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July 16
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New comment on audrey's review of
The Realm of Rights
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July 09
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New comment on audrey's review of
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
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May 14
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Edward
marked as to-read:
The Realm of Rights (Paperback)
by Judith Jarvis Thomson
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Edward
gave
to:
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich (Hardcover)
by Mark Kriegel
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in April, 2008
Edward said:
"First of all, this book isn't all about Pete Maravich. The first four chapters are about his dad Press excelling at this new sport called "basketball" and then later as a charasmatic coach. The last chapter is about Pete's sons playing ba...more
First of all, this book isn't all about Pete Maravich. The first four chapters are about his dad Press excelling at this new sport called "basketball" and then later as a charasmatic coach. The last chapter is about Pete's sons playing basketball aftre his death in their father's shadow. All very interesting (especially the latter), but not about Pete.
Second, sure Pete had amazing numbers. His college record of most profilific scorer still holds, which averages out to 40-something per game (this doesn't count his freshman year and keep in mind he was a long-range shooter and there was no three-point line) he had multiple 60-point games (with a high of 69). He led the NBA in scoring a couple of times. A lot of his skills aren't captured in conventional stats. His ballhandling was ridiculous, including his passes and his dribble. He was ahead of his time and I'd like to say that his skills in this regard have really stood the test of time, but they haven't. I watched a couple of his highlight reels and then watched reels for Jason Williams (the white one): no comparison. Except one thing: I saw Avery Johnson do this amazing thing where he faked a behind the back pass, brought the ball back to his front after cupping it, and layed it up. I didn't realize that Pete had first done this move like 15 years earlier!
There was also the time he kept the ball spinning on his fingers (and then knuckles when his fingers started to bleed) for an hour. Or when he hit 178 free throws in a row while practicing, or when he bet someone that he could keep shooting from 30 feet away for half an hour and not miss 2 in a row (just for scale, the free throw line is 15 feet away). Or this drill where Pete holds the ball behind his knees, lets go of the ball to clap in front on his knees, and then catches the ball before it hits the ground. That's fast! John Wooden, the great college coach, saw Pete's crazy skills as a kid (how cool is that?).
Third, Pete's life was filled with tragedy: the pressure on him (with his dad even being his coach in college), his mother committing suicide, and even him dying at only 40.
Fourth, the writer uses "Great White Hope" way too often. ...less
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April 23
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New comment on audrey's review of
Painism: A Modern Morality
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March 28
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Edward
added:
The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library)
by Thomas Pynchon
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Edward
is currently reading:
Contemporary psychotherapies (Paperback)
by Gary S. Belkin
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Edward
is currently reading:
Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science (Paperback)
by A. David Kline
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Edward
added:
The Culture of Make Believe (Paperback)
by Derrick Jensen
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Edward
gave
to:
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (Paperback)
by A.J. Jacobs
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in December, 2007
Edward said:
"I saw this dude in person talking about his newer book ("The Year of Living Bibically"): he seemed quirky, intelligent, curious, funny, and overall quite interesting. In time I saw that he used the same one-liners in every medium available...more
I saw this dude in person talking about his newer book ("The Year of Living Bibically"): he seemed quirky, intelligent, curious, funny, and overall quite interesting. In time I saw that he used the same one-liners in every medium available and he was kind of obnoxious, but this was before that. He cast quite a spell on me and I knew I wanted to buy one of his books then. He had just talked about "The Year", it was newer, and honestly it just seemed a lot more interesting than a book about reading the encyclopedia. However, "The Year" was only available in hardcover, this was in paperback. There's a great example of cheap-stupid-Polish-man-logic:
1. I want book X, I don't want book Y.
2. Book X is expensive, book Y is cheap.
Therefore, 3. I buy book Y.
Still I liked it: it made me appreciate knowledge for its own sake a little more and I tried intentially to remember a lot of this stuff (making mental notes as I went and quizzing myself every once in a while, to less than optimal effect). I list some highlights (to contine to try to remember this stuff):
A.
- "assualt" is the ATTEMPT to apply force, "battery" is the actual application
B.
- Bacon, Francis died for knowledge
C.
- "claque" is canned laughter
- lightning goes up (under "climate")
D.
- the Darwins did a lot of things
- Descartes liked cross-eyed women
- Dyer, John: "A little rule, a little sway/A sunbeam in a winter's day/Is all the proud and mighty have/Between the cradle and the grave".
E.
- "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all" (from "Ecclesiates").
- there are not dates between Oct. 4 & Oct. 15, 1582 because that's when we switched to the Gregorian calender (under "Eggplant").
F.
- "This too shall pass" (ask me to explain this "Fable").
- "Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and I knew I would never be so happy again" ("Ftzgerald, F. Scott").
- Alex Trebek: "I'm curious about everything--even things that don't interest me" (from "Frigate birds").
- in nautical law a country has jurisdiction over the first 3 miles from its coast because that's how far a cannon's range was then (IBID)
G.
- Lincoln's "Gettysburg address" was a 2-minute warm-up speech for a 2-hour speech by Edward Everett.
- Eric the Red called it "Greenland" so more people would join him there.
H.
- boring
I.
- boring, too
J.
- Jessie James was shot in the back while he was adjusting a picture in his home (I know this from the movie, too)
K.
- Kafka wanted most of work destroyed after his death
- Kiekegaard thougt his family was cursed after his dad cursed God
L.
- Elisha Gray almost beat Bell's patent for the telephone just like Langeley, Samuel almost beat the Wright Brothers.
- "capitonyms" are words in our Language that change their meaning based on whether their first letter is capitalized (like "Polish" and "herb"), "miranyms" are the words between antonyms ("flat" is the miranym of "convex" and "concave")
- Lucky Luciano helped the US Navy in WWII.
- the Lumiere brothers made the first movie.
M.
- there is a master kilogram
- Montaigne made up the word "essay" which meant "attempt" or "project of trial and error".
- the cuckoo is an agressive mimic.
- the blind man wants to know what the color scarlet is like so he interviews a lot of people, thinks about it a lot, and finally announces "Scarlett is like the sound of a trumpet" (from John Locke).
Nothing.
O.
- Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system (on Mars).
P.
- Thomas Paine died poor, drunk, and his skeleton was lost en route to England.
- passenger pigeons became extinct in Sept. 1, 1914.
- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the USA (July 4th, 1826).
- people find time shorter as they age because they notice long-accustumed changes less often
- "But we are born of risen apes, not fallen angels... and so "we are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses" (Robert Andrey).
Q.
- a "Qa" is a Babylonian liquid measurement.
R.
- Walter Reed discovered that yellow fever was spread by misquitoes
- scholarship in Judiasm is an "ethical good", hell is "Gehenna"
- a gedankenexperiment is a thought experiment
S.
- Chief Justice Salmon Chase is on the front of the $10,000 bill
T.
- some think the IQ test measures analytic intelligence at the expense of creative and practical intelligence, crystallized at the expense of fluid intelligence
- the Tungusta event was an aerial explosion that flattened 500 acres of forest in Russia, 1908.
-Mark Twain submitted the first type-written manuscript (I do remember this)
U.
- Descartes walks into a bar, bartender asks, Yo, Descartes, do want a beer?" to which he replies "I think not" and disappears (I told this to 2 old philosophy professors in an email; they didn't think it was too funny [one actually pointed out how the joke made a mistake about Descartes cogito]).
- dalmations and humans are the only mammals to produce uric acid
V.
- vending machines were installed so workers didn't need a full break for food
- the opposition is the team that the harlem globetrotters beat all the time
- "axillism" is sex with the armpit
W.
-Nagasaki was bombed after the plane was unable to bomb Kokura
- the white house was originally called the president's palace
-the life expectency in ancient Rome was 29 years
XYZ.
- "All great truths start out as blasphemies" (GB Shaw).
- Zywiec is the last word in the encyclopedia bertannica, and it is a small town in south-central Poland.
I have come full circle.
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