MTheads

Monkey Island Key To Unlocking Hominid Evolution

Get off my monkey island and take your soul-stealing black box with you, too!!

Clever Title Escapes Me.

Thought I'd put out a list of books I've read over the last few weeks while you were watching TV and shopping at Walmart.

Starting from most pretentious:

To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czeslaw Milosz.  Sort of reminded me of the Koestler book of essays.  Like Koestler, he was also a refugee from the Nazi parts of Europe.  He wrote a lot about homesickness, intellectuals, and the years running up to World War II.  His writing is rather understated.  I preferred the directness of Koestler. 

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.  Wow.  One of the best books I've read in a long time.  Wonderfully discursive, original, funny, with interesting characters not straight out of the pantheon of moody, narcissistic, bitter post modern types who populate much of contemporary fiction.  The fact that it didn't have any well developed women characters did not bother me.  I write this because this fact was mentioned as a detraction in many Amazon reviews.  But the book is about a bunch of guys!  I wouldn't have appreciated the wedging in of a fully developed woman character just to fulfill some people's a priori fictional check list.  I crave a true creation from an author, not a politically correct template where the writer fills in some blanks.  Blech.

The Dog Who Bit A Policeman by Stuart M. Kaminsky.  This is another of his Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov books.  Besides being good police procedurals, the setting of this series is Moscow, which is fun for me as I'm living in Moscow.  Plus, the author writes sympathetically about the police in Moscow.  Kaminsky's characters are hard working, competent human beings trying hard to navigate the "new" Russia and solve their cases.  His portrayal of the police here is rather refreshing from what one mostly hears about them.

The Charm School by Nelson Demille.  Since this novel is about an American embassy military attache in Moscow back during the Cold War, I thought it might be fun.  It wasn't bad as far as these plot driven books go.  I don't enjoy that kind of escapism much.  It's not that I'm a snob.  After all,  I've got the visual-media tastes of a precocious 14 year old with bad acne (Yes, Dr. Who is the penultimate culmination of television entertainment.  Ditto for BattleStar Galactica).  It's because I read so fast that books that are mostly action and plot read like the back of a cereal box for me. 

I read some English Reformation-era mystery which I did not enjoy -- today's sensibilities in the 1600s.  I can't even remember the title of the book or the author.   Then, to clear my palate after that mediocre read, I read several Father Brown mysteries by Chesterton.  Much better written, though a bit heavy in the psychological analysis.  I blame William James. 

Something Found Us At The Beach...

We were going through our photos taken at a beach several years ago and came across this one.  God only knows how we all managed to escape alive.  It must have just been curious about the camera and not hungry.

Tacitly Sanctioned Hate Is Still Hate

It has always bothered me when otherwise intelligent people casually say they don't like "the South".  They look at me as if I know where they are coming from.  Oh, I do.  They think they are are sending a cultural message akin to the international sanctions on South Africa that the Southern regions of the US are full of racist red necks and bible belt weirdos.  The fact that many Black and Brown people live down there also plays a part, though they would say it was the racial tension they dislike, not that they were uncomfortable in the company of lots and lots of minorities.  Coincidentally, the preferable parts of the US to these people tend to be very White.

These sophisticated types much prefer to travel to the gentler post racial-cleansing parts of the world --  less racial tension, better wine, and no one will fault you for enjoying France.  They also venture with an open mind to the far flung regions of the world where they can soul-feast on bizarre rituals and traditions, like men shoving bamboo stakes through their cheeks.  It's a privilege to witness such sublimity, and one they feel separates them from the hicks in the South.  Sophisticates often enjoy traveling in the Third World.  Their quiveringly sensitive souls really feel for the inhabitants hustling to make a living all the while smiling and making crafts for them to display back at home.  Now they have seen the World in all its divine squalor and have become better people for it.

They can overlook any crime, any ignorance, any history, any current malfeasance in any other part of the world if they can bring home a souvenir and some stories.  They pride themselves on their ability to appreciate people with different cultural beliefs and ethical standards.  But for the South -- only disdain.

Saying one doesn't like the South should be considered as stupid as saying one doesn't like Mexico or France, wink wink.  Because there is always the "wink, wink" when one admits to not liking Mississippi.  You know, wink wink, because the clan I identify with demands that I unthinkingly assume the entire state is made up of ignorant racists with no culture or cuisine or geography that could possibly be of interest to someone as worldly as myself, wink wink. 

Texas comes in for a lot of the same disdain from the same set of people (you know, a bunch of gun-toting Bush-voting yokels live there, wink wink).

What bothers me is that the people who hate the South think of themselves as enlightened and intelligent.  Yet, they think themselves superior to the people in the South.  This makes them passive racists as far as I'm concerned.

Rainy afternoon. 

Why Can't Every Building Have Sun Shades Like These?

I love this building.  Been busy the last week being bled for yearly physical.  Had to go to American style medical center in far away country.  But it's nice being back in Moscow with the family.  Too bad it's been raining here every day.  But I guess the green has to be fed.

Freedom Of Choice, Unless It's School Choice.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article about a documentary on public education and charter schools.  The film maker, Madeleine Sackler, started out with the idea to make a documentary about four families participating in New York's Harlem Success Academy's lottery for places at their successful charter school.  She came to the project without strong opinions about school choice.  She says:

Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story, a vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise.

During the filming, she and her crew came across what looked like a protest against Harlem Success Academy outside a school building the charter was seeking to use.  From the article:

They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.'  But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.)

Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?"

One day k-12 public education will look completely different than it does today.  It'll resemble our university system with students and parents able to choose from any number of ways to get an education.  We'll use the internet and e-books and our homes.  Small schools will open that can cater to specific interests and needs.  It'll become truly democratic and responsive to its customers. 

Gone will be the common student experience of attending assigned schools which pretty much all work the same.  But in its place, students and parents will become responsible for guiding their own educations.  To me anyway, the idea of education as something one participates in is much more exciting than being given a school district and a bus number.

Watch Me Intertwine Two Completely Different Books In One Confusing Book Review

I can hear the cries of my children, "Mommy, we're hungry!  Mommy, we don't have any clean clothes!  Mommy won't say anything!  Mommy isn't breathing!  ..oh, wait, she's just in a reading coma!"

Yes, pretty much all I've been doing is reading.  I have read Neil Gaiman's American Gods.  I thought it was mildly entertaining, if you like the idea of wise-cracking old people who are sort of gods pissing, copulating, and eating their way around the seedier parts of America while the human protagonist goes along with just about anything asked of him with little in the way of real curiosity outside of a general curiosity to know what's going on and what's his role.  His role?  I still don't know.  Fun.  

Oddly, the gods in American Gods reminded me of Anthony Bourdain's kitchen workers in his Kitchen Confidential book, which I also recently read.  Bourdain compares restaurant workers to pirates.  They swear, copulate, try to copulate, talk about copulating, mercilessly tease, and generally behave badly to each other all the while maintaining some unwritten code of loyalty to one another.  This could be fun for a few years.  However, I'd eventually be bored by it all.

That's exactly how Gaiman's characters were written.  And that is how I felt about the gods and people in Gaiman's book: I was soon bored of them.  Not much depth.  What is much more fun to read are the one star reviews for the book on Amazon.  I am not the only one to wonder where the promised Wonder went.  And as I wasted much of my youth reading really good science fiction, I'm hard to please.  My husband, however, loved the book. I'll have to have him give a counter review.

I very much liked Kitchen Confidential.  Bourdain is a good writer, so good, I'm now less inclined to eat out.  It's not a book about mouth watering food.  It's about the crazy people who work for and run restaurants.  I actually bought the book because I had read on the back he had graduated from the CIA.  Idiot me thought that meant the Central Intelligence Agency.  The idea of  an ex-agent who then became a chef sounded interesting.  After pages and pages detailing his past illegal drug use, I kept wondering how he was going to end up at the CIA.  Oh, he does, at the Culinary Institute of America.  Despite that, I loved the book.  I may read more of them.  I'm interested to know how his travels throughout the world have impacted his opinions on food. 

Old Lady Who Lived In Cabin Vindicated After "Devil Dog" Caught On Film

Devil dog is actually running away from big foot.  Coward.