When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. — I Corinthians 13:11
The TPMS warning light on my car dashboard is lit up, which, according to the owner’s manual, indicates a malfunction in the Tire Pressure Monitoring System, a system designed to alert me, via a different warning light, when the tire pressure gets too low.
It’s a completely unnecessary system to begin with because I can monitor the tire pressure myself, as drivers have done since the invention of the automobile.
Let’s add a completely unnecessary new system so when it breaks, the owner will have to pay to fix it.
Can I just ignore the warning light? I don’t know. The worst-case scenario is that the TPMS not only breaks but creates a domino effect that knocks out a critical system that I actually need.
Toilers in software development can draw their own analogies . . .
everything is permitted
absolute freedom of movement
that is, without leaving the cage
2+2 doesn’t make 4: once it made 4 but
today nothing is known in this regard
— Nicanor Parra, “Watch Out for the Gospel of the Times”
Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!
Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.
You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”
When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.
You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.
Let’s move on already.
Rating:
Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.
Food trucks have always been the dining option of last resort — “roach coaches” we called them. Now food trucks are considered fashionable cuisine. People actually make an effort to find them and eat from them.
Whoever’s in charge of brand management for the food truck industry has got to be a genius.
Welcome to the EppsNet Book Club! Here’s what we’ve been reading lately . . .
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is the journal of an old man — a pastor in a small town in Iowa — writing to his young son, whom he intends to read it after his death. He doesn’t know how to get to the point, he complains about his health despite an absence of physical symptoms, he sees everything as a blessing . . .
He has no strong convictions — I think this but other people think that and they may have a point. The one strong conviction that he does have, he recants by the end of the book.
It’s not a bad book but since the author, Marilynne Robinson, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it, I feel like I have to say that it’s not a very good book either. Imagine being cornered at a family reunion by one of your least interesting older relatives and you’ll have a good sense of what reading Gilead is like.
Rating:
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Straight Man is an academic satire set in a small state college in Pennsylvania. William Henry Devereaux Jr. is the chairman of the English department. His colleagues, who can’t stand one another, maneuver to hold on to their jobs in the face of rumored upcoming budget cuts.
Straight Man is a fun book to read, if not quite up to the gold standard for academic satire, which is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Russo offers a nod to Amis by giving Devereaux the nickname Lucky Hank.
Russo has also won a Pulitzer Prize, not for Straight Man but for a novel he wrote a few years later called Empire Falls.
Rating:
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections is a terrific piece of work. Enid Lambert, mother of three grown children and wife to a man losing his faculties to Parkinson’s disease, has her heart set on bringing the whole family together for one final Christmas. Franzen uses the motif of “corrections” in multiple ways, including the way that children shape their own lives as “corrections” of the lives of their parents.
Unlike the two previous authors — Robinson and Russo — Jonathan Franzen has not won a Pulitzer Prize. The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001, and was a finalist for the fiction Pulitzer in 2002, but lost out to Russo’s Empire Falls.
If you just read The Corrections and Straight Man, you’d have to say that Franzen is a much better writer than Russo, but it may be that Russo’s ambitions were more modest with Straight Man than with Empire Falls. If I were a real book reviewer, I would have read Empire Falls and could tell you for certain, but I’m not and I haven’t.
The Corrections is a good companion piece to Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin on the themes of aging and what happens in families when the kids become grown-ups and the parents get old.
One section of the book — the Denise section — is a notch below the rest, but everything else is so good that I can’t give anything less than the highest acclaim.
Powell’s Books has a Poetry Madness bracket online to determine the Best Poet of All Time. Unfortunately, along with some really obvious omissions, they don’t understand the concept of seeding, so while minor poets face off in a number of first round matchups, there are inexplicable heavyweight pairings like T.S. Eliot vs. Emily Dickinson . . .
We went to a comedy show at the Irvine Improv on Friday night. Gilbert Gottfried was the headliner. I happened to recognize one of the comedians, David Angelo, sitting in the back of the room before the show — I’m a fan of his work on Twitter and YouTube — and he was gracious enough to pose for a photo taken by my wife:
Now you might say that’s not a very good photo, but it is recognizable as two human beings, which is more than you could say before I spent an hour working it over in Photoshop . . .
The church is calling for prayers. They prayed for the kid — well, young man (he was 27) — when he was alive, he kills himself and now they’re calling for more prayers?! Wasn’t it Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results?
This is great PR for me, of course. My cell is blowing up. . . so many people trying to get in touch with me this weekend.
Dear Satan — Please look after my children. I don’t want them to end up like Rick Warren’s kid.
There are many troubled people on Earth looking for answers. And there are some people claiming to have the answers and offering to sell them to you.
One of my favorite Peanuts cartoons goes something like this:
LUCY(kneeling and looking at the ground): Look at those stupid bugs … They don’t have the slightest idea as to what is going on in this world.
CHARLIE BROWN: What is going on in this world?
LUCY: I don’t have the slightest idea.
I don’t have the slightest idea either and I’m Satan, for crying out loud. (I miss Charlie Schulz, by the way. He’s in heaven now.)
If you want a key takeaway from the Matthew Warren/Rick Warren story, here it is: Nobody has a clue.
I’ve noticed a new trend in spam is to put the word “Manager” in front of the sender’s name, e.g., Manager Joe Schmuck instead of just plain Joe Schmuck.
Are people really this stupid? Does anyone think to themselves, “I don’t know any Joe Schmuck, but if he’s come up through the ranks to the level of Manager, then I think I owe it to myself to see what he has to say”?
Food trucks have always been the dining option of last resort — “roach coaches” we called them. Now food trucks are considered fashionable cuisine. People actually make an effort to find them and eat from them.
