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books

Little Gold Book of Yes Attitude

I’ve been on quite a self-help binge lately; what with my whole mastery push for 2009 and now another Gitomer book. I’ve enjoyed this one the most so far because it really ties in with my current thinking. Historically, my way of thinking was that this whole positive attitude stuff was a bunch of bull. In fact, I’ve spent a lifetime counting my failures, lamenting them, and tossing in plenty of self-deprecating humor. This potentially bad attitude certainly hasn’t destroyed my life. And I feel that I’m a relatively well-adjusted adult without the need for an attitude adjustment, but this book was next in the stack of Gitomer books so I cracked it open.

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The Audacity of Hope

I’ve been dreading this book. Loaned to me by a friend, it sat on my bookshelf for months. Each glimpse of it brought feelings of inadequacy. Inadequacy that results when something potentially educational or informative sits on my bookshelf while I continue reading works of fiction or books about sports. Fiction=escape. Sports=leisure. Politics=work.

Then I started it, like in April of 2007. I made it half way through then I got really board. It sat, half-finished, for more than a year. I picked it up again after the election. In the end, I’m looking for direction. I waffle on all of the major issues facing this country and I disagree with the extremists on both sides. This book is basically Obama’s take on the breadth of issues that I want to be conversant in, so it’s a start. A start on the practice of understanding where I stand on the issues facing this country.

Obama organizes this beast into nine chapters. I’ve listed them below with Obama’s titles in bold print and my take on the what I think the key points of each chapter are or what the subheadings for each chapter should be (he doesn’t have subchapters, except for the occasional line-skip). I didn’t have time to add my take on everything.

(1) Republicans and Democrats

Yes, we are different. But not that much different.

No matter how wrongheaded I might consider their policies to be – and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies – I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them the values that I share.

Oh, you had me at hello. But wait:

But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

This is important stuff folks (look past that fact that you and I know hunters who read books). If he can “reach across the aisle” and if he can convince us to listen and work together, we are going to resolve things more efficiently.

(2) Values

Obama says he is not an ideologue.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

He brings this point up when talking about a Republican’s efforts to squash a school breakfast bill for five-year-olds because it would “crush their spirit of self-reliance.” He goes a little further and says:

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society.

I’m in agreement. Who wouldn’t be? But I listen when people tell me stories about government handouts that get wasted. I listen, because it makes me mad. Heck, increase my taxes if it goes to programs that help people who want to be helped. When Obama was a community organizer, he was on the ground and could insure that tax dollars for his area went to the right place. I know some people who run a local neighborhood organization and if I could channel my tax dollars to them to use for their projects, I’d pay even more taxes. Why? Because they efficiently help people and they care. How can Obama insure the same level efficiency from Pennsylvania Avenue? I don’t have the answers.

(3) Our Constitution

Okay, this gets theoretical. I’m listening to John Adams right now and struggling with things that Obama talks about. I’m a quant guy and getting my head around this constructionist versus contextual reading of the Constitution is difficult. In the end, Obama chooses the interpretive route:

Ultimately, though, I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution – that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.

This is a can of worms and I can only pretend to support why I’m on Obama’s side. Maybe it’s because the Constitution was written when slavery was commonplace. John Adams fought hard against slavery but couldn’t get any verbiage to decry it written into the Declaration of Independence (and I think he was in France when the Constitution was written). Things change man, they change.

(4) Politics

Hopefully Obama is as brutally honest with us now that he is running the show as when he was writing this book. He explains about how he transitioned from being a guy hesitant to call donors for contributions to someone who actually enjoyed it. I say this is honest because it doesn’t seem like he needs to admit this. But he does:

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising, I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population – that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.

And a few paragraphs later:

The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.

I just hope he stays in touch with these feelings.

So now, he spends the rest of the book getting down and dirty with the issues. He takes them one-by-one, just clipping down through issues and giving his take.

(5) Opportunity

  • Education
  • Science
  • Energy
  • Globalization and Free Trade
  • Social Security
  • Minimum Wage
  • Health Care
  • Taxes

(6) Faith

  • Abortion
  • Same-sex Marriage
  • Separation of Church and State
  • Prayer in Schools

(7) Race

  • Enforcement of Nondiscrimination Laws
  • Deteriorating Condition of the Inner City Poor
  • Immigration and Undocumented Workers

(8) The World Beyond Our Borders

  • Isolationism
  • Defense Spending
  • Defense Strategy
  • Military Action and the U.N. Security Council
  • Imposition of Democracy
  • Providing Development Assistance

(9) Family

  • Day Care
  • Flexible Work Schedules

He talks about a lot of stuff and lays out his take on all of these things over the course of the pages. I just don’t have time to deal with all of this right now. I want to go down the list and figure out where he stands, mostly because I want to hold him to it. Heck, I end up agreeing with him for the most part. But I have stuff to do. I’m going to have to get this book when I get a Kindle so I can make notes and refer back to it. Yeah, that’s it.

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books

The Hunters

This is the third book in Griffin’s Presidential Agent series. A series which is fast becoming one of my top fiction reading experiences. I think the stuff is genius.

I really like the way Griffin humanizes his characters. He gives them quirks and cool traits that add to their personalities and add a lot to the story. But what sets him apart is the pure volume of characters in which he does this. I lose count of all of the antagonists, protagonists, and supporting characters for which Griffin opens this window into their psyche. He does it sometimes through his standard narration written in choppy, cryptic prose. His main tool, though, is to use the thoughts of the characters themselves, which he puts in italics. The thoughts read like a standard conversation at times, it’s just that it’s a conversation going on in the heads of the characters and not being verbalized. I don’t see this method used that often by any of my other favorite thriller writers, but Griffin employs it extensively.

I think he employs this method because it’s the only way he can throw first person style thoughtfulness into his narration. He can’t take the first person perspective throughout because these books are so big and Bournesque. If he took the main character’s perspective instead of that of a narrator, he would lose a lot because the main character can’t be all over the globe at the same time. But by going into first person mode every so often, you get great character insights. This way, the reader can get a little more emotionally involved and really refine who they like and dislike.

In the end, these books get me involved in the characters like Grafton and Hillerman do, but they capture some of that international intrigue and thrill left out of a crime novel. It’s a good mix.

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Mastery

This is a little book that packs a big motivational and inspirational wallop. Leonard is an ex-military guy and writer for Esquire who took up aikido late in life (age 47). He uses his exploration of aikido as the basis for this book, but his thoughts and theories can be applied to any pursuit. I got a lot of out it.

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One Shot

When you’re reading a book in the middle of a series, you know the hero isn’t going to die. This takes away some of the anxiety you feel when the hero embarks on the “attack on the fortress,” against impossible odds of course. Which is not a good thing because it also takes away some of the excitement of the book. However, series writers usually align their main characters with friends, family, cohorts, and colleagues who fall in harm’s way, thereby putting someone you care about in peril, which restores some of the excitement.

Child is expert at this. He often has Reacher finishing up the book with an “attack on the fortress” and Reacher rarely goes in alone. He’s usually accompanied by at least one highly attractive female and one person with some military or law enforcement experience. It’s always pretty implausible, but who cares. I don’t care how formulaic Child gets with this stuff, he always manages to throw in enough twists and coolness that each book seems fresh and fun.

My wife and I differ on our fiction choices; my tastes are more accepting of a slower paced mystery-style thriller, whereas Gail prefers something that runs at breakneck speed. However, we meet at Lee Child and both like the series. They’re good stories and Reacher, the main character, is outrageous. Who can’t love a guy who lives completely off the grid and only travels with the clothes on his back (which he replaces occasionally and washes almost nightly)?

Chock up another great one. The popular fiction I’ve read this year has been great. Shortly I’m going to sit down and review my year in books. Maybe I’ll do that on Christmas Day, seems like a great Christmas Day kind of thing to do.

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books

P is for Peril

I’m getting close to catching up with Grafton’s alphabet mystery things. They’re just frickin’ reliable and I can bank on some great fun. I would love to know how Grafton feels about her predecessors like Raymond Chandler. In certain ways she pays homage by creating a hard-boiled, lonesome, private detective embroiled in smartly woven crime novels that highlight greed, corruption, and other human frailties. But she also pokes fun a little and makes things lighter. This book made me think of some similarities and differences.

One method to deepen the persona of said private detective is to build a relationship with coffee, cigarettes, or some other sort of vice. For example, in The Long Goodbye Chandler often had Marlowe making coffee. Real good coffee. I seem to recall rich descriptions of a simple cup and it was easy for me to picture Marlowe hunched over a cup of coffee, reading the LA Times, sorting through the next steps in solving whatever mystery was unfolding.

In much the same way, Grafton has Millhone eating McDonald’s all the time. Junk food, it’s another vice. But it allows Grafton to throw in some humor. Early on, Millhone has this run-in with breakfast.

I stopped off at McDonald’s and ordered coffee and a couple of Egg McMuffins. I needed the comfort of junk food as well as the nourishment, if that’s what you want to call it. I munched while I drove, eating with such eagerness I bit my own index finger.

It’s easy to picture a Millhone eating in her car while she’s ruminating on the details of the case. Grafton’s methods always keep it a little lighter, but I think it’s just as effective for character development and it strikes the right chords with me for the most part. I don’t think Millhone is supposed to be as dark as Marlowe, and she isn’t.

But both Millhone and Marlowe are alike in that both of them shun the societal norms of marriage, kids, and settling down. Recall that passage I talked about where Marlowe goes on a tirade against any other life but the one he is living. Take a read, I excerpted it in The Long Goodbye post. Millhone has a moment kind of like that when she goes to interview someone for her case. She’s interviewing a woman at the woman’s home, where there’s a handful of screaming, rambunctious kids. The screaming is so loud that Millhone can’t concentrate on the conversation. She thinks:

I tried to concentrate on what Blanche was saying, but all I could think about was that even at my age, a tubal ligation probably wasn’t out of the question.

So, much like Chandler, Grafton crafts Millhone in a manner that you never have to worry about her giving up this detective thing. Maybe we’re wrong though, who knows, maybe at “Z,” Millhone will have a husband and a kid and just ride off into the sunset. Something to look forward to I guess. That would certainly close out Millhone.

Hillerman died a few months ago and I feel like he never closed out his characters. But I may be wrong because I didn’t read the last few with that thought in mind because I didn’t realize how close to death he was. I’ll reread them all when I retire.

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books

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Endlessly fascinating! I know, it sounds cliché, but it accurately describes this read. Every time I sat down to read it, I was engaged, tuned in, and thinking about my relationship with food (a relationship that is somewhat warped). I think that’s what Pollan is trying to do here, just give you information so you can think about what ties you and your food together. He nails it big time and although I’m not going to make any major changes in my eating habits immediately, I have a feeling that this book will stick in my mind forever and certainly change how I view what I shovel into my gullet.

Warning, this is an aside! Before I launch into my take on this book, I need to mention something about really great nonfiction and really great fiction. I’m never as captivated by really great nonfiction as I am by really great fiction. This book still took me a few weeks to read and it’s one of the best chunks of nonfiction I’ve read in years. Contrast this to a little piece of Scalzi’s sci-fi that I read while I was reading this book; I banged through it in a matter of days. I just get along a little better with fiction, I guess.

Pollan structures this book as a description of four meals that he consumes with family and friends. He uses each meal as a mechanism to describe four different ways that food can get to your plate. He digs deep, and goes way back to the original speck of energy that indirectly caused the origination of that morsel of food you’re going to put in your mouth. In the process, he goes on numerous thoughtful and often humorous diatribes about various social and ethical consequences of eating what we eat. It’s not preaching at all, it’s just discussing. I think he does a good job of looking at things from multiple angles.

The four meals in order are:

  1. Industrial (burgers, fries, and McNuggets in the car on a California expressway, with wife and son)
  2. Organic Industrial (oven roasted chicken and vegetables, steamed asparagus, organic ice cream and organic blackberries, all purchased from Whole Foods, with wife and son)
  3. Grass Fed (grill roasted chicken and sweet corn, chocolate souffle, from Polyface Farm in Virginia, with friends)
  4. Perfect Meal (wild California pig, slain by Pollan himself, hand picked greens, Bing cherry cake, with fellow hunters and gatherers and wife and son)

Think of these meals as a continuum – a continuum from most processed (McDonald’s) to least processed (wild pig), from higher on the food chain to lower, and from industrial to private. Do not interpret this order as going from unhealthy to healthy, unsustainable to sustainable, or ethically wrong to ethically virtuous. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if many interpret it this way. Pollan, at times, may come off as self-righteous with an agenda, but I think he tempers it with a grasp of reality. I read it with an open mind and I haven’t checked any of his facts. I assume they are mostly correct because this book hasn’t been met with any noticeable public outcry from, say, the beef industry or McDonald’s. But like any work of nonfiction, or news story, read it with skepticism.

So on to the four meals. The basis for the industrial meal is corn, and Pollan explores it in detail in the first quarter of the book. I knew I was going to like this book when I came across a few interesting gems like the following within the first 30 pages.

On where the term corned beef came from:

… Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt – hence “corned beef”. …

On where the term corn hole came from:

… the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Eventually Pollan converts to a very serious tone when discussing corn. The “corniness” of his family’s meal from McDonald’s is probably higher than you think.

Some time later I found another way to to calculate just how much corn we had eaten that day. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant. … soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (28 percent). …

I never thought of corn this way. Even if you don’t agree or trust his facts (and he recites a ton of data), this book will make you think of corn differently. You will make the link between fossil fuels and corn production, between government subsidies and corn production, between obesity and corn production, and between the environment and corn production. Links that may be debated as to their direct or indirect effect on the well-being of humanity, but thought-provoking and worthy of consideration nonetheless. He sums the corn/industrial section up with:

… America’s corn-fed food chain looks like an unalloyed disaster. I mentioned earlier that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition for the energy captured by plants and stored as carbohydrates, energy we measure in calories. There is a limit to how many of those calories the world’s arable land can produce in a year, and an industrial meal of meat and processed food consumes – and wastes – an unconscionable amount of that energy. To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do), is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90% of its energy is lost – to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken. This is why vegetarians advocate eating “low on the food chain”; every step in the food chain reduces the amount of energy by a factor of ten, which is why in any food system there are only a fraction as many predators as there are prey. But processing food also burns energy. What this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children that just mine. …

The thing is, despite his tone, I don’t expect him to give up McDonald’s, especially since his son likes it. He left me with the impression that he’s open-minded about it all; that if his kid says “hey dad, let’s get a McNugget meal,” Pollan would grab a salad and maybe even a small order of fries, and think nothing of it.

Corn falls by the wayside, but the term industrial hangs around for the next quarter of the book because Pollan uses it as a modifier for his organic meal. He unearths a fair amount of hypocrisy occurring in our country’s recent obsession with organic and discusses the facts and perceptions around the term. Here is a synopsis:

And yet, and yet…an industrial organic meal such as mine does leave deep footprints on our world. The lot of the workers who harvested the vegetables and gathered up Rosie for slaughter is not appreciably different from that of those on non-organic factory farms. The chickens lived only marginally better lives than their conventional counterparts; in the end a CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] is a CAFO, whether the food served in it is organic or not. As for the cows that produced the milk in our ice cream, they may well have spent time outdoors in an actual pasture…, but the organic label guarantees no such thing. And while the organic farms I visited don’t receive direct government payments, they do receive other subsidies from taxpayers, notably subsidized water and electricity in California. …

But perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked in Arizona…to the moment I walk it out the doors of my Whole Foods. …

… And so, today, the organic food industry finds itself in a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes unsustainable position: floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.

He spends more time on this topic and weighs the pros and cons of going organic, industrial, or industrial organic. This gets kind of tiresome and circuitous, but makes a lot of sense when he moves on to the next meal; the grass fed meal based on ingredients from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia.

Pollan had heard about Polyface Farm in his research so he called up Salatin and requested to purchase a steak and have it Fedexed to Pollan’s home. Salatin said no, because Fedexing a steak was explicitly against his code of ethics. Salatin says:

“Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn’t mean we should do it, not if we’re really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.

The interesting thing is that Salatin’s Polyface Farm makes no claims about being organic and Salatin actually detests the word.

… Polyface Farm is technically not and organic farm, though by any standard it is more “sustainable” than virtually any organic farm. Its example forces you to think a lot harder about what these words – sustainable, organic, natural – really mean.

Thus we embark upon what I think is the most fascinating part of this book: the stories of Pollan’s time on Polyface Farm. This Salatin guy refers to himself as an “alternative farmer” or as a “grass farmer.” He basically uses the ecosystem on his farm to maximize his use of the land. Here is a passage that I think is important:

It isn’t hard to see why there isn’t much institutional support for the sort of low-capital, thought-intensive farming that Joe Salatin practices: He buys next to nothing. When a livestock farmer is allowed to “practice complexity” – to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to – he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds that he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

One the coolest examples is the way they have the chickens graze on the same area that cattle have after a three or four day lag. Salatin says “…you’ll always find birds following herbivores…that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate.” Pollan elaborates:

… It seems the chickens eschew fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in – but not a day longer. That’s because the fly larvae in the manure are on a four-day cycle, he explained. “Three days is ideal. That gives the grubs a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.” The result is prodigious amounts of protein for the hens, the insects supplying as much as a third of their total diet – and making their eggs unusually rich and tasty. By means of this simple little management trick, Joel is able to use his cattle’s waste to “grow” large quantities of high-protein chicken feed for free; he says this trims his cost of producing eggs by twenty-five cents per dozen. … The cows further oblige the chickens by shearing the grass; chickens can’t navigate in grass more than about six inches tall.

Incredible isn’t it? I thought this was so cool, but it’s only one of the tasty morsels Pollan serves up in the Polyface Farm section. I’ll let you read it because we have to get to the meal that he hunts and forages for himself.

This hunting and foraging starts out with Pollan talking about our omniverousness, how being omniverous effects our physiology and psychology, and just how messed-up our dietary habits are in America. He then branches off into the ethics of eating meat. All great, thought-provoking stuff. I have so many pages turned over for stuff I want to talk about that it’s overwhelming, so I’m not going to talk about it.

Anyway, it’s all just a build-up for his trip into the woods to hunt and kill the wild pig for dinner. Pollan, who is somewhat of a vegetarian, is surprised by his trip into the forest to hunt the pig. I love this passage describing the start of the hunt.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, like nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes my ears roam at will, retuning with a the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a …wait: What was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Eloquent, intense, and I can completely relate. Not because I hunt, because I don’t. But I play golf, which is stalking a different type of beast. You know what I mean if you’re passionate about golf.

He finally gets his pig. Pollan describes the fourth meal in great detail, the Perfect Meal. It is a great finish to a great book.

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Stuff White People Like

I’m pretty much just a white, Euro-mutt. I guess I have a little Greek blood in me, and certainly some German, and also some English and Belgian; but I don’t identify with any of those cultures. I really don’t have any ethnic underpinning. I’m just a white person, basically, and I always figured that I blended in to the American melting pot enough that the quirks of my existence went unnoticed by the rest of society. And certainly, I never expected those very same quirks to be exposed as part of my racial make-up.

But earlier this year, someone brought to my attention the fact that white guys, strangely enough, seem to be the only people wearing shorts with a sweatshirt during those cold days in the shoulder seasons. You know those days; it’s about 50 degrees and you can get away with shorts, but you have to wear long sleeves on top and maybe even a vest because different parts of your body have different tolerances to the cold. Right? You with me? Who doesn’t do that? I mean, it’s just more comfortable wearing shorts despite the cold, isn’t it?

Well, evidently not. This strange clothing regimen seems to be part of stuff white people like and serves to further define my race. Oh, you think I’m crazy, well check out #86 of stuff white people like. There are studies, and there may be empirical evidence. This Lander fellow has done exhaustive research on white people and engages in an ongoing dialogue on the web and in print to document the white race and the unique tastes of millions.

And it’s absolutely hilarious!

I have a warped, dark sense of humor and I understand that this humor is not for everybody. So no, I don’t blame you Mr. White Person if you don’t like it. However, if your dislike is rooted in the fact that you squirm when Lander makes fun of certain shallow and intolerable traits that you exhibit, that probably means you’re just a little too insecure for me. Let me tick off some of the ones that I found pretty hilarious.

Have you ever met that white dude that always tells you that “Guinness just tastes better in a pub in Irelend.” Listen, I drink Guinness, it’s my beer of choice. But I’ve never been to Ireland and I’ve never consumed it in a “real Irish pub.” I’m not lying, about twenty @s#holes over the last few decades have said those very words to me while I’m drinking a Guinness. “Oh Steffen,” they say, “if you think that’s good, you need to go to Ireland to really taste Guinness.” The next time someone says that to me, I’m going to tell them to shut the f&^% up. Hey, I’m insecure, no doubt about it. The fact that some of my best Guinness experiences involve a can, a couch, and college football, makes me feel inferior to those world travelers who’ve been lucky enough to sip the fine beer in Ireland. Hey European traveler, you win, you are a better white person than me.

And what about that whole thing about making you feel bad about NOT going outside? Why do white people do that. I remember my mom saying “hey kids, stop playing Space Invaders and go outside, it’s beautiful out.” To this day, I can’t sit around all day on Saturday watching college football without feeling a huge sense of guilt. Dammit, I’m outside all the time; I play lots of golf and I walk freakin’ everywhere. I’m done feeling guilty about assuming the horizontal position all day on Saturday during September through November. This has been exposed as one of those destructive cultural traits of my race and I’m not going to let it lead me down the road to therapy.

I’m guessing that in Lander’s white continuum, I’m about a middle-of-the-pack white guy. According to him, at one end of the spectrum are people like Eminem and Bruce Willis, who have very few traits generally associated with white people. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the ultra white people like Sean Penn and Ira Glass, who probably read the Sunday New York Times every week, drink a lot of FAIR TRADE coffee, and shop at farmer’s markets. I don’t engage in those, but I do have a Mac, I like hummus, I wear a fair amount of outdoor performance clothes, and I’ve been promising to learn Spanish for years. So yeah, there’s no mistaking the fact, I’m white, but you may have to ask some detailed questions to figure out if I’m the “wrong kind of white person” (someone who, for example, feels that their gym teacher was their favorite high school teacher).

I guarantee that Lander will rip something that you cherish. He won’t just rip it, he will expose it, analyze it, throw it on the ground, spit on it, then walk away; and you will have no recourse. He has no mercy. You go through stages during Landers’ satirical trashing.

  1. First you’re angry that someone could make fun of something that you hold so dear.
  2. Then, you feel like an ass because he starts making sense and you actually start to understand the hypocrisy that he is exposing.
  3. Finally, you see the humor in it all, and you laugh. In fact, you may even change your behavior a little.

This is a great book for the audio format. It’s brainless and the narrator has a great, deadpan, documentary-style delivery. I laugh a lot when I think about it and I think it’s really creative stuff.

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books

The Last Colony

This is my one sci-fi book for the year. That’s one horror and one sci-fi in 2008, which is about normal for me. This is the third, and last, in the Old Man’s War trilogy by Scalzi. I read the first one back in February 2007 and they’ve all been great. I read this one the fastest. In fact, despite being pretty busy, I think I banged this thing out in about 3 days. The only book I can recall reading faster was The Kite Runner.

If I were to rank the books in this trilogy them by coolness, I would go 1, 3, 2. If I were to rank them by how thought provoking they were, I would go 3, 2, 1. On pure action, I’m saying 1, 3, 2. On chances for a great movie, this is the one. I’m reading a few heavy books right now which will get posted between now and the end of the year, so I needed this break from reality.

This book brings together the main character of book one, John Perry, and the main character of book two, Jane Sagan. They are married and living a somewhat genetically unmodified life, with their adopted daughter, on a quiet planet somewhere in another solar system. Then they get an offer from the governing body of the human universe (the Colonial Union) to be the leaders of a new human colony on another planet. It seems like an exciting opportunity to them, so they accept it. There are a couple of curveballs for the couple. First, the mortal enemy of the humans, this group called the Conclave, will stop at nothing to destroy this colony. Second, the Colonial Union may not really care if everyone in the new colony dies and is not above putting the new colony in harm’s way to further their own political agenda.

It’s a good combination of military and politics. Scalzi certainly draws up some intense and creative battle scenes, but the political discussions and verbal sparring are the highlights of this book. The dialogue is complicated and multi-faceted, yet very clear and easy to follow. It centers on a general mistrust of the government’s truthfulness (or lack thereof) with its subjects.

The ending is really cool and wraps up the trilogy (at least according to his credits). But I think he has already incorporated characters in a new book so maybe it will be kept alive forever. If I really wanted to get the story, I could probably just go to Scalzi’s website and read some of his ruminations. Like no other author I know of, his life is really an open book. I used to be more of an avid reader of his blog. I no longer subsribe to his blog feed but I do go there every so often to see what’s up. Check it out. I would love it if more authors did this sort of internet marketing.

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Little Red Book of Sales Answers

Yes, this is basically a self-help book. But it’s a business self-help book. Business because it focuses mostly on stuff you can do to grow your business and increase your sales. Self-help because it focuses on developing personal skills that will help you in sales rather than the strategy and tactics of closing the deal.