Whatta Fiasco

Complete and utter fun. Really. Don’t miss it. It made a nice last book to round out a year of some excellent reading.

In spite of there being some interesting first hand accounts of the history of modern physics, this isn’t about physics at all. (Although there’s more than enough physics here to chew on for the layman.) Nor is it, strictly speaking, about complex systems. It reads like an entertaining, rambling combination of memoir and lecture. It’s much as if you were sitting with the author in a coffee shop and letting him talk at you, anticipating your questions. (Except that it takes him two hundred pages of prose before explicitly stating his strongly implicit belief that humans are the most complex adaptive system there is.) Before you know it, he’s wandered off into granola, crunchy, environmentalist land with some vague echoes of Jared Diamond.

What this book really is, is a plea to take seriously the challenge posed by complex adaptive systems. It is absolutely critical that we find ways of understanding and dealing with them beyond the WAGs* we normally apply. He’s right.

*Wild ass guess

Violence. Lots and lots of violence. (But the stage fighting is not at all convincing.) And lots of old cars. But for all the rock’em sock’em blood splattering, there’s an interesting story going on about the last stand of an old style patriarch in the midst of a disintegrating yakuza system.

I am inordinately fond of the Mystery productions of the Nero Wolfe stories, but having Michael Prichard read the tale is almost as good. Classic entertainment.

If you’ve heard anything about this collection of short stories, it’s been positive. It’s all true. She has a deft way of spinning strange other wordliness that will suck you in with a quiet, sure voice. Gorgeous.

The holidays are mostly over around here and all have survived, although there’s more than a little holiday depression making its rounds.

It doesn’t help that the holiday season includes reduced time for fencing. Last night we had our first practice in a week. There was plenty of slow and creaky, and I could tell how much I’d been eating over the past week. (Not that it was a terrible indulgence, but there was some indulgence.) It took half the evening to get myself back up to something like my normal speed. It took even longer to get my fencing brain rebooted, and that still had a few hiccoughs. By the end of the evening I was getting double touches and even a few single lights. It’s not comfortable to find yourself on the strip flailing about with no plan in your head, and the plans that you do have falling woefully short. You might even call it discouraging. But you work with what you have, and this is just the way I work when it comes to fencing. And work is what it takes.

Another item accomplished this past week is that hubby and I came to some more agreement about what we want to get done with the house in the near term. We’re currently looking at getting new appliances for the kitchen and getting the flooring in the replaced. We’re still waffling on whether to replace the linoleum with more linoleum, or to upgrade to an inexpensive tile.

Tonight I go back to the gym for the first time in almost two weeks. Last minute Christmas sanity shopping last Thursday derailed last week’s workout. And much like fencing practice last night, I expect this one will be a reminder of why it’s good to limit the number of indulgent holiday weeks to a reasonable level.

Not too much to say about this biopic about Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx does an excellent job. I do regret watching the extended version on this DVD though, because it had edited out clips interleaved with the theatrical release, but not integrated. Every time it switched to one of the extended cut bits, there was a freeze before it cut over. Quite disconcerting, although it might be less annoying on a better DVD player.

What a great little book. Nazis, communists, Kansas City mafia, and alien spaceships in Augusta, Kansas. Just good fun.

If you’re looking for testosterone driven violence involving guns and automobiles in a corporate environment, this might be up your alley. It’s not really my cup of tea. Half way through, I was ready to put it aside because it was still clearly in set up mode and the plot hadn’t quite kicked in yet. But a mild bout of insomnia had me discovering that the action started in the very next chapter. I’m almost wishing I’d just slept through the night instead.

Our protagonist discovers that his violent trip up the corporate ladder is proving detrimental to his happiness and home life. Then things get worse. Several opportunities to turn things around present themselves, but he rejects them all. He decides being unhappy isn’t so very bad after all. Cue more violence. Ugh. The extrapolation that went into this novel is interesting, but the story becomes a brutal exercise in refusing to change.

Short and poignant. It’s 1944. An aged beekeeper in Sussex (who is never introduced because he needs no introduction) gets pulled into the mysterious disappearance of a parrot, companion to a mute German boy. There is, of course, a body. Does it have anything to do with the way the parrot tends to recite long strings of numbers in German? But the mystery is just there to pull us along through a garden of life. Michael York reads this one wonderfully.