A marvelous analogy...

I was over on Slashdot, checking out an article on how both the Earth and Mars seem to be getting warmer recently, when I checked out an article on how some Bay Area (as in S.F.) schools are reducing homework levels. Among the comments to the article was this "exchange":

Math was especially true in this regard, math homework was nothing more than endless repetition of braindead problems designed to wear down your spirit and break you as a human being.

Sure. And shooting hundreds of free throws is nothing more than endless repetition designed to break your spirit, and not at all about making you a better basketball player.

The response goes on to note, "I've stopped being surprised by the number of university graduates I meet who can't figure out a 15% tip without a calculator."

One of the things I learned late in my college career was how doing the homework helped me pass engineering courses, not necessarily because of any credit given for doing so, but because I found exams were much more "tolerable" after I'd practiced with homework problems. The same goes for language study.

Cheers...

Winding down the day...

One of the "hits" available at the Amazon Mechanical Turk is writing and posting a review of one writer's short stories. In exchange, one earns an entire dime from said author. So, as you read my review of Of Bombs and Puppies, keep in mind that I have something of a small conflict of interest thing going on, here. :^)

The story starts out with a fellow reporting for jury duty, which I suppose is an interesting enough starting point, and then vectors off into a twilight zone inhabited by permanent jury selection candidates, neurotic defense attorneys, and a vaguely Slavic defendant named Yubi. The action is non-stop, pretty much, except that it flows with all of the naturalness of a movie shot as one long "take" (along the lines of Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark). At the end of the story, I'm not sure if the last line is supposed to explain the rest of the piece; then again, I don't expect to lose much sleep over the question.

To be sure, there are some nice turns of the phrase here and there. There is, for example, definitely something of Raymond Chandler in the line, "Mr. Yubi shifted his eyes rapidly over the jury, and twitched his mustache in a way that made me want to go home and shave." And I did find an affine touch of Douglas Adams in the line, "I knew it was dangerous to drive like this with a nuclear weapon hitched to my bumper, but I was worried about something else."

Nice turns were not confined to one-liners, as in the case of the following:

The director of the CIA called and apologized for everything.

"What are you apologizing for?" I asked him. "Can you be more specific?"

"No." he said.

So, to be blunt, while there are nice moments of consciousness, this is not Immortal Prose™ we're talking about. Fortunately, unlike Sokurov's Ark, this story is short enough to read without fidgeting; unfortunately, I am not impelled to seek out more of the writer's work.

Cheers...