Brown Motion

OR alternately it could be titled - Why I like paper books or Why I go to the library. To wit - I have enjoyed many a fall color when we lived in Michigan for many years.  During the course of this stay, at the onset of autumn we drove about four hours north of the Detroit suburb where we lived to a place known as the Upper Peninsula. For most Michiganders this was a seasonal must do.  The Upper Peninsula or UP as it was affectionately known is a largish bit of real estate, in fact about 30% of the state was the UP bordered by some of the cleanest fresh water on earth.  It juts out into three of the five large lakes otherwise called the great lakes. The point I am getting to, believe me there is one in the end - is that the landmass here was mostly forested.  With some species of birch or the other, but predominantly featuring maples.  What happened in autumn or just as summer days turned cooler was that the leaves on these maples and other deciduous tre...

It was a couple weeks of parallel processing.  As in consuming some new literary finds at the local libraries.  Here are the titles and synopses in no particular order - Eight Flavors - untold story of American Cuisine - by Sarah Lohman - a fun read if you like it spicy and hot.  Well not literally.  But Sarah does a good job of narrating the history of some of the most common spices on the American dining table and also explains through use of experiments the human ability to distinguish what the palate likes and does not.   Black Pepper is the most popular of spices in American cuisine today and held its own for couple hundred years.  Sriracha is gaining popularity in the last couple decades made right here in sunny California.  Another sauce Korean Gochujang is a 'hot' contender. Calculating the Cosmos - by Ian Stewart - a British math professor who explains a bunch of complex physics and math using language that is enjoyably easy.  For...

Most of what I blog is.  But I thought about what I read.  Read read or read.  Makes no difference. I prefer non-fiction because it opens up the world just a bit more in throwing light on an idea, concept, fact or person, an achievement or a relationship,  a root cause or what stems what. Biographies, Business of running a business, Human origins, Human thinking, Psychology or Philosophy, Medicine or Engineering, Architecture or History.  The subjects are varied and the magic is in how the author is able to convey information without sounding pretentious or pedantic. But I do have my share of non fiction favorites.  Genres perhaps.  Thrillers and Mysteries mainly. Comedy or humor as a stand alone (both fictional or not) but very few authors can pull off a 300 page tome just trying to make you laugh. George Carlin could.  Pelham G. Woodhouse had it down with Jeeves and his crummy cast of characters.  Bill Cosby with his Fatherhood and...