What if “your song lyrics were a state machine?”:http://www.whatspop.com/blog/2006/11/glancing-alternative-song-structures.cfm
Month: November 2006
The Gods don’t want me blogging
I finally post the first item here in, what, three months, and the next day things come down the pike that virtually guarantee I won’t have a lot of time for the next however-long.
All I will say that if that old saw about “When a door closes, a window opens.” is true, I’m the guy whose efforts to open the window just went from vigorous to mildly frantic.
Schroedinger’s Ball, Adam Felber
Although I’ve not succeeded in catching a broadcast in a long time, I maintain a great deal of affection for NPR’s “_Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!_”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/. As a result, when I was in “Quail Ridge Books”:http://quailridgebooks.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp on Friday–it being perhaps not entirely surprising that the onset of the Christmas season tends to drive me more to local retailers, even though I’m generally content to browse at Barnes & Noble most of the time–I picked up (among other things), “Adam Felber”:http://fanaticalapathy.org/’s _Schroedinger’s Ball_.
It’s a decent way to pass a few hours–not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re moderately familiar with Cambridge, where almost all of it takes place, it is perhaps more amusing than if you’re not–for instance, a scene takes place in the _Bow & Arrow_ (which, Googling tells me, 1) was the bar in _Good Will Hunting_ and 2) apparently no longer exists), in which I have actually been drinking. And drunk.
There are various other landmarks mentioned (The Coop, the _Au Bon Pain_) or alluded to (for instance, “_Grendel’s Den_”:http://www.grendelsden.com/, which I’ll note is probably the only a restaurant in the US that has a link on its website to “a US Supreme Court decision”:http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=459&invol=116 on it. Or, at least, a case that directly involves them).
In fact, it is perhaps telling that the things I find myself mentioning are all about the context in which it takes place. It _is_ an amusing book, and has some clever bits, but it is short, and it is fluffy. But that’s exactly what I was looking for, so please don’t consider this a complaint.
After a couple more fluffy books, of course, I intend to start the new Pynchon novel. That should be anything but.