The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
Indianapolis
Here is a picture my mother took of the dog with her fancy new camera:
I wonder how long it took her to get that pic.
Brown is the New Green
My brother and sister-in-law are expecting a baby girl in December. We haven’t had a girl in the family since me, so the grandmotherly types are going insane. I just hope she doesn’t end up with a closet full of pink. So I’ve been looking at the baby clothes lately and I must say.
It is all pink and flowers and things that say “hugs and kisses”. I’m going to be sick.
I’m one of those people that only wears black. And if I weren’t, I’m still kind of a tom boy. So I think I’m going on mission to save this child. I was at Carson’s today and this is what I found:
That would be brown.
Those are flowers in the print, which makes it for girls. But it’s brown. Who exactly thought that was cool? Calvin Klein. I don’t know what to make of it. But it was this or the pink velvet Adidas dress. Sorry, Kid. You’ll thank me later.
At the Library – Dirty Books
I’ve mentioned that as a volunteer at the Library Used Book Store, part of my job is to review donated books and list those more valuable titles for sale at our Amazon site. We look up pretty much everything, because you never know what is going to be worth a fortune. What I find even more interesting than what is “valuable” is “what is going to sell before I even get home”.
The first time I saw it happen, it was a faith-based book on maintaining (or reigniting) a healthy sex life throughout marriage. I think I listed it for $8.00, but it sold instantly. I had certainly never heard the title before.
Last night, I found a trade paperback that looked to me like your standard romance novel. Kind of a modern-western romance novel, set in Colorado. As I flipped it over to find the ISBN, I saw a warning about explicit sex. I looked at the cover again. How dirty could it be?
I opened the book to a random page. Oh. Very dirty. Very, very dirty. I almost set it aside for a “Do we even want to sell this in our little Library Fundraising Shop?” I looked it up as I thought it over – then listed it for $7.00. No one would know at first glance that this was a dirty, dirty book and anyway – listed books are shelved in a different place from the standard $1 or $2 titles that our local patrons purchase. I thought it would be ok.
Certainly was. That book sold before I got home last night. The moral of this story is news to no one:
Sex sells.
At the Refuge – Molly 2
If I thought for a second that my house could stand another Moluccan Cockatoo, I would be bringing this bird home.
Molly 2 is a boy. And while Cockatoos are always a handful, males Cockatoos are just not for everyone. Foolish people buy them because they are the “cuddly birds”. That’s one way of putting it. High maintenance might be another. Demanding. Stubbourn.
Molly 2 is very focused on people and not at all interested in other birds. In fact, two of the “ladies” at the Refuge, PJ and Rosie, have tried to make friends. He runs away. They can be a bit pushy.
Molly 2 has a very high pitched scream and he can use it. But tonight, he sat quietly on the perch in the kitchen while I worked in the front room. He ate his walnut and waited for me to come over and pet him. My friend and fellow volunteer, Jose, couldn’t believe it and I must say, it was a breakthrough. “Excitable” birds can be managed. But the really bad screamers are always losing their homes.
Molly 2 steps up very nicely and can speak a few words. He is available for adoption and you can read more about him here.
Also Waiting For Me
I came home yesterday. Let the dog outside. Threw my clothes in the washing machine. Let the birds out to play. Read the mail. Eventually made my way upstairs to my bedroom.
Something was wrong. Someone had been in here. And I couldn’t put my finger on it – which isn’t really odd because I don’t notice anything in my house. You could rearrange my living room furniture and lay odds that I won’t notice. Then I saw it:
Well. There wasn’t actually a dish in the room, but the new remote was tied up in a bow. My mother had gotten me satellite DVR for my bedroom while I was out of town.
I have been very cranky since the “digital TV” announcement because I have never had cable in my bedroom and my TV works perfectly well, thank you. Although sometime I should tell you about buying that TV and discovering that I had to go back to Best Buy to purchase an antenna because they no longer come standard.
DirectTV guy did not hook my stuff back up properly, so the TV is not connected to the stereo receiver and I can’t watch my DVD player. My brother is coming this weekend to fix it because he didn’t like the way I set it up last time. But so many channels. I was going to pick up that Solzhenitsyn book last night but then. On VH1:
Live at Wembley. I might never read another book again.
The New Semester
I came back from Florida and my school books were waiting for me. The first thing I did was get on the Internet to see if the textbook has a website. In my last two courses, the books had websites that had practice quizzes. And it is my opinion that practice quizzes are the keys to the kingdom.
Google was sending me around to buy the book, so I looked inside the text for the website. There was a Student CD Rom. With Video Clips, Study Out Lines and Web Links.
This is how school is different, and I don’t think that is just about online learning. The text book companies, as opposed to the school itself, are providing the multimedia tools. Now, I’m sure that the texts are chosen in part for the compatability with the program, but I would be very interested to hear about how classroom professor are using the technology. Do classroom teachers and students bother looking at the websites?
I took the summer off, and I will be starting the new semester while on the road. Again. But I’m looking forward to getting started. Better go pick up a new notebook.
Depressing Travel Story
I am leaving for Florida tonight to visit my grandmother and was reminded of a travel story. At the risk of writing about work:
My friend and colleague, Rolland, was a 30 year veteran of my company before he retired. He had worked in both Public Relations and Special Programs, which is code for “on the road all the time”. He is also an enthusiastic leisure traveler. He has been to all 50 states and is the best resource for “all of the places worth seeing” that can be found in a human being. He is the reason I went to Hoover Dam.
Rolland is helping us out with a project, and was booking his airline tickets just as I had walked over to do the same. He noted that United was only flying regional jets to our destination, while American was flying the big guys. Our travel agent, Nancy, asked if he would prefer American. He said, “I’m no longer a premier member at United, so it doesn’t matter which airline I fly.”
I asked, “But aren’t you a million mile customer?”
He replied, “No. I only got to 800 thousand-something.”
The most frequent traveler that I know hasn’t made it to a million miles. I am never going to get there.
LibraryThing
Among the websites I require to function is the fabulous LibraryThing. This tool allows me to catalog all of the books in my own library. I haven’t begun to effectively use all of the functions, but look at that little widget to the right! Isn’t it cute?
After setting up an account, members can search for books to add to their own catalogs. Or research books, looking for the reviews of other members before commiting the time to read it. There are communities and discussion groups. There are tools that show which other members have the same books that I have. I actually find more interesting that each of my books show how many other members have them. When last I looked, I had at least one book that no one else on the site has. And two or three that I share with only one other person.
LibraryThing allows me to see the catalogs of my friends. So I know what books not to buy them for their birthdays. In some cases, that is rather depressing. Like my friend Liza – who is a librarian. She and I share only 13 books in common and seven of those are Harry Potter.
This website is free of charge to join, but only up to a catalog of 200 books. Personally, I paid up the $25 to become a LifeTime member.
I understand that a similar site, called Good Reads, has become rather popular. But I am perfectly happy with my LibraryThing.
Endangered Species
I’ve been spouting this theory for awhile now, and because it is an unpopular theory that I dared not express at the lunch table, my mother has had to hear it a thousand times. I just got some validation.
Panda bears are the Poster Children of the Endangered Species movement. It mostly bothers me because the fact that pandas are endangered is not, in my opinion, really the fault of Man. Pandas eat only one kind of food, bamboo. An incredibly inefficient diet, so they have to eat a ton of it. And they are just bad at reproducing.
I realize that they are much better at reproducing in their natural habitat, and their natural habitat is disappearing. But they do not seem to have any ability to adapt. So my theory is that if there is a modern species that nature had selected for extinction, it is the panda.
This article does not exactly mirror that theory, but it certainly has a common sentiment. Not that I had ever remotely considered the panda in any argument regarding intelligent design. It closes with:
Humanity’s experience with pandas has shown us that saving the species is not going to be easy — or cheap. In fact, eminent conservationist Chris Packham has called panda conservation “possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century.” He said he “would eat the last panda” if it meant he could transfer all the money thrown at pandas to other, “more sensible” species (like insects, rodents, and plants) or to entire habitats.
So why is the Panda bear the Poster Child for the movement? Let’s say it all together:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/26010891#26010891
Because they are cute!
Solzhenitsyn
I’ve always had a weird fascination with Russia, the way my father always had a weird fascination with China. It started in high school, when I was trying to cram in academic courses in order to graduate early. There was a semester long Russian History course, and it was taught by the American wife of a Russian immigrant. This was after the Berlin Wall came down and about five minutes before the USSR dismantled.
Trying to cram a thousand years of history into one high school semester is totally ridiculous, but I had a great time and aced that sucker. I knocked out my poli-sci requirement in college with “Russia and the United States”. Catherine the Great, by Henri Troyat, is on my list of Required Reading in the study of reigning queens. So it is to my humble shame that I did not discover Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn until One Book One Chicago picked A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch for the book club. I want to say it was 2006.
A short novel with really clean, uncomplicated language (which I guess one could claim is equally about the translation) that gave this pampered western suburbanite a feel for how the hell a man got through the day in Stalin’s gulag. A day, an hour, a minute at a time.
Last summer, I picked up The Cancer Ward, which was a fictionalized account of the author’s Cancer treatment while in exile – I think it was the late 1950s. It drew a picture so far from the world that I know – between Communism, the illnesses, the (to me) backwards hospital culture, and then the gender roles – and I was completely sucked into it. I have three more of his novels waiting for me on my shelf right now. (Not to mention two Tolstoys, two Dostoyevskys and Troyat’s biography of Peter the Great.)
Solzhenitsyn died last week. He had gone back to Russia several years ago and was very critical of the West. But he seemed to firmly believe something that I have always suspected: that Russia sometimes likes to think of itself as a European nation, but it is really its own animal.
“Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking,” Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. “For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category.”
I can’t manage to keep up with the American literati, let alone those of foreign countries, but here’s hoping that post-Communist Russia is growing worthy successors to this great voice.
The Next Dark Age 