Wiggilator

I made a Wiggilator. It's a bunch of springs mounted onto a board. You whack it, it oscillates like crazy, you laugh, it comes to rest, you move on. Soon everyone will want one. I will make millions of dollars. I will take my family out for Chinese food. It will be good.

Book Readin'

The Information Age has taken a heavy toll on my ability to read text in any form and of any significant length. My attention span has been so truncated that I struggle to read the little pieces of paper inside fortune cookies. That's really pathetic. I'm fighting back though. I am making a serious effort to read documents of ever increasing content and complexity. ATM receipts, error messages on machines at work, IKEA furniture assembly instructions, mortgage refinance documents and the occasional book are now being devoured with a hunger not felt since the late 90's and early 00's. That was an era when consuming the entire Foundation series by Issac Asimov in six months was nothing. Also during those years of enlightenment I burned through the works of Hanif Kureishi, John McGahern, Arthur Miller, Patrick Kavanagh and various American authored short story collections.

It's not really an attention span issue that drove me away from books to be honest. I've been thinking about this for a year or so and have made some conclusions. It was an imagination problem. I could no longer attach faces to characters in books, they were just names, and when the book had more than five characters it became impossible to follow the storyline because all the faceless subjects got mixed up in my head. An attempt to read a Douglas Coupland book ended after 25 pages of frustration and complete confusion. I was no longer able to handle excessive detail and side plots and sub plots. I wanted the meat and none of the side crap.

Maybe I have been reading the wrong stuff during these last few years. Perhaps the mental effort that my job often requires (nobody was kind enough to preemptively inform me that the trigonometry, vector mechanics, machine design classes I took at college would ever be put to good use) has rendered my mind spent at the end of the day such that I take more pleasure from kid's books (Spot Goes To The Farm, Spot Loves Mommy, Spot Gets Hammered, Spot Gets Divorced, Spot Is Homeless, Spot Dies... I made up a few of those) than from my own. Hey, maybe I'm just thick and was never meant to read.

No, I'm not thick, just slow at times. Like I said at the start of this rant I have been fighting back. In the last two months I have managed to read more books than I have read in the previous five years.

Recently read: Joe Wilson and His Mates by Henry Lawson, Children of The Bush by Henry Lawson, Introduction to Fluid Mechanics by Fox, McDonald and Pritchard, Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Missing Éire

The Wife: Are you homesick?
Me: No, why?
The Wife: You're listening to RTÉ online (LINK) and talking about getting drunk and eating chips in the rain.
Me: Maybe I am.