As usual, if you wish to discuss plot elements (so as not to be Filed Upon by those who have not read that far) go to the book discussion area and use the * * * spoiler * * * warning with a full page of downward scroll before saying anything….
Alliance Rising is shipping now.
by CJ | Jan 9, 2019 | Journal | 40 comments
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Just finished it, late last night, and really enjoyed it. Nice to get back in that universe after a long time. Hope the A-U History comes out soon!
@CJ — Hey, CJ, Jane, and Lynn Abbey — Apparently, there has been a changeover to more secure HTTPS for your blogs and sites, which meant that, since some time on Jan. 8th, I wasn’t able to login to the blog here (or the others, or Closed-Circle.net). I emailed y’all, but it may not have gone through. Finally, just now, it occurred to me, maybe I needed to check for HTTPS, and aha! that got it. (The links from a Google search and Wiki do work fine, however.) — So I have updated my bookmarks and favorites links. Other regular visitors may be having the same problem. (I haven’t checked at Sheridan, that’s next.)
—–
I am now about halfway through the book. My reading speed is down, due to my eyesight. 🙁 But I’m very much enjoying the book! I won’t give away spoilers.
I’ve noticed about 6 typos so far, in the first three chapters, but nothing further, yet. I’m putting these in a text file and will send to you to check against the MS for any future revisions, once I’ve finished reading the book.
But never mind that. Loving the book and looking forward to the second book when it comes out, and to the Alliance-Union History when it comes out.
Exceedingly thrilled to read this, with such a key piece of history playing out. Thanks so much!
The change to encryption has been going on for a few years at an accelerating pace. Most are by now. One should notice encryption, and be very circumspect at non-encrupted sites!
Chuck’s been working on it, and I think we are ok now.
3/4 of the way through. I’ve never found another author who could make sitting around a table not only interesting but compelling. And I love how the simple act of a ship docking at port can create both admiration and sheer panic.
I’m busy reading it, and enjoying it so far. It will probably take me a few more days because I’m fairly busy at the moment.
OT: My youngest daughter and her wife are having twins this time around. Gramma greed!
W00t! When is the happy event scheduled to happen? How many grands so far?
Were they not twins, their due date would be in August. Since they are mono amniotic identicals, they may come as early as late May or early June.
Cool, Tommie, I hope they and their mom will be healthy and happy!
Castor and Pollux? — Hmm, guess it’s been done. 😉
(Nothing else springs to mind. I am sure there are some twin girl names and tales I’m not thinking of. — Then again, they could be fraternal twins or she could get one of each, a boy and a girl!)
One hopes for a happy event. — A family friend had twin boys the year I graduated high school, later in the month I was born. I wish we hadn’t lost contact. Those two boys — are now about to turn 35. Heh. And I hope they have found partners, a couple of special someones. Hmm, that must be really something to be the spouses of twins! Hmm, and to have your uncle or aunt look just lik your dad or mom.
I can’t recall what the natural biological record is. Identical triplets are possible, but I don’t recall if quad or quints identical have been recorded for humans. Wow, that would be something. 😀
Helen and Clytemnestra, sisters of Castor and Pollux. They were two-sired quadruplets. Most likely they’ll have vegetative names, as their brother is Hollis, (holly tree), and their mothers are Barbara and Briony. Briony is a flower.
My son also has a son, so that will give me four, i all goes well.
@BCS The Dionne quintuplets, born May 10, 1934, are the first quintuplets known to have survived their infancy. The identical girls were born just outside Callander, Ontario, near the village of Corbeil. All five survived to adulthood.
But note the conditional, “to have survived infancy”, suggesting others have indeed been born but did not all survive infancy. Certainly quints will be premies, the Dionnes were two months, and very small, the five weighted just over 13 pounds at birth. So the conditional is well taken. It’s thought a sixth fetus miscarried.
@Hanneke – I’ve got a little unnamed Iris reticulata hybrid from Alan McMurtrie here I need a word to describe that’s right up your alley.
The word I’m looking for is a Dutch girl’s costume. It has a white blouse with puffy sleves, a halter top that may be open to below the breasts, or higher, a separate colored skirt, and often a contrasting apron down most of the front. It may well be regional.
That’s what the violet and white colors on this blossom suggest to me.
The german one is dirndl. Maybe lavendar dirndl?
Hi Paul, sorry for not answering sooner. I lost the site for a while as the bookmark on my phone didn’t work anymore, due to the switch to https.
I’ve been searching for costumes such as you describe, but Dutch historic costumes generally don’t have a halter top, and a white blouse with puffy sleeves isn’t part of any of the Dutch costumes either. They tend to have a heavily starched shoulder plate running all the way across and reaching down to the top of the boob area (maybe because one doesn’t want rain trickling down the cleavage?), or a buttoned up high blouse.
You could search in pictures for “Nederlandse klederdracht” if you want to check them out yourself. There’s no word for the historic costumes as a whole, except “klederdracht”, sometimes shortened to “dracht”. Costumes are very location-specific, and tend to get called after the town or province where they were worn.
Tommy is right, both are an essential part of the dirndl, the historic costume from Bavaria (Beiern) in Germany – searching for “dirndl historisch” in pictures led to more authentic costumes than just “dirndl” or “dirndl trachten” as it’s a popular modern sexy costume.
Icelandic traditional costume has white blouses with colorful haltertops, often embroidered, that would also fit your iris, but I haven’t found those in violet (more red, green, blue or black with the white blouses). Swedish and Danish costumes are clearly related, and sometimes have halter tops, but conform less stricktly to your description.
The skirt with a contrasting apron is part of most women’s historical costumes all over this area of the world, so that doesn’t narrow it down.
Yay! *happy dance*
Currently reading. Have yet to meet Al. Al Liance – brand new character and how he rose from a nothing into a . . . – but you have to read the book.
As usual, the authors manage to put the scare into just about everybody. At least Bren can relax on his boat for at least one book.
Jonathan up here in quite cold New Hampshire
Hey, it arrived this afternoon… Read, read, read, etc.
Speaking of which… Can you add a larger version of the map from the Map Room? The current version is around 600×400, and I just can’t get it to where I can read things and figure out stuff… Thank You!
CommentKeep bugging me on this one. It’ll take some thinking.
Living on a fixed income, ya’ll. Won’t get money til Tues. Won’t get book until Fri. But then next weekend! My knitting nook has a comfy chair, good lighting, an ottoman, a lap robe and a table big enough for munchables, and a pot of tea, and reading will definitely be happening.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/58a13a106e09a824008b69c1-960-640.jpg
I was wandering around and came across this image inside the High Flux Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Errrm, is that a stairway in the upper left? Why? 😯
Got me, I’m amused!
Because how else can your highly charged particles climb to a higher state of matter-energy?
They climb the stairway to heaven when the DeLorean is in the shop to get its hydrogen flux-capacitor checkup when it doesn’t get back in time after reaching however many “jigawatts” at 88 mph. 😀
High Energy whatsits: yeah, presumably, you don’t want to be in there when that thing’s on.
(I’m not clear on whether those are a wave effect or actual stairs. Gonna look at it a little closer.)
Curious how everything’s glowing blue. You’d think there’d be things toward the UV. But then I guesss you’d need some psychedelic posters and a lava lamp. Heh.)
When the containment vessel was being constructed, there was a need to descend down into the guts of the vessel. The engineers just never removed the stairs when they were ready to put it into action.
Two possibilities tied to one another: 1) Cerenkov radiation – typically blue; 2) water bath inside the vessel absorbs all but blue frequencies of light.
I agree, on both points (certainly Cherenkov radiation), but if it’d been me I’d’ve pulled the stairs up behind me because they’d be useless everafter and just get in the way.
NB: Nothing goes faster than the speed of light IN THE PARTICULAR MEDIUM IT IS TRAVELING IN. When the radioactive atom emits a particle it must be going at 3X10^8 m/s because it may be emitted into a vacuum. Think of it as: when it discovers it’s in water AND violating the local speed limit, it has to dump that excess energy so that comes off as photons in the blue spectrum–no matter WHAT they showed in “Doctor No”–and proceeds at the local speed limit (0.75c).
What else would you expect where Dr. Manhattan is working? Maybe they’re testing new warp field configurations.
(This is one of those times that a forum instead of a blog would help, because it’s big enough for a topic of its own. We’re off-topic, but it’s a “cool sciencey / science-fictional” topic, for sure.)
Even if/when they turn it off, at some point, they might send robotic arms / flying drones with arms — or some poor saps down there in suits to fix something. Presumably, it’s got enough dangerous emissions that putting a person or other living being in there is a bad idea. Or does it “calm down” after a resting period? I don’t know.
Wouldn’t it also glow in the ultraviolet range? Or do we only see it in the blue because we only see a hint of UV, that grow-light black-light glowing socks effect? For that matter, wouldn’t it be glowing in many wavelengths, so it’d appear more white (all visible light) but shifted toward blue because blue is higher energy / higher speed / moving towards in a wave rather than moving away / slower? I mean, UV is higher than blue, so I’d think particles moving exceedingly fast would tend to have a UV component, not just blue. (I’m saying I don’t know, so it’s a basic science question.)
Separate point: I was going to say, having a hyperspace / jump space / warp field bubble here on a planet sure seems like a risky, weird, spooky thing. Yet of course, they’re doing experiments on such things (other related phenomena too) in several places around the planet. — And for that matter, since we don’t yet know for sure what such a thing looks like or how to produce it, or control it, well…then presumably, we might discover something interesting and exotic, perhaps several somethings we don’t know about yet — by accident, while looking for something else. Or we could stumble on the right combination when trying to get there. Or presumably, stumble on it while “in the neighborhood” of other effects / properties / forces.
That’d be a heckuva thing. Mighty puzzling if it’s tough to sense it conventionally, or without the right sensing equipment. I mean, if it’s trans-light inside the bubble (in some impossible post-Einsteinian way) then the only way we’d be likely to “see” it (sense it) would be whatever happens on the interface of the bubble and normal real-space (sublight). Hmm, and if some researcher or cat or lab mouse is in the bubble because, hey, it was an unforeseen outcome…. Hmm.
Hah, my browser / macOS spellchecker does not know the word “sublight.” It thinks it should correct it to “sunlight.” No, close, but not there. But then, it’s very iffy on other science fiction words too. (I’d discovered it didn’t like starbase; still doesn’t, it either wants stargaze or star base; but it’s OK with starships. It has trouble with various kinds of -mates and whether that makes one word, two with a space, or with a hyphen. It gets picky about crewmember and wants to change any crewwoman into a crewman (hmm, either chauvinist or very trans…) and various other things. — I keep trying to turn off spelling correction, but it keeps turning it back on again)
You’d think the people programming and feeding the spellchecker’s dictionary would tend to be science fiction fans and toss in perfectly good, common sci-fi terms. (I mean, for one thing, they’re usually in modern dictionaries, or they are reasonable expansions of attested words. Example: crewwoman.)
There must be a way to add to its user dictionary, I’d think. Gotta find out how to improve this. — But it also cannot handle any other language besides English being in the text. Very annoying what it does to perfectly good Spanish and French, and presumably any other language.
Nobody is ever going down there in any kind of suit! That place is radioactive! Construction materials will have absorbed the radioactivity, making them radioactive.
Don’t just sit there spinning ideas, go to the Wikipedia page for Cherenkov radiation. Get the facts.
Paul, that’s why, in my 2nd paragraph, I _asked_, rather than assumed, and why I supposed that it would be a Very Bad Idea to send down people in suits, that it would be too dangerous, and suggested robotic equipment. I _asked_ if it was such that it would “calm down” to a lower energy state, rather than remaining too radioactive. (And they did send in people in suits in some areas too near Chernobyl, for instance, either because they had no other choice or they didn’t fully understand the danger yet.) — I _know_ I don’t know enough. I was not trying to make solid pronouncements, but rather to ask and bring up ideas. I thought how I was phrasing things made that pretty clear.
But BCS, here’s what I don’t get: you’re no more than a few clicks away from easy access to the answers. Doesn’t it occur to you to go to Google or Wikipedia to find the answers for yourself? Maybe you won’t get it all, maybe not much, but you’ll get something out of it. Let it sink in a couple days, expecially it you read it before bedtime (amazing, how the brain can learn new things while we’re asleep), and it’ll make more sense the second time around. Is there no value in self education?
Wikipedia is an excellent resource. The articles are short, to the point, and reliable. #### gets corrected quickly by people who know the subject. No fake news there! It even has a page for the Chernobyl “liquidators” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators
“According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, ‘25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled’, which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators) and 165,000 disabled.”
Just as a practical matter, it is a waste of time, effort, and space on CJ’s server for me to try to explain here what has already been done very completely elsewhere. And if you wouldn’t understand it there, how would you understand my explanation? It’s the same Science.
Usually, I do Google for answers, or look on Wiki. But not always. I don’t always have time to read something right then. I am sure this is so for nearly everyone, including those who are very curious and do read for themselves. I wasn’t expecting an in-depth answer. But it seemed like a simple question. Also, hey, some degree of common sense: if a thing is so hot or active that it’s _glowing_ in the pictures, yeah, pretty good indication it’s not a great idea to be around it. Sure, I will look it up. I wasn’t trying for any major point. I was only curious, either. I don’t know anything about that particular location or the high-energy particles generated and their properties, or what that does to the space and container.
Paul, I’m sorry to have irritated you. Sure, I take your point about looking things up, educating oneself. I went to college too. 🙂 I like learning. I am curious. (I wouldn’t be asking questions and speculating otherwise. Note that, please.) — Do you look up everything, every time a question occurs to you? Every time you get curious or have an idea? Do you always have time to look up and read a few pages of material? I think all of us probably do not have that luxury. We get busy, we think about many things, and so we don’t always avail ourselves of the opportunity. And yes, I could’ve opened another window tab, checked Wiki and Google, read for 15 minutes or an hour or so, and been far more educated…or I could’ve gone down a rabbit hole, distracted by other, loosely related stuff. But instead, I wrote something here. Come on, guy, I’m reasonably bright. 🙂 And generally, I try to be friendly. Also, hey, for me, this is relaxation. When I post here, it’s like a chance to sit down or stand around with a bunch of people who like many of the same things, a chance to be with people who are somewhat or very much like me, and some who are probably quite different. And yet we like science and science fiction and a wide variety of subjects. Generally, people here are friendly and helpful and curious, and come up with some wonderful ideas and interests, hobbies, activities, interests. So I get to hang out with some very cool people I would not otherwise get to hang out with. And you come up with some pretty cool things also, such as that post, which you meant to be both fun and interesting, to share with folks here. I like that, Paul. I would not have written a reply if I didn’t find it of interest. (And just like I don’t always look something up, I don’t always reply to every neat thing, of course. No one gets to do that.) Nor would I expect you or anyone to have scads of time to expound on the science, even in layman’s terms and simple, regarding the topic. I would’ve gone for a simple answer, a sentence or so. Most often, if I speculate with some question or idea that intrigues me, I don’t get an answer anyway, but that’s OK. It still may spark interest or thought for other fans who read here, just like their posts (such as yours) do for me. That’s all I was after. I am sorry if it annoyed you that I didn’t first look it up, or that it is fun for me to speculate. That speculation is also part of the learning process. It can be part of the scientific process. It’s a more informal version of generating hypotheses, testable ideas, or checking for what’s known. It’s a more informal way of putting ideas on the table for others to think about, to answer or not, to say, hey, cool idea, I hadn’t thought of that; or perhaps, oh, but that wouldn’t work because…. Or whatever else some discussion might spark. If something I say is fun, entertaining, thought-provoking, if it is ever cool or looks at something in a way that someone else has not thought of, or that inspires them to other things, to questions and discovery, well, then that’s very cool and that’s all I was after, besides enjoyment with fellow fans and geeks.
You and I don’t always get each other. We have different approaches and personalities. And yet, hey, I like hearing what you have to say, what you think about or interests you, what you find funny or entertaining. I hope you also, most of the time, understand and like what I say and get why I say something, or get my approach to it. If not, well, that’s OK too. — If some people don’t like my style or approach or don’t get me, well…that’s fairly usual in the real world too. I’m kinda geeky, a little different, but I can’t help that. It’s who I am and how I am. If others don’t always get that, or if it bothers them, well, I’m sorry, but I can’t do much about that either. It is part of what makes me, me.
I did not mean for us to have a digression into a little fuss about self-education, looking things up, or one’s approach to things. How about we both let it go and have some gfi and go back to enjoying CJ’s wonderful stuff, and the company of other people (and cats and such) here, including each other’s company? We mostly get along and it’s a small point, and we’ve both fussed enough about it already, eh? 🙂 I did not mean to rankle your nerves, and yes, I absolutely do value broadening one’s horizons, learning new things. It’s one reason I hang out here, after all. I’m always surprised by new things here, and I very much like that.
That’s too much to take point by point, but let me take one or two.
When I began working at UCLA’s Campus Computing Network, our lead systems programmer was brilliant and I began going to him with my questions. For a while he indulged me, but then began telling me to “go look it up”. True, IBM had provided us with extensive documentation for the computer, 4′ of it, and that was just for the end-user stuff I was involved with. Anyway, I did, had to, and it was the best thing he could have done for me–taking away my “crutch”.
When Dr. Hans Asperger identified and described for the literature(*) a “class” of children with a syndrome that came to be named for him, of which I am one (as was my father), he called them his “little professors”. Aspies tend to have a particular trait of mind that fits what is learned/known into a “spider web” or “stone wall” where everything is connected to and supports its “relations”. It’s not a mnemonic technique, we’re not those performing “instant memorizers”. It doesn’t give us an eidetic memory–something that doesn’t “fit”, doesn’t have connections or support, is at least as likely to be forgotten as anybody else. Nevertheless, we do have a very comprehensive memory. Perhaps because like the spider web if you pluck at one thread it jiggles the whole web, and that keeps all those nerve connections refreshed and strong.
In these days of “alternative facts” and “inconvenient truths”, I like to say: Some people walk down the path of life oblivious to all the stones in their path, trip, pick themselves up and walk on, over and over. Others see the stones, don’t want to deal with tripping, kick ’em aside and walk on. I see the stones and pick them up and examine them, decide there’s a place where they’ll fit in the stone wall I’m building at home, and put them in my ruck sack to take home.
So, yes, absolutely! I very often find myself wondering about things big and little, and go research them. Before the days of the WWW, I’d learned to avoid encyclopedias! I’d go looking for something and find myself browsing–it took too long to find what I was looking for. Nowadays once a week or so I do browse “Science Daily” or “Ted Talks”, and my spider web grows with more interconnections.
Look at what I’ve done here! See how it is the “broad picture”? Things are connected.
So, no, I can’t give diletante sorts of answers. “Cooling down” is nothing like a cup of coffee, kinetics–it’s all about radioactive decay, half-lives, the “Weak Force”, and transmutation. Science is like some religions, like Buddhism, say, everything is interconnected.
(*) It should’ve been called “Doyle’s Syndrome”, because it was fully described in the literature decades earlier by A.C. Doyle! Sherlock Holmes was an Aspie.
Hah, yeah, it’s very possible to wander around in an encyclopedia (or Wiki or YouTube) or a dictionary, going from interesting topic to topic. 🙂 And I suspect you’re right about there being different styles people take to those pebbles or stones; not only which you mentioned, but others too.
Some people are better at establishing those links (associations, connotations, “mental hyperlinks”) between items. They can form more links and see connections faster, and develop several working ways of looking at something, sometimes as if in parallel. That seems to be one of the things about intelligence: some people are better at it than others. Or some people have more innate ability for one area than others. (Language ability or mathematical ability, for instance, but any subject area.)
We all seem to be geared to form those webs (neural networks) for how a set of things are related, what is directly known, what relates to what and how.
Another Aspie online once said he thought I was maybe hyper-sensitive emotionally, or to emotional content, but that I also seemed, to him, a little Aspire-Like in what he saw (text) of how I did things or how I thought. That stuck with me. (I had never heard of Asperger’s until sometime after I’d joined forums online and had thereby “met” a few in fandom or elsewhere.) (As far as I know, I’m not an Aspie.) But his idea made me wonder if there could be another point on the spectrum, or another axis to it? I’ve never quite been satisfied with some of the assertions, claims that some Asperger’s folks and some autistic folks don’t have or don’t sense emotions, or a few other traits ascribed to folks on the spectrum. Because I see emotional content and reactions and recognition going on there, at least with folks online I’ve known who are Espies. I’m not refuting that there are differences in thinking styles or how people are wired, but instead, I think we don’t yet understand well enough what’s going on. I tend to think that there’s more of a three-dimensional (or multi-dimensional) spectrum going on, to account for autism spectrum and neuro-typical folks, and others not classified so conveniently.
One point on that: I’ve seen some o the descriptions of symptoms to look or that would indicate Espies or autism spectrum stuff going on in a person. Yet I also have seen folks with various handicaps, physical and cognitive conditions, and some of the coping mechanisms or mannerisms that happen are similar to what I’ve seen described for folks with autism or Asperger’s (or OCD, sometimes) for instance. This makes me think there’s more to this that is going on than either “near-typical” or “autism spectrum” behavior or cognition. (Some handicapped folks can do swimming or rocking or other things ascribed as autism symptoms, and neurological-typical people talk about getting “song stuck” on “earworms,” for instance, other things besides. So hmm, I’m not doubting, just saying, it sure seems to me like we don’t yet have a good handle on what’s going on in the larger picture.
I think I might have something about those pebbles (or stones):
I think I have a different style for when I’m playing or relaxing, versus other thinking. When I’m relaxing, such as when I post on blogs or forums, I tend to free-associate more and play with ideas. I tend to play with putting things together and speculating, generating questions or ideas. In other contexts, I don’t seem to use that style as much, or at least, I am not as aware o it.
It’s as if you’ve got a monkey, let’s say, and he sees all these pebbles around him. He has some natural inclination to be drawn to or to use certain kinds of pebbles and not others, He connects some more readily into patterns, and others, he doesn’t do as much with, or maybe he bypasses them as not what he’s looking for, not so interesting.
But these pebbles he likes, he will turn over, arrange and rearrange in patterns and designs, and he may create several of these. Some are unfinished in places. Others are complete. Still others, he will elaborate upon again and again, making them more complex, even appending or rearranging an overall pattern, or a major pattern, to include a minor pattern. Occasionally, these are playful, whimsical, just for fun, or may appear wacky or odd to other monkeys. Yet to the monkey in question, these make perfect sense as exercises of imagination, or investigation, discovery, learning, testing out new ideas, or just plain fun or artful creations.
Some other monkeys come along from time to time and see each other’s pebble patterns. Some monkeys “get it” about any given monkey’s pebble patterns. They get excited, they like those patterns too, and they may copy or create similar ones, or they may compare patterns with that monkey, so they both modify their pebble patterns after comparison. Other monkeys may shake their heads and say that monkey’s had one too many coconuts, it doesn’t make sense what his patterns are, and they go right on by. Some monkeys, however, get offended in some way by the given monkey’s patterns. Just why they get upset may differ from monkey to monkey, yet for some reason, they get upset by the monkey’s pebble patterns. Still others have other reactions.
There are plenty of pebbles and plenty of monkeys. Somehow, all the monkeys skip some kinds of pebbles entirely; all the monkeys skip those pebbles. Some kinds of pebbles are very common. Others are very sought-after. Certain monkeys like pebble of certain kinds but not others.
Side Note: I heard “Bungle in the Jungle” again recently, and wondered if it might have had anything to do with inspiring the Chanur books. I recall someone had opined once that Egyptian motifs and mythology had contributed as inspiration for the various species and styles running around in the Chanur books. — I have no idea if either theory has any grounding in what really went into CJ’s thinking. But after a description of monkeys and pebbles, those came to mind, along with an image of a bunch of monkeys happening on a zen pebble garden with an unusually widee variety of pebbles. Heh.
A new Alliance book and for a while all is good in this world – though I suspect for the characters they’d probably disagree!
Yippee! …and I can also access Wave without a Shore again rather than CJ’s old, old blog that the link had been sending me to.
Alliance Rising was a great read, and it made me want to go back and read the other books in this universe, which I intend to do as soon as I get through some of the other pressing items in my to-be-read queue.
I finished Alliance Rising a couple of days ago, and I’ve posted a few thoughts on the book discussion thread.
Should have guessed this was going to be the first part of a trilogy.
So MY question is what amount of time before we get part 3, 3years – 4 years?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Another great installment… and I finished it too soon.
Adding it to my Great Father’s Day Kindle Transmission where I zap my dad all the books I want him to read this year. He’ll be pleased with the haul.