Separate But Not At Peace

According to the Writer‘s Almanac:

[Today is] the birthday of American novelist John Knowles, born in Fairmont, West Virginia (1926). He is best known for his novel A Separate Peace (1959), based in part on Knowles’ experiences at Phillips Exeter Academy. It the story of two friends, Gene and Phineas, one an intellectual and the other an athlete, and their summer together at an expensive American prep school during the early years of World War II. A Separate Peace is one of the most widely read postwar American novels. It is frequently compared critically to J. D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was in its sixty-fourth Bantam paperback run in March 1986, with more than seven million copies in print. In 1960, Knowles won the first William Faulkner Foundation Award for this notable first novel.

Great. I read A Separate Peace in junior high school. I bet you did, too. And now I want to know why. Why did we read that? What was the point? What makes this a good little novel? I haven’t the foggiest idea. In fact, I‘d completely forgotten about until I saw a snippet of the movie version the other night on tv. What I saw was pretty bad. And it didn’t really bring back the novel. My memory is so terrible. So do you remember the novel? And do you have any idea why every American schoolkid (or lots of them, anyway) has to read it? Do kids still read this today? p.s.: If things seem random around ai recently, that may be because they are. I don‘t know which way is up these days, but it seems some part of me is fighting doggedly not to allow the rest of me to happily fall back into student mode. Please bear with me while my multiple personalities engage in mortal combat. To the victor will go the spoils. p.p.s.: The Writer’s Almanac online version is like a blog, but it‘s not a blog. The index page shows you the current day, and entries are archived by week, but there’s no way to link to just one day‘s entry. It should just be a blog. An audioblog, even. Yeah, it should. You can sign up to get it in your inbox every morning, and that’s nice, but, well, why not do it via RSS?

Posted 03:49 PM | Comments (6) | ai books

Bikers: Beware the Bic

A few days ago when I was leaving school I started unlocking my bike and found, to my great surprise, that it it was already unlocked. Apparently, that morning, since I was late to class I had rushed in locking the u-lock and I hadn‘t properly seated the u-bolt w/in the lock before I turned the key. So all day my bike sat outside the school in downtown D.C. unlocked. It looked locked, but if anyone had grabbed the u-locked and pulled, the lock would have come right open. Luckily, no one tried it. Also, I use a cable lock in addition to the u-lock, so a bike thief would have had to get through that, as well, before taking my bike. I don’t trust cables completely because I think they‘re too easy to cut. I’ve had three nice bikes stolen in my life (two came back to me—I‘m a very lucky guy!), so I try to be serious about locking my bike. After I discovered that my lock hadn’t really locked, I also discovered that it seemed to be locked open; I could no longer get the key in to open the lock and insert the u-bolt. I guess when I turned the key w/out the u-bolt being fully seated, I basically broke the lock. So the next day I went to the bike shop and bought a new lock. I didn‘t want to spend an arm and a leg, but I wanted a good lock, so I got the cheaper Kryptonite they had, a $35 standard Kryptolock u-lock. I was bummed about having to spend $35, but glad to know I had a quality lock. And then I saw this: Your Brand New U-Lock Is Not Safe!

As you guys might remember, I recently had the nicest set of wheels I’ve ever had stolen from me. Today I was hanging out with a friend and we got to talking about that - he said his friend showed him just recently how to open a U-Lock with a ball point pen. Of course I didn‘t believe it. That is until just thirty seconds ago when I opened my own Kryptonite Evolution 2000 with a bic ball point pen! This has to be the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen. Try it. Take the end off the pen, jam it in the lock, wiggle around and twist.

Is this for real!? It kind of looks like it. The above site links to videos of people actually opening Kryptonite locks with Bic pens, and Kryptonite responded and did not deny that this was possible. The owner of City Bikes (where I got my lock) even chimed in yesterday saying he‘d found the Bic trick quite easy to replicate. Some lock owners are talking class action. And I just bought a new Kryptonite lock. Crap.

Posted 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | life generally