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There’s a flapper in my bathroom!

I don’t write about the perils of DIY plumbing on this blog (except for this post, which featured one of my favorite stupid puns), because them’s the breaks of home-sorta-ownership, right?

Anyway, the flapper in the upstairs toilet has been faulty for a few months now. After flushing, I have to take the lid off the cistern, tap the flapper down over the flush valve, or it’ll keep draining for quite a while until the flapper drops down on its own.

Today, I finally decided to pick up a replacement flapper and do the repair. It wasn’t too difficult: shut off the supply valve to the toilet, flush to empty the cistern, and remove the faulty flapper. (Note: my wife was on flashlight duty, ably assisting with light and tool-retrieval.) Since it was apparently a factory-assembled component of the fill valve, I needed to cut through it with an Xacto knife to remove it. It came off fine, and the new one fit just on easily. There was some experimentation with the length of the chain from the flapper to the flush arm, which necessitated turning the supply valve on and off, but we found a correct length, and all was good! Flapper repair: complete!

Then I noticed the leak on the floor.

At first, I thought it was a spillover from the cistern, since I did some of the work while the tank was full. But no: the leak was coming from the supply valve, which does not appear to have been replaced since the house was built. In 1968.

The leak would only stop when the valve itself was shutoff (meaning no water gets to the toilet). I called my dad, a genius of household repair, for his advice, but his tips were for naught. Good thing we have a second bathroom downstairs!

Now it looks like I need to engage in this guy’s strategy, shutting off the water in the house, draining the pipes, removing the valve stem, buying a replacement, and fitting the new one on.

You don’t want to go buy a replacement without having the old one on hand, because you will always buy the wrong one. So that means the house’s water has to be turned off from the beginning of the process to the end. And that means I’ll be waiting till tomorrow, because there’s no way I’d be stupid enough to start a job like this at night and risk being without water for another day!

Which is to say, I may skip Monday Morning Montaigne this week.

(Note: Sure, I could call a plumber, but this simply cannot be that complex a job and, with the NFL season over with, I need to do something manly this weekend!)

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What’s the worst that could happen?

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear bomb expert who sold secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is a free man!

Khan said he was finished with his nuclear work and wanted to devote his time to education. He said he had no plan to travel abroad apart from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, for a Muslim pilgrimage.

I see nothing that could go wrong with that plan!

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6th Bloggiversary!

Today’s the 6th anniversary of Virtual Memories! Congratulate me!

I’ve had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you readers have gotten something good out of it. I’m always glad to find that there are people reading my stuff. At my day job, I was kinda shocked the first time I was at a conference and someone mentioned a joke I’d put in my From the Editor page. I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea of that audience, and I’m thrilled that there’s some sort of readership for this site, too.

As a treat (to myself), I’ve gone back to the second post I wrote (the first one was just a test item). You’ll find it hard to believe, but it was about whether I’d get around to reading the huge stack of books under my hall table! Some things never change!

So let’s go back to the list and see what I finally got around to reading from those days since 2003:

READ

UNREAD

Looking over that “unread” list, I don’t have a ton of regrets. I’d most like to get around to reading D.H. Lawrence, maybe the Schama book, and Byatt’s Possession. Of the ones I did read, I rank Little, Big at #1, then Gould’s Book of Fish, then all the rest.

I’m going to try to read those Stoppard plays again sometime, since I just didn’t follow them well enough. I was probably just reading for volume, which is never a good idea.

Thanks for coming by. And please leave comments, if the spirit moves you.

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Mauled

There are several awesome things about this NYTimes article about shopping malls:

  1. it’s written in the second person;
  2. it turned me on to deadmalls.com;
  3. it is a near-parody of the Times‘ legendary condescension toward “flyover” country, but not near enough;
  4. it is completely blind to the ways in which Manhattan is becoming an imitation of northern New Jersey mall culture.

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0-forum?

When I was a small press book publisher, I was put on the Comp list at Bookforum. Despite not having published a book since 2003 and closing down the company in 2004, I’ve remained on the freebie list. The new issue arrived last week, on the heels of my 0-fer festival (here, here and here).

So, of the 60+ books that got reviewed in this ish, how many of them was I interested in reading about, and possibly buying?

Two: The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern and Herbie Archives. (Curiously, Dan Nadel’s review of Herbie — a comic book about a fat guy who gets superpowers from enchanted lollipops — was placed in the nonfiction section of the table of contents.)

I still need to check out William Vollmann’s essay on why Nazi photography is creepy. Or maybe I don’t. And Tom Vanderbilt’s review of books on how the suburbs and the internet are alienating or fragmenting or something seems pretty blatherous. I did have high hopes for this Richard Price interview, but then I discovered that it was a Richard Prince interview.

I’ve been going on lately about my inability to read contemporary books, but I realized that I should check to make sure I’m not full of crap. To that end, I checked through the last 3 years of my list of All The Books I’ve Read, sorted by date of publication, and realized that I am full of crap! Here’s a PDF of 2006-2008, each year sorted by book-date.

I decided to include all books from that year and the previous one as “brand spankin’ new,” arbitrary as that seems.

  • 2006: 5 new books (2 novels), 11 overall published this decade, 35 overall
  • 2007: 7 new (4 novels & 1 play), 14 from this decade, 31 overall
  • 2008: 8 new (6 novels), 13 from this decade, 29 overall

So I guess I have been more susceptible to book-hype lately! Or there were a bunch of good books out last year. Still, maybe I should follow the suggestion of one of my newer readers (hey, Zeke!) and put a ban on any books that are fewer than 3 years old.

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Lost in the Supermarket: The Cookies and the Calculus

Academics have long argued whether Gottfried Wilhelm “Choco” Leibniz stole the idea for calculus tasty cookies from Isaac “Fig” Newton, or vice versa:

When choosing between these two, I think it’s less important to worry about UK vs. Prussian pride, and more important to keep in mind that the FDA has some pretty gross standards for permissible levels of insect heads in fig paste.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series

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What It Is: 2/2/09

What I’m reading: The Montaigne. The Clive James.

What I’m listening to: Soul Mining, by The The

What I’m watching: It was movie-watching week for me! Monday: Charlie Wilson’s War (the Steve Martin strength of the opening scenes didn’t carry through, sadly, but it was pretty entertaining), Tuesday: The King of Comedy (my favorite Scorsese/Deniro movie), Wednesday: Quick Change (I was transfixed by the c. 1990 version of NYC, and also by Geena Davis), Thursday: Human Nature (with the weirdly talented Miranda Otto) and Annie Hall (it’s been almost a year! This time, I really focused on the amazing job done by Diane Keaton). Oh, and there was some football game.

What I’m drinking: Miller’s (Westbourne Strength) and Q Tonic, and a bunch of Yuengling & Killian’s.

What Rufus is up to: Praying for springtime. I can tell.

Where I’m going: No plans. Got any ideas?

What I’m happy about: Getting down to Philadelphia this weekend to see my pal Drake for a celebration of the 10th anniversary of his horrendous beating (that is, a celebration that he’s survived the experience).

What I’m sad about: Everything he lost.

What I’m pondering: Whether to help Drake out by becoming a trustee for him.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the disadvantage of greatness

With Of the disadvantage of greatness (pp. 849-853), Montaigne counters Mel Brooks’ wisdom that “it’s good to be the king.” M. concedes that the actions and effects of kings are awesome, but the tradeoff is that they’ll never have a measure of themselves because of the deference of their subjects.

See, in M.’s childhood, his mates always took it easy on him in athletic events, because it wasn’t worth it to totally trounce him. Similarly, he says, princes will never know what they’re worth, because their subjects will do anything to let them win.

(Of course, you could try to “speak truth to power,” but as M. reminds us, “For Dionysisus, because he could not match Philoxenus in poetry, and Plato in prose, condemned the one to the quarries and sent the other to be sold as a slave on the island of Aegina.”)

M. extends this thought to Homer’s treatment of the vulnerability of the gods. He contends that Homer allows Venus (Aphrodite) to be wounded in battle in the Iliad because this “endows her with courage and boldness, qualities not found in those who are exempt from danger.” He writes:

The gods are made to angry, to fear, to flee, to be jealous, sorrowful, and passionate, in order to honor them with virtues which among us are built of these imperfections. He who does not share the risk and difficulty can claim no involvement in the honor and pleasure that follow hazardous actions. It is a pity to have so much power that everything gives way to you. Your fortune repels society and companionship too far from you; it plants you too far apart.

The passage reminded me of our Seattle trip two years ago, when I met up with a friend from grad school. He’d had some serious mental problems in recent years, mainly due to autoimmune problems. The conversation we had still haunts me.

At one point, I asked him about the Iliad, his favorite book. I was rereading it, and I asked him about the meaning of the gods in the poem. I always tried to reconcile the idea of them as “extensions of the psyche” with their overt actions within the battles. I don’t know if I really thought about the idea that they were imbued with flaws and vulnerabilities in order to magnify their greatness. I think I’d been coming at the problem from the other direction, the idea that the greatness of the heroes was in their inhuman qualities, with Achilles foredoom as the apex of this concept.

I mean, I knew that the characters’ humanity was critical to understanding them, but I never thought about transferring that principle to the gods. So this short essay by M. may re-launch me to Troy, along with the 1,000 ships.