Being the bookworm, I couldn't resist this particular meme. The last one I'd indulged was the superhero one. This one on the other hand, makes a lot more sense.
by Lewis Carroll
After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser, you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile to much, and just avoid hat shops altogether.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.
I'd hoped for Through the Looking glass or at least H2G2. Anyway, there it is though, full of smiling cats and queens playing crocquet with flamingos.
W3rd.
--The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
-- Christopher Morley
I don't have a laptop and the hospital anyway doesn't allow any electronics inside anyway. So I ended up lugging a couple of dead trees conveniently pulped, flattened and printed on. The chosen few were from the Johnny Maxwell trilogy from Terry Pratchett - Johnny and the Bomb and Only You Can Save Mankind .
Both these books are classified as young adult fiction, but Pratchett's no Enid Blyton and doesn't try to replace her either. There is no Faraway Tree or Wishing Chairs in here, only a boy who can't filter out the wonders of this world and an old lady who's got time on her side. The total unreality of Johnny's world is different from the fairyland of the average adult fiction book.
The stereotypical gang in the books provide for some biting comments, especially on racism and female suffrage. For example the introductions are just too good to miss and is probably the best page on the book altogether. Here are the choice bits of it :-
The thing about all of us, Johnny thought, the sad thing is that we're not very good. Actually that's not the worst part. The worst part is that we're not even much good at being not much good. Take Yo-less. ... He was black. Technically. But he never said 'Yo', and only said 'check it out' at the supermarket ... Yo-less said it was racial stereotyping to say all black kids acted like that but,however you looked at it Yo-less was born with a defective cool. ... 'One of them was black' Johnny nodded dismally at the phone. Yo-less had explained about this sort of thing. He'd said that if one of his ancestors had joined Atilla the HUn's huge horde of millions of barbarians and helped them raid Ancient Rome, people would've definitely remembered that one of them was black.
For all that brilliant social commentary Pratchett is capable of, he just can't write out an ending to a book. Almost all good Discworld books were left hanging in status quo, which you can't do with a book like Johnny and the Bomb. There's a bit of closure missing in the book which sort of justifies its events with the ending rather than the other way around. Dark humor of Tom Holt too convey this disturbing sense of too many very convenient coincidences. Nobody but Wodehouse in Pearls,Girls and Monty Bodkin has written that perfect book where the audience is giggling away at the simple coincidences piling up to set up a ROTFL ending. But in that case, the twists were quite random and as surprising as the first time I read Oscar Wilde's Model Millionaire but multiplied many times over. Johnny and the Bomb doesn't even belong on the same shelves.
In other words, the book doesn't really keep you guessing. Only You Can Save Mankind on the other hand has a bit more material to it, especially if you put yourself in the early nineties with CNN broadcasting the Iraqi night sky with the Scuds, Patriots and AAA tracers flares included. The total disconnect a pilot feels between pressing a button and real people dying is palpable and carried into the book with clarity.
The initial messages from the alien spaceship and the very obvious absence of a Don't fire button are all digs at the guilt free violence that the war breeds in a real world, only here transported into a twelve year old's video game. The player respawns, but the enemies die forever which sort introduces the guilt factor while shooting down an enemy fighter.
Also buried in there are prods at the allied forces about the Geneva Convention and similar codified rules of war. The requirements of similar treatments for POWs as well as a blatant disregard for civilian collateral damage were highlighted in the game but the suggestions go a lot further than what just happened on your screen. Remember Vietnam, Agent Orange and hot Napalm.
It is quite unfortunate to say that you had to be there (or at least put yourself back in the '90s) to actually read between the lines of this book. These books are for all those who sat by watching the bombs drop over Baghdad and witnessed the 'taking out' of several strategic hospitals and bunkers. A fourteen year old in 2006 will not find the irony or relive the horrors reading this book - he (or she) just doesn't have the context. The books paint a blood red sunset to the west and spotless hands of those who pressed the buttons. So to simplify - I liked the stuff between the lines, hated the ending and liked the characters (totally).
Reality is hard to live with - Unlike Johnny, we can't cope.
--How do wars start ? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, and they believe what they read.
-- Karl Kraus
A long long time ago, one of my classmates happened to read one of my blog entries about taxation. He commented that my English has come a long way but I should under no circumstances write about economics or money. But recently I've started to watch the US stock market, more out of curiosity than actual expectations of profit.
Since I'm neither an investor nor a trader there, unlike most ticker watchers, I was interested in watching the ebb and flow of the stock prices rather than scramble to buy or sell. Considering the (rise and) fall of the petro dollars ever since the new millennium dawned, the dollar value is merely a transactional discrepancy for an outsider. Gold is rather more stable to compare against, especially considering the unique situation India is in terms of gold demand and consumption.
The frontrunner of the Web 2.0 stocks has been Google's IPO. The stock which was priced (possibly overvalued) at 300+ USD was and still is riding on the investor confidence thanks to the recent products (albeit Beta) which have come out of the Google stable. Then, suddenly Google insiders decide to get a little cash out of the market and into their pockets. The sell was more massive than all the other 199 companies put together and basically was a shot in the arm for California's treasury in tax dollars. It could be said that the sales wouldn't affect the economy as the money never really left the market but merely got converted into scrips. But the more important question to ask is whether this is a precursor to something more dramatic (always a good idea to watch CFOs selling stocks).
On the other hand, we see another trend marked up against Gold versus the stock market. Technically speaking, the stock market should be ahead of the curve on Gold in the growth sector mainly because of the risk involved (which should be compensated by increased returns and vice versa). But very recently, that has stopped being true for GOOG stock. This is probably more a reflection of the falling value of the dollar rather than the intrinsic value of the stock in particular but the trend in itself is disturbing.
I' m not the smartest dude in the world, but even I would be hedging my bets in tech stocks if I held a few million of these. So it is probable that these two events are related in some way, but to speculate whether one event was in anticipation of another would be completely irresponsible. In fact, if I were a Wall Street mogul I'd be convincing you to buy while I sold off all of mine slowly (just like the old times in '99).
In conclusion, something's cooking.
** disclaimer ** : these are very much my own opinions and I am a code monkey @ Yahoo!, so if you do something stupid based on these, Y'all can go to this excellent village ["Yee Haw !"] that's missing its idiot.
--The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
posted at: 00:31 | path: /observations | permalink |