looking for alaska Review

looking for alaska, Green. Yes. I’m made suspicious when a character in a book is presented as a smart kid but doesn’t behave the way smart kids in my experience have behaved. Even if a person’s particular talent seems very limited in scope, part of being smart is to be curious about the things one runs across, so it strikes me as unrealistic when someone who is presented as knowing a specific thing about a vast array of people is simultaneously presented as being completely ignorant of geography. People come from places, and many people have references to those places in their names. A smart kid will have wondered “where is that?” The only conclusion I can reach, having finished the book after writing the rest of this paragraph, is that the character in question is not intended to be a smart kid. That and a couple other bits make me suspect that the author was not a smart kid, but it is at best perilous to infer much about the author from his work.
That nagging bit aside, the book did not make me wish I hadn’t read it. It’s very much a YA novel, with Consequences and Lessons, and Green does a reasonable job of it.

Lights Out

As the Red Cross is warning about being prepared for potential power outages during high winds, FP would like to add some items to your preparedness checklist:
-battery-operated twinkle lights
-Triscuits and smoked clams or sprats
-canned hummus and more Triscuits
-bulky sweaters
-trashy magazines and a flashlight

Spook Country Review

Spook Country, Gibson. Yes. It’s a little disappointing that Gibson has gone from being the prophet of cyberspace to being Tom Clancy, but his writing is still enjoyable enough. He has the mechanical good grace to use “whoever” when it’s called for (and when people who don’t understand the rules of the language would use “whomever”), and if his plots are adolescent fantasies (and therefore a bit masturbatory), the books themselves at least lack the technoporn quality of the actual Clancy.

The modest proposal diet

Some alternatives to the 100 Mile Diet, wherein one eats only food grown within 100 miles of one’s home:
-The greenhouse diet, where you only eat local foods that are not native to your local climate and must be raised in greenhouses. Very handy in BC.
-The eat the wild animals you can catch in your back yard, who foolishly trust you due to the neighbors feeding them diet.
-The realize that the energy needed to farm the food needed to power your legs is less efficient than a gasoline engine and drive everywhere diet.
-The only eat food that can take public transit diet (primarily vegetarian).
-The carpool diet, where you only eat food transported in groups of two or more.
-The Nerfherder diet, where you only eat candy.

Unless you're willing to sell out your neighbors

Amazon is plunging into that failprone breach that is online grocery services. (Well, Schwann’s does OK.) But while they will admit to serving the Seattle area, and I have seen their trucks around, they won’t tell you if they serve your area or let you look at their selection and prices unless you give them your name, full address, and phone number. Yay for you, Amazon.