The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

I’ve recently gotten an iPad.  I’ll write on it at some point, but for now it’s worth noting that it’s led to my reading more.  So there’s quite a few volumes here to discuss.  Audiobooks first, then on with my readings.

– Pontoon by Garrison Keillor.  While cleaning out my mother’s apartment, I found this as a set of disks.  I like Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stuff, so I brought it home and listened to it on my commute.  I did enjoy it – it’s fairly typical Keillor, all small-town doings with finely sketched eccentric characters doing unexpected things.  But interestingly, given how I came across it, it turned out to be largely about how one woman adjusts to the unexpected death of her mother, and the things she discovers about her mother.  So I enjoyed it, but I cannot deny that there were painful moments.

–  The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman.  Also listened to on audiobook.  I was drawn to this having heard that it is an epic fantasy written by an atheist.  Sort of a Narnia for the atheist set, from what I heard.  I must say, I am not disappointed.  I greatly enjoyed the book and look forward to listening to the next two volumes of the series.

The book did one thing that impressed the hell out of me.  It sets up a world in which everyone has a “daemon,” or familiar animal, who is a constant companion.  While the book doesn’t explicitly state this, it’s pretty clear that the daemons are the souls of the individuals, reflecting their underlying personality and giving energy and spirit to the person.  An interesting concept.

Then, around halfway in, it becomes clear that a group of villains based on the Catholic Church (I told you Pullman was an atheist!) are experimenting with severing the connection between people and their demons.  The point-of-view character has her own connection threatened.  And the book does a masterful job of turning this into a major tragedy.  Even though the concept of demons is entirely fictional, the scenes showing them as being threatened (or, in some cases, separated) are incredibly moving.

All in all, strongly recommended.

– David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  I like Dickens, and I suppose I always meant to read this eventually.  And this is another cleaning-out-my-mother’s-apartment story: I found a copy of it there (I know she loved the book), so I decided to read it.  When I was around halfway done, I got the iPad and so switched over to reading it there.  And at one point I started listening to an audiobook of it, though I abandoned that effort shortly.

It’s standard Dickens: a diverse set of memorable characters, a quickly moving plot driven by much coincidence, much humor and much pathos, and an interesting window into the Victorian mindset.  (There’s one plot involving a young woman who runs off with a man who cannot, for various reasons marry her.  This is viewed as a tremendous tragedy, and she’s ruined.  What an awful worldview, that calls a woman running off for love “ruined” and views the man who runs off with her as a villainous seducer.)  Justly a classic, I loved the book.

But a note on the audiobook experience: when I’m listening to audiobooks, I generally do so while driving.  And occasionally my mind will wander before coming back as events in the book progress.  I found it impossible to attend to this book in that way: the story and prose is sufficiently dense, and a slight lapse of attention caused me to lose track of enough literary gems, that I quickly abandoned the attempt.  I may return to it at some point, having read the book through, but I could not have my first experience of David Copperfield be an audio one.

– Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, on the iPad.  An account of the 2008 campaign, focusing first on the primary battle between Obama and Hillary, then on the general election between Obama and McCain.  Very gossipy about the candidates and their staffs, very quick-moving, and very enjoyable.  I did love this book and strongly recommend it.

Overall, both Clinton and Obama came off well, McCain rather less so (his temper and tendency to shoot from the hip are both on prominent display).  The only major candidate who comes off really poorly is John Edwards, who is shown to be narcissistic, selfish, and at times delusional.

– Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein, on the iPad.  Somehow I never read this one back in the days when I was devouring Heinlein books by the truckload.  But when I saw that it was available on the iPad, I decided to give it a shot.  A fun little story, though far from Heinlein’s best.  Not bad for a quick little read.

– Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, on the iPad.  This is an account of the near-collapse of the financial system in the spring, summer, and fall of 2008.  This isn’t the book I was hoping it to be – I was hoping to read a book that went into details on what caused the meltdown, to get a better understanding of the financial system.  Instead, this was a page-turning narrative of how the meltdown proceeded and what the financial industry leaders and government officials did to try to keep things afloat.  It read like a thriller, with major players trying hard to make deals before deadlines, some succeeding and surviving, others failing and seeing their firms go belly-up.  But not the book I wanted, but a fun read nevertheless.

My biggest surprise: just how involved the government was in driving the deals.  In some cases, Hank Paulson (treasury secretary) or Timothy Geithner (then chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, now treasury secretary) got the CEO’s of the financial corporations on the phone and ordered them to do deals of various sorts.  In some cases they called groups of the CEO’s to meetings and strong-armed them to do what they felt needed to be done to keep the system going.  Rather startling – you call this a free market?  But overall, probably a good thing that they did, else the entire financial industry might have collapsed, taking the world economy with it.

Recommended, though only if you want a narrative of what the players did over those frantic weeks, not if you want to understand how it all came about.

I knew I was forgetting something in that last post.  I also read these over the last couple of months:

– General of the Army: George C> Marshall, Soldier and Statesman, by Ed Cray.  A biography of George Marshall, Army chairman during WWII and the Secretary of State who gave the world the Marshall Plan.  A good biography of a great man.

– Victorian London: The Tale of a City, by Liza Picard.  This fine book covers several aspects of what it was like to live in London during the Victorian era.  Everything from the smell of the city (pretty bad, especially before they put in the sewers in around 1860) to what people ate to how the different classes lived to the style of their funerals.  Full of lots of fascinating tidbits that call out for more research.  Strongly recommended, especially if you want to know more about this era.

– Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel.  I listened to this one on audiobook.  I loved it.  It’s a historical fiction based in Henry VIII’s court focusing on Thomas Cromwell.  For the less historically-inclined, Cromwell was one of Henry’s advisors, raising to the post of Chancellor.  In most representations of Henry’s court, Cromwell comes off as a bad guy.  But not in this one: Cromwell is definitely the good guy, a humanist in a time when most people were anything but.  Interestingly, the bad guy is Thomas Moore, who is usually presented as a good guy.  Here he comes off as religiously intolerant, to the point of favoring the burning of heretics.

Mantel does an excellent job of drawing the major figures of Henry’s court, including Henry himself, Cromwell, Moore, the Bolelyn clan, Cardinal Woolsey, and several others.  I can’t recommend this one enough.

– Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame Smith.  Then there’s this one, that I also listened to on audiobook.  If I had been reading it, I would have thrown it across the room in disgust after a couple of chapters.  I only managed to listen to it because I had several long drives, and it doesn’t take much effort to listen to an audiobook.  But really, don’t bother.

The book is an interesting concept: what if Abraham Lincoln had been a vampire slayer, fighting against those dread beasts?  What if many of the major historical events of the 19th century were driven by vampires, who were strong supporters of slavery (which allowed them to purchase their meals)?  But the execution is just plain awful.  The biggest problem is that Lincoln is almost entirely passive, the tool of a group of “good” vampires in a war against the bad vampires.  But that’s just cracking the coffin on the awfulness of this book: this one even had me feeling sympathetic to the record of Jefferson Davis, which is going some.

Avoid at all costs.

– Horms by Joe Hill, another audiobook.  Now that’s more like it.  Iggy Parrish, who is generally suspected of brutally raping and murdering his girlfriend a year earlier, wakes up one morning to find he is growing horns.  Soon he finds that people are confessing their worst sins to him, and asking his permission to act out their worst impulses.  (Sometimes he says yes, sometimes no.)  In time, he and we start to realize that he’s turning into the devil, with other satanic powers to follow.

The book does a nice job of exploring this idea before turning into a solid thriller as Iggy starts using his powers to discover who really killed his girlfriend.  Yes, it’s a revenge thriller (a genre that I’m rather fond of, actually) with a supernatural touch.  But there’s also lots of sweet romance and childhood scenes, largely told in flashback.  And it’s interesting to see how Iggy learns the strengths and limitations of his powers.

My only reservation is that everything is just a little too pat.  This is the kind of book where, if a cat wanders across the walk in chapter 2, you know it’s going to be important in chapter 20.  Everything fits together a little too neatly, but that’s not much of a literary sin.  So I can happily recommend this one.

– The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.  An old friend, a comfort book.  I’m a big fan of Bujold: she’s one of the authors whose books I buy on initial publication no matter the topic.  This is one of my favorites of hers, and I reread it, not for the first time.  It’s a fantasy set in a well-thought-out world, full of excellent characters and fine plot twists, with an interesting set of gods of involve themselves with the characters’ in interesting ways.  Strongly recommended.

Hmm… I’m surprised there isn’t more on this list.  I could swear I read something else in the last few months.  (Well, I have been reading a few other things, but didn’t finish any of them yet.  Look to future installments for details.)  I guess it was a busy and challenging few months, though, so I guess it’s no surprise that everything is a bit blank for me.

Before getting into the story, some phone numbers for Ebay customer support that I managed to find (they are not forthcoming with these):

General support: (800) 322-9266  or (408) 376-7400

Power seller support line: (866) 515-3229

Now, the story of what I consider to be some of the worst customer support I’ve encountered.

My mother, who died unexpectedly a little less than a month ago, was a power-seller of long standing on Ebay.  For many years she ran a business selling antique postcards under the account AKDMNANA, clearing in the tens of thousands of dollars a year for the last several, reaching gold-level power-seller status, and having several thousand positive feedbacks.

When she died my mother had several open auctions.  I’ve managed to get access to her email so have been receiving notifications from Ebay when those auctions close.  Further, several of her customers have been sending queries, and I’ve been getting notifications of those as well.

I’d like to satisfy those customers.  I really would.  My mother was proud of her Ebay store and went to great efforts to make sure the customers were satisfied, and I feel I owe it to her and them to close out her last business dealings with her Ebay store in a way to do credit to her.

Unfortunately, I don’t have my mother’s Ebay password.  And I can’t think of any way to get it – I’ve done the best I could to answer her account security question, but the answers I’ve tried just haven’t worked.

So I called Ebay customer support.

That alone was a challenge.  Ebay does not broadcast their customer support phone numbers.  (I found them, and they’re on the top of this post if you should have need of them.  But they aren’t anywhere on the Ebay site.)  And even then they want you to get a PIN to access customer support by logging into your account, which I couldn’t do in this case, so I had to negotiate around the phone menus to get past that.  So as you see, just getting a person on the phone is a challenge.

But I managed to do so, first calling a couple of days after my mother’s death.  I got transferred to someone in a special department (fair enough: while Ebay has to have encountered the deaths of sellers, it’s understandable that they would have special representatives for this kind of thing).  The person was perfectly nice and told me that while normally they don’t normally allow survivors to take over an account, given that my mother’s store was so well established they would make an exception.  All I would have to do was to fax a copy of her death certificate to a number that they gave me and they’d let me into her account.

I was quite busy with funeral planning at the time and didn’t have all the paperwork yet, so it took me a couple of weeks before I was able to get ahold of death certificates.  Once I did, I called customer support again, got the fax number once more, wrote a cover note explaining the situation, and sent off the fax.

And got no response, even though I had included both phone number and email with the fax.

So I called again a day later.  The phone rep told me that they hadn’t gotten the paperwork and gave me a different fax number to send to.  (The first fax number was not the right one, at least according to this person.)  So I sent the whole package to the second fax number.

And waited.  And got no response.

I tried calling two days later.  The wait on the phone was too long, so I decided to try again later.

Finally, I called again this past Tuesday.  After spending almost an hour on hold, I finally reached someone.  And got the fourth version of the story.  This person told me that they could not give me access to the account, but if I sent the paperwork, they would close the account.  Yes, they had a policy on what to do in these cases.  No, she couldn’t tell me what the policy was.  The people who managed that policy don’t do business over the phone, so there was no way for me to find out what the policy was.  She had no suggestions on what to do about those open auctions.  She had no way of telling if they had gotten the paperwork that I had faxed the week before.  (She thought the right fax number was the first one I had gotten, but really, who knows at this point.)  She said that she’d try to send me an email or phone me if/when the paperwork was received and something was done with the account.  It’s now two days later and I haven’t heard anything and don’t expect to hear anything.

But just note what I said in the above: Ebay has a policy for handling the death of sellers who have open auctions.  But she didn’t know what it was, and there was nobody I could talk to who did.  That’s got to be about the lamest excuse for customer support I’ve ever heard of.

After all of this, it’s clear that I’m not going to be able to do anything to close out those last auctions.  (And I should note that other than trying to do the right thing for those last customers, I don’t care about the state of the auctions.  The amount of money involved is on the order of fifty dollars, which isn’t worth the bother of trying to figure all this out, find the product somewhere in my mother’s apartment, and generally deal with all of this hassle.  I’m only trying to do the right thing here, and am stopped from doing so by Ebay’s Kafkaesque procedures.)

I’m going to send emails to those customers for whom I have email addresses letting them know of this.  If any of them or any of my mother’s other customers ever manage to read this, I am very sorry.   I’ve tried to do right by you, I really have.  But Ebay has made it impossible.  I hope the items you bought were not important to you, because there’s really nothing I can do at this point.

And here endeth the rant.

A couple of months ago, I started listening to audio books in the car.  Strange that I never did that before, when you think of it, but I figured that this would be a good way to “read” some fun pulpy fiction, saving my book time for more serious stuff.

So far I’ve enjoyed it a lot.  But I do have one reservation: drive-time used to be think-time, and now it’s listen-time.

Over time, I may back away from the audio-book thing in favor of spending that time in thought.  But until then, I’ll supplement my “What I’ve been reading” with the occasional “What I’ve been listening to” posts.

– Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton.  Crichton’s last book – I don’t think he actually finished it before he died.  A full-out swashbuckler, one of those books where the hero puts together a stalwart band of adventurers each with a unique talent and personality and proceeds to launch an attack against impossible odds running up against dramatic obstacle after dramatic obstacle.  Evil Spaniards!  Cannibals!  Betrayal!  Corrupt Officials!  Exclamation points!  Fun and preposterous!

– A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  Somehow I’ve made it to this point in life without ever actually reading A Christmas Carol.  Now I have, or have listened to it anyway.  You know the story and round up all the movie versions you’ve seen and you get a good idea of what’s in the book.  A classic, not much else to say.

– Under the Dome by Stephen King.  King tortures another small town in Maine, this time by having an impenetrable invisible barrier appear between it and the outside world.  But the biggest threat isn’t the dome: it’s the corrupt small town Hitler-wannabe who seizes power and the various sociopaths he puts in power.  A big sprawling book with a huge cast, compulsively readable (or listenable, as in this case) with a strong narrative drive and excellent characters where the biggest downside is that the bad guys are a bit too bad (Big Jim Rennie really should have had a handlebar mustache to twirl).  And two special bonuses that make it stand out beyond other King books: first, there is no book author anywhere in sight (King has a habit of making his protagonists be authors, something that annoys me).  And second, the ending wasn’t bad, which makes it way better than most King endings.  (I’m not a fan of King endings, in case you hadn’t guessed.)  It’s not a perfect ending, mind you, but it’s nowhere near as bad and arbitrary as, say, that of The Stand. (And a special shout-out for Raul Esparza, the guy who read the audio book.  It’s an excellent performance, and his character voices helped make their personalities stand out.)

– What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell.  A Christmas present from Andy, this is a collection of articles written by Gladwell over the years covering a wide range of subjects.  Gladwell has a gift for diving into a subject and providing interesting details that make you go “huh” and look at the world a little differently.   A few examples from the articles collected in this book:

• The inventor of the birth control pill was a staunch Catholic who thought he was helping to make the rhythm method more practical.
• It would be save money to lavish expensive apartments and support services to the worst of the chronically homeless even though that would be fundamentally unfair.
• FBI criminal profiling is largely smoke and mirrors, having more in common with carnival fortune telling than with scientific crime fighting.

I greatly enjoyed this book.  I love learning something new about a part of the world that I did not suspect existed, and I enjoy having my preconceptions challenged.  Gladwell is excellent at providing those things, and I heartily recommend this one.

– Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold.  This was my beach-read for the week in Puerto Rico.  A thriller set largely in the 1920’s centering on Carter the Great, a stage magician, and featuring appearances by a number of historical characters ranging from the young Marx Brothers to Warren G. Harding.  Nothing really profound about this one, but I enjoyed it.

– The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins is one of the leading evolutionary biologists, though in some circles he’s better known as a member of the new radical atheist movement.  This is his argument for why evolution is true and why the appallingly large number of young-earth creationists are wrong.

I find biology to be fascinating, for me the most interesting of the sciences.  And I find evolution by natural selection to be an elegant and often beautiful process.  Put that together and I greatly enjoyed this book.  And although it covered a lot of ground that I already knew well, I learned several new things in it.

I do have two criticisms, however.  First, I was hoping that this would be a book that I could recommend to creationist friends laying out the arguments for why evolution is true.  But Dawkins, who clearly has a lot of anger for the creationists, often launches some pretty nasty attacks at them, referring to them, for example, as “history deniers.”  While I don’t really disagree with his underlying point, he’s hardly going to persuade people by insulting them.  (Believe me, I’ve tried it over the years – it doesn’t work.)

Second, he often quotes long passages from various works about evolution and the biological sciences.  That’s fine, so far as it goes, but in several cases those works are his own books.  There’s something unseemly about an author who quotes himself (didn’t Oscar Wilde have something to say on that subject?), and it hardly seems necessary here.

But Dawkins lays out several solid arguments for evolution, many of which I hadn’t considered before.  And he describes several related matters that I found interesting, most notably the chapter on how embryos develop and how critical that is in evolution.  So with the two caveats above, I recommend this one.

And here’s my review of the Villa Montana, the resort where we stayed, in case anyone is thinking of a trip to Puerto Rico (or happens to stumble across this on Google).

The Villa Montana is a great place if you want a quiet vacation in a warm place.  The rooms were comfortable and amazingly spacious: we had two suites that were joined together, sharing a staircase and entrance.  The two-bedroom suite was surprisingly large, complete with a full kitchen and a vast dining/living room, two full bathrooms, and a large patio.  The one-bedroom suite had a nice sized living room and a kitchenette.  Both suites had washing machine and dryer.

The beach is lovely and quiet.  While there are several adjacent houses, there are no other resorts nearby.  The beach is on the north coast of the island and has waves active enough to attract local surfers.  But a short walk down the beach there’s some of the nicest snorkeling I’ve ever done with a complex coral reef system on a stretch of beach protected from the waves by an offshore reef.

The facilities at the resort are fairly sparse.  There are two small swimming pools and one restaurant, Eclipse.  The food there is good but not great, though the service is slow: even for lunch it was typically an hour after sitting down before we were served.  But while waiting you’re sitting overlooking the beach and enjoying the warm breezes, so it’s not exactly a hardship.

There isn’t a whole lot near the resort.  While Puerto Rico has many attractions, including Old San Juan, a rainforest, and bioluminescent bays, they are all at least an hour’s drive from the resort.  If you’re looking to do a lot of touring, this really isn’t a good home base.  Similarly, we never did find a really good restaurant nearby, though we tried several that were recommended by both the resort staff and other local people that we encountered.

The front desk staff were all helpful and had brochures and information about several of Puerto Rico’s attractions.  There is a stable a short walk from the resort if you are interested in horse rides up the beach ending in nearby cliffs complete with caves: Julie and the girls enjoyed a ride there.  And there are several local options for snorkeling, surfing, and scuba: I recommend Aquatica as a dive and surfing operator – you can get a brochure at the main desk.

All in all, a great place to stay if you want to spend some days enjoying the beach and the water, especially if you’d prefer to do your own cooking.  If you’re looking for a more active vacation, however, this is probably not the place for you.

Thursday evening the girls and I went snorkeling in a bioluminescent bay.  In this bay there is a sort of microorganism that, when you brush against it, lights up much like a glow-in-the-dark watch dial.  Swimming in the waters under a moonless sky was amazing: when you are still, the water is dark.  But make one move and you are covered in glowing glitter.

I would hold my hand still under the water, then move my fingers and watch them glow.  Or dive beneath the waves and watch the glitter stream past my mask.  Once the Unidentified Humanoid swam by me and I could see a large glowing object looking like a comet passing within a foot of my face.

I’ve read that there’s only around a dozen of these bays in the world and Puerto Rico has three of them.  All I can say is that I loved my time there – it was like swimming in a pool of stars.

Unfortunately it was all too dark to take pictures.  I tried with the underwater camera, but the glitter was too dim to be captured.  But here’s one of us on the boat on our way to the bay.

That was the last adventure of our trip.  Friday it rained much of the day, and we had a lazy day.  (Though I did get out for a last snorkel.  What, should I have been worried about getting wet?  I saw what looked to be a school of newborn fish, tiny little things the size of a fingernail with yellow and black stripes swimming beside a much larger fish of the same sort.)  And then Saturday was the usual scramble to get to the airport and home – the first sight of ice on the rivers seen from the plane was quite disheartening.

But we’re home now.  It’s nice to be home, but I do wish it was warmer!

On Tuesday, we drove into Old San Juan, a roughly two-hour drive from our resort.  Once there, we visited the Castillo de San Cristobal, an immense fort built over 150 years starting in 1634, first used by the Spanish to defend their gateway to the West Indies, but later used to watch for submarines during WWII.  An impressive place with incredible views.

Here’s one of the watch stations built during WWII, a strange thing to see grafted to the side of an old-style fort.

After that, we shopped for a while in the streets of Old San Juan, a place filled with shops catering to the cruise ships that often make this a port of call.  Then it was dinner at a nice Japanese place that Andy visited while on cruise last year, then a stroll back to the car passing by the decorated plaza.

And on Wednesday, we rested.  A little body surfing, a little snorkeling, a lot of sitting by the beach and reading.  Then we finished off the day by paying a visit to a local theater and watching “Sherlock Holmes” (in English, with Spanish subtitles).

A restful and delightful day.