Equality NOW!

Check this shit out:

On the left we have the Spanish version of James Patterson's Swimsuit. On the right, the English edition.

First off, how come they get such a sexier title? For the sake of accuracy, both cover models appear to be wearing the swimwear known as the "bikini."

Swimsuit? That's what you wear to do water aerobics with the other old ladies. It has built in beige mesh. Bikini? Much more exciting.

Secondly, I find the Spanish cover model's bikini far more scandalous. Look how much thinner the straps are! And the patch covering her stuff? Teeny. I might even go so far as to call it Teeny Tiny. Plus, that patch isn't even visible on the English cover. You have to use your stupid imagination, and if people could use their imagination to successfully see naked women, wouldn't the porn industry be a complete failure?

The English version does have a more severely posed model, however. Her back is arched in such a way that suggests the insertion of a metal rod to replace her spine, and this is now the closest thing she gets to being reclined and relaxed.

As a substitute for the visible crotch area, the English model has a definite side breast thing happening.

Side breast for crotch area? Looks like someone was going for the classic Separate, But Equal thing here. And we all know how that ends up.

It begs the question, Why make s different cover if they're going to be so alike anyway? Who knows. Any excuse to make a model pose uncomfortable in 8 inches of tepid water, I suppose. And not to get too far off track, but if I were a lady posing for Maxim or some crap like that, I would demand to see where that water was coming from. I need to be sure that they freshened it up since the last time Kirsten Dunst was here.

Machine Man by Max Barry

Brief summary of the first dozen pages:

Super logical engineer dude gets his leg crushed in an industrial accident, loses it. The prosthetics he’s presented with are crap, so he builds his own new leg. He then find his flesh leg inferior and incompatible with his new leg. What’s a fella to do?

I had fun with this book. Max Barry knows how to write something that keeps moving along without being completely plot-driven.

Some would say it’s philosophy 97 (4 less than 101), but I’d say the idea of whether a person is a body or a body a person is something that warrants reexamining as technology progresses.

The most interesting theory in this book is the question of why we create mechanical and technological substitutes for things only to mimic their biological or natural counterparts. How much money did someone sink into creating e-ink when we already had ink, and why didn’t they try to come up with something altogether new an improved?

Like I’ve said, author/idol Tom Spanbauer always says writers should do three things to an audience: Make them laugh, Teach them something, and Break their hearts.

Make Them Laugh:
Main Character on Love: “I had gone seven years without kiss and now I’d had two in a week. It was the kind of data event that implied serious contamination of laboratory conditions.”

Teach Them Something:
Main Character’s Speech to Girlfriend After She Hangs Onto the Salt at the Dinner Table: “Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violates process encapsulation. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that in incredibly inefficient and systematically dangerous.”

Break their Hearts:
[I’ll leave this one alone because I don’t want to give out all the details here]

Fun book. It sags somewhere near the end when it turns into an all-out action film and loses some of that emotional core. But it’s close enough.

Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick

The incredible story of Kevin Mitnick, hacker extraordinaire.

A truly fascinating book, both in the narrative and the technical details, Mitnick will have a lot of people rethinking what hacking is, what it means, and why people do it.

On the hacking side, there is a lot of techie stuff in here that might be tough for some to follow, although having only a cursory knowledge of information systems is more than enough to help readers understand WHAT Mitnick was doing, even if you might not understand exactly HOW he did it.

On the narrative side, I was pleasantly surprised as the story evolved from one of technical curiosity to a fugitive story complete with a helicopter chase.

Combining the two sides is the curious fact and often humorous descriptions of Mitnick's social engineering ploys.

One of my favorites (recreated here based on my shoddy memory):

Mitnick calls a telecom office pretending to be one of their salesmen. "Yeah, I'm out here in the field and I lost my database password. I was hoping I could get that from you, I have some clients I need to meet with and I need to show them the new software."

The guy at the office says, "I can get you the password, but I can't give it out over the phone."

Mitnick says, "Hmm...I might not be in until later tonight or tomorrow. Tell you what, can you print it out for me and seal it in an envelope? Just leave it with Peggy [Peggy being the name of a secretary Mitnick got from some earlier calls] and I'll get it from her."

The worker sees no problem with that, and 20 minutes later Mitnick calls Peggy posing as the salesman, asks if she has an envelope for him, and asks her to open it and read him the contents.

The book is full of entertaining vignettes like this one. And if a good book is supposed to change your life, this one succeeded. I spent Saturday looking at shredders.

Skyjack by Geoffrey Gray

A defeat in Vietnam was imminent. He nation was also mired in recession. Labor strikes crippled the workforce. Unemployment soared. So did the crime rate. Prisons were overcrowded and taken over in riots. Communes were built. Cults formed. Otherwise normal teenagers ran away from home, and had to be “deprogrammed” after they were brainwashed.

This is a paragraph from a book, and basically explains why I don’t think I can read this one. It’s just a style issue. Despite a strong interest in the material, I got about six pages into this book before deciding I couldn’t do this to myself.

I’m not going to attempt to critique too much because hell, this guy got a book contract, so I guess the style appeals to some. But for me…I don’t know. Really choppy. And I end up re-reading sentence like this one over and over, not to appreciate them but because I keep thinking I read them wrong:

The Cooper Curse is what those who have felt it call it.

I’m not a big grammar-correction officer by any means. Grammar, in my opinion, is useful for two things. First, it helps us as a guideline to write readable material. Grammar is the basic structure behind what we think of as "flow" in a piece of writing. Second, it is something that people correct other people on because they want to look smart. In order for a self-appointed grammarian to correct someone, they first have to know what the speaker said. If I say "me and my friends" when I SHOULD have said "my friends and I" there's very little reason to correct me because you know exactly what I was saying. And I'm totally okay with that in a book because that is the way people speak in real life.

This book, however, was just plain hard to read.

From time to time the sentences have a certain Bukowski-esque appeal, such as this one:

Skipp Porteous wants to talk and says can we meet and I say fine.

But more often than not I’m just confused, like in this one:

Soon I am leaving for the airport and now I am on the plane and I can’t get the ballad out of my head.

Did we just time travel in that sentence, or is it being written at the moment the narrator zipped up his bag and writing it took so long that we are now in the airplane seven words later?

The writer has covered boxing for a number of media outlets, and that’s not too shocking. The style does seem more appropriate for a boxing match where the flow of time can feel changed depending on the action and punches mark punctuation points.

I’m not saying I won’t take another crack at it later. For now, though, it’s just not what I’m looking for.

Eat Like a Man: My Manhood Test

I had a recent run-in with this cookbook.

Cookbooks are an area of interest for me, somewhat because I cook, but more because I'm consistently boggled by the fact that they turn out so terribly.

This one did a decent job with some of the common problems.

For one, it seemed like most of the recipes had pictures, and ones that showed the food looking good. People, for the love of god and everything he has ever cooked up, put a picture with EVERY recipe. I don't know what pozole looks like. Is it liquidy? Slimy? Because mine was liquidy and slimy and I need to know that it was wrong.

The smaller written parts of this book were actually more entertaining and helpful than the recipes. For example, advice nuggets like writing down a simple pancake recipe on an index card that goes in your wallet is a pretty decent idea. You might only use it after crashing at someone's house a half a dozen times, but according to the punch-based evidence, that's twice as often as I use my Jimmy John's punch card.

My issue with this book was two-fold.

One, it had that Esquire feel where it's a little too much about saying, A real man is like this and that. For example, this book is a big proponent of the idea that experimenting in the kitchen off book is the real way to cook.

I hear this kind of thing a lot. This or that person "can only cook from a recipe." That's a silly thing to say, and cooking is one of the only fields where this applies.

At work, gearheads are always coming in to look at our Chilton manuals. It's not because they're dumb or don't know what they're doing. It's because there is a lot to know, and some adjustments and specifications on cars have to be fairly exact. But we still consider these people mechanics.

Cooking is the same deal, if you ask me. And the only people who talk a lot about how cooking off book is the only real cooking are either people who cook and want it to seem more special than it is, or people who don't cook and use it as an excuse to never learn.

I made a polenta from this book, and it was godawful. Mushy, not super flavorful. It has all the looks of something a guy should like, a goldenbrown cornbread bed covered in sausage and cheese. But it's pretty much shit, I have to say.

Second, the recipes seemed a little complicated to me. I wouldn't call myself a total amateur. I've made lots of different shit, and my percentage of good foods is improving. But a lot of these involved marinades and prep work that takes goddamn forever, or ingredients that you're not likely to have laying around.

Which brings us to Coca-Cola Fried Chicken.

Things seemed to be going well. The shit had been marinading, the batter looked good, and I had the oil going strong.

Then, as I was pulling the last piece of chicken out of the fryer, I saw that the thermometer I was using had broken sometime during the cooking process.

Fuck.

So not only was there potentially broken glass in the chicken, but almost certainly mercury.

It's always struck me as hilarious, by the way, that mercury thermometers go in our mouths. Glass and mercury. Go ahead and just stick that in your mouth. Couldn't they have come up with some kind of thermometer made of mace and a cactus?

Anyway, this was the test of whether I was a man, as I saw it. Could a man resist, after standing in a kitchen for an hour or so, frying chicken, at least sampling the meat, despite the potential for horrific internal injury and poisoning that has really, really fucked up a bunch of Asian people?

Of course not.

I took a bite.

Now here's the thing: It was only a bite.

The coke marinade, the big difference between this and other fried chicken? Tasted pretty much the same to me. It was darker, and that was about it. But not irresistable. Not so delicious that it was worth a second bite, and the rest went in the trash.

Two epic failures from one book were enough to have me move on. They may have both been my fault, but I decided to take it like a relationship that starts off with two pretty bad dates. Maybe we could have made many years of beautiful meals together, but hey, I'm a man. Man enough to break the streak before it becomes a pattern, anyway.