Woulda, coulda, shoulda . . . Rating: Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Books
See You in Hell: The Fritz Pollard Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The head of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which monitors diversity in the NFL, expects the league to institute a rule where players would be penalized 15 yards for using the N-word on the field. — NFL expected to penalize players for using racial slurs in games – ESPN The N-word. Let’s see . . . the N-word is “National,” the F-word is “Football” and the L-word is “League.” Wait — what?! I’m now being informed that the N-word in this case is “nigger.” That’s what the Fritz Pollard Alliance wants to penalize. OK, that’s a great idea, Fritz Pollard Alliance, and by “great” I mean “bullshit.” Has anyone at the Fritz Pollard Alliance read the Harry Potter books? In the Harry Potter books, Voldemort is known as He Who Must Not Be Named. He’s so powerful… Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
I bought this book and read it because it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. See, it says so right there on the cover: “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” Did you know there was a time in our country’s history when black people were bought and sold as property, sometimes by other black people? And did you also know that 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more on car insurance? Human slavery is deplorable, yes, but at this late date, can it be deplored any more than it has been already? If you have new depths of insight into the hearts and minds of the participants, by all means offer them, but Jones doesn’t have them. Reading The Known World is like reading a history book, albeit with a little more authorial contempt for some of the characters. It’s customary in book reviews to mention authors whose work… Read more →
The ‘Why’ Technique
The usual purpose of ‘why’ is to elicit information. One wants to be comforted with some explanation which one can accept and be satisfied with. The lateral use of why is quite opposite. The intention is to create discomfort with any explanation. By refusing to be comforted with an explanation one tries to look at things in a different way and so increases the possibility of restructuring a pattern. — Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking Read more →
Challenge Assumptions
General agreement about an assumption is no guarantee that it is correct. It is historical continuity that maintains most assumptions – not a repeated assessment of their validity. — Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking Read more →
Periodic Reassessment
Periodic reassessment means looking again at things which are taken for granted, things which seem beyond doubt. Periodic reassessment means challenging all assumptions. It is not a matter of reassessing something because there is a need to reassess it; there may be no need at all. It is a matter of reassessing something simply because it is there and has not been assessed for a long time. It is a deliberate and quite unjustified attempt to look at things in a new way. — Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking Read more →
2013: The Year in Books
These are the books I read in 2013, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion. Books of the Year: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren My Library at LibraryThing Read more →
30 Feet Away
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. — Raymond Chandler, The High Window Read more →
A Display of Interest, However Shallow
He himself did not care what happened at the house during the day. There was no more reason for her to be curious about his work than for him to be concerned with the groceries, laundry, getting the children to school, and whatever else she did. Yet it would seem rude, almost brutal, to drop the pretense and admit that neither particularly cared what the other was doing. A display of interest, however shallow, made life easier. — Evan Connell, Mr. Bridge Read more →
Farewell, My Lovely
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room. — Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely Read more →
Passing the Cloudera Hadoop Certification Exam
Today I took and passed the Cloudera Certified Developer for Apache Hadoop (CCDH) exam. Two resources were helpful to me in this successful endeavor: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White The Cloudera practice test, which I found much harder than the actual exam. Read more →
The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates
“Do not ride your bicycle around the corner,” the mother had told the daughter when she was seven. “Why not!” protested the girl. “Because then I cannot see you and you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you.” “How do you know I’ll fall?” whined the girl. “It is in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house.” “I don’t believe you. Let me see the book.” “It is written in Chinese. You cannot understand it. That is why you must listen to me.” “What are they, then?” the girl demanded. “Tell me the twenty-six bad things.” But the mother sat knitting in silence. “What twenty-six!” shouted the girl. The mother still did not answer her. “You can’t tell me anything because you don’t know! You don’t know anything!” And the girl ran… Read more →
It Is Hard Living Down the Tempers We Are Born With
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away. — Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans Read more →
How to Save a Lot of Time in Interviews
There used to be a book titled The Top 2800 Interview Questions…And Answers. I have this fantasy: You walk into an employer’s office, shake hands, and say, “I know you have a lot of questions for me. So let’s save us both a lot of time.” You slide that baby across the desk toward the manager… “So here they are, along with all the answers. Now can we cut the crap and talk about the job and how I’ll do it for you, okay?” — Nick Corcodilos Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews: The Big Short by Michael Lewis
I worked in the information technology department of a mortgage bank in the run-up to the 2007 implosion of the subprime mortgage market . . . Given that it was fairly evident at the time that complicated financial instruments were being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it, it’s remarkable that very few people foresaw the catastrophe and that even fewer actually had the nerve to bet on it to happen. Long story short, the major rating agencies — Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s — were incompetent in their rating of subprime mortgage bonds, giving investment-grade and, in some cases, triple-A ratings to high-risk instruments. A lot of people took the ratings — which implied that subprime mortgage derivatives were no riskier than U.S. Treasury bonds — at face value and acted accordingly. But there were also some interesting psychological factors in play, not… Read more →
Seeing the Thing Through
Ah, poor fellow!–and Herzog momentarily joined the objective world in looking down on himself. He too could smile at Herzog and despise him. But there still remained the fact. I am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it. After smiling, he must return to his own Self and see the thing through. — Saul Bellow, Herzog Read more →
The Life That Exhibits Itself
“In paths untrodden,” as Walt Whitman marvelously put it. “Escaped from the life that exhibits itself . . .” Oh, that’s a plague, the life that exhibits itself, a real plague! There comes a time when every ridiculous son of Adam wishes to arise before the rest, with all his quirks and twitches and tics, all the glory of his self-adored ugliness, his grinning teeth, his sharp nose, his madly twisted reason, saying to the rest — in an overflow of narcissism which he interprets as benevolence — “I am here to witness. I am come to be your exemplar.” Poor dizzy spook! — Saul Bellow, Herzog Read more →
The Price is Right
Guess how much I paid for this stack of books . . . Hint #1: I bought them at the One Dollar Bookstore. Hint #2: There are 10 books in the stack. Read more →
Elmore Leonard, 1925-2013
Elmore Leonard wrote 45 books. Were they good books? Well, let me ask you: Do you know anyone who’s written 45 good books? Neither do I. He’s a literary Joey Chestnut. I know Leonard wrote at least one good book though and that book is Get Shorty. It’s not Proust but it’s a good novel, not just good as genre fiction. I really enjoyed it. In fact, my enjoyment was such that I bought another Leonard book, Maximum Bob. If I’d read Maximum Bob first, I would have stopped right there with the Leonard canon. Maximum Bob is so bad, it’s hard to believe these two books were written by the same person. I read Gold Coast as a tiebreaker. Gold Coast is better than Maximum Bob, no question about it, but not nearly as good as Get Shorty. So I stopped reading Elmore Leonard books, but I highly recommend… Read more →
Aside
If Grateful Dead fans are Deadheads, what are fans of Philip K. Dick?