Today in short book reviews: REAMDE

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Stephenson’s latest is best skipped, frankly. It’s a turgid mismash of unearned and unplausible coincidences stapled together with NS’ trademark deep-dive research. Unlike his prior works, which typically used a fine story (“ripping good yarns,” even) to explore some other topic (nanotech, cyberspace, monetary development, etc.), this time it’s a scattershot explosion of whatever stuck on the wall — MMORPG gaming, money laundering, international terrorism, great circle air traffic planning, immigration, firearms, drug smuggling, northwestern geography, and Eritrean adoptees.

No, really. It’s kind of a mess, and feels lacking in the craft I found in even the more self-indulgent portions of the Baroque cycle, or Anathem.

PICTURES! We got PICTURES!

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Dating back to last spring, actually. Moral: Is more fun to take than to edit and process.

Posted in Pix

The Geek You Didn’t Know

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God knows we here at Heathen are Apple fans, though sort of accidentally — we lack the zeal of of the true believers, but by and by we seem to have accumulated one of about everything Apple makes. We’re sad about Steve, obviously. 56 is entirely too young (Christ, I can SEE that from here), and the guy was still churning out hits. It is not exaggeration to say that, without him, the personal computing landscape would be very, very different — and most likely much less interesting, and much less usable by the broad population. He didn’t invent the personal computer, but he did a huge chunk of the work required to get it to a place where my 76-year-old stepfather can use it without calling me.

But this post isn’t about Steve. This post is about Dennis. You Heathen are a geeky bunch, but even so most of you have know idea who Dennis Ritchie was, or even that he died Saturday at the age of 70, but the odds are overwhelming that, in reading these words, you’re enjoying his work.

Dennis Ritchie wrote C. The partially-geeky among you will recognize this as a programming language, but it may have never occurred to you that languages, too, must have authors. C is now ubiquitous. It is no exaggeration to say that C and its derivatives (most famously C++, but also Microsoft’s C# and the Objective C that Apple favors, among others) run the world. The definitive book on the language has a real title, but it is known to coders the world over as “The K & R book.” The “R” is, of course, Ritchie.

But that’s not all. C is intimately tied to the Unix operating system, which is also Ritchie’s work, along with his colleagues Brian Kernighan (the “K” mentioned above) and Ken Thompson. You may have heard of Unix, but you (again, the noncoding Heathen) have no idea of the scale of its reach in your life. Unix runs everywhere, in some flavor or another. That commercial flavors have fallen from favor in recent years is of no consequence, because their de facto successor is Linux, which began life as a noncommercial, open, and free implementation of the same ideas. Without Unix there is no Linux. More than that, though, the world wide web as you know is based on Unix ideas and tools and protocols. Without Unix, the Internet itself would not be the same.

Today, variants of Unix run on countless devices — every Apple device running OSX or iOS is running a variant of something called FreeBSD, which is itself a variant of Unix. Android runs on Linux. The New York Stock Exchange? Linux. Your Tivo runs Linux. This site, and countless others (including Google, Amazon, and Facebook), is hosted on Linux. The firewall at your office probably has a Linux kernel. VMWare, the dominant virtualization platform in the world, is based on Linux.

Much was made last week of how many folks learned of Jobs’ passing on an Apple device. I’m sure the figure, if it could actually be measured, was a very high percentage. If we ask an equivalent question about Ritchie, though, the answer is easy: All. There is no communications channel in modern use that does not, somewhere, rely on his work or its descendants.

Humble pioneers are known for admitting that, in the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Apple’s modern success and resurrection are based on a solid software platform, the sine qua non of any technological endeavor. Steve clearly saw further than his contemporaries, but Dennis Ritchie was one of the giants who gave him a leg-up.

Godspeed, Dennis.

Update: This tribute post is worth reading, too. I didn’t cover it here, but it’s not just the C was influential and remains essential; it was also hugely groundbreaking in terms of portability. What Ritchie and his colleagues did with C — i.e., creating a portable computer language not beholden to idiosyncrasies of the various computing hardware platforms — was widely considered impossible at the time. Or, as the linked writer put it:

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it.

Dept. of Documentaries We Want To See

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It has come to our attention that there is a new documentary about Big Star.

Sadly, the web site seems to be completely devoid of information regarding screenings, or streaming opportunities, or even a mailing list. Awesome.

(For the uninitiated, the wikipedia entries on the band and its most famous member are useful; you almost certainly know at least one of their songs already, as a truncated version of “In the Street” was used as the theme song for “That ’70s Show.”)

Dept. of SERIOUS Overreach

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Balko: “The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill on Friday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act.”

In other words, they want U.S. law to govern you no matter where you are. So: Planning to buy some special brownies in Amsterdam? That would be illegal under this law.

Cephalopods are better at hiding than you are

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It’s another BB hit, but it includes a bit of data I didn’t have: Octopi are very, very good at matching color, and they do it by sight, but they are color blind.

Go watch the video.

The other thing is this: Octopus camouflage isn’t about looking like the background. It’s about hiding itself from observers, and those can be two very different things.

The Only Heathen Post on Amanda Knox

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I don’t really have an official position on whether or not Knox killed whomever it is she supposedly killed in some ill-defined drug-fueled sexcapade, but I have inadvertently become aware that Nancy Grace considers her release a miscarriage of justice, which — based upon only the most cursory review of other coverage — seems to be something of a contrarian position.

This makes me more or less certain that cutting Knox loose was precisely the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not she killed anybody, based on my theory that anything that makes this bleating harpy unhappy is, by and large, good for humanity.

It’s the little things

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You’ve by now probably all seen Apple’s home page which, in a week they’re launching a new iPhone revision, is nevertheless dominated by their memorial to their founder and leader. That’s classy.

What you may not have noticed unless you’re really nerdy is that the photo of Steve has the name “t_hero.png”.

Computing pioneers, like rock stars, are all mostly postwar baby boomers. Actually, the rock stars — the first ones, like the Beatles Jobs idolized — are a bit older, which is hilarious. In either case, though, we’re on the narrow leading edge of a demographic inevitability. The next 20 to 30 years will be costly in terms of musical and technological giants, but I’m a bit at a loss to figure any whose loss we’ll all feel as acutely as this one.

Say what you will about the remaining Beatles or the Stones, but their best work is undeniably years behind them — Jobs was still churning out vastly influential hits.

He was able to do this because, as he was fond of quoting, he liked Apple to “skate to where the puck will be.” He started doing this very early. From a 1985 interview he gave with Playboy — when he was all of 31 — we find an early example. Younger Heathen (are there any?) may find it hard to believe, but back then the broad reaction to computers was “well, they’re cool, I guess, but what can you do with them that’s useful?”

Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?

Jobs: So far, that’s more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.

Playboy: What will change?

Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people‐‑as remarkable as the telephone.

Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

Jobs: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

Now, the Internet existed in 1985 — I got my first email address only two years later — but it was nerdland, and very few were thinking even a little bit that grandmothers might use it to look at pictures of their grandkids someday. Apparently, Jobs was in that crowd, which is how we find ourselves with devices today that delight instead of confound, and how, odds are, you learned about his passing on a device he made. Lots of you will read this post on one, too.

Godspeed, Steve. We’ll miss you.

(It’s proper to note that, given the twin legacies he’ll leave, Bill Gates may well be the runner up here. His contribution to computing hasn’t been as dramatically evolutionary or as prolonged as Jobs’, but his business savvy and technical acumen did much to make business computing a foregone conclusion. His real legacy, though, may turn out to be the fact that after having founded Microsoft and become the richest man in the world — a title theretofore usually held by inheritors of wealth, not self-made men — he decided to take on a new, ambitious humanitarian mission instead of settling into a very expensive and luxurious retirement.

But nobody ever stood in line for a new copy of Windows.)

Dana Gould Kills

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In this clip from the Kevin Pollack Show, he plays a Pollack Show game called “The Larry King Game” for nearly ten minutes. What’s the game? Simple: Do a bad Larry King impression, and (a) reveal something personal purportedly about King that King probably ought not reveal and (b) go to a caller.

There are, apparently, lots of other clips of other celebs playing the game, but I have a hard time imagining anybody riffs and improve for 8 minutes better than Gould.

H/T: Metafilter, natch.

I have no idea why it’s taken me so long to blog this

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Via Mohney, who’s quoting, but: “How Many Cormac McCarthies does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer:

A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon — partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.

The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.

Then all is dark.

Related: Yelp reviews as if written by McCarthy, which is an ongoing Tumblr.

Facebook is Not Your Friend

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You are not Facebook’s customer. You are Facebook’s product. They tell us that now we have more control than ever about what information we put in, but I remind you all that the ONLY way to have REAL control over that data is not to give it to Facebook in the first place.

People sometimes ask why I don’t publish the whole feed of this blog there; this is one reason. This is also why virtually none of my photos are on Facebook.

Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart

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R.E.M. have called it a day after 31 years, 15 albums (and “Chronic Town”!), and uncountable influence on popular music.

This makes us at Heathen HQ a little sad, but only in a nostalgic way. R.E.M. for ME is the sound of my teen years, rich with twang and jangle and pop, and full of joy, starting the moment I popped a cassette of Lifes Rich Pageant into a boom box in 1986. Twenty-five years later, I’m playing that album in my office as I write this, and some part of my soul is still 16.

While for most of my life, I wouldn’t have hesitated to list the Athens band as one of my all time favorites, in truth my devoted fandom extends only to the mid-90s; Monster is the last record I really and truly enjoyed, and it’s only the first five records that still have a hold on my heart. (I could, for example, never hear “Shining Happy People” again and be perfectly content.)

Consequently, Bill Berry‘s retirement in 1997 was sad to me, but also mostly irrelevant — I bought a couple of the post-Berry “R.E.M. as a trio” records, but never really connected with them in the way I did with other, earlier records.

Here’s five R.E.M. memories, in no particular order, from my own 25 years of fandom:

  1. In late 1986, the aforementioned copy of “Pageant,” my Walkman, and the discovery of something I’d keep for a long, long time.

  2. A fall afternoon in Houston in the late 90s, picking up longtime Heathen and un-indicted co-conspirator Eric from Pizzeria Uno on Kirby; as he gets in the car, the first bars of Murmur bubble out of the CD changer, and he comments that it’s like cool water. That’s still true.

  3. January, 2009, I run into Mike Mills at Washington National Airport as we’re returning home from the Inauguration. Erin says I shouldn’t, but I approach him anyway to quietly thank him for making the music that’s been such a big part of my life. He doesn’t seem to mind.

  4. September 15, 1995, at the Woodlands; Eric and I and many others we know see the band on the Monster tour. It is insanely hot and muggy and miserable, but somehow they transcend it and play a great show (the opener was a little band called Radiohead. Then we all pile back into our cars to catch a now-defunct act at a now-defunct bar. Ah, being 25.

  5. Back when MTV used to play music videos, they’d sometimes hype a premier. On a fall afternoon in 1987, Eric and I rushed back to his parents’ house to catch the first showing of the clip for The One I Love, the first single from Document. Hilariously, I notice now that the director of photography was a pre-culinary-obsession Alton Brown, which makes geographic sense.

Good thing I work at home. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a loud, jangly, Athensy afternoon here at Heathen HQ. If’n you’d like some video nostalgia of your own, I note that the R.E.M. site has a full video catalog.

For more see the AV Club’s coverage. I love that there’s already a Thank You R.E.M. tumblr. There is of course a long and rewarding thread at MeFi.

Criminally, there is no BluRay yet

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This long-form post at Metafilter about one of our favorite 80’s movies sent me looking, but it turns out that while Streets of Fire did get the HD-DVD treatment, there’s no BluRay version yet.

Guess I’ll have to buy a reg’lar DVD instead.

Seriously, though, go check out the MeFi post. It’s a great example of the form, calling out the names associated with the film you’ve probably forgotten, such as

  • Starring Amy Madigan, Rick Moranis, Michael Pare, Willem Dafoe, and Deborah Van Valkenburgh, with appearances by Bill Paxton and Mykelti Williamson
  • Directed by Walter Hill
  • Songs by Jim Steinman (i.e., “the dude who makes Meat Loaf sound like Meat Loaf,” and who is really due a Heathen treatment of his own)
  • a fucking sledgehammer fight
  • and Diane Lane at 18

What’s not to like? Expect a Heathen World HQ Viewing soon.

Wait. How’d This Happen?

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Right, so, Mrs Heathen and I have been meaning to cancel Netflix for ages. We hung on for a while on the strength of hopes about their streaming options, but the honest truth of the matter is that their streaming selection blows goats.

Our main “unowned movie” outlet is rental via the AppleTV from iTunes. It’s a great solution; it costs more than physical rental, but there’s no going-and-returning aspect to it, and you don’t have to plan like you do with Netflix.

However, we’ve also noticed something else: The promise of Netflix and related endeavors was that we’d get access to a much larger set of films than any video shop could have. And that remains true, but only if you plan and deal with Netflix’s legacy DVD-through-the-post plan. Rights issues (presumably?) have kept this awesome “long tail” of content off streaming servers, so physical DVDs remain the only way to watch most films. Neither Apple nor Amazon nor Netflix Streaming offer anything close to what you can get on DVD.

So somehow, over the last 10 years, the actual set of movies easily rentable by a humans on a Friday night has actually gotten smaller, since Netflix managed to kill Blockbuster after Blockbuster more or less destroyed the local purveyors.

Even so, we never used them. We’ve had one DVD on hand for literally years. It went back last week. But if we want to watch a randomly selected film, odds are we won’t find it online anywhere legal – and we’ll find ourselves back at Netflix. I assume the problem is rights issues, i.e. copyright shenanigans, which means once again Big Content is keeping businesses from providing something people want.

Well, that and the fact that most people are happy if you let them rent one of a dozen blockbusters, and never have a desire to see an old movie, or a small indie film, or a foreign film.

Remedial Appreciation: Van Halen

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On the strength of the last post, I’m listening to their studio work this afternoon, and I’m having the same experience I usually do with their catalog: why don’t I listen to this more often? There’s a lot more to this band’s 7-record catalog than most people remember.

Frankly, they’ve been gone so long that it makes it easy to forget how huge they were; to think about Van Halen is also to recall the tragic private plane crash 24 years ago last month that claimed the lives of Sammy, Eddie, Alex, and Michael — plus, ironically, David Lee Roth, who happened to be camping in the otherwise deserted stretch of California wilderness where the Lear went down.

At the top of their game after the successes of both the last Roth record and the first Hagar record, we’re left wondering what magic they might have created if only for the critical instrument failures. At night, far from populated areas, Eddie — a new pilot, with far too few instrument hours for the flight, truth be told — was likely unaware of the danger until the final moments, which I suppose is a mercy.

Still, you wonder what amazing music they might’ve made had they lived. I mean, with the band freshly sober and firing on all cylinders, it seems unlikely that they’d have wasted the decades of musical opportunity that would’ve followed with petty infighting and substance abuse problems, like so many bands we could name.

Right?

Right?

Now, the Heathen Top Ten:

10. “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love,” Van Halen, 1978. It’s like a distillation of the whole band, full of swagger from Dave and Eddie over solid rhythm from Mike and Alex. Also, perhaps a near-singularity of apostrophe use in a song title.

9. “Romeo Delight,” Women and Children First, 1980. It’s like the first record, but tighter and more concentrated. Use with caution.

8. “Running with the Devil,” Van Halen, 1978. The first track off the first side of the first record. You know the thumping. You know what’s coming.

7. “And the Cradle Will Rock…”, Women and Children First, 1980. Have you seen Junior’s grades?

6. “Dance The Night Away,” Van Halen II, 1979. Them Dutch Boys beat the sophmore jinx. The second record isn’t the lightning bolt the first one was, but it remains a solid rock-and-roll record. The interlude at about 2 minutes in is worth the cost of admission.

5. “Cathedral,” from Diver Down, 1982. “He’s doing that with his volume knob? Are you shitting me?” Also, the song in which it’s easiest to tell Eddie was raised by a classical musician.

4. (Twofer): “Sunday Afternoon In The Park” into “One Foot Out The Door,” Fair Warning, 1981. This record is just criminally underrated; the whole thing is awesome, especially side two (see what I did there?). It smokes, and nobody listens to it.

3. “Get Up,” 5150, 1986. I remember buying only two tapes on day of release when I was in high school; this was one (I’ve written about the other one before). Warning: do not listen while driving, lest you run afoul of the local constabulary. Also, dig Alex’s drums.

2. “Mean Streets,” Fair Warning, 1981. Honest to God it’s hard not to list this whole album, but “Mean Streets” opens the record, and has for my money Eddie’s best solo.

1. “Eruption,” Van Halen, 1978. Oh, come on. You knew this would be the top track. It’s the sine qua non of both the band and the guitarist.

Dept. of Accidental Interviews

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This is probably one of the earliest interviews done with Eddie Van Halen. The author, Jas Obrecht, was actually at the venue to interview Pat Travers instead, but Travers blew him off. Travers’ opening acts that night were Van Halen and AC/DC, which is hilarious in hindsight.

The 23-year-old wunderkind suggested he be the subject instead. “Nobody has ever wanted to interview me.”

The Onion, Again

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U.S. Commemorates 9/11 By Toasting Stable Afghan Government From Top Of Freedom Tower:

In a moving and beautiful ceremony held atop Lower Manhattan’s gleaming, 120-story-tall Freedom Tower, the nation commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by raising a glass to the stable democracy of Afghanistan and to a decade of unprecedented peace and prosperity across the globe.

As a brilliant cascade of red, white, and blue fireworks lit up the skyscraper’s observation deck, those in attendance reflected on the horrible tragedy that improbably, and stirringly, gave way to a harmonized Middle East and one of the most triumphant and fruitful eras in the history of the great American republic.

“A decade ago, 3,000 of our citizens perished in a senseless attack on American soil, and as I stand here today atop this magnificent edifice, celebrating the thriving republic of Afghanistan and all our allies in the now wholly stable Muslim world, it’s clear the U.S. has not only risen from the ashes, it has flourished,” said former U.S. president and master of ceremonies George W. Bush, who was widely applauded after 9/11 for respecting the rights of citizens at home and abroad while combating terrorism through largely peaceful means. “These last 10 years could have been divisive, turbulent, sad, hopeless, and grotesque. But instead, they were the exact opposite of those things. And for that we must all feel both blessed and truly proud.”

There’s more.

Confidential to Certain Heathen Women

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There’s a delightfully odd web series of which I’ve just become aware called 7 Minutes in Heaven, in which host Mike O’Brien does a brief interview with some nominally famous (and typically funny) person inside a closet — i.e., in the style of the teen party game of the same name.

Certain Heathen tribe members — e.g., those involved perhaps in personal training or nonprofit accounting, and certainly Mrs Heathen herself — may find the Christina Ricci episode amusing due to a certain tic she exhibits.

Metafilter has more. Don’t miss Patrica Clarkson.

The penultimate Astros post

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Over the weekend, the Giants of Enron Field lost their 97th game of the year, thereby tying the all-time record for the club.

There are only 16 games left, and while they’ve improved slightly since the break (which is surprising), they’re still on a track to lose 11 of those games. 108 here we come!