The Month That Was - June 2011: Another busy month. I now have a tenant in my old condo and so am officially a slumlord, of sorts. I've been working on repairs of the old place and maintenance and doing minor upgrades -- the hardest part of which is trying to get everyone's timing right. But by and large, that's going well, which is good because if I tried to sell the place now I'd take a big fat loss. On the other hand, it might be better to take the loss, and the tax benefit, and start getting return on whatever money I could get out of it. I could debate the prospects endlessly, simultaneously curing your insomnia.
Here in the greater Dexter area, the big news this month was the appearance of a bear. Just a young'un. They are guessing about a two year old, probably just recently off in the world on his own. There were reports of a momma, but that hasn't been verified. Of course we were immediately inundated with public service messages about how to handle encounters. It was a minor pop culture phenomenon and most everyone I know was thrilled. (Me? Not so much. See below.)
I am effectively done with the first draft of my latest writing project. I'm not ready to talk about it extensively, but I will say it's not like what I have done before. In fact, it isn't really even original fiction. It will be Kindle only, I know that. And if the audience for my novels was in the dozens, the audience for this will be lucky to crack double digits. With each passing work, writing makes me feel like Don Quixote.
Speaking of books, I read a ton this month. You get hit with the standard two reviews but there was a third book I finished which was solely to indulge my inner child. A while back I read the entire series of "independent reader" books by Rick Riordan featuring Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (All my adult friends were reading Harry Potter, so I had to be different.) Like all such books, they are completely manipulative and contrived (which is what young readers need), but so what, they were entertaining. He's started a second series in the same universe, The Lost Hero being the first. I won't bother to review it until I've completed the whole series which will probably be years away since the second book doesn't come until fall and there will probably be five total. Still, highly recommended for a young reader (say 10-12) or as a bedtime series for a younger child (say 6-8).
I do realize I've been deluging your with book reviews the last few months. Maybe next month we can get some TV reviews going. Or something else new. Worse comes to worse, I could go back to writing about football (oh, wait...).
[Books] Book Look: Positively Fifth Street
[Books] Book Look: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
[Rant] A Day in My Life
[Dexter] Bear Bearings
[Detroit] Spitting on the Hand that Feeds It
Monday, July 04, 2011
[Books] Book Look: Positively Fifth Street
Book Look: Positively Fifth Street, by Jim McManus: My new official favorite poker book. Jim McManus was a writer and teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and serious amateur poker player when he scored a gem of an assignment from Harper's magazine: cover the World Series of Poker along with the sensational murder trial in the death Ted Binion, the now former owner of the casino where the World Series was happening. In addition to his journalistic duties, he uses the side games to parlay his magazine advance into buy in for the big tournament. Participatory journalism.
The core thread of the book is McManus' path through the tournament, but every curious and informative side angle is given treatment. We get some background on the history of poker, especially with its evolution from Texas roadhouses to Vegas glitz. We get brief descriptions of some of the legendary players. We get some bio background on McManus himself. We get a thorough discussion of the b-story: the sordid murder of Ted Binion.
The Binion family plays a key role in turning poker from Wild West anarchy into a glamorous and semi-respectable pastime. It was at their Horseshoe Casino in downtown Vegas where the WSOP experienced its meteoric growth in popularity. In the case of Ted, however, along with his skill at managing gaming risk, politicians, mobsters, and poor-schmuck gamblers, came a predilection for fast drugs and expensive women.
Binion was murdered by his lowlife simian bodyguard and sleazy hooker girlfriend, who were cheating on him and after his millions. The details of both the murder itself (at least as imagined by McManus) and their behavior during and after are borderline comic absurdity. Honestly, if I was to script the most cliche-laden cop show murder I could imagine, it would be what played out in real life among these three.
It sounds like a confused gumbo of topics but they link up serendipitously. McManus, it turns out is a pretty solid family man, but he must react to and try to understand the lurid Binion case, the business of throwing great gobs of money on to the table, and some sordid casino types, which eventually ends up with him getting in trouble with his wife for having a lap dance at one of those sprawling Vegas strip clubs. He is good on the topics of temptation and weakness, both subtle and gross.
Also serendipitous is that this is a document of a certain activity at a kind of peak. This was a point in the short but beautiful run of truly glamorous poker, and of the monstrous popularity of Vegas itself. Over the subsequent few years, random nondescript internet players would swamp every tournament but at the turn of the millennium it was still dominated by colorful big names. And even as late as 2000, Binion's was loaded with old Vegas atmosphere and tradition. By 2004 the WSOP would be sold to casino giant Harrah's and the Horseshoe to another gaming giant. Reading Positively Fifth Street now one can't help but sense that Those Were the Days.
At playing cards McManus does very, very well, perhaps a bit to his own surprise. He makes the final table finishing fifth and winning a boat load of prize money in the process. McManus leans on some low-end playing experience but what is most engaging is that he constantly goes back to poker literature and how-to strategy guides for inspiration. Throughout the tournament he often finds himself heads-up with big name players whose books and advice he's idolized. Best of all is how absolutely normal a player he reveals himself to be, at least in the sense of his moment to moment actions. He accidentally string bets (acts like he's going to call then raises), doesn't quite identify all the possible hands (never mind get the probabilities right), he makes bets when he knows he shouldn't and checks when he knows he should raise. In other words, he plays just like me (and probably you). It's endearing. He is also exceptionally skilled at describing the action -- very exciting stuff.
Should you read Positively Fifth Street? Yep. If you like poker, or are curious about poker, or gambling in general, or Vegas in general, or maybe even as true crime it'll work for you. But what it's really about is the temptation of vice. Ted Binion yielded completely and fatally to vice. McManus is willing to risk pretty much his whole advance to get into the tournament but, at his most libertine, can't go beyond a lap dance. Where do you fall on the spectrum? If you've ever been tempted by the dark side, you will recognize feelings that drive the people in this book.
The core thread of the book is McManus' path through the tournament, but every curious and informative side angle is given treatment. We get some background on the history of poker, especially with its evolution from Texas roadhouses to Vegas glitz. We get brief descriptions of some of the legendary players. We get some bio background on McManus himself. We get a thorough discussion of the b-story: the sordid murder of Ted Binion.
The Binion family plays a key role in turning poker from Wild West anarchy into a glamorous and semi-respectable pastime. It was at their Horseshoe Casino in downtown Vegas where the WSOP experienced its meteoric growth in popularity. In the case of Ted, however, along with his skill at managing gaming risk, politicians, mobsters, and poor-schmuck gamblers, came a predilection for fast drugs and expensive women.
Binion was murdered by his lowlife simian bodyguard and sleazy hooker girlfriend, who were cheating on him and after his millions. The details of both the murder itself (at least as imagined by McManus) and their behavior during and after are borderline comic absurdity. Honestly, if I was to script the most cliche-laden cop show murder I could imagine, it would be what played out in real life among these three.
It sounds like a confused gumbo of topics but they link up serendipitously. McManus, it turns out is a pretty solid family man, but he must react to and try to understand the lurid Binion case, the business of throwing great gobs of money on to the table, and some sordid casino types, which eventually ends up with him getting in trouble with his wife for having a lap dance at one of those sprawling Vegas strip clubs. He is good on the topics of temptation and weakness, both subtle and gross.
Also serendipitous is that this is a document of a certain activity at a kind of peak. This was a point in the short but beautiful run of truly glamorous poker, and of the monstrous popularity of Vegas itself. Over the subsequent few years, random nondescript internet players would swamp every tournament but at the turn of the millennium it was still dominated by colorful big names. And even as late as 2000, Binion's was loaded with old Vegas atmosphere and tradition. By 2004 the WSOP would be sold to casino giant Harrah's and the Horseshoe to another gaming giant. Reading Positively Fifth Street now one can't help but sense that Those Were the Days.
At playing cards McManus does very, very well, perhaps a bit to his own surprise. He makes the final table finishing fifth and winning a boat load of prize money in the process. McManus leans on some low-end playing experience but what is most engaging is that he constantly goes back to poker literature and how-to strategy guides for inspiration. Throughout the tournament he often finds himself heads-up with big name players whose books and advice he's idolized. Best of all is how absolutely normal a player he reveals himself to be, at least in the sense of his moment to moment actions. He accidentally string bets (acts like he's going to call then raises), doesn't quite identify all the possible hands (never mind get the probabilities right), he makes bets when he knows he shouldn't and checks when he knows he should raise. In other words, he plays just like me (and probably you). It's endearing. He is also exceptionally skilled at describing the action -- very exciting stuff.
Should you read Positively Fifth Street? Yep. If you like poker, or are curious about poker, or gambling in general, or Vegas in general, or maybe even as true crime it'll work for you. But what it's really about is the temptation of vice. Ted Binion yielded completely and fatally to vice. McManus is willing to risk pretty much his whole advance to get into the tournament but, at his most libertine, can't go beyond a lap dance. Where do you fall on the spectrum? If you've ever been tempted by the dark side, you will recognize feelings that drive the people in this book.
[Books] How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Book Look: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu: Just when you think there was nothing left to make out of time travel stories, somebody comes up with something new. The protagonist uses time travel for the purpose of avoiding pain and hiding from life, or, as he describes it, living chronologically.
The protagonist, also named Yu, has deep connections to time travel. His father devoted his life to the invention of a time machine only to have it fail when demo-ing it to an investor. It turns out someone else had been working on similar idea and ended up with the glory. Devastated by this failure, his father used his machine to disappear into a parallel time/space and Yu's been searching for him ever since. His mother, given to depression and passive aggression, has locked herself into a time loop to escape her own pain. For Yu's part, he's become a time machine repairman, which seems to mostly consist of popping in on other time travelers when their machines have broken down because they tried to change the past. All the while, he lives his entire life inside his own time machine, with its hyper-feminine artificial intelligence for a girlfriend and a holographic, yet "ontologically valid", dog as a companion.
The narrative is alternately loaded down with ironic and semi-satirical time travel/metaphysical exposition, which ranges from snicker-worthy to tedious (although mostly the former). As Yu flits from universe to universe you lose track of the when and where of things (kind of like Inception), but that's OK. The metaphoric aspect of the time travel is what counts here. It's very well done and quite clever, the way he keeps the story human.
Should you read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? You'll need a strong streak of geek, or the time travel aspect will chase you away. Otherwise yes, it's an engaging book all the way around, with a thoughtful core about our inability to escape the past; getting lost in time and fear of moving forward; playing it safe. So we beat on, time machines against entropic swells, borne ceaselessly into nonlinear reality.
The protagonist, also named Yu, has deep connections to time travel. His father devoted his life to the invention of a time machine only to have it fail when demo-ing it to an investor. It turns out someone else had been working on similar idea and ended up with the glory. Devastated by this failure, his father used his machine to disappear into a parallel time/space and Yu's been searching for him ever since. His mother, given to depression and passive aggression, has locked herself into a time loop to escape her own pain. For Yu's part, he's become a time machine repairman, which seems to mostly consist of popping in on other time travelers when their machines have broken down because they tried to change the past. All the while, he lives his entire life inside his own time machine, with its hyper-feminine artificial intelligence for a girlfriend and a holographic, yet "ontologically valid", dog as a companion.
The narrative is alternately loaded down with ironic and semi-satirical time travel/metaphysical exposition, which ranges from snicker-worthy to tedious (although mostly the former). As Yu flits from universe to universe you lose track of the when and where of things (kind of like Inception), but that's OK. The metaphoric aspect of the time travel is what counts here. It's very well done and quite clever, the way he keeps the story human.
Should you read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? You'll need a strong streak of geek, or the time travel aspect will chase you away. Otherwise yes, it's an engaging book all the way around, with a thoughtful core about our inability to escape the past; getting lost in time and fear of moving forward; playing it safe. So we beat on, time machines against entropic swells, borne ceaselessly into nonlinear reality.
[Rant] A Day in My Life
A Day in My Life: A simple description of a typical Saturday, for no good reason. Nothing terribly interesting happens. Just trying to personalize things a bit.
I sleep in, which means I don't worry about getting out of bed until 9. I can get up earlier, but only if feel like it. Since it's Saturday and I pretty much won't have any significant social interaction with anyone who cares, I don't shave and cover my mangy head with a baseball cap. I have a beloved friend who has told me I look ridiculous in hats, and it's almost certainly true, but like I said, today is a grub day. I slap on a t-shirt, cargo shorts and sandals and hop in the Camry. I immediately remember that it is due for an oil change and its annual detailing. I vow to get it done next week, as I have each of the last three of weeks.
Sleeping late also means I have little time to waste so breakfast will be fast food. I stop at the McDonalds near my office. I eat a good deal of fast food. Perhaps too much, but I am not of the belief that it is inherently unhealthy. If you don't overindulge and supersize things, you don't get a ton of calories and as long as you make up for it by veggie oriented eating the rest of the time, you're fine. Plus, you get in and out in 10 minutes and spend about $4. I rarely carry-out; I almost always order at the counter and eat in. I keep a book with me in the car and I take the opportunity to knock off a chapter while I'm shoveling the breakfast burrito in my face. The current book is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (reviewed above).
From McDonald's to the office. I have a leftover issue that I probably won't be able to resolve until Monday which will be a bit of a black mark for me, so I'll see if any brilliant solution comes to me by staring at my computer screen. Joyfully, I arrive to an email that says one of my employees has gone above-and-beyond to take care of it. A big dose of awesome. Now I can use the extra time to get some personal stuff done. I have a tenant renting my condo and, not realizing I needed to, I never notified the condo association. This resulted in a sternly worded letter and some paperwork to fill out, so I take the opportunity to shamelessly use the company fax machine to send the stuff over. I then hop on the web to try to get the utilities switched over but it turns out I can't do that without the tenant's SSN. I'll be seeing the tenant tomorrow when I get the garage cleared out so I'll deal with it then.
Speaking of shameless, I go to the candy machine and see that there is a dangling bag of M&Ms. That means I can get two bags for the price of one, which approximates theft, but then these machines have shorted me regularly enough in the past so it's probably more of a wash. I briefly munch on M&Ms while I surf the web in my ongoing hunt for a cheap smartphone plan for ATT or Verizon (I have given up on T-Mobile) when I receive an email from another dear friend who is about to move to England for three years along with her husband and two-year old. She points out that the 2012 Olympics in London would be the perfect opportunity for a visit, and I immediate realize that I will be semi-obsessed with trying to plan it for the next few weeks. We'll see. But the cumulative force of everything I have yet to do drives me out of the office and back on the road in short order.
I plan to hit Abbot's Nursery, but I'm zoning out to Sirius and zip right past the freeway exit so I continue on to Bed Bath and Beyond where I need to buy a shower caddy. The one I want only comes in brushed nickel and everything else in my master bath is polished brass, so I just buy an inexpensive one as a placeholder until I find what I want, then I'll move the cheap one to the upstairs bathroom. I also snag some placemats since I ate dinner the other night on two layers of paper towels. I am disgusted with the level of girliness I am displaying. Worse, I forgot my coupons.
I check out and throw the housewares in the trunk and backtrack to Abbott's. I had some landscaping ideas early in the season, but after a fair amount of rotting wood siding was discovered, I decided I would hold off on any major landscaping projects until that gets sorted out and I see where I am with money. Still, I have some serious bare patches in my gardens that it wouldn't hurt to address if only in a small way. I see some good stuff at Abbott's -- I like the Asian Lillys and some of the other perennials, but I quickly realize I need to make some measurements and maybe even sketches before I make any decisions.
So I head back home to address lawn and garden issue number one: getting the sprinklers going. Programming them turns out to be a breeze, the problem is that, while the program kicks in and countdowns occur as expected, no water is coming out of the nozzles. There is a valve somewhere to turn on the water, but the problem is I have no idea where it is. Fifteen minutes or so of searching about doesn't help and I can't find any documentation so I'm stuck. I make a call to the local sprinkler guy, get voice mail, and leave a message. Frustrated, I take the opportunity to call for another bit of maintenance I have been meaning to get done: have an external keypad set up for my garage door.
I call the local garage door guy and he makes me read some numbers off the garage door closer to him. He tells me $45 if I just want the unit and install it myself, another $45 for him to install it. Since I have no bloody clue how to install one or even where to find the wires I tell him to do it. He says he'll be over shortly. I use the interval to re-pot a lucky bamboo, and to spray vinegar on some weeds that have intruded into the cracks in my driveway. (Vinegar is supposed to be a cheap, organic trick for slaying weeds.)
The garage door guy appears and it takes him all of ten minutes. It turns out these things are wireless. "Installation" involves nothing more than screwing it into the door frame. The joke is on me. I would call it a life lesson but odds are I will never have to install a garage door opener so it's really just a loss. I write the guy a check.
Having failed to get the sprinklers working and having gotten soaked on the door opener keypad, I need to blow off some steam. I decide to bike to Pinckney Rec Area, about 8 miles away, do a criminally hilly five mile trail run around Crooked Lake, then ride back. Sure enough, as soon as I'm ready to leave, the sprinkler guy calls back. His turn to get voice mail; I'm geared up to go.
The ride over is pretty sweet and quick and I'm feeling good. I lock up my bike and walk by the shore of Silver Lake passing all the swimmers and picnickers and find the Crooked Lake trailhead. I set a steady rate, about nine minute miles, knowing full it won't last through the hills. And it doesn't. Between the hills -- some so steep you could only technically call my pace a run -- and the bugs -- this passes through essentially a thickly wooded swamp -- I finish in at a 10 minute mile average, which is exactly what I ran when I did the organized race here a couple of months ago. At least his time I have the excuse of the bike ride and the bugs to slow me down. The good news is that I crossed paths with what looked to be a turkey hen and about eight chicks. They say there are a ton of turkeys around this year. In fact, Washtenaw County is rich with wildlife -- coyotes, fox, turkeys, and scariest of all, feral pigs. And now we have a bear or two for the first time in living memory.
Sucking down about a gallon of water from the fountain I make a note-to-self that it's time to start swimming outside. Silver Lake is where all the triathletes train swimming laps around the buoys and I'm tired of the pool. The ride home is, if anything, nicer that the ride there.
I get back and I am tired. 16 miles of riding and five miles of hard hill running. It's quarter to seven and I need some food. I'm not up for cooking so I decide to treat myself to one of my favorites: Pad Thai from No Thai at North Campus. I take the scenic route along the river to get there. Chicken Pad Thai, medium spicy, Diet Coke. I sit and eat and read another chapter.
Before I'm done for the evening I have to follow my discipline. On the way home I stop at Barnes and Noble, further treat myself to a piece of key lime pie, and work on my writing project (still not at the point I can discuss it, but my confidence level is about 95%). The next time I look up it's 9PM. I drive home, stop and pick up my mail, pay a couple of bills on line, including an outrageous one to a periodontist that I have very mixed feelings about. I pack my gear for a 10AM class at the gym tomorrow and now I am toast. I crack open a beer and zone in front of the TV to write this overlong post.
At this exact moment I look up and it's 2AM and Empire Strikes Back is being re-run in HD. Obi Wan says "That boy is our last hope." Yoda replies "No, there is another." I change the channel to High Stakes Poker at Bellagio. Doyle Brunson has a set but he doesn't realize someone else has the same set with a higher kicker. Or maybe he does because he mucks it. I would have gone broke on that hand.
It's bedtime. My final thoughts: 1) I ate poorly today; something that I will correct tomorrow -- double up on veggies, 2) I left the damn shower caddy in the trunk of my car. Sigh. Goodnight.
I sleep in, which means I don't worry about getting out of bed until 9. I can get up earlier, but only if feel like it. Since it's Saturday and I pretty much won't have any significant social interaction with anyone who cares, I don't shave and cover my mangy head with a baseball cap. I have a beloved friend who has told me I look ridiculous in hats, and it's almost certainly true, but like I said, today is a grub day. I slap on a t-shirt, cargo shorts and sandals and hop in the Camry. I immediately remember that it is due for an oil change and its annual detailing. I vow to get it done next week, as I have each of the last three of weeks.
Sleeping late also means I have little time to waste so breakfast will be fast food. I stop at the McDonalds near my office. I eat a good deal of fast food. Perhaps too much, but I am not of the belief that it is inherently unhealthy. If you don't overindulge and supersize things, you don't get a ton of calories and as long as you make up for it by veggie oriented eating the rest of the time, you're fine. Plus, you get in and out in 10 minutes and spend about $4. I rarely carry-out; I almost always order at the counter and eat in. I keep a book with me in the car and I take the opportunity to knock off a chapter while I'm shoveling the breakfast burrito in my face. The current book is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (reviewed above).
From McDonald's to the office. I have a leftover issue that I probably won't be able to resolve until Monday which will be a bit of a black mark for me, so I'll see if any brilliant solution comes to me by staring at my computer screen. Joyfully, I arrive to an email that says one of my employees has gone above-and-beyond to take care of it. A big dose of awesome. Now I can use the extra time to get some personal stuff done. I have a tenant renting my condo and, not realizing I needed to, I never notified the condo association. This resulted in a sternly worded letter and some paperwork to fill out, so I take the opportunity to shamelessly use the company fax machine to send the stuff over. I then hop on the web to try to get the utilities switched over but it turns out I can't do that without the tenant's SSN. I'll be seeing the tenant tomorrow when I get the garage cleared out so I'll deal with it then.
Speaking of shameless, I go to the candy machine and see that there is a dangling bag of M&Ms. That means I can get two bags for the price of one, which approximates theft, but then these machines have shorted me regularly enough in the past so it's probably more of a wash. I briefly munch on M&Ms while I surf the web in my ongoing hunt for a cheap smartphone plan for ATT or Verizon (I have given up on T-Mobile) when I receive an email from another dear friend who is about to move to England for three years along with her husband and two-year old. She points out that the 2012 Olympics in London would be the perfect opportunity for a visit, and I immediate realize that I will be semi-obsessed with trying to plan it for the next few weeks. We'll see. But the cumulative force of everything I have yet to do drives me out of the office and back on the road in short order.
I plan to hit Abbot's Nursery, but I'm zoning out to Sirius and zip right past the freeway exit so I continue on to Bed Bath and Beyond where I need to buy a shower caddy. The one I want only comes in brushed nickel and everything else in my master bath is polished brass, so I just buy an inexpensive one as a placeholder until I find what I want, then I'll move the cheap one to the upstairs bathroom. I also snag some placemats since I ate dinner the other night on two layers of paper towels. I am disgusted with the level of girliness I am displaying. Worse, I forgot my coupons.
I check out and throw the housewares in the trunk and backtrack to Abbott's. I had some landscaping ideas early in the season, but after a fair amount of rotting wood siding was discovered, I decided I would hold off on any major landscaping projects until that gets sorted out and I see where I am with money. Still, I have some serious bare patches in my gardens that it wouldn't hurt to address if only in a small way. I see some good stuff at Abbott's -- I like the Asian Lillys and some of the other perennials, but I quickly realize I need to make some measurements and maybe even sketches before I make any decisions.
So I head back home to address lawn and garden issue number one: getting the sprinklers going. Programming them turns out to be a breeze, the problem is that, while the program kicks in and countdowns occur as expected, no water is coming out of the nozzles. There is a valve somewhere to turn on the water, but the problem is I have no idea where it is. Fifteen minutes or so of searching about doesn't help and I can't find any documentation so I'm stuck. I make a call to the local sprinkler guy, get voice mail, and leave a message. Frustrated, I take the opportunity to call for another bit of maintenance I have been meaning to get done: have an external keypad set up for my garage door.
I call the local garage door guy and he makes me read some numbers off the garage door closer to him. He tells me $45 if I just want the unit and install it myself, another $45 for him to install it. Since I have no bloody clue how to install one or even where to find the wires I tell him to do it. He says he'll be over shortly. I use the interval to re-pot a lucky bamboo, and to spray vinegar on some weeds that have intruded into the cracks in my driveway. (Vinegar is supposed to be a cheap, organic trick for slaying weeds.)
The garage door guy appears and it takes him all of ten minutes. It turns out these things are wireless. "Installation" involves nothing more than screwing it into the door frame. The joke is on me. I would call it a life lesson but odds are I will never have to install a garage door opener so it's really just a loss. I write the guy a check.
Having failed to get the sprinklers working and having gotten soaked on the door opener keypad, I need to blow off some steam. I decide to bike to Pinckney Rec Area, about 8 miles away, do a criminally hilly five mile trail run around Crooked Lake, then ride back. Sure enough, as soon as I'm ready to leave, the sprinkler guy calls back. His turn to get voice mail; I'm geared up to go.
The ride over is pretty sweet and quick and I'm feeling good. I lock up my bike and walk by the shore of Silver Lake passing all the swimmers and picnickers and find the Crooked Lake trailhead. I set a steady rate, about nine minute miles, knowing full it won't last through the hills. And it doesn't. Between the hills -- some so steep you could only technically call my pace a run -- and the bugs -- this passes through essentially a thickly wooded swamp -- I finish in at a 10 minute mile average, which is exactly what I ran when I did the organized race here a couple of months ago. At least his time I have the excuse of the bike ride and the bugs to slow me down. The good news is that I crossed paths with what looked to be a turkey hen and about eight chicks. They say there are a ton of turkeys around this year. In fact, Washtenaw County is rich with wildlife -- coyotes, fox, turkeys, and scariest of all, feral pigs. And now we have a bear or two for the first time in living memory.
Sucking down about a gallon of water from the fountain I make a note-to-self that it's time to start swimming outside. Silver Lake is where all the triathletes train swimming laps around the buoys and I'm tired of the pool. The ride home is, if anything, nicer that the ride there.
I get back and I am tired. 16 miles of riding and five miles of hard hill running. It's quarter to seven and I need some food. I'm not up for cooking so I decide to treat myself to one of my favorites: Pad Thai from No Thai at North Campus. I take the scenic route along the river to get there. Chicken Pad Thai, medium spicy, Diet Coke. I sit and eat and read another chapter.
Before I'm done for the evening I have to follow my discipline. On the way home I stop at Barnes and Noble, further treat myself to a piece of key lime pie, and work on my writing project (still not at the point I can discuss it, but my confidence level is about 95%). The next time I look up it's 9PM. I drive home, stop and pick up my mail, pay a couple of bills on line, including an outrageous one to a periodontist that I have very mixed feelings about. I pack my gear for a 10AM class at the gym tomorrow and now I am toast. I crack open a beer and zone in front of the TV to write this overlong post.
At this exact moment I look up and it's 2AM and Empire Strikes Back is being re-run in HD. Obi Wan says "That boy is our last hope." Yoda replies "No, there is another." I change the channel to High Stakes Poker at Bellagio. Doyle Brunson has a set but he doesn't realize someone else has the same set with a higher kicker. Or maybe he does because he mucks it. I would have gone broke on that hand.
It's bedtime. My final thoughts: 1) I ate poorly today; something that I will correct tomorrow -- double up on veggies, 2) I left the damn shower caddy in the trunk of my car. Sigh. Goodnight.
[Dexter] Bear Bearings
Bear Bearings: It was first spotted at Hudson Mills Metro Park. There were two witnesses, but when the rangers searched, they saw no evidence. People I know dismissed it as probably just a big labradoodle. Then somebody got a photo. It was a young black bear; an adolescent probably just newly on his own. PSAs went out about what to do in a bear encounter. The reactions were telling.
It became a minor phenomenon. Everyone I know said it was cool. A twitter feed and facebook page popped up. T-shirts are still available.
Internet forums then began lighting up with people who tried to be even cooler by mocking the furor and claiming not to understand why everyone thinks it's a big deal. Often they peppered their comments with humble brags about how much time they spent up north where bears are more common and yet they never had any problem.
The DNR set up a trap with the intent of catching it and putting a collar on it.
What nobody did was even consider that the bear is dangerous and should be caught and removed from the area. No, we are supposed to live in harmony with it. After all, ask anyone and they will tell you it just wants to get along with us. Clearly it's an Animal Planet planet.
Here's a new flash. IT'S A BEAR, ok? A BEAR. It doesn't know it's supposed to just live and let live. It doesn't have a sense of its place in the community. It doesn't do any sort of moral reasoning at all. It is a highly intelligent predatory creature that, even as an adolescent, is higher on the food chain than anything else around here.
Sure enough, after the fun and games reality begins to set in. Less than a mile up the road from me, some poor woman had her chicken coop raided and destroyed. She now says that the Momma bear is present also, although the DNR hasn't verified that. This is how it starts. Note the quote: "They'll come right in front of my door and sit down. They'll let me get in a foot of them; they're not afraid of me at all." I cannot emphasize this enough: THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.
Here's how this will play out. Somebody will find a half-eaten Chihuahua on their back porch. Or maybe somebody's golden retriever will barrel through their electric fence and into the woods, never to return. Then it will start to dawn on people. There might even be an outcry to remove the bear(s), but probably they'll just blame the dog owners. What the poo-poo'ers and nature ennoblers don't realize is that they are being completely cavalier about the danger to human life. What are they going to say when someone child happens to be playing in the back yard when Momma Bear comes by? Are they going to take responsibility for treating their fantasy version of nature as reality? No, of course not. They'll probably blame the parents for not watch more closely because, as we all know, all good parents should be capable of keeping a 24/7 watch on their children.
There is a reason human beings have gathered in cities and built fences and weapons. Nature is not on our side. Not when we were wandering the African veldt 25,000 years ago and not in Dexter, Michigan in 2011. Live and let live is not an option, no matter what Animal Planet tells you.
Besides, don't we have enough trouble with feral pigs?
It became a minor phenomenon. Everyone I know said it was cool. A twitter feed and facebook page popped up. T-shirts are still available.
Internet forums then began lighting up with people who tried to be even cooler by mocking the furor and claiming not to understand why everyone thinks it's a big deal. Often they peppered their comments with humble brags about how much time they spent up north where bears are more common and yet they never had any problem.
The DNR set up a trap with the intent of catching it and putting a collar on it.
What nobody did was even consider that the bear is dangerous and should be caught and removed from the area. No, we are supposed to live in harmony with it. After all, ask anyone and they will tell you it just wants to get along with us. Clearly it's an Animal Planet planet.
Here's a new flash. IT'S A BEAR, ok? A BEAR. It doesn't know it's supposed to just live and let live. It doesn't have a sense of its place in the community. It doesn't do any sort of moral reasoning at all. It is a highly intelligent predatory creature that, even as an adolescent, is higher on the food chain than anything else around here.
Sure enough, after the fun and games reality begins to set in. Less than a mile up the road from me, some poor woman had her chicken coop raided and destroyed. She now says that the Momma bear is present also, although the DNR hasn't verified that. This is how it starts. Note the quote: "They'll come right in front of my door and sit down. They'll let me get in a foot of them; they're not afraid of me at all." I cannot emphasize this enough: THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.
Here's how this will play out. Somebody will find a half-eaten Chihuahua on their back porch. Or maybe somebody's golden retriever will barrel through their electric fence and into the woods, never to return. Then it will start to dawn on people. There might even be an outcry to remove the bear(s), but probably they'll just blame the dog owners. What the poo-poo'ers and nature ennoblers don't realize is that they are being completely cavalier about the danger to human life. What are they going to say when someone child happens to be playing in the back yard when Momma Bear comes by? Are they going to take responsibility for treating their fantasy version of nature as reality? No, of course not. They'll probably blame the parents for not watch more closely because, as we all know, all good parents should be capable of keeping a 24/7 watch on their children.
There is a reason human beings have gathered in cities and built fences and weapons. Nature is not on our side. Not when we were wandering the African veldt 25,000 years ago and not in Dexter, Michigan in 2011. Live and let live is not an option, no matter what Animal Planet tells you.
Besides, don't we have enough trouble with feral pigs?
[Detroit] Spitting on the Hand that Feeds It
Spitting on the Hand that Feeds It: This story tells you everything you need to know about Detroit. The city is getting a massive amount of philanthropic assistance from the Kresge Foundation:
I once encountered a bum in front of a diner who told me he was hungry and hadn't eaten in days. I offered to buy him a burger inside. He said, "F**k you. Just give me the five dollars." I didn't. My advice to Kresge is to find something of real value to do with their money because Detroit is pathologically self-destructive and despite everything that has happened -- all the devestation and degradation and death of the past 50 years -- they are still not ready to change.
Kresge has invested more than $100 million in Detroit's transformation, funding a riverfront promenade, building greenways and backing incentives for entrepreneurs.In return, they get contempt. The Mayor can't accept somebody else getting some credit:
"Everyone talks about Kresge, Kresge, Kresge," the mayor said in an interview. "We're pleased with the support we're getting from them, but... Kresge is not doing this in a vacuum by themselves."A city executive is indignant that these outsiders won't just give them the money without strings attached:
"People want to know that their interests are being represented," says Marja Winters, the city's deputy planning chief and co-leader of Detroit Works. "Someone who doesn't live here can't accurately represent their interests."Presumably she'd rather just let people suffer before she sacrificed control, I mean, they've done right by the people so far, haven't they?
I once encountered a bum in front of a diner who told me he was hungry and hadn't eaten in days. I offered to buy him a burger inside. He said, "F**k you. Just give me the five dollars." I didn't. My advice to Kresge is to find something of real value to do with their money because Detroit is pathologically self-destructive and despite everything that has happened -- all the devestation and degradation and death of the past 50 years -- they are still not ready to change.
Sunday, June 05, 2011
The Month That Was - May 2011
The Month That Was - May 2011: We went from one of the snowiest winters recent memory to the rainiest spring in 25 years. Honestly, I feel like some kind of farmer doing nothing but talking about the weather, but it's been pretty intense and it has a much greater affect on me than it used to. The good news is that we did have two straight days of rain free weather so I go to cut a relatively dry lawn and was able to finish it in under two hours. You can't imagine how excited I was. Seriously, I did a brief but poignant happy dance when I was done. (A friend of mine set the over/under for me contracting with a mowing service for the 4th of July.)
Somehow, I feel busy despite that fact that I didn't do much this month. Got a quick trip down to FL done get Miss Anna packed up after her last freshmen year final. Details below. I skipped out on my planned trip to NYC for Memorial Day, just because I put it off for so long that the price became exorbitant. Lame, I know.
I am writing something, it's just too early to discuss yet.
I bought two new pairs of running shoes and got my road bike in order. Now I'm in the market for a mountain bike because I have really taken to running the trails at nearby Pinckney Recreation Area, including the world famous Potowatami Trail, and I want to try biking them this year. I have not ordered from them yet, but Bikes Direct seems to have bikes with pretty solid components available for about half retail price. Of course you have to tack on another $100-150 for your local bike shop to build it, but still, as cheap as it gets. I'll let you know how it works out.
Just seems like I'm ticking off the months without too much drama. A blessing I suppose.
[Good Links] Top Grade Linkage
[Travel] Reliving in Florida
[Books] Book Look: This Side of Paradise
[Detroit] Failed City Porn
Somehow, I feel busy despite that fact that I didn't do much this month. Got a quick trip down to FL done get Miss Anna packed up after her last freshmen year final. Details below. I skipped out on my planned trip to NYC for Memorial Day, just because I put it off for so long that the price became exorbitant. Lame, I know.
I am writing something, it's just too early to discuss yet.
I bought two new pairs of running shoes and got my road bike in order. Now I'm in the market for a mountain bike because I have really taken to running the trails at nearby Pinckney Recreation Area, including the world famous Potowatami Trail, and I want to try biking them this year. I have not ordered from them yet, but Bikes Direct seems to have bikes with pretty solid components available for about half retail price. Of course you have to tack on another $100-150 for your local bike shop to build it, but still, as cheap as it gets. I'll let you know how it works out.
Just seems like I'm ticking off the months without too much drama. A blessing I suppose.
[Good Links] Top Grade Linkage
[Travel] Reliving in Florida
[Books] Book Look: This Side of Paradise
[Detroit] Failed City Porn
[Good Links] Top Grade Linkage
Top Grade Linkage: A quick round up of some good reading and miscellaneous nonsense:
- The story of a master thief.
Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof's edge...The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the [gem] was sitting on didn't register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth's bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.
I would have thought such people only existed on TV shows. - I recently had a problem with ants living in some rotted wood siding. I'm guessing they were some innocuous breed and not Argentinean Ants or I would be in real trouble.
I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers.
- An actual night club bill from Vegas. Nearly $200,000 for a night in Tryst, a night club at Wynn. Nearly 150 large in champagne. Nearly $200 for Fiji water. Note the tip. Actually tips, plural. $29581 gratuity. Then another $29581 under "other tip". Then of course, there's the gratuity line so you can fill in more. Ah, Vegas...
- The market is a cruel a mistress for the writer.
Mr. Grossman, who has been compared to both J.K. Rowling and Jay McInerney, tried his hand at literary fiction before turning to fantasy. He says supernatural fiction is fast becoming a dominant strain of contemporary literature. 'We are the mainstream,' he says. 'Literary fiction is a subculture.'
Time for me to put some vampires or zombies in my stuff, I guess. Actually this is not all that new. Literature has always had a supernatural bent: Gods in greek theatre, horrors of Hell in Dante, witches and ghosts in Shakespeare, etc. Fiction is lies, after all. - Robin Hanson discusses how irrational bike helmet regulations are from a safety perspective. Actually, he's commenting on the nature of status as it relates to safety regulations. But bike helmets, as you know, are one of my personal hobby horses. I'm in favor of a world where riding without a helmet is a source of glory.
- Paul Theroux is always interesting on travel. His upcoming Tao of Travel will likely be a must.
[Travel] Reliving in Florida
Reliving in Florida: Another run down to North Miami, this time to pick up Miss Anna at the end of her freshman year. It is astounding how much crap can be fit in a closet-sized dorm room. Honestly, when you figure in the cost of the plane tickets, rental car, hotel rooms, and package shipping, it would have been cheaper to have her leave everything for charity and just replace it when she got home. In any event, it was a full day of disassembling, packing, cleaning, and hauling packages to UPS (whose agents we got to know on a first name basis). Of course there were good-byes to be said, both sad and happy; a fair amount of dramatic emotional churn.
Not just for Anna. All sorts of cues had me reliving my freshman year. Smoldering conflicts brought to a head at the last minute before leaving. Glad to be done with school, sad to miss your friends. Knowing you should be an adult and make use of the summer, but not really having a good idea how. Not knowing what to do with yourself, and so acting with ego and false confidence on confused and counterproductive intentions. Just generally being a mess of a human being. It's a frustrating and frightening time of life, although you don't know any better. And there are no words to make it easier. Even the promise of having an eighteen-year-old's health wouldn't make me want to relive that time.
Funny thing is that as soon as the boxes were shipped, we reverted to formula. Kate and Anna and I have been on innumerable little vacations together, all immensely pleasurable, and the next morning we found ourselves bombing north for Orlando, Universal Studios in our sights.
We checked into the Loews Royal Pacific Resort, one of the three that are located inside the grounds itself (along with Loews Portofino Bay and the Hard Rock). It's a decent enough place, nice pool, lots of activities, free water taxi to the key points in the park. But there are problems. We had a horrendous time getting housekeeping to make up the room. By the time 5 o'clock came around we started making inquiries. The strange thing was that everyone reacted like it was completely normal. By 7pm an angry call from me to the Manager on Duty finally got some action. Kate's poignant comment: "Do they realize that a room is no good unless you can actually use it?" There were other service oddities, such as general confusion about when the park opened for early admission, but I will say there was no sign of rudeness or disaffection among the staff. It's a nice place and it's possible we just had one bad experience, but I would try Hard Rock first if I had to do it again.
As far as theme parks go Universal Studios is as good as Disney. It's not quite so sprawling across the land and it sticks to more traditional amusement park stuff, but these are not bad things. Universal consists of three sections: 1) Universal Studios Park, 2) Islands of Adventure, and 3) Universal Citywalk. In theory Universal Studios is a "movie themed" park, Islands of Adventure contains variously themed "islands", in practice most of the "islands" in Island of Adventure are movie themed, so really there is little difference between the two proper amusement parks. Citywalk is kind of like Downtown Disney, basically a high-energy outdoor mall -- restaurants, shops, etc.
Both the amusement parks are heavy into "3-D experiences" which used to be pretty pathetic, if I recall correctly from the early Star Wars themed ones I saw at Disney many years ago. The latest ones are killer, though, and the Harry Potter one at Islands of Adventure is truly astonishing. Essentially it's a mild roller coaster through a darkened building which, in concert with 3-d animations, animatronics, and plain old fire and water, makes for quite a wild ride. You find yourself playing quidditch then being attacked by dementors and so forth. Just slightly less interesting was the hot ride from a couple of years ago, Spiderman 3-D. Same sort of thing.
One of the best things about staying at an in-park hotel is that you get early access to the park. One hour early. So you can get in at 8am instead of 9am. I don't think we waited more than 5 minutes for any ride and we pretty much covered the whole of Islands of Adventure, including lunch, by noon. Nice. I'm not much for theme parks, but Universal Studios is a good time. Reliving childhood there would be something I could stand.
Not just for Anna. All sorts of cues had me reliving my freshman year. Smoldering conflicts brought to a head at the last minute before leaving. Glad to be done with school, sad to miss your friends. Knowing you should be an adult and make use of the summer, but not really having a good idea how. Not knowing what to do with yourself, and so acting with ego and false confidence on confused and counterproductive intentions. Just generally being a mess of a human being. It's a frustrating and frightening time of life, although you don't know any better. And there are no words to make it easier. Even the promise of having an eighteen-year-old's health wouldn't make me want to relive that time.
Funny thing is that as soon as the boxes were shipped, we reverted to formula. Kate and Anna and I have been on innumerable little vacations together, all immensely pleasurable, and the next morning we found ourselves bombing north for Orlando, Universal Studios in our sights.
We checked into the Loews Royal Pacific Resort, one of the three that are located inside the grounds itself (along with Loews Portofino Bay and the Hard Rock). It's a decent enough place, nice pool, lots of activities, free water taxi to the key points in the park. But there are problems. We had a horrendous time getting housekeeping to make up the room. By the time 5 o'clock came around we started making inquiries. The strange thing was that everyone reacted like it was completely normal. By 7pm an angry call from me to the Manager on Duty finally got some action. Kate's poignant comment: "Do they realize that a room is no good unless you can actually use it?" There were other service oddities, such as general confusion about when the park opened for early admission, but I will say there was no sign of rudeness or disaffection among the staff. It's a nice place and it's possible we just had one bad experience, but I would try Hard Rock first if I had to do it again.
As far as theme parks go Universal Studios is as good as Disney. It's not quite so sprawling across the land and it sticks to more traditional amusement park stuff, but these are not bad things. Universal consists of three sections: 1) Universal Studios Park, 2) Islands of Adventure, and 3) Universal Citywalk. In theory Universal Studios is a "movie themed" park, Islands of Adventure contains variously themed "islands", in practice most of the "islands" in Island of Adventure are movie themed, so really there is little difference between the two proper amusement parks. Citywalk is kind of like Downtown Disney, basically a high-energy outdoor mall -- restaurants, shops, etc.
Both the amusement parks are heavy into "3-D experiences" which used to be pretty pathetic, if I recall correctly from the early Star Wars themed ones I saw at Disney many years ago. The latest ones are killer, though, and the Harry Potter one at Islands of Adventure is truly astonishing. Essentially it's a mild roller coaster through a darkened building which, in concert with 3-d animations, animatronics, and plain old fire and water, makes for quite a wild ride. You find yourself playing quidditch then being attacked by dementors and so forth. Just slightly less interesting was the hot ride from a couple of years ago, Spiderman 3-D. Same sort of thing.
One of the best things about staying at an in-park hotel is that you get early access to the park. One hour early. So you can get in at 8am instead of 9am. I don't think we waited more than 5 minutes for any ride and we pretty much covered the whole of Islands of Adventure, including lunch, by noon. Nice. I'm not much for theme parks, but Universal Studios is a good time. Reliving childhood there would be something I could stand.
[Books] Book Look: This Side of Paradise
Book Look: This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Keeping with the above theme of college days, my main read this month was F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. Note that while I have linked this to the Kindle version on Amazon (free), it is long past its copyright expiration so you can snag it for free from just about anywhere on-line. Gutenberg.org is a good place to start for the Kindle averse.
This is the story of a wealthy, spoiled boy with a flighty mother and disconnected father. He is sent to boarding school; goes on to Princeton; falls in love and has his heart broken. Along the way, almost tangentially, his parents die, he fights in WW1, and goes broke. We are given detailed descriptions of his innermost thoughts and feelings at school, especially at Princeton, his impressions of those around him, and his evolving desires and ideas. But his reaction to his parents deaths is little more than annoyance, we hear nothing about his war experiences despite being in combat, and his reaction to the vaporization of his family fortune is blase.
It sounds reversed doesn't it? The huge dramatic events in his life are mere sideshow, but all the details of his identity and ego development are the topic of the book. And that is a stroke of genius, because that is what it is like to be that age: completely self-consumed. The self-obsession of the main character is exaggerated contrast to the external events around him. Clever way to zero in on a young man's ego.
This Side of Paradise is F. Scott Fitzgerald's version of "The Book Everyone has In Them." For most it's the "college experience/coming of age book" although there are variations that have nothing to do with college. It is the documentation of the painful birth of an adult, or at least the start of the ongoing process of adulthood. Someone we know once wrote a book called Apple Pie along the same lines.
The eternal commonality is there. The deluded self-opinion, the disregard for that which does not directly affect you, the misguided attempts at self-definition and the corresponding attraction to charismatic, pseudo-intellectual ideas and people. Also there is the pain and uncertainty, which in retrospect from a fully lived life can seem almost quaint and precious, but as lived it is devastating.
This Side of Paradise is set pre-WW1 for the most part, so despite the familiar themes and feelings, things are different. Most of the young characters speak in florid semi-cryptic poetics, more concerned with the impression their words leave as opposed to clarity of communication. But there is still shameless college pranksterism and debauchery, here among the elite at Princeton, and which I witness in Ann Arbor to this day. The writing often seems self-indulgent, but again that kind of plays into the themes. This was his first novel and Fitzgerald was not quite Fitzgerald yet, but the core of the talent that eventually produced Tender is the Night and Gatsby is discernible.
Should you read This Side of Paradise? Not until you have read Gatsby or Tender. It doesn't measure up to those in any way. Allow me some self-indulgence and suggest you read Paradise after reading Apple Pie. I'd be curious to hear what parallels you could draw.
This is the story of a wealthy, spoiled boy with a flighty mother and disconnected father. He is sent to boarding school; goes on to Princeton; falls in love and has his heart broken. Along the way, almost tangentially, his parents die, he fights in WW1, and goes broke. We are given detailed descriptions of his innermost thoughts and feelings at school, especially at Princeton, his impressions of those around him, and his evolving desires and ideas. But his reaction to his parents deaths is little more than annoyance, we hear nothing about his war experiences despite being in combat, and his reaction to the vaporization of his family fortune is blase.
It sounds reversed doesn't it? The huge dramatic events in his life are mere sideshow, but all the details of his identity and ego development are the topic of the book. And that is a stroke of genius, because that is what it is like to be that age: completely self-consumed. The self-obsession of the main character is exaggerated contrast to the external events around him. Clever way to zero in on a young man's ego.
This Side of Paradise is F. Scott Fitzgerald's version of "The Book Everyone has In Them." For most it's the "college experience/coming of age book" although there are variations that have nothing to do with college. It is the documentation of the painful birth of an adult, or at least the start of the ongoing process of adulthood. Someone we know once wrote a book called Apple Pie along the same lines.
The eternal commonality is there. The deluded self-opinion, the disregard for that which does not directly affect you, the misguided attempts at self-definition and the corresponding attraction to charismatic, pseudo-intellectual ideas and people. Also there is the pain and uncertainty, which in retrospect from a fully lived life can seem almost quaint and precious, but as lived it is devastating.
This Side of Paradise is set pre-WW1 for the most part, so despite the familiar themes and feelings, things are different. Most of the young characters speak in florid semi-cryptic poetics, more concerned with the impression their words leave as opposed to clarity of communication. But there is still shameless college pranksterism and debauchery, here among the elite at Princeton, and which I witness in Ann Arbor to this day. The writing often seems self-indulgent, but again that kind of plays into the themes. This was his first novel and Fitzgerald was not quite Fitzgerald yet, but the core of the talent that eventually produced Tender is the Night and Gatsby is discernible.
Should you read This Side of Paradise? Not until you have read Gatsby or Tender. It doesn't measure up to those in any way. Allow me some self-indulgence and suggest you read Paradise after reading Apple Pie. I'd be curious to hear what parallels you could draw.
[Detroit] Failed City Porn
Failed City Porn: Something I haven't done in a while: Completely gratuitous stores about the degradation of Detroit.
- Illiteracy in Detroit is around 47%. That's not a surprise. Though I was born in Detroit, I grew up in the city of Southfield which is on Detroit's northern border, just across the famed Eight Mile Road. Southfield's illiteracy rate is 24%, which is third-world-ish. It was a nasty place to grow up, but at least we could read and write our way out back then. I guess maybe we all did.
- One booming business in Detroit: demolishing abandoned homes.
- The Irish trad/punk band Flogging Molly wrote their latest set of songs in and about Detroit. They admit it makes little difference: "I don't have any answers. I sing for other people's frustrations." Just hope the songs are catchy.
- In contrast, Grand Rapids (second largest city in MI and furniture capitol of the world) was labeled one of America's Dying Cities" and they responded with a video of pretty much the whole city lip-synching "American Pie". Not sure whether that actually makes sense, but it's pretty cool.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
The Month That Was - April 2011
The Month That Was - April 2011: Waterworld. At least it seems that way. Spring has brought some new little twists on homeownership travails as detailed below, but I am getting more comfortable with these things. Soon I will be able to set aside my obsession with sorting out my house and get back to writing or travel or whatever.
Speaking of writing, Misspent Youth is now available on Kindle. Woo hoo. $4.84. Barely more than a latte. Go download it now. (I assume you are aware you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books.) Same deal as with all my books: buy a copy and leave a nice review on Amazon and I'll be your BFF.
Speaking of travel, photos from my last trip to Florida -- Palm Beach and the Dry Tortugas -- are now up on Smugmug. Good desktop background fodder.
Speaking of whatever, I ran ten miles for the first time in the hopes of doing a half marathon somewhere this summer. I have my eye on one out in Deadwood, but it's an open question as to whether I'll make it.
[Books] Book Look: Lay the Favorite
[Books] Book Look: The Devil's Alternative
[Movies] Flick Check (HD Version)
[House and Home] Waging War on Nature
Speaking of writing, Misspent Youth is now available on Kindle. Woo hoo. $4.84. Barely more than a latte. Go download it now. (I assume you are aware you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books.) Same deal as with all my books: buy a copy and leave a nice review on Amazon and I'll be your BFF.
Speaking of travel, photos from my last trip to Florida -- Palm Beach and the Dry Tortugas -- are now up on Smugmug. Good desktop background fodder.
Speaking of whatever, I ran ten miles for the first time in the hopes of doing a half marathon somewhere this summer. I have my eye on one out in Deadwood, but it's an open question as to whether I'll make it.
[Books] Book Look: Lay the Favorite
[Books] Book Look: The Devil's Alternative
[Movies] Flick Check (HD Version)
[House and Home] Waging War on Nature
[Books] Book Look: Lay the Favorite
Book Look: Lay the Favorite, by Beth Raymer: This was a fun book that appealed to the gambler in me. It's a memoir of a girl's rather oddball way of coming of age. Her plans to work in her boyfriend's family restaurant crash along with their relationship so Beth finds herself broke and rudderless. She wanders into a couple sleazy occupations: An in-home erotic dance service although she never drifts into having sex with her customers, and pornographic modeling, although she never actually poses for other people, she takes pictures of herself and photoshops herself into sexy twins. (At this point, I have to admit my BS detector went off. It seems awfully convenient that she could skirt the outer edges of prostitution and pornography yet manages never to cross the line into becoming "one of them". But that may say more about my cynicism than her candidness.)
In search of better work while waiting tables in a diner, one of her customers sends her to meet a professional gambler named Dinky. There begins her foray into the semi-legal world of sports handicapping. We are treated to a fascinating review of Dinky's life -- how his gambling got started, how it progressed from picking winners to making book, how he skirted the law, how his operation in Las Vegas functions. Beth starts out as essentially a gofer, but in time is taking bets and making six figure cash exchanges. All this is set in the halcyon days of Vegas before the crash -- it was like catnip to me.
When Dinky's operation starts to get in trouble Beth moves on from there and gets involved with a new corporation running an internet sports book out of the Caribbean. Her things get even stranger what with political unrest, rampant hookers, gang threats. It too eventually folds.
In the end, Beth actually rips off a fairly large sum from a lying, dirtbag gambler and heads for somewhere warm, presumably to write this book.
Lay the favorite is lively and good humored. It is an especially entertaining variation on the first book that everyone has in them somewhere concerning how they came to find a place in the adult world. Much of its charm lies in the characters who float in and out like comic book gangster wannabes and assorted operators of various stripe.
It is flawed in number of ways, however. First, from a gamblers perspective, it portrays absolutely nothing of what's involved in running a successful sports book. We are told these folks follow games and research obsessively, but we are given little on the process of how it is done or what they are specifically looking for. At one point Raymer throws out a bit of psychology suggesting that at the core of all gamblers is a powerful desire to lose. This is a sharp and accurate insight from my experience, yet we are given absolutely no follow up on it, she simply returns to describing the events of her life.
More importantly from a dramatic perspective, over the course of the book Beth goes on a journey to nowhere. At the outset she is a lost, capricious, morally confused girl. At the end she is a lost, capricious and morally confused girl. The overall sense is that we were just treated to a string of interesting events with no real point. Not that it makes the book unenjoyable. As I said at the outset, it was a fun read and if that's enough for you, then the answer to the question "Should I read Lay the Favorite?" is yes.
By the way Lay the Favorite is being made into a movie. The character of Dinky is being played by Bruce Willis. In the book, Dinky, is a huge, hideous, obese slob. Of course, that wouldn't play in Hollywood, so you get Bruce Willis. God only knows what they're going to make of this. Sounds like it might be related to the book in name only. Typical Hollywood, eh?
In search of better work while waiting tables in a diner, one of her customers sends her to meet a professional gambler named Dinky. There begins her foray into the semi-legal world of sports handicapping. We are treated to a fascinating review of Dinky's life -- how his gambling got started, how it progressed from picking winners to making book, how he skirted the law, how his operation in Las Vegas functions. Beth starts out as essentially a gofer, but in time is taking bets and making six figure cash exchanges. All this is set in the halcyon days of Vegas before the crash -- it was like catnip to me.
When Dinky's operation starts to get in trouble Beth moves on from there and gets involved with a new corporation running an internet sports book out of the Caribbean. Her things get even stranger what with political unrest, rampant hookers, gang threats. It too eventually folds.
In the end, Beth actually rips off a fairly large sum from a lying, dirtbag gambler and heads for somewhere warm, presumably to write this book.
Lay the favorite is lively and good humored. It is an especially entertaining variation on the first book that everyone has in them somewhere concerning how they came to find a place in the adult world. Much of its charm lies in the characters who float in and out like comic book gangster wannabes and assorted operators of various stripe.
It is flawed in number of ways, however. First, from a gamblers perspective, it portrays absolutely nothing of what's involved in running a successful sports book. We are told these folks follow games and research obsessively, but we are given little on the process of how it is done or what they are specifically looking for. At one point Raymer throws out a bit of psychology suggesting that at the core of all gamblers is a powerful desire to lose. This is a sharp and accurate insight from my experience, yet we are given absolutely no follow up on it, she simply returns to describing the events of her life.
More importantly from a dramatic perspective, over the course of the book Beth goes on a journey to nowhere. At the outset she is a lost, capricious, morally confused girl. At the end she is a lost, capricious and morally confused girl. The overall sense is that we were just treated to a string of interesting events with no real point. Not that it makes the book unenjoyable. As I said at the outset, it was a fun read and if that's enough for you, then the answer to the question "Should I read Lay the Favorite?" is yes.
By the way Lay the Favorite is being made into a movie. The character of Dinky is being played by Bruce Willis. In the book, Dinky, is a huge, hideous, obese slob. Of course, that wouldn't play in Hollywood, so you get Bruce Willis. God only knows what they're going to make of this. Sounds like it might be related to the book in name only. Typical Hollywood, eh?
[Books] Book Look: The Devil's Alternative
Book Look: The Devils Alternative by Frederick Forsyth: When it comes to cold war thrillers, Frederick Forsyth is everyone's daddy. He wrote such movie fodder as Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File. When William F. Buckley wanted to start writing his own cold war fiction he told his publisher he wanted to write something like Forsyth. And now having read The Devil's Alternative, the source of the tone, pacing and style of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October and Red Storm Rising have become quite clear. So yeah, Forsyth's a genre monster.
When I delve into genre fiction it's almost always either a spy thriller or a mystery. Mysteries tend to be more flexible; they can span great stretches of time and vary anywhere from screwball comedy to high concept art. Spy thrillers seem to be more limited. Some have literary aspirations and most people mention John Le Carre as an example of the literary bent of spy novels. I'm not sure I'm on board with that. Le Carre writes more subtly and with a greater capability to dramatize than most, but I'm not sure I would call any spy novels "literary" other than at the margin.
And that's not condescension. Genre writing takes as much talent and dedication as mainstream fiction; even more for well written works that find new angles and insights within the standard constraints. So when I say I feel lukewarm about The Devil's Advocate it's simply because it's heavy on the aspects of the spy genre that aren't to my taste.
Released in 1979 and set a couple of years into an imagined future, we are in the heart of the spy writer's glory days of the Cold War. (Spy writers really have never recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Islamic terrorism is just too crude and dirty by comparison.) Due to twin disaster of nature and incompetence, the Soviet Union is facing a crop failure that will inevitably lead to famine. Separately, a Ukrainian dissident has committed a terrorist act that he hopes will inspire rebellion in other nations subjugated by Russians. Despite being mortal enemies, the U.S. does not want such chaos to ensue since it will likely lead to the downfall of the Soviet premier and his replacement by a super hawk and inevitably change the cold war to hot. These twin threats and their resolution become linked over the course of the novel and we are treated to cast of international characters, nicely diverse in motivation, all with a role to play for good or evil. And, of course, a surprise twist at the very end.
The Devils Aternative reads like a movie yet to be made -- mix in a leading man (say a Christian Bale type), a good side man (Morgan Freeman would work; doesn't he always?), maybe a call backs to the genre (Harrison Ford as someone's superior officer; Michael Caine as a spymaster) and crack director (not Michael Bay please) and you got yourself a summer blockbuster. You could write the script nearly scene for scene with the novel (maybe that will be my next project).
It's about the perfect spy thriller and where it falls down for me is not a shortcoming of the book but my lack of appreciation for comprehensive technical description. The book is about a third too long. There are longish stretches where the technical points and procedures are explained in very thorough detail, something that is key for the genre fans. This adds to the realism and fires the imagination of readers (I won't call them spy-nerds, but if I did it would not be an insult) who are the bread and butter targets of espionage/military writers. A description of the inner workings of an oil laden supertanker is riveting to some. Not me. I would rather you cut to the chase because to me it doesn't matter. As long as the plot is plausible, I'm happy. I don't need proof. But that's why I am not the main target audience here. By the half-way point I found myself skipping and skimming to get to the resolution.
Should you read The Devils Alternative? If you love espionage ala Ludlum and Clancy, then yes. Read it now. You will not be disappointed. If you're looking for something to distract yourself with while your cable is out and you can't get the latest action flick -- sure. Otherwise...meh. You could do worse, but you may find it grueling in parts. Feel free to skip ahead now and then.
When I delve into genre fiction it's almost always either a spy thriller or a mystery. Mysteries tend to be more flexible; they can span great stretches of time and vary anywhere from screwball comedy to high concept art. Spy thrillers seem to be more limited. Some have literary aspirations and most people mention John Le Carre as an example of the literary bent of spy novels. I'm not sure I'm on board with that. Le Carre writes more subtly and with a greater capability to dramatize than most, but I'm not sure I would call any spy novels "literary" other than at the margin.
And that's not condescension. Genre writing takes as much talent and dedication as mainstream fiction; even more for well written works that find new angles and insights within the standard constraints. So when I say I feel lukewarm about The Devil's Advocate it's simply because it's heavy on the aspects of the spy genre that aren't to my taste.
Released in 1979 and set a couple of years into an imagined future, we are in the heart of the spy writer's glory days of the Cold War. (Spy writers really have never recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Islamic terrorism is just too crude and dirty by comparison.) Due to twin disaster of nature and incompetence, the Soviet Union is facing a crop failure that will inevitably lead to famine. Separately, a Ukrainian dissident has committed a terrorist act that he hopes will inspire rebellion in other nations subjugated by Russians. Despite being mortal enemies, the U.S. does not want such chaos to ensue since it will likely lead to the downfall of the Soviet premier and his replacement by a super hawk and inevitably change the cold war to hot. These twin threats and their resolution become linked over the course of the novel and we are treated to cast of international characters, nicely diverse in motivation, all with a role to play for good or evil. And, of course, a surprise twist at the very end.
The Devils Aternative reads like a movie yet to be made -- mix in a leading man (say a Christian Bale type), a good side man (Morgan Freeman would work; doesn't he always?), maybe a call backs to the genre (Harrison Ford as someone's superior officer; Michael Caine as a spymaster) and crack director (not Michael Bay please) and you got yourself a summer blockbuster. You could write the script nearly scene for scene with the novel (maybe that will be my next project).
It's about the perfect spy thriller and where it falls down for me is not a shortcoming of the book but my lack of appreciation for comprehensive technical description. The book is about a third too long. There are longish stretches where the technical points and procedures are explained in very thorough detail, something that is key for the genre fans. This adds to the realism and fires the imagination of readers (I won't call them spy-nerds, but if I did it would not be an insult) who are the bread and butter targets of espionage/military writers. A description of the inner workings of an oil laden supertanker is riveting to some. Not me. I would rather you cut to the chase because to me it doesn't matter. As long as the plot is plausible, I'm happy. I don't need proof. But that's why I am not the main target audience here. By the half-way point I found myself skipping and skimming to get to the resolution.
Should you read The Devils Alternative? If you love espionage ala Ludlum and Clancy, then yes. Read it now. You will not be disappointed. If you're looking for something to distract yourself with while your cable is out and you can't get the latest action flick -- sure. Otherwise...meh. You could do worse, but you may find it grueling in parts. Feel free to skip ahead now and then.
[Movies] Flick Check (HD Version)
Flick Check (HD Version): Since I now have that beautiful 65" plasma HD screen I figured I better view a couple of effects heavy movies to see what's up.
Inception -- Uh...what? It was visually stunning beyond my imagination, but I can't for the life of me figure out what was going on. I'll grant you I'm old and my mind is going, but still. I am reminded of an episode from the X-Files called Jose Chung's From Outer Space written by the brilliant Darin Morgan. At one point in that script we were three flashbacks deep, yet we never had any doubt where we were in the story. Not so in Inception. It was like drilling down in a fractal. Every view was different but how they connected was lost. Very pretty to look at though.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I -- Boring, even in high def. Even more boring than the Half Blood Prince. There are huge swaths of this movie given over to meaningful looks and pointless handwringing. I've never liked the replacement Dumbledore and he's at his worst here, at least he's dead now (Ack! Forget the Spoiler Alert!). It's getting repetitive what with horrible things happening but Harry always succeeding through the love of others. And what's with this whole Horcrux thing. Suddenly, out-of-the-blue, we find out about these horcrux thingies that can stop Voldemort. Deus Ex Machina, my friends. Still you gotta watch 'em to see how it turns out now, you're fully invested. But you don't have to admire it.
Inception -- Uh...what? It was visually stunning beyond my imagination, but I can't for the life of me figure out what was going on. I'll grant you I'm old and my mind is going, but still. I am reminded of an episode from the X-Files called Jose Chung's From Outer Space written by the brilliant Darin Morgan. At one point in that script we were three flashbacks deep, yet we never had any doubt where we were in the story. Not so in Inception. It was like drilling down in a fractal. Every view was different but how they connected was lost. Very pretty to look at though.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I -- Boring, even in high def. Even more boring than the Half Blood Prince. There are huge swaths of this movie given over to meaningful looks and pointless handwringing. I've never liked the replacement Dumbledore and he's at his worst here, at least he's dead now (Ack! Forget the Spoiler Alert!). It's getting repetitive what with horrible things happening but Harry always succeeding through the love of others. And what's with this whole Horcrux thing. Suddenly, out-of-the-blue, we find out about these horcrux thingies that can stop Voldemort. Deus Ex Machina, my friends. Still you gotta watch 'em to see how it turns out now, you're fully invested. But you don't have to admire it.
[House and Home] Waging War on Nature
Waging War on Nature: We had an enormous amount of snow this winter. It has all melted, plus it has been raining all Spring and the cricks-a-risin! The Huron River is much higher than I have ever seen it. Seriously, this is a huge issue. My lawn has lots of 45 degree slopes which give my little John Deere tractor fits in when it's wet. As the weight shifts off one side it just spins its wheels and leaves tread patches when the ground is wet (no limited-slip differential on lawn tractors that I know of). I was lucky to get my lawn done in one of the small open windows of clear days with a minimum of damage. Others, not so much. As I write this it's May 1st and some of my neighbors have six inch high grass and no clear days forecast. Some of them are looking having eight to ten inches of grass to mow before they can get to it. Horror.
More troublesome are box elder bugs. I had a swarm outside my back window -- literally thousands of them. They are harmless -- no sting, no bite, no eat stuff. But they are everywhere, and they get inside too, to escape the cold at night. For a while I was squishing five or six a day. You can call an exterminator to come out and spray for them, but another way to kill them is with soapy water, plain dishwashing liquid. So for the last month I been going out back before sunset with a spray bottle of soap and water and wiping out as many as I can. I think I can finally declare victory...or maybe they are just regrouping.
More annoying are woodpeckers. Prior to buying the house, one had savaged the chimney which now needs boards replaced (I got some money off on closing for that). Lately one had taken to actually pecking at a metal chimney nice and early in the AM. Apparently they do this to attract mates. If you have never had the experience, it is a near equivalent to being awoken by some jackhammer tiles near your bed. My initial reaction to this was to price out a bb gun, but that turns out to be illegal for some silly reason. So a couple of mornings I just went outside in my jammies and whipped a rock at the little bastard while voicing strong words. I think he got the message. I'll never look at Woody Woodpecker the same way again.
All this is important to me as I am now one of the local landed gentry. This is what we country folk fret over.
More troublesome are box elder bugs. I had a swarm outside my back window -- literally thousands of them. They are harmless -- no sting, no bite, no eat stuff. But they are everywhere, and they get inside too, to escape the cold at night. For a while I was squishing five or six a day. You can call an exterminator to come out and spray for them, but another way to kill them is with soapy water, plain dishwashing liquid. So for the last month I been going out back before sunset with a spray bottle of soap and water and wiping out as many as I can. I think I can finally declare victory...or maybe they are just regrouping.
More annoying are woodpeckers. Prior to buying the house, one had savaged the chimney which now needs boards replaced (I got some money off on closing for that). Lately one had taken to actually pecking at a metal chimney nice and early in the AM. Apparently they do this to attract mates. If you have never had the experience, it is a near equivalent to being awoken by some jackhammer tiles near your bed. My initial reaction to this was to price out a bb gun, but that turns out to be illegal for some silly reason. So a couple of mornings I just went outside in my jammies and whipped a rock at the little bastard while voicing strong words. I think he got the message. I'll never look at Woody Woodpecker the same way again.
All this is important to me as I am now one of the local landed gentry. This is what we country folk fret over.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
The Month That Was - March 2011
The Month That Was - March 2011: I was hoping to have Misspent Youth available on Kindle by now, and I am this close but not there yet. Current target is Monday the 11th. Planned price is $4.84, just like Business as Usual and Apple Pie.
Note: You know you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books, right? There is free software for everything from PCs to iPhones that lets you buy and read kindle books.
It's been a rough month with the house, but at last there is progress. The mud room is finally complete, more furniture is ordered (this will get me about half way to furnished), and a horrendous rattle in water pipe was solved without having to tear up the floorboards in the living room (fingers crossed). I still have a torturous pinging when the furnace kicks off and my lawn tractor is in the shop, but I am in a much better frame of mind about it than I was mid-month.
Also, I note that my home of Dexter, MI is the fastest growing municipality in Michigan. That's kind of like being the best ski resort in Tahiti, but still.
And I got to travel this month (although I really had no business doing so). You can read all about it below.
[Good Links] Shrinking Heads
[Tech] R.I.P. Zune
{Travel] Keys to My Heart
[Books] Book Look: Quantum Reality
Note: You know you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books, right? There is free software for everything from PCs to iPhones that lets you buy and read kindle books.
It's been a rough month with the house, but at last there is progress. The mud room is finally complete, more furniture is ordered (this will get me about half way to furnished), and a horrendous rattle in water pipe was solved without having to tear up the floorboards in the living room (fingers crossed). I still have a torturous pinging when the furnace kicks off and my lawn tractor is in the shop, but I am in a much better frame of mind about it than I was mid-month.
Also, I note that my home of Dexter, MI is the fastest growing municipality in Michigan. That's kind of like being the best ski resort in Tahiti, but still.
And I got to travel this month (although I really had no business doing so). You can read all about it below.
[Good Links] Shrinking Heads
[Tech] R.I.P. Zune
{Travel] Keys to My Heart
[Books] Book Look: Quantum Reality
[Good Links] Shrinking Heads
Shrinking Heads: Loved this article on therapy from someone who had three therapists fall asleep on him. Needless to say, they all manufactured a plausible psychological excuse.
Speaking of psychology, this on procrastination from a Hollywood psychologist to entertainment industry big wigs:
Speaking of psychology, this on procrastination from a Hollywood psychologist to entertainment industry big wigs:
By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels's practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung's Father archetype. "They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write," he says. "Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he's answerable to, but it's not human. It's Time itself that's passing inexorably. That's why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you're defying this authority figure." Procrastination, he says, is a "spurious form of immortality," the ego's way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. "You say, 'I'm surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,' " he says. 'I'm surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.' That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair."A writer might simply call that yielding to mortal fear.
[Tech] R.I.P. Zune
R.I.P. Zune: Very sad to see that Microsoft has given up on Zune. The service and music store will continue, but the player is dead. The knee-jerk analysis is that there was no way they could stand up to the iPod, which is perhaps true, but I think the bigger issue is that all dedicated music/media players are evolving into smartphones and tablets. With that in mind Microsoft is aiming to be an operating system provider, not a device maker. So they will be hammering on Windows Phone 7 and some tablet variation to battle Android and Apple in the ongoing struggle over pods and pads.
I have two Zunes -- a first gen 30 gig model that is my main music player and a second gen 8 gig that I keep loaded with workout music for runs and the gym. They excel at what I need them for, which is to play music -- not movies, not facebook, not Twitter, not re-orienting myself to the enlightened Tao of Apple. Basically, I want a super convenient Sony Walkman. But once again, it looks like the world is passing me by. And just when I think I've finally caught up to it.
I am also quite possibly the last person on Earth still using a Motorola RAZR for a phone. The lagging edge has served me well. And I'm in no hurry to change. I have a pay-as-you-go plan for voice and text and it literally costs me about $200 a year for what I need. And I feel confident that Microsoft will continue to support existing Zunes as legacy products (they are actually pretty god about that), so I may be OK for some time to come.
Still the inevitable change is, well, inevitable. At some point I will probably have a smartphone and a tablet. Probably about the time they are beginning to go obsolete.
I have two Zunes -- a first gen 30 gig model that is my main music player and a second gen 8 gig that I keep loaded with workout music for runs and the gym. They excel at what I need them for, which is to play music -- not movies, not facebook, not Twitter, not re-orienting myself to the enlightened Tao of Apple. Basically, I want a super convenient Sony Walkman. But once again, it looks like the world is passing me by. And just when I think I've finally caught up to it.
I am also quite possibly the last person on Earth still using a Motorola RAZR for a phone. The lagging edge has served me well. And I'm in no hurry to change. I have a pay-as-you-go plan for voice and text and it literally costs me about $200 a year for what I need. And I feel confident that Microsoft will continue to support existing Zunes as legacy products (they are actually pretty god about that), so I may be OK for some time to come.
Still the inevitable change is, well, inevitable. At some point I will probably have a smartphone and a tablet. Probably about the time they are beginning to go obsolete.
[Travel] Keys to My Heart
Keys to My Heart: [[Photos to come.]] I do still love Florida. First, Palm Beach. I flew in on Friday, arriving in the early afternoon (a fine enough flight, no rant needed), snagged my rental, and headed for Worth Ave.
It's tempting to resort to clich‚d descriptions of gauche, wealthy WASPs; white-haired men sporting colorful khakis and reconstructed cougars dropping half a grand on a hairstyle. The clich‚s would be accurate. The street is peppered with Bentleys and Rolls and high-end Mercedes. Anything below a Lexus sticks out. Gucci and Neiman Marcus and Jimmy Choo and Cartier and Brooks Bros and Polo. The street-side real estate glossy magazine is filled with eight-digit homes with private boat docks and servant's quarters. Women are decked out in desperate housewife level finery, towing pugs and papillions. Men with fishing and golf logo'd sportswear and millionaire-banker jawlines are killing time over single barrel bourbons while their wives/mistresses are overspending. And tourists, of course. In fact anyone who didn't fit in the above category could be presumed to be a tourist.
Now many of you are cringing at the thought of such a gaudy display of wealth and status. Leaving aside the questionable merit and motives for such anti-snobbery, let me just say that from an aesthetic standpoint, you would have to acknowledge the place is remarkably beautiful. The architecture is old Floridian, with the quasi-moorish influences in the roofs and turrets. There is a nice clock tower at the end of the street where the ocean begins. The beach is a perfect Florida Atlantic Ocean beach. And the streets are absolutely spotless. Decadent or not, it's a good place to hang out.
I confined myself to taking some photos and having an al fresco dinner of Neapolitan pizza and white wine. Then back to my hotel room. Big day tomorrow.
The plan: Pick up Miss Kate and the airport, swing by Barry University to get Miss Anna and barrel-ass it to Key West. And that we did. A brief stop in Key Largo at the renowned Key Largo Conch House where they have an "As Seen on the Food Network" banner up and are happy to mention all their awards and the fact that an actress named Jorja Fox from CSI-Las Vegas once enjoyed their fish tacos. The food was tasty and the atmosphere was pure Key Largo -- ultra casual, open air amidst the palms, fishing-hole kitschy d‚cor, and somewhat lackadaisical service. Late in the day we pulled into the Reach Resort in Key West proper.
In recent years, Hilton has taken over two resorts on the southwest side of the island under the auspices of the Waldorf Group, which is to say their luxury recreational group (as opposed to Conrad, which is their luxury business group). The two resorts are Casa Marina and the Reach Resort. They are separated by about four residential blocks and services can be used seamlessly across resorts.
If I had to characterize them differently, I would say Casa Marina is larger and more traditionally resorty. Reach is smaller and going for a more hip, boutiquey feel. Both are exquisitely beautiful.
Reach was something of a mixed bag for us. It was 5:30 before our room was ready, which was really not that big a problem since we were able to familiarize ourselves with the bar and the pool side amenities. The room itself was more than a little, um, challenging. A handle to the closet came off at the touch and the mini-fridge could have woken the dead, but strangest was the layout. While there was a bit of a hallway between the bedroom and bathroom, the bathroom itself, including commode, was not separated from the bedroom by a door. That was truly creepy. I mean, it is sufficiently isolated, I'm sure, but I really need to close and lock the door when I am going potty. It may be psychological, but I just feel more civilized when the sounds and smells of my bodily functions are fully private.
But apart from that, Reach is a top notch place. I would have been happy to stay a few more days and spend some time on the private beach and maybe sample the steakhouse, called Strip which is accentuated with large pictures of naked women. Like I said, they are look for a hip, edgy vibe at Reach.
I should point out that, despite my snarkiness, the staff was unfailingly friendly and helpful. That is hugely important and trumps all the little peccadilloes.
Reach is one block east of the south end of Duval Street. And Duval Street is where the action is. Stretching the length of the island north to south, Duval is lined with innumerable crap shops, bars, and miscellaneous nonsense (including at least one "adult club"). Since this is my fourth visit to Key West, I'm sure I've written about Duval Street before. I suppose you could consider it similar the Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but somewhat less lurid, although no less profane. By their nature, Conch Republic types have more of a chilled-out hash-house streak than the bayou hustlers in the Big Easy.
We walked down Duval towards Mallory Square, stopping here and there, hoping to snag a waterside dinner table to catch the sunset. Of course the waterfront was packed on a Saturday night so we moved inland a block and had a fine open-air rooftop dinner at the appropriately named Rooftop Caf‚.
Up early the following morning for the big adventure to The Dry Tortugas. Little more than a collection of coral reefs and sandbars, the Dry Tortugas lay about 70 miles west of Key West. (They're called "dry" because there is no fresh water, not because you can't drink there...although you can't drink there.) You get there via the Yankee Freedom ferry as part of an arranged tour, and a very, very nicely done tour at that. If you've done boating/snorkeling day tours before, you know they can be very regimented and controlled. Not so with the Yankee Freedom. It's not cheap, but when you add up everything that's included it is really a great deal. The ferry ride, park entry fee, breakfast, lunch, snorkeling gear, and a tour of Fort Jefferson -- all included. Bring sunscreen and towels. You only have to pay for drinks and afternoon snacks, and I suppose you could pre-pack those too.
The key thing that differentiates this from other tours is that once you are at the destination, you are pretty much on your own timetable. They do guided tours of the Fort at two or three times and you can sign up for any, or just tour it by yourself -- there are placards for a self guided tour. The Fort is a very cool place; labyrinthine old brick work that virtually shouts of its violent and sordid history. It's a moat-outlined three-level hexagon with an expansive, green, cactus and mangrove filled courtyard and astounding 360 degree views from the top. Reserve an hour for touring and explorations. Then head to the beach for some outstanding snorkeling in the reef-protected waters. Huge schools of silvery fish try to stay clear of the diving pelicans, just yards from your mask. Honestly the best snorkeling experience of my life (although that's not saying much). Top it all off with a couple of drinks on the trip home and it makes for one awesome day. When visiting Key West you really must take the Yankee Freedom to the Dry Tortugas. I can't recommend this highly enough.
Thanks to the room availability SNAFU at check-in, we were able to snag a late check-out the following day so I took the opportunity for a 5-mile run in the morning before the heat was upon us. It was an interesting experience in the contrasts of the island. Jogging along the south shore it's pretty clear to see that is the "bad side of town," if there really is such a thing in Key West, but this is clearly where the homeless guys and vagrants hang out on the benches and sleep off whatever is ailing them. The beach here is long, but not particularly attractive and the winds whip up hard, as evidenced by the near constant figures of kiteboarders. The core of the island is residential and the houses -- generally very cozy and well cared for behind their old growth shade trees -- are fairly tightly packed. The north shore is where the docks are -- fishing charters, old schooners doing sunset sails, various ferries. As you move west you reach the heart of Duval Street and Mallory Square, then continuing southwest you encounter the coiffured realm of Truman Annex, home to Harry Turman's Southern White House. Along the far western shore is a naval station and the docking area for the big cruise ships. Keep heading back south and you eventually reach Ft. Zachary State Park, the site of the only good beach in Key West and some truly funky beach architecture. Turning back east toward the heart of town takes you through the smallish old town with Cuban and Haitian shops and divey diners. Key West is a remarkably varied place for such a small island.
I love Key West. Certainly one of my most favorite places in Florida (but that tends to change with each new trip). I've been four times and I still have much to explore. I was sad to leave.
The last couple of nights we settled in the Coral Gables. In the weirdness that is Miami you often find nice upscale neighborhoods next to downtrodden quasi-ghettos. Just a stone's throw from Little Havana (which is not the worst place in Miami, but not remotely upscale), Coral Gables could be lifted from any high-end urban metropolis. A fine set of restaurants and shops, good area for walking about. If you need to stay in the city, as opposed to at the beaches, you probably should shoot for Coral Gables.
Just a quick swing towards downtown then across a bridge and you find yourself on Key Biscayne -- a lovely island with a predominantly country club feel about it. The exception to this is the Bill Baggs State Park which features a terrific beach, nature trails, etc. Sadly, we only had about an hour there, but it was enough time to slap on the bathing suit and go out and bob around in the warm Atlantic Ocean while some sort of photo shoot (featuring children) was proceeding on the beach. Not surprising since the beach here often shows up on the various "most beautiful" lists. I first set foot in the Florida Atlantic nearly 40 years ago and it still feels like home.
Our final evening was Anna's birthday dinner, an adventure that included my getting lost in the car, my getting lost on foot, and finally driving a trio of college coeds to the world's sketchiest liquor store on the edge of Little Haiti to buy a bottle of Grey Goose through an armored window. It was not my finest hour.
I couldn't count the number of times I've visited Florida, but I still love it. Facing the fact that I will likely end up here one day when I take my place in God's waiting room just isn't all that depressing to me. I think I could adapt to being a Worth Street trolling, white haired millionaire, clad in Tommy Bahama. Hell, I wouldn't mind being known as that cranky old man on Duval Street.
It's tempting to resort to clich‚d descriptions of gauche, wealthy WASPs; white-haired men sporting colorful khakis and reconstructed cougars dropping half a grand on a hairstyle. The clich‚s would be accurate. The street is peppered with Bentleys and Rolls and high-end Mercedes. Anything below a Lexus sticks out. Gucci and Neiman Marcus and Jimmy Choo and Cartier and Brooks Bros and Polo. The street-side real estate glossy magazine is filled with eight-digit homes with private boat docks and servant's quarters. Women are decked out in desperate housewife level finery, towing pugs and papillions. Men with fishing and golf logo'd sportswear and millionaire-banker jawlines are killing time over single barrel bourbons while their wives/mistresses are overspending. And tourists, of course. In fact anyone who didn't fit in the above category could be presumed to be a tourist.
Now many of you are cringing at the thought of such a gaudy display of wealth and status. Leaving aside the questionable merit and motives for such anti-snobbery, let me just say that from an aesthetic standpoint, you would have to acknowledge the place is remarkably beautiful. The architecture is old Floridian, with the quasi-moorish influences in the roofs and turrets. There is a nice clock tower at the end of the street where the ocean begins. The beach is a perfect Florida Atlantic Ocean beach. And the streets are absolutely spotless. Decadent or not, it's a good place to hang out.
I confined myself to taking some photos and having an al fresco dinner of Neapolitan pizza and white wine. Then back to my hotel room. Big day tomorrow.
The plan: Pick up Miss Kate and the airport, swing by Barry University to get Miss Anna and barrel-ass it to Key West. And that we did. A brief stop in Key Largo at the renowned Key Largo Conch House where they have an "As Seen on the Food Network" banner up and are happy to mention all their awards and the fact that an actress named Jorja Fox from CSI-Las Vegas once enjoyed their fish tacos. The food was tasty and the atmosphere was pure Key Largo -- ultra casual, open air amidst the palms, fishing-hole kitschy d‚cor, and somewhat lackadaisical service. Late in the day we pulled into the Reach Resort in Key West proper.
In recent years, Hilton has taken over two resorts on the southwest side of the island under the auspices of the Waldorf Group, which is to say their luxury recreational group (as opposed to Conrad, which is their luxury business group). The two resorts are Casa Marina and the Reach Resort. They are separated by about four residential blocks and services can be used seamlessly across resorts.
If I had to characterize them differently, I would say Casa Marina is larger and more traditionally resorty. Reach is smaller and going for a more hip, boutiquey feel. Both are exquisitely beautiful.
Reach was something of a mixed bag for us. It was 5:30 before our room was ready, which was really not that big a problem since we were able to familiarize ourselves with the bar and the pool side amenities. The room itself was more than a little, um, challenging. A handle to the closet came off at the touch and the mini-fridge could have woken the dead, but strangest was the layout. While there was a bit of a hallway between the bedroom and bathroom, the bathroom itself, including commode, was not separated from the bedroom by a door. That was truly creepy. I mean, it is sufficiently isolated, I'm sure, but I really need to close and lock the door when I am going potty. It may be psychological, but I just feel more civilized when the sounds and smells of my bodily functions are fully private.
But apart from that, Reach is a top notch place. I would have been happy to stay a few more days and spend some time on the private beach and maybe sample the steakhouse, called Strip which is accentuated with large pictures of naked women. Like I said, they are look for a hip, edgy vibe at Reach.
I should point out that, despite my snarkiness, the staff was unfailingly friendly and helpful. That is hugely important and trumps all the little peccadilloes.
Reach is one block east of the south end of Duval Street. And Duval Street is where the action is. Stretching the length of the island north to south, Duval is lined with innumerable crap shops, bars, and miscellaneous nonsense (including at least one "adult club"). Since this is my fourth visit to Key West, I'm sure I've written about Duval Street before. I suppose you could consider it similar the Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but somewhat less lurid, although no less profane. By their nature, Conch Republic types have more of a chilled-out hash-house streak than the bayou hustlers in the Big Easy.
We walked down Duval towards Mallory Square, stopping here and there, hoping to snag a waterside dinner table to catch the sunset. Of course the waterfront was packed on a Saturday night so we moved inland a block and had a fine open-air rooftop dinner at the appropriately named Rooftop Caf‚.
Up early the following morning for the big adventure to The Dry Tortugas. Little more than a collection of coral reefs and sandbars, the Dry Tortugas lay about 70 miles west of Key West. (They're called "dry" because there is no fresh water, not because you can't drink there...although you can't drink there.) You get there via the Yankee Freedom ferry as part of an arranged tour, and a very, very nicely done tour at that. If you've done boating/snorkeling day tours before, you know they can be very regimented and controlled. Not so with the Yankee Freedom. It's not cheap, but when you add up everything that's included it is really a great deal. The ferry ride, park entry fee, breakfast, lunch, snorkeling gear, and a tour of Fort Jefferson -- all included. Bring sunscreen and towels. You only have to pay for drinks and afternoon snacks, and I suppose you could pre-pack those too.
The key thing that differentiates this from other tours is that once you are at the destination, you are pretty much on your own timetable. They do guided tours of the Fort at two or three times and you can sign up for any, or just tour it by yourself -- there are placards for a self guided tour. The Fort is a very cool place; labyrinthine old brick work that virtually shouts of its violent and sordid history. It's a moat-outlined three-level hexagon with an expansive, green, cactus and mangrove filled courtyard and astounding 360 degree views from the top. Reserve an hour for touring and explorations. Then head to the beach for some outstanding snorkeling in the reef-protected waters. Huge schools of silvery fish try to stay clear of the diving pelicans, just yards from your mask. Honestly the best snorkeling experience of my life (although that's not saying much). Top it all off with a couple of drinks on the trip home and it makes for one awesome day. When visiting Key West you really must take the Yankee Freedom to the Dry Tortugas. I can't recommend this highly enough.
Thanks to the room availability SNAFU at check-in, we were able to snag a late check-out the following day so I took the opportunity for a 5-mile run in the morning before the heat was upon us. It was an interesting experience in the contrasts of the island. Jogging along the south shore it's pretty clear to see that is the "bad side of town," if there really is such a thing in Key West, but this is clearly where the homeless guys and vagrants hang out on the benches and sleep off whatever is ailing them. The beach here is long, but not particularly attractive and the winds whip up hard, as evidenced by the near constant figures of kiteboarders. The core of the island is residential and the houses -- generally very cozy and well cared for behind their old growth shade trees -- are fairly tightly packed. The north shore is where the docks are -- fishing charters, old schooners doing sunset sails, various ferries. As you move west you reach the heart of Duval Street and Mallory Square, then continuing southwest you encounter the coiffured realm of Truman Annex, home to Harry Turman's Southern White House. Along the far western shore is a naval station and the docking area for the big cruise ships. Keep heading back south and you eventually reach Ft. Zachary State Park, the site of the only good beach in Key West and some truly funky beach architecture. Turning back east toward the heart of town takes you through the smallish old town with Cuban and Haitian shops and divey diners. Key West is a remarkably varied place for such a small island.
I love Key West. Certainly one of my most favorite places in Florida (but that tends to change with each new trip). I've been four times and I still have much to explore. I was sad to leave.
The last couple of nights we settled in the Coral Gables. In the weirdness that is Miami you often find nice upscale neighborhoods next to downtrodden quasi-ghettos. Just a stone's throw from Little Havana (which is not the worst place in Miami, but not remotely upscale), Coral Gables could be lifted from any high-end urban metropolis. A fine set of restaurants and shops, good area for walking about. If you need to stay in the city, as opposed to at the beaches, you probably should shoot for Coral Gables.
Just a quick swing towards downtown then across a bridge and you find yourself on Key Biscayne -- a lovely island with a predominantly country club feel about it. The exception to this is the Bill Baggs State Park which features a terrific beach, nature trails, etc. Sadly, we only had about an hour there, but it was enough time to slap on the bathing suit and go out and bob around in the warm Atlantic Ocean while some sort of photo shoot (featuring children) was proceeding on the beach. Not surprising since the beach here often shows up on the various "most beautiful" lists. I first set foot in the Florida Atlantic nearly 40 years ago and it still feels like home.
Our final evening was Anna's birthday dinner, an adventure that included my getting lost in the car, my getting lost on foot, and finally driving a trio of college coeds to the world's sketchiest liquor store on the edge of Little Haiti to buy a bottle of Grey Goose through an armored window. It was not my finest hour.
I couldn't count the number of times I've visited Florida, but I still love it. Facing the fact that I will likely end up here one day when I take my place in God's waiting room just isn't all that depressing to me. I think I could adapt to being a Worth Street trolling, white haired millionaire, clad in Tommy Bahama. Hell, I wouldn't mind being known as that cranky old man on Duval Street.
[Books] Book Look: Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert
Book Look: Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert: I guess you can consider this part 2 of my continuing forays into the wackness that is reality. The last month was an exploration of the nature of time, reaching back to the beginning of the universe. This time it's all about the meaning of Quantum Theory.
Quantum Theory is the most audacious and intellectually challenging concept ever devised. It addresses a known situation wherein a particle doesn't exist in until it is observed or measured. Now, let's be clear on that. It's not that we don't know it's if it's there or not until we look at it, it is that is literally doesn't exist. OK, that's not exactly true, but in the common sense of existing, it doesn't. It exists in a bizarre state called a probability wave in which it is in all possible places we could see it at once. Only when we look does it settle into a particle in one spot.
Bizarre and surreal. Yet it is true. It is going on around us all the time, these particles popping into reality. The best discussion I know of on this idea is a lecture from Richard Feynman (made available courtesy Microsoft, you may need to view it in IE). It's worth watching if you're curious about this.
So you see what I mean about wackness. This makes the theory of relativity seem positively tame.
Early in the twentieth century a number of scientists (Werner Heisenberg is the big name here, but he was one of many who had a hand) came up with Quantum Theory to deal with this. It is an enormously complicated set of laws based on something called waveform physics, which generates exact answers to all experimentation done in the quantum realm. In other words, we know exactly what rules govern this stuff -- verified by experiments over and over again in the ensuing years. We can make very accurate predictions about what will happen when and where, but we don't really know what it means as far as the nature of reality. I mean, really, what is this nonsense about being in all possible places at once?
This is what Nick Herbert tries to sort out. In the end he can't, of course, because it's not something that is known. (In fact, some make the argument that it can't be known.) So he has to settle for reviewing the possibilities. Unfortunately, many of possibilities devolve into very unsatisfying conclusions. Herbert does a thorough job, but let me shortcut to a few interesting ones.
Observer Created Reality -- this is the new age notion that, in a very real sense, reality as we know it is created when we observe it. Now, that leaves wide open the question of what counts as observation. Einstein belittled this by saying (paraphrased) that he could not imagine a mouse having some creative control over the universe. At least one physicist has proposed quite scientifically that reality only occurs when it comes into purview of intelligent consciousness. This leads to the view of the universe as a lattice of interconnected observations, outside of which there are only probability waves. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, did it really fall? The answer is, apparently, there is no tree only the probability of one.
Many Worlds -- this was conceived in the early sixties. It stems from the whole notion that unobserved particles exist in all possible states prior to observation. One thing that quantum physicists are really keen on is finding a way that there is nothing special about our existence. If ours is one existence that occurred out of an uncountable number of possible turns the universe could have taken over its life, that leaves these guys having to figure out why this one instead of the others. So if these bizzare quantum things exists in all possible places prior to being observed, why did they just happen to end up the way they did? (As a gambler, this problem doesn't bother me. Bad beats happen. Trust me on this.) The many worlds theory gets around this by saying they all happen, you just can't see the others because they exist in a parallel universe. Then science fiction writers figure out ways around that and we get Sliders and Spock with a beard.
Action at a Distance -- not really a conception of Quantum Reality but a fact that must be accounted for, and frankly, it gets my gold star for the single weirdest thing in the universe. Also called quantum entanglement, this tells us that unconnected things can have "knowledge" of each other. It is possible to get two particles in a state such that they mirror each other. Imagine two particles one charged negative and one charged positive (it's not really a charge, but think of it that way for the sake of argument). If you put these particles in an "entangled" state, when one particle changes charge the other also does at the same instant. The key thing is that there is no need for one particle to indicate the change to the other; it's as if they are physically connected. The kicker is it doesn't matter how far apart they are. They could be the full instance of the known universe apart and they would still change instantaneously. This, as Herbert points out, is essentially voodoo. Stick a pin in a doll in Haiti and some poor schlub in Peoria screams in pain. Except with entangled particles it actually happens. It looks like in some sense, everything in the universe is connected as if it were a single object. I hate that. It makes me feel like I'm in some kind of hippie-mystic acid trip.
Einstein never warmed to Quantum Theory. Of the unobserved universe being created of probability waves, he famously said (paraphrase), "God does not play dice with the universe." He was less adamant in time but always felt that it the notion of the quasi-existential, probabilistic state required of a particle prior to observation was untenable. Even as more and more experimental validation came he never gave in. In the end the best he could argue was that the universe is really made up a normal stuff and the Quantum Theory is incomplete. That there is something else to it that we have yet to discover that makes the numbers work out for the normal stuff of the universe without resorting to the wackness. Interestingly, a group of people called the neo-classists have tried to do just that, but to account for Action at a Distance they have had to resort to something going faster than the speed of light, which Einstein proved impossible.
As you can tell, the bottom line here is that nobody has a friggin' clue about the essential nature of the world we live in. We can predict what will happen in specific circumstances quite well. Perhaps even better that when Issac Newton sorted the world out back in the day. Because of this we can make use of the nature of things without actually knowing the story behind them. But on the objective nature of Reality, our ignorance is monumental.
Herbert does a clear, precise cataloging of the theories, their proponents, and their shortcomings. He does not talk down nor does he gloss over issues. He chooses an unconventional demonstration of observer created reality using polarization of light through a crystal which is more than a bit confusing. I highly recommend the Feynman lecture linked above for that demonstration. He also goes into some detail about the sorts of experiments that are done to validate Quantum Theory, but I could not follow them.
Should you read Quanum Reality? If you have a passing familiarity with this topic and while you've read or seen a bit about it, you still don't know what it all means, then yes. Herbert is at his best when trying to dig into what all this means rather than the experimental justification. At that he excels. If you have little or no knowledge of quantum theory, I don't recommend this as a starting point. More popular recent works by someone like Brian Greene or Paul Davies would be a better place to start. But do try to get here eventually; it's an eye-opener to our ignorance. And in the end, while Herbert has his favorite ideas, like every other physicist, one suspects that he realizes that at the moment, the metaphysical theories just reflect the pre-existing human bias of the scientists involved. The truth is, we just don't know, and we may not for may many years to come. My guess is that when we are resorting to the stuff of fantasy and sci-fi, we are probably as far from having any answers as we have ever been.
Quantum Theory is the most audacious and intellectually challenging concept ever devised. It addresses a known situation wherein a particle doesn't exist in until it is observed or measured. Now, let's be clear on that. It's not that we don't know it's if it's there or not until we look at it, it is that is literally doesn't exist. OK, that's not exactly true, but in the common sense of existing, it doesn't. It exists in a bizarre state called a probability wave in which it is in all possible places we could see it at once. Only when we look does it settle into a particle in one spot.
Bizarre and surreal. Yet it is true. It is going on around us all the time, these particles popping into reality. The best discussion I know of on this idea is a lecture from Richard Feynman (made available courtesy Microsoft, you may need to view it in IE). It's worth watching if you're curious about this.
So you see what I mean about wackness. This makes the theory of relativity seem positively tame.
Early in the twentieth century a number of scientists (Werner Heisenberg is the big name here, but he was one of many who had a hand) came up with Quantum Theory to deal with this. It is an enormously complicated set of laws based on something called waveform physics, which generates exact answers to all experimentation done in the quantum realm. In other words, we know exactly what rules govern this stuff -- verified by experiments over and over again in the ensuing years. We can make very accurate predictions about what will happen when and where, but we don't really know what it means as far as the nature of reality. I mean, really, what is this nonsense about being in all possible places at once?
This is what Nick Herbert tries to sort out. In the end he can't, of course, because it's not something that is known. (In fact, some make the argument that it can't be known.) So he has to settle for reviewing the possibilities. Unfortunately, many of possibilities devolve into very unsatisfying conclusions. Herbert does a thorough job, but let me shortcut to a few interesting ones.
Observer Created Reality -- this is the new age notion that, in a very real sense, reality as we know it is created when we observe it. Now, that leaves wide open the question of what counts as observation. Einstein belittled this by saying (paraphrased) that he could not imagine a mouse having some creative control over the universe. At least one physicist has proposed quite scientifically that reality only occurs when it comes into purview of intelligent consciousness. This leads to the view of the universe as a lattice of interconnected observations, outside of which there are only probability waves. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, did it really fall? The answer is, apparently, there is no tree only the probability of one.
Many Worlds -- this was conceived in the early sixties. It stems from the whole notion that unobserved particles exist in all possible states prior to observation. One thing that quantum physicists are really keen on is finding a way that there is nothing special about our existence. If ours is one existence that occurred out of an uncountable number of possible turns the universe could have taken over its life, that leaves these guys having to figure out why this one instead of the others. So if these bizzare quantum things exists in all possible places prior to being observed, why did they just happen to end up the way they did? (As a gambler, this problem doesn't bother me. Bad beats happen. Trust me on this.) The many worlds theory gets around this by saying they all happen, you just can't see the others because they exist in a parallel universe. Then science fiction writers figure out ways around that and we get Sliders and Spock with a beard.
Action at a Distance -- not really a conception of Quantum Reality but a fact that must be accounted for, and frankly, it gets my gold star for the single weirdest thing in the universe. Also called quantum entanglement, this tells us that unconnected things can have "knowledge" of each other. It is possible to get two particles in a state such that they mirror each other. Imagine two particles one charged negative and one charged positive (it's not really a charge, but think of it that way for the sake of argument). If you put these particles in an "entangled" state, when one particle changes charge the other also does at the same instant. The key thing is that there is no need for one particle to indicate the change to the other; it's as if they are physically connected. The kicker is it doesn't matter how far apart they are. They could be the full instance of the known universe apart and they would still change instantaneously. This, as Herbert points out, is essentially voodoo. Stick a pin in a doll in Haiti and some poor schlub in Peoria screams in pain. Except with entangled particles it actually happens. It looks like in some sense, everything in the universe is connected as if it were a single object. I hate that. It makes me feel like I'm in some kind of hippie-mystic acid trip.
Einstein never warmed to Quantum Theory. Of the unobserved universe being created of probability waves, he famously said (paraphrase), "God does not play dice with the universe." He was less adamant in time but always felt that it the notion of the quasi-existential, probabilistic state required of a particle prior to observation was untenable. Even as more and more experimental validation came he never gave in. In the end the best he could argue was that the universe is really made up a normal stuff and the Quantum Theory is incomplete. That there is something else to it that we have yet to discover that makes the numbers work out for the normal stuff of the universe without resorting to the wackness. Interestingly, a group of people called the neo-classists have tried to do just that, but to account for Action at a Distance they have had to resort to something going faster than the speed of light, which Einstein proved impossible.
As you can tell, the bottom line here is that nobody has a friggin' clue about the essential nature of the world we live in. We can predict what will happen in specific circumstances quite well. Perhaps even better that when Issac Newton sorted the world out back in the day. Because of this we can make use of the nature of things without actually knowing the story behind them. But on the objective nature of Reality, our ignorance is monumental.
Herbert does a clear, precise cataloging of the theories, their proponents, and their shortcomings. He does not talk down nor does he gloss over issues. He chooses an unconventional demonstration of observer created reality using polarization of light through a crystal which is more than a bit confusing. I highly recommend the Feynman lecture linked above for that demonstration. He also goes into some detail about the sorts of experiments that are done to validate Quantum Theory, but I could not follow them.
Should you read Quanum Reality? If you have a passing familiarity with this topic and while you've read or seen a bit about it, you still don't know what it all means, then yes. Herbert is at his best when trying to dig into what all this means rather than the experimental justification. At that he excels. If you have little or no knowledge of quantum theory, I don't recommend this as a starting point. More popular recent works by someone like Brian Greene or Paul Davies would be a better place to start. But do try to get here eventually; it's an eye-opener to our ignorance. And in the end, while Herbert has his favorite ideas, like every other physicist, one suspects that he realizes that at the moment, the metaphysical theories just reflect the pre-existing human bias of the scientists involved. The truth is, we just don't know, and we may not for may many years to come. My guess is that when we are resorting to the stuff of fantasy and sci-fi, we are probably as far from having any answers as we have ever been.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
The Month That Was - February 2011
The Month That Was - February 2011: The first time I used the snow blower it was kind of fun. A novelty for me. The next couple of times I was grateful to be able to clear my sizeable driveway so quickly. By the fifth time I had to take it out in a month and a half, I was cursing the damn thing as a proxy for all the damn blizzards we've had. I'm beginning to fear having to mow the damn lawn come spring.
This month featured a too-short long weekend to a couple of Atlantic seaboard beach towns that were new to me. More below.
Taxes loom large in my existence these days. Larger, for the moment, than the Kindle edition of Misspent Youth, but that will change soon (or at least by April 15th).
And the check engine light came on in my car again, because I needed to spend a few hours sitting in a cramped waiting room reading a two year old issue of Good Housekeeping while CNN drones away in the corner. I just haven't done enough of that in my life.
[Movies] Why Movies Suck, and Hollywood Too
[Books] Book Look: Krakatoa
[Travel] Cold Beach Mix
[House and Home] House Schooling
This month featured a too-short long weekend to a couple of Atlantic seaboard beach towns that were new to me. More below.
Taxes loom large in my existence these days. Larger, for the moment, than the Kindle edition of Misspent Youth, but that will change soon (or at least by April 15th).
And the check engine light came on in my car again, because I needed to spend a few hours sitting in a cramped waiting room reading a two year old issue of Good Housekeeping while CNN drones away in the corner. I just haven't done enough of that in my life.
[Movies] Why Movies Suck, and Hollywood Too
[Books] Book Look: Krakatoa
[Travel] Cold Beach Mix
[House and Home] House Schooling
[Movies] Why Movies Suck, and Hollywood Too
Why Movies Suck, and Hollywood Too: Um, yeah. To elaborate, I have been making the point for years the TV is vastly superior to film. Now it's looks like I am may be an unheralded prophet. (It looks like that to me anyway.) The trope of movie suckitude has been around for ages, but coupling it with TV's ascendency has been rare. Now a recent article in GQ suggests the zeitgeist may be coming around to my point of view.
Semi-related, I know pretty close to zero about celebrity culture. Seriously, I was at a friend's for the Oscar telecast and it was populated almost entirely of people I could not name and knew nothing of. But every once in a while, a celebrity gains enough fame or infamy to hit my radar.
Let me just say Charlie Sheen is a god among men. Charlie Sheen shoots rays of fire and poetry out of his hardened fists. He has the blood of a tiger -- a tiger that is a genius and always wins. He is the new drug Huey Lewis was searching for. Anyone who is not Charlie Sheen is a pussy. And a wussy. Charlie Sheen is the man Mel Gibson wishes he could be, and the man Tom Cruise wishes he could love. Charlie Sheen is the chairman and CEO of Charlie Bros. Studios.
"And for all those people who spent years trying to get movies made at all the companies that are now gone, there's now one place to work where you can get respectfully treated and fairly judged," says Rudin. "It's HBO."This is all I'm saying. The article author half-seriously blames Top Gun. An acceptable thesis. Worth a read, but it's nothing you haven't heard from me before.
So cable has become the custodian of the "good" niche; entities like HBO, Showtime, and AMC have found a business model with which they can satisfy a deep public appetite for long-form drama. Their original series don't need to attract huge audiences; and as a result, any number of ambitious writers, directors, and producers who might long ago have pitched their best stuff to studios now turn to the small screen, because one thing nobody in cable television will ever say to them is "We don't tell stories anymore."
Semi-related, I know pretty close to zero about celebrity culture. Seriously, I was at a friend's for the Oscar telecast and it was populated almost entirely of people I could not name and knew nothing of. But every once in a while, a celebrity gains enough fame or infamy to hit my radar.
Let me just say Charlie Sheen is a god among men. Charlie Sheen shoots rays of fire and poetry out of his hardened fists. He has the blood of a tiger -- a tiger that is a genius and always wins. He is the new drug Huey Lewis was searching for. Anyone who is not Charlie Sheen is a pussy. And a wussy. Charlie Sheen is the man Mel Gibson wishes he could be, and the man Tom Cruise wishes he could love. Charlie Sheen is the chairman and CEO of Charlie Bros. Studios.
[Books] Book Look: Krakatoa
Book Look: Krakatoa by William Manchester: The loudest sound in recorded history occurred on August 27th 1883 when Krakatoa, a wee little island in Indonesia just west of Java, vaporized itself in the last and largest of four major explosions. Krakatoa was one of the most cataclysmic events ever witnessed by humans and there are no end of descriptive superlatives that can be employed, but that's the one that gets me: The Loudest Noise in Recorded History.
It was heard 3000 miles away at the far end of the Indian Ocean. It shattered the eardrums of sailors on ships nearby. It reverberated in shockwave form around the world seven times over the course of the next five days (though only measureable by sensitive instruments). I don't know why that one stands out to me over the final explosion being some multiple times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon, or the pyroclastic flows that boiled alive folks on the nearby islands, or the tsunamis that killed the majority of the victims, or the rain of hot ash, or the ship hulks found far inland, and so forth. It's the noise that gets me.
The full story of Krakatoa naturally goes way before and beyond the final cataclysmic event itself. This is problematic for the book, because Manchester is not the most focused fellow. Krakatoa is part history, part personal memoir, part science, part commentary, which is fine if there is a firm structure. There isn't. Reading Krakatoa is like having an extended conversation over dinner and drinks with a charming, but scatter-minded, academic who drifts off on long tangents.
We start by going all the way back to pre-colonial history and the first sightings of Krakatoa by the Portuguese and how it came to be named and the evidence for the timing of previous known eruptions. All this is well and good, but could have been aptly summarized in a single chapter instead of several. We then step into the scientific side of things with a long discussion of the genesis of plate tectonics and how it explains the long ridges of volcanic activity that cross the globe, with a generous and fairly romantic aside of the author's personal experiences as a young student doing research in Greenland.
We should now be on about chapter two or three, but we are roughly half-way through the book and we still haven't got to the meat of things. Even in the microcosm of the description of the eruption proper we seem to hop back and forth from island to island and forward and back in time. It was very hard to get a sense for the actual events in a coherent timeline.
Manchester does better in placing things in social context. The advent of the telegraph and other bits and pieces of scientific technology and their role in events is nicely done. The explanation of the Muslim uprising in the days following Krakatoa as being highly dependent on the natives feeling the volcano was a punishment for accepting the wicked ways of the Dutch seems a bit strained. The follow up of the scientific research that came in the wake of the eruption is well filled with minutiae and extraneous detail.
The tale of his own visit to Krakatoa decades later fares better, but it is one of the few humanistic points in the book. And I suppose that is the ultimate problem I have. Despite the narrative form, nothing much about this story seems to be about people. We encounter a few personalities who were present and left documents, but none are fleshed out or sympathetic. There are tiny glimpses of struggle and conflict, but no heroes or cowards that are truly moving. That may not be Manchester's fault. It could be we just know very little about the individuals who were there and survived. It could be that the Dutch never produced charismatic Shackleton or Burton types. But whatever the case, mostly what we are left with is raw information and Manchester's personal enthusiasm. The natural spectacle is awesome, but Wikipedia can handle that.
You see what I'm driving at. The "Should you buy this book?" question gets answered with a qualified no. I can't see Krakatoa thoroughly satisfying anyone's curiosity. It might work for skimming -- if a section doesn't touch you, just skip ahead a bit. That's a plausible plus.
By the way, Krakatoa is growing again, quite rapidly, and is rather active. We may get to see, and hear, it again. This time we'll probably have videos on youtube before the sound reaches us.
It was heard 3000 miles away at the far end of the Indian Ocean. It shattered the eardrums of sailors on ships nearby. It reverberated in shockwave form around the world seven times over the course of the next five days (though only measureable by sensitive instruments). I don't know why that one stands out to me over the final explosion being some multiple times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon, or the pyroclastic flows that boiled alive folks on the nearby islands, or the tsunamis that killed the majority of the victims, or the rain of hot ash, or the ship hulks found far inland, and so forth. It's the noise that gets me.
The full story of Krakatoa naturally goes way before and beyond the final cataclysmic event itself. This is problematic for the book, because Manchester is not the most focused fellow. Krakatoa is part history, part personal memoir, part science, part commentary, which is fine if there is a firm structure. There isn't. Reading Krakatoa is like having an extended conversation over dinner and drinks with a charming, but scatter-minded, academic who drifts off on long tangents.
We start by going all the way back to pre-colonial history and the first sightings of Krakatoa by the Portuguese and how it came to be named and the evidence for the timing of previous known eruptions. All this is well and good, but could have been aptly summarized in a single chapter instead of several. We then step into the scientific side of things with a long discussion of the genesis of plate tectonics and how it explains the long ridges of volcanic activity that cross the globe, with a generous and fairly romantic aside of the author's personal experiences as a young student doing research in Greenland.
We should now be on about chapter two or three, but we are roughly half-way through the book and we still haven't got to the meat of things. Even in the microcosm of the description of the eruption proper we seem to hop back and forth from island to island and forward and back in time. It was very hard to get a sense for the actual events in a coherent timeline.
Manchester does better in placing things in social context. The advent of the telegraph and other bits and pieces of scientific technology and their role in events is nicely done. The explanation of the Muslim uprising in the days following Krakatoa as being highly dependent on the natives feeling the volcano was a punishment for accepting the wicked ways of the Dutch seems a bit strained. The follow up of the scientific research that came in the wake of the eruption is well filled with minutiae and extraneous detail.
The tale of his own visit to Krakatoa decades later fares better, but it is one of the few humanistic points in the book. And I suppose that is the ultimate problem I have. Despite the narrative form, nothing much about this story seems to be about people. We encounter a few personalities who were present and left documents, but none are fleshed out or sympathetic. There are tiny glimpses of struggle and conflict, but no heroes or cowards that are truly moving. That may not be Manchester's fault. It could be we just know very little about the individuals who were there and survived. It could be that the Dutch never produced charismatic Shackleton or Burton types. But whatever the case, mostly what we are left with is raw information and Manchester's personal enthusiasm. The natural spectacle is awesome, but Wikipedia can handle that.
You see what I'm driving at. The "Should you buy this book?" question gets answered with a qualified no. I can't see Krakatoa thoroughly satisfying anyone's curiosity. It might work for skimming -- if a section doesn't touch you, just skip ahead a bit. That's a plausible plus.
By the way, Krakatoa is growing again, quite rapidly, and is rather active. We may get to see, and hear, it again. This time we'll probably have videos on youtube before the sound reaches us.
[Travel] Cold Beach Mix
Cold Beach Mix I had no business doing any travelling. I really am trying to dedicate myself to the house for the plannable future. But I also really needed a break from house fretting -- it's a very bad sign when you haven't changed your TV off the DIY Network in four days. So last minute trip was planned.
The plan: Get to Washington DC, then make for the Delaware shore, Rehoboth Beach in particular. But "last-minute" means pricey flights. So I decided to drive. Did it make sense?
=Flying=
Plane ticket: $400
Airport Parking: $50
Rental Car: $150
Total: $600, about 4 hours
=Driving=
Gas: $100
Tolls: $50
Total: $150, about 9 hours
So at a cost of 5 hours I saved $450. That implies I value my time at about $90/hour. Of course all such calculations are muddled with risk. Lord knows you can't count on flight timing and you can't monetize the massive annoyances of plane travel. On the other hand, you can't predict traffic and you might come back from your car trip to find you check engine light on (I did).
The biggest risk, in either scenario is the weather. In this case it was a killer snowstorm, but a strangely localized one. I left Dexter at 6 AM and by the time I reached Toledo it was pretty much a white out. I was travelling at about 35 MPH and praying they would not close the turnpike. Honestly, it was as bad winter driving as I have ever encountered. Strangely, back home, not 50 miles north, they found the snowfall trivial. And after an extended slog across a snow-packed turnpike, once I was past Cleveland it was as if someone drew a line and the roads were clear the rest of the way. Still, it added an extra couple hours of driving to the day. So instead of nine hours to DC it was eleven and after a stop for dinner, it was another four to Rehoboth Beach.
I am a lifelong fan of the resort towns on the Atlantic seaboard. I've hit just about all of them in Florida, then on up through Tybee Island outside Savannah, to Hilton Head, up the Carolina to the Outer Banks, and now to Rehoboth Beach and Cape May. After that, there's a big gap until you hit Kennebunkport, ME. The crap-shop charm of the boardwalks, the sea air, and the big summer homes are quite appealing to me.
Still, any beach town loses something in cold, gray weather. The colors grow drab. The gentle ocean breeze becomes a frigid wind. The streets are deserted -- although perhaps not so much. Getting into a restaurant on Saturday and Sunday night was not trivial. There were crowds at many, and the bars tended to be quite full. I can't imagine it was just locals.
Rehoboth Beach is about 4 hours from Washington DC and presumably a good deal closer to Baltimore. It has an unusual dual reputation as being both gay friendly and family friendly. When you pull into town you'll see things like an advertisement for something called "mandance" but you'll also see toy stores and arcades and such. Rehoboth Beach is dominated by one broad main street that runs perpendicular to the shoreline. It is lined with the requisite shops and restaurants and bars and such. Cars are allowed but it's very walker friendly. It lacks any sort of central architectural theme that I could see, other than what might be called "beach town cute". Follow it less than a mile down to a nice long boardwalk with more of the same. I strongly suspect this is alive with activity in season.
It's tough to get a really good feel for a place when it is out of its usual character. I suspect summer nights in Rehoboth might be over to the lively of the spectrum, but the existence and proximity of some clearly pricey homes and rental properties suggests that things rarely get out of hand. Reputation also suggests that the 20-something-beach-weekend-hook-ups tend to occur in the next town south called Dewey Beach, although there are some high-end looking beach rentals down there too.
Even in the winter, though, the beach is quite lovely, but what it may not be is the best place for swimming. Reports (mostly from Trip Advisor) suggest that efforts to replenish the sand have resulted in sharp drop offs and waves that crest close enough to shore to make it awkward.
Not sure how I feel about Rehoboth Beach. I don't think it would be my first choice. It would work for a weekend with friends as a getaway from DC/Baltimore, and I suspect that is what it is mostly used for. But I don't think it's worth a jaunt across the country.
Perhaps a bit more interesting is Cape May, New Jersey. You can reach Cape May from Rehoboth via a car ferry. It's about ten minutes to the ferry in Lewes, De, an hour and a half ride over ($70), then another ten minute drive to Cape May proper.
Unlike Rehoboth Beach, Cape May has a layout closer to an organic beach town. Instead of one wide main street there is a grid of small residential streets peppered throughout with shops and restaurant, with the two major areas being the beachfront and a closed off segment of Washington St. three or four blocks inland. The natural layout of the place is enhanced by the numerous Victorian houses that populate the side streets. Most seem to be in excellent repair and many have been converted to bed and breakfasts or rentals. It makes Cape May seem like something for substantial than just another beach town. Like Rehoboth, it seems upscale enough not to give off the vibe of a place that gets overwhelmed by Jersey Shore guidos (but I suppose you never know). Nicely done.
But there are downsides too. Parking was no problem in the winter, but I suspect in season it is troublesome since most of it seems to be street side. Nor is the beach free in season; you need to buy a pass: $5 for a day, $10 for three days. Preservation, such as it is, requires a certain amount of control, it seems.
While I think I prefer Cape May to Rehoboth, again, I don't think it would merit a visit were I not already local. On the other hand, Atlantic City is not far away. I could see a trip including a mix of Atlantic City gambling and beach time in Cape May. Possibly. But I would more likely head to points north or south for an Atlantic Ocean fix.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Annapolis. Not a beach town but we stopped for lunch on the way back and I must admit I would take it over either of the two beach towns in anything but perfect swimming weather, but of course I knew this. I have done it to death over the years, which is why it wasn't the final destination. Great place, with history and sailing and excellent food. Don't miss the mussels at McGarvey's.
The plan: Get to Washington DC, then make for the Delaware shore, Rehoboth Beach in particular. But "last-minute" means pricey flights. So I decided to drive. Did it make sense?
=Flying=
Plane ticket: $400
Airport Parking: $50
Rental Car: $150
Total: $600, about 4 hours
=Driving=
Gas: $100
Tolls: $50
Total: $150, about 9 hours
So at a cost of 5 hours I saved $450. That implies I value my time at about $90/hour. Of course all such calculations are muddled with risk. Lord knows you can't count on flight timing and you can't monetize the massive annoyances of plane travel. On the other hand, you can't predict traffic and you might come back from your car trip to find you check engine light on (I did).
The biggest risk, in either scenario is the weather. In this case it was a killer snowstorm, but a strangely localized one. I left Dexter at 6 AM and by the time I reached Toledo it was pretty much a white out. I was travelling at about 35 MPH and praying they would not close the turnpike. Honestly, it was as bad winter driving as I have ever encountered. Strangely, back home, not 50 miles north, they found the snowfall trivial. And after an extended slog across a snow-packed turnpike, once I was past Cleveland it was as if someone drew a line and the roads were clear the rest of the way. Still, it added an extra couple hours of driving to the day. So instead of nine hours to DC it was eleven and after a stop for dinner, it was another four to Rehoboth Beach.
I am a lifelong fan of the resort towns on the Atlantic seaboard. I've hit just about all of them in Florida, then on up through Tybee Island outside Savannah, to Hilton Head, up the Carolina to the Outer Banks, and now to Rehoboth Beach and Cape May. After that, there's a big gap until you hit Kennebunkport, ME. The crap-shop charm of the boardwalks, the sea air, and the big summer homes are quite appealing to me.
Still, any beach town loses something in cold, gray weather. The colors grow drab. The gentle ocean breeze becomes a frigid wind. The streets are deserted -- although perhaps not so much. Getting into a restaurant on Saturday and Sunday night was not trivial. There were crowds at many, and the bars tended to be quite full. I can't imagine it was just locals.
Rehoboth Beach is about 4 hours from Washington DC and presumably a good deal closer to Baltimore. It has an unusual dual reputation as being both gay friendly and family friendly. When you pull into town you'll see things like an advertisement for something called "mandance" but you'll also see toy stores and arcades and such. Rehoboth Beach is dominated by one broad main street that runs perpendicular to the shoreline. It is lined with the requisite shops and restaurants and bars and such. Cars are allowed but it's very walker friendly. It lacks any sort of central architectural theme that I could see, other than what might be called "beach town cute". Follow it less than a mile down to a nice long boardwalk with more of the same. I strongly suspect this is alive with activity in season.
It's tough to get a really good feel for a place when it is out of its usual character. I suspect summer nights in Rehoboth might be over to the lively of the spectrum, but the existence and proximity of some clearly pricey homes and rental properties suggests that things rarely get out of hand. Reputation also suggests that the 20-something-beach-weekend-hook-ups tend to occur in the next town south called Dewey Beach, although there are some high-end looking beach rentals down there too.
Even in the winter, though, the beach is quite lovely, but what it may not be is the best place for swimming. Reports (mostly from Trip Advisor) suggest that efforts to replenish the sand have resulted in sharp drop offs and waves that crest close enough to shore to make it awkward.
Not sure how I feel about Rehoboth Beach. I don't think it would be my first choice. It would work for a weekend with friends as a getaway from DC/Baltimore, and I suspect that is what it is mostly used for. But I don't think it's worth a jaunt across the country.
Perhaps a bit more interesting is Cape May, New Jersey. You can reach Cape May from Rehoboth via a car ferry. It's about ten minutes to the ferry in Lewes, De, an hour and a half ride over ($70), then another ten minute drive to Cape May proper.
Unlike Rehoboth Beach, Cape May has a layout closer to an organic beach town. Instead of one wide main street there is a grid of small residential streets peppered throughout with shops and restaurant, with the two major areas being the beachfront and a closed off segment of Washington St. three or four blocks inland. The natural layout of the place is enhanced by the numerous Victorian houses that populate the side streets. Most seem to be in excellent repair and many have been converted to bed and breakfasts or rentals. It makes Cape May seem like something for substantial than just another beach town. Like Rehoboth, it seems upscale enough not to give off the vibe of a place that gets overwhelmed by Jersey Shore guidos (but I suppose you never know). Nicely done.
But there are downsides too. Parking was no problem in the winter, but I suspect in season it is troublesome since most of it seems to be street side. Nor is the beach free in season; you need to buy a pass: $5 for a day, $10 for three days. Preservation, such as it is, requires a certain amount of control, it seems.
While I think I prefer Cape May to Rehoboth, again, I don't think it would merit a visit were I not already local. On the other hand, Atlantic City is not far away. I could see a trip including a mix of Atlantic City gambling and beach time in Cape May. Possibly. But I would more likely head to points north or south for an Atlantic Ocean fix.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Annapolis. Not a beach town but we stopped for lunch on the way back and I must admit I would take it over either of the two beach towns in anything but perfect swimming weather, but of course I knew this. I have done it to death over the years, which is why it wasn't the final destination. Great place, with history and sailing and excellent food. Don't miss the mussels at McGarvey's.
[House and Home] House Schooling
House Schooling: I may have mentioned (have I?) that I am actually living in the house now. As a result, everything I have to get done is in my face every minute. Like life, it's all about patience and priorities.
I have some big ideas: I have a vision of a hot tub and plunge pool out back, and I think maybe there is an opportunity for a small addition off the master bedroom to add a big walk-in closet and storage area. But I also know I am living with a 17-year-old roof and water heater. Both seem to be functioning well, but...priorities.
There are small things I'd like to do: Add vanity lighting in the master bath and get a reverse osmosis water filter system installed (it's very cool). There a couple places I have picked out for Roman blinds. But I'm still waiting on the handy-man to finish the shelving in the mud room and the master bath (projects now four weeks on...). Then there are the furnishings. I have no furniture in the living room, dining room or kitchen. I need to outfit the basement bar. And oh yeah, there are three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs that are also empty. I like to think of all this less as "empty" and more as "a blank canvas". Waiting is good, I tell myself. I need to be on guard against buying something I won't like just because of my impatience to have everything done NOW.
Of course, before any of that comes getting my old place sorted out and sold or rented. That's a time sink and wallet drainer right there. On the other hand, no hurry. It's beginning to look like there's no point is selling. After 15 years of ownership I would have to take a loss. Might as well rent it for what I can and hang on to it for a while.
It is OK for things to be unfinished -- Life is a marathon, not a sprint -- Be accepting of unresolved issues. All this is advice I would, and probably do, dole out regularly, yet I struggle tasting my own medicine. So whatever the frustrations with home ownership, I have no regrets. Facing all this was the whole point.
Well, at least it was one of the points. The other point was financial. Buy at the bottom of the market (I hope), live here for another 15 or 20 years, at which point I will be close to retirement and hopefully have a nice profit if/when I downsize.
But the big point was that I did not have to be the person I was at age 49 for the rest of my life. I should still be learning, changing, trying new things, taking reasonable risks, and generally improving myself and gaining wisdom through experience. In fact, I should be better at it now than I was 25 years ago having had all that practice. So far, in those terms, the house has been a huge success.
At some point, when all this becomes second nature, I will stop boring you with house stories. Either that or I will start to go off on rants like I used to about travel. If the later, I expect that may coincide with the need to mow the damn lawn.
I have some big ideas: I have a vision of a hot tub and plunge pool out back, and I think maybe there is an opportunity for a small addition off the master bedroom to add a big walk-in closet and storage area. But I also know I am living with a 17-year-old roof and water heater. Both seem to be functioning well, but...priorities.
There are small things I'd like to do: Add vanity lighting in the master bath and get a reverse osmosis water filter system installed (it's very cool). There a couple places I have picked out for Roman blinds. But I'm still waiting on the handy-man to finish the shelving in the mud room and the master bath (projects now four weeks on...). Then there are the furnishings. I have no furniture in the living room, dining room or kitchen. I need to outfit the basement bar. And oh yeah, there are three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs that are also empty. I like to think of all this less as "empty" and more as "a blank canvas". Waiting is good, I tell myself. I need to be on guard against buying something I won't like just because of my impatience to have everything done NOW.
Of course, before any of that comes getting my old place sorted out and sold or rented. That's a time sink and wallet drainer right there. On the other hand, no hurry. It's beginning to look like there's no point is selling. After 15 years of ownership I would have to take a loss. Might as well rent it for what I can and hang on to it for a while.
It is OK for things to be unfinished -- Life is a marathon, not a sprint -- Be accepting of unresolved issues. All this is advice I would, and probably do, dole out regularly, yet I struggle tasting my own medicine. So whatever the frustrations with home ownership, I have no regrets. Facing all this was the whole point.
Well, at least it was one of the points. The other point was financial. Buy at the bottom of the market (I hope), live here for another 15 or 20 years, at which point I will be close to retirement and hopefully have a nice profit if/when I downsize.
But the big point was that I did not have to be the person I was at age 49 for the rest of my life. I should still be learning, changing, trying new things, taking reasonable risks, and generally improving myself and gaining wisdom through experience. In fact, I should be better at it now than I was 25 years ago having had all that practice. So far, in those terms, the house has been a huge success.
At some point, when all this becomes second nature, I will stop boring you with house stories. Either that or I will start to go off on rants like I used to about travel. If the later, I expect that may coincide with the need to mow the damn lawn.
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