Sunday, January 07, 2018

The Month That Was - December 2017

Wow is it cold. My latest heating bill was $333.00. The furnace is running pretty much non-stop these days, what with me having a house guest and all. We have had week long stretches on sub-zero lows, which terrifies me when I think of whether all the ridiculously expensive landscaping I have had done will survive.

Apart from the cold, everything is going fairly well. I need to start planning my 2018 adventures; they will be scaled back this year, since last year was pretty much spent spending, if you get my drift.

I have done no fresh writing but have worked on a revision of my existing partial manuscript in the hopes that it will kickstart me. The good news is I like what I've written so far, the bad news is I'm still stuck on how to proceed. This is not writer's block. I have plenty of possible paths to take it, but none of them cohere. Can only hope it will come eventually, as it always has in the past.

[Travel, Florida] Ave Anna Maria
[Rant, Tech] Homo Technologus
[Movies] Flick Check: Star Wars: The Last Jedi
[Books] Book mlook: Malice

[Travel, Florida] Ave Anna Maria

Every time I stay in a Florida Gulf beach town I think to myself, "Yeah, I could live here..." Anna Maria is no exception. But we start with an interesting AirBnB.

Normally, a trip to the Gulf means renting a room in a small beachside hotel. But as it turned out, for less than the price of a serviceable hotel room, I could get an entire house on AirBnB. Essentially I got a two bedroom/two bath home (part of a duplex), a five minute walk from the beach on the north end of Anna Maria, just around the corner from a string of shops and restaurants. Five star ratings from previous renters. All for about 70% of the price of a wee hotel room. I went for it.

This was not my first AirBnB. I rented one for my Idaho/Eclipse trip back in August, but that was managed by a rental house agency. This house was one of what I guess to be a set of three, owned by a guy and his two sisters. I think they list them all on AirBnB and just move around to stay whichever one isn't occupied for any given time. In any event, I met the fellow at his house -- nice, good natured guy -- he showed me around briefly and was about to be on his way when I asked, "What about keys?"

"Oh, I lost them a while back. Just leave the door unlocked. There's no crime here and the guy who lives downstairs is ex-Marine special ops."

Alrighty.

So I wasn't really sure what I was getting into here. A part of me felt like I was a character in an Elmore Leonard novel, about to find myself entangled with highly colorful kooks in some sort of shenanigans. But realistically, I had nothing all that valuable. Visits to Florida generally involve two pairs of cargo shorts, a couple of ratty old t-shirts, bathing suit, sandals, and sunglasses. My laptop wouldn't get me $50 on Craigslist, and its contents are backed-up. My phone is always with me, and I could lock the door from the inside so personal safety wasn't an issue. The former special ops Marine turned out to be a touch over 60 with a startup that was about to go Series A. So, yeah.

And it was fine. I never saw either the owner or the special ops guy again. I gave them 5 stars and they gave me five stars so my AirBnB cred is now perfect. And I gained a genuine affection for Anna Maria Island.

To get to Anna Maria Island from Sarasota you can do a lovely hour-plus drive at about 25 mph up through longboat key, or you can drive through the next city north, Bradenton, and save about half the time. Since I have driven the keys more times than I can count, I chose the short route.

Bradenton is downscale from Sarasota -- filed with weatherbeaten old strip malls and chain restaurants. It's not the best place to live in Florida but it may be one of the cheapest. There are a couple of areas in town that are coming along -- a historic downtown area that has some old, character-full buildings and commercial activity, like one those officially designated revitalization zones you see in struggling cities, and as you move west toward the water there a lot of nice looking gentrified gated communities for snowbirds and such. For the most part though, Bradenton is on the low end. They have a problem with opiates and crime/gangs associated with them, like every other working class city, although not so bad as to make it unliveable.

In my travels I have seen a large number of places like this. Cities that end up as the functional back rooms for primarily tourist enclaves. The people here constitute the underclass of the service industry. What, in less abiding times, we would have called menial labor. They wash dishes and bus tables, clean the grounds and the rooms, work the convenience store counters and souvenir shops, wash cars, haul trash. They have no job security and no growth opportunity but, as long as the tourists and retirees keep coming, they can generally stay employed with a couple of part-time jobs at a buck or two over minimum wage.

Cross the bridge from Bradenton to Anna Maria Island and things are different, of course. That said, Anna Maria isn't the tightly controlled environment of say a Sanibel or Boca Grande. It doesn't cost anything to get on the island and it's easily accessible to many Gulf-area cities so the tone of Anna Maria is somewhat different from the truly high end places. More commoners -- proles, if you will -- hit the island, so right at the point of crossing there is an ugly shopping center area right near the largest public beach, Holmes Beach, which like the whole island has that perfect baby powder sand that the Gulf is famous for. The beach is lovely, but on the the immediate area surrounding it is generically commercial and as such, an inexpensive area. That is to say, it fits the likely clientele.

Not surprisingly, as you move away from this area, either north or south on the key, things get more hoity-toity as the upstairs cushions itself from the downstairs. My AirBnB was in the farthest north neighborhood, entirely residential, just past a string of tastefully done shops and restaurants.

I know I sound awfully snooty as I write all this. I don't mean to. The proles who visit seem just as happy as the petty bourgeois in the upscale areas. I'm sure they are. But to pretend there are not clear class distinctions in some of these places is to ignore the obvious. Also to deny that I prefer luxury and exclusivity in my vacation locales is to ignore myself.

It startlingly easy to fall into an island rhythm. The house I was in was delightfully shaded, so it never got too hot and I didn't turn on the a/c, just had the windows open and breeze going 24 hours a day. Wake up mid-morning, slip on a pair of shorts, t-shirt, and sandals then walk down the street for something to eat. Or don my running shoes and go for a beach run. Come back, change into bathing suit for a swim in the Gulf. In the evening walk down to a restaurant on the pier on the sound side for the fresh catch, or a beach bar for some peel 'n' eats and a beer and watch the sunset.

I've been coming to this area for over 20 years and I've seen and done most everything touristy around the area, so the only significant excursion was to Mykella State Park, an interesting stretch of swampy wilderness -- plenty of wildlife and history (including gators, of course). A fine low-key day trip. But in truth, there is little new in these parts for me to see.

All Good Things... I returned north on Christmas day to record cold and had to get up the following day to run the snow-blower so I could get out of my garage. I love Michigan, I love the area where I live, but really need to be snow-bird. Bug out after Thanksgiving and not return until April. That would be perfect. Now I'm thinking of buying a place and just letting AirBnB rent it out when I'm up north. I'd make sure I had keys as special ops Marines are in short supply.

[Rant, Tech] Homo Technologus

Well, well, well. There are so many possible angles to take on this assessment of facebook, by one of it's own (formerly). He points out that facebook fosters an inane form of communication. He also highlights instances where social media has been instrumental in horrific deaths and even genocide. He slaps down a culture in thrall to the quick dopamine hit from a "like" or a "mention".

He's right about all that, of course. On the other hand, the same can be said of 30-second sound bites and they've been around since the dawn of mass media, not social media. As far as the dopamine hit, for that we can blame evolution for giving us something called the Coalitional Instinct.

At some point in our evolution some humans developed a mutation wherein our brains released dopamine (feel-good juice) when we bonded with others into a group. Groups were better at hunting and gathering and providing and also better at protecting themselves from the terrors of the primitive world, so people with this mutation thrived relative to loners, and pairs, and simple family units. Groups became clans became tribes became nations and so forth.

That biochemistry is so powerful that we will readily engage in terrible behavior in the service of our group. It can range from simple hypocrisy and little white lies to outright atrocity. And we will use every trick in the book to delude ourselves that we are acting nobly no matter what. This behavior is hard wired into us. We probably engage in this charade multiple times every day. And when I say "we" I mean you, me, and everyone else. Every time you link to some news article that demonstrates how your side is right about some issue or another, and you convince yourself that it amounts to some sort of clear, objective fact, you are engaging in this activity. When we are in thrall to this Coalitional Instinct, we literally do not see or hear information that would result in cognitive dissonance, our brains erase it from perception.

This is what the internet and social media have unleashed. All the information in the world is at our fingertips, yet rationality and thoughtfulness are swamped by that ancient, primal dopamine hit from demonstrating a righteous, loyal connection with our tribe. And for all it's complicity in this, facebook is a poor second to Twitter in this game. Have you ever been on Twitter? Yikes.

Anyway, this is the generalization of what the facebook exec in the article, Chamath Palihapitiya, is talking about, although he loses sight of the core problem and decides it's really just that people aren't sufficiently devoted to the progressive issues that he thinks are important.

None of this is new, but like everything else in the world it is faster and easier than ever before, and the genie is out of the bottle. We'll never go back, we had better learn to deal.

Personally, I'd be happy if facebook would just stop presenting me ads for "male-enhancement pills" and "50+ dating" sites, although I understand them thinking that is my tribe. There are are worse tribes.

[Movies] Flick Check: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

(Spoiler Alert - as if you don't already know everything) I came out of the theatre kind of neutral on it, but upon reflection really disliked it. (Yes, I saw it in a theatre. Seeing a movie in a theatre has become a tradition on my visits to my brother down south. Otherwise, never would I.) That tells me that it had some at least some things going for it for me to not hate it at the outset. Considering it was 2.5 hours long, the pacing must have been pretty solid: lulls in action were tolerable, plot was easy to follow. Also solid was the acting -- especially Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver, and Mark Hamill. The Rey-Kylo Ren connection was holding my attention and offers a good core theme for the trilogy.

But dear God was the secondary story, with Finn and Rose, inane. Honestly, it was after-school special bad. Let me say it: It was Phantom Menace bad. How do adults, even if they are writing for kids, come up with something so unrelentingly stupid?

Nearly as stupid was the Carrie-Fisher-and-Laura-Dern-teach-Poe-not-to-be-such-a-cowboy tertiary plot. At least this served the purpose of "prepping" Poe for leadership of the Resistance, but, wow, was it a cut-and-paste job.

The Force has always had a bit of deus-ex-machina feel about it, but here it's taken to absurd levels with mind control across vast reaches of space, along with Yoda reappearing in a truly ham-fisted turn of events, and when Carrie Fisher uses the force to survive unprotected in empty space and fly back to her ship -- well, that is a nuke-the-fridge moment if there ever was one.

So now Han and Luke are dead and Princess Leia is dead in real life so maybe they can let go of the fan service. The core storyline of Rey vs. Ren is still intact and serviceable. I suppose there is a thread of hope. The best of this generation so far has been the one-off Rogue One so maybe the upcoming early Han Solo movie will work well. But, hope or no, this trilogy is likely to go down as only marginally better than the prequels.

[Books] Book Look: Malice, by Keigo Higashino

Police Procedurals are such a well worn genre at this point that finding something new and different is very gratifying. Malice takes a lot of chances with form. There is a rather abrupt POV change early on, only later do we discover that there was a very good reason for it. More interestingly, the motive is one that is dangerously undramatic. That is to say, it is almost a "just because" sort of explanation, but the in the context of the story it plays alright. Also, a good deal of the plot revolves around writers and writing, and a writer writing about being a writer is usually the touch of death, but again, Kiego-san, manages to keep in relevant, primarily by making the detective into a sort of anti-writer and the story ending up by focusing on bullying in school not writing. (As described, bullying in Japanese middle schools sounds horrific, if this is an accurate depiction. Worse than anything I experienced in Southfield, Michigan.)

Higashino has a steady, no-nonsense prose style. He wastes few words and doesn't bother with too much scene setting. That is very nice; an author who respects your time.

The mystery itself is well thought out. It starts out like it's going to be locked room murder, then goes off in one direction, does a complete reverse, and then angles off one last time, doing a good job of keeping you on your toes. There are bits and pieces of blatant manipulation along the way -- terminating dialogue just before the big reveal, hiding important details, etc., but nothing that is out of the ordinary for a police procedural.

Should you read Malice? Sure. It's a page turner of a mystery and a fresh take on an old genre. Higashino is the premier mystery writer in Japan and is highly regarded in Edgar Award circles. He deserves it.