BooksFirst: Travel Edition

Books Bought

None

Books Read

Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge
Rough Guide to Beijing
Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Comments

This is a special edition of my regular BooksFirst post so that I can get back on track with posting at the beginning of the month. One good thing about long plane trips is that you have plenty of time to catch up on your reading, even after factoring in sleeping and watching bad buddy movies.

Vernor Vinge is one of the best science fiction writers nobody has ever heard of. This multiple Hugo-winner is incredibly creative and has continually turned upside down the conventions of traditional hard-sf milieus. On a per book basis, he is perhaps the highest quality writer in the field.

Rainbow’s End is his take on the cyber-punkish near future scenarios pioneered by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and takes it to the next level. In Vinge’s world, the cyberworld and the realworld overlap with all sorts of multiple levels of virtual projection. It also posits a rapidly changing culture where a few years in a coma leave you’re irreparably lost in the wake of future shock. The rather intricately woven plot centers around three generations of a family of the future. The macguffin of the plot never quite lives up to its potential, but the book throws away more ideas than most novels even have. There are several gizmos and devices in the book that if not already under development need to be patented pronto. I particularly want the self serving refrigerator/kitchen counter combo.

My bible while in China was the Rough Guide to Beijing. When we plan a trip, we go to BigBoxOfBooks and browse all the travel books and pick a few that look useful. Rough Guides are less comprehensive but hipper than the big names. I liked the way it was organized by neighborhood with all the sights described by area. Nothing is worse than having to flip back and forth because shopping, dining, and sightseeing are all in different sections.

Every morning I would get up between 5 and 6 and go walking for a few hours before the scheduled activities began. I took with me my camera and a small backpack with a camcorder, the Rough Guide, and a tourist map I bought for a buck in the hotel gift shop. Between the map and the guide book I found all the interesting attractions to the north and east of the Forbidden City on my own.

Naked Economics is a wittily written primer that makes the dismal science interesting. The many absurd and clever examples illustrate even the most obtuse concept. Charles Wheelan leads the reader down a path of increasingly controversial topics with clarity and perspective. It is hard to read this book and not come away an ardent free trader.

Reading this book while in rapidly developing China was particularly relevant. Everywhere I looked I could see his examples of how education, drive, and human capital could overcome the severest handicaps. The Chinese have taken to capitalism like a gourmand coming off a long diet. The speed with which a dour authoritarian regime can become a neon-glazed temple of consumerism is astounding. Everywhere there were billboards and neon signs. With all the product and food safety scare articles coming out of China right now, maybe the pendulum needs to swing back a little towards increased government regulation and scrutiny.

I got literary goth rock star Neil Gaiman to autograph a hardcover copy of Good Omens, which he cowrote with fellow clever Briton Terry Pratchett, when he was at Balticon last year. To my shame, I had started the book a long time ago but never finished. I used the return flight to start over and finished it before the wheels touched the ground.

The book combines the premises of The Omen with The Importance of Being Ernest. An angel and a demon covertly conspire to keep the anti-Christ from bringing on the Apocalypse. The pace is madcap and the satire is razor sharp. Overall the tone in way more Ankh-Morpork than Neverwhere, still there are small strands of Gaiman darkness struggling to get out. Never has Manichaeism, pre-destination, free will, and the nature versus nurture debate ever been wrapped up so delightfully drolly. Still, the two authors tend to overstuff everything and the book could have been maybe 20% shorter without loosing any of its edge. A great breezy fantasy.

Wall Versus Canal

He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.- Chinese Proverb



Some silly blogger recently compared the C&O Canal to the Great Wall of China. I have walked parts of both, so let’s do a comparison.

	C&O Canal		The Great Wall
Length	184.5 miles		10,000 li (~4000 miles)
Year Started	1836		1368 – Portions of the Great Wall go back to at least 200 B.C., but the wall as currently constructed in its present location was built during the Ming Dynasty.
Purpose	Transportation to Ohio		Defense from barbarians
Outcome	Ceased operation in 1924.		Manchus bribed gatekeepers in 1644. The Ming Dynasty fell shortly thereafter.
Current Status	Tourist attraction mobbed on the weekends.		Tourist attraction mobbed nearly all the time.
Admission Cost	$5 per vehicle or $3 per walker/cyclist at Great Falls		45 yuan (~$6) per person at Badaling
Visible From Space?	No		Opinions vary, but generally not. And with the smog as bad as it is in China, it’s barely visible from itself.

There’s no way the C&O Canal measures up in any way. In the words of Richard Nixon, “It is worth coming 16,000 miles just to stand here and see the Wall.” There you have it.

If you are travelling to DC, there are lot of things to see and do without getting anywhere near the C&O Canal. I wouldn't recommend going to China and not seeing the Great Wall. While the canal is a worthy source of local pride, it will hardly ever be the international destination that is the Great Wall.

I have more pictures of the Wall in this Flickr set.

Back From China

At 8:30 in the morning local time (or 8:30 PM EDT yesterday), I boarded a shuttle bus from a hotel in Xian, China to start heading home. About 24 hours later, I was eating a bacon hamburger in Sterling, Virginia. For the past twelve days, most of my food has been eaten with chopsticks.

While I will be blogging about this trip for months (more on the logistics of that later), I have some big pictures lessons I took back with me.

China is more modern than I expected. The level of industrialization and overall complexity of life was much higher than I realized. Beijing in particular is a big modern city with all the entailing problems.

The Chinese are much more fashionable than I expected. There was not a Mao jacket to be seen anywhere, even ironically. Golf shirts and slacks where the primary oufit of men. Women wore tasteful but attractive clothes that wouldn't be out of place in any American mall. Heck, a lot of it is the stuff that ends up in American malls or at least reasonable facsimiles. Polo, Diesel, and Levi's were particularly common.

China is cleaner than I expected. I spent a lot of mornings wandering the city, including areas that would be considered slums in our country, and everywhere trash was being swept up and disposed of. The mechanics of that are very different than in the U.S., but the job gets done nevertheless.

The air in China is breathable, barely. Here expections and reality came closest. China's smog is infamous and not entirely exagerated. While it doesn't induce immediate respritory attacks, if you like sunshine, China is not for you. Once you got used to the concept that you didn't really need to see things more than three blocks away, the perpetual gray haze background became just another fact of life.

The Chinese have taken to capitalism with a vengeance. From bargaining in the markets to huge malls to ubiquitous advertising, commerce is everywhere.

Parts of China are breathtakingly old and beautiful. The temples and historical places are both awe-inspiringly huge and gorgeous.

China is hell-bent on making a good impression at the Olympics in 2008. Construction and refurbishment was everywhere as the entire city of Beijing gets a makeover for its moment on the world stage. From the sidewalks to the monuments to the malls, everything was getting a facelift or at least a fresh coat of paint. Now if only the cameras can capture all the vibrant colors through the smog.

I came back with over a thousand pictures and more than three hours of video footage. I hope to share both big picture impressions and small telling observations. In the meantime I promise not to make this blog the cyberspace version of your relative's yawn-inducing vacation slideshow.

All-in-all, I had a great time but I'm glad to be back. And I'm not touching chopsticks for at least a month.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What about China would you like to know (as if my week and a half visit makes me an expert)?

Best Of 2007, Part 1

By this time tomorrow, I will be on my way to China, so blogging will be infrequent at best for the next two weeks. If you see more than a couple of posts from me that means that I have been spending way too much time in internet cafes instead of seeing the sights and mingling with the people.

To tide you over, it is time for my semi-annual Best Of Post where I catalog the posts that are either the most popular, the ones I’m the proudest of, or just the ones I will need to find the link to most often.

So It Goes. The death of Kurt Vonnegut, the secular patron saint of this blog, was not entirely unexpected but it did come abruptly. KV was a personal inspiration and I said as much. The amazing outpouring of emotion across the internet and beyond stunned even me, so I collected links to all the various remembrances and created Listen: A Vonnegut Meta-Tribute.

Brandy Britton, RIP. 2007 also saw the passing of frequent Foma topic and former call girl Brandy Britton. In the year that I covered this home-grown scandal her life avalanched from farce to tragedy. I vowed never to blog about her again. This resolution was severely tested when it came to light that Brandy was an affiliate of DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, but I resisted the temptation to go to that well one more time.

National Coolest Comics Character Competition. On the lighter side, my multi-post tourney to crown the coolest comics character ran from the kick-off on March 15 until the Best of Show on April 22 when Bucky Katt from Get Fuzzy took the trophy and immediately hit Satchel over the head with it.

Michael and the Magic Foob Closet. In other comics events, the fire at Mike Patterson’s apartment forced him to run screaming out of his burning closet. As the end times of the Foobiverse continue to gather I will have come up with an update soon.

Birthday Love Story. Some of my sappiest posts elicit the best responses. My wife and I share a birthday and I dug out some old photos to really drive home how long we have been together.

You Tube Superstar. At the other end of the scale, there is clearly no limit to the self-degradation I will stoop to in order to come up with a blog post. I found that creating a YouTube worthy video only takes a digital camera, a desk lamp, some song lyrics, and a complete lack of talent. Watch again at your own risk.

Balticon. Now that I am on BloggerPlus, I can string together a group of posts on a similar topic and link them together. I managed to milk three days at a science fiction convention into no less than four full posts.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: As is the Best Of tradition, you are welcome to tell me which of my favorite posts I left off the list. I also welcome links to your favorite post from your blog or another one. It’s all good.

BooksFirst - May and June 2007

Books Bought

The Smoke Ring by Larry Niven (first edition, autographed)
The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven (first edition)
The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (first edition)
The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven
Ringworld’s Children by Larry Niven
Naked Economics by Charles Whelan
The Best of the Best: 20 Years Of The Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

Books Read

Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven
Ten Days In The Hills by Jane Smiley

Comments

Once again I am late with my BooksFirst post. As I will explain later, I hit a road block on a book that I nearly finished in May, but I wanted to get this post out before I forgot everything about the other books I read recently.

I have been eagerly awaiting Boomsday by Christopher Buckley. I read Florence of Arabia last fall and thought current events had passed it by. Buckley avoids this trap by placing Boomsday (the name he gives the day baby boomers start retiring and bankrupt social security) slightly in the future which allows him to satirically extrapolate current trends. Like Ana Marie Cox's Dog Days, which I read in May, the protagonist is a young female blogger with a chip on her shoulder. The plot is convoluted to say the least, but at the center is Cassandra Devine who through her online blog and lobbyist connections tries to throw some light on the baby boom retirement crisis. She only mildly tongue-in-cheek comes up with some old fashioned Swiftian modest proposals. She suggests “voluntary transitioning” or paying aging boomers to knock a few years off their golden years.

I was hoping for a more biting look at the blogosphere, but the virtual aspect of the story is actually pretty slim. More interesting is the sausage-getting-made look at the log-rolling, back-stabbing, and throat-cutting that goes on when trying to pass even ludicrously untenable legislation. There are a lot of broad stereotypes here including a dim-witted president with a conniving chief of staff, a rich but stupid politician with presidential ambitions, a sexually conflicted televangelist, a silk-collar member of the clergy, an unscrupulous internet mogul, and a smorgasbord of even more ludicrous minor characters. The plot itself deftly wraps several threads together, but the initial MacGuffin is never quite addressed. I’m not sure how you do any contemporary story about government assisted suicide without name checking Vonnegut at least once, but Buckley, to his shame, does just that.

This is a fun, frolicking read, but not quite what I wanted. Still, it is one of his better works and side-splittingly funny in a lot of places. It’s going to be even funnier in a few years when it becomes true.

When I go to Balticon, I always peruse the dealer tables for collectible books to get the guests to sign. This year, the best I could find at reasonable prices were some sequels to their more famous books. Since the dealer had a thirty dollar minimum charge, I randomly grabbed a book to fill out the order. The Draco Tavern is a short story collection about a guy who owns the only bar in Earth that serves extra-terrestrial tourists.

While waiting for Jerry Pournelle to move the line along, I asked Larry if The Draco Tavern got compared to the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series. He kind of annoyed answered, “Well, they both take place in bars.” The Draco Tavern stories are more vignettes or thought pieces than true stories. The formula is that some exotic alien shows up with a problem of some type and after a few drinks, or the alien equivalent therof, a clever resolution is achieved. A few of the longer ones are very good, but the shorter ones come off as writing exercises, which they probably were. Larry Niven is at the stage in his career where his cocktail napkin doodlings sell, and a few of these stories are of that quality. But the tales are quick and breezy and usually humorous. If you need more Niven, these are good quick-bite fun-sized stories.

Ten Days In The Hills is on of these modern literary books that gets glowingly reviewed everywhere. It is loosely based on The Decameron as ten people spend ten days in close quarters getting into each other’s grille. The ten people are a who’s who of Hollywood lefty artsy types. We have an aging mid-list writer/director, his book-writing wife, his sexy starlet ex, and a mish-mash of relatives, agents, old friends, and hanger-ons. The book is divided into ten chapters and each chapter is divided into different points of view. Each time the point of view is switched at least one old tale, anecdote, film treatment, or urban legend unfolds. There is a lot of sex and not nearly enough of the good stuff happens on stage. For such a faux-smutty novel, the language is surprisingly prim.

A long time ago, I read Moo by Jane Smiley thought it was a very clever skewering of academic life, so I was looking forward to 10 Days. I even had a gimmick. Since I had checked it out off the waiting list at the library, I only had three weeks to read it. I intended to read one chapter a night for ten nights. Each chapter is nearly (and suspiciously) precisely 45 pages long. At a rate of a page a minute, that would make a good nightly read. I never hit that pace because the point of view shifts and long backstories bogged me down.

I did manage to get through the first half on track. Then I set it aside for Balticon where I found an advanced proof copy on a gimme table and the deadline of the library due date went out the window. I tried to get back into it but each chapter kept kept getting longer and longer. Day 8 picked up but then the book turned into a roadblock. I was determined to finish before starting something else, but I just couldn’t follow through. The entire first two weeks of June went by in avoidance.

Finally I buckled down and just plowed through. The whole back half of the book where they decamp to a wealthy Russian gangsters Xanadu-like villa is more dynamic, but ultimately confusing and pointless.

The book is set near the start of the Iraq war and the war is an enormous symbol in the book, but of what I have no idea. They keep talking about their dread of “the war” but the characters never seem to have any real connection to it. There is no sense of a parallel with current events like Ian Mcewan pulled off in Saturday. These Ulysses-like time compressed novels seem to be a trend, but not a good one. I could have spent my ten days in much better company.

For the next month I am staying away from heavy lifting both figuratively and literally. I am packing a lot of books for my trip to China and the reading list is being expressly chosen for disposability and lack of bulk. We’ll see how far I get.

Mea Maxima Culpa

or
My Life As A Sock Puppet

In addition to writing this blog, I am a commenter in a couple of on-line communities. Every virtual neighborhood is slightly different in tone and demeanor, but they rely on a lot of mutual trust to remain stable. One I’m a regular in is particularly tight knit. If you are from there, you know who you are. If you are a curious observer, it’s not hard to find.

In this group there is a core group of regulars that go so far as to socialize and relate with each other in the real world. It has a particularly convivial atmosphere free of much of the humorless earnestness found so many other places on the internet. Like any virtual environment with open doors, it attracts its share of trolls, strawmen, and doppelgangers. They usually raise a ruckus, get bored, and eventually leave. In the meantime all sorts of shit is stirred, hackles are raised, and tension is heightened.

More than once, the issue of treatment vis-à-vis newcomers to this group has been raised hypothetically. Is there a clique and inner circle? Is the barrier to entry too high? Is the group too intolerant of differing opinions? Is there an orthodoxy that can’t be questioned? For reasons I still can’t quite pinpoint I wanted to find out. I would prefer to rationalize my motives but I fear it may have been some morbid mix of hubris, arrogance, and mean-spiritedness.

For this prank, I created a personality typical of the many drive-by trolls the site gets, a rabid libertarian with a propensity to SHOUT in CAPS LOCK. I made some ground rules for myself:

• I would never personally attack another commenter.
• I would never engage in a conversation between my “real” self and my alter ego.
• I would not take my fake opinions seriously.
  
• I would try to be provocative without being offensive.

It’s the last one that was the toughest line to walk. For one thing, I never quite knew where I wanted to go. Did I want to be an obvious caricature? How should I react to responses from people I respect? What should I do if I was confronted? These were all issues I unsuccessfully wrestled with.

I also couldn't decide how outrageous I wanted to be. My first couple of comments were arguably over-the-top offensive and treated as such. It pained me to be rightfully dressed down by people for opinions I didn’t really hold. I was never willing to go full throttle and I began to pull my punches. Not surprisingly, the better I behaved, the better I got treated. The Golden Rule works to some discernable degree. Still, I knew I had ruffled feathers. Not everybody was taking to the kinder, gentler version of my bombthrower.

I also wondered how long and how far I could and/or should take it. I toyed with being a fake blogger and even set up a website with a few red meat posts. I never published the link, but at least one fellow commenter was able to follow enough breadcrumbs to find it. I have no idea how. People on the web have scary mad skilz.

I got sucked into the role playing and found myself expending too much psychic energy on my other personality. I found myself upset when argued with. I got angry when I was ridiculed, even though it was what I was going for. I was even more dismayed when I was ignored. The silent treatment has always been the most brutal punishment to me.

I also had no end game or exit strategy. I imagined I would eventually grow tired and abandon the personality and it would become just another of the many anonymous provocateurs that had come and gone.

But like many sociopaths, I wanted to be found out and stopped. There was an ego effect at work that made me drop clues. My alias was an obvious spooneristic pun that one anonymous member figured out pretty quickly. And of course, I did get caught. I doubt I'm the first multiple personality on that blog, but I am the clumsiest. I posted a comment under my “real” alias that obviously belonged to the golem. I had nearly done this earlier in the day and knew the risk, but I had to get one last cryptic shot in. The second I hit the submit button I was embarrassed, terrified, and relieved. I frantically kept hitting refresh knowing that I would be called out. I apologized to the group, but I know it’s not enough.

I went too far and I’m glad it’s over. The people on the other end of a wire have actual feelings and emotions. To amuse myself I have damaged real friendships. Maturity is respecting rights and accepting responsibility. That is why chat rooms filled with teenagers are such free-fire zones. They haven’t learned that words have meaning and consequences.

Social experiments always reveal way more about the testers than the subjects. Character is defined as how you behave when no one is watching. I learned that I had created one, but that I hadn’t shown any.


CommentBeggingDept.
For Boodlers: Can I find redemption or forgiveness?
For Others: Have you ever posted anonymously or under a different identity just to troll?

Slow Boat To China

I’m going to China, but it’s not on a slow boat, it’s really a direct flight. Dulles International now has non-stop service to Beijing. About noon on Friday I will get on a 747 and will get off in China twelve hours later. When I went to Vietnam two years ago, it took twenty-four hours door to door including two transfers. This flight will seem like a milk run.


Why am I going half way across the world? Because my son got invited and I am piggybacking along. As loyal blog readers will remember, last fall my family hosted one of five cultural exchange students from China for a week. Now it is time for the return trip and three of the host families are going to stay for a week in Beijing. The kids will be staying with the families of the students they hosted. The parents will be staying at nearby hotels.

While there, we will see the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the clay soldier army in Xian. A good part of the trip will be just our kids shadowing the Chinese students during their typical day at school. And they are still in school because high school kids in the rest of the world get a lot fewer breaks than American students.

Because we spend so much time in and around the school in Beijing, we won’t see anything in the southern part of the country like Shanghai or Hong Kong. I’ll just have to pick that up on a different trip. The next time I am in the neighborhood.

I really have no idea what to expect. China is in the press a lot as it prepares for the Olympics next year. I expect to see construction and smog. Douglas Coupland’s J-Pod made fun of the rather fragrant smell of success that permeates China. On the other hand, the latest issue of Fast Company (in an article that is not online) makes China sound like 1.3 billion emerging hipsters.

We are loaded for bear with three cameras, 10 gigabytes of memory chips, a camcorder, and four hours worth of miniDV tape. We also have a suitcase full of gifts and trinkets that we intend to empty to make room for souvenirs. Today I bought a phrase book so I can ask “Where is the bathroom?” and say “No fried snake, please.” Other than that, I plan to rely on my ugly American obliviousness.

I have no idea if I will find time to update the blog while I am there, but I sure think it would be cool if I could. If not, I will bore you to tears with the travel slides when I get back.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Feel free to offer any travel tips or share some horror stories.

Taking License

The other day at Wonkette, they were making fun of the Virginia DMV website where you can make your own mock-up of vanity license plates. Like Maryland and a lot of other states, you can get tags for nearly any group or organization that you can imagine. In Virgina, you can get personalized messages on them as well. Since the online page gives you a preview of your choice, the lure of mischief is enormous.

One of the most popular types of tags are the college affinity tags, so I decided to play with those. Since Wonkette is a political humor site, most of theirs were ridiculing politicians. In keeping with the Wonkette theme, this one fits their snark level:



These plates work best as a pair:




But they don't have to be political to be funny. Here I went for the obvious pun:



Sometimes the DMV will not let you use certain offensive words on a tag. This blog learned that the word "JEW" can't be used in any combination. The forbidden words are a little perplexing. They wouldn't let me use "Nuke" so I had to settle for this:



I found it ironic they didn't like "NUKE" but this tag was just fine:



It doesn't even need to be a Virginia college to have a tag. I thought it would be funny to put on a phrase that no hardcore fan of the school would ever really have, like these:




"G8RH8R" is actually already taken, but I doubt it is on a Florida plate.

And when I saw that this college was a selection, I had to throw all political correctness aside to see if this phrase was available:



It is. And I hope it stays that way.

Finally, I was upset to find this one was taken:



Guess I can't move to Virginia anytime soon.


BlatantCommentWhoring™: What would your vanity tag say?