Excellent Quotes: A Catskill Eagle

My Mom fled the long winters, seasonal affective disorder, and blue collar parochialism of her neck of New England for warmer climes as soon as she graduated from college. But, some of the family still lives there and so do many friends and I have been going back more often for work lately. My travel has been all in the summer and spring, when a fella thinks, "Yeah, I could live in Boston. What a pretty place." (Note: I also regularly think this about Chicago; I have been advised to visit during the winter months before making any foolhardy decisions.)

Now, the Cradle of Liberty has many things going for it, Puritanical weather aside. One of them is Janet Echelman's aerial sculpture over the new Rose Kennedy Greenway. Another less ephemeral thing is the legacy of Robert B. Parker's Spenser mysteries. The books center on a laconic Beantown private investigator, known only as Spenser, with a sweetheart named Susan and A Man Called Hawk as a best friend.

I am a sucker for anything driven by a code of honor character--gimme an N, gimme an O, gimme an I, gimme an R, whaddya got? Heartache! Spenser indeed has an internal code. And Hawk has a code, too. Spenser's code makes room for a girlfriend--he is not actually a true Philip Marlowe clone--even if the relationship is sometimes rocky. Hawk's makes room for the occasional fine, foxy lady but his code is too close to the street to really let anyone all the way in. The bad guys don't stand a chance.

Spenser and Hawk are kindred spirits, but they cover their brotherly affection, book after book, with a steady flow of snappy, erudite banter as they track down the baddies. They are either the first post-racial detectives in history or they just don't give a crap what anyone thinks; they play the race card on each other like it was a long night at the green felt table in Vegas. In A Catskill Eagle, Spenser has just broken Hawk out of a false imprisonment and they are tracking down one Jerry Costigan, who has been horning in on Spenser's Lady Friend and may be involved in much more:

"Remember where Mill River Boulevard is?" I said.

"Un huh."

"Jerry Costigan lives off it on something called Costigan Drive in something called The Keep."

"The Keep?" Hawk said.

"The Keep."

"The more money you honkies get," Hawk said, "the sillier you get."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Didn't you grow up in a place called The Ghetto?"

"Shit." Hawk said. "You got me."

"See, you intolerant bastard."

Hawk drove quietly for a moment and then he began to laugh. "Maybe I move to Beverly Farms," Hawk said, "buy a big house call it The Ghetto." He made ghetto a two-word phrase.

"The Wasps would turn lime green," I said.

"Match their pants," Hawk said.

-- Parker, Robert B. A Catskill Eagle. New York, NY: Dell, 1985. P. 65.

There are a jillion Spenser novels. I think I have read every one. If you haven't read them, try out one of the forty on offer. If you haven't read one in a while--Parker died while writing a new novel in 2010--I suggest picking up a paperback for a long flight and getting reacquainted.

PS - Why the television series starring Hawk was set in DC, I will never understand. But understand this: "Time to Pretend" by MGMT is good stuff; now playing on iTunes.

Hacking

Quite a while ago I went to the Noisebridge hacker space in San Francisco to be all rebellious and to learn me some hacking like a real hipster.

Now, I imagined that a Matthew Broderick figure dressed in subtle greys and designer blacks would be teaching me to code my way past the corporate ice of the New York Times to list myself in their database as an expert news source on hacking and computer security issues. Shazam! Super-size my irony, to go, please. What I got was a middle-aged dude in cargo shorts who somewhat phoned in our lesson on soldering Arduino boards to make one of a number of prefab kits.

The good news: I picked a kit to work on that allowed me to assemble a master remote control that issues the "shut off" command for every known major brand of television. Bwahahaha! It works up to 50 feet away. I have tried it on my own tee vee and it turns off the boob tube like a champ.

If only I weren't such a non-hacker chicken and were willing to take it with me to bars and airports to flip the kill switch on the droning ubiquity of cable "news" in public spaces. But I worry about explaining to the flight safety mandarins how my exposed wiring and inexplicable mini-UV light bulbs are just a fun project and not, wait, no, I don't need to visit the special room, no, it is just a fun project I did, and I have a plane to catch, please, please take off the surgical glove, there is no need for that....

Still, it was fun to re-learn to solder -- turns out I had completely forgotten how to do it correctly -- and to brush shoulders with Fog City's energetic maker culture. Not that I can actually make anything else without serious coaching and supervision. But, I do have my one hilarious remote. If your television mysteriously up and quits, look out the door for my car coasting down your street with the lights off.

PS - Prior to that, I went to a maker space and took a lesson in lock picking. Yeah, I can't do that by myself, either. But, speaking of the waterless Golden State, I can listen to "The Golden State" by John Doe; now playing on iTunes.

Recipe: Balsamic Salad Dressing

Recently I took a cooking class. Never done it before and it was a lot of fun. Our chef/instructor was very, how you say in America, high-energy, but she knew her stuff. We learned to prepare a few Southern Italian dishes and drank a Sicilian wine that was full-bodied and didn't threaten to kill anyone, you know, the way a lot of full-bodied Sicilians do in books and movies.

So, a win. Yum.

Without giving away too many state secrets that would put my cooking class host out of business, below is her truly yummy recipe for a balsamic dressing for a Panzanella salad; I think it would go well with a green salad,too.

1/8 C balsamic vinegar
1/4 C olive oil
1 T Dijon mustard
1 T honey

Combine all in a jar with a tight lid and shake until well-mixed.

PS - As noted, we had it over a salad of large, toasted bread cubes, tomatoes, cucumber, shallots, and basil. Golly. Also delish is "The Unguarded Moment" by a very young The Church; now playing on iTunes.

5-4-Fri: View Count Zero

I have a surprising number of blog posts that Sitemeter now swears nobody has read. This cannot be true because some of them have posted comments from readers. Still, in a shameless, cable-television-like effort to boost ratings without going to the trouble of actually generating any new content, may I recommend five of them to you this Friday:

Cryptonomicon
B-Minus
Excellent Quotes: The Sign of the Four
5-4-Fri: Mixed Drinks
The Inaugural

Let's see if the old Interwebs tracker will acknowledge hits going forward.

PS - Looking back, it seems that I only posted ONE blog entry in all of 2010. Such shameful slacking. Oh, but Digital Underground is not slacking on "Humpty Dance"; now playing on iTunes.

Do It: Read "Kill the Password"

A while back, my main email account was hacked. After some deliberation, I had given my new email address to a friend whose Internet hygiene is questionable and, sure enough, within 24 hours I was receiving notes from friends that I was spamming them.

My first reaction was panic. What if the hackers locked me out of my own account? What if they stole my credit card numbers? What if they posted my miserable self-recorded guitar playing on the Web?! My next reaction was to act immediately to change my password and read up on security. Then, sheepishly, I began to change my password everywhere I had an account. Why? Because I was using the same password every. place. I. went.

I know. Bad form. But I am more secure today. Thanks in large part to a recent article in Wired magazine, which, while painting a doomsday scenario for the future of online safety, does offer some very helpful security tips.

To wit, few of the author's "Dos": 

"Enable two-factor authentication when offered. When you log in from a strange location, a system like this will send you a text message with a code to confirm. Yes, that can be cracked, but it’s better than nothing. 

Give bogus answers to security questions. Think of them as a secondary password. Just keep your answers memorable. My first car? Why, it was a “Camper Van Beethoven Freaking Rules.” 

Scrub your online presence. One of the easiest ways to hack into an account is through your email and billing address information. Sites like Spokeo and WhitePages.com offer opt-out mechanisms to get your information removed from their databases. 

Use a unique, secure email address for password recoveries. If a hacker knows where your password reset goes, that’s a line of attack. So create a special account you never use for communications. And make sure to choose a username that isn’t tied to your name—like m****n@wired.com—so it can’t be easily guessed."

So, do it: read "Kill the Password." It's great.

PS - The last of the "do's" has been the real eye-opener for me. Oh, and it is completely safe to bend an ear to "Devastation" by The Besnard Lakes; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: The Hardy Boys

Friend, are you like me? Do you like action, mystery, and cliff-hanging suspense? Then you, too, will want to read The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories, Registered Trademark. Yes, youngster, you'll enjoy the thrilling adventures of America's favorite detective duo, Frank and Joe Hardy. Their keen insight, cheeky but never inappropriate disregard for adult supervision, and touching camaraderie with their swell friends help bring the criminal element to justice and will thrill you, making you eager to read more of their serial exploits, all in hard cover.

Indeed, if you can ignore the dated, casual ethnic stereotyping, leveled vocabulary, and the fact that there was no actual author named Franklin W. Dixon, you can--as I do--feel nostalgic about this classic casebook series. You can even re-read one as an adult, which I recently did.

The entrepreneurial offspring of Bayport's well-known detective Fenton Hardy, the Hardy Boys--always introduced as brown-haired and level-headed Frank and younger, blonde, impetuous Joe--were a staple growing up in my house. Their best pal Chet Morton always had a sweet tooth, a new hobby that proved remarkably helpful to the case at hand, and a vivacious sister, who provided a love interest for Joe. Their "favorite dates" Callie Shaw, a giggly blonde who sees Frank, and the aforementioned Iola Morton, a brunette who goes with Joe, added romantic interest, forming cleverly mismatched hair color couples.

The books were full of this sort of thing:

     "While Frank and Joe stared in utter amazement, the huge clock and the wall section behind it began sliding to one side.

     "'Why,' Frank gave an inward gasp, 'it's a door, hidden by the clock attached to it!'"

     -- While the Clock Ticked. Dixon, Franklin W. New York (NY): Grosset & Dunlap, 1962. Pp. 134-35.

I never confused it with literature, but I must admit to reading a ton of them as a kid and to collecting a few of the 66 titles for myself. Go back and read a story; it's fun, but you'll probably need only the one. And recommend matching wits with the Hardy Boys to an age-appropriate kid in your life.

PS - No need to buy all of them. You can just fire up the old jalopy and check them out from the Bayport Public Library. Oh, and "Sunrise" by Yeasayer is a thrilling adventure in an of itself; now playing on iTunes.

Caneel Bay

I recently went to the US Virgin Islands for a brief vacation. I was a Virgin Islands virgin, so I wanted my first trip to be special (and I wanted them to respect me afterward). I chose to go to Caneel Bay on St John. I chose right.

In a fit of noblesse oblige, Laurance Rockefeller--who was enraptured by the island--bought up much of St. John through an environmental protection intermediary, gave it to the US government to create the Virgin Islands National Park, and built a low-profile but sprawling hotel for the 1% on several of its many charming bays. As a result, your Caribbean vacation can consist of lolling around in a paradise well-stocked with sunshine, gorgeous water, charming flora and fauna, and hikes in the park rather than gambling, smoking, and sitting cheek to jowl with casual drunks in the swim-up bar at a chain high-rise hotel adjacent to a nominal "beach." Thank you, Laurence.

The Rockefellers are like that. Yes, they have sometimes been problematic misogynist monopolist prudes who crushed their competitors with Social Darwinist furor. But they protect land with vision and missionary zeal. And I like my overlords like that ... and I love that for $31/hour today someone like me can bask in the Caribbean's glory before global warming makes translucent seas and coral reefs a relic of the Holocene.

It is truly delightful.

PS - Go there immediately...or, uh, once the hurricane season ends (Caneel closes for September and October). You can thank me, and Laurance, later. Oh, and "Pelican" by The Maccabees is also delightful; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Game of Thrones

When he is not obsessing over medieval culinary delicacies and the finer points of battle dress, media sensation George RR Martin is busy crushing it story-telling-wise.

Hearing about the popularity of his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, I got a copy of the first book for my girlfriend. She promptly inhaled the five-part-to-date series and is impatiently awaiting the next installment. I decided to give it a shot since she liked it so much and have been amazed at the way Martin invents and fully inhabits his fictional land of Westeros, home to seven squabbling kingdoms. Nearly every one of the inter-bred ruling family members and their minions is interesting (chapters are serially told from the perspective of one character at a time), there is enough hot and cold running backstory to pay homage to Frank Herbert, and the author has conjured up a killer app for his series: The Wall.

The Wall is made of solid ice 700 feet high, 100 leagues long--that's 300 miles to those of us not living in the British Isles--and so thick that it houses tunnels and prisons and The Seven know what else inside it. The Wall is all that stands between the "civilized" residents of the South and a northern territory known as Beyond the Wall or, more chillingly, as "The Land of Always Winter."

Somewhat disappointingly, The Wall is not really an allegory about the small-mindedness of Rep. Duncan Hunter or the bizarreness of modern US/Mexico relations. It more than makes up for it, however, by being awesomely about keeping The Others out of the South. The Others are a terrifying race of gaunt ice beings whose eyes shine blue and who silently slaughter you and your pals as they remorselessly converge on you regardless of your defenses. Oh, and, after they kill you, your undead corpse--complete with colorless skin offset by black, blood-engorged hands--rises to kill anyone you knew before. Brr.

Take a gander; here, Sam, one of The Wall's guardians, summarizes what the history books in Westeros say about the shivvery beings beyond The Wall:

 "The Others come when it is cold, most of the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear. They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night ... or else night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part's plainly true. Some accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don't know what those are. Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls."

-- A Dance with Dragons. Martin, George R.R. New York (NY): Bantam Books, 2011. Pp. 179-180 (of 1705 in the e-version).

Martin seamlessly weaves together something the reader has seen--Small Paul's nightmarish death at the hands of a corpse-riding ice horror--with a totally believable "history" from the past of his fabricated world. Combined with an unerring ear for an authentic-sounding kind of Middle Ages lingo--"it makes no matter" and "plainly true"--the plot sucks you into a fully-conceived universe that you are happy to inhabit for thousands of pages.

PS -- I must admit that I skipped the fourth book, which has nearly universally been reviewed as a slog whose only real purpose it to set up book five. I am quite a slow reader so I WikiCheated instead and read the plot online, skipping from book three to the present. Oh, but "Northern White Clouds" by Supermule is no slog; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: The Affair

Lee Child (nee Jim Grant) is already a best-selling author of thrillers; he is about to become quite le celebrite when the Tom Cruise vehicle, "Jack Reacher," is released this December.

Reacher novels all follow a bullet-proof formula: Jack--a code-of-honor drifter who got BRACed from the Army's military police and has since gone off the grid--drifts into town. His engagement in the plot begins uneventfully. He picks up a job or hitches a ride or buys a cup of his beloved coffee. This immediately entangles him in a massive and highly-secretive plot to do very bad things, conducted by bad men, that the Law cannot or will not address. Jack laconically investigates. He meets and beds a local woman. Events come to a head. Inevitably, Jack brutally kills the perpetrators (sometimes he kills a symbolic representative of the evil-doers, sometimes he kills their leader, sometimes he kills a phone book full of baddies.)

As a character, Reacher has some endearing quirks: He does not do laundry; instead, he simply throws his old clothes away when he buys a new set. He owns just a toothbrush. He always knows what time it is without consulting a watch or clock. He has a Sherlockian memory for all sorts of neat facts that prove useful in solving crimes, such as the rate of deadfall due to gravity, the population of most major cities, the percentage of cheese in the moon, and so forth. He doesn't really care much about anything. But--like all good noir heroes--he secretly does care about some things and he'll do anything to get to the truth.

As an author, Child, too, is  endearing. He has a delightful way of over-specifying the mundane and under-selling the big stuff. He brings a LOT of detail into the narrative, but avoids the Clancyesque (THIS Jack will never reach into the darkened room and expertly and precisely flip the light switch of the Leviton MDI06-1LI 600W, 120 Volt AC 60Hz, Single-Pole light switch mounted exactly 3 meters above the Woodgrain Millwork WG 1866 9/16 in. x 5-1/4 in. x 96 in. Medium Density Fiberboard Base Moulding that abuts the carpet).

Violent, yes. Formulaic, true. Still, I love me some Reacher novels. Here's a taste for those of you who have not yet met the quietly menacing protagonist in the black and white. Jack is on an emerging date with Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux, the local lady he will bed:

"The clock in my head hit ten in the evening. The pies arrived, and so did the coffee. I didn't pay much attention to either. I spent most of my time looking at the third button on Deveraux's shirt. I had noticed it before. It was the first one that was done up. Therefore it was the first one that would need to be undone. It was a tiny mother-of-pearl thing, silvery gray. Right behind it was skin, neither pale nor dark, and very three dimensional. Left to right it curved toward me, then away from me, then toward me again. It was rising and falling as she breathed."

- The Affair. Child, Lee. New York (NY): Delacorte, 2011. Pp. 199-200.

Read the series. I recommend either starting at the start, with Killing Floor, or at the helpful review of Jack's life to date, with Bad Luck and Trouble.

PS - One of Jack Reacher's key attributes is that he is six-foot-five (Reach-er, get it?). In the movie he will be portrayed by Tom Cruise, who's playing height is five-foot-seven. Enjoy the ensuing fanboy controversy. Oh, and "Sticky Chemical" by Bobby Bare is another endearing thing; now playing on iTunes.

Funny Thing: Muzak

As any reader of this blog knows, I am fairly dedicated to music. I am learning how to play the guitar (for 15 years now), am a recovering mid-life crisis band member, and I provide a song recommendation with each entry in the “PS” section of the post.

I also have a good-sized CD collection. Not so large that I can start my own rebel Internet radio station anchored off the New York skyline. But large enough that it can be reasonably blamed as a major contributor to the fact that I continue to rent an apartment rather than own my own home.

I have been having a devil of a time migrating my collection out of my ‘90s-style entertainment unit--which hulks in a corner of my living room intimidating the bric-a-brac and the smaller furniture--and into my iMac. Sometimes, I sort of want to follow one well-heeled pal’s lead and just pack it all up in boxes and send it to a company that loads it onto a drive for you at a fixed price per CD...but then the Scotsman in me goes nuts and says, “Hey, English fancypants, you canna load them yourself, you valueless yuppie?!”

But the prospect of logging serious time at the computer swapping hundreds and hundreds of disks in and out is daunting. It is a mirage of discipline that fades as I walk across the desert of dinner dates and movies and work. What to do?

Well, I’ll tell you, dear reader. I determined to load one CD onto iTunes each day when I get home from work. Not more. Not less. Just a few minutes every day. In a few years I’ll have all my music in there and each day my iTunes reservoir groweth rewardingly.

This has, surprisingly, been working exceedingly well. I just refresh a small stack of CDs on my desk and pop one in nightly when I get home from the grindstone factory. I am up to 5.1 days of music already (you gotta love the Apple measurement systems).

But I did recently have one moment of panic that reminded me that I am not a digital native; that, like Larry, Curly, and Moe, I am perpetually waiting at the nun’s orphanage for digital parents to adopt me, getting older and more eccentric with each passing software release (woo woo woo).

As I got into the groove of slugging a new CD into the collection each day I inserted one that was both a DVD of music videos and a CD of songs all on one platter (damn you, broken-up R.E.M. and your tech savvy). As only Apple can, when it came time to eject the disc, my iMac wanted to know which format I wanted to eject: one, the other, or both. I panicked. I began pressing buttons at random. The pretty, rainbow wheel of “loading” began to spin perpetually like a digital Tibetan prayer wheel in the center of my screen. My system began to Escher itself into a Mobius strip of indecision. Nothing worked. Nothing responded. I was screwed.

I looked desperately for an override. I examined with minute attention to detail the body of the computer, looking for a pinhole into which I could insert a paperclip to eject the disc as in days of old. I swore. I begged Steve Job’s ghost for insight. I promised to put an Apple bumper sticker on my car. Nothing worked.

After some serious sweating, I recalled that I had a brand new, shiny, optical drived, envy-inducing iPad. Ha! Salvation. I sat by my recursive iMac and used the iPad to Google how to force a disc out of a Mac. It was so meta.

And here is what it the sum total of mankind’s knowledge, stored on the Cloud and delivered at the speed of light from a self-repairing global network of servers told me: push the eject button on your keypad. Push “|>”

Doh!

PS -- Seriously? I overlooked the eject button?! Sigh. Oh, one song you should load into your collection is "The Heartbreak Rides" by  A.C. Newman; now playing on iTunes.

Thai Massage

This week I met with my professional coach for a healthy and frank discussion of my weaknesses as a person and employee and finalized a work plan to face head on some of the issues that keep me from being the best that I can be. I also met with my boss for my 2011 performance review, celebrating what I had done well in the past year and addressing the strategic concerns that continue to bother her and keep me from being the best that I can be.

I also started running again, slowly and badly, since my recent annual checkup revealed that I have gained 10 pounds and am approximating the ideal weight for an all-pro tight end but not so much for a desk-bound middle-aged manager and that my weight issues are compromising my long-term health and keeping me from being the best that I can be.

Additionally, I scheduled time with my dentist to replace two old, dark amalgam tooth fillings with miraculous, white ceramic fillings that cost about as much as a new car payment. (Speaking of cars, I dropped a cool grand on car repairs, too.)

I brought the week to a gentle close by calculating how much I owe the federal government in taxes.

All in all a purposeful week of accomplishment and bravery that left me in serious danger of weeping openly if one more piece of constructive criticism or personal upgrade crossed my path.

So, I decided that I needed to:

(a) drink with a vengeance and wake up in jail with a new tattoo
(b) get a fluffy puppy who will love me unconditionally
(c) get a professional massage

I chose (c) a massage. In fact, I decided to get (c) a Thai massage because there is a parlor a few blocks from my house. Now I understand that this sounds like I chose (c) pay for sex. There are a few common misconceptions about Thai massage floating around. Let me clear some up.

     There is no sex involved. This is initially disappointing but ultimately morally comforting. It also proactively eliminates the need for my next annual medical checkup to include a healthy dose of penicillin.

     You pay about 60 dollars an hour. Your life looks on the surface like you are in the 1% if you take a gander at the iPad, the Starbucks card, the cool neighborhood, the hipster cache of music, the foreign car, and all the rest. But you are reminded in a subtle but ugly way that you are really in the 99% if your level of relaxation,which grows with each minute of massage, simultaneously erodes with the nagging consciousness that it is costing a dollar a minute to relax.

     Thai massage is not really massage. When you hear the word "masseuse" you imagine an attractive but un-embarrassingly-arousing woman named Helga who smooths the week's woes from your body with firm and comforting caresses. A Thai masseuse is in reality a tiny but unnaturally strong woman named Somchai or a compact, gymnastic man named Sunan; neither is interested in your comfort. Thai massage is less like getting a lightly-oiled hug and more like enduring a thoughtful beating.

     Yes, they step on you. Dude, I got Sunan and he stood on my thigh for quite a while. Ouch.

On a scale of 1-10--where 1 is the pressure of flannel sheets on your body as you sleep by a crackling fire and 10 is telling your captors the nuclear codes just to make. it. stop--my massage held steady between 6-7, punctuated occasionally by real pain.

Really, I feel like I joined Fight Club. But, I can rotate my head to see behind me beyond my elbow now.

So I had my many troubles manhandled out of me and I paid dearly for it. I needed it. I needed it a lot.

PS - But next time I may call Helga. Oh, and "Neeps and Tatties" by Stanton Moore is not painful at all; now playing on iTunes.

Do It: Watch WALK OFF THE EARTH

The catchiest, earwormiest song on the airwaves today is from Melbourne's Gotye, pronounced Gaultier (heh).  His Making Mirrors album sports the infectious "Somebody That I Used to Know," apparently "feat-ing" a singer named Kimbra.

Now--in a visually compelling group-grope of a single guitar, the band Walk Off the Earth has covered the tune. My vote for best viral video of 2012.

So, do it: Watch Walk Off the Earth's cover.

PS - That pronunciation guide is like a dictionary entry that says "Gotye: Of or relating to Gotye-like stuff." Oh, and Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" itself is something you've got to get to know; now playing on iTunes.

Woefully, I am Letting the Woeful Go

Each Bloguscript posting follows several rules. One is the use of the word "woeful" every time. I have kept it up for three years, but, woefully, even I grow bored with this awesome inside joke. So, goodbye my friend. You may reappear again sometime, but you are off the protocol.

PS -- Maybe I will select another word to obsess over. Watch for it. Oh, and this Thursday seems like an appropriate time to recommend Thursday by Morphine; now playing on iTunes.

Fellow Travelers

Recently, I was on a plane trip from DC to San Francisco. I am on planes a LOT now-a-days for my job. Most of the time, the trips are uneventful. But, this time I was seated next to a, how you say in America, character.

I sat in the aisle seat in the first exit row on one of those big ole 777s and for a while it looked as though I might get the two-seat side row to myself. However, a well-but-sloppily-dressed and heavy-set middle-aged fellow eventually showed up and said, "That's me there," pointing at the window seat. I started to get up to let him in but he demurred. He made it clear that he'd just do a few things first.

In order: He tossed his Jack Spade man bag across me onto his seat where upon it rocketed off and into the wall space between our row and first class. He shrugged sheepishly and next tossed his glasses onto the seat, where upon they, too, bounced off and ricocheted under the seat in front of us. He laughed awkwardly, took better aim, and proceeded to caroom his book off the seat cushion, seat back, and tray table and onto the floor. He shrugged. Then he tried to put his luggage in the overhead rack three different ways (wheels in, wheels out, sideways) before adopting the original wheels in approach. He continued to insist that I not bother getting up and just scooted by me into his seat -- like a well-heeled but unkempt bear trying to be polite in an unfamiliar social situation-- affording me a gratis close-up view of his posterior.

Once seated, he retrieved his scattered belongings with much huffing, puffing, and grunting. After take-off, he opened his glasses case to pull out a brand-new pair of reading glasses complete with price tag. He unfolded them, placed them on -- price tag still hanging Minnie Pearl style --  and started reading approximately two billion newspapers. With each, he carefully hand-tore out any article that caught his fancy, folded it into a neat square, a careful rectangle, or other geometric shape and added it to an increasingly tall stack. This process took about two full hours. The bulk of these papers, which did not merit personal rending and collection, were added to a growing rat's nest of newsprint that littered the airplane floor at his feet.

Woefully, interspersed with the paper rustling, tearing, and folding were a continuous, irregular but prolific set of burps, farts, and yawns. The yawns, in particular, deserve their Boswell. Tired, I had endeavored to catch some shut-eye so, at first, I did not realize what was happening. But, as I emerged from the disorienting fog of war that is sleeping on long-haul air travel I realized that my seatmate was making an odd series of noises that indicated enthusiastic agreement, a kind of laconic orgasm, or a successful itch scratching. The man would periodically say, "yeahyeah," with a drawn out first "YEAAAH Yeah." It took me a while to realize that he was, in fact, yawning.

Now, the odd thing is that this man was obviously quite well off. His rumpled clothing was high-end stuff. I checked the price of Jack Spade bags when I got home and they run to $400 a piece. He was perhaps the eccentric scion of some industrial age fortune? An odd but brilliant dotcom founder? A well-funded performance artist secretly videotaping my reaction for a planned MOMA installation? Who knows?

I was particularly grateful to the "flight deck" for their announcement that we would be landing soon.

PS - Naturally, as we landed I needed to go to the restroom to relieve myself of the copious amounts of water and Coke I drank on the flight. But, I was sufficiently traumatized by our time together that I deliberately let him precede me off the plane and waited until he veered into a Men's Room before I made my selection of a lavatory much further down the hall. I am as sure of this as anything I have learned in my life: I did not want to find out what peculiarities accompanied his ablutions. Oh, and while my fellow traveler was clearly well off, both Aloe Blacc and I Need a Dollar; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Heat Rises

I have been watching ABC's "Castle" since it premiered and -- while it will not win any awards -- it combines puns, crime drama, romance, puns, New York City, puns, and charismatic Canadians Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic...so I am happy.

The general gist: Richard Castle is a famous mystery novelist and divorced father raising his teenage daughter along with his live-in Broadway diva mother. When a copy-cat serial killer parrots the plots of his books, he meets NYPD Detective Kate Beckett, a no-nonsense hottie struggling with the lingering loss of her mother's unsolved murder. After they work together to solve the Castle copy-cat killings, Rick Castle ("Rich Asshole?") and Kate Beckett pair up to investigate homicides in New York along with a team of engaging background players on, and off, the force.

ABC has won my heart forever by publishing three best-selling mysteries as if they were actually written by Rick Castle, complete with acknowledgements from Rick, readers' guides, and author's photos. In them, Castle chronicles the adventures of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Jameson Rook, and his paramour and no-nonsense hottie, NYPD Detective Nikki Heat.

In Heat Rises (a better title, suggested by his editor, Castle admits, than his woefully bad original Heat Heat Heat), our heroes are investigating the seemingly tawdry death of a Catholic priest. Events lead them to interrogate an attractive and single member of the priest's flock, whith whom he has been working to fund a potentially shady human rights group. Killer puns abound. To wit:

"Emma Carroll was quite attractive in what some would call a cougarish way, but the skin was swollen around her eyes, which had a dullness from medication or despondency, or both. 'I'm still reeling,' she told them as soon as they sat. 'Father Gerry was a great priest and a great man.'

'Were you close?' Heat surveyed her, wondering if there was any forbidden romance lurking, but she couldn't tell, which usually meant there wasn't any. Nikki prided herself on having finely tuned lay-dar."

- Heat Rises. Castle, Richard. New York (NY): Hyperion, 2011. P. 69 of 451.

Ahh, puns. Yay.

PS - You can read Heat Wave and Naked Heat, too, if you like. I did. Oh, and "Night Train" by James Brown is hot, hot, hot; now playing on iTunes.

Return of the iMac

When my iMac woefully died a brutal, total head-crashing hard drive death after just 5 months of service, I was sorely disappointed. So I packed it up and went to the Genius Bar and they replaced the drive. Fortunately, I had been backing everything up onto a G-Drive Mini. I reloaded all my bad poetry and poorly-recorded acoustic guitar songs as well as my carefully collected iTunes library and all was right with the world again.

But it would have really, really sucked not to have a back up copy of everything. If you are not taking similar steps, do so immediately.

PS - While it is kind of a rip-off, get the AppleCare protection plan, too. Oh, and "Return of the Mack" by Mark Morrison is smoother than a Steve Jobs pitch; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Our Kind of Traitor

John le Carre (nee David Cornwell) has gotten more play from a five year stint in the British Foreign Service than anyone has a right to. He is also in an odd situation: he is both a past master of the novel and a struggling new writer. As a student of the Cold War and the author of the "Karla trilogy" and its predecessors, le Carre is an odds on favourite (as he might spell it) for the best genre writer of his generation worldwide. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, he transcended his niche into full-on social critique, narrative mastery, and stylistic genius. No one has gotten it so right for so many pages since -- and many have put forward admirable efforts. Yet, the woefully troubling slide into the post Cold War era that saw le Carre put out such subsequent books as The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama (Graham Greene needs a cover band about as much as The Beatles did), and Single & Single, revealed nothing so much as a precocious young writer trying -- and failing -- to hit his stride.

I am pleased, therefore, to announce that -- although I swore at one point to never buy a le Carre again -- his recent Our Kind of Traitor hints at a return to form. All the basic framing is there: British spies, class warfare conducted through trade craft even more occult than that of the Secret Service at its height, exotic and depressing locales, spare tension leeched through laconic and detached men who ghost through their lives and careers as unacclaimed soloists, and -- ta duh! -- Russians. All this solid bone structure lets le Carre's book look pretty on the runway no matter what today's mode. The student of the Cold War has returned to teach us that everything old is new again.

A case in point taken from the scene where long-serving intelligence maven Hector Meredith is recruiting career washout Luke Weaver to join his newest division, the Counterclaim Focus Group:

"'What's the most dire, fucking awful thing you've ever seen in your life? Anywhere? Apart from the business-end of a drug lord's Uzi staring you in the face. Pot-bellied starving kids in the Congo with their hands chopped off, barking mad with hunger, too tired to cry? Fathers castrated, cocks stuffed in their mouths, eyeholes full of flies? Women with bayonets stuck up their fannies?'

Luke had never served in the Congo, so he had to assume Hector was describing an experience of his own.

'We did have our equivalents,' he said.

'Such as what? Name a couple.'

'Columbian government having a field day. With American assistance, naturally. Villages torched. Inhabitants gang-raped, tortured, hacked to bits. Everybody dead except the one survivor left to tell the tale.'

'Yes. Well. We've both seen a bit of the world then,' Hector conceded. 'Not wanking around.'

'No.'

'And the dirty money sloshing about, the profits of pain, we've seen that too. In Columbia alone, billions. You've seen that. Christ know what your man was worth.' He didn't wait for the answer. 'In the Congo, billions. In Afghanistan, billions. An eighth of the world's fucking economy: black as your hat. We know about it.'

'Yes. We do.'

'Blood money. That's all it is.'

'Yes.'

'Doesn't matter where. It can be in a box under a warlord's bed in Somalia or in a City of London bank next to the vintage port. It doesn't change colour. It's still blood money.'

'I suppose it is.'

'No glamour, no pretty excuses. The profits of extortion, drug dealing, murder, intimidation, mass rape, slavery. Blood money. Tell me if I'm overstating my case.'

'I'm sure you're not.'

'Only four ways to stop it. One: you go for the chaps who are doing it. Capture 'em, kill 'em or bang 'em up. If you can. Two: you go for the product. Intercept it before it reaches the street or the marketplace. If you can. Three: collar the profits, put the bastards out of business.'

A worrying pause while Hector seemed to reflect on matters far above Luke's pay grade. Was he thinking of the heroin dealers who had turned his son into a goalbird and addict? Or the vulture capitalists who had tried to put his family firm out of business, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England on the rubbish heap?

'Then there's the fourth way,' Hector was saying. 'The really bad way. The best tried, easiest, the most convenient, the most common, and the least fuss. Bugger the people who've been starved, raped, tortured, died of addiction. To hell with the human cost. Money's got no smell as long as there's enough of it and it's ours. Above all, think big. Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a statistic.'"

- Our Kind of Traitor. le Carre, John. New York (NY): Viking, 2010. p. 131-2.

Today's new normal apparently requires the same old skill sets, it's just that now the expenditures need annual budget justifications. But once the op is approved, the men and women who execute it still sweat it out in safe houses, stumble through opaque ethical murk, and cobble together teams of odd personalities with fringy skills. And John le Carre has always had a pretty good feel for that kind of thing. Welcome back, Kotter.

PS - Hector's my kind of guy. Oh, and "Tightrope" by Janelle Monae is my kind of song; now playing on iTunes.

The No. 3 Pencil

I am completely flummoxed by the No. 3 pencil. I have one -- goodness knows how it even found its way into my life -- sitting in the pretty, orange Fiesta juice cup I bought at an antique store to hold pens and pencils on my desk.

It is a FaberCastell "Mongol" 482. Aside from its vaguely mysterious ethnic and historic ambiance--did Genghis use this pencil line to efficiently tick off the names of the towns his horde would next destroy-- it has a cool ferrule. But it is a hard, scratchy bastard in actual use and produces a super-light graphite mark on the page. Why would I want that? I am not an engineer. I am not a draftsman. I am not an 18th century Italian artist. I want a pencil that shows up. I want a pencil that is far less likely to be brandished as a defensive weapon. I want a No. 2 pencil. Full stop.

My idea of a stunning No. 2 pencil, should you be wondering, is the gorgeous and effective Koh-I-Noor "Mephisto" 465. Ahhhh. This is the pencil of choice for National Geographic Board meetings. This is a pencil deserving of the allusion to a diamond of great worth. It is a devilishly good tool. I have a cherished box of twelve (only 10 remain!) given to me with appropriate solemnity by a colleague at the Society as a bequeath upon his departure. I felt honored and genuinely touched and a little geeky that the gift mattered so much, not just personally but acquisitively -- I wanted my own stash. (I am not sure Koh-I-Noor even makes the Mephisto any longer except as a mechanical pencil.)

In conclusion, the No. 3 pencil: why? Just woeful. I'll keep the FaberCastell just in case Damien Hirst needs it, but I doubt I'll ever use the damn thing. That is all.

PS - If you are very good, sometime later I will bore you with my feelings that the Cristal clear Bic ballpoint pen -- blue ink cartridge -- is the supreme writing instrument and one of the pinacles of Western civilization. A man needs two items to write, period: the classic Bic pen and the Koh-I-Noor pencil. Oh, and another indispensable thing is "You I Want" by Tegan-and-Sara-sounding Jesse Thomas; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Ender's Game

My new doctor randomly recommended to me that I read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, famous adoptive son of Greensboro, NC. It wasn't quite as random as, "Stay off that foot, read Ender's Game, and call me in the morning," but we got to her interest in SciFi pretty quickly. To be fully transparent, I was probably carting around The Windup Girl at the time (you know, on the off chance that I would sit for just a brief minute in the Kaiser Permanente waiting room).

In any case, as the loyal reader knows, if I read it, woefully for you, I inflict it on you. So, prepare yourself for a quote from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella cum novel:

"It was a hot summer afternoon in Florida when they landed. Ender had been so long without sunlight that the light nearly blinded him. He squinted and sneezed and wanted to get back indoors. Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of the Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle. The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked. He hated it. He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged."

- Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York (NY): Tor (Tom Doherty Associates), 1991. P. 158.

PS - I read the 1991 "Author's Definitive Edition" complete with a very engaging introduction that acknowledged its obvious debt to Asimov and explicated some of its intent and meaning for Card and for some young readers. Plus it scored points for self-deprecating humor: "It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Ender's Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written me to say, 'You know, Ender's Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction!'" Oh, and speaking of science fiction, Ron Glass (playing space preacher Shepherd Book) is the unusual black man with a pony tail. And rapper Freedom Williams was a black man with a pony tail. And his '90s hit with C+C Music Factory, "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" deserves its own authors' definitive edition; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: The Bourne Supremacy

Okay, I had spaced on the fact that all Robert Ludlum books--including The Bourne Supremacy--are woefully deficient in almost every category I look for in a novel. The movies, however, are so awesome that one tends to forget the defects of the source material. And since I spend a LOT of time on planes these days in desperation at a used book store I snagged Supremacy out of a discount bin and began what I can only refer to as a sort of personal literary Bataan death march. (I have real trouble stopping a book--I need to get over that grad school era commitment.)

In any case, and woefully for you, having read the damn thing and having survived it I am posting an illustrative if execrable quote:

"'This is Bourne. Put my wife on the line.'

'As you wish.'

'David?'

'Are you all right?' shouted Webb on the edge of hysteria.

'Yes, just tired, that's all, my darling. Are you all right--'

'Have they hurt you--have they touched you?'

'No, David, they've been quite kind, actually. But you know how tired I get sometimes. Remember that week in Zurich when you wanted to see the Fraumunster and the museums and go out sailing on the Limmat, and I said I just wasn't up to it?'

There'd been no week in Zurich. Only the nightmare of a single night when both of them nearly lost their lives. He running the gauntlet of his would-be executioners in the Steppdeckstrasse, she nearly raped, sentenced to death on a deserted riverfront in the Guisan Quai. What was she trying to tell him?

'Yes, I remember.'"

-Ludlum, Robert. The Bourne Supremacy. New York (NY): Bantam Dell, 1987. P. 145.

Can you feel the pain? Oh, the horror. The horror. Six hundred and forty-six pages of inappropriate italic emphases in the wrong places and for inner monologues. The monologues! He had forgotten the monologues. The visions of them came back to him in a half-remembered rushing blur. The book. The book, sucked.

PS - I want my $4.50 back. Oh, but while Ludlum is a best-left-behind relic of the '80s, you will still enjoy this thing called rap when you rock out to "The Power" by German uber-group Snap; now playing on iTunes.