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De-LAYED!

Flight was delayed almost two hours because a passenger had a breathing device that wasn’t cleared to fly. One of the stewardesses was the first person to notice that the device might need to be checked out, which is a little late in the process.

Having seen enough of the passengers shamble up the aisle to the restroom, I’m convinced that we were actually loading up on extra fuel.

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Leaving (for) Las Vegas

I haven’t been to Vegas since January 2004, when I helicoptered into the Grand Canyon and was stage-side for a Tom Jones concert at the MGM, but I’m 70 minutes from boarding my flight to this year’s ISPE conference in the Unreal City!

This trip should be less eventful than that last one, mainly because I’ll only be in the city for about 65 hours, and I’ll have to sleep for part of that. Also, the exhibit hall hours start at 7:15am on Monday & Tuesday. Ouch.

Some business-related pals will also be at this show, so I foresee some decent dining (and some drunken football-viewing and -betting that will happen on Sunday). That said, Vegas itself isn’t conducive to my kinda picture-taking, so I doubt there’ll be a great Flickr set coming out of this trip. But if there is, you’ll be the first(ish) to know.

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Go as you pay

Here’s the lede from a story in this morning’s NYTimes:

Senate Democrats face an agonizing choice in the days ahead: find a way to raise at least $50 billion in new taxes, or undermine their most important rule [“pay as you go”] for enforcing budget discipline.

I find it telling that “don’t spend so much” doesn’t seem to be one of their choices.

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Better read than dead. Or vice versa. I think.

Maybe I’m misreading the signs, but it looks like we’re due for a round of worlds-enough-and-time! In this case, the publication of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read opens the door for literary types to name the “great books” that they’ve never read (and likely will never get around to).

In this case, Slate has followed up 2001’s Literary Critic’s Shelf of Shame with a new piece: The Great Novel I Never Read. While the former canvassed critics (duh), this new feature garners responses from contemporary authors.

I’m usually leery of this sort of exercise, as it can degenerate into people disparaging some legitimately great novels because they’ve never gotten around to reading them. I used to think that I keep that gigantic list of all the books I’ve finished since I began college in 1989 just to scare people out of asking my opinion about any particular book. After looking over this article, I’m starting to think that my real reason is to justify not having read some of those great books, myself: “Ferchrissakes! Look at how many other books I’ve read! There are only so many hours in a day!”

(Of course, I’m guilty of disparaging great books on flimsy grounds, most recently in my rant about the immediate sense of alienness (not alienation) I got when starting Middlemarch earlier this month. Of course, now that I’m around 500 pages in, I’m wondering how I managed to get this far in life without reading it. And, sure, maybe I felt more sympathy for Casaubon than the average Middlemarch reader, but I’m a sucker for a classically trained scholar who can’t bring himself to start writing his great work. Go figure.)

Fortunately, that snide attitude isn’t on display in the new Slate piece. Instead, I noticed something funnier: while I’ve read a number of the books cited in this article, I’ve actually read only one book by any of these contemporary authors (Little, Big by John Crowley).

Now back to Raffles & Bulstrode! (which means I’m just about to finish book five)