jesse.in.mb
Do not let my colleagues fool you with their nay-saying about James Swain’s The King Tides (Lancaster & Daniels Book 1). It is an entirely adequate beach read with a chipper pacing and zombie-like kiddie predators. To my mind, the main drawback to this book is the sponsored content, or the weird brand name dropping plus generic non-affiliated copy material–depending on if the author was paid for this or just lazy and trying to meet a word-count. It was jarring to be reading about the author’s disappointment that a kiddie diddler had smashed his phone only to be rescued by Verizon!
“His phone was new, courtesy of his ex-girlfriend tossing the old one out of a moving car. Replacing it had been a snap. A quick trip to the Verizon store and forty-five minutes later he’d walked out with a new Droid, his contacts and apps restored. Kenny’s phone was also a Droid, and he wondered if Kenny had bought it from Verizon, which had more locations than a hamburger chain. If he had, then all his data was stored in the cloud and could be easily restored.”
Spoilers: he also upgrades his phone from a Droid to a Moto Z2 Force during this exchange for only $40! I’m not sure that I’d recommend this book on its merits, but there are now enough people who have frog-marched themselves through it that it’s part of the current Glibertarian cultural canon. Don’t be left out!
JW
Have you ever read all the information that comes with penicillin prescriptions when the pharmacist fills them? Vomiting. Check! Mild skin rash. I wonder what “mild” means? Upset stomach. Check! Diarrhea. Uh-oh! I’ll be right ba….
Brett L
As part of an experiment in group self-abuse, I read James Swain’s The King Tides (Lancaster & Daniels Book 1). This book is terrible. Random shit not at all relevant to the plot, rogue FBI agents distributing kiddie porn (actually the most realistic part of the story), super-fit former Navy SEALs with beer guts congenital conditions that somehow didn’t disqualify them from that competitive system, kidnapping attempts of hot teen-aged white girls that the police don’t care about. I regretted reading this, even though it was free. Don’t buy it. Please do not encourage Mr. Swain to write any more books.
In my literature entry for the month, I read Without a Country, a Turkish work translated into English. It’s an interesting family history starting with German Jews fleeing Hitler to populate Ataturk’s new university system, where hope and religious tolerance flourish, and tracks the changes in Turkish culture from the Muslim secular hope of Ataturk to the more fundamental Muslim sympathies. It was a good book. I enjoyed the writing.
I also read Curious Tales from Chemistry: The Last Alchemist in Paris and Other Episodes by Lars Öhrström. As a chemistry geek, these are fun little tales about substances, some basic chemistry like orbitals, and history. Places, people, and things interesting to their history (like the guy tasked to steal British steel-making secrets for the Swedes).
Old Man With Candy
In Jewish tradition, the Torah is divided up into sedras, roughly analogous to chapters. Each Sabbath, a sedra is read, sequentially, until at the end of a year cycle, the last sedra is finished. We have a nice holiday to celebrate it, Simchas Torah, then the process is begun again. For years, I had a similar ritual, reading a chapter at a time out of The Feynman Lectures on Physics each week until I was done the three volume set, then I’d begin again. This kept my basic physics sharp and it was, for a geek, remarkably enjoyable. The Lectures were a series of notes from a one year freshman physics sequence taught by Richard Feynman (arguably the greatest physicist of the 20th century), and transcribed and edited by two other physicists, Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands. The collaborators did a wonderful job capturing Feynman’s voice and unique style, and this set of books might be among the greatest works in the English language. Anyway, for reasons of life, I stopped doing my ritual some years back, and recently, it occurred to me that my brain suffered from the absence of Feynman’s ghost. So I started again. And it’s every bit as delightful and wonderful as I imagined, the exact opposite of dry technical books. Even if you’re not mathematically inclined, there’s so much clear and common-sense explication of how the universe works that you’ll come out of the experience much smarter than when you went in.
I linked Volume 1 of the set because that’s the one that is likely to have the most appeal to non-physicists. It covers a sweeping range of topics; though focused on classical mechanics, Feynman talks about probability, thermodynamics, cosmology, biology, psychology, wine, and as a bonus, he offers his rather tart observations about philosophy. More so than anyone else writing about science, he is rigidly clear about what things are “this is the way it is, we can describe it, but we can’t say why it is this way” and what things are “here’s something about which we know why.”
Strange as it may seem, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the sun far better than we understand the interior of the earth. What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.
One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girlfriend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.” She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world.
Here’s an example of Feynman’s presentation methods, talking about the incredibly important and almost universally misunderstood topic of entropy. If you like this and the lightbulb goes on, pick up Volume 1 of the Lectures and prepare for a wild and crazy ride through the way the universe works.
SP
I also selected The King Tides (Lancaster & Daniels Book 1) for my free Kindle book this month since there was nothing else even remotely interesting. (How much do the authors pony up for this? I can think of no other reason for the choices.) However, being smarter than my dear Glib friends, I waited until they had all reported in, then quietly deleted it from my Kindle unopened.
In enjoyable reading, I am swiping through How to Speak Midwestern by Edward McClelland. Things I’ve learned so far include: where Little Egypt is; what a frunchroom might be; where a gangway is located and for what it might be used; who Trixie is and what she’s up to with Chad.
SugarFree
I read the Joe Pitt series by Charlie Huston. Hard-boiled vampire private detective in a Manhatten ruled by vampire clans as bitchy and mean and petty as any 8th-grade clique of half-pretty girls. They are competently written. but mostly crib from various other, better detective novels for plot: the spoiled heiress with the monstrous father from The Big Sleep, the cynical operator playing all sides against each other of Red Harvest, Mike Hammer’s blase cruelty of those he has decided are guilty. The best book is the third, Half the Blood in Brooklyn, with Joe fighting off a thoroughly crazed sect of Hassidic vampires and their odd workaround for obtaining “kosher” blood. Overall, the series isn’t bad, it just also isn’t very good.
I read/watched Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil. Gregory Peck as Dr. Mengele is one of the more inspired casting decisions in movie history, constantly walking the line between terrifying and absurd. The biggest knock on the movie from a production standpoint is the blue contact lens they had to put on young Adolf–they are distracting in our 1080p world.
I also read/watched that old stand-by, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Chock full of juicy Catholic guilt and atheist hate, the movie satisfies like no other. The Zodiac Killer said of the film “I saw and think ‘The Exorcist’ was the best saterical [sic] comidy [sic] that I have ever seen.”
I made it through two chapters of The King Tides. It was terrible.
I picked up a couple books this past week.
Originals by Adam Grant and Talk like TED by Carmine Gallo. Originals is about how non-conformists influence and change the world, while Talk Like TED is about public speaking a la TED Talks.
I have no interest in public speaking (or really doing anything that requires me showing up somewhere on someone else’s schedule), but I am into livestreaming and video marketing.
So far Originals is really interesting. Adam Grant is a great writer and he pulls in some compelling studies and references. I haven’t cracked open Talk Like TED yet.
ZARDOZ
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN READING ONES. BOOKS CAUSE NOTHING BUT TROUBLE! OH AND IXNAY ONYAY ETHAY IZARDWAY OFYAY OZYAY!
ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN.
Swiss Servator
Upon recommendation (and loan) of a regular at my local, I read “The Last Days of Night” Edison vs Westinghouse (as in Thomas Alva vs George) and Nikola Tesla wanders into the picture. The story is from the point of view of Westinghouse’s young lawyer in the fight against Edison over the patent of the light bulb. Mostly based on actual events, it is a fairly interesting look into inventing, what drives/drove the inventor/inventors of the time. A little electricity learnin’ and some fancy laweryin’ too. Reads quickly, and has some very, very short little chapters…almost like the author was not sure where he was going at first. Probably would make a decent movie if cast right. Give it whirl if you have some time.
STEVE SMITH
STEVE SMITH BUSY WITH CASCADIA INDEPENDENCE. HIM NOT HAVE MUCH TIME READ. JUST TREATIES AND FOREST LAW (HIM PROMINENT FOREST LAWYER!). READ MONTHLY QA REPORTS ON HIKER ENCOUNTERS TOO. BY ENCOUNTERS, MEAN RAPE.
Comments
254 responses to “What Are We Reading – July 2018”
Reading “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami. I have been a Murakami fan for a long time and I almost gave him up after 1Q84. That book was way too long, pointless and self-indulgent. I thought he had lost it. However, Colorless Tsukuru is a return to his old form and I’m really enjoying it.
Interesting. I had 1Q84 on preorder and it’s been on my “to read” shelf for years now. I probably should’ve let it go when I did my big book purge, but most of my Murakami stuff stayed for my “books I enjoy lending/giving to friends looking for something interesting to read” collection with my non-1984 Orwell.
It’s a little upsetting because it’s this cover and the eyes peak up over the next book…staring, judging.
My big problem with Murakami is I always enjoy the experience of reading it, but could not tell you what the plot of it was when I’m done.
“could not tell you what the plot of it was when I’m done”
1Q84 takes this to an extreme. I think he kind of became a victim of his own success with that book. I theorize that his editors came to view him as a genius, so they didn’t do their job properly. They assumed that his towering ability overshadowed the meandering pointlessness of the book, when they should have been taking a machete to it. And not meanderingly pointless like DFW in which part of the experience is the meandering pointlessness; 1Q84 is a lot more masturbatory.
It also has some rather disturbing themes involving pedophilia that I found odd and unnecessary.
I’ll get to it someday. A friend lending me Wind Up Bird Chronicle actually got me reading more consistently again after HS and College curbed my interest in pleasure pretty significantly. Wild Sheep Chase is my usual “this is the most accessible start here” suggestion, and I found his collection of short stories The Elephant Vanishes impenetrably weird.
I really like Wild Sheep Chase. Norwegian Wood is good, less of the magical realism and more of a traditional narrative. It makes me wonder if it’s partially autobiographical.
Yeah, I’ve got Norwegian Wood, Wild Sheep Chase and Sputnik Sweetheart on my shelves for ready lending.
Currently reading the Galaxy’s Edge Series
Good military Sci-Fi with a political element and entertaining characters.
I highly recommend it if that’s your thing.
Love that series as I’ve mentioned before. Looking forward to the next Boba Fett … I mean, Tyrus Rex book next month.
That was my only problem with the series, parts remind me of “Star Wars”\
I am currently on book 7 and I am really enjoying it in spite of that.
Well, that’s part of the deal. The premise for the original book is “What if the storm troopers actually were bad ass?” At least that’s my interpretation. They are riffing on Star Wars somewhat, which I like, but the further you go the further it gets from it. Anyway, I dig it.
Just purchased the first one based on you and CA always talking about it. Thanks for the rec.
I’ve read a couple. Good “junk” reading – it exists purely to entertain. I’m sure I’ll read more.
Thanks so much for the Feynman flick.
I hope you went to see Part 2 as well. Absolutely fascinating.
I’ll watch those this weekend.
PARTY!!!
I watched part 1 when I shouldn’t have. Part 2 is on pause until lunch.
My son (a physics major) just discovered them on YouTube..he is fascinated.
OM, thanks for the recommendation. I’ve got that on my “to read” list, and if it’s as good as I suspect, I’ll probably go for the whole series.
It’s better than you expect. 😉
It turns out that Caltech put it online. Personally, I need my books on paper, but if you want to give it a perusal here you go:
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html
Holy shit.
He was my hero when I was in college.
No one said there was going to be math! /guy who somehow got a math minor
Oddly enough, Feynman’s books weren’t required (but they were recommended) my freshman year there. The required books were from the Berkeley series. Goodstein used to spend inordinate amounts of lecture time ripping on the Berkeley series and how awful they were, so I don’t know who picked the textbooks there for Physics 1. Feynman was on campus but rarely seen. He had a reputation for not caring to waste his time with undergraduates, but I never saw him so I don’t know if that’s actually true. Some of my friends used to work part time as waiters at the Athanaeum (faculty club) and said they saw him occasionally.
Just wait till you get a Yeast Infection from the Penicillin
…or C. diff.
I don’t think Penicillin usually opens the door to C. Diff.* I think its more the newer “broad-spectrum” antibiotics.
*For those who don’t know, C. Diff is a fungus in your gut that makes you shit about every 15 minutes. For six weeks.
Speaking from personal experience, C. diff is *horrifying*. It has made me extremely circumspect about using antibiotics; basically I will not take them not unless it’s life or death.
I did not know and I wish I still did not know.
More fun C. Diff facts:
The C. Diff spore is so tough that it survives exposure to alcohol. Alcohol hand gels don’t do anything to prevent its spread, and lab tests for C. Diff start by washing the sample with alcohol, which kills everything else but C. Diff. The sample is then cultured, and if you’ve got C. Diff, it will show.
That’s just wrong!
One more:
It looks like the best treatment for C. Diff is a “fecal transplant”. Somebody with a healthy gut shits into a bag, and . . . I’ll let you figure out the rest.
Two words: yellow soup.
I might look into the Richard Feynman lectures, I loved “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and “What do you Care What other People Think?”
He was a unique mind, and I’m trying to get my 16 yo son to read them.
Unique indeed. I can’t remember the source of the quote, but someone once said, “There are two kinds of genius. The first is someone just like you, if only you were much better than you are. The second is spooky magic. Feynman was spooky magic.”
The supervisor I had for my MS had Feynman as his PhD advisor. He had a lot of interesting stories.
I’ll bet, I first started learning about him when I watched the movie about the Challenger inquiry.
Then people on here recommended “What Do you Care” and I was hooked.
One of my middle school science teachers recommended surely you’re joking and I too was hooked.
QED was really great and I think I will re-read again sometime soon.
I’ll second QED. I think I read that when I was about 16 and I still remember bits and pieces of it.
My favorite quote relating to science is from Feynman. I use it anytime someone starts talking some woo bullshit and then references quantum physics.
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”
I loved that book.
I FINALLY finished the second volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes collection. Many pages of small print with an unfamiliar type of English. But I loved both volumes and I’m sad to see the end. I especially like the bonus essays by Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s also a parody of Sherlock Holmes written by JM Barrie that’s pretty funny.
a parody of Sherlock Holmes written by JM Barrie that’s pretty funny
My interest is piqued.
Look it up. They were friends, and they wrote part of a play together. The play bombed big time. So Barrie wrote a parody in which the two writers visit Sherlock Holmes to find out why nobody wanted to see their play. He got Doyle’s writing style down perfectly.
This?
https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/My_Evening_with_Sherlock_Holmes
This one.
Vacation? What kind of Euroweenie six months paid time off camper holiday bullshit is that?
I read, thanks to Q’s recommendation in last months thread “The Broom Of The System” by DWF. I enjoyed it for what it is. And man did I hate that fucking little gamma bastard Vigorous. Surprisingly little titties in it though, for a Q recommendation.
I also read John C. Wright’s latest trilogy, “Super Luminary”. Completely unhinged space opera so over the top it makes the old Lensman series look like quiet lit-fic. Human demi-gods versus space vampires, using stellar objects as weapons. Interestingly enough, some of the more bizarre stellar objects are real objects. If that sort of thing is your thing, highly recommended.
Finished up the sci-fi reading with the last part of the Monster Hunters Memoirs trilogy by Ringo/Correia “Saints”. Nothing groundbreaking or earth shattering, but if you dig Ringo’s style and want some stuff filled in on the backstory of MHI from the 80s, it’s a fun read.
No non-fiction this month.
Rick Vigorous: He of Micropenis!
Which, consequently, was one of the more interesting themes to me. Is Vigorous just held back by his own neurosis, or are his fears justified; is it really impossible to penetrate someone emotionally if you are unable to penetrate them physically? Still, he is a major cuck.
It was. I also sort of wonder if he didn’t really have a micro-penis. Was he simply hung up on how he wasn’t hung? And most of it was his own neurosis. Some of Lenore’s reactions, and the fact he had a wife previously makes me thing maybe his dick wasn’t quite as small as he thought it was and his being a cuck had more to do with him being a cuck than with his anatomy.
I never thought of it that way. His self-perception is so distorted that he basically convinced himself of his own inadequacy in spite of having normal equipment… interesting.
That book also got me thinking about what it really would be like to have a micropenis: size jokes aside, it seems like a legitimate disability and would really screw with someone’s mind.
He got his first wife pregnant. So…I mean, strange rituals with turkey basters aside…that was my take on it. The guy was a gamma cuck who aspired to being a beta/alpha but couldn’t cut it. He was so delusional, he had to blame it on something external and thus his ‘micropenis’. The only person who affirms that view of himself is the psychiatrist, but that guy was literally disgraced and in the employ of OG Lenore.
And…I think it would certainly have an impact. I know a few folks in the community who have it. And they are seriously into submission/humiliation/chastity play. And the wife has an ex I absolutely /loathed/ that was smarmy bastard despite his lack of equipment/being borderline micropenis. Didn’t matter to her since he was the one on the receiving end of the action b/t them. But god I couldn’t stand him and that was the only thing that made that relationship tolerable.
“I know a few folks in the community who have it.”
Interesting that someone who basically has a sexual deformity would choose to become involved in an explicitly sexual community. Coping mechanism?
I’d reckon that it probably is somewhat. And from a certain point of view, they have value in the kink community to femme doms and others who find that kind of humiliation play arousing, that they might not have in the gen pop. And since they tend to be subs they are getting their kink on. Though whether the micro-penis and sub mindset is co-morbid or the later is a result of the former, who knows.
I also think the fact that there isn’t a good way to get your penis enlarged is countra indicative of a patriarchy ruling the world.
Either way, I feel sorry for the poor bastard. And being dead average I can sympathize a little considering some of the donkey dicks swinging around in the community. I could write a whole essay about that though.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Breasts-Hanson-Dian-Hardcover/dp/B00HUC3W0G/
what I am reading at this very moment
Dommaine de Coussan
Cotes de Thongue
Syrah, Grenache Noir
2015
Produit de France
::golf clap::
*symphony applause*
No Mourvedre? Piker.
GSM: not just a cell phone standard.
Last month I read “It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past” by David Satter
Almost as hard to read as “Hungry Ghosts” but not quite as visceral.
If you call yourself a communist it should be mandatory to read these two.
If you call yourself a communist it should be mandatory to read these two.
First they’d have to get over the hump of accepting that it was either real communism or, at least, a sincere attempt to implement real communism.
It’s not sincere, because it didn’t work. If it had worked there’d be no wreckers alive to say it hadn’t.
It is a bit bizarre how an (alleged) historical inevitability is so absurdly fragile that you have to kill so many people just to make it not really work.
I’m hung up on real communism: how is it that top men are able to make perfect decisions in all details with more utility from 2,000 miles away than 100 million people can by evaluating data first hand and trying to optimize their own outcomes? How can anyone communist so hard so good, brah?
No, no, no. You see, real communism is what happens after all that. The totalitarian state that centrally plans the economy, whose sole purpose was to empower the proletariat, withers away and what remains is an anarchic (free of rulers) society in which every man is working for the benefit of his fellow man and there is no exploitation, scarcity, overproduction, capital accumulation, or other forms of inequality.
It is a system so incredibly implausible that it makes anarcho-capitalism look fault-free.
The whole “not real communism” thing to divert from the inevitable abuses of the totalitarian state ignores that the totalitarian state (and the re-engineering of human nature “by any means necessary” that it is supposed to accomplish) are an inherent, non-severable part of communism.
Actually, first they’d have to learn to read.
Don’t worry, they’ll all be quite literate. Maybe not alive, or living outside of a forced labor camp. But literate.
MUH FREE HELTHCAYR
Finished the 3rd and 4th books of the Ravenwood Series
Books three and four did not live up to the first two, which were excellent. If you like period mysteries, they are good.
I started and gave up on Peter Hook’s Substance: Inside New Order. Thank God I only paid $1.99 for it. He’s really a whiny bitch and no one from that time seems particularly cool. I should know better than to peek behind the curtain. So many of my musical heroes are complete assholes. It’s almost better not to get the know the person behind the art.
But, if the stories of crazy musicians and true life Spinal Tap are your thing, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements is vastly superior and actually kind of fascinating, particularly if you were there.
I also read The Long Goodbye for about the millionth time. I love that book.
>>The Long Goodbye
So who killed the chauffeur?
“Damned if I know.”
What am I reading right now? Uh, the Glibs?
Are your lips getting tired after the first four or five comments?
Tea leaves.
In college me and some friends were trying to figure out how reading tea leaves was supposed to work. We read up on it a bit, made tea and tried it out. Everyone else had blobs that didn’t look like much and mine had a horse at a gallop without a rider. I showed it around, everyone agreed it looked like a horse, mid-stride, but assumed they were seeing it that way because I’d said something.
Someone came down the hall and we flagged him down “look at the tea leaves do you see anything?” “This is dumb, you guys are dum…whoa that looks just like a horse moving really fast, kinda uncanny.” We looked up the interpretative meaning and it was something unpleasant like “you’ll be forced to go on a journey that will keep you away from home longer than you want” or something and we washed the cups and never talked about it again.
“10 years, internal exile in Siberia!”
Cause you’re hung like a horse?
I’m not gonna discourage that rumor.
Was that when you went to Korea to fondle the penis trees?
*sigh* Sadly, nothing. I have lost my reading mojo.
Not your reading Mojeaux?
That too.
Akshually, TV’s been giving me some good storytelling lately, which is not something I thought I’d ever say.
BTW, I was just checking a pending comment (two links in one comment) and saw that your attempts to link to Gab got eaten by the autospambot. It seems LT_Fish was likely right in that the ai TLD is unusual, but I’ve asked SP to check and see if there’s something worth digging into.
Oh, thank you!
I’m making my way through the original series of Star Trek short stories – written by James Blish. Essentially the same plots as the show with some tweaks/differences here ‘n’ there.
I just finished an old Colin Dexter book – Last Seen Wearing – and I have to admit I get a little tired of all the red herrings toward the end.
I’m also reading – nighttime book – The Ascent of Man – for the second time. I find Jacob Bronowski’s musings very interesting though he does slap on the rose-colored glasses when discussing the impartiality of science. I’m sure he would have been a global warming alarmist if he was still alive today, nor would he have liked anyone speaking out of turn against the “settled science”. But I could be wrong since he does come of as a curmudgeon, part of the old school non-politically correct type that is sorely lacking these days.
OT: Damn, the best thing that ever happened to this guy was his wife fucking another dood.
https://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/crime/article215577310.html
I’m no Solomon, but here’s the Don math:
a/ value of marriage where wife is happy to run around: $8.32
b/ wife’s responsibility for damage to the marriage: 99%
c/ respondent’s liability: $0.0832
Congratulations, you’ve won a judgement against an empty bag.
Eh, he’ll be collecting part of that guys paycheck for the rest of his life. Not sure if you can garnish Social Security payments.
Exemptions are going to vary by state, but typically any government benefit is exempt from garnishment. Some exemptions can be removed by commingling, but a lot of times the bank sees that the only funds are federal benefits and they return the garnishment with that information.
Tryna read Skyfaring, but it’s a bit too…personal? I prefer my nonfiction to be more historic and scientific, and less “personal journey”.
I’m adding the Feynman lectures to my self-enrichment list.
I read all of his shorter biographical books when younger and enjoyed them very much. I’ll have to dig them out for the firstborn.
I crunched through the first 5 Inspector Rebus books while on vacation (and a little after). Loving them, thanks to the Glibs who mentioned them. Taking a break from the series because:
I’m re-reading Witchy Eye since it’s been awhile and Witchy Winter just came out. I believe I mentioned it before, but it’s “flintlock fantasy” – really great world building, Appalachian girl with a secret destiny vs. the forces of Thomas Penn, Emperor of the New World.
For all you nerds – I’ll be making time to read though Prometheus: Up & Running.
>> Inspector Rebus books
looks interesting. I just bought the first book after reading this..
Been browsing through Denis McLoughlin’s “Wild & Woolly – An Encyclopedia of the Old West.” Funny thing – McLoughlin was a Brit, but most of his writing career was about the American West.
My daughter gave me a copy of “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant” for my birthday, I’m about halfway through right now. Growing up in the South this subject matter would not have been on my reading list, so there is some interesting history I was not aware of. But the book is sort of “meh” so far.
I’ll definitely look into the Feynman Lectures, thanks for the tip OMWC! Watching the youtube lecture right now.
Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography was/is available for free if you have a kindle. It’s worth a read.
belay that – see Amazon is charging 99c now
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Personal-Memoirs-Ulysses-Grant/dp/1438297076
The Law – Bastiat This is, of course, fantastic. Worth a read every year. Along with Adam Smith, one of the highest density of good-idea-to-words-on-the-page of anything I’ve ever read. Re-read it because I read The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law with my spawn. Bastiat – Recommended. Tuttle Twins – Recommended (I’ll have more to say once we read all the TT books together)
Intellectuals and Society Thomas Sowell is very, very disappointing and angry with his colleges. Whiffs of get-off-my-lawn-ism, which ain’t a bad thing. The passage about why Sowell isn’t disturbed by the number of bullets fired by police made me laugh aloud in an inappropriate time and place. Lots of good stuff in here, and would probably be a good thing to pass along to a conservitarian in the summer between high school and college. *cough* *Tundra* *cough* In the hands of an intellectually honest intellectual, could function like their version of the Screwtape Letters, but I ain’t holding my breath. Recommended
Master and Commander Well written adventure story with an engaging protagonist. The narrative structure has some technical flaws that I hope to see ironed out in later volumes. Not outstanding, but has such a reputation that I went ahead and placed a hold on the next book in the series. Recommended, with reservations
His Majesty’s Dragon Fuck me. If I knew this was Master and Commander + WWII-era RAF + a-boy-and-his-dog story, I would have gotten around to this book years ago. A fun read. Recommended.
Guns, Germs, and Steel This book has a lot of really strong ideas marred in their presentation. Some of the information has permeated intellectual culture and I’ve picked it up from elsewhere, so it feels like old hat even though Diamond is the one that really put it out there for consumption. Some of the most interesting stuff hasn’t, and here I’m talking about the analytical stuff like seed weight being a main driver of agriculture synthesis. That’s news to me, and really illuminating. So where is the marred presentation? First, he fails to actually demonstrate a lot of the analytics. He uses axis orientation of continents as a stand-in for environmental heterogeneity. That…sounds like it could be right. But is it? Given that we only have one huge horizontal land mass, and its the one that civilized first/fastest, that’s a really important issue that isn’t explored. Australia is pretty horizontal, but we are told its very heterogeneous. What gives? The next is that this guy doesn’t know jack-shit about how technology develops and spreads. He’s stuck it two very outmoded and wrong ideas. First, he talks about inventions as atomic and segregated ideas that spring up in huge discontinuities of technology. This is 180 degrees from the way that technology works. Technology is the slow, incremental advancement of tools that generate slow, incremental advancements in human ability punctuated by huge discontinuities of human ability when everything comes together (e.g., like how cast iron had to wait for furnaces, mining, and logistics to advance to all come together, then bam, China is never the same). The second issue is, basically, that every culture is working on the same tech tree and they’ll all get there eventually. Technological advancement is a super-low probability game played many, many, many times. Lots of advancements would have been discovered by the second person in the same environment, but many would not. Many are the result of luck, a base level of technical know-how in society, and one very inventive person getting hit by inspirational lightning. This flaw is most glaring when discussing American Indians total lack of hard-metal smithing and use of the wheel. American metalworking of gold, silver, and copper was very advanced and they should have been able to figure out how to refine iron and make steel, but they didn’t. They had wheels, but never though to put them to use in carts or wheel barrows. China did both of those things in less time than the American Indians where around. And that’s just the luck of the draw. But Diamond ducks this. The last flaw of this book is that Diamond clearly hates the west and isn’t able to obfuscate it well. This is well-trod ground, and I don’t have much new to say here. Not recommended. Its been superseded by better books like 1491+1493. Go read them.
Empire of the Summer Moon Highly recommended by the Gliberatti, so I was excited when I got to the front of the wait list. I thought it was.. fine. Its my least favorite kind of history, what I call the LLoStH or the Long Litany of Shit that Happened. There’s no narrative or story or point, and there could be. Its not a failing of the author to go with LLoStH, but it would have been very easy to add some narrative flourishes to tell the story of a down-on-their-luck tribe that only becames a powerhouse because of the tool introduced by their own nemesis. That would have been more compelling to me. That said, as much as others here like it, I’ll say Must Be Good, but for Other People.
Aurora: CV-01 I didn’t know jack shit about this book other than 1) it didn’t have a wait-list for the audiobook and 2) someone on some review website said it was a classic space opera story. So I snagged it. Holy shit, am I glad I did. This is a Totally Not Star Track story; you can still see where the author took a file and torch to the serial numbers. And its great. I’m not a huge Trek fan, but TOS crew is a great crew with a lot of dramatic potential. This book was a lot of fun to read. Its Trek with all the Utopian bits sucked out and replaced with a bunch of classic space opera tropes. And its better for it.
Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff Good read, but not my cup of… tea (puts on shades.) At first, it was Matt Kibbie tells you why Matt Kibbie, personally, likes libertariansm. Then its Matt Kibbie tells you why Matt Kibbie loves Rush. And I was all on board with that, Matt Kibbie is probably our leading expert on Matt Kibbie, and I found him relatable and sympathetic. Then it became Matt Kibbie Relitigates the Tea-Party Era Culture War. And while I agree with most of what he’s saying, relitigating the culture war is not my idea of a good time. Hell, I don’t like the culture war we have today and I try to avoid it. I don’t want to wallow in light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-oh-nope-its-a-train that was the Tea Party era for me. Neither Recommended nor Anti-Recommended
why Matt Kibbie loves Rush
Is he Canadian? I’m pretty sure Canadians are required by law to like Rush.
No, he’s from Grove City. Haven’t spent time in Grove City, I can understand why he’d be into Rush.
*Having spent time in, not Haven’t.
I tried to read it and only got halfway. Not a bad book, but not too engaging.
Anyone living in the limelight probably likes Rush
I prefer the fish-eye lens.
RE: Guns, Germs, and Steel
I agree with your assessment. It’s an interesting theory, but it strikes me a little bit as a “just-so story”. I think his ideas tell part of the story, but they don’t account for everything. The question of why Europe came to dominate the global landscape is a relevant one and one that, unfortunately, won’t be answered anytime soon because of all the racial overtones to it.
I don’t know, I think Smith answered that pretty well.
As in, Adam Smith? If so, then I agree.
Otherwise, I haz confuz.
Yep, that’s what I was referring to.
A good take on this is The Wealth & Poverty of Nations.
Master and Commander, I thought I might read two or three, but by the end of the second one I had to see what happens next.
There are a lot of twists and surprises that never let it get boring to me.
I really loved the first few Temeraire books but I think they started to wander a bit after that. I didn’t read the last two, but it looks like she wrapped the series up there, so I probably should, for completeness.
At some point in the future, you might find Ecological Imperialism interesting.
The author is the same guy who introduced the idea of…
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there is an audiobook version. I’m really quite dyslexic, and I spend all day reading at work. Any more, I don’t have it in me to fight through printed text in my free time. I can do it for short stints like I did with The Law, and I’m going to read the Little House books with my Thing 2 this year, but that might be it for a bit.
Still, I really appreciate the recommendation.
The Columbian Exchange.
The last flaw of this book is that Diamond clearly hates the west and isn’t able to obfuscate it well.
I thought that was the first flaw.
I read it when it first came out, got about halfway through, then got to annoyed to continue.
Too bad. You would have gotten a good laugh from the afterword, which contains the obviously Swifian suggestion that we should treat history like science because its totally like science and you should respect historians because they are doing Science!
Would either of you care to expand on this? I’ve never really gotten that vibe from Diamond’s work.
First is the double standard he holds the west to. On the one hand, they didn’t do anything with their own agency to get their overwhelming cultural advantage. On the other hand, every time they encounter natives, they are presented as gleefully leading extermination campaigns. Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either either they knew what they were doing and they knew what they were doing, or they didn’t know better and they didn’t know better.
Second, there is no examination of intra-continental conflicts within Eurasia. Its all just one big happy family. There was no genocides within the continent, it was all Europeans landing on the shores of a different continent and spreading small-pox and trampling with horses while protected in their armor. This is the biggest deal because he’s framing things the wrong way. The same way “should we have nuked Japan?” is the wrong question and “Should we have fire-bombed cities into ashes years before the nuke?” is the proper framing. The oceans are a convenient line for post-hoc examination, but its not a real threshold in practice, people were committing genocide against peoples on the same land mass already. Crossing the ocean didn’t change that, but in the analysis that’s a fundamental (if unspoken) assumption.
I don’t have any quotes to give you (hard to highlight an audiobook from the library) but there’s the assertion that every advancement in Eurasia wasn’t a cultural achievement, its just a product of more time + more inputs. That would be fine, if it was consistent. But its not. At the same time this analysis is applied to Eurasia, everything that happens in Australia is an important cultural event that needs a deeper look.
There’s the complete gloss over the heterogeneity of Eurasia’s physical environment, while the heterogenaety of every other continent is gone over in detail. From his telling, you come away knowing that PNG is different from the nearest part of Australia, you know that the Mississippi basin is different than southern Mexico, you know that northern Africa and southern Africa are different. But in this telling, eh, everything from the Danube to the Middle East to upper Mongolia are just part of the same ecological environment so there’s no need to go into explaining how agriculture and culture transmits across Eurasia takes place. You might think that China isn’t part of the West, but in this book it clearly is. Diamond studiously avoids discussing any time China projected power. Or any time the various Islamic societies projected power, etc.
Non-westerners are repeatedly said to be at least as smart as Eurasians. When Euraisans dominate other cultures, its not because they did anything with their own agency or intellect, its just a happenstance of germs and steel. When non-eurasians inexplicably fail to produce results like Eurasians did (see hard-metal working, wheel use, and I’ll throw in paper production and writing in a highly bureaucratic empire), we are told that it is unreasonable to expect them to have done so
I don’t list these to just say here’s a litany of errors. Every error in logic I found points in the same direction – minimizing the western culture and maximizing reasons it would be impossible to hold other cultures up to the same standard of development.
When every error goes in the same direction, they aren’t accidents. They are the result of bias.
I would argue that 50% you’re reading Diamond rather uncharitably and 50% Diamond could have further explicated his views to preemptively defend himself from such a reading. As I noted downthread, Diamond was writing in reaction to those academics who rejected any explanation of human behavior that pointed to the impact of biogeographical factors as essentialism and scientific racism. Again, his own words:
Furthermore, I would argue that Diamond didn’t spend as much time going over Eurasia because he assumed that the reader already knew that story. I will admit that it has been awhile since I’ve read the book, but I remember he was careful to use the term Eurasia and not “the West”. Particularly because he is focusing on biogeography, of which Eurasia is a meaningful term but “the West” isn’t. So, I would suspect that Diamond would suggest your criticisms in that vein to be non sequiturs. That having been said, Diamond does recognize that variance within Eurasia was an important topic not touched upon in his book and worthy of further discussion.
All in all, I’m still not seeing how any of this means Diamond “hates the West”. On his website Diamond notes that GG&S receives a lot of hate from both race “realists” and SJWs. This alone signals to me that his thinking is right on the money.
Could be. I don’t think I’m overly sensitive to it, and I don’t require stuff I consume to flatter my preconceived notions. I’ll happily cite Marx and Taylorism when I think he’s/its right, even though they both repulse me in the broader sense. But maybe I’m not the intellectual hero I flatter myself to be.
In any case, I think its a minor gripe I threw in at the end of my more serious gripes about the book. The technology issue is the real gripe for me, because its foundation to the non-germ-related conclusions of the book.
I agree that the atomized “Sid Meier’s Civilization” tech tree view of technological progress overly-simplifies the very complex and dynamic (in the mathematical sense) system of diffusion of innovation.
The race realists have that inconvenient science on their side.
GG&S is an interesting book, albeit flawed. I wonder how many of the flaws are due to an attempt to write something readable by the general public. That said, my hackles went up early in the book when he was talking about Stone Age Polynesian Islanders and said that their lack of technology didn’t mean they weren’t “at least as intelligent” as technologically advanced Westerners. “Just as intelligent” – no prob. “At least as intelligent” – WTF did the idea come from that they are as or more intelligent that Westerners? The anti-Western bias does indeed permeate the book, and even in a book for the general public is entirely avoidable.
He makes that argument at least twice. And it didn’t smell any better the second time around.
If we accept the arguments of Murray & Herrnstein, etc., surely Austro-Tai peoples are genetically closer to East Asians, no?
Ceteris paribus, of course.
Perhaps, if he had offered any support for the claim, it wouldn’t have rankled. But he just tosses it out there with zero support, as if of course Westerners should be thankful if they are only a little stupider than Polynesian islanders.
Its been awhile, but as I recall the book was basically an exercise in trying to find any reason other than culture to explain why the dominant culture on the planet is Western European. Which is a legit inquiry, I suppose, but it came off as an attempt to deny that Western dominance might be due to Western culture, and had the aroma of the multi-culti “all cultures are equal” ideology. Sure, sure, there are other factors, but a book on cultural dominance that studiously avoids the differences in culture sounds like its pushing a sub rosa agenda.
That said, I found it an interesting read.
I would think it a truism that local technological level is not a direct consequence of the aggregate intelligence quotient of the population. At least controlling for all factors outside of genetics. I wouldn’t say that we are inherently more intelligent than our great-grandfathers, even though, technologically, they were born in a world where the majority of transport was done via pack animal.
That’s also why I (and I think Diamond as well) was careful to make a ceteris paribus statement, as the Flynn effect is well documented and seems to be progressing much too quickly for a root genetic cause, which is why most researchers propose factors like better nutrition, or my preferred explanation, greater familiarity in the culture with psychometric tests and testing overall.
Diamond has never denied that this is a multivariate phenomenon. GG&S was written in reaction to those who at the time ignored the possibility of geography as a impactful factor as it was too close to biological determinism and essentialism. In his own words:
Fair enough; he was trying to tease out the other reasons (besides culture) for Western dominance. This may fall into the bucket of “trying to write a readable book for a general audience”; he didn’t want to be constantly trying to factor back in the cultural reasons when he wanted to focus on other reasons.
The excerpt you quote above has a certain “to be sure” feel to it. The proof isn’t in his bare acknowledgement that culture and individual choice play a role; the proof is in how he deals with this in the rest of the book. And I found the rest of the book had a certain multi-culti feel to it. Perhaps if he had framed it as “Its hard to deny that cultural dominance is mainly driven by culture; indeed, its almost a tautology. But let’s look at some of the other factors that also figure in the ongoing dynamic.”
Fair enough.
Dammit, this is the internet. This is no place for a civil exchange of perspectives and opinions, man! Where’s the invective, the insults, the all-caps accusations of ignorance and bigotry, the name-calling?
Sure, but intrinsic differences (due to genetics or a combination of genetics and environment) in intelligence are explicitly rejected by the author in the beginning of the book.
Well, again, how is not being a hereditarian equivalent to “hating the West”?
Its the unequal demand for rigor. Arguments that the west is in any way superior are held up to serious rigor (that oh btw produces a lot of useful insights) including this rejection. In the same passage, arguments that Polynesian are superior can be supported with nothing more than an anecdote and extrapolation. Its right in the preview in Amazon if you want to take a look.
Unequal demands for rigor are absolutely the product of favoritism. And “hating the West” is a lackadaisical way of saying that there is tribal favoritism.
I don’t really begrudge him it. He spent a big section of his adult life with these people groups. He would be a sociopath is if he didn’t like them more. And like I said, the demand for rigor produced valuable knowledge.
Just finished Farther than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook.
Highly recommend, very captivatingly written and gives you a sense of what it was like to sail into the vast and unknown Pacific. Also interesting tidbit; men will sign up for three years of backbreaking labor, shitty food and ghastly living conditions for three weeks of strings free sex in Tahiti.
I’ll have to take a look at that. I assigned “The Trial of the Cannibal Dog” to one of my classes and I thought it was good but not great.
Men sign up for a lifetime of backbreaking labor for sex with lots of strings (see: marriage).
Touché
After several folks here spoke highly of it I’ve started “Empire of the Summer Moon” about the Comanches. Fascinating. I knew there were “Indian Wars” and all sides behaved poorly, but I’ve had to take a break from it. The sheer brutality of all the participants was getting to much for me. Still, extremely interesting tale of a part of our history I didn’t know much about.
If the whites had delayed a hundred years in pushing beyond the Mississippi, it’s likely the only Indians they would have found would have been the Comanches. They were equal opportunity exterminators
I agree with A Leap’s review that there’s not much “plot”, but fascinating none the less.
It did bounce around a lot, but I thought it was great.
Quanah Parker was a scary man.
I wish he would have been more open about what he really did on his raids, but it was still a great read.
Parker County (Weatherford) is named for Quanah as is the township of Quanah up by the SW corner of OK. His statue in the Fort Worth is regarded with extreme respect by native and interlopers alike. When his mother was “liberated” and returned to white society, she was frightened and miserable until she eventually escaped back to the only life and family she had known since she was ~11.
When Quanah finally gave up and came up out of Palo Duro, his clan was forced onto Fort Sill where he was encouraged to be a good injun and be a model unto his people and cultivate their civilized success. He was given a house and a considerable string of cattle; he wore a suit and string tie, and he finally agreed to surrender (divorce?) all but one of his 12 wives provided some officer would be good enough to update the other 11 on their new status. No officer being found with the cajones to deliver the news, the wives were retained.
those badass scalp hunters in Blood Meridian have a few run-ins with the Comanches. rather colorful treatment all around.
Yes, I don’t disagree with Leap’s comments, it just didn’t bother me. I don’t really need a narrative, I guess, which makes sense because I’ve never been terribly into fiction.
Ron, what’s most remarkable about Quanah Parker is how completely he shifted his outlook once it became clear that the Comanche couldn’t win. He was a fierce and utterly ruthless enemy, but once he decided that he had no choice but to surrender he went all the way into adapting to white society. For the most part, anyway – he wasn’t giving up his multiple wives or his braids, but he somehow managed to successfully build a new life as a rancher without much in the way of lingering bitterness.
I agree, my wife was rolling her eyes a little as I was reading it because I kept stopping to tell her about it and she said I had a man crush on him.
A friend’s father once observed that if every other native had so much as a Marlin M60 and 100 rounds of rimfire, the Europeans would have never made if off their beachheads.
To keep it on-topic, I have resolved that this weekend I will finally crack the spine of my copy of The Organization Man which I purchased about two years ago. I’m not nearly as effective at actually reading books as I am at obtaining them, and this is about to change. I’m especially looking forward to this one.
Straying from the topic at hand, well…I…uh… I don’t know what to say to this. Just read it. Read it and weep.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/t-magazine/best-bar-soaps.html
This is a parody, right?
STEVE SMITH DOESN’T WAIT FOR HIKERS TO DROP THE SOAP
STEVE SMITH WORRIED ABOUT TOXIC MASCULINITY. WILL TECNU WORK ON THAT?
Of course it isn’t.
I prefer Michael’s Wool-Fat Soap. Soap for lads who fancy sheep, made by lads who fancy sheep.
Looked at the article. For some reason, thought of man-buns and avocado toast.
Okay that’s ridiculous. Not that I don’t plug products on this site…ever, the best bar of soap one can buy is clearly THIS ONE. It smells like soap–and that’s it. If you must have a hipster douche hygiene product and hate having to purchase it more than once every 6 months, you may want to take a look.
HAHA. That’s some ad copy meant to play on people’s insecurities about their masculinity. Ivory bar soap is like a dollar for a 16 pack of bars.
Irish Spring is even cheaper.
Zest. Now. And forever.
I was a big Zest user until I went on an 18 day backpacking trip and came back sneezing relentlessly around heavily perfumed things and breaking out wherever they touched my skin. Speedstick Original would make my pits look like a neglected child with diaper rash. I miss that stuff.
I never noticed that Zest was heavily perfumed.
I grew up with it as a kid. So, as far as I can tell, it just smells like soap.
Zest – Why not just pour Liquid Plumr straight up your face?
This is a chemical burn.
All of you are wrong.
If you do not wash up with a bar of carbolic soap, you are a filth-ridden piece of shit who only deserves to be put out of his misery through steel and fire.
Will you accept sulfur soap?
I can’t even imagine what that smells like.
I will accept Dettol, however.
I use either Irish Spring bars or body wash- whichever one is cheaper when my wife goes shopping.
Costco? Because Walmart doesn’t sell it that cheap.
I think I got it at Walgreens, the internet tells me it comes in 10 packs and that the regular price is 4.50 for said 10-pack regularly, but I apparently picked it up on sale for a decent discount last time I bought some.
Shit man. I get why pizza choice or and burger-preference make friends fight. But I never realized choice of soap was one of those topics.
The soap I use is seasonally dependent. I use Dial in the summer months when my skin is fine. I tend to get very dry, itchy skin in the winter so I use frou-frou moisturizing soaps then, and take colder showers too.
What’s always confused me is that while my skin gets quite dry, my hair stays oily as fuck all year long. When we first got married, my wife would lecture me about how you don’t have to wash your hair every day…..until she saw what my hair looks like if I skip a day. It looks like I rubbed bacon grease into my scalp.
My I ask of what cultural extraction your hair is?
Because my swarthy, panty-dropping mixed-Mediterranean is rather oily and hasn’t seen the a shampoo bottle in ages. And doesn’t need it. (But sometimes when I’m losing weight my hair dries up and I apply some jojoba oil and beeswax, to my bitter shame.)
Bah. Soap is for the weak.
OT: The guy is a spokesman for the Tennessee Dem Party.
https://twitter.com/Gilgamark/status/892125676647710726
With enemies like this, who needs friends?
Oh cool, he linked a piece by the revolting flabby lump of flesh Charles Pierce, who was the guy who wrote upon Ted Kennedy’s death how Mary Jo Kopechne would have so appreciated all the wonderful things Ted Kennedy did for women…..you know, if he hadn’t left her to die.
“They aren’t listening.” i.e. they wont do as they are told.
Maybe you just haven’t explained your position well enough.
I mostly read the Glib comments.
I read Playboy for the articles.
I took you to be more a Biguns kind of guy. At any rate, it’s really for the lack of articles. . .of clothing. Amirite?
Juggs.
Those shitlords?!?! smdh I can’t even right now with this.
Some of us, I assume, are good people.
In no particular order
Farside by Ben Bova – good, if a bit cliche at times.
Mercury Falls by Robert Croese – doest take itself very seriously, vaguely theological, but a fun read.
The Final Winter by Iain Rob Wright – fun read, but a bit predictable.
Mavericks by Craig Alanson – I love this series, but this was probably the weakest one so far. Tried to tell two stories in one book and rushed them both. Still better than most sci-fi I’ve read recently.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Heinlein – still working on this one. I liked the first half of the book better than the second half. I have a generic feeling that I’m missing something by reading it now instead of in the 80s. Sometimes I feel like he’s trying a little bit too hard.
Before you pick it up gain, go vote for Reagan and then snort some coke off a copy of a Miami Vice VHF tape, and see if that helps.
hey, that’s almost exactly the little song from the MST3K treatment of Hobgoblins: “It’s the Eighhhhties, do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!”
You say that like I don’t have that whole movie memorized.
hah….thought it was just a funny coincidence.
“Make my muscle car prune colored, please!”
FWIW – The Cat Who Walks Through Walls wouldn’t have been better if you read it in the 80’s.
Agree. It’s on my short list of books that need to be collected and burned.
I read everything Heinlein wrote by time I was out of college.
Other than the title, I remember nothing from this book. So, I assume it wasn’t one of the better ones.
So that’s factually wrong. Cat was published in ’85. So well after high school.
Was that one of RAH’s weirdo end of life books. I can’t remember if it was, but I think one or some of the characters were in those later in his Unified Theory of Heinlein Universe.
It’s part of that late in life World as Myth cycle, and involves rescuing Mike the computer from the Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and fighting of the galactic overlord.
OT: DO NOT WANT
https://gazette.com/news/mountain-lions-join-colorado-man-for-breakfast/article_49e2114e-91b2-11e8-a3f7-2fbdbf6865ba.html
I don’t know man. Doesn’t your Tinder profile say “Cougar friendly?”
I suppose it depends on what part of me is being devoured.
I didn’t realize you were so…discerning in your vore fantasies, Q.
DO NOT WANT.
Rule 34 would seem to apply here.
Noooooope.
Just finished “Into the Storm”, by Taylor Anderson. First one of a series about an old War I destroyer seconded to the Asiatic Fleet in War II that goes through a space/time warp while being pursued by elements of a Japanese squadron and ends up in another universe. Good read.
Re-read Dean Koontz’s “The Good Guy” mostly to study how he does some of the things he does. IMHO, Koontz is a master storyteller and the way he blends structure, dialog and scenes is superb.
I’m just starting a book by Douglas Bell on postmodernism (falls under the ‘know thine enemy’ category).
Sounds like a variant of the Axis of Time books – except that’s a near-future fleet ending up back in WWII.
https://youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw
Uh, wrong one
https://youtu.be/Vj7_fxZWDsc
Hah!
“The Compleat Angler” by Izzak Walton, and boy is it a struggle.
Well, hell, just look at the title – the guy can’t even spell!
and all the f’s for s’s…..tough to read with a serious buzz, lemmetellya
http://viralplanet.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/re3-1.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vIWAv9NcYf0/UfEgPVKig5I/AAAAAAAAKL4/sPzXKa0dW3c/s1600/howtousedtumblr_mq12g9aKfT1qb80xlo1_500.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e3/00/07/e300072d55141439a0d1c44aed0fa31a.jpg
http://static6.depositphotos.com/1006753/575/i/950/depositphotos_5758104-Sexy-student-girl-with-a-stack-of-books.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5c/e1/bb/5ce1bb8dae1f8283fd3f51eff13ac64a.jpg
Collectors’ editions.
Reminds me of my ex. Sigh… she unnerved me.
OT: “According to six sources, Guilfoyle showed colleagues lewd photos of male genitalia and disclosed whose genitals they belonged to.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/kimberly-guilfoyles-fox-news-departure-came-following-misconduct-investigation-report
Maybe you shouldn’t send dick pics if you don’t want them shared.
Corollary: If your girlfriend or prospective girlfriend has a gay best friend and you’ve sent her dick pics, the gay best friend has seen them.
Is she looking for a second opinion on the quality of the genitals from another connoisseur?
Depends on the genitals in question. Rando-dick pics sent too soon are shown off as a tacit punishment for being too free with them, particularly good or bad ones are shown for their merit or lack-thereof, and some are shared as a form of “I went out with this guy, and look what he’s rocking, my jaw is still sore” type bragging.
I don’t understand, does anyone send dick pics and not want them to be shared?
I don’t mind someone showing off my nudes, but I’ve been told by a guy or two that they forwarded my pics to someone else and I was all “wtf?” so I think there’s shared and *shared*
I just finished “Steak” by Mark Schatzker. The author goes around the world to find the best tasting beef. It was not as informative as I had hoped, but maybe that it isn’t that fun to read about someone else eating steak.
Don’t keep us in suspense!
Well, that’s the thing, is he doesn’t come up with a very definitive conclusion other than a “happy” grass fed cow is going to give you tastier beef. I don’t know if it warranted the 300 dense pages to reach that conclusion.
I read that a couple of years ago on the advice of a friend. My reaction email to him:
“you sit through it and it looks fantastic, but in the end you’re not getting a single bite”
Like porn.
Suggesting that grass-fed is superior to grain-fed (assume same cut/same breed) is a full stop, and 100% propaganda. And yes, I can tell the difference.
How so? Genuinely curious here.
Better flavor, more marbling, improved texture and juiciness. My cattle expert husband is shouting “younger” – but although generally correct, I don’t think that’s a valid point.
Thanks. I don’t get steak that often, mostly because my wife doesn’t care for it and partially because of the price point, so I’ll admit to not knowing much or having much of a palate. Though the most recent time I ordered a steak, it was the most disappointing steak I have ever eaten. Just terrible.
You just haven’t gotten your hands on the right steak
Oh man, this. I’m sorry, I’m a foodie and a snob, but I have a good pallet. Maybe not world class chef level, but pretty damn good.
About 2 years ago my wife was having digestive troubles and was put on a FODMAP diet to try to figure out what the problems were. We had to switch to grass-fed beef. It wasn’t bad, but there was and is a noticeable difference in flavor. I would buy her one of those and me one of the grain-fed after the first two times. Basically Temple Grandon figured out the secret; hug the cows with a machine before you blast their brains into liquid against the back of their skull with a rivet, and don’t let ’em see it coming and they taste better. it’s the same principle as game meat from an animal killed by surprise versus one where you wing it and have to track it.
I love watching Temple Grandin lecture. She’s a fucking genius.
https://youtu.be/b5cUk9RH6lQ
^This^
I prefer grass fed flavor but not the leaner, tougher texture and I prefer grain fed for texture.
The friend I buy beef from does both. I get choice grade texture and grass fed flavor.
That pretty much hits the nail on the head.
The Rape of Nanking (subtitle: The only book of Chinese food recipes you’ll ever need) written by STEVE SMITH. Brutal.
That one was a rough read.
Never do an image search for the Rape of Nanking. Learned that one the hard way.
Just reading about it on wiki is enough to turn my stomach.
There is so much that it admirable and alluring in Japanese culture, but man they can be a bizarre and repulsive people as well.
Board books to baby. Brain melted.
Boynton?
OT: Misleading clickbait headline!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6871840/plastic-chemicals-food-packaging-make-penis-smaller/
Alternative headline: Cellophane wrapped food linked to shrinkage.
I can do better than that….
Shrink wrapped hot dogs lead to shrink wrapped hot dogs.
A Wicked War by Amy s. Greenberg. It is about the US-Mexican war.
Also reading Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty
I have that in my Kindle, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
So far it is ok Patrick Henry is interesting but the writing isn’t the best.
This is probably long past dead but I read this and I thought it very readable:
https://www.amazon.com/Lion-Liberty-Patrick-Henry-Nation/dp/0306820463/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1521589423&sr=1-1
I’M FEELING MUCH BETTER. I THINK I’LL GO FOR A WALK.
I finished Skennerton’s “The Lee-Enfield Story”. He needs an editor. The most recent edition joined my “to-read” queue.
I started reading Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” and Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”. Holy shit is “Bloodlands” depressing. “Meditations” is good.