Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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New and possibly noteworthy.

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

By way of the LAT, we have learned of a new book: Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game by Dan Barry, a writer for the NYT.

Barry’s book is about the April 18, 1981 game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, which went for 33 innings, the longest game in baseball history.

We’re not sure if we’re going to purchase this or not. On the one hand, it does push some of our hot buttons (failure, Rhode Island). On the other hand, it sounds like the kind of lyrical baseball horseshit we hate. If any of our readers purchase and read Barry’s book, we’d welcome a review.

Edited to add: Lawrence pointed us to a review of a new Richard Feynman biography, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss. This is another book we’re not sure about purchasing: between Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, and No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, we kind of feel the ground has been well covered. We are also slightly suspicious of anyone whose book credits include The Physics of Star Trek. On the other hand, the review (by noted SF writer Paul Di Filippo) is pretty favorable, so we may have to give this one a shot.

Posted in Books, Geek, Rhode Island, Sports | Comments Closed

Happy BAG Day!

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

Yes, technically, Buy a Gun Day was yesterday. However, I can’t really get down to my local gunshop from work before 6 PM in crosstown Austin traffic. So I stretched things a little. Is that a crime?

Actually, this one has been on lawaway at Tex-Guns since the first part of the year, and it was just a happy coincidence the the payoff date corresponded to BAG Day.

Winchester Model 9422

That’s a Winchester Model 9422 Legacy. Tex-Guns sold it new to someone back in 1986 (if I remember the date correctly), and they came back in a few months ago and put it on consignment. It came with the original box and paperwork.

I need another .22 rifle like I need another 1911, or another hole in my head, but this one is beautiful; I’d put it at 99%+. I’m not even sure it has been fired. And it goes well with my pre-64 Model 94.

(Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that this one is going to end up in the hands of one of my nephews at some point, when his parents decide he’s ready for a real rifle. That is, if it suits him. If not, well, let’s just say my nephews have some choices.)

(Carlos Hathcock, call your office, please.)

Adding a little visual element to the photo are two books that I picked up recently: The Story of the Winchester 1 of 1000 and 1 of 100 Rifles, by Edmund Lewis, and the very recent limited run reprint (not a signed first printing) of Carlos Hathcock White Feather by the Chandler Brothers, which I ordered from Precision Shooting (1-860-645-8776: it isn’t listed on their website, and the advertisement in the April 2011 issue says they only have a limited number of copies available at $39.95 per.)

Edited to add 4/17:

Just for grins, and because I was killing some time before meeting folks for breakfast, I decided to do a second photo:

The 9422 is on the bottom: the top gun is my pre-’64 Model 94 in .30-30. One of my projects when school lets out for the summer is do some work on getting a proper setup for doing gun photos. My current setup is improvised and clunky.

Posted in Books, Guns, Photography, Winchester | Comments Closed

Achievement unlocked: blogmeet.

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

The staff of WCD met up with the legendary Borepatch, along with bloggers Josh and Matthew, last night at Green Mesquite BBQ.

Borepatch his ownself notes the irony of us using Al Gore’s Internets to plan this meetup, since we spent much of our dinner discussing ways to smash the state (along with how to fix the educational system, where we could go shooting, downtown apartments, SF books, and a whole bunch of other random crap).

We are encouraged by Borepatch’s suggestion that we might be doing this again next time he’s out, and are hopeful that we can get at least a couple of other folks to join us. The honorable Borepatch is a charming and gregarious dining companion; dinner with him is indeed a treat. (Edited to add: We just realized that might be read as slighting Josh and Matthew, so let us make it clear that they’re pretty good guys, too.)

Posted in Admin, Beef, Books, Food | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: March 30, 2011.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Here’s the LAT obit for Farley Granger (fixed – thanks, Lawrence).

I don’t have much to add to this, except I seem to have a much higher opinion of “Rope” than most of my friends do: I thought Granger pretty much carried both that movie and “Strangers on a Train” on his back. He was brilliantly twitchy in a way matched only, perhaps, by Anthony Perkins.

I wonder what Frankenheimer’s “Manchurian Candidate” would have been like with Granger instead of Laurence Harvey. Not that I dislike Harvey, but I think Granger could have pulled it off; he was only three years older, and I believe he would have brought an interesting dimension to the role of Raymond Shaw.

I haven’t been able to find an obit in a US paper for H.R.F. Keating, but by way of Bill Crider, here’s the Telegraph‘s obit.

My mother used to subscribe to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That was my first exposure to many writers, including Keating: his Inspector Ghote stories were regularly in EQMM. As a critic of the field, his Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books is indispensable: I’m slowly making my way through his list, and will perhaps finish sometime before the heat death of the universe.

Rest in peace, Mr. Keating.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 29, 2011.

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

David E. Davis, Jr., former editor and publisher of Car and Driver and Automobile. (LAT obit.)

When I was in high school, I read the Davis Car and Driver religiously. It was full of great stuff: road tests of radar detectors, explanations of why the 55 MPH speed limit was wrong, my first exposure to P.J. O’Rourke (“Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West”, which is still one of my favorite pieces of writing in, like, ever), Patrick Bedard…the list goes on.

Eighty’s a pretty good run for a guy who destroyed his face in an M.G. crash. Rest in peace, Mr. Davis. I hope you’re driving something fast on heaven’s equivalent of the Nürburgring.

This has been noted elsewhere, but here’s the NYT obit for Diana Wynne Jones. (Edited to add: here’s a short but nice tribute from Michael Dirda in the WP.)

Edited to add 2: Bill Crider had these first, but the deaths of Farley Granger and the mystery writer H.R.F. Keating are being reported. I’ll have more to say after better obits are published.

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Star Song of the Dream Dancers.

Friday, March 11th, 2011

I believe it was one of the early 80s cyberpunk writers (I’m thinking Bruce Sterling, but it could have been Lew Shiner) who suggested that the most generic possible SF book title combined the words “star”, “song”, “dream”, and ‘”dancers”. For example, “Dream Song of the Star Dancers”. Or “Star Dancers of the Dream Song”.

I was strongly reminded of this by a post at the Tor website, outlining the most common words in fantasy and SF titles. Song and dance is apparently out; dragons and war are apparently in. A reflection of the time we live in?

(Hattip: the Scalzinator on the Twitter. His list of demands for Tor if they want him to write <go to the Tor link> actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. I mean, who among us has not wanted all of those things? Well, with one exception in my case, simply because I live in an apartment. But other than that, perfectly reasonable.)

Posted in Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

Heretic!

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

My “Applications in Business Programming” class had our first meeting last night.

This is the textbook we’re using for the class.

Note that it is:

  1. Readily available from sources other than the university bookstore.
  2. Recently published.
  3. Reasonably priced. ($34 is about average for a programming book these days.)

Given that I paid $180 for the textbook for my previous class with this professor, I think this is worthy of praise. Well done, sir!

Posted in Books, School | Comments Closed

The lunatics are on the grass.

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Two things that made me chuckle, and one that didn’t.

Goodnight Dune, the children’s book.

Goodnight Keith Moon, which is probably not for children.

(Hattip: Robb Allen.)

This is an old story, but I don’t think I’ve linked it before: Margaret Wise Brown left the rights and royalties from her books to her neighbor Albert Clarke. Clarke was nine years old when she died in 1952. So what’s happened since then? (I know this was published in 2000. I haven’t been able to turn up anything more recent on Albert Clarke, except a rather mean article on an obscure website calling him a drug addict and suggesting that nobody should ever buy a new copy of Goodnight Moon.)

Posted in Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 3, 2011.

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

I went to the fights last night, and a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy broke out.

Sirhan Sirhan has been turned down for parole for the 13th time. What’s interesting about this article is that it focuses almost as much on Sirhan’s lawyer, William F. Pepper, and Pepper’s previous efforts:

Pepper says [James Earl] Ray, who was convicted of killing King two months before Kennedy was slain, was framed by the federal government and that King was killed in a conspiracy involving the FBI, the CIA, the military, the Memphis police and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis.

This gives me an excuse to plug Hampton Sides’ excellent (and Edgar-nominated) book Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, about the killing of King and the manhunt for Ray. I picked it up about two weeks ago, and read the first 300 pages in one night. The only reason I stopped there was because I was dozing off. Sides’ book has an amazingly strong narrative drive for a true crime work; it reads very much like a good novel.

I’m not going to say it deserves the Edgar;  I haven’t read any of the other nominated books (I did pick up The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science last weekend, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) but I do commend Hellhound to your attention.

This is not a strategy I had considered for driving up page views, but good for the Austin Bulldog.

Edited to add: This is the closest thing I’ve found to a discussion of food items at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this year. No photos. I’d apologize, but I don’t want a photo of the “Pulled Pork Sundae”, which frankly sounds disgusting.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Law, Neuroscience, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Miscellaneous stuff.

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I’ll be covering various topics. Short answer: probably not, if you haven’t seen it here. Longer answers:

Posted in Books, Clippings, GPS, Guns, Stupid | Comments Closed

Crankery.

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

This doesn’t really count as “gun crankery”, though guns are somewhat involved.

This 37 Signals essay on the 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalog in turn led me to this NYT piece (from 2008, but I hadn’t seen it before) on George Herter, with particular concentration on his book, “Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices“.

Every now and then a copy of Bull Cook shows up at Half-Price Books; so far, I’ve managed to snap up two (one for myself, one as a gift). Collins has it right about what makes the book so fascinating; you’re reading along, and you come to an assertion such as the Virgin Mary’s fondness for creamed spinach, and you say to yourself, “What?”. (Herter was not a big fan of sourcing his material.)

I haven’t been able to obtain any of his other books: I’ve never seen How To Live With a B—-h (though here’s a review of it from someone who found a copy), and the one copy I’ve seen of Herter’s safari guide was priced too high for my tastes. Bull Cook seems to be the easiest Herter book to find; if you run across a copy, I’d recommend picking it up.

(Field and Stream also published a longer history of Herter sometime back; if I can find a working link to their profile, I’ll add it here.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Guns | Comments Closed

Book geekery.

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

By way of TJIC, I found this nifty little query page that lists the NYT bestsellers for your birth week (both fiction and non-fiction).

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I’ve only read one book on the list for my birth week. On the one hand, NYT bestseller lists seem to be dominated by a fair amount of transient crud; on the other hand, I’ve actually read more of the books on TJIC’s list (three total) than my own. (Believe it or not, I’ve read Boss. Within the past couple of years, even. And the closest I’ve ever been to Chicago is changing planes in the airport.)

I am halfway tempted to start a project of blogging my way through the books for my birth week, just for grins.

Posted in Books | Comments Closed

And while I’m on the legal beat…

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Alex Tabarrok, one of the Marginal Revolution bloggers, has an interesting article in the latest Wilson Quarterly about the economics of bounty hunting.

In Philadelphia, where commercial bail has been regulated out of existence, The Philadelphia Inquirer recently found that “fugitives jump bail . . . with virtual impunity.” At the end of 2009, the City of Brotherly Love had more than 47,000 unserved arrest warrants. About the only time the city’s bail jumpers are recaptured is when they are arrested for some other crime. One would expect that a criminal on the lam would be careful not to get caught speeding, but foresight is rarely a prominent characteristic of bail jumpers. Routine stops ensnare more than a few of them. When the jails are crowded, however, even serial bail jumpers are often released.

Edited to add: Just for grins, I thought I’d throw in a couple of links to Paladin Press books on bounty hunting, such as “Rex Venator”‘s Modern Bounty Hunting: A Real-Life Guide for the Bail Fugitive Recovery Agent. Holy cow! You can get Paladin Press books on your Kindle now? Man, this is a great country.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Kindleing, Law | 2 Comments »

A handful of randomness.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

I intended to post this yesterday, but got sidetracked: the SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian have reached a settlement in their legal dispute. I’ve previously blogged about the dispute here, here, and here. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

I’m posting this only because it amuses me: the Statesman has posted the APD’s annual list of “local bars where drunken driving suspects reported having their last drink before hitting the road”. Particularly chuckleworthy to me is the large cluster of places in one block of 6th Street…

Speaking of the Statesman, there’s also a kind of neat profile of Austin writer, former Dell employee, and MonkeyBrain Books publisher Chris Roberson, who is taking over the current “Superman” story line with issue 707.

And speaking of things that amuse me, “Never Said About Restaurant Websites” pretty much hits all of my peeves (and Lawrence’s) save one. And we’ve both submitted that one. (Hattip: Daring Fireball.)

Edited to add: Here’s something else I wanted to blog but forgot: “The Now-You-See-It Restaurant“.

He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.

…

He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so durable, no sweat.

The bar, a mobile cart, will be stocked with only one brand of each spirit, and on a given night there will be just two whites, two reds and one sparkling wine.

…

Diners, for example, will be expected to set and reset the cutlery on their tables with utensils from drawers beneath. That way Mr. Fraser won’t need as many servers. It will save him money, he said, and translate into fewer intrusions for diners. “You’re visited only at points of the meal when you really need help,” he said.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Law, Media | 2 Comments »

Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

The NYT has a regular feature, “Recipe Redux”, where Times writers revisit a classic recipe from the pages of the NYT, and attempt to update it for contemporary tastes/styles/availability of ingredients.

This week’s recipe was for Chocolate-Rum Mousse; the original actually sounds pretty good, at least to my unsophisticated palate.

So how did the NYT‘s chefs (Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa, who run the Ideas In Food website) update this recipe?

Talbot and Kamozawa considered making a terrine lined with the chocolate mousse and layering it with popcorn and more mousse, so the popcorn would behave like the chocolate wafers in icebox cake, softening and melding with the mousse.

Should have gone with that idea; sounds good to me. But, no:

Talbot and Kamozawa substituted beets for chocolate in the original recipe

Beets? Beets?! Were these people not loved enough as children?

Okay, let’s be fair: how did it come out?

After blending it together, 1966-style, they had a mousse that they liked a lot but didn’t quite love.

So…

…they whipped out their handy ISI dispenser (handy for some; it’s that magical tool that drove the foam craze) and made the mousse into a cloud.

To the cloud! Sorry. Here’s what I think they’re referring to when they talk about an ISI dispenser.

I asked Talbot whether readers might be daunted by a recipe that calls for an ISI dispenser. “We’ve grown and matured,” Talbot said, “and realized any recipe you put out there, no one really follows it. All it is is a suggestion: you might want to do this.”

Yeah. The original recipe sounds simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to prepare with nothing more than a blender and a stove. The new one requires relatively specialized kitchen equipment and sounds like crap.

I have to ask: if you did a side-to-side, A-B comparison, would Mr. Latte approve?

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | 3 Comments »

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