Friday Links

Worth Mulling: A Late-Summer Reading List – a few books on this list I’d like to track down:

• Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems by Michael Strong
• Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell

Bolt shreds 200m mark, sets second world record this week – 19.19 for the 200m. Sliced .11 off the old world mark of 19.30 he set in last year’s Olympics. This guy is amazing, and I hope he’s clean. We don’t need more reasons to be suspicious of athletic performances.

Giants’ owner and teammates say Burress jail term is an American tragedy – I’m not a Giants fan, I don’t care about Plaxico Burress, but it sure seems odd to me, the way that whole story has evolved. Two years in jail for a weapons violation? Wow. Whose interests are served by it?

Bus drivers reject paying red-light tickets – Issuing automatic $100 tickets for not stopping at some exact spot on a road is a DUMB idea. It annoys drivers who are doing nothing wrong, and is nothing more than a cash grab by cash-obsessed local governments. Just because technology enables a particular idea is NOT justification enough for implementing it. In fact, that might be an argument against it.

Books for my Reading List

I really should start a Reading List page on this site.

Hey look, I just did!

Here are a few “must” reads on my mind right now:

• Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob (Jeff Coen) – see this fascinating interview with Mr. Coen, a federal court reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Here is a summary from that piece:
  

  Using source material like police reports, interviews, and court transcripts, as well as his own notes from covering the trial, Coen recreates not only the trial of mobsters Frank Calabrese, Sr., Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, James Marcello, Paul Schiro, and Anthony “Twan” Doyle, but he gives us a significant look at Nick Calabrese, Frank Sr.’s brother and Outfit hitman, whose turning states evidence gave us incredible testimony and an unprecedented look into the inner-workings of the Outfit.

• The Forgotten Man (Shlaes) – she makes the case that FDR did not solve the Great Depression, he lengthened it and made it worse.
• The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid (D. Luskin) – using the word “conspiracy” might indicate overreach, but there is no doubt that very powerful interest groups — government, media, buisness, etc. — go to great lengths to keep us in the dark and even to actively obfuscate and spin half-truths in order to protect themselves and their corrupt pals.

Some others I want to check out:

• Lippmann, Liberty, and the Press (J. Luskin) – no idea if it is a good book or not, but the whole debate about Walter Lippmann and his conception of journalism interests me. And ironically, I chanced to see this title when searching for D. Luskin above. What are the odds?!

How to Win Friends and Influence Programmers

Joel on Software writes about the usefulness of the program manager.

A bit long, but worth it. Lots of good practical advice on proper design, and funny too:

Of course, when programmers are peers of the program managers, the programmers tend to have the upper hand. Here’s something that has happened several times: a programmer asks me to intervene in some debate he is having with a program manager.

“Who is going to write the code?” I asked.

“I am…”

“OK, who checks things into source control?”

“Me, I guess, …”

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I asked. “You have absolute control over the state of each and every bit in the final product. What else do you need? A tiara?”

At the end, he recommends the classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I had intended to read that for a while now, so this seals the deal for me.

Via Dustbury.

P.J. O’Rourke Commencement Speech

One of my favorite authors, both funny and wise, at his irreverent best: Fairness, idealism and other atrocities.

A favorite part (among many):

Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.”

Or, as I like to paraphrase it: kwitcherbitchin’.

There’s one book of his that absolutely blew me away on nearly every page: “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty”. It’s many things at once: a travel book, a hilarious book, and it’s full of wicked insights about the harsh realities of the world that newspapers and “news” magazines tend to gloss over. Highly, highly recommended.

An Ode to Toast

Seriously

One of the marks of good writing — for me at least — is the ability to take a fairly mundane subject, and give it a treatment that draws the reader in, via clever use of tone, or lyrical use of language, or some other method.

You know, like James Lileks does nearly every damn day of his life.

So this morning I was on the website of the Chicago Tribune, and saw this link: Why toast matters.

First thought: “hmm, that sounds pretty stupid”.

Cool New Book

“Playing With The Enemy” by Gary W. Moore

Where baseball, history, military, reading, and fathers all come together … and what could be better than that?

For years, Gary Moore knew little about his father’s unfulfilled would-be baseball career.

That is, until his father, Gene, had a health scare later in life and the younger Moore pushed for details on his father’s invitation from the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1949 to play for them.

The elder Moore never made his date for reasons that if disclosed here, would spoil parts of Gary Moore’s book, “Playing With the Enemy.”

Mr. Moore is a local man who owns a business in the Kankakee area, and the first thing he asks prospective employess is how much they read.

“When you read a book, you are creating a movie in your head.  Reading keeps you going and enhances your imagination. Not reading causes atrophy.”

My kind of guy.  The story:

“Playing With the Enemy” tells the story of Gene, a 15-year-old baseball phenom who played in far downstate Sesser. Headed for stardom with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Gene’s destiny is interrupted by Pearl Harbor. As a Navy man charged with guarding German sailors captured from the U-505 submarine, Gene teaches the enemy the game of baseball so he and his teammates could play while waiting for the war to end.

Ignoring the News – Cheaper Than Prozac, and Fewer Side-Effects

I’ve noticed something lately: the less news I read, the happier I am.

This actual headline from the weekend might help illustrate why that is: “Death Toll Rises to, Like, 12,553,942 in Iraq”.

Although it’s very possible that I’m not remembering it exactly right.

Still, the point remains: the news business thrives on two things: making a crisis out of every storyline, and on creating “narratives” to simplify things for us morons.

“America’s Secret War”: A Fascinating Book

Buy This Book:

America’s Secret War by George Friedman

For fans of geopolitical intrigue, behind-the-scenes diplomatic arm-twisting, and real analysis explaining why countries and their leaders do the things they do, this is easily one of the most informative, balanced, fascinating, and just plain useful books I’ve ever read.

I’m somewhat plugged into the world of the military, geopolitical conflicts and intrigue, the CIA, “war is politics by other means”, etc. Not an expert, by any means, but I read a fair amount about such things. Some people watch “24″; I read about real spies and geopolitical intrigue. And I learned a lot from this book.

I didn’t know, for example, that during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the U.S. hinted very strongly to Saddam Hussein that should he win that war, we would not object to a subsequent invasion of Kuwait.