Book reviewed: Native Son by Richard Wright

This book, written over 70 years ago was controversial at the time, it’s subject being the plight of the “negro” in America in the 1930’s. I read it because it took me too long to get through the grocery store lineup and it was only $3. The protagonist, a violent and utterly poverty stricken balck man called Bigger Thomas, kills a white girl in the first 50 pages and then spends the rest of the novel getting in deeper with every chapter.

You know, I am sure I would have enjoyed this book if it had been written by a modern writer. But the trouble with reading old fiction is that the styles of writing become so dated. I found myself wading through molasses at times and it was a real struggle not to just flick through the book 5 pages at a time. The author keeps waahing on using 10 words where one will do, kind of like Cliff at work. Avoid this book, unless you have a time machine to put you back in the social context. Maybe this was “protest fiction” back in 1938 but now it’s just a curiosity.

My stock options

This was prompted by our CEO’s comment the other day that our stock options were a little “under water”. Mine are so far under water that they have scars from wrestling with Giant Squid.

A week to go, this is worse than Christmas

Here we are. Less than a week out. I don’t know who is going to win, the Republicans managed to smear their way in in 2004 and steal 2000 so I am not writing them off just yet. I know, Obama is perfect for the iPod generation, he may turn out to be a fraud. But at least he will be an inspiring fraud.

Does this all matter to me? No, not really. The prospect of my neighbour to the south being led by an angry muppet and a pit bull are a little worrying, I personally don’t believe we can afford 4 more years of Friedman style eco-politics. In the words of that West Virginia housewife, I am votin’ for the n*gger.

Crazy as a shit house rat

I just don’t know what to make of the looming U.S. Presidential election down south. We have our own elections coming out this month but almost everyone’s attention is drawn to the snuff movie that is the American political game.

McCain appears to be a frightful unrepentant neocon, still fighting the cold war and seemingly unable to grasp simple realities like the Internet, the energy crisis, climate change, Muslim resurgence and America’s imminent demotion to bankrupt second class power a-la Russia in 1990.

Obama is a secret muslim who wants nothing more than to be the boss of whitey. If this isn’t true then he is an elitist who understands nothing about how to gather votes from a red neck nation.

Obama will almost certainly win, McCain will kill him with a throat strike during the final debate. Palin will leap out of the grassy knoll (grassy gnoll?) and club his inert body with a hockey stick. Biden will make some crack about men of colour and then reveal himself as a secret Libertarian, appointing Ron Paul as his V.P. and going on to sell Alaska to the Chinese in order to relieve the national debt and allow California to clear it’s credit cards.

I left my razor in San Francisco

Thank god, I am home again, no more airlines for a while I swear. Michael and I spent 3 days in San Francisco at an ecommerce conference. The trip was great, that city is a keeper. I fully intend to return for a longer visit, hopefully before the San Andreas fault does some redecorating. Michael did the bookings through Expedia and through some crossed wires he booked one room for the both of us to share.

Now while neither of us is ambiguously gay guy I think we both found the first night pretty creepy, I am not that comfortable being half naked with strange men, Michael was unusually quiet as well. So the next day I took the first opportunity to rebook another room. On a side note while I was looking for a image of Bert and Ernie to put with this post I came across this rather disturbing image (nsfw!).

Aside from that the trip was a lot of fun. We skived off from work for a morning and slithered across the Golden Gate bridge and back. The bridge was a super cool hunk of iron and rivets, I was suitably impressed.

Yeah, San Francisco is worth it. LAX airport was the usual scum pond of course. So it goes.

Our American Cousin

I read the news today. Oh boy. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The fact that Wall Street is in free fall doesn’t worry me that much. My mutual funds are there for the twenty year cycle, so a 2 or 3 year down turn isn’t my problem. My stock options became a joke the day they were issued 2 years ago and I will turn to them when I can’t afford better toilet paper. My mortgage was just renewed on a fixed rate last year so I have 4 years before I have to care about interest rates.

Should I care if a bunch of w@nkers down in Toon Town shoot themselves in their wood panelled offices? Well I do feel some disquiet. You know that poisoned version of capitalism that our friends south of the border have chased for the past few decades is going to self correct, the wild ride is over. So will it creep north to us? It will, the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. But in the meantime I hope more than a few of those tossers who threw over a real degree to go make a bucketload as a finance major end up working minimum wage or worse. They deserve the whole nine yards of risk.