September

Though I still have not finished Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra* ...

... I have started with two other books since I need a dose of good literary talent. And so I am reading two renowned names that I have always wanted to read but not read so far. (Actually, I think I may have cursorily perused through Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in the 90s.) And so I began Wedding Song by Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz and The Counterlife by (future Nobel laureate?) Philip Roth. Aah...such delight in reading good literature after suffering through the pulp fiction of Vikram Chandra.

Coincidentally, both had an interesting snippets about September, with the former novel, which I started last night, started with the short but powerful lines:

September. The beginning of autumn. The month of preparations and rehearsals.

And this excerpt from Roth's book, which I started this morning and already got through the first chapter (which I thoroughly enjoyed. The writing style is very different than Updike but Roth still reminds me more of Updike than Saul Bellow. It is amazing how good writing about a 39 year old dentist, his inadequacies, his affairs, and his death has gripped me and gave me more satisfaction than the cat-and-mouse games of a cop and a gangster and all the interesting side characters in Sacred Games!):

It was early in the afternoon at the end of September; from the cold touch of the breeze and the light heat of the sun and the dry unsummery whish of the trees you could easily have guessed the month with your eyes closed - perhaps have even guessed the week.

Related:

• Deciding to do the impossible - NYT
• Philip Roth: Life and Counterlife: A Review Essay - Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 3, 325-339, Oct., 1989 - available via JSTOR, which you may have free access to through your public library. At least you do through Boston Public Library.
• A review by The Book Diva
  

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* I am trudging through it only to say that at 900 pages, it is the longest book I ever read! I have somehow gotten to page 500 or so and given how little it has interested me - with every passing day, the story interests me less and less --- I wonder if I will have the patience to get to the end. Given how long it is, it meanders too much and is easy to lose focus and interest. It started with a gripping encounter between Sartaj and Gaitonde, which I had read elsewhere before as an independent short story ... but this book meanders around and has petered to a very anti-climactic boring middle. Hope there is some surprise or good ending because so far the story has been only mildly interesting in parts. And the writing quality is sub-par at best. I wonder what all the hype was about!

Happiness and our future selves

I had picked up Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, from the public library. However, I am reading too many other books at the current time and probably will not read this book now but managed to find an excerpt in the Foreword that I read.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

From the little I read about the book, I learned about the impact bias i.e. "people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it." Here is an interesting wiki entry on various cognitive biases.

You can read the NY Times review of the book or hear the author at TED talk about "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" (I think I linked to this before.)

Also, every released book seems to have a blog these days.

No Planet Relief

Not refering to Bush saying today that climate change action shouldn't slow economies..

BBC switches off climate special, Planet Relief

This has raised a whole lot of debate including these excerpts from various British newspapers.

The transformation of climate change from a scientific to a political issue became clear last night when the BBC dropped plans for a day-long TV special on global warming, writes Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor of the Independent.

The BBC has abandoned plans for a Comic Relief-style special, 18 months in the making, about climate change after senior executives complained the corporation should not be preaching to viewers. - The Telegraph

The cancellation comes a week after it came under fire from two of its most senior news and current affairs executives over impartiality issues surrounding the TV special. - The Guardian

Others agree: "People are understandably interested in this, but it is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. There are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped." - Peter Barron, editor of BBC's Newsnight in The Daily Mail.

Reasons for withdrawal - "Impartiality guidelines" or not, I have found the BBC's site on global warming and climate change to be a very useful resource on the subject.

Related: Planet in peril

Iraq dog-and-pony show

A few days ahead of the September 15th deadline for the third and final report or as the article calls it - General Petraeus' Iraq dog-and-pony show - read Alternet's reality check.

Remember:

In July 2007, Petraeus released his interim report on Iraq indicating that coalition forces had made satisfactory progress on 6 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress. On August 15, 2007, the LA Times reported that, according to unnamed administration officials, the report "would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government."

Also this from the WaPo on August 30, 2007:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

If you are confused now about how many benchamarks are really met...worry not - the lawmakers are busy examining the report and debating it. Are you still worried? Firstly, are you with us or with them? You one of those mistrustful unpatriotic guys? You probably do not believe the violence is down either!
(Do read the article . Incredulous!)

"If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

What part of the Iraq strategy "is working" do you not understand?

"The terrorists and the Baathists loyal to the old regime will fail because America and our allies have a strategy, and our strategy is working." - President Bush, November 1, 2003

"Our strategy is working." - Vice President Cheney, September 28, 2004

"That's our strategy. And it is working and it is going to work, for the good of the country." -
President Bush, June 24, 2005

"Our strategy is working." - White House's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq", November 30, 2005

"This approach is working." - President Bush, December 7, 2005

"It is a concrete example of how our strategy is working." - Frm. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, March 20, 2006

"It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working." - President Bush, March 20, 2006

If nothing else, the Republicans sure are good at repetition. And this is another nightmare that just won't go away...

Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden plans a new video addressing the American people regarding the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, terror monitoring groups said Thursday.

After you recover from the sense of dejavu all over again, here are some other related articles.

Even supporters of the Bush administration criticise its incompetence and the dysfunctional political system behind it, writes Timothy Garton Ash

Someone called Hunter blogs at Dailykos, opines: "American lives continue to be the cold commerce of foreign policy failures, the spent loose change of patriotism."

And if all this isn't discouraging... this guy may be the next liar-in-chief...er..commander-in-chief of the country!

Brought to you by Brave New Films and TheREALRudy.org, here are seven minutes of video that will cure you of any delusions about Rudy Giuliani being the "hero" of 9/11.

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We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders and we need to raise hell. - Molly Ivins (God bless her soul - she's probably up there raising a rucus :))

Innovators under 35

The TR35

MIT's Technology Review presents its seventh class of outstanding innovators under the age of 35. These driven, creative individuals will alter the state of medicine, computing, communications, and energy. Their work represents the future of technology.

Immense self-loathing and humbleness comes thinking of all the time and talent wasted by me - not that I would even qualify for a TR35 list any more even if I were doing something useful with my life!

Also in the issue, read the interesting editorial - Whom Should We Reward?, which discusses the recent Facebook controversy and also refers to an old controversy, which is discussed further in an article in the issue - albeit from the point of view of the rewarded, Watson. The wronged Rosalind Franklin died prematurely and though a few recent articles have tried to set the record straight 50 years after the discovery, it is the Watson-Crick model for DNA we know...not the Wilkins-Franklin model, is it?

Note: Despite hours spent on the internet, I had not heard about the whizkid, Facebook's Joe Hewitt - until a week or two back, when I ran into two interviews with Hewitt. Reading them, I learned that he is only 23 and in addition to Facebook, (which I do not use and want no part of any of the recent wave of social-networking sites be it Orkut or Facebook or Myspace), he also contributed to developing the Firefox browser (which I use exclusively and prefer a lot over Microsoft's Internet Explorer) in a "previous life".

A squirrely affair

Sounds like a B-grade horror flick - The Attack of the Squirrels!

Yet again*, a squirrel is on the attack, this time biting a tot and a trooper in Orlando.

* Previously: David & Goliath

A fishy story

A study finds why attempts to restore a native trout haven't worked: They used the wrong fish!

A 20-year government effort to restore the population of an endangered native trout in Colorado has made little progress because biologists have been stocking some of the waterways with the wrong fish, a new study says.

This continued for 20 years? This is more incredulous than the NASA goof-up over inches versus metric units during the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter robotic probe in 1999. Ok...no... that case takes the cake given the millions (billions?) of dollars involved and the fact that it was the brainiacs at NASA in charge. (Want me to be patient with them NASA scientists... they are not rocket scientists ... oh wait...in a way, they are! :))

Thank god NASA finally decided to go metric this January for all operations on the lunar surface when it returns to the Moon. Don't want any more "big oops for mankind" scenario as they plan to send men back to the moon!