www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2005-05-08.shtml
Aviator, Spanglish, Fockers, and Fat Albert 01-02-05 iPod, Cut and Run, English, Ford 500 I don't know about you, but I'm about fed up with all the free -- and ridiculous -- advertising and publicity Apple Computers gets. If they decided to bottle air and sell it, calling it, no doubt, "PowerAir" or "AirMac" or "AirPod," they'd claim that they had invented air. Then all the articles about the new MacAir would treat that claim as if it were true and suddenly start treating other air-packagers as mere imitators, playing "catch-up" with Apple. I remember years ago, when Apple came out with their PowerBook notebook computer. I was at a meeting with an extraordinarily dumb young movie producer who kept going on and on about all the cool things his PowerBook could do. I can care it with me on planes and it runs on batteries!" Finally I got fed up and just showed him my Toshiba laptop. "I can do all those things, and this computer cost me a thousand dollars less than yours." It was a cruel thing to do, I thought, to take the wind out of his sails like that. He gave me a withering look and said, "Yes, but mine is an Apple." All the rigid, corporate-determined uniformity and buy-it-from-us-or-drop-dead attitude of Microsoft, but you have to buy your hardware from them, too. I watch Apple users attempt to manipulate their clunky operating system -- click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, just to get where I can go with a single action on my keyboard -- and I hear them raving on and on about what wonderful trhings Apple is finally deigning to make available to them, but which PC users have had for years, and it all makes me vaguely sad. Then, when they're talking among themselves and they don't think you're listening, they reveal the evil truth: Macs crash too. And Mac software has bugs and flaws and security gaps and stupidity built in, just like Windows. Once you've bought into the hype and forked over your money, they've got you and you can't get free without completely replacing everything. My little Panasonic E-Wear, and later my Rio Cali, let me take incredible amounts of music with me when I exercised or took long flights. Then the iPod comes out and it doesn't do anything that I needed and didn't already have. Not only that, but it was deeply ugly, a plain ivory-colored box with pathetic controls that looked like it should hold generic earswabs. Compared to my Rio Riot, it was a piece of junk and looked like a piece of junk. I still have MP3 players with more capacity and better interface than the iPod, and people talk and write as if the iPod had invented the whole class of machine, and all the others were just imitations. Even the current PC World magazine has been suckered into this Apple mystique. They had a "brave and daring" front-of-book essay about how PC makers ought to learn to do things more like Apple. The colors and shape of the cheap plastic they wrap their products in. They make the ugliest, silliest, most embarrassing-looking cheap plastic products in the industry, charge half again as much as you'd pay for a cleanly designed, functional looking product, and they are given credit for design! A lot of smug Apple owners will write me taunting letters about how Windows crashes all the time. And I have about a hundred times as much software to choose from, and can customize my own machine (despite the best efforts of Microsoft) a thousand times more than you can, and I'm paying less for it, and it looks like I actually intend to do serious work with it. As for your iPod, I just have to shake my head and laugh. There are much better -- and better-looking -- products out there, and I already own some of them. But you go on believing that yours Is the best in the world. You'll get into the harness, they'll put the blinders on you, and you'll think you're pulling the queen's carriage instead of the old farm wagon you're dragging along. Not until his was the name paired with Dave Berry's on the wonderful children's chapter book Peter and the Starcatchers. But with a collaboration, you never know which author contributed what. Most collaborations are unequal in the contribution of the collaborators. Some collaborations are greater than the sum of their parts. So I assumed -- shoot me if I'm wrong -- that Dave Berry was the guy who thought up the huge pirate ship sail made of brassiere material, and Ridley Pearson thought up the good stuff. Mostly I assumed that Pearson actually did the sentence-by-sentence writing. So when, in Hudson's News at the Atlanta airport during a long layover, I saw Ridley Pearson's name on a new novel Cut and Run, I let nothing stand in my way -- not even the fact that my bag was already full and to have any hope of fitting this book into my bag I'd have to forgo buying the history of the 1917 flue epidemic that I had already decided to buy. Nothing against the history of the flu, but it will still be buyable when I get back home. Not that I couldn't have bought Cut and Run back home, too, but then I wouldn't have been able to read it on the first three hours of my flight to LA. Larson is a federal agent with the Witness Protection Program when he falls in love with a protected witness named Hope and, against all the rules, has a brief affair with her. But when she cuts loose from the program and goes out on her own, hiding from the feds and the crooks because she's lost faith in the program's ability to protect her, he isn't with her -- and it's his own fault. For years he harbors the vain hope of reconnecting with her, only to have it forced on him by the fact that the whole database of protected witnesses has been compromised by the very criminal syndicate that wants her dead. They aren't after her particularly -- the list of protected witnesses and their hiding places is valuable in large part because it can be auctioned off so lucratively to other crime groups. But Larson is sure that she'll be at the top of their list of targets. And now everything is complicated even more by the fact that she has a child with her. Like any sane American, I want this book to be made immediately into a movie because everything that happens in it is cinematic and thrilling. Nobody's just sitting around being protected -- everybody, the child included, is determined to survive. And there's a hit man named Paolo who is just about the scariest guy I've seen in crime fiction for years. Pearson doesn't spend a lot of time giving detailed backstory and developing subtle characters. Some readers might even think he isn't characterizing at all. He's merely doing it subtly, in the midst of the action. Only one thing stuck in my craw -- the absolutely implausible but apparently obligatory sex scene, under circumstances where I simply can't believe any woman -- or at least any mother -- suddenly wanting to get it on. But I forgive Pearson that faux pas for the sake of how exciting and satisfying the rest of the novel is. Nothing against you personally, but the odds are on my side on this. Fans of language in general, especially histories and grammars of languages, are not exactly thick on the ground. I actually read, for pleasure, books like The Languages of China and The Languages of Japan, because even though I'm too old and mentally faded to learn new languages now, I still am fascinated by how languages tick, and all the strange and wonderful ways humans have found to organize their thoughts. But nothing is more fascinating to me than my own language -- how it works and how it has changed across time. I had to tell you this so you'd understand that when I rave about David Crystal's book on the history of our language, The Stories of English, I don't actually expect you to enjoy it. I took History of English in grad school and followed the familiar pattern -- attempt to explain how English got to be the way it is today. But usually, that means looking at standard English today and in every previous era -- which leaves out much if not most of the story. Because of course standard English is not and never has been spoken by most people. What most of us speak and write is something else, which can differ from st...
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