Over a year ago I ran across a column by Clive Thompson in Wired, “Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing”. I liked it then and upon rereading it, I still like it well enough to share here.

So I’m playing a quick game of virtual tennis tonight on Wii Sports. I’ve worked my way up to pro over the past few weeks, so the opponents that the computer creates for me are by now very skilled.

Well, here we are on the eve of Obama’s inauguration and I’m trying to be hopeful. Not because I think the Obama administration is going to screw up the country, but because I fear that the country is already too far gone, fighting a Cold Civil War that it can’t give up.

Not the first one I’ve downloaded. No, the first one I’ve written! It’s on sale now in Apple’s App Store, and is the only search hit for “SpinClock”, at least at present. It’s also a big reason why this blog hasn’t been updated recently, since I was giving the project all of my spare time since Christmas.

As I have opined earlier in this very blog, I would be happy to have either Obama or McCain in the White House for different reasons. This afternoon, I went to the polls to make my final choice.

George Orwell’s book 1984 ends with, “Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache…He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” The phrase “Big Brother” has been thrown around for so long as a symbol of gray government totalitarianism that the real Big Brother has surfaced from a direction that Orwell wouldn’t have guessed.

The subtitle of A. J. Jacobs’ book is One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. It is as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds, but at its core is a true accomplishment: the author read through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in one year.

Yesterday it was hot, hot and muggy, and the kids had a friend over. After a dozen hours they were getting restless and bored, so at their suggestion I took them to the nearby mall to window shop. I had no desire to shop, window or otherwise, and so I took along my Kindle to read, and my phone, so I could stay in touch with them. The rest of Tucson had the same idea, apparently; the mall was as crowded as Christmas, swarming with people, music playing, lights blazing. I found a chair to sit in, to tune out the chaos and read, just like I used to do years ago at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

A couple of weeks ago, while having lunch at Pei Wei, I thought I saw a cyborg at the next table. A well-dressed young man, perhaps a junior executive, was leafing through some notes next to his nearly empty plate. Fixed to the right side of his head, covering his ear, was a large circular piece of electronics about a centimeter thick. Inset around the outer edge was a ring of pulsing blue light. He looked…exactly like an extra in some 1980s-era movie about The Future.

I recently finished the last of a nine-volume fantasy series by Robin Hobb, a trilogy of trilogies all set in the same medieval-like fantasy world, the Realm of the Elderlings. This is a tremendously popular milieu for fantasy writers and readers ever since Tolkien, so much so that there is an embarrassment of riches out there on the bookshelves. Also, let’s be honest, an embarrassment of junk that recycles the same two-dimensional tropes. Understanding the difficulty in finding truly valuable fantasy fiction, then, let me assure you that if you’re going to invest in a nine-volume series, this one is worth it.

My wife and I have the house to ourselves for several days over this 4th of July weekend, as my sister invited our kids to visit her in California. This is the first vacation for them away from us, and although they were a little nervous, I think the time is right. I would have liked all four of us to go, but my wife is too sick to travel that far, and I cannot take time off work this month. So the kids get a chance to spend some quality time with their aunt, and we get a sneak preview of the empty nest.

“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” —May Sarton, poet and novelist (1912–1995)

Recently my youngest daughter and I finished the video game Myst IV: Revelation. One more Myst title remains (End of Ages), and we will have finished the entire Myst cycle. We just began this last title, but have stalled somewhat, and I wonder if we will ever finish our five-volume journey. We both enjoy playing games and especially enjoyed the first three in the Myst series. The fault, I’m afraid, lies with the games themselves, and I worry already that the final one has “jumped the shark”.

I’ve had my Kindle for almost four months and have read hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages on it, from blogs and newspapers to magazines and books both short and long, both classic and fresh. And now I must rant to the world about the surprisingly low quality of digital print. Not the font—the Kindle’s display is so much like paper, visually, and the font so smooth and clean, that I relate to it like paper print, and judge it like paper print. Because I do, I’m much more aware of the fairly severe and systematic typos that seem to slip past whatever digital proofreading process is in use, if any. Here are the worst problems, and some possible solutions:

It takes me longer than it should to compose my “out of office” email messages at work. The text of the message itself is quite short; what’s hard is actually pressing the Send button. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that I am allowed and even encouraged to use vacation days. Emotionally, it feels like I’m playing hooky. A holiday, where everyone is out of the office, is so much different than a day where I am home and everyone else is laboring away under a fluorescent glare.