Vis a tergo

Top 106 Unread Books

A little while ago, Kevin evoked another meme. I tracked down the self-confessed originator of this meme as Nicholas, the user "nhw" at Live Journal. His original post was about a month and a half ago and it's already fallen off Kevin's front page, but it's still interesting.

I'll paraphrase the original instructions, since I'm not going to follow them exactly :)

This is a list of the top 106 books tagged "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of September 30th). Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'll see if I can get Ronda to do her version. I know there are a couple on there that she's read and I haven't.

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Social networks as distributed memory

Talk about social networking sites usually involves their affect on the here and now. Shared friends, shared tastes, and shared experience are usually given as their reason for existing. Yesterday I had an interesting experience with Facebook that showed me another use of these sites. They can be used as a memory amplifier.

Now, I don't know how often you get nostalgic with your friends, but I do quite often. Most of my friends are friends I've had since I was younger, so the conversation lends itself to nostalgia. One set of topics that have come up more than a couple times in the past is memories related to elementary school. Inevitably the subject of lunch boxes will come up.

I'm sure it was a nationwide phenomenon back in the 70s, so I don't think I need to go into the importance of picking your lunch box when you were under 10 years old back then. Were you a "Six Million Dollar Man" kid, or a "Hong Kong Phooey" kid? Did you want your warm Spaghetti-Os in a "Snoopy" thermos or a "Holly Hobby" thermos? Talk about decisions!

Whenever this discussion came up, I always had a faint memory of my very first lunch box in first grade ("Year 1", Kevin). Lunch boxes always had a theme, and the theme was usually a television show, but I could never remember the theme of my first lunch box. I had flashes of a double decker bus, a fat kid, a clubhouse, and a kid sliding down a fire pole. When trying to remember what the actual show was, I usually came to the conclusion that I was either misremembering something or confusing two different lunch boxes.

Enter Facebook. A former co-worker had joined a group on Facebook called "Unlike 99.99999999999% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 60s", so I clicked on the link to it to check it out. In the photo gallery it had a thumbnail for a picture that triggered some faint memory. The cryptic caption at the bottom says "double deckers cult veiwing". It had the fat kid. It had the bus. In addition, the dog and the guy in the suit and bowler hat looked familiar.

Off to Wikipedia. Search for "double deckers". It immediately takes me to an entry for "Here Come the Double Deckers". "...[a] TV series from 1970/1971 revolving around the adventures of seven children whose den was a red double-decker London bus in an old works yard." This had to be it!

Off to Google. Search for "Here Come the Double Deckers".

You're kidding me. A fan site for this show? A show that ran for 17 episodes. I gotta see this. Wow. A comprehensive fan site. With a "Collectibles" link. And what is there a picture of on the "Collectibles" page?

The Lunch Box! That's it. That's my first lunch box. It feels like the culmination of a sneeze that's been threatening for years. I am now delegating the memory of minutiae to Facebook. Don't ask me how an obscure British kids show became my choice for the subject of my first lunch box. Ask Facebook.

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I am Bengie Molina

Kevin's post on Chasing Shadows today furthered three memes; one relatively new, one relatively old, and one he made up on his own.

The relatively new one involved doing a Google image search on your name. The first picture that comes back is "you". The first picture that came back for my name was a picture of Giants' catcher Bengie Molina's 2007 Topps Series 1 (or Series 2?) baseball card.

It came up because I wrote in to a Baseball Card blog about the fact that his card was the same in both their Series 1 and Series 2 releases.

The relatively old meme was the concept of figuring out your "Porn Name". I'm sure you've all heard this meme before, but I'll explain further just in case. The formula, probably carefully derived by the smartest 8th graders at Castillero Middle School (neé Castillero Junior High School), involves the following:

1) Your first pet's name is your "Porn Name" first name.
2) The name of the street (sans its title e.g., "Way") you grew up on is your "Porn Name" last name.

My Porn Name is: Mittens Zinfandel

Mittens Zinfandel, according to Google Image search

The meme that Kevin made up himself says that if you Google your name and the first link is to something about you, you can consider yourself a success. I am the third link, but links involving me make up a large majority of the first page.

I'll have to do something about that assistant professor at University of Southern Maine School of Business.

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What I Learned Today - Water pressure

We've been experiencing water pressure issues since the kitchen was completed about a year ago. At the time, there was construction going on nearby and our neighbor also said that she thought she noticed a drop in water pressure around that time. Apparently this circumstantial evidence was enough for me to make up my mind that once the construction was done on the large condo complex nearby, the water issues would (don't say "evaporate" -- don't say it!) clear up.

Construction seems to be pretty close to complete. Last weekend, the water pressure issue was still present. The shower pressure was so bad that Ronda and I actually decided to investigate around the house. The other annoyance had been that the front sprinklers couldn't all be on at the same time, or nothing would get watered. Using my vast knowledge of residential plumbing, and my impeccable investigative skills, I went to check the main water shut off valve. It was 75% closed. Amazingly, once it was opened, the sprinklers worked again as expected. Unfortunately, the shower problems remained.

Due to a small bit of synchronicity, the drain for our washing machine had backed up requiring a plumber visit. Once he had routed out the drain pipes and my wallet, we asked him about the water pressure. He said something about sediment blocking things like shower heads and sprinklers. I thought he just wanted to leave, and didn't put a lot of stock in his answer.

Cut to this morning. I turn on the shower to a gentle trickle that Tanner would put to shame on a good drool day. That was it. I was going to unleash my investigative powers based on the clues from the plumber. I found the pipe wrench and took off the shower head. It's amazing how much water actually makes it through a 3/4" plug of sandy sediment behind a shower head. Needless to say, this was the problem. I'm happy to report that we now have normalized shower head pressure and can successfully rinse soap off of our bodies.

So, if your shower is having difficulties, let me pass on what I learned today -- remove the shower head and see if it's plugged up. Especially if there has been work done in and around your house.

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Mawwied?

Well, it's been two and a half months, so it looks like it's gonna stick. ;)

Ronda and I got engaged on August 11th! Of course, with Ronda's organizational skills, the wedding is well on it's way to being planned at this point. We're getting married in Cincinnati at the Krohn Conservatory.

The most common response when we've told people about our engagement? "It's about time."

Coincidentally, that will probably be the same response to this announcement on Vis a tergo.

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