Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

I finished another Palahniuk title Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey. it was pretty good. it's the posthumous story of an oddball named Rant Casey told by his friends and others who knew him. Rant becomes famous after his death for being patient zero in a major epidemic of a new strain of rabies.

the book was a bit hard to follow as there are symbols such as moon and sun next to the writers. the book is written in world war z style from the perspective of those who knew Rant. also there's reference very early on to things like party crashing and boosting which aren't explained until later. and important characters like Echo are intermingled early on with filler childhood friends. so you have to untangle things as you go.

as the story unfolds there are some major reveals which are done in a satisfying way. Palahniuk uses this major reveal technique well as he also did in Fight Club. the author was probably on to something with the ability in the ability to record and playback your sensory reality as you perceived it at the time. with Google glass we're moving in that direction now. so no need to climb Mt. Everest just do a playback from someone who got there and experience for yourself what it's like to reach the summit.

like all of the Palahniuk stuff I've read it makes you think. he touches on some deep topics like social segregation, fitting in, duty. I'm continuing chipping away at Chuck's work. will read some more when I get another chance.

Fracking in Nova Scotia

So there's an election coming up in Nova Scotia. One issue that's discussed is about energy and related power rates.

There seem to be a couple schemes being floated. one is to pipeline oil from Alberta to the east. another is to build an undersea cable from the Muskrat Falls project in Labrador to deliver electricity to Nova Scotia. also seems to be some Quebec power scheme lurking in the wings

these ideas to me all sound crazy. it would cost many billions to even set this infrastructure up before the first watt of power actually arrived here. and after what happened in Quebec I don't know why people are so eager to try to move oil such a vast distance from Alberta

there seems to be an agreed code of silence between the political parties and the media about fracking in Nova Scotia. the NDP has made it clear by their actions they don't want fracking, and that's their mandate. but what about the other parties? and why doesn't the media at least ask?

it's crazy to bring power from Newfoundland and Alberta when the same energy is sitting right here in our own land. fracking is safe, mature technology. they've been doing it in Michigan for over 50 years and their lakes and rivers are still pristine.

if this election like every election is allegedly about jobs and growing the economy as the politicians claim blah blah blah then why not frack and actually do something that would create the high paying industrial rural blue collar union jobs right here in Nova Scotia instead of in other provinces or overseas?

Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney

I finished up another zombie book. It was Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney.

It was a good book. A typical McKinney fast and compelling read. This book is the origin of the dead city series. The story of where it begins in Houston. After 4 major hurricanes in two weeks Houston is badly flooded. Among all the death and rot and oil refinery chemicals stewing in the water the necrosis filovirus emerges.

The book is the story of two police officers in the Houston PD working in the emergency task force and their families. Sergeant Eleanor Norton and her boss Captain Mark Shaw. They are working together at the command centre at a Houston University. As the zombies emerge and overrun the university and the city it's a struggle to survive and get their families out and try to help the dwindling and desperate survivors as best they can. In the McKinney style their paths intersect through the story.

The McKinney zombies are interesting. They aren't the "undead". only a living person who is bitten by a zombie and then turns before dying of some other cause becomes a zombie. which makes more sense if you think about it; it's a bit like rabies or ebola in that sense. after all how can someone who is dead get some infection or virus or any condition.

I got the book at the library. they ordered it in for me. it's always a treat to be the first person to read a brand new library book. so I checked and I guess there's still two more in the dead city series to read. I'll definitely be looking for them to finish off this great series.

The reducto ad absurdium of government health care in Nova Scotia

It would be comic if it wasn't so tragic. This week a series of errors were revealed in Nova Scotia cancer treatment. highlights include one person getting a needless mastectomy while another who was supposed to didn't get the operation. Also there was apparently a mixup around biopsies between two other people and someone got scheduled for another person's procedure.

The whole thing is pretty unsurprising, given the money line from the article "no one will be disciplined as a result of these incidents". yep see you tomorrow, hey it's just cancer and everyone dies eventually of something so whatever.

the quote was hardly necessary. the media has been so passivized and cowed by the monopoly health care system that I haven't seen a single call for accountability for this or anyone to be fired or even disciplined. not in the herald and not on atv news either. just vague calls for more spending.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Picked it up at a yard sale I happened by with the kids one day. The guy wanted $2 for it. I offered a quarter. He said I could have it for free.

I'd heard of it but never read it. It was interesting. Only 35 pages and not too hard to read. The major points seem to be the workers seizing control of the means of production, abolishing of private property, and ban religion.

In chapter 2 there's a 10 point plan for the proletariat. Interesting that at least some of those items have been implemented.

In chapter 3 there's a survey of various other socialist and workers parties at the time of the writing in 1848. Later in a forward to a 1872 English translation Marx and Engels point out that "... the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated". That remains true to this day. Marxism undeniably lives on while political parties and even countries have come and gone.
 

Stranger Than Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk

Continuing the Chuck Palahniuk series, I finished Stranger Than Fiction {True Stories}. It was pretty good. An easier read and less intense and disturbing than the novels of his I've read.

This is post Fight Club written in 2004 and the author is a bit more self aware shall we say. The book is a series of essays in several sections. The first section is crazy stuff Chuck saw through America like an annual demolition derby of farm combines. The middle section Chuck seems to be visiting/interviewing interesting offbeat type celebrities like Juliette Lewis and Marilyn Manson. The third section is Chuck writing in his own voice about meeting Brad Pitt (who recurs throughout the book), Hollywood life, the experience of being a famous author, his relationship with this father and the deaths in his family on his fathers side. He also discusses writing and some authors and writing style Chuck admires.

You would definitely have to read Fight Club first to appreciate this book. I liked it. Chuck is lucky, the former technical writer sitting in some corporate office writing about diesel engine drivetrains, then boom, this book he wrote and had pretty much forgotten becomes a phenomenon and Chuck becomes an unlikely part of the New York / LA scene - he seems to love every minute of it. I hope would too if that happened to me.

There's still some more Palahniuk to go through and I enjoy his work. So will continue this series.