Current reading list

Book #1: Generals Ten British Commanders who Shaped the World - by Mark Urban Verdict: Light history, a good add for the military buff's collection I found out this morning that this book hasn't been released yet in the US. But when it is, buy it. This was one of my bride's Christmas presents to me this year, and it's a great bit of a read. To squeeze ten different military biographies into a single (manageable) volume, each subject is given no more than a high level overview, but there's bound to be something in there that you didn't know before about two or three of them. What I respect about the author's choice of 10 is that a couple of them are in there because of how they screwed up - showing that he's fair in assessing what type of events 'shape the world.' Not to mention that this book that made me feel way cooler when people saw me reading it on the plane than my usual "Conan and the Giant Demon Spider King of Doom" air-travel reading fare. Book #2: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson Verdict: The ultimate bathroom reader. Another Christmas gift, this from a friend here in the UK. Bill Bryson is a famous travel writer, what the hell is he doing writing a serious book covering most every area of modern scientific study around? A damn good job, that's what. He humanizes the science, making it fun to read. Whether it's the story of how the first discovery of phosphorous was due to one man's obsession with turning buckets of human urine into gold, or how the personal rivalries of early paleontologists read more like a bad soap opera (in the best, back-stabbing, wife-stealing, twin-impersonating way). And as an added bonus, there are a lot of jokes about the French. Bryson goes out of his way to tell you when to ignore the big numbers or exact figures, and relates all of the interesting bits of the journey of scientific discovery in fairly short, long-bathroom-break length chapters. The illustrated version in particular has some great images and captions to accompany the text. It's laugh out loud funny in parts, so much so, you'll forget you're actually learning something when you read it.
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Movie Review

I think I've mentioned before, it's a rare treat for us to see a movie in an actual theater. With all the movie goodness out of late, though, we had to steal away to take in a summer flick. My bride had been itching to see War of the Worlds for weeks now - every time the trailer came on the tv, she had the same comment: 'that's a different role for him.' 'What, action movie, dodging explosions, trying to save the world?' 'You know what I mean.' While the movie starts off as only vaguely interesting, it quickly degrades into the sci-fi equivalent of the Blair Witch Project. Apparently, what she meant by different was 'makes me want to scrape the memory of that movie off my brain with a dull spoon.' I've rarely seen an action movie in which so little actually happens - Not to spoil the movie for you, but humanity survives, and it's no thanks to Tom Cruise. Halfway through the movie, I found myself rooting for the alien invaders, in the vain hope that if they killed off Cruise the movie might return to interesting. The heroes of the movie are freaking protozoa (my 9th grade biology teacher would be proud that I recognized them). Seriously. Protozoa. I don't care if the plot is a remake of an H.G. Wells classic. If your hero is a single celled organism, your movie's in trouble. To do a better job of keeping up with movies, we signed up for the UK Netflix equivalent - Screen Select. DVDs shipped right to our mail box, no late fees. I love living in the future. The only problem with this kind of service is that I tend to update my rental queue with a dozen of whatever's struck my fancy at the moment. Which leads to us getting every movie Danny Kaye ever made in one continuous stream. This time, my bride has her own login. And it's her responsibility to watch my selections and make sure we don't end up with a Chris Rock screen fest.
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Introducing iProduct

iProduct. It doesn't matter what it is. It's from Apple. So it's cute. And cute has intrinsic worth, right? I love my iPod. I really, really do. I love it so much, I went out and bought Giuia one. (a pink one). But the new iPod shuffle just strikes me as silly. OK, so if all you want is a half a gig of music to carry around, I suppose it's fine. But a lot of the people who ran right out and bought one were mostly already owners of the grown-up iPod. It's not particularly innovative - the "shuffle" feature has been on the iPod pretty much since the beginning. But what scares me is that the ad for the iPod shuffle actually says "Do not eat iPod shuffle." (It's there. Scroll down.) Mac users frighten me.
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