Nothing funny about feldspar

As Plagioclase and I walked past an AT&T store today, we popped in so I could look at an iPhone. It was quiet there, and I said we were just going to take a quick look at it and leave. The salesguy said, “I’ve got two with your names on ‘em right here.” “Riiiight,” we replied.

So we poked a little, and marveled at how pretty they were, but we couldn’t get a real sense of how to use them because they were tied down pretty securely. Flicking to scroll was pretty nice, but I found I kept having to hit the “Home” button because I kept getting lost in what I was wanting to do (look at a map).

Anyway, we put the phones down and left, and agreed that this generation iPhone isn’t for us. As I said before, I don’t use my phone and iPod as it is. Maybe by the third generation…

I mentioned that Plagioclase’s mother is having many more “bad days” lately. It turns out that it may be more serious than just normal aging + painful arthritis. More tests underway.

As I lay not sleeping at three o’clock this morning, I drifted into that weird “Isn’t that cool?” state that one gets into when one isn’t really paying attention.

This morning, I was thinking how cool it is that 3 × 17 = 51. I mean, 51 doesn’t seem at first glance to be a multiple of anything. At least not to me. Then I started thinking about the trick to determine if a number is divisible by three, and I thought that was really cool, too. Then I thought about writing this post, and then I went to sleep.

A half-dozen Very Expensive Specialist books (and magazines, if available) start showing up scattered throughout the house.

Just wondering why he doesn’t ever seem to be enamored of topics that can be easily studied by bargain-bin books.

(I’m the same way, but for me it’s “equipment” and not so much with the books. Piles of floss and fabric for cross-stitch? Check. Power tools for home repair? You bet. “Project” chairs for reupholstering? Absolutely. Hey! Maybe I can cross-stitch a slipcover — that way my crappy repairs won’t show.)

Why I stopped reading Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer on page 10:

The lake itself could not be seen from the Chestnut ridge, thanks to the sharp ascent of the Milwaukee’s eastern bank. But when Phillip [Best] climbed the steep bluff that hugged the lake’s edge, he marveled at the vast sheet of rippling gray silk that stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, jagged tripods of canvas-draped uprights sliced the horizon.

Ten pages like this was all I could stand. And it goes on in this vein for the rest of the book (that I could tell; I was skipping through it in ever larger chunks). I understand the desire to “bring the past to life with intricate descriptions” but man, an editor would have been handy.

I happen to like this sort of economic-history-of-America-organized-around-a-single-industry. Recently I read And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails and enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s a completely different writing style, perhaps one more suited to my taste, but the author didn’t spend a lot of time telling me stuff he had no way of knowing to be true.

Ambitious Brew has some good reviews on Amazon.com, and at least one suggested that the book starts slowly. I guess I just don’t have the abiding interest in the topic to wade through the first part to get to the “good stuff.” Given what I saw of the later writing, I’m not so sure that I ever would have had the right kind of interest.