Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce, just announced the release of the new book she’s been putting together, Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy). It’s a book of essays by several of her good friends (some of whom I read regularly), about fatherhood from the perspective of fathers, wives, daughters and sons.

I’ve written two of the 17 essays, one about my father and one about Jon. A few weeks ago I gave my father an advance copy of the book with the hope that he would read what I had written, but I didn’t say anything to him other than HERE IS MY HEART AND SOUL, DO WITH IT WHAT YOU WILL. I found out a week later that he had taken it home and used it to prop up a wobbly toilet. I like to think that I improved his life by those two inches.

I’m totally going to pick this one up.

My favorite author goes head to head with Stephen Colbert.

Hit play or view it on Comedy Central’s site.

Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, the new book by Julian Dibbell is now available.

Julian’s goal was to earn more money selling imaginary goods (ie. online gaming goods) than from his “real job” as a professional writer. He came up short of his goal by only a few hundred dollars and, though I haven’t read it yet, I understand the book documents the entire endevour from day 1.

In addition to bookstores selling his book, Play Money will also be available in the virtual world of Second Life (in the currency of that world—Linden dollars).

From the press release:

In-game versions of Play Money designed by Second Life coder/publisher Falk Bergman are available for L$750. These copies can be signed by Dibbell at his in-Second Life interview with journalist Wagner James Au on July 27th. For the Second Life resident who needs something a bit more tactile, L$6250 buys a real-life copy of Play Money, shipped with care to the buyer’s real life address, in addition to the standard in-game version.

(At the time of this press release, Linden dollars are trading at approximately L$300.00 to the US$1.00. Adjusted to US dollars, an online copy costs US$2.50, and the price of a real-life copy bought in-game is around US$20.85.)

I’ve previously written about Julian’s professional gameplaying.

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review on Charles Tilly’s new book “Why”, I had one of those eureka moments in tracing back and understanding the deterioration of an old relationship. I hope you’ll glean some insight as well.

Though I haven’t read it, Gladwell summarizes the book’s breakdown of the types of reason-giving we give into four categories: conventions (social formulae), stories (common sense narratives), codes (legal formulae) and technical accounts (specialized stories). Depending upon the type of reason we give, we run into trouble because of the unspoken message that is sent by our choice.

Imagine, he says, the following possible responses to one person’s knocking some books off the desk of another:

1. Sorry, buddy. I’m just plain awkward.
2. I’m sorry. I didn’t see your book.
3. Nuts! I did it again.
4. Why did you put that book there?
5. I told you to stack up your books neatly.

The lesson is not that the kind of person who uses reason No. 1 or No. 2 is polite and the kind of person who uses reason No. 4 or No. 5 is a jerk. The point is that any of us might use any of those five reasons depending on our relation to the person whose books we knocked over. Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—“Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions.

As I usually do with Gladwell’s writing, I highly recommend you check out this article, “HERE’S WHY“.

Sumo wrestlers are to teachers as real estate agents are to Ku Klux Klan members—or at least these are a couple of ideas put forth by the book I got for Christmas, “Freakonomics”. The book makes some startling connections between seemingly incongruent situations.

Economist Steven Levitt and journalist/contributor to the New York Times Magazine Stephen Dubner’s have co-authored this much talked about book from 2005. I’ve been devouring it in my spare time and I’m loving every page. It’s hard to describe exactly what the book is about because the most unifying theme one can identify within it, is that using statistics you can disprove a lot of conventional thinking.

I’m just about finished it, but in the meantime I have also been enjoying some of their other writings, both at the Freakonomics Blog and as guest posters on Google’s Blog. I have to wonder, what would Levitt do if he had access to Google’s information? Seems like there is a whole other book there waiting to be written.

If you enjoyed my previous recommendation of Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, then I definitely think you should check out Freakonomics. Oh, and if you’re interested, the chapter excerpts will give you a little taste as to how sumo wrestlers are similar to school teachers.

I spent Wednesday evening with a really nice couple, the McNabb’s, talking about everything from webpage advice to antique reading lamps.

One of the things I really liked learning about was the husband’s experience with the banking industry. He is a banking consultant and even wrote a book on how to deal with banks, “The Bank and You … A Survival Manual“. It was published in 1986 and became a best-seller. Though it might seem to be getting a little old now, he explained that most of the information is still relevant.

He shared his reasons for writing the book, which are summarized nicely in the preface,

“The Banks and You…A Survival Manual has been written to assist the reader in knowing what banking today is all about. A concern I do have at this time is that banks appear to be leaning on their own staff, and if they do this and get away with it, what in the world is going to stop them from leaning on their customers?”

He goes on to say that the book was started at a time when they were “locked out of [their] business”.

“The book was originally started as a hate book and entitled How to Screw Your Banker before He Screws You! After we won the war with our bankers, I decided this book was very much needed, and the hate tones were immediately dispensed with.”

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the book delves into topics like:

• banker intimidation
• how bankers treat women
• the lies that bankers tell and how to protect yourself
• cultivating a relationship with your banker
• whether on not to take the loan
• signs of a pending banker - client breakdown
• what to do if you go out of business
• handling bankruptcy

The book also shares his own story of how he and his wife were able to turn things around pay back their loans for less than $.05 on the dollar.

He gave me a copy and I’m looking forward to reading it; I think it could be very insightful.

I also liked chatting with him about the process of publishing a book because I’ve got a little idea for a book that I’ve been sitting on for the last few years. Some of the things he told me were the names of people in the publishing industry, how to get an ISBN number and how to promote a book. Perhaps this new information will get me going on it again.

Oh and one last thing, the photo on the back made me smile because he no longer looks like that at all.

Kevin Kelly over at Cool Tools has a review on Behind Bars: Surviving Prison. I found the excerpts to be very interesting. It’s the kind of stuff you’d want to read before you, or someone you know was headed for the big house. Even if you’re not, it’s still interesting.

I finished the book that Anna left for me to read, “Middlesex” this morning. What a great novel! She sure knows how to pick them.

“‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license…records my first name simply as Cal.’
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, ‘Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.’”

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one of the most realistic seeming fictional books I’ve ever encountered, I highly recommend reading Middlesex.

A seemingly impossible thing happened today. The painting I’ve been thinking about doing for months now, finally happened. But that’s not the impossible thing.

I decided to read some more of Anna’s book, “Middlesex”, while I waited for the primer to dry. It’s one of those books where you can’t wait to get back to it, but at the same time you dread the fact that you’re racing through it so fast that soon it will be over. Suddenly there came a rustling from the other side of the house. It sounded like someone was on the stairs. Must’ve been the toilet just topping itself up, I thought to myself.

I had a roommate about a year ago that believed someone or something haunted this house. How silly I thought, it’s just an old house; old houses creak and twist under their own weight. It’s probably just the wind.

The toilet moaned again. Or was it? I knew that my house is 100% apparition free. There are no such things as hauntings, there is always a reasonable explanation. Another pause, then more noises. I put my book down and peered down the hallway. There was nobody in my house - this I knew because both the doors were locked. Shuffling in the living room. Oh !@#%&.

“Hello?” I ventured, “Is anybody there?” I knew I would feel silly after I discovered the obviously logical explanation, but nervously I grabbed a chair to defend myself against whatever interloper happened to be in my home.

As I rounded the corner, there in my living room was a small terrified bird feeling trapped inside this old house. She smashed herself against the glass terrified of what I might do to her. I opened the door and the small creature set herself free. Goodbye my little bird, I said as the beautiful sparrow flew into the sky. I have no idea where that bird came from.

Having such a visitor is supposed to be a good omen; a signal that something good is about to happen to me. It reminded me of someone else I used to call “My Little Bird” and whom I also set free. Of course if she ever wanted to visit me she would be totally welcome, because she’s my best friend.

The suspicious man from a few days ago approached me again today. This time he was alone, but again he asked me what time it was. I told him I thought it was weird that he kept asking me for the time and that he should stop asking, especially since he has a watch. I knew his watch worked, but it’s not polite to just accuse someone of outright lying, so I tried to catch a glimpse of what time he actually had.

He told me that he “forgot…” (was he implying he forgot how to read it? I’m not sure) which really isn’t the case because when I tried to look at his watch to see if he really had the wrong time he covered the watch’s face with his thumb and then finally he moved it enough for me to read his watch. He asked if it was quarter to nine. It was. I looked at him incredulously and then walked away.

The whole sequence of events struck me as very odd and so I thought about this guy and what he could possibly want. I ran the scenario through my head, “What time is it?” and then it struck me. 4:20. Answering 4:20 is code signifying that I want to buy some drugs.

That’s the only logical scenario I can come up with, but could it be? The penalty for selling drugs in Malaysia is death. Why would anyone put themselves at such risk?

I read about a girl from Australia the other day that got caught with four kilograms of pot in Indonesia (that’s 8.8 pounds). She was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She’s going to appeal but it doesn’t look promising. Why anyone would take that big of a risk is beyond me.

Sometimes things just don’t go the way you’d like them. This morning for breakfast I apparently failed at getting my order across. I wanted to get a plain roti with butter (just like a scone) some scrambled eggs, and a nice glass of cold water. Instead I got some half boiled eggs still in their brown shells and liquid inside, and some toast with some marmalade like jam. The toast was good anyway but there was no way I could possibly even crack the runny eggs. I thought it was funny that even the ice water that I ordered was hot and particularly sans ice. Apparently if you order water and they don’t hear the “ice” part, they think you want to use it to make tea.

This evening I finished reading my book, “Canadian History for Dummies“. Don’t worry I’m well aware of the irony in coming to Malaysia to learn about Canada. But wow, what a great look into Canada’s astounding past. Some of the things I remember hearing about in school, but most were new facts that I either wasn’t interested in, in school, or that the curriculum didn’t cover.

I found the roles Canada played in the first and second world wars very interesting, and particularly eye opening was the sequence of events involving the French and their huge part in Canadian history and their consequential feelings of being jilted by the rest of Canada. It made a lot more sense when you have the whole story and not just what I remember from the news during the Lyin’ Brian Mulroney years. The true story is a lot more complicated than this idea I got growing up in the west that “French Canadians are just hard to get along with” and “they refuse to be bilingual just on the principle of the matter.” I’d get into it more, but it’s a long story that involves broken promises, back stabbing, political maneuvering, and an attempt by the British to eliminate the French culture from Canada.

I highly recommend this book for anyone with a remote interest in the history of not only Canada but the whole continent of North America. There is a lot of shared history between Canada and the United States. It’s full of things that will make you laugh not to mention a lot of darker history that makes you want to cry. It’s all in there.

Today I had the chance to go to Channel V with Jon. As I’ve mentioned before Channel V is south-east Asia’s music channel. It would be like going to Much Music headquarters in Canada. We presented the latest changes that GXM has made for channel identification spots. It’s pretty cool stuff and it made me wonder how hard it would be to try and make some channel identification ads for Much Music. I’ll look into it when I get home.

On my way back to the residence I finished Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (audio version). I had heard that it wasn’t as good as Douglas Adams celebrated novel, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but on the contrary I found it to be just as good and recommend it on the same level.

I checked out the cost to go to Iran from here, but when I checked the dates I realized that I made a gross miscalculation with regard to how long it is until I leave Malaysia. It looks like I won’t have time to do any extra traveling after all unless I finish up the work-study early or have my flight plans changed. I’ll have to look into these respective possibilities.

I shaved off my beard today. I was holding onto the hope that someone might come and visit me here and well… though she’s a big fan of my facial hair she’s not going to see me here.

On my commute to work I’ve been listening to the audio version of the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It’s by Malcolm Gladwell, and it’s about how we make decisions - both good and bad - and why some people so much better at making decisions than others. My friend Jason recommended it to me along with another of his books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, which is about change and more specifically it shares a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.

So far Blink has been an eye opening experience; when I’m done I will certainly pick up The Tipping Point. In almost every chapter - if not every chapter - I find myself at the edge of my seat hanging on every word. I particularly liked the insight on improvisational acting (he believes in Keith Johnstone’s techniques), the story behind a massive war games held by the United States in 2002 (which in reality was a failure), and the decision for the Coco-cola Bottling Company to switch to New Coke in the 80’s (read about New Coke at Snopes). I’m only on Chapter 6 of Blink but I love everything about this book.

I’m in Medicine Hat for the Easter weekend. I took along Stephen Hawkings book, “The Universe in a Nutshell”, which Anna-Maria gave me for my birthday, to read in the car. This morning I was explaining The Twins Paradox to Tracie, my brother’s wife - they are also here visiting. The Twins Paradox goes something like this:

In the theory of relativity each observer has his own measure of time… One of a pair of twins (a) leaves on a space journey during which he travels close to the speed of light, while his brother (b) remains on Earth.
Because of (a)’s motion, time runs more slowly in the spacecraft as seen by the earthbound twin. So on his return the space traveler (a2) will find that his brother (b2) has aged more than himself.
Although it seems against common sense, a number of experiments have implied that in this scenario the traveling twin would indeed be younger.

Tracie responded, “So if you fall in love with someone 30 years younger than you, you can use this to come back and be the same age.” I told her I was impressed that she so quickly picked up on the most obviously practical application that this concept enables us to do.

You need a premium account to view articles at Salon.Com, but if you don’t have one you can take a few seconds to view an advertisement and get a free day pass. It’s well worth it to read an exerpt from journalist Craig Unger’s new book “House of Bush, House of Saud”. If half the things he writes are true, it’s enough to make you sick. A lot of the things I read in this article were also pointed out in Michael Moore’s new book “Dude Where’s My Country?”

Immediately after 9/11, dozens of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. in a secret airlift authorized by the Bush White House. One passenger was an alleged al-Qaida go-between, who may have known about the terror attacks in advance.

Update: I tried to get through the audiobook version and it kept putting me to sleep. Unger makes some pretty damning claims against Bush and it’s hard to know what is true and what is speculation.

As some of you astute readers may remember, I’ve been reading a book online called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I just finished it, and now I’d like to write a little book review. Now I’m going to be quite honest with you (brace yourself, here comes the self deprecation). I’m not exactly an expert on books. I haven’t really read a lot of them. I mean I did read a bunch of Stephen King novels and I occasionally like to pick up this or that to pass the time. But as I said I’m not exactly a literary expert, and to make matters worse my writing ability is mediocre at best. So here it is—the first book report I’ve ever done that wasn’t for grades. Coincidentally I think it’s the first book report that I’ve ever done after having actually read the novel. Ok, enough rambling, it’s time to get down to business.

Cory Doctorow’s short novel, “Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom” is set in the future, I’m guessing a couple hundred years. In the future there’s no more scarcity, it’s very Utopian and it’s kind of like Star Trek where you don’t need money to get things. Also, in this world, the people don’t die. They save their identities to a backup and when death or illness sets in, somebody does you the favor of restoring you from back-up. There is a lot more sci-fi stuff that I won’t bog you down with now, instead I’ll move on to the meat of the story.

Julius, the protagonist, is a cast member at Disney World, (he’s an important one—an Ad Hoc.) The trouble starts to brew when Debra, another Ad Hoc starts making changes to the rides. Julius is worried about her taking over the Haunted Mansion and taking the history out of it by having “scary haunted mansion experiences” pumped straight into your brain instead of the usual way of actually experiencing a scary mansion. I think my philosophy teacher would really dig this. (On a side note I’m thinking of asking him for some design tips, I love the work he’s done). Well I digress. . . Julius has to stop Debra, meanwhile keeping the other Ad Hocs and guests happy. Overall I really liked the novel and found myself imagining what life would be like if I lived in Doctorow’s world. “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” was fun, cheap, and best of all it only took a few hours to read (it’s just 10 short chapters).

Now you can see why I could never break 78% in English class. Maybe I can plagiarize a better review from Amazon.com. I guess I was never meant to be a writer.

What am I going to do now? Well I’d like to go to Disneyland, but instead I think I’ll go home and get some lunch.