Wow. So yesterday I got home at about 9 and sat down to write a blog post that Maddie and I had discussed, involving her mishearing “Barnes and Nobles” as “barbells” or perhaps “barnacles.” But then I got distracted by the stack of the books I had bought recently.

First of all, I’m kind of a nerd. You could infer that from The Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner (one word: SQUEE!), but if you can read the bottom title, that’s actually the nerdier book by a long shot. That’s the book that makes you spontaneously decide to learn new programming languages.
Second of all, since about half of those are from the Friends of the Library Book Sale and the rest were bought with gift cards, I spent a lot less on them than you might expect. Oops, I lie; I paid full price for Freakonomics (in the Amherst bookstore too). But seriously… so many Barnes and Nobles gift cards! I got $60 of books today (er, yesterday) and just started handing gift card after gift card over to the cashier. It was rather amusing for both of us.
Third of all, the color scheme is striking.
But not as striking in photos as in real life. I tried to quickly correct that in iPhoto by fiddling with the temperature/tint sliders before writing the blog post that I was TOTALLY just about to write, in just a second… but then I discovered that iPhoto will actually do the heavy lifting for you, if you’ll only tell it what’s a neutral color in the photo. I can’t believe it took me so long to figure this out, because it is actually magic. Observe the improvement:


Finally, Smetana Hall in my photos can achieve a little more of the grandeur it displays in reality. (As can Ryan. Teehee.)
THEN I was further distracted by the adorable graffiti I saw today (gah! yesterday!), while walking from breakfast at CTB to the library foundation, where yes, I do still volunteer. I am a huge fan of cute graffiti (similarly smart or insightful graffiti), because it is cuteness where you are not expecting cuteness, and that is a wonderful thing.

I felt inspired to replicate it. The original is better though, if only for the setting.

I thought he might be a nice character to put into a blog header– because I seriously need a new blog header, ja?– so I spent far more time than necessary making potential blog headers. And looking at old potential blog headers that I made in similar fits of creativity and that never saw the light of day.
And then it was midnight.
Which is far too late to be blogging, except it’s really not, but I didn’t feel like blogging anymore. But I did feel like staying up till 3 AM doing nothing in particular. I definitely get what Jiyoung was saying when she told me about staying up all night just because you’re not tired. At all. I went to bed more out of a sense of obligation than any physical desire to sleep.
Then I slept till noon.
SO. This is a long and elaborate way of telling Maddie, “Sorry for not spicing up your late-night cello-practicing break with a blog post about our 2.5 hour rehearsal that was mostly spent eating blueberries, reading incomprehensible Chinese books, and sightreading songs by Kermit the Frog. I’ll make it up to you someday.”
Why lawyers are like avocados
9 July 2009 by AprilUmberto Eco is probably best known for his novels like The Name of the Rose and the like, big sprawling novels that I see at book sales and libraries all the time and always kind of ignore, assuming they’re not my style. In contrast, his tidy little collection of essays brilliantly (for people like me) titled How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays has been on my short list for years, and I have scoured countless bookshelves in search of it, to no avail.
Until Monday, when I discovered it sitting innocently in the public library, as if it had been there all along rather than concealed somewhere in the bowels of the earth.
I expected some sort of metaphorical finagling in the titular essay to bring its superficial ridiculosity down to a more respectable level. To my utter delight, there was none. “How to Travel with a Salmon” is all of two pages long, and the salmon– a real, nonmetaphorical salmon– is purchased in the second paragraph. And those two pages? Hysterically funny. In the penultimate sentence appears this sentence: “I asked for a lawyer, and they brought me an avocado.” It’s fabulous.
Most of the other essays are similar: brief, anecdotal, hilarious. There were only a few longer than three pages and a few dull enough for me to skim. The rest are gems.
The common aim of most of them is to satirize the modern world, or at least the modern world of the late ’80s and early ’90s– hence titles like “How Not to Use the Fax Machine,” which indicates that the author had no inkling of how electronic mail would exacerbate the problems he addresses, like spam. The mere notion of fax spam is actually really amusing to me, considering that I only use fax for college applications and similar official things.
Also, conceptually I still find fax machines really bizarre, but we can go into that at another date.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that some of the selections have the tone of an old guy expressing suspicion over the effects of modern technology on society. These are suspicions I sympathize with but, as you might imagine, do not fully agree with. The benefits of technology like email, in my opinion, outweigh the unfortunate side effects.
Eco also pokes fun at a number of things we all can get behind, including: pompous art criticism, the Italian version of the DMV, airplane food (this one is amazing), sports fans oblivious to your uninterest, people who make jokes about your name that you’ve heard a million times before (”the first idea that comes into a person’s mind will be the most obvious one…”), and instruction manuals for gadgetry or appliances, which he claims “expound at length things so self-evident that you are tempted to skip them, thus missing the one truly essential bit of information:”
It goes on at some length, but I was laughing too hard to type it out. Anyway, read this book.
Aside: I was either going to review this or Freakonomics, which is also excellent in the way popular economics books are. But everyone’s already heard of Freakonomics and probably already knows whether or not they should read it, whereas How to Travel with a Salmon is more obscure.
Tags: books, essays, How to Travel with a Salmon, review
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