The Good

• Largely met my personal list of expected expansions based on my viewing of the television show: How Cooper became an agent (check), the backstory of Windom Earle and his wife, Caroline, and even small details like who is Diane, Dennis (later Denise) Bryson, Gordon Cole, Cooper’s love for coffee (a college sweetheart introduces him to various brews) and pie.
• Captures that peculiar Twin Peaks mix of naivete and horror. Cole is a real loner as a youth, and his lack of worldly knowledge adds a fish out of water humor (particularly funny is his experience hitch-hiking home from a scout camp, and his first young love with the slightly older, drug-dabbling born-again Marie). Horror is deftly inserted at various points: how he comes across his mother’s ring, an arsonist college sweetheart, and his first few cases as a new F.B.I agent. Certain chill-inducing events — like the television show — are never explained (a man “painted blue” that appears outside Cooper’s window). Especially creepy are entire passages and even years transcribed as “erased” or “missing,” leaving unspeakable things to the imagination.

The Bad

• In the book, Cooper investigates the Teresa Banks murder in southwest Washington, which contradicts the depiction of that case in the movie, Fire Walk With Me, where Chester Desmond leads an investigation, while Cooper is back in Philadelphia.
• As Cooper’s entire lifetime was spent outside of Twin Peaks, none of that town’s unique denizens appear. There is only the tantalizing glimpse of the pacific Northwest in the final few pages.

Conclusion

If you’ve watched the television series and are hungry for more, this book provides that and then some. Damn good pie — I mean book.

What our hardware is made of, how it’s made, where it comes from, and where it goes when it’s discarded are subjects I never gave much though to until I read High Tech Trash. The answers turned out to be quite important, especially for a self-described technophile, who has gone through more than his fair share of tech toys, and consequently produced an inordinate amount of “e-waste” when those toys lost their utility or cutting-edge appeal.

High Tech Trash lays the facts out straight:

• Much of our hardware is made from minerals that are mined from the earth at great effort, and therefore expense.
• The creation of circuit boards, common in practically all consumer electronics, uses toxic chemicals in the etching process. Silicon Valley polluted its own ground water through the eighties with chip manufacturing, leading to several “superfund” sites and is one reason why water must be piped in from Hetch Hetchey. Many of these plants have simply moved to other parts of the world.
• Even when sent through the proper channels, recycling isn’t easy. Consumer electronics aren’t made of a single material like a glass bottle or an aluminum can. The boards must be broken up using toxic chemicals used in their creation and burned to extract the recyclable metals.
• Due to globalization, the negative side of electronics manufature has simply moved elsewhere. Much electronics manufacture has moved to Asia along with the waste. There are very poor Chinese villages where our “e-waste” – also called “effluent of the affluent” — is disposed of by people with buckets of acid. The run-off goes into the streams, and pollutants released into the air. Much of the “e-waste” is burned in open fires and toxic plumes head out over the Pacific Ocean to California. The biggest downside to globalization is we’re sheltered from the results of our excessive consumerism. The manufacture is hidden, and so are the waste effects — out of sight, out of mind.
• There are flame-retardant chemicals used in the plastic housings of consumer electronics. One in particular, PBDE, has shown up in human blood and breast milk samples of people across the globe, worryingly similar to PCBs in its storage in human fat. The EPA’s modus operandi seems to be, introduce chemicals for commercial reasons and regulate after something is proven toxic.
• The final annoyance is that Europe is much further along in regards to e-waste regulation and disposal, while in America, the burden is on the consumer. If I’m any example, there isn’t much education going on as to the effects of our electronics consumption.

After reading this book, I’m reconsidering the hardware purchases I make, and at the very least, will make sure to recycle “e-waste” in the proper manner whenever possible. The book also reminded me that although our devices are used to explore create a virtual world that doesn’t seem to have any impact on the material one – it most certainly does, from the hardware to the labor in its creation and disposal, and the energy to run them.

In California, there are resources available to make recycling easier. Here are some resources I found for proper disposal of my own electronic stuff:

• Apple has some recycling options. They will take back old computers and displays with the purchase of a new Mac. They recycle iPods and if you do so, offer 10 percent off a new iPod. They will recycle iPods and cellphones.
• Radio Shack will accept and recycle rechargeable batteries of any kind and also old cell phones.
• CRC.org has some computer recycling options in the Bay Area.
• In San Mateo, at least, there is a recycling database that you can consult to find recycling options.
• ACR Recycling in Santa Clara looks like a good one for Silicon Valley.

Synopsis

Biography of Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind Peanuts, who wrote and drew every strip over several decades, all by himself.

The Good

• Exhaustive, going all the way back to Schulz’s mid-western upbringing in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he likely received his strong work ethic and moral sensitivities.
• Events in Schulz’s life are illustrated with Peanuts strips. Many life parallels are claimed, such as Charlie Brown voicing Schulz’s personal insecurities (there was a real-life “little red-haired girl”), and the domineering qualities of Schulz’s first wife find a home in the ornery fussbudget Lucy (a favorite phrase “snap out of it” is doled out to Charlie Brown as psychiatric advice). Schroeder’s constant piano playing is claimed to be a stand-in for Schulz’s relentless strip production, much to the consternation of Lucy, who vies for Schroder’s attention.

The Bad

• The hunt for cartoon parallels sometimes goes too far; Snoopy meets a “cute beagle” while Schulz was having an affair in the early seventies. Another stretch comes in regards to a story line (called a favorite of Schulz) featuring Charlie Brown developing a rash resembling a baseball on his bald, round head, wearing a paper bag, and then being voted camp leader. Michaelson interprets the strange tale as the death of Schulz’s mother and his surprising success as a leader in the army.
• The biography largely paints Schultz as an unhappy and unloved man, to where his family is critical of the biography — despite having authorized it.
• Much from 1975 on gets short shrift, possibly because Schulz was happier during his second marriage and the author found less to support his morose thesis.

Conclusion

Despite my skepticism at some of the more depressing material, I found the book fascinating enough that I ordered the first four volumes of The Complete Peanuts books. These cool Peanuts compendiums are coming out from Fantagraphics, two a year for some time to come. That’s one good thing about this Schultz biography: I rediscovered my childhood love for Peanuts and am revisiting the Schultz’s life-long labor of love. Somehow, I think Schultz would be okay with that.

Additional Reading: New York Times

Glut claims that ever since people banded together into tribes, knowledge was organized in a top-down hierarchy, or a taxonomy. Even the most technologically primitive societies organize things into family trees, meaning boar and sheep are both animals while plants are a different category, subdivided into more. This is no different than our current use of hierarchy in the organization of files and folders on a computer or web server.

The advent of writing meant an information explosion, leading to stacks of stone tablets in the first libraries. But without the means to mass produce documents, power became consolidated among the publishers. During the Dark Ages, the monasteries had control, laboriously copying documents by hand while the masses remained illiterate. Gutenberg’s printing press produced another information explosion.

The author goes so far to claim this explosion resulted in mass psychosis. The cultural upheaval of the enlightenment may today be looked on as positive, but it meant a huge increase in revolution, rebellion, witch burning, and religious condemnation. Basically, a battle between those seeking to retain control and those who wanted to destroy the controllers after the spread of information. This also applies to modern times, with old media crumbling at the hands of new, and continuing worries of Internet addiction. In the future, we may look back on the early web days as yet another period of cultural upheaval due to the freedom of information.

Glut eventually presents the history of the Internet. Some Internet pioneers wanted the network to be similar to a library, with both authors and readers having the ability to edit web pages. Other information-friendly ideas were two way links, and meaning implicit in the markup. Imagine the the Internet resembling Wikipedia.

Instead, the Internet is chaotic and nearly random — there is no over-arching taxonomy. Hence, the “search engine” has emerged as a second-best way to access to information. New gatekeepers — web designers and developers — have increased in importance. Basically, where the librarian was the historical organizational pivot, we now have technical people replacing them, who may not have any interest in the organization of knowledge as a whole. The end result is arguably, not good for the masses who could benefit from the wealth of online information.

Thankfully, Google’s mission statement could apply to a librarian: “organize the immense amount of information available on the web.” Some are thinking ahead to a “semantic web” where meaning would be layered over the existing Internet, enough so to be often included as one aspect of the nebulous “Web 3.0.”

After reading Glut I felt that while we have definitely made the dissemination and reproduction of information faster than ever imagined, the organization is as woefully lacking as ever before. The amount of information has increased exponentially, leaving us with more need for information technology than ever before. In its absence, people complain of “information overload.”

In conclusion, Glut was a interesting book if you like history. Although its analysis came up a bit short. I’m glad I read it.

At first I wasn’t too into this book, but ultimately I was sort of glad I persevered. It attempts to document the entirety of history — all the way back to the Big Bang — in a mere 248 pages. Naturally, a heck of a lot has been omitted, so on one level it’s merely a “greatest hits” compendium. But several chapters were new information to me, and the unusual nature of our current, technology infused century becomes starkly clear in the context of large swaths of history.

The downside is that for the first half of the book, I felt like I was wading through familiar information: the birth of the solar system, early earth, evolution, and man’s initial spread across the globe came and went along with several yawns.

But at a particular point — due to my schooling in Western-centric history — things became interesting. Specifically, the colonization of Mexico and South American at the hands of Spanish Conquistadors is portrayed in a blunt and unflattering light. The author believes that the ease of Spain’s conquest had more to do with the relative susceptibility of the local population to unfamiliar diseases than any talent on the part of Cortez and Pizarro (this seems to be a key concept of another book I want to read, Guns, Germs, and Steel). This makes sense in the context of the preceding world history covered in this book: the mixing of peoples via trade routes between Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, the battles between Europe, Muslims, and Mongols, and the Black Plague, all left Eurasians hardier and technologically more advanced than in South America.

The other chapter I enjoyed was the final one, that talks about the crossroads humanity has created at the turn of the century. It’s argued that the world’s population outstripped the earth’s ability to host it in the 1980s. The immediate future concerns our species’ impact on the earth itself (global warming), and dwindling resources. The biggest problem is that despite our technological advances, there is nowhere else for excess population to flee to — we have basically colonized the entire globe. Throughout history, mass migration was an option. Presently, we have nowhere to turn — it doesn’t look like we’ll be creating bases on other planets anytime soon.

The author then suggests that based on our current course, the world’s population will peak around 2025 and fall (along with living standards) to 1900 levels by 2100. At that point, we will have achieved a level of sustainable equilibrium but at a great price.

It is suggested that humankind may be able to work together and figure out a technological solution — but that would require a very quick societal shift which based on the evidence in this book — has never happened in our history. It seems if we live up to our history, the countries of the world would rather fight over what’s left than redistribute wealth and resources — or limit the birth rate to 2 children per couple as the author suggests.

Anyhow, I don’t really recommend this book, but if you come across it in a bookstore or the library, you could polish off the last chapter in one sitting, and check out Guns, Germs, and Steel.

A few months ago, I challenged myself to watch all the James Bond films… and so did the author of The Man Who Saved Britain, however he did it as a result of growing up in England. This thoroughly entertaining book is a simultaneous memoir, history tome, and James Bond tribute. It attempts to place the suave spy in British history, claiming that the popularity largely stemmed from how the British empire — spanning multiple nations worldwide and with a technologically superior fighting force — fell apart after World War II, and looking for something to believe in, latched onto the macho myth that is Bond.

As the Cold War descended, waning British power put forth a different sort of hero that displayed individual initiative and traveled the world to exotic places for action and adventure, proving the English were still necessary at least for working behind the scenes — no huge government with massive military force required. So England had a sixties spy craze: The Avengers, Danger Man, and Bond.

The author has an extremely vibrant writing style, weaving childhood anecdotes between the history and pop culture references. He’s also charmingly unafraid to admit problems with his thesis. At one point he claims author Ian Fleming wrote about a nude woman’s “black triangle” that the author held as a fond memory for many years, only to find out while researching this book that he had it wrong all along and Fleming wrote no such thing.

I found Winder’s recounting of British history fascinating. Early this century, the British Empire reigned supreme over many nations resulting in bizarre imported knick-knacks like a stuffed cobra fighting a mongoose, brass talismans, and maroon rugs stuffed into every British home. But during both World Wars, British military might was clearly checked and help from the Allies was essential to avoid becoming a German colony. Simultaneously, there was an elite, moneyed upper class in England that was completely inept in terms of physical force, they would be helpful with nutty campaigns as vigilantes. Being wealthy, they were never in any danger of being deployed to the front lines. It’s from this bizarre situation that James Bond author Ian Fleming came from.

The war was good to Fleming, tapping his imagination, forcing him to work within discipline. Fleming schemed, plotted, and carried out dangerous missions. From the famous Room 39 in the Admiralty building in London’s Whitehall, Fleming tossed out a myriad of off-beat ideas on how to confuse, survey, and enrage the Germans.

In a 1940 trip into a crumbling France, Fleming supervised the escape from Dieppe, juggling the security needs of his country against the crush of refugees seeking escape from the Nazi machine. With Fleming flair, he spent one of his last evening eating and drinking some of the best food in the country, and one of his last days coordinating the evacuation of King Zog of Albania.

The book suggests that after the war, as the British Empire collapsed, Fleming departed to Jamaica and wrote many of the Bond novels, reliving spy adventures that weren’t really possible anymore. It was a fantasy of a British man being able to wander the globe, comfortable in all situations, living a life of material luxury and political utility. But the dark side of empire is under the surface — the sexism, alcoholism, gluttony, moral ambiguity, and the racist view of a world to be exploited.

Yes, the book isn’t afraid to poke holes in Bond when it’s deserved. Winder claims Fleming’s best book is From Russia With Love while others like Moonraker are completely worthless. He’s similarly critical of the movies — a huge fan of the Sean Connery classics but feels that when Roger Moore takes over, the film’s fly off on some tangent completely unrelated to the original books. Moonraker is specifically singled out as a feeble attempt to cash in on Star Wars, and several times he heaps condemnation on the Die Another Day, in particular the debacle of the invisible car.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in James Bond or British history in general, I recommend checking out this book. Just due to the amusing writing style of Winder I finished it pretty quickly.

This excellent history book recounts the world chess champion match betwen Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972, with Nixon as President and the United States and Russia submerged in the Cold War. Fischer the individualist American and Spassky the communist came to represent much more than merely two savants doing battle with wooden pieces on a checkerboard — this was yet another competitive confrontation between east and west.

The book’s most interesting character is the tragi-comic Bobby Fischer — a petulant, petty, and near Howard Hughes-like eccentric. Gifted at chess as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, he lived and breathed the game, even carrying around a little pocket set on which to study moves constantly. He was extremely competitive and possibly had a paranoid fear of losing — he reportedly cried after tough matches. But his oddness went beyond mere personality quirks — ethnically Jewish, he was notoriously anti-semitic and denied his own ancestry. In the years leading up to the championship match, Fischer became convinced the “commies” were out to get him, to the point where he had fillings removed from his teeth as they may have contained KGB monitoring devices and he was reluctant to fly to Iceland (where the championship match was being held) for fear of sabotage. I’d love to see a biopic of Fischer — Nicholas Cage comes to mind (the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer was about a different child chess prodigy).

As a child, Boris Spassky experienced the hellish Nazi invasion of Russia. Spassky was groomed as a chess star with institutional backing: the Russians considered chess exellence to be proof of Soviet intellectual superiority. He was supposed to win against Fischer as a matter of Russian pride — the entire country was counting on him, and literally, there was the dire warning that he could be in grave danger if he didn’t succeed.

The match as depicted in the book is alternately nail-biting and hilarious, as Fischer’s nutty personality leads to totally unreasonable demands on the Icelandic organization running the tournament: Fischer says the board doesn’t have enough contrast between light and dark. Fischer says the lights are too bright. Fischer can’t concentrate with all the television cameras. Fischer wants the first few rows of the audience removed as the noise is too distracting. These annoying demands may have been a psychological strategy to wear Spassky down, but early on Fischer loses two games, one a forfeit because of lateness.

As the match continues, things get really nutty as Spassky feels fatigued, leading to suspicion that he’s being drugged or there’s an American death ray causing him to make stupid chess mistakes. The KGB descends, X-rays are taken of the chairs, and the lighting examined to search for nefarious CIA spy technologies.

Beneath all the drama is the foundation of chess (of which I’m pretty inept). But just as in traditional drama, a chess game has an opening (most of these have been well-documented), a middle, and endgame (usually after both queens have been eliminated). I chuckled at some of the standard game terms like the “Nimzo-Indian defense,” the “Ruy Lopez Opening,” and the “Sicilian Defense” that either player employs not unlike the “crane kick” from The Karate Kid. Chess becomes a psychological battle of wills — due to the ever-present threat of making a stupid move, a player must get into their opponent’s mind to figure out if they see something you don’t. The fear and trying to read your enemy’s mind — it’s suggested that this can lead to paranoia. Fischer is quoted as saying “chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”

Following the marathon match, it seems Fischer’s eccentric ways got the better of him, as he drifted away from competitive chess and forfieted his hard-won title to the Russian Karpov due to a list of over a hundred demands for the next championship tournament. Gary Kasparov would later become the ultimate Russian chess champion who would do battle with IBM’s Deep Blue computer. Meanwhile, Fischer was in hiding, far away from the United States, diving deeper in his eccentricities and becoming a near recluse. He now lives in Iceland, and has invented a style of “random chess” that could breathe new life into the game. The chess world is peppered with Fischer “what ifs” — who would win a Fischer — Kasparov match? Could Fischer have defended his title against Karpov in 1975?

The mere fact that even I’m interested in this subject shows that this book did a wonderful job of recapturing the chess-mania in 1972. I highly recommend it.

Check out this documentary on YouTube.

I occasionally pick up non-fiction, science books to see if my increasingly fuzzy brain can keep up with the concepts. With Beyond Reason, I could generally follow the logic, but the math formulas proving exactly why — completely went over my head. The book is an examination of the limits of science through eight ideas that are currently considered — for all practical purposes — impossible. Dewdney provides the historical context, a summary of the example, and then digs down into the math.

Impossible Machines: You can’t build a machine that runs forever without an external source of energy, that produces useable energy. Perpetual motion, and why “free energy” will never be practical because energy must be conserved. A frictionless machine in a weightless environment is the closest we can get, but as far that generating energy it’s useless. The history takes us back to the Industrial revolution with pumps and waterwheels and various hucksters who tried to fool people with elaborate machines (one of which revealed a person in an adjacent room turning a crank). It’s also worth noting that this fruitless quest continues today.

The Cosmic Limit: Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Light as the absolute speed limit. Einstein’s thinking process as to how he came up with his theory of relativity. I think the interesting thing is how Einstein’s contemporaries laid the groundwork, but seemingly nobody dared make the mental leap that required the speed of light to be the absolute and everything else in the world went along with it.

The Quantum Curtain: It’s impossible to know the detailed behavior of any quantum system — properties of a particle don’t exactly exist until observed. We learn how photons either act as particles or waves, Bell’s Theorem, and eventually the metaphor of a dead cat.

The Edge of Chaos: Some classical systems produce long-term behavior which cannot be predicted. There are many situations that are just too complex to predict the results — even for ever increasingly powerful computers — the situations just get too out of control in order of magnitude. Because of this the author believes that weather prediction — such as will we ever have a computer that can predict the weather a year in advance — is impossible. I found this chapter very interesting. Some systems are naturally chaotic, starting with the weather-prediction computer experiments of Lorenz to come up with “Lorenz attractors”. These patterns are from analysis of seemingly simple systems that produce very complex results merely by changing one input. The charts resemble the “automata” that Wolfram obsesses over in his book A New Kind Of Science.

The Circular Crypt: You can’t construct a square equal in area to a given circle using only a ruler and a compass. This is a geometric discussion of “squaring the circle.” This problem boils down to the impossible (or transcedental) nature of pi. In order to accomplish this task, you have to know the circumference of the circle and translate that into a straight line.

The Chains of Reason: There are some theorems that are impossible to prove. This part had way too much math and I couldn’t get my head around it. It was basically going over a the “incompleteness theorem” (Godel) that proved that unproveable theorems could exist. I guess Godel’s theory doesn’t fall into that category (?).

The Computer Treadmill: There are some yes / no questions that no computer will ever answer. Turing machines suggest that any algorithm can be reduced to simple instructions in the form of long string of “yes, no” (1,0) . Increasingly powerful computers, can be taught to simulate simpler ones. It’s easy to assume that because of this, computers will one day be able to solve the most intractable problems. There are many things that are simply not reduceable to an algorithm and therefore will always be uncomputable — even if you have a faster computer. Then as another does of reality, Church’s thesis states that the mythical Turing machine (simple as it may seem) doesn’t exist in the real world (we have physical limitations of power consumption and finite speed), and for some reason the author tacks on Ackerman’s function as an example of a simple algorithm that would quickly bring a powerful computer to its knees.

The Big-O Bottleneck: Some mathematical problems solvable by computers still need an exponential amount of time. Even if you get a problem that can be defined by an algorithm that a computer can understand, some are found to be so difficult that the only way to deal with these problems is brute force raw computing power, limited by speed and power consumption. There’s a simple chart that orders complexity in order of increasing computing time: logarithmic, linear, quadratic, exponential. The last type really starts to take a toll quickly, as each “next step” is an order of magnitude larger than the one previous. At this point the math took a serious toll on my brain and I couldn’t make heads or tails of Cook’s Theorem.

Anyhow, the end result of reading this book makes me think that I could never have been a mathematician or a physicist, but I can at least comprehend the general ideas, but which I quickly forget and have difficulty summarizing as proved by this blog post. I might call this the Blog Information Entropy theorem.

• Recipe for Mrs. Fields Cookies: Pretty simple, really.
• Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes: The whole concept of breakfast cereal had to be invented, too.
• Mystery Meat: Spam, head cheese, potted meat product, and why I’ll never eat chorizo again.
• The Beale Cipher: One of those things that you can obsess over for the rest of your life.
• The Equator-Crossing Ritual: What’s up with all these ridiculous secret hazing-style rites?
• The Tootsie Roll Pop Indian: Some people have too much time on their hands.
• Is Thomas Pynchon Really Another Famous Writer?

• What’s the recipe for Oysters Rockefeller? Poundstone travels to New Orleans to find out.
• The Rosicrucians: There’s a temple in San Jose I’ve been meaning to check out.
• The Bohemian Club: A lot more information has surfaced since this book was written about this party in the woods north of San Francisco for the wealthy and powerful.
• The Secret Teachings of L. Ron Hubbard: The founder of Scientology claims some amusing stuff.
• Mount Weather: This might be where Cheney goes any time he needs a secret, undisclosed location.
• Concealed Blackjack Computers: Wearable computers that help you count cards — the casinos don’t like ‘em.
• Dr. Bronner’s Soap: They sell this cool liquid soap at Trader Joe’s (I like the peppermint) but there’s tons of nutty stuff written on the labels.
• Where to Get Hard Liquor in Disneyland: A secret club.
• Brando Talks: After Marlon Brando moved to the South Pacific, I guess he took up gabbing on shortwave radio.

• Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe: Does the greasy finger-licking white meat really have 11 herbs and spices?
• Money stuff: Secret security measures in American dollar bills, the UPC code decoded.
• The Rorschach Test: What to say when you see those ink blots to not have the psychologist mark you down as insane.
• What’s in perfumes: Do you know what ambergris, fatty aldehydes, or civet are?
• What’s in alcohol: The complex, centuries old Benedictine liquor has a secret recipe. I’m scared of Angostura bitter.
• Magic tricks: Uri Geller, The Amazing Kreskin.
• Secret initiation rites of the Freemasons: For a bunch of guys who supposedly founded America and built the Denver airport, the frat-boy-hazing rites sure sound whacked.
• Is Walt Disney cryogenically frozen?: I’d like to watch the decapitated Pluto cartoon.
• Secret number stations: When I first read this section, I got chills.

All in all, this is a pretty fun book. There is the undercurrent of corporations making money off a clueless public, and some of the secrets are a bit head slapping when you realize you’ve been bilked for so long. Two more books, Bigger Secrets and Biggest Secrets follow this one.

We’ve all heard of online game worlds like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Second Life. Play Money pulls us into economies set up within these virtual realities that cross over to our own: sale of in “in game” items for dollars. The scarcity of some digital goods (or the time it takes to acquire them) inevitably presents a real-world money making opportunity — people are willing to pay good money for them. Enter a complex web of enterprising ideas: the search for loopholes (glitches where cooked food is worth multiples more than raw), characters controlled by macros (which can get you banned), or the infamous sweat shops in other countries where “gold farmers” are paid low wages to repeat one repetitive task all day such as clicking on a rock to extract gold.

A side plot is Dibbell’s descent into MMORPG addiction. He starts off as a casual reporter, observing how one obsessed player has constructed a dark room in his garage where he spends several hours each day playing Ultima Online. But before you can say “n00b” Dibbell himself is playing the game. He challenges himself to earn more in one year via Ultima Online than he does as a freelance writer.

Soon, Dibbell has quit his job in the Bay Area, moves to Indiana, and almost inevitably, he’s obsessed with minutiae of power scrolls, put undue strain on his family, and involved with some shady, near mafia-like gold brokers who nearly control the monetary supply of Ultima Online through the amount of items they possess. He sinks into depression and his marriage starts to fail. Eventually, he’s on the road, logging in via truck stops in an increasingly futile attempt to meet his monetary goal before the end of the tax year.

I found this journey amusing because I still consider games entertainment. It doesn’t seem like Julian was having much fun. But once “play” has a monetary value attached, it becomes work very quickly. This book suggests that the blurring between work and play will become more common in a post-industrial society where the search for “frictionless” economies dealing in digital goods is increasingly lucrative (think Google or Enron). He duly mentions how our “real world” monetary system is no longer linked to the gold standard; we all traffic in “play money.”

The book does have some flaws. Near the end of his quest, Julian lowers his original goal of earning an annual salary, by reducing it to one month. Meaning, instead of earning 50K in a year he eventually says earning 4,000 dollars in one month would be good enough. Never mind maintaining 4K over the course of twelve months. Basically, he cheats (still, earning 4K in a month from an online game ain’t too shabby. You’ll have to read the book yourself to find out if he succeeded). Second, the book contains much material pulled from the blog he maintained as events transpired, making me wonder if should just read the blog instead.

Still, this is a fun, entertaining book — I polished it off in two days.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage makes history accessible through an entry point familiar to all — beverages. The six drinks are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. From that list alone, you may have a rough idea of what time periods and events this book covers.

Thanks to Standage’s comforting narrative style, once I started reading this book I knew I’d finish it in a day or two. Familiar tales became unique when looked at from a different perspective. We learn about the Boston Tea Party through the eyes of politically powerful British East India Trading Company, and how the French Revolution was initiated by a speech outside the Cafe de Foy — a coffee house.

As for the discovery of beer, the foamy drink dates back to the dawn of agriculture in Mesopotamia. When grains are soaked in water, the sprouting grains produce sugar in the form of maltose. This “malting” process combined with yeast (used for creating bread) produced fermentation and the result was beer, which is essentially “liquid bread.” Early beer was as simple as a huge jug with rotting grains and water, from which people would drink using straws to filter.

Over time, wine developed from fermented grapes. Distillation was discovered during the middle ages which led to spirits — distilled wine is brandy and distilled beer is whiskey. Coffee originated in the middle east and provided a mental stimulant perfectly paired with the age of reason. The quest for tea lead to the expansion of the British Empire to China and India. Coca-Cola is presented as a quintessential American beverage and a metaphor for how American capitalism has spread worldwide through advertising and embodying the American brand of capitalism.

Looking at world history in this way is a humbling exercise, as it suggests that for all the “manifest destiny” and chest thumping, early world exploration could basically be seen as simple greed — a more cynical observation is that alcohol and caffeine are addictive substances.

There’s even a neat appendix where Standage has researched how to sample antique versions of the six beverages for ourselves. I’ll try to find some St. Peter’s Brewing King Cnut ale — I’ve seen that brand at Whole Foods. I think I’ll pass on old-time coffee, which is supposedly best replicated with a pot of coffee that’s been on a whole day.

If you have any particular fondness for any of the six beverages listed above, I think you’ll enjoy this book, and get a refresher course in world history along the way. Cheers!

The book Twenty Ads That Shook The World is probably required reading for advertising majors. It’s a retrospective of the past century of advertising, and focuses on particular ads that were paradigm shifts in the way commercial messages were crafted and received by the public.

My disclaimer is that I really don’t care for advertising, as I have a slight anti-corporate streak that considers our socitey over-commercialized and monetized beyond what is healthy. It’s to the point where some of the most television-addicted among us discuss advertising as if it were entertainment on the level of the programs themselves.

That said, certain ads still catch my eye, like the minimalist Apple computers on white backgrounds, or corporate “anti-ads” deployed in a viral manner.

But even for the advertising-shy, I find study of commercials invaluable toward understanding how advertisers seek to manipulate we hapless consumers. So here’s a brief overview of this book’s twenty powerful ads.

1. P.T. Barnum: A story to sell. In advertising circus spectacles, it wasn’t just an elephant, it was an elephant from the deepest heart of Africa where a hundred men died in the process of capturing it. You can see the lineage of the story up to today, where the founders of YouTube lived in a rat infested office over Amici’s Pizza. Having a story makes the product more dramatic and therefore memorable.

2. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound: Personalizing the corporate face. This basically means a product called “Vegetable Compound” is not as appealing as one sold by a memorable individiual, in this case the ficticious “Lydia E. Pinkham”. Other examples are Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Colonel Sanders, and heck, the real but unquestionably iconic George Foreman, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.

3. Pears’ Soap: Associated value. Put a product in an appealing setting, which enhances the product.

4. Pepsodent: Preemptive claim. Make a claim that is common to all competitors but is played up by your particular product. For example, you could say “Boffo Mouthwash: Kills 90% of the germs on contact!” when perhaps it’s true that pretty much all mouthwashes do exactly that. But the public doesn’t know this. Not a lie, just witholding the information that your particular product is nothing special.

5. Listerine: Selling the need. Invent a problem, and provide the cure. Think today’s toothbursh with color-changing bristles indicating when it’s time to get a new brush. Kinda handy, but is it really a technological breakthrough? This is a case of solving a problem we didn’t even know we had, which is an advertiser’s dream, as we may look toothbrushes without colored bristles as inferior and in need of upgrades.

6. Queensboro Corporation: First to use radio as the first electronic medium. This company embraced radio advertising when all the other companies didn’t. When technology provides a new means of mass communication, getting ads on it might be a good way to differentiate yourself from the competition.

7. The Kid in Upper 4: Birth of Advocacy Advertising. Ads begin to get psychological, perhaps because the obvious tricks are exhausted, or the public has grown used to them. Associate the product with a cause that enhances the product, even if the product has no obvious relationship to the cause. Consider how Mobil Corporation sponsors public television. The show probably has nothing to do with oil, but the show’s viewers may think better of Mobil because of the positive content in the show.

8. DeBeers: Establishing desire. Diamonds were continually reinforced as some must have product that was extremely valuable, even worth going into debt for. In a sense, the diamond isn’t so much the product, as the desire for one.

9. Coke on Christmas: Days of the year associated with a product. Holiday spending is huge, but another sneaky way to get people to buy stuff is to get it associated with an annual holiday via an ad campaign. The example here is Coke and Christmas, but on a lesser level I can think of huge TVs, guacamole, and chips for the Super Bowl, chocolate for Easter.

10. Volkswagen Beetle: “Strong” contrary to competitors. The product’s uniqueness was used as a selling point. Take a look at this ad that played off of Americans looking at the odd shape of a Volkswagen as a negative, but prompting the reader to read further, where they find the ad copy describing how Volkswagen’s quality control was exemplar.

11. Miss Clairol: Abstraction can be used to sell a “difficult” product. Embarrasing or taboo products (tampons, condoms, deodorant) are hard to sell through typical advertising methods. The secret strategy for Clairol hair dye was sexual innuendo and ambiguity. Ads read “Does she or doesn’t she?” which referred to the question of whether or not these beautiful models dyed their hair, but subconsiously it was a question of some sexual talent in the mind of the consumer.

12. Marlboro Man: Independence. We all know the buff bronzed cowboy lighting up a smoke in the American west, but Marlboro was originally a women’s cigarette. The macho spokesmodel became recognized the world over, which is a real sign of success in the ad world: a commercial that can cross cultures in a wordless manner.

13. Hathaway Man: Branding. In the 1950s brands were rediscovered, consumers were eager to enter affiliation with products, and pay extra for using a particular brand. Like Marlboro, the Hathaway Man was branding the company and the persona wearing the shirt, not the shirt itself. Subtle, but huge difference.

14. Anacin: The unique selling proposal. A painful headache was described as “hammer in the head,” a problem for which Anacin had the best cure. It was memorable and lodged in the consumer’s mind: just like the clanging hammer.

15. 30 Second Politics: Negative advertising. This political ad showed a child followed by a mushroom could, claiming that if you voted for the opponent, America would be destroyed. Suddenly it was okay to have a commercial that blatantly trashed its competitor.

16. She’s Very Charlie: The politics of scent. The melding of perfume, the powerful memories attached to smells, and association with the seventies women’s liberation.

17. Absolut: Metaphysics of wrap. This is where ads get mental and conceptual. Nothing but a long series of famous artists designign the Absolut bottle in their styles. Excellent branding, plus the implication that Absolut is an anyhwere product, useful everywhere and by all kinds of different, unique individuals.

18. Apple’s 1984: Ad as artifact. This legendary commercial took advertising to the level of spectacle and event. The style was cinematic, as if a whole movie could be filmed about the product. There was barely any image of the Macintosh computer being advertised, just a serious, high quality message, style, and mood that displayed much about the vision Apple had for itself.

19. Infomercial: The hard sell via television. I wrote a post on Ron Popeil’s late night pitches. The art of crafting a sales pitch for television has to be recognized even if the end result is often kitchy.

20. Nike and Michael Jordan: Hero as product. Welcome to the height of celebrity sponsorship, where a celebrity’s personality (and even the company brand) is intertwined with the product.

In reading this book, I found that advertsing is much more psychologically and socially complex than just selling a product through establishing utility to the consumer. In the future, with more intrusive customer profiling and targeted advertising, I’m certain there will be more paradigm shifts in advertising ahead.

First, it should be noted that the Brunner uses a futuristic vernacular that at first I found a bit hard to get my head around, along with jumpy, extremely brief chapters that flit from subject to subject. However, I soon grew used to the quick, jumpy pace.

Brunner is remarkably priescent in regards to the future. He predicts the Internet quite accurately as a “datanet” where computers are connceted via computer terminals in every home. But he goes a bit further in his description of how the network impacts culture:

One and only one thing preserved even the illusion of national integrity. The gossamer strands of the data-net proved amazingly strong.

Poeple drew comfort from knowing there were certain objects near at hand… of which they could boast, “This is the biggest/longest/fastest frammistan on Earth!” Alas, however, tomorrow it might not be. Paradoxically, therefore, they derived even more emotional sustenance from being able to say, “This is the most primitive potrzebie, you know, still at work in any industrialized country!”

Other pages are similarly spot on in their descriptions that could be yanked from today’s headlines. One mentions low quality foods coming from overseas that have made their way into the food supply. Another mentions how people chase celebrity in their attempt to be famous for ten minutes. There was a huge earthquake in San Francisco which nearly bankrupts the nation and exposes their apathy (reminiscent of New Orleans). There’s even a mention of Paris Hilton — well, the hotel, not the celebrity, but I chuckled a bit at that lucky choice of words.

In the future, the most common problem is a “jacked in” lifestyle that many people are psychologically unable to cope with — referring to the ever-quickening pace of technology and the quest to keep up. This reminded me of the Ray Kurzweil theory of a coming singularity where computer technology surpasses the computing power of the human brain. Keeping in mind Moore’s Law, after that point, artificial intelligence’s continued exponential development will surpass our ability to comprehend it — technology will continue growing at an exponential rate without us, unless we “jack in” and join the burgeoning intelligence in hybrid human-technological fashion.

Now that is an optimistic viewpoint, but what Brunner gets right is that we’re unlikely use this technology to augment our intelligence, instead culturally devolving into a wasteland of televised gladiator fights, games, and advertising, while the government employs technology to control the population. Every American is given a number, used to build an identity to be tracked through the datanet, and after taking sedatives to cope with the culture shock, the average citizen’s biggest concern is how much the government hands them in the form of credit.

Eventually the plot moves to the hero, Nickie Haflinger, who grew up in a government lab, where through genetic manipulation smarter humans are being created in hopes that they can cope with the technological onslaught. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will mention that I found it oddly optimistic. I suppose I expected some bombs going off and martyrdom. I also didn’t care for this book as much when it started describing the quasi hippie society in California, that with its description of earthen homes reminded me strangely of an idealized Hobbiton. But I chalk this up to the book’s inception in 1975, just a few years after the hippie counter culture movement when it might have seemed possible that California could lead a world-changing, social revolution.

More appealing to me is the geek fantasy that instead, through a clever bit of computer code, one can change the world. I found that part pretty cool, as I did the aforementioned surprisingly accurate prognostications of the future. This book inspires me to read more science fiction.

Anyhow, here are the ones I really liked, enough that I’d seek out additional work by the artists responsible.

• Cajones Past by Christian Roman is a funny tale that reminds me of some groaner yarns from a particular camp counselor — one that starts out exciting at the end is some lame pun that makes everyone slap their heads. But hey, it’s summer camp, or in this case, a road trip.
• The Bunny Brothers by Mike Milo and Harry McLaughlin has some hilarious character design like Looney Tunes gone wrong. I wish it were drawn in a cleaner style instead of with a grease pencil but I guess that’s the underground comics charm. (Website) (Website)
• Crystal Blue Sensation by Albert Calleros is a highlight. The art (inspired by Mexican graffiti?) is a combination of twisted and cute that I’ve never seen before. I read this one a few times as each panel has enough quirkiness to bear closer examination. (Website)
• El Pasion Del Hombre Incredible! by Rodney Clouden is pretty freaking hilarious. I love the exaggerated muscle man doing manly things, totally justified as the plot concerns the difference between men and women, specifically how it feels to be a man watching a chick flick like The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants. The fact that the woman is in a Mexican wrestling mask allows any man to imagine their significant other in place of that character.
• El Paso by Rafael Navarro is a romantic, wordless comic, evocative of some Spaghetti Western. I liked the attractive romance comic drawing style looks like charcoal beneath brushed ink. (Website)

All in all, a decent amount of entertainment for the price of two tacos. Pass the Tapatio.

First up is Hunter and Painter by Tom Gauld, an artist I’d never heard of before. The short comic is simple yet effective, drawn in a style reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Dan Piraro (Bizarro).

It’s about two cavemen, one an artist, and the other a likely ancestor of a Hollywood producer. Looking like large lumps with tiny heads, one sports what looks like battle scars. I found humor in how the pair are actually quite sophisticated, discussing issues not unlike modern men. Near the comic’s end, it had me pondering the unknown motivations behind cave paintings, and a rather wry observation on the sort of art that stands the test of time.

The story contains just enough information to be comprehensible yet moves along briskly. It’s never self-indulgent, and the simple art serves the story expertly.

I’ll have to check out some of Tom Gauld’s other works. Here’s his website. It has some picture galleries with examples of the art contained within his various comic book titles.

Hungry Planet is a gorgeous photographic journal from the same folks who created Material World. The idea is simple: travel the globe and photograph families in different cultures posing with piles all the food they eat over the course of a week. Besides making for nice photographs, the book acts as an informative introduction to food variety and issues of scarcity, plenty, production, and cooking from around the globe.

There are two reactions I can imagine from a first-world nation citizen to this gorgeous document: we’re very blessed to eat our readily available, relatively cheap processed food, or: man, we eat a lot of garbage and are wasteful, over-consumers. I lean more toward the latter, but I’m really glad to have leafed through this book and had my eyes opened as what extravagance our digestive tracts are treated to.

The simplest way to illustrate the disparity is to mention the two extremes: the poorest family in Chad, makes do with a weekly allotment of grains, goat meat, dried fish, a few limes, water… and that’s about it. The price: $1.23. This is to feed a family of six for a week.

Contrast this with the most extravagant American family, whose photograph is a smorgasborg of gut-busting, bloated nourishment, barely able to fit the image’s frame, for $341.98 a week. This is for a family of four.

Personally, I found this rather mind-blowing. I think I’ll look at my $1.50 cup of coffee in a different light.

Once the depressing stuff is internalized, it’s fun to explore the tasty range of mouth-watering and exotic foods. China has many convenience foods on sticks that were unfamiliar to me: stinky tofu, scorpions, and seahorses. Many nations eat parts of animals I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot barbecue skewer. Others delight in fruits and vegetables I have no idea which end is edible.

Industrialization has also affected the food we eat. The less well-off make do with grains and simple carbohydrates. As a population becomes more prosperous, protein is added to the diet. But the most technologically advanced populations gravitate towards convenience foods, preprepared meals, and packaged snacks — which ironically, are a return to simple carbohydrates — and unfortunately, ones that are notoriously unhealthy: salted, stuffed in a foil bag, and sold by a mega-corporation.

These highly processed convenience foods seem to gain a foothold in modern societies as they’re relatively cheap and allow people more leisure time. But one side effect is that cultural variances in diet are slowly vanishing. Australians eat “Rice Bubbles” which are their version of Rice Krispies cereal, the German family enjoys frozen pizza, and Japanese kids say their favorite food is potato chips. Pretty much every country knows about McDonald’s and inevitably, that nation’s youth flock to it when offered a choice. Will a day will come when the stinky tofu stick is passed up for a french fry?

The book also has one dutiful segment devoted to the unhealthy effects of too much processed food: obesity and diabetes. The majority of American adults are overweight. Burp.

But looking at Hungry Planet made me realize that there’s a whole lot of awesome organic and non-processed foods I haven’t tried. But instead of being a hunter-gatherer or growing the food myself, my first-world convenience option requires I hit Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or the local farmer’s market. Not too back to basics there, but I guess it’s better than hitting the vending machine and then the gym.

Additional Reading: NPR, Spilt Milk, Neatorama

I’m happy to read a longer-form comic story from Adrian Tomine, one of my favorite contemporary comic book artists. Three issues of Optic Nerve (#11 is the last) have been devoted to Ben Tanaka, a pathetic, selfish twenty-something loser with some stereotypical Asian-American racial hang-ups. The character may appeal to those curious about life as a minority in America and the downside of interracial, romantic relationships.

While I don’t agree with Ben’s racist views, I can certainly relate to them. He’s bent on hooking up with a white woman, which he fails miserably at in Optic Nerve #10. So he journeys to New York to determine what’s up with Miko, his Japanese ex-girlfriend.

Much to his annoyance, he finds her dating a “white” guy. Ben confronts and pathetically argues with Miko, after which he sheepishly mumbles, “Don’t to this to me,” in his mind, the relationship is still all about how his ego is either stroked or bruised. Meanwhile, Ben’s Korean-American lesbian friend Alice is building a successful relationship with a “white” lady, Meredith.

I use quotes as Meredith is hapa, half Taiwanese and Caucasian, and Miko’s new boyfriend is actually American-Indian and Jewish. Ben isn’t able to wrap his head around this multiracial complexity, sticking to his ridiculous value judgement that a white guy and an Asian girl is pathetic, but an Asian guy and a white woman is something to celebrate. He tried to emulate the latter and failed. So he’s selfish, racist, and sexist, too.

Dejected, Ben Tanaka returns to California alone, suppressing the thought that the two women in his life have found happiness in new relationships. Unfortunately, Ben will likely blame his loneliness on a racist world and those people that seek to oppress him, failing to see that all his problems could be solved by some self-examination. And my desire to see Ben Tanaka to get kicked in the balls was more or less fulfilled by a “rice king” (Ben Tanaka’s words, not mine) and a cute hapa lesbian. I’ll take that.

Another strange aspect of Optic Nerve #11 is that because Tomine himself is Japanese-American, I’m more able to accept the Ben Tanaka character. If this same series was authored by someone of a different racial background, the exact same observations — true as they may be — might come across as offensive. I’m not exactly sure what to make of this thought.

I also find the mystique of interracial relationships rather juvenile. I’m Japanese-American (I grew up in Hawaii) in an interracial marriage. Racial mixing is common both in Hawaii and California, and when you see it everywhere, the exotic nature loses its edge. Still, it’s an issue that is worth highlighting because mainstream American culture is hopelessly behind the times in featuring minorities, let alone ones that cross the color lines.

In conclusion, I’m glad that Tomine is exploring more complex subject matter spread over several issues. There’s an important message, that minorities can be just as pathetically racist as anyone else, and a possible link between sociopath behavior and racism. However, I hope Tomine moves beyond this sort of adolescent, twenty-something angst subject matter, and picks up the pace a little. I’m fully expecting Optic Nerve #12 to show up two years from now.

The Number is yet another financial / retirement planning book that purports to help the reader figure out what their “Number” is: the amount of money needed to retire comfortably. It’s much less “how to” in favor of contemplating “why.” I found this approach alternately fascinating and frustrating.

Much of the book has us pondering the meaning of a fulfilling life, saving the formula for the “number” until the very end. In the interest of a concise review, here are the steps to calculate “The Number”:

1. Estimate how much you’ll need to live on per year in retirement.
2. It’s safe to withdraw around 4 percent annually from a reasonably well diversified portfolio.
3. Do the math to get “The Number.” If you think you need, say, $100,000 to live on annually, you’ll $2.5 million on the day you decide quit working.

The problem is the wide range of possible answers for #1. It will vary widely from person to person depending on what sort of lifestyle they want to enjoy during retirement. No financial adviser can do this.

The author sagely suggests that the perhaps the reason why people are so freaked out about retirement is they haven’t really thought about their life goals and as a result, how much money they would require. They may be socking away far too much, or more likely, far too little.

These are good points, but I felt frustrated because this book is directed at a different demographic — the baby boom generation. Many pages are spent inspiring people to question materialism, undo years of workaholic behavior, and find something more meaningful than a new car, a vacation home, and a great bottle of wine.

Yet, mixed in with these suggestions these noble suggestions, there are dire warnings directed towards the really wealthy — no, the ridiculously wealthy, who are enjoying a super-cushy existence at present and expect to maintain it. Eisenberg interviews an independently wealthy businessman who produces a chart, listing the approximate levels of wealth you’ll need to accumulate to sustain a certain lifestyle:

• “Comfortable” :: lives in one place, eats/travels modestly, though better than most, etc. -> $1 — $2 million
• “Comfortable+” :: likes occasional upgrade, mid-priced country club, maybe small second hone, etc -> $2 — $5 million
• “Kind of rich” :: likes finer things, eats/drinks/travels well, gives $ away, picks up checks, couple of nice houses, etc. -> $7 — $10 million
• “Rich” :: spends week / months abroad, exclusive gated golf communities, place for every season, fractional jets, sits on boards, etc. — > $20 million

I’m not sure if Eisenberg’s intent here is to make me say, “Wow, I really planned on riding around in a private jet and own several homes! I’m hopelessly screwed!” Because, my actual reaction is: “That’s great, because I’d be perfectly fine in the ‘comfortable’ category.”

I really have no desire to belong to a country club or any of the other posh materialist stuff on the list. Since many of the trappings of the “uber-rich” are so hopelessly out of reach for me, I’ve essentially given up trying — which sure makes it easier to save for retirement, as my step #1 of the “number” is within grasp.

But in the end, Eisenberg really hopes that every reader put some thought into their life’s purpose, which is admirable. Worrying about money should be an afterthought to defining a fulfilling life. I think he’s saying that instead of obsessing over the “number,” we ought to over what our life’s dreams are, and then figure out how much money we’d need to achieve them.

Note: For a more hands-on, practical financial planning book, I’d recommend any Suze Orman title, Smart Couples Finish Rich, or The Millionare Next Door.

Additional Reading: The Number Website

This is a pop-culture history book, celebrating those strange gadgets perfectly suited for half-asleep, late night television infomercials, when the odds of a impulse buy is supposedly high — or perhaps people dream about the products and awake deciding to buy one after a first cup of coffee.

The Ronco and Popeil products fill a practical need you didn’t know existed. Do you need a kitchen tool to make a spiral french fry out of a potato? Well, after watching Ron Popeil demonstrate one to a constantly clapping studio audience, you might think, yeah, I do.

A long line of the products had eye-catching names, many with the suffix “O-Matic”. You get the Chop-O-Matic (food chopper), the Dial-O-Matic (food slicer for making cross-cut fries), the Veg-O-Matic (slices, wedges, and dices with one stroke), and the Peel-O-Matic (tomato peeler). I suppose “Webomatica” is yet another product in this legacy.

Other products border on the bizarre, such as the Beauty-Rite Plastic Plant-Maker, the Sit-On Trash Compactor, and the Outside-Inside Magnetic Window Washer — essentially two sponges with magnets, tied together with a string, so you could wipe down the outside of a window pane while cleaning the inside. Now available at a thrift store near you, I imagine.

Part of the fun of this book is realizing how much the art of the pitch has stayed essentially the same over the years. Ron Popeil started as a salesman, doing live product demos in department stores. So naturally, with the advent of television, his sales pitches found a national audience. Hence, today’s infomercial could be added to the list of Popeil inventions.

The book contains a pretty good list of pitch tips (note that all of these line up surprisingly well to Steve Jobs’ Mac keynotes — I feel another post coming on):

Location, location, location: Setting up a kitchen item booth near the women’s restrooms guarantees a captive audience.

Build a crowd and hold ‘em: Attracting one or two people is hard, but attracts the next few, and when there’s a crowd of several, even more is guaranteed just to see what the others are watching.

Make the product sound and look indispensable. The gadgets have a basic theme of something useful tweaked to make it even better. There are many “multi-function” ones, such as the steamer with the plastic try on top specifically for vegetables.

Say it again — and again.

The amazing world of superlatives: Pepper the talk with loaded adjectives like “magic,” miracle,” “fantastic.”

Get the audience involved: Ask rhetorical questions, like “isn’t this amazing?”

Asking for the money — the turn: Price is never revealed until the end. First mention a higher price, and then say how low the actual “special” price is. An odd number like “4.89″ sounds much cheaper than a round 5, although the price difference is negligible.

But, wait! There’s more! The bonus product.

Your money back — no questions asked: This offer is given because most likely, the buyer won’t use it.

I mention often that I’m advertising-phobic. I really dislike being asked to buy something, usually because I want to think about things in a logical manner and make purchasing decisions following research — not because I succumbed to some salesman’s pitch. But I can still appreciate the entertainment value of a well-crafted ad. In fact, I find studies of past advertising fascinating, often because with the passage of time, the “new” lust fades and one can see products more objectively — and often for the silly inventions they actually were.

So the next time I’m in a store and see slight “improvements” of once-suitable products (a toothbrush with colored bristles that change color over time, or a laundry-soap ball), I smile and realize I have the long legacy of Popeil to thank.

Note: You can watch some of these product commericals at Biography.com.

Besides the Muppets, Sesame Street featured many odd musical segments and cartoons, seemingly drawn by drugged-out animators from the sixties. After flipping through the book, I thought it would be fun to check out some of these segments through YouTube. Here are some of the shorts which I think you’ll vividly remember, once reintroduced to them. They certainly brought back some odd memories (mostly sadness, confusion, and wonder) in my mind.

Fairy Alphabet

YouTube: Fairy Alphabet

This animation was always mesmerizing to me as a kid. I think it was the combination of the Renaissance fair music and a mellow female voice chanting the alphabet. The animation was also hypnotic, with various animals and vaguely medieval objects morphing into letters. I do distinctly recall however, that at a certain age I would get frustrated by this cartoon, expecting the animations to have something to do with the letters used — for example there’s a snake after “S” and a worms wit the “W”, but what does a hobby horse have to do with “J”? I think that was a sign it was time to move on to The Electric Company.

“J”

YouTube: J Song

I liked this animation because it had to do with the letter “J”, the first letter of my name. But in retrospect, I was definitely confused by some of the terms here (“journeyman” “jimmy” “jitterbug”) and was rather in awe of the grandmother who juggled sheep. There’s definitely a message here, about acceptance of eclectic people and their wacky hobbies. Maybe that’s why I’m okay with a bottle cap collection.

Pinball Numbers

YouTube: Pinball

There was always something amazing about watching a ball rolling along a track. I remember being into mazes and trying to predict where things would go. I think the first half of this cartoon is way better with the ball on ramps and stuff, but it’s still worth watching if only for the energetic music.

Daddy Dear

YouTube: Daddy Dear

This one scared me as a kid — definitely during last part where a girl’s doll closed its eyes and drifted off into the dark. Oh, and that dandelion with the lion’s head… talk about freaky.

Lost Kid and Yo-Yo Guy

YouTube: Lost Kid

I used to jet out of the room when this one came on. The idea of being lost and some crazy yo-yo wielding freak who morphed into architecture and fountains was just too heavy. I guess we would have found out about the sixties sooner or later, but this psychedlic introduction was a bit odd.

Counting Rocks

YouTube: Counting Rocks

I loved this one. I think it was because growing up in Hawaii means being surrounded by rocks and sand. Basically, it’s just a bunch of rocks with high, squeaky voices turning into numbers, which is no big deal in retrospect, but I still think it’s cool.

Ball Rolling

YouTube: Ball Rolling

This ball rolling down a bunch of silver scaffolds was fun but creepy at the same time. It’s pitch black around the roller-coaster, and at the end, the ball drops into a grinding machine and is reduced to a red powder. I think this was a bad move because as a kid, I identified with the ball, and seeing this new-found friend crushed to a powder in the dark, as its reward for navigating a metal maze was not exactly a heart-warming concept.

I’m pretty sure that in later years, the grinding part was replaced with an ice cream sundae.

Funky Squares

YouTube: Funky Squares

This funky groove probably set the stage for later musical appreciation. It’s a cool animation, and pretty amazing what could be created with a bunch of squares, fun music, and imagination.

Mr. Stupid Typewriter

YouTube: Typewriter

This dumb typewriter was a recurring character. I think the most distinctive part of his scenes was the introductory: “Nooney nooney nooney noo.” I also like his “Wha?” to voice confusion.

A common educational strategy on Sesame Street seemed to be a moronic character that slowly learned things. As a kid, I remember learning along with the Muppet-morons, but later upon understanding the concept, it was a real ego booster to see the same segment again, and get to feel superior to the still confused character.

The Lonely “N”

YouTube: The Lonely N

This segment alternately confused, saddened, and scared me. It had a spaceship, which was a plus — but being a lonely “N” on a far away planet was a truly horrible thought. I always wondered how they would get down off of that mountain, since it didn’t seem like that spaceship was ever coming back.

So to sum up, it seems as a small child I was scared of the dark, of being lost, separated from my parents, and things that changed shape or looked like lions or monsters. Sounds pretty normal. But after watching some of these trippy cartoons, I think I need my blankie.

The Second Coming Of Steve Jobs begins with his removal from Apple Computer, and follows the computer visionary as he struggles to rise, phoenix-like from his ashes by starting a new company, NeXT computer, and purchasing the floundering Pixar from George Lucas. Throughout the process it shows how his personal quirks affect many aspects of each startup, from the expectation of perfection from employees, his anger at Apple computer, to the value of style in addition to (and sometimes over) substance.

This book is filled with anecdotes offered up by acquaintances and co-workers of Jobs, and even delves into some minutiae that is far too gossipy in nature for my taste: the various “New York” women Jobs dated, his relationship to Larry Ellison (including a bizarre prank they played on an Apple fan who naively wanted to be CEO of the struggling, late nineties Apple), and his propensity to manage underlings through rants, tirades, and expletives.

Although many of the stories were taken from a wide range of personal interviews and sources, I noticed some common threads throughout:

1. Many voiced difficultly understanding how Jobs could be charming one moment while cruel and cutting the next.
2. Whether or not his tirades were real or faked for effect, for many they were a powerful motivator to do their best work. By obsessing over tiny details (maybe 1% of the actual work), many reacted by putting their full energies into making the other 99% exemplar, even if Jobs never personally commented on it.
3. The psychology of failure (NeXT layoffs, and Disney halting production on Pixar’s first attempts at Toy Story) were quite possibly cathartic, enabling him to move beyond his past business failures, and return to Apple renewed, while simultaneously bringing Pixar forward to astounding (even by Hollywood standards) success.

All in all, I found this book a mesmerizing read. I’d advise keeping in mind that it was based on many anecdotes likely tainted by the passage of time (and sometimes unclear motivations) and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt. Until we get the Steve Job’s version of iWoz, the Jobs legacy will still largely be a question mark.

But if you concentrate on the facts presented here, it provides a nice framework — and there’s no denying Apple’s moves from 2001 to the present give more evidence to this book’s basic concept that Steve Jobs did in fact “return” from the technological grave — stronger than before — and along the way, turned Apple and Pixar into brand names that evoke quality and excellence.

Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Boy On Earth by Chris Ware is the closest to a recent comic masterpiece I’ve read. There’s so much perfect about it.

With many otherwise outstanding graphic novels, there’s something that slips a bit from perfection, such as mesmerizing art but a slightly lacking story (Blankets, Gemma Bovery) or the opposite is true (Persepolis). Chris Ware on the other hand, has an exacting, detailed style and designs his layouts so carefully that his work seems to have been created on computer by a team of graphic designers and illustrators (which it isn’t). His stories are similarly crafted, with multiple interpretations, visual symbolism, and a disjointed narrative that seems certainly plotted out beforehand by a team of writers (which it probably wasn’t, either). It’s astounding to realize this 380 page work is a one-man production.

The plot centers around Jimmy Corrigan, your basic urban loser, who spends the majority of his time alone in a crappy office job, fielding phone calls from an overprotective, nagging mother. Jimmy however has a reasonably active imagination plus the common introvert’s problem that he’s feebly incapable of communicating his fantasies to anyone, let alone women he’s interested in.

Jimmy receives a letter from his long-forgotten father, whom he doesn’t know a thing about. He travels just before Thanksgiving to meet this unknown mystery-man. Over the course of the awkward visit (during which Jimmy runs away and is hit by a car between meals at fast-food joints), his father slowly warms to Jimmy as does his grandfather and step-sister.

The story sounds a bit mundane, but Ware makes it mesmerizing through outstanding art and visual symbolism. For example, the iconic yet tragic Superman makes a recurring appearance, representing the concept of a flawed “super man” — a father figure. The first pages document Jimmy’s mother’s affair with a Superman actor at an autograph signing. In this short sequence, we’re introduced to several of the themes explored in the work: a mother that is less than stellar, an uncomfortable loneliness eased by fantasy, betrayal by a father, uncomfortable sexual situations, and a childhood disillusionment with the adult world. The “super man” can be seen a childhood ideal that is often dashed to bits (in darkly humorous ways).

The book is full of decidedly non-super father figures. In addition to Jimmy’s dad, we meet his grandfather who’s own lonely childhood is conveyed through ornate flashbacks to turn-of-the-century Chicago. In turn, his father is a strict disciplinarian who stifles the imagination of the Corrigan patriarch. In the present day, this abused boy has become a walker-shuffling skinny old man shopping for a little boy’s toilet seat so he can sit down and not fall into the toilet. He also bears the convenient, aged privilege of speaking his mind without fear of offense — the exact opposite of Jimmy who is afraid to say anything out of fear of embarrassment.

In yet another fairly brilliant visual metaphor, the women of Jimmy Corrigan never show their faces, appearing either slightly out of frame, from behind, or hidden behind hair or hands. I interpret this as a visual representation of how Jimmy is unable to look females in the eye — he’s deathly afraid of them. The only two female characters that ever show their faces are Jimmy’s step-sister and his mother — both near the novel’s end.

This estrogen-phobia is evoked by panels subtly representing Jimmy’s point of view. In one sequence, Jimmy is seated on the plane next to a particularly forward and intense girl, whose face isn’t shown, but her long legs and breasts are noticeably on display. After telling Jimmy that he shouldn’t eat the airline food and that his father must be a jerk, she barks at him for staring at her breasts. Of course, we know that Jimmy may have been sneaking a peek, since that’s what we’ve been forced to notice about this lady through the art. This sequence of panels serves to have us empathize with Jimmy and we know what he’s thinking although it’s not explicitly presented from his viewpoint.

Yet at other times, images are specifically shown from Jimmy’s stance: before he meets his long-lost father, we’re shown several identically-sized panels of old men with their eyes blacked out. Each is an imaginary father in Jimmy’s mind as he tries to predict what his dad will look like. It’s a daring assumption that the reader will “get” this sequence, and the book is full of bold decisions like this.

Unfortunately, I can only scratch the surface here. I’ve read Jimmy Corrigan several times, discovering new things on each return visit. I think if you give it a chance, you’ll be surprised at the masterful way Chris Ware utilizes the comics medium. There are so many neat things going on that experiencing it is like deconstructing Citizen Kane and analyzing all the bits and pieces of visual technique that work on the subconscious. Yeah, it’s that good.

The graphic novel continues on where Persepolis 1 left off. Marjane’s parents have sent her from Iran (still at war with Iraq) to live in Vienna. She experiences the typical growing pains of teenager-hood, except mixed with the “outsider” status of an Iranian immigrant without a family to support her. She feels guilt because people are dying in her country and she is not experiencing it, but also resentment towards her own culture, in that she is free to experience the artistic and sexual freedoms of the west.

However, these freedoms fail Marjane as she is shuffled from home to home, and at last spends a period of time homeless on the streets. Eventually, she returns to Iran, hoping for a more sensible life, but falls into another situation of uncertain identity. Her marriage to a stable, Iranian man is initially embraced but soon falls apart. It’s clear that the free thinking Marjane experienced (and sometimes resisted) while away from Iran actually changed her more than she realized. She now lives in Paris.

That said, there is still much opportunity for humor and wry observations along the way. Especially funny to me, is her relationship with a particularly wimpy writer Markus, and her art-school experiences in Iran. Marjane also has an ability to make openness and confession entertaining in a way that doesn’t seem like you’re just reading someone’s self-centered diary (or blog). I think it’s because she understands the cultural context for her experiences. Even the break-up of two lovers is somehow given a political analogy.

Note: Here’s a link to Marjane’s blog. Also, Persepolis is being made into an animated film, to be released in 2007. It looks like the film retains the stark, graphic design look of the comic. I for one will want to see it.

Most hilarious is Today’s Special, a deconstruction of the exotic food in fancy Manhattan restaurants (choice quote: “If cooking is an art, I think we’re in our Dada phase”). Sedaris serves up layers of odd recipies, like skirt steak coated with suffocated peaches and asprin sauce.

This talent at jumbling odd yet imaginative nouns takes him into amusing places as in Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist, covering his descent into performance art via useless college courses and methamphetamines. Soon he’s hanging out with Alfred Jarry wanna-bes and their human-hair bowls. At story’s end, Sedaris is pouring a milkshake on his head in an art gallery performance before his wise-cracking, IBM computer programmer father.

Sedairs is alternately morbid, cynical, artsy, homosexual, and sentimental, but he’s not above base humor, as in You Can’t Kill The Rooster, a breakdown of his younger brother who oddly never took on the relatively refined tastes of his siblings (in that, he prefers pot to speed). The Rooster’s crass talk runs the lines of “If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed,” and “Fuck the stock talk, hoss, I ain’t investing in shit.” The icing on the cake is how Sedaris’ aforementioned programmer father finds such blunt banter admirable. Regarding The Rooster: “Now there’s a guy who knows how to communicate.”

Eventually, Sedaris moves to France, resulting in several stories about his expatriate adjustments. He deftly writes (still in English) the stumbling grammar spoken by a beginning French language student:

“Sometimes me cry alone at nght. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you.”

His French teacher is not amused:

“‘Were you always this palicmkrexis?’ she asked. ‘Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine.’”

Ha, ha, ha. I open this book on the train on my way to work, and a half-hour magically vanishes into Sedaris’ fruity, pointed world.

Woz is inspiring in a different way from Steve Jobs. He admits to being a shy introvert, spending time on his projects alone, and getting satisfaction from having a new idea and working hard on it just so you can see a cool thing all by yourself. Money and fame don’t even come into his equation.

Overall, the book is an easy read: I polished it off in a handful of evenings before bed. The writing style is simple, and friendly as if Woz is talking directly to you as a pal. There is only one really technical part (that went right over my head) where he describes the workings behind the Apple floppy drive.

It’s also funny; there’s a lot of ink devoted to Woz’s infamous pranks. He documents his “phone phreak” days with Steve Jobs, where they built blue boxes that could hijack the telephone system and allow a person to make free long distance phone calls. Another really entertaining one is where Woz builds a television jammer no larger than a pen. He used it in college to make televisions go haywire, and when people would approach the TV in order adjust it, he’d turn it off, making them think something about their body position was clearing up the reception. By doing this selectively, he could get several people huddled around a TV in strange poses, one leg pointed north or a finger on the screeen. Others would then tell them to hold that position so they could watch the show, resulting in an absurd theatre. But as an example of Woz’s shyness, he never revealed he was the one responsible, preferring to chuckle from a distance.

But the impetus of Apple Computer is the meat of the story. Woz states that he was the brains behind the Apple I, and pretty much built it himself. Steve Jobs’ role was to call into play his many personal connections, such as Ron Wayne who did a lot of the legal paperwork for starting a business, and negotiate the first big order from the Byte Shop. It’s obvious that although Woz had the enginerring brilliance to create the personal computer, he needed a lot of other people’s help, namely Steve Jobs, to turn it into a business.

Along the way Woz gives tidbits of life advice. To close, here are some that appear in his final chapter, “Rules to Live By”:

“Believe in yourself. Don’t waver.”

“Artists work best alone.”

“If you don’t enjoy working on stuff for yourself — with your own money and your own resources, after work if you have to — then you definitely shouldn’t be doing it!”

“It’s so rare to be able to see the future… but when you see it, you know it. If this ever happens to you, leap at the chance to get involved. Trust your instincts. It isn’t often that the future lets you in like that.”

I’ve gotten many a laugh from his segments on This American Life. I sheepishly must admit, I haven’t read any of his books (although my wife has, namely, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Cordoroy and Denim). Now of course, I want to read them.

At the event, Sedaris read several of his writings:

1. His experience as an assistant to a medical examiner, witnessing gruesome autopsies and horrible deaths.
2. Two Kate Bush loving birds try to break into his house, leading him to plaster windows with terrorist pictures and 70s album art featuring faces on it.
3. Rude taxi driver who asks him “Do you like the dick?” resulting in an evening at his sister’s looking at seventies animal porn.
4. The cut-off of water in France mashed with two drug dealers in a trailer, leading to the question: who is the woman and who is the man?

Sedaris recommended two books written by other authors:

Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Shehan, about the schizophrenic Silvia Frumkin. Sedaris called it funny and interesting, as the author smartly stays out of the powerful personality, and you don’t have to feel too sorry for Frumkin because she’s dead.

World War Z by Max Brooks. According to Sedaris, this is a realistic zombie book. The zombies don’t run.

I was very impressed with Sedaris’ writing, which is concise yet imaginitive. His subject matter is alternately mundane, surreal, sarcastic, and hilarious.

In all of his stories he presented, he made leaps from one plot thread to another, with faith that the reader is smart enough to follow him. This leads to a multilayered feeling where themes from each anecdote overlap, causing exquisite connections, such as a drug dealer’s wife’s crass views on homosexuality, a vase of flowers used to make coffee, and Sedaris’ relationship with his significant other. His ability connect the dots is amazing.

I’m thinking one mark of a truly great writer is someone who can make casual observations fascinating. I get the feeling Sedaris could write about waiting in line at the post office and make it simultaneously hilarious and profound.

This graphic novel is an autobiography, in the same vein as Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Joe Matt’s The Poor Bastard, and Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You.

However it parts dramatically from the typical Drawn and Quarterly fare in two big ways: One, Marjane illustrates in a minimalist, graphic design manner, in large swaths of black and white and little detail, making Charles Schultz look ornate. Second, Marjane’s story about about a constricted life in a conservative nation at war is adult, blunt, neither romanticized nor glorified. The wordy and smart writing is an interesting contrast to the sometimes child-like drawings.

At times, the scope of the work is epic. This entire first volume documents only Marjane’s childhood — not even a teenager, yet witnessing kidnappings, arrests, killings, and family friends taken away and executed. Even from a young age she was forced to confront serious issues of politics and war, as Iran slipped from a free, intellectual country into a conservative one ruled by religious extremists.

It’s involving to see school kids being taught to beat their chests and wear veils, shocking to read about children from poor neighborhoods given golden keys before being blown to bits at the hands of the Iraqis on the front lines, and nearly exhausting to realize this was all witnessed by a girl not even a teenager.

What keeps this heavy, depressing story line from becoming unbearable is Marjane’s illustration style. It took me some time to get used to the sometimes jarring contrast between subject matter and artwork, but it soon grew on me.

First, it adds a needed edge of humor. The expressions on the character’s faces when expressing dismay or laughter is at times unintentionally exaggerated.

It’s worth recalling Scott McCloud’s theory in Understanding Comics that the more simplistic the rendering, the easier it is for people to relate to the characters and see themselves in that role, because the faces are so abstracted.

So despite the foreign country and theme, we see Marjane as a typical daughter, and her parents as relateable, loving, caring parents, despite the chaos blossoming around them. It may be the key to this novel’s success at introducing foreign events and subject matter to the Western world.

While reading Persepolis 1, I began to wonder if America could ever descend into fascism or religious fundamentalism. It is said that for Germans living under the Nazis, civil liberties were slowly whittled away like salami on a deli slicer. When people finally realized what was happening, the sausage was gone.

Judging from Marjane’s experience, the things we should watch out for are propaganda (a good observation is made that every day, the Iranian news reported that 10 Iraqi planes had been shot down. If true, for the number of years they were at war, Iraq must have had a larger air force than the USA). Second, the disappearance of many citizens under the guise of political prisoners. Lastly, the government’s desire of control (under the guise of war) over private life: regulations on clothing, parties with liquor, protests, etc. I find it hard to believe any of these things could ever happen in the United States, but it’s something to think about.

Anyhow, I highly recommend Persepolis if you want an engaging, unique view of life through Persian eyes.

Note: Here’s a link to Marjane’s blog. Also, I did not know at the time I wrote this that Persepolis is being made into an animated film, to be released in 2007. It looks like the film retains the stark, graphic design look of the comic. I for one will want to see it.

So here’s a list of the book titles on the 1001 Books list shoved through the filter of the AFI 100. The result is just a handful of books to read that would make an easy start:

The Godfather (3 on AFI) (IMDB)

Gone With The Wind (4 on AFI) (IMDB)

The Graduate (7 on AFI) (IMDB) (Webomatica)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (20 on AFI) (IMDB)

The Grapes Of Wrath (21 on AFI) (IMDB)

2001: A Space Odyssey (22 on AFI) (IMDB) (Webomatica)

The Maltese Falcon (23 on AFI) (IMDB)

To Kill A Mockingbird (34 on AFI) (IMDB)

Doctor Zhivago (39 on AFI) (IMDB)

A Clockwork Orange (46 on AFI) (IMDB) (Webomatica)

All Quiet On The Western Front (54 on AFI) (IMDB)

The Third Man (57 on AFI) (IMDB)

Ben-Hur (72 on AFI) (IMDB)

Wuthering Heights (73 on AFI) (IMDB)

Frankenstein (87 on AFI) (IMDB)

Anyhow, I think I’ll do another post that lists all the books on the 1001 books list that were turned into movies. Yet another way to tackle this insanely lengthy list.