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Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl jumped onto my list from the wife’s bookgroup. And I’m grateful. I didn’t love the book, yet it was a different read. I needed some fiction.

The ending startled me, but also disappointed me. I didn’t see it coming…which is fine. Yet the twist didn’t feel true to the fascinating character of the father, whose peripatic lifestyle always included his precocious daughter, even when all else was left behind. Hmmm.

I did find myself wondering whether each and every academic citation Pessl peppers the story with was real. I want to believe they are… but… I don’t know.

Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 is a book I own for one reason: my cousin’s picture is on the cover. He wrote one of the articles, and he provided the picture because one of the editors asked if he had any photos from that period. Turns out he did, and it fit what they wanted.

Last month, I finished the collection of articles from newspapers and magazines and books. They helped color the facts and narrative I learned a few weeks earlier in Vietnam, A History. I read many of the early articles over a few years, but last month I kept this volume on the top of the pile and read the last half of the collection in a rush.

Early in the chronological collection, James Michener covers the Kent State killings. In a pre-CSI time, Michener dissects the many divergent reports and does his best to explain what happened as best he can. A lot of detail to fill in the story behind Neil Young’s “four dead in Ohio” — this isn’t something I’d ever known beyond the headline.

The collection ranges from brief reports to an entire book, finishing with Michael Herr’s Dispatches. What a depressing, picturesque experience he shares.

I don’t think I’ll track down the earlier volume, which covered from 1959 to 1969, but I learned much from this volume.

Neal Stephenson’s website doesn’t even list The Cobweb as one of his works. The reason? It was originally published, in 1996, under his pseudonym Stephen Bury. But, after Quicksilver made him a NYTimes bestselling author, it was a no-brainer to re-publish under his real name. No mention of what Stephenson might be working on now…

I enjoyed the smart send-up of everything from agricultural grants to the politics of intelligence agencies. Set in the build-up to the first Iraq war — at the time, the only one we had… ahh, those were the days — The Cobweb has two unlikely heroes. Both Clyde Banks, an Iowa deputy, and Betsy Vandeventer, a CIA analyst, pick at the frayed edges of an Iraqi conspiracy and arrive at the unlikely truth: real WMDs, made in America, for use in Iraq. Banks saves the day, directly.

The first President Bush comes across as rather quick, here. His cameo in the book is fun. The book is a thriller, with its utter implausibilities… but I sped through it more quickly than any other book in recent months. You’ll enjoy it, too.

Thanks to the Internet, I know now that listed co-author J. Frederick George really is a separate person: Stephenson’s uncle!

Over the weekend, I pulled the boy’s loose tooth out. He asked me, and after watching him worry over this rotating incisor (top left) for days, I was glad to end the suspense. (And it didn’t hurt him.)

The hard part? Remembering to play the part of the tooth fairy. Fortunately, my better half delivered, and the magic continues.

Other than a few minutes a day on Setgame.com, finding his six sets, he doesn’t yet spend much time on the computer, or know about clock.

Let’s keep the tooth fairy our little secret a bit longer, OK?

I email myself things I want to look at later, and maybe blog. (I use del.icio.us more for work, and I’ve never spliced my feed for that reason.)

Problem is, my blog trails other interests, so the tasty tidbits pile up. Here’s a quick scoop from the 60 (!) possible links waiting in my personal inbox.

• In late August, the NYTimes captured a cultural shift with At a Family Gathering, an Internet Cafe Breaks Out: “Soon guests were positioning themselves to get dibs on one of the three computers in our Long Island house the way they would otherwise line up to jump in the shower.”
• David Pogue on product managers: “The product manager (P.M.) is an interesting beast, sort of a crossbreed: somebody who knows a lot about the product and its target audience, as the engineers and programmers do, but who’s also there to promote the product, as the P.R. people do.” One amusement: this is a re-run. Pogue was just excerpting one of his own past columns!
• Time to fill out my 15th anniversary report for college, leading into next spring’s reunion. Hmmm…
• I haven’t played Bloxorz, but it came recommended (don’t remember from whom).
• Kottke drew attention to a 1934 vision of information presentation and consumption which predates Vannevar Bush’s Memex. With a short video, describing the concept of the “televised book.”
• A 1996 video of Steve Jobs and John Lasseter with Charlie Rose. 23 minutes, about Pixar, and running while I finish this aggregation. Jobs was still running Next!
• Joe Clark shares his obsession with fonts in the Toronto subway.
• Six long bicycle trails without cars. Hope I can find time for one or more someday.
• Marc Andreessen gives his colleague Ben Horowitz a place to share his Counterpoint: Ben Horowitz on micromanagement, including “When hiring and when firing executives, you must therefore focus on strength rather than lack of weakness.”
• I’ve tried a few of these magazines for the iPhone, but it’s not that impressive.
• Screencast about Quicksilver: is it efficient to learn more about how to use efficiency tools? 😉
• Here’s the equivalent of e-cards from The Onion: someecards, such as this one. I haven’t found an “occasion” yet, but I look forward to the day.
• If you don’t follow indexed, you should. Here’s one reason why.
• David promised that he would catch me if I tried this trick.

Enough for tonight. Eight minutes more of Jobs and Lasseter from 1996 on Pixar.

Game Theory at Work: How to use game theory to outthink and outmanuever your competition by James Miller isn’t my usual brain candy. I asked for this book last Christmas, on a semi-whim, and got it as a gift. I read it last month.

Though written by economics professor James Miller, this book reads well. It’s not artful. You could call it Machiavellian except that it’s even more direct and honest about tactics than The Prince. Game Theory at Work is more a playbook than a strategy tome — and that was refreshing and more interesting. I can’t claim to have applied what I read yet, and business is more than a game. But there are moments… Miller has a blog, Adventures in Economics. Subscribed.

Side note: there’s a pretty impressive result on Google Books for this book. First time I’ve taken a look at this Google service in months. High utility value, which I love.

Amazon delivered my pre-ordered Spook Country by William Gibson some weeks ago, and I made time for it a few weeks ago. For Gibson, this book felt entirely too much in the present. Rather than a recognizable, but just slightly altered view of how the near future might present itself, Spook Country felt like right now.

I still enjoy some of the characters, especially the amalgam of cultures and ethnicities that Tito presents. Tito is a young member of an extended Cuban clan, trained by the KGB (or so it’s hinted) during its glory days. The family’s embrace of the “systema,” as they dub their fieldcraft, is fun to read and follow, with the most believable use of iPods ever.

By contrast, the former rock star/current journalist Hollis is more interesting for where she goes than who she is. And the other characters — even the ones I was sympathetic to — were colorfully drawn cutouts, not people. I like the mood and ambiguity of Gibson’s books, but this novel gripped me less than others he’s written.

After finishing these brief notes, I watched the video on the book page. I’ve never looked at Gibson before. He’s not how I imagined him. I also read Tim Bray’s review of the same book. I’d avoided his take earlier. Bray lives in Vancouver, where all the characters collide, so he has his own (ahem) Pattern Recognition. And, it seems, a stronger appreciation of this novel.

As to Gibson… he’s always have Neuromancer, even if it pains him to have all subsequent work compared to that wonderful burst of static noise.

The San Francisco summer (September) delivered another beautiful morning today. The Bridge to Bridge 12K race is a local fixture I’ve never run. Starting at the Ferry Building, the race has only one short, steep hill, as it stays along the water almost the entire race, finishing in the Presidio. The official results are not available yet, but my self-timed result was 47:00 (approx). I’m very pleased with that ~6:18 pace, although I’ll update with the official time when it appears.

Update Official results: 47:12.4 for 9th in the M30-39 age group, and 34th overall, out of 2294 in the race. Pace was actually just a shade under 6:20 per mile.

The miles were marked clearly for a bit and then…not so much. Here’s what I got:

• Mile 1: 6:21
• Mile 2: 6:27
• Mile 3: 6:30 (only hill on the course, up and then back down)
• Miles 4-6: 18:15 (all on Crissy Field, dead flat, turning at the Golden Gate Bridge)
• Mile 7-finish: 9:32

In my preparation for the race, I ran a 5:46 mile on the track this past Tuesday, as the final piece. The previous three miles were 6:20, 6:23, and 6:12. Stretching it out over 7+ miles worked pretty well today, so I’ll aim for the 10K this Thanksgiving Sunday.

I spent most of August carrying around Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow. I read snippets when I could, finally finishing around Labor Day, with the brief mention of the infamous helicopter evacuation of the last Americans from Saigon.

This is a popular, general history which doesn’t talk down to its readers. I learned much. Karnow does tell his readers about Vietnam, not just America’s role in the country’s tumult, though the focus is on the 1950s-1970s. Unlike Iraq, Vietnam has a cohesive history as a nation, although it’s not an unalloyed story of triumph. The division between North and South was the exception, not the rule.

The American presence in Iraq feels wrong because, like Vietnam, the war is disrupting our national self-image, our world presence, and our economy (and that last part does matter). Seeing that so many warned of the dangers of our involvement in Vietnam, it’s all the more tragic to watch us assume that our ability to change other people has improved. So many who supported America’s role in Vietnam at first learned the error of their ways…and yet we dragged on for years.

Read these words, from page 514, and replace one country name with another. This is from a report in October 1966 by Robert McNamara to President Johnson.

Worst of all, South Vietnam’s leadership and population were apathetic, corrupt and undisciplined, and there appeared to be no prospect of stirring them out of their torpor. “This important war must be found and won by the Vietnamese themselves. We have known this from the beginning. But the discouraging truth is that, as was the case in 1961 and 1963 and 1965, we have not found the formula, the catalyst, for training and inspiring them into effective action.”

We were in Vietnam until 1975, although the military mostly left in 1973 (aside from, ahem, the matter of bombing in Cambodia). Are we ready for another seven to ten years? (And Iraq doesn’t have the unified history that Vietnam could harken back to.)

I read the revised edition, updated in 1990 with additional interviews with some of the North Vietnamese participants who were unavailable before the initial publication in 1983. In high school, I saw some of the accompanying PBS series, as it was shown in the basement of the science center over several evenings. Thinking back, the visuals and storytelling there missed the mark with me. Now, after reading Karnow’s book, I’d take more away from the visual companion.

Metacritic condenses the reviews to an 85, quite high. I found The Bourne Ultimatum to be a worthy continuation of the character, but it’s not the best of the three (as many were saying).

A few notes…

First, the “edgy” camera techniques every time Bourne sprung into action spun me around a bit too often. I wanted to shout at someone occasionally “Just hold the damn camera steady!” If the technique intruded that much, they went too far. Appreciation was shaken into exhaustion.

Second, the female agent Nicky Parsons has the least vocal role imaginable in a thriller. The meaningful silence schtick? Carried way too far.

Third, the vicarious travel put James Bond and Harrison Ford movies to shame. Jumping from Moscow to Turin to Paris to London to New York to Madrid to Tangiers and then New York and probably a few spots I’m forgetting along the way = fun.

Fourth, the New York City car chase was nothing special, but the rooftop and alley ballet in Tangiers and the directed almost-escape from Waterloo Station in London captured full attention. The wife’s comment about the Waterloo scene? “My cell phone headset doesn’t stay in place that well, and I’m just driving a car.”

Fifth, the first Bourne book was the first Robert Ludlum I ever read, as a pre-teen, so it’s imprinted fairly well in my memory. The third book, though… can’t say that I remember it well enough to know just how far the movie Bourne has strayed from the printed page. I was impressed with the first film’s fidelity to the tenor of the book, despite obvious required liberties with the story. By now, I’m just watching the movie — which is a good thing.

I am not plugged in enough to know, but I can’t believe this is the last Bourne movie we’ll see.