The Scooter Book by Bob Woods - cute but too breezy... seems like a rush job, 'cause one of the chapters (#3?) ends before its final sentence does.
Generation Kill by Evan Wright - absorbing account by an embedded reporter about a Marine reconnaissance platoon (? brigade?) invading/liberating Iraq in March/April 2003. Lotsa ammo, gore, craziness, surreality, and death.
Against All Odds by Chuck Norris and Ken Abraham - autobiography of this action icon reveals some aspects of his life and philosophy... I'd like to see more context, but Chuck ain't exactly a historian or brimming with intellectual curiousity... I saw the man up close, one time, before he got into movies. (More to relate, but I'll save that for a future entry.)
This past week, I had my 2nd Amy Lin experience of the season. I attended a talk by a woman named Amy Lin (let me call her "AmyLin2") on her doctoral research of a couple years back. The title of her talk was "The Dynamics of Tumor-Immune Interaction in Solid Tumors." (You can find her journal article on it or something close to it here .) For this, she got her PhD. in Biomathematics.
I'm afraid this was all quite new to me. I attended because I was curious to see what AmyLin2 was like and to find out if there was any relationship between her research and that of my relative's (Leucocyte/endothelial cell interaction in autoimmune diseases).
My first Amy Lin experience was about a month ago. AmyLin1 gave a piano recital of works by Debussy, Schubert, Chou Wen-chung, Chen Yi, and Beethoven. (She currently teaches piano in Strasbourg, France.)
On the surface, AmyLin's 1 & 2 seem to have nothing in common, except their names. They look different and seem to have different personalities.
And yet, they do share a certain background. They both have a B.S. in math from Johns Hopkins University. Their years at Hopkins don't seem to have overlapped, as far as I can tell. (It's "theoretically" possible that they could've encountered each other, in that AmyLin1 did spend time in Baltimore continuing her piano studies at Peabody Conservatory for many years after graduating from JHU.)
Will I have another AmyLin experience? Someone at Hopkins might have some leads, but I'd prefer to leave it to chance (since I don't want to be accused of being obssessed about this or worse.)
Well, well... it seems that the law of averages is catching up to me. It seems this 2nd half of the year, I've been suffering damage to my car in contrast to relatively accident-free months and years previous.
The latest calamity to befall me:
My car just got bashed by a falling tree branch as I was driving to work, this stormy and windy morning. Fortunately, I suffered minor damage, as far as I could tell. I managed to drive around much of the fallen branch (fortunately, no oncoming traffic as I swerved into the other lane).
It was one of those classic moments... I could see the branch coming off the tree and falling in front of me seconds before it landed on the road. There were other branches branching off from the main one, so I couldn't just drive over it. The obstruction stood a couple feet off the ground.
My hood has some dents. I can still open it. My windshield is smashed in the lower right-hand corner. (Trace fragments of bark embedded in the glass.)There's a fingertip-size dent in the body, or sill, near the windshield impact area. Not big enough, it seems, to hamper removal and replacement of the windshield. But, the paint is chipped off.
And that seems to be all the damage I can see. I guess I'll take another look before I call in the claim to my insurance agent.
When I was shopping in Alexandria, VA 2 weekends ago, I ran across this guy from Baltimore. He was serving samples of his beer (Raven) at this wine supermarket I'd visited.
He described his beer, as German or Bavarian. I couldn't tell if this was true, if it was as tasty as some Bavarian beer I've had. I was worried that my sense of smell and taste were deficient, that day. (Earlier, I'd bought a bunch of cilantro, but could not smell much of it when I'd tried to.)
On the other hand, he told me that the beer was brewed under contract by the same folks that brew Clipper beer. The brewery is in Lansdowne. (Or maybe it's the Raven office that's there.) According to him, the beer formula was developed in Germany.
I asked him about getting his beer served in the football stadium. He replied that it was too expensive for he and his partner (it's only a 2-man company) to pay the Ravens football company the access or service fee they require.
(Incidentally, the beer had been named before the football team had decided on the same name.)
This guy also talked about his other job, working for a company (Computer Donation Mgt.)that recycles and refurbishes computers. Well, I'm not sure if they actually sell complete machines. I just checked the website and it seems that over eBay, they sell parts.
He was telling me that they send lotsa scrap to China. I guess that's what the website is referring to when it says that the materials they extract from the computers don't end up in a landfill. I suppose they send lotsa stuff to China to be recycled.
That jives with an article I read somewhere about how China is destination for lotsa scrap material, like wire, because labor, there, is cheap and plentiful. It's cheaper for stuff to be sent there and sorted by hand, than be processed in the States.
I mentioned that to him, as well as a story about the recycling of California Pepsi bottles in India. Back when I was doing the radio show, I'd once interviewed a Greenpeace activist about a case she'd handled that concerned the whereabouts of these Pepsi bottles. I forget how she discovered that they were being sent overseas rather than being recycled in California or No. America. To make a long story short, she went to India and discovered a valley of plastic Pepsi bottles near the city of Madras. The bottles were being processed, there.
Hey, is there any wonder that the dollar is falling? All we can export is American junk or scrap. (And our military know-how...)