Phillip Karlsson's random thoughts, musings, and mindless pabulum.
well...that seems to have worked. I think I'll set up jon with his now.
I was reading yesterday's Altercation. There's a great letter by a Kathy Nowak in there that includes this gorgeous quote:
George Bush can hardly be termed uneducated. And that is why he should hang his head in shame. If he were someone who knew no "big words," there'd be no shame in that. If he were an immigrant doing his best to learn on the fly a very complicated language and getting his meaning across somehow, I'd find that that admirable. But to have learned the words, to apparently like their sound, and to use them so utterly incompetently indicates to me that there's some very muddled thinking behind those words.That is humor.
I have read neither of these books.
However, they start their review mocking the phenomenon of history books focused on a single subject:
I just finished Mark Kurlansky's "Salt" book, and previously read his other really good book, "Cod". I thoroughly enjoyed both of these books. Though I do think that Cod was better. Salt, although there is obviously more of it around, was a little longwinded in many places.You walk into the bookstore and there's a book on display called "Dust: A Universal History." It's really interesting. It follows the history of dust from the big bang to the rise of human civilization in the dusty regions of the Middle East to the invention of commercial dusting sprays and chemical-impregnated dust cloths. And then a chapter, "Dust to Dust," describing the slow work of wind and water, and (finally) of entropy itself, returning all that's solid in the universe into dusty particulate matter. And there you have it all, pretty much. Dust -- who knew?
Then you're in the bookstore and there's this other book on display called "Bagels: The Story of Human Civilization." And it's really interesting. It starts with the cultivation of the sesame seed (circa 4000 B.C.), skimming cursorily over the oft-told tale of wheat farming. You learn of the codification of kosher dietary laws, and of the early trade routes of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), from whose pods come the edible poppy seed. The recurring clashes between lactose-tolerant and lactose-intolerant peoples. The toroid: According to some scientists, the shape of the bagel is the shape of the very universe itself. The very universe. Well, gosh. Bagels -- who knew?
Then, some time later, you walk in and there's a book on display called, "Lint: A Head-Exploding Typhoon of Unlikely Connections, Showing How the Entire Universe Is Made of Nothing but Lint (Including You)." And clearly this trend is getting out of hand. You turn to the last chapter to see what sort of scientists might be saying that the universe is made out of...? Oh, string theory.
I'm just making all this up, of course. But ever since Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," there's been a small avalanche of books like these; they start with tiny little monads of topics, and wind up trying to account for vast swaths of human or natural history (or both). Some are great, like Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book and Mark Kurlansky's "Salt: A World History." Barbara Freese's book, "Coal," is really good. Other times, you get books like Steve Jones' "Y: The Descent of Men."
However, I also really enjoy this trend of these single purpose books. I'm a computer geek, college was an engineering program, and therefore a little skimpy on the liberal arts, including history. The last time I had taken a history class was back in High school when I got the usual bare bones approach to U.S. History that stopped sometime around the Civil War, because any thing after that was too political. (James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me " is a great look at this phenomenon.)
This is an incredibly dull way to look at history, and is one of the reasons that so many people hate it. History is a hell of a lot more than a series of dates and locations. I first started to enjoy history after college when I began brewing beer. In addition to learning about brewing, I started reading about different beers, that, inevitably led to the books that discuss beer history, and this all of a sudden, made history an interesting subject to me.
Obviously beer isn't the lens that everyone should use for a reintroduction to history, although maybe it should be, but the plethora of books using this approach means that there's going to be some subject for almost anyone to find interesting. Knocking the genre just because there's some bad books in there is like mocking Science Fiction because of the "Left Behind" series (which I refuse to link to).
P.S. Some of the good beer books are listed back in my old beer reference page. I also recommend Dava Sobel's "Longitude".
Since that was so much fun, I decided to also upgrade perl on our development machine to 5.8 from 5.00503, which was extremely current a few years back. Some of the cron jobs that run (such as the one to mirror the files for this blog out to the live machines) were breaking sporadically during database connectivity for unknown reasons. Being lazy, instead of tracking down the reasons, I decided it would make more sense to get some of the software up to versions release during this millennium.
The problem where was that back in perl 5.6 they broke some binary backwards compatibility for external modules...which is fair. It also meant that I had to reinstall every Module that we use. Since we don't have a nice list of those anywhere, it's been a fun couple of days jumping back and forth with CPAN in order to find them all. Even now, I went to post this entry and discovered that I'd missed some. MT must use perl's "require" instead of "use" so it didn't get caught until now.
Hopefully I'm up to date now, and can actually get some real work done.
the sad part is that I found out the posting mechanism was broken because I had something completely unrelated I wanted to say, and then forgot what it was while getting stuff working again.