The obvious celebrity death of the week is Art Buchwald. That also fits in with my being all literary this week, except that I don't think I'd read his column in the past 20 or so years. I may have reread a collection of his columns a while back, but political humor tends not to age well. Even if one remembers the events that were being mocked, it's impossible to read about them with the same reactions if you know how things later played out.
My quote of the week is by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. Commenting on textbooks, McNealy said, "Math hasn't changed since Isaac Newton." While I realize that his intent was to question the need for continual updates to grade school math texts, it's a pretty dumb thing to say. A quick Wikipedia search for dates shows that Newton died in 1727. Just to name one obviously important later figure, Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in 1777. A few other mathematicians McNealy may have heard of who post-dated Isaac Newton include Euler, Laplace, Lagrange and Poisson. Sheesh!
My weekend was occupied with books, though not primarily mathematical ones. I did a used bookstore run yesterday, getting rid of 26 and acquiring 11. I decided that the selection at McKay is worth the trip out to Manassas. Actually, I find that the comraderie among the early morning sellers there is as important to me as the actual trade. I don't go that often but it seems that the same few people are there selling books every single time I go. We stand out there waiting for them to open and talk primarily about other bookstores.
I'll note that I was particularly organized this time and took some of the index cards on which I've written down titles and authors of books to look for. The downside of this is that I feel obliged to get the stuff I was looking for and pass up some other potential delights in favor of those. The only thing I seriously passed up this time was a copy of Hobson-Jobson, a famous dictionary of Indian English. It's not like I have any use for that, but I remember reading an amusing essay about it (by Salman Rushdie, if I recall correctly). It was, however, more important to have some Isabel Allende as suitable reading for my upcoming trip to Chile.
I attempted to find a place in Burke, which might have worked better if I'd actually written down the address correctly. There is a big difference between Burke Road and Burke Lake Road, alas. When I reached Braddock Road without success, I just headed to the Beltway and drove over to Hole in the Wall books. I still have mixed feelings about their trade system, which only lets you use trade for half the price. But it is a friendly place and reasonably convenient for me. If I read more science fiction I'd probably consider it paradise.
Today featured an excursion to Baltimore. I decided it was time to clear out the den so brought all the stuff the various shops have rejected (or that was in too poor condition to sell, e.g. torn covers) to The Book Thing. I figure that I'd rather donate to a place where they won't just sit on a dusty shelf. My colleague, Chris, was interested in going, but wasn't home when I called. Which was probably a good thing, since it would have been out of the way to meet up with her. As it was, I left later than I'd really wanted to, so was concerned about the weather. Of course, I can't just drop off books without looking around, so I ended up donating 63 books and acquiring 7. I also helped a woman who was looking for "clean" books for a high school library. I have no idea why she picked me to ask if Dickens was suitable enough. I don't care much for Dickens, in general, and I've never read Hard Times, but I was reasonably sure there are no sex scenes. I suggested a few other things to her that I thought might be more to the tastes of high school students. I found Twain unreadable at that age (though I love him now), but school libraries should still have him on hand. In general, I said that the classics section was a good bet. I did caution her that I'm not sure today's teens will stick with it to read, say, Moby Dick. (For that matter, I didn't read it until I was older and more patient. But "Bartleby the Scrivener" was a big hit with my senior class.) When she asked me if Nancy Drew was too babyish for teenagers, I steered her to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Alexander McCall Smith.
For the record, my reading tastes in high school ran towards Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Isaac Asimov. I'm pretty sure that the former would be viewed as unsuitable, alas.
As usual, I got slightly lost getting back to the highway, though less lost than usual. I suppose I could have gone back up to the Baltimore Beltway and around that way, but it is longer. Going via downtown is shorter, albeit confusing. I mostly rely on the "aim for the tall buildings" method of navigating, which works up to a point. it did eventually get me to a street which had a sign pointing me to I-95, so all was well.
The snow started coming down when I was somewhere around Bethesda. It really wasn't too bad until the last couple of miles. Even then, the roads weren't slippery. The main issue was the visibility, as there was white stuff swirling all over. So I skipped a couple of other errands I had planned and came straight home. I can stop over at the hardware store near work instead, for example. And I can make my own salad dressing if need be. In the end we only got a couple of inches, so it should be cleared up pretty quickly. Given that it't taken until now for us to have the first snowfall of the season, I can't really complain much about our winter.
Copyright 2007 Miriam H. Nadel