by Henry Hoke

The narrator is a displaced mountain lion in California. It was certainly interesting, and nicely brief. I like books that try to capture an animal’s perspective. It really lost me though when the girl takes him to Disney World.

Oh, and it came with stickers.

by Louise Aronson

First, the negatives. I am so glad to be done with this 300-page book. Did this woman have any editor whatsoever? She must have put down every single thought on the subject of elderliness that ever entered her mind.

Now the positives. I liked learning about geriatrics. I feel a geriatrician is exactly what my mother-in-law needs – a whole-person doctor. (If only I could get her out of the house to see one.)

And I did feel inspired to bookmark one thing. Why do we all hesitate to call ourselves “old”? “Imagine a forty- or fifty-year-old saying, ‘I don’t like to think of myself as an adult. I’m just a kid who’s been around a few extra years.'” Well, actually, I can and do know at least one person who’s said something to that effect, so, not so shocking… “Or a children’s hospital that eschews the term ‘child’ because of its association with immaturity, and instead markets itself as serving short, unemployed people.” OK, that part is funny to imagine.

by Latanya Mapp Frett

Was at its best when it spotlighted feminist activists around the world and let them speak of their own experiences in their own words. Was at its second best when Mapp Frett spoke directly of her own experiences. Was not at its best when she spoke in general terms,

by Ben McKenzie & Jacob Silverman

An antic-crypto screed in which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and the implosion of FTX figures heavily. I spent most of my 2020 workyear researching cryptocurrency, blockchains, stablecoins, etc., so I have an interest. I also have been a follower of the Effective Altruism movement, with which SBF was associated, so that’s given me a double-interest in the FTX story. I read this with glee. It’s not bad; while unabashedly anti-crypto, it doesn’t come off like a bone to pick, but rather one person’s not unreasonable opinion. Ben McKenzie does make constant references to his being an actor, a somewhat famous actor in his day, but I never saw anything with him in it so I didn’t care. (His biggest role was on a show called the O.C. which was for people younger than me.) For an actor, he’s damn smart.

He’s got lots to share firsthand about SBF because he actually once scored an interview with him as well as something of a Twitter relationship. He found the guy to be really weird (no surprise there), intrinsically; and also, it just felt so weird that SBF wanted to talk to him at all – not only that, but really seemed to want him to LIKE him. McKenzie shares some insight he got form a former FBI agent: Just listen. “Tell the suspect you know he is a good person, but you need help understanding what happened…” Bad actors, all of us, need to see ourselves as good people.

So, the FTX story. I remember it well (it wasn’t even a year ago). Binance, a rival crypto exchange, held tons of FTX tokens (FTT). When they announced that “concerns” about FTX’s balance sheet had led to them to decide to liquidate all their FTT tokens, that was the end. The CEO of Binance, “CZ”, had gotten into some kind of bicker-war with SBF, Well, all it took was the announcement of intent to sell a major quantity of FTT, and “Voila, bank run.” “CZ had played his hand well.”

McKenzie’s problem with crypto is that it has no use case, nothing for the here and now – use cases are always presented as “Someday it could…” His fundamental problem is that it seems to misunderstand the nature of money. Money has value because we TRUST the government to back it. We TRUST that other parties will accept it as legal tender because it has the government of the USA backing it. Crypto is “trustless” – that’s allegedly a feature, not a bug. But he doesn’t think that the necessary trust that could make it ever be anything more than a speculative gamble can be conjured out of thin air, or out of trusting the code – code is written by people. I could see having some good arguments with the guy.

Volumes 1, 3, 7, and 9

Yes, I’m counting these as four books; wanna make something of it?

I got these off of Paperback Swap. These were the only volumes available.

When I was a kid I had two or three “Charlie Brown’s Super Book(s) of Questions & Answers” – which contained some of the same content as these. So it was a walk down memory lane as well as a chance to spend some time with Snoopy.