Ah well, she thought, being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick up some of it as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

A lovely idea.

At this moment he noticed what seemed to be a damp, evil-smelling substance oozing under the door and into his office. A tremor ran down the treasurer’s spine. Suddenly a clock began to strike midnight and even this made him shudder. But his heart sank completely when he heard the sound of a latch-key being softly turned in the lock. Clutching his briefcase with damp, cold hands Rimsky felt that if that scraping noise in the keyhole were to last much longer his nerves would snap and he would scream. At last the door gave way and Varenukha slipped noiselessly into the office. Rimsky collapsed into an armchair. Gasping for air, he smiled what was meant to be an ingratiating smile and whispered : ‘God, what a fright you gave me. . . .’ Terrifying as this sudden appearance was, it had its hopeful side–it cleared up at least one little mystery in this whole baffling affair. ‘Tell me, tell me, quickly! . . .’ croaked Rimsky, clutching at his one straw of certainty in a world gone mad. ‘ What does this all mean? ” ‘I’m sorry,’ mumbled Varenukha, closing the door. ‘ I thought you would have left by now.’ Without taking his cap off he crossed to an armchair and sat down beside the desk, facing Rimsky. There was a p l uhuit gtlur ukursnu jtuukununuh uin trtsf r j sdjksdfsdfsdlgkj sdflkjsdf lksdjfsdfsdf

The last sentence notwithstanding, this is text from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a book that happens to be on my Amazon Wishlist.

Could this be my subconscious spamming me with reading suggestions?

I’m feeling a bit queasy now.

Book Burro is way better than any lookup script I have seen. And it looks like he’s working on a new feature for adding your own custom sources. Go get Book Burro now.

One of the choice weapons to be had in the game of Quake is the BFG, an acronym for, you guessed it, big fucking gun. And that is was. The BFG was so big and powerful that if you were to use it in close combat you could easily pulverize yourself along with your opponent. Don’t mess around with the BFG.

These days, FPS games are not among my hobbies. Becoming the protector of two small children has wiped clean any penchant for violence, pretend or otherwise. I’m pretty much a pansy now. But B.F.G. remains an acronym for virtual violence in my mind. So it was with great surprise I learned quite recently that the author Roald Dahl was a Quake fan. Or at least so it seemed considering he’d written a book called The BFG. Yet, seeing as how Dahl died in 1990, many years before Quake came into being, it didn’t seem likely that his book had much, if anything, to do with bad ass weapons.

In fact, it’s a book about a Big Friendly Giant (BFG), and it’s for children!

The BFG is guzlly and glumptious, absolutely scrumpdiddlyuptious. I’ve never before had so much fun stumbling over words in a book. The BFG has a vocabulary to silence the most natterboxy chidlers. Snozzcumbers and frobscottle and whizzpoppers, oh my! Read this book aloud to your five-year-old and she will think you’ve lost your mind.

It’s really quite an endearing story, too. The young orphan Sophie, plucked from her dormitory window by The BFG one night, learns the terrifying story of how nine other giants, massive ruffians all, spend their nights gobbling up “human beans” for fun and nourishment. The BFG, resolutely vegetarian and reduced to subsisting on loathsome snozzcumbers, gathers dreams and distributes them to sleeping children. Sophie and The BFG concoct a plan, which includes the Queen of England, to trap the nine evil giants and save the world from their nightly prowl. They successfully carry out their plan, with heroic little Sophie bringing down the beastly and frothsome Fleshlumpeater with a blow to his Achilles tendon. It’s brilliant and funny and fun.

Not all novels and chapter books for children are created equally. Some seem written in such a way as to make them nearly impossible to read aloud, often because of an extremely terse style. (Example: Judy crossed the room. She picked up the book. Put it in her backpack. “What’s that?” Scott asked. “A book,” said Judy.) Danny is, by comparison, a dream to read aloud. The language is rich and flows like a river full of rainbow trout. The characters are complex, funny, and interesting. And the story, a seemingly simple tale of a boy and his father, is rewarding in the extreme for fathers to read to their sons and daughters.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is, without the slightest doubt, the most marvelous and exciting story any father, or parent, could ever read to one’s child.

The not-so-subtle subtitle of his latest work of “non-fiction” is Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. In the book he predicts a bleak future for the planet and mankind. Either today, tomorrow, or the next day the world will reach its peak production of oil and, thus, begin a rapid and rapturous decent into chaos and ruin. The global economy, fueled by cheap and plentiful oil, will cease operation. The “drive-in utopia” of the American landscape will erode rapidly. Many businesses will close up shop, jobs will be lost, and an entire way of life will vanish. Civil unrest combined with rampant epidemic disease and malnutrition will severely cull the world’s population. It’s gonna get ugly, and fast.

In its place will rise a society much like pre-industrial Europe. Agriculture will be the principle industry, and it will be small-scale and intensely local. Those with useful skills, like farming, carpentry, and bread-making, will prosper. Working animals will be of great value. Materials with intrinsic value, like gold, will be used as currency. Feudalism isn’t out of the question.

Or not.

Predicting the future is hard. Really hard. Most of us like to think that we know what the future will bring. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and sometimes fearful and depressed. But most of the time we’re really bad at predicting the future of really big things, like the fate of mankind. Kunstler isn’t any better than the rest of us in making predictions, he just has a lot to say about it, and he’s exceptionally good at saying it. The trouble is, he takes it too far. The Long Emergency includes a fair number of footnotes citing sources. Unfortunately, a lot of his sources tend to be fellow “peakers” who long ago sealed our fates when they saw how soon the oil will run out. (Aside: yes, the oil is going to run out sooner-or-later. Kunstler believes it to be sooner than we think and sooner than we’re prepared for it to happen, thus, the gloom and doom. Some believe we will hit peak production this decade or the next, others believe we’ve already peaked. No one knows for sure.) His other sources often include magazine articles written by journalists. He rarely goes after the primary studies glossed over in these articles. It weakens his argument to not dig deeper. And he’s prone to exaggeration. In the chapter titled “Nature Bites Back: Climate Change, Epidemic Disease, Water Scarcity, Habitat Destruction, and the Dark Side of the Industrial Age,” he really reaches the extent of his knowledge when he discuses the unusually cool summer of 2003 in the Northeast:

For instance, while Europe broiled in the summer of 2003, the northeast United States breezed through an eerily cool summer, with few days over 90 degrees all season. An altered jet stream pattern prevented southerly air from penetrating the Northeast. In fact, on one of the very few torrid days that whole summer, August 14, a surge in demand for air conditioning took down the electric grid in the Northeast.

In fact, the conditions of the blackout of August 14, 2003, were a lot more complex than a few people cranking up their air conditioners. You can find a great deal of information regarding the blackout on the Dept. of Energy’s website, where even a casual glance gives you ample reason to distrust Kunstler. And this is but one small example of the type of jumping-to-conclusions that Kunstler is given to. The net effect of all these little simplifications is the overall dismantling of his thesis. His persuasiveness loses its power.

The final blow for me, which led me to dismiss most of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that had been boiling up inside me as I read The Long Emergency, was near the end of the book (p. 296) where he describes, in gross detail, what living in the long emergency will be like. It would seem the only part of the continental U.S. that stands a chance of a near-term positive outcome is The Pacific Northwest, which happens to be the part of the country in which I live. He considers the climate “very favorable” and rich in agricultural land. We have lots of water. Large urban areas, such as Seattle and Vancouver, will suffer the vicissitudes of scarcity, but otherwise things are looking up for rural and small town Cascadia. Except for one thing, pirates! Aaarrr, that’s right me hearties, our vast unprotected coastline is simply asking for molestation “by military or paramilitary seaborne adventurers originating from the far side of the Pacific rim.” It’s the plank for us, for sure.

I’ll tell you, the day I see Asian pirates attacking Alki Beach is the day I eat this book.

While I wait, I will have to catch up on the mountain of periodicals that have accumulated on my bedside table over the last two months.

See more progress on: Read the “Baroque Cycle” in its entirety

See more progress on: Read the “Baroque Cycle” in its entirety