding some of the studies on the consumer society being published in the past few years to be a chance to understand how I, and the rest of the US, was molded into a Citizen Consumer and perhaps even hope for slowing down the mad embrace of unbridled want all over the globe.

14 Jan 2004 at 1:13, Helsinki

Matka Suomeen

While waiting for Tennispalatsi to open the doors to the theatre for the Return of the King I noticed a photo exhibit which was likely placed there for the RotK crowds. The exhibit is promoting a new book from Otava Press, Matka Suomeen, Journey into Finland, by Pekka Luukkola [ there is a sample pdf at the bottom of the page ]. The text is in both Finnish and English with photos covering all regions of Finland. The photos are beautiful and the details of Finland throughout history complement them to make the book a very pleasing whole. The price is about 50€,ISBN 951-1-18925-5, but I think it's a worthy investment for anyone who enjoys excellent photography, loves Finland or who has family elsewhere on the globe who imagine Finland as something a bit like a post-glasnost ex-Russian province. I've had people in the US ask me if we can get UPS or Fed-Ex in Finland so embrace your denial and send a copy to the family back home who think you live in a hovel next to the red factory.

21 Dec 2003 at 20:46, Helsinki

Raw Nerve

I love single malt scotch so when I saw that an author I love, Iain Banks, was to write a non-fiction book about scotch I waited impatiently for it to arrive at the posti. Sadly, Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram is possibly one of the most disappointing books I have ever awaited anxiously for publication.

You would think that a terrific author and scotch drinker approached by a publisher to do what any scotch drinker only dreams of, to drive around scotland drinking scotch and writing about it, would be a winning combination but you'd be wrong. He mentions rather frequently the envy of his friends as he writes which gets rather annoying after a while. I admit that I am jealous as I would have loved going along on the tours but what scotch drinker, his audience, wouldn't be?

The most aggravating and inappropriate part of the book is the frequent insertion of Banks' commentary on the US invasion of Iraq. I fully agree with his anger, his frustration and overall distaste for everything involved with the war in Iraq but this is not to say that I want to read about it while trying to enjoy a tour through Scotland. It gives one the idea that it was written very quickly without any editorial control and it shows. Had I been the editor, I would have ripped out nearly everything about the war since such things tend to either alienate people of other opinions or bore those of the same opinion when the subject of the book is about Scotch not war. Not to mention the pages and pages he devotes to his gas guzzling Rover without any sense of irony in bitching about a war for oil. Guess where the fuel to power your Rover comes from Iain.

Banks also has a very irritating tendancy like many bloggers to talk about something and then stop abruptly with a parenthetical remark to the reader that more will be coming (but more about that later). Either write about it or don't and let the reader get on with the story instead of propping up your lazy writing style with such evil stylistic crutches.

The reader is regaled with everyone in his family, all of his friends, boat, cars, and just about everything but an entertaining meander through scotland with detailed remarks about the distilleries and their history. There is some terrific content but it gets so lost between the story about his boat, grumping about the war and frequent asides that don't always add to the journey and leaves you feeling cheated that you had expected so much from such a promising book. A map of the many trips and locations of the distilleries would have been a nice touch as would have a few pictures of one of the most beautiful countries on the face of the planet.

I will say that Iain and I at least share the same snobbery in single malts by strongly preferring the Islay malts. While I really didn't enjoy the book I can still respect the man who had a very short time to cover a broad topic without a strong editor. Iain, if you're just like all the googling obsessed authors I know and come across this give yourself more space to organise your thoughts better and more time to research for such kinds of books as I wanted desperately to love this book. I'll be happy to buy you a few drams of scotch and rant about Bushistan since I even left the country partly due to my strong opinions but keep it out of your writing unless you do a book about politics.

16 Dec 2003 at 22:58, Helsinki

Carrot Cake

I adore the Cook's Illustrated cookbooks. I don't have many cookbooks but I have nearly all of the CI series and subscribed to the magazine for a number of years. Their most recent addition, Inside America's Test Kitchen: All-New Recipes, Quick Tips, Equipment Ratings, Food Tastings, Science Experiments from the Hit Public Television Show, is another wonderful book full of reliable recipes borne from testing and research. What I find most attractive about these cookbooks, aside from their being utterly reliable, is that all of the recipes are for foods that most people could realistically imagine themselves making and eating regularly. The books also appeal to the chemist within since many of the recipes, ingredients and kitchenware are discussed in detail.

Recently we had dinner at a nominally American-style restaurant and for dessert we decided to split a slice of carrot cake. I love carrot cake so I was a bit bummed when it arrived smothered in caramel sauce. Oh, and no cream cheese icing. Finns seem to enjoy things SWEET when they have something with sugar which I can appreciate except in alcoholic ciders but, not everything tastes better with more sugar. Carrot cake is lovely on its own so leave the pineapple in but lay off the karamelli kastike, ok? :)

So, I was really happy to find that CI has a terrific recipe for carrot cake in the new book. They emulsify the vegetable oil for a lighter cake and adjust the carrot portion to keep it from being either soggy or dry. And they didn't forget the cream cheese icing. :)

Simple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

carrot cake

• 2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/8 teaspoon gound cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound ( 6-7 medium) carrots, peeled
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 1/2 cups safflower, canola or vegetable oil

cream cheese frosting

• 8 ounces cream cheese, softened but still cool
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened but still cool
• 1 tablespoon sour cream
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups confectioners' sugar

For the cake:

1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350F. Spray a 13X9 inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment and spray the parchment.
2. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and salt in a large bowl; set aside.
3. In a food processor fitted with a large shredding disk, shred the carrots (you should have about 3 cups); transfer the carrots to a bowl and set aside. Wipe out the food processor workbowl and fit with the metal blade. Process the granulated and brown sugars and eggs until frothy and thoroughly combined, about 20 seconds. With the machine running, add the oil through the feed tube in a steady stream. Process until the mixture is light in color and well emulsified, about 20 seconds longer. Scrape the mixture into a medium bowl. Stir in the carrots and the dry ingredients until incorporated and no streaks of flour remain. If you like nuts in your cake, stir 1 1/2 cups toasted chopped pecans or walnuts into the batter along with the carrots. Raisins are also a good addition; 1 cup can be added along with the carrots. If you add both nuts and raisins, the cake will need and additional 10 to 12 minutes in the oven. Pour into the prepared pan and bake until a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time. cool the cake to room temperature in the pan on a wire rack, about 2 hours.

For the frosting

1. When the cake is cool, process the cream cheese, butter, sour cream, and vanilla in a clean food processor workbowl until combined, about 5 seconds, scraping down the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the confectioners' sugar and process until smooth, about 10 seconds.
2. Run a paring knife around the edge of the cake to loosen from the pan. Invert the cake onto a wire rack, peel off the parchment, then invert again onto a serving platter. Using an icing spatula, spread the frosting evenly over the surface of the cake. Cut into squares and serve.

Ginger-Orange variation

Follow the recipe for the carrot cake, reducing the cinnamon to 1/2 teaspoon, adding 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger along with the spices, adding 1/2 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger along with the carrots, and processing 1 tablespoon grated orange zest along with the sugar and eggs. For the frosting, substitute an equal amount orange juice for the sour cream and 1 tablespoon grated orange zest for the vanilla.

2 Dec 2003 at 23:04, Helsinki

The Cunning Linguist

Richard Lederer has 2 new books coming up: A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language and The Cunning Linguist: Ribald Riddles, Lascivious Limericks, Carnal Corn, and Other Good, Clean Dirty Fun. Carnal Corn...:)

Another new book from OUP, Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-By-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century should be interesting. Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation appears to be quite popular in the UK. I may have to get a copy of that myself since having had the commas rapped out of my knuckles by nuns because I was a shameless comma splicer as a child has left my punctuation confused and often wrong.

Umberto Eco, the noted semiotician, just published Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotiation which should prove interesting for translators, people learning languages or language enthusiasts in general.

26 Nov 2003 at 13:58, Helsinki

I Like Pie

Tarts with Tops on: How to Make the Perfect Pie by Tamasin Day-Lewis is a lovely new cookbook. It's filled with all sorts of savoury pies, apple pies, American pies and other traditional kinds of pies from around the UK. It's impossible to read this cookbook without getting hungry as well as a little amused at the colourful selection of words in the recipes themselves. Hearty winter comfort food with ingredients easily found even here in Helsinki.

Cod, Smoked Haddock and Scallop Pie

Ingredients

• 1kg/2.25lb cod or unsmoked haddock, skinned and filleted
• 225g/8oz or so natural smoked haddock
• 8 or 9 scallops with large commas of coral, cleaned and the white discs sliced in two, the corals left whole or sliced if large enough.
• 290-425ml/10-15fl oz milk
• 55g/2oz unsalted butter
• 30g/1oz plain flour
• 1 bay leaf
• nutmeg
• a large glass of white whine or better still vermouth
• the white part of three leeks, cleaned and cut into rings
• 1kg/2.25lb potatoes, peeled, cooked and mashed with butter and milk
• handful of fresh dill, chopped
• sea salt and black pepper

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
2. Put the unsmoked piece of fish in a gratin dish, pour over the milk and cook in the oven for 15 minutes. It may not be cooked right through when you remove it, but that doesn't matter.
3. Remove any bones and flake the fish in large chunks into the gratin dish you're going to cook it in, reserving the poaching milk.
4. Meanwhile, cover the smoked haddock in boiling water for 10 minutes. Drain the water off and flake the haddock into the gratin dish.
5. Make a roux with the butter and flour, then add the hot poaching milk, bay leaf and a suspicion of grated nutmeg and whisk into a smooth sauce. Add the wine or vermouth, cooking it down for at least 10 minutes. Season well with black pepper, but go easy on the salt as smoked fish carries a lot of it.
6. Steam the leeks until tender and add them to the fish.
7. Put the raw scallops and the coral in with the fish, then strew the handful of dill into the sauce and pour it over the fish.
8. Cover with mashed potato, ruffle the top with a fork and dot with butter.

Place on a baking tray and consign to the heat for about 30 minutes. The sauce often erupts through the potato like a geyser and courses down the sides, which is part of the charm of the finished offering. One of the few dishes that really should be brought to the table nuclear hot. Serves 6.

19 Nov 2003 at 22:54, Helsinki

Deciphering Quicksilver

When the Baroque Cycle was first announced there was a cryptic message on the front page of the site. I recognised the code but I figured cracking Finnish was enough for the time being. Someone deciphered the message and has a a nice translation of it along with an explanation of how he deciphered it. Stephenson also mentions this in a letter on the Baroque Cycle website. I was hoping for a more clever and witty message but now I'm sorry I didn't bother with it and get the autographed copy of the book. :)

There is a mention of, but no link to, the seminal book on this philosophical language that Wilkins created which this cipher is based upon. I went looking and found An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language in whole on-line complete with translation and original pages scanned in. Worthy of a look if you enjoy historical crypto.

Quicksilver is a terrific read if you enjoy history and if you're patient enough to read through 900 pages while knowing that there are 1800 more pages still to come. :) I don't know if Neal is one of those authors who googles for mentions and reviews but if he is and finds this page I'd like to say thanks for such an engaging book and that I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment.

15 Nov 2003 at 21:26, Helsinki

Moveable Paper

I've always loved paper crafts, like making the Dot-bomb icosahedron and such, as well as pop-up cards and books. I somehow ran across The Flying Pig this week which has some really cool kits for animated paper projects and pop-up critters you can put into cards and letters to surprise someone. This art is known as kirigami and there is a good book on the subject titled, Kirigami: The Art of 3-dimensional Paper Cutting. Another book has a more practical approach for engineers who want to understand how pop-ups work, Elements Of Pop Up : A Pop Up Book For Aspiring Paper Engineers. However, some pop-ups take more than simple paper engineering to create :)

I wish people would send more cards instead of email for the holidays and maybe even ones of their own design. For some reason, I suspect that people think that making cards is for kids and not adults because adults are supposedly never in possession of enough free-time to do anything that might make them look like they have any free-time.

23 Oct 2003 at 12:54, Helsinki

What part of "Baroque" didn't you understand?

I got a copy of Quicksilver while we were in London. I had to snag it off the stocking cart in Borders since Foyle's didn't seem to have any copies forthcoming anytime soon. It's big, so big in fact that I bought the paperback traveller copy that they often have in airports and, surprisingly, quite often in Akateeminen. I read the New York Times review, the Salon review and the review in Time Out London by a reviewer who seemed to have a clue about what the word Baroque means. There is also an online Quicksilver Wiki which Stephenson himself set-up if I understand correctly. I've started reading it and it's everything I expected it to be; a wandering adventure through the Baroque age with the ancestors of the Cryptonomicon's main characters. It is more stylised to the period and less Pynchonesque than Cryptonomicon.

So, the question is, why are so many geeks who have bought this book in the wake of the popularity of the Cryptonomicon griping about it's length, its complexity, its supposed lack of plot and obtuseness? Who ever said a story had to have a single well defined plot? Quicksilver reminds me a bit of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel in its style. It's fun trying to see just how many famous figures in our past he can cram into an entertaining history lesson cum novel. To be sure, this book isn't for everyone but it's refreshing to read something so retro and so different with a challenging vocabulary instead of the usual 8th grade selection of tired words. It's BAROQUE, GET IT?! :) Expect more of the same from the next two books in the trilogy, The Confusion [1 April 2004] and System of the World [1 September 2004]. I might balk at reading his books if he moves into the Rococo Cycle after this though. :)

10 Oct 2003 at 20:18, Helsinki

Banned Books Week

It's banned books week this week and to celebrate I'm reading Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, the story of Michael Servetus a heretic in his own time who wrote one of the most vigorously banned books in history.

21 Sep 2003 at 19:48, Helsinki

New Fall Books and Music

There are so many new books and CDs coming up in the next month or so that I have to make a list. In spite of the mass of useless new books on just about every variation of government corruption and analyses on terrorism, there are a seeming ton of interesting new fiction and non-fiction titles. I'll be forced to choose between whisky and books in my luggage returning from London. Note to self: Take a big empty suitcase to London.

Books

• Basic Photography ~ Michael Langford
• Beer: the Story of the Pint: The History of Britain's Most Popular Drink ~ Martyn Cornell
• Cobweb ~ Stephen Bury
• Complete Care for your Aging Dog
• The Cryptographer ~ Tobias Hill
• Dog is My Co-Pilot ~ Editors of Bark
• Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care ~ John McWhorter (1 Nov)
• English as a Global Language ~ David Crystal
• Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House ~ Franklin Toker (30 Sept)
• Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK ~ Idler Magazine
• High-rise (1970s A Series) ~ J.G. Ballard
• Hitler's Scientists: Science, War and the Devil's Pact ~ John Cornwell
• I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking ~ Alton Brown
• The Kitchen Detective: A Culinary Sleuth Solves Common Cooking Mysteries With 125 Foolproof Recipes ~ Christopher Kimball
• The Language Report ~ Susie Dent (9 Nov)
• Library: An Unquiet History ~ Matthew Battles
• Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation ~ Dan Kennedy
• Lost Recipes ~ Marion Cunningham (14 Oct)
• Lucky Girls: Stories ~ Nell Freudenberger
• The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the "Oxford English Dictionary" ~ Simon Winchester (Oct)
• Millenium People ~ J.G. Ballard
• Monstrous Regiment ~ Terry Pratchett (1 Oct)
• The Music of the Primes ~ Marcus du Sautoy
• Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia ~ Orlando Figes
• The Political Animal ~ Jeremy Paxman
• Quicksilver ~ Neal Stephenson (2 Oct)
• Raw Spirit ~ Iain Banks (6 Nov)
• Restaurant Favorites at Home (The Best Recipe) ~ Cook's Illustrated
• A Rhyming History of Britain ~ James Muirden
• Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth ~ Kaz Cooke
• Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic ~ Tom Holland
• Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany ~ Ben Schott
• A Series of Unfortunate Events #10: The Slippery Slope ~ Lemony Snicket (1 Oct)
• Shite's Unoriginal Miscellany ~ A. Parody
• Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design ~ Henry Petroski (16 Sept)
• Story of Photography ~ Michael Langford
• Tarts with Tops on: How to Make the Perfect Pie ~ Tamasin Day-Lewis
• A Venetian Affair: A True Story of Impossible Love in the Eighteenth Century ~ Andrea di Robilant (3 Nov)
• Waxwings ~ Jonathan Raban
• Who Sleeps with Katz ~ Todd McEwen
• The Wolves in the Walls ~ Neil Gaiman

Music

• Elvis Costello - North
• Waltz for Koop: Alternative Takes
• Kraftwerk - Tour De France Soundtracks
• Sting - Sacred Love
• The Complete Adventures of the Style Council

DVD

• The Office Series 2 [2002]
• Prime Suspect
• Red Dwarf - Series 1
• Red Dwarf - Series 2

13 Sep 2003 at 12:33, Helsinki

Dystopian bookshelf

After a long dry summer of not much fiction to interest me my nightstand has piled up with a number of titles which all seem to be in the dystopian satire genre. Perhaps it's due to the current state of the world or that publishers are just on a dystopia kick but I'm not complaining.

I just finished reading Stephenson's Interface in preparation for Quicksilver coming at the end of September. Interface is a fun, quick read since it is Stephenson in his pre-Pynchon phase, which means it's less than 1000 pages and doesn't require you to keep a dictionary or an encyclopaedia handy. It's somewhat plausible fiction which may someday even be regarded as prescient.

I haven't seen any reviews or mention of J.G. Ballard's new book, Millenium People, but from the blurb on Amazon it promises to be another terrific story. A middle-class revolt is my kind of dystopian satire.

And I'm currently reading Max Barry's Jennifer Government, another dystopian satire where much of the world is now owned and run by American corporations. The United States Federation Economic Blocs are filled with people whose last names are the name of the corporation they work for, e.g. Hack Nike, Violet ExxonMobile, Jennifer Government. It is described as "Catch-22 by way of The Matrix" which is a bit lofty but it's a terrific bit of satire. Apparently it is already going to be made into a movie.

Perhaps I should spend more time with Paul Brian's post-apocalypic fiction bibliography to find more dystopia while I'm on a roll. :)

9 Sep 2003 at 1:06, Helsinki

My Hel' Life

The KLM in-flight magazine recently had a blurb about a new book by Sean Condon, My 'Dam Life: Three Years in Holland, about his expat experience. I bought a copy since, well, I'm an expat and thought it would be entertaining to read someone elses' far more interesting adventures in expatriotism than my own.

The book is entertaining if you're an expat or are familiar with Amsterdam. However, he really stretches the material he has to make into a book length tale. It likely would have been much better with a ruthless editor cutting it down into a feature length magazine article. He has a good story, but it bogs down in 250 pages when he spends more time on self-deprecation and less on the larger experience as a whole.

He does, however, nail a few parts of the expat condition terribly well. In particular, the part of trying to fit in without being exposed as a poseur by skating on the just-enough-to-be-dangerous knowledge of the local language.

The barman, a guy around sixty with a face like a wry and maudlin dog, greets me witha nod, which I return before aksing in fractured Dutch for a koffie verkeerd, which translates as coffee the wrong way, deemed wrong because it has melk (milk) in it. After I order a cognac, the barman spurtles another sentence at me, and thinking that he is asking if I want anything else, and pretending to be Dutch but unusually short in stature, I say Nee, dank u wel, (No thanks) and shake my head, feeling semi-bilingual and semi-proud over this brief transaction.

I'm sorry, the barman says, but I asked what sort of cognac you'd prefer ~ Courvoisier, Rémy or Martell? He speaks English perfectly.

Ummm...Rémy Martin, I reply, not leaning too heavily on the French accent. He nods, not patronisingly or anything, just a run-of-the-mill barman's nod. But I need to regain some dignity fast, so I change my coffee order to an espresso and I think I see him smile.

I've had this happen so often in Helsinki that I couldn't help but smile and laugh at someone else going through the same humiliation of being discovered as a fraud. HB is a conversation magnet and people will often stop and spew words at me, usually in the morning before I've had a sufficient amount of coffee, which I have no hope of grasping. I have trouble understanding English before my second cup of coffe, much less a turbo colloquial version of a language that isn't even in the same family as English. I've developed a few techniques for saving face in this kind of situation:

1. Smile and nod if you don't hear a "-ko" on the end of the first word which indicates a question.
2. If there is a "-ko" on the end of the first word, listen for "aika", "paino", etc., which signal questions which you have answers for in Finnish.
3. Keep petting the dog and hope they'll walk on, even if they think you're a little odd.
4. Say nothing and let them think you're mute.
5. If all else fails, admit your finnish isn't so good, hide behind your sunglasses and look at your watch as though you're now running late.

Sure, most Helsinkians speak English reasonably well, but when you're an expat in a country where only 1% of the country's residents aren't Finnish, you want to try to fit-in which means you have to start by faking it and enduring the humiliation when you get busted.

The resident grumpy old cur [GOC] in our apartment house [ it's a law somewhere that says every apartment house must have a meddlesome old fart ] grumbled at me, when I was walking HB through the entryway, about a few strands of dog hair on the hallway rug. We had just moved in so I just smiled and nodded and escaped with the dog as quickly as possible. A few months later, I was out having a smoke when she descended upon me screaming in ferocious Finnish. I looked around me wondering who it was she was yelling at. It was strange as I came to realise it was me she was yelling at since I could no longer hear her and only noticed her bright, bright red painted lips moving at warp speed. When she paused to breathe after 5 minutes of ranting, we had an enchanting conversation [ edited for brevity :) ]:

• <Me> Er, I'm sorry. I'm new here and I don't speak much Finnish yet. Do you speak English?
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• <Me> Well...no, not yet. I'm sorry. There are 2 billion English speakers and only 5 million Finnish speakers on the planet mostly because you have to move here to learn Finnish.
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU COME TO LEEVE HERE AND DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• [ at which point she looks at me like I've just taken a crap on the sidewalk and started eating it. ]
• <Me> Errr....
• <GOC> YOU MUST NOT SMOKE HERE OR IN THE BUILDING AND YOU HAVE BEEN LEAVING YOUR BUTTS ALL OVER HERE. IT IS FORBIDDEN! [ which she repeats about 20 times since, I guess, not speaking Finnish makes me deaf and stupid ] IS YOUR HUSBAND FEENEESH? I CAN EXPLAIN THIS TO HIM. HE WILL UNDERSTAND.
• <Me> Errr, What? What are you talking about? I, uh, don't smoke in the house and, well, I don't leave my butts on the entryway stairs.
• [ It slowly dawns on me that she has decided to dump on me for every smoker who ever bothered her in life, but especially someone[s] who has taken to smoking in the building and stamping out the butts on the entry stairs. Again, not me. ]
• <GOC> LIAR! I DON'T BELIEVE YOU! IT IS FORBIDDEN! A FEENEESH WOMAN WOULD KNOW THIS!
• [ again repeated 10 or more times at a pitch only dead Finnish husbands and dogs could wholly sympathize with. ]
• <Me> Uhhh.
• [ I was trapped for about 30 minutes while trying to say as little as possible waiting for a moment I could escape before she removed what few shreds of dignity remained. The irony of the story is that it was not, in fact, forbidden to smoke in or around our building. She nearly had me convinced I'd be facing a firing squad shortly. ]

I see her every now and then which invokes a pavlovian response of fear and flight. She says hello, smiles and speaks to me in Finnish which makes me wonder if she has some kind of evil twin living in the apartment with her since this clearly can't be the same woman who reamed me a new one for being a dirty smoking outsider who doesn't speak Finnish. I have a nasty neighbour and Condon deals with the residence police in Holland. It all evens out in the end I suppose.

When you're new to being an expat, you feel exposed and vulnerable if you're completely out of your element. You've gone from being one of "us" to being one of "them" in one short 12-hour flight. Every experience seems new but slowly you realise that it's a well beaten path with oft told tales just like yours. Condon does a reasonable job making the mundane stories funny and entertaining without being boring...like mine. :)

4 Sep 2003 at 15:51, Helsinki

Best of TPJ

This week, rather unexpectedly, the ORA book fairy visited us via DHL with a big box [ Thanks, again, Gnat :) ]. One of the new titles that was released just about the time we left the US, Games, Diversions and Perl Culture: Best of the Perl Journal is a real treasure. All of the hardcore TPJ subscribers who think that they can just read their old issues should really reconsider getting a copy.

As the self-appointed Perl Historian the article titled TPJ Cover Art: From Camels to Spam is priceless as each cover is explained by the photographer with anecdotes and stories. I'll never forget bumping into Jon in the lobby of the hotel at YAPC19100 when I was hungover, wearing sunglasses and trying to get the valet to fetch my car without being noticed. Jon rather brightly handed me the new issue of TPJ, Issue #14 - sending mail from perl, which featured a Magic 8 ball on the cover. He looked at me rather expectantly and asked, "Do you get it?". Now, see, I was looking pretty mangled but even I got the 8 ball fortune "Outlook not so good" reference on the cover of a magazine about sending mail early in the morning with a vicious hangover. I vaguely remember giving him a tired look and nodded in the affirmative since I'm not much of a conversationalist before coffee. Jon had already consumed about 2 pots of coffee by that point as far as I could tell and I think I cheered him up since he mentioned noone else appeared to be getting his clever joke. :)

My favourite cover of all was Issue #16, Poetic Justice, which featured a photo of e.e. cummings gravestone with his name in all capital letters. I miss TPJ even though I know the reasons why it's now owned by CMP, it doesn't have Jon as the editor or the clever covers which leaves it to be just another run of the mill deadly boring tech rag.

The book even has each of the Quiz Show questions and answers from all of the conferences and Tom's Perl Wizard's Quiz although, it is suspiciously missing the original Perl Purity Test. Just Another Perl Haiku, Damian's unleashing of Coy.pm upon the world, is also featured. I've often lamented that Acme:: found a following but few appear to have written up and shared their own Coy.pm vocabulary/.coyrc as I had envisioned. Some day, I will have to collect all the anecdotes and all the dirt on everyone and write the Perl clerihew generator.

It's the best book [ and index ] evah! Thanks Jon! :)

24 Aug 2003 at 15:48, Helsinki

Baking for Fido

HB is now in his 12th year and still pretty spry for an aged giant breed dog. I don't give him table food very often and now that we live in Finland the treats he used to like in the US aren't available. I anticipated that it would be difficult or impossible to find the biscuits he likes and ordered 2 cookbooks before moving so I could bake some for him myself; Real Food for Dogs and Better Food for Dogs. He loves both of the following recipes enough to lick every crumb and morsel off of the floor :)

Real Food for Dogs has only one recipe worth noting, the cheese please biscuit recipe, which cleverly binds the fats and flavour to the oats which are usually left uncooked in most recipes. However, much of the rest of the book has recipes that are clearly not for the larger breeds or for anything more than very occasional treats. There are adorable illustrations throughout the book.

Cheese Please Biscuits
pg. 12, Real Food for Dogs

• 1.5 cups boiling water
• 1 cup quick-cooking oats, uncooked
• .25 cup butter or margarine softened to room temp.
• 1 or 2 beef or chicken bullion cubes [ optional ]
• 1 cup grated cheddar cheese
• 1 egg, whisked
• .5 cup powdered milk
• pinch salt
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup wheat germ
• 3 cups whole wheat flour

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F / 170°C
2. Boil water.
3. Pour the hot water into a large bowl and add the oats and the butter [ and bullion cubes ].
4. Stir the mixture and let stand for 5 minutes.
5. Add the cheese, egg, milk and salt and stir with a spoon.
6. Blend in the cormeal and the wheat germ.
7. Slowly add the flour, a bit at a time, until you form a stiff dough.
8. Roll dough to desired thickness and cut into bones or other shapes with a cookie cutter.
9. Place on non-stick or greased baking sheet and bake for 50 minutes or until golden brown.
10. Turn off heat and let biscuits remain inside the oven for an hour to make them crunchy.

Note: The dough can be quite stiff. Also, these biscuits go from brown to black very quickly due to the cheese so mind the baking time closely.

Better Food for Dogs has quite a few practical recipes which are graduated by weight and dietary need. A large part of the book is about dog health and nutrition which is nicely done and not so scientific as to put you to sleep. The recipes are fairly simple, in both metric and imperial measures, and easy to make. Each chapter also has references and websites listed as further resources. The authors seem to be fond of canola oil [ rapeseed oil ], but I prefer to use sunflower oil as either will do. It's an excellent book if you want a few good recipes for treats and occasional dinners for your dog as well as get a bit of knowledge about canine nutrition.

Carrot Apple Oatmeal [ Peanut Butter ] Flax Cookies
pg. 182, Better Food for Dogs

• 3 cups / 750ml whole wheat flour
• 1 cup / 250ml quick-cooking rolled oats
• 2 tbsp / 25ml flaxseeds
• 1/2 tsp / 2ml ground cinnamon
• 3/4 cup / 175ml water
• 1/2 cup / 125ml chopped carrot
• 1/4 cup / 50ml finely chopped cored apple
• 2 tbsp / 25ml each blackstrap molasses and canola oil
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp / 5ml vanilla

1. In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, flaxseeds and cinnamon. In a food processor, combine water, carrot, apple molasses, oil, egg and vanilla. Puree until smooth. Pour over dry ingredients and mix well.
2. In the bowl and using hands, knead until dough holds together. Transfer to lightly floured surface. Roll out dough with rolling pin to about 1/8-inch(3mm) thickness and cut with bone shaped cookie cutter. Place on lightly greased baking sheets.
3. Bake in preheated oven at 350°F(180°C) for 20 minutes or until firm. Reduce oven temperature to 300°F(150°C). Bake for 30 minutes longer or until hard. Transfer cookies to a rack and let cool completely. Store in a tightly sealed container for up to 30 days.

Note: I add about 1/2 a jar of natural peanut butter [ no added sugar ] to the wet mixture for added flavour. I use one of the handheld chopper/blender/mixer gadgets and find it works better than a food processor. The dough is really easy and quick to blend if a bit rubbery so be sure to keep some extra flour handy.

19 Aug 2003 at 12:51, Helsinki

The Believer

One of the few things I managed to find in the London bookstores was a copy of The Believer Magazine, the new lofty lit mag from Dave Eggers. I got the June issue and I must say, in spite of my disdain for pretentious lit rags, it's a really good publication. I enjoyed nearly every column and article, especially Tom Bissell's article about reality TV. At one point he even makes the case for it being much like pornography:

It is a dodgy form of entertainment indeed when its victims are literal, and Reality Television is filled with victims, however willing they often are. This sense is, I believe, precisely what fills one with unease about Reality Television. The whole genre leaves one both vaguely unnerve and completely dissatisfied, for it does not even attempt to explain why anyone would want to do to him- or herself what Reality Television so often asks people to do. Maybe I am naive, but money is not an answer enough. Neither is the dark black asterisked sort of fame one garners from appearing on a Reality show. The scales do not balance. Reality Television ask everything of its subjects and nothing of its audience but that it watch. This makes it identical to, among other things, pornography. That what Reality Television depicts is basiclly real, that it happened, is finally not compelling enough. Things "happen" all the time: the banality of reality.

Another good piece is an interview with David mnftiu Rees. I also really like the idea share column which has a few interesting ideas for the creative set. The Tool column is a wonderful visit with arcane and wacky tools for the more literary engineers.

One of the more entertaining and curious bits was a small block of text called "A Query":

For a book about the alphabet and its uses, we are looking for authors' experiences with the following letters: Y,T,R,I,Ø,F,U,N,W,H,P,L,B,J.

For a brief period, we had saisfactory entries for the above letters. However, many were revealed to be hoaxes, jokes, or both.

Bonnie Demby-Lyons and Jennifer H. Thoms
P.O. Box 471108
San Francisco, CA
94147

Damn, if only they needed an essay about the sublime K! :)

One of the writers is apparently working on a 'cultural history of demolition' to be published sometime next year that I'll have to look for.

It's a spendy mag at $65 per year [ no foreign subscription info but it would likely be double that price ] but the quality is very good and there are no ads anywhere. Maybe I'll subscribe and have my mother send it to me every quarter.

5 Aug 2003 at 22:03, Helsinki

A book for all Nerd Porn Auteurs

While I'm still wondering why Amazon recommended Once More with Feeling to me the other day, it reminded me of Ernie Cline's Nerd Porn Auteur. Since Apple just introduced the iSight, it should be required reading for all geek and nerd operators who are tired of the same old porn. Maybe the book will help their technique. :)

10 Jul 2003 at 23:04, Helsinki

Mauri Kunnas

One of the best kept secrets in Finland is Mauri Kunnas whose illustrated books for children are absolutely captivating. I bought a copy of the Canine Kalevala for my niece in March as it is a delightfully illustrated version of the Finnish national legend for kids. Sadly, many of his books are out of print and they're virtually impossible to find in online new or used bookstores. They're even difficult to find in Helsinki since it would seem they print only a small number of the books. If you run across a copy or two of his books somewhere, buy them as they are both delightful and rare. His next book is reportedly going to be about Vikings.

Kunnas' work also appears in the Finnish parts of A Europe of Tales, a very nicely done website about the legends of Europe, Mr. Clutterbuck's House and the Vammala City website.

4 Jul 2003 at 12:49, Helsinki

Book Review: The Bug

After reading a review of The Bug on Salon I ordered a copy from Amazon UK for a bit of light summer reading. I hadn't read Ullman's non-fiction book, Close to the Machine, but I thought that someone with experience in the tech field might be able to write a passable novel about a bug and the programmers involved. I was disappointed and think I should have waited for the paperback on remainder sale. I'd give it 1 star out of 5 on amazon and, if you don't mind the spoilers, read the review below.

The physical book is actually very well done with an ASCII art bug motif throughout the book as well as a Conway-esque motif for the sections. Sadly, there is little artistic value in the text itself. The book opens with a jet-setting consultant who is given pause at customs to briefly recall Ethan Levin, a programmer in her distant past, whom even in the beginning has a pall of doom about him. The story then flashes back to 1984 when computers were still for nerds and the Macintosh had just been introduced. It's nice to see that someone still remembers the pre-internet age with some clarity, but the story dulls shortly thereafter.

Ethan Levin is a recognizeable sort of corporate programmer who was a CS Ph.D. candidate until his father died which forced him into the workplace and he never returned to academia. He continues to play with his Conway-esque 'simulated ecosystem' which is an underlying motif throughout the book. After Ethan is introduced to the reader he becomes a 'shit magnet' and you know very early on that this character has just beamed down to the surface wearing a red shirt.

The bug appears, discovered by the jet-setting consultant who was then just an ex-academic linguist hired by a friend to be a QA tester, and it takes on a life of its own. In fact, the bug has more personality and believeability than any other character in this book. Ethan is the receptacle for every programmer stereotype you can imagine; absent minded, oblivious, self-absorbed, obsessive, asocial and a bit odd. His girlfriend of 4 years goes on a trip to India with her girlfriends' husband since Ethan can't go due to his work schedule. She returns from India having slept with her travelling companion and he smothers his life by hunting the bug, now named 'the jester', even more fervently. Towards the end she leaves him after he catches them shagging in his bedroom and it is revealed that a year earlier she had an abortion without telling him and holds him responsible because he didn't behave like the guy in pregnancy test commericals when informed that she was pregnant.

The author can't quite decide whether to make him psychotic with an array of behaviour that even the most callous of co-workers couldn't passively ignore but somehow do in this story or to make him a raving alcoholic which the jet-setting consultant conveniently ignores, too. I have a really hard time imagining that an entire workplace of people would blithely turn a blind eye on a person who goes to such lengths to isolate himself from the world with earplugs and even a parachute tent around his desk who then later reeks of cheap bourbon. There is one brief moment where the stereotypical night Unix admin notices that he's not doing very well but instead of giving him a chance at redemption the admin simply takes him home, shags him, then leaves which smacks of page filler and more dumping on an already beleaguered character. Later he sees the night admin kissing another female co-worker in the parking lot and I have utterly no idea why in the hell that was thrown into the story. Perhaps the author needed a gay scene or something.

Ullman tries to insert what she thinks a clever 'lesson', but is just a really hackneyed manipulative device these days in a family obsessed society, when Ethan creates families in his 'simulated ecosystem' which makes it thrive just before hanging himself [ and isn't found dead at home for 17 days ]. Ironically, this same 'lesson' is not applied to the jet-setter consultant who is divorced, has no children and is living alone when telling the story. The QA tester, now fluent in C and moving up the corporate ladder, finds the code causing the bug which wasn't Ethan Levin's code afterall. If the guy was such an unloveable asshole, as he is made out to be throughout the book, it's unlikely he would have committed suicide. Why the author dumps on this character and then offs him in the end makes me wonder if the entire book isn't semi-autobiographical and if the vendetta against this character isn't personal.

Life is, indeed, in the details but Ullman doesn't waste many realistic details on her characters since those are saved for the bug itself. I'll give her bonus points for writing a somewhat more realistic than usual book about programming environments but the characters were uninteresting and flat, one of whom the author clearly despises and manipulates like a voodoo doll, which renders the novel a disappointing read. It does mention Perl on page 329 but unless you collect books that mention Perl I cannot find a reason to recommend anyone purchase, read or keep this book.

1 Jul 2003 at 13:15, Helsinki

The Cautionary Tale of Crake

I recently read Margaret Atwood's new book Oryx and Crake and found it to be an excellent read in spite of the lukewarm reviews it seems to be getting from the critics. I collect post-apocalyptic fiction and have since I found a liking for it when I was 8 or so. Perhaps I have always had a dark view of humanity and Oryx and Crake touches a very particular potential future for humankind should the unbridled hubris of scientific 'progress' continue.

Margaret Atwood did her research for the subject matter of this book very diligently as it is not simply one event that brings about the dystopic future and it lends the story a realistic texture and dimension. So many post-apocalyptic stories tend to focus on just one event that it makes them less credible. I cannot imagine one single event, apart from the Sun going supernova, that would effectively eradicate all human life.

The story opens with Snowman in the aftermath who tells the story in the frame of flashbacks. His name was Jimmy in his former life where he grew up in a series of corporate compounds, enclaves erected to protect biotech researchers from the pleblands outside the walls. All of the coastal cities have been submerged by this time and the weather in February is like summer in the Sahara. It's an astute observation for her to make that global warming will come but it will merely force adaptation rather than extinction. The real story begins when he meets the precocious Crake who foreshadows the shape of things to come.

In a time of near obsession with technology and biotechnology I think Oryx and Crake should be essential reading because it could be our future not very long from now. I have worked in biotech laboratories and I wouldn't bank my future on the validity of the results from most research conducted today. Many academic labs are giving way to corporate research funding which also tends to have an effect on the direction and tenor of the work.

Humans know so little about the world around them yet seemingly have the hubris enough to believe that the genome which took billions of years to evolve can be understood enough in 50 years to be manipulated without dire consequence. Margaret Atwood understands the precipice upon which we now stand and the dizzying fear at the thought of the intentional misuse of what powerful little we know. Many of the physicists at Los Alamos regretted the consequences that followed the creation of the nuclear fission bomb but there are much greater risks and consequences in trusting scientists and megacorps with the one thing we all have in common; our DNA.

3 Jun 2003 at 17:38, Helsinki

Stephenson Goes Baroque

Since I'm a bit of a crypto and crypto history enthusiast, I have been eagerly awaiting Neal Stephenson's new book, Quicksilver, ever since I read Cryptonomicon. Quicksilver will be set 300 years in the past. I don't read much fiction anymore since the vast majority of it is disappointing and not worth the rather steep prices, which are even more frightful overseas, but I always anxiously await new works from a few authors like Tom Wolfe [ who, from what I've read lately, is currently writing a campus novel I'm just itching to read ], Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley and Neal Stephenson. Quicksilver's pub date had been pushed back a few times so I signed up for a mailing list to notify me when the book would be forthcoming. I finally received an email and the end of the wait is near; The Baroque Cycle pre-publication hype has begun.

11 May 2003 at 21:31, Helsinki

A little bit of history repeating...

I've been reading the new From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly and I have been impressed with both his approach and his analysis of the subject matter. He notes the fleeting and mostly disappearing bits of computing history from even as recently as a decade ago. I have also noticed this just by the culling of bits from the Perl history project which are few, far between and often lacking a public interest in preserving for posterity. I save what I can in hopes that it may someday be useful and appreciated. Much of the book owes its research to corporate archives which aren't public but which the author was able to obtain access to.

The book stops at 1995 for various good reasons so those looking for an open source software history will have to wait, but he does mention open source in the very beginning which immediately gives him credibility as a historian with a clue:

"A second limitation of this book is the cutoff date of 1995. Naturally historians have a professional reluctance to write about very recent events on which they lack a proper perspective, so I have no fear of criticism from other historians on that score. However, any self-respecting industry analyst or software journalist would bring the story up to date and would, for good measure, project a few years into the future. This involves a set of skills different from that of the historian. It is not mere pusillanimity that makes me reluctant to attempt to do the same, but the fact that such projections are often wrong and therefore that contemporary obsessions often miss the real drama and turning points. For example, in the last 5 years there has been an enormous amount of press coverage of the Java programming language, the Linux operating system, and open-source software. I have no idea whether these will turn out to be turning points in the industry or not, and my opinion is certainly no better than the average pundit's. On the other hand, I find it quite fascinating that in the business press of the early 1990s the Internet was one of the least-written-about subjects, getting perhaps one-tenth the column inches devoted to Microsoft Windows or the tribulations of WordPerfect. I don't know what it is, but I bet there is something much more important going on right now than Java, Linux or open-source software, and that it will be 2010 before it becomes fully apparent."

The book is full of interesting little tidbits such as the Computer Usage Company [ CUC ], the first software contracting firm, was a start-up whose first four programmers were all women who were recent science or math grads. His style is a wee bit dry but that's understandable when you're working with this kind of project where there are lots of facts, big gaps in information and few personal accounts of the subject matter to give it a more human dimension. Every story in this book has a much larger story to tell, you can feel it, but people die and their story dies with them unless they have made an attempt to preserve it. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call to some whom history is important.

The author is also working on The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets which is due out by August and should be very interesting to read as well.

2 May 2003 at 12:37, Helsinki

smorgasbord

Moving to Finland hasn't stopped my book addiction although it has slowed the flow a bit since I'm more selective about what I'm willing to pay to have shipped here. Stockmann has a decent selection, if a bit slim, of books from the UK so this helps keep me from shopping amazon.com with abandon. :) I have found a bunch of new books, CDs and DVDs worthy of shipping in the past few months:

• For those who enjoyed Salt: A World History will no doubt enjoy Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar. This book led me to consider writing a history of ginger since I adore eating ginger in most forms and it would appear to be one of the few spices or condiments which hasn't had a history of it published recently.
• Simon Winchester has a new book, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 which should be quite a good read. I've been fascinated by Krakatoa ever since I read The Twenty-One Balloons when I was a kid.
• The Penguin Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why so you can plan your holidays around the local cuisine.
• From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (History of Computing) from MIT Press in their continuing fine series on the History of Computing.
• Colour: Travels through the Paintbox, a history of pigments via an engaging travelogue.
• Practical Cryptography by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier which should guarantee it being a useful book for most cryptoheads.
• A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America which looks to be a fascinating study of American consumer economics.
• Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States which is an update to a classic reference.
• The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories
• Fantabulosa: Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang which should prove to be a source of great fun and curiosity.
• Latin: or the Empire of a Sign covers the history of Latin over a time period not often studied in great detail even when you take 8 years of it in Catholic school :)
• Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future, a rather important topic in modern linguistics.
• Alternative Histories of English that tries to give a lot more depth and realism to how and why English evolved into such a diverse language.
• Pattern Recognition is Gibson's best book in at least a decade. Definitely worth a read while I'm anxiously awaiting Quicksilver
• Schott's Original Miscellany for random entertaining trivia.
• Snow, Forest, Silence: The Finnish Tradition of Semiotics (Acta Semiotica Fennica) and Teach Yourself Finnish to help my continuing quest to understand this wacky language. :)
• Lonely Planet: Finland because I am still as fresh as a tourist around Finland.
• I can't say enough good things about the Cook's Illustrated series even though I now live in the land of metric measurements I still love their recipes and insights to cooking. The Quick Recipe (The Best Recipe Series) and Best Kitchen Quick Tips: 523 Tricks, Techniques and Shortcuts for the Curious Cook should both be as excellent as the various other CI books I have.
• Different is Jori Hulkkonen's new album and anyone who likes electronica and/or bossa nova should really give this one a try. (yes, he's Finnish :)
• Like the Deserts Miss the Rain is for ETBG fans and is worth the price of the cd for the version of Corcovado which was only on the Red, Hot and Rio album 5 or so years ago.
• I still have a very soft spot for the Pet Shop Boys; Disco Vol.3 will be sure to transport me back to the early 80s when I could dance until 4am without the rapidly aging body I have now :)
• Biography. Lisa Stansfield is such a fabulous singer and yet, much like Alison Moyet, far too often overlooked. She's the new Barry White only whiter and female. I love this woman.
• The Office - The complete series 1 is absolutely brilliant. If you loved the movie "Office Space" or "Haiku Tunnel" you'll quickly be demanding recordings of the Office from relatives and friends in the UK.

23 Mar 2003 at 8:32, Helsinki

Jonathan Franzen

When the furor over Oprah selecting The Corrections and the author's disdain for being lumped with other books of what he regarded as pulp reached it's most annoying intensity I gave the book a pass. I don't buy much fiction anymore since I have been consistently disappointed over the past decade by lousy stories that I felt robbed of the time it took me to consume them.

Last fall I noticed Franzen had a book of non-fiction essays, How to Be Alone, which contained a number of utterly brilliant pieces including a painfully personal account of losing his father. Franzen is from my home town and the book got me hooked on his writing so I decided to try The Corrections which is so vivid that it has restored my faith in fiction. If you eschewed the book before on account of the Oprah scandal I suggest you give the book a try since it's clear that this author can write a story that keeps the pages turning and won't let go even when you've finished reading.

I really hope he keeps writing and I'll have to work hard to keep from thinking of St. Louis as St. Jude :)

16 Jan 2003 at 0:28, Helsinki

Bob's your uncle!

OUP has recently published Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions: Making Sense of Transatlantic English which is a must-have for the English enthusiast or merely curious. It is not a dry lexicography but a lively and practical comparison of the two major dialects of English in all parts of daily usage. The author, Orin Hargraves, touches briefly on orthography and vocabulary then delves right into government, education, medical, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, sports and a host of other topics with detailed descriptions and tables to illustrate the differences. It's a brilliant book and I hope to see more from this author in the future.

14 Jan 2003 at 10:22, Helsinki

I feel a sin coming on...

New book and magazine finds for those with cash burning a hole in your pocket:

For the language lovers there is A Word A Day: A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English by the person who is known for the AWAD mailing list and Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success by the current Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society.

A Dictionary of Weights, Measures, and Units just published by OUP will be handy for just about anyone ever confused or lost in the abundant array of units of measurement.

Joe Queenan, quite possibly one of the most ascerbic and funny writers of our time, compiled The Malcontents: The Best Bitter, Cynical, and Satirical Writing in the World which pays tribute to the grumpier literati throughout history.

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century will appeal to bibliophiles who enjoyed the authors previous works including Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture

For the technical, Digital Typography using LaTeX is one of the best books for multi-lingual TeX I've ever seen and would recommend it to beginners and advanced users alike. Ruling the Root : Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace is an interesting and timely read given the currrent problems with ICANN and the recent attacks on the root servers.

The Lunar Men which tells the story of 5 scientists in the 1700s whose discoveries helped bring about the industrial revolution. Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller is an excellent book for any bomb history enthusiast as it details some of the stories of what really when on between the scientists, usually only mentioned in passing in other works, and serves to make them more real instead of mythical figures of scientific discoveries past.

Seed Magazine is a recent Canadian periodical aimed at "Science and Popular Culture". It's like Wired only with less focus on type and layout and more focus on actual content. It has promise and I hope it doesn't go the way of Wired. A very cute and surprisingly good magazine for the dogerati is The Bark with everything from how to lobby for dog parks to doggie poetry to the latest in doggie gadgets.

And, lastly, I Feel A Sin Coming On, a collection of hilarious postcards to amuse your friends or leave on the fridge to scare the babysitter. :)

4 Nov 2002 at 14:01, Helsinki

the mostly cloudy soon-to-be expatriot

Sarah Vowell has a brilliant new book out titled The Partly Cloudy Patriot in which she articulates much of my own feelings about the US that I could not say as well. I have always eschewed patriotism since it has so often been the source of problems all over the world. We like to give a lot of lip service to being one big happy global family yet still draw geographic and ethnic borders.

After 9/11, there was little room for those of us who weren't ready or willing start waving the flag or exclaim 'god bless america' at every turn. Sarah Vowell expresses my own feelings, suspicions and trepidations so eloquently that I find it reassuring to know someone else feels the way I do.

Immediately after the attack, seeing the flag all over the place was moving, endearing. So when the newspaper I subscribe to published a full-page, full-color flag to clip out and hang in the window, how come I couldn't? It took me a while to figure out why I guiltily slid the flag into the recycling bin instead of taping it up. The meaning had changed; or let's say it changed back. In the first day or two the flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we're all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the "evildoers," then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that's when the flags started making me nervous. The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government. Skepticism of the government was actually one of the platforms the current figurehead of the government ran on. How many times in the campaign di d President Bush proclaim of his opponent, the then vice president, "He trusts the federal government and I trust the people"? This deep suspicion of Washington is one of the most American emotions an American can have. So by the beginning of October, the ubiquity of the flag came to feel like peer pressure to always stand behind policies one might not necessarily agree with. And, like any normal citizen, I prefer to make up my mind about the issues of the day on a case by case basis at 3:00 A.M. when I wake up from my Nightline-inspired nightmares.

....

I will say that, in September, atheism was a lonely creed. Not because atheists have no god to turn to, but because everyone else forgot about us. At a televised interfaith memorial service at Yankee Stadium on September 23, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Hindu clerics spoke to their fellow worshipers. Placido Domingo sang "Ave Maria" for the mayor. I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don't believe in god have to believe in is other people and that New Yrok City is the best place ther ever was for a godless person to practise her moral code.

I found all of the essays in The Partly Cloudy Patriot to be witty, insightful and, at times, very amusing. I encourage anyone else who may feel similarly to go get a copy as she somehow makes it agreeable to be an American in spite of these being trying times, even for a soon-to-be expatriot :)

24 Sep 2002 at 12:51, Helsinki

The importance of being glass

Glass has always been a fascinating substance. Its chemical properties alone have sparked liquid vs. solid debates for ages. The chemistry behind the colours in glass is a science as well as an art unto itself. Gold is used for imbuing glass with a bright red hue but too much or too little heat can lead to what glass artists refer to as 'baby shit brown'. We use glass in so many things that we take it for granted that it has always been around. Sure, Halfpint on Little House on the Prairie waited years for Pa to get a window installed since glass was expensive and scarce but where did glass come from?

Glass: A World History is a new book on the history of the substance we take for granted.

22 Sep 2002 at 10:53, Helsinki

Herbie Rides Again

My first car was a bright yellow 1975 fuel-injected VW Beetle. I worshipped that car as it was my ticket to freedom from the suffocating suburbs.

It had personality, quirks and no heat but I adored it just the same. On really hot days I had to park it on an incline so that I could pop start it with the clutch after getting it rolling. Dad and I replaced the injectors a number of times though the most memorable time I had to drive up to the bank to get some money before they closed and on the way home I saw what looked like my father driving behind me. When I parked in the driveway, sure enough, it was Dad behind me leaping out of his car yelling "Shut it off! Shut it off!" Apparently, in the rush to get the injectors replaced we didn't get the seal on one of the gas lines tightly enough and it was spewing gas all over the magnesium block. :)

The floorboards on Bugs were notorious for rusting away and mine was no exception. Driving back from a college prank with a friend we were soaked when I drove through a rather large puddle on the highway which spewed water up into the car and she squeaked, "It's fucking Orca!". There were 2 inches of water on the floor of the car and we were drenched but I still giggle whenever I remember it.

In the winter I would freeze since the heat never really worked but years later I would find the hose that was supposed to carry heat into the interior of the car was never connected to the vents. I had vanity plates to express my love for my bright yellow love bug; amo id.

I am ruthlessly unsentimental about personal possessions but still I think of that car fondly and wish I could drive it again. You could see the bright yellow a mile away and hear the engine nearly as far. Even now I can tell the sound of an old VW Beetle before I lay eyes on the car itself. Perhaps it's because the car came of age with me or maybe it's because few cars have the sort of charm the VW Beetle has but the new Beetles just aren't the same.

The book Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile prompted my waxing nostalgia for my old bug. It explores the history of the Bug and delves into the cultural phenomenon it became. The SUV will be forgotten eventually but the Bug's charm and place in our memories will remain.

9 Sep 2002 at 22:33, Helsinki

Let Freedom Read

September 21st through 28th is Banned Books Week. To raise awareness about censorship there are read-outs being planned around the country.

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. George Orwell

Celebrate by reading a banned book.

9 Sep 2002 at 0:18, Helsinki

weird words

Word freaks will probably want to pick up a copy of Weird and Wonderful Words, fresh off the OUP press and written by the editor of Verbatim.

7 Sep 2002 at 13:10, Helsinki

Novel Eco

If you enjoy Umberto Eco's fiction in addition to his works on semiotics and language then you'll be happy to hear that he has a new novel due out in October, Baudolino.

26 Aug 2002 at 1:09, Helsinki

Our Town - Internet style

A recent find at the local B&N, The Egg Code, is a dizzying and delightful romp through the post-modern sprawl of the Internet. Through a series of colourful vignettes the author moves characters around like pieces on a chess board and at the center of it all is the Gloria 21169 router. It's funny and suspenseful. A highly recommended post-dot-bomb read. :)

20 Jul 2002 at 12:32, Helsinki

The Day I Turned Uncool

I recently found a little gem of a book while idly browsing at the Borders searching for something new and possibly amusing. The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-up sounded like something I would write so I bought it and have been recommending to everyone I know.

When growing up, we all think that we won't ever be as dull as our parents but, ever so slowly age catches up with us all and before we know it we're reluctantly becoming uncool. It's the little things at first, mowing the lawn, laundry on a Saturday night then one day the revelation comes that the world is no longer your oyster and it hits you; you have become your parents.

Each of the chapters are 'confessions'; I played golf. I take pride in my lawn, I spend a great deal of time engaged in home-improvement projects, My social circle has shriveled and shrunk, I went to a wine tasting, I am no fun anymore, Caffeine has become my recreational drug of choice, and I had a little midlife crisis. It's witty, sharp and hilarious prose mostly because you've been busted, you're uncool. :)

11 Jul 2002 at 20:58, Helsinki

Le Tour sponsored by Bengay

The Tour de France is coming in a few weeks though I doubt I'll make the team considering my new found adoration of Bengay for my sore lower back and achy everything else :). I have, however, always wanted to do a bicycle tour of Wales and France. Lonely Planet Guides have started publishing cycling guides, such as Lonely Planet Cycling France, that are really terrific. I wish they had these 10+ years ago when I did a lot of touring with gazetters and topo maps :). For the Bengay set there is also French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France which is an amusing travelogue of riding the course...in a much more entertaining and slower fashion :)

11 Jun 2002 at 1:00, Helsinki

Digital Babel

The June issue of Wired has a nifty timeline tracing the roots of computer languages [ caution: 500k file ] from 1954 through 2001. It is interesting to see what has lived and what has not and that Perl sorta stops at Perl4.000 :) A sidebar also mentions Larry as a charismatic leader which is something I don't think has had that much influence on Perl's continued usage and survival as a computational tongue since Larry isn't that active outside of a small developer circle.

One visual effect of the timeline is just how much congestion in the number of languages there is after 1990, a computational Tower of Babel. Diversity isn't a good thing everywhere and, since Microsoft gained much of it's monopoly through Microsoft Office as the standard application which eased file exchanges, I suspect a majority of these languages will die off in the next few years. Speak: A Short History of Language may also provide some insight into survival of the fittest languages. After reading the 5th Apocalypse I have a feeling that Perl6 will need all the help it can get to survive.

10 Jun 2002 at 22:58, Helsinki

Take a trip without luggage

Book find of the month, The Clitourist. I hope they do a companion volume "Adventures with Dick" :)

26 May 2002 at 0:37, Helsinki

Steinbeck Revisited

This year is the Steinbeck Centennial and Penguin Putnam has published a boxed set of some of his more famous works most of us were forced to read and write papers on in grade school. I never liked The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and I cried my way through The Red Pony. I identified him with depressingly sad tales that I had no way of relating to as an 8 year old but, on a whim, I looked on Amazon to see what titles they had of his and I noticed he wrote quite a bit of nonfiction so I loaded up my basket and decided to give him a second chance.

What a difference a genre makes! His nonfiction is glorious, crisp and I suspect Tom Wolfe was influenced by Steinbeck's journalistic style. The Wayward Bus, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, A Russian Journal, Once There Was a War and Travels with Charley in Search of America are a tribute to the craft of telling a story which seems to be a dying art these days.

With all the mad hoo-ha over blogging replacing journalism it's easy to see in prose like Steinbeck's why that will never, ever happen as long as there is a story to tell and someone worthy of telling it. Blogging isn't journalism any more than the gossip page in the local paper is journalism but both have their place. In an age of the 5 second newsbite and millions of cross-linking blogs I would love to see more real in-depth stories told by the likes of a Wolfe or a Steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

The mark of a good storyteller is how timeless and classic the work remains with the passage of time like Aeschylus and Shakespeare as, while fads come and go, the human condition is at its core still the same as it ever was. So, Happy 100th Birthday Mr. Steinbeck and I humbly apologise for dismissing your work on the basis of my dislike of your depressing fiction. May you fly to the stars on the wings of a pig. :)

14 May 2002 at 18:53, Helsinki

Worst-Case Golf

The Worst-Case Scenario people have done it again, Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Golf. I've never actually figured out what the point of golf is even though my brothers-in-law all swear by the little white ball but I still laugh until my sides hurt at Caddyshack. Screw the first 18 holes, I'll see you at the 19th by the pool while reading this...I wonder if they have a section on "How not to laugh and point at the guys who dress like golf pros from the 40s" :)

14 May 2002 at 17:28, Helsinki

Warp speed Mr. Dyson

Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship is a new book by Freeman Dyson's son George. The 50s and 60s were a wacky time and it doesn't surprise me one bit that while people were drinking martinis, buying Saturn Lamps and doing the frug, Freeman Dyson and friends were attempting to build a nuclear powered space ship. It makes Arthur C. Clarke and Jules Verne seem even more clairvoyant than previously thought. The age of the atom may be coming back into vogue now too as Nevada has announced atomic test license plates to commemorate it's nuclear legacy.

4 May 2002 at 22:13, Helsinki

Lost Languages

Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts is a recently published book on archeological cryptology. It discusses everything from Linear B to Easter Island and is beautifully illustrated. The author also has an upcoming book, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris which should be of equal interest to crypto enthusiasts.

3 May 2002 at 0:44, Helsinki

Mad Science in the Kitchen

I don't know if Einstein really had a cook and, as a theoretical physicist, he probably sucked at something so concrete as applied organic chemistry, but What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained may be an interesting read. It's probably a popular science version of the outstanding Cookwise.

30 Apr 2002 at 0:21, Helsinki

Ben Dova Ben Bova

From the it's-late-and-I'm-easily-amused department, Ben Bova has released a new book The Rock Rats which is apparently a victim of a very amusing misprint of his name [ local copy since Amazon removed it ]. For the Massachusetts Townese impaired, Ben Dova is equivalent to Bend Over.

n.b. - A trip to the local Barnes & Noble reveals that this is an Amazon.com prank or goof which makes it even more amusing :)

30 Apr 2002 at 0:06, Helsinki

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The long awaited revival of the ancient library at Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, has opened to the public finally!

• Total site area: 40,000 m²
• Total Library floor areas: 69,000 m²
• No. of floors: 13
• No. of seats: 3500
• No. of volumes: 4-8 million
• No. of maps: 50,000
• No. of manuscripts: 100,000
• No. of electronic applications: 30 data bases
• No. of of rare books: 10,000
• No. of electronic materials: 100 CD-ROM titles
• No. of musical media: 200,000 disks/tapes
• No. of audio-visual material: 50,000 disks/videos
• No. of staff: 578
• Complex includes: Conference Center (3200 seats), science museum, planetarium, school of information studies, calligraphy institute and museum.

25 Apr 2002 at 15:59, Helsinki

Richard Rhodes has a new book

Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, has a new book being released on 7 may, Masters of Death: The SsEisatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. It should be interesting reading following the book about the Wannsee meeting. Not exactly light reading, but certainly thoughtful reading in a time of war, aggression and religious jihad.

25 Apr 2002 at 13:52, Helsinki

Honey, I baked the children!

Amazon was cheeky enough to recommend How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking and, when I took a closer at the book, I must admit it's my kind of book since the author includes baking children in the table of contents. I guess the editor or author never played 'one of these things is not like the other' in gradeschool. :)

24 Apr 2002 at 0:32, Helsinki

Gastronomica

New England grocery stores are weird. When I first moved to Rockport the grocery stores required you to get a membership card of sorts to get the 'discounted' price on products in exchange for the opportunity for them to demographically track you and your purchases. The first major difference from any other US grocery store was found in the frozen food section; not 1, not 2 but 3 whole aisles filled with ice cream. I discovered that New England is the highest per capita consumers of ice cream in the US. The layout of the stores were wrong too as the aisles were narrow and the dairy and meat were at the beginning of the store instead of being near the check-out. The produce section was small and disappointing but the seafood counter was usually impressive. Meat, especially chicken was very expensive compared to the midwest prices.

Well, I know I'm getting old as I just discovered the best grocery store in the Boston Area and I'm excited about it; The Roche Bros.. They have an extensive deli/bakery/produce section with fresh products, reasonably priced meat and the dairy/frozen food section is the last thing you see before heading for the cashier. It's as though an engineer who shops designed the layout. Amazing. Oh, and the reciept is categorised! And they have baggers who have a concept of how to pack groceries and then wheel it out to your car. I feel a bit weird about them taking the cart out to the car still. Maybe everyone else has this, but since I left St. Louis with Dierberg's, I've lowered my expectations to meet the average New England grocery store. So long Shaw's/Star Market, Stop and Shop, Trader Joe's, Bread and Circus and every other grocery I ever had the misfortune to shop at.

Food is often the barometer of a culture and whenever I visit somewhere new I usually visit a grocery store just to get a handle on the people. Helsinki's grocery stores are small but there is a high premium placed on freshly baked goods, produce like fruits/berries and dairy. The packaging isn't as elaborate as the US and whole foods outnumber processed food. Finns lack Velveeta, call the Embassy. We took Jarkkos parents to the grocery when they visited last year and while she couldn't really articulate what she thought of it, I could tell his mother was entertained by the size of the store and the 50 varieties of mustard or 135 different cereals available. She asked me how I found the time to shop in such a store with all the choices. The US may only have 2 political parties but we have plenty of mustard produced by the monster food conglomerates to choose from :)

If you like food and culture then you will probably be interested in Gastronomica, a quarterly magazine and the new Modern Library Food Series including Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet.

22 Apr 2002 at 0:21, Helsinki

Secret Life of Food

Yesterday, while book shopping, I found the coolest and cutest book I have seen in a long while, The Secret Life of Food. I'm no chef but this is a book filled with food creations that imitate life with fairly easy recipes that even a cooking retard like me could manage to make without too much fuss. The meatball eyeballs are hilarious and the Jell-O Aquarium [ pictured above ] is something I'm definitely going to try making since Jell-O by itself is a pretty boring food but making an aquarium with it is simply brilliant :)

Jell-O Aquarium by Clare Crespo

Ingredients

• 1 gallon glass goldfish bowl
• 2 boxes Berry Blue Jell-O gelatin
• 1 can fruit cocktail
• gummi fish or plastic fish [ or print out some tropical fish on a colour printer, print the mirror image of them, cut them out, paste them together to create a fish on both sides then laminate them ]
• plastic aquarium plant [ optional but really adds something to it ]

Directions

1. Prepare the Jell-O as per the directions on the box. Pour into fishbowl.
2. Drain fruit cocktail and slowly pour it into the goldfish bowl. This is the 'gravel'. If you have the plastic tank plant, add it before pouring in the fruit cocktail and hold it in place until the cocktail anchors it on the bottom.
3. Place fishbowl into refrigerator to thicken for an hour to partially set.
4. Remove from refrigerator and place fish in the gelatin using a stick or utensil to position them.
5. Return the fishbowl to the refridgerator to set completely and firmly.
6. Serve with a spoon and don't eat the plastic bits :)

21 Apr 2002 at 13:56, Helsinki

Why not Vermillion?

The Aegean Park Press just made my day by publishing M-30, Japanese Diplomatic Secrets as I have been hunting for over a year now in hopes of finding the algorithm for the purple, jade and coral ciphers used in WWII by the Japanese. If I ever actually find it I'll write Crypto::Purple/Coral/Jade for CPAN. It contains nearly 1200 pages on CD-ROM in PDF format. Apparently it was authored by the same guy who published the classic book about the Black Chamber but was censored from being published before now. The Man Who Broke Purple is an excellent read if you're interested in Purple but be sure to get an edition with all the pages since some of the early printings had an error and are missing the last 50 or so.

Of course, they have oodles of other cool books on a wide range of cryptologic and intelligence topics too. If credit cards could groan, mine would be screaming. :)

16 Apr 2002 at 17:03, Helsinki

Wannsee

For the 60th Anniversary of the Wannsee Meeting, Mark Roseman wrote The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution [ available in the US in late May ] to explore the meeting in more depth than the HBO movie Conspiracy could possibly attempt to do. It is a very thought provoking book since Hitler has always been at the center of the blame but the author argues that the Wannsee meeting was merely a codification of a process that was already underway and not under the direct order of Hitler. He has done enough research to support this besides it being far easier to believe that mass genocide was more complex a proposition than one man ordering thousands of zombie-like Germans to murder millions.

My interest in WWII has rarely strayed from signals intelligence and crypto but the discovery of the Wannsee protocol is interesting because it has prompted historians to return to their material and take a much closer look at the mechanics of how the incomprehensible and the unthinkable actually happened. Somthing of this magnitude couldn't have happened overnight and there were social, emotional and economic factors that influenced the eventual decision. It is frightening and real once the idea manifests itself that it was a gradual rather than a decisive action stemming from a clear directive which makes it far more elusive to define how it happened and, more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again.

14 Apr 2002 at 21:35, Helsinki

Raymond Carver

I went looking for a book tonight and found my old and tattered copy of Raymond Carver's All of Us causing me to become completely distracted. I was introduced to him in high school by one of my teachers who noticed I was fond of Checkov.

The Attic

Her brain is an attic where things
were stored over the years.

From time to time her face appears
in the little windows near the top of the house.

The sad face of someone who has been locked up
and forgotten about.

Romanticism

The nights are very unclear here.
But if the moon is full, we know it.
We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.

His minimalist style in his peotry and prose demands a lot of the reader since the emotion is so condensed. The poem and the story are told in the volumes unspoken. If you aren't familiar with Raymond, go find a copy of his short stories and discover one of the best short story writers of the late 20th century.

11 Apr 2002 at 0:57, Helsinki

conflictum librorum

I have a social disease -- I always carry a book with me no matter the destination or occasion whether it be a movie, a pub, dinner with friends, anywhere. Sometimes I carry two, one fiction and one non-fiction if I'm in a mood where either might be of more interest should the opportunity arise to read them.

I've never thought about seeing a shrink about it as I can usually discreetly hide my affliction by leaving the books in the car or hide them in a bag but I often feel a little twinge of guilt for having my cherished friends along with me for the evening. When I have a holiday from work I nearly always visit a bookshop and, depending on the lack of shelf space at home, I sometimes surreptitiously disguise my purchases by disposing of the shop bag and putting them on the shelf. Perhaps I have a clinical case of A Gentle Madness.

I felt a bit better today when I happened to read The Buying of Books by Carl S. Patton published in February 1922 where he freely admits to the same affliction I have come to know and love:

Dr. Johnson expressed the opinion that the best sort of book was a small one that one could 'carry to the fire'. I have sometimes improved upon this sentiment of Dr. Johnson, especially in the reading of German and French books. These books are often published in paper covers and sewed together apparently with a single thread. It is a matter of a few moments to split a five-hundred page volume into five parts of a hundred pages each, and to take each part to the printer's and have the wide margins trimmed down, until you have a pamphlet of handy size to carry in your pocket. Such pieces of books I have not merely 'carried to the fire' but carried in every conceivable place, reading them on the street-cars and while I was waiting my turn in the barber's or the dentist's chair. When I have thus been stealing a few minutes to read, I often envied the people who had more time to spare. But when I observed how many people have oceans of time, but carry no books in their pockets and spend no time reading, I have wondered whether we do not value even our highest opportunities better if we do not have too many of them. Thus I say to myself when, leaving my automobile at home because I cannot read while I drive it, I take my seat in an unobserved corner of the street-car, and pull from my pocket a copy, or even a fragment, of one of my books.

I used to commute via train and rarely, if ever, noticed anyone else reading a book though many would skim a paper in the morning and tap on a laptop. Most people stared idly out the window, even in the dark of winter. I live in fear of being somewhere without having a book when I could be reading.

I often assess how well I will get on with someone when I have a chance to visit their book collection or lack thereof. A friend of mine and I were talking recently about how he and his SO/wife are 'food compatible' which I thought was a rather profound observation since living with someone does require an agreeable match in the realm of cuisine. Someone who loves spicy variety and a late dinner probably won't live happily ever after with someone who only likes hot dogs at 5pm. After some thought I realise that my better half and I are 'book compatible' as not only do we order the same things from a menu usually [ leaving one of us to try and pick something else quickly ] we also tend to order and shop for the same books which leads to harmony on the bookshelf.

Jarkko laughs at my desire to open a bookshop in Helsinki but, given our affliction, it may save us money :)

10 Apr 2002 at 18:50, Helsinki

And now, a word from our sponsor

According to TV is 75, TV and I share the same birthday though I'm not quite 75 this year. TV is a Virgo :) The History of the first 75 years of TV is really intriguing, especially how the TV itself has changed over the years much like the computer has evolved over time to become smaller and more easily integrated into our daily lives. The TV omnipresent in American life; from the laundromat to the pub, to the grocery store, to the shopping mall to the automobile.

The TV, like the computer, started life as a big, clunky, expensive, esoteric device that eventually became a fixture in every home. So many moments in the past century have been vicariously enjoyed by those tuning in to witness events that would otherwise have just been a front page story with a photo in a newspaper. Who doesn't remember watching the assasination of JFK, the lunar landing, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, the falling of the Berlin Wall, the first shots of Desert Storm or the attack on the WTC and Pentagon? I hate the TV. I love the TV. It's difficult to articulate the affection for something that makes you feel like a vegetable, a passive voyeur. Love it or hate it but it was the printing press of the 20th Century and the internet is just a speedbump on the way to something even more revolutionary I suspect. The perfect popculture delivery system.

Tube: The Invention of Television is part of the Sloan Technology Series and is the best book to date on the history of television. A new book about Farnsworth and the early development of TV, The Boy Genius and the Mogul has just been published. Another pre-history, Please Stand By and The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind [ companion website ] deal with more of the effects of TV on society.

10 Apr 2002 at 16:55, Helsinki

A Twist of Lemony

As a result of a series of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket has an Unauthorized Autobiography hitting the bookstores early in May.

8 Apr 2002 at 14:02, Helsinki

Spring Forward

I've always been late to rise and late to bed so "Daylight Saving Time" or "Summer Time" has often left me a bit miffed since everything in the US seems to revolve around the people who are early to rise and are early to bed. After 9pm it's nearly impossible to find a restaurant or shops that are open unless you live in a city centre. This appears absurd considering we are not an agrarian society that rises with the sun to tend the crops anymore, but makes more sense in the energy conservation rationale.

Timekeeping has been a bit of historical curiosity and contention throughout the ages and there are several books which treat the subject quite well; History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Calendrical Calculations and The Oxford Companion to the Year.

7 Apr 2002 at 16:00, Helsinki

The Amazon.com conflict

It used to be that I had to get my ass off the sofa and actually venture out to the bookshops for my vice but Amazon makes it too easy to find everything I'm looking for and a whole lot of other stuff that I hadn't thought of before. Jarkko and I now have nearly every flat surface in the house piled with books and eye each other suspiciously when we hear the too familiar screeching of the UPS truck arriving at our front door to deliver even more books.

I try not to shop for more books these days but Amazon is a cruel mistress, taunting me with new selections it knows I won't resist like Elvis Costello's new album When I Was Cruel, What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Electronic Frontier, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society and A Brief History of the Future since I have a taste for tormented English musicians and the history of technology.

I think we need a house where all the walls are covered in bookshelves :)

2 Apr 2002 at 0:09, Helsinki

Chemist Porn

Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements is as close to porn for chemists as it gets. Each element is treated to a section on its name, cosmic qualities, human uses, foods containing it, medical uses, history, uses in war, economic value, environmental impact, main properties and curious trivia. My only lament is that there isn't a diagram of the element showing the electron configuration and shell structure nor is it as lick-a-licious as smell-o-mints, but that is just a nit in such a fine work. In the introduction the author quotes a song written and sung by Tom Lehrer [ an mp3 version is also available ] to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorous and fancium and flourine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium,
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, cobalt, carbon, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discarvard.

30 Mar 2002 at 22:59, Helsinki

Janeane Garofalo in Big Trouble

I've always been a big fan of the ascerbic comics like H.L. Mencken, Joe Queenan [ the book white trash had me howling with laughter :) ] and Janeane Garofalo. Janeane was on Conan last night promoting the new movie she's in, Big Trouble, based on the Dave Barry book.

I love Janeane for her cutting wit and her refusal to dress up like a barbie doll to fit the hollywood mold. As I sat on the couch with my hair all grody, wearing sweatpants with fuzzy wookie legs I got the impression she could actually hang out in my living room. If fashion means looking like Gwen Paltrow, Janeane keep on holding your own :) I must also note that she has fabulous taste in eyewear with a nicely styled tortoise cateye frame.

30 Mar 2002 at 10:40, Helsinki

More than just a picture book

Oxford University Press has announced a new translation of the Kamasutra. Apparently the authors have combined their talents to rend a completely new translation of the Sanskrit text and they have found, unsurprisingly, that Sir Richard Burton's translation published in Victorian England was subjected to quite a bit of editorial censure and ignorance. It will be released in the UK this month and the US in June so I'm sure all the men in the UK will be running off to the nearest Waterstone's for a copy :)

29 Mar 2002 at 17:40, Helsinki

Every sperm is sacred.....

Once upon a time, before you
were born, two cells collided,
one bigger than the other. The
bigger cell (the egg) and the
smaller cell (the sperm) became
one very special cell...

Having been raised Catholic, in spite of recent scandal, most of us were left to figure out sex on our own without the benefit of books or parental guidance. I received a shipment of books from Amazon the other day and a mistake in the packing made me the lucky recipient of Cells Are Us which covers almost everything but the actual coital act in cartoon fashion. It's a biology book for children on how their body was created and works at the cellular level. The publisher, Lerner Books also have Cells Wars, DNA is Here To Stay and Amazing Schemes Within Your Genes.

I'm thinking that maybe I should buy Dr. Ruth Talks to Kids: Where You Came From, How Your Body Changes and What Sex is All About, The Encyclopedia of Sex and, her most recent masterpiece for pre-schoolers, Who Am I? Where Did I Come From? since I may have missed something along the way. Although...maybe I'll wait for the audiobook version so I can hear her say "Penis" and "Vagina" and giggle. :) There is hope for future generations who won't have to call their Mother after they graduate from university exclaiming that they just figured out what "Afternoon Delight" means!

29 Mar 2002 at 15:38, Helsinki

Weird science

I love Henry Petroski and his books like The Evolution of Useful Things, The Book on the Bookshelf, Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering and The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. He has a new book, a memoir since he won't be outdone by Oliver Sacks, Paperboy: Delivering the Press in the 50s which I'll have to read because anyone who can write an entertaining book on something as mundane as the pencil has to have had an interesting childhood.

The MIT Bookshop, a dangerous place I only dare enter a few times a year at the behest of my wallet, has a new book to interest Petroski fans, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse. It's filled with 35 profiles of inventors and their inventions like Stephanie Kwolek the DuPont chemist who invented Kevlar and was an inspiration to me when I studied chemistry. I am a bit disappointed that Wozniak is named inventor of the personal computer since he simply created something that J.C. Licklider had laid much of the foundation for years earlier [ the biography is one of the absolute best computing history books I've ever read....read it if you haven't already ].

Inventors and their inventions are terrific reminders that being in the right place at the right time is sweet serendipity:)

19 Mar 2002 at 23:37, Helsinki

World Book Day

Today is World Book Day so go buy your kids, someone elses' kid or even yourself a book today :)

14 Mar 2002 at 10:27, Helsinki

Perl, Preening and Pendantry

For those single and thinking that maybe winning a Nobel will help your chance to get laid James Watson shows that it doesn't help a whole lot in his memoir Genes, Girls and Gamow:) Rest easy.

I thought reading an account of a famous scientists struggle to be a social entity in addition to his scientific self would be interesting but it lacks an intimacy you'd expect from a guy who's telling you about his horny salad days. Reading it won't get you laid but it will give you some solace that even a guy like Watson had a hard time getting a date. :)

12 Mar 2002 at 0:22, Helsinki

Stupid White Guys

Feeling like the news is really a satellite feed from the planet Mayberry these days? Well, it's time to run, not walk, to the bookshop and get a copy of Stupid White Men by Michael Moore who did Roger & Me. Ironically his cameraman for that film was a cousin of Dubya. How many cousins does Bush have as he seems to be related to the entire administration of Florida and Texas? Bill O'Reilly interviewed Moore and stayed on the ever so predictible if you aren't completely behind capitalism you must be a socialist line of reasoning which is wrong but it helps the capitalists justify outright theft as 'progress'. Enron is just a new form of progress! Go buy the book. I just wrote my congressmen and you will too.

27 Feb 2002 at 12:55, Helsinki

Get your Verne On

The book, then the movie of the same title, Journey to the Center of the Earth I was hooked on Jules Verne and his stories. Lately his books have been coming back into print. Most recently, Magellania, a story of a man whose motto is Neither God nor master, he has shunned Western civilisation to live on an island where it gets complicated by immigrants who want in on his utopia. This is the first time the book has been published, in it's original form, in English. The Modern Library also recently published The Mysterious Island which is based on the Selkirk of Selkirk's Island who was the model for Robinson Crusoe. Many others have come back into print recently as well; Adventures in the Land of the Behemoth, Dropped from the Clouds, The Chase of the Golden Meteor and Paris in the Twentieth Century.

24 Feb 2002 at 8:54, Helsinki

Well, at least it isn't a Speedo....

First we had Ashcroft draping the boobied art deco statues in the Hall of Justice and now there is an inane scuffle over George W. Bush and his Family Paper Dolls created by the same guy who did George Bush and His Family Paper Dolls because it shows our president in 'gender appropriate undergarments'. I guess they noticed the sex toys section at the back for Laura. I hate to think it just can't get any more retarded in this country as I'm sure there are plenty of surprises left in the 315 days remaining before I escape.

21 Feb 2002 at 10:57, Helsinki

The Earl of Grey or Gray

I'm reading a new book from Knopf A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States and it is an intriguing exploration of Language, in this case English, and its possible role in national identity. The EU has 15 languages that it provides translators and translations for since language is very much a part of national identity, moreso than their respective currencies. So, when the colonies gave the British Empire the shove Noah Webster of later dictionary fame was a vocal advocate of making an American language to give the young country a sense of identity. Hebrew was briefly considered as was French to spite the British but English won in the end due to practicality in spite of the fact that only 1 in 4 people spoke English as a first language. In contrast 230 million [ 1990 ] americans of whom 199 million speak only English as of the 1990 census. We can blame Noah Webster for all the seemingly absurd differences in spelling between US and UK English since he felt it would make the language 'our own'. It's a pity he took so much effort in affecting this change since the spelling differences have become just an annoyance and the culture of both countries has provided more than enough differences in the language to make them distinct.

I was never very keen on US history as 200 years doesn't make racist, egotistical, rich white guys any more interesting than they are in the present . However, much to the authors credit she has written a very readable and interesting tale of American history and some of the early influences on American English. She even tells the oft forgotten story of Sequoyah who invented the Cherokee alphabet to help liberate his people as well as Gallaudet [ sign language ], Morse [ morse code ], and Bell [ speech ]. I still don't think I'd like most of the forefathers if they showed up for tea but I wish more history textbooks were written this well.

20 Feb 2002 at 23:23, Helsinki

Pink Pirates

History has been notorious over the centuries of overlooking women and their contributions to science and other fields even though some justice is being done in new biographies there are scores of other women whom history forgot to pay tribute to. Yesterday at the local bookshop I spied Booty: Girl Pirates on the High Seas which tells the story of a number of female pirates one of whom was the last person hanged in the state of Massachussetts for the crime of highway robbery....her name was Rachel Wall. It gives me hope for history becoming a bit more accurate in the future when publishers are willing to print books about the bitchy captain hooks of the seven seas that I don't ever recall reading about in history textbooks. :)

19 Feb 2002 at 18:06, Helsinki

Life is in the details

A couple of years ago I read an article in Smithsonian Magazine titled Reading the Message in Everyday Things about John R. Stilgoe, a professor at Harvard University who teaches classes and writes books about things we completely take for granted and often escape our notice. I was immediately intrigued and read his books Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places and Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1938 to find out more about this man and his grasp of the uncommonly common. After reading his work I took pen to stationery and wrote to invite him to give a presentation to the Boston.pm since an appreciation for the wisdom in the details of life would be a welcome change of pace. The one track minded programmer would benefit greatly from seeing and pondering the details in the world beyond the keyboard. He replied in kind and expressed regret that he was going to be away for the summer term but would welcome another invitation during the Fall term.

I forgot all about this until last night when Jarkko found Suburbia by Bill Owens. The book is an utterly brilliant collection of photos from 1970s suburban California. I stared at a photo of a food pantry for nearly 20 minutes noticing how some brands of food had changed and remembering what the pantry looked like at my house. There is a picture of an elderly couple in a garage workshop that captivates since they look very happy and then you notice there are bare breasted women covering the wall behind them. Some of the pictures are accompanied by wry little comments that frame the photos perfectly. Every picture is a time capsule. If I knew or ever saw any of my fellow neighbors I'd attempt making a 2002 version of Suburbia as I'm sure that 30 years from now everything will look quaint and amusing as much as 30 years ago seems now.

9 Feb 2002 at 22:46, Helsinki

Forget the Hoover, think Black Hole

The Economist has an interesting article this week about Artificial Black Holes the immediately reminded me of an excellent book titled As She Climbed Across the Table where Alice, a physicist, creates what she comes to call "The Lack", a rather punctilious little desktop black hole. Theories about black holes have been around for quite sometime, even inspiring The Black Hole credited with the very first instance of CGI. It's an interesting field of physics and maybe they'll succeed so that in 30 years we can have our very own desktop black hole metaphysical rubbish bin that will put the entire sanitation industry right out of business. :)

29 Jan 2002 at 17:09, Helsinki

Think Hard™

New Englanders like to think they know how to barbeque but since I'm a transplant here I am often sorely disappointed at the culinary offerings in the name of pilgrim barbeque [ exceptions being East Coast Grill in Inman Sq. and Blue Ribbon BBQ in Arlington ]. I am already salivating at the thought of being back home for YAPC so I can go out and have a beer and pile of real barbequed meat and then have breakfast at Uncle Bill's Pancake House at 4am for a good home cooked heart attack on a platter since it will probably be the last time I'll see such food for a long, long time.

It could have been the subconscious longing for grilled meat smothered in sauce that prompted me to look at a book with a bottle of BBQ sauce on the cover, Secrets of the Wholly Grill: A Novel about cravings, barbecue, and software. The publisher Carroll &amp; Graf have one of the most ecclectic catalogues I've ever seen so after reading the flap I took a risk and bought it. It was an excellent purchase :) It's an amazingly well crafted satire on the current shady practices of the computer/software industry. It's hilarious and sharp, an unexpected find in a sea of rather boring fiction these days. The author is an IP lawyer in the valley so he's got the whole scene pegged and possibly a bit cliche in parts. The first chapter is online which may convince you to go get a copy :)

The February Issue of Harper's this month contains a fun list of new trademark applications since 9-11 on page 25...a few of the funnier ones:

• Bin Laden to Rest™
• Bin There Bombed That™
• Bum Laden™
• Fight Terrorism: Go Shopping™
• High on America™
• Hero Hanky™
• Osama, Yo Mama!™
• Terrorists Suck™
• Trash bin Laden™
• T.U.R.D. Terrorist Under Restrained Discipline™
• We're Our Own Enemy™

and the best one is....God Bless America!™.

I guess it's time I applied for use Perl; get laid();™.

n.b. - I decided to go hunting for who might be trying to register "God Bless America&trade;" and was rewarded with several including GBA Fireworks and America Bless God!™ Ephemera and did you know that Perl& has been trademarked by Perl, Inc.? TESS is sure to give hours of umitigated horror and delight. :)

28 Jan 2002 at 19:11, Helsinki

Get your wordrobe on

The NYT had a nice article today about George A. Thompson, a word sleuth who spends his days combing 19th century New York newspapers. This sounds like an awfully interesting and fascinating job. John McWhorter has a new title The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language that explores the history of language in an enjoyable and accessible manner, controversial or not.

The Word Spy has already started collecting newly minted words for the Enronigate debacle that is sure to grow only to be forgotten with occasional historical references in short order. OUP has recently released Dictionary of the Internet which is full of words that you wouldn't find in a mainstream dictionary and may not be in common use in 10 years.

It would be nearly impossible to do but it would be interesting to make a gantt chart of 'words of the times' along with the events and plot the average amount of time the words they gave life to die out from popular usage. So many words, so little time.

27 Jan 2002 at 14:50, Helsinki

Through a mirror, darkly

Discovering America: Travels in the Land of Guns, God & Corporate Gurus is a interesting read that I happened to see at the local bookshop recently. It's a sort of travelogue cum expose written by a Canadian who spent several years looking for America in places few natives would ever dare go. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a similar book in the 1800s, Democracy in America which a surprising number of Americans haven't read. He interviews the Michigan Militia, takes a gun class at the Smith & Wesson factory, follows an abortionist in her mission, visits Huntsville Texas for an execution among others.

While he hits all the hot spots there are parts that sting, even for me, in his observations about America so I give the author much credit in doing his homework and being quite observant. It's not a balanced look at the country but then that's pretty evident in the title. Even so, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring how the rest of the world sees the US and are interested in beginning to understand why. It is not unbiased and it will piss you off in places but sometimes the truth hurts.

23 Jan 2002 at 15:16, Helsinki

Break out the old CueCat

As you might have guessed by now, Jarkko and I have a rather large accumulation of books/treeware. In Ex Libris , there is a part titled "Marrying Libraries" where the author explains that after years of marriage and children that they were possibly ready to finally merge their libraries :) Over a year ago I purchased a bar code scanner to use the ISBN barcodes on each book in conjunction with Perl to get the book info off of Amazon.com or bn.com and shove it all into a db.

Today I dusted off my little bar code wand as there is a new bit of software, long available for windows, now available for Mac OSX users, Readerware. You just install the software, scan your bar codes, run the autocatalog and there it is. You can customise it and export it to your palm as well. I guess I know what I'll be doing all weekend :)

18 Jan 2002 at 14:20, Helsinki

If this guy is right then why do I have a moustache?

Apparently wishing that people would not treat women any differently in school or work than men merits the label of 'feminist' or the more endearing 'feminazi' but when I see books like The Wonder of Girls it makes my blood boil since it, once again, returns to the gender stereotypes so programmed into the brain by western civilisation. USA Today had a small article about the book, no doubt to drum up publicity, which is no more repellent than The Rules since both send the same message that girls should do everything they can to get a man to marry them, start having babies and not have other expectations in life since that's not in your hormonal programming. I guess someone forgot to tell the Navajo and other matriarchal cultures.

I'd rather see books for how to keep your kid from taking a gun to school or how to recognise if your kid is making bombs in their bedroom since that seems more pressing than telling girls what they should be instead of letting them be whatever they want to be.

15 Jan 2002 at 17:28, Helsinki

The Big Picture™ writ large

When I was working at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the largest botanical research institution in the US with an extensive herbarium, I had the joy of getting to sit in on a lecture by E.O. Wilson who is a friend of the director of mobot, Peter Raven. If you aren't familiar with him you should be as he is the Jacques Cousteau of the biosphere. Aside from some of his more controversial research he has a lot to say about the loss of biodiversity. The average suburbanite probably doesn't care much about the loss of rain forest any more than global warming but when you go through the herbarium with him choosing specimens at random with half of them being extinct you start to get the idea that we're in big trouble. Groups such as the Applied Research Group who find new uses for plants, including such things as cures for cancers, etc. since plants manufacture compounds we can't replicate, are in a race for species before they all disappear.

The Future of Life is his latest book and Salon has an interesting interview with him. Let's hope someone pays attention to him as living in a tin can cruising around the cosmos as an alternative to living on earth doesn't really hold a lot of appeal.

14 Jan 2002 at 16:21, Helsinki

An improbable enterprise of thorns

While reading the Salt: A World History I was reminded of an obscure detail in history that few have ever heard of; the East India Company hedge in India that was 2,500 miles long, which would stretch from London to Constantinople, manned by 12,000 people and its purpose was to prevent smuggling of salt among other things. Recently, a library conservator ran across a mention of the hedge. Intrigued, he started researching this seemingly outlandish idea that somehow had gone completely missing from history. He wound up writing a book about the hedge and one of the greatest British follies of all time: The Great Hedge of India: The search for the living barrier that divided a people. History certainly does always seem to repeat itself in a species that never seems to learn from it.

10 Jan 2002 at 17:38, Helsinki

It must be the opium

I'm not sure which is more disturbing; Aghanistan talking about reviving tourism in a country where millions are starving in a war zone or that Pat Buchanan's latest neo-Nazi rant has been on the Amazon.com top 5 list for the last week. There must be some good drugs going around that I missed out on.

8 Jan 2002 at 23:15, Helsinki

Lemony Snicket. Buy Now.

This morning Sarah mentioned a Lemony Snicket and that his books are much like Edward Gorey. I have been an avid collector of Gorey for most of my life so, after doing a little research on the net I stopped by the local B&N to look at the books. After 30 mins of reading through The Bad Beginning and The Austere Academy I immediately grabbed a copy of all 8 books in the "Series of Unfortunate Events". I haven't been this excited by an author in ages. Maybe this is old news to people with kids but you simply must buy these books as they are the most delightful stories for any age I've chanced upon in a long time...and I include the, to me, rather dull HP series.

The American Dialect Society has voted and chosen the word of the year for 2001: 9-11. I'm bitterly disappointed as 9-11 is not a word and part of me really would like life to just move on. "In America it is now the way of referring to the most horrendous event of the century" according to the article. I bristle at the suggestion. Maybe the Bells will change the 911 emergency phone number due to the psychic trauma of the nation to 910 or something. Well, if we don't all get nuked off the planet due to rampant nationalism and fundamentalism maybe we'll have a better word next year.

8 Jan 2002 at 19:46, Helsinki

Or There and Back Again for a Dragonleather Jacket

Last night TorgoX asked me if Jarkko had first read the Lord of the Rings in Finnish or English. Last August Jarkko purchased a copy of LOTR for his sister and commented how the Finnish translation of Taru Sormusten Herrasta [ and available for 20€ at Akateeminen Kirjakauppa in Helsinki ] was far superior in some ways to the English as much care was taken by the translator to capture the essence of the story. Tolkien also studied Finnish at some point in his education before settling on English which may have helped the translator somewhat in communicating with Tolkien.

In my quest to find the Finnish edition online for TorgoX I happened to come across The Snobbit and Lord of the Legos which needs no translation at all for those who can't be bothered to read the rather lengthy tome. :)

8 Jan 2002 at 16:58, Helsinki

The Symbol of London under London

Unlike most Londoners I have always loved The Tube, especially the fancy new Jubilee Line which is the only line that connects with all other lines. The Jubilee went into service just in time for the hotly contested Millenium Dome that had fancy urinals [ the ladies room wasn't nearly as interesting ] in addition to a few interesting exhibits. I also have a collection of old underground maps and use the P22 Foundry's Johnston Underground as my default system font. So, I was fairly excited to see a new book released on the history of the Underground, Underground to Everywhere, since most of the previous books on the subject have either disappointed or have gone out of print. The recently published London: The Biography is a delightfully different vignette style history of London that has a few tales about the Underground as well.

And the word of the day is Pinacotheca \Pin`a*co*the"ca\, n. A picture gallery. I asked the guy who has the nice PHP D30 photo album if his code was public since I've just not found anything that I really like as much as his simple and elegant solution...and he is, apparently, going to release it in another week or so. Yes, I'm embracing the dark side but at least I'll have a stylin' photo album :)

12 Dec 2001 at 17:23, Helsinki

Fictionary of the future

OpenBSD finally installed on my Sparc with not too much hassle. If you are considering the sparc64 platform be warned that it has spotty driver support for some of the PCI cards and be sure to repartition the boot disk even if the partition utility says it's happy with everything from the formerly solaris labelled disk. Even as a still-in-kinda-beta operating system on sparc64 it does so many things right including the pkg_add ports utility. It is also a treat to run something other than Solaris on a sun4u box for a change.

In spite of my loathing of aptly named Faith Popcorn [ mostly air and nutrient free ], I picked up a copy of Dictionary of the Future this weekend. While most of the book is filled with Junk English, marketspeak and blatant pandering to her Boomer generation there are a few words that have promise;

• Elderotica - erotica for senior citizens. [ I thought erotica was 'ageless' ]
• Abzyme - enzymes that have certain properties of antibodies.
• Genetocracy - the new genetic aristocracy; see also genetrification.
• Free-Range Children - 21st century kids who are raised in the spirit of an earlier era. [ I have no idea what in the hell she means but it's making me hungry :) ]
• Fight Chat - family counselors will soon discover the internet as marriage therapy for feuding couples and have them fight via IM or IRC. [ Yeah, if you can't communicate in person the internet via IRC will make it MUCH better! The first rule of about Fight Chat is that we don't talk about Fight Chat! ]
• National Parent Permits - A movement will emerge to assure [sic] that parents are prepared, educated and capable of bringing up healthy and productive children. Major manufacturers and service providers will give discounts and special benefits to those with permits. [ Not a bad idea but I suspect she's never been in a room full of parents and mentioned this idea...she's still alive. ]
• Telesprawl - Urban sprawl created by telecommuting workers.
• Permalance - the merger of permanent and freelance in the new economy.
• CoHo - short for corporate home office.
• Groligarchy - describes the concentration of agriculture and food-production power in the hands of a few agribusiness giants; see also foodopoly.
• Karaoke Managers - a style of lip-synch management where you mouth the buzzwords and platitudes of your superiors.
• Bachelor Herds - in societies where wealthy older men are allowed to acquire young new wives, the result is herds of angry young single men.
• Authethnic - Cultural expressions of all kinds that are unadulterated and unmodified by the American homogenization process.
• BABOONS - baby boomer. no savings. [ brilliant word :) ]
• Wired to Failure - the unintended result of Internet access in the majority of American Classroom; see also Empty Luggage Syndrome.
• IMB - A coming acronym for "I mean business". When consumers choose the most industrial-strength option when a far more modest solution will do.
• Orthorexia - an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy and avoiding even the slightest bit of fat, preservatives or salt.
• Camoflanguage - language that seeks to hide rather than illuminate.
• Sarchasm - the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.
• Unobtanium - a combination of 'unobtainable' and 'titanium'. [ cute ]
• Burn - your available cash.
• Stegotext - ordinary looking text carrying encoded information.
• Netlag - dissociation that comes from spending so much time on-line that we expect the rest of life to keep pace.
• Wristicuffs - fighting via email.
• BuySexuals - describes those who cross-shop at status stores and Wal-Mart.
• Infophobia - a psychological problem marked by the fear of being uninformed.
• Carcoon - cars are becoming cocoons of their own.
• SHUV - an accident caused by a SUV.

10 Dec 2001 at 18:12, Helsinki

The "Symbolic Muscle"

Installing either OpenBSD or NetBSD on a Sparc64 box is a bit of a chore....hurry up, wait, scan readme, try again, etc. Neither distribution is polished to the point of simplicity or even functionality just yet. In the lull of installation excitement I was cleaning out my inbox and looked at a book Amazon recommended a while back and, upon looking, found another more interesting book; A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. Since Perl has so many Dicks it's sure to be riveting reading. :) And, a book for every ActiveState employee on your Christmas list is How to Manage your DICK. One of these days I'm going to have to open my own bookshop. :)

9 Dec 2001 at 20:52, Helsinki

When it rains, it pours™...books

In the continuing stream of boutique and niche histories, the man who brought us Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World has just published a new book, Salt: A World History, that I spied today in a Gloucester bookshop. Salt played a role in so many parts of human civilisation that it is terribly ambitious to do a complete world history of the substance but, since Cod was so well done I'm sure the author does a reasonable job.

5 Dec 2001 at 18:05, Helsinki

I miss Aslan....

Apparently, someone who spells oriented as orientated (UK) has spent the time to detail not only the mystery of the title change between the US and the UK versions of the Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but the nitty gritty language differences as well. I've also sent an email to Scholastic Publishers to ask them why they changed the title since they are the responsible party. We'll see what they have to say to this no doubt hackneyed question.

I think it's just a big scam to produce more collectibles :)

4 Dec 2001 at 16:13, Helsinki

Junk English

Ken Smith has a new book, Junk English that may cause just about anyone with proper knowledge of the English language to squeak with amusement...and shame :) He's the same guy who wrote Mental Hygiene , an amusing look at educational films and Ken's Guide to the Bible that left me worn out from laughing too much. He did not, however write Run Naked, Run Free . Junk English has a wonderful collection of bones it picks on but one I found particularly close to home:

Nonprofit. A common confusion is that a nonprofit or not-for-profit organization is one that exists for the general welfare rather than for private gain. After all, if an organization doesn't exist to make a profit, its purpose--and, by proxy, the intent of the people who work within it--must be noble and altruistic.

Nonprofit or not-for-profit, however, apply only to the accounting methods used by the organization and have no bearing on what positions the organization supports. And while the organization cannot by law make a profit, the individuals within it can. Many nonprofit executives profit handsomely from their work.

In the wake of 9/11 there are more stories every day about how this or that charity has abused, mishandled or otherwise completely bungled the philanthropy of millions of people. It's tragic.

4 Dec 2001 at 11:29, Helsinki

Citius, Altius, Fortius

A new book, Unlocking the Clubhouse is soon to be published and is the result of several years of research on the past, present and continuing gender gap in computing. Wired even ran an article on Saturday, IT: The Industry without Women detailing the size of the chasm and how Europe is trying to recruit and retain more women in IT. This is all well and good but I think they are all looking in the wrong place for answers when the questions begin not at age 25 but at age 2.

I know quite a few of the Perl guys have very young daughters so this may be a topic of interest. One such father had an article on Salon.com today about My Britney problem -- and yours as he has a 5 year old daughter and wonders what it all means. I caught about 5 mins of the Britney Vegas concert and even I was a wee bit aghast at the costumes and the overt 'whore' look on such a young girl. I always loved Madonna [ more often than some of her music ] as she radiated a smart sexy take-no-shit kind of attitude while taunting and flaunting her sexuality...and I sense none of this in Britney. She seems a 2-dimensional wannabe Madonna.

I empathise with the father as, in a world where girls are told that math is hard, looking good with a pound or two of make-up on and anorexic gauntness is more valued in a woman, Britney and her ilk do nothing to help his daughter avoid the path of least resistance or boys to expect more than titties, ass and unquestioning submission from girls. There are so many reinforcements in all the images we are bombarded with everyday online, on TV and in print that it would seem nearly impossible. Even Fiji reported having a sharp increase in eating disorders and poor body image after the arrival of TV.

One hope is not waiting until 25 to ask girls 'why didn't you choose CS?' but to start expecting greater things from them as parents when they are 2 through 18 years of age. My father taught me to play chess at 5 so we would have something to do together in the morning before school, my mother nearly assaulted a librarian for denying to loan me an adult level book when I was 8 and both of them fully expected all of us, my 3 sisters and myself, would go to college, graduate and have careers. It simply wasn't a question or an option to do anything else.

My mother asked "Why?" when she heard Jarkko and I eloped mostly because, to her mind, why would I need to get married since I own my own home, have my own career and am getting a bit long in the tooth for babies....and I imagine that, with her career, had expectations been different in the early 1950s she might never have gotten married herself. I never thought having both parents working and making us go for what we wanted was unusual until I started noticing that when I was 30 that I was nearly alone in being in technology and single. I remained the only girl out of my all girl highschool class both unwed and with a career. All the rest had gotten married and were having kids named Reginald and 'Trip' as a nickname for Foo Bar, III. After a little research I found out that my mother was the only one who worked full-time and sometimes full-time++ since she also taught classes in the med school at night. I think that's a rather interesting statistic...one that may mean something since a working mother does create a different impression upon young girls than ones who do not.

It is my firm belief that people rise to the level of the expectations presented to them in a personal and meaningful fashion. So, maybe it's time that parents started expecting more from their daughters and not simply accepting that an education is merely preparation for marriage and children, not a serious intellectually challenging career. And maybe they could teach the boys how to vacuum, dust, do laundry, clean up after themselves and grocery shop at the same time. :)

3 Dec 2001 at 16:12, Helsinki

Merry Megawatt Christmas

I am not terribly fond of John Grisham, the author, but recently bought a copy of Skipping Christmas as I was in need of a bit of fluff reading and figured it doesn't get much fluffier than a Grisham Novel. It's a story about a couple who decide to go on a cruise instead of doing the whole Christmas thing of lights, parties, presents, etc. Seems simple enough until the neighborhood engages in a bit of suburban terrorism since their house is the only one on the street without lights. This happens in real life so no shock value there. However, it reads like a Stephen King novel about a couple being attacked by the Christmas cheer mafia and their daughter. If you are moving to suburbia but have reservations don't read this book. :)

I spent about 5 hours tonight driving around Lexington, Woburn, Burlington, Rockport, Glouchester, Lanesville and Essex looking for inspired holiday lighting displays to capture on film. I bought a tripod and some Ilford 3200 black & white film a few weeks ago in preparation. I was a little uncomfortable at first to jump out of my car with photographic equipment and take photos while people were in residence but after the first shots it got easier. One couple even came out to say hello and tell me the story of their creation.

I'm still not finished but after one night of driving around I noticed that there are a lot fewer people with holiday lights and even fewer with truly inspired displays than in the past. The patriotic theme of red, white and blue is very popular this year. I found a flag on the side of a house in coloured lights and denuded trees seemed to be the most popular choice to adorn with patriotic strands of light.

Today was the arrival of Santa in Rockport by lobster boat. Rockport has an almost Whoville-like Christmas as once Santa arrives, he is driven around the Neck, he lights the Christmas tree in the square and then everyone in town gathers around with hot chocolate and sings carols with Santa leading from the old Rockport firetruck. It was 71F in Eastern MA so it was lacking the usual bitter cold and the threat of snow. However lacking in appropriate festive weather the Rockport Christmas tree is absolutely lovely. It is adorned with red, white and blue lights, shiny foil stars, red balls and big bows emblazoned with a flag motif. I helped decorate the Rockport tree for a few years when I lived there and prefer a more traditional theme but, as trees go, it is quite a sight. I hope the photos of it turn out and I may have to go back with some colour film to capture the red, white and blue theme.

2 Dec 2001 at 1:37, Helsinki

Seamlessly Internettled

I snagged William Safire's new book Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella the other day and have found it to be an entertaining read as expected. However, he also reminded me of the Dictionary of American Regional English with it's soon to be published 4th volume. I didn't know that the lead editor, the deus machina behind DARE, Fred Cassidy had died last year leaving the project somewhat in turmoil but still moving 'on to Z'.

If you have a few bucks to burn, go up to AbeBooks and get a copy of vols. 1 - 3 and wallow in the pages of this utterly amazing dictionary or help identify a few terms or donate cold hard cash to DARE. You could also donate to The Dictionary Project which gives 3rd grade children a dictionary of their own since it would seem the US has billions to spend on bombs but not a similar amount to spend on teaching children to read and spell. One of the first presents I ever remember getting for Christmas was a Dictionary and an Encyclopaedia so this particular cause is near and dear. Nothing is quite as unimpressive as a computer nerd who can't find his ass with both hands and a flashlight much less spell or form a complex sentence with polysyllabic words.

You might also be amused to know that the word 'downsizing' has a surprising origin, especially considering the modern SUV:

"The word was born in a happy spirit. The United Auto Workers leader Leonard Woodcock was an early user, reported the quarterly American Speech, speaking of 'the down-sizing, as GM calls it' on Meet the Press on Sept. 5, 1976. A month later, an ad for Ford LTD's in Southern Living asked, 'Will down-sized cars have down-sized prices?' The raising of oil prices by the Shah of Iran in 1974 sped the need to reduce gas consumption, and Newsweek in 1978 reported "the rush to down-size cars to meet tougher fuel-efficiency standards.'"

Downsizing didn't make the lexicon of layoffs until 1990. :)

26 Nov 2001 at 14:17, Helsinki

Satan is an anagram of Santa

Dave Cross's xmas season rant made me think of David Sedaris' Holidays on Ice, a wonderful collection of cynical and satirical christmas stories.

The first story is the classic Santaland Diaries which first debuted on NPR almost a decade ago and I laughed then and still laugh at it every year when they replay Sedaris himself narrating the story of his experience as an Elf at Macy's.

"In the afternoon we were given a tour of SantaLand, which really is something. It's beautiful, a real wonderland, with ten thousand sparkling lights, false snow, train sets, bridges, decorated trees, mechanical penguins and bears, and really tall candy canes. One enters and travels through a maze, a path which takes you from one festive environment to another. The path ends at the Magic Tree. The Tree is supposed to resemble a complex system of roots, but looks instead like a scale model of the human intestinal tract. Once you pass the Magic Tree, the light dims and an elf guides you to Santa's house. The houses are cozy and intimate, laden with toys. You exit Santa's house and are met with a line of cash registers.

We traveled the path a second time and were given the code for various posts such as "The Vomit Corner," a mirrored wall near the Magic Tree, where nauseous children tend to surrender the contents of their stomachs. When someone vomits, the nearest elf is supposed to yell "VAMOOSE," which is the name of the janitorial product used by the store. We were taken to the "Oh, My God, Corner," a position near the escalator. People arriving see the long line and say "Oh, my God!" and it is an elf's job to calm them down and explain that it will take no longer than an hour to see Santa."

The next story is a brilliant send up of those awful holiday family newsletters you get from family and friends titled Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!. He even has the appropriate overuse of the "!" throughout the story for a touch of realism.

Dinah, the Christmas Whore is a priceless tale of Sedaris' sister bringing a whore home for christmas.

"Up and down our street the houses were decorated with plywood angels and mangers framed in colored bulbs. Over on Coronado someone had lashed speakers to his trees, broadcasting carols over the candy-cane forest he'd planted beside his driveway. Our neighbors would rise early and visit the malls, snatching up gift-wrapped Dustbusters and the pom-pommed socks used to protect the heads of golf clubs. Christmas would arrive and we, the people of this country, would gather around identical trees, voicing our pleasure with worn cliches. Turkeys would roast to a hard shellacked finish. Hams would be crosshatched with x's and glazed with fruit -- and it was fine by me. Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn't please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase "Ho, ho, ho" would take on a whole different meaning; and I, along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way. It suddenly occurred to me. Just like that."

He rips apart the christmas theatre by children tradition in Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol and gives the sermon to christmas capitalism in Based on a True Story then delivers the final twist of the knife with Christmas Means Giving a tale of suburbia.

If you aren't big on the holidays and haven't seen this book then it's time you did. :)

24 Nov 2001 at 23:50, Helsinki

post-turkey coma

Well, Thanksgiving is over and I can still say I have zero casualties from my cooking. I was a bit disappointed that the tofurkey didn't arrive as planned only to have Veat in its stead. I love the name ...vegetable + meat = veat..but was really looking forward to trying the tofurkey. We have enough leftovers to feed a small country and the cranberry-apple pie has a magnetic appeal.

I just finished reading The Northern Lights an interesting and tragic story about a man whom time forgot, Kristian Birkeland. The book received a lukewarm review by the NYT but I think it was written primarily to revive the memory of Birkeland rather than be an exhaustive biography. He had such a fertile mind that a proper biography would be more than 1000 pages since not only did he study the Aurora Borealis and have revolutionary cosmological ideas, he also invented the rail gun and the first commercially viable method for producing ammonium nitrate [ saltpeter ] among a slew of others. He had an amazing passion for science and even worked to develop the fertilizer process in order to fund the research his university could no longer justify funding. He is the embodiment of the saying 'If you want something badly enough there is nothing that will get in your way.'

Another book I waded through, Perl for Web Site Management, is also well done. I read through it a few months ago for a tech review and found that most of my suggestions made it into the final product which is always a nice feeling to see that you've helped out in some small way. The author sticks to the pragmatic side of Perl instead of inserting things just to make himself look clever as so many tech books seem to be plagued with these days. The book is also mostly Unix-centric which is refreshing as well. The conversational tone and style makes it really easy to read. The layout, too, is easy to read since it would appear that troff has been forsaken in favour of better kerning, leading and type :) I still think the book should have introduced using mySQL or PostgreSQL with Perl for the web as static content is so 90s but maybe that can be a whole book on its own.

The Smithsonian Magazine December issue features and article titled Cold Comfort which has some stunning photos of the Ice Hotel that is high on my list of places I want to visit when we move to Helsinki.

And I'm hoping to finish updating the Perl history update since I updated the CPAN FAQ a few days ago before I slip into a soporific coma here on the couch after eating more turkey and pie.

24 Nov 2001 at 19:03, Helsinki

Like a Luddite at COMDEX

Today I escaped work for a little while and went by SoftPro Books in Burlington to see what might be new in the world of technical books and chat with the staff who, over the years, have become practically family. Sadly, they are feeling the same lull in business everyone else is and the store was pretty quiet. After getting the lowdown on what has been popular and the usual gossip I noticed that the author of the Ugliest Perl Book has a new title Perl to Python Migration. I looked at it a while and wasn't that impressed. I guess it won't sell that well just because if people have production Perl code that they probably aren't going to 'migrate' it and just do new stuff in Python and eventually get around to reimplementing the Perl stuff later. This guy makes up for low sales by writing in volume though. There was also another book, The Procmail Companion that looked promising both in it's brevity [ 300 or so pages ] and by its content. Nothing else was really all that new or exciting in the world of books. I did see a few that would make excellent doorstops though. :)

After work I decided to brave the grocery stores so I could 'beat the rush' on Wednesday for the annual American Thanksgiving Holiday Feast. Everytime I go to the grocery store I feel like a luddite at COMDEX. Everything is big, shiny and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing there or what I'm supposed to buy. Women with carts full of stuff and kids go by me and give me that knowing look of 'you're a stranger here' while I'm standing in the middle of the produce section dazed and confuzed. In my 20s, my fridge used to be a shrine to minimalism; coke, cigarettes and take-away boxes from eating out the night before...is there some magical transformation that is supposed to happen when you hit your 30s to infuse you with this vital grocery knowledge?

I had to trek to not one, not two, but three stores to find everything I needed which is almost legendary. I even found myself shopping at Bread & Circus, a 'whole foods store' where everything, and I do mean everything, is organic. I just want a pound of butter, not 6 different choices of damn organic salted sweet creamery butter. You know, butter, it just shouldn't be this hard. It's enough to make you homicidal by the time you check out and they ask you innocently enough, "paper or plastic?". I looked at the woman tonight and said, "Don't you mean toxic or organic grocery bag?" . Fortunately, she got the dry sarcasm. I asked for the hand-milled paper bags. :)

After I made it safely home unscathed I sifted through the mail to find that Martha Stewart must be reading my journal with her latest special issue At Home with Technology that includes a section on how to make your own laptop tote, how the supermarket checkout works, shopping on-line, 'tucking in technology', computer crafts and an "Ask Martha" column with such tough questions on cleaning your computer and if it is safe to leave the computer on all day. Wahoo. And, to add insult to injury, I find that Tiffany has decided that, after years of sending me a catalogue, that now that I have a husband he should receive a catalogue instead of me since, I guess , no married woman buys her own jewelery these days. When we bought our wedding rings I'll never forget the women in Tiffany's telling me, with a wink to Jarkko, that should I ever find that my rock is too small that I could 'upgrade' my rock by trading in the old rock for a bigger one. Well, sexist jerks or not, they do make some lovely things and I'm a sucker for their beautiful south pacific pearlnecklaces.

Guh, now I feel like I need to watch the Man Show, drink a few beers, scratch myself and find a football game on TV to shake off all this girly crap. Hmm, pass the beef jerky and the pr0n will you?

19 Nov 2001 at 23:33, Helsinki

There's life out there....

CPAN is joining the quest for intelligent life in the universe and now has a CPAN SETI Team so that we can use SETI::Stats, read Beyond Contact and hope the aliens we find aren't like the martians in Mars Attacks!

So, put those spare cycles to good use and come help Perl find intelligent life in the universe :)

7 Nov 2001 at 10:34, Helsinki

Perils d'amour

The demographic on the #perl IRC channel is rather interesting as most over 25 years of age are married and often have kids whereas the under 25 crowd are single angst-ridden guys who often talk about how much they dislike women or girls or, more often, bitches. This makes me wonder what miraculous transformation happens between early teenage years and 25 to mend this rift.

Well, I have found the perfect Christmas gift for young boy geeks of all persuasions, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating & Sex the third book from the Worst-Case Scenario people who give us such valuable information such as How to survive Ebola and Anthrax exposure. Yes, now you, too, can learn how to:

• Determine if your date is an axe murderer - The bad news is that most of the characteristics describe a bunch of Mongers I know :)
• Determine the gender of your date - One would hope you had this covered long before the date but...
• Escape from a bad date - My mother always said to carry enough money for a phonecall and a cab home but I guess breaking glass in the restroom and climbing out windows is all the rage these days.
• Spot fake boobies and hair. Now, you can tell this was written for guys as they say "If a woman is over thirty and has strikingly full breasts that sit very high on her chest, you have reason to be suspicious". Hey guy, never heard of the Wonderbra?! And they don't mention how to look at a guys feet and hands to decide whether his bulge is real or just a tube sock.
• Deal with body odour and bad breath - I guess breathmints and SpeedStick are passe.
• Survive excessive gas - the illustration of the 'fart position' alone is worth the price of the book.
• Survive if you are stopped by the police. - I once had a date with a guy who I finally agreed to go out with after he pestered me for months. As we were driving to dinner we get pulled over and it turned out that he had a bench warrant from the city for having expired registration on his car. I bailed him out much later that evening but, needless to say, it was his first and last date with me :)
• Remove difficult clothing - includes a step-by-step how-to on removing the bra with one hand.
• Fake an orgasm and spot a real orgasm - again, the illustrations here are priceless.
• Have sex in an airplane lavatory - You know, they have The Mile High Club but sex in a loo that usually has barely enough room for me to pee in doesn't really sound enjoyable. I mean, I'm 5'7" and 130pounds or so...what do people of, er, ample body mass do?
• How to survive snoring - I have a St. Bernard who snores loudly enough to be heard upstairs at night...somehow 'rolling him onto his side or stomach' isn't going to be an option.
• Survive if you wake up next to someone whose name you don't remember - Again, this must have been written by guys "Do not guess at her name. Acceptable terms of endearment are: Honey/Sweetie/Cutie/Darling/Baby/Sugar/Beautiful/Handsome/Gorgeous". Right. Just hope you don't get the girl with the baseball bat next to the bed with a sharp aversion to patronising 'terms of endearment'.
• Have an affair and not get caught - You either have a woman that is psychic or one that won't ever notice, either way this whole section won't be of much help.
• Stop a wedding - The fire alarm and feigning seizure are the most creative.
• End a relationship - includes a list of useful excuses and an 'it's not you, it's me' letter that is absolutely priceless....obviously the authors never dated someone of more than average persistence.
• A list of pick up lines to avoid - and boy do they have some winners in there like "So, are you legal?".

So no more will geek boys need to take Sex tips from ESR and they'll be prepared for anything, including fear and loathing, on the dating scene. I wonder if I should pitch a "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: female computer geek" with such important skills like 'what to do when cornered by a guy who is telling you his life story at a LUG meeting', 'how to tell the 16 year old pre-pubescent ego transport to fuck off without really trying' and 'how to write your name in the snow because that's what it's really all about.'

Dating sucks and while I don't know that the survival handbook will be of much help it certainly is very amusing. A 'good sense of humour' always ranks in the 'top 3 ideal qualities in a man' surveys Cosmo does every year. :)

5 Nov 2001 at 15:46, Helsinki

The land beyond the sea

A few weeks ago I spied an unusual looking book at Barnes & Noble; The Riddle and The Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveller. Since I studied medieval and Renaissance literature in addition to Chem. E. in college, I was familiar with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, one of the most popular travelogues in history, so I decided to buy the book and it turned out to be a very interesting read.

One of my English professors was Dr. Helen Mandeville who was a flamboyant ex-nun, full of life and possessing a collection of hats that only she and the Queen Mum could get away with. She mentioned once that she was related to the legendary knight and that the family believed much of the diary was blasphemous at the time it was written. We studied the book mostly for historical context rather than its actual content but Giles Milton diligently studies the content to confirm and explore Mandeville's story.

Milton succeeds in restoring some credibility to Mandeville's tales of traveilling through Turkey, Armenia, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Chaldea, Ethiopia, Amazonia and India as well as confirming that he was, indeed, an Englishman from St. Albans. Here was a man who set out in 1322, travelled for the next 34 years and, when he returned, wrote the most readable account ever published. It quickly became very popular being translated into a dozen or more languages within 20 years. At the time it was published, The Church discounted anything that didn't fit into its biblical view of the Earth which added a forbidden appeal. The book has been said to have been a great influence and inspiration to Columbus since it spoke not only of the reality of circumnavigating the Earth but that other lands were habitable.

I often wonder what it would have been like to embark on such a journey. These days we book a plane ticket, read the Rough Guide on our destination, and find a hotel room where, upon arrival, we can generally be sure to find most of the same trappings of our home. I find this takes much of the adventure out of travel and have wanted to trek through Nepal on horseback and the Sahara by Camel in an attempt to find that sense of rare exploration. However, there is little uncharted territory left on Earth in the 22nd Century unlike when Mandeville set out to explore the world and it is fun to vicariously discover and experience the strange new people and lands through his eyes.

2 Nov 2001 at 0:35, Helsinki

Idiomatic Lingua Franca

Penguin recently published a new edition of The Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms. I'm rather disappointed it doesn't have any etymological information for these idioms but it is still enjoyable to browse through them.

It is amazing how much spoken English is idiomatic as you usually don't begin to appreciate this until you are stuck in a room with non-native or non-fluent English speakers and begin to notice that they are giving you the smile and nod of 'I have no idea what you just said'. Idioms are difficult to nail a definition or a single meaning to very often. The author of this dictionary does a fine job in spite of its incomplete and somewhat superficial treatment of the wide range of idioms in the English language. The index could be much better as well. A few entertaining idioms the Perl crowd might appreciate;

• to swallow a camel and strain at a gnat - to tolerate a great wrong while protesting at a minor lapse.
• like turkeys voting for Christmas - someone planning for his or her own downfall or destruction. "The standards at this school are extremely poor, but no teachers are going to complain. It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas as the school would then be shut down."
• as sick as a parrot - a cliche often used by football managers, meaning 'very disappointed'.
• warts and all - with all its faults and imperfections, a realistic portrayal. The phrase comes from Oliver Cromwell's statement that he wanted his portrait to show him accurately, 'warts and all'.
• there is method in his madness - although he seems to be acting illogically, he has, in fact, a purpose in everything he does.
• to cross one's bridges before one comes to them - to worry unnecessarily about something that may never happen.
• to keep something in purdah - to keep from public view. The idiom derives from the veil or curtain that kept Muslim women from view by separating their living quarters from the rest of the household.
• a mouse potato - someone who spends a lot of time amusing him- or herself by playing computer games, programming, etc.
• to know one's onions - to know one's job. to be extremely capable.
• the pumpkin has not turned into a coach - the early promise has not been fulfilled, and disenchantment has followed.
• to put in a nutshell - to explain in a few words, to give a bare summary.
• the ship of the desert - the camel.
• U and Non-U - upper class and non upper class, based on Nancy Mitford's system of distinguishing social classes according to the words they use. For example: it is 'U' to say lavatory and 'Non-U' to say toilet; 'U' to say napkin, 'Non-U' serviette; 'U' to have a bath, 'Non-U' to take a bath.
• a screenager - a teenage computer expert
• damned if you do, damned if you don't - it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
• remember Ozymandias - be humble, don't boast, for even the great will one day fade from memory.

31 Oct 2001 at 23:56, Helsinki

History of Britain

All this week The History Channel is airing Simon Schama's A History of Britain II at 9pm EDT. Simon Schama, as you may remember, wrote A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500B.C. - 1603 A.D. and this show is based on his second book in the series A History of Britain, Volume II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776. Simon Schama is like the Carl Sagan of British History. The academic elite scoff at him but I find his writing enjoyable anyway. I also quite enjoy the BBC History Magazine which often has interesting articles and blurbs a bout history books that never seem to make it over to the states like Schama's books do. Anyway, the History of Britain series is worth watching if you have the time.

30 Oct 2001 at 12:17, Helsinki

If the Man Show had a Magazine

In my quest for the new and/or unusual in books, periodicals and paper I discovered The Idler today in a Harvard Square bookshop. I'm surprised I've not noticed it before but it is quite snappy :). I laughed at The only bad things that haven't happened to the Kennedy's yet and The Idler Wage Slave Support Group which could make even a USPS mailcarrier love their job. I also learned two new terms;

• Cock Puppet - New phrase to describe the changing power dynamic in the recession-bound workplace, as it shed its veneer of civility, its lip-service to "the team". Use as in: "How's Tony getting on in charge of the new department?" "Oh, bill's wearing him like a cock puppet." See also: using him like a dirty bitch monkey.
• Metro Knowledge - New term to denote a superficial understanding of current news stories, coined in honour of the freesheet newspaper distributed on the London Underground. Usage: "What do you think of the situation in Palestine?" "I'm sorry, I have only Metro Knowledge of that. What's going on exactly?"

And the Hydrogeology of Guilt....All they need now is a chat show like The Man Show with some rather interesting interviews to surprise you.

28 Oct 2001 at 20:39, Helsinki

Do you have a paper bag to go with this?

It's Saturday night, the night for lovers ... and it happens fifty-two times a year!

Today on Amazon, I noted that the #2 bestseller in the e-books section was 52 Saturday Nights: Heat up your sexlife even more with a year of creative lovemaking . I thought it rather amusing that, for a country where just about anything with nudity can be considered porn, the e-book may be liberating people who wouldn't dare own a print copy but would be willing to discreetly download an electronic copy, rename it to 'business report 2001' and disavow any knowledge of this highly amoral act.

While I shouldn't be surprised at this since porn tends to drive a range of new technologies usually, I am wondering how fast e-book readers and their ability to render graphics will evolve considering porn just isn't all that interesting as black and white pixelated stick figures. I still don't know how useful it will be to take your palm to bed with you, armed with '52 Saturday Nights' to try and spice up your 'sexlife' but at least you won't get caught reading it on the train with a paper bag on the cover to conceal the title.

What would be really cool, instead of some clunky 'e-book reader' etc, would be a device a little thicker than a piece of paper and about 8.5 x 11" in size with a stylus that you could roll it up to carry with you or lay it on your lap or wherever to display magazines, the newspaper, etc all wired to it based on your subscriptions. I don't think I'll ever get rid of my treeware books but it would be nice to have serials, magazines and newspapers available like this to warm up to the idea. It would also be neat to have it use encryption to conceal some things from plain view with a visual encryption where only the person wearing glasses matching the pages' encryption scheme could see the information unencrypted. From boobies to the WSJ... Techno for Porno.

25 Oct 2001 at 16:46, Helsinki

J - E - L - L - OH!

I know you lose sleep at night wondering which flavour of Jell-O you'll make for dinner, what Jell-O is actually made of and envisioning cute co-eds in thongs sliding around in a tub of cherry Jell-O and Cool Whip so I thought I would mention the newly published bookJell-O: A Biography by the same author who wrote Spam: A Biography. I'll hold out for her next title, Velveeta: A Biography.

Maybe I should pitch the titles Peeps: Icon of American Pop Culture and The Immortal Spork to Penguin Putnum afterall.

22 Oct 2001 at 22:06, Helsinki

Better pack Dr. Seuss next time

The next time you fly I highly recommend being very careful in selecting your reading material for the flight lest you be thought a terrorist. I wonder if airports will start issuing a banned book list or an Index librorum prohibitorum like the Catholic church has done for centuries.

21 Oct 2001 at 10:38, Helsinki

WADD QSSYJEC DQFSEQVUF :)

The US would seem to be making fast and furious backwards progress in the area of crypto these days in the name of 'homeland security'. I have a keen interest in cryptologic history and have collected quite a few volumes on Bletchley Park, The NSA, WWII codebreaker memoirs, signals intelligence, Station Y,Enigma and Purple among others. Since I'm working on several historical cipher Perl modules it makes me concerned as to just how far this 'anti-crypto frenzy' will go. I've asked the people at HavenCo to keep a non-public CPAN mirror just to make me feel better. I also received Cryptologia today in the post so at least there is some hope for the continued flow of journal and historical information.

Jarkko and I visited Kayenta, Arizona on our way to Monument Valley and Kayenta is home to the Navajo Code Talkers Museum. I was rather disappointed and sad that the museum was in the local Burger King until we learned that the owner of the Burger King was the son of a Code Talker. The Navajo language was still considered classified by the US Government until 1967. This year the codetalkers have finally, at long last, received recognition for their invaluable contribution to the success of the Allies in the Pacific Theatre and there is even a movie, Windtalkers , which was about to be released in November but has been moved back to June 2002. Another movie, Enigma about the Bletchley Park efforts to crack the German cipher, was moved back from October to sometime early 2002 as well.

Stay informed on the issues and shop at Bletchley Park for a very nice selection of books and your very own "BP Britain's Best Kept Secret Rubber [ eraser ]" :) And hope that the zeal to protect the US doesn't actually become a war on privacy, civil liberties and the academic freedom to study cryptography outside the boundaries of the NSA.

17 Oct 2001 at 22:38, Helsinki

Poppies....poppies....

When PM Tony Blair mentioned that 90% of the heroin on the streets of London originates from Afghanistan it made me wonder where the other 10% comes from. I had a friend appear on the doorstep of my flat one night dressed like boy george and white as a sheet. I had heard he was having problems though I'd not seen him much. I knew immediately that he was doing heroin and wondered what in the hell had become of this nice 18 year old kid who was a pretty good programmer and fun to go clubbing with. That was 15 years ago and I imagine there are others much like him who are now faced with the supply of their addiction dwindling.

Afghanistan, however, is not the most prolific producer of heroin, Burma, nee Myanmar is though Afghanistan does appear to have increased production significantly after the war with Russia ceased in 1989. Making heroin from poppies, or papaver somniferum is a somewhat risky and often tedious process. A concise historical timeline of heroin is rather interesting and it's quite ironic that heroin was introduced to help morphine addicts kick the habit.

Opium: A History is a well crafted history of the drug and the events surrounding it from 4000BC to the present. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey is a classic account of addiction. Ben Stiller also gives an amazing performance as a heroin addict with a perfect life but who can't escape the drug in Permanent Midnight.

12 Oct 2001 at 9:37, Helsinki

Planet of the Cockroaches

I collect Academic or 'campus' novels and Atomic or Nuclear fiction and have for a number of years. My latest addition to my campus novel collection is The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters which has an irresistable title and a cover/binding that you'll have to see to appreciate.

I haven't seen any good Atomic fiction around lately but This is the Way the World Ends may be worth pulling off the shelf for rereading. I woke up this morning vaguely remembering a dream where cockroaches, not Apes were the dominant society after a nuclear holocaust [ but I really don't have latent anxieties about the entire Middle East going to war with the US and beginning the first and last thermonuclear holocaust. no, not at all ] thinking the movie would have been much more interesting. Instead of a gun and dirty apes it could have been a can of Raid or a Roach Motel and creepy crunchy giant cockroaches.

In June I made an effort to find an Atomic short story that I remembered reading back in grade school but couldn't [ and still cannot ] remember the title or the author. The only thing I remember of the story is the protagonist sets off on a journey on the 'God Roads' [ highways ] and eventually finds a city where he enters what I recall sounding like the WTC and learns that the 'Gods' were like him. It has vague hints of Ballard but I have been unsuccessful in finding it. I even wrote to Paul Brians who published the book Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction who, unfortunately, hadn't heard of the story. He also has a delightful Nuke Pop collection of pop culture images of Nuclear War. He sent me an HTML copy of the book which I then made into a PDF as his book is out of print and seemingly impossible to find even via Abe Books. If you are interested in having a copy drop me a line and I'll share it as long as you don't put it up on the web anywhere. Also, if the story I describe rings a bell, definitely let me know.

I also went looking for a set of CDs from Voyager Co a company that used to make really cool CDs in the late 80s and early 90s for both Mac and PC. A particular documentary series called Our Secret Century in 4 sets and Ephemeral Films contained a wealth of all the cheesy public service films we were all forced to watch in school. Unfortunately, the company sold its assets to someone else and Rick Prelinger moved on to other things but all of the movies are available from the Internet Archive movie collection. It was most amusing to go to a coffee house movie theatre in Helsinki this summer to see 2 movies comprised of this sort of stuff including some naughty bits. One title that is still available from the original Voyager catalogue is The Day After Trinity which I have and admire for it's presentation as well as it's accurate historic content.

10 Oct 2001 at 17:46, Helsinki

The Euros are coming!

While the US news media is too busy hyping the Anthrax case in Florida to cover the biggest economic happening in European Union, I thought I would note that on 1 January 2002, 13 of the 15 member countries will officially begin to use the Euro in circulation. In Finland, everywhere you go, everything is marked in both Finnish Markka and Euro. So much history is behind many of the different currencies that it's a historic moment that so many countries can set aside their attachments to their respective identities to agree on using one single currency.

The logistics of this task alone is amazing. The Suomen Pankki [ Bank of Finland ] has a plan on-line of how they will change to using the Euro. One interesting situation will be what the bars and other businesses open prior to and after midnight on New Year's Eve will do at the stroke of midnight.

I've always thought that the US banknotes are bland and bordering on ugly when compared to the rest of the world currencies. The Euro notes and coins are beautiful both in their design and colours with each country getting a country specific design on the flip side of the coins. The notes vary in size and have an architectural theme ranging from the classical on the 5 Euro note to the modern on the 500 Euro note.

The History of Money and Sterling: The History of a Currency [ The UK is not one of the countries changing to the Euro and this helps illuminate some of the history behind the Pound ] are both enjoyable books for those interested.

So, all you currency module writers, and you know who you are, better make sure you are all prepared for the Euro. I know I'll enjoy travelling without 13 different currencies in my pocket from now on :)

9 Oct 2001 at 21:12, Helsinki

The Sarah Dessert

I've been a long time reader and fan of Verbatim, a language quarterly that remains quirky and fun to read. Recently the editor, Erin McKean, published a book titled Verbatim with some of the best tidbits over the years. Once of my favourites is an article by Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, among others, where he pastes together a 'history of the world' from genuine 'student bloopers' collected by teachers throughout the US from 8th grade to college level.

"The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain."

and another article Assing Around

"The word ass appears in American slang in multiple ways with multiple meanings. It has a rich and varied history and can signify anything from good to bad to more. A mildly transgressive word, ass is not quite as serious as shit or fuck--it is more of a humourously vulgar word, but certainly 'dirty,' especially when paired with the anatomical specicficity of -hole. And because ass is so short is is easily combinable with other words, making it quite versatile. What also lends to ass's character, especially as a curse word, is its sound. The almost hiss of the ss allows for particularly colorful emphasis in many expressions...."

The note about the sound of a curseword is something I hadn't quite considered before...a successful one has a particular sound to it, harsh even. This is true in German and even in Finnish where the 'r' is hard and rolled so it sounds mean and angry.

Definitely a fun read for those who enjoy wordplay and certainly beats watching CNN these days.

9 Oct 2001 at 17:49, Helsinki

And if you like Umberto Eco

get on down to your local bookshop and snag a copy of Five Moral Pieces if you don't have a copy already especially in light of the 'new war' we are all supposedly being dragged into. The five essays are;

• Reflections on War
• When the other appears on the scene
• On the press
• Ur-Fascism
• Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable

It's outstanding and I think the publisher pushed up the printing due to its timely content.

6 Oct 2001 at 15:34, Helsinki