Syllabus #244

We've Spring Breaked.  We broke Spring.  Spring is broken.  Spiritually, that is.  Official Spring won't hit until Tuesday, but in our hearts and minds, we're already there.

I enjoyed a nice visit with the parentals, I walked, I ran, I zoomed in on lots of flowers.  My sleep schedule is still all messed up from the time change, and then driving back and forth between Central and Eastern time.  Monday morning will be a real treat.

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What this article about bewbs fails to mention is the proportionality of it all.  Are Sweeney's boobs objectively that big, relative to boobs everywhere?  Probably not.  But relative to her own tiny body?  Yep, they're tig ol' biddies.

This NYT roundup of the funniest novels since Catch-22 was ever so useful.  My TBR list in my public library account grew by half a dozen books, thankyouverymuch.

I'm not sure if this link will render properly, but Saturday's New York Times Daily newsletter had some real gems in it.  The mini-essay about baseball was a treat.

Analog Reading:

Finished Tripping on Utopia:  Margaret Meade, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science.  It was ultimately pretty meh.  I was intrigued by the topic, and the content itself was not uninteresting.  However, the structure of the book jumped around from topic to topic and just skimmed the surface of each moment in time in such an unsatisfactory way.  Also, there were a few central figures in the book, aside from Margaret Meade, and then a whole mess of people who would be introduced for a short passage and then never spoken of again.  It was hard to get invested in the overarching story while constantly trying to remember who was who.  Obviously, there were a ton of people involved in this movement that spanned multiple decades, but the book would have been more engaging if it had narrowed its focus and delved deeper into fewer aspects of the time period.  This felt like the entire contents of a survey course shoved into less than 300 pages of reading.

Now reading yet another book by my old pal Steve King:  The Outsider.  This is separate from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, but promises to bring back my best girl Holly Gibney.  I started it yesterday and have already read over 160 of the ~650 pages.  It's gripping.  It's horrific.  It will almost certainly take a whiplash inducing turn that I could never see coming.  But so far, zero n-words have been used in the production of this book.  I mean, there's still time, but I'm rooting for Steve here.  You can do it.  Just cut that word out of your writing cold turkey, homeslice.