SASCHA DOT COM

This Buda's For You

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:59:00 +0000

I'm in Budapest - and enjoying it! Some thoughts on the history, culture, and overall experience coming soon.

Spam Bam

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:42:00 +0000

I want to call attention to Placentia, California-based internet company VPLS and their related company KRYPT.

They are the single biggest sources of SPAM e-mail I receive. If you do business with VPLS or KRYPT, you should stop. If you are considering doing business with them, please don’t.

Both VPLS and KRYPT have web pages showing their policies that prohibit SPAM or bulk e-mail – VPLS’s is here, KRYPT’s is here – but based on the flow of junk to my inbox, these policies are irrelevant.

These two companies seem to do business with a range of spamming clients – and one of the biggest is someone named “Joseph Small.” Mr. Small is the owner-of-record for a wide range of spamming web domains, including (but not limited to):

assiststop.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
metalglivequick.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
mapthissite.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
aidobstruct.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
aboutglivequick.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
newsubset.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
regfinishnow.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site
mapthisbase.info – click here for the WHOIS information for this web site

Actually, clicking for the WHOIS info is an exercise in futility, since they all lead back to “Joseph Small” and show his address-of-record as being in Point Roberts, Washington. The listed phone number in these domain records is 250-448-6460, but a reverse search of the number turns up a location in British Columbia – a fair haul from Point Roberts. The listed e-mail address for Mr. Small is info@changedlife.info, but doing a WHOIS search for changedlife.info is basically a dead-end: the records block the name of the registrant and provide a new address, this time for a company based in Westchester, CA.

Moreover, the information that is blocked can’t be accessed even if one tries directly: WhoisGuard, a company that says it hates SPAM, actually enables spammers by sustaining a system in which links of web domains can be managed from a company or individual whose identity is totally protected. In order to report a spammer to WhoisGuard, I have to provide my own e-mail address; but why would I want to do that? And anyway, Mr. Small or whoever he is, does not send his SPAM through the changedlife.info domain, as I noted above – so reporting it would lead nowhere, because that domain appears innocent.

WHICH is why it is so important to report on VPLS and KRYPT. They allow their servers to be used to send these SPAM e-mails and, regardless of who the owner of these various domains actually are, VPLS and KRYPT also have the power to stop the flow of SPAM. If not, they should be forced out of business.

R.I.P. Elinor

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:48:00 +0000

My grandmother, Elinor Sachs Mandelson, died last Wednesday, May 21, 2008; she was 95, and in an advanced state of decline both physically and mentally.

Elinor was a complicated woman. Very smart, and educated beyond what was typical for her generation, she tried hard to apply the Dewey(esque) philosophy she learned at Radcliffe College to every area of her life, imparting a clear sense that one should speak truth to power (though she probably wouldn’t have used that phrase). In my experiences with her, it seemed clear that she believed that knowledge and logic could serve as the mechanisms for overcoming life’s hurdles, and I think she felt this particularly strongly where women were concerned: that women had, in some way, an obligation to try harder to be logical and unemotional in confronting life.

But in spite of my ability to articulate this sense of her, Elinor and I never quite understood each other. As a child, I found her stern, and her love of many of the same things that interested me – books, for instance, or discussing politics – never compensated for that feeling that I was always bumping up against her rules. That was one area where her devotion to logic failed her: her own rules, once established, were hard to break no matter the external (or exigent) circumstances.

Later in life – hers and mine – we both tried to push past this early history, to redefine our relationship and find more common ground. It worked, for a time. Elinor took an avid interest in my writing, and since the web was hard for her to access, I took to sending her large-print copies of many of my articles, along with letters about one thing or another. In 2001 alone I sent more than forty letters. Invariably, within a couple of weeks, I would receive discursive replies in her classic long-hand, on the same stationary she had used for as long as I could remember. This was, I think, a cathartic series of exchanges for us both.

I say “it worked, for a time,” because my grandmother’s deteriorating mental abilities made such exchanges impossible after a certain point. I cannot imagine how this degrading experience must have affected her, and can only wonder (or, perhaps, hope) that her decline was maybe less obvious to her than to those around her.

My lingering sense, from childhood through early adulthood, was that Elinor always wanted something from me that I couldn’t seem to give to either of our satisfaction. And I suppose I felt the same way: I wanted a more emotional connection from someone for whom that kind of love did not, I think, express itself easily. I also had developed such a bond with my paternal grandmother that working harder to evolve my relationship with Elinor did not seem like a priority until very late in her life. We only get one life in which to work out these relationships, and all we can hope for is that we tried our best to do so. Ultimately, I tried, we both tried. What remains now are memories – the very things that, as my grandmother herself discovered, are never as easy to hold on to as we would like to think.

Visual Search

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:30:00 +0000

A few years ago, I read about a new kind of internet search engine, which held out the promise of a different, better way of presenting information from the web: as a series of visual worlds, with lines delineating the interconnections between each piece of information, and thus emphasizing relevance. In other words, showing search results from the web as map of the web itself. That search engine was called KartOO, and from time to time I have returned to it, to see how it has changed or improved.

In the years since, the basic KartOO presentation has stayed the same, while the features and functionality have evolved and expanded. Users can subdivide their search according to specific categories (e.g., images, videos), or zero in on better results by selecting from a “topic” on the left side navigation. Moving the cursor over the results reveals the connecting lines between different bits of information. Scrolling forward generates a new “map,” showing the next set of results and their web of connections. Searches can also be saved for later use.

The reason I keep coming back to KartOO is the hope that it might somehow prove useful – more useful than it so far has. “Visual” searches have an intellectual appeal, a la mind mapping software, but do I necessarily care that page X links to page Y if one, both, or neither have the information I need? Maybe a system like KartOO is just ahead of its time: maybe the reliability of information within and throughout the internet remains so inconsistent that revealing the relationships is currently more confusing than clarifying. Still, I encourage people to test KartOO: each of us processes information differently, and some may find such visual representations more effective than Google, Yahoo, or other’s straight lists.

That said, I have also wondered when a competitor to KartOO would appear. There are two other visually based search engines of note, though neither functions with KartOO’s level of detail. The first is Snap, launched about two years ago, which tried to expand upon the basic search approach by providing users with a “preview” of the web site related to each search result, with a list of links and text on the left, and the preview pages on the right. Conceptually, this is used the idea of visual identification to support search: if the preview picture showed a blog, but users wanted a newspaper, it would be easy to dismiss the result and move to the next one.

SearchMe (currently in beta testing, but accessible to the public) takes a similar approach, but with an even stronger emphasis on the pictures. Results show “pages” for the user to scroll through, with the relevant text highlighted at the bottom and literally circled on the page. Recognizing this is not a fully launched product, it’s hard to be too critical – but I found that the search tool itself generated inconsistent results, while the idea of trying to decipher the often-small print on a pictured web page made determining the right result a real challenge.

Neither Snap or SearchMe aims to do what KartOO does, however: they are “visual” search engines only in their reliance on pictures of web pages. For now, as far as I know, KartOO stands alone in trying to map the process of searching the internet.

Users who have comments on these search engines - or recommendations for others - are encouraged to submit them, and relevant comments will be published.

Old Signs

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

Living in New York – an old city by the standards of this country – one is surrounded by a constantly shifting combination of the past, the present, and hints of the future. New apartment buildings rise up next to existing, stately pre-war structures; new parking meter systems arrive to replace old ones; new bus stop shelters are erected next to newsstands from a bygone era. This is to say nothing of the dramatic changes – like the conversion of the old, stately Apple Bank (really the Central Bank) building into high-priced apartments – or the monumental ones, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed creation of a series of buildings over the Hudson Railyards.

One element of aging that I find perpetually engaging concerns signs. Signs in New York City, as elsewhere, seem less inclined to change with the surroundings. Signs seem to be forgotten, orphaned, even as the streets or buildings or whole neighborhoods around them evolve. Even when new signs are added, old ones are often left in place, anomalous reminders of some recent or not-so-recent past – and an inviting home for the graffiti and other detritus that is yet another aspect of life in New York.

So, here are some aging signs from the Upper West Side. Oddly, there seems to be a theme here ... one not much different from another set of signs about which I wrote back in 2006. And even though these are from the West Side, one sign does have a sticker that says “Yorkville”; whether that’s represents an invasion from the East Side or a sense of Yorkville’s value, we’ll never know.

Hello Muddah

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:45:00 +0000

Five days from now my daughter will be 11 months old; five days and a month later, we will celebrate her first year with us. Right now it is just an average Saturday in May – and yet it is hard to convey the degree of excitement and passion involved simply in this moment, a very generic moment except for thinking about such things.

At almost-11 months, my child is a joy beyond anything I could have imagined. She is smart, funny, loving, communicative, both dependent and (trying to be) independent, and by and large gives the impression of someone who knows exactly what she wants and when she wants it. As a parent, I will lay no claim to perfection, but I take joy in the fact that my daughter is excited to see me when I come home from work, or that she hands me books to read and knows when I’ll make funny faces she’ll want to look up to see.

At almost 11 months, what I want for my daughter has not much changed, either. I want her to grow up to be a strong and independent child, and then a strong and independent woman, someone who engages with the world and who discovers the things she enjoys in life – and who gives back to society in some meaningful way, too.

And where Mother’s Day is concerned – or Father’s Day, for that matter – my thoughts have not changed since I wrote about the subject last May, before my daughter was born. This year, the holiday comes just as the Bush administration’s new “economic stimulus” checks are going out to people across the country, with the expectation that folks will use the money to buy more stuff, thus providing more “economic stimulus” than they otherwise might given the shoddy economy. No doubt that with Mother’s Day happening tomorrow, more than a few retailers are hoping to catch an early slice of that so-called and very short-term “stimulus.”

I still think these holidays are terrible, because if you love your mother (or father) then one special day is irrelevant and unnecessary. Every morning when my daughter sits up in her crib and says “Hi,” and every evening when I come home to her, and all those other moments in between ... make just about every day feel like a father’s day. If you are someone who hates your parents, then you have bigger issues than these two holidays will ever solve. And if, like most of us, you have a complicated relationship with your parents, well, the day may feel like a burden to try to address something significantly more challenging than a card or a special brunch can. Instead, the flowers or the card or the brunch become a placebo, helping us pretend to feel better about a situation that remains emotionally fraught.

So, along with all those other things I hope for my daughter, I hope that she will approach these holidays (and others) with the appropriate degree of skepticism and independence, and figure out what (if any) meaning they have for her, and make her decisions from there – without guilt, without a sense of obligation from her parents, and without some absurd sense of societal judgment. More importantly, as I wrote last year: “I certainly hope for my child’s love and affection – and I definitely hope that we never find ourselves in a situation where the expression of those feelings is channeled towards a single day or event.”

Still No Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:25:00 +0000

Back in March, I wrote about a band called Murder Mystery.

Well, the Murder Mystery wagon keeps rolling along: the band was recently featured on daytrotter.com, in a very nice piece by Sean Moller, and on Yahoo’s Better Living Through MP3 blog, by Ken Micallef.

Both sites feature MP3s to download, including (on daytrotter.com) two previously unreleased songs, so if you haven’t listened already, here’s your chance, or visit the band’s own website at http://murdermysterymusic.com/.

Spamming In My Name

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:01:00 +0000

Attention, folks. If you received an e-mail offering any kind of product or service - like a Rolex, Tag Heuer, or "15 Hot Leads" - purporting to come from any e-mail address "@sascha.com": it is fake.

Completely FAKE. Spoofed. Not from me. (And there's no one else here; it's just me.)

I feel bad for anyone who gets spam, and worse for people who think the senders are actually those whose e-mail addresses appear in the messages. They usually aren't; most spammers seem to use systems that (semi-)randomly replace the "sent from" address with something real-looking.

Not only is it obnoxious, it's terrible on e-mail and mail server systems: in addition to the spam messages that others receive, I have received several hundred auto-generated bounce-back messages for spam messages that apparently didn't go through or were otherwise blocked. And I didn't even send the spam!

There are systems one can use to report spam, such as SpamCop.net. Or, if you are facile enough with your e-mail system to find the detailed headers in the e-mail, you can likely identify and contact the network administrator whose system is being misused all by yourself. Either way, the scourge of spam continues - and its costs are not limited to the recipients alone.

Water, Water Everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:12:00 +0000

Well, it’s done: our Kenmore 2-Stage Drinking Water Filter, Model #38461, is installed, and it works beautifully. Reports I read online of water pressure problems have not been an issue, and after a few minutes of running water through the system to prepare the filters, everything has been great – and our water tastes much, much better. Moreover, as a follow-up to my previous two posts on this issue (“Sears, Please Hold” and “Sears Responds”), I did receive three free filters from a very kind Sears store manager; but no note was included, so this will have to do by way of thanks.

BUT, if the installed water filter seems like it should be the end of the story, there are two other notes worth making. Readers of my “Sears, Please Hold” column will recall that my original issue was trying to determine what model replacement filters would be required for this water filter unit. When the box arrived and I unpacked it, I was more than a little amused to find that right there on the front were the replacement filter model numbers! This makes it even more difficult to understand why it was so hard to get this information from Sears itself.

Just as funny is that the box directs buyers to call the toll free Kenmore Water Line at 800-426-9345, or look on kenmorewater.com for help. I did not call the number, but I did go look on the web site. This model filter (#38461) is not shown there as of today; the previous model, #38460 is listed, along with the corresponding replacement filter information. The Sears.com web site does not have any reference on the various filter product pages to the Kenmore Water Line or its web site. Once again, not very helpful.

Fair is fair: I’ll add my positive product feedback to the relevant Sears.com page, and tell Consumer Reports, too. Seriously, though, as I said in my first post on this issue: these are the kinds of comedy-of-nuisances that discourage customer loyalty, even when product quality is strong. For Sears’ sake, I hope someone fixes these things soon.

Customer Service Report

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:38:00 +0000

If you or a loved one are contemplating buying from Sears or sears.com, you might want to read this first -- and think carefully about your expectations for short- and long-term customer service.

Retailing must be a terrible business these days. I have written about book stores, and in general the issue of how small stores can and should compete with so-called "big box" super-sellers is a complicated one. But there is nothing like having a massive, nationwide retailer like Sears make such a hash of its own product sales systems that it cannot answer a question from the average consumer about which parts go with which products.

Ooops.

****
UPDATE: Sears responded to - and largely resolved - my issue.

No R-E-S-P-E-C-T

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:44:00 +0000

The arc of my interest in Amy Winehouse was fairly straightforward, beginning with the elemental appeal of the songs on Back to Black, which a friend encouraged me to listen to; working its way through the news of her drug use and erratic behavior; using that news as a trigger to dismiss Ms. Winehouse’s broader musical relevance; and then an almost grudging acceptance that this album, those songs, and her voice are more than just the latest pop music phenomenon.

Or at least, I hope she’s not just a phenomenon. That same friend recently called Ms. Winehouse the “the Janis Joplin of our time” – and while the jury is still out on that statement, we should all hope for her sake that this was not intended to suggest an untimely, drug-induced death, a scenario still (sadly) imaginable.

Reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ recent piece (“Amy’s Circus”) in The New Yorker was another reminder to me of how pervasive is this grudging acceptance of Ms. Winehouse’s talent. Frere-Jones describes dropping Ms. Winehouse’s first album, Frank, into the trash after listening, to indicate (with what seems a dollop of unnecessary melodrama, if you ask me) distaste. I own Frank, too, and I would agree it lacks the intensity and energy that makes Back to Black so damn good – but I have hardly thrown away my CD.

The drug use and general craziness – the circus, to borrow Frere-Jones’ term – are perhaps not good indicators of musical longevity, especially if one judges Ms. Winehouse against the likes of Britney Spears or other pop music forces-of-nature who have managed to wind down their careers and music sales in a corrolary spiral of drugs, alcohol, and misbehavior. Except that comparing Ms. Winehouse to anyone else in that pop music crowd is unfair: where their songs (catchy beats notwithstanding) are mass-produced, lyrically light pablum ... Back to Black is a package of incisively smart, witty lyrics paired with an effective musical updating of older (but still very appealing) R&B and soul styles, and supported by a voice that is powerful, compelling, and capable of subtlety, too.

Ms. Winehouse’s future is her own to make – as is the degree to which she moves from phenomenon to permanent force in contemporary music.

Winning Wine

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:10:00 +0000

Congratulations to Malcolm Nicholls and his award-winning Pinot Noir 2005 Santa Maria Valley: Gold medal winner in the San Francisco Chronicle's 2008 Wine Competition, $35-and-over Pinot Noir category!

Check out Nicholls Wine here: http://www.nichollswine.com/

More on the Wine Competition here and here.

And don't miss the great Kammy Roulner cartoon on the bottle!

Murder Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:32:00 +0000

Need good new music? Take a listen to Murder Mystery's album Are You Ready for the Heartache Cause Here it Comes! (Downloadable through the band's MySpace page or on iTunes, or purchase the CD through Insound.com.)

In a review last month, the Village Voice called them "a pop band with a soul and a brain," which sounds about right to me. The Voice cites Nick Lowe, The Magnetic Fields, or the Talking Heads as influences; I also hear The Kinks and The Strokes. Maybe they're all in there - or maybe Murder Mystery is just very much its own thing. Either way, they deserve a hearing.

And for entertainment, you can also watch this kooky, not-authorized-by-the-band video of their song Love Astronaut on YouTube.

Cheesy Honey

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:27:00 +0000

So-called noir or pulp fiction can, at times, seem elusively easy to write. Tips: Make your sentences short, declarative, and firm. Compare vanquished goons to gorillas, and villains to, er, villains. Use words like “vanquished” at exactly the wrong literary moment. Call things by slang terms, and don’t be afraid of contractions. Make sure most scenarios stretch to the absurd, and involve violence, suggestions of nudity, and implied sex.

And make sure the names are absurd. Like “Honey West,” the much-banged-around-but-never-knocked-up heroine of a series of pulp novels from the late-1950s to the 1960s by the couple who wrote as “G.G. Fickling.” In Kiss For A Killer (originally published in 1960, and reissued in 2006 by Overlook Press, along with another in the series) Honey finds herself being framed for a series of murders she didn’t commit, in a tale that is laughable even within this often-ridiculous genre.

Honey describes herself as “...a hundred and twenty pounds... Thirty-eight, twenty-two, thirty-six. Something wrong with that?” (P. 32) If one asks the men in the story, the answer is clearly “No!” The women, however, are less taken. A case in point is “Toy Tunny,” a short, slightly pudgy oft-nudist, daughter of a cult leader named “Thor Tunny,” who seeks to thwart Honey at every turn – including Honey’s attempt get out of a jam by seducing Toy’s beau, Ray Spensor. “No nonsense, Miss West,” says Toy. “Lover is a sensitive guy. You’re liable to shake up his molecules. Down, girl.” (P. 77)

I think “Down, book,” is more like it. Fortunately this one didn’t take much time to read, even if it was a less-engaging literary palate cleanser after my last literary adventure than I had hoped. Still, I like books like this, in part because of their absurdity and artifice, whether the authors wrote them on a drunk, thought they’d be easy money, or invested all of their psychic energy and literary wit. Or all three, as is sometimes clearly the case. Novels like these can reveal a lot at both their best and their worst, about their time, social perceptions across different class and race lines, and about the cities in which they are set.

If Kiss For A Killer is on the latter end of the best-to-worst spectrum, bookstore owner and anthology editor Otto Penzler has been getting a lot of attention for his recent compilation The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The '20s, '30s & '40s. NPR’s Morning Edition ran a nice feature on the book, while the New York Times decided that there might be a literary trend worth exploring and mentioned it, too. Go forth, and read.

In Search of Guilt

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Review of The Age of Shiva, by Manil Suri, published January 2008 by W.W. Norton, New York.

As a new parent, this line from Manil Suri’s novel The Age of Shiva struck me solidly: “To be a parent is to be guilty.” (P. 424) My daughter is barely eight months old, but I already understand the meaning, for actions large and small. There was the time early on – she was maybe 2 months old – when I said “Hi!” at a moment when she was zoning out; I scared her; she cried for what seemed an endless time; I felt guilty. She bumped her head the other day, as I laid her down on the changing table – bumped it because she arched her back at the last minute, as I lowered her – and I felt guilty for not protecting her. And so it goes, on and on, and whether I am responsible or not, in my experience, my sense of responsibility also carries a feeling of guilt. We want the best for our children.

Right now, I feel guilty about something else, too: this book. Suri’s novel is the coming-of-age of story of three characters, starting with Meera Sawhney, a young woman whose family fled to Delhi from Rawalpindi during the partition of India and Pakistan; under the strong hand of Meera’s father, known as Paji, the family has reestablished itself and lives a comfortable life. The second principal figure is Ashvin, Meera’s son with her husband Dev; we know Ashvin principally through Meera’s eyes, as she narrates the story from his birth to adolescence. The third character is India itself, through various and turbulent terms of leadership. If he wasn’t past the point of “coming-of-age,” I would count Paji as the fourth principal character, because his presence is a constant; but more on that later.

Nowhere is this book better than in Meera’s descriptions of the environment around her; Suri has a way of taking singular experiences and contextualizing them with a grand sweep that can be richly descriptive, beautiful, and sharp. Early on, Meera attends an Independence day celebration with her sister Roopa, and Dev. At the concluding fireworks, she observes – as if in a dream state – that Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi seem to step out of their postered images, and thinks “And here we are, from the Mughals and the British to Gandhi and Nehru, all lined up for the finale. The scene bursts into Eastman Color, the sky stretches to Cinemascope. The volleys rise into the night, the bricks in the street light up like day.” (P. 30)

Years later, seeking out Ashvin to celebrate Holi with him, Meera reconnects with the teenage son who, she worries, has pulled away from her so much. After wrestling with him playfully, she recalls, “You looked down upon me, your laughter subsiding to a half smile, then flickering behind something else – shyness or uncertainty, I couldn’t tell. We stayed there for a moment, enthralled in each other’s gravity – the moon and the earth, the earth and the sun. Then the spell broke, the grass around us began to reappear, and with it, the buckets and the benches and the people.” (PP. 403-4) Along with such descriptions, the book is enjoyable and moving when describing these complicated families; the in-laws, siblings, and children; the competition, affection, and hatred; the love, both passionate and ambivalent; and the struggle of life during periods of social and political unrest.

My guilt kicks in because despite all this – despite the plot, and notwithstanding Suri’s often-masterful writing – Meera’s character is trite, as are many of the others. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her relationship with her father: Paji is domineering, seeking to exert control over as much of his daughter as he can while pushing her into what he believes should be a fruitful, fulfilling, well-educated life. Meera resists or accedes, but in each instance does so obviously, transparently, to the point that the interactions and their underlying dynamic feel clichéd. For example, Paji is rigorously intellectual and anti-religious; knowing this, Meera not only participates in a ceremony that brings him to the edge of frustration but, at a crucial moment, makes the final gesture she had previously sought to avoid: touching Dev’s feet, a sign of respect that Paji finds anachronistic. The moment should be filled with tension for the reader, but it isn’t – because the reader knows that presented with an opportunity to disappoint Paji, Meera will do so.

Were that the sole instance of this dynamic, it might be forgivable, but it is a theme that repeats throughout the book. Where Meera is in control of her life, she is presented with – and makes – unoriginal choices. At another moment in the story, she seemingly vacates her body and relinquishes control, in an odd seduction-cum-rape scene in which it is difficult to believe in either the seduction or the rape . Until the moment of intimacy, she found the man repulsive. How is she now nearing the point of willingly having sex with him – and then, just as quickly, feeling endangered? The choice Meera makes in the first place is neither terribly logical nor (in the literary sense) an inspired one, which limits the reader’s emotional connection to the character and her plight. It falls flat.

Perhaps this is just a nice way of saying that The Age of Shiva is a “coming-of-age” story in which the main character never quite fulfills that destiny. “To be a parent is to be guilty,” Paji writes to Meera. Even as Meera appears to understand this sentiment, which seeks to explain and excuse so much of her father’s behavior, she remains throughout frustrated and disappointed: either unable to seize control, or when she does, making the obviously wrong decision with little in the way of surprise and mystery. To find literary success in predictability, characters need more depth than these.

***

Readers interested in a novel about a similarly turbulent period in India's history - with terrific characters - might enjoy A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which I reviewed here.

***

(Thanks to LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program for the opportunity to review this book!)

Reading on the Fly

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:01:00 +0000

Riding the subway recently, I once again found myself standing next to a bookish-looking high school age girl. She is tall and gangly, with small, round glasses, and an over-stuffed backpack, and I have seen her more than a few times – she seems to share my habit of aiming for a specific spot on the train at a specific time of day. As the doors closed behind us, I noticed her hanging on tightly to one support bar, her head bowed. “Long day,” I thought to myself, and rather sympathetically at that.

My concern may have been misplaced. The girl was hanging onto the bar, head bowed, because she was trying to read the book that another woman, seated at the end of the row, had open on her lap. The several extra feet of distance between us meant I could not see what the book was, or make out any of the words, but the gangly girl had a view of every word, and seemed to be doing her best to take it all in, and not terribly concerned about quite obviously reading over someone else’s shoulder.

***

Although I certainly have my Billy Bigelow moments, I don’t spend too much time worrying about what I want my daughter to be. I do have a sense of what I want her to be like: smart; independent; happy; and most importantly, someone who contributes something good to the world, even on a small scale. Those qualities, however, can be present in a person doing many, many things, from architect to zoologist and any number of occupations in between.

Still, I have to confess to a moment of sweet, fatherly dreaming, a particular kind of jealousy, watching this high school girl reading (someone else’s book) on the subway. This was a fantasy of thinking about how much I would not mind if my daughter was as interested in books as I am, as this other girl seemed to be. This is fantasy, not least because I know nothing of my fellow subway rider, including whether she really was reading at all, or cares to do so in general.

If it’s the thought that counts, though, then there you have it. Tall, gangly, and bookish are OK with me, and I confess that I do feel confident that at some point – maybe even soon – my daughter’s interest in books will evolve from a desire to chew on them, to a desire to digest them instead.

Computer Costs

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Given the problems I have been having with putting my computer in "Suspend" mode - about 30% of the time, turning it back on disables the USB ports - I decided to go for a month leaving the machine running 24/7. I thought it would be worth trying for 30 days, to see what the impact might be, in exchange for not having my peripherals turned off and thus being forced to reboot the computer.

I'm running a two-year-old Dell XPS 400 desktop, with an Energy Star rating. (I also have a smallish flat screen monitor, which was turned off; no reason to leave it on.) I use the computer a lot, but not without the occasional break.

The results of my test are now in, and I can put a dollar figure to it: $25. That's how much my electricity bill went up during those 30 days while I left the computer running. Is it worth an extra $25 to leave the machine on? No - not worth it to me, and not worth it to the planet. However, it would be great if Microsoft could figure out a way to fix their Windows operating system so that the "Suspend" feature works as a user might actually expect.

New Book Review

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:56:00 +0000

My review of Jeffrey Hantover’s forthcoming, very beautiful novel The Jewel Trader of Pegu is posted here.

A Night At the Museum

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:11:00 +0000

A direct quote:

"If you work in or are passionate about the arts and haven’t read Giles Waterfield’s The Hound in the Left-hand Corner, you should. Immediately. You may not yet know it, but this is the book you have been waiting for, notwithstanding that it was first published five years ago."

Ok, I'm quoting myself -- from my new review of Mr. Waterfield's not-so-new, but thoroughly enjoyable, book. You can read the review here.

Rain & Raz

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:13:00 +0000

Back in August, thick into summer, I was enjoying the new TV series Burn Notice - and Barry Eisler's latest book, Requiem for An Assassin. In the book, the half-Japanese / half-American hero, John Rain, gets a bit of an assist from some Israeli friends who bring along a new-ish weapon they've been field-testing: an ADS or "Active Denial System," based on "nonlethal millimeter wave technology."

At the time, I didn't think Eisler was making this up - I just didn't know how real it was.

Apparently, it's quite real, if not quite at the level of easy field deployment Eisler writes about. (Although those were Israelis in the book; perhaps they're more advanced about these things.) In any case, NPR's defense correspondent Guy Raz went to check out the system - and get zapped by it - in this story on this evening's "All Things Considered."

A Review of Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:57:00 +0000

I'm working on a book review, which will be done later this week. In the meantime, how about this refresher on other books I have written about over the last few years...

Frequent Flier?

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:56:00 +0000

If you fly even occasionally, you may have noticed that the whole process of what you need to do to get on an airplane is different - and keeps changing. And changing. And changing. (At least the makers of Ziploc bags are getting a good deal out of the current set of rules. It's now called "3-1-1," because everything is better when there's a happy, innocuous-sounding mnemonic for it, right?)

So, have you noticed the change in process for checking passengers' identification? Read more on the other side.

Bullish on Moose

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:13:00 +0000

I have very much enjoyed my recent visits to Brunswick, Maine. The terrific, newly re-opened Bowdoin College Museum of Art is what brought me to town, but there was another reason to feel good about my visit: the excellent Bull Moose Music store.

New York City, despite being the greatest city in the country and one of the best on our planet, has not been immune to the pressures of the big box store and the surge in “retail” banking, which affects bookstores and other kinds of shops, including CDs stores. Since Tower Records went bankrupt (a small irony for a big box retailer), and NYCD closed its shop on the Upper West Side, New Yorkers are increasingly dependent on chains like Barnes & Noble or Borders, stores like J&R (which I like, but is not nearby), or on the internet.

So visiting Bull Moose in Brunswick was a real treat, and I was happy to do my part – three times now! – for the local economy by spending some time and money there. Two things made this worthwhile: the ability to browse leisurely even late at night (when many other things in Brunswick are closed, Bull Moose is still open), and the degree of variety in its stock. Much has been written about whether or why big box stores are good or bad – for consumers, communities, and other businesses – but there is no question that Bull Moose had shelves full of CDs that are harder to find at chain stores that cater to the lowest common denominator of interests. Browsing in person, instead of virtually via the internet, is also valuable; I find that the mind makes associations and connections to other interests more rapidly when I am looking at the CDs (or books) directly. Moreover, the clerk in the Brunswick store knew her store and her clientèle well enough to give me one CD for free, noting (sadly!) the otherwise-limited interest in one of my purchases. Did that encourage me to come back the next day? Yes! Bull Moose also stocks some used CDs, which most mass-retailers do not, in many cases offering the option of buying the new or used version of whatever one wants.

Although there are apparently ten Bull Moose stores around Maine, the shop I visited felt like one-of-a-kind. Alas, it only made me feel the absence of such stores here in New York that much more.

Lasting Memories

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:10:00 +0000

A few months ago, I wrote about the challenge of identifying the value in the objects and information that wash over us every day. The volume of these “artifacts” can be overwhelming, which makes it even more important to evaluate them, to work hard to save that which should be saved, and where possible, to let go of those things that seem less relevant. Making these distinctions ourselves, in the the present, might result in a different set of artifacts preserved than if the historians of our lives were to evaluate us after the fact – but this only reminds me of how fragile our lives are in the first place.

Since the arrival of our baby this summer, the whole subject of history, memory, artifact, and ephemera has taken on new meaning. How do we attempt to capture – in word, sound, or image – the amazing milestones of our child’s firsts? Can we realistically catalog a child’s growth by taking pictures of those special moments, by marking down in a book when something happened? At times, it seems like all we have: little facts and markers defining the outline of a person, into which grows the consciousness, the spunk and spirit, that makes us human. Then we match the person to the markers, and we say “Oh, remember when you...?”

***

It is the unpredictability of it that both enervates and frustrates me. My father’s recent cruise through some family archives turned up a letter he sent to my grandfather almost 30 years ago – a letter that was, itself, a marker for what would have been the 50^th birthday of my aunt (who was killed at Auschwitz as a teenager). The letter is beautiful, eloquent, and deeply moving because of its subject: not only the survival of our family, but its robust continuation and accommodating the memory of loss. It is a letter about parents and children, written by someone who was both a child and a parent, sent to a parent – and passed on to someone who is now also a parent, in addition to being someone’s child. It is exactly the sort of object one wants to preserve.

The letter also refers to conversations that my father and my uncle had about the subject before my dad wrote the letter; the content of those conversations is lost, otherwise unrecorded. Perhaps if there had been wide use of e-mail back in the 1970s, we would know or be able to unearth some more information – or maybe not, buried as it might be under the thousands of messages that would surely have followed. One assumes that my father, writing for both people (as his letter begins, “My brother and I have discussed...”), was reflecting their shared views, and I have no reason to think otherwise – but we will never know.

***

So, we do the best we can. Thus far, with our daughter, we have been good about some things, less so about others. We capture – one way or another – the things that seem to matter to us now; and we add in many others that don’t: because our judgment is fallible, or because we’ll never know, or because the whimsy of a moment might, in the end, be more valuable than the official milestone. We try also to add in the things on the margins, the letters or e-mails or other captured conversations that help define who we are, and what we were thinking and feeling. As a new parent, as the son of parents and the grandson of parents, with memories of my own, the best I can hope for is not so much that I will have made the right decisions, but that I will have made the decisions that were right at the time – and that maybe, if I am lucky, I will remember why many years later.

WiFi Wave Booster

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 21:21:00 +0000

If you live in a large house – or an apartment with thick walls, like mine in New York – then you may have faced a challenge in getting your wireless (WiFi) internet connection to work, or to work well. In my case, the wireless router is based several rooms and walls away from my computer. Although there is a courtyard in the back of our building, and the router and my computer are within sight of each other across this open space, it has not made much difference; a 6-foot USB cord that put my WiFi adapter nearer to the window should have resolved connection issues. It didn't and hasn't.

Despite copious tweaking of the antenna positioning on the router, and despite playing with the height and angle of the adapter, the connection would consistently drop and need to be reset, usually in the middle of a large download of some kind.

I have often wondered whether this was just a “feature” of my computer, of Dell’s TrueMobile WiFi adapter that came with it, or of the Windows XP operating system: that there was something fundamentally flawed that made WiFi a real drag. It wouldn’t be the first time that I have had frustrations with this computer, after all; see my post from June about USB port problems, which remain largely unresolved. But in this case, the blame seemed more widespread: both my laptop and my wife’s computer have also had connectivity issues in various spots in the apartment.

I’ve looked into this problem before and I thought my options were either to buy another router and configure it as a signal booster (along the lines of this tip, via Lifehacker) or just move back to Ethernet cables. At moments of frustratingly failed connectivity, I have often thought about attaching a cable to a rock and tossing it over to the other window.

Fortunately for my neighbors’ windows, Lifehacker came through with another tip on creating an easy WiFi signal extender: they pointed to a template for a parabolic antenna you can make yourself, over at freeantennas.com. (There is a broader explanation of how and why it works posted here.) I lack the fancy wireless measurement tools that would let me tell you precisely how great the gain in signal strength is, but I can tell with great certainty: it works. It’s been more than a week since I made the antenna extender and attached it to my router and the WiFi connection hasn’t dropped once. The spots where my laptop used to have trouble are now filled with WiFi signal from my own network. Problem solved! And: so easily! This was about 15 minutes worth of effort and about $1.50 worth of materials.

All that said, a few comments and suggestions about the template, how to make it, and how to make it work. Definitely follow the instructions here, but with these modifications:

An easy way to make the template bigger: put it into a word processor, like OpenOffice, and resize the template (while keeping it square) within your document.
Print the template directly onto one half of a manila folder: stronger than paper, more readily at hand than card stock.
This one is key: cut the tabs a little longer than shown on the template! It will make it easier to fold the tabs over, through the slots, when you’re finished.
Cut out the templates and glue them – pattern-side up – onto tinfoil. Then cut the tinfoil to follow the pattern of the templates. Use a sharp knife to make the slots for the tabs, cutting through both the manila folder and the foil together.
The pictures on freeantennas.com show extenders on both router antennas (for those that have two). Try just one antenna first. I only made one, and it’s done the trick.
Lastly, the principle involved – focusing your WiFi signal – is not limited to your router: it can also work on your computer’s network adapter. In my case, my adapter is its own antenna. But I took the other half of the manila folder, covered it with tinfoil, and stuck it behind the adapter. Now, the connection is really strong, directing both the router’s and adapter’s signal more effectively.