soapbox

Arthur C. Clarke passed away.

The quote I borrowed from in the title above is further explained here.

I read a good bit of sci-fi growing up, and Clarke’s work was really influential to me. I cut my teeth on the Asimov catalogue, as I’m sure many of y’all out there in blog-land did (and I still enjoy re-reading a few of his really top-notch short stories). That being said, I really felt I had arrived when I wrapped my mind around some of Clarke’s works, which often felt more intellectually rigorous.

For those of you who only know him through 2001 (film and/or book), I’d encourage you to check out some of his other works, particularly Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End, one of my absolute all-time sci-fi favorites.

The recent issues with Iran have made me wonder more than a little bit if they’re trying to pick a fight so that we’ll march in and make things better. Just imagine a speech to their people once we leave, “You may think you want more person freedoms, but look how horribly the [big devil] Americans did. You’d much rather have a strict Islamic state, wouldn’t you?”

That made me think of The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley. If you haven’t read it, it’s about a tiny little country with monetary issues in post-WWII Europe who decides that the way to fortune is to declare war on the US, lose, and then get tons of support. In the end, they accidentally win and much hilarity ensues. It was a great read in middle school.

Anyway, I bought the book from amazon and now they point out other books that would match similar searches. This brings me to The Mouse that Roared by Dwayne Murray Sr. An electrician from New York who now dabbles in thriller novels. The interesting thing here is that Amazon now lists out “Statistically Improbable Phrases” for books. Basically, they’re phrases that should be more or less unique to a given author, clever turns of phrase unique to the book. Dwayne Murray Sr. apparently used the phrase “bully club” several times in his book while no other work of fiction contains that phrase. It kind of makes me wonder what exactly it is… is it a club for bullies to join so they can sit around and discuss proper bullying methods? a club specifically designed to stop a bully in his tracks? or, is it, as I fear, a repeated error in the book because the author doesn’t know what a billy-club is. That answer doesn’t bode well for the book as a whole.

…A new self-help guide due out this April by none other than yours truly, author of the popular recent works, “How To Not Break the Evaporator” and “Yeah, I Think That Might Explode”. Highlights from this new release include:

 1) Arrive a day early for your presentation to enjoy another night in the swanky on-campus apartment normally reserved for visiting professors and artist-in-residence types.

 2) Enjoy a day of meeting with familiar faces and catching up on all things, punctuated by free lunch at the faculty club with current students, the presentation you’re ostensibly there to give, and dinner with faculty that evening. Bonus! Pick up helpful job search and career advice from sources both likely and unlikely along the way.

 3) Enjoy additional night in swanky apartment before catching flight back home. Time everything right to include visits with other friends and such in the area while visting alma mater.

…and the list goes on!

 Yeah, so it’s been a good trip so far. Meeting with more professors until 3 PM, then it’s talk prep time, SPS meeting with Sigma Pi Sigma inductions, followed by my talk at 4 PM, which I finished the PowerPoint for this morning while visiting the nanotech class taught by my friend from Rice, Jen, who’s now a prof here. Visiting with former profs has been great, and several of them have already given me enough free career advice to remind me that the mentoring relationship never really ends…

Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” won’t even be published until March 6. Students at Hanover High School were among three schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts given advance copies to study. In the novel, an ostracized teen living in Sterling, N.H. — a wealthy, Upper Valley college town on the Vermont border — goes on a school shooting rampage, killing 10 people in 19 minutes.

This “Sterling” town shares many things in common with Hanover: Sterling has Sterling College, and its neighbor towns are called Lebanon and Norwich. So some people think it may inspire a real shooting. In the novel the high school shooting happens today@_@. Tim (the professor) said the school principal sent an email this noon saying everything is OK, except 18% students didn’t show up. I guess today is really an exciting day for those high school kids…

The official release date of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, 7th and final in the series.  Woo-hoo!  I was hoping it would roughly coincide with the release of the movie version of book 5.  Just hope I have money to buy a copy by then.

…Alabama!

Yeah, it was a good weekend. Had a nice, albeit all too brief, trip back home with Sara to visit my family from Saturday, 10/28, to Tuesday, 10/31. Ate way too much good food and enjoyed some good quality time with folks I wish I could see lots more often. The weather cooperated, even though it tried it’s best to keep me grounded in Boston on Saturday with some hellacious winds. (We had a 100 knot headwind from Logan to Charlotte, NC!)

Further details and links to pictures after the jump…
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Reports indicate a surge of manly activity of late. Evidence of this phenomenon can be seen in the following instances:

1) The publication of the “Alphabet of Manliness”. C’mon, you know you want one…

2) Land Rover SUV vs. Mining Truck…guess which one wins! Large things crushing small things is decidedly manly.

3) Finally, we have evidence that certain walruses are more manly than you are. Doing crunches to the theme from “Rocky”? Yep, you guessed it: manly.