During China’s cultural revolution, two best friends, sons of prominent intellectual families, are shipped off to countryside to live and work as peasants. Their daily routine is hopeless, hard, dangerous, and dull until they secretly obtain a Chinese translation of a Balzac novel, filled with romance and adventure. They memorize the story and use it to impress and educate a pretty local village girl with whom they are both infatuated.
Coca-Cola Company has scored a winner with a new feel-good ad that’s been playing these Olympics. When I first saw the commercial I was riveted. Who was that woman? What a gorgeous song! The answers lie, thankfully, at the Coca-Cola website. Her name is Sharlene Hector; she’s a UK singer. The song is I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, popularized by Nina Simone in 1967, composed by Richard Lamb and William Taylor.
The Hector version is not yet available on iTunes (What a missed opportunity Coca Cola!!!). You can buy the imported single from Amazon.com. The Nina Simone song is available at iTunes, plus several other artists’ versions.
Seven or eight years ago I had the privilege of hosting Douglas Adams at my home in San Francisco for a brainstorming meeting on a game project (which eventually became Starship Titanic). I had heard of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, aka H2G2, but hadn’t read it. What I had heard was that it was very funny – Monty Pythonesque humor applied to sci fi. Wanting to get a rise out of Douglas, I made him some tea and served it in a ceramic mug from Japan with a little ceramic frog hiding in the bottom of the cup. Douglas sipped his tea coolly, and when the frog emerged from the depths of the tea Douglas gave a little startled grunt, caught my eye and laughed, and continued to drink his tea. As I expected, unflappable.
Now years later, and three years after Douglas’ untimely passing, I am finally enjoying what brought Douglas his initial fame. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first book in a five book trilogy in which our unsuspecting hero Arthur Dent narrowly escapes the Earth seconds before it is demolished to make way for an interstellar highway. Arthur escapes with his colleague Ford Prefect, who reveals to Arthur that he is actually from another planet and was working on a guidebook to the galaxy before getting stranded on Earth. Catching a lift with the cooking crew of the Vogon ship that destroyed Earth, Arthur and Ford are subjected to the torture of Vogon poetry before being ejected into space, only to be picked up by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the galaxy’s BMOC, with his Heart of Gold improbability spaceship.
I was inspired to read The Rule of Four, the first novel of two recent college grads Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, by a review from a bookseller’s website As Yet Unpublished. The Rule of Four is a fast-paced mystery that takes place on the campus of Princeton University. It revolves around an effort to decode a literary work from the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia, a real book around which there has been a lot of actual scholarly research. (See Introduction to Hypnerotomachia by MIT press.)
Like the other Renaissance code-breaking murder mystery, The DaVinci Code, to which it is often compared, The Rule of Four includes a couple of murders, a loyal team of sleuths, and plenty of historical references. The main differences are that The Rule of Four is actually much better written than The DaVinci Code, it is much more intellectually stimulating, and it doesn’t try to rewrite the history of the Catholic Church.
So many people had recommended Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser that I bought the audiobook on Audible.com and listened to all 9 hours. I have mixed opinions about it. On the one hand Schlosser does a wonderful job describing the history of the fast food industry with terrific case studies of McDonalds and Carl’s Jr. Visionary entrepreneurs brought America efficiently prepared meals at prices low enough to make the food affordable to all. Schlosser also expertly delves into the the structure and participants of the entire industry, from the meatpackers and potato farmers to the franchisees and corporate marketeers. The research effort that went into this book are well deserving of praise. I was especially bothered to learn about how in-bed fast-food marketers have become with our public schools, with the schools pimping junk food to students in order to raise revenue. It is shameful that we are trading off the health of our children for the tax dollars that should be going into our schools.
A couple of summers ago I had the great fortune to be able to help a friend of mine a few hours a week with her Montessori pre-school. As the eldest of six kids growing up, loving children and not having my own, this experience was a welcome break from my usual high-tech reality. What so amazed me was that each of these 20 or so 3 and 4 year olds was a vast and extraordinary universe in and of him and herself. All of humanity’s emotions, joys, despairs, and conflicts were played out every day in our little classroom.
My favorite student (and as much as teachers try otherwise, we all have our favorites) was a 4 year-old girl named Zoe. She sparkled with intelligence and enthusiasm and displayed unusual grace and maturity for her age. Everyone loved Zoe. So I was surprised one day when, during lunch, she asked to sit next to another student, Matthew (not his real name), and he ignored her, not letting her in. He continued to ignore her that day, even when Zoe asked him point blank, “Matthew, my feelings are hurt that you won’t play with me. What did I do wrong? Why won’t you play with me?”
