"When Daddy Was A Little Boy", or, why book publishers need to stop being stupid

Once upon a time, there was this publishing house called Raduga Publishers.

A brief blurb on them:

The Progress / Raduga Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publishing house founded in 1931. It specialised on output of the books translated into foreign languages. The children's literature was only a part of its production. They also published scientific, arts, political books, books for people studying foreign languages, guidebooks and photographic albums. [...] The Progress Publishers stopped the existence after dissolution of the Soviet Union.

If you go on to that link, you can see some of the covers of the books they put out - they look quite delightful.

A big part of my childhood was reading, and one of my most cherished books of that time was this hardbound collection of stories called "When Daddy Was a Little Boy" by Alexander Raskin (originally in Russian, and translated into English by Fainna Glagoleva).

Here you have a 10-year-old's review, which tells you everything you need to know about the book, really. But sadly, pretty much every book put out by Raduga is out of print. The only copies exist in the hands of a few people lucky enough to come across those books, and amidst library collections.

Until today.

I managed to find a scanned PDF from a library website, and intend to transcribe it into a document with the original images/artwork and put it someplace for download.

This experience has given me a renewed respect for Google's book-scanning efforts, and I'd like to - in my own humble way - tell all the publishers that opposed this: You all are giant, flaming idiots. Let there be a way for the books to live on long after you're dead and buried.

To give you a taste of what the book is like, here are some of the initial images, and the author's foreword.

---

Cover Image & Publishing Info

Table of Contents

Artwork accompanying author's foreword

Author's Foreword

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear Children,

    I want to tell you about how I came to write this book. I have a daughter named Sasha. She's a big girl now and often says, when speaking about herself, "When I was a little girl –" Well, when Sasha was a very little girl, she was often ill. She had the grippe, and a sore throat, and an infected ear. If you've ever had an infected ear, you know how painful it is. And if you haven't, there's no use explaining, for you'll never understand anyway.

    One Sasha's ear hurt so badly that she cried and cried. She couldn't sleep at all. I felt so sorry for her that I nearly cried, too. And so I read aloud to her and told her funny stories. I told her a story about the time I rolled my new ball under a car when I was a little boy. Sasha liked the story. She was surprised to learn that her daddy had once been a little boy, and that he'd gotten into mischief and had also been punished sometimes. She remembered the story, and whenever her ear would begin to ache, she'd shout: "Daddy! Daddy! MY ear aches! Tell me a story about you when you were a little boy." And each time I'd tell her a new story. You'll find them all in this book. I tried to remember all the funny things that had ever happened to me, because I wanted to make a sick girl smile. Besides, I wanted to my girl to understand that being greedy, boastful, or stuck-up wasn't nice at all. That doesn't mean I was always like that when I was a little boy. Sometimes, when I couldn't think of a story, I'd borrow one from other daddies I knew. After all, every daddy was once a little boy. So you see, none of these stories were invented. They all actually happened to little boys. Now that Sasha is a big girl, she's hardly ever ill and can read great big books all by herself.

    But I thought that perhaps other children might like to know about a daddy and the things that happened to him when he was a little boy.

    That's all I wanted to say. But wait! There's something else. There's more to this book. Each one of you can discover the rest for yourself, for your own daddy can tell you about things that happened to him when he was a little boy. And so can your mommy. I'd love to hear their stories, too.

With very best wishes,
Your friend,
A. Raskin

---

Who wouldn't want to read the book after all that?

And since it's only about 160ish pages, it only takes about an hour to read. I can use these reading credits to offset a similar amount of time wasted on frivolity like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Not really life with a dumbphone

One of the worst things on the Internet is attempting to outgeek geeks. Only one thing is worse, and that is trying to out-hipster hipsters.

For the uninitiated, I'll try to define "hipster" (in its Internet sense) a little more concisely than Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.

A hipster is someone who actively rejects the mainstream, and a large part of the reasoning is that the idea of a "mainstream" seems to run counter to their need to stand out from the teeming, unwashed masses who have seemingly been brainwashed into their 'preferences'.

I (try to) pass no value judgement on hipsters, as sometimes I can come across similarly (being a Bieber-hater, for e.g., although I try to convince myself that it's because he's shite.)

And yet, when I try to draw on other people's experiences in a life with a dumbphone, I come across examples that are either not really dumbphone enough (GPS? Music? Podcasts? WTF?), or way too smartphone-hating.

The problem with the first linked post is that the blogger's reaction is a little extreme. He tries out a Moto Cliq tied to T-Mobile, and after a terrible first experience, continues to do the exact same thing! He then moves on to a Huawei Comet (again with T-Mobile), and has an even worse experience, promptly pronounces renunciation of smartphones, and goes for an LG "feature"-phone. Which can still do GPS, music and podcasts.

So it's not really "life with a dumphone", but more like "life with a non-shitty phone and service provider, but let's start small". He's basically gone hipster without knowing it.

My issue with the second linked post (in two parts, One and Two) is that it is phenomenally hipster, in that it denounces the typical smartphone user as being a socially inept person in real life, who dumps all over real-world relationships, based on a survey done by a phone systems company ("81 percent of survey participants said they would prefer being single and keeping their smartphones!", "on average, an adult spent nine hours a day playing with a smartphone and only about 27 minutes per day talking with their significant others!") Except that the study it cites was an April Fool's gag, as confirmed by the company in question on their blog. There's an important lesson in there about getting your data from the right sources, as well.

After having to forcibly live with a "proper" dumbphone, it is a little strange that there is such little chronicling of such experiences. Ah well, if the mountain will not come to Muhammad...

The Metallica "Angry soon-to-be-ex Fan" is stupid

Nearly everything in this "Open Letter To Metallica from an Angry soon-to-be-ex Fan" is either wrong, misguided or plain foolish.

What have Metallica said or done that betrays a lack of concern or knowledge about the fans feelings? Their news update is pretty clear (IMHO), and just about stops short of an apology. What more do you want them to do? You're taking them to task for not wanting to perform in a - by your own admission - "shitty venue"? And you're mad at them for this? To paraphrase the hackneyed t-shirt slogan, "They've upped their standards. Up yours." :-)

Spirit of personal integrity? Laugh and a half, that one. "Put on our headphones and tear shit up"? Well, that's what the Metallica 'fans' did at the concert venue, and look how well that worked out for them.

Saying "we can behave like idiots because you do too" is far too childish for someone in the age-range of the average Metallica fan.

The absolute kickers were these lines:

See…you shouldn’t toy with the affections of people who love your music…they will react like homicidal lovers. They will set u on fire.

..followed shortly by:

Heavy metal is supposed to represent a spirit of rebellion and independent expression but it seems like you expect less from your fans.

Allow me to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

There are strangely unsettling parallels between the thinking that drives this blog post, and the apologists for the London rioters.

Gotta get down on Sunday

1. Take a train to tiny speck of a station.
2. Trek through the Sussex country-side on roads without sidewalks.
3. Step back into the late 18th/early 19th century of railways.
4. Hop aboard a choo-choo train.
5. Stare at guy in dirty overalls shovelling coal into the firebox of ancient steam locomotive.
6. Inhale coal gas fumes in moving train.
7. Gawk at adverts for companies, brands and products long since extinct.
8. Take shortcut across a meadow that turns out to be grazing lands.
9. Watch woolly and shorn sheep gambol.
10. Marvel that gambolling doesn't just happen in books.
11. Wade through a slushy path to a delightful little patch of green.
12. Curse at rain for threatening to deprive a day of its cricket.
    
13. Rejoice at the senior citizen players deciding to play anyway.
    
14. Rejoice even more at the clouds relenting and deciding to let the sun through.
    
15. Get picture taken with one of the finest commentators of all time.
    
16. Laze through a cricket match with a pint of bright Sussex ale.
17. Laugh at random commentator who keeps quietly asking spectators and players the names of the batsmen and bowlers.
18. Shoot the breeze about cricket obscuridae with genuine lovers of the game.
19. Run back through aforementioned meadow to catch taxi and train back home.
20. Feel like a character out of a chilled out Enid Blyton novel.
21. Crash.

Best. Sunday. Ever.

Showing the URL protocol in the Firefox address bar

A fair amount of people seem to be using Firefox Aurora.

Unfortunately, the latest Aurora 7.0a2 build (as of tonight - 12th July, 2011) has enabled a 'feature' as part of the Firefox team's efforts to copy Google Chrome's efforts at being different: they have gone and disabled showing the "http://" (the protocol) part of the URL.

I was dreading the day this would come to my beloved Firefox - but fortunately, Firefox retains the ability to make quick, under-the-hood changes using about:config.

Here's how you go about ensuring your URL bar isn't screwed around with:

1. Go to about:config
2. Find the value called browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double-click and toggle it's value to false

And that's that!

Suspicious Gmail IMAP Activity

Quick note for future reference: if your Gmail activity window shows frequent IMAP access from the United States IP 67.220.123.24, don't panic (as I did initially).

It's just your Nokia phone polling Gmail for new mails. That IP resolves to em.outgoing4.messaging.nokia.com.

Just FYI. And FMI.

Kurt Vonnegut is awesome. And very scary.

I finished reading Slaughterhouse-Five on a Sunday night.

Monday morning, the better half informs me of weird bed-side behaviour and ramblings about time travel.

I then flip through my phone, and realise I'd typed this out in the "Notes" section, reproduced verbatim (except for the timestamp bit; that was generated by the phone)

Date: Monday, 20th June, 2011
Time: 00:21

Time is like a fractal tree. The past is always the trunk, the future always the branches, and the present is always the junction of the two.

To the simple mind, time can be visualised as an endless 3-dimensional matrix of amber. And every moment of our lives is captured in it as bugs. Except we are all the bugs, in every direction. But our actual physical manifestation can only be one point in time, because is is not a spatial dimension!

This seems to make sense at some points, but is also disturbingly out of reach to my conscious mind and brain. Hence recorded here.

What. The. FRACK?!

Dear Mr. Vonnegut: what have you made me smoke, and may I please have some more?

Sending all the wrong signals

From BusinessInsider:

The investment banking career path is now even more attractive than it was before the financial crisis, when it drew 9 percent of the class of 2008.

Shortly after the dot-com bust at the turn of the millenium, I was able to waltz into any computer/IT course as there were suddenly no takers for an industry that had caved in on itself. It would be 2005 at least, till people considered a career in tech a good option.

And now, despite the entire global economy coming to a grinding halt not two years back because of the investment banking industry shenanigans, students are flocking to it in greater droves than before.

Why? (My theory follows.)

The bailouts. "Privatise profits, socialise losses" has found a large number of takers (surprise, surprise), and the concept of "high risk, high reward" is only an abstraction now. Now that the US government has clearly indicated that highly risky behaviour will definitely be punished with a stern warning and a slap on the wrist, MBAs around the world are essentially going "cha ching!" with the cartoon-y cash symbols in their eyes.

I'm all for the the government showing that failure in business ventures is not a cardinal sin, but most certainly against fostering blatantly amoral behaviour.

Shucks.

London, baby!

[Title link]

Amidst downing the occasional drink on a very firmly un-occasional basis (in the presence of superiors, no less!), I had an inkling that this trip to London was going to be very different from my previous wide-eyed jaunt as a wee lad of 12 summers past. This feeling was strengthened by an alcohol-induced clearheadedness, which I had to fight a little bit to catch my first glimpse of the London Eye as we swooped down to land. And the minute we settled into the hotel, I was convinced: this *was* different already - I most definitely did NOT stay in a matchbox the last time, and my family's luggage could co-exist with us harmoniously in the same hotel-room.

But there was more to come. Keeping aside minor trifles such as work, there was a lot more to be done. I was older and had done most of the touristy stuff already 15 years ago - now was the time for adventure, the off-beat, the road less taken! So with a heart resolved against going to the Big Ben, I set out towards London Bridge (which was, disappointingly contrary to some expectations, NOT falling down) to meet a few friends for a drink. I had no idea then, of how regular a feature of the Londoner's life that was - drinking, that is, not setting out towards London Bridge.

The Bridge was about 4 km away from the hotel we were staying in, and I bravely decided to hoof it. The brilliant weather of a London summer evening, combined with the stunningly detailed architecture of even the most mundane residential and commercial establishments, did their part in endangering my life every step of the way. So awestruck was I by my surroundings, I rarely ever stopped gawking up at the buildings and the skies! A decidedly modern city in a developed country, yet so mindful and proud of its long and varied history. Nearly every step of the way had a delightful snippet of historical trivia, which completely won over the quiz geek in me.

And that quiz geek ruled dominant for most of the weekends - the Saturday-Sunday trips consisted primarily of one to the Royal Observatory as Greenwich (home of GMT, where everybody steps on the Prime Meridian), Bletchley Park (site of the World War II code-breaking efforts and workplace of Alan Turing, the Father of Computing), and a host of museums! Of course, such elitist snob activities were reserved for only when the sun was up. Dusk and beyond only saw vicarious pleasures, whether it was watching Sallu become cool again, a campy 3D horror flick, adding a notch in the gun of trivial pursuits, or just plain stumbling back into the digs after more than a few rounds of 'experimental indulgence' at a host of the local establishments.

There was the occasional day-time fun as well - London certainly knows how to manage party events. A long week-end saw the Notting Hill Carnival, and my last weekend there was the Thames Festival - both primarily open-air parades of the various cultures that make up London. The former was firmly Caribbean in nature, while the latter delved well into the realms of downright freaky, with samba dancers, zombies, pirates, giant flamingoes, dinosaurs, and robots as well! After capping off my last weekend on-site with a fireworks display of sheer brilliance, it was time to wrap up as many loose ends as possible in the remaining couple of days, down a few bagels at the Heathrow airport while waiting for the darned delayed flight to show up, pick up the customary 2 litres (and a couple of fridge magnets to prove I don't have a one-track mind!) at the duty-free stores and head back home.

If I do get an opportunity to return to the (in my humble opinion) best example of urban planning in the world, I will "mind the gap" this time.

Lalit Modi's colourfully dopey past

Conspiracy to traffic cocaine: Charged [screenshot], and indicted [screenshot].

How many Lalit Kumar Modis from New Delhi would have gone to Duke University in the mid-80s?

Oh the irony, having the misdemeanours of your youth exposed by the same company you've - a quarter of a century later - struck a hojillion-dollar with.