Bradbury

Speaking of classic literature, I checked out a book by Ray Bradbury at the library last week.  I loved his “Fahrenheit 451“, so when I happened upon “Now and Forever,” I thought I’d give it a whirl.  The book contains two novellas – “Somewhere a Band Is Playing” and “Leviathan ‘99.”  Yesterday morning I read all of the first story.   It was quietly gripping.  As I read, I became conscious of the fact that Bradbury’s writing is carefully composed, as though each word belongs.  The effect caused me to read slowly, not because I was bogged down with verbiage, but because the author had set the pace.  Using deceptively simple and clean writing, Bradbury maintains full control of both the story and the reader.

The Big Read Meme

I swiped this meme from Reeva because I thought it was a good one. According to Reeva, “The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.” (Reeva, could you kindly send me the link to this statistic? I couldn’t get to it through your blog and couldn’t find it online. Thanks!)

How do you stack up to this statistic? Below is a list of the top 100, with instructions for how to post the meme on your blog.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put a line through the books you HATE.
5) Post your list in your blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (can’t get into this series, even though I tried)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (read the first 4)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (read snippets as needed)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (forced to read in 8th grade English – hated it)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read (acted in!) A Midsummer Night’s Dream – does that count?)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (see #2 above)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (do the various spin-offs count?)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving (just heard about this on MPR)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (liked the first 3 in the series – other 3 got old)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (own this one, haven’t cracked it open yet)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett I’ve read this more than once
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

There are a few books on this list that I may have read, but can’t remember – The Wind in the Willows, Brave New World and The Color Purple. I know that I’ve seen The Color Purple and The Wind in the Willows as movies, but am not sure if I also read them. I recently watched Pride and Prejudice in movie form, which makes me want to try reading some Jane Austen. If I like one, I’ll read more.

Looks like I’ve read 20 out of 100 – one-fifth. Not bad.

Weighing in at 1,008

I got an email the other day from a website called Blogged.com.  It’s a blog-ranking site and I had been notified that my blog got a ranking of 8.0 out of 10 in the entertainment category.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was a spammy sort of email, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.  Today I had a second look and bombed on over to Blogged.com to see what I could see.  I found my blog listed among the entertainment blogs on page 51.  My ranking was 1,008 out of 78,288 (if I’m reading it right).  Not too bad, I suppose.  At least my blog is entertaining someone out there in the blogosphere.

Petabyte, NINabyte

In the latest issue of Wired magazine, Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson expounds upon what the magazine is calling “The Petabyte Age.” With computers crunching tons of data, Anderson maintains that scientists will no longer need to come up with hypotheses and models to test their theories.  They’ll simply have to look at aggregated numbers and they’ll have their answers.

While numbers can be fascinating for what they show us, I think Anderson overreaches with his notion (dare I say it’s a hypothesis?) that mounds of computer-analyzed data will save humanity.  The one paragraph that sticks in my craw from the article is this one:

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear.  Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology.  Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.  Who knows why people do what they do?  The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.  With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

Oh, really . . . . I think Anderson is being cheeky here – trying to get a rise out of us.  Well, then, let me rise to the occasion.  Numbers can be easily manipulated.  That’s why we often hear, “Numbers can say whatever you want them to say.”  It all depends on what you want to focus on with a given set of numbers.  If numbers were truly static, how could people get away with cooking their books or sway people with warped statistics?

As for throwing out all the fields of study that Anderson thinks we’ll no longer need, what a load of hogwash.  Besides, his list is so, to borrow a word from my daughter, RANDOM.  Taxonomy is the naming of living things.  While The Petabyte Age may allow us to count things in all of their permutations, we still need names in order to tell those things apart.  Linguistics deals with the study of language.  Unless we’re planning to let all the computers do the talking about these numbers, I suppose we’re still going to need to speak and understand the structure of language.

As for sociology, psychology, and ontology (the study of the nature of being), all of these fields deal with the whys of life.  Why are we here?  Why do we do what we do?  Why are things the way they are?  With all due respect to Anderson, a heap of numbers without the whys is just a heap of numbers, and frankly, a human being who doesn’t ask why isn’t much of a human being at all.  “Why?” is one of the first questions out of a toddler’s mouth.  It’s the first question out of my mouth about pretty much everything.  (Writers thrive on the whys and what ifs of life.  Either that, or I’m still a toddler.)

This brings me to the NINabyte.  The band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) is like a kid in a pasta shop.  The band is having fun throwing massive amounts of spaghetti at a wall to see what will stick in its effort to try out various online applications and experiment with different methods of music distribution.  It has accounts through Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, along with its official website.   Its newest offering is a Google Earth application that shows how many times its freely available album “The Slip” has been downloaded by geographic location.  NIN meet The Petabyte Age.  We now have the NINabyte.

Upon examining the downloads in Minnesota, my first question was, “Why aren’t there as many downloads in Minnesota as compared to other geographic locations?”  Obvious question, ain’t it?  But there it was.  Could it be that NIN hasn’t done as much touring or marketing in Minnesota?  Could it be that the music of NIN isn’t necessarily music to the ears of Minnesotans?  If the latter is the case, why don’t Minnesotans like NIN’s music?  Not that they don’t.  I’m simply hypothesizing here.  The data, even though there is a lot of it, actually raises more questions than it answers.  Any researcher, scientific or otherwise, will tell you that’s the typical effect of data.

In discussing this topic with Hubby (a sociology major), he came up with a few of his own questions concerning Anderson’s hypothesis.  Where do the numbers come from?  Sure, we have lots of data sets hovering around in computers waiting to be analyzed.  Does this mean that we don’t ever have to collect another iota of data?  By what mechanism do we verify that the data these computers are regurgitating is legitimate or valid?  Any monkey (no offense to the monkeys out there) can enter data into a computer, but, if you put garbage in, you’re going to get garbage out.  (Remember GIGO?)  (Hubby reminded me that Stephen Colbert once told viewers to go to Wikipedia and change the amount of remaining African elephants.)

Given my analysis of Anderson’s topic, I’d have to say that scientists and sociologists and psychologists and the rest are fairly safe in their jobs.  After all, we’re going to need them for their expertise in analyzing those petabytes and NINabytes.

Here’s an article from Ars Technica that also questions Anderson’s article.

The Legitimacy of a Mailing List

Now that I’ve formally registered my business name – Woo Woo Teacup Publishing – with the State of Minnesota, guess what?  I’ve been getting mail addressed to my business.  Advertisements for business services, mostly (“junk” mail in my opinion because I haven’t needed the services).  Being as how the State is the original source of my business name, I’m assuming they sold it for mailing list purposes – unless these enterprising businesses are culling the State’s list themselves.  Even though I haven’t published anything yet (still working up to it!), getting mail addressed to Woo Woo Teacup Publishing makes it feel like my business is legit.

Cackling Daughters

We are getting accustomed to our French Daughter and she is getting accustomed to us. Now that she has settled in, she laughs and jokes right along with us. She is coming to understand Daughter’s eye-rolling sarcasm. Daughter, who picks up on the particular speech patterns of her friends, is starting to speak like French Daughter. French Daughter, meanwhile, is mimicking Daughter and the rest of us in a cute, sing-song-y voice, with that darling French accent. The girls (and the rest of the family, come to think) are going to bed waaaaay too late and then sleeping in (except me – I have to work). The girls actually slept until noon today.

Along with our planned activities and day-to-day life, the girls are watching quite a few movies. This works especially well when we play the movie in English, but turn on the French subtitles. The girls are watching “Juno” now, which doesn’t have French subtitles. French Daughter said that was fine as long as Daughter turned on the English subtitles. French Daughter finds it easier to read English (as I find it easier to read French) than to hear it pronounced. She’s doing just fine, though, in speaking English and in explaining French things in English to us. Once in a while, she can’t find the words to describe something and then we turn to Google Translate or the French/English dictionary, or we assist her by restating things in a way she does understand. It’s all good.

The night before last, Hubby and I heard our Daughters cackling loudly. We were downstairs and they were upstairs, watching a movie. The cackling commenced after Daughter made a silly face at French Daughter and French Daughter did or said something silly back. They had each other rolling on the floor. Now that’s the way daughters should get along.

Jangled

There was an incident in Central Minnesota two days ago that still has me jangled.  A man entered a courthouse with a concealed gun and sat down at the back of a room where the County Commissioners’ board meeting was being held.  He sat through the entire meeting and when the Commissioners were about to adjourn, he said something to the effect of, “There’s one more order of business to attend to.”  Then he pulled out his gun and took people hostage.  He allowed a few people to leave, telling them to contact a state television studio, and one of them promptly went to the Sheriff’s office, which is within the same complex.  The Sheriff, a SWAT team and several other officers were on the scene immediately and evacuated the courthouse.  The man with the gun pointed it at the County Administrator and at one of the County Commissioners.  He was told to drop the weapon, but refused, and then pointed it at the officers.  Three of the officers, including the Sheriff, shot the man, who was pronounced dead at the hospital.

I have been in this courthouse.  I have been in this particular room.  It is a small room, with space for the Commissioners’ table, plus about twenty chairs for audience members.  It is a miracle that no one else was shot.  I have heard that the officers had instructed the hostages to lower themselves to the ground and crawl out of the room.

I know some of the people who were in that room being held hostage.  When a friend of mine called to inform me of the incident after having been escorted out of a different area of the courthouse by three armed SWAT members, my knees almost buckled and I found it hard to breathe.  I continue to tense up when I think about this horrifying situation.

There are people who are siding with the armed man, saying that the County Commissioners had done him wrong and pushed him over the edge.  The man had a history of flaunting the law and then litigating when the County Board didn’t allow him to do what he wanted.  Some are speculating that his gun wasn’t loaded.  Minnesota Public Radio just reported that his gun was indeed loaded, with one bullet already in the chamber.  He had a second gun and handcuffs on him, too.  And to think that he sat calmly through an entire County Board meeting, waiting to make his move.

Hubby’s Motorcycle Table

Hubby has asked me to post a picture of his motorcycle table.  He used three discarded motorcycle mufflers and a discarded motorcycle rim for this masterpiece.  I think the most expensive part of the table was the glass top, which we bought for $50.  If Hubby had to buy all the parts to build this new, it would cost quite a lot more.  He built this table a few years ago and has plans for creating more furniture out of motorcycle parts.

To ISBN or Not to ISBN?

I have a minor dilemma.  I think I have it figured out, but wanted to pass it by my readers to get some other opinions before taking the plunge.

I am going to publish my Greenville book through Cafe Press.  In the book publishing business, the majority of books are assigned an ISBN – International Standard Book Number.  This number, which is unique to each book, helps the publishing industry in distributing and tracking books.  It’s critical for bookstores and online book retailers for ordering and inventory purposes.  Each edition (hard cover, soft cover, later editions) of a book gets its own number, so book people can tell the editions apart.

The ISBN also serves to identify the publisher of each book.  Book publishers buy blocks of ISBNs to assign to the books they publish.  A publisher can purchase as few as ten ISBNs or up to 1,000.  (Oops, just checked the website and it appears that a publisher can now buy one ISBN at a time.  Online publishing must have driven that change.)  There is only one company in the United States that sells ISBNs – R. R. Bowker.  To get ISBNs in other countries, over 160 other businesses have been given exclusive rights to sell ISBNs in their geographic locations.

The cost of 10 ISBNs is $275. One hundred ISBNs go for $995 and 1,000 ISBNs cost $1,750.  As you can see, it behooves a publisher to purchase more ISBNs at a time because of the great cost savings, however, R. R. Bowker recommends only purchasing the amount of ISBNs a publisher plans to use within the next 5 years.  Obviously, I’m not going to be publishing 1,000 books within the next 5 years, nor can I spit out 100 books in that amount of time, so my option is to buy a block of 10.  (Forget one at a time.  It costs $125, which is not cost-effective no matter how you slice it.  Well, okay, I guess it’s cost effective if you only plan to write one tome in your lifetime, but still.)

In addition to buying ISBNs, a publisher must also purchase bar codes to have printed on the backs of books so the purchase price can be scanned by booksellers.  Bowker sells each bar code for $25.  By the time one starts adding up the costs associated with assigning an ISBN to a book, the whole thing looks pretty daunting for a self-publisher.  As an unknown author without the distribution power of a major publisher, I’m realistic about my chances for success in this venture.  Lots of really fine books languish in obscurity through lack of distribution.  Because I’m publishing Greenville as a print-on-demand book through Cafe Press, how likely is it that other retailers will pick it up?  I read an article about Amazon not wanting to handle print-on-demand books from other suppliers because it wants writers to use its print-on-demand services, so that avenue looks to be out.

So, then, if I’ve chosen a limited venue for selling my books, is it worth the expense to purchase ISBNs, along with the requisite bar codes?

Chocolats

Our French Daughter brought us a couple of gifts, much to our surprise. (We really didn’t have expectations along these lines. We thought it would be a treat simply to get to know someone new. French Daughter is a real delight.) We were given a photo book of France, which is called “Colours of France” and very aptly named.

French Daughter, at the suggestion of her mother, also brought us a giant box of chocolates. A couple of pictures of the box before we cracked it open:

(My goodness. I see I’m not very good at taking a straight picture, am I?)

The chocolatier is Jeff de Bruges and les chocolats are made in France and Belgium for the company. The label on the box says, en français:

“Je craque un peu, beaucoup, à la folie.  Je craque pour lui, pour elle, pour toi, pour moi.  Je craque le matin, le midi, le soir pour les Chocolats.”

Google Translate tells me that this says:  “I crack a little, many, the madness. I loves him for it, for you, for me. I cracks in the morning, midday, evening for Chocolate.”

That’s not quite right.  I think it means, “I crack a little, a lot, the madness.  I crack for him, for her, for you, for me.  I crack in the morning, the midday, the evening, for chocolate.”  Of course, the basic gist of it all is that I crack the box open, no matter what the reason, because who needs a reason to eat chocolate, right?

And this chocolate is to die for.  Pick your favorite creamy American chocolate and it won’t touch the yummy mouth-feel of this chocolate.  When we opened the box, we were enthralled by the many beautiful shapes.  There were two pieces that looked like cameos, a couple of Egyptian heads, and a couple of ice cream cone-shaped chocolates, along with more traditional round and square shapes that were decorated with white chocolate designs and fluting.  If I had been thinking straight, I would have taken pictures before we ate them, but I could hardly ask my family to stop mid-bite, could I?

We have a few left that we are going to share with our extended family this afternoon.  Someone (Daughter, I think) keeps taping the box shut so we have to work to reopen them.  Sly girl!

The Radishes Are Coming

Now that we’ve had a gigantic dose of rain followed by several toasty days, the plants in our yard are growing beautifully. We have two small beds of herbs and vegetables, including radishes, carrots, onions, basil, spinach, parsley, lettuce, tomatoes, rosemary, oregano, sage, tarragon, and jalapeño peppers. The jalapeños aren’t doing so well, but everything else is looking healthy.

The radishes are coming . . . (and the carrots!)

Our flowers are looking lush, even though the irises are a couple of weeks late.

The irises – late to the party, but stylishly so.

On one of my vacation days (one of those days I said I was lazy), Hubby and I created a new garden bed on the north side of our house, where there is far too much shade and the soil is practically all sand. Grass wouldn’t grow here, at least not whatever it was that we planted. We thought maybe hostas would do the trick. A friend of ours spontaneously stopped me in the store last week and asked if we could use some hostas. She’s a gardener and regularly breaks apart her plants and then has to find something to do with them. Giving them away is one of her options. We were the willing recipients this time. We went over to her house and she dug up and broke apart a monstrously large hosta while we were visiting. She was able to break one plant into six nice sized ones. She also gave us some other plants from her garden, some cetum and lennium (don’t know if those are spelled correctly). By the time we were through with collecting plant material, the trunk of our car was filled, plus we had two pots in the back seat area.

Hubby and I, with the assistance of Young Son #2, Daughter, and French Daughter, aerated the soil and moved rocks to create an edge for the bed. We had enough plants to fill a bed along the entire north side of our house. Et, voila! The result:

Sharing

We are very much enjoying our French Daughter.  I am relearning some of the French I was taught in high school.  My favorite new word is moustique, which means mosquito.  Very important to know that word in Minnesota.  We’ve become intensely conscious of our language usage and how much we mess with the English language.  We’re making good use of our old French/English dictionary.  It travels with us everywhere.

Our French Daughter has been sharing her culture with us and we’re finding far more similarities than differences.  She showed us a few websites she visits, which I will now share with you.

News from her region:  http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/

A magazine she likes:  http://www.elle.fr/elle/

Fashion sites:  http://www.promod.fr/tops/index.html

http://www.zara.com/

http://www.pimkie.com/

Needless to say, we’ve been very busy.  I was on vacation for a few days, but returned to work today.  I was quite lazy on vacation, so it’s hard to get back into the swing of things.

(We’re now listening to French Daughter’s favorite song, “I’m So Excited,” first done by the Pointer Sisters, now done by Le Tigre.)