Eat Food

Sounds pretty straightforward, but of course it depends on your definition of food.  Pollan calls most of what is sold in supermarkets “food like substances”, and he definitely does not consider them actual food.  I’m inclined to agree, and I like his suggestion of shopping only from the outer edges of a supermarket – typically the areas which host fruits and vegetables, meat, and diary.  The center of the supermarket is home to the much more questionable food-like substances largely composed of high fructose corn syrup and chemicals with unpronouncable names.

Not Too Much

Most people eat what is in front of them. Maybe this is good manners, but I think it’s mainly because we are gluttons and would eat more if it were readily available in front of us. Americans in particular eat a lot, and we also eat in unusual places (a large portion of our daily calories are eaten within our cars). Sit down meals are extremely uncommon, a phenomenon I’ve never quite understood having grown up in a family where we ate dinner together every night.  By eliminating the social aspect of shared meals, we tend to eat more food, more quickly.

Mostly Plants

This one is a little hard for me, since I am generally a meat eater. However, I’ve increasingly found that my taste for meat is largely from habit and lack of experience with vegetarian cooking.  I have Indian friends who rarely eat meat because they don’t know many ways to cook it and it doesn’t fit their stereotypical meal – I am just the opposite. I would like to reduce my meat in take, because I know there are delicious vegetarian or low-meat options that are often cheaper and healthier than what I’d eat otherwise. Towards this end, last night we made artichokes, a vegie I haven’t eaten in about a decade.

Grow Your Own

There is a lot of interesting material in the book, and he does a good job of making the healthy diet he suggests seem doable (ie affordable) for most people. Of course Pollan’s beliefs about food go deeper than just the nutrition it provides us — he is also very interested in the ecological impact of our food choices. The final section of the book is where this comes out most clearly where he makes a passionate speech on why everyone should have a garden to grow their own produce.  I was inspired by it, and definitely at least want to start growing basic things like herbs. Who knows, maybe by this summer I’ll be ready for more advanced agricultural adventures.

World War Z: This “Oral History of the Zombie War” is a pretty entertaining sci-fi/horror book. The format is a series of interviews with the survivors of a recent zombie holocaust which makes the story seem much more real, although the science behind the zombies is a bit thin. A quick (if a bit creepy) read, although it got a little tiring in the middle portion.

The Trouble with Tom: a history book from my historian brother. While most people know a bit about his life, this book is about “The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine”. And they really are strange times. By the time he died, Paine was reviled by most Americans because of his anti-religious views. The book chronicles Tom’s bones as they travel from his initial burying ground in New York, across the Atlantic to Britain where his casket is used as a footstool by cobbler for a time, before finally making it back to America (or at least his brain probably did). The book is less about Paine, and more about the many interesting historical characters who owned or affected the course of his bones’ 80 year journey.

A Cook’s Tour is a “Global Adventure in Extreme Cuisines” by author/chef/traveler/tv show guy Anthony Bourdain. The book is the basis for the Food Network show of the same name, which he spends about half of the book mocking. Reading this will make you both very hungry and very tempted to buy a plane ticket to Vietnam (except for the parts about eating the still beating heart of a cobra… that was less appetizing).

The Know-It-All is “One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”… by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Full of humorous tidbits, the book tracks the author’s progress as he reads all 33,000 pages from A to Z. Mostly a comedy, it has some interesting thoughts on what it means to be intelligent, as well as some touching father-son moments.

As a grad student I’ve had a few publications in conferences, but I recently published my first book. Unlike my previous work which was mostly technical giberish, my latest piece goes back to nature, and the backpacking trip that my dad, brother, and I took up Katahdin, an amazing mountain in Maine. Although the first print run was only two copies, it was very well received, and I’m planning to order a third copy soon. I made the book using software from Blurb.com, a site which makes it easy to create publish your own photo books.

To create a Blurb book you must download their software which allows you to create pages by selecting from a set of predefined page layouts. There is a pretty large selection of page layouts, but it does feel a bit constricting to not just be able to drop in a picture or text wherever you like. I found that most of the photo pages had awkward text box placements, so it is best if you can make your pages be almost all pictures or a column of text with pictures on the side. There are very few options for having a wide text box which spans the full page, so if you want a landscape picture on top with text underneath, you end up needing to have your text in two very short adjacent columns. Another annoyance for text formatting is the lack of an option for justified text (so that the words on the right side of each row line up nicely like in a newspaper).

Of course the first step is to bring your photos into Blurb’s software. They provide several options for this such as importing from various web sites like Flickr and Picasa, but you probably don’t want to do that because it is important to use as high resolution images as possible. Instead you will just want to import the files directly off of your computer if you have them available. For full page photos in the 8×10 books they recommend your pictures be from a 4 megapixel camera, but the ones from my 2.1 megapixel Canon came out fine (for my taste).

When I first tried Blurb half a year ago, you were required to select a “theme” for your book which then restricted you to a predefined set of six possible page backgrounds. Fortunately, you can now select any color background for each of your pages, and there are many different frames and borders you can place around your pictures.

Despite a few minor complaints, the book creation process is straightforward. Just drag pictures into boxes and type out your text. At the end of the process you upload the file you’ve created to the blurb website (you can do this easily through the software). After that you can order as many copies of your book as you like and they will be printed and sent out to you.

Blurb offers several size books, 7×7, 8×10, and 13×11, in both soft and hardcover. You pay by the length of your book, but the prices are quite reasonable – 40 page 8×10 hard cover books are $30 and if you up it to 80 pages it is only $35. A full list of blurb’s prices are here. Make sure you choose the size of your book correctly when you start, since there is no way to change that later.

If you are in it for the money, you can list your book for sale on the blurb website – if you set the price higher than the blurb default then you are paid the difference automatically. It sounds like a great way for photographers to sell portfolios and small photobooks without having to invest in a large print run.

The finished product that I received is great! The printing is clear, with good contrast and colors. The full page pictures I used are lower resolution than blurb recommends, and are a little bit fuzzy, but I attribute this more to my camera than the printing. The paper is a reasonable weight and glossy. The hardcovers come with a dust jacket which makes it look very professional. Before I ordered my book I spent some time browsing the blurb forums, and was surprised to see a number of posts from disappointed customers. After receiving my own book, I’ve decided that they must just have had ridiculous expectations or were simply doing something wrong–I did not calibrate my monitor or do anything special, and am still quite happy with the colors and sharpness.

My girlfriend made a book for me about our trip to Spain during our last spring break which she had printed at Picaboo and it also has some beautiful pictures in it. Both books have similar print quality. During the creation process Picaboo provides more stock images to use as backgrounds while Blurb expects you to bring your own or use solid colors. Picaboo also has a neat cutout window on their cover which looks in to the first photo, as well as some nice shadow effects on the images. However, blurb is significantly cheaper – a 20 page book from Picaboo is $30, and it is $2 per page after that. If you are willing to make your own backgrounds, I’d recommend blurb just because you can get a lot more for the price. From what I’ve seen, blurb’s software keeps getting better and better, and it seems to be run by decent people.

The books make fantastic gifts, I gave copies to my dad and brother and they were very impressed. Now I just have to go print another copy for myself!

• Blurb – make your own book
  
• The Greatest Mountain – order your copy here! (or just look at the preview)
• Katahdin – some more photos from our trip

I just finished reading Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a hilarious story of an extremely dysfunctional academic department. Over the course of a long weekend, the narrator, William Henry Devereaux , Jr, manages to be charged as a duck murdering terrorist, cry for joy from wetting his pants, and (almost) play in a donkey basketball game. While the storyline alone is comical enough, it is told with a sarcastic humor that shows up even when the tale turns more serious to deal with relationships both between parents and children and husbands and wives.

The root of the narrator’s problems is that he just can’t ignore the opportunity to make a joke or do something ridiculous. This is his way of rebelling against the stagnation of his tenured faculty position in a small Pennsylvania college. He feels like even if he acts out every ridiculous whim that occurs to him, his life will remain the same. Of course the book is a bit of an exaggeration of academic life, but admittedly it is a profession which seems to attract eccentrics, so parts are not too far fetched. Although the book is focused on an english department, I couldn’t help but wonder about how the story would be different if it were a computer science one–we certainly have our odd ball characters who would fit right in. The narrator’s boredom comes from the fact that he no longer actively practices his craft (writing fiction), other than to grade mediocre essays in his writing workshops. I think (or at least hope) that since scientific fields tend to place a larger emphasis on experimentation and are constantly evolving with new technologies, there is less monotony and more motivation for academics to stay involved with their field.

I highly recommend the book. At times it is sad or touching, but it is always hilarious.