L - Shingles

Protect against shingles - stay off the roof!

R - Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina, By Leo Tolstoy

So you want to read something with some weight to it? I think I can help you out there. I just finished reading A.K. a couple days ago - of course I started it about a year ago - and it is a book that I can recommend to anyone who loves long, involved plots with lots of characters and an overwhelming amount of detail. In the best Russian novel tradition it includes lots of sitting around and brooding about stuff and deeply passionate, albeit somewhat irrational, inter-personal relationships.

Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870's and it first appeared in serial form in a literary magazine. The ending was not published in the serial so the first time the entire novel appeared was when it was published in book form. When you consider that the paperback version runs some 960 pages you realize that the literary magazine was evidently a pretty hefty thing - of course they did spread it out from 1873-1877, so that helped a bit.

Many critics consider Anna Karenina to be one of, if not the, best novel ever written. It is also widely considered to be the greatest of the "realist" fiction novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky lauded it as did many others at the time of its publication. Even today there are many who recommend it highly.




OK, enough of all that stuff, on to my opinions.

As you can see on the left, I read this on my Kindle (greatest electronic gadget ever, BTW), which saved me from having to lug around a 20 pound novel for months at a time. The translation I read was done by Constance Garnett in 1901. I have no idea how accurate a translation it is, but I had no gripes. I like Russian novels for their weight and their brooding thoughtfulness, so I entered into this project with a hopeful and positive attitude. I was not disappointed.

Anna Karenina begins with one of the all-time great first lines "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." From that point on it moves quickly to introduce us to the main characters and their situations. For approximately the first third of the book it is really a pretty easy read, but it does begin to get challenging as you go on. The greatest challenge (and greatest reward as well) is that Tolstoy moves into a lot of events and detail that enhance the characters but don't really advance the plot. This is, of course, the nature of the realist novel. It chronicles the life of the characters and allows the plot to build over time. You could probably make a condensed version that left out a huge amount of that detail, but it would be devoid of the richness that makes the people real.

Tolstoy also uses the novel as a platform to exercise his own opinions regarding the state of the peasants, the decay of the government, the ultimate disaster of immorality and the challenge of righteousness. The unfortunate truth is that it is very hard to really grasp the soul of this novel without multiple readings, something that few of us will do. But despite its size and all the weight of brooding detail it is fundamentally an engaging story and a thought-provoking development of it. Don't read it if you are prone to depression, but otherwise I can endorse it with a thoughtful, brooding, look.

Besides, Tolstoy has a great beard! And that's a good enough reason to read it.

I - All the news you can use

Seriously? "sturs"? On the front page of the USA Today web site? I can understand the odd typo or two, but this just screams "I flunked out of the third grade!"

To me, this sort of thing just spells j-0-b o-p-e-n-i-n-g.

Update: 8/15 - it now says "spurs".

L - What's in a name?

What can I say? This just seems like a really poor naming decision by someone.

Not sure what it really means, but I think I won't be stopping in to find out.

L - Staying Together...

Continuing with the theme of odd juxtapositions, and courtesy of Google Earth, here we have yet another convenient side-by-side arrangement. The green field on the left, with all the little white dots, is the Belle Passi Cemetery. The field to the right, filled with the colored dots is M & M Metal Recycling - AKA "The Junkyard". So now after you have your little problem with the DMV and the liquor store, assuming the worst and that your personal stake in this present world has come to an end, you and your car can end up in the same general location on lots next to one another.

Ideal for those whose relationship with their automobiles is the defining emotional attachment of their lives they can now be planted next to where their car is being parted. Together forever - such a beautiful thought...

T - Nice Car!

So I pull up at a stop light today and glance over to my right at the car next to me. The driver is a very well-dressed woman probably in her mid to late forties. She is perhaps dressed a bit young for her actual age, but tasteful. Her hair and makeup are absolutely perfect and she has that "successful divorcee" look about her. So what kind of car was she driving?

A Cougar, of course!

L - Let's Get Together....

Some things just don't go together.

If you look very closely at the sign in the accompanying picture you will notice an odd juxtaposition of businesses. Consider how the bottom three businesses work together. First, we have the DMV, the infamous Department of Motor Vehicles, where people go to get their driver's licenses. At the DMV you have people going out to take the driving test, nervous, uptight and worried. They come back and wait anxiously to hear that they drove OK and finally they get the go-ahead to legally drive in Oregon. Oh, happy day!

And what better way to celebrate that you are now a legally licensed driver than to swing by the Liquor Store for a celebratory bottle. So convenient! And now, fortified by bottle and license you can take to the streets and drive like most of the people in Central Oregon. If the unthinkable happens and your driving skill combined with the contents of the bottle fail to keep you safe on the road then you can wend your way back to this little mall, where, between the liquor store and the DMV you will find a Rite-Aid drug store - the ideal place to acquire those necessary post-accident bandages and analgesics.

One-stop shopping! Ain't it great!

T - You Really Can't Cure Stupid

Intermittently humorous comedian Ron White is famous for his "You can't fix stupid" line and the realities of daily life seem to reinforce that viewpoint over and over. Case in point: yesterday I was driving home from the bank and the car in front of me was having a really hard time staying between the lines. It waited almost all the way through the green light at one intersection and then puttered along a 35 MPH road at a screaming 20. Even at that hyper-cautious velocity it managed to nearly rear-end the car in front when that car stopped to make a left turn and sat at a 3-way intersection allowing everyone in sight to go through for several cycles before a gentle beep from the horn of one of the people following inspired movement.

Drunk? Talking on cell phone? Nope - just too busy trying to eat an ice cream cone to properly manage the car! It did, however, get me thinking about distracted drivers and especially distracted drivers and cell phones.

A couple years ago I did some casual research (OK, I stood on a street corner and counted for 15 minutes or so) and found that about one in 10 drivers was talking on a hand-held cell phone while driving. Others have claimed that it was a lot higher where they were, but few had ever actually tried to count and see. That was before all the hands-free laws and about the time that groups were claiming that a driver talking on a cell phone was more dangerous than a drunk driver. The funny thing is, though, that the accident statistics never really bore out the claim. The rather small up-tick in minor accidents was pretty hard to pin on the cell phones and there just wasn't the huge increase in wrecks you would expect if 10% of the drivers were actually driving drunk. The hands-free laws were mostly passed on the basis of lab-type research and common sense, which surely tells us that holding something in one hand while driving doesn't improve your driving in any way, shape or form. The funny thing is that it seems to me that the people I now see driving while talking on a hand-held cell phone really are driving like they are drunk. I doubt that I see even one in 50 any more, but it seems that the ones who still do it are the very ones who never should have.

The sorrowing realization is that there are certain people who probably just plain drive like they've been lobotomized - regardless of whether they are distracted or not. These also seem to, unfortunately, be the same ones who think that they drive just fine while talking on the phone, putting on makeup, reading the newspaper, answering texts, changing CDs, programming their GPS, slapping their kids or even while eating an ice cream cone. Not only can't you fix stupid, but you can't fix bad drivers either.

I - OBL dead - Oh, Big Deal!

Smoking hot headlines and big news this week! Osama bin Laden has been found and killed by Navy Seals at his compound in Pakistan. It really is a big deal in one sense, in that the capture or killing of OBL has been a priority in the U.S. for the last decade, but on a more realistic note, look down the CNN headline picture on the left. Down... farther... just a bit farther... Yes! There it is! Just below the sub-head that reads "Latest News". See that item there? The one that says "Gas could soon top $4 nationwide"? How about them apples, huh?

Sure the killing of OBL probably deserves some big headlines - at least for a day or two - but the real issues are down below the fold. (OK, old newspaper terminology, I know, but it fits.) Down there are the issues with the economy, the flooding in Missouri (and the rest of the Midwest), the twisters across the South and Southeast, and a whole slew of other real problems that haven't changed a bit while we froth at the mouth over the killing of one terrorist leader. You can't even *find* a current article on the nuclear reactor mess in Japan.

Al Qaeda has not really been hurt by this action, and it probably has done more harm than good to the international opinion of the U.S., but the press wants to make it into a huge thing. I have to suspect that at least part of the motivation is to make our president look more presidential, but I think I hear the Nobel committee asking for their prize back. Terrorism will continue (and probably get worse for a while), and the economy will stay in the tank. Lybia will still be a huge challenge and Afghanistan is going to keep soaking up dollars and lives, but the press will feel good about the war on terror. Frankly, I think that Dubya hit the nail on the head back in '02 or whenever it was when he said that he neither knew nor cared where Bin Laden was. It didn't mean that he wasn't interested in getting him if the opportunity presented itself, but it meant that he understood that the real problems of global terrorism went back to nations like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who support terrorism or provide the economic conditions that drive people toward the radical elements.

When we defeat terrorism, in all its guises not just Al Qaeda, it will owe more to Wal-Mart than the Navy SEALs. We will defeat terrorism when all of the people in these countries have a standard of living that allows them hope for the future and the ability to pursue happiness in their lives right now. Only with the replacement of totalitarian regimes with governments sensitive to the needs of all the people and with diversified economic growth not tied to the elite few will the radical element begin to recede. But that's a process for the decades and doesn't make the kind of headlines that sell papers, I guess.

R - One Man's Wilderness

One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, By Sam Keith from the journals and photographs of Richard Proenneke

In 1968 Dick Proenneke was flown into the Twin Lakes in Alaska and started to build a cabin. Dick was 51 years old and had a lifetime of working with his hands behind him. He possessed the type of skills that were essential to making his dream of living in the Alaska wilderness possible.

This book, taken from Dick's journals and re-worked by Sam Keith, chronicles the construction of the cabin and the first two years that Dick spent there. I ended up reading it because my wife has a strong attraction to Alaska and told me it was a "must read". Roughly the first two-thirds of the book are devoted to the process of building the cabin and the challenges he faced during that period. The last part is mostly concerned with some of his explorations around the area and the wildlife he encountered.

I have to admit that I found the first part of the book far more interesting than the latter part. That probably reflects how I tend to get very involved in books that are focused on the engineering aspects of life, the "how do we do this?" kind of thing. There are some rather interesting thoughts that occurred to me while reading those pages. First, I thought about how I would have done some of it a bit differently. There are a lot of ways to build a log cabin and there is certainly nothing wrong with how Dick did it, but it provides me with a great deal of enjoyment to visualize alternate approaches that might have taken less labor, yielded better (in my mind) results, and possibly made less use of non-natural materials. Case in point is that Dick assembled many parts using nails where I would have used wooden pegs. He also used tar paper and plastic sheeting on the roof under a thick layer of moss. His method worked very well, but I would have probably split shakes instead.

The other thought that kept coming to my mind was that he was in phenomenal physical condition (and obviously remained that way since he lived in the cabin all or part of each of the next 30 years). I kept thinking that there was no way on earth I could do what he did. I might have the skills, but I no longer have the strength or stamina, and that was a bit of a melancholy thought.

If you have an interest in the Alaskan wilderness and in log cabins and isolation then I think you would find this a very good read. There are also a couple of follow-up books and the journals are available on-line in PDF format. I'll post the links as I find them.

The book on Amazon.com

More Readings From One Man's Wilderness - A huge PDF file of Dick's journals from 1974-1980

Alone in the Wilderness - a web site by Bob Swerer about Dick Proenneke