Review: More Alternative Truths: Stories from the Resistance

More Alternative Truths: Stories from the Resistance by Bob Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars



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Review: The Joy of Pi

The Joy of Pi by David Blatner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of pieces from Adams, an anthology gathered from the dead man's hard drive (R.I.P.) and odd pieces from here and there. There are some themes that emerge. This includes the yearslong, frustrating effort to get a Hitchhiker's Guide movie made. While that project was not getting sufficient interest, Men in Black, the 1997 movie based on the Aircel comics book bought by Marvel came out. Adams reports this disproved any notion that sci fi comedy wouldn't work. Also Adams felt miffed at how some elements were overly "familiar". He doesn't cite specifics, but I think his list must include:
* When K reveals there are about 1500 aliens on Earth and most of them are on Manhattan just trying to make a living, James asks "Cab drivers?". This is a reference to writer Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' novels, particularly the final novel 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish', where archivist Ford Prefect's entry in the Guide hints that driving a cab is a good way to make a living for aliens visiting New York.
* The final scene reveals that our universe is seen to exist in a gaming marble, just like the miniature galaxy. Both the scene and concept of the miniature galaxy were was inspired from Douglas Adams's novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', where Ford Prefect tells Arthur Dent he knew of a planet that got used in a game of inter-galactic bar billiards and was potted into a black hole ("only scored 30 points, too").

There is also a fair amount about his atheism, stance against dams as more harm than good, and frustrations and excitement with personal computing, especially around Macs. I would have loved to work with him in gathering user stories for software design. He had an eloquent and unwavering vision for how ease of use should present in consumer technology.

Also, this reminds I need to someday read the Dirk Gently books. His future plans for that are only a small percentage of the content here.

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Review: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The Henry Miller Reader

The Henry Miller Reader by Henry Miller
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

...Listening to their recital I got the impression that the whole neighborhood was crippled and riddled with malignant diseases.

Everybody with whom they had any dealings, friend, relative, neighbor, butcher, letter-carrier, gas inspector, every one without exception carried about with him perpetually a little flower which grew out of his own body and which was named after one or the other of the familiar maladies, such as rheumatism, arthritis, pneumonia, cancer, dropsy, anemia, dysentery, meningitis, epilepsy, hernia, encephalitis, megalomania, chilblains, dyspepsia and so on and so forth. Those who weren't crippled, diseased or insane were out of work and living on relief. Those who could use their legs were on line at the movies waiting for the doors to be thrown open. I was reminded in a mild way of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. The difference between these two worlds other- wise so similar lay in the standard of living; even those on relief were living under conditions which would have seemed luxurious to that suburban working class whom Céline writes about. In Brooklyn, so it seemed to me, they were dying of malnutrition of the soul. They lived on as vegetable tissue, flabby, sleep-drugged, disease-ridden carcasses with just enough intelligence to enable them to buy oil burners, radios, automobiles, news-papers, tickets for the cinema.

"Why are so many people into astrology?"

“Someone might struggle to admit they’re feeling vulnerable, but can more easily acknowledge ‘my Cancer moon is really sensitive today,’” Solas ["an Irish psychic intuitive"] says.

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Review: Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy

Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy by Bill Adair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the final days before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in early 2023, the Democrats who controlled the January 6 committee released hundreds of transcripts, emails, and reports. Because Republicans planned to abolish the committee when they took over, the Democrats gave the documents to the U.S. Government Publishing Office, which posted them on a little-noticed website.

Scattered throughout the site were more than a dozen interviews with people who had invaded the Capitol or otherwise been involved in the insurrection. It took me some time to decipher the messy system for storing the transcripts—it was like the Democrats had tossed the transcripts in a closet as they were rushing to vacate an apartment—but I eventually identified the ones for the January 6 attackers. Individually and collectively, the interviews told a detailed story about the attackers’ backgrounds, education, occupations, sources of political information, and what motivated them to come to Washington to join Trump’s protest. The investigators were methodical and asked similar questions of each person.

As I compiled quotes of the attackers, two patterns emerged. One involved the social media that the insurrectionists used to connect with one another and get their political news. The investigators asked them if they relied on widely used platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, and also asked about smaller apps and sites that were used by conservatives and the far right such as 4Chan, Gab, Truth Social (founded by Donald Trump), and Parler. But the transcripts revealed the smaller conservative sites were not popular with the people who stormed the Capitol. When the investigators asked about social media, they heard one answer over and over.

Facebook.

The investigators found a similar pattern when they asked about news sources. The January 6 attackers had some variety in the sites they used to keep up with politics—a few occasionally looked at the mainstream media and a couple of them said they even checked out the much-derided CNN—but there was one source that nearly every one mentioned.

Fox News.

https://webharvest.gov/congress117th/...
Eric Barber

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