In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
After reading The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, I decided to pick up another book by this author. I chose, “In the Lake of the Woods”.
It was a very interestingly written story, which posed as a mystery, but in the end left bits of the puzzle missing, allowing the reader to piece together their own ideas about who the characters really were and what they did.
The book was set in Minnesota and had a very authentic feel to it.
I really enjoyed the non-traditional chapters which consisted of excerpts from books and the criminal investigations, which the book referenced in overt and oblique ways. They fit very nicely into the story and in their own way added to the narration.
Amazon link
In the Lake of the Woods
“Survivor” and “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk
I recently read two books written by Chuck Palahniuk, “Fight Club” and “Survivor”. I really enjoyed them both.
Fight Club
I had recently seen the movie and I loved it. I immediately got the book at my local library. I loved the book as much if not more than the movie. The author really has an interesting way to tell a story where it seems like the story is happening around the characters rather then than the alternative of the characters making the story happen. I loved it. The whole notion of duality in the book was far more robust than in the movie.
Here are some of my favorite quotes.
“”What you have to consider,” he says, “is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”
How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than his indifference.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.”
“”We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,” Tyler said. “So don’t f_ck with us.”"
Survivor
This book started slow for me. I liked the idea well enough, but it was just really slow until somewhere in the middle of the book. I am desperate to know if all the cleaning advice offered in the book actually works. For instance, if you soap the inside of a crease in a pair of dress pants before ironing, will it really make the crease sharper? Then somewhere in the middle of the book, I really started to like it and by the end I was completely hooked. It was very unsettling to read a book where the page and chapter numbers are in reverse order.
In some ways his writing reminds me of William Gibson, except that when Mr. Palahniuk has a really clever original idea, he develops it completely as part of the story, while Mr. Gibson blows you away with the idea and never completes it.
One other interesting bit of the story for me was that I’ve know people raised in religious colonies, which made the entire story more real to me.
Here are a few of my favorite excerpts. The author has a wonderful gift for twisting a phrase or thought.
“”We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,” Tyler said. “So don’t f_ck with us.”"
“It’s all so deep.
So real.
Everything the agent’s been telling me makes perfect sense. For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?
With all due respect.
According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.”
“We’re all miserable together. It’s the opposite of a victimless crime.” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Amazon Links
“We’re all miserable together. It’s the opposite of a victimless crime.” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Tag Problems
Rebecca notes a problem with tags that goes beyond spamming, namely people who purposely pollute the public tag-space to be funny, offensive, or to push their own political agenda. I suppose this is a specialized case of spam. I still think this folksonomy idea is very cool, but we’ll see how it plays out over time.
Spam Cold War
If you’ve been using the internet long enough you can remember when spam first became a problem for you. While filtering has taken care of nearly all my email spam, I still have the occasional problem of comment spam on the blog.
To combat comment spam, I have used the MT-Blacklist spam filtering plug-in, closed commenting on old entries, banned repeat offenders, and now even started offering TypeKey authentication. These measures have reduced the comment spam problem to background noise.
I have always thought that if spam didn’t pay, the slimy people who send it might spend their time on other pursuits, like say bilking the elderly out of their retirement savings. Unfortunately, spam does seem to pay enough to keep them in the game.
Comment spam is slightly different than email spam. With comment spam, the spammer is trying to use a whole stack of internet software to increase their rank in search engines, and thus drive more traffic to their scam web sites.
Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see in my RSS reader, that the MSN search folks were going to support a novel modifier of the A HTML tag, namely <A HREF=”LINK” REL=”NOFOLLOW”>. The idea being that if comment spammers increase their “pagerank” by polluting blog comments, that search engines would ignore those links with the NOFOLLOW attribute set.
It’s a very simple idea, which appears to reduce the incentive for comment spammers to bombard blogger web sites. I don’t expect them to change their habits overnight, but perhaps they’ll move on once comment spamming is deemed less effective.
After reading the MSN search team blog entry, I thought to myself, “I suppose I could make a plug-in to MovableType to automate that.” Tonight when I logged in to my MovableType installation I saw the announcement that there is already a new plug-in available.
The cold war between the forces of good and the evil empire of spammers continues. The first presidential candidate who promises to send the spammers to Gitmo gets my vote.