So this is kind of a small thing, but I thought it was pretty interesting. On page 48, Glory and Shaftoe are interrupted by wailing sirens. Glory asks what it is, and Shaftoe "sees searchlights. And it ain't no Hollywood premiere. 'It's war, baby,' he says." I thought the juxtaposition here was really funny. Here Shaftoe is, saying that this isn't some Hollywood thing, and then some terribly cliche Hollywood line comes flying out of his mouth. Maybe he wants it to be Hollywood, because then it wouldn't be real? I'm not sure, but it's amusing nonetheless.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/jackie/news/story?id=2828584

This is a fascinating update on black baseball players. It is 60 years since Jackie Robinson and yet, for all sorts of reasons, only 9% of MLB players are black. Any sharedness of baseball that DeLillo may have been suggesting (Cotter and Waterson or Nick and Sims) is vastly diminished in today's version of the game. Not only are there few black players, there are only 2 black managers, few front office types, and a dwindling fan base. Two teams, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves, have 0 black players. There are more players from the Dominican (81) than African Americans (68) and the MLB invests 5 or 6 times more money in player/youth development programs in Latin America than in the urban U.S.

On page 901 the text reas, "The wedding photo was available for inspection, of course, and confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short." Mario too is described as having a huge head and being the shortest member of a tall family. Also we read the part about "the first birth of the second Incandenza son." Maybe, when Mario's birth is described as a "surrprise birth" it also refers to the fact that Mario is CT's biological son. Remember too that CT avoids Mario at all costs.

As others have already mentioned, this book is pretty funny. It's also (at the moment) accessible, even with the math thrown in there (which I rarely understand).

I like how this author takes big ideas, issues, or groups and focuses it into a person, a conversation, or just into one paragraph.

Like others, the description of humanity as a bunch of badasses was amusing, so I won't go on abot that.

I loved how he summed up academics (I'm currently writing a research paper on the problems within academic writing) by having the "tech guy" interact with Charlene and her friends. It sounded JUST like CORE class! Instead of explaining the "silliness" of academics, the author just shows it. A lot of authors have actually gone about explaining their view or point, but this is a more entertaining (in my view) way of doing it.

So many of our favorite themes are showing up again in this book! The first major one that I noticed was paranoia, our good buddy from pretty much every novel we've read this semester. Of course, since the novel is about codes and encryption and war, paranoia is huge. I really liked Stephenson's recognition of the paranoia, though; on page 53, he writes, "The question is: how much paranoia is really appropriate?" I guess I liked the implication here that sometimes paranoia goes over the top (see Gravity's Rainbow), and that there's a fine line to be drawn between too much and not enough paranoia.

Book number four!

Firstly, I find this book hilarious. I've read aloud multiple passages to my friends/roommate (eventually they got annoyed I was reading so much) My favorite was the first paragraphs of the first chapter (Barrens, p. 5)
"After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was boring in Murdo, South Dakota...Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass"
excellent. that means the rest of us are stupendous badasses as well =)

I also found the passage starting on page 58 very funny.

In looking up what to expect when encountering Cryptonomicon, I discovered the Cryptonomicon ecard. Pretty awesome, guys.

E-Cards, yay!

So this blog is about to come in a great deal of handy (...?) right now for me. Here's the deal:
I'm writing for my portfolio for the English major right now, and that includes a dystopian future type story. Basically, in the story, Africa has become similar to what the Great Concavity/Convexity is in IJ. I actually had the idea for the story and the landscape before reading IJ, but this is so perfect it will only help inform my writing.
I would love to reread the sections describing it and its formation to further inspire my description of the landscape in my story, but I'm having the hardest time finding all the parts. I KNOW there are more.

After all the discussion about being forced out into the world and forced to abandon infant-like innocence I though Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's character, the girl that "spent most of her life passed out and sleeping" was an interesting example of someone that is managing to retain that infant-like innocence. Only such a character is perpetually taken advantage of, and the "single passivest person" Gately's ever met (924). So staying "beyond" the corruption of the world isn't really that attractive either. As "Death's Poster-Child," is she an illustration of how someone that resists the world is just waiting for death?

Gately keeps having these dreams, or rather, nightmares, about Orientals (begins on page 809) while he's lying in the hospital bed. In his dream he is robbing an Oriental man and he tries to blindfold him using twine (which is clearly too thin) and so the Oriental keeps looking back at him, "blink inscrutably." When I read this I kept thinking, "Why is he using twine?" but that maybe it was supposed to be because Gately had the idea that Asian eyes were so small that they could be covered with twine. He also mentions that the Oriental was wearing "a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs." First of all, why is the Oriental sexless? Why does Gately use the word "it" to describe the Oriental? I guess the biggest question I have is why is Gately apparently so afraid of Asians? I thought maybe it was supposed to represent the pervasive ethnocentricity that Americans believe in.