Tax collection in the Ottoman Empire

I'm reading Haruki Murakami's The Strange Library now. Twas a gift. And the present tense is correct. I could have read it cover to cover tonight but the library isn't open until Tuesday and I won't be able to pick up my requests until I get off from work. Besides, I don't mind enjoying this one over a couple of days. Murakami is very good at writing people who aren't drones but who basically do what they're told. Which is arguably most of us in real life.

Overheard

Okay, so tonight I heard a barista telling another barista about a dream she had. If you don't like hearing about other people's dreams, especially second-hand, my apologies.

She and her boyfriend (she didn't use the word, only the guy's name, but it's an educated guess) were eight years old again. And they got married, but only, as she says, for tax purposes. Her father was angry that he wasn't invited to the wedding, until she assured him it was just because of taxes and they were going to get divorced.

Then the boyfriend/husband turned into a buffalo chicken pizza and died. She describes sobbing in the dream.

That last part might have been a case of one hemisphere censoring to soften the effect of the other, if the body was so damaged that it started looking pizzalike. But at least she was laughing as she told the story, so it wasn't a lasting trauma.

Winter thoughts

Brrr. I'm a fan of winter, but it has been bitter cold today and tonight. Probably the kind of weather that's better appreciated in retrospect, or behind the thick walls of a heated room. If not both.

Also, I'm sort of glad that of all the times I could have a terminal computer crisis, the time it happened was the week of the Charlie Hebdo thing. There's too much posturing whenever something like that happens, and who needs the temptation to add to it? What is there to say? It's awful what was done. The world is, as always, filled with people doing bad things, good things, nothing, or some combination of the above.

Wait for it....

I might think things about stuff. I might write some of those things down, put them on this blog. In the near future. Why not now? Oh, the vague hope that my thoughts might sound better when fully formed than they do now when I'm slumping off to sleep. Pure optimism, really.

The return of...

Okay, yeah, as you might have guessed, I'm on a different computer now. The short version is that while the problem with the old one might have been simple - seemed simple, anyway - fixing it turned out to be complicated, and the time and money would only maintain it until the next thing went wrong. So this is all right, except I kind of miss Windows Vista.

In the interim I've done a fair amount of reading. There's this coffee table book on modern art that I'm still in the middle of. Interestingly an older gentleman I met on the street last week told me he was an artist and showed me photos of some of his paintings. He was pleased when I was able to guess that he was influenced by the Fauvists. Knew about them before I read the book, but still.

I also read The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters. It's a murder mystery/police procedural set in New Hampshire a few months before an asteroid is due to plough into the Earth, devastating humanity. The fact that there's no apparent hope of survival in the long term might be a barrier to getting into it. That also turns out to be the book's greatest asset, the fact that it's in effect a prolonged Serenity Prayer.

Saturday/Sunday Random Ten. Don't ask. Too late, I'm already telling you

Last night when I got home the cursor on my laptop went all kerplooey so I couldn't move it, and when I did manage to move it it went in random directions. Which I hoped it would be over this by the time I finished watching that first Sherlock episode on a DVD I borrowed from the library, but it wasn't. Also, doing a system restore didn't seem to accomplish anything. So this morning I took it to Staples to see what they made of it. The cursor worked perfectly, although some things showed up on a malware scan. So it's working again, knock on wood, until it doesn't.

These are songs I heard yesterday.

1. Tom Waits - Somewhere
2. Lou Rawls - Groovy People
3. Tito Puente - China
4. Dave Van Ronk - A Shantyman's Life
5. Diana Krall - The Best Thing for You
6. Camper Van Beethoven - Northern California Girls
7. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Night Rally
8. Fleetwood Mac - Storms
9. St. Vincent - Birth in Reverse
10. Gogol Bordello - Not a Crime

Have you seen? Have you heard?

A lot of short people I've talked to think that tall people have it made. Not necessarily so. I won't deny there are advantages, and I (moderately tall, not NBA star level) wouldn't necessarily trade. Still, there are drawbacks. If you look at a commonly accepted list of ways of conveying confidence they tend to be things that people of smaller stature do almost as a reflex, but that some of us have to remind ourselves to do.

I thought about this today while watching Foxcatcher. Mark Schultz, played by Channing Tatum, is quite a bit bigger and buffer than I am. (At least in the movie he's also denser and more naive.) The man is dominated by two smaller guys. The good one is his brother Dave, a wrestler like him. (From what I remember about the high school team, wrestling does draw a lot of smaller statured guys.) The bad one is John E DuPont, whose status as a manipulative sociopath is obvious to the audience at least.

This is a good, bleak film. There's an act of violence I knew was coming near the end, because I'd heard of it being in the movie and because it happened in real life. It still hurt

Less depressing is this Miranda July story I read tonight, and that - who knew? - is posted in English on a page from Russia's answer to Facebook. The idea of a woman teaching older's to swim in her apartment, obviously with no pool available, is funny and beautiful. Although it is sad she knew her boyfriend wouldn't be interested in the story. Why the hell wouldn't he be?