Somusing

Having participated in three Pinewood Derbies, the last one with two sons racing cars, and with many to come in the future, it was fun to watch this movie . It's nice to watch a comedy that isn't determined to be crude and inappropriate, too. I enjoyed it.

Spam has gotten so obnoxious, intrusive, and time-consuming. Especially if you're the domain contact and postmaster at a large number of domains. And even with spam filtering. But then every once in a while, the infinite number of spam monkeys strikes paydirt, and I receive a spam with a subject like " Better Life, whirligig mullet ", and I don't even have to open the email because my life is better already thanks to the deep beauty of their word-art. Ah, pink quivering meat product.

I read this over the weekend for a local book club, mostly motivated by a desire to refute someone's suggestion that it might be a "man's book." I'm not sure why I felt so compelled to argue about that particular issue, but whatever. It's a coming-of-age story about a white kid who grows up in an igloo in Northern Alaska, uncool with the local Eskimos, who live in a village, and later uncool in the city of Anchorage. (He does become cool later, though.) It was really an amazing book: the writing was very good (it reminded me of the great writing in Peace Like a River , another excellent first novel), and it's a good, though sometimes depressing story (depressing mostly because of how the government so easily ruins native communities, just like in the old days, but with money and alcohol and free houses instead of guns and alcohol and jes' killin'em). Anyway, it's amazing to read about life in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. And probabl...

I discovered an interesting exchange of letters between John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma . Mackey defends his company against Pollan's portrayal of it in the book, and Pollan almost apologizes , but not quite. Then Mackey replies again, but that's linked on Pollan's website. They're long but worth reading.

Watched this last night on DVD, causing Jon to stay up later than he wanted to. Probably one of the scariest airplane crash scenes I've ever seen. I really liked the part on the island, which had no music and very little talking (until the Tom Hanks character starts talking to a volleyball he calls Wilson). The end was less satisfying than I was expecting; I wanted people to show some interest in how he managed to survive for four years alone on a island. I'd want to know all the details! What are we supposed to learn from a Robinson Crusoe-like story, though? To appreciate what we have, I guess. And maybe to marvel at the survival instincts of humans? I'd like to learn to tie more knots.

Or as our drive-in has it, Nacho LEBRA . I don't know if they ran out of letters or if they're creative or what. We laughed. Jack Black using a Mexican accent is funny, it turns out. Professional wrestling is always weird, even when it's funny. I liked it.

What a great book ! Targeted at young adults, it's about a young boy in a utopian society. This is, I think, the third time I've read it (for a book club this time), and it was still good. Some of the surprises were still chilling and horrific, even when I knew what was coming, or maybe partly because I did know what was coming. There are apparently a couple of companion books to this one, not exactly sequels but somehow associated. They are Messenger and Gathering Blue . I'm looking forward to reading them, especially after an article in Reason magazine recently, which was about children's literature with libertarian themes.