Duck and Cover! (1951)

Arcade classic, explained.

Pac-Man Dossier.

Why I miss Maryland in spring.

Man, it gets nice early in the DC area. Two doors down from my parents' house, there's another two-year-old Benji, whose mother kindly offered the use of his sand table and jungle gym while we're visiting.

One child pushing the other on the swings -- loop closed. It was at this point I decided I was no longer needed and went back to Nana and Poppa's for a cup of tea. I'm sure they're fine.

[Sorry for the formatting problems. Dang Macs!]

Bookish.

Moral Relativism, by Steven Lukes. Maybe for others, but didn't work for me.

In Xanadu: A Quest, by William Dalrymple. Brilliant travel writing. The quest is to retrace the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan's Xanadu. As between the competing schools of travel writing - genial companion (Fermor, Bryson) vs misanthropic depressive (Theroux) - Dalrymple generally shades toward the latter, but that's not criticism. There are very funny moments, and a great finish. Highly recommended. This is what's left of Xanadu now; the little blue squiggle across the bottom there (zoom out a bit) is, in fact, Alph, the sacred river.

Musical stylings.

A medley of "Baa baa black sheep" and "Pittsburgh's going to the super bowl":

Braddock. Catch the fever!

NYT article here. I actually have had sorta good times in Braddock, biking through on the way to the Great Allegheny Passage. The view of the Edgar Thompson works is impressive. And also Jeanne and I saw a good production of Thérèse Raquin in the Braddock library.

Bookish.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. A confection, but philosophical. A tale of a Paris concierge who reads Tolstoy, and a suicidal girl who lives in the building. Worth the read. One review here.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif. Kind of like Catch-22, with Under Officer Ali Shigri as Yossarian. The hook of the story is the death of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in a 1988 plane crash. Very funny; highly recommended. NYT review here.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. "Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence." The story of a moral entrepreneur, Balram Halwai, from a poor Indian village, who gets a start as a driver for a rich family in Delhi. Impressive; this won the Booker Prize last year. One interview here, in which the author says of poor Indians, the subjects of the novel: "But also their intelligence impressed me. What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers." I leave analysis of that observation as an exercise for the reader.

Bookish.

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Gruesome tale of Russian serial killer in the 1950s, or rather the policeman who tracks the killer down. Absolutely preposterous plot. Terribly clumsy use of free indirect discourse. Incoherent characters. Stay away.

Bookish

The Journal of Hélène Berr. This was published last year from a manuscript that the author had given to the family cook bit by bit for safekeeping during World War II. Berr was a French 21-year-old daughter of a decorated WWI veteran and respected industrialist, an accomplished violinist and lover of English poetry, and Jewish. This is a record of how her world descended into madness. No happy ending. In France, she has apparently become known as "the French Anne Frank." Like Frank, Berr was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, then to Bergen-Belsen, and died shortly before the camp's liberation, of typhus. One review here.

After Steel.

1. Suffer through collapse of industry that once dominated region and supplied world with steel;
2. ?
3. Profit!