Moonlight Memories

Just a few random musings about music, due to the lateness of the hour.

The Weekend Question posted yesterday over at Captain Picard's Journal asked readers to name covers of songs done by artists that were better than the original versions. The many responses he received were both interesting and humbling...mainly because I either didn't recognize many of the songs, or didn't realize that the versions I'd always liked were covers of the original.

Actually, I generally don't think about whether a particular song I like is the original or a cover. When I do realize it and listen to both, I usually prefer the original (a comment made by several of the respondents). I posted my preference for the Klaus Hallen version of the song "My Moonlight Memories of You," written and originally sung by - gasp! - Barry Manilow. I heard the Klaus Hallen cover first as a beautiful fox trot tempo, and in fact Agnes and I danced a Fox Trot exhibition routine a few years ago using that music. When I later found the Barry Manilow original it just seemed lifeless, even though the lyrics were the same. Here are the lyrics to that wonderful song:

One time in everybody’s life, there is a moment
Like the moment we knew
And if you’re a fool, you let it slip away.
Some time in everybody’s life, there is a feeling
A feeling so rare
And once it is gone, it can never be replaced.

I’m dancing with a shadow,
Holding on to a dream that’ll never come true.
Still haunted by that old love song -
My moonlight memories of you.

My heart is like a ghost town
To every stranger that passes on through.
All they find there is what you left behind there –
My moonlight memories of you.

You thought when you left me I’d let you go
But here I am –
Loving you more than you’ll ever know.

If I could hold you, feel your heart beat
Just one more time
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
‘Cause without your love I’ll never be free of
My moonlight memories of you.

One time in everybody’s life, there is a moment
Like the moment we knew
And if you’re a fool, you let it slip away.

I’m dancing with a shadow,
Holding on to a dream that’ll never come true.
Still haunted by that old love song -
My moonlight memories of you.

Boy, I like that combination of music and lyrics!

I couldn't think of other versions of songs for a while, although two others have since come to mind:

The Z.Z. Top version of Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas" is very good, but I think it lacks the driving energy of the original.

Madonna's version of Don McLean's "American Pie" is almost as good as the original, but I think I'll always prefer Don McLean's because I saw him perform it live in concert while I was in college.

Have a good evening. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Don't Dig Here!

For hundreds of years, the image of the skull and crossbones has been a universal symbol of danger - leave this alone, don't touch this, keep away, bad juju, etc.:

Then, a few decades back, a study showed that the image of the grinning skull and crossbones might actually attract the attention of young children to things they shouldn't touch, and so was born the image of "Mr. Yuck," a new, supposedly more child-scary symbol for poisonous substances:


There's an art and a science to designing and delivering effective warnings, and one of the most important warnings we may ever post is also one of the most daunting to design.

I'm now reading a very interesting book titled The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. Mr Weisman's book examines what might happen to man's works if all of us suddenly disappeared - through plague, assimilation by the Borg, or whatever. How long would our skyscrapers, dams, canals, agriculture fields, and cloverleaf intersections last? What would replace them? What sort of animals would replace us? And, most important for the present discussion, what might happen to the most deadly places on earth - untended nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage sites?

This isn't just an academic question. While the nuclear power industry touts the safety and security of nuclear power, the unadvertised truth is a bit more nuanced...as the disaster at Chernobyl and the near-disaster at Three Mile Island illustrate. The nuclear industry generates many tons of contaminated waste each year...some of it so intensely radioactive that it will be deadly to humans for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. This waste cannot be destroyed or rendered safe by any technology we now possess. It has to be stored in a place remote, safe, and secure enough that it's threat will be minimized (as much as something so deadly can be) into the distant future.

But here's the issue: if these sites will be deadly for ten or fifteen or a hundred thousand years or more, how do we warn the people in that unimaginably distant era of the danger? Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors were living in caves or in very basic hunting and gathering societies, without written language beyond simple cave paintings. They couldn't conceive of things like nuclear weapons, space shuttles, maglev trains, or single-cup coffee brewers. How might they have tried to pass a complex - or even a simple - message to a society whose shape they couldn't even imagine? We don't even have to look back that far: the English of Shakespeare's plays is opaque to many modern Americans, and the Old English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales even more so. Chaucer wrote in the late 14th century - about 700 years ago - and Shakespeare in the late 16th century - about 500 years ago. If we have trouble understanding them today, how will language and society have changed in another 500...much less ten thousand...years?

Many interesting studies have been done and articles written about how we might warn far distant generations of deadly threats. One very good article can be found here, at the DamnInteresting.com website, and it contains links to other, related documentation. You can also look at a gallery of proposed warning signs and symbology here. As a person with a background in linguistics, I find this absolutely fascinating; as a human being, I find it frightening beyond any silver screen images of alien invasions or giant bugs run amok. We need to be able to warn the great-great-great grandchildren of our great-great-great grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren of buried threats we don't fully understand ourselves.

Much of the challenge lies in making the message unambiguously threatening. How do we convince future archaeologists or hobby diggers that a particular place is not just uninteresting, but terribly dangerous? The high priests who buried ancient Egyptian kings plastered their tomb entrances with hieroglyphics threatening terrible curses on those who would violate the sites...and we all know how well that worked.

In one way, none of us living today has a personal interest in the safety of generations so far in the future that even our dust will be long forgotten. But our grandchildren will be a few steps down the road to that dangerous future, and I care very much about the world they'll live in.

And so should you.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Bilbo's Quick-and-Dirty Guide to American Elections

A while back Yo, who blogs at Etcetera, posted a comment to my blog asking if I could explain the American election system. He thought that I might be able to explain it so he could understand it. While I appreciate the implied compliment, a full explanation of American elections is beyond the scope of an average post...but I'll try to summarize it as best I can for Yo and for other readers outside the United States who are mystified by our system. There's a very good, very detailed explanation of our Electoral College system on Wikipedia which will give you much more information...for now, here's Bilbo's short summary...

The fundamentals of our system of elections are set forth in the Constitution. First of all, it's important to remember that in this country, we don't elect our president by direct popular vote...when we vote for a particular candidate, what we're actually voting for are the members of the Electoral College from our state who actually cast votes for the candidates. Each state receives a number of electors equal to the total number of its representatives in Congress (one for each Senator and Representative, plus three for the District of Columbia). Remember this...we'll come back to it later.

The presidential election season traditionally begins early in the election year (2008 is the next one), when the individual states hold their primary elections or caucuses. These help to winnow down the roster of potential candidates and establish the front-runners, who are then nominated by the state delegations at the national conventions of the major political parties in late summer. Ideally, the candidates who won the majority of the party votes in the primaries and caucuses emerge as their party's candidate for the national election. Once nominated by the party conventions, the candidates select their running mates (vice-presidential candidates), usually on the basis of a desire to "balance" the ticket (one from the northern states and one from the southern, for example), and the campaign begins in earnest.

The actual election is held on the first Tuesday in November. Registered voters (every citizen over 18 years of age is eligible to vote, unless they are a convicted felon) go to their local voting station (mine is at the local elementary school) and cast their votes for the candidate of their choice.

The results of the popular vote are closely tracked at the state level, because what determines the outcome of the election is not the nationwide popular vote, but the winner of the popular vote in each state. The candidate who "wins" each state "wins" the votes of the members of the Electoral College from that state. The total number of electors is presently 538, and a candidate must win a majority of them (currently 270) to win the presidency. A criticism of this system is that candidates spend most of their time wooing the residents of the states with the most electoral votes, to the detriment of the smaller states, but so far there's been no serious effort to change the system. You may remember that in the presidential election of 2000, Al Gore actually won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the election on the basis of electoral votes.

So, at the end of Election Day, the votes are tallied and the numbers of electoral votes for each candidate tabulated. The winner is generally known at this point, but the election is not official until the Electoral College meets and the electors formally cast their votes. At this point, the new president and vice-president are officially named and the planning for the inauguration and accompanying parties begins. The new president takes the oath of office and assumes his (or her!) position on Inauguration Day (January 20th)...and the nation breathes a sigh of relief that it's all over.

Okay, that's Bilbo's Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the American presidential election process. There may be some minor errors, but that's essentially how it works. Yo, and other readers in other countries, I hope this clarifies things for you. If you have specific questions, there is a lot of information available on the Internet both at Wikipedia and at the official websites of the U.S. government. Or you can ask me (by e-mail to bilbo_the_blogger@yahoo.com) and I'll try to answer it for you.

Wish us luck as we start into the new campaigning season. We'll need it.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

....and Don't Come Back Without Permission!

The history of Tibet is a long and often sad one, and the invasion and occupation of that nation by China in 1949 brought the independence of the near-mythical Himalayan nation to an end. China, of course, maintains that there was no "invasion," and that Tibet is a part of China; over the years, many millions of ethnic Chinese have been encouraged to settle in Tibet, displacing the native Tibetan population and changing the very nature of the country. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, has lived in exile ever since.

The Chinese are very sensitive to criticism of their occupation of Tibet, to the point that some amazingly stupid things can happen. According to an article on MSNBC.com, the latest action in China's attempt to fully stamp out all traces of Tibetan independence is the banning of Tibetan monks, wherever they live, from reincarnating without government permission.

Yes, you heard that right.

I've always maintained that religion and politics can be a dangerous mix, and here we have an exhibit of what I mean. Tibetan Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and by banning any Tibetan Buddhist living outside of China from reincarnating, the Chinese hope to eliminate the influence of the only such person who matters - the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and political leader. The Chinese have named their own "official" Dalai Lama, and want to get rid of the competition.

Will it work? I guess we'll see whether the law, described by the Chinese government as "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation," will have much impact. My guess is that if people are going to reincarnate, they'll continue to do it whether the Chinese government gives them permission or not. The Dalai Lama is one of the few major religious leaders I respect and admire, and I somehow doubt that a Chinese-appointed substitute will ever be accepted as legitimate by anyone outside the Chinese government.

If the Chinese government wanted to do this right, though, they'd have done it the way my beloved Commonwealth of Virginia would: put a heavy civil penalty fee (not a tax!) on reincarnation. Now that would probably work.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

With Friends Like These...

The long-expected resignation of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General has led to the expected flurry of news analysis and windy pontification on the part of our vast herd of feral talking heads. I, of course, have my own ideas on the underlying meaning of Mr Gonzalez' fall.

Many political observers have noted that Mr Gonzalez seemed to be out of his depth as Attorney General, and have commented that his primary qualification for the position appeared to be his long friendship with and support of Mr Bush. I think this illustrates the real problem.

The presidency is a hard and lonely job, and presidents don't have many friends. Tom Clancy noted this in one of his novels in which accidental president Jack Ryan's political adviser told him that, as president, he'd find that 40% of the people would hate him no matter what he did and 40% would love him no matter what he did...his job was to connect with the 20% that hadn't made up their minds yet. It's understandable for a president to want to surround himself (herself?) with advisers with whom they are comfortable, politically, philosophically, and personally. But there's a problem with that.

Presidents don't need friends at the senior level of their administrations. They need public servants who, while they understand and support the president's general agenda, are more focused on the good of the nation than their relationship with the leader. The emperor's friends and courtiers didn't tell him that he had no clothes, and the president's friends aren't going to tell him the unpleasant news, or drag him back from the brink when he's getting ready to do something stupid. A strong Attorney General, focused on his (or her) role as the chief law enforcement officer of the nation, would never have let Mr Bush get mired in a useless legal and political morass like the ill-considered mass firing of U.S. Attorneys, or the warrantless wiretap fiasco.

When the founders of our nation sat down to write the Constitution, they had just finished fighting a bitter war to escape the control of a distant king. They didn't want to create a political system that would just substitute one king for another, and so they created an elegant, if messy, system of checks and balances in government. They realized that we, being human, needed an alpha wolf to be the leader...but they also realized the dangers inherent in making the wolf too alpha, and so they created three co-equal branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, and granted each one specific powers that would prevent any one of them from gaining too much abusable power. It guaranteed tension within the government, but it also guaranteed a system that would be more likely to prevent the development of a dictatorship...or a new king.

Mr Bush believes in the need for a more powerful executive with sweeping powers he believes are necessary to defend the nation in the so-called (and sadly mislabeled) War on Terror. Instead of the steady and complicated task of explaining the threat and seeking the support of the legislative and judicial branches, he's tried to amass more power to himself in the interest of being able to take what he views as strong and decisive action.

Well, we can see how that turned out.

Instead of a strong Attorney General who would help the president work within the law to meet the threat, Mr Bush relied on a yes-man who pushed his agenda unquestioningly, without asking the hard questions and giving the unwanted, but necessary hard counsel. Instead of working with the Congress to change the laws if necessary while protecting our freedoms, Mr Bush sought to bypass the people's elected representatives and used his political majority to ram through his policies...with predictable results in the last election. And instead of working with the Congress to pass the legislation the nation needs, both Mr Bush and the Congress complain about judges who "legislate from the bench" ... not seeming to realize that judges occasionally have to step in when the legislators can't or won't legislate from the legislature.

And so, after years of bloviation and political posturing, we still have no comprehensive reform of our immigration laws. We're fighting a global war against an implacable enemy with a bickering legislature tired of being sidelined by an imperial president, both of them frequently at odds with a judicial system upon which we rely to keep them toeing the line of the Constitution.

2008 will be an interesting election year. From my perspective, none of the front-runners for the presidency are real presidential material, and I don't see many people in Congress who impress me very much. Could I do better? Don't know. But I like to think that, by at least listening to the rest of the government, and to trusted advisers willing to tell me that I had no clothes, I'd at least do better than the current crop of ideology-focused bozos.

With over 300 million people in this country, you'd think we could do better.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

The Sounds of Silence

On August 14th, two weeks ago today, four suicide bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi towns, killing more than 500 people, injuring nearly 300 more, and totally destroying the towns. The dead were all civilians, and included men, women, and children.

The world's reaction to this act of barbarity is instructive. Here is a complete list of the condemnations of this act issued by senior Islamic clerics:



Let me repeat that in case you missed it:



And here is the full text of the statement of condemnation issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations:



This is the complete text of the statement of condemnation issued by Pope Benedict XVI:



Riddle me this, Batman: where is the outrage? Where are the voices of our religious leaders condemning the actions of a few twisted murderers who pervert their religious beliefs to justify the most heinous and savage acts of violence?

When the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison came to light, the story and photos ran 24/7 on Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and every other media outlet in the Middle East and around the world. When American servicemen were accused of murdering civilians in the town of Haditha, the howls of outrage around the world were deafening. What happened in these cases is instructive:

First, the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light because an American soldier, revolted by the actions of his comrades, reported the situation to his superiors. The case was investigated, and responsible individuals were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. It's true - and sad - that no senior officers went to jail, but the overall reaction is worth noting: America identified and punished the offenders.

The murderers of Hadita were identified, tried, and convicted.

The U.S. Army and Marines pay large amounts of money to Iraqi civilians whose property is damaged in raids or accidents, and compensation is paid in many instances when a civilian is accidentally killed or injured by U.S. forces. Here is the full list of compensation offered by Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hamas, and Hezbollah to the thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered in suicide attacks or other acts of violence, and the responsible individuals who have been convicted and sent to prison:



Quite a list, eh?

And our own government is at fault as well. Thomas Friedman wrote a superb article in the New York Times last Sunday titled "Swift-Boated by Bin Laden." It's been reproduced in several places, and is worth your reading. His thesis is that George Bush and the Republican Party skillfully used the accusations of Vietnam-era malfeasance by John Kerry while he served in a swift-boat squadron to smear him and injure his presidential campaign...so effectively that the use of past deeds to damage present political campaigns is known as "swift-boating." And so, Friedman asks, why are the President and the Republicans not swift-boating Osama bin Laden and the faceless murderers of the Middle East? Why are we not seizing the information war from bin Laden, al Zawahiri, Hamas, and the others whose only language is that of terror and murder? Why are we not exposing their ghastly crimes and calling for the world to acknowledge and condemn them?

As long as we fail to condemn the silence of the so-called Arab street ... as long as we give murderers and religious bigots a free pass ... as long as we silently accept the condemnation of those whose own actions are deserving of that condemnation, we are no better than they. War is a terrible thing. Murder is a terrible thing. But ask yourself this:

Who is holding its people accountable for their actions? How many Iraqi murderers are being brought to justice? Why are our so-called religious leaders - of all faiths - giving these evil animals a free ride?

But we're Americans...and we're always guilty. Blaming America is easy. Looking at yourself and seeing the image that Dorian Gray saw, that's hard.

Where's the outrage? Where's the justice?

When you find it, let me know.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

The Wheat and the Chaff

There's an interesting post over at It Is A Numeric Life this morning, dealing with the so-called mere exposure effect, the idea that if people are repeatedly exposed to a subject, they begin to prefer that subject over others. She notes also that "Many psychology experiments clearly demonstrated that our brain always prefers the familiar."

This is both good and bad. On the good side, I think we all need that certain level of comfort that comes with what is usual, expected, and familiar. We prefer our country to others, think our home is more "homey," and our children are more intelligent and attractive than others. On the other hand, exclusive attention to the familiar chokes out new ideas and inhibits learning and personal development.

People smarter than I have noted this effect in the realm of the media: when there are hundreds of cable channels to choose from, we choose those which appeal to our narrow interests. There are tens of millions of blogs, more than we could ever hope to read, and so we tend to limit our visits to those we find that appeal to our interests and agree with our points of view. Between my job, my dancing, and doing most of the cooking and housework at home (since Agnes works two jobs to my one), I don't have the time I'd like to read more widely, although I make an effort.

It's important to look at various points of view in order to understand where others are coming from. A blog I visit regularly is titled "Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: Diary of a Palestinian Mother," and it's written by a lady who is a Palestinian journalist and mother who divides her time between Gaza and the United States. Her blog is relentlessly political, very well-written, and utterly infuriating in what I view as its perpetuation of Palestinian victimhood and tendency to blame everyone but the Palestinians and the larger Arab world for their plight. I've posted two mildly critical comments to this blog over the months I've been following it...the first never made it out of moderation; the second was accepted, but generated only a few silly ad hominem attacks against me for not toeing the Palestinian line (the best simply told me to go back to Bag End). As you know if you've been following my blog, you know that I am equally critical of both the Palestinians, who would rather revel in their victimhood and strike out violently than take responsibility for bettering their situation, and the Israelis who, while understandably motivated by the shadow of the Holocaust and the fear of terrorism, have evolved a political outlook based on raw power and the need to dominate their neighbors.

I'm not smart enough to sort out the festering snakepit of the Middle East. If I were, my name would be in the papers instead of Dennis Ross's and Tony Blair's. But I like to think that, by looking with open eyes at both sides of the argument and trying to look for both the good and bad points, I can better see potential ways ahead that don't involve suicide bombers on the one side and boots on necks on the other.

We need to see all points of view, but we also need to be able to determine which of those points of view have merit. We have to be able to separate the informational wheat from the chaff of stupidity and closed-mindedness. It's especially hard in a time when political and social discourse is so polarized, but that just makes it all the more important.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to start sorting through the vast mountain of chaff already generated by the 2008 presidential campaign. I find it hard to be as optimistic as the boy who looked at the pile of manure and implied the existence of a pony.

Right now, it's just manure. And the wrong end of the political horses.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

A Few Last Thoughts About Reading

I'm ready to move on to new topics, but wanted to share one last thing with you before I close off the subject of books and reading for a while. Over at Out of My Hat yesterday, John mentioned our current discussion of reading and offered a few interesting derivations of words which began their life as acronyms. I'd heard some of these before, and while some may be apocryphal, they're all interesting. But it got me to thinking about a humorous piece I ran across some years ago that I knew was buried somewhere in my vast and untidy digital archives. After much diligent search, I found it, and reproduce it below. It's a bit long, but funny enough to be well worth the read. Welcome to the B.O.O.K. (with a tip of the hat to the anonymous original author, and with very minor edits by Bilbo) ...

*****

Introducing the B.O.O.K.™

A new aid to rapid--almost magical--learning has made its appearance. Indications are that if it catches on, all the electronic gadgets will be so much junk.

The new device is known as Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge™. The makers generally call it by its initials, B.O.O.K.™

Many advantages are claimed over the old-style learning and teaching aids on which most people are brought up nowadays. It has no wires, no electric circuit to break down. No connection is needed to an electricity power point. It is made entirely without mechanical parts to go wrong or need replacement.

Anyone can use B.O.O.K.™, even children, and it fits comfortably into the hands. It can be conveniently used sitting in an armchair by the fire.

How does this revolutionary, unbelievably easy invention work?

Basically the B.O.O.K.™ consists of a large number of paper sheets, which may run to the hundreds where the B.O.O.K.™ covers a lengthy program of information. Each sheet bears a number in sequence, so that the sheets cannot be used in the wrong order.

To make it even easier for the user to keep the sheets in the proper order, they are held firmly in place by a special locking device called a binding.

Each sheet of paper presents the user with an information sequence in the form of symbols, which the reader absorbs optically for automatic registration on the brain. When one sheet has been assimilated, a flick of the finger turns it over and further information is found on the other side. By using both sides of each sheet in this way a great economy is effected, thus reducing both the size and cost of each B.O.O.K.™ No buttons need to be pressed to move from one sheet to another, to open or close the B.O.O.K.™, or to start it working.

A B.O.O.K.™ may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. Instantly it is ready for use. Nothing has to be connected up or switched on. The user may turn at will to any sheet, going backwards or forwards as he pleases. A sheet is provided near the beginning as a location finder for any required general information sequence, while more specific location finders can often be found at the end in a sheet called an index.

A small accessory, available at trifling extra cost, is the B.O.O.K. Mark.™ This enables the user to pick up his program where he left off on the previous learning session. The B.O.O.K. Mark™ is versatile and may be used in any B.O.O.K.™ without modification. Interestingly, almost any common item which can be inserted between the sheets of a B.O.O.K.™ can be used as a B.O.O.K. Mark™, resulting in significant potential savings and eliminating the necessity of purchasing multiple B.O.O.K. Marks™ to facilitate use of multiple B.O.O.K.s™ at the same time.

The initial cost of a B.O.O.K.™ varies with the size and subject matter. Already a vast range of B.O.O.K.'s™ is available, covering every conceivable subject and adjusted to different levels of aptitude. One B.O.O.K.™, small enough to be held in the hands, may contain an entire learning schedule.

Once purchased, the B.O.O.K.™ requires no further upkeep cost; no batteries or wires are needed, since the motive power, thanks to an ingenious device patented by the makers, is supplied by the brain of the user.

B.O.O.K.'s™ may be stored on handy shelves and for ease of reference, and can be easily located as the program schedule is normally indicated on the back of the binding. Altogether, the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge™ seems to have great advantages with no drawbacks. We predict a big future for it.

A Boss's Response:

The B.O.O.K.™ does not, in spite of the claims made above, seem “to have great advantages with no drawbacks.” Soon, it probably won't even be legal. Consider:

“It can be conveniently used sitting in an armchair by the fire.” Being made of paper, it might burn in the fire. Probably fire laws in most locations wouldn't allow its use there. Worse, such a device, which encourages close proximity of the user to fire, will be outlawed by Fire Marshals or similar safety officials in most locations.

“Each sheet bears a number in sequence, so that the sheets cannot be used in the wrong order.” How quaint; to think that the programmer (author) would be allowed to turn over such an important task to the user! “Cannot” is clearly misuse; any user could incorrectly turn to the wrong page. A proper user interface might correct that, of course, such as requiring that each sheet be torn off to expose the next. This is in clear conflict with “The user may turn at will to any sheet, going backwards or forwards as he pleases.”

“B.O.O.K.'s™ may be stored on handy shelves and for ease of reference.” The user interface obviously needs more work before such a system can be practical.

“…The motive power -- is supplied by the brain of the user.” Clearly, the inventors have not examined recent trends. No serious person would suggest even expecting a “user” to have a brain present, much less to use it so continuously.

I'd suggest the inventors return to their consoles and do a thorough associative search of various data banks, like the rest of us, and forget this nonsense.

******

Try out a B.O.O.K. today! You won't be sorry!

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

A Few More Words About Reading

Yesterday's post on reading set a near-record for the number of comments received, so I know I've hit a major nerve in my readership. John wrote, "I'd have to guess that most of us that read/write blogs might be more surprised about non-readers. After all, we are readers!", while "noisms" made the interesting comment that, "I doubt that it was ever the case that everybody read widely. I'd like to see the statistics for the number of regular book-readers in the USA in the 1950s and the 1900s, for example. I think the distractions are more common nowadays, but the number of people who really love reading has stayed the same, and probably always will. After all, if TV, films and the internet haven't distracted the hard core from giving up books yet, it's doubtful they every will!" And "Yo" commented on the cost of books as a limiting factor in their enjoyment (although good public libraries, where available, are a way around that).

All of the comments I received were good ones, but one got me to thinking about reading in a somewhat different way. Odile S, from The Netherlands, wrote this: "...Books are available on audio. (Are these considered to be books?)."

That's a great question. For me, reading will always conjure the mental image of curling up in my favorite chair with a traditional printed book in my lap...in front of a roaring fire in winter, or on a cool, shady nook during the rest of the year. I like to think that the heft and feel of a book represent the weight of the enjoyment and knowledge it contains. Are audio books really books? I think the weasely answer is, "it depends." There are some books that seem meant to be listened to when read aloud - books for young children and most poetry, for instance, fall into this category. Hearing someone read masterpieces like "Casey at the Bat" or "The Cremation of Sam McGee," or reading them aloud yourself, is a thrilling experience...and speaking as one who has read "Green Eggs and Ham" about seven million times to children and grandchildren, I can vouch for the joy of hearing Dr Seuss's simple, rhythmic language that draws children into the story. On the other hand, I don't think I'd enjoy listening to a mass-market bestseller quite as much as I would enjoy actually reading it. Some biographies and a few histories lend themselves to being read aloud - Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the Second World War is one, partly because of the majesty of Churchill's writing. Jim Dale's reading of the Harry Potter series is said to be superb, but I haven't heard them yet, other than excerpts he read during radio interviews.

And there's another twist on the audio book that's now available: the Star Trek-like "e-Reader" electronic book from Sony...a slim, elegant device about the dimensions of a large paperback, but only a half-inch thick, onto which you save downloaded books in the same way you load music to your iPod, and read them on a bright, crisp screen. I bought Agnes one of these for her birthday and she uses it occasionally, but I think that, like me, she prefers the feel of a "real" book. The advantage of the e-Reader is more in its utility for traveling - it's nice to be able to carry a dozen books or more for less than the weight of a single normal paperback.

No matter how you do it: reading the printed page, listening to the audio book, or reading aloud to yourself or others, there's nothing like reading. In fact, I think I'll go and do some of it right now!

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

A Few Words About Reading

You already know that I read just about everything I can lay my hands on...a gift I inherited from my mother, who once laughed at me for reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast because I didn't have a book handy. I can't imagine not reading, and I've tried to pass that love on to my children and grandchildren (I can probably start reading to Leya any time...she's four days old, after all).

A CNN article I found the other day documented an Associated Press-Ipsos poll on the habits of readers in the United States, and offered some interesting observations. According to the poll, one in four US adults said they read no books at all in the past year; of those who did read, women and senior citizens were the most avid readers, with religious works and popular fiction the top choices of reading material. By comparison, a 2004 report from the National Endowment for the Arts titled "Reading at Risk" noted that only 57% of American adults had read a book in 2002, a drop of four percentage points in a decade, and blamed television, movies, and the Internet for the decline.

According to the original AP-Ipsos poll, those who did read were very enthusiastic about it, with many respondents reporting that they'd read dozens of books and "couldn't do without them." The median figure of books read was nine for women and five for men. People from the South tended to read more than those from other regions, mainly religious books and romance novels. Whites tended to read more than blacks and Hispanics. People who described themselves as Democrats or "liberals" typically reading slightly more than Republicans and "conservatives." The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds of the respondents, more than any other category of book. Half of the respondents reported reading popular fiction, histories, biographies, and mysteries, and one in five cited romance novels. Every other genre (including politics, poetry, and classical literature) was named by less than five percent of readers, while more women than men tended to read every category of books except for history and biography (underlining a book industry observation that men tend to prefer nonfiction).

So what does all this mean?

There are lots of books out there, and too few people are reading them. I tend to prefer history, biography, sociology and linguistics, but also have a lot of fiction authors I enjoy (Harry Turtledove, Carl Hiaasen, Michael Gruber, John Dunning, and many others). Agnes, on the other hand, prefers mysteries and thrillers.

To each his or her own, I guess. It doesn't really matter what you read, as long as you entertain yourself, stretch your mind, and learn something useful. The weekend is upon us - why not head out to your nearest bookstore and pick up something that looks good. You won't be sorry.

Have a good day and a great weekend. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo