I found “Exit Ghost” at the library while browsing the large print section. I’ve been meaning to read another Philip Roth book ever since American Pastoral. I can read large print forever. I love large print.

I immediately sensed that this is a writer that will never lie to me. His private thoughts just ring too true. He does not filter.
This book is about a famous writer in his 70s going off the rails and watching himself make “bad” decisions with no power to stop it. The comedy in the book flows from this old gent being made into a clown by his own desires.
For example, against his better judgment he enters into a home swapping agreement with an attractive young couple. His reasoning is,
“Then she would be living among my things and I among hers.”

His desires wake up so quickly after such a long down-time. He spends the book tracking the life story of a genius writer named E.I. Lonoff (who, I read, is really a stand-in for Bernard Malamud) and fighting off younger, more virile versions of himself.

The crushing weight of the past in this book almost overwhelmed me.

“You said, ‘Oh Manny, we could be so happy in Florence.’”
Learning this made her enormously happy. “Oh, my. You were such a bad boy. What else? What else? To have a witness to something so long gone– what a gift! Tell me what you heard, bad boy! Tell me everything!”
Tell me, she was saying to me, tell me please, about this intimate moment with this irreplaceable person I love who is dead, tell me on the day I’ve learned of the return of the tumor that is hurtling me toward my own death…”

How is that for wanting house yourself in a little lean-to made of the past?

One thing that threw me off was the weirdly shallow portraits he draws of younger men. They are virile and confident, but are only described that way in one or two words and he’s done.

He makes a HUGE deal about how EXTREME his 11 year hiatus in a comfortable cabin in western Mass. As if anyone crazy enough not to live in Manhattan for any time at all should be a subject of a novel that reminds you of that fact on every page.

He devotes a lot of space to a weird little play he writes about his interactions with the younger woman. He develops that relationship in the play and then develops a “real” one with the woman in the book itself. was it a way of showing how impotent he was? was it some dialog he wrote that didn’t fit in the book, so he worked it in as a play? I’m kind of annoyed by this book within a book and I find that I don’t value what takes place in that fake book, which makes me wonder why I care what takes place in the actual book.

This book left me swimming in a muggy soup of human pheromones, auto exhaust, pollen and a hint of urine.

I was very disappointed by Son of A Witch. It started with promise but devolved into randomness. The author knew he had to fill the middle of the book with events in Oz, but nothing inspirational came to him, so he just had the characters wander around doing appalling things to each other. I can’t even count the unresolved plot threads. Everyone came together for a wrap-up at the end. During the wrap up, it was mentioned to the main character that he had certainly grown over the course of the book. I couldn’t see it. The rule of “show it instead of tell it” applies here. The author failed to provide a compelling climax or give insight into the growth of the main character. No where near as good as Wicked.

The visit to the vast prison called “South Stairs” was relatively inspired, as was some of the politics between the races of Oz, and there was some hilarious dialog between characters. Mostly, though, Oz was rendered in gray scale with muted sounds.

Something apparent from the get-go is that the author was using the event of a world wide zombie plague on which to hang a series of critiques of our society. He lazily trotted out a series of stereotypes from each region of interest (South Africa, Israel, India, China, North and South Korea, Japan, Hollywood, the survivalist mid-west, ineffectual Washington, DC). Using the context of a zombie war, the details of which were chilling and persuasive, he delivered a series of pretty banal anecdotes about our society.
These interludes were short, however, and I found the book hard to put down.

Our group camp was right next to a huge horse camping area. There’s horses to look at, but there are also a host of flies. There is also a huge marsh behind this group camping area. I didn’t get a chance to look at the other group sites, but I think there is a reason those others filled up first.

The lady at the registration desk is a menace. Just do the opposite of what she says.

Bring lots of bug repellent, tuck your long pants into your socks and stay out of the tall grass. Do a tick check

I took a nice bike ride down some horse trails and down some non-designated trails. This review mentions that the horse trails are too bumpy. I found this to be true until I let some air out of my tires. After that it was tolerable. The non-designated trails were much more interesting. I wound through groves of birch trees, through the massive blowdown area, and past amazing views of the St. Croix River. There is nothing remotely challenging.

Don’t be fooled by the little sign of the swimmer on the summer park map. There is a goose-poop fouled area of hay creek roped off by a line of bouys about 3 feet from the shore. They did go to a lot of effort to import a vast amount of sand for the beach and the kids had a blast there. The adults lounged in the shade. The company on this trip was the best part. Maggie had a great time. I am proud of the blueberry pancakes I cooked over the fire.

The wonderful thing about St. Croix State Park is the views of the St. Croix River. The river and its far shore have this surreal, seven shades of green look, like a diorama made of the Garden of Eden by an over-enthusiastic convert.

There were multiple equipment failures. Our tents are in bad shape. The cheap coleman tent needs a seam sealant. and the expensive Eureka tent has a broken pole! I think someone we loaned it to maybe broke it? Anyone know anything about this?

1. Java
2. other java related languages
3. Competitors to Java
4. design of computer languages, virtual machines, and compilers
5. Web related stuff
6. Security software and how it works
7. Information display and reporting

So far, I’ve used it to review code from open source projects to see how it works.

It is named after Captain Holly of the Saddleford Owsla.

be sure to read the comment section.

Medicine in this country before 1900 was likely to do more harm than good to the patient. Primary reasons for this were that doctors were not well trained or regulated and that what training they did get was not based on science.

A small group of superheroes led by William Welch helped start changing this. The medical schools, owned and controlled by local doctors, made more money if they let in anyone who wanted, so there were no academic standards for getting into medical school. Training was based on thinking that hadn’t changed much in the 2200 years since Hippocrates. The belief that you could decide what was true just by deduction and creating a consistent model and not by scientific method, still ruled the day.

The superheroes got together and formed the medical equivalent of the Justice League of America. Many of them were trained in Germany. They created Johns Hopkins University. This would be an institution devoted to medical research based only on science. Other institutes including the Rockefeller Institute and Columbia University started soon after with similar missions.

A striking story from the book was the progress made by these superheroes using pre-antibiotic steampunk medicine against bacterial infections. I always thought that people were helpless against bacteria before antibiotics, but there was much progress in creating anti-toxins, anti-serums, and vaccines. In fact, the survival rate for bacterial meningitis was higher after a serum treatment was found (1910) than it is today with all of our ass-kicking antibiotics.

We say today that the flu comes from people living in close proximity to pigs and birds in China. The 1918 flu probably broke out in Kansas, causing a deadly epidemic in Haskell county where people were also living in close proximity to pigs. It spread from there as a mild illness, and mutated back into something deadly. It was only called Spanish Flu because all other western press suppressed stories of the illness so as not to hurt morale or cause panic during wartime. The Spanish press reported it truthfully so it appeared to the world that it came from Spain.

The superheroes spent most of the book hunting for a bacteria they believed caused the flu. I found myself wishing that Barry had explained the science better. For example, he states that a scientist was trying to figure out why pneumococcus bacteria sometimes had a carbohydrate shell and sometimes did not and how a bacteria could change between those two forms. It states ” he ruled out each substance one by one until he found that it was DNA. ” Well, great. How did he do that? Barry takes pages and pages to describe these guys slaving away in the labs, washing glassware, working the autoclave and growing cultures, but skips the potentially dramatic story of actual discovery. The climax of the book, when a Teen Titan name Richard Shope proved that an outbreak of flu in pigs was caused by a “filterable” virus. He just states this. “And then Detective Magruder went out to lunch and looked at the evidence again and solved the crime.”

Finally, the book spent a lot of time describing the devastating effects the virus had on civilian life. Philadelphia, like every other crowded city, was ripped apart by the flu in 1918. The government pretty much ceased to function and a group of civic minded people formed a parallel government and began running the city’s response to the crisis.

If you’ve seen us in the past month or so, and your kids have a rash… maybe it is fifths (You’re welcome). We were concerned because the literature says that complications could develop if you get this virus while you are pregnant and we did expose a pregnant woman, but it seems that it is only the early stages of pregnancy that this is a concern. The baby was born last night is healthy.

It is called fifths because it is the fifth of the classic childhood skin rashes after measles, rubella, scarlet fever, and the mysterious fourth’s disease.

I had just moments before made a vow not to verbally abuse any motorists, so I just rode away without saying anything.