The book is billed as “ten short stories about being a guy”.  Most of them qualified as very readable, I can’t say that I’d call any of them masterpieces but yes readable.  There were two that rose to be what I would call memorable.  “Princes” by David Levithan  is the story of a teenage boy who loves to dance, of course he loves to dance because he’s gay.  He comes out right before his brother’s Bar Mitzvah and this is the story of how his brother fights to let his brother bring a date.  The other story I really liked was “Fear” by Terry Truman which is the story of a boy in a bad neighborhood who learns to stand up for himself against some home invaders.

This book also includes “The Unbeatable” by Mo Williams which I believe is the short story the movie Sky High was based on.  I love it when decent literature is the inspiration for film.  It’s a nod to the fact that writers are still important and the driver of all the good media we can consume.  Even though you don’t have a prayer of selling a book of short stories for more than a buck these days, those fine folks who are building castles in the air and sweating to put them on the page still matter.

It was a nice event, about fifty people turned up, the crowd skewed to the older side.  I decided to wear a shirt and tie and was pretty overdressed.  A couple of people asked if I worked for the campaign.  I sat in the back, which is my usual MO, especially in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing.  It was held at a local theater/restaurant/pub called Chunky’s, they served drinks and spaghetti and salad.  I decided long ago that I hate Chunky’s food but this is the best meal I’ve had there.

Congressman Hodes started out the event with a speech.  His main points were partisan standbys.  Now I’m about as liberal as they come  but I like to think I’m pretty well informed.  He discussed how the Republican Party wants to privatize social security, end medicare and extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  Partially true but two out of three are politically dead ideas and the tax cut extension is probably a no go unless Obama gets convinced to go along for some bizarre reason.  I personally would have liked to see something a little more nuanced but when I take a tour of the comments section of any Yahoo story on politics I understand what he’s up against.

To be a political candidate in this day and age you have to tailor your message to the masses and the masses just aren’t paying attention or taking that extra second to take a look on Snopes before they get outraged and pass along a completely false story.  Regardless it would be refreshing to have  a politician who feels free to be a little more subtle and thought provoking when they are talking to people outside of DC.  What is so impressive about Obama is that he was so popular and can still speak plainly and clearly about complex issues.  I wish the Democratic party would just adopt this as a universal campaign principal.  Unfortunately “well we tried to tell you” party probably isn’t in America’s future anytime soon.

The Q&A was fantastic, that was when you really got to see Congressman Hodes in action.  The crowd was pretty knowledgeable, I sat next to a teacher with two masters degrees.  Her main concern and question was about monitoring the mercenaries in Iraq.  There were other questions about jobs, health insurance and a little foreign policy.  One man was concerned about Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear program.  I asked about the economy, specifically what can be done to reduce structural unemployment.  Representative Hodes actually gave a pretty good answer, he talked about improving the educational system, reducing the cost of student loans and introducing more programs where public service would provide money for education.  I’m a big fan of programs like the Stafford Loan forgiveness program so I thought it was a decent answer.

I’d like to thank Congressman Hodes and his campaign for inviting me to the event today, I know he’s polling well below his probable competitors but when a  botched Sarah Palin endorsement is on your likely opponent’s resume how can you give up easily?  Seriously read that link, Sarah is God’s gift to comedians.  So Paul, here’s hoping that you win in November. At the end I asked his local campaign manager what kind of volunteer opportunities there are and he said “everything” so I’ll see if there’s anything I can do as we get closer to election day.

I loved this book because it echoes truth.  I worked in restaurants for about ten years after high school and the cast of characters that make up the core crew of any restaurant are some of the most interesting and most damaged people you’re going to meet.  Of course there is a heavy contingent of folks just working their way through college but the ones that you see on your shift closing down at 1 AM and then back the next morning cutting lemons beside you at 8 in the morning are people you want to know.  Restaurants also contrast with the corporate environment in that the work is low paid, easy to find and in most cases temporary.  This allows people to behave in a more open and genuine manner, which for good or for ill allows you to get to know your coworkers much faster than you do in a more sterile environment.

I love the TV show The Office, breaking it down the basic premise is what would happen if people acted at work exactly like they do in their private lives but I’ve seen that show played out in every restaurant job I’ve had.  Anthony Bordain tells the stories of how he got into the restaurant industry and tells the stories of the characters he encountered in his journey from dishwasher to to chef.   I loved how realistic his description of the type of people who take each job in a restaurant, from the bartender to the sous chef to the expediter.  Also this is the first book that completely captures how when you work in a restaurant it becomes your whole world, your social life, your dining room, and the place you get paid all rolled into one.  Home is just a place where you sleep it off until it’s time to do it again.

So if you’ve ever done a summer in a kitchen I would highly recommend this book.

For example, the first part of life that Honore explores is slow food.  He discusses eating fine meals at a European pace, interviewing chefs, foodies and some fine folks from a “slow food movement”.  However since this story came out, fast food restaurants are slinging out more meals than ever, at least according to numbers I’ve read.  I’m sure that most of us would love to sit down and enjoy a fine meal but the pace of life just doesn’t allow it all of the time as I will explain as I go more in depth into how I’ve explored this  set of essays.

One more word of caution for those of you who decide to give this book a peek, the slow lifestyle that Honore espouses in this book is mostly for the wealthy.  I know that there are hordes of people stuck in terrible abandoned manufacturing towns just trying to get by, there are others who are battling warlords and trying to pack out bags of selenium mud just to feed their family.  For those who share my liberal sensibilities the stark contrast of what’s really going on in the world and the way Honore uses his style to show fast living as a problem make him look like an out of touch elitist.  I’m not so sure that allowing more people to work a French style workweek is the hot agenda item on most people’s table and the fact that this book seems oblivious to that made it seem elitist to me.  It seems as if in every chapter Honore made a point to state that slow living is not just for the rich but it seems like all of his ideas would be far out of reach for the mass of desperate men who would be happy to have a bit of factory work and a couple of hot dogs.

The book is broken down into chapters of slow food, slow driving, slow neighborhoods, slow sex, slow child raising, slow working,slow exercise and slow leisure.  Whew, quite a heaping helping of ideas and ideals and I’m not sure you could do it all without a European style social net or an inherited couple of million dollars.  I’ve tried to apply many of the ideas into my life with mixed results.

For example I’ve made a serious effort to avoid restaurant food and take my time eating and paying attention to portion size.  I had a physical last month and a follow up this month, I’ve lost a bit of weight, not a significant amount but more than a rounding error and my blood pressure is significantly lower.  Maybe Mayor McCheese doesn’t have my best interests in mind after all.  I’ve tried slow driving, that is driving defensively and at the speed limit.  I keep records on my gas mileage and honestly it’s worse than ever.  This one is a hard one to guess on, is driving a bit faster and keeping up with the bulk of traffic actually faster and more fuel efficient?  It may be, after this tank I’m going to switch back to my old ways of driving the same speed as everyone else and see how the mileage holds up.  I know there may be a safety advantage to being a bit slower but it’s really hard to tell if just blending in with traffic or putting the needle right at the limit is the safer strategy,  plus I’d need to drive for 10,000 years to see which way really made the difference.  For now I’m leaning away from the slow driving.

Slow sex?  Well I’ll just keep that to myself except to say that it’s different, and sometimes trying something different after you’ve been married for ten years is good.  I’ve also been trying the slow child raising and letting the kids have a bit more room, I actually think we’re all getting along a bit better so this is another keeper.  I’ve been trying the slow exercise too, basically this is weightlifting and so forth going at a snails pace.  I haven’t noticed a huge change in my fitness level but it does feel good.

The slow neighborhood idea is just out of reach, and probably out of reach for most everyone.  We all want a house with a big yard in a friendly walkable neighborhood.  Of course that is just an impossible dream because big yards just make that store or movie theater a couple of miles further than it would be in a city, and the other aspects of city living are about as opposite to a slow lifestyle as can be imagined.  As part of this section though he discusses a planned community called Kentlands in Maryland which he described as an idyllic break from urban sprawl that residents were loath to leave.  I have to admit after checking out a Google search that at this point home values and quality of life seem to have held up there.  I think our problem may be that cities in the East were built before people could plan for cars and cities in the west were built before people knew that they wanted to spend some time outside of the car.  For now though living in a walkable neighborhood with the advantages of suburban life is a rich man’s pleasure, I doubt anyone is willing to bulldoze Nashua and start all over.

So the book had it’s highs and lows, it’s an passionate plea for a lifestyle that I’d love to implement.  Ultimately though I think that if improving the human condition is the goal, we should be looking elsewhere first.

The premise of the timequake is that for some reason the universe contracted and everyone went back 10 years in time.  What makes this a particularly devastating event is that everyone is conscious, but unable to change anything about the events that they travel through.

Honestly I don’t know how a novel like this could have ended up as anything less than spectacular, especially in the hands of a master like Vonnegut.  I guess some ideas just look good on the outline but fall flat on the page.  It’s also possible that he was looking to wrap up a long career of writing, his next book, A Man Without a Country, was his last.  It’s always possible that Vonnegut is having another joke with us by claiming that the timequake concept fell flat and spinning out a suitable autobiography.

Timequake is a story of free will and regrets.  We deal with out pasts by remembering the exciting parts and coloring the unpleasant parts until they are in a suitable form for our inner narrative.  In Memento the character Leonard says “Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.”  Dealing with events long put to bed and having to see them in vivid detail would be painful and maddening and living through the long boring stretches in between with nothing to do but reflect on them would only heighten the torture.  I suppose there are a rare few that have lived life to the fullest, learned from their mistakes and gathered their self worth from simply being, but that aspect of the human condition may simply be myth.

Here’s the beautiful part of my reading of  Timequake.  I had actually read it 11 years ago, when I was single and living in an apartment in Salt Lake with my friends Dave and Jerus.  Even though I was in my older 20s at that time I just didn’t have the concept of good art being a mirror and spent my whole time reading the book thinking about war, poverty and injustice rather than thinking of myself as an actor.  In my mind I was an impartial observer of the world stage.  Now that I’ve actually gathered a bit of ability to self reflect, it was like reading a whole different book.

I really can’t imagine going through all the petty fights with family members, the foolish things I’ve said when I’ve dropped my guard more than I intended, the mistakes I’ve made.  Sometimes life deals you situations where you should have said or done something and didn’t and I would not want to live through those again.  Dealing with time in a linear fashion the mistakes can be seen as learning opportunities but  I have no doubt that seeing them acted out in the world’s more realistic puppet show would drive the most clear headed among us to insanity.

There would be joyful days too, like the days my children were born and the morning I was told my daughter would survive her meningitis.  I can’t see what I would usually call a good day seeming anything but petty if I was put through 10 years full of time to just think, when all the doing is taken care of by my past self.  I suppose that’s what Vonnegut was reaching for when he dreamed the book up.

Vonnegut walks the fine line between parody and satire and crosses over into cynicism.  For example one story meant to capture the death of eloquence in America uses Lincoln’s speech as he leaves Illinois as an example of what great leadership and eloquence we used to celebrate.  The speech he uses as an example though is actually a mash-up of three Lincoln speeches.  How can you glory in the day to day when the memories you have of the past are larger than life?  I think that a timequake could also bring some peace to anyone who glories in a past time when things were better than they are now.

So if you read this book, I suggest you give it another turn in 10 years and see what your own timequake would feel like.  God willing I have another date with this book sometime around 2020.

Energy is the first topic, the book goes over the story of Michael Faraday and how he discovered that energy is a universal phenomenon, how energy was discovered to be an immutable and unchangeable property, when you start a reaction you end up with the same amount of energy as you went in with.  Often it’s a different type, such as kinetic energy being changed to heat energy, or if you have a generator you can change kinetic energy to electric energy.  Faraday was one of the first scientists who was able to show that energy is a universal property and explain that it can transform.  The M for mass chapter discusses the story of Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry who proved that in a chemical reaction mass is conserves, specifically by weighing metal and then rusting it and weighing again, thus proving that the oxygen that was bonding with the metal was adding to it’s mass.   The C is of course the speed of light, James Clerk Maxwell who while studying the older work of Cassini an Roemer, one of science’s oldest rivalries, discovered that light works differently from most energy sources in that it makes jumps, as if it is sometimes mater and sometimes energy.  Mr. Bodanis even goes over the origin of the equal sign and why energy squared is such a powerful and universal physical property.

What I loved about this book wasn’t only the greater understanding of the science, the author tells the stories of the scientists in a powerful narrative fashion that made me want to learn more about them.  For example Michael Faraday was a young scientist struggling to get cred. in a world where class mattered more than smarts.  Roemer battled the king’s favorite astrologer Cassini about how light traveled across the universe, Roemer was right but Cassini has a space probe named after him and a Wikipedia page while Roemer has slipped into obscurity.  For the section on squaring the effects of energy, the tragic tale of Voltaire and Emilie du Chatelet was a heartbreaking tale of romance, science and love lost.  Seriously I’m surprised that there isn’t a major motion picture based on the tale already.

The book also went beyond Einstein and into the application of the theory, it has the most visceral description of what happens when a nuclear bomb explodes that I’ve ever seen.  It’s evil stuff and I hope that it’s never leveled against human beings again.  If the burning of skin right off the body and the radiation sickness isn’t enough, there’s a moment of vacuum that happens when the superheated air contracts that rips flesh off bones.  It seriously called into question the decision to use the bombs in World War II and I can see why many of the scientists who understood exactly what these explosions did were ashamed in their roles in creating the weapons in later years.

So far I have to say this is one of the best reads this year.  It was that good.  Thanks so much for the loan Doug, I feel very enriched by the experience.

This book is one that I read years and years ago when a girlfriend had suggested the Tao of Pooh and last month I did a re-read.  The reviews that this book got originally were far less than stellar.  Hoff comes across as a bit bitter and didactic.  After forgetting about the content and reading the Amazon reviews I was going to give this a pass, but I’m glad I picked it up again.

Hoff rages against things like microwaves, sidewalks, fast food, and feminism and at first glance it looks like he’s gotten out his laundry list of stuff to rail against.  Once I had read it though I see that Hoff is making the case for Taoism.  Would someone who follows the Tao really eat a microwave chimi-changa?  Don’t Taoists walk just as much for the walk as to get anywhere?  Why do they need direct paved over paths?  If men are treating women with the respect they deserve why do we need feminism?  To clarify, yes the respect they deserve is to do whatever they want including work for equal pay, get just as educated and so forth.

OK we need all those things because we live out of harmony with Taoist principals, but still, wouldn’t it be a nicer world if we didn’t need them?

Tuesdays with Morrie is the story of Mitch Albom visiting his old sociology professor as a grown up man and spending time with him as he dies of Lou Gehrig’s disease.  It seems as if that might make for a sweet story but I don’t really care to hear all the sunshine that dying people have to pass around.  Morrie goes through the predictable lectures about how you should spend time with family and friends, take care of your health and dance like no one is watching.

Someday I’d like to see the book from the guy who spends his dieing days getting revenge on those who deserve it while he still can, says mean things to people that have disappointed him so they can feel guilty for the rest of their lives, and spends all his cash on decadent pleasures .  Unfortunately that book hasn’t come out, I guess because for some reason the normal bucket list is fairly benign.

I didn’t quite hate it as much as I thought I would, Mitch does show some writing talent.  I just feel like Mitch lets us play the part of voyeur into the room of a dying man in exchange for a little money and fame.  The main life lesson this book taught me of is that our society is quick to sell privacy and cheap sentiment.

I love how well he handles the topic of his fame and fortune, he seems to take it in stride.  I like how people who become famous later in life seem to be a bit more fully baked than those that were shoved out into the limelight at an early age.

This novel focuses on his family when they’re older and most of them get an essay each.  I especially loved the one about his brother, it was about him becoming the first one in the family to have a child and how fatherhood changed and didn’t change him.

This book seemed a little darker than the other books, but still it was very enjoyable.  I didn’t laugh out loud as much as I did reading the other books, If you want to see some of the better quotes you can look here.

Cecil Adams is the pseudonymous author, possibly a team of authors, that created a weekly column in the seventies.  People would write in and ask obscure questions and Cecil would find the answers.  Everything was in play from what happens if you carry a glass of water into space to why is there on channel one on television.

As you can see from the last question, since my Comcast now comes with channel one, lots of the information that Cecil imparted is now wrong, irrelevant or quaint.  This book even includes a charming chapter on the phone company.  Who is the phone company again?

Unfortunately someone like Cecil would have a tough time getting off the ground, now we have Wikipedia, Google and even Cecil has moved his content online with a forum where you can ask the “teeming millions” as Cecil affectionately called his fans questions and they will point you to a web link that will probably answer your question.  The days of writing in and hoping that weeks or months later that your question would be answered are long gone and good riddance to them but still those days of reading a paper while I did some laundry have a warm place in my heart.