Yesterday, I woke up at 2am, unable to get back to sleep. With my schedule out of whack, I was starving at lunch. The Thai Ginger restaurant down the block was happy to oblige.

The material is presented clearly with several interesting asides. As with the FAA pilot knowledge tests, the question bank included is the same one you’ll see on the exam. By working through and understanding the overviews, you should easily pass the technician exam.

In Banana Republicans, Stauber and Rampton’s examine the public relations and journalism campaigns that have gone on in the last ten years. Like their other books—Toxic Sludge is Good For You!,
Mad Cow USA and Trust Us, We’re Experts!—their work is methodical and replete with cross-references. I came away with a greater awareness aware of the shenanigans and gross manipulations going on around us. I also wanted to take a shower… PR is a dirty business

The “Echo Chamber” was especially interesting chapter as it discusses the rise of conservative talk radio and, more recently, Fox News. Several examples are highlighted where a seemingly trivial event becomes perverted into a scandal of monumental proportions. Fans of The Daily Show will readily notice how often repetition from different results causes an issue to take on a certain truthiness about it.

(Paraphrased from something I sent a friend this morning)

After seeing twenty minutes of previews, including one for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, and speculating quitting my day job to write better screenplays, I was hoping Snakes On A Plane (SOAP) would be a good, bad movie.

Had the producers stuck to making the movie in an intentionally self-parodying way, interjecting puns and quotable one-liners, it would have been enjoyable. Or, had they kept it entirely serious, yet failed in a cheesily humorous and external way (think Dawn of the Dead), it would have been enjoyable.

Instead, they were indecisive. The beginning starts with the irrelevant subplot of the Bad Guy who will eventually be blamed for orchestrating the Snakes On The Plane as a way to assassinate the Lone Eyewitness Who Could Put Him Away For Life. That would been the hallmark of a serious movie gone bad.

Later, on the plane, after the snakes have been released, people are being bitten in improbably PG-13/R places. The deliberately ridiculous and gratuitous violence easily indulged the juvenile side of my sense of humor.

But, by the third act, they had exhausted their CGI budget and Places To Have Snakes Bite People. It seemed they wanted to end the movie. Insert the obviously dubbed “I’m MF tired of these MF snakes” line, land the GD plane, roll the MF credits, and show the music video at the end. AAGDTYCDAI.

Wait for it on Netflix and enjoy the (I hope) blooper reel.

It is nice to see a book like this is available, not only to affirm what I already have learned on my own and through my kindred, loner friends, but also as a guide for people who don’t understand how we interact (normally) with the world.

Rufus’ conversational tone is entertaining but sometimes over-compensating. The chapter on romance was spot-on with my personal experience. I had to chuckle – and wince – at the stereotypes often featured in media and advertising.

I highly recommend this book.

Although morbidly fascinating, it’s best not to read this before National Novel Writing Month!

This is like a phone book, containing the contact information and brief submission guidelines of several periodicals and book companies to which one can market their work. Many of the entries are of this form:

• Read our publication (and guidelines) before you submit content to us.
• Don’t call us or fax us.
• Don’t submit the work to another publication until we’re done looking at it.
• Expect to wait at least a month, likely more, before we’ll respond.
• Thank you for your interest! Hope your day job is going well.

The advice I received in a non-fiction writing class suggests one should aim for acceptance of work by non-mainstream/lower-paying publications (e.g. Salmon-Gutting Quarterly) first, and use this to build credentials as you gradually work your way up the tiers to the mainstream (e.g. The New Yorker) publications. Also, most of this information is likely obsolete.

The collection is diverse, highlighting Le Guin’s talents and versatility as a writer. My two favorites from this collection were “Diary of the Rose,” which reminds me of a subplot plausible in a pre 1984 Orwellian-style world, and “Schrödinger’s Cat,” for its surreal silliness (the cat will be dead or not dead.).

In the first part of the book, the author spends time justifying why you need to improve your time management skills: work/life balance, why being a workaholic is a bad thing, nobody works well under pressure. It’s good stuff.

Next, he suggests a framework for recording where you’re spending your time relative to your priorities. This is actually the most essential part of the book as it will become self-evident where you’re being inefficient.

The second part of the book lists the top twenty time-wasters (list below), ways of identifying subissues within them, and suggestions for dealing with them. Working through the time spent/priorities exercise may be all the self-correcting behavior you’ll need. However, if you’re like me and identify more than one time-waster, Mackenzie recommends you focus on reducing the effects of only the most egregious each month.

1. Management by Crisis
2. Telephone Interrupts
3. Inadequate planning
4. Attempting too much
5. Drop-in visitors
6. Ineffective delegation
7. Personal disorganization
8. Lack of self-discipline
9. Inability to say No
10. Procrastination
11. Meetings
12. Paper work
13. Leaving tasks unfinished
14. Inadequate staff
15. Socializing
16. Confused responsibility or authority
17. Poor communication
18. Inadequate controls and progress reports
19. Incomplete information
20. Travel

I found enlightening the notion that posted milestones and quantifiable job objectives are a good thing because they free you from undertaking things that are not priorities.

This is a very entertaining book, casting doubt on conventional wisdom and suggesting other ways of looking at common assumptions. Prepare to be challenged.

One of the more interesting examples was an analysis of the Chicago crack gangs that uncovered an organizational structure indistinguishable from McDonalds’. The teenage crack dealer earning $3.30/hr believes this is his best ticket to the lucrative “board of directors.” However, because the field is competitive, the pay is not. Many dealers have to live at home.

They abstract this organizational structure to that of a tournament. In concept, the dealer could be a shortstop or editorial assistant (or pilot or intern or ..) In a tournament, you must start at the bottom, enduring long hours and hard work at substandard wages (because competition is fierce), to have a shot at the top. Advancement is done by proving yourself to be exceptional at what you do. If/when you realize you’ll not make it to the upper levels, you’ll likely abandon the game. (For example, when turf wars started, the street dealers’ risk versus reward shifted… severely.)

• travails of finally getting approval
• managing the design compromises
• testing everything from squidding in the parachutes to recalcitrant fuses
• launch (sticky valves, faulty cork on the Delta, dead batteries in the failsafe)
• successful landing and working around problems like the flash memory. The best pun in the book: “The Spirit is willing, but the Flash is weak”
• indicators that water was once present on Mars: laminated rock with spherules (possibly hematite ), jarosite (a sulfate salt), crystal molds (precipitate from water that saturates a rock).

As I write this, both rovers have lived nearly ten times past the original factory warranty. Spirit is parked, making panoramas, having its software updated and waiting out the Martian winter. Opportunity is driving towards another crater (and hopefully past that to Victoria).

Excellent Book