Celina > Recent Status Updates

“James, the most vicious of the lot, was forgiven for his crimes. He was white, entertaining, and an alleged foe of the government; in other words, an ideal American.” (2/2)

“The makeover of Jesse James was part of a broader mid-century rehabilitation of slave owners including Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Their biographies were rewritten by Hollywood’s cowboys-and-Indians culture, softened to appeal to 10-year-old boys and the 10-year-old boy in every man.” (1/2)

This is good, but I think I’ll have to read it on paper. The narrator is good, rendering the different characters’ voices subtly and accurately, but the MC’s breathy, naive voice makes already emotionally unsettling content hard to take. Plus, there are subtle clues and foreshadowing that are hard to keep track of in half-hour chunks. I think this is a book that calls for flipping back and forth a lot.

Ever since this came out, I’ve been dying to read it, and it’s just OK. I’m glad I didn’t pay money for this.

This is great so far (if you don’t count wondering if the author ever spoke to an actual woman), but a library reserve has come up and i have to set this aside for now.

On raunch comedies that weren’t American Pie: Crap movies are crap. I appreciate the need to call out toxic pop culture, but I’ve never heard of at least half these titles, let alone watched them.

If I’m not mistaken, Sophie Gilbert is a British writer who moved to the US in 2007, presumably as an adult. So it’s a little weird to see her do these deep dives into American Pie and other classic US trash. Not bad, but weird. Two possibilities:

1. maybe she’s more American than I’d thought
2. maybe this crap is more pervasive and more formative than I want to think.

“And wind speed tends to be higher in the winter than the summer because of sharper temperature gradients. Sun and wind are therefore complementary, and they have a triplet, hydropower, which is just one more form of solar energy.”
2/2

“[Wind energy] is graceful in another sense. Because it takes a while for the sun to heat the air molecules that produce the wind, wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, just as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb. Not only that, but the further north you go, the stronger the wind gets, which is useful since Norway has rather less sunlight than, say, Greece.”
1/2

Until now I’d only heard the name Zbigniew Brzezinski. I don’t know anything he did outside of the Iranian Revolution, but I have to say the one thing I know about him is not impressive.

I’ve had a couple of false starts with the preface, keeping track of dates and details, but this time I think it will stick. I paid for the audiobook so I want to listen to this. It’s really good so far.

“July 4 [1939]

To me one of the most alarming – as well as ugliest – symptoms of the moment is the growing tendency (on both sides) to deny any sincerity or good faith to their opponents. If there is a naïveté in too blind a faith in the essential decency of human nature, there is also a naïveté of a more dangerous kind in denying any idealistic motives to one’s opponents.”

This would have been a good book for my dad 😞

Part 1 was ok. Part 2 looks better.

Huh? Anecdote out of nowhere about a “group of South Americans” taking some pregnant women to Antarctica so their offspring could claim some oil reserves as “natives of the region”? But the babies all died for a lack of bacteria? I’m gonna need more information.

Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll do: buy this on paper. I don’t want to rush this and the narrator is only OK (it’s a tough book to read, with all the different accents and voices).

This is much better. The only problem now is that I’m on a tight schedule to finish before this is due back. I turned up the speed for a few chapters and now it’s looking more manageable. I kind of wish I’d bought this on paper so I could linger with it.

Almost everyone in this book but the title characters is hot garbage. Impressive variety, but I don’t know that I want to spend an entire book with this parade.

This is about at the reading level of a magazine article. Some of it is basic (leave your leaves, No Mow May, test your soil), but there are some good, doable ideas here for simple DIY projects to encourage wildlife: Create a Butterfly Puddling Station, Build a Brush Pile, Hang a Pinecone Feeder.

Picked this up on a whim from a library display and now I’m relaxing with some nice garden pictures after having a day.

É quase que um Steinbeck com mais sol e pimenta, mais humor. O foco romântico, quase heróico em vidas econômica e geograficamente marginalizadas. Sem querer forçar a comparação, pra mim que me criei nos EUA a referência da mesma época (anos 1930) é essa.

Mas o Sem Pernas não compreendia que aquilo pudesse bastar. Ele queria uma coisa imediata, uma coisa que pusesse seu rosto sorridente e alegre, que o livrasse da necessidade de rir de todos e de rir de tudo. 2/2

Havia, é verdade, a grande liberdade das ruas. Mas havia também o abandono de qualquer carinho, a falta de todas as palavras boas. Pirulito buscava isso no céu, nos quadros de santo, nas flores murchas que trazia para Nossa Senhora das Sete Dores … 1/2

I hadn’t meant to reproach her. Maybe on some level I thought that such a fissure of straight-talking had now opened between us that it could displace years and years of complicated sediment, much of which existed out of sight, out of consciousness, just like that, in a word, an accusation disguised as a statement of fact: sister, this is how you made me feel.