One of the surprises about my retirement life is that I am not reading as much as I thought I would. Prior to retirement, I imagined that I would read perhaps 4 or 5 books a week. The rate turns out to be much lower. I've also become much more selective. I'm not reading just any old thing. There needs to be a reason for reading it.

But the reason can be as simple as entertainment. Based upon a published review, I decided to read Search: A Memoir with Recipes by Dana Louise Potowsky: A Novel by Michelle Huneven. Compared with some of the grand space operas I like to read (think The Expanse -- review forthcoming), this is a small story. Rather than covering the fate of mankind as it expands beyond our solar system, this story -- told in first person by a restaurant reviewer for a local paper -- covers the search for a new minister for a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in southern California. 

Being a lapsed UU myself, the novel provides many moments of amused recognition. The following quote strikes me as particularly typical:

"I contributed two articles I'd published in the Times: one was about my writing group's bouillabaisse. (One person made the fish stock -- the bouilla -- and everyone else brought a pound of seafood -- the baisse. Since we were UUs, no two people brought the same thing, making it a 'delicious union of diversity.'"

As I've already said, it is a small story and the stakes are small except that they are big for the search committee members and for their congregation. I won't reveal how the search turns out, but I will say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this little novel.

 The recent passing of the comedian Gilbert Gottfried brings to mind his memorable appearance in The Aristocrats. In case you don't know, The Aristocrats is a documentary film. But the subject of the documentary is unlike any other documentary I've ever seen. It's a documentary about a joke . The joke was apparently well-known in the community of professional comedians and widely known as "The Aristocrats," but I believe it was relatively unknown outside of that community at least until that film came out. Released in 2005, the main creator of the film was Penn Jillette (yes, THAT Penn -- the magician). I enjoyed the film so much when I watched it at the now-departed Tivoli Theater in Kansas City that I bought the DVD. My wife, on the other hand, was sick to her stomach and disgusted when she watched it with me. You see, the joke is probably the most disgusting dirty joke ever told. And Gilbert Gottfried's telling is the dirtiest one of all. And it's what I thought about when I learned that he had died.

 I've been posting occasional book reviews on Facebook, and I've decided not to give Facebook free content anymore. I'm going to copy at least some of that old content to this platform, and I plan to post new reviews here going forward.

Here's the first old one. It's from 2020 (snip):

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This is part of my continuing book review service for my handful of followers. I'm going to make a marginal recommendation for a very silly book: "Make Russia Great Again" by Christopher Buckley. Buckley's earlier works include "Thank You for Smoking" and "The White House Mess." This recently published memoir was written by President Trump's former Chief of Staff from his prison cell. It is a fictional work that occasionally veers close to the news. It was amusing, but I cannot imagine that I will ever want to read it again. Thus, one for the library. In the strange times we now live in, I feel that I must mention again that the book is fiction, and it is political satire.

Rest in Peace

The recent death of Dennis Ritchie is another sad milestone for information technology. As the inventor of C and UNIX, I would argue that Ritchie's impact on western civilization exceeds that of Steve Jobs.

A Start

This is the start of my web log.  Hello World!