Category Archives: Books

How Many Watts Was Byron?

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Not so cold today. By that, I mean just above zero F. The garage door opener started working again — luckily it had been stuck open — and the dog spent a little more time outside. By the weekend, I understand, temps will be above freezing. Which means meltage and then ice hazards when the refreeze comes. Winter’s a gas, that’s for sure.

Before the snow started to fall on New Year’s Eve — the snow that’s the bottom layer of our two feet or so now — I was out buying a few things and acquired a pack of 60W incandescent bulbs. Just to have some around for those few fixtures left in which we use them.

I read about the phase-out of 40W and 60W bulbs in PCMag, and the article assured readers that, “For now, though, just understand that no one will be taking away your light bulbs, only that you’ll see fewer incandescent ones in stores through the next year.”

That’s no fun. Time to start Internet rumors about squads of government hit men going around smashing incandescent bulbs. People believe less plausible things about the government, after all. (I Googled “Byron the Bulb” and the bit I wrote nearly seven years ago is on the first page.)

Tuesday Recommendations

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Butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wis., a burg southwest of Fond du Lac. Every year a PR company I’ve long dealt with sends me a box for the holidays. It’s the only time I eat toffee. It’s insanely good. Only a few pieces will make you feel a little queasy, so rich is the confection. But you eat them anyway.

The Man of Bronze. It’s the first Doc Savage novel, and probably the only one I’ll ever read. With genre pulp, that’s usually enough. I have memory fragments of the mid-70s Doc Savage movie I didn’t see – not many people did – so I’m probably remembering the commercials. My friend Kevin recommended Doc Savage as an entertaining read of no consequence, and I’ll go along with that so far. You have to like a yarn that begins with the sentence, “There was death afoot in the darkness.”

Gravity. It’s a really engaging Man Against Nature story, or to be more exact, Woman Against Vacuum. With a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that keeps your attention. Also, worth the extra money to see in 3D, and not too many movies are. In fact, the depiction of space alone is worth the price of admission. A few of the space-science stretchers bothered me a little – I don’t think hopping from spacecraft to spacecraft is quite that straightforward – but not that much. I don’t want exact space science from a movie, just high verisimilitude, and this movie delivers.

Lizard Point Consulting’s geography quizzes. Every now and then, I make Lilly and Ann take some of the easy ones, such as U.S. states or capitals. It’s my opinion that every adult American citizen without cognitive impairment ought to know all of the states.

But I can’t brag about a lot of the other quizzes. It’s clear that my knowledge of, say, French regions is fairly meager, and sad to say I don’t do that well on Japanese prefectures, either – I tend to remember only the ones I’ve been to, plus a scattering of others (like Aomori, where Aomori apples come from, because it’s due south of Hokkaido).

Even quizzes that ought to be easy-ish, such as African nations, have their confusions. Without looking, which one is Swaziland, which one Lesotho? Which is Benin, which one Togo? Which one is Guinea, which one Guinea-Bissau? (That should be easy, Guinea’s bigger.) Similarly, it’s hard to keep track of which –stan is which in Asia, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakstan.

Dictionaries!

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Not long ago, I put many of my dictionaries together on one shelf. Then I got a little snap happy with the camera. Most of them date from the 1980s. It’s a modest collection, but I’m fond of all of them.

I’ve always kept the biographical and geographical dictionaries together. Just seems right somehow. They’re really good for thumbing through to  find odd bits of information.

The beaten up American Heritage Dictionary New College Edition is beaten up for a reason: I bought it on August 23, 1979 — I wrote the date inside — to take to college two days later. It also got a lot of use in my early editing jobs.

The Dictionary of Business and Economics was so impressive I wrote the authors, complimenting it. The Macquarie Dictionary is Australian. I bought it in Sydney and it became one of the larger souvenirs I’ve ever lugged home. Chambers is British, but bought it in the U.S. I can’t find my Canadian dictionary, which is really a modified American Heritage volume, including the addition of the maple leaf on the cover. I bought it in Duncan, BC, which is on Vancouver Island.

Between Hitchen and Hittite Law

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A major re-arrangement of books and other items continues on the lower level of our house. Today I moved my copy of the 14th Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Why do I have a copy of such a weighty set of volumes – and I mean that literally, since I had to move them all – in this age of vast libraries accessible via broadband? Sentiment. Inertia. My fixed notion that I’ll never get rid of a book unless it’s completely fallen apart.

That isn’t quite true. I’ve donated books. But only ones I have no interest in, and I’ve never had many books like that.

Besides, I acquired the 14th Edition nearly two decades ago, before the rise of easy Internet information, misinformation, and pseudoinformation. I chanced across a church rummage sale one day in 1995. The entire set was being offered there for exactly $2. So at 24 volumes, that was 8.3 cents a volume. Not the famed 11th Edition, but at that price worth the investment.

I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time with Britannica over the years, but I’ve dipped into the well now and then. One day I spotted the entry for Hitler, Adolph. The entry isn’t as prominent as you’d think, because the 14th Edition was published in late 1929, which turned out to be awful timing for selling expensive books. Hitler merits only 16 lines on Volume 11, page 598, there between entries for Hitchen, a town in Hertfordshire, England, and Hittite Law: see Babylonian Law. Would that he had stayed there in his obscure corner of an old reference work.

He’s called a “Bavarian politician.” It’s clear from the text that his main claim to fame at that moment, at least in the English-speaking world, was his part in the Beer Hall Putsch. (Ninety years ago this month, which I’d forgotten; but the Chicago Tribune, of all things, recently reminded me of the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht this month. The paper was able to find a few survivors and interview them.) The text also points out that, whatever his status in the NSDAP, Hitler didn’t even have a seat in the Reichstag representing the party – Dr. Frick and Ludendorff did.

Ludendorff, whose entry in the encyclopedia is a lot longer than Hitler’s, later broke with the Nazis and had the good fortune to die of natural causes in the mid-30s. By contrast, Wilhelm Frick, not one of the better-known Nazis any more, was shown the business end of a rope in Nuremberg in 1946.

No Thanks, Mr. Luhrmann

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Back to posting around June 16. Not exactly a summer vacation, especially since the pace of for-pay work isn’t slacking off, but more like a warm-weather interlude. Except that it isn’t quite warm enough to be summer, at least not in northern Illinois.

I’ve heard about the latest version of Gatsby, and so decided to read the book again. I’m going to pass on the film, for reasons stated before. But also because I’ve heard about the soundtrack.

From hotnewhiphop.com: “The director, Luhrmann, spoke on the adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, and creating music for it that blends the Jazz Age with a modern spin. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is peppered with contemporary music references specific to the story’s setting of 1922. While we acknowledge, as Fitzgerald phrased it, “the Jazz Age,” and this is the period represented on screen, we—our audience—are living in the “hip-hop age” and want our viewers to feel the impact of modern-day music the way Fitzgerald did for the readers of his novel at the time of its publication.’ ”

Something like Classical scenes in medieval paintings featuring clothes and armor that looks suspiciously medieval? No, that’s being too generous. The producers clearly believe (and correctly so) that a genuine period music soundtrack — or even one featuring closely authentic, newly recorded versions — wouldn’t sell as well as a hip-hop soundtrack, and are pretending it’s for artistic reasons. Yet posh Jazz Age clothes and cars seem to be OK for the movie (to judge by the marketing). I don’t see why Jay Gatsby shouldn’t be dressed like a hip-hop star.

I forget which costume drama I saw about Marie Antoinette some years ago, but it had the same problem — a distractingly modern soundtrack. In that case it was ’80s New Wave, which I’d prefer over hip hop any time, but it still didn’t sit well on the film.

Wednesday Gallimaufry

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Missed the conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and Mercury so far. Every night I’ve thought about it, it’s been cloudy. Every time it’s been clear, I’ve forgotten about it. Ah, well. I satisfied my need to see major celestial events for a while about this time last year with the Transit of Venus. If the next big thing I get to see is the eclipse of August 21, 2017, I’ll be satisfied.

Oz the Great and Powerful was an interesting failure. Ann wanted me to take her to a movie last weekend, and that happened to be one we could agree on, and playing at the second-run theater for $1.75. The 2D visual effects – layer-caked CGI – were worth that much, especially the colorful landscape of Oz. The story was uneven and so were the characters, especially Mila Kunis’ Wicked Witch of whichever direction.

Hyde Park on Hudson was likewise an interesting failure. Saw that on DVD a few weeks ago. Mainly I wanted to see Bill Murray give FDR a go. At times he did quite well with the part. Then there were moments I looked at him and thought, that’s just Bill Murray.

Chanced across this video not long ago. Wow, these kids are talented. How does that happen? It also made me look the original English version of the song. I can’t remember the last time I heard it.

The last book of the year that Lilly is reading for freshman English class is Animal Farm. She asks me about it, and I oblige her with what I know, but it’s all I can do not to overload her with detail about the Russian Revolution, Whites vs. Reds, Lenin, Marxism, Stalinism, Trotsky, show trials, old Bolsheviks, the gulag, Five Year Plans, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, etc., etc. Over the summer she’s supposed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’ll have to resist the urge to blather on about that, too.

Dog Chew

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The dog’s got some canine habits, for sure. Such as chewing things. Pictured below is a stuffed figure I don’t ever remember getting, and which no one in the house has paid much attention to for years. The hound found it recently and did some damage. Was Mr. Sluggo to its Mr. Bill. Reminds me of the young days of Katie, my mother’s dog, who destroyed (among other things) most of the pine-cone elves acquired in Germany in the ’50s that we used to hang as Christmas decorations.

A few months ago I picked up a hardback book at Big Lots. That retailer isn’t generally known for its books, but it had a bin of landfill-destined titles that I had to rummage through. I found A Fiery Peace in a Cold War (2009) by Neil Sheehan, whom I know as the author of A Bright Shining Lie, which I read some years ago, and remembered liking.

The progression of pricing was from $32 on the dust jacket to $7 at Bargain Books, which I could tell from a partially obscured price tag, to $4 at Big Lots. For that price, I would take a long look at Mr. Sheehan’s latest.

The book promised a biography of the man more responsible for the creation of the U.S. ICBM arsenal than anyone else: Air Force Gen. Bennie Schriever (1910-2005). I’d never heard of him. I started reading it the other day, and it’s good so far. I was interested to learn that Schriever mostly grew up in San Antonio. The early chapters contain a number of references to places that I would know 50 years later.