Watching the End of an Era

I've never been such a dedicated fan of anything in my adulthood that I went and stood in line for an event. The only time I did that was the last two Lord of the Rings movies and actually didn't spend much time at all even for the midnight showing of Return of the King. In fact, that was the only time I went to a midnight event and it was a low key affair locally, La Crosse being a small city. So it was with amusement that I read the email notification from Barnes & Noble about the Midnight Madness event. While I'd reserved a copy, I had no plans to pick it up until later next week.

As the days went by, I pondered the fact that the Harry Potter series is most likely the last gasp of big event books. Like others, I'd placed a great deal of hope on it bringing more young people to books in general. It would be the thing that got kids going in an increasingly illiterate culture, for if kids would be willing to read 700 page books, they'd have to look for other books, right? Alas, that has not proven to be the case, kids are reading fewer books today than they did ten years ago. Oh yes, they would read Rowling's books, but that's it. To a bibliophile such as myself, this was painful to find out.

With that in mind, I realized that I'd most likely never see such an event again in my lifetime. This was a cultural "happening" that wouldn't be repeated, for there will be no more adventures of Harry Potter in the foreseeable future. So I drafted my dad to drive and off I went to B&N to watch the people there, as people fascinate me. While he went off to Sears to match exterior paint for our long overdue house repainting, I walked over to the book store to see how things were scheduled.

At 8:30 pm there were already kids in black robes wandering the store and the staff were in full costume. After inquiring about how the books would be distributed, I had my name checked against the reservation list and had a paper bracelet put around my wrist, an orange one with the number 95 written in green. Those with orange bracelets went first, with green to the mallside registers and red to the front registers. These were the first waves to get the books, I was told and they figured it would be less than an hour to get them all sold.

I left and returned at 9:30 PM after going to another store, the rest of the mall was officially closed with one of the exits open besides the B&N entrance. The parking lot was packed, the store was packed, and more people were arriving. Most were young, of course, with many a parent in tow with a smattering of adult fans present. Spirits were high and the mood was festive, entertainment began around 10 PM with activities for the kids. There had been a broomstick contest I hadn't been aware of, so all the fancy brooms hanging from the ceiling weren't just there for decoration after all. The pretty young lady who won the contest got to be the first buyer, which was a nifty prize. I didn't see the wand making activity, but heard about it, but the fun one looked to be the potions table. Hard to tell, the kids were packed tight around it.

As time went buy, fatigue set in and I began to hurt a great deal, but I was still wandering around, observing the festivities. Eventually, I parked myself in the military history aisle and started reading Machiavelli's Discourses, which I purchased along with Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Oddly enough, I was in a very small minority purchasing other books that night, so much for getting extra sales from the event. After awhile, I had to get up and stretch, circulating once again. It was around 11 PM and the young folks were starting to really tire, especially the under 8's and teenagers. The tweeners had more energy and I could see parents rubbing their faces. Even so, the mood was still good.

A bullhorn was used to announce some things and half the store couldn't hear it. Of course, that was the half I was in, so there was some confusion for awhile. I ended up asking questions at the middle of the store and found out I had to buy my other books right away, which I did. At 11:30, more muddled bullhorn announcements and finally they started lining people up, with the first 50 of each color going first. At 11:40, even more unintelligible bullhorning and I suspected my block was next. I snaked through to the center of the store and found someone in authority (she was standing on a table, so I automatically assumed she was).

Yep, time to get in line and since I was number 95 (I am not a number, I am a free man!), I was asked to anchor the line so people with lower numbers could go before me. Lo and behold, I'd been drafted without even going through the Sorting Hat routine! Ah well. Some of the best conversation on the night was held in the line, because it took forever to get moving once Midnight hit. People were well behaved, even those with astronomically high numbers such as 270.

Once the line did start moving, it got going fast and I was out of there by 12:20 AM. The store was rapidly emptying as was the parking lot, far too many of all ages were up past their bedtimes and wanted to go home.

There was a sweetness to this event that you don't run into very often these days. While it was rough on my health, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness an end of an era. I find myself somewhat saddened by it.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It is an end of an era that has spanned a decade for the Harry Potter book series has finally been completed with the release of Deathly Hallows. I was a latecomer to the hoopla, only getting into it after buying the first book for my sister in an effort to encourage her to read. Out of curiosity about the craze, I borrowed that paperback edition of the Sorcerer's Stone and was impressed with it. It wasn't great literature (at least it won't be considered that for some time), but it was an old fashioned ripping good yarn of the English variety. The adventures of Harry and his friends, Hermione and Ron, have been a welcome companion over the years, with each book becoming progressively more adult and dark. Yet there was always the intertwined themes of love and hope, which promised a happy ending after all the darkness.

So does the final book deliver on that and provide an entertaining story? I can say that it does in my opinion, but that light at the end of the tunnel only comes after harrowing setbacks and many deaths. This is a very grim book with only occasional touches of humor in it, as it starts off with loss of life and just keeps going, with more lives and innocence lost in the following chapters. Answers to the mysteries surrounding various characters are finally answered, many were telegraphed in the previous books but there are still many surprises to be found.

Some may be confused by the final battle, which is lengthy, but it all holds together in the logic of the Potter universe. The characters I wanted to see together got together, while others are tragically lost. What I liked was that Voldemort was shown to be as weak as he truly was, something I'd picked up on in the earlier books. While I can imagine people will cry foul at the resolution, I felt it to be realistic given the age of our protagonists.

The one spoiler I'll give is a simple one: Neville is the MAN. The boy finally gets his shining moment and after seeing the latest movie, I can't wait to see that young actor play it out on the big screen.

Fred Thompson

With the new concept of never ending political campaigns, the American voter is facing a multitude of candidates at a far earlier time before November of even years. The Presidential race is the worst offender, with both main parties offering up a bewildering array of candidates already having debates! Given that politics is right up there with incest as a discussion point in conversation due to the extreme polarization instituted by the main stream media, this is something voters don't want to deal with right now. Add in a field of politicians that are failing to really catch on fire and it is all very dull and tedious at the moment. I get the feeling both parties are waiting for a 'white knight' to come in and save them from terminal boredom. A wise man would wait and build up his support and start motivating people first, rather than declaring two years out like the rest of the candidates.

It looks like we have that in Fred Thompson, politician turned actor turned politician turned actor turned politician (I bet we hear somebody try to call him a flip flopper). With great thought, he waited and sounded out whether or not he would be a viable candidate. Contrast that with other candidates who couldn't wait to declare. His feelers were greeted with a draft Fred movement and it quickly got rolling.

I admit I'm very excited by his entry into the race, he was my favorite senator to watch during hearings and my late mother and I both had thought him Presidential material. Some have faulted him for being "lazy" while in the Senate, but the man is a thinker. He doesn't knee jerk react, he considers things first - which is a rarity in the modern short attention span society we live in. Even his testing the waters was done with planning, his much younger and better looking wife is a Republican campaign consultant and was looking for a way to raise his profile in Washington last year. Can't get much higher than running for President!

Oh and a footnote about Jeri Thompson: Fred was divorced from his first wife in 1985 and first met her in 1996, they were married in 2002. I've run into ugly rumors being spread that she broke up his first marriage. Unless she has a time machine, it is impossible for this to be the case. Yes she is much younger, but she wasn't a child and is an accomplished attorney herself, so consider Fred to be a very lucky dog. I do.

Now is Fred a good conservative? This question is being asked a lot and I would call him a Reagan conservative. But what's a Reagan conservative? I categorize it as being dead center in the mainstream of the Republican Party, the group that is rarely heard from, what with the radical social conservatives and liberal/moderates shouting loudly at each other. But what I really like about Fred is that he is a Federalist who believes in limited government. Here are two quotes (via Wikipedia):

"[It] provided a basis for a proper analysis of most issues: "Is this something
government should be doing? If so, at what level of government?"

"Our
government, under our Constitution, was established upon the principles of
Federalism -- that the federal government would have limited enumerated powers
and the rest would be left to the states. It not only prevented tyranny, it just
made good sense. States become laboratories for democracy and experiment with
different kinds of laws. One state might try one welfare reform approach, for
example. Another state might try another approach. One would work and the other
would not. The federal welfare reform law resulted from just this process."
"Federalism also allows for the diversity that exists among the country's
people. Citizens of our various states have different views as to how
traditional state responsibilities should be handled. This way, states compete
with each other to attract people and businesses -- and that is a good thing."

This is what will appeal to voters fed up with an ever expanding and corrupt government, this is what our country needs.

Fred Thompson has very Reaganesque approach and will appeal across a wide spectrum, as he understands the way government should work and also the dramatic challenges the U.S.A. faces worldwide. With a disarming charm and killer wit, Thompson resembles Ronald Reagan and that has the Democrats worried -- and well they should!

I never expected to endorse or support a Presidential candidate this early, but Fred is the real deal and I am completely behind him. If you want this country to get back on the right track, check out his website, http://www.imwithfred.com/

End Game Near?

The idea that Iran's influence in Iraqi politics has been growing along with the amount of arms they have smuggled in is getting harder to ignore, despite the desperate desire of both the Executive and Legislative branches of our government to avoid dealing with it. The latest sign that we may have lost the political war is posted about at Heading Right. If this petition holds up, support for the ground war will evaporate completely in the United States in short order. There is no doubt in my mind that Iranian money and arms are heavily influencing this, as our Congress has given our enemies proof that we are a weak willed and cowardly society. This has encouraged the Iranians and foreign jihadists no end, despite the astounding losses they are suffering. The sad thing is that the political left and quite a few moderates have forgotten the lessons of childhood playgrounds. The psychology of a bully scales up and now that we've shown our weakness, the bully will never leave us alone. That scaled up bully is Islamic terrorism and he's going to be wanting our lunch money on a regular basis after we abandon Iraq. Expect a "fortress America" mentality setting in and then being rather loudly blown up, as we can't even secure our borders. We may see a future like Israel's current situation, with suicide bombings and attacks becoming common.

We as a society are telegraphing our weakness very loudly at the moment, with the behavior of the Democrats in Congress, and the constant anti-war beat of our mass media. The drift to the Left over the war is also making the socialist fringe feel like they have a mandate here, while socialism is starting to lose its luster in Europe due to its colossal economic failures. Amazing, given that even the French have realized that it doesn't work well. All of this points to very bad times for our country in the near future as political strife undercuts our achieving anything constructive at home or abroad. The Democrats have sold their soul and are now selling out their country for political power. Nothing good can come of it and I wonder how long it will take the American people to wake up and realize what they did this last November.

Confessions of a Bibliophile

Currently, I'm trying to read too many books and have been ill enough that it is difficult to read for extend amounts of time. In the Old Testament, I'm just about to start The Second Book of Chronicles and look forward to a little less listing of names. Taking a break from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, I'm reading Nico Machiavelli's The Prince and hope to finish that today or tomorrow. It is very edifying and grim to read, for much of what he wrote are unpleasant truths. I can see that some of his teachings are being used in the political arena (primarily by the left), but interestingly enough other lessons are being completely ignored. The lessons being ignored are fatal ones if old Nico is correct. At some point I'm going to have to get his other writings. For the moment, Machiavelli is my light reading, eventually I'll finish the Robert Heinlein juvenile novel Spaceman Jones as that is proper light reading material. The latest Harry Potter novel looms large in the near future, so I better be clearing some time for it.

The Easton Press made me an offer I couldn't refuse, which is the ability to receive books every two months instead of monthly from the 100 Greatest Books club. I adore the quality of the books and being a reader rather than a collector, I want longevity in my books. Too many of my old paperbacks have fallen apart and cheap book club editions don't hold up much better. The quality of writing is also high for this particular subscription and I've been well pleased with the books. The latest book ended up replacing my over one hundred year old copy of The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, so that was a nice bonus. Of course, the one flaw to the every two month plan is it will now take me twenty years to collect them all. Here's to hoping I can find a way to get a little more income and go back to monthly deliveries.

Of course, there are cheaper alternatives out there and one is finding books on eBay. I don't limit my hunting to Easton Press volumes, there are other lesser but still very good publishers out there. The Folio Society has published nice editions at lower prices for decades and I might have joined them but the upfront price is very steep with a requirement of four books purchased within four weeks of joining. That turns into a cost of at least $150 after all costs are totalled and I wasn't going for that. Instead I started hunting on eBay for their books and scored some great bargains. Another defunct publisher like the Folio Society was Heritage Press (or Heritage Club) and my copy of The Prince was printed by them. They went under in 1992 but the books seem to be readily available on eBay.

Thanks to the bargain of used books, I've acquired Folio Society editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Robert Graves' The Greek Myths and The Siege and Fall of Troy, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. All are nicely illustrated and I only compromised on one set that was too cheap to pass up despite minor staining to the cover. While not leather bound or gilt edged, they are far beyond what you normally get in a hard cover.

One nice thing about paying more for books is that it slows down acquisition and makes it more likely I'll someday catch up on my reading. At least that's the theory I'm operating by at the moment. I will admit they make my book shelves look a great deal better!

Does This Thing Still Work?

Four score and seven years ago I last posted - or so it feels. Now I had to deal with the fact that Google has made users of Blogger use a Gmail address and that entailed some jumping through hoops to get started again. While little has changed in my personal life since the last post, a few things have changed here and there, such as the ending of the Help Defeat Cancer project at World Community Grid. I felt good about the project and it looks like it achieved what it set out to do, but I also admit a little melancholy crept in when it finished. I'd actually upgraded my dual core PC to 2 GB of RAM just to run it smoothly on both cores. Still, there are other good projects there and I keep crunching.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are finally above .500 and it only took them until May to do it! Yes, I'm damning them with faint praise and yet I hope to see them do a lot better with the rest of the season. The bright spots have been watching Rich Hill become the pitcher I thought he was going to be and Derek Lee's hitting doubles like a madman. While most people love the home run, I love the double. Why? Simply put, a team that hits a lot of doubles will score more runs than a team of sluggers, as I've noticed that doubles hitters tend to hit for average. Most sluggers are an all or nothing proposition and therefore are less reliable. I was spoiled by watching Bobby Dernier and Ryne Sandberg hit what Harry Carey called "the daily double". Dernier would double, then Sandberg - presto, instant run. Now if rookie Felix Pie could get into that frame of mind, this will be quite a season.

I think I shall end this post on that positive note and continue in another.

Sparing Time for Helping Humanity

PC time, that is. As I posted earlier, I've downloaded software from BOINC that allows distributed computing projects to use computer users spare time to do work on various projects for science. It all really got rolling with SETI at Home, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and blossomed into the medical field with projects on smallpox vaccines, and human protein folding which applies to many illnesses from cancer to AIDS. Collectively, the thousands of home computers add up to a super computer for each of these projects, often doing thousands of days of computer time in hundreds of days.

Out of gratitude for getting BOINC rolling, I give SETI about 1% of my spare computing time and devote most of it between two other projects. Both Rosetta@home and World Community Grid serve as coordinators for various simulations for medical researchers. While I'm never sure exactly what I'm working on from Rosetta, they have been involved in AIDS treatment research as well as trying to map out how proteins in the brain work for patients who have Alzheimers Disease. World Community Grid is something IBM started and hosts multiple projects that you can pick and choose from by setting up your profile. Not all are available to BOINC users, as they are also using a different platform from Grid.org. Currently, WCG has Help Defeat Cancer, FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, and are starting up Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy. I've concentrated my time on Cancer and Genome Comparison while occasionally beta testing the new software for the various programs. Right now HPF2 isn't out for BOINC and I'm eager to crunch data for that.

The most important one to me is the cancer program, it requires quite a bit of PC power to do and is a project to automate the diagnosis of lethal fast moving cancers by running slides of biopsies through scanners. Eventually, the algorithyms being perfected for this will allow diagnoses in days rather than weeks, which is critical with fast moving cancers.

I also give time to two other projects at a much lower priority. One is Spinhenge@home which is a nanotech research project into how different nanocarbon molecules react magnetically under a wide range of temperatures. Getting switching to work in nanoparticles will be a big achievement and open the doors to ever smaller electronics. The other project is SIMAP, which is a project to database protein simularities for researchers to access. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do molecular medicine comparisons, it will be in a pre-existing database. This project is intermittent and just finished a limited batch of data this past week. Blink and you miss out on this one.

There are many other projects out there, including one's aimed at finding pulsars, breaking cryptography, predicting climate shifts, even rendering 3D computer animations. Check out this site for a full listing of them.

These are my current BOINC based stats, back in the past I also crunched numbers for the SETI@home Classic and for Grid.org's cancer and HPF1 programs.