DirtPriest's 75-Offensive Linemen Unite

Well folks, I didn't quite make it to 75 in 2010 but close enough. An estimated 65, depending on where exactly I was in the Harry Potter Series at New Years last year, still averages out to over a book a week. In fact that equals 1 1/4 exactly.

So off I go to see what sort of interesting stuff is read this year and what sort of chats they lead to. This goes back to my thread from last year.

1. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Finally I get to read a scifi classic, and on a fancy new eReader to boot. Bester's famous story is a gripping and entertaining tale of rage and hatred culminating in a realization of the ills and destructive behaviors of those emotions.

Gulliver Foyle is left for dead on the Nomad after a space fight. A ship responds to his hails for rescue but turns away, sending Foyle on the path of revenge. Layer after layer of intrigue and suspense open in each new chapter as a race to prevent a final destruction via war between the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites and ends with each single human being personally responsible for the survival of the species. How's that for a combination tease/review. Very good vintage science fiction. Oh, it also can be found under the title 'Tiger, Tiger'.

Alfred Bester is one of the finest of the vintage scifi crowd and anything of his it at worst pretty good. He at one point decided that he had said all that he wanted to say in the science fiction arena and went on to write for both TV and magazines, so his body of work isn't that big. His The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award and is also a great story.

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.

Hi, DP! Wishing you a belated Happy New Year! Guess I’m the first one here. The picture is very beautiful but you may need to re-size it or something. I think it’s too big.

Fair enough and done.

# 5 Ah perfect! Thank you!

Thanks for the review of The Stars My Destination. I've wanted to read it for sometime now.

Happy 2011! I also wishlisted your first book. How do you like the ereader? You have the same kind that my girls have.
--BJ

Tossed your first book onto the Giant Freaking Wishlist. It sounds very good.

Welcome back! I always thought it was cool that the writers of Babylon 5 named one of their recurring characters after Bester.

I have been hearing good things about Babylon 5, but I have never seen it. Is it on in reruns?
--BJ

Forgot about the Babylon 5 reference there. It was (is?) a pretty good show but I just liked Star Trek way better. I almost never watch TV shows though and never got into it. If it isn't on in your area you can probably rent the DVDs or get them through netflix in the mail or maybe even watch it online to see if it is worth investing the time in to watch. My friend Nathan loved it and watched the entire series on DVD in less than a month, six seasons or so, to the tune of three or four episodes a day.

The Sony 650 is awesome so far. My only complaint is some nitpicky things about organizing material in the collections, mainly that you can't mix files from the main memory with files on an SD card, but it's not that big of a deal really. I also wish there was a preset page view option that just split a page in half from top to bottom (for scans where both pages are face down on the scanner as one page) and one that divides it into three horizontal sections but still, it is most impressive. A Latin to English and back dictionary would be nice too. If you have a good sized library of bootlegged books from the various internets there is a problem with the file metadata but that can be corrected and edited with a library program like Calibre. I have some odd display problems, for example my Agatha Christie books all are listed as "Microsoft Word - Christie, A..." and have "administrator" as a part of the file's 'title', not the file name but it's metadata title. It's like having LibraryThing tags in a jumble.

We watched the whole series recently on DVDs from Netflix. All but the last season were as good as I remembered. The last season was as bad as I remembered. I guess that's what happens when you plan a story arc, execute it well, then can't force yourself to end it when it's over! :)

Last seasons can be that way with lots of series, I guess. Books, too, can have this problem if the series goes on too long.
--BJ

I've been over this before on LT but Babylon 5 was written by J. Michael Strazinsky. He showed up to pitch an excellent comic book (Rising Stars), but instead of ideas and sketches he had the entire series done and in storyboard form ready for professional finishing. That's like a model showing up for a photoshoot needing only a hat to be ready for action. Strazinsky has a reputation for thoroughness and skill and was forced to truncate his ending that he had planned out years earlier.

Interesting!

My daughter has been renting this series lately and watching it. That was why it caught my eye.
--BJ

For clarity, the comic book sale was a totally separate thing, after Babylon 5 was completed.

Another nice thing about the Sony eReader is the extreme handiness of the dictionary. For example...


2. The Quincunx of Time by James Blish
... before giving a review of sorts, a quincunx is the pattern formed by dots at the four corners of a square or rectangle, like the five on common dice with pips, and is from the Latin for 'five twelfths'. That's how handy the dictionary is. Anyway, the short novel (or is it a novella?), is a slight expansion of the excellent short story 'Beep', which is in the equally excellent collection Galactic Cluster.

Blish is very adept at utilizing complex physics concepts and exploring their ramifications in story form, like the spindizzy drive from Cities in Flight or in the current case, an instantaneous communication radio using the Dirac equations from quantum mechanics (again) and the phenomenon of DeBroglie interference. The DeBroglie effect is basically a theoretic echo created by an atomic particle that resonates through all of spacetime instantaneously at an identical frequency. Huh? you might say, but if such a theoretical device could be made to actually function, well... that's the stuff that makes science fiction great. Just another example of Mr. Blish doing what he did best. A shame he was an unabashed chain smoker and died in his early 40's of cancer.

The basics of the story is an exploration of the above Dirac communicator and a universe in which cause and effect relationships do not exist and there is no such thing as free will. Or is there? I really can't go into it any deeper without giving away the plot, but as a warning there is almost no 'action'. There are basically four scenes, a 'present' that starts the story, a two part look back at the origins of the Service, and a return to the 'present' which begins the story. The main difference between the short story and the novel is that the longer version has a bit more thought put in to the ending and the ramifications are explored in much more depth. Neither are particularly long. Of course, parts are lifted in whole, but the novel is far more satisfying for the extra Blish-ness put in to it, and it's not just word count padding. Can you tell that he is my favorite scifi author?

I am currently enjoying The Physics of Football, which is far more layman oriented than The Physics of Baseball, which we discussed last year sometime.

Stopping by to say hi so I can find you again.

What an exciting game! I enjoyed every minute of it. That is what football is all about. Hope the Horns were taking notes!

I heard that the Stanford coach might go to Michigan. That would be pretty wonderful, I bet.
--BJ

The Sugar Bowl was pretty exciting. I had a feeling that Arkansas would get back in the game because they were physically dominant but yet trailing by a good margin. That sort of thing creates turnovers and game altering plays. Not that Ohio State wasn't playing hard as well but Arkansas was hitting hard and dropping easy catches. OSU was catching well covered passes and getting some lucky runs by Pryor. They are very well coached too, Ohio State is. There was a play early where they ran a play action pass, the Arkansas defender read that play action and stayed on the receiver. Problem is, Pryor handed the ball off to the trailing back. As soon as the defender turned and saw a run play in progress after all the Ohio State receiver #10 cracked him to the ground, after letting the defender run himself out of the play for a good while. Also the first time Ohio State has beaten an SEC team in a generation, going back to 1979 when Bear Bryant beat Woody Hayes.

The UM coaching job is up in the air, there are many rumors but nothing has been done. I have a bad feeling that Harbaugh, who grew up in Ann Arbor, either doesn't want the pressure of the job or would rather take 6 or 7 million dollars from an NFL team. Plus his brother is the Ravens head coach and a long time NFL assistant. Time will tell. His Stanford team is exceptionally well coached.

Happy New Year tj, if I didn't say so on your thread.

The Physics of Football is a very good book so far. The point is to teach basic physics through concrete examples from the gridiron as opposed to more abstract textbook examples of billiard balls (perfectly elastic and frictionless of course) and falling weights. I think it would be a great book for a younger reader who can do some basic algebra but hasn't gotten to more advanced applied maths. The lessons are specific and famous plays like The Catch and the Immaculate Reception as well as a sprinkling of the funny. I especially liked the section titled 'Surely You're Juking'. The Physics of Baseball which I read last year was more of a baseball book for physics readers, the opposite side of the spectrum.

One last thing. Billiejean asked about my thoughts on the Sony eReader and I have one more thing. The screensaver mode is a little odd, you can select up to 99 pictures but it rotates between the first five only. Odd. It has no effect on the main purpose of the machine but I might as well put that datum out there. I decided to just pick one to use and I will award an attaboy and an imaginary wooden nickel to anyone who can identify the source, and a full tech point to anyone who can name the artist.

#2 - The Stars My Destination has just been reprinted by Gollancz here in the UK as part of their "Masterworks" series. Having heard about it for years, but never seen it anywhere, I was able to pick up a copy easily recently, and your review has reminded me that I really do want to read it soon!

There were lots of good plays by Arkansas that worried me for OSU. They got the safety (not sure it really was one), the blocked kick, and the terrific two-point conversion. It was a tough day for Arkansas as the basketball team also lost (to my beloved Longhorns). The guy who made the 2 point conversion had a touching story about starting over. Both teams played really great, I thought.

I had thought that there might be some sort of NFL dispute and that some NFL coaches are wanting to switch to college so that they will be working. I think Harbaugh would be a better coach for Michigan than Les Miles would have been. So, good luck.

Asked my daughter about your picture, but she did not recognize it. I think you have a better sony ereader than she does. I don't think hers does pictures at all.

Have a great day!
--BJ

Hi Janet, or should I say 'Cheerio!' Either way, it is a great SF story and is part of a masterworks series for a reason. Bester never disappoints. Did you ever stop to think that if something happened to Prince William Britain would eventually have their first King Harold since before the Norman Conquest? Would he be Harold II or do the old Saxon Kings not count? Nobody names their children Aethelred anymore but there are plenty of Edwards, Edgars and even a few Edmunds.

I have the new-this-summer Sony Touch 650 but all of the Sony models have basically the same software and they are all great reading computers. The biggest difference is whether you want wireless connectivity and a bigger than a paperback screen, a touch screen or just a basic pocket sized unit for reading on a bus or whatever. One more think I've noticed about it is that the aluminum body of it feels very cold in a chilly basement but that's just basic thermodynamics.

The picture didn't generate much in the way of guesses but for a painting that has meant a lot to me for a long time I suppose it is quite obscure in the bigger real world. It's the cover of the old Dungeon Master's Guide from the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game back in 1979, painted by Jeff Easley who is still active in the fantasy art world. Actually it is the cover of the reissue from about 1983 but now we're getting trivial. It is way better than the original cover.

Original Cover

Proper Cover

#22 - No, no, I am American, just live in London, still think cheerios are a breakfast cereal! Also, no idea about William/Harold, etc. I am one of the "ignore the royal family" crowd, and since I didn't go to school here, and since my kids didn't learn the whole order of kings thing, I just don't know. I guess I should, really, after all this time. Anyway, I am really looking forward to reading the Bester soon.

Fair enough. As a history buff I've been wanting to ask that question to someone over there for some time now. Use it in a conversation if you get a chance just to see what kind of look you get from a native. Sugar Smacks and Apple Jacks!

It's hard to decide what to exactly read when you have access to so much stuff so after finishing the Physics of Football I moved on to a short Blish novel, assuming I could make up my mind between Fafhrd and Grey Mouser or Tad Williams' new Shadowmarch series.


3. The Physics of Football by Timothy Gay
I really don't have much to add after my comments in message 19. The book does an admirable job of explaining fundamental physics to a reasonably intelligent audience and covers, at least in basics, of most aspects of physics, without trying to conceptualize abstract examples.


4. The Star Dwellers by James Blish
Not sure what to make of this one. Mostly aimed at the Hardy Boys audience, it lacks a bit of the technical science that I like from Blish, but it still is a decent enough story. Blish always seems to have some point to make about his times, in this one he has quite a rant about the poor education of such impressionable young minds. He advocates, if that is the right word, a crash course education where children are force fed as much information as possible as quickly as possible. This leads to an elite Cadet Corps where a teenager in the program is assigned as an apprentice to an adult member of the government. So, man has developed an interstellar space drive (as usual) and are early in the exploration game, having discovered a few life forms of questionably intelligent life forms, make a big discovery of interstellar life in the Coal Sack nebula. The life forms like living in the space drives on the ships and in nuclear power plants on earth. Anyhow, the point is that a younger person can apply wisdom if they are properly educated and a treaty is signed with these very foreign and abstract life forms, some of which are as old as the universe. A bit open ended though.

My pick of the Colts for the Super Bowl obviously wasn't the right one, but the NFL is so random that you really can't pick a consistent winner from week to week. If you ran the playoffs over and over you would get a different net result pretty much each time. No Charlie Batch FUPA League Trophy for me this season. My prediction for the season was a record number of teams between 10-6 and 6-10. Twenty-two teams out of 32 fell in that range, 5 were below 6 wins and 5 were above 6 wins. That's 11/16 of the teams in my range (and yes, I have the decimal to fraction chart memorized down to the 16ths of an inch).



(2 outcomes x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16 just for the first round, 16 more for second round gives 16 x 16 = 256, Conference Championship games add a further 4 possibilities so 256 x 4 = 1032 and finally the Super Bowl adds a final 2 possibilities for 2 x 1032 = 2064 total possible playoff permutations, believe it or not from the original 12 teams. I will happily stand corrected if someone can show me the correct computation for the scenario if this is not right.)

If you read through that probability calculation you easily deserve some nice music (courtesy of YouTube)
Here's some new Sting...
And some classic Highwaymen.
As a bonus I found this Loreena McKennit while looking for the Highwaymen. The lyrics are from a poem by Alfred Noyes, the only reason I know this is because somewhere I read that they were from a Robert Burns poem and found they were not when I looked them up for some clarification

I haven't done statistics in a long, long time!

I thought there was no way Seattle would win in the first round. Guess I was wrong there!

Just got back from taking my baby back to college. Once again an empty nest. Guess I will drown my sorrows in a book.
--BJ

I got laughed at myself for telling my friends in the football league that the Seahawks would run over the Saints. You can't win without that ground game, but the Saints win probably 7 out of ten times regardless. The other games went according to plan except the Jets were able to stage that late win. That game was easily predictable as far as style goes though.

An empty nest is a quiet nest, convenient for reading and telephone chats.

I've decided to read some Vonnegut and mayhaps some Hemingway this week before the Tad Williams series. I just couldn't get in to the first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, not that I'll never read it but why push myself into a struggle when there's so much good stuff to read right away. Currently reading Galapagos which is acidly funny and trying to get my brother (the one who finds Golf Digest a chore) to read A Man Without a Country. After that... ? A chronological reading?

Wikipedia had this self assessment by Mr. Vonnegut looking back on his novels in Palm Sunday:
* Player Piano: B
* The Sirens of Titan: A
* Mother Night: A
* Cat's Cradle: A-plus
* God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
* Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
* Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
* Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
* Breakfast of Champions: C
* Slapstick: D
* Jailbird: A
* Palm Sunday: C

I had checked out Slapstick at the library over the summer but there were almost no positive reviews of it on LT and even the author seems no not like it much, so it went back unread. Shame, shame. If it were a beer that would be alcohol abuse.

I'm hoping someone enjoys that Loreena McKennit video from #26, it's the sort of thing that would be popular around here. How many people take a classic English poem/ballad and set it to music these days?

Still wishing I had a keyboard for my basement computer...

Picard: ....replace my library with a Kindle collection?
Wesley Crusher, brightly: Could save you space, sir. They're well-lit, easy to use --
Picard, coldly: Get off my ship.

I think there was a movie with Captain Kirk and his reading glasses and real books to read in it. I have been wanting to watch to old original Star Trek series lately. I saw it for sale at Borders, so I might get it bit by bit with coupons. (I hope they stay in business long enough!)

I thought that the National Championship game was a really good one (and an interesting score, too). Lots of defense, which I don't think people expected. There have been some terrific bowl matchups this year.

Looks like UT has gotten most of its coaches lined up. Except offensive line -- which they have needed to fix forever, so I hope the new coach is great! I saw interviews with the new OC and DC and they both said lots that I liked to hear.

I keep hearing that Les Miles is going to Michigan. He has had lots of success at OSU and LSU. I still think that Harbaugh would have been better, but I guess he got too good of a deal to pass up with the 49ers. Its funny, but I heard that lots of NFL coaches are wanting to move to college because of a possible lockout next year. But they can't really lock out a coach they just hired, can they?

It is super cold here. I just want to stay home and drink hot chocolate. Too bad I can't! :)

Going to check out your links above.
--BJ

Followed the links above in #26. Beautiful!

I had been having internet problems, which now seem solved with one less computer online. Must be either the modem or the internet access we have.

Thanks for the youtube links. I had never heard any of them!
--BJ

No problem. I saw the Sting video on some tribute to Larry King while flipping past CNN, of all things. I have a feeling that there were some parts of it cut out on youtube but I'd bet that's a great album.

It's always nice when the two best teams square off like that. Even if there are other cases out there (TCU) they were the only major undefeated teams. My only surprise was that Auburn couldn't dominate Oregon inside and up the middle. Two great teams. Now if this new Michigan guy works out...

As to that, apparently Les Miles left UM on bad terms with a few of the higher-ups at the school and they didn't want him back. That sums up exactly what State fans up here hate about Michigan people - that the UM fans are so snobby and overly proud that they just can't let things like that go. A shame that Les Miles didn't get the job. This whole thing makes me glad to be a fan of an out-of-state school, because the State fans are so hateful of the snotty UM fans and the UM fans look down their noses at the unwashed masses of State fans, laughing the whole time. Literally, like when we went to a UM game and 108,000 people laughed when they showed the Big 10 scores and MSU was losing.

One month from Friday pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

I have no clue what to make of the lockout situation. On one hand, a rookie (Stafford and Bradford) should in no way make more money than Manning and Brady. They desperately need an NBA style rookie cap/slot system where there is no negotiating. Fifth pick gets this much. Done. On the other hand, these guys deserve some decent money for the risks they are taking, maybe the league should use the 'excess' money to make sure that injured players are taken care of after their non-guaranteed money in those big contracts goes away.

A bigger side of the problem is that the league is so advertising driven that in a small way it controls the price of things nationally. The first thing I think of there is beer, namely Budweiser. What an awful product on every level. However, because of its ads people buy that crap up at a premium price and it is awful tasting. Case in point, my sister in law cooked up a little venison roast with some potatoes, nothing too fancy. The meat was ok but the potatoes were awful and I couldn't eat them. They had a sour yuk taste to them that I just assumed was from the venison. No big deal. Later I saw a Bud Light bottle on the kitchen counter and joked to my brother that he must have gotten tired of it being in the fridge and dumped it out for the bottle deposit. Nope, he said, it was in the dinner. Mystery solved. Long winded story but it shows how a lousy product is popular because of the ads. Clydesdales and all, it's a long story that goes back literally to the late 1800's.

Well, my internet continues to go down all the time. So it was not having too many computers on at once. We have called ATT already with no results.

Funny story about the Bud. I have to admit that I love the Clydesdales commercials, although I don't think I saw any of them this Christmas. Which is kind of surprising.

I agree that it is ridiculous for rookies to get paid more than big time veterans. (Although, I must admit that Bradford is a truly nice person, so I am happy for him. I don't know much about Stafford. I am sure that he is, too.)

So, who is the new coach at UM? I saw last night that the coach from Tulsa is going to Pitt. Tulsa has had a number of good coaches in both football and basketball. I guess I really should go watch them play. I mostly just go to high school games.

How much snow did you get? We just got a dusting. I was hoping for more. It is still really, really cold though.
--BJ

We got just 3 or 4 inches of dry powdery snow with lots of drifting. Could have had much more if the wind was more easterly off Lake Huron but it stayed from the north mostly. No big deal because it isn't slushy on the roads, nothing like the hamboning down south or on the east coast.

The new coach is Brady Hoke, a former assistant under Llloyd Carr (old joke, you can't spell Lloyd without 3 L's), defensive line coach initially. He played linebacker at Ball State and recently initiated a huge turnaround at San Diego State. They went 9-4 with losses at Missouri, BYU and TCU and a home loss to Utah and hammered Navy in their bowl game. This was after a 4-8 season his first year and a 2-10 season under former Lions hopeful and Heisman runner-up Chuck Long (to Bo Jackson).

He apparently still has friends in the UM hierarchy unlike Les Miles. He was a Lloyd Carr lackey, which makes him by extension a Bo Schembechler man.

One more thing, Stafford is from Highland Park Texas and has been mentored by another hometown QB there since middle school, one Troy Aikman. He went to Georgia so he could start as a freshman. Also, his dad attended UGA for graduate school. Didn't know that, thanks wikipedia. Had to check that Highland Park data...

Shame about the Tulsa coach leaving but sometimes you can only do so much at one place and you have to move on to a bigger institution. They've had some really good all purpose guys there lately, but I'd bet they can't get any really top notch defenders there in OK. That looked like the problem when I watched them go back and forth against So. Miss.

Some other time I'll go on about how Augustus Busch stole the recipie for the Czechoslovakian 'Beer of Kings'. I think I have in the past but I'll do it again.

Thanks for the info on the UM coach. I saw some of SDSU play this year. Looks like you have a good one there.

Interesting about Stafford being from Highland Park. I had no idea. Can't get a much better mentor than Troy Aikman.

I hope that the coach does well at Pitt. It is hard to keep coaches when not in a BCS conference. I don't know how TCU has done it. And now they are in a BCS conference.
--BJ

TCU has done it because coach Patterson likes it there and he's had them at a BCS level for several years by getting the highly coveted Texas recruits, maybe that 'C' has helped them a bit more than a regular state school. TCU is no stranger to the big time, they were in your old SWC, you know. That was about as big time as it got through the 1980's.

My brother gave me a nice tidbit about why Les Miles didn't get the UM job. According to rumor he was let go in the late '90's because he was bagging then head coach Gary Moeller's wife and those aforementioned higher-ups wanted no part of him coming back.

I never wanted the SWC to break up. I loved playing almost all Texas schools because they were so close.

I wonder if Les Miles will stay at LSU?
--BJ

You probably heard that the Mad Hatter was given an extension at LSU.


5. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
I really enjoy the sarcasm of Vonnegut. Maybe others don't, but If you like it it's the best stuff. In Galapagos, Vonnegut narrates as a ghost recapping events in 1986 AD from the vantage point of one million years in the future. Of course, there is a World War III and the only remnants of humanity are the descendants of a small group of survivors of an ill-fated 'Nature Cruise of the Century' to the Galapagos. Vonnegut cuts to the core of human frailty and that of his institutions as the world finances fall apart, leading to food riots and war. Those damn big brains humans used to have! So easy to be befuddled by mysteries... Evolution theory plays a minor role here as humankind has become more streamlined and smaller brained, the better for catching fish, with nothing for tools but teeth and flippers after a million years on the Galapagos Islands, but the bulk of the story is about 1986 AD, one million years ago, and it is told in the author's classic time-is-irrelevant-to-the-narrative style, doing things like putting an asterisk before names of people who will not survive the day, moving way ahead of the story-time by jumping ahead and inserting lines like, 'She would live to the ripe old age of 85, when she was eaten by a great white shark', while describing a scene when the character is in her 40's. If you've read Vonnegut then you know what I mean.


6. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynmann
And then there was this gem. Now, in all honesty I tend to stick to genre stuff that can be classified as good scifi or decent scifi or whatever the genre is. Rarely do I read some lousy book, and I almost always enjoy what I read. I say this because most of my reviews have to be taken with a grain of salt, if you don't like reading, say fantasy stories or histories, just because I think a book is outstanding that doesn't mean that it is great literature. More that it is an enjoyable example of its field.

All that is just to set up that I think this is a great book for a general audience. Mr. Feynmann is a Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist and you might say to yourself, 'What could I gain from reading an autobiography of such a person? I don't know anything about subatomic whatchamacallits and thingamajiggies.' Well, this is a great collection of anecdotes about his weird life, growing up in the 1920's with a reputation as a kid genius for repairing old fashioned radios to college at MIT and Princeton, after that a stint in the Army at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb project. Then, professorship and readjusting to society, playing in a samba band during Carnival in Brazil, so on and so on, all the way to tenured professorship at Caltech and the Nobel Prize. Yup, samba band.

I would call this more of an anecdotal autobiography as it consists of stories about events and times rather than a cohesive narrative. Each of them has funny moments and his style is very conversational, all of them jump from topic to topic, one might be about his safecracking exploits at Los Alamos (multi-talented guy), the next about being rejected by the army after the war on a psychologically unsound recommendation, and so on. It pays to play mind games with army doctors and yet be completely truthful. To me, the best parts were his scathing criticisms of the education systems both in the US and in Brazil where he spent a fair amount of time. Mostly it revolves around learning without really learning and people teaching facts by rote as opposed to how to use the facts.

So, this is the best thing I've read in a while (in a general way) and I am sure that anyone who reads it will find it entertaining an at least a few levels. And, a boon to the average Joe who might find this book, there is no physics at all, at most something like 'I was working on a theory of electron/neutron interactions at the time...' Not one single equation either.

I think that my older daughter has a copy of the Feynman book around here somewhere. I will have to find it.

Obviously, ESPN does not really know that much about this sort of thing since they reported just a few days ago that there was no way LSU would keep him. The contract was probably already signed at that point.

I do think I like Gundy better, even in spite of the "I am a man!" speech.
--BJ

"I'm a man! I'm 40!" (one of the better blowups in this politically correct tiradeless sports world...)

:)

Still hoping that we get a good o-line coach! That is the final piece in the puzzle.
--BJ

I'm surprised you have never heard the Highwaymen. Always thought they would be some sort of requisite music for folks from Texas. Always good stuff.

Admittedly though, I'm confused as to how Mike Gundy got brought up, unless he's being considered for an assistant position at Texas. Why he'd leave Okie State to be an underling there is a mystery to me.

Saw this on 'theChive.com' today and though someone might get a laugh out of it...

I only brought up Gundy because we were talking about Miles who previously coached at OSU. Gundy will no way leave OSU. That is one of the reasons they picked him. Tired of losing people. Of course, they just lost their fabulous OC.
--BJ

For ages, I have been thinking I'd like Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, your review has convinced me to go and buy it as soon as possible. Thanks!

It's pretty cool on several levels and fairly quick to read. Thanks for stopping by.

Didn't know Les miles was an OSU guy. Thanks for clearing that up. Time to watch the Packers lay the lumber on a good Falcons team thanks to the magic of DVR then full body immersion in Tad William's Shadowmarch series if I'm sober enough to lay in bed and read it.

I was barely sober enough to get a start on Shadowmarch Saturday night after football. Things take a while to get rolling but it is (as expected) very good. All the buildup is for a good cause and I can't wait to cruise through what has tghe appearance of a great fantasy series. There are some surface similarities to his magisterial Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, namely a fascination with a big 'city' featuring a few very prominent towers and what should be a teenage star of the story growing up throughout, on the way to power and renown, but so are many other fantasy tales. Special thanks to Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware for the awesome India Brown Ale last Saturday. Left Hand Brewery's Pilsner is pretty good too.

Did you ever see the video of Johnny Cash singing that Nine Inch Nails song? I thought he did the song better than NIN. Sorry about the non sequitor. Something about your poster reminded me of it.
--BJ

Actually, he looks a lot happier in the poster than the song is. So I don't know what made me think of it. I am a Johnny Cash fan from way back. (Don't know why I did not remember The Highwaymen. But my memory is not too good anymore.)
--BJ

All of the Johnny Cash albums from American Recordings are awesome. The NIN song is on American Recordings IV (wikipedia), here's a link to their discography of The Man In Black. American Recordings is, believe it or not, owned by Glenn Danzig and is in no way a country record label. On the wiki page, A.R. II is the 'Unchained' record. They are, however, Johnny Cash the way he should be, stark and raw, roiling with emotion, much of them are just Johnny and his guitar. I think they are the best work of his career.

One more thing, this was the promotional advertisement when he signed with American Recordings. 'Screw you Nashville and your lame record companies that don't want me!'' I can't help myself, it's one of the best photos ever.

I heard that Michigan got a really good coach! Congratulations!
--BJ

(Still no O-Line coach at UT.)

#52. I have that pic on a t-shirt.

I'm a bit worried myself, a little. Not in Coach Hoke, but with his hiring of a defensive coordinator Greg Mattison. Plus, he's from the Ravens who have a mighty and intimidating defense and it's obvious that physical play is crucial to defending. Minus, I hate the Tampa 2 defense, specifically the zone coverage that goes with it. A team has to have elite cornerbacks to make the scheme work. I've been over the reasons why I can't stand such soft zones but at least the Ravens (and the Buccaneers where the defense made its debut) stress the dominating physical play. It should work at UM as that's supposed to be the primary focus around here, plus there is such an emphasis on pro-style offenses in the NCAA. Scoring points isn't the reason that the Michigan Wolverines are the winningest program in history with over 800 wins.

I apologize for going a little overboard with the Johnny Cash but most people don't know that those records even exist. Other than 'Hurt' none of them received any radio play at all.

That would be about the best t-shirt possible. There are a few math joke ones that I would like to have but that would be the ultimate.

Overall, it does sound like a move in the right direction for Michigan. The Big 10 (12) is going to regain dominance, I bet.
--BJ

Rumor has it the UT is getting the O-Line coach from Georgia. Is this a good thing? I did not think that Georgia had a good team this year. I think Colorado beat them.

More rumors. The conditioning routine has gotten tougher and the coach runs with the players. The new strength and conditioning coach had a great interview with the reporters. I was impressed with him.

I cannot wait until football season starts again!

Oh, well, back to tennis.
--BJ

Hard to say about assistant coaches. UGA had plenty of tough competition this year but I was mildly surprised to see them get beaten fairly easily by UCF in a bowl game. UGA was one of those 6-6 teams that had no business in a bowl. Is that a reflection on an o-line assistant? Unknown. They've been pretty good recently and maybe they have a load of freshman/sophs right now.

I'm already eager for some college ball myself.



This is what the Big House looks like from row 8. Actually too close as the game takes place in such a wide angle of vision.

Boy, you had some really great seats! I don't get seats that good at the high school games!

Central Florida is quite good. The lesser known Florida schools are upping the ante and the major schools better look out. (OK, except for Florida International.) USF also has a good program.

Is high school football as big in Ohio and Michigan as it is in Texas and Florida?
--BJ

HS football is bigger in Ohio than MI but nothing like down south where players can work year round on their game. It's a pretty big deal but we don't have the giant campus 4-A schools like in Texas which has almost thrice the population of MI. (The thrice is from Conan O'Brien's show. He's been going on about a pet peeve, namely that new silly words keep getting added to the dictionary, like staycation, when there are so many perfectly good words nobody uses anymore. Thrice-the word so nice you'll use it thrice...)

UCF and USF have done well lately and USF has Lou Holtz' kid who did very well with East Carolina the last few years.

And they were great seats. Too bad the guy we got them from had a nervous breakdown over his mom being sick and lost his job. He moved to his brother's house in Tennessee. Matlock was doing weird things like breaking in to his own apartment so he would have an excuse to skip work and stay home to get drunk. Or showing up to work at the bank wasted. Poor guy, I have heard through the grapevine that he's doing better.

I hope things turn around for your friend.

I had forgotten that Skip Holtz was there. I think the UCF coach has a sort of tie to ND as well. I think he got in trouble over his resume and ND decided not to hire him. He seems to have done very well at UCF.
--BJ

George O'Leary was let go from Notre Dame for padding his resume, claiming a master's degree that he didn't have and falsifying his football letterman status. I looked it up because I couldn't remember the difference between him and the guy at UTEP (Mike Price), who was let go from Alabama for taking a stripper back to a hotel room, paid for with a school credit card. All before he had officially signed a contract to be the coach. My brother and I couldn't recall the details of each incident during the bowl season so there it is.

I hope Matlock does well for himself in Tennessee too.

I went to Indiana University for my undergraduate degree, where football games were free if you had a student ID, but, of course, basketball games were at a premium. Then, I did my graduate work at Ohio State, and boy, was that a different world!

But look now! Ohio State is number one in basketball! Who would have figured?

I am happy to report that UT beat Kansas in Lawrence tonight for the first time ever!
--BJ

#64: Oh great. So now there will be riots after both football *and* basketball games. Sigh.

#65> :)
--BJ

Welcome to my messy little upstairs bedroom of the internet scaifea. We seem to share a large number books on a variety of topics. I think that's my favorite part of LT, peeking in on someone else's library. That and occasional chats.

Basketball has really taken an upturn over the last several years in Texas. Didn't I see UT vs. Texas A&M a week or so, both ranked? With Bobby Knight announcing the game since he's now a Texas Tech guy? I didn't watch much but heard Knight say he was impressed by the way the Longhorns were systematically dismantling a good A&M team. I don't follow basketball much anymore but when I did (80's & early 90's) Ohio State sucked and were an embarrassment for some reason. Some places are football schools, some are basketball schools. When is the last time Kentucky or Memphis had a great football team? For that matter, when was the last good U of Michigan basketball team? Reputations change quicker in basketball, I assume because you only need a handful of good players to make a team. And why can't Indiana get back to that national dominance? Too much to live up to, too much pressure?

We had a similar deal to the free football up here. Central Michigan is in the next town over from me and they had such poor attendance that they were almost thrown out of the MAC. They were begging students to stop by the stadium to swipe their IDs. They didn't have to stay for the game but that needed so many students to 'attend' to stay in the conference. It worked because that was shortly before the Dan LeFevour era when they were by far the best team in the MAC. Now he's gone and they had a 3 win season with a new coach (former solid MSU QB Dan Enos).


7. Shadowmarch by Tad Williams
The start of yet another long, lengthy, wordy, long, in-depth, lengthy and very long Tad Williams series. He seems to be good at it. By that I mean that it's not puffy and flowery overdone descriptions like Robert Jordan, but a well told lengthy fantasy tale. There aren't any overly excessive parts, the length comes from several separate stories that are all well told, which may or may not intersect later. My only regret about his series' is the length of time it takes to read them which leads to, not boredom per se, but a restlessness to move on to something else. His Otherland series (great blend of scifi with a few fantasy elements) took me over a month to read, and I can put in some serious time on a per day basis. I thoroughly enjoy it though.

In a nutshell, back in the past, the people of Eion conquered the whole of their continent away from the Twilight People, the fairies, or as they call themselves, the Qul-na-Qar (or something like it). The Twilight People have hidden behind a misty barrier for centuries and now it has begun to encroach on the realm of Southmarch. In the excellently fortified island-city of Southmarch, (akin to Mont Saint-Michel) their King has been kidnapped and held in a southern city. His children are forced to run the realm in his absence and, of course, things take a turn for the worse with the invasion of the fairyfolk, treacherous politics (isn't it always) and a spot of murder. There is an Egyptian styled continent to the South where the tale is told of Qinnillian, the newest of the hundreds of wives of the Autarch, and also the introduction of some interesting races, namely the dwarven-like Funderlings, the diminutive Rooftoppers and the Skimmers, a seafaring people. Lots going on, hence that length that many readers are turned off by.

How could I forget the football this weekend? Would have been better if the Jets could have finished that comeback, or if they had started off better. Man I hate the Steelers. And Back-Foot Cutler. If he could sort out his mechanics and quit being an arrogant dink the Bears would be a far better team. He has a knack for blowing up on his teammates like a primadonna starting pitcher (Jeremy Bonderman anyone?) I was impressed with the way that Caleb kid came in for the Bears and played well. Good job Hanie.

Also, Dan LeFevour was cut by the Bears in training camp and is currently somewhere in the Bengals system.

Texas can be good at basketball, but they never reach the final four. I am talking about the men's team. Back in the 80s the women's team went undefeated and won the National Championship. Lately, however, they are not what they were.

I thought that both of the games yesterday were really good. I loved how the team behind never gave up. The Jets really impressed me because they were so far behind. I also loved how the third string quarterback for the Bears came in and played his heart out. What a guy! I wonder if Greg Davis saw that game?

I am going to ask my girls if they have read any Tad Williams. That looks like a series that they would enjoy. I saw on LT that the new Rothfusss book is coming out March 1. 2011. Is that even possible?
--BJ

That Jets comeback will be exactly what the Packers will do to the Steelers for the whole game, and the Packers have a better defense, at least fundamentally. The Jets get away with a lot of grabbing and holding whereas the Packers are just fundamentally sound. And they have Charles Woodson, still the only defensive player to win the Heisman, albeit by augmenting his stats by returning kicks and catching several touchdowns in that great 1997 Michigan National Championship year. He won over Peyton Manning by the way.

Frankly, I'd rather watch women's basketball anyway. At least they play as a team, as opposed to running around trying to dunk all the time.

I've read everything by Tad Williams except for Tailchaser's Song, which was his popular first book and his Aquaman comic arc of about ten issues. Every word of it has been outstanding. His series are lengthy but his shorter single works Caliban's Hour, Child of an Ancient City, are actually fairly short.

Remember the photo of Rothfuss' baby-height manuscript? I think I linked it somewhere on my thread. Apparently it is possible! Better late than never. With luck the third volume will be out within the next year or so and he doesn't pull a Tad Williams by having such a massive third volume that it gets split in twain and we have to wait an extra year for it.

I remember that photo now that you mention it. So how on earth could it have taken this long? I guess the editing process is a lot of work. I can hardly type out a post without misstating something.

I spoke to my daughter last night and recommended Tad Williams to her. Maybe I can find some copies at our used bookstore here in town. I have been wanting to wander around it lately. I have had a lot of trouble in the past finding my way around.

I never saw a women's basketball game until I went to UT. They were at the top of the game at UT in those days. They were quite exciting to watch. And we got really great seats, because most people went to the men's game (and they weren't that good, either).

Woodson was the same year as Manning? I hadn't recalled that. And pretty impressive that they are both still playing. The Super Bowl looks to be a good one.
--BJ

We had a bad computer accident around here, losing all of our personal folders. Stupidly they were on the desktop, an old Mac habit from the pre-hard drive, floppy disc days. Apparently either a system update wiped them out or my little nephew lassoed everything on the desktop and trashed them while his mother was standing right behind watching as he restarted the computer to run windows so he could 'play motorcycles'. No idea what actually happened but I lost about 100 GB of books that I had downloaded, including almost every Osprey Publishing history book that I had, with the exception of the 40 or so on my Sony eReader. Also gone were about a hundred math books that I was amassing since I'm starting back at community college this summer with an eye on a degree in Mathematics from either CMU or Northern Michigan. Anyway, over a thousand books gone and a couple hundred hours of finding, downloading, sorting and catalogueing wasted. So many books that I didn't have room to back them up on my downstairs keyboardless computer. Dammit, Jim!!!

I say this because it's apparently my fault somehow and I'm not touching my brother's computer anymore so my postings will be even more sporadic until I get a keyboard. Not easy to do when I 'work' 10-14 hour days babysitting five days a week and get paid with room, board and tobacco. I have to steal pop cans out of the garage for deposit to get a pack of gum. If my brother wasn't so cheap he would have had a second hard drive for about 50-100 bucks which would have solved this whole problem.

For the record, the only thing I don't like that Apple has done with their system is that once the trash is emptied it is gone forever, unless you have a fairly expensive UnErase program (anywhere from 40 to 100 dollars). The older systems well in to the 1990's came with Norton Utilities that had an UnErase program but no more.

I am so sorry that you lost all of those books! Hope you get your new keyboard soon. And best of luck with the Math degree.
--BJ

Oh no - that's awful! I'm so sorry. That's always my nightmare: that I'll lose everything on our computers, although apparently my husband (a physicist and computer 'nerd') backs our system up very regularly. It's still scary, though.

Hi. I stumbled upon your thread looking up football stuff - from Louisiana and went to LSU so I'm a huge fan. It's great to see some sports discussion on LT. Also read Shadowmarch a couple years ago and Shadowplay last year. I just got the third volume and will probably crack it soon. Looking forward to your thoughts on that series.

72 - That is awful. I hope there is some way you can recover some of it.

Greetings jane. What a shame the football season is over, but if you've been a Browns fan for as long as I have sometimes the end of the year is a blessing. I can put the last season away and look forward to the next, with a new coach that I don't know much about. Better yet, only two weeks or so until spring training opens for baseball.

I have managed to recover some of the files. It sure looks like a vast majority of them but I now have folder after folder of pdf's titled 010001 through 330999, not to mention text files, rtf's, html documents, my podcasts that I had stashed for rainy days, etc. I've pawed through them a bit and found several book files, some pizza coupons and last year's fantasy football draft sheet. Just need literally several months to go through the hundreds of thousands of files and find my stuff, among almost everything that has been trashed on this computer in the last year. My brother did go out and buy a $60 hard drive to back everything up with Apple's Time Machine program.

I also came up with a fun new game that might sweep the nation. Well, I doubt it, but it would be fun for a certain sector of people. I have no keyboard downstairs and wanted to look up something on wikipedia. So I started with a random page (there's a button for that in the margin) and tried to find a way to get what I wanted from that starting point. Here's a few examples. I wanted a picture of the Mackinac Bridge, my random starting page was an old Honda 50cc minibike article. How would a person go from that to the Mackinac Bridge you ask? Well, that was an easy one. There was a list of other Honda motorcycle models, among them the CRF line of dirt bikes used in motocross. The CRF page had a link to the AMA Motocross Series with its list of champions over the years. One of them was Jeff Stanton, my personal favorite, three time motocross champion and supercross champ, as well as a Michigan native. Click, click, click, Mackinac Bridge. It's like that six degrees of Kevin Bacon game mixed with some Jeopardy trivia. (Online tryouts for Jeopardy Feb 8th, get yourself signed up.)

Another example is trying to get to the C.D. Tenerife page, a soccer team from the Canary Islands in the Spanish League, or as they call it, La Liga. This was even easier as my random start was Findlay Township PA, home of the Pittsburgh International Airport. Through that I found (and bookmarked) a long list of international airports of which there is one on Tenerife, then a sports on Tenerife page, and done. I've been getting in to soccer this year after enjoying the World Cup. There's lots of neat things that separate it from what is pretty standard in American sports leagues. My brother got me a new FIFA Soccer game for the Playstation and I've been trying to decide which team to play. I've narrowed it down to C.D. Tenerife and Hibernian of Edinburgh in the Scottish League, for whatever that's worth. (The C.D. is for Club Deportivo or Sports Club)

And by the way, scaifea, physics is a form of magic. At a fundamental level there is a barrier that our knowledge just can't figure how to cross. That darn quantum mechanics. Not only is it magic, but it's magic that doesn't even make much sense other than it works. Every experiment designed to prove or refute it has led to a further strengthening of the theory of matter so on it goes. It probably has something to do with the spin rates. Regular matter, like electrons have integral spin rates like, 1 or -1, while the subatomic particles have spins of 1/3. Things always get sticky with irrationals or long repeating decimals like .333333... Close enough to magic for me. For now, and that doesn't even consider how all this stuff came to be or why it's here.

Here's a Dragon Tree, native to the Canary Islands. A nice warm looking picture for those of us stuck in the cold.

Speaking of stuck in the cold, the weather forecasters here are using the b word to describe our weather tonight and tomorrow -- blizzard! Maybe I will get that snow that I wanted after all! Got to run a few errands today, as we might not be able to drive tomorrow. Luckily, my husband has 4WD.

I was so tired that I fell asleep and missed 2/3 of the finals between Murray and Djokovic (can't spell it). The first set was quite good though. The other day I saw part of the Winter X-games. That never ceases to astound me. I cannot believe that people will do those things.

Are you going to participate in the Fantasy February group read? I know this is such an old book, but I am going to read HP and the Chamber of Secrets. I am the only person on the planet not to have read this series. I read the first one last November and actually liked it. I did not think that I would.

People were wearing shorts here on Saturday. I kept telling my dog not to start shedding as the really cold air is on the way. I am counting on her to keep me warm if the power goes out. :)

I am glad that you were able to recover some of your files. Makes me not want to move the ebook direction. Glad to see you back online!
--BJ

I will read through the group read thread and see what folks have to say. Hopefully you don't have big problems with ice from this winter storm. It could be bad.

First freezing rain, then ice, then snow. Kind of like the last storm that was so bad that we lost power several years ago. I said I would be totally prepared next time. Am I? No, but we did buy a generator. We will pick up some gasoline for it tonight. Off to run a few errands before I can't get out of the house.
--BJ

We have ice, snow, freezing rain and bitter cold weather...enough now...spring needs to get here soon.

-------------

On another subject,

I'm compiling a list of birthdays of our group members. If you haven't done so already, would you mind stopping by this thread and posting yours.

Thanks.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/105833

The winter storm was moderately bad here. We've had more snow in a sitting (not that often though) and wind like that (again not that often) but as a combination it was pretty singular, and it was almost entirely overnight. About a foot of snow, maybe 14 inches. It's hard to say because of the extreme drifting. For some reason there were several people trying to get to work in the morning who got stuck in knee deep drifts across the road. Several folks in the neighborhood came out and pushed/dug them out because they were blocking the snowplow. Not a good day to drive an old minivan. One of them was a guy regretting not paying the extra money for four wheel drive on his brand new pickup. They are terrible to drive in the snow, especially a smaller one like an S-10. One day of total shutdown, even ambulances were beached on the roads and now back to normal.

Snow blown under the old garage wall

The real problem-huge drifts like this

8. Shadowplay by Tad Williams
This is the volume where the story opens up and the reader finally gets to see what the story is really about, or at least what some of the main themes are. The first book sets up the story (as it should) but mostly provides a familiarity and intimacy with the characters and places. Volume two ties several of the disparate strands together and gets the interest level up even more. Great characters and some very evil villains. The only thing is that you assume they will be overthrown in the end somehow. Unlike many fantasy stories the characters are believeable and not some trumped up superhero. Not much more to say right now as I consider this to be one very long book broken up into four parts for publishing.

Love your snow pictures. Also 14 inches here. But Tulsa is taking longer to recover. School's out tomorrow for the 4th day in a row.

I definitely want to check out those Tad Williams books.
--BJ

I forgot to ask. Who is Robert Jordan? He wrote a series?
--BJ

He wrote the Wheel of Time books that are still not completed even after his death a few years ago. They were the biggest thing in the fantasy/scifi arena since Star Trek before Harry Potter. His estate hired some other writer to finish the last book and he, of course, decided it was best told through a trilogy. I've been waiting for literally twenty years now. The problem is that a friend loved them and finally got sick of the excessive, flowery over-descriptive prose. This was discussed a year ago or more when I brought up how Robert E. Howard used a perfect economy of words and Jordan would go on for two or three pages about the different shades of green in a grapevine covered in dew at sunrise. That was where Scott gave up after eight long, tedious and repetitive books.

Thanks for reminding me.
--BJ

Thanks for sharing the beautiful quilt with me. I would be so proud to have a quilt I made featured! I hope that I can finish my little one someday.

I never did find out, did Michigan beat OSU? Any news about your new coach? Are you happy with him so far? Were you for Green Bay or Pittsburgh? Being a former longtime Cowboy fan, I just couldn't root for Pittsburgh even though there are tons of Longhorns on the team. I did like that they made a game of it (until that last drive anyway).
--BJ

No problem. The only problem was that glossy magazine paper is notorious for not scanning well.

OSU pulled away and won easily in that game UM did better the first time around this season, losing on a buzzer beater.

I was hoping Pittsburgh's plane would crash on the way to the game. I despise them, as do every orange blooded Browns fan. Even being in Michigan I have liked the Packers since I was little. It goes back to being fed up with the Lions after they lost Billy Sims. I didn't like the Silverdome either and to this day I like the Great Lakes area teams that play outdoors. Cleveland, Green Bay, Buffalo and (sort of) Chicago.

Brady Hoke seems to be a much better fit than Rich Rod. He at least cares enough to coach a physical defense.

Only a chapter or two left in the Tad Williams book, then the final volume. Awesome.

I heard a rumor that the Buffalo Bills are moving to Canada. Know anything about that? Interesting since Canada has its own football league.
--BJ

The Bills rumor has been floating around for a few years and they have played a home game in Toronto the last two years, I believe. It wouldn't surprise me as Toronto has way more money to support a team than Buffalo but the Bills are a founding member of the AFL from 1960 so who knows what will happen.

Had a good chuckle with this from thechive.com today.

I really can't stand the fact that television is filled with these ridiculous shows about stupid people doing stupid things. It can't be because we are a nation overloaded with ignorant morons, can it? Boy I hope not, but as I look around town here at the people who make drunken fools of themselves at my local disc golf course, smashing glass bottles, destroying trees and branches that they throw their crappy throws in to, vandalizing everything in sight and starting fights then maybe we are a nation rife with idiots. That's not to mention the two girls in my friend's geology class who didn't know what acorns were and didn't understand when they were told.


9. Shadowrise by Tad Williams
This series is building to a great climax. At least it had better for all the time I've put in to reading these books. There are several separate threads twining around, several have by now been either merged or clarified. One note to anyone who does read these: Pay attention to the tales and legends of the gods. They play a large role in the story. "The gods are real and they will destroy us for not believing in them." This is some good fantasy writing. The world of Southmarch is described in exquisite detail without being so wordy as to drag on interminably. It's just a long tale.

I'd like to write more but I'd get into the spoiler area and besides, the baby is crying.

90 - Love that picture. I've been at a loss to understand the draw of reality tv for some time. I'm starting Shadowrise next week I think - glad to hear it lives up to the first two.

Tad Williams has never let me down. I just need to find his run of seven or eight Aquaman comics of about four years ago.

The only reason I can come up with for the spate of Reality TV is that people like to make fun of other idiots, especially if they are richer, prettier or whatever. I still like watching The Soup on E! Network. No idea when it's on but I see it in the guide every so often. They do a fine job of showing just how inane these shows are. It used to be Talk Soup years ago, making fun of Springer and Rikki Lake but the reality craze has supplanted those talk shows. All I have to say is that Spring Training opens fully next Monday, which is enough Reality for me. That and high level Soccer is a great game that will never be very popular here for several reasons. If you get a chance to watch the English Premiere League on Fox or ESPN, check it out (ESPN Saturday mornings live). I even watch the Mexican League on Telemundo.

Pretty funny! I don't really watch reality tv, except that I did watch several episodes of Ice Road Truckers. That show fascinated me. Plus my uncle from Alaska had told me about the ice roads. He worked for years on the North Slope.

Lately, I feel like I live in Alaska. All these negative temperatures! Last night we hit -12F here. I did not think that was possible in the mid-continent area. Bartlesville, just north of here, hit -28F or so. Yikes! I would not let the doggie outside because I did not want her little paws to freeze.

The library has A Game of Thrones ready to check out so they must be open finally after almost 2 weeks of being closed. Hoping to pick it up today.
--BJ

By reality show I mean that useless drivel like Survivor (how do those girls keep their armpits shaved so nicely?), The Bachelor, whatever that Kardashians show is, Housewives of New Jersey, or the more obscure ones like Woman Cops of Cincinnati. I could come up with more but I try hard not to remember this kind of junk. Ice Road Truckers is informative and moderately interesting. One show that I wanted to like was The Big Break on the Golf Channel but they focus so much overdramatizing the people, a la the Bachelor, that the golf skill aspect was overshadowed, especially early in the season. If anybody watched the Phoenix Open over the last weekend, that Tommy Gainey guy was one of the early winners on the many versions of Big Break. He had a bad 17th hole Sunday and dropped back to about tenth after leading for the first 62 of the 72 holes in the tournament.

Right. I never watch those. Can't even watch the commercials for them.

Missed the golf. I guess it is getting into golf season now. I was listening to the local sports guys (on radio) disparage the Longhorn basketball team. They are really cruising. One thing I found out was that UT did make it into the Final Four not that long ago. I did not remember that. I follow the football team a lot more than the basketball team. Soon it will time for baseball. Seems too cold for it now.
--BJ

I was thinking and wanted to clarify something. I have no problem with Women Cops of Cincinnati in principle, but the ads that I have seen for it had the featured lady sounding like she was reading off of a cue card and trying to sound tough. It's the difference between secretly taping someone acting naturally and openly recording someone who is acting in an odd way for the camera. Just so I didn't make anyone mad.

Testing my keyboard and it seems to work fine, a bit sticky but I wanted the same kind I had before so my only option was a used Apple Pro of questionable heritage. It has USB ports on it, one for a mouse and the other will power my eReader, if I try to plug them individually into a USB hub then nothing works right but linked through a keyboard works fine.

I have the whole afternoon to read Shadowheart(?), with a break for some Mexican League Soccer tonight on Telemundo (Guadalahara vs. Cruz Azul of Mexico City, might be UNAM Pumas, whatever, I have no idea who wny of these teams are at the moment and the Spanish speaking announcers don't help much either). I'd like to finish the book, it is great but I'm dreadfully tired of reading it every single day and night. Something else would be nice but I hate reading two things at once, it make sit seem like you will never finish either of them or are not reading one or the other closely enough. Taking a break for a short story is another matter however.

I should have known better. Totally jinxed myself with the reading time. Not five minutes after I sat down to read my nephew wandered down the basement stairs wanting to play video games with me. I watched the soccer match (Monterrey Tigres 2-0 over Cruz Azul if anyone cares) then fell asleep reading a half hour later. I haven't had much time since either. Beats trying to dig a ditch though.

I had to duck outside for a few minutes this morning and the air smelled like rain for the first time in a long time, instead of smelling like ice. That's the first portent of spring up here.

My daughter's fiance is from Monterrey, so he probably follows their futbol team.

Our massive snow is almost entirely gone. Amazing what above freezing temps can do.

Tiger still seems to be self-destructing. Wonder if he will ever recover?
--BJ

It's warm here too. We set a daily high temperature record of 48° overnight.

Recovering golf mojo is not easy so good luck Tiger. Now he knows what it is like to be human instead of a golf robot.

He might follow the Tigres but he may be a fan of CF Monterrey. There's only one way to find out... I like the Tigres because they are somehow a part of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. I've seen that here and there reading about these national soccer leagues. Theres a team in Portugal called Academica or something who were a university team that joined the new professional league in Portugal in about 1970. It's a whole new vista in sports for me.

Good luck holding on to the #1 ranking for your Longhorns. I watched a few minutes of the end of their drubbing of Okie State and I'm not sure what looked better-the team or the barbeque stand.

Did you say the Longhorns are number one? I had no idea. We watched the game. I left toward the end and my husband came in talking about the loss. I said "What?" He said that they had switched to OU and Nebraska and OU had lost. I did not realize that, so I thought he was talking about UT.

The local OK sports radio guys are talking about all the coaching drama at UT these days with the football team. I am ready for all of that to be over. Just want to see some football.

I will ask him what team he follows. Apparently the college-professional sports is different there than here. He explained it to me once and I think that certain colleges feed into certain pro teams rather than a draft -- maybe kind of like minor league-major league baseball teams. I kind of think he follows whatever team is affiliated with Monterrey Tech. But I am not sure.
--BJ

Barring a loss, UT should be #1 next monday when the new poll comes out. Kansas was (and technically is still) until then but they lost to KState.

I have no clue as to how these leagues are organized, but I was reading a bit about the English Football League pyramid today, they have four levels of national leagues then literally 19 layers of regional and county leagues. The teams are promoted up and down based on results after every year. Must get complicated to keep track of things over time. I can see some old codger reminiscing about when Swindon Town was in the Premiere League or some other team was way down in the Shropshire County League.

10) Shadowheart by Tad Williams
Well that's finally over. I don't think I'll claim this to be Tad's best work. not that it is bad or second rate, but it just isn't as great as Memory, Sorrow and Thorn or as the Otherland series. The best way to put it is that it just isn't as satisfying in the end. Hopefully someone who reads these as a first glimpse into the realms of Mr. Williams doesn't think the author is an old windbag.

There was so much treachery and death in this story that it wasn't that fun of a read, relatively. Some of the characters were evil bastards almost to the point of unbelieveability, but most fantasy tales are like that. Who wants to read about Joe Average, arch-villain in training? Also, the author seems to have a fascination with ancient castle/cities that have longer histories than the men who have ruled them, as well as the networks of caves and buildings underneath them. There seems to be magical mirrors that are key elements in almost all of his stories, not to mention his abortive Mirror World comic series from ages ago.

And congrats to your Cornhuskers for beating my beloved Longhorns on the basketball court. I must admit after all the hoopla over the football game, I really did not want to lose to them before they left the Big 12. But hey, they played better for sure! I also think that kind of loss could be a good motivator for the Longhorns in the tournament. They were winning way too easily.

Sorry your last series did not end as well as you would have liked. I am reading A Game of Thrones, from the Fantasy February group read (late, as always) and really loving it. I am reading kind of slow these days, but I am enjoying the books I have going right now pretty well.
--BJ

It was still a great story, just that I rank it third out of the three overly long series he has written. Thanks for the update on the basketball. I had no idea. If it were football I'd say 'ha-ha!' but it's not so I won't. I haven't really considered how Nebraska might stack up in the other sports.

It was a great game in Lincoln. The fans were unreal. Shouting through the whole thing. At one point Nebraska was up by 11 late in the second half. UT pulled to a tie, but too late. The top UT player did not perform well until too late. It was quite an exciting game. I always thought that Nebraska should do well in baseball being in the land of the College World Series. But apparently not. Football is the great love there, I think.

It is certainly a football school, but I do remember about eight years ago they made the College World Series for the first time ever. Too bad considering the stadium is only a few miles from Lincoln. They do have the most Academic All-Americans ever, both overall and in football alone. That's why I've clung to them for no good reason all these years.



I've been spending the morning pawing through my massive pile of recovered files from our little 'accident'. Things are going far better than I expected. Part of the problem is that I have to go through, file by file, a backup copy of my existing library of ebooks. So far they have been in order of the directories in my library so I could mostly dump entire folders full of files that are on my computer downstairs. I'm trying to find the pile of new downloads I had which was mostly math texts and lots of histories of the classical world, with a sprinkling of this and that. I bet I find them in a big group eventually. I've gone through and deleted 15 of the 36 folders already, then rename the recovered stuff (36000 pdf's named 00001 to 36525 is a pain on many levels). After that I have to redownload some cool podcasts I've found, like The Tolkien Professor, The Norman Centuries, a History of Rome series, History of Baseball weekly series that spans back to 2002, Druidcast and a few others. After that I'll be back to normal.

Sounds like things are going pretty well with recovering your files. Good thing you are so good with a computer.

I noticed on tv last night that college baseball has started already.
--BJ

Guess what I found right after I posted... The pile of new downloads I was looking for. Awesome, and nowhere near as bad of a mess as I thought. Deleting vast piles like that was a huge help.

College baseball starts about the same time as MLB spring training and runs through the end of the academic year, June-ish.

Awesome!
--BJ

Yep. College baseball opening weekend is always one of my favorite sports times of the year - LSU's basketball team usually being something I want to forget.

LSU is usually quite good at baseball.
--BJ

LSU has a long list of great teams, the CWS seems lacking if they aren't there. Has LSU been any good in basketball since Shaq left? He was the Last Big Thing that I got to see before I stopped following basketball after high school. I really liked the Nolan Richardson Arkansas teams from then, they were fun to watch as a neutral observer. They seemed to be on TV every week. Sorry.

It's funny, for not being a basketball school we manage to sneak into the tourney every now and then - last two I remember being 2009 when we made it a couple rounds in before running into the UNC juggernaut and 2006 when we got the the Final Four on the back of Big Baby Davis and Tyrus Thomas. Also our famous basketball players (Bob Petit, Pistol Pete, Shaq) blow away the fame of any of the football (Y.A. Tittle is probably the biggest) or baseball (Ben McDonald probably, though Brian Wilson made a name for himself in the last World Series). This year and last, however, basketball was beyond awful - RPI is currently 215 or so and ranked in the 250s - miserable stuff.

I've always liked LSU football, they have played well over the years and always have some great players. I particularly like Joseph Addai but he needs to go to a different team. His power running is wasted with the Colts. If Green Bay could get him they would be unbeatable. The list of Saban and Les Miles players is long and illustrious, at least as great collegiate players. Nome of them haven't panned out like I thought in the NFL, namely Devery Henderson and JaMarcus Russell. I had a feeling Russell wouldn't be smart enough. Glenn Dorsey played great for a solid KC Chiefs defensive line last season, too, and that Landry guy at safety is probably the best player on the Redskins. Too bad he's stuck with Mike Shanahan, whom I think is the most overrated coach in the history of football. I'll watch LSU over any team save Nebraska and Michigan for as long as the Mad Hatter is there. He's outstanding and lucky, which mixes well with genius.

Started reading a paper book for the first time since Christmas. I had to resist the urge to tap-tap a word to look up the etymology in the dictionary, like I do with my eReader.

Is it wrong to call a little baby a smiling fool? I have a big problem with telling a kid that something he did was dumb or stupid, or calling him a dummy, but smiling fool is ok, I think. Isn't little Bailey cute? She looks so much like her dad as a baby it's scary. So far I've called her Todd (dad) by mistake more than Brayden (her brother).

Cute, cute!
--BJ

I finally remembered to ask my daughter which Monterrey team her fiance prefers. She said that he really doesn't watch much soccer. (We have definitely shared our love of American football with him!) Of the two teams in Monterrey, he prefers the Rayadas of Monterrey Tec over the Tigres. But more than either team, he prefers the Chivas of Guadalajara. That team seems popular in central Texas, as I have seen lots of signs for them in local restaurants in Austin.

Have you read any Guy Gavriel Kay? I picked up a copy of Tigana at our Borders going out of business sale because several people recommended it. But I have never read anything by him. I am still reading A Game of Thrones. I don't know why I am so slow at reading it, because it is a wonderful book. I tried to find a copy of my own at the sale, but they did not have it. There were still a lot of books there, though. I had no trouble finding books to buy.
--BJ

Glad I could spark up that little conversation. Too bad he likes the only team I root against in that league. However, it's only because a friend of mine got his ass kicked as he was mugged at knife point in Guadalajara years ago. His brother got a call at 2 AM at the bar to come and pick them up. 'Where are you?' 'In a fruit market in Juarez with no money or passport for Jean.' He had been left laying in the street with nothing but his pants and a fractured skull. On the plus side, I also had a question of mine answered. Why does the Monterrey soccer field (sorry, it's a pitch) have football yard lines chalked on it? Here you go... 2/3 of the way down in the Sports section of Monterrey Tech's Wikipedia page.

I read Kay's Last Light of the Sun several months ago. It was very good, the writing was great and the story was interesting. Most if not all of his fantasy books are set in an alternate Medieval styled Earth. He is without question a true wordsmith. Too bad about the Borders, I was pretty crushed when both of our local Waldenbooks closed 15 years ago just on the announcement of a new B&N at the local mall. At least you weren't that satisfied with the store itself. By the way, Kay also edited the Silmarillion with Christopher Tolkien and they are some sort of cousins. (Just because I had it open, here's his Wikipedia page.)

Delurking to say Hi!! Cute baby! How old is she? Thanks for sharing! I love babies and pictures of babies!

The wikipedia article was interesting. I guess everything under the sun is in wikipedia. That amazes me.

Things in Mexico are not what they were. I am sorry that your friend had such a bad experience. When the new passport rules came out for Mexico, I got my first passport so that I could go there. Now I tell my girls they should not go there. My younger daughter has many friends from there, and she was invited to Mexico City over last summer. But I just could not let her go. My older daughter has flown to Mexico alone, but now I prefer her to stay here. Of course, she is an adult, and I can only advise. The border areas are really frightening. I like the current President of Mexico, and I am hoping that he can turn things around.

I cannot believe that I have checked two more books out of the library and still haven't finished one. Sometimes I think that people who stick to one book at a time are on the right track. I am going to have to start returning some unfinished which is a bummer!
--BJ

Hi tj. It's been a while. Little Bailey was about three months in that picture. Now she's almost five months. I haven't done a lot of lurking around on LT lately with the new baby and my brother's computer issues over the last few months and have barely kept up with my own little dusty alcove here. For the record, by the way, I am reading a biography of Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United on my eReader and the only Graham Hancock book that I haven't read, namely Heaven's Mirror. It was a treat to have that show up in my mailbox a weekago from England. I think it's the only one of his books that did not have a U.S. printing, which would explain why I haven't tracked it down yet.

I can see Jean getting in trouble like that. He's a bit on the arrogant side. Most of my friends are neutral towards him unless they have had issues in the past but whatever. He has a Master's degree in Engineering Mechanics from Mich Tech so I'm about the only person around who understands what he's talking about most of the time. That and we're both good cribbage players. Their problem was simply that Guadalajara isn't the best place for a gringo to be mouthing off after dark. I wouldn't do what he did there in Detroit or even Saginaw. Poverty, envy and fear really mess up a society.

I have to ration myself at the library. My old limit was to not check out more than I could carry under my arm while walking home. And yes, wikipedia is a handy start to looking up just about anything. I still enjoy my game of getting to the page I want without typing starting from the Random Page link. My brother told me that he heard at work that there is a 'game' like that out there in which you have seven clicks to get to the 'God' page. Rminds me of the time my friend joked that I should start a fantasy Bass Fishing league online just to make a few bucks on advertising and when I was setting up our ESPN Fantasy Football page for the year I saw they already had a Bass Fishing league in the miscellaneous games. Now officially everything has been done with the exception of time travel.

Almost done wit hthe Graham Hancock book, probably tonight. It fits right in with his other books about forgotten ancient civilizations. Heaven's Mirror focuses on the surprising similarities between ancient Egypt, Hindu and the legends surrounding Angkor Wat in Cambodia, as well as Easter Island. Some of the evidence is circumstantial but in legal terms there is such a thing as preponderance of evidence.

Also, I had a good laugh watching Jeopardy last night. There was a category 'Starts With a Body Part', answers like 'Arm-istice' and 'Leg-end'. They showed a mouse like thingee with the question 'This has fur thirty times softer than human hair.' The guy answered 'What is a tit-mouse?' And immediately apologized to the two women he was competing against. It was a chin-chilla.

Love the photo.

I can hardly believe that it is March. Both my girls are coming into town today. That is wonderful!

I added this book to my wishlist as well. I guess my wishlist will become bigger than my library the way I keep adding to it.

I am speculating about what I want for dinner for Mardi Gras. Pretty sure it will include Dr. Pepper. I am glad that Lent is almost here. I think I need it.

Have a nice weekend.
--BJ

11. Heaven's Mirror-Quest for the Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock
This was the last of Hancock's books that I was able to get my hands on. They all cover the theory that there were unknown or forgotten cultures and civilizations before recorded history which were destroyed at some time in the remote past, either by strife or, more likely, a massive and global natural disaster. The end of the Ice Age around about 15000 to 10000 BC would fit the bill nicely. Hancock explains in great detail about this in his most informative book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, showing how, using sound geologic principles, there were several major meltdowns over a short period, followed by lengthy centuries of calm. An example is a glacial meltwater lake in the US slowly growing behind an ice dam. When the ice dam retaining the water finally gave way it created a literal mountain of water that flowed to the Pacific Ocean in a wide torrent from north of Vancouver to somewhere in Oregon. The estimated tidal waves would have devastated most of the Pacific Basin and, not coincidentally, coincided with a major tapering off of the Jomon culture in prehistoric Japan.

That was a bit of table setting for the hypothesis of Heaven's Mirror. The argument is that there was (is?) some sort of relic religious belief from prehistory that somehow survived and carried on some specific ideas about the immortality of the soul through knowledge of the motions of the stars. The data is carried along in mythic stories about various gods and whatnot, but there is a common theme of numbers to the initiated, which relate to the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is a very slow backwards (apparent) movement of the stars relative to the sun's annual journey from its observational northern and southern maximums, at the tiny rate of 1 degree every 72 years. These few specific numbers pop up all over the globe in myths, and are detailed in Hamlet's Mill. These myths are eerily similar considering the wide time and distances between the people who used them.

In ancient Egypt their creation myth was that the Benben stone was created out of primordial nothingness concurrently with the Bennu bird, which is the same thing as the more familiar Phoenix, just under an older name. The world was created from the egg of this Bennu bird and this egg was regarded as a sacred ideal, much like the holy grail. On Easter Island, they had a tradition of swimming to a nearby island to recover a sacred physical egg and presenting it to their master. This combined with other similarities, like the phrase 'ra' referring to the sun as a godlike deity, points a finger towards some kind of unknown connection to ancient Egypt, or at least a common reference point in the past.

There are even more of these 'coincidences' between Egypt and Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia. For starters, the name Angkor itself may be a clue. It is pronounced 'Ankh-Hor', which could mean it it refers to Horus of Egypt, as in 'Horus Lives'. The legendary pre-Pharaonic leaders of Egypt were called the Shemsu-Hor (Followers of Horus). There are about 3000 years difference between the building of the pyramids in Egypt and the building of Angkor Wat, but both are purported to have been built over older sites. Both also closely mimic specific regions of the sky on the ground and at a specific time. The Giza monuments are (controversially) a mimic of the constellation Orion, which was clearly associated with, in fact 'was', Osiris, Isis being the star Sirius trailing behind. On the spring equinox, traditionally the start of the solar year, in the distant time of 10500 BC, Orion would have been due south, the Nile river would have intersected the Milky way just east of Orion. The Sphinx would have pointed directly at Leo as the sun rose directly under its paws. This is clearly diagrammed and explained in The Message of the Sphinx for anyone interested.

Now, is it a coincidence that the temple complex of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom exactly mimic the constellation Draco on this exact date? Every one of the temples has an analogue in the sky, including a few of the brighter stars nearby the Constellation. There is even a temple, the most mysterious and strangest of them all (according to several accounts by visitors going back well over a hundred years) which represents the ecliptic north pole. This is basically the center point that the procession revolves around. By the way, the apparent pole in the starry sky at night moves with this process and currently matches up with the Polaris in the little dipper but within in a few hundred years that star will noticeably 'revolve' around this point. Anyway, Angkor Wat is filled to overflowing with serpent imagery (Draco, remember) and myths about 'churning the milky sea' and whatnot, which almost indisputably refer to this precession. The site is aligned just off center east to west so that the vernal equinox sun rises directly over the big central tower in the picture above. (The sun moves in an arc and doesn't move straight up.) And on and on.

Back to the numbers in conclusion. There seems to be a consensus that Giza, being the oldest of several ancient and mysterious sites, was used as a 'zero meridian' by this long lost culture and almost every major monolithic site is a multiple of 54 or 72 degrees from Giza (and each other) not 70 or 45 or 60 but 72 and 54. Any variance from this can be easily attributed to the building being done on the nearest available site. Easter Island is the farthest off of the pattern but it is within 2 degrees and is the only inhabitable land for 2000 miles. I'll put this link here for anyone interested. It goes in to some detail about this geodetic pattern. This pattern is global and includes the pyramids of South America, which have associated myths about the Feathered Serpent and the Viracocha, allegedly Caucasian people who came from the sea in primitive times and civilize the continent, giving them the skills of stone masonry, astronomy, agriculture and their amazing calendar which runs out on December 23, 2012. Honestly, it just starts over. You can make one out of three gears.
(This link takes you to a 7 page pdf file detailing how to make this calendar out of paper gears, this link is to a youtube video showing how this system works, less than 2 minute video.)

The conclusion is that there once existed, and may still exist, a 'cult' that firmly believes that the future is written in the stars and they have built sacred sires on a global scale to announce their beliefs, on one level for the unwashed masses and a much higher level for the initiated. This argument can be extended to the Freemason inspired layouts of Paris and Washington DC, but that is a tangent I will pass on today. Now, the Egyptians had an epithet 'As Above, So Below.' They went to great lengths to achieve this symmetry on the ground, as did several other peoples around the globe. Why? Frankly, how? The precision of these giant stone complexes is astounding. The Great Pyramid of Giza is more precisely aligned to true north than the Greenwich Observatory which marks the 0 degree meridian on modern maps. And most of these places used stones bigger than cars, some of them approaching old trains in size, literally hundreds of tons. The mind, it boggles.

I do have a small request. Some friends of mine had a plaque in their bathroom that had a Psalm on it which basically said 'As above, so below' in slightly different words. I wouldn't mind figuring out what verse that was. I am reasonably certain it was a Psalm.

Another really nice review!

I am not familiar with that Psalm. But I will look into it some. Others out there are probably more informed than I.
--BJ

Bailey... Too cute?


12. Football - Bloody Hell!: The Biography of Alex Ferguson by Patrick Barkley
I've been following soccer for a fairly short time, but my years of experience as a sports fan are paying off. I've been absorbing a new sport like a sponge. For those who need to know, Ferguson is the long-time coach of Manchester United, and has been knighted so he is properly Sir Alex Ferguson. Even more properly, Sir Alec as he changed the spelling after moving from Scotland. This particular book was fairly interesting and would have been far more enjoyable if I had a mental database of English and Scottish soccer to round out the information in the book. It's hard to keep your Strachans straight from the McGhees or Bobby Charlton if you have no idea who they were. Like reading a book about Babe Ruth and not knowing at all who Lou Gehrig was.

Still, the book was well written and clear, fairly educational for me but surprisingly long. It covers his upbringing a little but mostly focuses on his coaching career, which followed a so-so playing career in the Scottish League. Other than the general soccer information, the most informative part was from his playing days with Rangers in Glasgow. He was ostracized and eventually sold off because he was married to a Catholic girl and Rangers, the team he had been a fan of growing up in Glasgow, was heavily biased toward the Protestant faith. Celtic in the same town was the other way around, ans thus is arguably the most heated intra-city rivalry in all of sports. The book goes on to chronicle his career as a manager in Scotland, his first Scottish Premiere League job with St. Mirren and his feud with their management, his meteoric rise at Aberdeen and eventual move to Manchester. He was first and foremost concerned with building a youth squad everywhere he coached, but at Manchester the budget was available to buy virtually any player that he wanted. Some players were bought for tens of millions of pounds, played for a few years, and then were sold off for more tens of millions, some guys, like current player Ryan Giggs, were signed as teenagers (Giggs in 1987 at age 16) and played there fore year after year. From watching a few games I had gathered Giggs was a crafty, wily old veteran, but I had no idea how crafty or how veteran he really is. Very fun player to watch if you are learning soccer.

I watched Manchester play Marseilles just a few days ago and having read this biography added a new depth to a team that I frankly don't like that much because of their New York Yankee-esque spending of insane amounts of money to but the best players in the world. From what I have gathered, they have an annual payroll of over 700 million pounds, which is over a billion dollars, and they have hundreds of players under contract loaned out to teams world-wide. When they need a guy, they just bring him back, or sell him off to raise payroll. Also, Marseilles has the first guy who looks like he plays in the NFL. Not could but does. He's a defenseman named Diawara from Senegal. They still couldn't beat Man U in the UEFA Champions League and still no French team has ever sauntered in to Old Trafford in Manchester and won. Anyway...

There was some good stuff about the breakup of Ferguson and uber-star David Beckham, who currently plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy in MLS. They had a long running feud and Ferguson eventually threw a cleated shoe at Beckham, gashing his forehead open (apparently English folk call it a 'boot'). After that it was a sale to Real Madrid, then to Italy somewhere (AC Milan, had to look it up), then LA. Also discussed was Ferguson's support of the hated American owners, the Glazer family who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

There was a major focus at Manchester of not only winning the Premiere League but on winning tournament trophies in Europe, like the above-mentioned UEFA Champions league. So, some years, games were sacrificed by playing younger players in league games to focus on UEFA play and in general there was a push towards a large team with plenty of players who had access to plenty of playing time.

In summary, probably not much of a read unless you are a serious soccer fan, in which case it is fairly interesting.

Beckham was actually loaned twice to AC Milan from LA, not sold. Sorry.

Interesting concept, loaning players. Seems like it would hurt team loyalty.

Haven't looked at the Psalms yet. My life is becoming chaotic these days. And, yes, Bailey is totally adorable!
--BJ

The loan process is usually either young players who are better off playing full time in a lower league than on a youth squad (similar to a minor league system, most major teams have an Under-21 or -17 team), or a guy you don't need badly and want to get some or all of his payroll off the books. There doesn't seem to be trading, but apparently a team will once in a while demand a player in return with cash for selling their guy. Occasionally it is used like the rehab assignments in baseball for someone recovering from an injury. The MLS season started last weekend and DC United has a guy on loan from Sweden that somehow survived a nasty car crash in which his companions were all killed. There was literally half of a car left, how anyone survived that mess is a minor miracle. Also some leagues run at different times so you could loan out a player to a summer league team in, say, Ireland or Norway or the US, where seasons run spring to fall instead of summer through to the next spring.

I suppose loyalty would be a question but the player is still technically part of the parent team that loaned him out. I learned over the weekend watching Premiere League Review (on Fox Sports, it's a very good recap with insightful commentary) that a loaned player is ineligible against his original club. Wolverhampton had some guy from Chelsea who couldn't go, even though he is one of Wolverhampton's hotter players at the moment. For the record, Wolverhampton reminds me of the Cleveland Browns. They had some high glory days in the 1940's and 1950's, followed by half a century of mediocre at best. At least the Browns had a few AFC Championships in the 80's that Elway ruined. Buck-toothed jerk.

That book on the holocaust you are reading, or read I guess, sounded pretty grim. I suppose that goes without saying. I actually get physically sick reading about both the Civil War and World War I, dizzy and faint. I'd like to learn more as a historian but just can't do it.

I have never like Elway, ever since he refused to play for the Baltimore Colts. I used to root for Denver, but I no longer could after they got Elway. Even with Elway gone, I still find it hard to root for them.

Maus was a magnificent book, well worth reading. It was a testament to human spirit and the amazing will to survive of some people. That being said, I found myself somewhat depressed after reading it.
--BJ

What a lame snowstorm. From golfing to this again! The biggest problem is that I have to go to the local Delta College tomorrow right during the guts of it to finalize some enrollment and financial aid stuff.

I have some cool pictures from the Midland Center for the Arts dinosaur exhibit, plus from an amazing collection of MV Agusta Italian motorcycles, from their original bike in 1949 to a brand new superbike that is going to Bonneville in a few months to take a crack at the world speed record

And thunder-snow now to boot!

I am sorry you are having snow this late in the season. I hope it clears off and melts away soon. What classes are you signing up for?
--BJ

We had thundersnow last night. Since yesterday morning we have had rain, snow, sleet, hail, more snow, more sleet and more snow. It is supposed to stop snowing tonight and then stay below 32 degrees until next week. Phooey!

Bailey is cute cute cute!!

#125: Just catching up; the only Biblical parallel to "as above, so below" that comes to my rather heathenized recollection is from "the Lord's prayer," in Matthew 6:10: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

13. Tales of Ten Worlds by Arthur C. Clarke
Not a bad little collection of short stories, some better than others as is usual. A couple of them were very good, I particularly liked the one titled 'Hate' about a pearl diver who stumbles across a crashed 'Sputnik' in the shallows of an oyster bed. Being a Hungarian, he was suitably angry at the Communist Russians and plotted a way to make the trapped pilot suffer before death from lack of oxygen. His plan backfires spectacularly.

Now that the business is over, thanks to swynn for identifying that for me. I had a feeling it might have been the Lord's prayer but some little birdie told me it was a Psalm. Whatever. The whole book with the exception of Isaiah could go away and it wouldn't bother me a bit. Isaiah is quite inspirational and contains the best of Christian thought, peace and fellowship, without being preachy in any way. It is the one with the great 'What you do to the least of these, you do to me' line that sums up everything a person really needs to know about the bible in a convenient sentence. The world needs more of that.

So, my college trip last week was snowed out. Boy was it strange to wake up pre-dawn, check the school closings, and go back to sleep! On the down-side I have to reschedule a few meetings, hopefully for next Wednesday. I have a conflict between an American History class which oddly runs from 2 until 5:10 and a one night meeting for a Geology field trip at 5 sharp, and the professor said that leaving early was not a problem. I just have to get it in writing with a signature before the field trip is filled up. The trip goes to the Sleeping Bear sand dunes area, of which I posted a picture of last year after I finished Dune. I'm taking another trip to Mackinac Island later in the semester, plus the Geology course proper and Statistics. I just can't comprehend going to school and not having a math class. If I'm lucky I'll get in a Fitness Walking class to clear a PE credit that is required for all degrees at Delta College. They used to offer golf, archery, softball and all sorts of fun sports and games but things are limited twenty years later. Tennis, raquetball, swimming, martial arts of all sorts and basic conditioning are all that is left.

That had to be the strangest snowstorm I can recall. If it were a week later we just would have had a heavy rain but instead I had to shovel 8 inches of ridiculously heavy snow here and at the parentals. I pulled a pectoral and am not happy about it. Is that proper grammar? I think so... It's hard to give a cute baby a bottle with only one and a half arms.

I'll slap up a couple of pictures from the museum soon.

Late snows are always heavy, aren't they?

Sounds like a good choice of classes, especially the Geology. I have one of those Great Courses on Geology that I am slowly working my way through. I haven't watched it in a while.
--BJ

#137: Glad to help. And I'll add a pitch for Micah, which contains my favorite verse:

"What doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

That is a pretty funny photo! I guess cats make the best pictures and that is why they have that cheeseburger site.
--BJ

*snork!*
Excellent picture!

I thought that picture would get some giggles.

Baseball starts tomorrow, Tigers-Yankees on ESPN at 1. The Tigers have a great team ready to go but I'm hoping the manager doesn't stifle them by being ultra-conservative. They have a some great young guys at the top of the order but Leyland rarely lets them be aggressive on the bases because, one, he does,'t want to run in to an out with Maggs and Cabrera coming up and two, he doesn't want an open first base so that those guys get walked intentionally. Let them walk those guys, that's more RBI chances for the middle of the order. What are they paying Victor Martinez all that money for? Walk Cabrera and let Victor drive him in. Leyland is a stodgy old duffer in a game where you need to play like a kid.

That's what I say. Walk those guys and run up the score!
--BJ

14. The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski
Interesting to an actual bibliophile, this traces the history of the humble bookshelf. However, it is a story that can only be told in tandem with the history of books as well. Petroski traces these paths starting with scrolls and medieval codices and their storage issues, through the chained libraries of the Middle Ages (with the spines inward), to modern library design. The chained libraries had a lectern at a convenient height to sit (or stand) and read the captive book. I particularly enjoyed the later section on library design, notably how modern libraries are reliant on artificial light, ignoring the sunlight coming through the few windows in most designs, which is completely contrary to older libraries which were arranged around the windows. In fact, a smart observer could often tell where exactly the library was in a big stone edifice by looking for the spot with the most windows. There is an appendix on organization systems which was interesting, but not interesting enough to reorganize my tidy sectional library. Not a bad book but certainly for a specialized audience, many of which are LTers. Petroski has also written a similar book on Pencils, which I must find. I like pencils the way most other people like cats or dogs.


Do yourself a favor and run a google image search on 'Chained Libraries'. There are many neat-o pictures of old libraries to be seen.

Flor the record, I think the Tigers-Yankees games were reruns from last season. Ultra-conservative play with some shady strike zone calls, the Tigers lost both of the nationally televised games and won the one only seen locally.

Interesting book!

By the way, I saw that Colt McCoy made the list of Top Ten Most Accurate QBs in the NFL (or something like that). He was number 9 and the only rookie on the list. I watched the UT Spring game on tv Sunday. I really think they should let Case McCoy start rather than Gilbert. Why are they so hung up on Gilbert? Gilbert threw a terrible INT and another one was almost intercepted. He reminds me of Chris Simms.
--BJ

Maybe that Gilbert guy will get his spleen ruptured like Simms did with Tampa and you will get your wish. Not that I'm rooting for a guy to get hurt, but that was the first think that came to mind with the Simms comparison. We watched several plays of that game during the commercial breaks during the Tigers game and I think I saw that pick you referred to and whoever it was missed the receiver by a long ways. Who's fault was it? I don't know, it's hard to say during a scrimmage like that. Maybe the WR was way out of position. Which reminds me of the best analysis I've ever heard during a game. Back when I watched a lot of hockey, a CBC announcer said during a Maple Leafs game that Brian McCabe was, 'So far out of position that he might as well be on the bench.' He was awful defensively but was one of those offensive defenseman types that are rarely worth having. That same season we also heard, 'There's McCabe, turning it over in the neutral zone again.'

McCoy ought to help the Browns immensely over the next few years. They have a good line, a great RB, frankly, they have a solid team that needs some time to sort out a spotty defense, figure out who the good players are and get rid of the ones that stink. You might recall Mohammed Massaquoi from Georgia and Brian Robiskie from The (hated) Ohio State University. They ain't bad in the NFL, at least for a young tandem. Their biggest need is defensive line.

Out of curiosity, I checked McCabe's stats. He was well in the positive for the underappreciated plus/minus stat (+63), but he had 214 assists with 84 goals scored. That's a huge amount for a defenseman on a yearly basis, but that +/- rating is 298 in the net and 235 allowed. If a hockey player has a goal tally like that, +63 is awful. A good defender would have allowed far fewer goals. He would make some dumb turnover trying to lead a rush up the ice almost every period and give up a free breakaway to an opponent, and with Ed Belfour giving up rebounds every time, the Leafs lost many a game that way. One of those years they led the NHL in goals scored and goals allowed and, surprise!, lost in the playoffs on a turnover/bouncing puck off Belfour's chest for a goal. What a great team that needed to dump the biggest liability on defense since Paul Coffey. Or at least move him towards the front and put in a real defender.

I shouldn't go on like that but it's one of the reasons I don't bother with the NHL anymore. Completely overrated players that are deemed stars, like McCabe, Canadian teams that just couldn't compete because they had to pay salaries in US dollars or flat-out moving to the US, (Quebec had to trade their #1 pick in the Eric Lindros draft because he refused to play in Canada, the team was quickly sold and moved to Colorado where they used those picks to be a powerhouse franchise for a decade, Sackic, Forsberg, Deadmarsh, Foote, just from that one trade), two-line passes are now legal, kiboshing the necessary fighting (keeps the dirty stick work to a minimum, believe it or not), the season starts during baseball's pennant run at the end of September and runs well in to the next June, and the fact that 16 of the 30 teams make the playoffs, which is over half of the league. And I can't skate, so it isn't worth my time. I'd rather watch Star Trek, Frasier or Coach reruns on TV.

I do miss the White-Out games in Winnipeg where everyone wore white shirts and hats in the crowd. Somehow the Phoenix Coyotes just don't do it for me. Screw you Gretzky, you puss. He needed a few elbows to the jaw. Everyone in the league was afraid to hit him because he was the league glory-boy. Some fisticuffs with Mark Messier would have been worth putting him on a stretcher. Thanks for buying the Jets so you could move them to an arena near your mansion in Arizona then failing as an owner. In this rare case I would be rooting for a guy to get hurt, and yes, I would have much rather had Messier on my team than Gretzky.

I have most of that pile of recovered book files sorted out so now I have time for an occasional long-winded rant on my thread. Haha! I can even read some more now, I'm catching up on a few Early Reviewers scores that have been sitting around for a while. Tomorrow I promise to stick a couple of those museum pictures up that I forgot about posting.

Eric Lindros sounds like John Elway. And I really don't like John Elway. :) Glad that you have your files fixed. By the way, did you see that Notre Dame is playing A&M in the Womens Championship game? I was disappointed that Butler played so badly. They all pet their bulldog as they went on the court. I liked that.

By the way, it looked like to us that Gilbert was playing against the number 2 defense and Case McCoy was playing against the number one defense. OK, I admit it. I am biased on this issue. And I did feel sorry for Simms when he received that injury. He could have died because the coach would not pull him for a long time after he was injured. At least, that is the way I remember it. Simms was a nice guy. I was just more of a Major fan. You know that famous play where Simms threw the interception for a touchdown out of the endzone in the OU game? That photo is prominently displayed in dozens of restaurants here in Tulsa. It makes me crazy!
--BJ

That's what you get for being a Texan living in Oklahoma. Just an observation. In the Simms case, maybe neither of them realized how badly he was hurt. I recall that being a bit bush league on the coach's part though.

Lindros was much like Elway, but at least Elway had some guts and was at least sort of tough.

I did try to watch some of that game but just couldn't do it. My heavy smoking buddy was over for the Tiger games and the smoky garage was too much. I still feel sick from it. Had to turn it off and go to bed last night, especially after watching Butler miss three shots in a row and have no chance at all on either end.

That ND vs A&M must be an interesting match for you. If the game is tonight then I'll be enjoying the UEFA Champions League matchup between Real Madrid and Tottenham of London. Quarterfinals for the European championship, you know.

Made a trip to the college I'm attending starting (again) this summer. I toured through the library while my friend took a geology exam and saw a fairly remarkable thing. They only have a small section of paperbacks, five shelves high by about ten feet, the size of an average single section of shelving in a common book store. Out of that small selection, they had an entire shelf of Agathe Christie mysteries, about 30 or more of them which would comprise about 1/16 th of the entire collection of paperbacks. That's a nice touch, lots of good ones too, even the Mr. Quin one I've been planning on reading for a few months now.

Currently reading James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise, an Early Reviewer special which lays out in somewhat gruesome detail the Asian Expansion policy of the Teddy Roosevelt administration, so far the focus has been on the war in the Phillippines against the Spanish and how neither side thought the locals were 'civilized' enough to rule themselves. Pretty interesting so far. After that I have one of Conn Iggulden's Genghis Khan novels, which I'm going to skim through as it is part of a series that I'd like to read in the future, then a book on Simon Bolivar, all from the cool ER program. The first two have been hanging around here all winter, Bolivar just came in the mail last week, so I had best get to them before school starts mid may. My geology class will be almost a part time job, 8-12 monday through thursday for 4 weeks, plus study time and two weekend field trips. Talk about a crash course for my return after almost twenty years.

Still haven't gotten an answer as to whether it is good or bad etiquette to call a baby a 'smiling fool'...

I personally love the photo and I think you can get away with the remark as the doting uncle!

When do your classes start?
--BJ

Class starts May 16, 8AM. I swore I'd never take another 8AM class after a torturous art class way back when but I don't mind getting up that early these days. 8-12 art then a 12:30 Computer Programming class was just too much for my tired brain. Geology is much more my style anyway.

If you look up smiling fool in the dictionary, that picture ought to be there for the lighthearted entry. I'm sure I could find some sleazy politician for the negatively connotated entry but guys like that (mostly guys anyway) I prefer to call a smiling gooje, whatever that means. One of those made up words that magically gets the point across.

You are brave to sign up for an 8 am class. I can't even think at that time of day. My dog sometimes gets me up at 5, but I just fall back asleep. I do think that people who function better at that time of day have brain cells hitting on all cylinders. Best of luck with your classes!
--BJ

Coffee is an amazing thing. Two cups and I'm set. Thanks for the good will.

Coffee is one of the greatest things ever. :)
--BJ

Indeed! *goes to see if there's enough for a third cup*

I can only do about three cups myself. That's a quart of coffee. If that's not enough then you might as well drop what you're doing and go back to bed.


15. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley
Mr. Bradley is most famous, and deservedly so, for Flags of our Fathers. His follow-up Flyboys is also a worthy history, but Imperial Cruise is the result of research into why the Asian world and specifically the Japanese 'Empire' was so vehemently anti-American.

The book starts with a look into the privileged upbringing of Teddy Roosevelt and his careful culturing of a public persona which stands as the standard view of the real Roosevelt to this day, like refusing to let anyone photograph him playing tennis, but doing studio shots in his Rough Rider gear to promote his manly image as a pioneer. The absolute shenanigans of Roosevelt and then Secretary of Wililam Taft involved in the Battle for Phillipines Independence from Spain, the support of Japan as 'honorary Aryans' in their quest to civilize the Asian continent in the proper white Christian way, followed by the refusal to support them in a post-war treaty with Russia, and the poor xenophobic treatment of the Chinese at the turn of the 20th century are areas of our country's history that are usually conveniently swept under the rug. The best way to sum up this book in a sentence is that there is a picture of US Army soldiers waterboarding a Philipino of some sort, civilian or guerrilla fighter, it doesn't really matter, way back in 1901 and the soldiers had a rather morbid song about it.

The main thrust is that white Christian politics of the day stood mostly for setting up a government for uncivilized 'lesser races', usually with disastrous results for both sides, as they were clearly incapable of governing themselves as uneducated savages. Not much of a surprise, but it foretells the whole Iraq mess. All in all, an excellently informative book. I liked the conversational style Bradley uses, like calling the main players Teddy and Big Bill, several reviews were negative on that point but so be it.

Little Bailey is so cute! Love seeing her pics!

Khan- Empire of Silver by Conn Iggulden
In all fairness, I didn't read the entire book, but since this is for the early reviewers program I have to post something. I was curious to check this series of books out and was very impressed with the early few chapters, but as I'd like to read the rest of the Genghis Khan books in their proper order I had to make myself stop, which wasn't easy. That is about the best thing you can say about a book. I am eagerly anticipating grousing up copies of the earlier and future books in this series.

Bailey is insufferably cute, but I will still slap a picture up every so often as they seem popular. I'm pretty excited about getting an occasional Christie mystery from the college library in a few weeks...

Pretty tempting review!
--BJ

Based on the few chapters I read I think I'll really like the first trilogy that this one begins a followup series. The first is about Genghis Khan and his empire building and the second is his sons and nephews continuing on. One of the best video games ever made was Genghis Khan, way back in the Sega Genesis days of the early 1990's. I loved that and a few other similar games from Koei, Liberty or Death was a difficult simulation of the Revolutionary War, Nobunaga's Ambition, the best of the bunch, immersed the player in the Shogunate Era of Japan, even with the limited power of the old Nintendo system. Nobunaga's Ambition was popular enough that it is still around in Playstation 2 editions and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ancient China) is out for the PS3 and XBox 360, but that one was my least favorite of the bunch. Why I felt the need to type all that is beyond me but whoomp! there it is.

Reading update: I've decided to wait a bit on Bolivar in the interest of getting the gears oiled up for college. The Golden Ratio, e-The Story of a Number and a shortish book on the history and development of the periodic table are officially on deck. That periodic table is one of the great inventions of mankind, right up there with the lightbulb and bread-slicer. What a handy thing.

My daughter has a poster of the periodic table in her bedroom here at home. I keep threatening to take it down, but she won't allow it.
--BJ

I should get one for myself with my extra student loan money.

I think we picked it up at Office Depot in the fall school supply buy for not too much money. We have had it for at least seven years. I think she had the whole thing memorized at one point.

There was an episode of Gilmore Girls where Luke's brainiac daughter went on a science field trip with fellow brainiacs and they were signing the elements of the periodical table to the tune of "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" by Gilbert and Sullivan. It sounded like a fun way to learn the whole table.

I will have to check that out. I bet my daughter would love that.

> billiejean - Here it is on YouTube.

Heavens - there's even one sung by Daniel Radcliffe! The other one has the words for it, however.

I like it! I remember Animaniacs doing something like that with that song, but I might have been thinking of this here song of Yakko singing the world nations. An interested person can find a classroom sized periodic table here and there online for $50 or so, or $100 in the cool windowshade roll-up type. Might be too tempting to pass up.

Here's some more Animaniacs I found looking for the Modern Major General song...
The Presidents
States and Capitols

They actually did an H.M.S. Yakko sketch that featured that song but I can't find it on Youtube. In english. Hungarian, though which defeats the purpose. At least I somehow remembered that they did something with it.

Since those made me think of my favourite Monty Python song I may just as well slap the Galaxy Song on here too.

Hilarious! I remember that my girls learned the states and capitols song when they were in third grade. The song about the elements sounds kind of hard to me, though. Quite a mouthful. Thanks, y'all, for the songs!

No problem. I'm here to entertain as well as educate.


16. The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio
The Golden Ratio, or phi, or even better, Φ, is an irrational number (equal to 1.618...) that pops up in many strange instances and has some odd properties. In its basic form, it is a simple ratio of a line segment divided in such a way that the proportion of the whole to the longer length is equal to the longer length to the shorter.



It pops up in the construction of a pentagon and the pentagram (the sides of the 'star' are divided in this ratio) and, supposedly, in the Parthenon of Athens. There is a tendency for leaves and twigs to branch off at angles determined by phi, the proportions of the human body as well as many animals are believed to be determined by Φ, and on and on.



The author goes through a long series of alleged uses of Φ, some of which are debunked (the Parthenon and the Pyramids) and some seem to be legitimate. As is to be expected, there is considerable information on the Fibonacci numbers (link to Wikipedia), where the new term in the series is the sum of the two proceeding, this series converges to phi and has many appearances in nature, like the left and right hand spirals of a sunflower's seeds are always consecutive Fibonacci numbers. The math in the book is minimal, proofs are relegated to a series of appendices, and the bulk of things actually revolve around the concept of Φ being 'aesthetically pleasing', a long standing idea. Livio examines art that is claimed to use Φ in its dimensions somehow and tends to fail to find it.

The best way to sum up this book is that I drew out a logarithmic spiral for a friend and mentioned that any line drawn through the center of the spiral intersects the spiral over and over at the exact same angle. His response was, 'So what?', and yours probably is as well, but he was interested to know that a diving hawk follows this exact spiral so it can easily keep its eyes on its prey on the ground. I guess that's enough.

The Golden Rectangle


Logarithmic Spiral determined by a nautilus shell made up of nested Golden Rectangles


The Golden Ratio as a continuing fraction (I love fractions)


And finally a sunflower with 34 and 55 spirals, both Fibonacci numbers

That is all pretty interesting. I used to love math. I don't think I can do much of it anymore.

I loved algebra and geometry and hated trig. I studied Oceanography in college and had to take lots of Calculus for that. Do I remember any of it? Hah! Just like a foreign language, if you don't use it you lose it.

Trigonometry was a fun subject for me. All the important stuff in the universe are circles and triangles. Not for everyone though. And yes, it is a foreign language. That's what I plan to tell any academic counsellors, at least until I get to a university where I can learn Greek. My big plan for the rest of the year is to go through an old trig book from the pre-calculator days and relearn it properly, then go through my old calculus book so I'll be ready for a major math class in the winter semester, either Business Calculus (as a test) or differential equations, which is where I left off almost twenty years ago. I might retake calc III as I missed the end of that class way back when and never did properly figure out the chapter on vector field analysis. I'd really like to take a basic oceanography class as I think there is plenty of archaeological work to be done under the seas. The end of the last ice age raised the sea levels at least a hundred feet and there is plenty of sound evidence that it was done in a few catastrophic releases of interior meltwater. All of the shallows that are usually colored light blue along the coastlines might be hiding some old ruins, some have been studied in India and Sri Lanka, the mountain chain between Taiwan and Japan as well as the strait between Taiwan and China, in the Mediterranean especially on Malta, and in the Caribbean around both Cuba and the Bahamas where the somewqhat famous Bimini Road lies. And don't forget the Persian Gulf which was filled in at that time and the legends of the Sumerian cities all state that they were reconstructions of cities that were flooded in what is usually called the Biblical Flood. What's under that filthy polluted water? We might never know as there is no diving allowed in the water because of security concerns.

Anyways, off to try some disc golf unless the course is flooded or soaked. The river has been at its highest in many years and the road in to town has been closed for almost a week. We have to drive about five miles either east or west to cross the rivers that flow in to Midland. That stinks when I am out of cigarette papers and have to make an almost twenty mile trip to a store that I can see from the end of my county road.

Ok, this may be the coolest 75 book challenge thread, yet.

What is your weather like? It is really cold here. I went down to Dallas for the weekend and came back to almost freezing (OK, a low of 38). That is cold to me for May. We could see the tornado damage in Tushka when we went through. It was nothing compared to Tuscaloosa, but still pretty bad.

I have never heard anything about buildings under the ocean. That is something I would like to learn more about. Sort of like AVP only not under ice. (I know that is a ridiculous movie, but I really like it!)

I also think you have a pretty cool thread. :)
--BJ

That ridiculous AVP movie has a theoretical basis in fact as far as a possibility of an ancient civilization in Antarctica. Maybe farfetched but possible. We have no idea really, just reasonable guesses with contradictory evidence here and there that doesn't fit with the accepted norm.

Our weather has been fine except for a series of fair sized thunderstorms, one missed us east and the other west. It was odd hearing the tornado sirens in the distance but nothing came of it. Temps have been cool but not cold for around here, probably about the same as Tulsa actually. That tornado in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa might have been the strongest one ever measured with modern radar. It was an awful thing to see on TV, I can't even imagine something like that flattening my neighborhood.

Not the best of pictures but that is U of Alabama's huge football stadium dwarfed by that tornado off in the distance. It is from a video that I saw live on the Weather Channel so the still quality is poor.


Thanks for the compliment Sandydog. I try to keep things interesting in my little corner lemonade stand on the internet. And I haven't even had my monthly or so rant about the underachieving Detroit Tigers yet. There's a skewering of the management coming when I get some time to type it up. I've officially had it with static conservative baseball and the umpiring this year has been completely unacceptable.

172 - Great review. I added it to the wishlist.

That is an amazing tornado photo. Tornadoes really scare me. I am glad that they usually break up before they get where I live.

Same here, we have our shot after Lake Michigan warms up, around September we have something bad in the area with the winter air blowing in. There are way fewer tornadoes in MI than Ohio , the I- states or Wisconsin. That was the first time I've heard those sirens in anger in several years, just the first-Saturday-of-the-month tests at 1 PM.

Still trying to chug through e: The Story of a Number but we've had visitors for Tigers/Yankees and a freak power outage right at bedtime when I was all excited to read for a few hours. Couldn't find any candleholders so I just slept, albeit poorly. It is way more technical on a math scale than 'The Golden Ratio', it is dipping in to limits on functions and basic calculus. Just the sort of thing that requires a fair amount of time to dedicate to it to understand.

Oh, hey JanePE, I like that picture on your profile page of the LSU game. That's the best midfield logo in sports, especially when the grass gets a bit muddy and the edges of the tiger eye fade out. Great place for a game, I'd love to visit Death Valley someday. Always a great game no matter the outcome for a neutral observer like me.

Yay! I'm at school right now, Early American History at 2 PM. Exiting other than waiting six hours for class, but I had to take the ride to campus when I could get it. Next week my Geology clas starts so at least it's a one time thing.

Have a great day! Tell us all about it.

Wasn't much going on. I sat around all morning reading through my textbooks and that book on logarithms I've been nibbling on, went to lunch and discovered that the reuben sandwich was taken off the menu (Booo! Hiss!!!), then went to my history class where we listened to the teacher tell us about herself and got an overview of the natives that were all over. She seems pretty funny. How can you discover a land that has been inhabited for millenia? 'I claim this coffee shop for France!' We stopped early as her plan is more along the lines of discussing and reinforcing the reading rather than lecturing material that is to be read later. She didn't want to get 'All hot and heavy' on the Jamestown colony. I think I'm in love....

Speaking of love, Justin Verlander threw a no-hitter on Saturday and was untouchable. This Arecibia guy for Toronto fouled off several pitches and got a walk on a close pitch for the only baserunner then the next guy grounded in to a double play

Sounds like a good start. I want to hear about the geology class, too. Too bad about the reubens. I love those. I am still watching basketball these days.

Geology starts next week then I'll fill you in. I do know it will be an intensive triple-time course, it finishes in five weeks instead of a normal 7 1/2 week summer or 15 week regular semester class. No basketball for me, I'm too busy to watch even if I liked it.

Boy is it odd sitting in a classroom after all these years, and I have the advantage of being well versed in the topics of discussion. Not to mention outside information dragged in to a discussion in history class. For example, over half of the class didn't know that hot dogs are really Frankfurters. Obviously this came up during a discussion of German immigrant traditions that are still around. I don't think the other half even knew that Frankfurt and Hamburg are cities in Germany.

I'm enjoying the class, other than being stuffed in a tiny full classroom in the basement of the art building on a nice spring day. There are two empty desks in the entire room and, as usual, one is right next to me. Nobody ever sits by the fat dumpy guy unless they have to. Except for the cute girl in my Geology class, but I'm pretty sure she has a big engagement ring. I'm finding out soon. Have to be buddies first so she won't think I'm weird.

Which reminds me that I should see if my grade is posted for my first paper...
Yay! A 93%. There's a good start. We had to hand in a Document Analysis essay on the diary of Alexander Falconbridge, who was a surgeon on slave ships coming from Africa in the 1780's. What is the agenda behind it, what does it say about its era, etc. He was a devout abolitionist who, after his diary was published, vainly attempted to help reorganize a freed slave colony in Sierra Leone. His diary was pretty graphic and professed a belief that even the Africans had just as much a love and yearning for liberty and justice, but whether they were on equal terms with white Englishmen was a bit fuzzy to me. Mrs French was of the belief that they were not (to Falconbridge) but I was more taken by the pre-Victorian prudishness of his claim that the women slaves would throw themselves overboard due to the 'inconstancy of their paramours', rather than being repeatedly raped and stripped of all humanity by their situation and ending it all. A sad document of a sad time.

Much sadder than the fact that we have a skunk or two living under our front porch and the stink is giving me a splitting headache. They crawl under there a few feet from my bedroom window in the basement and all the smell settles down there as well. My first test is tomorrow and this headache is not what I need right now.

Sounds like you are off to a great start! Good luck on the test. I want to hear more about geology class, too.

I'm off for the field trip to Traverse Bay / Sleeping Bear Dunes for the weekend. I'll slap some pictures up when I get back. The Geology class is pretty cool, we've been learning a serie sof mineral formations and igneous rocks so far, and lectured about the other rock types. Pretty simple stuff but fascinating. When I get back I'll write up some of the cool data about the evolution of the Great Lakes. It is beyond interesting to me. The only downside is cramming a bunch of new information about the concurrent Wildflowers of Michigan bonus credit that I figured that I may as well try as well. Totally new botany stuff to learn, but I have to listen to the field lectures anyway.

Your class sounds like so much fun. My daughter is looking at taking accounting online (not much fun) and photography out in the field this summer at TCC. I am thinking of watching her online class over her shoulder if I can.

What a nice trip. I plan to put up several pictures of the rocks that I brought home. One I call 'War and Peace of the Middle Devonian Era'. Basically it is a football sized hunk of Petoskey Stone (local ancient fossilized coral that is only found in a few places world wide), and stuck to it is a baseball sized clump containing almost all of the other fossilized creatures of the time, some shells and other coral, from around 400 million years ago. Not much to look at but an impressive geologic record. And yes, hunk and chunk are technical terms. I found many nicer specimens that I plan to snap a few photos of. You know that you've done well when you find a great piece of coral and the Doctor teaching the class can only say woooowwww, in that drawn out way that is nice to hear. Not to mention the amazing beach rocks at what he called the Geologic Wonderland. It was. I brought home a backpack full of the most incredible stones you could hope to find on a beach. The glaciers back in the Ice Age basically scoured them from wherever they were in Upper Michigan or Canada and carried them to what is now Lake Michigan where they in effect rolled around in a tumbler for around 10000 years. An unbelievable variety of almost any kind of basic rock you might care for, neatly rounded and polished.

Dr. Clarey handed me a few rather non-descript sandstones that I would have overlooked but he told me they were called Jacobsville Sandstones from a specific outcrop in the U.P. and are the among the oldest rocks in the world, from the Precambrian Era, which was so long ago that the rocks themselves have been almost all metamorphosed into something else or drawn back into the inner Earth to be melted and recycled. There are few regions that have rocks from the earlier dates of the Era, which goes back to 4.5 billion with a B years ago, when the Earth is assumed to have cooled and formed a crust of rocks. Those sandstones are well over a billion years old, if not more than 2 billion, and now they are in a backpack in my garage. Let's just say that as life began to evolve in this era, there was very little oxygen since the free atoms of it in the atmosphere were all bonded with iron and other elements on the surface, and as the little beasties of the time started making excess oxygen from photosynthesis and whatnot, they began to fill the atmosphere with it, which kicked off a chain of evolution of oxygen using organisms. Those sandstones were already there watching that, the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. The mind, it boggles.

Wow! How wonderful it all sounds! I have one of those Great Courses on geology. Now I want to pick up where I left off. My daughter called from Alaska. She and new hubby panned for gold and found about $40 of it between them. Can't wait to see the photos of your billion year old rocks.

Pictures tomorrow, I have to get caught up in history (not a problem), study for geology test (again not a problem) and then work on a bonus class that ran concurrent with the geology trip on wildflowers of Michigan, which is a little bit of a problem since I have some 'foreign' homework in a subject that I have rarely thought about in over twenty years. I'm telling the professor that the last time I thought about haploid gametes was for an extra credit question in 9th grade. I don't know where else I would have heard that term. I'm also loaning her The Singing Life of Birds for brownie points.

Here's some links for anyone interested.
Fossils of the Michigan Basin
Petoskey Stones from wikipedia

I spent a little time at Sleeping Bear Dunes in high school - camping all around the Great Lakes with my family. Really beautiful, but I had no idea about the geologic importance. Is there a good book for the class?

We just have a pamphlet rife with geologic data about the area, it is impressive but technical. I'll get back to you with some resources in the near future. I forgot I had an evening meeting for the next geology trip tonight so the photos have to wait a day. Mackinac Island and its varying levels from the fluctuating lake Huron (in technical terms Lakes Algonquin and Nipissing, since the glaciation and crustal rebound have drastically altered thinks around here over the last 15000 years or so), then through the eastern U.P. to check out the Cambrian sandstones, notably Tahquamenon Falls.






It took me a few minutes to find a picture showing some very old sandstone not obscured by the water. These layers are contiguous with the fairly famous Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior.

Lovely photos! You live in a beautiful place!

Michigan is a beautiful place but I live in the flat bottom of a bowl that had been filled with water for a long time. The ground is flat boring clay on top of layers of cool rock underneath. Basically, around the edges of the depression that I am in the bottom of, the layers are exposed, like punching a dent in a piece of wood and having splinters of wood grain rise up around the outside Drywall might be a better example, layered drywall better yet, but you get the idea. The rocks at those falls are about a way below me here in Midland under about 1200 feet of clay and I forget how many thousands of feet of overlaying younger rock. Again, the mind, it boggles.

Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? It is beyond description.

Have not been to the Grand Canyon, but that would be a great trip. I'm in a rush, my theory that if i sit down to do something important while waiting for someone who is late works every time. Here's those sandstones, a greenstone, both billions of years old, and a couple of other pictures. And a link to my photobucket page with a bunch more pictures. I will label them later, there are a few pictures from Sleeping Bear Dunes there too.


The 'sand' in the cracks of the greenstone are so old that it has lithified into some sort of quartzite stone itself.


'War and Peace of the Middle Devonian'-not much to look at but an almost football sized petoskey and almost every type of fossil of the era


When you squish and cook a granite (right) it foliates into these layered rocks called gneiss (left). Same stuff chemically


Jacobsville Sandstones and a Dolomite limestone in the center

Great photos! I love the gneiss. I don't think I had ever heard of that before.

My professor brought up the good point that what is sold as 'granite' countertops is not technically granite. Basically, granite is an igneous magma based rock that has lighter minerals as its makeup, and will be whitish to light gray or any shade of red to pink. The red is the feldspar, white is quartz, black flecks are called hornsblende. Anyways, if it is very dark grey or black it is technically not granite, having magnesium and iron in it. That makes it a basalt (or gabbro if it is coarse like the granite sample on the right of that picture). What the heck. Here's the basics....



(There are subdivisions of the types but these are the main groups)
Scoria and pumice are quite similar but for the size of the holes. Felsic means Feldspar and Silicon, Mafic refers to Magnesium and Iron (Ferric), as nicknames. The coarse grained samples cooled over a long period (inside the earth) so the sample had time to clump together, the fine grained igneous are pretty much chemically the same but cooled faster and didn't sort into grains. Granites are lighter, relatively, and form continental rocks, basalts are noticeably heavier and form lower oceanic crusts, at least as a rough rule of thumb. Obsidian is quartz (sand basically) that cooled so quickly that it didn't have time to even form crystals. Same applies to basic glass. Peridotite is a special case. So, in conclusion, unless your granite countertop is whitish or pink, it isn't granite to a geologist.

By the way, I brought all this classification stuff up to show that things are commonly misidentified in non-specialized circles. Most people would have called that layered rock a 'layered or grained granite', which it sort of is, but it is properly a metamorphic igneous, in this case a granite but any igneous could foliate into those layers. The foliation is what makes it 'gneiss'. It is just a process of heating and pressing igneous rocks that creates gneiss. To a chemist they are identical, minus trace elements. Depending on the makeup of a rock, the heating might 'cook' out mica flakes or garnet crystals, etc. If it actually melts, it is no longer metamorphic but resets to a new form of igneous.

Another metamorphic cycle of interest is the shales. Heat and pressure metamorphs wavy bumpy layered shale into slate, which is almost perfectly flat and great for chalkboard and roof tiles. More 'cooking' turns the slate into a crystalline rock that is similar, but has crystals in it, mostly micas, and a glossy sheen, called phyllite. Even more heat overcooks it into schist, a German word for crappy rock. It quickly falls apart and erodes back into the clay that made up the shale that the whole process started with. Shale layers are usually rich in oil or at least natural gas. We have some wells in my area, mostly inactive now, that draw oil from the Antrim Shale, which is right near the surface by Traverse City where that field trip went to. The wells here are almost a half mile deep here.

That Antrim Shale is the boundary between the Mississippian Era and the older Devonian. Here is the Ellsworth Shale (from a clay tile mine) and the Traverse Group Limestone at Bay Harbor in Petoskey. The Antrim shale is between the two, Ellsworth on top, then Antrim, then below them is the Traverse Limestones, being the oldest. This assembly is a half mile or more beneath me in mid Michigan. That Ellsworth quarry site is where I found the War and Peace of the Middle Devonian sample in some blocks the mining company brought in from Petoskey to line the access road into the pit. I cracked it out with a screwdriver then slid/fell down a small slope of gravel and had to leap over a slimy drainage ditch with a 15 pound rock in one hand and a bootlegged screwdriver in the other. With style and panache. I then calmly asked Scott to grab my bag when he was done, drawing attention to him bashing away on some rocks himself. The whole class then knew we were nuts.





(I'm going to start a new thread pretty soon for anyone who gets bogged down by the photos.)

I love all the photos and hearing about your wonderful class! The capitol building in Austin is entirely pink granite. But I would never want that on my kitchen counter. On the other hand, I have worn out wood look formica! One day I will get some kind of rock there. :)

Just don't let some greasy salesman sell you a marble countertop. It is not as hard as a steel knife so it would be quickly ruined. Not that a marble slab isn't great for rolling dough on, but it will end up dinged and/or scratched as a countertop surface.

I looked at a few pictures of the capitol building and it was inconclusive, and unless you are taking a geology exam, you can call it granite. Might have technically been a rhyolite but they are close enough to the same thing in practical terms. That's a nice looking building by the way. The inside of the dome might have been more crystalline but the picture was a bit pixellated.

I'll try to post some tidbit every day or two since my reading time is at a standstill for at least a few more weeks. I have 14 credits this summer semester and ten of them are in the current first half.

That is a lot of summer school hours. :) You jumped right in, didn't you?

Thanks for the tip about the marble. I was kind of thinking of it for something different. Now I don't think I will go that way.

Jumping right in is an understatement. Three of the credits are/were field trips but the first trip was about 25 hours or more of field work with a two hour lecture on angiosperms, Botany 221 class level. It was very hard to concentrate on that stuff when I just wanted a shower and a bed after only a few hours sleep the night before, plus some sunburn. That got me way behind in my reading for American History and I'm still not caught up. The hardest thing of all though is the half dressed college girls parading all over the campus, but I've narrowed the hunt down to a few so that's not a big distraction anymore. But my friend is always elbowing me to check one out every few minutes, then makes fun of me for ogling and calls me 'rubberneck' all the time. What a dutch.

My geology professor is a serious Tigers fan and calls me the Skipper in class as a joke because neither of us can stand Jim Leyland. Total sarcasm. Once in a while I have to call for a lefty from the bullpen and explain a few things to the class.

Mackinac Island trip is this weekend and several people in my class have signed up on short notice for the extra credit. Now I have to drive a third van all weekend, pal Scott and Dr. Clarey are driving the others, and I get the shaky Ford. Small price to pay for the education, plus there's no way I'd let the other mooks in the class drive.

I'm enjoying your enthusiasm and your pictures of the local geology. I've always been fascinated by the "bones of the earth" and my love of the Flint Hills in my birth state of Kansas, where the water has eroded between the hard limestone caps, and the limestone lines all the highway cuts, was undoubtedly responsible for that.

Our rock layers are all pretty flat after being ground away by glaciers, so the road cuts in Michigan are almost all through gravel and sand debris from those glaciers. In fact, the only big hills in the whole lower penninsula are glacial moraines and drumlins, and other specialized sand and gravel piles left by receding ice. Moraines are the most obvious being sand piles at the end of a conveyor belt of ice. Glaciers always move forward, flowing away from their center of mass, and a retreating glacier is actually just melting faster than it creeps forward.

195) Back to JaneEstrada, I haven't found out about any specific resources that would be commonly available in a library, but I'm going to check for some online resources shortly.

OK then, I finally got some time to find a few good books on geology out of my busy professor. He has Intro from 8-12 and Dinosaurs from 1-4 so his time between classes is at a premium.

Under Michigan: The Story of Michigan's Rocks and Fossils and The Day the Great Lakes Drained Away both by Charles Ferguson Barker - Both are more along the lines of illustrated children's books but the data in them is very good and easy to access.
Geology of Michigan by Dorr & Eschman - Borderline collegiate textbook from the 1970's but nothing has been published to surpass it yet. It is a little bit dated as far as plate tectonics and some technical advances over the last 40 years though.

If you are more in the mood for a travel book or highlights of the state, those are pretty easy to find.

One online resource that I did find that you may or may not care for is the Geological Society of America at www.geosociety.org (couldn't figure the HTML today and I'm late for a round of disc golf). With a little site cruising in the publications area you can read through several years of back issues of GSA Today magazine. Probably more than you wanted but it is there if you do.

Two quick things. One, Lake Superior is of a completely different origin than the other lower lakes. It is a remnant oceanic basin that was undergoing a seafloor spreading much like the Atlantic Ocean is today at the mid-ocean ridges but the process was stopped for some reason, probably by bumping into a continental plate. There are several old inactive plate boundaries within the continent, like the New Madrid fault that roughly parallels the Mississippi River. That is the site where the largest earthquake on record in the lower 48 was recorded in 1811 and 1812. The old boundary is approximated by the Mississippi from the point of Illinois on downstream. Two, here's a link to a nice geologic timeline from the GSA. The little tiny tan sliver at the top is the age of hominids, of which Homo sapiens is just a small part. Like this but legible.

Have you heard anything about these upcoming solar flares? Do you understand exactly what it is about?

Solar flares can cause some electrical interference by altering the electrical flow through transmission wires or devices. Mostly they are a hazard to space systems (satellites and astronauts) and radio communication. Electrical grids are supposed to be built with several layers of redundancy to absorb fluctuations in current so I doubt that solar flares would ever be a problem in that regard, contrary to media buzz on TV. They used to fuzz out TV reception a little bit back in the primitive days before cable TV and remote controls, but I think only ham radio people ever really noticed. Basically the flare is a massive ejection of ions and radiation into space and the only real health hazard is gamma radiation. That would be very high frequency energy similar to x-rays, but even more penetrating and energetic, and doctors make you wear a lead shield during basic x-ray imaging. Almost everything else involved in a solar flare is absorbed or deflected by the ionosphere and magnetosphere, but a marked increase in the Northern Lights would be fun to see.

There theories out there postulating that mass extinction events in the past are caused by gamma ray events either from the sun or open space (another star, black hole or other phenomena like a quasar) but there isn't much hard evidence to support it. Not that it couldn't or didn't happen though. One of the 2012 disaster scenarios is that all life earth will be wiped out by gamma radiation from the galactic center, but on grounds of simple geometry I doubt it highly. The earth and solar system does pass from the 'northern' hemisphere of the galaxy into the 'southern' in 2012, but we are already so close to the theoretical equator of the galaxy that any event like that would have already happened. I highly doubt that there is some paper thin sheet of radiation emanating from the core of the galaxy, not even in a cheesy scifi story. The only reason this whole silly 2012 problem even exists is that the Mayan calendar 'ends', and by ends it simply starts over at day 1, lunar year 1, solar year 1, something like that, which is a simple three gear cycle that takes I forget how many tens of thousands of years to cycle through. The hysteria is all based on Mayan myths about the ends of prior cycles in disasters. The real mystery is why their calendar started out at 1, 1, 1 so far in the past, as opposed to some particular date in 'historical' time as opposed to 26000 years ago or so. That's a whole new can of worms, entirely separate from the solar flare can of worms.

Almost forgot. Solar flares and sunspots follow related eleven year cycles of ebb and flow, but things are only partially understood. We can't even make a good weather forecast on earth, outside of a potential major event, more than about two days in advance, if that. I was waiting for five days for both the big winter storm that we got in the Great Lakes this year and the Alabama tornado outbreak. Good job by the Weather Channel on those, but basic weather is just too chaotic to make a fair guess into the future. So the sun is even more difficult to predict.

Thanks! I did not even realize that the galaxy had hemispheres to pass through. Gamma radiation is a pretty big deal, though, I think. But I don't know what we could do about it. I would love to see the Northern Lights. Can you see them in Michigan? I am guessing that this is more of a winter experience.

Wow. Five weeks and fifty postings on my thread since my last book review.


17. e: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor
To a non-math person, the best thing about this book will be the title. It is quite dense in advanced calculus, complex variables and crazy concepts of number theory that I would have had to use a pad of paper on the side to figure out what was really going on. The problem for me was that I didn't see a particular point to the whole exercise, other than e is a very special case among irrational/transcendental numbers, namely it is the only function (an 'equation') that is equal to its own derivative. If that makes no sense to you then all you need to do is chuckle at the title. By the way, 'e' is a notation for a special base in a logarithm system. On a calculator you will find a button 'log' for base-10 logarithms (and an inverse 10^x) as well as a 'ln' for natural logarithms, with its inverse 'e^x'. Again, if this makes no sense then just giggle a little politely and back away slowly.

I also wanted to post these pictures, then I will start a new, less congested thread.


A cool metamorphic rock from a park in the Mancelona area, one of a myriad of glacial erratics dropped randomly throughout Michigan.


The Geologic Wonderland of Lake Michigan's northern beaches

Off we go to a new thread...