Dave's Fiction Warehouse

S hould auld acquaintance be forgot? Probably not, but life goes on, you know? One of the few things I really loved about the movie "When Harry Met Sally" was Billy Crystal’s frank admission that he didn’t know what the hell “Auld Lang Syne” was supposed to mean. I don’t either. But if I’ve had a bit too much drink on New Year’s Eve — and that is not unheard-of at the Warehouse — I still can get misty-eyed over the song, watching the boozy couples sway amid the confetti. Probably because the generally accepted meaning of “Auld Lang Syne” boils down to “for the old times.” Who can’t drink to that? The older I get, the better I was. With all due respect to Robert Burns, here’s a ballad composed by James Watson in 1711 that is a bit easier to comprehend: Should Old Acquaintance be forgot, and never thought upon; The flames of Love extinguished, and fully past and gone: Is thy sweet Heart now grown so cold, that loving Breast of thine; That thou canst never once reflect On Old lo...

I 'm really trying to think of something to get Mom for Christmas. This has become an annual problem. She’s in her 80s, and after all those Christmases and birthdays there’s nothing she wants, and certainly nothing she needs. Lately my brothers and I have resorted to sending edible treats of one sort or another — ham or fruit or chocolate or cheese. But there’s only so much one woman can eat. Mom grew up during the Depression, which means that things pretty much have to disintegrate into their component molecules before she’ll think about replacing them. She works outside a lot and lives in Montana, so once I got her a nice warm Eddie Bauer parka. She thanked me profusely and always commented on what a nice gift it was, but I never saw her wear it. The thing is, she already had a perfectly good coat. Maybe it was slightly frayed or patched here and there, but it had years of use left in it and you can’t just quit wearing a perfectly good coat. Especially one that probably, by then,...

W e were talking about the insane Twitter flame-fest that erupted during and after NBC’s live version of The Sound of Music. What the hell was up with that? I was shocked and saddened. What do people expect of live television? Something really classy like the f*%$#ing Grammy Awards? Look, the original Sound of Music was corny even when it was new, and this stage version didn’t add much in the way of sophistication. But we’re not talking Schindler’s List here. You had good-looking people doing a pretty good job with all the goofy numbers, and in a way it was kind of refreshing to see a big star like Carrie Underwood laying it on the line without the possibility of her inevitable gaffes being edited. I’m not her biggest fan, but she showed some guts there. Some of the commentary was sporadically amusing, like this Vanity Fair report from too-cool-for-school Michelle Collins. But really, she’s making fun of The Sound of Music itself, not this particular performance. Believe me, she’s not ...

I 'm sitting here thinking about all the cameras I’ve bought over the years. I mention it because I’m thinking about buying another one. It’s kind of a sickness with me. It’s another shot of bourbon for a man who’s had way too many. And it’s getting near closing time. My first serious camera was a Mamiya-Sekor 1000 DTL; I guess that was in 1972. I ordered it from 47th Street Photo in New York. There was something about the viewfinder, the fresnel screen: When you snapped something into focus, it was like looking at a 3D finished print right there in the camera. It was a slice of irreplaceable time. I loved that camera. I took a lot of pictures of my toddlers, and a lot of my camping trips. Some of those photographs still exist, grainy black and white prints I produced in a laughably primitive home darkroom. Any iPhone would be better, of course, complete with Instagram-style filters that can faithfully replicate every freaking mistake I ever made as a fledgling 35mm photographer. B...

I t’s a question I’ve long pondered: Why America, with all its tech prowess and industrial might, can’t produce a string of Christmas lights that will last more than one season. Yesterday I decided to deploy my annual Christmas display, a subdued arrangement consisting of lighted garlands on the porch and fake greenery around the entrance and a door wreath that is admittedly getting a little threadbare. I plugged everything in. Three of the four strings remained dark. No problem, I thought: I’ll just change fuses. I did that, and — voila! — now none of the strings would light. A variety of Christmas curses filled the tepid air over Jacksonville — like Darrin McGavin in A Christmas Story, except mine was actual profanity. I considered bundling all the Christmas crap back into the garage and being done with it. But this morning it’s still out there. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a metaphor for finding the Christmas spirit in an aging heart. Sometimes it just doesn’t light up when it should. A...

M y daughter once asked me why I read so much crime fiction. I forget what I told her, but the correct answer came to me today: It’s not the genre I love so much, but the certain favorite authors who work so well within it. More importantly, it’s the certain recurring characters who have come to seem like old friends. Which is why I’m reading Tatiana, Martin Cruz Smith’s latest novel featuring the laconic Russian investigator Arkady Renko. When I saw some weeks ago that Smith had written another Renko novel, I actually preordered it. For the record, I never preorder anything. I first met Arkady Renko in Gorky Park, in 1982 or so. I still consider it among the finest crime novels ever written. More than 30 years later, Renko is still in Moscow, which is no longer Soviet but just as brutal and corrupt as ever. Maybe more so, what with Putin’s Kremlin on one side and desperate billionaires on the other. He’s investigating the supposed suicide of a crusading journalist. Of course it’s not ...

"T enth of December]," by George Saunders, might be the best book I’ve read this year. And this year I’ve read quite a few. A few caveats: It’s a collection of short stories, so it might not be for everybody. And some of the stories have an oddball, almost science-fiction feel, so it might not even be for most people. It’s running about 3½ stars on Amazon’s reviews. But trust me: this is pretty good writing. These are not the obtuse and unremittingly bleak little yarns that so often pass for literature and get nominated for obscure prizes. Some are funny, some are sad, but most are both. I’ll just say this: when I laugh on one page and get teary-eyed on the next, I believe I’m in the presence of a master. I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of George Saunders until this book was mentioned as a finalist for the National Book Award. Maybe it’ll win and maybe it won’t (the winners are announced next week), but this is one nomination I can agree with. My favorite stories are t...

B efore I forget, Happy Halloween. I’ll be happy when it’s over. We have about a bushel of candy ready to go, and I guarantee you it will be gone before the kids quit coming. Something about this Springfield neighborhood, the big porches and the wide sidewalks. A holiday like this, maybe it is a little too pedestrian friendly. Still, the wife gets a kick out of it and the weather here is always mild enough to sit in a rocking chair in one’s shorts. I drink a little wine and ponder the Halloweens of my youth, when all the costumes were homemade. Not that it mattered. Usually nobody saw the costume anyway because you had to wear a parka and mittens to ply the streets of Somers, Mont., at that time of year. Anyway, if you like that photo above, here are a few more from back in the day. They’re referred to as “creepy” and “disturbing,” but really, they capture the old-time essence of Halloween, before every kid could afford a store-bought costume based on a movie character or a video game....

W hen the subject comes up, which is often, I always remind people that Florida is not necessarily the weirdest state in the union. I’ve lived in quite a few states and they are all weird in their own way. But lately, I’m starting to wonder if Florida might not deserve some special distinction. Not just because it’s the home of rogue pythons, bugs the size of parrots and Rep. Ted Yoho. I’ve been reading T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida : The True History of the Sunshine State. Even if you toss out half of what he says as hyperbole and screed — which might be wise — it’s hard not to conclude that rational people should probably seek their fortunes elsewhere. The history of Florida is bleak indeed. It’s a long yarn involving geology, climate and human rapaciousness. Allman sums it up thusly: “People are constantly ruining Florida; Florida is constantly ruining them back.” According to Allman, it started with the Spaniards, who came ashore 500 years ago looking for gold in the only area in N...

T he zombies of " The Walking Dead " have the reflexes of Play-Doh, zero tactical awareness, and a top speed of 1.2 miles per hour. Yet somehow they are able to take down major characters week after week. That’s just one of the problems I have with this show. I’m coming up on the end of Season Three via Netflix and there are so many new faces it’s beginning to feel like Saturday Night Live. Longtime cast members keep exiting the show in entirely foreseeable ways — nearly always involving the snapping dentures of the undead. In a zombie-rich environment, is it really so difficult to remain alert for zombies shuffling up behind? These are not ninjas, creeping stealthily from tree to tree. Walkers grunt and moan and tend to trip over discarded items. But even after dozens of episodes, the living still tend to become so dreamily preoccupied that the undead can easily get within eviscerating distance. Or, if our seasoned veterans do take flight in a timely manner, they run straigh...

The bridge of the Starship Enterprise W hen I’m not blogging, which is most of the time, I am cooking things on the grill. I do it so much that recently I bought this expensive Weber to replace the cheap piece of crap I got a couple of years ago. Two or three seasons and it was falling apart. Yes, the barbecue season in Florida lasts roughly 12 months a year, but still. Anyway, this Weber is the Cadillac of grills. It turns out that being able to regulate the heat is a real plus. With previous grills, I had essentially two choices: ambient outside temperature and about 700 degrees. You had to keep an eye on things. Risk a trip indoors to freshen up your drink and you might return to find that the hamburgers had gone supernova, the skewered vegetables reduced to curls of ash. A nice, medium heat makes more things possible. Cooking on planks, for example. I’d often seen friends do this and secretly regarded it as a dumb affectation. But for stuff like fish and shrimp you can’t beat it. B...

"The tramps were burning a sofa in the fountain.” I 've always laughed at that line, from Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis , for its precise allegory of a civilization brought low. He’s talking about a mansion once magnificent enough to warrant a fountain; now here are some barbarians igniting the furniture for no particular reason. It’s better than “Ozymandias,” really. John Boehner I thought of it again while reading this piece in the New York Times. It explains how the government shutdown is not really an outgrowth of stupidity and foolish pride, as you’d think, but is the explicit goal a years-long strategy by certain of America’s uber-wealthy (spoiler alert: The Brothers Koch) to persuade the ignorant to destroy their own comforts. It’s a nice bit of reporting, and depressing too, as all good reporting should be. I know smart people can persuade stupid people to do pretty much anything, but I’m still a little fuzzy on why billionaires like the Kochs even care whether t...

H ave you been collecting Bill O’Reilly’s series of historical tomes? He’s hit upon this formula that churns out best-sellers like autumn leaves. The formula is this: “So-and-so got iced. According to Wikipedia, here’s how it went down.” Then he pays some guy to tart it up like a thriller and cranks open the money spigot. So far we’ve got Killing Lincoln , Killing Kennedy, and now Killing Jesus. Next Christmas he’s going to package them as a boxed set: Killing Time: Everything You Wanted to Know About Some Notable Deaths But Were Too Freaking Lazy to Look Up on the Internet. Do I sound envious here? Not me. I salute any man who can make a great deal of money restating the obvious. At the very least, O’Reilly deserves credit for getting the basic idea, making a few notes and then paying some other guy to write it. I can picture poor Martin Dugard, his name forever in smaller type, going home to his kids at night and saying, “What are you looking at? It puts food on the table.” To be hon...

T his will be a rant about the government shutdown even though I don’t understand much about it. That’s kind of how I roll: Always ready with a knee-jerk opinion even if I have very little to base it on. Here’s the way it looks to an ignorant man: A certain minority within the Republican party has decided that the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law and was later upheld by the Supreme Court, will ruin this country. So instead of waiting for that to happen, they’ve decided to ruin the country themselves. A preemptive strike, so to speak. A matter of principle. This small cadre of freedom-loving Americans knows that canceling government for a few days won’t quite accomplish that. That’s just the short game — a few geezers have to turn around their motor homes at Yellowstone and drive away cursing Obama. The real firepower gets rolled out in a couple of weeks. That’s when these stalwart defenders of liberty will refuse to pay the bills Uncle S...

I know: Nobody comes here to get the final analysis on Breaking Bad . But I can’t say goodbye to the best TV show ever made without saying something about it. Those of you who’ve never seen the show are free to to go. I promise, my assassins outside won’t track you down later. First of all, memo to David Chase: This is how you end a critically acclaimed series. Vince Gilligan and his crew executed the long-awaited finale just as brilliantly as every episode before it. Here’s the thing about that ending — Walt on the floor, Jesse racing away into the night and Lydia realizing the inadequacy of her humidifier — it didn’t leave you wanting more. You were left with a pretty good idea about the fate of every character that mattered, and all of those fates seemed fitting. The episode does have its critics, certain aesthetes and artistes and ignoramuses who may have cheered when Jeff Daniels won an Emmy for Newsroom. Some complain that the ending lacked realism, that it pandered to an unwashe...

Leader of the pack I 've been reading Stephen King’s latest novel, Doctor Sleep . It’s about what happens when the paranormal kid in The Shining grows up and discovers that all the supernatural horror of his childhood didn’t burn up with the creepy Overlook Hotel. It’s still out there, in a somewhat different guise, old wine in new bottles. The new bottles in this case are a group of outwardly middle-aged RV owners who pilot their land yachts aimlessly back and forth across America, backing up traffic wherever they go and pissing off considerate drivers like me. But these folks are not tourists. They call themselves the True Knot. They’re kind of like vampires, but they don’t feed on blood. What they really need is “steam,” their euphemism for the paranormal energy produced in certain rare individuals. They’re more or less mortal — they eat and sleep and have sex — but they can live hundreds of years as long as they keep a supply of steam on hand. That involves scouring the country...

H ow many times this year have you had a $100 bill in your possession? For me, maybe once. They just don’t come around like they used to. So it’s with a certain detachment that I read about Uncle Sam minting a snazzy new C-note that’s harder to counterfeit. I suppose it matters in North Korea, where counterfeiting ranks right behind starvation as the national pastime, but the rest of us here in the lower 99 percent of Americans probably won’t be seeing many of the new bills. The most telling thing about the story is, as usual, the thousands of crusty comments that have glommed onto it like barnacles. America’s education system may rank near the bottom in developed nations, but all Americans are experts on fiscal policy. The noted economists on Yahoo’s news site weigh in thusly (small errors intact) on the new $100 bill: “… it will end up in Saudi Arabia, China, Isreal, or any number of nations we waste our money on.” “… fodder only for drug dealers and congressmen, plus the occasional ...

W here was I? Oh yeah: Bitching about the beggars of Missoula. Seems like a long time ago. But then, I guess it was. More than two months now. For me, it’s a personal best for not blogging. Not sure what’s happened to my occasional urge to write here. I think it has something to do with running out of ideas. Every time I consider a topic, I eventually remember that I wrote something just like it earlier. Kind of like this post. No excuse really, considering all the amazing stuff that’s happened since July. For instance … well, just a whole lot of things. What does it say about me that only things that spring immediately to mind are a few more mass shootings and Miley Cyrus tragically losing control of her tongue? Whoa. That tongue thing: It’s a silent disease that afflicts too many nymphets. Won’t you please help? We can’t do anything about mass shootings, but surely the nation that put men on the moon can sort out Miley’s tongue. Not much else to report. About all I’ve been doing is w...

I walk a lot, so I encounter a fair number of beggars. I used to think Jacksonville, Fla., was bad in that respect. There, it’s a rare stroll where I don’t get accosted at least once. But Missoula takes it to a whole other level. This time of year, you can’t go a single block without encountering at least a cardboard sign and semi-aggressive pitch from the holder. Unlike Jax, the beggars here are mostly young and lean. They have nose jewelry and complicated hair. They are not what you’d call down on their luck. I suppose that’s at least partly because the Rainbow Family of Living Light had another of their gatherings in southwestern Montana earlier this month. The Rainbows are a lot like the bikers of Sturgis, bound together mostly by wardrobe and a misplaced sense of nonconformity. They gather for the big party, then take weeks to disperse to other climes. In the meantime, despite their philosophical rejection of conventional culture, they could really use some conventional cash. It h...

T oday we went out early to watch the Missoula Marathon. Tess, who has run a couple of half-marathons herself, takes great joy in cheering on the runners. I do too, although I take special interest in people who look as if they have no business on the course: the overweight, the elderly, the very young, the halt and the lame. Let’s just say I admire their moxie. Just as I hope somebody might admire mine in the unlikely event I decide my running days are not truly over. There’s something inspirational about watching ordinary people put themselves to the test. Standing on the sidelines, clapping and shouting out the cliches of encouragement, I did kind of wish I was among them. I know how bad you can feel at the end of a long race, but I also know the euphoria near the finish. An 86-year-old man trotted by somewhat stiffly, and the crowd went wild. No doubt they were thinking what I was: If he can do it, what the hell am I doing on the sidelines?

T his morning we were out walking past the University of Montana and came upon a large group of pretty girls practicing cheerleading moves. The amplified voice of the instructor, also a pretty girl, carried across the open lawn: “One, two, three and four; five six seven eight… don’t flex your hands.” The girls moved with a charming lack of unison; maybe it was early in the course. I should have taken a picture. But sometimes a man my age, taking pictures of girls their age, can have his intentions misconstrued. Even if (or especially if) the man my age is with his wife. So we walked on, our pace somehow matching perfectly with the called cadence. They were still at it on the return leg of the walk. It was one of those little moments I’ll remember. Not sure why. All that youthful power concentrated on something so inconsequential. Pretty girls are welcome everywhere, forgiven everything and denied nothing. And this is how they wield it: learning to generate pep for a football squad. It’...

W e have arrived in Missoula, Mont., after trekking 2,600 miles or so across this great nation of ours in a red Nissan Altima. The car is slightly worse for the wear; yesterday a chunk of wood detached itself from a logging truck on I-90 and knocked out the passenger-side mirror. So at least part of Day One in the Coolest City in the West will be spent tracking down some replacement parts. One thing about Missoula: It’s not a town where auto repair is the first thing that comes to mind. Everybody is biking and paddle-boarding and sipping high-end coffee and checking themselves out in the store windows on Higgins Avenue. Middle of the day in the middle of the week, and nobody’s working. Like Portlandia, Missoula does seem like a place where young people go to retire. I’m not young anymore, but I am sort of retired. So I will pose as an artsy type, a novelist of some sort, and should fit right in. The condo will help. It is very chic and minimalist, with floors of bamboo and cork and sli...

W ell, mark me down as one of those who thought Mad Men kind of sucked this season. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley catches a large ration of shit from commenters for suggesting as much, but she’s right: Stories you expect to be linear, like literature, have become circular, like soap opera. Plots are being recycled, and the only thing that keeps the show remarkable is its authentic backdrop of history and fashion. Especially fashion. My eyes are still red from that glimpse of Peggy’s pantsuit at the end of the episode. Still, even at its most mundane, Mad Men is better than another damned reality show, or cop show or dumb ABC laugh-track sitcom. At this point I don’t much care about Don Draper’s personal demons, but I am curious whether he’ll grow a Peter Max mustache and start listening to Three Dog Night. Everybody else did. One thing about the world in 1968: everything was about to get worse. Maybe that’s rubbing off on the writers. Oh well. They could transform Mad Men into...

I 've kept my own counsel on this Edward Snowden case. I didn’t want to judge him too quickly. My first impulse was to dismiss him as a self-aggrandizing little twit, who surely can’t really believe that the security apparatus of his own country is more pernicious than those maintained by his new friends in China, Russia, Cuba and Ecuador. But now I have sufficient facts to render a judgment. And my judgment is this: Edward Snowden is a self-aggrandizing little twit. I hope he has a hard time ahead of him, because I think he richly deserves it. Yeah, it’s terrible that the NSA is collecting almost as much personal data as Facebook. But what kind of a horse’s ass complains about intrusive surveillance and then accepts the generosity of Beijing? What kind of idiot whines about the erosion of privacy and then heads straight to Moscow, where full-court domestic surveillance was invented? Next stop, apparently, is Havana. Then on to Quito, where Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa Delgado...

I watch Game of Thrones, but I’m never quite sure if I like it. I felt the same way about the five (so far) weighty books in the series. It’s too much. The whole thing is a vast, often plodding yarn that has way too many characters — not all of whom are very interesting. There are so many people wandering around in medieval garb that you really need a program to tell who’s who. At least Jaime Lannister now stands out: he’s the one with the missing hand. Goes downhill from here For a fantasy series, this is about as gratuitously brutal and bloody and dark as it can get. Think Lord of the Rings as written by Cormac McCarthy: Frodo plans a trip to Mordor, but he’s tortured and beheaded before getting out of the Shire. Game of Thrones is like that. Any major character can die unpleasantly at any time, and when you find yourself wanting something to happen, that’s when the opposite will occur. In George R.R. Martin’s world, no good deed goes unpunished. The most recent episode is a case in ...

I 'm pretty happy with this FitBit so far. In the couple of weeks I’ve had it, I’ve only missed my 10,000-step goal once: that was the day we drove the 500 miles back from the North Carolina beach. Most days, I’m well over 10,000. The subtle nature of the FitBit — that it quietly remembers every freaking step — has a tendency to gamify the act of walking. You want to better your high score, even if the reward is no more than a silly badge appearing on your phone. And you definitely don’t want to see the sad-face that appears when you’ve fallen short. Too bad it doesn’t also administer a mild electric shock. Not that I’m experiencing dramatic weight loss. It is just walking after all, not the Tour de France. I’ll never attain the physique of Lance Armstrong this way, but I suppose I’ll never have his pharmaceutical bills either. Anyway, just an update. I like it so much I ordered one for the wife. The good: It’s tiny and completely unobtrusive, easy to forget you have it clipped on....

I t’s been a slow week. So let’s go to the mailbag: Dear Dave : So, what have you been reading lately? A : I just finished Beautiful Ruins , by Jess Walter. Excellent book, about a struggling Greek innkeeper and his encounter with an American actress in 1962, when the movie Cleopatra was being filmed. Richard Burton makes an appearance. I can say no more than that, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But it’s a lovely book. Dave Bob, the idiot savant who inhabits a renovated supply closet here at the Warehouse, gives it four stars. Jess Walter wrote the highly regarded Citizen Vince in 2005. My brother Mike recommended Beautiful Ruins, and because he reads nothing but crime fiction, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is not a mystery at all. Not a serial killer in sight. It’s just a very good, funny, and insightful book. Check it out. Note to Jess Walter: I’m available to do back-cover blurbs on spec. Dear Dave : What’s it like living in the Springfield neighborhood...

A fter 15 years of the Internet, I thought I’d heard from pretty much everyone I’d ever crossed paths with since being born. But the other day there was a comment on a video I’d uploaded to YouTube: “did you attend Flathead H.S.?” I recognized the name. We’d been close friends during my freshman year. All the girls back then loved the way he danced. Once he was helping work cows at my folks’ ranch and got kicked in the chin by a calf. He said he still had the scar. During our brief e-mail correspondence that was pretty much the high point of our shared memories. It was good to know what became of him, but I don’t think we’ll be staying in touch. No reason we should. Internet reconnections are like that: you are delighted to hear from somebody and then in the awkward span that follows you realize there’s a reason you lost touch. His dad was in the Air Force and got transferred the following year. My folks moved not long after. Neither of us ever thought to write. That’s OK. When you rec...

I got a FitBit. Have you heard of these things? Susan Orlean mentions them in the latest New Yorker. It’s a little pedometer not much bigger than a quarter; you clip it to your shorts and it keeps track of how many steps you do in a day. The magic number is 10,000, or about five miles. As I understand it, if I do that distance every day for several months, all the ladies will be lifting their tops whenever I pass by. Or at least not averting their eyes in disgust. Ten thousand steps seems like a lot, but so far it’s not been hard to hit the goal. It turns out most people, unless they’re bedridden, get a fair number of steps just living their boring lives. At my house, for example, I go up and down the stairs about 100 times a day because I keep forgetting why I went up there. So all I need do is make up the difference by getting out and hoofing it for an hour or so. The FitBit syncs automatically to my computer and iPhone, so I am rewarded by these immensely gratifying smiley faces wh...

T he first post I ever wrote here was about The Sopranos, HBO’s series about the New Jersey mob. At the time I was annoyed by the ending: an abrupt black screen that said “hardware malfunction” a lot more than it said “this is a fitting end to one of the most groundbreaking TV shows ever made.” That was six years ago. I mention it because I recently watched The Sopranos again for the first time since then. This time I viewed the episodes three or four at a sitting, instead of waiting a week between shows and six months between seasons. We got through the whole show in three weeks or so. It was a different experience. The condensed viewing schedule makes the story less episodic, more novelistic. The characters and their relationships become more clear. Even the hated dream sequences seem somehow less self-indulgent. On the other hand, I quickly went from disliking Tony’s kids to actively despising them. One more accolade for David Chase: A truer portrait of asshole teenagers, circa 2005...

I was reading about this guy Sohel Rana, who made a fortune supplying cheap clothes to cheap Americans. Turns out it’s not that hard to get rich in Bangladesh, if you pay your workers nothing and thumb your nose at the basic costs of keeping them alive. One of his factories collapsed the other day, killing more than 1,100 people. He’d been warned the day before that the building was a death trap, but decided to roll the dice. The collapse was a mixed blessing for Mr. Rana. On the one hand, there are a lot fewer people expecting to collect their 10 bucks for the week. On the other hand, pretty much everybody in Bangladesh now wants him dead. I thought of Mr. Rana when I was reading this other thing, about the Koch brothers fine-tuning their spending plans for the 2014 midterm elections. After the ass-kicking the Kochs suffered in the last election, the Pollyanna in me wanted to believe they’d go back to the traditional way of projecting political will: voting, say, or being tiresome ...

O ver the past couple of days I’ve built a new computer. That was the easy part. Now it’s a matter of getting everything to work as it should — not just all the speedy new hardware, but the new operating system known as Windows 8. So far I don’t like the OS much, but my wife does and I’ve heard that most people eventually warm to it. So I’m still learning and mostly restraining the urge to bitch and moan. Fortunately, I had the foresight to keep my old computer running and online throughout the process. Without it, I’d still be staring at a scene similar to the picture above. It’s true what they say: With Google and YouTube, there’s almost nothing you can’t learn. I sometimes wonder if all that “cloud” memory isn’t slowly replacing organic memory, and if the process won’t someday exact a dear price on the human race. We’ll forget all the important stuff and then the technology will go away. We’ll want to know how to build a fire or bring down a deer with a stone-tipped spear, and there...

W hat is art? That was the theme of Sunday’s New York Times crossword, which I finished in (for me) average time. It was titled “You’ll Know It When You See It.” I kept wondering if the creator had been inspired by Tilda Swinton. Swinton, you’ve probably heard, has since Saturday been periodically napping in a glass box at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Of all the stories appearing in the Times over the past week, I don’t think many have gotten the same kind of public response. People may not know exactly what art is, but they damned sure know what it isn’t. Me, I’ve seen a lot of weird things at MOMA, and the Guggenheim, and I just shrug at this kind of thing. I’m quite the sophisticate. I’m not one of those guys who looks at an abstract painting and says, “my kid could do that” — even if I’ve thought it more than once. My theory on art is this: If it evokes a feeling of some sort, even disgust, then you can call it art if you want to. Ditto if it’s a famous actress who is likely to...

I 've been reading Standing in Another Man’s Grave , the newest novel by Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin. I like the book a lot but I won’t really do a proper review — other people do that better than I. I mention it because this book strikes me as sort of a landmark: it’s the first crime novel I’ve read that really makes social media part of the story in a believable, matter-of-fact way. The venerable John Rebus, no longer an inspector but a retired adjunct to Edinburgh’s cold-case unit, is drawn into a case involving the disappearance of several young women over the course of a decade. The cases all seem unrelated until Rebus discovers that in two of them, pictures from the women’s cell phones were sent to someone on their contact lists shortly after the women were last seen. Over the course of the investigation, Facebook and Twitter and texting and streaming video all play a significant role. The aging Rebus is something of a luddite, but he’s also a shrewd cop. Even while some...

O ne thing about online convenience: Every way it makes your life easier contains the potential to make your life infinitely harder. Eventually you’ll find yourself cursing at your computer screen in impotent rage. Because the very thing that makes the internet so convenient — no human contact — is what makes it so maddening when the magic goes away. Today I find myself locked out of my online bank account. This has happened before. Ever since the swine at Capital One 360 took over my former online bank ING, my sign-in number appears to be good for only one or two accesses. Then it quits working and the account gets locked and I have to go through this long process to reset the number. I’ve done it four times now. I answer a bunch of personal questions, like who was the secret lover of my third-grade teacher, and I get a code via e-mail allowing me to change my sign-in number yet again. The problem today is that the e-mail with the code hasn’t come. Capital One 360 says they sent it, b...