November 2005 Archives
I read Derailed in one day, while I was bedridden with the flu. I tore through the pages, and it kept me from focusing on my aches and chills. The story concerns a family guy in his early forties who is at a low point in his career as a creative director for an ad agency. He also has troubles at home: he and his wife don't really talk anymore, not after they learned that their daughter has a particularly grave form of juvenile diabetes.
So when he meets a beautiful young woman on the train, and they begin to flirt, it's hard to not wonder why he develops a crush on her. They end up in a cheap NYC hotel for a fling, but when they leave the room, an intruder bursts in, takes their money and wallets, and rapes the women. But things only get worse. In the days to come, the rapist begins blackmailing and harassing the guy, making his life far more miserable than it was before.
Naturally, there are some twists to the story, which add to the fun. A few parts of the book are a little far fetched, but I enjoyed the ride so much I didn't particularly care. Link
(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)
Illustrator Rob Ullman occasionally self-publishes small books with his editorial illustrations and sketches. I've always loved his art: cute girls, nerdy guys, bizarre situations, and his work keeps getting better. Atom Bomb Bikini #4 is limited to 300 copies, and this time comes with some beautiful color pages. It costs $6. You can buy it directly from his website, www.lurid.com. Link
When our family travels by plane, we like to set up an iBook or portable DVD player for our kids. It keeps them quiet and occupied, which the other passengers enjoy as much as we do. I've been using a regular signal splitter so both girls can listen at the same time, but the jet's engines make it hard for them to hear the show.
The $80 Boostaroo Revolution High Definition Amplifier and Splitter is a battery powered amplifier and splitter that provides plenty of volume. It's a bit pricey but you can buy cheaper Boostaroo models (I haven't tried them so I can't vouch for them). The other bummer is that it uses AAAA batteries, which I never knew existed until I got this. The unit does come with a set to get you started. But it works wonders. The sounds is crystal clear. I also use it to boost the input volume of my phone recording gizmo so that when I interview people for stories I can hear what they are saying on the recording. Link
Alexander Shulgin is a chemist living in northern California. He'd worked as a consultant for a number of Fortune 500 companies, but is most well-known for rediscovering MDMA, aka Ecstasy.
In his home laboratory, Shulgin likes to design mind altering drugs and take them with his wife and close circle of friends. This book, Pihkal (which stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved, and which was co-written with his wife, Ann Shulgin), is about his research and drug trips.
The first half of his 978-page book is autobiographical. The second half has the molecular structure and lab instructions for making 179 different mind-altering drugs. (I have not tried to make any of these drugs, and I don't have any desire to. One reason is that they require hard-to-find precursors. Another reason is that the recipes look very difficult. The third reason is that I'd be way too scared to take the drugs.) For each of the drugs listed, Ann and Alexander describe the effects the experienced from taking them at different doses.
For example, here's Shulgin's experience with a compound called 4-ALLYLOXY-3,5-DIMETHOXYPHENETHYLAMINE
QUALITATIVE COMMENTS: (with 24 mg) I first became aware of something in about 10 minutes, a pleasant increase in energy. By 20 minutes it was getting pronounced and was a nice, smooth development. During the next hour positive and negative feelings developed simultaneously. Following a suggestion, I ate a bit of food even though I had not been hungry, and to my surprise all the negative feelings dropped away. I felt free to join the others wherever they were at. I moved into the creative, free-flowing kind of repertoire which I dearly love, and found everything enormously funny. Much of the laughter was so deep that I felt it working through buried depressions inside me and freeing me. From this point on, the experience was most enjoyable. The experience was characterized by clear-headedness and an abundance of energy which kept on throughout the day and evening. At one point I went out back and strolled along to find a place to worship. I had a profound sense of the Presence and great love and gratitude for the place, the people, and the activities taking place. The come-down from the experience was very gradual and smooth. Food tasted wonderful. I went to bed late, and quite ready for bed, although the energy was still running. However, sleep was not long in coming.Link
I doubt I'll ever learn command line Unix. I just don't need to use it that often. I open a terminal window once a month at most, to paste in a cryptic Unix command copied from a website.
But being somewhat curious about what these commands mean, I picked up a copy of "Learning Unix for Mac OS X." Two things attracted me to it. First, as the title states, this is a book about learning Unix for Mac users. Second, and more importantly, it's only 130 pages. That made it much more approachable than most Unix books I've seen, which are big enough to soak up a bathtub of water.
It took me about an hour to skim, and I learned what obscure terms like grep and sudo mean, and what pipes are. I'm sure I'll forget again, but I know where to go if I need to relearn them.
There is a newer edition out, called Learning Unix for Mac OS Tiger, but it is 280 pages long. I don't think I'll buy that. I have all I want in my version, at least for now. Link
There Are No Electrons is an endearingly goofy book that attempts to explain electronics by setting up a world of tiny green creatures who talk like stoned beatniks and follow the rules of electronics to get around (mainly, they are after females of their species). Amdahl does a great job of explaining concepts like capacitance, inductance, and impedance.
Amdahl eventually does resort to presenting standard electronics and schematics, but by the time you get there, you'll have a good feel for it. I think high school age kids and up would appreciate this. Link
O'Reilly has a successful line of "Hacks" books -- each of which offers 100 how-tos for getting the most out of software applications, web sites, or hardware like TiVo. The weirdest and most wonderful of the bunch is Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. The various hacks in the book are less about tweaking your brain, than they are about doing little exercises that show you how your brain works, and why it isn't always an accurate interpreter of reality.
The book has a quite a few entertaining optical and auditory illusions. One of my favorites is Hack #23: Adelson's checker shadow (shown here). Believe it or not, squares A and B are exactly the same shade of gray. Link
I live in an old house, and things frequently break or need to be upgraded. I like to at least try to repair things myself before calling in the pros. This book, by Reader's Digest, The Family Handyman: Helpful Hints : Quick & Easy Solutions / Time-Saving Tips / Tricks of the Trade, is a gold mine of how-to information. No house should be without this book. The section on home wiring alone is worth the price of the book -- I've now installed five light fixtures in the house. I would have been hopelessly lost without the information in here.
I doubt I'll do much plumbing beyond toilet flusher and sink valve stuff, but the section that explains the plumbing system in a house helped take the mystery out of roof vents, at least. Link
LinkPitfall [1948] TOMMY FORBES: Is there anything you want me to do today, Dad?
JOHN FORBES: Yeah. Until my rich uncle dies, quit growing.Sleep, My Love [1948]
DAPHNE: We’ve got a lot — but we haven’t got everything. I want what she’s got. All of it. I want her house, her name, her man. And I want them now. Tonight.The Street With No Name [1948]
ALEC STILES: Here. Buy yourself a closetful of clothes. I like my boys to look sharp.Out of the Past [1947]
JEFF BAILEY/JEFF MARKHAM: I sell gasoline, I make a small profit. With that,I buy groceries. The grocer makes a profit. We call it earning a living. You may have heard of it somewhere.Ride the Pink Horse [1947]
FRANK HUGO: Small fry. All your life you waste time worrying about small fry things. About a job. About a two buck raise. About getting a pension.FRANK HUGO: Guys like you work all their lives breaking their backs, trying toearn meat and potatoes. You end up borrowing enough money to buy a hole in the ground to get buried in. Then when you get a chance to make some realscratch, what do you do, mice like you and Shorty? You ask for peanuts.
Force of Evil [1948] WALLY: What do you mean “gangsters”? It’s business.
As the editor-in-chief of Make magazine, one of my biggest challenges is finding contributors who are both great maker/inventors and great writers who can express themselves clearly. William Gurstelle is just such a person. In fact he's a living national treasure. I think he should get a MacArthur Genius grant.
Gurstelle's projects in Backyard Ballistics are a lot of fun, and maybe a little dangerous. He starts with the venerable potato cannon and moves onto the "hydro pump rocket," "pneumatic missile," "Cincinnati fire kite," "Greek fire and the catapult," "tennis ball mortar," "the flinger," "pnewton's petard," "dry cleaner bag balloon," "carbide cannon," and "ballistic pendulum." The projects are all do-able, unlike other project books I've seen, and Gurstelle's commentary is always helpful. Link
Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising is a popularization of Timothy Leary's "eight circuit theory" of the brain, which describes the functioning of the brain as having eight connected areas of thought and behavior. The first circuit is associated with "horizontal" approach-avoidance behavior, seen in everything from bacteria to higher life forms, the second circuit defines our "vertical" dominant-submissive behavior. The other circuits get more complex, and I have to admit that circuits five through eight are confusing.
Wilson offers a number of different exercises that help us identify and tune these circuits, and always does so in a humorous, non-pendantic way. It would be a mistake to read this as a piece of serious non-fiction. I got a lot more out of it but thinking of it as an entertaining, insightful, and pretty useful way of viewing human behavior. Like Terrance McKenna, Wilson is at his best when he challenges the things I believe in so strongly that I didn't even realize there was another way of looking at them. Link
I've mentioned Ed Emberley's delightfu instructional drawing books before, but his Complete Funprint Drawing Book is especially fun for younger drawers, because it's based on making faces and whimsical animal bodies out of colorful thumbprints. My 2-year-old and I have a great time with this book. She makes the thumbprints and we both make the drawings. Link
Jim Woodring's comic books have fascinated me for over a decade. I never tire of reading his (often wordless) stories about inscrutable amphibians and perplexed, frustrated mammals trying to survive in a world in which every object has the possibility of coming to life and either devouring you, cursing you, or presenting you with an unusual gift. His latest book, Seeing Things, consists mainly of surreal charcoal drawings that remind me a lot of the work of Boris Artzybasheff (an illustrator from decades past who drew amazing and disturbing covers for Time magazine).
After exposure to Woodring, I look at the world differently. I see plants and patterns in nature that scream "Woodring" to me now. He opened up a secret world that had been right in front of me all along. Link
