This is the other early Heinlein novel I picked up for this trip. It’s
one of Heinlein’s so-called “juveniles”, and I can barely remember having
tried to read it when I was eleven or twelve. The hero is a school kid
named Jimmy Marlowe; he gets treated very badly by the
school’s headmaster, and I found it so unpleasant that I put the book
down and never picked it back up again.

The book is both better plotted and less inclined to lecture than
Beyond This Horizon, which was written seven years earlier;
still, I found it less satisfying. I don’t think it’s just because it’s
a juvenile, either, as many of Heinlein’s juveniles are first rate.
Perhaps the editor’s hand was a little heavier on this one.

All-in-all, I found it interesting mostly as a precursor to
Stranger in a Strange Land. I don’t believe that it’s set in
precisely the same universe, but the Martians we see only from afar in
Stranger in a Strange Land are clearly very much like the ones
we meet up close in Red Planet. It was interesting to get a
closer look at them.

I tend to enjoy long series of novels with complex plots and varied
characters.
Dorothy
Dunnett and Sharon K. Penman’s historical series are
two examples. But 19th century British literature is also full of long,
complex books that can totally wrap themselves around my imagination and
allow me to live in the story while it lasts. This novel is roughly 900
pages long. It ties together the previous novels in the series so tightly
that if you haven’t read them you will miss much of the richness of the
story and the subtle references made to the past. It’s long and involved
and very Victorian.

With that said, I barely could put it down long enough to eat or get some
sleep. The essential storyline revolves around Rev. Josiah Crawley’s
indictment on theft charges for allegedly stealing a check and using it
to pay off bills. Crawley is a perpetual curate in a Hogglestock, a small
village on the periphery of Barsetshire. He and his wife and kids are
near starvation and crushed under the shame of poverty–shame that is
made much, much worse by the fact that he was raised a gentleman and is
highly educated. But he has a fatal flaw. His gentleman’s pride makes him
refuse any help and his personality is so prickly with it that he puts
off anyone wanting to help him. He even refuses a lawyer for the trial
since he doesnÂ’t have the cash to pay for one and won’t take the charity
of his friends. And he has become depressed to the point of being nearly
psychotic.

That’s the skeleton that Trollope fleshes out with the love story of
Grace Crawley and Henry Grantly, the adventures of Conroy Dalrymple and
Clara Van Siever, the broken romance of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames and
the marital relationships of Archdeacon Grantly and his wife and Bishop
Proudie and his wife. Mrs. Proudie is absolutely the best female
character I have read in a long time. She’s an interfering, prideful,
domineering, sneaky woman who so totally overwhelms her husband that she,
in fact, is the real Bishop of Barsetshire and he only a figurehead.
Everyone, including her husband, hates her with a passion. I did too. Her
fate in the end is wonderfully apt. Trollope puts some hysterically funny
episodes in this novel, including a scene where Johnny Eames, a minor
character, has to escape the clutches of an admiring woman on the make
for a husband by crawling out a window because her mother has locked him
in. But when Trollope made Mrs. Proudie, he pulled out all the stops.

This is a heavily-edited collection of O’Rourke’s columns over the last
five or so years; the conceit is that he’s pontificating to the various
folks who happen to pass through his house, and they get to make
smart-aleck remarks back at him. It works fairly well, and the material
is typical P.J.: serious subjects treated humorously, irreverently and
sometimes profanely–but only after considerable thought. He’s
undeniably flippant, but it’s still Humor from Knowledge rather than
Humor from Ignorance. It’s funny, thought-provoking, and occasionally
chilling, as when he says, “Smoking crack is a way for people who
couldn’t afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.”

The only discordant note isn’t really O’Rourke’s fault. The essays span
the end of Clinton’s presidency and the beginning of Bush’s, but the book
was published prior to 9/11/2001. As a result, he spends a certain
amount of time fulminating about topics that no longer seem quite so
important, and ignoring others that now seem crucial.

But anyway, I liked it.

I was scrounging around the local Borders for books to take with me on my
trip, and found a couple of old Heinlein titles I’d never previously read.
I picked up this one when I got through security at the airport, and
finished it about two hours later, just before it was time
to board the airplane to Seattle.

I enjoyed it, but, bluntly, this isn’t Heinlein’s best work. The plot
meanders here and there; the real climax of the book occurs about
two-thirds of the way through, and the material after that just goes on
to the end of the book without any real action.

On top of that, the book’s dated, and not in a good way. The book’s
about a future utopia in which economics and gene selection are solved
problems. There are lengthy lectures about Mendelian genetics, mostly
stuff I learned in elementary school, which were probably interesting to
science-fiction fans in 1942 but which I found merely tedious. Then
there’s the unintentionally funny scene in which a mathematician balances
the national economy perfectly (something which probably isn’t even
possible) using a mechanical computer made up of rods and cams.

But even Jove nods, and this was one of Heinlein’s earliest novels; and
it nicely filled the two hours I sat in the terminal at Burbank airport.

There was one interesting plot device: nearly everyone in this Utopia
(well, all the men anyway–it was 1942) carries a sidearm. As
Heinlein puts it, an armed society is a polite society. When you
know that being rude can get you challenged to a duel and possibly
killed, you’re unlikely to be rude. I bring this up because one of my
friends keeps making the same point over lunch, if not as stylishly. (He
knows who he is….)

Yesterday was a long day, spent mostly at airports and on
airplanes. The final session of the Tcl conference was yesterday
morning, and it was the best so far; Kevin Kenny presented a particularly
good paper on optimizing Tcl code. Then Michael Cleverly and I and the
big guy from Washington D.C. whose name completely eludes me had lunch at
the McDonalds at the Pacific Center Mall, and went off to Vancouver
Airport.

You can fly from Vancouver to a number of U.S. cities, so to make
things easier you go through American customs in Vancouver instead of at
your destination. This is nice, as it gets it out of the way when you’re
not in a rush, i.e., when changing planes in Portland. On the other
hand, once you check in you’re stuck in a tiny little gate area without
many amenities. As I’d gotten to the airport well in advance of my
flight on the theory that I’d rather spend my time walking about the
airport than walking about Vancouver with a heavy suitcase, this was an
unpleasant discovery. On top of that, all of the electrical outlets were
dead, so I couldn’t even pass the time writing weblog entries on my
laptop.

But I’m home now, and I can honestly say that all of the airport security
people I encountered, both coming and going, were polite, efficient, and
no more intrusive than necessary. And, shower curtains to the side, the
Crowne Plaza Hotel Georgia was an extremely pleasant place to stay.

Actually, I’ve been posting all week, I just couldn’t
upload the posts. You can scroll down…or, if you’d like to read things
in order, you can jump to the archive page
for the first
page in the set and start reading from there.

This is simply the funniest thing I’ve encountered in years. I
tried–tried–to read bits of it to Jane at the bookstore and
nearly busted a gut. I literally had to stop and lean on the the
bookshelves and catch my breath.

As the story goes, in 1962 Lileks’ mom was given a cookbook entitled
Specialties of the House; it was a product of the North Dakota
State Durum Wheat Commission. His mom wisely consigned it to a remote
closet where Lileks himself found it 1996 and was astounded by the
nauseating pictures and absurd recipes.
The Gallery of Regrettable Food is the result.

It’s not, as you might think, a compendium of food which was once popular
and is now frowned on; rather, it’s about food which was never appetizing
at any time, and recipes that no one with any sense ever made. It’s a
collection of photographs, graphics, and copy from cookbooks of the
last century, along with Lilek’s own snide (and often distressingly
funny) remarks.

Learn how Spry shortening makes everything better, and how to use 7-Up to
brighten up your casseroles. Read about the dark side of jello molds and
appetizers and the Man who Hated His Spinach. But perhaps not just before
dinner.

You can get some highlights of the book at
lileks.com.

This is, of course, Keillor’s ode to Jesse (The Body) Ventura, and
to my surprise (given the public acrimony between the two men)
it’s not nearly as mean-spirited as I expected. To be truly
mean-spirited, a work of satire needs to hew a little closer to the truth
than this one does.

At least, if the Jesse Ventura’s life was anything like Jimmy Valente’s,
the world is a much strange place than I thought.

So much for satire; so how was it as a book? If you’re a Keillor fan
you’ve probably already read it, and if you’re not a Keillor fan, there’s
probably not much point. It’s an extended yarn of the kind he likes to
spin once in a while, it’s incredibly silly, and it kept me reading until
the end. I laughed every so often. But
Lake Wobegon Days it ain’t.

The rest of yesterday went pretty well, all things considered,
though I had a hard time staying awake for all of it. Between the last
paper and the conference dinner I walked a couple of blocks to “London
Drugs”, where I got some more Tylenol and cough syrup. With their help I
stuck out last night’s Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and finally crawled
into bed about 11 PM. I felt a lot better this morning, if not yet 100%.
The shower curtain and I agreed to disagree.

We had six more papers today, and impromptu “Works In Progress” talks (10
minutes each) and “Application Show and Tell” talks (15 minutes each).
The “Works in Progress” sign-up list was looking pretty empty this
morning, so I signed up to talk about
Snit for 10 minutes and
whipped up a little presentation in
Notebook.

All I’ve got tonight is another couple of Birds-of-a-Feather sessions;
then some more papers tomorrow, and then I fly home.

I let the shower curtain win this morning, as it was too much
effort to fight with it. I could tell when I woke up that I was coming
down with a cold, and so my first act after showering and dressing was to buy
some Tylenol and cough drops at the gift shop in the lobby. The morning
session of the conference was a bit of a trial.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though. Despite ill-timed
colds and overly friendly shower curtains I’m having a ball. It’s neat
to get a chance to meet people I’ve hitherto known only by name.

This is my second Tcl conference; the previous one was five years ago, in
1997, when I was just getting started with Tcl and no one present had any
reason to know who I was. This time it’s been very different. I’m a
relatively small fish in the Tcl pond, but I’m definitely a resident.
Since 1997 I’ve written some Tcl tutorials that have proved popular,
and a couple of open source software packages that use Tcl; on top of
that I wrote a paper for this conference (“Automated Testing of the Deep
Space Network’s Uplink Subsystem”, don’t ask unless you really want to
know). I really haven’t had to worry much about introducing myself to
anybody this time around.

I presented my paper this morning, and apparently I was
lucid despite being mostly on autopilot. When I know a topic
backwards and forwards you can just wind me up and I can expound at
length (Jane can testify to this), and it probably saved me. I
just hope I’m not too dopey the rest of the day.