Author: Ridley

It’s been a pretty shit month, hasn’t it? I’ll write more about that later, but I need to distract myself a little tonight, so that’s what I’m doing now. I dedicated my January reading to “authors who influenced authors I like.” I started out with G.K. Chesteron’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It’s an exquisitely written but ultimately puzzling book. It’s marvelously paranoid comedy in the opening chapters, turning to broad farce, and finally to something akin to magical realism and…I’m not sure exactly what. He’s a terrific writer, but I enjoyed it less and less the deeper in to it I got.  Next on the list was my first-ever Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye. I know it’s only one novel, but I can tell you already that I flat-out love Chandler. The plotting is a little over elaborate and some of the characterizations feel more racist now than they probably did when the book was released. That aside, he’s an incredible stylist. He keeps it tight without ever making it seem as though being sparse was an end of itself. He’s incredibly pleasurable to read, and I say that as a person who has never had any interest in crime fiction.  Friday, I finished P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves. I’m told that this is, at best, a middling example of the Jeeves books, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless. “Breezy” is the best word to describe these stories. The dialogue is hilarious, the inner monologue of the nigh-clueless Bertie Wooster is a hoot, and the plots, while a little repetitive, will make you grin. If you’re looking for something that you’ll enjoy reading without being overly challenged, Wodehouse is a perfect fit. In case you haven’t been following the latest news in web browsers (and frankly, I haven’t either), you might not be aware that Opera now features a built in VPN. I don’t know how it compares to other VPNs, but it is severely limited in terms of countries you can select. Still, a built in VPN seems like a Very Good Thing Indeed and it was enough to get me to take it out for a spin. Opera looks enormously like Microsoft’s new Edge browser, or maybe it’s the other way around. It has the features you’d expect in a modern browser. Most importantly, it supports extensions, so you can use things like LastPass (and you should be using LastPass or something like it), and it supports private browsing and things like that. It’s surprisingly lightweight as well. Just for grins, I pulled up Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge and loaded the same four web sites (Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook) to see how much memory they were using. Edge was by far the lowest, using a mere 28mb of RAM. I suspect this is partially due to it being built in to the operating system (I’m using a Windows computer tonight) and partially due to the limited support for extensions. Opera was the next lowest at 87mb. Chrome clocked in at 125mb, and Firefox sat in the 450mb range. WTF, Firefox?  UPDATE: Windows Task Manager is bullshit. When I opened the same sites on the different browsers, the memory usage for the browsers was reported as wildly different by Task Manager. But…the total memory usage percentage moved by almost identical amounts for each browser (in the 550mb range for all four). Opera still feels lighter and faster than Chrome and especially Firefox, but my initial numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Anyway, I think I’ll keep using Opera for a bit. The VPN even works on my Android phone, albeit as a separate app. The only downside I’ve found so far is the sync between different machines doesn’t seem to work especially well. I can live with that.  Here’s a little bit of required reading: Keith Law’s weekly Stick To Baseball post. If you’re not follow Keith, why not? He regularly writes about baseball (duh), books, food, music, and board games. That’s in addition to his weekly links-list-a-go-go. He writes frequently, he writes well, and he writes almost exclusively about things I’m interested in, so this is the easiest recommendation I’ll ever write. I just read that the courts have stayed the executive order barring people-from-certain-countries-but-definitely-not-just-Muslims from entering the U.S. Thank goodness for some good news in a week that’s been almost devoid of anything positive. Right now, I’ll take what I can get. R.K.

This is a perfect encapsulation of how my father fought: This is taken from Hellblazer #71 by Garth Ennis and the late Steve Dillon. Obviously, it’s not mine, and if they want me to take it down, I will., but it’s just about perfect for my father and I wanted to share it. 

My father passed away Monday morning. This is something that had been in the mail for a long, long time, and it was only his almost superhuman will to live that had seen him through more than enough medical issues to put down a lesser man like, for example, me.  Most of the good things I know about being a man can be traced directly back to his teachings and, more importantly, examples. His integrity was on a level I could never hope to achieve. Thanks to him and my mother, I never knew that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy reading or eating vegetables or things of that sort. He encouraged me to share his interests, but never made me feel forced and, if he was disappointed that my football career ended in third grade, he never let on. Even after my parents divorce, I never, ever had to question where I stood with him. What I didn’t learn, until later, was that he voluntarily increased the agreed-upon alimony payments to my mother because he felt that their agreement was unfair to her. That, in a microcosm, was who he was and who I strive to be. He was good, he was fair, and if he felt that something wasn’t right, he wouldn’t hesitate to fix it. He was incredibly silly, too, so my sense of humor, for better or worse, is something I got from him. Even in his mid-seventies, he was playful and affectionate. His granddaughters adored him. His wife lived for him, and he for her. He adored his children and he was genuinely proud of us, of what we’d done and who we’d become. He was a good man who was well-loved and well-respected. I miss him, and I hope I can live my life in a way that lives up to the example he set. Even if I can’t always reach that high standard, I know he’d be proud of me anyway.

Tomorrow’s going to be a rough day. I imagine you’ve already read your fill of people wringing their hands/gnashing their teeth/working themselves into a lather over the prospect of a Trump presidency.  That’s hardly a surprise as the president-elect hasn’t shown much in the way of good judgement or good taste since winning the election. Chuck Wendig posits that the awfulness is by design, and that could well be the case. What worries me the most about our next president is that he refuses to be held accountable for anything. Right from the beginning, he made it clear that the he didn’t care whether what he was saying was true or not, and when he was caught, he regularly doubled down with another lie. He couldn’t even be forced to produce his tax returns, the bare minimum financial disclosure expected of presidential candidates. Think about that one for a moment: It’s like interviewing someone for a job and having them tell you “you can see my references after I get the gig.” He’s appointed his son-in-law to a White House staff position, which is potentially a violation of anti-nepotism laws. He’s refused to divest himself of his business interests, which may be illegal in and of itself, but it sets up a situation where breaking the law at some point is a certainty. After admitting that Russia was likely behind the leak of extremely damaging information against Hillary Clinton, he said it was “time to move on,” suggesting that he wasn’t interested in investigation whether or not a foreign power interfered with the presidential election. The man who will take the oath of office tomorrow morning has made it clear that he does not feel even remotely beholden to the law and thinks he is not accountable to anyone. There are more things to scare me about a Trump presidency than I care to list, but this is the greatest. He has refused to accept any restriction, any limitation on his actions. That fact that he hasn’t been held accountable for his actions suggests that it will only get worse. -RK P.S. My thanks and admiration to everyone who will be in the District to march in protest, including my wife and several of her friends.  

When things get lousy, the thing I have the most trouble with is overcoming inertia. It’s been a pretty lousy time lately, so I’ve had all the forward momentum of an overturned tortoise. The best way to deal with unpleasantness is to face it head-on, but that’s a lot of work and I haven’t felt up to it. On the plus side, video games exist, right? Times like these, I feel an overlarge sense of accomplishment for fulfilling the least of my obligations. There are times when I can’t even manage that much, although I’ve come up with a Terribly Clever Strategy to keep me moving when I would rather not: I pretend that I don’t have any choice. That my seem a little slight and overly obvious, but I’ve found it to be a useful fib to tell myself. It’s what gets me out of bed and on the way to the office on cold mornings when I know work is going to be a bit of a pig and I have a beautiful wife next to me and a warm cat sleeping on my back. I would really rather be doing almost anything else than going to work or, ideally, doing nothing at all. I am not be nature especially ambitious or dedicated to my job, but I show up something approaching every day. Of course, abject fear of losing the job plays a part as well. Anyway, I’ve made a few commitments to myself and I’m telling myself that they are non-negotiable so as to encourage following through when I’d rather not. Maybe someday, I can use this sense of unease, on both a personal and larger level, as a spur to bring about changes in myself and the world around me. That sounds awfully noble, and I’d like to be the sort of person who does that. For now, though, I’ll just rouse myself by pretending that I have no other option. It’s not the most admirable motivation, but at least it works for me. “Another John Doe” by thenewno2, which is Dhani Harrison’s band. He sounds a lot like his father, doesn’t he? Anyway, I like the moodiness of this song and suspect I would like it more with an adult beverage in my hand.

Last week, I eagerly read Keith Law’s take on Stranger In A Strange Land, the most interesting Heinlein novel I’ve come across. The whole piece is good, well worth clicking the link, but the addendum is what stuck with me: “…I forgot to mention the one absolute nails-on-chalkboard line in the book, where one character (Jill?) says that nine times out of ten, a rape is at least partly the woman’s fault. I know it was written a half-century ago, but it’s absolutely cringeworthy, and knocked the book down a full grade for me.” I get and even agree with Law’s reaction, but the thing that I keep coming back to is that fact that the reader can hear the author’s voice behind the character. I’m not saying that Heinlein agreed with the statement in question, but when you read it, you hear him saying it, not the character. It’s not just Heinlein, either; if an author has a “bad” character make a statement like the one above, you can hear the author condemning that line of thought. If a good character says it, you hear the author condoning it. That’s a long way of saying that Law’s statement reminded me of the best book I read in 2016, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was a terrific yarn, but what made the book stand out was the fact that the characters were so well drawn that you (almost)* never heard the author’s voice behind them. Strange and Norrell are both, for all their magical prowess, incredibly human. They say and do things because they’re the things that Strange and Norrell do, not because Clarke puts them on a soapbox to voice her opinions.  In the end, they’re neither altogether good nor bad, and reading their story reminds you of just how rarely characters are drawn so well. I wound up reading twenty four books on the train last year, a few less than I’d aimed for, but there were a couple of weighty tomes on the list that slowed me down a little. I won’t try to rank them, but a couple of ’em merit an end-of-year mention. The most interesting book I read was Dr. Greg Graffin’s Population Wars. I’m not sure how I’d classify it. It’s a memoir, a statement of natural philosophy, a biology primer, and a sociology…something. It’s not the most focused book I’ve ever read, but for all of the information, it’s never a dry read. The other contender for my favorite read of 2016 was William Gibson’s The Peripheral. It’s incredibly fast and smart and it begs to be read in one sitting. It comes across as near future speculative fiction, but at it’s core, it’s a cautionary tale about the devastating consequences to a culture which comes into contact with a more economically-advance culture. 2017 is off to a fine start, at least with respect to what I’m reading. I’m a little embarrassed to say I’ve never read G.K. Chesterton before, but he’s highly regarded by many of my favorite writers. I’m reading The Man Who Was Thursday now and I laughed out loud several times on the train tonight. And man, could I use a laugh or two right now. -RK   * There’s a bit of poetic justice near the end that, while satisfying, felt a little too clear cut in its black-and-whiteness and took me out of the story.

What a year, right? For me, it was a wildly mixed bag. At the absolute top of the list, Nicole and I were married in October and that is enough for me to think warmly about 2016. I’m going to have the pleasure of spending the rest of my life with her, which I was probably going to do regardless, but now we have special rings which grant us powers beyond the ken of mere mortals. I think that’s how wedding rings work. I probably ought to read up on that. On a lesser but nonetheless delightful note, Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League, and won it by an impressive margin. I’ve been follow the Foxes since the 1990s and their triumph is easily the most shocking occurrence in sport I’ve ever seen. They were listed as 5000-1 long shots and it would have been fair to regard them as unrealistically optimistic. They’ve returned to their expected form so far this year, which is to say, relegation is a real possibility, but that title will be on the books forever. The many, many celebrity deaths hurt, of course, but they didn’t hit me as hard as seeing video after video of law enforcement officers abusing and killing unarmed black people, most of the time without any repercussions. If there is no “justice for all,” there is no justice at all. For me, this was the biggest horror story of 2016, even more so than the election of Donald Trump. Don’t get me wrong. I believe that Trump’s election is an unmitigated disaster and one that will exact a price for decades to come, but when the utter corruption of the criminal justice system is exposed and not punished? On a personal note, the year ended badly. My father was badly injured in a car crash last week. He survived, but suffered seven broken ribs, a broken knee, and a collapsed lung. He remains in intensive care and it’s unlikely he’ll be leaving the hospital in January. Seeing him there reminded me of Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For A Train” (covered her by Jerry Jeff Walker): “To me, he’s one of the heroes of his country, so why’s he all dressed up like them old men?” Combined with a really tough few months at work, last year ended badly and I’ve struggled to keep myself moving forward. I approached 2017 with tremendous hope but no expectations. -RK  

If you can’t say anything nice, and there’s not much else to talk about, it’s hard to get a conversation going, isn’t it? I’m not going to pretend that the election and the parade of terrible news since hasn’t put a damper on my spirit this year. When you throw in the fact that mercury is apparently circling backwards around my office, I just don’t have a great deal of positive news to share. I’d like to point out one story that’s flying a little under the radar. While everyone is focusing on the genuinely awful transition to a Trump presidency, the governor of Texas is trying to be the Mini Me to Trump’s Dr. Evil. He’s taken to twitter to link to conspiracy theories on non-news sites like WND, to attack electors for doing what the electoral college is meant to do ,  and to attack companies which exercise their right to boycott, which the courts have determined is protected by the first amendment.  He’s even taken to aping one of Trump’s signature lines. Texans like to say that everything is bigger in Texas. Apparently, this applies to political embarrassments as well. I did get around to reading The Handmaid’s Tale and absolutely loved it. Good speculative fiction most often revolves around not just having a delicious idea, but actually executing on that idea. Larry Niven, for example, is chock full of great ideas and writes great short stories about them, but he struggles with stretching them to novel length. Margaret Atwood had a terrific concept and did it justice, all the way to the ambiguous and completely appropriate ending. Oh, and there’s a new Nine Inch Nails EP! I haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but what I’ve heard is raw and angry and very, very promising. Alan Moulder helps out on production, and there are a few other familiar names on board as well. I’ve been in a tweexcore mood of late, but there’s nothing like a short burst of Trent Reznor to get me going on a chilly, grey Christmas eve eve. And really? That’s about it right now. We’re going to be traveling the next couple of days and I’ll be thinking about what I’m going to do instead of end of year lists over the next week. There will be a good deal of football (the kind you play with your feet), good food, and the love of my life to keep me warm in these dark days of December, so I think it’ll be OK in the end. -RK

I’m a little bit burnt out. That’s the only thing I can think of to explain it. I’ve had several people ask me why I look so sad and I’m not, really, I’m just thinking about something else and so not thinking about smiling. I’m not even in a bad mood, I just don’t have the energy to keep up appearances right now, you know? Of course, reading J.G. Ballard’s Millennium People this week probably didn’t help. It’s rife with good ideas, clever references, and bags of satire. It also isn’t especially good. It’s overwritten, with more figurative language than a LiveJournal poetry group. It isn’t remotely believable, but I doubt that it’s meant to be. Ballard is in his element putting a magnifying glass on the warts and boils of the middle class and turning them into full-blow horrors, but I caught myself thinking “Oh, come on” at least a dozen times. It’s worth reading but I doubt that I’ll ever re-read it, if that makes sense. So, to put myself in a better mood, I’m finally getting around to reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s one I’ve been meaning to read for ages and I finally picked it up when I saw it in the half price section at the book store. I’m sure it’ll be just the pick-me-up I’m looking for. ‘Tis the season for familial obligations, so I’ll be doing some driving up and down the interstate over the next few weeks. It is exceedingly unlikely that anything of interest will occur during these visits, so expect mostly updates about what I’m reading, how poorly my football team is doing, and some new song that hit me over the head and changed my life. I’ll probably be dressing the cats up like little Santas if I can find the right gear.