More Books

I finished Disney War a few days ago. It's by James Stewart. It was pretty good. Its about Disney during the Michael Eisner era. I remember when The Little Mermaid came out. It was kind of the first big cartoon (animation) movie in a long time by Disney. Computer graphics was becoming a big deal then too. Anyway, the rebirth, so to speak, of the animation group at Disney was a big part of Disney's resurgence. Another one was Video sales. Plus they bought Mirimax and raised prices at DisneyWorld amongst other things.

Anyway, Eisner comes off largely as a jerk. He did not seem to appreciate the people who worked for him and he was one of those CEO's who gets a zillion dollar bonus even if the company lost money that year.

I finished The Wanderers earlier today. It's a novel set in the Bronx during the Dion era (1950's I believe). It was pretty good too. It starts off kind of slowly. I liked the subject. It seemed like an interesting time and place. There are about a half a dozen main characters. They are high school aged guys. The are in a club called The Wanderers. There are a different gangs like The Baldies, The Wongs, The Ducky Boys. The structure of the book is what made it interesting. It doesn't have a single plot per se. Each chapter will be like a short story about a particular Wanderer. Its sort of the Slice-of-Life approach. Which is kind of cool. It gives you a feel for the way life was for these guys. The book seemed believable. I remember liking the movie. It was good but not a classic, like American Graffiti.....

Comments

The ability to add a comment seems to have not been running correctly. Brother Mike pointed out that he tried to leave a comment and the system asked him for a blogger id or some such thing. I think I have this set correctly. Leave a comment someone and let me know if it is working. I would have assumed that the default behaviour for this thing would not have required an id. But I guess some people like that feature.

Books

I finished Steven Pinkers, The Language Instinct a few days ago. It was good. It was about 420 pages and it took maybe 3 days to read. I enjoyed it. Its a book about linguistics. I think the idea is that there is something genetic about the human capacity to talk. I am not sure why this is such a big idea. But it seems to be what Noam Chomsky made his name from. Other than that, he talks about how languages are structured and how some languages seem to have evlolved from Indo-European. I learned that the western alphabetical languages derive from a Canaanite source. All in all I'd give it a 3.5/5.

Along similar lines, there was a book I read a while ago called Power Of Babel by John McWhorter. That was another good book. I think I liked it a little more though. 4/5 maybe. It was kind of a comparative linguistics book. It talked about how different languages say things in different ways. Like how some languages don't use 'the' for example. Or how some Asian languages have 6 different tones to say the same words. Just tasty stuff.

Right now I am re-reading Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz. Tony lives in Virginia and runs into a group of Civil War re-enactors. He travels around the South visiting Civil War sights, talking to people about what they think about the war and the South and other stuff. Its worth re-reading.

First Post

I am trying out blogger. com here. I think this is a google thing. Anyway it's free. I got no reason not to check it out. Hey cyber-space! I haven't done a whole lot of web stuff in a while. But I have been reading about CSS and XML and figured I could use this to brush up, amongst other things. If you are looking for something exciting at this point, I would have to say "Move along there is nothing to see here."