Here and There

I just decided to sell my hardback copy of Bill Clinton’s My Life and donate the proceeds, however paltry, to Barack Obama’s campaign for president. If I owned any books by Hillary Clinton (or Geraldine Ferraro, or Mark Penn, or Howard Wolfson, or Rosanne Barr), I’d do the same.

It would be pretty cool if a lot of people did this, people who, like me, once admired some of these figures, and have gone through various stages of shock, disbelief, and anger at the way they’ve behaved in this campaign.

The cameras have been rolling since 2006 … this should be good.

It details the views out of airplane windows on 12 major routes in the U.S.

Can’t find a link, but I’m just about finished reading “The Castaways” by Mark Singer, published in the Feb. 19 issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a stranger-than-fiction tale of a group of Mexican fisherman who end up stranded on their fishing vessel in the Pacific Ocean. There is survival, comraderie (or lack thereof), Catholicism, marine biology, international trade routes, Mexican presidential politics, poverty, education (or lack thereof), and more.

I recommend you either pick up a copy of the magazine, or find someone who has it and borrow or Xerox it and read this story.

I want need this book.

I finished the audible.com version of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything, which had me a few paragraphs into its introduction. A few things therein were nearly identical to some thoughts I had been having, as I mentioned in a post last month.

First, like any good book, I was depressed when the narration ended, and the generic audible voice came on to spew the credits and thank me, the listener, for choosing audible-dot-com.

I had the file with me for about a month, on walks to work, during my “lunch” breaks, in Venezuela, on BART. Its stories of scientific theory, refutation, recalculations, discoveries, Eurekas, and more kept me company even when I wasn’t listening. I found so much revelance in and out of the book that I wanted it to last forever.

Thirty chapters, 544 pages, and right around 18 hours of audio from Bryson (and narrator Richard Matthews) will take any slightly interested reader on a thoroughly enjoyable ride through history, focussing mostly on the so-called natural sciences, like astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, and biology. Its theme (spoiler alert) is simple: that the universe is an utterly amazing place, and it’s a wonder we have made it to where we are.

It’s a wonder Bryson was able to make it to where he is, given the enormity of the undertaking of writing such a thoroughly reported and written book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything will, if you’re anything like the geek I am, make you feel good about the big, dark, lonely universe we live our short, crazy lives in.

Highly recommended.

One of the most practical uses of the Internet for dorks like me, but also, I suspect for all music lovers everywhere (and I assume just about everyone likes music, to a varying degree) is the ability to look up a song based on its lyrics, and vice versa.

I don’t need to single out the sites that house databases of song lyrics. True, the project is an incomplete one, but it’s made a lot of headway over the years.

Here’s the story that lead me to feel compelled to post about this (warning: it’s slightly convoluted):

Started listening to the audio version of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything this morning. In its introduction, Bryson talks about a few phenomena that I’ve either thought about recently, or that’ve had songs whose lyrics spoke of them.

The first of these was the realization that, over the course of all history (well, to be fair I was really only thinking of human history), all of any individual’s ancestors had to have got together at exactly the right time, in the right place, in the right conditions (whatever they were) to have mated, which, eventually, led to that individual’s existence. Yeah. Wow.

The second coincidence to spring forth from A Short History occurred in Chapter One, in which Bryson touches on the phenomenon that, were an individual to attempt to travel to the edge of the universe (obviously to see what’s on the other side of the boundary), the feat would prove impossible. This happens, of course, because space is curved. So … “if you go straight long enough, you end up where you were.”

That line, of course, reminded me of Modest Mouse. I happened to have my iPod with me, so I got to work, opened Firefox, searched for the lyric and the name “modest mouse,” and there it was. “3rd Planet” was the song I was looking for. Cool.

Even nicer would be if you could type the lyrics straight into iTunes, or, fuck, even cooler, say or speak them into your iPod, and the song would show up. I suppose that would require the song files being embedded with lyric data. Not impossible, I’d like to think.