books

BOOKS


I know that most of you were pacing anxiously back and forth this weekend, your heart racing and your nipples hardening at the thought of a new Bison article on Monday. What newly rediscovered ancient wisdom will he have for us? What moronic activity have I engaged in that will meet his disapproval? Where can I send my next 10% of gross as a donation? I know not everyone is a serious reader. I realize not all of you regard books as a sacred mission rather than simply a tool. But today you get my blathering on several books, and by all the gods you will like it. As I was catching up this morning on my Web reading I was over at http://www.survalblog.com/ perusing the articles on e-book storage. All great advice. Quality CD-R rather than the cut rate bulk batch. EMP proofing, etc. But with all the redundant equipment being talked about, I wonder if it would actually be cheaper just to buy the paper books in the first place for your disaster reference library. Even stockpiling used notebook computers, once you factor in the solar panels and extra, dry batteries in storage for continued electric power, you are talking little if any savings. One step you might want to consider is taking all your e-books, mostly free, and then buying the best cost efficient ink printer you can find and printing them out. Perhaps even cutting and pasting out the less pertinent information so you only need to print a fraction of the advice ( a lot is filler to justify the high retail price ). That might be the cheapest way of all.

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I read the newest Stephen King book awhile back, I believe the middle of November, and then pretty much forgot all about it. “Under The Dome”. I donated the copy to the library since it was hardback and since it only cost me $9. Wal-Mart had a fit of insanity and shipped it to me at that low price no additional charge. I relished the idea of them losing money on the deal since they owe me for no longer being the one stop shopping I had come to love. I want restitution for gas money and my time. I figured someone had to give the library books because every time you see a story of them in the paper it is a huge donation for equipment, but never books. It’s a friggin library. Books should be what they are all about. I knew I wasn’t going to read the thing again anyway, so I made a desperately needed karma deposit. It was a good story. Not his best, but then a bad King is better than a lot of crap being passed as entertainment nowadays. It wasn’t really doomer fiction. Even though the premise is good, it was really all about people’s true nature coming out in a crisis. And not always good behavior resulted. It was a good book, it never bogged down ( like “The Stand”, which is one of the all time over valued end of the world books ever ). I read it as quick as I could since it held my interest well. But for doomer porn, nothing approaches his “The Mist”. Nobody seems to value this as a TEOTWAWKI book. It is about 40k words so technically a novella but I think of it as a book onto itself. It was sold alone, but also in a collection of his short stories. I think it is much better than The Stand, doomer wise. I’ve read it several times. The movie was pretty faithful to the book, but the end was a disappointment. Under The Dome is a good enough King book, but don’t get it for survivalist fiction.

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I just read “How To Survive 2012”. Good Christ On A Pogo Stick! What a laugh that was. I’m not sold on the Mayan Calendar End Times, so I didn’t expect to be persuaded. He uses a lot of math to convince you he is right, larding the text with plugs for his other books almost as much as I do. But setting aside all that, he really lost me with his nutrition advice. Since that book was never translated into English he generously gave us a quick overview. Only eat fruits, veggies and grains. Included were strict time schedules of when you had to eat what. It seems if you drank your fruit juice in the wrong sequence then End Times would come sooner. But, seriously, he claims any venereal disease can be cured by 16 days of fasting. Almost anything, it seems, can be cured by fasting. This guy is so full of crap with food, I can’t take his other claims seriously. What an idiot. My theory is that an American sailor on shore leave molested him as a boy and he hates all Americans now and is trying to kill us with his books. Think about it.

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“The Day After Roswell” is another book you don’t get to take seriously but to enjoy as an alternate theory. In one section, he gives the history of the computer. Starting around 1830 with Babbage. Then on to the original company that preceded IBM in 1890 with an electrical calculating machine ( for the census ). The advances before WWII. His point was that computers followed advance after advance, building on one another, until suddenly, overnight in 1947, a quantum advance from tubes to transistor. Impossible to achieve other than alien technology from the crashed UFO. Perhaps. I have my doubts, since it seems the book was merely a response to the popularity of The X-Files. Why wasn’t it published sooner? Anyway, not a bad alternate to conventional theories of technological advances. It should have been at least one hundred pages shorter, as it drags at times. But I liked it. A fun concept, an entertaining read.

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