Okay, I've been bad about keeping this updated, so here's a burst of the books I've read the past couple of weeks. They may be out of order. They probably are. But oh well. The reviews will also be short.

#16: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken makes a good case that the goals of environmental and social justice groups are intertwined. Because how much justice can you really have while people are suffering from the wastes of others? And how can you protect the environment when there's people who don't have the power to protect themselves? There's a lot more to it, and he traces a lot of the history and inspirations. The book is shorter than it looks, because the entire second half is a printed compilation of many different groups. The "world's largest group" in the title is his umbrella to include all of those groups, which he makes a pretty good case for.

#17: The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde writes the Thursday Next novels, which I haven't read yet. They've been highly recommended though. But the first one is "The Eyre Affair", and as I've never read Jane Eyre, or a good bit of other "Great Literature", I'm afraid I'd miss some of the jokes.

Nursery rhymes on the other hand, I know pretty well. And I'd been wanting to read some mysteries, so a murder mystery comedy seemed like a good bet. And it was. Jasper Fforde is a very good writer, and has many good turns of phrase. Perhaps this series isn't quite as dense on the amazing writing as I've heard about others, but there's still plenty in there to keep me going.

#18: The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has the dubious honor of being one of the first major op-ed columnists to notice what an unmitigated disaster Bush and the rest of his crew were. For his perceptiveness (it really wasn't that hard to notice, all of Bush's jobs as an executive had been disasters and bought out by his daddy's friends, and his time as Texas governor was nothing to write home about) he was rewarded by being dismissed as "shrill" or blinded of "irrational Bush hatred", even after it turned out he was right all along.

The book is a defense of liberalism, in the guise of a short political history of the United States in the 20th century, starting with the Gilded Age, and up through the present. Condensed, it goes as such: Until the Great Depression and the New Deal, most of the money in the country went to the top very few percent. Then with the New Deal's social safety net, and then World War II's war economy, price controls, and unionization, income inequality shrank dramatically. Over the past few decades, that trend has reversed. And this is in large part due to policies and politics, not impersonal economic trends. Most of which can be traced to the Republican party and the Movement Conservatives who run it.

Which seems to me to be pretty much right. His other two main points are that the Republicans electoral successes are due in large part to the switch of the South from Democratic to Republican, starting in the 70s. Because of civil rights and the Southern Strategy of appealing to racists, using code like "welfare queens" and "State's Rights" and playing up neo-Confederate resentment, and then using all of that to attack the social safety net programs.

The third tier is an argument for providing health care for every American, like every other major industrialized nation does, and which would get rid of the horrible sucking tick insurance companies whose profit margins depend on not paying for things and keeping people who need medical treatment off their rolls.

I already knew much of it, it's things he and others have said on the Internet, but it's good to have it all in one place. I dunno if it'll convert anybody who reads it, but at least now it's out there.

#19: The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

The second in the Nursery Crime series. This is already long enough, so see most of the comments about The Big Over Easy.

I know there's at least two more books I've read, but I don't have them here and don't remember at the moment. Damnit, me. Keep better records. I'll update them later.


Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People
#7: H.I.V.E. - Higher Institute of Villainous Education
#8: The World Without Us
#9: Marx for Beginners
#10-13: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
#14: The Unhandsome Prince
#15: Mutant, Texas: Tales of Sheriff Ida Red

# 14: The Unhandsome Prince by John Moore

Another of John Moore's comic fantasy books. My aunt has several of his, and I've been staying at her place occasionally since it's near school, so I read this before going to sleep. This one wasn't quite as good as Bad Prince Charlie, but I think it was written first, so wasn't quite as polished. But it was a good fun read.

#15: Mutant, Texas: Tales of Sheriff Ida Red by Paul Dini and J. Bone

I had some time at the library earlier this week, and grabbed one of their TPBs to read. This was written by Paul Dini, of Batman: The Animated Series fame. It's about the town of Mutant, Texas, where years ago, a radioactive comet hit a faulty satellite and brought the whole thing down on the nuclear power plant outside town. I think you can figure out where the "Mutant" part came from after that. It's half superhero story, half Texas tall tale, and good light fun.

It sure sounds like most of my reading's been fluffy fun books, but they're quicker to read. Especially comics. I try to have one non-fiction book and one fiction book I'm reading at a time, for balance.boo


Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People
#7: H.I.V.E. - Higher Institute of Villainous Education
#8: The World Without Us
#9: Marx for Beginners
#10-13: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

#8: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

This book was absolutely fascinating. The idea behind the book is what would happen to all our stuff, and the world, if humans all disappeared suddenly? No specifics as to why, if it's zombies, aliens, the Rapture, nanotech, whatever, because that's not the point. But in the process of that, it ends up being much more about society and civilization and what it takes to keep them running. And what effects humans have already had on the world, and continue to. It's extremely well written. The parts about wildlife returning to Chernobyl, and sea life returning to nuclear weapons test atolls are scary, yet amazing. They have photos of the mountaintop removal "mining" for coal, and I'd heard about it, but pictures are worth a thousand words. See some here.

This book is amazing, and I totally recommend it to everyone.

#9: Marx for Beginners by Rius

It's a cartoon introduction to Marx and his economic theories, and the history he lived in. It was published first in 1976, so it's kind of dated. I'm trying to read some more economics stuff and so figured I'd start with the cartoon compressed version.

And frankly, some of the quoted passages of Marx looking at the inequalities of capitalism could come from a modern analysis of how Wal-Mart works and treats its workers. (In short: Not Well.)

#10 (or 10-13): Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

I'm not sure to count this as 1 or 4, since it's a 4 book manga series, but all one story. I guess I've included other comics as individual books, but sometimes it feels slightly cheaty. Depends on the comic, I suppose.

Anyway. I haven't seen the movie version yet, though I've seen many of Miyazaki's other ones. It was interesting, and good. Though the end, like a couple of Miyazaki's other stories (such as Castle in the Sky) makes it seem like he has serious issues with technology. I think I'm just tired of the trope of "Humanity can't be trusted with this knowledge! So now we'll destroy it!" Aside from that gripe though, it was a very good read. Fantastic environments, good characters, and the other main theme is the futility and waste of war, which I don't have any issues with.

Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People
#7: H.I.V.E. - Higher Institute of Villainous Education

#7 H.I.V.E. : Higher Institute of Villainous Education by Mark Walden

I have the distinct feeling the phrase "Hogwart's for supervillains" came up in the pitch for this novel. Because that's largely what it is.
A group of 13 year olds with talents for mischief and crime are abducted by a mysterious organization to their elite training facility on an island inside an active-looking volcano. There they're taught courses like Basic Villainy by a cast of colorful teachers.

Now, with a description like that, your first reaction is going to either be "How lame!" or "How awesome!" Mine was the second. I loves me some supervillainy. Though for budding supervillains, most of the characters are friendly, courageous, loyal, etc. So they're not really that bad. Not even the big baddie who runs the place. Which is really the easier way to write "bad guys", make them pretty much admirable people, then add the trappings like mechanical hands and death rays and henchthugs and so on. The ending leaves it wide open for a series (presumably following the further years of the class) so it remains to be seen how things will be handled if the kids actually start doing nefarious deeds. All in all, probably not worth a hardcover price, but decent enough to read from the library or similar.

Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People

#4 Bad Prince Charlie by John Moore

This was a nifty humorous fantasy novel. Somewhat in the vein of Terry Pratchett's, who he even mentioned by name, when he was using footnotes. Kinda like the stuff I wanted to write at one point. It's quite good though, and I'm probably gonna read the other books he's written too.

#5 Making Money by Terry Pratchett

I love pretty much everything Pratchett's ever written. I'm an unabashed fanboy. And Moist Von Lipwig is a nifty character, the or I just have a weakness for con men characters who mean good in the end, really. I was a little disappointed in this one, though. I don't regret reading it at all, but it wasn't the best Discworld book I've read. The plot and the main villain both seemed a little weak. Things felt a little too easy. And I'm nerd enough I wish he'd gone more into the economics of money part, with the "gold standard" and all of the rest. A novel about trying to fundamentally change the entire financial structure of Ankh-morpok could have been fascinating. It just wasn't quite there. Some of the characters were excellent though, including Mr. Bent, the accountant, and the golem with an identity crisis. And it gave us some of the best looks at lord Vetinari.

#6 How to Win Friends and Influence People

It took me a while to finish reading this. Not because it was bad or hard, but because it was chopped up into short chapters. So I'd read one or two, and then figure I was done for now. It's easy to see why the book's been in print continuously since 1930something though. There's a lot of good advice in it. And some things I definitely have to work on changing with how I communicate with people. I think this is going to join Getting Things Done on a stack of books to read every so often, to get new perspectives and to see how else I can improve.

Previous Books:
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#1: Grave Peril

#3: DMZ: Volume 3: Public Works Written by Brian Wood and Drawn by Riccardo Burchielli

DMZ is an amazing comic. It's set in Manhattan, during the Second American Civil War. Volume 3 picks up with the effects of a no-bid reconstruction contract given to a shady company with connections to the President and a reputation for corruption. Oh, and hiring mercenaries.
That's not the only part of it, though. But even with that, what makes DMZ great isn't the individual plots. It's the depiction of life in a war zone, for the civilians who live there. And then it places that in New York City, to bring it home. That and the art both make it much more direct.

Man, I suck at literary-type reviews. It's a good comic. Read it.

I'm still working my way through How to Win Friends & Influence People.


Previous Books:
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#1: Grave Peril

graveyardgreg was doing this before, I think as some part of an LJ challenge to read 50 books in a year. Obviously, I won't make it by the end of this year (well, probably not), but I can still keep track and provide mini-reviews, and thoughts, and things.

And give me a reason to update, which I haven't been doing so much. So therefore, I give you the first three books.

#1: Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
Book 3 of the Dresden Files. I got into these a while ago, and I've been borrowing the books from my friend as I get through them. Harry Dresden is the kind of character that appeals to me. Yeah, he's a smartass. And he says things like how his trench coat flapped like Batman's cape. If you want more details, you can find them easily enough. This one was quite good, with ghosts and a vampire costume contest and a showdown in a burning building. Harry gets the crap beaten out of him every time, too. It's not like some series where the characters just keep picking up new powers until it's just ridiculous.

#2 Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant
The first chapter of this book made me the angriest I've been in months. But not at the book, at the situation it described. It's about Winchester, VA, which is less than 50 miles from where I live, so it hits close to home. But it's mostly about the white working poor in rural areas. By a self-described redneck socialist, who grew up there and came back after he retired, and didn't like what he saw. It's angry, and sad, and a celebration and evisceration of that whole culture all at the same time. And though I've lived in the same areas, and worked the same crappy underpaid exploited jobs, I've not really understood some of the things, the way they're explained here. It's an excellent book, that I recommend to anyone who wants to understand part of the reason things are how they are in America.

There was another book I read, but I forget what it was now, so I'm not sure if I should count it or not. I'll probably have more thoughts on some of these later. Next book: How to Make Friends and Influence People. I really need to learn to deal with people better. For many reasons.

"Food cannont cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can."

From The Secret, Page 59.

And with that, The Secret, you completely and utterly fail. I may skim the rest of the book, but at this point I know this book is utter and complete trash, and now I'm going to feel even more rotten having to sell it to people. I wonder if I'd get in trouble if people asked me about the book and I told them it was a complete pile of gibberish and nonsense.

Because The Secret is complete rubbish, it really is.

...is to write a self-help book and fleece a bunch of people who need help out of their money.

Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.

Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.

So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.

So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.

It's nice to know I've still got it. I borrowed a book from work because it looked interesting, and proceeded to complete reading it in approximately one day. Started reading it last night, finished about an hour ago, and that's including sleep and work. Yay me.

But it helps to have a good book to read. And I was reading American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An odyssey in the New China by Matthew Polly which has too many subtitles but is made of several parts of awesome. I picked it up at first because it looked interesting, what with the title, and the "Iron Crotch" bit, and the pic of the monk carrying a bag of Burger King. I almost put it back, but then I flipped it over and read the blurbs on the back. The last one sold me completely. Allow me to quote it in full.

"A lot of people talk about becoming a real live ninja and don't do a thing. That's bullcrap. But this guy actually did it! In conclusion, Matthew Polly is the complete opposite of a wimpy baby."
--Robert Hamburger, author of REAL Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book.

When a book has Real Ultimate Power, how could I NOT read it? And that's not a bad description of what he did. In 1992, he dropped out of Princeton for a couple of years, and went to China to find the Shaolin temple and train in Kung Fu with the monks there. Seriously. He spent two years in China, training, and eventually became a Shaolin disciple. The book is a description of those two years and the weirdness of China in the early 90s, and of a 21 year old on the opposite side of the world than he grew up on. And learning to kick ass. It's really awesome. You can read a more detailed and eloquent review here, which the author even commented on.

And the last little bit about this book, besides the fact that it made me feel even more like I've never done anything? A little bit of synchronity. I was taking a break from reading it before work, and turned on the radio, and guess who was getting interviewed on NPR? The author. Yeah, it makes sense that the author'd be on the radio around the release of the book, but it was still an interesting bit of timing.

And no, I won't tell you the secret of Iron Crotch. But it's exactly what it sounds like, just ask Monk Dong.

I just finished reading Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber. It's about Willie Sutton, one of the most famous and successful bank robbers in American history, who robbed almost a hundred banks and broke out of jail three times.

The irony of the title is it comes from a famous quote in an interview, where a reporter asked him "Why do you keep robbing banks?" "Because that's where the money is." But according to him in the book, he never actually said that.

And it is a fascinating book. It doesn't go into much detail about the bank robberies, because why should it? Most of the plans actually were fairly simple, he'd disguise himself as a cop or Fedex guy or something and get into the bank when there was just one person there, before it opened, then corral the other employees as they came in and convince the manager to open the safe, then walk out. He comes off as a real gentleman bank robber. Sure, it's his autobiography, so he'd have every reason to make himself look good, but it's still fascinating.

The other thing, though? Most of the book is about being in jail. He spent like thirty years in jail all told, the chapter about one of the escape plans skips over several years. He spent all of World War II in jail. He finally got out of jail thanks to a lot of legal wrangling on Christmas Eve, 1969. But the parts about jail are fascinating in themselves. Especially the kinds of hellholes some of them were, and reading him talking about the changes that came to the prisons in the times he was there. The whole book was completely interesting, and gave me all sorts of ideas.

While cleaning up, I've found at least five books with bookmarks partway through them, that I remember then that I must have started but never finished. The question is, do I start reading them at the bookmark, or start over? Guess I'll have to see how much of them I remember.

I don't think I mentioned this yet, which is slacky of me. The awesome website/blog World Changing has a book out, and it's an awesomely pretty book. I haven't read it thoroughly yet, but considering how nifty the blog is, I imagine the book's much the same. It's full of the kind of future that'd actually be nice to live in.

So, I was reading The Number of the Beast by Heinlein. It's...not very good. It started out with decent setup, once you get past the fact that yes, all four of the main characters are geniuses and perfectly share Heinlein's fictional version of libertarianism, have no nudity taboos, and are constantly reminding the reader "we're so much more enlightened about sex and nudity than you are". And if you can swallow the handwaved malarkey about shifting universes by pushing on a gyroscope in three directions. Which uses no power and lets you teleport anywhere instantly. But y'know, that'd be okay if it were the main plot thing and then it was all exploring different universes while running from somebody else who can do the exact same thing and is trying to kill them, but that doesn't happen. Not all that much happens, except a lot of re-hashed arguments about the authority of the captain of the ship and other such things that were covered well in Starship Troopers.

Where things really started to fall apart was when they ended up in Oz. And then from there it turned into basically Heinlein writing fanfiction for his favorite authors and himself, and it ends up at a giant interdimensional science fiction convention, with cameos and in-jokes galore, the original plot being long forgot, until it shows back up on the last two pages and I guess is resolved, in a way that makes no real sense.

And oh man, don't even get me started on the women. Now, I've never been a woman, but the women don't ring true at all through most of the book. Like seriously out of whack. And the whole pregnancy fetish thing, man. Sheesh.

Not Heinlein's best work, no. And I'm not sure I buy any of the arguments I've found via wikipedia about it being written to help lead people to good writing or things, it really just reminds me of fanfic, written for the appreciation of his friends. And published because he was Robert Heinlein.

Also, many SF authors seem to turn into dirty old men. Or dirty middle aged men. Some more gracefully than others. (Compare, say, Asimov's book of dirty limericks to any recent Piers Anthony.)

Okay, so where do you draw the line between being fair-minded and not reading something because you can tell it's tripe?

I'm thinking, in this instance of a new book. One by Pat Buchanan, of the crazytown Buchanan's. I'm not going to link the book because I don't want to help it's google rank, but here's the title. "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America" I mean, why not just title it "OHNOES! BROWN PEOPLE!"I I guess it might be worth reading so I can identify all the problems and know how to take its arguments apart, but that doesn't even usually work in political arguments. At least on the Internet, they always end up with attacks at me and not answering my questions when I'm posting links to articles that disprove what they're saying.

But on the other hand, that means I'd have to slog through 320 pages of crypto-racist bullshit like the summary. Stuff that's EXACTLY the kind of thing I was talking about the other day, the people who are all "America is great! But we're so weak we're going to be destroyed by a bunch of immigrants!"

"In this important book, Pat Buchanan reveals that, slowly but surely, the great American Southwest is being reconquered by Mexico. These lands---which many Mexicans believe are their birthright---are being detached ethnically, linguistically, and culturally from the United States by a deliberate policy of the Mexican regime. This is the “Aztlan Plot” for “La Reconquista,” the recapture of the lands lost by Mexico in the Texas War of Independence and Mexican-American War.
Comparing the immigrant invasion of America from across the Mexican border---and of Europe from across the Mediterranean---to the barbarian invasions that ended the Roman Empire, the author writes with passion and conviction that we have begun the final chapter of the Death of the West. Unless the invasion is halted now, Buchanan argues, by midcentury America will be a country unrecognizable to our parents, the Third World dystopia that Theodore Roosevelt warned against when he said we must never let America become a “polyglot boardinghouse” for the world."

Is it really worth reading the book, knowing that people are going to be quoting it, even when it's wrong, just to see if there's any new arguments in there, or should I just write it off as the same recycled bullshit that's patently wrong? And for the love of monkeys, where do they FIND these kinds of bullshit theories? Mexico is going to conquer the Southwest by having people move there because their lives in Mexico suck? THAT'S a "state of emergency"? Man. How can people think like that?

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments by shaneon, the bit about religion? Pat Buchannan is a Roman Catholic, like the majority of Mexicans.

So I bought and read through all of 1633 in a bit over 24 hours. I've finished the first two books in the series in just over two days. Now I want to go read all the others.

I guess that's about all there is to say about that, huh?

I'm reading 1632 by Eric Flint, a sci-fi/alternate history book about what if a small West Virginia town got transported back to 1632 in Germany, at the height of the Thirty Years' War. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but it's really good. It's very American, but in a good way. It celebrates the good bits (at least so far) and I've been grinning through most of it.

One part, in particular, prompted this post, because it put things I've known but not been able to express, exactly, into words that made me go "Oh yeah! That!" Let me quote.

"But they are also a people who cherish their laws. Which they enact themselves, you know, with scant respect for lineage and rank. From what my daughter tells me, they are the most inveterate republicans since the ancient Greeks."

Balthazar spread his hands, as if demonstrating the obvious. "This is why, I think, that their instinctive response was to protect us, along with our goods. The law was being broken, you see. Their law, not the crown's."

That's the crux of a lot of things I feel, I think. And part of why so many things tend to make me angry. Or used to, before they kept piling up and getting worse despite everything. It doesn't always work out that way in practice, but our laws are OUR laws, made by We The People, not something handed down from a king or god or anybody else. That makes it personal, on the important things. When the laws get ignored, it's not just flouting some authority, it's flouting all of us, including me. They're our laws, and they apply to everyone, including the people who write them and enforce them. That's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always, especially in a lot of things where Congress has basically become a rubber stamp for the corporate authorities on high with the money and the connections. Which is why THAT gets under my skin. They're undermining the whole point of the laws. The laws aren't something internal imposed on us from without or above, they're something we build for ourselves, not to keep us down, but to shelter us and build on top of. And when that's corrupted, it puts the whole system at risk. And for all its faults, I still love our system. We need to take it back, and make it work how it's supposed to. And because of this, there's people who would be happy to scream I hate America, while they support the same people who're attacking what makes America America. But I don't care what they think. I know better, and now I know how to put it.

Okay, anybody have suggestions for CDs or books to take with me? I think my book mix is pretty set, though. I'm gonna bring Earth, by David Brin, Perdido Street Station, and I have several candidates for the third one.

As for CDs, I'm going to burn some mix CDs, and burn copies of some others, there's no sense in risking any of the originals on a trip. I have room for 24 CDs, but I don't have to fill the case up, I'm probably only going to need music while I'm actually traveling, when I'm somewhere, I should be doing something cool that doesn't need me listening to a CD player.

My last post reminded me of something else. I finished reading The K Street Gang. It was a good summary of everything, although in the last chapter the writer switched back to trying to blame the corruption on "big government" and those gosh darn liberals who took power after Nixon and tried to regulate campaign money. But that's not what this is about. Two things struck me as I was reading it.

The first, the amounts of money. Oh, I'd seen the amounts mentioned elsewhere, and in other articles, but it didn't quite sink in. Words like "million" and "billion" get tossed around all the time, but the book got into things like the $19,000 a week hotel suite Abramoff's partner rented, the luxury cars, and the continuous amounts of money they got off people, and the chains of "non-profits" most of it got laundered through before finally ending up in their pockets. It's ridiculous. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that'd really happen, but I guess it did. And it's hard for most people to grasp the scale of things, because numbers on that magnitude are just numbers, they don't tie to anything we normally deal with. And when they're just written as $45 million", it gets mentally translated to "big". So I think newspapers should start writing out the whole number for things like that. $45,000,000 looks bigger than "$45 million." And $45,000,000,000 is visibly bigger than $45 billion, and easier to distinguish from "45 million.'

And the other thing that struck me was the excerpts from some of the emails that got sent around in high powered Washington lobbyist circles. They read like emails written by 14 year old AOLers. Spelling, and grammar and capitalization all optional, u instead of you, r instead of are, and way way way too many exclamation points. These were the kind of people who could bilk tribes out of millions of dollars and bribe Congresscritters into covering for little more than slavery? Man. I guess literacy isn't really valued that much, is it?

As pervasive as the Internet is, and as much I use it and have used it, it still doesn't feel quite real. It's just words on my computer screen most of the time, not, you know, actually real. So every so often when I come across a piece of the internet in real life, it's still kinda weird. Not because the things aren't cool or anything, it's just kinda like when I find out other people have actually heard of bands I like. I mean, obviously other people must like them, it's just somehow odd.

For example, Urban Dictionary has a book out. Of collected entries from it. It's a crystallized portion of the Internet, out of date already I'm sure. But I look at that and it's this paper and ink version of something that's just existed as photons and encoded magnetic stuff. And somehow, I find it kinda weird.

Or the Onion collections, though the Onion is a real fake newspaper anyway. And then there's a couple children's books I've seen based around ninjas, monkeys, robots, and/or pirates. Or books like The Pirates! in an Adventure With... Obviously, there's lots of writers on the Internet, and lots of people my age who've been exposed to all the same influences who're writing and doing things now. It's just somehow weird. Kinda like my private world of goofy weirdness is being trapped on pages and exposed to who knows what sorts of people.