Author: eboisen

This book is pretty well written – given the subject matter.  This is not something that you can’t put down, but it does a very good job of explaining how arguments are formed in a legal setting.  Many times these methods also work in a non-legal setting.  I have a few years experience working as a law clerk in Chicago, so I have some familiarity with how legal arguments are framed.  This book may be more eye-opening for someone who is not as familiar with how lawyers argue cases.  I would recommend this to a high school student on a debate team or someone who has law school in his or her future.

This book concentrates entirely on forming arguments.  It does not talk about how to present yourself before the court.  I could see it helping a recent undergraduate prep for a legal writing class.  I definitely give this book a thumbs up for properly explaining what it sets out to explain, but it likely has a narrow audience of people who will find it intriguing.

I recently placed an order with Onnit for some supplements and received this book as a free gift.  It was a pretty easy read and contained lots of useful information.  It discusses nutrition, exercise, supplementation, meditation, and attitude.

I have been following trends in training and nutrition for about 40 years. There wasn’t much regarding exercise and nutrition that was new to me. This book would likely be very beneficial for someone who is new to fitness and nutrition, but if you have been training and keeping up with supplementation for a while, the book may not give you much. The first chapter outlines a drink consisting of lemon juice, water, and Himalayan sea salt. This is meant to rehydrate and get your mind and body ready for the day. I was already drinking this long before I read this book. I was working out in the heat for much of my free time this past summer and came up with this drink to keep myself hydrated. It is far healthier than a sugar-laden “recovery” drink. The book also suggests getting this concoction in your body before you consume any caffeine. The theory is that you probably wake up somewhat dehydrated, so consuming caffeine, which tends to dehydrate, first thing in the morning is not a good idea.

The part of the book that I found the most beneficial was the section that talked about meditation and attitude. I had previously meditated regularly when I first got into martial arts. This section did not really tell me anything new, but it did remind me of the benefits and motivated me to resume the practice.

Attitude is something I definitely need to work on. I know that a good attitude leads to good things, but I fear that I have let some of the negative aspects of the last decade of my life spoil my appreciation of the good things that have also happened during this time. This book has reminded me to work on being more grateful. I am trying to be more mindful of what is right rather than what is wrong.

I also need to mention that the language in this book is a little atypical. It can be a little rough in spots. I am not sure why. It did not help get any points across. I guess the author wanted to appear to have an “edge”? It did not really bother me, but it may alienate some readers. I certainly do not see the rough language attracting any reader, so I do not see the point. Fifty shades of supplementation and training? Anyhow, if you are fairly new to fitness and supplementation and don’t mind a little coarse language, this is a pretty decent book. It contains good information and it is easy to follow.

I have been using Duolingo for the past 18 months in an effort to learn Italian.  I came to the conclusion, that after about a year, Duolingo by itself is nothing but an exercise in frustration.  I made good progress for the first 12 months.  I felt that my vocabulary increased steadily and I was able to piece together the gist of most conversations I heard.  After a year, however, lessons starting taking me way too long.  Before the year mark, I was normally getting about 70-90% of my daily lessons  correct the first time through and would finish three lessons in about 15-20 minutes.  After a year I started getting maybe 30% of my lessons correct the first time through and three lessons were taking 45 minutes.  Getting most questions wrong for days on end is not good for one’s psyche.  I was not feeling like I was learning anything after a certain point.

There are several problems with Duolingo.  The first is that there is no explanation of why something is right or wrong in how grammar rules apply.  This is very difficult for a native English speaker.  English does not apply a gender to its nouns.  Italian and many other languages do.  English just uses the word “the” in front of a noun.  (Like the bus, the comb, or the fork).  In many languages, the equivalent of “the” depends on the gender of whatever item you are talking about.  Verbs that act on nouns also change based on the gender of the noun.  This is never explained by Duolingo.  I know some German, so I am somewhat familiar with this concept, but it is still very confusing without some sort of explanation as to how these grammatical rules apply.  Duolingo gives no explanations of any sort.

The other problem, which really baffles me, is that after 18 months of three lessons a day, the user has not been taught to count to ten???  I took German for two years in high school.  I also studied some Spanish and Korean.  I know how to count to ten in all these languages despite giving a fraction of the effort to Korean and Spanish that I have to Italian with Duolingo.  They start teaching counting after 16 months and then they mix numbers into sentences that I usually have trouble constructing if the numbers were not in there.   And they don’t just mix in numbers, they mix in equivalents to first, second, and third, for example, without first teaching one, two and three.  Every method I have ever seen teaches student to count early in their learning.  I used to enjoy learning a little Italian every day.  For the last 6 months I have absolutely despised it.  I used do lessons seven days a week.  I found myself using “weekend amulets” to avoid weekend lessons.  I lost all joy in learning Italian.

Today I realized that I am not going to learn much if I hate something.  I uninstalled Duolingo after 18 months of nearly three lessons a day.  I have installed Memrise.  Hopefully this will bring back some of the enthusiasm for learning I had when I started.  If you want to learn a new language, Duolingo definitely helps with vocabulary, but learning sentence construction will require something else.  Hopefully Memrise helps.

Update:

I tried Memrise for a while and found it too simplistic.  It is nice that it uses real people saying words and phrases, but I guess I was farther along than I thought.  I have re-installed Duolingo, but limit myself to one lesson a day.  I find that it is having me do more refresher lessons now.  Maybe I was going to fast.  I find that it is fun again at this pace.  I ask native Italian speakers and do Google searches if a concept is not explained by Duolingo.  It is a free app.  Maybe I was expecting a little too much of it.

 

I just recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.  It was an incredibly interesting read.  I read the book partly because of Ashton Kutcher’s movie Jobs, in which he he portrayed Steve Jobs.  Jobs’ life seemed very interesting, and I wanted to learn more.  Kutcher did a great Job in the movie, but the movie did not do that well critically.  I now think I know why. While Kutcher did a great job looking and acting like Jobs, the movie omitted so many facts about his life, that it probably hurt the film’s credibility.  In fairness to the movie, which I found enjoyable before reading the book, it is limited to a couple of hours. The book is nearly 600 pages.  In my experience, 200 pages is usually enough for a feature-length film. This would mean an accurate portrayal would take five or six hours.  No one is going to make that movie. There were many facts of about Jobs’ life omitted from the movie, however, that I thought should have been included.
Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985.  Immediately following this he starts NeXT computer and puts considerable time and effort into it.  It is largely a failure, but an operating system that is developed for it ends up later to be his foot in the door back to Apple.  He ends up selling NeXT to Apple, effectively doubling his $50 million investment in it when Apple is desperate for a new operating system.

Jobs also starts Pixar during his exile from Apple. This created more wealth for Jobs than when Apple first went public.  Steve Jobs is very much responsible for saving Disney’s animation business with Pixar.  A Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monster’s Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars were largely created independently of Disney. These were Pixar’s films right out of the gate. Disney distributed these films, but Pixar created them.  Disney had very little success with animated movies in the 1980’s and although it created some very profitable animated movies in the 1990’s, it also had many duds. For every Aladdin and The Lion King there was The Rescuers Down Under, A Goofy Movie, and Ducktails.  Pixar was creating nothing but blockbusters that were also loved by critics.  Disney got smart and eventually bought Pixar in 2006. This deal gave Jobs 7% of Disney’s stock – a whopping $3.9 billion worth and made him Disney’s biggest shareholder at the time.

It says a lot about Jobs that he went back to a failing Apple after he had created immense success at Pixar.  He was running both Pixar and Apple in 1996.  He believed this may have cost him his life.  Why work that hard when you have billions of dollars?  Apple created the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad upon his return.  Jobs initially returned to Apple as the interim CEO, or iCEO.  He did not intend on staying.  I believe the “i” in all the Apple products comes from this.  He ended up staying until just months before his death in 2011.  He battled cancer for half of his second tenure at Apple.  He did some great things in this time, but was it worth it?

Apple saved the music industry with iTunes.  Most music was being pirated when iTunes came out. He convinced people to pay for their music again and they, in return, got a promise of quality and good karma.  It is almost incredulous that it worked.  For anyone who downloaded music 1999-2002, it did not appear that anyone would ever pay for music again.

For some reason the thing that sticks with me most about Steve Jobs is the Font.  Everyone takes it for granted, but if Steve Jobs had not gone overboard insisting that the original Mac had multiple fonts, I do not believe they would be as pervasive as they are on modern computers.  When Jobs did this, he must have appeared like a madman to his colleagues.  People had just recently been given the ability to type on a keyboard and see the corresponding characters appear on a screen.  Steve Wozniak’s Apple II design was the first computer to do this in 1977.  Now in 1979, engineers are going to spend inordinate amounts of time just to add the ability to choose the font that is displayed?  The time, money , and processing power sacrificed to create multiple fonts, at Jobs’ insistence, probably looked insane to everyone at Apple.  I believe it was things like this that got him ousted.  Looking back, however, the fact that the original Mac had multiple fonts, forced Microsoft and everyone else to include multiple fonts.  He injected calligraphy, or art, into early computing.  Who knows, decades later, how much this quirky little choice has impacted the world?  I am guessing greatly.

This is the fourth Vonnegut novel I have read.  It centers around a womanizing, but married Vietnam vet living in a post-war apocalyptic America.  His town is run almost entirely by Japanese corporations whose imported workforce does not mingle with the locals.  As with many Vonnegut novels, the scenes jump back and forth between past and present.  Vonnegut does this effortlessly.  Many authors would leave their readers too confused to follow along with his frequency of time travel.  The plot, however, seems kind of inconsequential throughout.  I never felt invested in any character or situation, but it was, oddly enough, fun to read.  The main character, Euguene Hartke, lives life as it comes.  He is often very fortunate or very unfortunate in his circumstances at different points in his life and the book seems to show that nothing he has done has influenced this.  Life seems to be one big crap shoot.  There are little political and social comments throughout the work that force a smile every few pages.  In the end the book seems to illustrate that it, just like life, has no purpose other than to try and appreciate it. I can only liken it to a psychedelic Seinfeld episode.

Apt pupil is another novella from Stephen King’s Different Season’s.  The book contains four novellas, so I have now read all four.  I was originally only planning on reading Shawshank Redemption and The Body because I saw both of their film adaptations and knew they did not seem likely to give me night terrors.

Apt Pupil definitely has its creepy moments, but I have come to realize that written descriptions are far more palatable than visual portrayals.  The book centers around Todd.  Todd is an all-American boy growing up in California.  He has been blessed with above-average looks, maturity, and intelligence.  Most would consider these traits blessings, but his intelligence and maturity seem to assist his decent into depravity.  The book is set in the 1970’s when some of the most despicable former Nazi leaders from World War II are still scattered around the globe with false identities.  Todd, an eighth grader at the start of the story, is fascinated with Nazis.  His hobby is researching and learning about every detail of their gruesome experiments and mass killings.  In doing research, he notices that Mr. Denker, an elderly man who lives in town, has a very strong resemblance to  a former concentration camp officer by the name of Kurt Dussander.  He gathers information until he is certain he has found the “blood fiend of Patin”.   In the book, Patin is referred to as a Nazi concentration camp in Poland.  Stephen King uses the name “Patin”, but it was presumably modeled after Mittelstein, which had a nearby aviation parts factory named “Patin” which likely utilized slave labor.

Todd pursuades Dussander to admit his true identity, and in exchange for Todd not revealing him to the world, forces Dussander to “entertain” him with death camp stories.  Todd even buys Dussander an SS costume uniform and forces him to wear it.  Eventually Dussander grows fond of the uniform and wears it when he has trouble sleeping.  Dussander had long ago abandoned his former life when he meets Todd.  Over the course of a few years, Todd re-awakens the “Nazi” in Dussander who begins murdering local winos he lures into his home with promises of a hot meal and a shower.  Despite appearing to be a model student-athlete by the end of high school,  Todd also becomes corrupted and takes up similar behavior.

One night Dussander has a heart attack while digging a grave in his crawlspace.  He calls Todd for help cleaning up his crime scene.  Dussander is admitted into the local hospital where he shares a room with a patient that has just broken his back falling from a ladder.  The broken back, represents the final straw in a man’s life that has seen most of his family taken from him earlier in his and life has taken away his belief in God.  The patient is soon revealed to be a former Patin prisoner.  He sees that God acts in very mysterious ways, recognizes Dussander, and contacts the authorities.  Dussander, knowing he has been discovered, makes his way to the hospital’s drug supply and poisons himself.

Todd is a very smart boy, but the detective handling the Dussander case is able to connect the dots.  He knows that Todd knew who Dussander was and suspects that Todd participated in some of the local murders.  In the end, Todd, the charming, all-American, salutatorian überkind, goes berserk with his rifle until he is killed by police.

I very much enjoyed all of the novellas in Different Seasons.  I am, however, going to switch to something a little more light-hearted for my next book.  I have started on Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus.  I believe Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author.  In the appendix of Stephen King’s On Writing, there is a section on recommended books.  Hocus Pocus is one of them.

 

In my last post I stated that I had read The Body by Stephen King and that I was going to watch the movie Stand by Me, which is based on it.  I found the movie on Amazon.  It seems like Netflix never has any of the old movies I am looking for.  Oh well, thanks Amazon!  I was happy to see that it was offered in HD.  The movie was made in 1986, but you weren’t given a hint of it’s age by watching it.   I am always amazed at how the Stephen King film adaptations use dialogue directly from the book.  No wonder he is so popular with film makers – he writes a great story and he also does the script!  The only really notable deviation of the film from the book is that in the movie Chris is the only one of Gordie’s friends that dies by the end of the movie.  In the book, Gordie, only 34 by the end of the book, is the only one to make it to the final chapter.  This does not effect the story much.  Some other minor deviations:

In the book, there is a scene with a shopkeeper that tries to rip Gordie off by  putting his finger on the meat scale and also short him on his change.  Gordie still goes to the shop in the movie, but the shopkeeper does not do anything that appears to be dishonest.  The book also has Gordie firing a .45 at Ace’s feet as he wades through swampy water.  This does not happen in the movie.  All this is fairly inconsequential.

If you have not seen Stand By Me, or you have not seen it in a long time, it is definitely worth watching.  It is one of Meathead’s (Rob Reiner’s) early directing efforts.  Rob Reiner is one a heck of a director.

With The Body finished, I ventured into one of the other novellas in Stephen King’s Different Seasons.  The story was called The Breathing Method.  I am really hesitant to explain too much of the story because I investigated it before I read it and learned of the ending before I read the story.  I was doing so to try to avoid reading something too creepy before bedtime.  Knowing the ending, however, kind of ruined it for me.  I will not reveal the ending and I suggest you do not look it up if you intend to read the story.

Set in the 1930’s, the story follows David, an aging attorney in a large Manhattan law firm.  David follows a plain, uneventful life.  Despite his age, he is not a partner.  One day, one of the senior partners of the firm invites him to an after-hours event on short notice.  David is apprehensive to go, but sees no options.  He attends and finds that it is a recurring event in the bottom floor of a Manhattan building where everything appears to be one-of-a-kind.  From the furnishings to the endless bookcases filled with the works of authors and publishers that do not seem to exist anywhere else.

The main point of this event and the recurring ones is the telling of great stories.  One is told by an old medical doctor who tells the story of a lovely young unwed woman who enters his office looking for help with her pregnancy.  She comes into the office long before it is obvious that she is pregnant and she makes regular monthly visits for check-ups.  The doctor was a general practitioner, but was very fond of delivering babies and devised a breathing method to assist women with their deliveries.   His new patient becomes a star pupil.  She takes to this breathing method and practices it religiously throughout the pregnancy.  In the end, the method really proves to deliver.  Oddly enough, for completely unrelated reasons, while I was reading this, my girlfriend took up the practice of doing meditative breathing exercises for five minutes prior to bed every evening.  This seemed to give additional realism to the story.  As far as Stephen King creepiness is concerned, the story is completely harmless until the very ending, at which point it is not.  I have been told that this story is going to be released as a feature film in 2020.

As explained at the end of my last post, The Body is a novella by Stephen King assembled into a collection of novellas named Different Seasons.  This story was fairly long for a novella.  If another couple of scenes were added, it could have filled out a 250 page novel.  It’s pretty hard to discern fact from fiction in this novel.  It is well known that Stephen King witnessed a friend of his get killed by a train as a youth.  There definitely seem to be elements of this event sprinkled into The Body.

The story follows a group of four 12 year-old boys through an adventure toward the tail end of summer.  They learn that a classmate’s body has been found after being hit by a train.  The body is initially discovered by an older brother and friend of one of the boys in the group.  The older brother and friend are afraid to reveal that they located the body because they found it while driving around in a stolen car.  The body is quite a distance from the boys’ neighborhood.  The adventure covers the boys’ thirty, or so, mile trek along the train tracks to find the body and hopefully, some notoriety.

The plan starts with all the boys asking their parents’ if they can camp out for the night in a friend’s field.  They setup a fake camp site complete with tent and lit flashlights and head out with sleeping mats in tow.  Their journey to find the body will take the better part of two days.

During the story the dis-function of each of the boy’s family is explained.  None are from great environments.  The main character, Gordie, who appears to be a young Stephen King, has the best upbringing of the group, but his family is troubled by the unexpected death of Gordie’s older brother.  Neglected by his distraught parents, Gordie narrates much of the story.  Gordie is revealed to become a famous author later in the story.  This is a primary reason for my suspicions that Gordie is a young Stephen King.

Stephen King does a great job of describing of the characters.  He provides just enough of the “essence” of the character’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and history to allow the reader to vividly fill in the rest.  I think this is key to much of his work.  Readers make the story somewhat “their own” by the way he creates characters and settings using just the essence of their characteristics.

There is a scene where the boys are camped out for the night and Gordie tells the story of “Lard ass Hogan”.  It is about a big chubby kid that turns a small town’s pie-eating contest into a barf-O-rama to get revenge on his fat-shaming tormentors.  I read this portion on a plane and had trouble not laughing out loud.

In the end the group of boys find the body, but decide not to report it.  The boys did a great deal of bonding during their adventure, but grow apart as they get older.  It is revealed that only Gordie makes it into his 30’s.  Memories of those few days with his friends stay with him forever.

This is a great story and it is prompting me to find the movie (Stand by Me)  on Netflix or Amazon to watch it again.

 

 

I enjoyed Stephen King’s book On Writing so much that I looked for something else from him.  Preferably something that is not creepy.  This was not a full novel, but a novella.  It is part of a collection of novellas entitled Different Seasons and bound into one book.  This novella was made into the film The Shawshank Redemption.  I loved the movie.  It has been a long time since I have seen it, but I do not remember it being creepy, so this looked like a good place to start.

After about 20 pages I was hooked.  The main character, Andy, is a successful banker.  His cheating wife and her lover are murdered.  The police believe Andy did it.  They do not have much in the way of evidence other than a strong motive and the lack of a solid alibi from Andy.  Andy, in fact, had nothing to do with the murders.  He is the victim of some very unfortunate circumstances and a very flawed judicial process.  It is not really explained, but for some reason Andy testifies at his trial.  This almost never happens in reality because it rarely has a good outcome for the defendant and the defendant cannot be compelled to testify at his own murder trial.  Anyway, he is convicted  and wrongly sent to prison.

Having the appearance and many of the mannerisms of a typical banker is not generally helpful in a prison population.  Throughout the beginning of Andy’s residency in the prison, he is regularly sexually assaulted by a group of its most depraved inmates.  He eventually gains the favor of the “screws” (prison guards) and the warden by helping them with various legal and illegal financial matters.  This eventually gains him extra privileges and protection  which eventually keeps him safe from the prison’s miscreants.

Well into his stay, another inmate recounts a story of another inmate in another institution.  This inmate brags about killing a man and a woman.  The murder matches the one Andy has been sentenced for very closely.  Andy attempts to have the warden look into it, but this just pisses the warden off.   The warden has enjoyed Andy’s help on many shady dealings, and has no desire to see him as a free man.  Andy protests and is punished until he realizes that no justice will be given to him.  He appears to fall, “back in line,” as a model inmate to appease the warden.  All the while, for 27 years, I believe, he is implementing a plan for escape.  He burrows through his cell wall with a rock hammer and then squirms through 500 yards of disgusting sewer pipe to freedom.  This is where the movie differs somewhat from the book.  In the movie Andy sends incriminating evidence of the warden’s illegal activity to the local media, picks up large sums of money from local bank accounts, and heads off to Mexico to live a new life.  He is then joined there by his longtime prison friend who is paroled after Andy escapes.  In the book Andy does not leave anything to indict the warden.  The warden does, however, leave the prison embarassed and broken by Andy’s escape.  I liked the movie’s ending better, but I loved both.   There is one more story in this book that does not seem too creepy.  It is called The Body.  The title sounds creepy, but it was turned into the movie Stand by Me.  It also was a very good movie and not too creepy.  I will start on that next.

I have never read a Stephen King novel before this one.  I have never been big on horror for entertainment and have noticed a stronger aversion to it as I have aged.  Life itself has provided me with more than ample horror.  I have no desire to supplement it, but I figure that there has to be something about Stephen King’s writing, beyond the subject matter, that has made him so prolific.  I really wanted to understand his methods.  

This book is a very easy read.  He starts it off with several stories about his childhood and upbringing.  It is very captivating, but after a while, I was wondering when he was going to talk about writing.  Stephen King believes that one should write what one knows about.  This includes what may be learned from his or her upbringing.  I began to understand his point and saw how I might apply this concept.  He provides stories from early childhood all the way to when the book was written.

His writing style seems effortless, but he reveals the work he puts into it.  He has methods for setting time aside (which mirrors a previous book I read – The War of Art) for writing.  He outlines the type of setting he does his best work in and when to start marking up a first draft – it’s a strict six weeks after completion.  No more, no less.  He also urges the reader to read and write often – every day, in fact.

The only grammatical thing he really touches on is the adverb.  He does not like adverbs and he feels that your reader will not like them either.  My biggest takeaways from the book were to write what you know and provide just enough detail describing people and things to give the reader the ability to fill in everything else.  His physique resembled a walrus in a tank top.  The previous sentence is an example of being descriptive, but without burying the reader in details.  Each reader will likely have a slightly different, but very vivid image of this unfortunate character’s appearance and won’t be bored with an overly detailed description.  It helps to keeps the story moving.

This was a really good book.  It is worth a read even if you have no intention of becoming a writer.  I really appreciate that Stephen King took the time to do this.  There are very few authors that have gained an audience as large as his, and even fewer that have given a glimpse as to how it was done.  As time goes on, this may be looked at as one of his most important works.  I am also happy to report that his methods should translate quite well to all fiction writing, not just horror.  He just appears to be writing what he knows.