Review: Baseball Card Vandals

Baseball Card Vandals by Beau Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This art book contains copies of the fronts of vintage baseball (and a few other sports) cards that have been “vandalized” with markers to make them humorous, or, in cases where there’s a swing and a miss on humorous, odd and arty. A typical example: for a Mark Belanger card, the artists added words to the top saying “The best thing to hang clothes on”, and modified his name below to say “BEHANGER S” while drawing a clothes hanger over the bat in his hands. The book contains mostly photos of the modified cards (you can find many of the ones in this book and many more searching the title on Google) with some introductory text describing the germ of the concept. Many funny, most weird (i.e., “The receipts at CVS are out of control”), a few just clever. Good for a half hour or hour of perusing. The examples on Google seem a bit randier, the book is tame in comparison.

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Review: Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business

Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business by Robert T. Kiyosaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absolutely not what I was expecting. The book is really about the subtitle in this case, not the title. Kiyosaki aims this book at sussing out what a person needs to understand in order to build a business of their own. He adds to the collection of charts he’s created and introduced in other “Rich Dad” books, or possibly not – I haven’t read all that many of them, but the ideas seem quite familiar. From my experience with this line of books, the author turns typical business and investing advice sideways, providing a different perspective and different guidance than in other, more traditional business and investment books. This one is more business and career guidance. I had been hoping, based on the title, that this would cover, at least in part, pre-retirement concerns, but Kiyosaki doesn’t in this volume. By amount of ink, I’d estimate that over half of this book is Kiyosaki’s “business autobiography”, telling the stories of his exploits in learning to run his surfer wallet business and his educational seminar business. I tend to enjoy these kinds of books, and I found these parts interesting. The rest of the book was dedicated to a few illustrative word triangles and two by two boxes that help classify and list the aspects of business that need attention or the different ways to make money in Kiyosaki’s world. He also returns to comparing his real father and his rich mentor, and it seemed like he trashed his father quite a bit more extensively than he did in his previous books that I had read. I did not find this very interesting, but for a different perspective for those building a business (or more creating the mindset to build a business – like understanding the roles of experts and determining which experts need to be involved), this may provide some value.

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Review: Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book changed my life. When I read it, I was playing around with a neural net, a kind of logical "black box" that can find patterns. Of course I was trying to predict the price movement of stocks. After literally hundreds of minor adjustments to my model, I got a stock predictor that actually worked. I traded it based on the indicators once and made some quick money. But then a lesson from Foucault's Pendulum started nagging me, the talk about the laundry list. (view spoiler)[ In the book, a researcher finds an old piece of paper, full of holes due to age. He can make out writing, but many parts of words seem to be missing. The researcher works on deciphering what the paper was about, assuming it was related to the Knights Templar, and he comes to realize that, if those missing pieces are filled in with certain letters, the document is a key to everlasting life and a timeline to a Templar reunion. This belief becomes pivotal in the story, leading to the researchers eventual demise when others demand the proof. But just before this happens, the researcher's wife points out that if you replaced the missing letters with different ones than the researcher chose, you would see that this was a centuries-old laundry list. In other words, you can make many stories from incomplete information, and an incorrect interpretation could be deadly. Occam's razor, dude, Occam's razor. (hide spoiler)]I decided to stop working with the black box, although I think I could have used it further, and possibly made a lot of money trading or writing about it. I had started to believe the story the black box "proved". At least I quit while I was ahead! Although I kinda wished I hadn't... BTW, I was predicting ERTS using CPQ (the former Compaq) and DELL as proxies for the market over trades between one and ten days. Back in the mid 90s. On a 386 using one bootable diskette.

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Review: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Hodgman writes of his life on the Eastern seaboard, living in older houses in somewhat rural areas of Massachusetts and Maine. At times funny, droll, bleak, boyish, self-deprecating, and self-congratulating, you can sense the person behind the PC in those commercials, as well as staring in or guesting on a podcast, has this personality that is well-exposed here. I enjoyed the humor, but the many knowing wink-winks he adds made it more difficult for me to enjoy – like a guest who overstayed his welcome. He also told quite a few stories revolving around garbage and the dump and mouse droppings that, while funny to a point, ended up leaning toward the disgusting and awkward. I can see Hodgman writing a truly classic book at some point, and some bits here are golden, but this was overall a good, not great effort.

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Review: Holidays on Ice

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read quite a few of David Sedaris’ more recent books, and realized that I had missed this one. Feeling in the holiday spirit, I picked up the audio. Sedaris seems changed. His stories are still a mix of outrageous, funny bits with cringeworthy episodes, the kind of humor that leaves me smiling with occasional guffaws. (That sounds a bit more like a weather forecast than I intended.) But his newer stuff is more personal, seems honed on real life situations, and is more wistful than this. Overall, this was quite fun, but if this is your first Sedaris, don’t stop here. I liked most of the stories here, the department store elf story that leads off the collection, “SantaLand Diaries”, was a narrow favorite.

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Review: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In some of the reviews I read of “The Pioneers” before I began listening to the audiobook, I got a sense that the book told too many stories of too many early settlers, and this concerned me. I don’t do well with books with huge casts that you had to keep track of. My worries were for naught – I enjoyed this story of the early settlers of Ohio and of the Ohio country and statehood. Being from Illinois and interested in early settler history, this felt very similar to reading about my area and the people that settled there. McCullough follows the stories of a few influential people involved in initial settlement, starting with a preacher/scientist who worked with congress to enable the initial “deal” creating the Ohio Company. McCullough then describes the travails of the initial group of settlers, including many Revolutionary War veterans, as well as leaders from subsequent waves of settlers. Mixed into the narrative are plenty of interesting stories, including a mention of Lafayette’s visit and salute to the old soldiers of freedom, and of Aaron Burr’s visit with the rich Blennerhassett family on their private island in the Ohio River to plot the overthrow of Mexico. I found the book held my interest throughout – McCullough found some great stories in this area and time and drew out the historical significance of events here.

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Review: The Convict and Other Stories

The Convict and Other Stories by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having listened to most of Burke’s mystery novel audiobooks, I didn’t know whether to expect short versions of his mysteries or something else. You get something else here, a collection of very readable short stories, many touching on the same themes Burke hits in his mysteries, especially his Dave Robicheaux stories set in New Iberia parish in Louisiana. I always said Burke knows how to write an atmospheric scene that drips humidity like bayou bald cypress trees in August, and he shows some of his writing expertise here. But there are also things missing in comparison to his novels. That’s not necessarily bad. Burke tends to write long, angsty, and over-literary inner monologues for his characters, and you don’t get as much of that in these short stories. I missed them. Burke also tends to repeat plot elements in his novels, but in these short stories he’s further afield than I am used to – there’s even a story about baseball here. (I’m currently reading Burke’s “The New Iberia Blues”, and it focuses around Hollywood filmmakers filming in rural Louisiana. I believe that means that more than 10% of his dozens of mystery novels revolve around this same theme – movie making in New Iberia. I suspect the Louisiana Film Board is way more successful in Burke’s novels than in real life! These stories must have preceded that plot theme.) Another interesting difference was the narrators of the audiobooks. Most of Burke’s unabridged audiobooks are narrated by Will Patton, and he has a way of amplifying Burke’s atmospheric descriptions. I would go out of my way to listen to Patton. Here, different narrators read each story. For this kind of collection, that worked fine. The variety helped separate the stories and keep my interest up. Overall, I liked these stories. They provided a taste of the writing of Burke without the deep investment required of his novels – kind of like a tourist version.

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