With the resounding success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens apparently thought he had a good thing going and started writing annual Christmas stories. There are five stories total, written from 1843 (A Christmas Carol) to 1848 (The Haunted Man). He skipped 1847 for some reason.
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It’s been a while since I did a tech post, so I thought I’d write about a few of the fun tech toys I’ve been playing with lately. Then I realized that most of these are Firefox add-ons, so I’ll make this a Firefox post. Continue reading
I know that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to cheer the hearts of mankind and to infuse us all with the spirit of the season. (Well, he also wrote it to try to jump start his flagging career—more on that later.) But my earliest memories of this festive classic involve being scared out of my mind by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Thank you, Hollywood. I’d make it through the Marley part with only mild whimpering, then get lulled into a false sense of complacency by the benign Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, only to be accosted by that terrifying bony hand emerging from its black shroud to point at Scrooge’s grave.
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For the most part, I really like oolong tea, but I don’t drink a lot of it. Lately I’ve been very focused on pu-erh, but I have made some recent interesting excursions into “the other gong-fu tea.” So here are a few recent oolongs of interest:
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China black teas are not an area that I have explored much in the past, but here are a few that I have sampled recently from Upton.
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A few more reports from my continuing exploration of the world of pu-erh tea, specifically sheng pu-erh.
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I just received a shipment from Upton that includes two interesting Darjeeling teas, so I thought I’d try them both right away. During the spring and summer I’ve been drinking a lot of first flush Darjeeling, so I thought I’d try a couple teas from the other flushes.
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After a string of reading experiences that I have found less than stellar, I decided to indulge in one of my favorite luxuries: re-reading. Considering how much there is out there that I want to read, I always feel a little guilty or lazy when I re-read something, but I greatly enjoy it. Freed from the task of keeping up with a complex plot and remembering who all the characters are, I can focus on subtler aspects of the work that I may have missed the first time around.
My choice this time was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in my opinion one of the truly great English novels. I finished the book about a week ago and have found myself reluctant to write about it. Writing about perfection is terribly boring, and I find Middlemarch just about perfect. Dorothea Causabon is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, with her youthful idealism and flare for martyrdom giving way to a more self-possessed peace in which she can finally act upon her own desires. She is also an interesting case of the female scholar (or would-be scholar) in the nineteenth century, a theme which we also see in the bibliophilic Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. She is clearly a woman of great mental capacity and yet is unable to realize her potential. I am not sure whether to blame “society” for this or the peculiar short sightedness and insecurity of Mr. Causabon.
Clearly I am in love with Dorothea, and when I think of Middlemarch it is her story that comes to mind. But the other stories are almost as riveting: the fall of the prosperous banker Bulstrode, the horribly failed marriage of Lydgate to Rosamund Vincy, and Fred Vincy’s pursuit of Mary Garth. I was particularly struck by the parallelism between Causabon and old Featherstone. Both of them are men facing death who seek ways to control the living after they are gone, Causabon in the single case of his wife’s possible re-marriage, and Featherstone in a more general sense of trying to disappoint as many people as possible with his will. Causabon fancies himself a man of high principles while Featherstone is unapologetically vulgar, but both are unable to accept death enough to let go of their earthly influence.
A more obvious parallelism is between the two failed marriages in the book. The Causabon marriage fails despite Dorothea’s desperate and selfless desire to make it work, while the Lydgate pairing fails due to the opposite tendency on the part of the selfish and indifferent Rosamund. Looking at the men in these marriages, we notice that both of them are possessed of some degree of intellectual ambition. The happiest marriage we see in the book is that of Dorothea’s sister Celia, who marries a gentleman farmer who has no use for scholarship. It is also worth noting that Celia’s marriage produces a child, while Dorothea remains childless and Rosamund has a stillbirth. Are we to draw the conclusion that the life of the mind and that of the hearth are incompatible?
Middlemarch is truly a spectacular novel and my favorite by Eliot to date (though I have not read all of her books). I’m sure that this will not be the last time I read it.
We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.
Perhaps it was some such notion as that expressed above that has driven me temporarily from the tidier worlds of Trollope and Austin to a trio of nautical adventures. I have read, in quick succession, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, and Typhoon by Joseph Conrad. Actually, that’s not quite true: I didn’t finish The Perfect Storm. A book has to be pretty bad for me not to finish it, and I found Junger’s tale of a doomed swordfishing vessel a choppy and unsatisfying read. Maybe some day I’ll rent the movie and see if Hollywood, which will presumably have no inconvenient scruples about strict veracity, as did Junger, can make it more interesting.
Typhoon was little better. Of the three books, it is the only work of pure fiction and is the only one by a man actually known as a writer, though I fail to see why. I remember reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in high school and being amazed that a writer could make such a darkly compelling story into such a dull novel. In Typhoon Conrad accomplishes a similar feat, rendering a life-or-death struggle against the sea in a manner that, frankly, made me sleepy. In order to stay awake, I would sometimes amuse myself by searching for antecedents to his ambiguous pronouns.
Speaking of ambiguity, the quote at the head of this post is from Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, the only work of the three that I take any pride or pleasure in having read. Dana was a junior at Harvard when he decided to take some time off to see the world (and hopefully get some relief for his weakening eyesight) by embarking on a voyage around Cape Horn to California aboard the brig Pilgrim in 1834. The voyage lasted two years. Actually, the Pilgrim stayed longer in California, but Dana, not wanting to make a career out of sailing, got a ride back earlier aboard the Alert. Dana’s account of his two years at sea is engaging and well-written, although not always riveting in its details. There were times, I confess, when I longed for some pirates or a giant squid to make an entrance and liven things up a bit.
Dana’s primary motive, however, was not to entertain, but to describe in detail the life of a common sailor. He shows us a life not only subject to vacillations of weather, but also to the sometimes cruel whims of ship captains. His account of a vicious flogging aboard the Pilgrim is one of the book’s most memorable scenes. He also details the extremely laborious process of curing hides and hauling them aboard for transport back to Boston. The edition that I read was closed with his “24 years after” essay in which he visits the modernized California to find that both the hide trade and sailing ships are things of the past. Overall, Two Years was an enjoyable read and I think that its place as a minor American classic is well deserved.
I dimly remember the days of search engine plurality. When you wanted to search the web, you had a number of choices: Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Northern Light, Lycos, Infoseek. If all of that was too much to think about, you could choose one of the meta-search engines like Dogpile that would pass your query on to a number of individual search engines. But at some point several years ago, most of us accepted the fact that Google, with its page ranking algorithm, was the best game in town. “To Google” became a verb and Google’s share of the search market probably topped Microsoft’s share in the browser market.
Every now and then, someone would question the Google gospel and try to promote a new search engine. Take Teoma, for instance. It popped up in 2000 and a few people were excited about it for a little while, but after the novelty wore off we all went back to Googling. Not only did Google have a great ranking algorithm, but the sheer volume of pages in its database was unsurpassed. Google has some issues with privacy, but who is really naïve enough to think that anything they do on the Internet is private?
Once again, a new contender has dared to raise its head. It’s called Cuil (apparently we’re supposed to pronounce that “cool”) and it launched yesterday. Cuil claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else.” The number they give today is 121,617,892,992. In addition, they are up front about their privacy policy, stating that they “analyze the web rather than our users.” So, they are claiming a larger database and the moral high ground (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”?).
Cuil’s interface is quite good. A page of Cuil results looks much more appealing than a page of Google results. Each result item displays with a blurb of about 40 words or so, as opposed to Google’s 10-15. This feature is useful in determining the relevance of a site. Cuil also features an image next to each result. This is decorative, but rarely informative. In fact, the images often seem to have been selected at random from the site. I did a search on “corn” and found that the entry for the Kentucky Corn Grower’s Association is adorned with an image of the Google logo, presumably because the page features a Google search box. A search for my place of employ, Ithaca College, turns up a picture of a horse and buggy. I can’t imagine where that came from.
Cuil offers an interesting feature called “explore by category,” similar to Google’s “related searches” feature. For the corn search, the “explore by category” menu offers a choice of “American cuisine,” “agricultural pest insects,” “crops,” “sweeteners,” and … wait for it … “UK MPs 1826-1830.” Huh? This feature does not always appear. A search on something fairly unambiguous (e.g., sea slug) will not show the “explore by category” box, but a term that can have multiple meanings (e.g., cook, java) will trigger the feature to appear.
In terms of search results, I am not especially impressed. On the corn search, one of the top hits was the Corn Island Storytelling Festival. The first page of Google results for the same search yielded only items actually relating to the crop. Generally, Cuil does not seem to share Google’s affinity for Wikipedia. Google searches very frequently feature this site high on the list, where in Cuil it seems to come up less often.
So, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m willing to give Cuil high marks for a good interface and kudos for their stand on privacy. As to search results, I’m going to keep playing with it. Only time will tell if this is the next big thing or if it destined to follow Alta Vista and Teoma into oblivion.
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