Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

In some blog or other I just stumbled upon this link to an incredible and inspirational video on YouTube.

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. I say “was” because he died two days ago from pancreatic cancer. This video shows his last lecture, given last September, when he already knew he would not have much longer to live. The topic: Achieving your childhood dreams.

I know I am coming very late to this. According to the counter on YouTube this particular copy of the video alone has been watched by almost 4.5 million people to date (and I’m sure there are countless other copies of it floating around out there).

Honestly, I don’t even remember all that many of my childhood dreams, much less would I still be interested in achieving them today. Also I had never heard about the guy before and even after watching this lecture I am still a bit fuzzy on what it was he actually did for a living (besides teaching, of course). But what he had to say nevertheless touched me deeply, as I am sure it will everybody who takes the time to listen.

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This was my first book by this author, about whom I have heard many good things. Looks like this wasn’t the best one to start with, because it didn’t exactly turn me into a raving fan.

I’m not saying it was a bad book. It certainly had its funny parts and the story had a good pace and was reasonably interesting, even though the sickly sweet happy end was not quite to my taste (are they ever?). But it didn’t exactly blow me away, either. Then again, even though I kind of like whales on the whole, I am not terribly interested in them. So reading a whole story about them can hardly be expected to overly excite me.

In this entertaining adventure-in-whale-researching Nathan Quinn, a prominent marine biologist, has been conducting studies in Hawaii for years trying to unravel the secret of why humpback whales sing. During a typical day of data gathering, Nate believes his mind is failing: the subject whale has “Bite Me” scrawled across its tail. Events become even stranger as the self-proclaimed “action nerds,” Nate, photographer Clay, their research assistant Amy, and Kona, a white Rasta (a Jewish kid from New Jersey), encounter sabotage to their data and equipment. They also observe increasingly bizarre whale behavior, including a phone call from the whale to their wealthy sponsor to ask that Nate bring it a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye, and discover both a thriving underwater city and the secret to what happened to Amelia Earhart.

I quite liked most of the characters, especially the old broad. (But, honestly: Amelia Earhart? Was that necessary?) There also were some interesting and inventive details that amused me. One thing that kept distracting me a great deal, though, was that as soon as the story came around to the whaley-boys and Gootown and all this, it reminded me a lot of Frank Schätzing’s “The Swarm” (which I loved). That was an unfortunate connection, because Schätzing’s novel is very different and darker in tone (well, up until the bloody happy end, but I tend to blend that one out in my recollection). So even though the basic idea of the 2 books is pretty much the same, the resulting stories are very different. I liked them both, but for re-reading one of them I would give precedence to Schätzing’s.

I have signed up for one more bookring of a Christopher Moore book: “Practical Demonkeeping”, but it will be a while before I get that one. I will keep Moore on my list of writers worth giving more chances to excite me, though.

Sorry for any weirdness that you might have witnessed during the last 20 minutes or so. I have just updated both my blogs (this one and the playground/testblog/thingy) to WordPress 2.6.

And again, even though I am still not using the Automatic Upgrade plugin, everything went through without a hitch. I don’t actually see anything new, but I haven’t been looking too hard, either.

As far as I can see from here, everything should be working fine, but if you notice anything amiss, please let me know.

There are no words to explain how much I am looking forward to watch The Dark Knight soon.

The official website, by the way, is awesome. So is this latest trailer they use as an intro there - but then, they all have been great so far.

I have never been much of a Batman fan, never have read even one of the comics in fact. But I am a huge fan of Christian Bale, so since Batman Begins I am sold on the whole Batman franchise. Not only is Bale excessively attractive, but he also has one of the most sexy voices imaginable (one of the reasons I can’t abide having to watch any of his movies dubbed in german).

I can’t remember any of his movies that I didn’t like (ok, well, Reign of Fire was actually utter crap, but it had not only Chris Bale, but also Matt McConaughey in it, so it was enjoyable from a pure eye-candy perspective - yeah, who said women can’t be shallow? LOL). I still think the fight scenes in Equilibrium were way cooler than the ones in Matrix. And Batman Begins was definitely way cooler than any other Batman movie ever made, thanks mostly to Christian Bale. So how could I have less than overwhelming expectations for this new movie?

Plus, William Fichtner is in it, too. Granted, only in the first 6 minutes, but so what? It’s quality that counts, not quantity. Or so I am trying to tell myself.

But this particular movie I actually want to see just as much in memory of Heath Ledger. What I have seen of his performance in the trailers so far looked stunningly impressive, and it makes me sad all over again that we lost him far too early. By rights I should have been able to see him grow up and grow old and make movies for the next 50 years at least. Not. Fair. Damn it.

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On a happier note: I also just stumbled upon the first (?) teaser trailer for the next Terminator movie, starring - yeah, you guessed it - Christian Bale. There is the sexy voice again… *sigh*

It does look not too bad at first view. I didn’t hate the third one nearly as much as apparently most other people did, so I pretty much look forward to the fourth, even though it’s still a long wait. And this music still gives me goose-bumps.

This is one of those books I had on my wishlist for a long time, ever since I developed a taste for dystopian fiction. I understand this story is one of the classics of the genre, written in the “paranoid fifties” when everyone was afraid of the world being blown up by a nuclear war. It’s strange that today we don’t waste a thought on that possibility anymore - the bombs are still there after all. Probably we have so many other things to worry about nowadays that we just don’t have time for worries about this anymore. Or we just got used to the threat.

However, in the fifties people apparently worried a great deal, judging by the staggering number of novels dealing with this topic. And since I am working on building my very own library of dystopian fiction, I had to read this one, too.

The plot is easily told: There has been an accidental nuclear war and most people in the world are dead (yeah, I know, not the most auspicious start to a story). The only ones still alive are the Australians, because this war took place in the northern hemisphere and the radioactivity will take a couple of months to drift southwards and kill them, too. Interestingly, the australian government chose to tell the people the truth and so everybody knows that they all will have to die soon and there is nothing anybody can do to change that fact. They even have an approximate date for it. The whole book is about the different ways people try to deal with this knowledge.

So far, so good. It does sound like it would be gut-wrenching to read this? That’s what I thought, too, before I started it. Unfortunately, I am either too cynic and hard-hearted, or else the story really is too simplistic and unrealistic. The concept had so much promise as a study of human behaviour in an exceptional situation, but the execution fell far short of my expectations.

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Now here we have a book that gripped me from the beginning and deserves to be called unputdownable. At 830 pages it is not a story to be read in a couple of hours. It took me the better part of 2 weeks to read it, even though I am not especially busy right now. Truly a book of almost Dickensian proportions that deserves to be savoured, if only to be able to spend some more time with its gripping cast of characters.

Interestingly, contrary to many other really long books (“The Historian” comes to mind), it doesn’t feel like half of it is superfluous and could have been edited out. The story is so detailed, and involves so many people and places, that nothing can rightly be sacrificed.

Faber’s bawdy, brilliant third novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era’s secrets and social hypocrisy. William Rackham is a restless, rebellious spirit, mistrustful of convention and the demands of his father’s perfume business. While spying on his sickly wife’s maid, whom he suspects of thievery, he begins a slow slide into depravity: he meets Sugar, a whore whose penetrating mind and love of books intrigues him as much as her beauty and carnal skills do. Faber also weaves in the stories of Agnes, William’s delicate, mad and manipulative wife, and Henry, his pious, morally conflicted brother, both of whom seek escape from their private prisons through fantasies and small deceptions. Sin and vice both attract and repel the brothers: William, who becomes obsessed with Sugar, rescues her from her old life, while Henry, paralyzed by his love for Emmeline Fox, a comely widow working to rescue the city’s prostitutes, slowly unravels.

Funnily, a lot of the important characters are either dead or unaccounted for at the end of the book. When I read the last couple of pages, I kept expecting to learn about the fate of the vanished women, but they are not mentioned anymore. When I reached the end, I kept looking for an epilogue or something, because I wanted to find out what happened to them and if they were safe. And that from me, who despises happy ends! Luckily, Faber resisted the temptation to tack on one of those. Or maybe he is just too good a writer for this temptation to even arise. Now that I had time to think about it, I am very happy that he left the women’s fate open for intepretation.

The whole story is a masterpiece of characterization and shows a deep understanding of human beings and their intentions and secret fantasies. With all the quite explicit sex scenes and descriptions of the goings-on at whorehouses and such, it surely is not for the prudish. But if you forego the pleasure of letting yourself be embraced by this story just because you blush when you read the words “cunt” or “cock” - well, then you probably don’t deserve any better. *shrug*

In any case, Michel Faber has earned himself a spot on my “to look out for” list and I have added his other books to my wishlist. I wish all the books I have read so far would have been this enjoyable.

Can a book with such a wonderfully quirky title be in any way bad? I’m sad to say, yes it can. This one certainly is. Bad, that is. Abysmally so, in my eyes. This book is by far the most un-funny and boring book I have read in quite a long while (and with the “luck of the pick” I had this year so far, this says something.)

I wanted to read this book, only because there is an audio version of it and its 2 sequels read by Hugh Laurie. The audio version of another book (Three Men in a Boat), read by Hugh Laurie, is one of my all-time favorites and was one of the reasons I developed a taste for audiobooks at all. And P.G. Wodehouse’s wonderful, fantastic, extremely funny Jeeves & Wooster novels I discovered through a recommendation from Hugh Laurie, so to speak (he is a huge fan). So I had high hopes for this book as well.

Sadly, they were dashed to pieces within the first couple of pages. Luckily the book has only 126 pages in total, so my suffering didn’t take all too long. If it wasn’t for a doctor’s appointment and the inevitable wait involved in it, I wouldn’t even have bothered finishing those paltry 126 pages.

Hugh Laurie might have enjoyed the story because he went to Cambridge himself once upon a time, but I just found it tedious in the extreme. There are certainly many ways to poke fun at academics, at Germans, at pretty much everything - and there probably are loads of books that manage to do this admirably. This one? Not at all.

The plot is ridiculous (and not in a good way), the characterization is none-existent, all the characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is cringe-worthy and the overall writing style is just … well, sleep-inducing is one way to put it. It’s just as bad as this Ladies Detective Agency drivel by the same author.

That’s a pity, because usually I enjoy nothing more than people making fun of Germans. And academics in their ivory towers. And university politics. Well, actually politics in general is a topic I can’t take seriously at all, so making fun of it is the only thing to do with it, really. But this book, though it had two or three single lines that were marginally funny, is definitely not at all my kind of humor - maybe it’s just so subtle that it went right over my head or something.

If I want to laugh out loud, I better go back to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books. Now that guy actually knew how to write funny. I’m done with McCall Smith for good - there are just too many better books out there.