Common sense isn’t a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments. Fairness isn’t a natural part of the universe. It’s purely subjective. — Scott Adams
John Burdett’s second novel, Bangkok Tattoo, was as good as his first (Bangkok 8). Both stories are set in (you guessed it) Bangkok, where Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep solves bizarre murders. Sonchai is a devout Buddhist and the plot is laced with Eastern religion. I especially liked this description of the Western concept of Self:
“…a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor.”
Ouch. The wannabe geek in me also enjoyed this password to a CIA online database:
AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783
I tend to rate non-fiction books by highlighters consumed. And if I really like the work, I post excerpts here so I can find them long after I’ve loaned the book to someone that really didn’t want to read it in the first place and promptly lost it.
News was the first industry to really feel the impact of the Internet, and we’ve now had an entire generation grow up with the expectation of being able to have on-demand news on any subject at any time for free. This may be good for news junkies, but it’s been hell on the news business. (Pg. 185)
If you loved Chris Anderson’s Wired article (Octoboer, 2004), The Long Tail… you will love his book (same name). I’m just a couple of chapters in but finding “hmmm” nuggets on every page.
Most of the top fifty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies and eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them were made in the past five years.
Anderson provides a deeper understanding of why Amazon and Netflix, et al. are so popular. This might be a two-highlighter book.
The flyleaf describes Douglas Coupland’s new novel as “a lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks.” I very much enjoyed two of his earlier works, Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, and offer these nuggets from the introduction to his latest novel:
Life is a contest between you and everyone else.
Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people.
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
You can’t fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal.
Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resume.
After a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless. — pg. 248
I think computers ought to have a key called I’M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. — pg. 386
Reading (3rd time) Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip. One of the main characters is a middle-aged guy that has been divorced six times. All waitresses. Part of his screening process was to ask them to name the Beatles. If they could not, the cultural gulf was probably too wide. How could you not know the names of the Beatles?
While discussing last night’s American Idol performances (Taylor Hicks sang a Beatles song) with a female co-worker today, I asked if she (mid-20’s) could name the Beatles. She could only come up with McCartney. Alas.
I just finished my second Michael Gruber novel (Valley of Bones) and liked it as much as his first (Tropic of Night). But I confess I’m having some trouble getting over the revleation (a couple of years ago) that he ghost-wrote 16 of the Butch Karp novels for Robert Tannenbaum. I’ve posted on this before (the “can’t get over it” part) but, damn! Sixteen books?! I loved the Buth Karp novels and feel …betrayed… that they person I thought wrote them, didn’t. A littlle googling revealed that Gruber and Tanenbaum are first cousins and when Gruber decided to go solo, they had a serious falling out. If you’re a Butch Karp fan, you feel my pain. If you’re not… you don’t know or care what the mellon farmer I’m talking about.
I mentioned how much I enjoyed watching Maria Bello pull on her unders in the film, Duets. I failed to mention that she will be appearing in an upcoming film based Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking, a very dark and funny novel. No idea if the movie will live up the the novel but you can listen to an interview with Buckley here. The film stars Aaron Eckhart with supporting roles by Bello, Rob Lowe, Katie Holmes and William H. Macy.
“Books are a fantastic way to gain knowledge. With books, one can learn new techniques, gain new skills, and learn from role models who have been to where one wants to be and can show the way. There are many different ways to read books and just as many ways to remember their salient points. One of the most effective ways to get the most out of a book is to mark it up. There is no standard way to mark up a text, but below are a few ways that students have found effective in marking up a textbook so that one can see the important points quickly, make it more memorable, and make it easy to pick up years later and re-acquaint oneself with the major concepts.”
What Not To Do
Don’t use a highlighter – Quality marking isn’t done with a fat-tipped highlighter. You can’t write, which is an important part of marking the text, with a large marker. Get yourself some fine point colored pens to do the job.
Don’t mark large volumes of text – You want important points to stand out. Although we all know that everything can’t be important, we often highlight all of the text on the page. You want to find the 20% of the text that is important (remember Pareto?) and mark that.
Don’t take the time to mark up items that you read on a daily basis – (e.g., magazines, newspapers), unimportant or irrelevant items.
Don’t mark the obvious – Don’t waste time marking up things that are already in your knowledge-base or skill set. If you already know it, you don’t need to mark it.
What To Do
Mark the text with a pencil, pen, or, even better, colored fine-tipped pens – Remember, you are not highlighting, you are writing.
Know your preferences – Some of you have an aversion to mark directly in the text. Books are precious things to many people and they want to protect them from damage and even the wear and tear of everyday use. If this describes you, grab some Post-It brand notes and do your marking and writing on them. This also gives you the advantage to move and reorganize them should you see fit. As for me, I like to mark directly on the page. I find that my books become more valuable to me when I add my contributions to the information that they contain.
Underline the topic sentence in a passage – Remember, each paragraph has one topic sentence. The rest is supporting information and examples. Identify the topic sentence to find it easier.
Use codes – Flag text with codes (e.g., Question marks to indicate disagreement, Exclamation marks to note agreement or to flag a strong statement, triangles to indicate a change in thinking, or a star for the topic sentence).
Write the passage topic in the margin as a reminder – Just a word or two.
Write questions in the margin – When you don’t understand something or when you don’t understand the author’s thought process on a particular topic, write the question in the margin as a reminder to settle the question.
Circle new and unfamiliar words – Look them up as soon as possible.
Add your or other author’s perspectives in the margins – Other authors have surely written on the same subject. What do they say? Do they agree with this author? If not, what do they say. Add these ideas in the margins.
Add cross-reference notes to other works on the same topic – Use the author’s name and a shortened version of the other book’s title.
Add structure to a narrative text – Use 1, 2, 3, 4…or an outline format I. A. B. C. 1, 2, 3, a, b, c…to add a structure that you understand.
Draw arrows to related ideas – Or unrelated ideas…
Summarize – Add your own summary after the last paragraph. That simple exercise will crystalize your thinking on the topic. If you can’t write it, you don’t understand it.
Extras
Post-It Brand Notes are great ways to also mark locations within books, much like bookmarks do. With Post-It Brand Notes, however, you can mark on them so you can see where you are turning before you start flipping through the pages. One can also use colored paper clips to identify pages or chapters that are important.
Conclusion
The idea is to enter, by way of your markings, into a conversation with the author so that his knowledge is added to yours so that a synthesis occurs and you gain a new understanding.
A new — or new looking — book is a treasure. In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again. It becomes much more enjoyable than a sterile copy that comes straight from the bookstore. Don’t be afraid to mark up the books that you love.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:
Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
“First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)
If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.
I’ve been reading Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book (Get Back In theBox: Innovation from the Inside Out) and was delighted to come across an interview with Rushkoff at Radio Marketing Nexus. Mark Ramsey talked with Rushkoff about “how to make radio relevant again.” Ruskoff misses the same things about radio that I do. AUDIO
“Because of my book tours I’ve been in a lot of radio stations, and even from 1995 to 2005 the amount of change I’ve seen has been shocking. There used to be this kind of quality to an FM radio station – I hate to be stereotypical, but there was a certain kind of chick who would be the receptionist at an FM radio station. There was a certain kind of guy that worked in the album room organizing the albums. There was a certain kind of geek figuring out the emphasis rack.
But FM stations are not really like that anymore. They feel much more like almost any other office, and if you didn’t see the control room you wouldn’t know you were in a radio station at all. They don’t ooze their culture anymore.
There was a smell and a quality and a texture to everything radio that I think was the fun of the industry. There was something so real about it. In the early days when I was a kid, you had Ron Lundy and Cousin Brucie – you just somehow knew those guys were there even though they were playing top 40 stuff. You knew it was a world of guys with records and personalities. And there’s so little of that on the radio today.
There’s almost nothing in mainstream radio that has that sense of this as a club of people in a cool place having a great time sharing some of their ecstasy with those of us driving to work or sitting in our bedrooms who wanted to have a taste of what it’s like to be an adult who understands music, who reads “Rolling Stone,” who understands why we’re fighting the Gulf War, or whatever it is. And I want to piece of that.
When I turn on the radio now I don’t feel that these folks have a piece of anything that I can’t get a piece of by going into Allstate to work in the morning. It’s just another working stiff with some computer telling them what to play and when to play it and when to read the ads.
I don’t trust the voice behind the music anymore because I don’t know that he’s really an expert or that he really cares. He’s not part of a living, breathing, fertile culture whereas if I go online and look at these Podcasts I know these people have done it not for the money but for the love of it. And radio is going to have to go a long way now to convince me that there’s somebody there who cares about what they’re doing for some reason other than the cash.
Finally, I would say the purpose of radio is to keep people company. And in order to keep people company there’s got to be a human being on the other side of it. The more truly human your radio station is the better it is at keeping people company. And the more computerized and business-like it is the farther outside the box you’ll find yourself.”
So there you have it. The pure, distilled essence of what’s wrong with radio today. And it seems like it would be very easy to fix. To get back in the box. But I fear we don’t even remember where we put the box.
