Things I Find in Books

Here is today’s installment of Things I Find in Books.

What is this new blog feature, pray tell? Well, I buy a lot of used books. Mostly form local thrift stores, though lately I’ve pared down my purchases because life has shifted in a way that I’m not able to visit thrift stores as often as I would like, and often when I’m there, I don’t find much I’m interested in.

It was better pickings when the Salvation Army Thrift Store was open. It’s now demolished and is home to a parking lot for a BMW dealership. Alas.

Nevertheless, I often find interesting things in the books I find, things previous owners have used as bookmarks.

So far, no money. That’s my dream, of course. Though this other stuff is neat.

Today’s entry is this, front and back of an emergency survival card produced by the Utah Department of Fish and Game, found in a 1947 Blue Ribbon Books reprint of Ogden Nash’s “Good Intentions”.

Emergency signals haven’t changed much since this card was printed – alas, without a year to identify it.

I suspect one of the numbers on the card is a phone number – the 563 prefix is used locally both in Idaho and Utah, where the book likely came from. I don’t have the guts to call it, because what do you say? I found your number on a Fish and Game card in an old book? So that’s not going to happen.

Also, if the number sequence after the word “aquarium” is a phone number, it’s not one currently linked to any aquarium I can find.

But the card has provided space for mathematics or memory-savers on many occasions, given the different types of ink used, and, I think, different handwriting as well.

Up the Down Staircase

Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of those books I've read quite a few times and discover something new each time I read it. (I guess in that way I'm like Beetlejuice and "The Exorcist.")

I think what I appreciated the most this time around is how Kaufman uses "found" writing to put this novel together. It's cleverly done, with the student essays, school circulars, memos, letters and other stuff never getting in the way of the plot, and with Kaufman using each different type of writing to move the plot along in a different way. She uses it to great effect to keep you reading, and to keep you guessing as to what's going to happen next. It's probably about the best I've read in the "found novel" genre, if that's such a thing. it's the kind of novel a writer gets to write once, and Kaufman does it well.



View all my reviews

Now Alexa is Making us Dumber

This weekend, I had what I’m going to call an Alexa moment.

I wanted Alexa, that voice-recognizing, music-playing wonder, to regale me with Sergio Mendes’ “Mas Que Nada” because Alexa is my musical slave and we’re paying $149 for Amazon Prime Music and I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste it.

Alexa, however, had difficulty digesting my request, responding to my “Alexa, play ‘Mas Que Nada’” with the “I can’t understand your question” response.

“Alexa, learn Portugese,” I said sarcastically.

“I have located a lingerie store nearby,” she beamed. “In Idaho Falls. It closes in four minutes  . . .”

My kids giggled uncontrollably while I shouted over them: “Alexa, play ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ and don’t embarrass me again.”

Alexa obliged.

I could end the story right there, echoing what Alexa O’Brien writes today in The New York Times (and in case you’re wondering, yes she does complain about Amazon appropriating her name for its devices):

“Amazon’s promise is that Alexia is ‘always getting smarter.’ Through big data collection and analytics, she will come to know us in ways we can’t even know ourselves. My worry is that she will make this Alexa dumber. The platform offers endless choices, virtual connections and access to a world of information, but that this major-domo of the ‘internet of things’ may deliver is reductive banter, mindless consumerism and a universe of trivia.”

To quote Brent Spiner’s character Bob Wheeler from the 1980s sitcom “Night Court,” “What a buncha Gloomy Gusses.”

Alexa is not making my family dumber, lingerie-salesmanship aside.

She’s encouraging us to learn things – I will forever remember it’s Sergio Mendes who is responsible for Mas Que Nada, thanks to this foul-up, because I looked it up afterward to make sure I had the right song in mind. And I didn’t ask Alexa to do it, figuring I’d let the fingers to the walking.

She’s encouraging us to think. Our youngest, an NFL football nut, was brought to tears by Alexa’s inability to offer him NFL scores shortly after we invited five Echo Dots into the house after Christmas until he learned that with Alexa, often rephrasing a question can get results. Now, if Alexa is stymied by a request, he carefully considers how to rephrase his question – sometimes even writing it out longhand – before he asks. And when he gets results, he remembers how to ask so in the future, asking Alexa is easier. Maybe this’ll translate into better communication skills overall as we point out to him that often, with human beings, you have to rephrase your questions in order for others to understand you.

Alexa is helping our family expand our musical interests. Time spent huddling around a screen listening to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Ethel Merman and Eddie Arnold can now be spent in other rooms of the house, free of a screen, as they work on homework, we play a game, or we drift off to sleep. My wife has discovered the joy of Glenn Gould playing Bach. I’ve discovered the joys of Pentatonix. And thanks to Alexa’s timing feature which will shut off music after a given time, we no longer have to brave dark, LEGO-infested bedrooms to turn off radios (isn’t that quaint) whose buttons are in different places model to model and difficult to find in the dark.

And there’s a lot out there to discover. “I have to re-think,” my wife has said on more than one occasion, “into not having Alexa play what I know, but finding out what Alexa can play for me.” There’s a lot out there, always expanding the breadth (and possibly the depth) of our listening pleasure, though I have to take Amazon Prime music for having a limited repertoire from the likes of Tak Shindo and Bill Anderson (my musical tastes are pretty peculiar; a favorite wake-up song is “Chicken Fat” sung by Robert Preston).

I’m now wishing Alexa had the ability to turn off lights if I ask her to do so. (If I’m willing to pay the money for smart switches, indeed she can. But I’m not there yet; the cost benefit of having Alexa turn off my bedroom light every night at the sound of my voice isn’t at the $60 for the switch threshold.)

O’Brien seems concerned, oddly, that we’re being rude to Alexa somehow, and – again, somehow – that rudeness is, well, rude. She doesn’t explain it well. Here it is, in toto:

And Alexa may not be the only one adapting. We talk to Alexa in the peremptory tone we reserve for barking at chat bots, snarkily dismissing interlopers in our social media feeds, or frustratedly answering staccato telephone menu trees. People do not talk to their dog the way they speak to Alexa.

Not that I want a HAL-9000 AI talking to me – or listening in, waiting for just the right moment to tell my our household AE-35 Unit is about to go kerflooey – but I find O’Brien’s “rude talk problem” amusing. If you think talking rude to Alexa is a problem, then soften your talk, you hard-bitten East Coaster. Maybe Flyover Country is having more fun and learning more with Alexa than you’d like to think. At least we will be, once I get back from the lingerie store.

Recipes Included(!)

Apparently, fiction books featuring recipes is a thing. I don’t know why it’s a thing, but it’s a thing.

That set me to thinking: What kind of recipes would I include in Doleful Creatures?

Aloysisus’ Stream Trout

Go down to stream. Catch trout. Eat trout.

And so on. I don’t see much future in putting recipes in books about anthropomorphic animals.

That caused me to wonder: Who was the first to put a recipe in a fiction book? And why would you do such a thing?

Answers are elusive.

Apparently, Patricia Cornwell has a pork chop gravy recipe folks are lending her book out to get.

I can see doing so if your book – or a character – really focuses on food. But just to slap one into a book? I don’t know. I see a lot of mystery books, for some reason, shouting “With Recipes!” or "Recipes Included!" (Always with the exclamation mark; always a bad sign) on the cover. I have to wonder if the books, let alone the food, are any good.

Or it’s like any other kind of hooptedoodle – great if it’s good, but simply in the way if it’s awful. And that probably has to do a lot more with the book and story than with the recipe.

Then again, there are probably recipes out there better than my books. So I should probably just shut up.

Tainted Election, the “Other” Stuff, and the Myrna Minkoff Effect?

I’ve spent some enlightening time reading (PDF) the “Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution” that made a lot of noise over the weekend, adding fuel to the fire that the 2016 election is “tainted” and ought to go into “do over” status.

Which I kind of, in a perverse contrarian way, hope would happen. Because I’m fairly certain we’d see “President-Elect Trump” change to “President-Elect . . . Trump”.

On what do I base that prediction? Absolutely nothing. Nothing other than a firm belief that those who favor Trump would double down on their votes while those who favor Clinton would double down on their votes, leaving the rest of us who either did not vote or chose to vote for independent candidates the same catch-22 we had before the do-over: Do we choose the iocane-laced cup in front of us, or the iocane-laced cup in front of the Man in Black? Oh, we might see a little swing here and there. But the general outcome I don’t think would change a bit.

And here’s the kicker: I’d support a do-over, if it were done on a short schedule, say no more than a week. (This to avoid the chances of any more Russian influence-peddling. And influence-peddling by the parties, candidates, journalists, et al. Because we already know enough about Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump we don’t need any more electioneering.) And I would pity the folks in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, no matter what time schedule the do-over would take.

The do-over would also have to include ANY candidate who earned votes in the November election. A do-over including only Clinton and Trump would, in my mind, be as “tainted” an election as the one the taint is all about in the first place.

I’d even go as far as to support a week-long Internet blackout before the do-over, in order to ensure the scourge of “fake news” would be checked. Zot me now with your lightning bolts of righteous indignation. But if you want an untained election, you have to remove every possible avenue of taint, and given the proclivity of fake news on the Internet, an internet blackout would indeed remove about 90% of the taint.

But here’s the rub, getting back to the report: There’s little new here as far as the election goes. There’s Wikileaks and the DNC and propaganda on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik. But other than the boogeyman of a foreign power trying to influence voters by discrediting one candidate over another, there’s little by way of relevatory matter in the report.

How can I be so blasé about “a foreign power trying to influence voters”? It happens All. The. Time. Covertly or not. And I still firmly believe the Democrats looked at Donald J. Trump, the most flawed political figure the Republicans could offer, and effectively said, “They’re nominating a dumpster fire for the presidency! We can do that too!” And did.

Here’s what’s more interesting about the intelligence report: Do you support, say, anti-fracking efforts or Occupy Wall Street? So do those self-same meddling Russians.

Not for the same reasons, of course. And here we get the Myrna Minkoff Effect once again: It’s the right message, from the wrong people.

Why would the Russians oppose fracking in the United States? Because their petroleum industry suffered greatly as oil prices plummeted due in part to fracking in the United States and Canada.

Why would the Russians promote Occupy Wall Street? Because railing against corporatism and influence-peddling by corporations in politics fits right in with their world view of the United States as an anti-democratic la-la land where money influences everything above all else – and if they can show that to their own people, their own people become less inured to the fact that Russia is also an anti-democratic la-la land where money influences everything above all else.

So get upset about their election-meddling, even if their election-meddling was on par with that of western journalists (again, the right message from the wrong people) who found plenty to fault Clinton for before Wikileaks even happened (and I don’t mean BENGHAZI!!!1!!!!11!).

Here's a challenge:  Can anyone out there point me to American media reporting on the “other” in the hacking report – I mean anything other than the election? Because it seems just as important that Russia is trying to undermine democracy by talking about fracking, Occupy Wall Street, racial tensions, etc., but I haven’t found any major media outlet discussing that. All everyone wants to talk about is the election -- as if having someone else in the White House will make all these other problems go away. I think it's clear, given the last two occupants of the White House, that problems will keep on coming no matter whose desk they land on.

Will the president-elect exacerbate these problems? Maybe. Maybe not. I'd be willing to give Clinton as much of the benefit of the doubt I'll offer to Trump. Interpret that as you may.

I now have to go into a long list of qualifiers: I am not a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him in November, nor in the preceding primary. Given the chance for a do-over election, I again would not vote for him. (Conversely, I would not vote for Clinton either. I’d be one of those third-party voters who would again vote for a third-party candidate (again, one of the targets of Russian meddling was indeed the third-party voter, so in that way I am also a victim of meddling, albeit a victim whose eyes are open). Neither the Trump nor the Clinton camps have behaved in a way that would convince me to change my vote, especially with the Democrats grabbing at any tiny straw held out to them to delegitimize the vote (and who is to say those straws aren’t being offered by those same damn meddling Russians?

Just A Thought

From T. S. Eliot's Choruses from the Rock

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.