Today I am taking a look at the mechanism on how time flies and whether I am utilizing that time effectively. I am not going to spoil things, you will have to listen and judge whether the same me is a good thing or not.
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January 5, 2024 – Lessons In Chemistry
For once, I am ahead of the game. It helped that I took some time off during Christmas to do things like read. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus was the January Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. I think that I would also be remised that if I didn’t say that this is not the normal Friday book review. I will talk later about what is happening next week.
This is not the typical type of book that we have been reading. For the last five years, it has been cookbooks and memoirs. We are not going to abandon those completely but lighten things up dispersing genre related fiction. This one you might say loosely relates to food as the main character Elizabeth Zott hosts a TV show about cooking.
This was one of the hottest books of 2023. It was the most checked out in the New York Public Library. It was the number one download in audiobooks and a New York Times bestseller. Of course I have never heard of it, but it was suggested by one of the book club members. It is safe to say that this is on the leading edge of trendy fiction last year.
There is a lot to say about this book. The plot has some things very familiar to me as well as things I know nothing about. It is set in the 1950s and 1960s about a woman who is in a man’s world in many ways. She is a chemist (something I know a little about) trying to be taken seriously in a science which I could imagine.
Elizabeth is a bit of a dichotomy. She wants to make waves in research but refuses to play the game in order for her to compete or gain respect for that matter. I am certainly not excusing wrong doing or even pretend that I totally understand the mindset of the 1950s because I wasn’t there. I was born post women’s revolution and a child of the 1980s, Women were always in the workforce, including a very few chemists.
I do have a bit of an Elizabeth streak in me too. Maybe it is a chemist thing, but sometimes you get a bit of right is right and it doesn’t matter what the consequences are. That attitude is not without its drawbacks however. I think that the trick is to deploy that tactic at the proper time. It is really hard to do and something that Elizabeth really doesn’t master either.
The major theme of the book to me is women’s rights. In my class of ten or so graduates, I think two of them were women. So, I have been watching the small tidal change of females in STEM for the last thirty years. What I am seeing is the shift of the sex demographic in higher education. The numbers are overwhelmingly female at all higher education institutions so it eventually has to trickle into the male dominated fields at some point.
I enjoyed the book. I suspect that if it had not been set in chemistry, maybe I wouldn’t have as much. It has that Mississippi Burning kind of appeal to it. The injustice is so strong that you root for the character to get vengeance. I suppose that I never gave it a thought about what life would be like for a woman in the 1950s trying to make a go of science in the academic world.
I have never read a work of fiction where chemistry played such a major role. I am also saying that I never really read Michael Creighton, so maybe that would qualify my statement a little. But, the Back to the Future/Weird Science/Honey I Shrunk the Kids type of portrayal is much more common way to put science out of reach for most people. The writers don’t understand it, so they are not going to make an attempt to make it approachable.
Heads up for next week I am starting Dante’s Devine Comedy. Dystopian fiction has kind of run it’s course for the time being. I thought that we might investigate the afterworld, not just our current one and so that is what I am picking for the next book. I have read the first third before. That is what we typically refer to as ‘Inferno’ and talks about the layers of hell and their corresponding sins. I am trying to figure out exactly how to break it down at the moment.
End Your Programming Routine: There is a good reason that this book was so popular last year. It is a fresh subject and a new approach to mystery. It reminds me a little of an alternate Julia Child plot. She shares many of the traits of Elizabeth with a little more worldly acumen. The story line kind of follows a similar arc but you can read that for yourself.
January 4, 2024 – Did You Get Anything Cool For Christmas, I Did
As you know, I am not a fan of Christmas. I am not a great gift giver and most of the things that I want are very expensive. Gifts are often a disappointment. It is not that I don’t appreciate a nice, new flannel. In fact I was thinking of buying one as I was wrapping up our Christmas shopping. I didn’t want to spend the extra money at the time, but it is just not fun.
I have wanted a fermenting crock for many years. The older I get, the more I appreciate sour and bitter flavors. In fact, I have made my own sauerkraut before. They are not terribly expensive, about fortyish dollars and I almost bought a handmade one at the state fair this year. I meant to, I just didn’t want to carry it all night and then I forgot by the time we left.
Honestly, this one is a little large. It is three gallons. That is a lot of fermented vegetables. They are meant to be out on the counter. If you think about it, how many pickles are you going to eat in one setting? You take one out each day and this is a way to get those beneficial probiotics. I think a more practical size is one gallon for that purpose. I would call this more of a production size.
Probably like all things, it is one of those things that one is not enough. In reality, you want one fermenting while eating out of one. So, maybe in the future, I will get a one gallon size for that reason. As I said, they are not that expensive. I also have been saying, start where you are. It doesn’t matter how many things you have if you don’t use them.
Sauerkraut, kimchi and pickles are definitely on the agenda. This time of year, there is not a lot of surplus, so I will start with store bought vegetables and small. As much as I like this stuff, it will be hard for me to get everyone onboard meal after meal. Start slowly and see how it goes.
What is nice about a store bought fermenting crock is the accessories. It has a properly sized weight for the vessel and an appropriately fitting lid. This can be done in a pot or a bucket, I have done both. This process is not about the tools, it is more about the acceptability of your spouse. Having a vessel that is approved to stay out on the counter makes it much more likely that it is going to bet used.
End Your Programming Routine: This quarter’s Backwoods Home magazine is all about fermenting. I am looking forward to reading that. It will be inspiration for my new element of fermenting. I would like my first project to be pickles, but I think it is probably going to be kimchi instead.
January 3, 2024 – What Does Time Off Look Like?
At one point in my life, I had watched every episode of This Old House. I suppose that this is one of my few, guilty pleasure TV habits. I lost track of the show on the switch from analog to digital broadcasting format in 2010. This is because I used to record the show when it was live and watch it later at my convenience.
Around 2016, I realized that it was being streamed and so I started picking the show up again with the episodes that I could. Not every show or season was viewable. In fact, the show had significant technical issues like not enough server bandwidth and clunky commercial interruptions that sometimes never came back. I fought through it picking off hours to watch and restarting.
Somewhere around 2020, I just forgot about it. I think that I was hot and heavy remodeling then I transitioned into driving for Amazon with an irregular schedule and then I started working again and my free time was devoted to writing to AltF4 as well as all the other things I needed to do. Right before my Christmas break, I remembered that I was years behind. A large part of my break was binge watching the last four years of This Old House episodes.
I now have a gap of seasons (I think). Some of my gap years are behind the paywall and so I remember things about certain projects but I can’t actually view them to confirm. I don’t know if I caught an episode here or there during normal broadcast and now I am misremembering things. I have a feeling that I am going to pay for a short subscription so that I can catch back up.
Not all of my time was spent in front of a screen. I did a lot of cooking, reading, and something that is a small family tradition. We usually do some sort of puzzle. This year we bought a very large and expensive Lego set that we spent several evenings building. I also got my electrical run so that I can move my keezer and get started in earnest with my wine cellar project this year.
Home improvement was definitely on the mind. I had the siding in front of my house removed. We have had a leak in the front picture window every since the siding was done in 2015. It has gone on long enough that I was beginning to worry about the damage that it was causing. This actually occurred before Christmas but I had already had many articles queued before my break. I also plan on discussing this more in detail soon.
What I didn’t do was a lot of thinking about AltF4. This was by design. When I need to take a break, I need a real break. I have learned this about myself over the years, I do not give up easily. Because of that, I tend to keep after things too long. That is to say we all reach a point of diminishing returns and it is necessary to take a step back. I have solve many a programming problem in the shower after a late night of working much longer than I should have.
End Your Programming Routine: My break was closer to two weeks than one since I had most of the week before Christmas already written and published ahead of time. I don’t know if that is actually enough time because right now I feel charged and ready to go. That feeling waxes and wanes throughout the year and hopefully this isn’t a veneer. That being said, happy to be back and ready to go.
December 29, 2023 – Slaughterhouse – Five, Conclusion
This is the end friends, for the book and the year. The reason that I got turned on to this book was I was looking at reading lists related to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Most of the books that I have been working on for the last two years have been on that list. This one, I can see that it is a very distant cousin at best.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book, I certainly did. It is just that the book wasn’t what I expected. The truth is that I didn’t really know what to expect. Or maybe more specifically, I expected it to be more dystopian that it was. This was an acid trip on the horrors of war.
I enjoyed the dark humor and satire throughout the book. It reminded me a lot of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” but set in a more historical setting. I guess I don’t follow the alien encounters interlaced throughout the book. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it was either to lighten up the darkness or make the whole story of war a farce. I am not sure which.
The main character Billy Pilgrim is made out to be a buffoon. In many ways, it was hard to empathize with him. The only thing that really changes this is that many of the other characters are even more dislikable. The sci-fi author Trout is a two-bit hustler, Billy’s wife Valencia is a glutton, most of the different soldiers were blood lustful jerks as examples. It makes the hapless Billy much more likeable compared to everyone else he encounters.
Does this book fit into the AltF4 reading list? I am gong to say no if you are following along. I would say that if this is the first book you read with me, then maybe. As far as it goes with changing your programming, you should already know that I am pretty anti-war. Even if we give World War II a pass as a ‘just’ war, it more than likely wouldn’t have happened without our meddling.
You had Churchill begging the US to get involved. You had the neutral US running arms and ammunition to the allies while at the same time embargoing raw materials to imperial Japan. And Hitler’s rise to power was a direct result of the World War I settlement and punitive policies that the US was instrumental in codifying. Sure, the Nazis were disgusting but they were only following our lead on our progressive, eugenics ideas. Using hindsight, who didn’t think that we were going to get involved?
Ever seen the movie where the bully antagonizes someone until they get fed-up and strike? We are the bully. Let me be clear, this is not what the book is about but the time to fight is actually before we get to the fight, not when we get in theater. It is too late by that point and then we have Billy’s account.
Now that we know what the book is not about, let me give a quick opinion on what I think about the book. Many pundits think that this is Vonnegut’s view of war through his personal experience. I can buy that. Kurt is Billy and arrives to the scene by what he feels as unprepared. As the “F’n New Guy”, not only is he scared and unprepared but also not battle hardened. So, everything that he sees seems revolting, including all of the people that he meets that are tempered by war. This is exemplified by the war winding down and people acting out of anger making things seem more senseless than in the context of battle.
I liken this book to all the flashbacks that Kurt sees as the result of PTSD. Whether he really had that or not, he probably had seemingly unrelated triggers bringing him back to those horrible days in the war. Truthfully, I think that a movie like “Platoon” does a better job transcribing the horrors to the uninitiated than this book. But the book is not so depressing and a lot more humorous than “Platoon”.
End Your Programming Routine: “Slaughterhouse – Five” does not make the AltF4 reading list. But, after reading it, I am more interested in more of Vonnegut’s work. There is nothing wrong reading a recognized author for entertainment. It just doesn’t quite bring the punch of foreshadowing deceptiveness as many of the other titles I have read in this vein. It is only the lens that I am evaluating the work that causes this opinion. “Slaughterhouse – Five” is a unique book with a good message that entertains along the way.
December 28, 2023 – 2023 Year In Review
Last podcast for the year. I cover the highlights of the year by month plus some of my favorite things that I did. I also get into what I am planning for 2024. I am wishing you all a happy New Year. Lets hope that this year is better than the last. But, let us not let fate determine that alone but do something about it.
December 22, 2023 – Slaughterhouse – Five, Chapters 7-10
We have reached the end of another book. This was a different sort of book then the ones I have been reading in this series. I would say that it is the lightest of all of them but before I get carried away with the totality of the work, today I am going to focus on the last four chapters.
Here is a quick section summary of these chapters. There is a crash of the plane full of optometrists in Vermont. Billy was the only survivor. Then the bombing actually happens. Billy’s wife Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to visit Billy in the hospital. The war ends for Billy as the Germans flee the Russians
I am struggling to perform a linear read a chapter, note the theme and then write about it. So much so that I went to read what other people was saying about the chapters. The story jumps around so much that it is hard to draw any sort of direct correlation to a strong point.
Some of the analysis I read talked about things like Tralfamadorian theory and drawing analogies to Einstein with four dimensions (X, Y, Z plus time). There was also the very strong antiwar theme, that one seems obvious and is the one that I would pick overall. There is also a bunch of symbolism that is pretty heavily abstracted.
For instance, on analysis I read said that the bird at the end represents the nonsensical-ness of war. I suppose that because the bird is the last thing written and not a character in the book, then maybe I could buy that it does mean something. But there were other speculations where Billy’s hatred of the barbershop quartet was related to the faces of the singers versus the faces of the Germans when they first saw the destruction of Dresden. Have you ever seen the ‘Gilmore Girls’? The show is annoying enough but then when you have the random barbershop quartet interlude into your conversation, it is downright obnoxious. In my experience, a barbershop quartet can be wonderful or downright inappropriate.
I missed this when I read the previous chapter block, the significance of the title. Before I read the book, I made an assumption was the title was going to be something like five individuals participated in some sort of urban firefight. As it turns out, the title is actually the POW’s address. This comes up several times in Billy’s delusional dreams as he goes back and forth between being in the war and other random events in his life.
End Your Programming Routine: I am struggling to find meaningful, consistent themes so I am going to cut it here. I definitely have more to say next week and I don’t think I will be so blasé. Distinguishing a very non-linear story with a specific portion of the book makes it hard to pick appropriate anecdotes. So it goes.
December 21, 2023 – Winter Break Ahead
I am going to do something that I haven’t done with AltF4.co, I am taking a break. Tomorrow will be the last four chapters of Slaughterhouse – Five. I will still have my conclusion to the book next week as well because I want to end the book with the year. I have yet to decide, I may do some sort of year in review next week. The truth is I would like to, but it is a matter if I can find the time.
Other than that, I am going to break until January 2, 2024. I am tired and I need a little distance to recharge my batteries. Christmas season is hard because just one more thing is pretty much how it goes with everything. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will see you next Year.
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