Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Hits and Misses

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Complicated here, during the last week. Not bad, just… complicated. Thought I’d sort of summarize a couple of points of potential interest, but first, a question for regular visitors:

Have you had problems accessing RAMH recently? One of your number has reported getting repeated “the connection was reset by the server” errors. It’s prevented her from even seeing the site, apparently. (I got the information via a Facebook message.) I haven’t been able to reproduce it from any of various locations, using various browsers and operating systems. But I wanted to check before proceeding to see if anything like that has cropped up for the rest of you. (Of course — ha! — if it has, then you won’t be able to read this post.)

Okay, now onto “real” matters…

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Using a Kindle: Some First Impressions

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[This is one of what will no doubt become a series on my experiences in using a Kindle 2. It’s not a drum I want to beat often — don’t want it to become one of those “I have X but you don’t, haha!” gloatfests. But it might be useful for people on the fence about the whole e-book deal.]

Frequent RAMH commenter DarcKnyt wondered recently over at his place: What are the pros and cons of e-readers? He asked for comments particularly from people who’ve used them. I probably gave him way more that he wanted/needed — it would’ve made for a long post here, and that’s saying something.

Here’s the bottom line, for me:

In general, I think the transition to e-books will resemble any other transition to a new/different technology. It will come with inconveniences and drawbacks… but ultimately people will learn to live with them (or the tech will advance to the point where they no longer apply), for the sake of the NEW conveniences and features they couldn’t even have faked the old way. (No doubt, when cavemen first started to light fires at night, a subset of them swaggered around, sniffed haughtily, and hitched up their fur loincloths, insisting that things were better when we kept watch by moonlight and the stars — and we sure didn’t have to keep getting up to dump another log on the moon every time the previous one burned down! And you couldn’t drop the moon in a river and put it out! It gave everything a much sleeker, more romantic look, than fire ever could! The moon didn’t threaten to get out of control and burn down the whole damn forest! Etc.)

(If you’d like to see the full thing, which includes more details of my experience so far, it’s resting comfortably over across the Web, at Darc’s place.)

I’ve since thought of a few other things I might have mentioned:

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Buh-Bye, Book-Buying Guilt!

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The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!)

Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! so often seem like merely sublimated versions of I want! I want! I want! So I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own greedy motives, especially when “wanting” something which I clearly don’t need.

All of that moral second-guessing, I’m afraid, has gone by the board since I opened my birthday present from The Missus over the weekend: an Amazon Kindle 2.

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If You Can Believe It (or Even If You Can’t)

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[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern,
currently available from Premier Amusements]

From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book):

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance.

“Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks.

“No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

(Niels Bohr)

…and:

Strangers

A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.

The man watched her for awhile, then asked, “What are you reading?”

“It’s a ghost story,” she said. “It’s very good, very spooky.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

“I don’t believe in them,” he said. “It’s just a lot of superstition. In all my years I’ve never seen a ghost, not one.”

“Haven’t you?” the woman said, and disappeared.

(Alvin Schwartz)

…and (plus the last sentence):

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

(Lewis Carroll [source])

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He Would’ve Been 86 (+ Two Days)

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[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: It’s me again. Actually working. I told you so!]

For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days — at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication.

In no particular order:

  • Dad’s birthday was May 29th.
  • The Missus and I were married on May 29th. (About which, more later this week.)
  • Memorial Day — because of my parents’ fondness for and involvement in drum-and-bugle corps — was pretty much the biggest national secular holiday for us, throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s. (And of course, in that much different time, it was always held on May 31 rather than the vague albeit convenient “last Monday in May.”)
  • It was at a Memorial Day family cookout in the late 1980s that Dad took me aside and told me of the pain in his shoulder, which I was not to tell Mom about because she’d likely recognize it for what it was: a return of his supposedly gone cancer.
  • Dad died on June 4, 1988.

Although I’m sentimental about Dad (and many other things), I know — intellectually — that picturing him 20 or 30 years older, but otherwise unchanged, qualifies as just a comfortable fantasy. If he hadn’t died in 1988, he might have died later, in an even worse way. And even if still alive and healthy at this moment, he might (who knows?) be 22 years’ unhappier. So yes, I know.

But damn, I sure wouldn’t mind talking with him every now and then…

I recently saw a TV show in which a character continued, obsessively, to call his girlfriend’s cellphone number — long after she’d died — because her voicemail was still active and at least he could listen to her voice reciting something like, I’m out living my life and can’t talk right now. Leave it at the beep!

Yeah: that.

[Comments disabled for this post, obviously, and the title shamelessly ripped off
and altered from the title of a post at my kid sister’s blog on Saturday.]

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In the Water

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[For information about this photo, called “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida,”
see the Note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Adrift

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

(William Stafford [source])

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Medical Update

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The Stepdaughter and The Missus: both doing fine, albeit exhausted.

The immediate crisis — borne mostly by the former, although vicariously by The Missus and the rest of us — finally passed last night, sometime after midnight. Now begins a loooong period of physical and psychological recovery. This has been a sad, scary, tiring week. So very glad to have finally put this much behind us.

Thanks so much to Facebook and Twitter friends for your support over the last few days.

Whether or not you “know” me from those other online milieus, whether or not you have any idea what crisis I’m talking about, I encourage you to learn at least a little — via Google or other resources, online or offline — about the term partial molar pregnancy. It’s not very common; The Stepdaughter’s very good, very experienced doctor said he has seen only three in his long career. But its real and potential impact on a mother-to-be and those around her is wildly disproportionate to its rarity.You, too, may never encounter it firsthand — even second- or third- — but it may not be a bad bit of information to have tucked away in the back of your mind.

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Real-Life Dialogue (Household Hints Edition)

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The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.

He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?

She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.

She: I can’t find my baking soda!

He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—

She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!

She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.

He: What do you need baking soda f—?

She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!

He: Er, the fire—?

She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!

She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.

She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.

He: Yes, I noticed. But the—

She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.

He: But the, uh, the pan—

She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.

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The Face of the Writer

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Just found this at Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler site.

The subject of the post was James Frey, author of the Million Little Pieces bogus memoir of a few years ago; I liked what it said about writers and writing, and liked the Orwell quote very much:

Contrary to what Frey, his publisher, Larry King and Oprah believe, writing is not a career. For some writers  — for the writers who, I like to think, will endure — it’s a calling. Those who write especially well are like priests. It follows that books are sacred texts, and that the best ones — even the best novels — faithfully deliver what the writer believes is the truth.

That is why we have favorite writers, just as we have favorite musicians; their works “speak” to us. And it is why we have very definite ideas who they are. George Orwell ends his essay on Charles Dickens by addressing this:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

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