→ October 22, 2007
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Top 25 non-fiction books.

Since this is probably going to be my lone post of the week, I figured it should be a long one. I started out planning to offer a list of the ten best nonfiction books I’ve read, and then found I’d written down thirty titles. I trimmed a few and settled on twenty-five. I’ve omitted self-help/instruction books (like books on cooking) and stuck to more serious topics, although some are lightly treated.

25. Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand. Heard the movie was terrible, which is a shame because the book was great. It’s a classic underdog story – horse thought to be too small, jockey blind in one eye, trainer with unorthodox methods, and so on – with Seabiscuit’s rise punctuated by several high moments and an almost too-good-to-be-true shot at redemption when he gets one last chance to win the race that has always eluded him.

24. The Catholic Church: A Short History, by Hans Küng. I’ll admit that this book may have a narrow appeal, but I think it’s a solid read even for those with no direct interest in the Catholic Church. Küng is the Church’s greatest internal critic, a Catholic priest and theologian who underwent an excommunication proceeding for his teachings. He rejects or questions several doctrines of the mundane Church, pointing out that such concepts as papal infallibility and the celibacy requirement for clergy are man-made, not divinely granted. The Catholic Church serves as a summary of many of his major works to date within the context of a Catholic’s history of the Church itself, dating back to its early days as a small-c catholic church hewing much more closely to the teachings of Christ than the bloated and often corrupt bureaucracy we see today.

23. The Prize Game, by Donald Petrie. A bit short and a bit slow, The Prize Game still has a fascinating and improbable story at its core: Piracy was once a government-sanctioned business with clear rules of engagement. Captured ships were known as “prizes” and there were strict guidelines for how captured cargo and sailors were to be treated. This style of privateering was all but ended after 1815, although the book does go briefly into privateering during the U.S. Civil War. If you’ve read any Patrick O’Brian books or perhaps played the Sid Meier game Pirates!, this book’s right up your alley.

22. The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn. Reviewed briefly here. Hamblyn tells an interesting story about the amateur meteorologist who came up with the system of nomenclature and descriptions for clouds that is still more or less in use today. The only hitch here is that there wasn’t a lot of drama in the book – not that Hamblyn should have made any up – so the book just sort of flows along without the tension that tends to drive successful history of science books forward. There are some interesting asides, and it’s amazing to think that there was a time when science presentations to the public resulted in packed houses.

21. Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain. Hilarious and cutting and explosive in its revelations of kitchen culture, Kitchen Confidential will make you think twice when deciding where to eat when eating out. And I would hope that it would teach all of you to head in the other direction when you see a sign that says “Discount Sushi.”

20. Catch Me If You Can, by Frank Abagnale. The movie sucked, but the book was great, and it’ll make you wonder why the movie’s producers felt the need to alter anything given how outrageous Abagnale’s life of deception was. He pioneered a new type of check-kiting and is one of the greatest social engineers the world has ever seen – all because he wanted to impress the ladies. And if his tale is to be believed, impress them he did.

19. The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter. Reviewed in depth here, Power offers us a history of human languages with a good dose of McWhorter’s own opinions, including his view that language is a dynamic, living entity that can only be constrained through fiat. He also takes the view that all “languages” are merely dialects, and explains why some languages still have nasty features like noun declensions and the subjunctive mood while others have lost them over time.

18. The Island of Lost Maps, by Miles Harvey. The Island of Lost Maps tells the story of one of the boldest and for a time most successful thieves of whom you’ve never heard, a milquetoast man – appropriately named Bland – who cut antique maps out of rare books in university libraries and sell them to collectors. Bland made about a half-million dollars in the early 1990s before he was caught. Harvey weaves Bland’s story in with a few other narratives, including a description of the map-collecting industry, the history of this sort of maps, and his own obsession with the story and with learning about the map world. That last thread is the one major negative of Island, as I’m firmly in the camp that says that a nonfiction book’s author doesn’t belong in the book unless he’s the subject as well.

17. God’s Equation, by Amir Aczel. Aczel’s first book was Fermat’s Last Theorem, a history of that famous equation and the math that led up to the ultimate solution by Andrew Wiles. The book started with a riveting description of Wiles’ first presentation of his solution – I’m serious, you’ll be caught up in it too – but the rest of the book was dry and very mathy, with only the occasional bit of real-life drama (like the suicide of one of the Japanese mathematicians whose work was invaluable to Wiles) to keep it moving. For his second book, however, Aczel chose a broader topic and crafted a much stronger narrative, describing how Albert Einstein’s greatest “mistake,” that of the cosmological constant (a sort of high-physics fudge factor) turned out, in the end, to be correct.

16. The Lighthouse Stevensons, by Bella Bathurst. The family of Robert Louis Stevenson is known for something very non-literary: constructing a series of lighthouses around the dangerous coastlines of the British Isles. Not only were these projects dangerous and very difficult, they also disenfranchised the various communities of wreckers who thrived on the proceeds of shipwrecks off their shores, often killing survivors to ensure their hauls. (Bathurst, also a journalist and the author of one novel, started to lose her hearing a few years ago after a head trauma suffered in a car crash, and wrote a column on how the loss is not entirely without compensations.)

15. The Tummy Trilogy/Feeding a Yen, both by Calvin Trillin. A series of four books that are more collections of stories of the quest for good eats across America and eventually the world. The Tummy Trilogy’s stories are more folksy, while Feeding a Yen seemed more focused on the food, although the disappearance of Trillin’s wife Alice midway through that tome is a sad reminder of her early death in 2001.

14. All the President’s Men , by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Still riveting thirty-plus years later, the book is more about the reporters’ gradual uncovering of the Watergate scandal than it is about the scandal itself. Loses a bit of its romance now that we know who “Deep Throat” was.

13. Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King. The story of the construction of the cupola on the duomo of Florence, Brunelleschi’s Dome focuses on the technological advances that Brunelleschi had to drive to be able to construct such a large dome without internal supports or risk of collapse. The story offers a surprising intensity because of the deadlines, the pressure from the Church, and various other external factors that make the project’s completion seem uncertain, although I can assure you from firsthand experience that it all worked out in the end. If you enjoyed this one, you might like the similar but fluffier Tilt, by Nicholas Shrady, about that crooked tower an hour down the A11 in Pisa.

12. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, by Giles Milton. I picked this one up in the remainders room of a local independent bookstore for no other reason than the inclusion of my favorite spice in the book’s title. It turns out that it’s a riveting and thorough history of the Indonesian spice trade, which has not a little to do with the fact that we in the United States are speaking English today and not Dutch. Black pepper, mace (the aril covering the nutmeg seed itself), and cinnamon all make appearances, but nutmeg was the spice that drove the markets and led to fierce battles and even torture over the control of the Spice Islands, particularly the tiny nutmeg-producing island of Run.

11. Millionaire, by Janet Gleeson. I may be biased on this one, as the subject of Millionaire is the inventor of paper money, a manor-born English ne’er-do-well named John Law. Law’s financial genius (just sounds right, doesn’t it?) led to the development of modern currency systems and credit markets, but also created one of the biggest speculative booms and crashes in history, and led to the need for a new word to describe those who had amassed so much wealth: “millionaire.”

10. The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto. The story of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, the early history of Manhattan (starting with the arrival of the Europeans, that is), and the enduring influence of the Dutch culture, language, and society on New York, both city and state, and the United States in general. Shorto had access to a recently-unearthed trove of over 12,000 pages of documents from the Dutch colonial government, and the result is a fascinating story with two heroes, the idealistic Adriaen van der Donck and the better-known but half-villian Peter Stuyvesant, some serious villains in the English, the Swedes’ short-lived foray into colonization, and early experiments in things like democracy, tolerance, and free trade.

9. Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel García Marquéz. I’m not big on memoirs, but this book has a lot of the feel of a Marquez novel, and if you’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude, then Living to Tell the Tale will give you a lot of insight into where the amazing stories from that novel originated. He’s lived a fascinating life, and his role as a journalist in the midst of revolutions and strife provides some incredible and often darkly comic stories.

8. Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar. Still the best book about Major League Baseball I’ve ever read, although it’s somewhat out of date. Helyar looks at MLB as a business and delves into a lot of the self-dealing and corruption that have shaped the monolithic monopoly we see today. And indeed, the self-dealing hasn’t stopped since the book’s publication.

7. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book responsible for the -onomics nomenclature scourge does do wonders to lift the image of the dismal science, showing how we can use data to learn things about human behavior and how we respond to changes in our economic world. Freakonomics includes a highly-controversial study of the connection between the legalization of abortion and the drop in crime in the 1990s, but also includes an interesting chapter on the life cycles of baby names, a chapter on why realtors – excuse me, Realtors® – are running a bit of a scam, and an ever more relevant chapter on cheating.

6. The Professor and the Madman/The Meaning of Everything, both by Simon Winchester. These two books, not strictly original/sequel but still inextricably linked, revolve around the production of the Oxford English Dictionary, a 70-year project that outlived all of its original heads and contributors. Professor is the better-known and more successful of the two books, telling the story of the asylum-bound murderer who proved to be one of the most prolific contributors of example sentences to the OED project, but I found it lacked the sort of narrative greed that propels Meaning, which tells the story of the OED’s history from genesis through publication, forward. I don’t see why you’d read one and not jump to read the other, though, since each offers a built-in teaser for its partner book.

5. Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis. I’ve got some serious issues with Moneyball, where Lewis put the narrative ahead of strict adherence to the facts, fabricating the anecdote that includes a mention of me towards the end of the book (and declining to correct it between the hardcover and paperback editions when I pointed out that it wasn’t true). As a result, I look at Liar’s Poker with a slightly jaundiced eye, because I’m not sure if the same accuracy problems infect Lewis’ other books. But I can’t deny that Lewis is a master of prose and storycraft, and Liar’s Poker is a cracking good read, with hilarious stories and comical characters and the intensity you’d expect to see in scenes set in a bond-trading room in the wild boom leading up to the 1987 crash.

4. Longitude, by Dava Sobel. I’ve always seen Longitude as the book that started the whole history-of-science book craze, by taking an esoteric story around a forgotten hero and crafting it as a novel, complete with villains, setbacks, and a linear plot that leads to a big climax. And as it turns out with so many of the best books in the genre, the invention at the heart of Longitude made the world as we know it possible: Transoceanic voyages were not safe until the invention of the chronometer, a device that allowed a ship in the middle of the ocean to determine its longitudinal location and thus its distance from Europe or the Americas. Longitude remains one of the kings in this field because the trials and tribulations faced by its hero, clockmaker John Harrison, were so severe.

3. Mauve, by Simon Garfield. The remarkable story of a teenaged chemist named William Perkin who in effect invented a color while trying to create a synthetic form of the anti-malarial compound quinine. Perkin’s mistake left him with a strong dye he called mauveine and an industrial process that would allow for easy, large-scale production. Perkin became a global celebrity, and his visit to the United States in 1906 was front-page news in the New York Times. He’s all but forgotten today outside of an award named after him that is given to a leading scientist in the field of applied chemistry.

2. Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile. Reviewed at length here, and soon to be a major feature film adapted by Aaron Sorkin and starring Tom Hanks. The book revolves around two amazing characters and their successful launching of the largest covert military operation in history, the U.S. funding and arming of the Afghan mujahideen, whose guerrilla warfare against Russian invaders was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

1. Barbarians at the Gate, by Brian Burrough and John Helyar. Still, for my money, the most novelesque non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Helyar and Burrough couldn’t have created better characters if they tried. The superficial story here is the takeover battle for RJR Nabisco, but the real story is how some very wealthy and intelligent men managed to act like teenaged boys when winning became more important than maximizing profits. The leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, until 2007 the largest LBO in history, ended up costing the victors in the battle nearly 50% more per share than the original offer due to the bidding war between multiple suitors, with the primary players being a management-led group that includes Shearson-Lehman, the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and rival buyout firm Forstman Little. One entertaining subplot is RJR’s then-failing effort to introduce a smokeless cigarette without admitting that cigarette smoke itself was a health hazard. Good luck with that.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ October 20, 2007
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NY Mag’s love letter to Gawker.com.

So it seems like half the blogosphere has been talking about and talking up a New York magazine piece about Gawker.com, a popular blog offering news and gossip about New York City celebrities and the local media; it’s also the lead blog in the same network that includes one of my daily must-reads, Deadspin. I found the article entertaining, but shallow and lacking a critical element. Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis completely missed the burning question around Gawker in particular and Web 2.0 in general: Where is the line?

Web 2.0 writers write and publish anything they want. There’s no editorial control. There’s no code of ethics, at least none visible to the outsider. The sourcing requirements are thin at best. If something incorrect or defamatory is published, it’s up to the subject to complain and force a correction – and we all know that a correction is never as good as not running the article in the first place, since you can never make all of the article’s readers unread what they read.

One Gawker piece that Grigoriadis highlights as an example of what makes Gawker so … Gawkerish was a verbal attack by a Gawker writer on a child:

Two weeks ago, Gawker writer Josh Stein jumped on the 4-year-old son of satirist Neal Pollack, calling him a “horror” and “the worst” for providing his father with some cute quips about expensive cheese at a gourmet store; Pollack responded by sending an e-mail blast about his feelings to his friends, but Gawker got hold of the e-mail and relentlessly dug into him again and again.

You wouldn’t see that type of attack in a mainstream news source because to a lot of people, this type of content is inappropriate and unprofessional. If the writer decides it’s okay to trash a four-year-old kid, his editor will take it out. The editorial structure does not guarantee us quality content – the latitude given a number of tenured baseball writers makes that clear – but it does give us some modicum of professionalism and, if nothing else, a very low probability of libel because the publication’s owners are sufficiently afraid of being sued. The article does mention that Gawker is moving to a pay-for-performance system for its writers – more page views equals more compensation. This makes sense on a business level, but won’t it encourage an even lower standard of reportage? Again, Grigoriadis leaves the question unasked.

Gawker also has another feature that wasn’t mentioned in the article, the Gawker Stalker, where readers send in celebrity sightings. This is hardly a new concept – celebrity-trash magazines have been doing this sort of thing for years – but the easy frequency of these reports should raise questions about whether these people, some of whom are only barely celebrities or public figures, have any right to privacy, or whether this feature reveals enough information to get a real stalker started. These questions lack easy answers, but they are important; Grigoriadis was too busy writing her loveletter to Gawker to pose the questions, let alone offer a (gasp!) criticism.

Finally, Grigoriadis paints an unpleasant picture of the staff writers at Gawker. Managing Editor Choire Sicha says “Not a week goes by when I don’t want to quit this job, because staring at New York in this way makes me sick.” Editor Emily Gould says she spends most of her time in therapy talking about Gawker, and says of her job, “I could be ruining my life.” If everyone who works there is miserable, why do they work there? Does it say something about the job, the company, the industry? We’re given no insight as to why they’re all so cranky.

(And apropos of nothing, really, isn’t the photo of Gould flipping the bird to the camera some solid unintentional comedy? The middle-finger salute lost its power to shock about fifteen years ago; it’s something you see little kids do because they think it makes them grown-up. When you see an adult do it like that, it’s not cool or counterculture; it’s a sign that the bird-flipper is either out of date or unoriginal.)

I can’t say I’m a huge Web 2.0 guy, at least not in its current, no-adult-supervision incarnation. I love the interactions that I have with readers in chats, in ESPN Conversations, and here on this blog, but there are plenty of times I’d like to see some limits on what gets put out there. In August of 2005, a commenter on the sports blog redreporter.com created a post of his own where he out-and-out accused Roger Clemens of testing positive for steroids, claiming that there were “multiple sources inside MLB” who confirmed it. There are no links, no quotes, and the writer doesn’t even use his real name. The user who runs the blog comments at the bottom, more directly accusing Clemens of using steroids, also under an alias. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, and I’m not a lawyer, but this is a pretty straightforward example of libel, and the problem with it is that once it’s out there, it creates a group of readers who will say with confidence that Clemens tested positive for steroids or used steroids, despite the fact that the entire story originated with a complete and total fabrication. Is this the model we want for the next generation of journalists? Should writers enjoy the reduced accountability that comes with writing pseudonymously? And is this the type of “source” from which we want the next generation of readers to get their news and analysis?

I understand that it’s easy to sit back and pick apart what a writer didn’t cover in a long article, and as I said above, I found it entertaining. But I am surprised at the apparent lack of intellectual curiosity on Grigoriadis’ part. Gawker and Web 2.0 are stepping far over an ethical line that the last generation of media were not willing to cross. Who’s right? Is Gawker co-founder Nick Denton concerned with these questions? Are the writers? I’m not any the wiser after reading Grigoriadis’ article, and that, more than anything else, is why I found it lacking.

Filed Under: Media
→ October 20, 2007
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Interview at Phuture Phillies.

I did a Q&A with James over at Phuture Phillies, discussing some of the top prospects in the thin Phillies’ system.

Filed Under: Chat
→ October 17, 2007
→ By

Airport food.

No, it’s not a complaint, but an article listing the best food options at 18 airports. I can vouch for two of these. Figs, found at New York’s Laguardia Airport, also has three or four locations in the Boston area, and I’d give them the nod for the best authentic Italian-style (ultra-thin-crust) pizza I’ve had outside of Italy. If the arugula and caramelized onions pizza is on the airport location’s menu, I recommend it – it’s outstanding.

Legal Sea Food is usually my lunch option at Logan Airport as well. I can’t say I’m thrilled with the prices – tough to get out of there for under $18 including tip – but it’s good-quality fish. Their crab roll sandwich includes a ridiculous amount of crab, and there’s just a thin layer of mayo on the roll (as opposed to enough mayo to drown every crab from Maine to Cape Hatteras). The fried fish sandwich is also a good value; both sandwiches are around $12.

I have a stopover in Atlanta on an upcoming trip, and if I can get to Paschal’s I’ll report on my findings.

Filed Under: Food
→ October 17, 2007
→ By

Monarch of the Glen.

The same book trail that led me to John Galsworth’s Fraternity also led me to an out-of-print (and very hard to find) book by Compton Mackenzie, who is also the author of Monarch on the Glen. Since I’d seen the commercials for the BBC series by that name, I figured I’d give the book a try and then move on to the TV series.

As it turns out, the TV series has almost nothing to do with the book, which is a shame, because the book itself is a hoot – an outrageous farce involving Scottish nationalists, the 1930s equivalent of today’s crunchy-granola nut jobs, a dopey American heir and his scheming wife, and best of all, the monarch of the title, Donald MacDonald of Ben Nevis. MacDonaldson, also known in the book as Ben Nevis and as the Chieftain, is the 23rd in a line of Chieftains on this particular estate in the Scottish Highlands (near a set of mountains, one of which is known as Ben Nevis), and he has some decidedly old-world views that clash with the “liberated” views of a set of hikers who decide to ignore the “no camping” signs and lodge in thewoods on his estate. Ben Nevis decides to teach them a lesson, and they decide to teach him a lesson, and much hilarity ensues. On top of all of this, the Chieftain has an American couple staying with him, and he’s trying both to con them into buying his friend’s estate at an inflated price and to set up the heir’s sister with any one of his sons.

Mackenzie has a skill for creating comic situations – humor by setup, rather than by punchline or wisecrack. (Although there are a few of those as well, and it was interesting to know that the “Eureka”/”you-reek-a” pun is at least 65 years old.) Mackenzie’s depictions of the various interactions between MacDonald and his antagonists, including the strange alliance he’s forced to forge to protect his castle, and the hunt for the “muckle hart” stag both show off his skill for creating absurd situations and letting the characters resolve them by themselves, so to speak. It’s easy comedy to read, and I imagine it was easy to write once he’d concocted the scenarios and developed the characters. It doesn’t quite measure up to the gold standard of British comic literature, the wonderful P.G. Wodehouse, but it merits a spot on the same shelf.

One interesting side note: There’s a name mentioned a few times in the book (although the character never appears) that might sound familiar to Harry Potter fans – Bertie Bottley. Think J.K. Rowling might have read Monarch of the Glen?

Filed Under: Literature
→ October 15, 2007
→ By

Various murders on The Orient Express.

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express remains her signature work. It features her most popular and most-used detective, the delightfully pompous Hercule Poirot; it is populated by a cast of unusual characters; its resolution is among her most complex and most difficult to foresee; and its setting captures the romance of European train travel while providing a perfectly closed system for Poirot’s investigation. The book’s structure is more regimented than a typical Christie mystery; rather than proceeding as a novel might, Murder on the Orient Express is mostly broken up by the stages of a planned investigation, with one chapter in the middle section devoted to each of the interviews with the suspects. That said, Christie was such a master of the language that the prose flies, and she even winks at the reader and tweaks M. Poirot with the discovery of the scarlet kimono.

Reading the book – which really needs little in the way of review anyway (if you like Christie’s books, you’ve either read this one or intend to do so) – reminded me of one of my favorite board games, a hidden gem from the late 1980s known simply as Orient Express. The game is long out of print, although it appears that at least one of the designers is trying to keep its memory alive through a new Website for the game. Orient Express takes the standard logic grid puzzles (here’s one example)familiar to law students studying for their LSATs and to buyers of puzzle magazines and turns them into a multi-player board game. There’s been a murder on the Orient Express and each player must try to solve the crime by searching berths, talking to suspects and crew members, and by sending telegrams regarding the suspects, all before the train completes its journey from Paris to Istanbul. The game itself requires that players follow trails of clues – often one crew member will suggest that the player talk to someone else or search a specific room – but some clues are simply red herrings, while others give information that might lead indirectly to the solution (e.g., the weapon used) without specifically pointing to a suspect or a motive. Players may also use “secrecy tokens” to make it more difficult for other players to interrogate a suspect or crew member or to search a room, as if the suspect/crew member had been bribed, and on certain die rolls a player may mess with one of his rivals by, say, moving him to a distant spot on the train. If the train reaches Istanbul before anyone has solved the case, every player remaining in the game must guess the solution; I’ve only had this happen once, and it requires a lot of high rolls on the die for it to come to pass.

The cases are very well designed; they’re all solvable and they’re all clear, with some occasional bits of humor (especially the victim’s names, which are always terrible puns) thrown into clues. The play itself is very simple – roll the die, move, interrogate someone or search a room, and occasionally move the train and, when it crosses a border, roll the die again for a somewhat random event to shake things up. If you already know how to fill out a grid for a logic puzzle, you can play this game with just a quick read of the instructions to get the board setup right. It’s a great thinking game that’s still fun because of the way the competition against the other detectives plays out.

The original game came with ten cases, each of which may only be played once, but there are at least three supplements of ten cases apiece available now. You can find used versions of the game online, at BoardGameGeek and occasionally on eBay, although I hold out hope that we’ll see a new version in print someday.

Filed Under: Games, Literature
→ October 14, 2007
→ By

The Fourth Bear.

Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear, the second book in his “Nursery Crimes” series and sequel to The Big Over Easy, is a typical Ffordian romp through an alternate universe populated by nursery-rhyme characters, aliens, and talking bears (indeed, the battle over whether they can carry weapons to protect themselves from hunters – the “right to arm bears” – is an ongoing theme in the book), full of wordplay and allusions to works of adult and children’s literature.

Jack Spratt, the head of the Reading police department’s Nursery Crimes unit, finds himself suspended before this case has even gotten underway, due to the unfortunate recent incident when Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother were both eaten by the Big Bad Wolf (both survived but have suffered psychological trauma), leaving him somewhat hampered in his efforts to track down what happened to Goldilocks. He’s not sure what this has to do with an explosion in a greenhouse that held a nearly fifty-kilogram cucumber. And he happens upon a porridge-trafficking scheme in the ursine community that may or may not be tied to some highly-placed officials.

The Fourth Bear has fewer out-and-out laughs than the books in the Thursday Next series, but it’s full of humor, both highbrow and silly. The cucumber storyline leads to a series of puns that I won’t repeat because they’d spoil a good chunk of the plot. Anything involving Ashley, the Rambosian alien whose native tongue is binary and who harbors a secret crush on his colleague Mary Mary, provides comedy value because of how literally he interprets everything he’s told and because of his odd fascinations with things like pirates, elephants, and 1970s television series. The characters occasionally break the fourth wall, observing the coincidences and plot clichés that Fforde employs to keep things moving. And there’s an allusion to Rebecca for those of you who miss the more highbrow references of the Thursday Next series.

Fforde’s storycraft has improved with each succeeding book, making The Fourth Bear a smoother read. As usual, three or four different storylines converge towards the end of the novel, but the way the cucumbers, Goldilocks, the porridge, the three bears, and a World War I-reenactment theme park come together was tighter than similar sequences in previous books, where it was harder to see how anything would come together until a few seconds before everything actually did. Fforde weaves the various investigations together, sometimes having them cross paths within the story and otherwise simply having Spratt and the DCI investigating multiple crimes at once, as opposed to his more standard method of jumping from one story to another. It makes for a tighter read, and it’s a style he should take back to the Thursday Next books, which just entered their second four-novel cycle.

Filed Under: Literature
→ October 13, 2007
→ By

Phoenix revisited.

Not much new to report on for this trip to Phoenix. I made another visit to the Phoenix Ranch Market – still the best burrito with carnitas I’ve ever had, for just under $5, as well as phenomenal Mexican cookies (40¢ each) and aguas frescas, to Honey Bear’s BBQ, and to the Gelato Spot (try the coconut gelato), as well as the obligatory stop at In-n-Out. The new spots I hit weren’t much to rave about:

• Cien Agaves is a sort of upscale tacos-and-tequila place in Old Town Scottsdale that opened just over a week ago. I was there during Happy Hour, when all of their tacos are $3. The lobster taco is supposedly their best (ordinarily $7), but the lobster meat is chopped rather finely and is heavily spiced, so the delicate flavor of the lobster is obliterated. The fish taco was excellent, with the fish perfectly fried with a cornmeal breading and just a small amount of the lime-cilantro sauce. The shrimp taco carried some of the same spices as the lobster, but shrimp can better withstand that level of flavor and heat. But the main problem with Cien Agaves is their lack of quality control. I ordered a grilled corn side dish – one ear at $3 – and what came was a bland ear of corn, grilled inside the husk, then opened and doused in butter with a heavy dose of cayenne pepper. And the first corn that came out had a rotten spot on it. The server took it back, brought another one out five minutes later, and explained that he had to throw three others out that had similar rotting issues. Not exactly a confidence-booster – and the corn wasn’t taken off the check. They’ve been open for a week; they won’t be open for a year.
• Tacos al Caporal is a tiny Mexican place in a strip mall on Country Club Rd in Mesa. It looks like a family-run operation, and no one there speaks English, although all of the items on the menu will be familiar to anyone who’s eaten at an Americanized Mexican place. The tacos here are $1-$1.50 each and are very small; they’re served just as meat on corn tortillas, and you can fix the tacos yourself at a small “salsa bar” that has green and red salsas, chopped onions, and shredded lettuce, all sitting on a bed of ice. The taco al pastor was a particular hit, although the carne asada and carnitas tacos were also good. They offer two or three flavors of aguas frescas, including a not-too-sweet tamarind. The only worry here is that the place was empty on a Wednesday night around 6 pm.
• Bandarang, in Mesa on Country Club near Route 60, has received some positive writeups online, but the food was bland and their lunch special setup leaves a lot to be desired. The chicken in sweet basil sauce had a lot of red chili flakes in it, but no heat, and no real basil flavor other than the leaves served as garnish. The white jasmine rice that came with the dish had been cooked at least a half-hour previously and kept warm, and the side dishes that come with the lunch special (fried rice, fried wontons, and vegetarian pad thai) are all kept lukewarm on a side table to be served buffet-style. They seem to draw a good crowd, so there’s some turnover, but my rule of thumb is that if it’s not hot, it’s spoiled.

But seriously – go to Phoenix Ranch Market. It’s cheap, it’s authentic, and it is ridiculously good.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ October 5, 2007
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A win against intellectual property theft.

The Big Lead is one of a small number of blogs to earn a place in my RSS reader, but boy, did they ever whiff today with their comments on the Jammie Thomas decision, where the Minnesota woman was found to have illegally shared – not just downloaded – over 1700 songs via file-sharing networks:

this is some bullshit – the woman who downloaded songs lost in court. Isn’t the greed of millionaires astonishing?

Um, no. No, no, and how-did-you-tie-your-own-shoelaces-this-morning-NO. Sorry guys, I love the site, but you’re way off base here.

We’ve seen an appalling decline in the respect that people have for intellectual property. Musicians make money by creating something and selling it, and the fact that it’s no longer sold as a physical good doesn’t make taking it without paying for it legal or ethical. It’s theft, and people who do it should be punished.

But what Jammie Thomas did was worse: She didn’t just download songs – the RIAA hasn’t really gone after those folks – she shared the songs on her hard drive, making them available to anyone else on the same file-sharing network. This really isn’t any different from running a CD piracy operation, except that the number of people who could obtain copies of songs or albums from Thomas was not limited by production or distrubution constraints: Anyone who could find his way on to teh Interwebs could steal music with Thomas’ help.

I had more sympathy for file-sharers seven or eight years ago, when there were no legal digital downloading services, meaning that to purchase a single song you wanted, you had to drop $15 or so on an album that included eleven songs you probably didn’t want. (Why this wasn’t considered an illegal tying arrangement is beyond me, but I’m not an antitrust lawyer, either.) Now, however, if you want to purchase a specific song, it’s probably available on iTunes and it costs a buck. So if you want the song, suck it up and pay the dollar.

So what exactly is “bullshit” about this? She violated federal copyright law, and she stole profits from record companies and royalties from musicians. Given a chance to present her side of the story to a jury – and I can’t see why a jury might be predisposed to favor the record companies – she could not convince them of her innocence. The RIAA pointed out that the file-sharing took place via her IP address, with the MAC address of her cable modem, via a username she’d used before on other services, and from a password-protected computer she owned, and the songs were found on her computer’s hard drive. It is, as the defense argued, possible that someone spoofed her IP address and MAC address, and that same person could have sniffed her username/password for other services and used it on the file-sharing network. But the defense also claimed the songs ended up on her hard drive because she ripped them from CDs, which doesn’t seem to me to tie to the evil-hacker theory. Someone knew the songs were there and set up this elaborate scheme to expose them on Kazaa, framing Thomas in the process? I don’t think so. She’s a thief, and she’s going to have to pay for what she did. At least she can take solace in the fact that she’s not facing criminal charges or jail time, since what the jury found her to have done is a federal crime.

And I really don’t get the “greedy millionaires” bit. If someone produces something of value, and it’s stolen, does he then have less of a complaint? Is it less of a crime? If I pick Mark Cuban’s pocket and walk away with $500, is it okay because he’s a billionaire – and is he “greedy” if he wants it back? I don’t get it. Theft is theft. And as someone who makes his living by producing intellectual property – which, unfortunately, I often find reproduced illegally on various message boards – I find this kind of theft, and any defense of it, particularly appalling.

Filed Under: Media
→ October 4, 2007
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Kitchen Nightmares: Original recipe versus extra snarky.

The American version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, just titled Kitchen Nightmares, is off to a solid start in the ratings, so we’re likely to be treating to quite a bit more swearing and family drama over the rest of this season. Although it’s entertaining, it can’t hold a candle to the BBC original.

The main difference revolves around food: the original version did, and the American version doesn’t, with food almost an afterthought in the way the U.S. show is edited and presented. It’s clear that Ramsay spends some time – perhaps a lot of time – in the kitchens of the restaurants he visits and in redesigning the menus, but the show gives us almost none of that content, instead preferring to show us arguments (which are many and varied) and “confessional” clips, the staple of the American reality show perhaps known as the best opportunity for the morons in each show to either 1) claim that they didn’t actually excrete the shit that hit the fan or 2) show some fake tears.

Episode #3 (The Mixing Bowl) was a perfect example. The restaurant’s manager, Mike, is an obvious fraud; Gordon sniffs him out in about ten seconds (although Gordon was outright hostile at that point, making fun of Mike’s weight, which I thought was out of bounds and out of character for the BBC version of Gordon) and at the end tries to convince the chef/owner to fire the guy. Mike spends all his confessional time either claiming that his various screw-ups weren’t his fault or crying. I understand that the producers and editors can make someone look bad through selective editing, but they can only make you look bad if you do bad stuff. I’ve been in my share of restaurants, and the only time I’ve had a chef or manager sit down at my table to chat was when it was a relative of mine. Mike was sitting down left and right, and giving out 50% coupons. You can cry all you want and claim it was some teenaged waitress’ fault, but it doesn’t take a lot of tricky editing to make you look bad.

But what we saw remarkably little of in this episode was actual cooking. The BBC version emphasizes the food; nearly every restaurant Gordon goes to is failing because the food isn’t made from fresh ingredients, is too complicated, or outright sucks. (“What the fuck were you thinking when you put apricots in the mashed potatoes?” has become something of a running joke in our house – well, at least when my daughter’s in bed.) The show shows a lot of the food, both before the revamp and after, and the bulk of what Gordon is shown doing is either working with the chef or creating a new menu, and usually we get a healthy dose of both. There’s certainly some drama on the BBC version, with chefs walking out and one episode with a hilarious bit of sibling rivalry, but what we’ve seen in the first three episodes here trumps the worst of the BBC series.

The production of the U.S. version also leaves a bit to be desired. I could do without the confessionals, which add nothing other than showing that Americans – at least those who work in restaurants – are immature little twits. (In other news, Kitchen Nightmares is the #1 rated show in France.) The free restaurant makeovers are a bit of a joke; in the British version, most of the improvement comes from hard work, not hitting the decorating lottery. And Gordon feels a lot more scripted. Not only is he generally more ornery, but even his asides to the camera seem like they’ve either been written for him or they’re the result of numerous retakes. The spontaneity of the original isn’t there. Finally, the U.K. version’s final segment, running five to seven minutes, includes a second visit by Gordon to the restaurant about a month after the initial trip, and he often has to review some of his major lessons or to just air someone out a second time. And sometimes business is just wonderful and it’s all hugs and roses (and f-bombs). But the U.S. version skips that; just one of the three episodes has had a real second look, two weeks after Gordon left and without Gordon there at all.

I haven’t deleted my Season Pass to the U.S. version, in spite of all of these flaws. I like Ramsay and I want to hear what he has to say between f-bombs. I’m also strangely riveted by one particular type of drama – seeing what an unaware or meek boss will do with an employee who is lazy, incompetent, or both. And I hold out hope that they’ll cut the gimmicks and let Gordon and the food rule the show. Gimmicks wear thin, but good food never does.

Filed Under: Food, Media