I joined my literary old friends, Hawk, Spenser, Susan Silverman and the dog Pearl, in an unlikely tale of a high end whorehouse in Boston in which all of the prostitutes were there because they enjoyed sex anyway, and thought they might as well be paid for it. The chapter in which this is described is by itself pretty much as funny as the other chapters, even while the implausibility is leaping right off the page and breaking the spell of utter enjoyment. Don't worry, though, it's only for a moment.

I started the book on a long walk and found myself laughing heartily at the mutual self-irony of virtually every character in the book, even including one or two of the bad guys.

Except for the bad guys, who as it turns out are not overly imbued with the self knowledge to recognize irony let alone the intelligence to enjoy it, all the good guys are having just the best of times. Susan is in good form, as insightful as ever about sex, love, prostitution and relationships. Spenser is forgiving of the bad guys foibles (with a good bit of unforgivingess thrown in just to keep it a tough guy detective novel), thoughtful, competent, fearless and tough. Hawk is, as always, Hawk, and even the hired muscle from out of town is given to repartee, badinage, persiflage and playing the clown. Except of course when bopping them on the head. The cops in various cities are helpful in setting up meetings with mobsters and making sure everything goes fine throughout.

The only downside to the whole enterprise is the pre-doomed effort to rescue April Kyle, a veteran of TWO previous Spenser outings, for one last time. Sad to say there won't be a sequel to this particular episode, but what does it matter, it's worth the very time itself just to spend another hour or two in the company with such agreeable and right thinking tough guys and one Harvard PhD girl. They do the best they can, they can't do any better, especially considering that it's a free country and people must be let alone to live their life and make their choices. You do the same, and go check out Hundred Dollar Baby [amazon link] . http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jul.htm#bookish152.dat Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jul.htm#bookish151.dat There is a divide between the world of today and the world of the past. A chasm, a break, a discontinuity. The atom today just isn't what it used to be: indestructable, indivisible, and taking up all its available space. In fact, the atom is none of these things. Filled with interior space, there's hardly anything to it at all. There was a time we didn't know that, though. Well, let's ask, who found this out? Who discovered the atomic nucleus we all grew up knowing about? Who split the atom? It was Einstein, right?

Ernest Rutherford was the fourth of 12 children, born in remote (as we think of it) New Zealand. He was collected up and brought to England via one of Prince Albert's Exhibition of 1851 scholarships (he was the second choice), a man who when he found out he had won the scholarship was digging potatoes on his parents' farm and cried out "I'll never dig another potato again as long as I live." This is a great story, well told, of the discovery, rise to prominence and scientific career of one of the greatest experimental scientists the world has ever known.

If you had been reading the newspapers at the time Rutherford split the atom, you would have known him as equally famous as Einstein. I had the best time reading A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford [buy at amazon] by Richard Reeves. The book is short, clear, colorful, and told me lots of stuff about the early days of experimental physics that I really should have known before. I was interested in physics when I was a kid. Why didn't I learn any of this stuff? I guess I was just too focussed on electronics and lasers. All that old stuff was, like "old", right? I remember "replicating" a Hooke's law experiment in physics at Harvard. We were given these old springs and had to measure their response. Fairly boring I guess, because... previously done! Now however, I'm a lot more curious about how people come up with ideas, follow them through; their antecedents and consequences.

In Frontier Genius, Reeves revisits his college, and replicates (with assistance from the physics department) Rutherford's famous gold foil experiment. Due to what we now know of radioactivity, this experiment could never have been conducted today in the exact form that Rutherford did it.

Of course you can visit the Rutherford Museum at McGill University and see a wide range of experimental apparatus that someone had the foresight to store away rather than take apart and reuse (which is what Rutherford himself no doubt would have done) when Rutherford left McGill, but the most fun thing to do is to pick up and read a copy of A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford [buy at amazon] . http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jul.htm#bookish151.dat Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jul.htm#bookish150.dat "Tragic & mysterious, inchoate & incomprehensible, "Muybridge's Horse" limns a hard-to-forget & variegated view of the life and times of seminal photographer Eadweard Muybridge. By turns overwrought enigmatic suggestive or occluding, Canadian poet Rob Winger reveals facets of the Muybridge you never knew: therein lies both the appeal of this poem and its central problem."

Muybridge's Horse [buy at amazon] . by Rob Winger

Okay okay. MY central problem with this absorbing book? When it arrived on my doorstep, it turned out to be a poem! I sure must not have read the description very carefully, for this to come as a complete surprise. I read the book anyway and I think I learned a lot about Muybridge, some of it no doubt true.

This incomplete fragmentary tale inveigles us with its mystery, but how much of it is true? Winger cites Rebecca Solnit's book "River of Shadows" in an appendix. It is tempting to read her book before reviewing this one. Whether or not Winger's poem is 100 percent factually correct, the skeleton of Muybridge's life is at once tragic and ironic.

Consider just a few aspects of the story: Muybridge's aloofness from a bride half his age, his murder of her lover (a man who was his friend?) of which he is found not guilty (although not legally insane), his abandonment of their son in an orphanage after his wife's death (unexplained), his destruction of the Guatemala negatives by torching his own studio (was this true or were the details poetic license?), his broken relationship with Leland Stanford after proving a horse's feet all left the ground during a trot or gallop (not specified) and the ensuing lawsuit. Then there were the twenty-five thousand photographs of human and animal locomotion at Penn. This was a man who was living outside of life.

In "Muybridge's Horse", Rob Winger gives us many unforgettable 'positives' with his description of the 'day to day' in and around Muybridge's life -- the lemons Muybridge ate to focus his attention, a striking and gruesome episode with a cat along with an incomprehensible newspaper reaction, the moment when Muybridge presents a film to Leland Stanford at home with his family, the horse stables and the characterization of Leland Stanford -- anti-abolition -- so admirable and necessary to know.

And of course we also get some insight in the area which is the main reason to return to Muybridge over and over: the birth of photographic sequence and the illumination of the miracle and fundamentally strange phenomenon of photography. Muybridge brought us something new yet perhaps it is something to which he could never adjust or adapt. Winger is right, we never do get to know Muybridge.

Other thoughts: I would like to have known the basis for selection of the several photos included, and why they are presented in miniature. As a work of photographic theory, "Muybridge's Horse" fell short. The enumeration of the names of the photos, while perhaps necessary for effect, is pointless. To attempt a description of the photos without presenting the photos is doomed to fail. Finally, a minor cavil: if there is a connection with Marcel Duchamps' Nude Descending a Staircase, as Winger strongly implies by his presentation of Muybridge's motion studies in Philadelphia showing nudes ascending staircases, it's worth arguing the case through exposition rather than innuendo.

In any case, you can make up your own mind: Muybridge's Horse [buy at amazon] .

(A nice touch: each page contains a different horse silhouette, so when you flip the book's pages, there is the suggestion of a galloping hourse in motion.) http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jul.htm#bookish150.dat Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008may.htm#bookish149.dat Motivation. What is it? According to Jim Johnson, author of The Sixty Second Motivator [buy at amazon] . motivation may be looked at as "readiness to begin to change". Thus, if you are highly motivated, you are "really ready."

You may be disappointed to learn that the "sixty second motivator" is a person, rather than a motivational principle, but there you are. That's just the way it is.

In this short parable, Johnson notes that trainers come in two types: martinets who order their trainees around like troops, and laissez-faire trainers who let their troops get away with anything. He notes that in both cases, the trainer ends up being able to successfully motivate only a small fraction of the population.

As a student nearing the end of physical therapy grad school, he hears of a third type of physical therapist (his tale is autobiographical). There is a "miracle trainer" working at a nearby hospital who can motivate anyone to get started on physical therapy in just sixty seconds. Indeed, several times during the story, Johnson-the-student pulls out and examines a stopwatch, skeptical and increasingly worried as the second hand ticks past 30, then 45, then nearly a minute. Suspense!

Not to worry, though. Somehow the patient begins the exercise at the nearly the last possible second, even where others have failed to motivate! In (and from) The Sixty Second Motivator [buy at amazon] , Johnson learns that there are just TWO reasons that a person may not be motivated to do stretching exercises, work out, or begin eating differently. Should I reveal them?

Of course!

First, the reason the person has been given (or is giving herself) to do the necessary deed may not be IMPORTANT enough. They have the key to unlock the door, but they do not care to use it! Several examples are given in the story of more-important considerations that get the sluggards up and moving around in under 60 seconds. These are, in reverse order of importance: 1) We won't let you out of the hospital until you can prove you are able to move around, and 2) The possibility of more and/or better sex in your life.

Second, the unmotivated individual may lack confidence in her ability to bring about success through her efforts. In other words, they have the key, but fear it will break off in their hand when they try to unlock the door. In this variation, the trainer removes obstacles to success, e.g. "Well, your knee hurts so you can't exercise, but have you thought about swimming?" "Why no! You're a genius! Soon my clothes will fit againd and I will look much much better! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!" (see motivation number 2 above)

That's it, there are just two elements to motivation. In Johnson's analogy, they are like a key to a locked door. Held in your hand unused they are of little value. But put the key into the lock and turn, and you can unlock the door, open it, and walk through to a better life.

If you don't believe me, buy the book, especially if your problems are related to success in undertaking a course in physical therapy. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008may.htm#bookish149.dat Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish147.dat Not everyone liked the methods set forth in Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 [buy at amazon] ., but for someone who has never used Adobe Camera Raw and who really wants to get the mechanics of layer mask operations down pat, this book was a breath of fresh air and a revelation. Of course I might feel differently after actually going through all 21 exercises, but having read the book and done some work based on what I learned, I'm a happy puppy so far. I don't think it's a good book for beginners. I had already worked my way through an early edition of one of Katrin Eismann's excellent books on retouching -- which are quite serious and methodic, and I also watched at least 27 hours of Deke McClelland at work in Photoshop CS1. Kelby's contribution is different. He gives you an overall algorithm to proceed through from the beginning of a picture that badly needs work to something pretty doggone interesting at the end.

Some of the photos are pretty badly off, and not all of them are fundamentally interesting. A photo of a gas pump -- very dark -- a photo of a window -- very dull -- some photos of cars -- very inherently uninteresting. But the layering, the adjustments in raw, the use of curves for modifying contrast? All good. The criticisms of some reviewers that Kelby does not adequately discuss how to avoid flattening? Completely valid. I doubt most people would really end up working this way, but for a learning romp through 21 photos I think it simplifies the presentation considerably. I'll return to this book for more detailed impressions after I do the exercises -- which I don't have time to go through at the moment 'cause I'm trying to maintain focus on some other areas -- but I liked it, I enjoyed it, and I read every page. The cheat sheet for the seven points is on page 255, by the way, if you're wondering what the seven steps are. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish147.dat Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish148.dat Last year's Spenser Novel "Now and Then" (which for some reason I remembered as 'In and Out') is a romp filled with hilarious dialog in the Robert Parker's great Spenser tradition. It seems twice as long -- and twice as enjoyable -- as the novels he churned out during the time of the TV series.

I sat in the living room all Saturday afternoon, laughing out loud at the wiseacre remarks of Spenser, his sometime ally in arms Hawk, and a couple of hired guns they bring in to help them protect Susan and do their detective tail jobs.Now and Then [buy at amazon] .

by Robert Parker It helps if you've read all the Spenser novels before; you know there's a romantic history between Spenser and his psychiatrist girlfriend that was somewhat fraught. And if you're familiar with the foibles of Boston's collegiate political scene you'll get a kick out of "Now and Then", which pokes fun at leftist followers and leaders alike.

Aside from the detectve thriller aspects of Parker's Spenser novels, and the ongoing character development which is really development of the way his characters interact with and think about each other, Parker is also developing and explicating Spenser's moral code; his sense of fairness and appropriateness in the way he hunts down his client's killer and brings that person to justice. You'll be laughing days later as you think of some of the lines in Now and Then [buy at amazon] . If I hadn't already returned it to the library, I think I'd be in danger of reading it again right now. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish148.dat Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:30:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#amwalk88.dat I was sorry to see amazon take down Samuel Chell's review of the Omron HJ 112 step counter; perhaps they felt it was statistically anomalous that 1640 out of 1647 reviewers had found it useful? Too bad because I certainly found it useful and the pedometer is fun.

This particular Omron model is very accurate, even in a pocket (although a little less so in a purse on a bus, I'm told), and it's good counterweight to my sedentary lifestyle.

Omron Digital Pedometer [buy at amazon] . It has a seven day memory, and resets to zero at midnight of each day. On Sunday night, I scroll back through the week, and enter my steps into a spreadsheet. It's a real inducement to get out and go for a walk, knowing at the end of the week I'll be looking at a lot fewer steps if I don't.

The Step counter differentiates between "aerobic" steps, which I presume it uses some pacing equation to determine, and also calculates distance walked (you must calibrate it to your step length when you first get it -- you do that at the same time you're setting the time).

There is a little watch battery to power the onboard clock included with the package, and even a little screwdriver like thingie you can use to open and close the case.

My interest in this whole topic was piqued when I saw the results of a study in a recent issue of Science which showed that people with pedometers in which they could read the number of steps took about 2,000 more steps per day than people who were in the dark. I decided to give it a try and will let you all know how it turns out in another couple of month.s http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#amwalk88.dat Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish146.dat Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" is an unconventional murder mystery, but a striking series of zany and believable character studies. Lethem gives us Lionell Essrog,an orphan at St. Vincent's School for boys in Brooklyn, a footsoldier in a small-time mobster's entourage, a loyal teller of jokes, an observer of the world and, to the best of his ability, a well adjusted sufferer, with various associated compulsions, of Touretz syndrome. Both Lethem and his protagonist are unusually thought-filled about the world. He has Lionel think and it's clear he's a thinker himself. Growing up, Lionell knows nothin' from Touretz, he just knows there are some things he can't help doing or saying. At one point he goes through a kissing compulsion, where he kisses the boys in the orphanage and then of course must explain he can't help it "It's a game!" he gamely tries out. He's only beaten up once.

Touretz offers opportunities to the writer. As part of the compulsion to count things, Lethem has Lionel counting the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge, standing in the cold wind going "one two three four five six" counting them in sixes because at the moment everything groups itself in sixes.

Lethem shows how the uncontrollable verbal tics of Touretz arrange and array themselves in Lionel's gritty Brooklyn social world, a constant patter accompanying his meetings with mobsters, cronies, a homicide detective, shouting in a local Zendo (a Zen place of worship) before being thrown out.

What about the murder? The murder is violent, it occurs early, its tragic but even so has a comic aspect to it. If violence disturbs you this book will be disturbing. The author makes it real, in story and occasion. A work of genius, a staggering conception to begin with and fully worked out, is Motherless Brooklyn [buy at amazon] . by Jonathan Lethem. Searching for the ISBN of Motherless Brooklyn, I saw that it appears on the movie database. Apparently it has been made into a movie, for release in 2008. If you read the book you won't need to see the movie. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2008jan.htm#bookish146.dat Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007dec.htm#bookish145.dat With so much going on in my action-packed 2007 life, I fell quite behind in my reviewing. Finally I have decided to give up waiting, to list the books with a few words about each and to get on with the rest of 2007. First, a preview (but not a promise) for 2008: I got some great books for Christmas -- a book of Ansell Adams photographs of California, one of the new translations of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dean Koontz's Brother Odd (third in the Odd Thomas series and the first I've read), Motherless Brooklyn, and The Country Cooking of France by Anne Willan.

Also, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh: people, ideas and things, instead of labor, capital and land, and Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric Beinhocker, which also talks about a paradigm shift in the field of Economics (zzzz) but... a different paradigm shift! It should be loads of fun comparing and contrasting these two in 2008 although fairly safe to say that insomnia won't be a problem all year long. Beinhocker is a senior consultant with McKinsey (who knows what that means?) while Warsh is a journalist who had the economics beat at the Boston Globe when the "beat system" was still in effect.

These were Christmas books and although I have read the first parts of each one, I haven't finished any of them with the exception of Brother Odd. Motherless Brooklyn is the story of a former mob goon who has Touretz syndrome, and turns detective when his mob boss is knifed to death in Brooklyn. Exceptionally written and completely original, it was the suggestion of a childhood friend who now teaches English in New York. It promises to be excellent, and after just one chapter I recommend it highly.

So, here are some of the recent books of the past year:

For Love of Politics [buy at amazon] Sally Bedell Smith
Unusually diligent. That's how I would describe myself for reading this entire book on Bill and Hillary's 8 years in the White House. It's also how I would describe the author, who spent 3 years interviewing people, reading articles, and compiling about 80 pages of end notes -- maybe around 4500. I always thought the Bill and Hillary team was a great team, with great problems, and this book is a great reprise. My initial impression was that it is striking how much Bill lied even in his first year. It's good to have a reminder that the questonable activities in Arkansas were never really resolved, and it's educational to see an inside picture of just what Hillary was doing during her White House years. It left me wondering if the team would work as well when reincarnated with an opposite symmetry: Hillary Bill rather than Bill Hillary.

The Decipherment of Linear B [buy at amazon] by John Chadwick
I checked this out of the library to learn more about ancient Minoan Crete. Linear B was their written language, a syllabary of Greek. It was preserved when the palace at Knossos burned, and the clay tablets were fired into stone. The records there were kept in probably 30 or 40 different hands, indicating that writing was probably relatively widespread. Chadwick worked with the amazing Michael Ventris, who cracked the code. An entire chapter is devoted to the civilization thus uncovered, and it's fascinating, detailing number of chariot wheels, the lines of command in their social organization, etcetera. The story of the decipherment is dramatic, too.

Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World [buy at amazon] by Patrick J Geary
This book was my mainstay sleep aid in 2007. It combines insight, humor, and an unusual topic which is not well covered anywhere else, nor with much consequence in the modern world. A bonus is that it reads extremely well aloud, and almost all the names are unfamiliar, which is hilarious. Or I should say... Hilarius, since there really was such a fellow. There were at least three thought-provoking insights or facts on each page. Nonetheless don't be too surprised if the person to whom you are reading falls asleep in fairly short order. This is a book I would read again, and probably will.

Broadcast Voice Handbook 4th Edition [buy at amazon] by Ann Utterback
When I do re-read the Merovingian book again, I could read it out loud and do a fabulous job, thanks to what I have learned from Ann Utterback's book. This book is authoritative, well researched, concise and thorough. Accept no substitute. Relax, warm up before you begin, mark your text for emphasis and pacing, and speak standing up. Do not smoke and if you do, quit smoking at once. The book contains many exercises you can read aloud. I got this book because I am producing "screencasts" to demonstrate the software of the company I'm working for, and I'd have to say they improved.

The Organized Life: Secrets of an Expert Organizer [buy at amazon] by Stephanie Denton
This is a small book I picked up for free at the swimming pool, and have kept next to the bathroom sink to read while I'm brushing my teeth. So, in essence I spent zero time on this book. Zero money, zero time -- if I gleaned just one idea from it, it would be worth it. And (drum roll) that I idea was ... when you are putting your silverware into the dishwasher, put forks together, spoons together, and knives together. In this way, you will speed your emptying of the dishwasher and make it more enjoyable too. (Note: I don't always do this, but I have done it once or twice and I have to admit it was fun as hell).

Getting Things Done: [buy at amazon] by David Allen
This is another book by an organizing expert, and his methods really have a following, so I thought I would check it out. I started using the Mac-only program Omnifocus to get organized just after it came out of private alpha, and have used it for a month or so. It's good, and you can get it half-price until Jan 7 2008. Allen's central idea is that you bring everything into one list (or pile), and then write "to do" lists in which the next thing to be done is one specific concrete action. He also recommends using file folders without the pendaflex thingies, i.e. non-hanging folders, and printing labels on them with a file folder label printer. I have done this too, and I have to admit that this also was fun as hell.

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager [buy at amazon] by Michael Lopp
The main reason I read this was because the author wrote part of it as a pseudonymous enterprise (he was rands) on his blog (randsinrepose.com). It has a good rendition of the cast of characters in software development and if I ever have to manage software development, or if I ever work for a company where software development is managed, then I will return to this knee-slapping LMAO book for necessary insights in minimum time. I didn't finish the book, but I wouldn't give it away either.

Brother Odd [buy at amazon] by Dean Koontz
I was fascinated by the idea of a monk who could see and converse with the spirits of the recently (and not so recently) dead. What I didn't expect was that Dean Koontz would be such a funny writer. The character of Odd Thomas was sufficiently entertaining that I would return to the first book in the series and read it, and perhaps read some reviews before reading either of the two forthcoming Odd books. People panned the second one, so I would give it a skip. On the other hand, there are so many other genres to be sampled that Brother Odd might be my last venture into Koontz-land.

Holy Terror (Rogue Warrior) [buy at amazon] by Dick Marcinko
There must be at least ten or 12 Rogue Warrior books by now -- all starring the author. The early ones were co-written by a master of the genre, and then there was a drop in quality when he left or was fired. This one is better, cosmopolitan and funny and, as usual, quite coarse. I read it earlier in the year so I'm a little vague as to whether the shootout in the Vatican was in this book, but I think so. It ended up with one of those great scenes in which the bad guy keeps on talking until finally the hero has a chance to bump him off. But maybe I'm remembering a different book?

On Creating Short Films for the Web [buy at amazon] by Hillman Curtis
This was a great read, and tells you everything you need to know to make a short film for the web -- at least at the time of writing. It's something you could do solo, assuming you know how to capture sound, which is not that easy. Perhaps you would be better off hiring a sound person. Hillman Curtis, as always, is on the cover of his own book, shown in a photo travelling off to make a film. I had a marginal interest in making a film when I got this book, which I obtained after watching one of the films he made, at hillmancurtis.com . I liked the film and bought the book. After I read the book, I realized that making a film for the web was basically a labor of love, and a huge amount of time consuming trouble besides. But I recommend the book.

Essential Actionscript 3 by Colin Moock
This authoritative and complete treatment of AS3 (the programming language for Flash 9 and above) has much more in it than I could possibly tell you about here. The book is too big, and its liveliness is a victim of the O'Reilly book plan factory. Moock probably didn't have much choice. The book leaves out one of the most useful aspects of AS3 entirely, the Ecmascript for XML innovation (E4X). So you'll need to get another book in addition to this one. If you're in Los Angeles send me an email and join the ongoing AS3 patterns study group, which resumes in January. We probably won't be reading this book for the purpose of discussion.

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web [buy at amazon] by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
This book is amazing! It has just the right amount of science in the intro, so that when you get to the organic gardening practicum in the second half, you have a firm scientific basis for understanding all that's going on under and about the surface of your lawn, garden, tomato patch, whatever. Is your soil bacterial or fungal, and which is better for what you're trying to do?

I was completely fascinated and captivated by the idea that when we were growing up we did everything exactly the wrong way to make our lives easier in the making of our lawns greener. May I plead that we didn't know any better? I looked at one of our old lawns last week, and it doesn't look any better today than it did 40 years ago. They must not be using organic techniques.

From this book you will learn how to make compost tea, and how and when to apply it. You will also learn how to read the soil test lab reports you get back from the soil laboratory that you send samples out to. Lowenfels and Lewis make this interesting even to someone who does not have to do anything in the yard, but if you do, then the information is VITAL.

Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle over Guns [buy at amazon] by Mark V Tushnet
Great and unbiased coverage of the legal basis for the debate. A new book, I had to return it before finishing. Will return to the well when I can get it for 3 weeks instead of two. Tushnet lays out what has come to be called the "Standard Model" of 2nd amendment interpretation, which has been put in place via legal research conducted by the Justice Department under the Bush administration. But he gives you all the positions and if you want to come to know better an issue in constitutional law -- and this is a good issue to focus on -- without getting too annoyed, "Out of Range" seems like a really good comprehensive start.

Building a Better Mouse [buy at amazon] by Steve Alcorn
It was more than the usual amount of fun reading this book, since I had worked with a lot of the people mentioned in the book after they left Disney and were working at Linn Electronics. Steve Alcorn was head of the engineering department at Linn. I don't know when he decided to write this book, but his sense of humor really comes through. I haven't finished 'Building a Better Mouse' yet but when I do I'll give it a proper review.

Terror Dreams [buy at amazon] by Susan Faludi
Terror Dreams is another book I didn't finish. I got a copy to read before a book party where I met Susan Faludi. The book is in two parts, the first a media analysis and the second a historical excursion into narratives of captivity in frontier America. I found the mode of inquiry in the first part incredibly annoying; Faludi seemed to personalize the media stories with intent. Like for example "Newsweek couldn't resist saying..." I couldn't really quarrel with her conclusions since I hadn't watched any of the TV shows she was talking about, news or otherwise. Not one to blow her own horn, Faludi only revealed about half-way through the book, and only in passing, that she had interviewed Jessica Lynch. The section of the book on the Deerfield Massacre was the most interesting exegesis of the Massacre that I have read -- and I lived in Deerfield for 3 years. Enough said.

Theme Song for an Old Show [buy at amazon] by Jeffrey Lewis
I found some enjoyment in this book, and I finished it. It's the third in a four-volume series of which the first book, Meritocracy, was really great. Theme Song for an Old Show traces the further adventures -- cast as fictional -- of the author in television land. It read kind of like notes for a novel rather than the novel itself, but what am I, a literary critic? I liked Hill Street Blues, for which Jeff wrote a lot of episodes, and this is a slight skew glimpse into the world in which it was created.

A Slave No More [buy at amazon] by David W Blight
This book was sent to me for review and I have read one of the 2 slave narratives. I just paged deep into the book and started reading. I read the story of the 5 escapes of a 15-year-old slave, the final one successful as the Civil War wound down. It was gripping and I read it straight through. Not very many escapee narratives exist -- just about a hundred. This was worth reading just to get a sense of ordinary slave life. The slaves escaped all the time of course, since they were beaten regularly. Generally they were recaptured by patrols throughout the south, and returned to their owners for more of same. Well worth obtaining and reading.

Meetings, Meetings and More Meetings: Getting Things Done When People Are Involved [buy at amazon] by Simon Ramo
This is a book of low key humor and insight. Ramo -- the 'R' in TRW -- said he had attended about 40,000 meetings, about a third of them necessary. If you work in an organization and wish to be effective, this book is essential. I haven't finished reading it, but once again, would not give my copy away.

http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007dec.htm#bookish145.dat Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007dec.htm#bookish144.dat Years have passed since Bill Clinton dominated the center of the political stage, not to mention stage right and stage left. So plenty of time has passed for plenty of books to be written and digested but even so, I came away with a different impression of the man, what he acheived, and what he was/is like.

It is a real pleasure to see a true master of the form run through every point, much as a championship pool player runs through one table after another, calling every shot and then making it with effortless ease. For Love of Politics [buy at amazon] by Sally Bedell Smith.

If you're undecided as to whether you want Hillary and Bill as co-presidents again, except this time with the roles reversed, then this is the book for you. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007dec.htm#bookish144.dat Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/orangebutton/2007dec.htm#ob65.dat I've been catching up with all kinds of postponed stuff recently. Finally getting around to it. A photo hike to Long Beach with my son turned up hundreds of new images, and we witnessed some kids in Compton getting arrested for trying to ride the train without a ticket. Couldn't this public transportation be free? Then riding it would not be a crime. I sent a friend's doctoral dissertation to another grad school pal, through a professor we all knew. He must be about ninety years old now! I tossed all my old course notes (not include his, which I burned in the wood stove in Maine about 10 years ago) from college. I won't be needing those for the test!

I sent all my negatives and slides to India to be scanned, through ScanCafe.com. The folder names I had specified were not too close to what I remembered, even though I used block letters, and some of the scans seemed to duplicate some of the other scans. At this point I'll be happy if what I get back matches what I sent even roughly. And I'm starting to worry about the second batch, which is three times as large as the first. I'm optimistic it will all turn out for the best, though, and even if it doesn't I'l have some good scans back. There are some sequential photos of Los Angeles development that I've always wanted to combine into a sequence of photos, and now finally I'll be able to do this.

I sent a piccolo back to my old school, the one I think I borrowed about 40 years ago. You can never have too many piccolos, they emit a piercing sound which can be heard for miles. Just the thing!

I picked up a camera and a couple of lenses from Steve's Camera Repair here on Sepulveda in Los Angeles -- these guys are great -- which had been out of repair for ages. Now may it find good use again.

Finally, in a deeply satisfying enterprise conducted in several sessions over the weekend, I disentangled a wind chime that had been hanging from a tree in the yard since before my girlfriend moved into this house. Who knows what ghosts of the past were mixed up in those strings.

Also put up a list of Movie locations of interest and links to some YouTube videos that others might enjoy. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/orangebutton/2007dec.htm#ob65.dat Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007nov.htm#bookish142.dat After teaching English for several years, Judy Muller worked her way up from small-town radio all the way to network television.

Her short, readable memoir, "Now This", is by turns poignant, moving, and hysterically funny. The copy that I checked out of the library had many dog-eared pages and I quickly grew to expect laughter -- to hear myself laughing out loud -- when I reached one of these frequent waystations. Judy Muller teaches a graduate course in broadcast journalism so I checked this book out of the library because I thought it might provide some good insights into the specifics of vocal delivery. Beyond learning that radio reporters actually write their stories (but many TV reporters don't), which for some reason I found surprising -- you mean they aren't incredibly gifted polymaths that speak flawlessly and just wing it? -- I learned very little about the mechanics of broadcast reporting, yet "Now This" is so accessible, and so funny, that I ended up reading the whole book anyway.

In anecdote after knee-slapping anecdote, Muller really captures a prevailing disjunction between the way the Big Media Powers that Be (back in New York) see the world, and the way the rest of us see it out here on the other side of William Penn's woods.

Judy Muller must have zillions of these stories under her belt, and now that she's gotten her memoir out of the way, it would be great to sit back and enjoy hearing her recount some episodes from her travels through small-town USA.

For one penny, you can obtain a copy of Now This! [buy at amazon] by Judy Muller. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007nov.htm#bookish142.dat Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007nov.htm#bookish143.dat Driving over the hill last weekend I tuned in to NPR (National Public Radio) for the 30 minute ride and picked up a story about WHAT a responsive chord had been struck by the production in New Orleans of Samuel Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot. In contemporary New Orleans, the play would be called "Waiting for FEMA". I decided not to wait, and got the play out of the library immediatement. If you're interested in this play, I highly recommend the two-language version En Attendant/ Waiting for / Godot [buy at amazon] . It's short enough that you can read it while ambling along with your dog, and the facing-page French and English texts mean that when the text becomes incredibly boring or repetitive (or both) you always have recourse to the opposite page, just to help keep your mind alive.

Did I mention that the play is actually set in or perhaps near Roussillon, the second most beautiful town in all of France? You will never know this if you only see or read the English version. Beckett adopted France and lived in Roussillon for some time. He wrote Godot in both languages and appeared as a plural edition, rather than being translated.

Quite a bit happens in W8N4G, and very little happens. There are no women in the play, which of course is terrible. Funny you never hear feminists complain about there being no parts for women in W8N4G. Actually I'm not sure that's true; I've never checked. The play is dark and the set is spare: just a bare tree which then sprouts 5 leaves in the second act. Life is transitory -- we give birth over an open grave and see just a flash of light between birth and death. Presumably it is this singular metaphor which provides the insight that drives the play's fame. That, and the fact that (spoiler alert!) Godot never shows up but they keep on waiting nonetheless. (you knew that, right??) If you read W8N4G while walking your dog, you will be glad of the moment when you return home and can put the book down forever, and happy to save so much time reading it, rather than going out to the theatre to see it (no matter how well and wonderfully acted) tediously performed. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007nov.htm#bookish143.dat Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007jul.htm#bookish141.dat Steve Alcorn's short but fully realized novel Everything In Its Path [buy at amazon] tells two parallel stories, one set in 1928 and the other set in 1540, just two years before Juan Cabrillo landed in California, opening California to the modern world. The stories are set in the same physical location, a canyon downstream from where the St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928. The protagonist of each story is a young girl of about 12 years old. Each girl has interests and intentions that are unusual for her culture. Aside from the thriller-type page-turning dramatic progression of both stories, I found the historical aspects interesting. For example, it certainly was fun to read about a time when gasoline cost just ten cents per gallon, and people needed to use blocks of ice to keep their food from spoiling. Also, thought provoking to think of a politically innocent time when you could just go out and dig up Native American skeletons and no one would think of you as doing anything but Archeology.

The story line from 1540 was fascinating as well, since it presented a lot of information about the Chumash Indians, but in a way that it wasn't a bit boring reading about it. Even though the book is short, by the end you have a very good picture of the details of Chumash daily life, and a fairly rich imagining of Chumash spiritual life.

The best part of the book, though, was the dam disaster and its aftermath. The preamble to the disaster, and the dam collapse itself, are related with an extremely light touch. You might expect that a novel about a civil engineering disaster to be filled with a dull engineering back-story. But then you might also expect to guess the endings of the stories of the two girls. You would be wrong in both cases.

I can honestly say that when Everything In Its Path [buy at amazon] by Steve Alcorn arrived, I started reading it right away, even though I was already reading a novel I had been looking forward to reading for eight years: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I actually found Alcorn's novel about the St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928 absorbing and involving me right from the start. I finished reading it before I read another page of Harry Potter's final adventure.

http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007jul.htm#bookish141.dat Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007may.htm#bookish140.dat The other night sitting at dinner, someone asked me the small-talk question of the age: "So, how much time do you spend on your email?" I listened in surprise as I heard myself say "Oh, ten or fifteen minutes at most."

I used to think I was SO clever, for having discovered I could use my email inbox as an address book, database, calendar, bookmark, and to-do list all rolled into one. "Gee," I thought, "I bet most people aren't this effective in managing information." So many different ways it could be filtered, and information retrieved instantly (well, almost always. well, maybe not). Was it any surprise that I had piled up two thousand emails in one inbox, and seven thousand clogging another, stretching back seven years? Oy!

What had happened in the meantime? After a series of amusing email exchanges in which I failed to get author and M.I.T. graduate Mark Hurst to send me a review copy of Bit Literacy for free (not that you shouldn't try), eventually I finally bought Bit Literacy [buy at amazon] .

After all, I reasoned, I know plenty of people who could use this book (although not ME of course, no no no no no ) and I could read it, pick up a few tips, and then forward it on to those most in need. As it turned out, I have found the book quite valuable and do not plan to part with it. It's the genius of Bit Literacy, and Mark Hurst's great gift to us all, that he gives a thoughtful -- and to me compelling -- rationale for getting your email inbox down to ZERO every day. "Let the bits go" he says. He tells you exactly how to do it, as well as why. And no, it doesn't involve just deleting everything. He gives you a day-to-day method, and he gives you a one-time "induction" procedure that tells you how to get to that point. These M.I.T. grads, always so methodic!

I enjoyed his insights and humor, and pithy observations like "It's far too rarely stated that the Technology Industry is not in the business of making people productive" and "The plain fact is that having too much work isn't something that a to-do list can fix."

Ain't that the truth!

Hurst tells you how to perform the magic on your email in-box, your to-do list, your photos, tells you how and where you store your files (and a good way to name the files too) and how to manage your media diet. He recommends some free tools, and some you have to pay for.

For me, the greatest value of this book will most likely come in using what Hurst calls a bit literate to-do list. In a bit literate to-do list, you can create 'to-do' items with an email, with each item tied to a particular day, and display the items in priority order, showing detail as well as summary. The Bit Literacy book actually can serve as a manual for Hurst's online to-do list service, for which he charges three dollars a month. A cynical reader might suggest that the book ought to be given away free with a paid subscription, or the relevant chapter (Chapter 5) posted for free on his service's website. Not being cynical, I simply signed up for the site, and am now moving forward in creating a more-aggressive summer vacation schedule. There has to be some personal payoff for increased productivity, doesn't there?

Whether you 1) just use his OEM strategy (open, engage, move) to clean up your email inbox, or whether you 2) sign up for his bit-literate to-do list gootodo dot com or whether 3) you go whole hog, and install and use all the programs he recommends in a footnote on page 177 (you could drop six or seven hundred bucks), this book is worth its weight in gold, in invoices, in ticks of the clock, in heartbeats, in peace of mind, or however you happen to measure increased value in quality of life. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007may.htm#bookish140.dat Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007apr.htm#bookish138.dat I have worked my way through four books on Flash, three of them on Flash 9 Actionscript Programming, one great, one a classic, one extremely useful and worn down, one perhaps at too low a level for the intended audience, but each one worth buying.

To me, the most valuable one is Joey Lott's book on design patterns, the most fun and approachable 'Making Things Move' by Keith Peters -- an excellent first book on Actionscript if you're interested in animation, and the most Dog-eared Joey Lott's book Actionscript Recipes. Woops! I didn't review that one here, but it's been very very useful.

Here are my reviews. Advanced Actionscript 3 Design Patterns by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson (buy at amazon)

The design patterns movement, the beginnings of which can be traced to Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides famous Design Patterns book, has informed and changed software development, and spawned a raft of books and study groups.

That's right, people actually get together, read these books one chapter at a time, and talk about software design patterns -- for fun! (I admit to being one of them). So, Joey Lott and Danny Patterson are taking on a real challenge in writing a book on this topic, and the term "advanced" in the title is well-advised.

The first chapter is not about patterns but pretty basic object oriented stuff: inheritance vs. composition, polymorphism, code conventions, design first then write unit tests first. These topics are standard fare for a book of this type, and the chapter is blessedly succinct.

The second chapter is on programming to interfaces, a fundamental idea of great importance. Lott and Patterson give one of the clearest explanations I have read of the advantages, and give a convincing argument for always programming to interfaces even when you are using inheritance. Dude! Actionscript 3 has interfaces!

Then you get the chapters on patterns: Model/View/Controller, Singleton, Factory/Template, Proxy, Iterator, Composite, Decorator, Command, Memento, and State. I guarantee that after you have read these chapters and studied the code, you will understand these patterns a lot better than before, and will have ideas on how to use them.

The book is rounded out with entire chapters on Events (everything you always wanted to know but were afraid you wouldn't understand why), sending and loading data, E4X, and RegEx.

I have only a couple of minor cavils about the book. It would have been SO EASY to include the compilation command line.

/flex_sdk_2/bin/mxmlc MyProgram.as

See? Now you can compile for free! The book doesn't give you info on command line tools, but assumes you have downloaded and installed the 30-day flex compiler. And in the wonderfully worked out and fully crafted source code which you can download from the publisher's website, once again I was left scratching my head, when it said you have to set the source path to the library. Thanks very much, but tell me how?

It is not possible to have a useful book of this type without showing substantial amount of source for real projects, and fortunately, here Lott and Patterson really deliver. The projects are not on the level of usefulness of Phillip Kerman's book "Flash 8 at Work", but they are complete enough to illustrate the patterns. All source is in 100 percent Actionscript 3, with no Flex component source; since the book is not about Flex I consider this to be an advantage. At any rate, this book communicates the usefulness, as well as the nuts and bolts, of some fundamental software design patterns, several of which I have already used, and others which I will use soon.

Ok, the first thing you have to realize about Colin Smith is his incredible level of generosity. In case you don't know who he is, he is the guy who digitally created an image of his guitar. That's right, he built it up as a still life in Photoshop, layer by layer, over 1000 layers.

So, the incredibly diligent author of this book is one of the good guys, and with all that Photoshop expertness behind it, it probably won't surprise you to learn that the book itself looks great. That having been said, however, it deals with Flash 8, rather than 9, so all of the Actionscript examples are of less use if you want to learn AS 3 going forward. And with the IDE (the flash timeline authoring tool) about to change dramatically, maybe this book is one for your archives.

So, what's in the book? There are things in the book that wouldn't even occur to me, plus some things I can see being really useful.

It wouldn't even occur to me to animate a gradient, but Colin shows how to produce a really flashy cool effect by doing just that.

He shows how to do greenscreen video on a budget, and he shows how to do video silhouettes, just by importing the video onto a one-color field, and then turning the brightness down to minus 100. Formidable!

Probably the best thing in the whole book, something I have always wanted to do, is he shows how to animate characters' mouths to match their speech. He shows exactly how to do this, and gives mouth shapes for each of the nine common mouth sounds/shapes. Just a couple of pages, a really cool technique. Can you give five stars for just a couple of pages? Why not!

There are some great tricks on how to ease your animation motions to a standstill and give it a realistic look, how to emphasize an oncoming picture by outlining it, all step by step, and how to add sound to a button. Because of the way the illustrations were placed, I found the book a little hard to follow from a reading standpoint, but the information is all there.

This book, written to a relatively low level, and with an intent to be comprehensive, is relentlessly procedural. The first hundred pages or so take you through installing Flex Builder and then step by step through some really simple mxXML based projects. There are truly some weird little "gotchas" that I doubt I would have noticed any other way but reading this book. In short, reading this book I know will save me countless hours of time, simply for revealing some drudge details that could have really messed me up, like the different kinds of quotation marks used when passing an argument to an Actionscript function from within an MX-based object. Plus I know what Flex is, and what it is not.

You can expect to know about layout containers, too. Consider the following:

"As you can see, there are 16 layout containers. Throughout this book we will cover nearly all of them. However, for now you'll just be concerned with the seven most commonly used ones, described in the following list: Hbox, Vbox, Canvas, Panel, Tile, ApplicationControlBar, and ControlBar" (This is not an exact quote; Brown gives the distinguishing characteristics for each, and follows with a procedural exploration of how to use them, complete with screen shots).

The author has a flex website, charlesebrown dot net . Check it out!

If you don't know anything about Flex and AS3 and you want to know it all, this isn't a bad place to start. If you like working step by step along with software, its perfect.You surely won't begrudge the author his diligent and thorough approach and basically good attitude even though the book is not too exciting. If you already know Flex, or Actionscript, this book will probably be too basic for you.

Keith Peters's engaging and readable book on Flash 9, Actionscript 3.0 Animation, Making Things Move (published by Friends of Ed, 2007) is unusual for a programming techniques book. It assumes you know very little to start with, but ends up being an authoritative work of lasting value.

Notwithstanding the "3.0" in the title, this is the second edition of "Making things Move," updated for Actionscript 3.0. The first version sold very well, but I think the second edition will open up Flash to a much wider audience.

This is because Peters almost always gives you two or three ways of doing something, and this extends to whatever Flash development environment you have chosen. There are three ways you can write Actionscript 3 for Flash: The Flash IDE (which you get when you buy Adobe Flash), Flex Builder 2 (which you get when you buy Adobe Flex Builder) and the free Flex 2 SDK (which you get when you download Flex SDK free from the Adobe website.) I use the third environment, so I really appreciate that "Making Things Move" tells you how to set up "trace" for debugging in the free Flex SDK environment. Because of the popularity of Flash animation, and the fact that the book tells you how to use the free development environment (and the fact that Actionscript 3 is so great), I think this book will be both popular and influential.

So, I found nuts and bolts information in the very beginning that was probably worth the price of the book even if I didn't animate a single bouncing ball, but what's the rest of the book about? Three things that everyone learned (or should have learned) in school: trigonometry, physics and how to think about stuff on your own. And you get it an applied context that basically gives you everything you need to build, and to understand how to build, an interactive 2D or 3D game -- except fancy graphics, of course.

User interaction, moving objects around, collision detection (two or three different methods), how to use acceleration and velocity for springing and easing, billiard ball physics, how to make things walk (forward kinematics) and reach for stuff (reverse kinematics), plus rotate collide and move in 3 dimensions, it's all in the book. All completely comprehensible. Various ways of placing things randomly on the screen, how to bounce back after colliding, how to swarm objects and connect them to each other? All covered. Matrix math, Brownian motion? Covered and explained. About the only thing Peters doesn't give you is the rotation matrices for four-dimensional graphics, but to be perfectly fair, nobody else does either.

This book is a product of tons of experience and thoughtfulness. Each technique appears to be so simple -- certainly there isn't too much code in any one example -- and yet along with each technique, it seems like there's at least one little `gotcha' that Keith Peters tells you how to avoid. In other words, you can scan the book quickly to see what's in it, to see what's there and examine the formulas, and then when you go back and read it, you also benefit because you pick up one of these 'gotchas' or an explanation of why one way is better than doing it another way.

Will you find this review useful if I don't complain about something? Okay! Well, in the spaceship example in chapter 5, which uses the keyboard, nothing works unless you click on the window first. The book says nothing about this, or how to prevent it. Can you set the keyboard focus onto your movie without clicking the mouse on it? I wish I knew.

Less important, in nearly every code example in the book, the constructor of each document class calls an init() method, which Peters says is a recommended "best practice" I would like to know why this is a best practice, since it just makes the code (and the book) longer and (ok, just slightly) more time consuming to read.

Lastly, everyone knows (or will know after reading this book) there are two kinds of animation, frame-based and timer-based. What I never realized is that there's a third form, time-based animation, that's smoother and more accurate than either frame based or timer based. Plus, it's immune to the frame rate of the movie, the motion stays just as smooth and constant as you have intended it to be. I really appreciate the fact that the book brought this to my attention, but why did the author wait until page 505 to get around to it? No matter, you're crazy if you don't read every page, from the beginning of the forward ("This is a book about art"), right to the very end of the index ("zero, dividing by zero in Flash").

This book is packed with useful information from beginning to end and will give you many happy hours and things to do on long winter nights in front of your compute; the very last example in the book, slipped in as a final parting gift just before the recap of all the book's equations, tells how to add the "Boing" sound to the bounce of your bouncing ball, in just 3 lines of code.

If you don't have any books on Actionscript 3, I think this is probably the best one to start with until the Moock book comes out, if you have an interest in animation. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007apr.htm#bookish138.dat Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007feb.htm#bookish137.dat The first books of the new year aren't any more impressive than the ones last year, when I read Perfect Assassin [buy at amazon] by Ward Larsen. Actually, I read these last month, and just haven't gotten around to saying anything about them until now.

This year I eased into the new year with two murder mysteries, one lowbrow by Robert Parker, and the other with a little bit higher brow, as Aaron Elkins brings back Gideon Oliver the skeleton detective to do his physical anthropology guru act with beach-bleached bones on foggy islands off the coast of England.

These islands are, in fact, the Isles of Scilly, and who can fault an inherently funny writer for placing his murder(s) and murderer in such a picturesque locale. I've always wondered if he does location research. If so, nice gig! Gideon Oliver rides again, in Unnatural Selection [buy at amazon] by Aaron Elkins, and we are looking forward to the next sally this summer, when "Little Tiny Teeth" is published.

I also breezed through Blue Screen [buy at amazon] by Robert Parker, in which Sunny Randall, Private Investigator, joins forces with Jesse Stone, small town police chief, who used to star in his own series of detective thrillers. Together, they dig into some dirty work from Hollywoodland, as a former prostitute/ screen athlete prepares to enter the big leagues. Of baseball, that is. And there's a delicious portrayal of Sunny's feckless Hollywood agent former boyfriend, e.g "Of course I didn't return your call until I had already talked to everyone more important than you. I'm a Hollywood agent, arent I?" The best moment (or at any rate most surprising moment) in the book: a cameo appearance from Susan Silverman, Spenser's shrink girlfriend from the Spenser series of novels. Wheel of life, wheel of life. I'm so far behind in my writeups (just because I decided not to write about my divorce in these pages doesn't mean that I stopped reading books) that I'll probably never catch up completely, but I have really enjoyed Michael Howard's Clausewitz: a Very Short Introduction [buy at amazon] which is not really a book but a 75-page pamphlet from Oxford University Press. They ought to be ashamed of themselves for charging so much money for such a poorly constructed book -- its pages started to fall out right away -- but Howard, who translated Clausewitz' On War, certainly knows it all, and delivers great value. Just buy two copies, 'cause one's going to fall apart.

I swore up and down that "I ain't gonna study war no more," but then I got curious about Clausewitz, who is often quoted as a brilliant war theorist. Certainly he was in enough wars himself, before the modern era, and he was also a prisoner of war in France. Bummaire! There are two entire areas he leaves out completely: naval warfare, and the effect of the economy on war & vice versa.

Howard gives a short list of longer reading project in case you need to know more about Clausewitz and the modern state. I recommend this very short introduction. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2007feb.htm#bookish137.dat Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 PST http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2006oct.htm#o53.dat One Saturday every October (a tradition which began today), Colin Smith spends two solid hours of photoshop improvisation in front of an appreciative and grateful audience of about sixty professional photographers, median age 62. Nearly all of them have been using Adobe Photoshop for decades and they're a friendly audience, although as a presenter if you venture into an area where they know more, you can easily lose the seminar as they take over and exchange knowledge. There's a reason this group is called the Adobe Technology Exchange.

Colin Smith is famous for having created, out of what used to be called whole cloth, a digital image of his guitar. Using Adobe Photoshop, he built a file of over 300 megabytes in size, created a thousand layers, layer by layer, out of nothing. He never sold prints, he says "I don't want to." What is the guitar to him? He plays the guitar everyday, put it on the guitar stand, puts it up into Photoshop, it's a digital still life.

Here's what he says about Photoshop mastery, and it's fascinating to watch him as he works. "A lot of it comes from music. The first thing you've got to do is build up your theory. You've got to understand how music works. There are basic rules in music that make music music. You can't create something that sounds harmonious and melodic unless you have the basic building blocks. This is what I'm trying to do with Photoshop. Once you've got the core down, then you can begin to create your own music. One of the things about music is, it's not all about creating a melody.

(he goes on to talk about backgrounds and riffs, and so forth)

"(people ask) How do you know so much? Because I spend a lot of time doing this. If you think you've arrived then you'll never get any better."

"Photorealism: don't try and do something that's too hard for you. Tackle something that's just a little bit outside of your reach -- stretch a little bit to do it, but don't go for something that's leaps and bounds away. I started with a game boy, a cell phone, or just a pen. Create it just as natural and realistic as possible, with something simple."

Colin has the website Photoshopcafe.com," where you can see a lot of free tutorials, and see his 100-percent-Photoshop-from-scratch wizardry, including the famous guitar. He has started to sell training videos on various Photoshop and digital photography topics, and brought some to the meeting today, but I don't know if they are available on the website yet.

Colin Smith also has written a book on Flash, which I would have purchased if he had brought more than one copy. How to Wow with Flash (8.0) [buy at amazon] by Colin Smith http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2006oct.htm#o53.dat Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/activist/2006oct.htm#act21.dat How can you get the least expensive compact fluorescent bulbs and keep tabs on the latest corporate environmental activist? Would you believe that a quick trip to WalMart kills two birds with one stone? You read me right. Walmart. After reading the September Fast Company story on Lightbulbs, my son Joe and I made a mad dash for the local Walmart for these wonderful new save-the-planet bulbs.

The Fast Company story portrayed Walmart as making a massive shift to compact fluorescents, propelled by an epiphany a Walmart exec had about how much less they would pay to light up their ceiling fans by using compact fluorescents (CF) instead of incandescent bulbs. In partnership with General Electric (GE), Walmart is going to sell you 60-watt equivalent lighting bulbs (900 lumens with 13 watts instead of 60) for about two dollars a bulb.

We went to Walmart, but we paid more than two dollars a bulb.

I had never been to the Walmart on Crenshaw in Los Angeles. It isn't as if I have always wanted to go to this particular Walmart,so first I went online to Sam's Club to price bulbs. Sam's Club had the bulbs at the lower prices, you could buy a dozen of each kind, with the 13-watters going for about two dollars. But, as I found after loading a couple dozen compact fluorescent swirly bulbs into my online shopping cart and trying to check out, you have to join Sams Club in order to get the price.

Next, I tried calling the local Walmart on Crenshaw, to see if they had the bulbs. Ha ha ha ha ha! This is not how Walmart works! Phone them? Very funny! Of course you must visit in person, silly! Walmart is a destination resort!

Next stop, chez Walmart. The teeming masses, yearning to consume. Cheaply. The 30-minute wait in line. (We were in the express line, 10 items or less.) The opportunity to buy a DVD for ten dollars, which at amazon.com costs much more, for example the well-reviewed 10,000 Black Men Named George [buy at amazon] . The Crenshaw Walmart is not an empire unto itself. It resembles a Walmart Pied-a-terre more than a small nation. Intimate rather than intimidating. There is a greeter at the door, but he faces into the store rather than out, and he discreetly looks aside so you can enter without feeling imposed upon. Perhaps he is actually trying to ensure you do not leave with a one-thousand-dollar LCD TV tucked under your arm.

The lower floor is groceries, so we hop on board the escalier automatique and climb skyward to the electrical section, where I expect to find half an entire aisle filled with compact fluorescent bulbs. Instead there were impressive STACKS of INCANDESCENT bulbs in the center between the aisles! We amble down a side passage and discover a meager selection of CF swirly-bulbs, the labels ("1-pack", "2-pack") not matching the number of bulbs (3) in every remaining package. This implied a price of three dollars and ninety-six cents for three bulbs. However, when we eventually arrive at the checkout counter, the actual price is seven dollars and fifty-eight cents for three swirlies.

We had selected a range of bulbs, which for now I will refer to in terms of their incandescent-watt equivalents, because everyone in the U.S. will understand the brightness equivalents: 60-watt, 75-watt, and 100-watt bulbs. The wattages for the new CF bulbs are 13, 20 and 26 watts, which is an exciting drop in power consumption, considering that the brightnesses are the same, and the new swirlies last for years and years.

When we got home and plugged in the bulbs, they fit all the fixtures with no problem. The swirlies throw a warm yellow color which compares well the incandescent bulbs that preceded them. The (least bright bulb) was a little too weak to read by, and the (brightest bulb) was a little too bright to look at. The bulbs were different in size. Does it surprise you that brighter bulbs are larger?

Some things to think about.

• Swirly bulbs contain mercury.
• Coal contains mercury, too. The differential amount of mercury released by burning coal for incandescents is more than the mercury used in a CF bulb, so even without the other advantages it's a net reduction of mercury release to switch to compact fluorescents right now.
• The swirly bulb manufacturing process is not automated: someone in China has to swirl the tube around by hand.
• The bulb will pay for itself in about five months if used 4 hours per day.
• the bulb will probably not burn out for at least five years
• WalMart will appear to overcharge you for the bulbs, but is in actuality just incompetent with their store labelling.
• LED bulbs are not really an option: they cost 10 times more and last the same length of time as a CF.
• Carbon.
• The light thrown by these bulbs is warm. And friendly!
• The bulb turns on in just under a second.
• You should get one of these bulbs today.
• I will not return to Walmart anytime soon.

Why do I know this? It's not because I'm particularly diligent in following up, it's because I have a blog. And one night years later Levar Harper's mother sat down at her computer, typed her son's stage name into a search box and found that someone she had never even heard of had written about her son. Earlier this year she invited me to attend a school concert that Levar's son was in at a local grade school, and if I hadn't been going to hear my own son perform, I definitely would have gone.

So listen up, people. ("People! Listen up!"). Start writing your blogs, right now. (Would now be a good time to suggest that you support your local schools?) http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/out/2006apr.htm#o52.dat Sun, 23 Apr 2006 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/orangebutton/2006apr.htm#ob64.dat I've always wanted to write a blog post about Jeneane Sessum and Dave Winer. And now I have them, not just in the same post, but even in the same sentence! But how could such a thing have happened, could two people be more opposite? It's true, it's true, it's really true, it happened playing the didgeridou.

Before I can explain that last remark, I first get to blame Jeneane for this, searching Google for her own name -- and by the way, have you noticed Google's cute Earth Day hat of solar panels and the sun, with a windmill in the background? -- anyway, Jeneane Sessum's blog gave me the idea to search for George D. Girton, and what did I come up with but the occasion of my fiftieth birthday present (one of them) from my then-loving wife Irene (we have divorce details to work out as we move towards summer; it's actually a pretty hard time for both of us) on one of Dave Winer's early blog collaboration projects here: All's well and something's happened. Well, I guess the rubric is still basically true. And after a short session on the aforementioned didgeridou, teasing out the low notes of Canned Heat's funky classic "We're on the road again" which I'm sure puzzled the hell out of the cat (though he's no longer frightened by my playing; the dog finds it deeply disturbing), the enticing juxtaposition of Dave Winer and Jeneane Sessum loomed unavoidably, albeit with the unanticipated topic of my own divorce, and there was just nothing for it but to write it up. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/orangebutton/2006apr.htm#ob64.dat Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/out/2006apr.htm#o51.dat I dropped Irene and Joe off at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX and then, considering that I was hemmed in by traffic, I paused to eat a blueberry yogurt, sitting right there in the front seat of the car. Since the yellow cab in front of me remained immobile, I ate a second blueberry yogurt, dipping my plastic spoon into the blue-and-white plastic package, decorated with delicious-looking blueberry images. The cab drove off and so did I: it was one o'clock and I had a full hour to get to the CalTech campus, meander through the campus for about 15 minutes, and locate Baxter hall, where Australian Museum director, scientist and author Tim Flannery would lecture at two p.m. on the pressing topics of global warming and climate change. On a whim I took a completely new route, turning to the south instead of east toward Pasadena. Then, following the signs to the new 105 freeway east, I soon found myself heading west. Just for a few moments, though. The sculpted concrete curves soon swirled me back toward the mountains that my grandmother's cousin Alson had painted back in the twenties.

That wasn't the only echo of art during the trip. About four miles later I passed through one of artist Yutaka Sone's favorite freeway interchanges, the Harry Pregerson Memorial Freeway Interchange. Yutaka Sone had been so fascinated by his Los Angeles freeway experience that he caused marble sculptures of his four favorites to be created by marble artisans in China, and displayed the models in a mini-jungle installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I actually found the experience of the arching freeways substantially diminished by the four-foot-square marble sculpture versions, just pale white maps seen from above. The interchanges suggest transcendance and the Pregerson is one of the most amazing in this respect. The two leftmost lanes, 'diamond' lanes which require at least two riders per vehicle in order to avoid a three-hundred-dollar fine, soar up to the left and then northwards toward the downtown skyscrapers on a loftier plane of freeway existence: exemplifying the higher moral value of fuel conservation through multiple ridership.

Later, about half way through the one-hour trek, I passed the familiar California Historical Marker number 531, a roadside indicator that the home of Charles Lummis is nearby. I reflected that I was at that moment doing very much the opposite of what Lummis did. Lummis walked to Los Angeles, photographing and writing about his trip along the way for Los Angeles residents reading the Los Angeles Times. Whereas I, already _in_ Los Angeles, am photographing and writing about Los Angeles for the rest of the world. And I'm not walking, I'm driving.

Finally I arrived in Pasadena, followed signs to Caltech, the final one being "To CalTech Auditoriums", and by mistake drove on walkways straight through the center of campus, obeying the 5 mph signs. Eventually I turned around at one of the loading docks where they must unload the liquid hydrogen during the weekdays, at least judging from the serious tone of the warning signs. I parked on the street and walked toward what I assumed was the center of the campus, passing a fountain resembling an icosahedron and eventually joining a stream of people heading to the global warming lecture. None of us knew where Baxter was located, and once we found it, had no idea how to find the lecture hall, so we just followed each other through a series of narrow stairways and ramps and eventually emerged into a lecture hall with nearly every seat filled, a table of books at the front of the hall. Elapsed travel time from LAX, one hour.

Among the books on the table were nearly two hundred copies of Tim Flannery's book, which I decided to obtain after the lecture. I never had a chance though, because at the conclusion of his talk, which was followed by about five solid minutes of hearty applause, not one copy remained to be purchased. Just as well, since I haven't yet finished my copy of Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent (and much shorter) Field Notes from a Catastrophe. The two books are on the same topic, you can get them both at Amazon right now, or wait for me to review Kolbert's book later on this week. I would definitely advise beginning with Kolbert's book Field Notes from a Catastrophe [buy at amazon] , which Flannery did not mention during his talk. The book Tim Flannery talked about was The Weather Makers [buy at amazon] by Tim Flannery. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/out/2006apr.htm#o51.dat Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:00:00 PDT http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2006feb.htm#bookish133.dat Camera Lucida was given me by a true friend, a friend far into the future. She will read aloud to me from Barthes' carefully expressed and deeply personal disquisition on photography (on the Photograph) and I anticipate the readings with delight. As it is, I read while I walk, around the block with the dog and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [buy at amazon] . by Roland Barthes (if you live in the San Francisco area you already know how to pronounce this name, it is like your bay area rapid transit - BART)

Roland Barthes takes us back to the origin of photography, shows us the first photograph by Niepces. To read this, to see this photo, and consider what has happened since then, these few things alone are worth your attempt at the book.

Barthes' reflections are subjective, particular to himself, but he is deeply connected to his life, his history, his past. For Barthes, the photograph is connected to its reality; what is seen has been real. What does he see and what can he know of his dear mother? He obviously loved her deeply, but finding her from her photograph(s) is another matter entirely. He is wonderfully methodical and it is obvious why instructors of photograph assign this book to their students. No one can read Camera Lucida and come away unaffected. A book of deceptively few pages, it's worth reading again.

But what has the photograph become in the world, in the time since Barthes wrote? I would love to hear what he has to say about our changed world. For Barthes, the world had already been disturbed by the photograph but now the photograph has changed, too. Its essence has changed a little bit. (Notice I am not making the mistake of trying to paraphrase his thoughts -- you will just have to read the book yourself).

Now, when we look at a photo of Jack Abramoff in the Bush White House, we have to hear that it is a photo which has been released by the White House in order for us to know ('think we know' would be a better phrase now) that it is authentic. The very existence of Photoshop and photos in the digital world mean that a photograph can now be an imagined future or an imaginary bridge from a distant and imagined past into a future which is as certain as the no-longer-certain photograph which depicts it.

Further, for the Barthes of Camera Lucida, the Photograph is black and white: no color (color is a future layer), no future (but the past instead), no lack of evidence: there is no doubt we are seeing what is shown, so little doubt that he speaks of violence when referring to the fact and immediacy of the photograph. This accounts for the power of propaganda photos, even when we know the photograph has been manufactured to show, for example, John Kerry together with Jane Fonda in a juxtaposition which never occurred in life. The photograph still makes it true even though it never happened.

Today everyone carries cameras. Photos are everywhere, myriad photos, exchanged across time and wire (what we used to call wire) floating us forward in a flurry of images, driving our seeing and reshaping our sight of the world and each other.

A pity (for us) that for Barthes there is no camera ludens, the playful camera. In his striving for the essence, in carefully establishing a vocabulary of analysis which systematically eliminates whole ranges of various kinds of surprise and carefully excludes a mere hedonistic impulse from his thought (that is, what he 'likes'), he must leave aside what must have been many rich opportunities in order to carefully consider those two intimate parters in the nature of the photograph, love and death. http://www.thedailychannel.com/journals/bookish/2006feb.htm#bookish133.dat Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 PST