Back to your regularly scheduled blog postings. I apologize for the break in the schedule but I was sidetracked on a work trip where I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Sorry, I have to get back to writing in my blog” at any point in the week. I’m trying to figure out how to set up Blogger to go into “Best of” mode when I know that I’ll be out (like preprogram some posts to launch at a given time) but until then at least know that I won’t stop posting without giving full warning. Given that I will at some point need to go on vacation and go off grid for a while, if just to restore my own sanity, this might be something to be aware of.
(Some people will view this next comment as random and others won’t but here is my review of Cirque du Soleil: I don’t think you can consider it a circus if no one is ever at risk of being mauled by a tiger.)
Anyway, so I spent a lot of time in planes and airports last week, which meant that I was able to finish Douglas Coupland’s latest book “jPod.” This is another in a line of good comeback books for Douglas as he is now back to his mid-nineties style. The book is about a group of computer programmers at an Electronic Arts like company and if you have ever spent any time in the IT industry the events in this book will be very familiar to you. Not all of them, but certainly the work environment is reminiscent of much of my previous life. Still, there are a few plot points worth discussing.
First, Douglas in this total meta move wrote himself into the novel as Douglas Coupland. With the Douglas character being a money grubbing, obnoxious, lying asshole. I’ve never seen an author take that tact with his own public persona, taking what a lot of people think of him and turning it up to eleven. The interesting thing is that it works and you start wondering if these are characters in a book who are self aware that they are characters in a book or if Douglas has just taken real events and slapped a “novel” label on them.
Also, at one point in the book he lists the first 100,000 digits of pi with one of the digits being wrong. I’m probably the only person who enjoys page after page of random digits sitting in the middle of a novel. Everything makes so much more sense when you read that list. (Oh, and yeah I found the wrong digit. It was so obvious.)
Finally, there is another line that will be in my .sig file for the next several years “The drivers of the new global economy are catchy ring tones, search engines and grocery store loyalty programs.” The incredible thing is I’m pretty sure he is right.
Otherwise, spent the weekend trying to get things back in order. Won another trivia contest but given that there was a Simpsons category it really wasn’t fair. “After the Ramones performed at Mr. Burns’ birthday party he ordered the band killed but named another band. What was the band?” No flower shop question though, which was a total bummer. Plus, it was Crawfish Fest this weekend so I got to sit down and listen to some zydeco with a big old plate of crawfish in front of me. That makes for a happy EC going into the work week.
The five random CDs of the week:
1) John Wesley Harding “Trad Arr Jones”
2) Trent Summar and the New Row Mob “Trent Summar and the New Row Mob”
3) Beth Orton “Central Reservation”
4) Robbie Fulks “South Mouth”
5) Jon Dee Graham “The Great Battle”
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