2: When the Music Stopped: The Big Band Era Remembered, Bernie Woods

It took me more than a year to finish this waste of paper.

Woods tells three kinds of anecdotes:
1) those in which jazz musicians or managers receive oral sex
2) those in which somebody does something very rude or annoying
3) those in which absolutely nothing of interest happens

Those in category 1 make Woods sound like a misogynist, or, in some cases, like a jealous male chauvinist.

Those in category 2 are of two kinds: the ones in which Woods' excellent intentions are stymied by some rude jerk, and those in which he or his wife (!) take offense at something minor, over-react, and do something rude or dumb, causing the situation to blow up.

Those in category 3 appear to be inserted solely to drop the name of someone famous Woods has met, seen in the distance, or possibly just heard of.

It's truly horrid. Woods paints himself as the biggest kind of jerk. Reading this book is like watching a train wreck in slow motion: you can't turn away, and you can't believe it keeps going, and going, and going. "Surely he'll realize what he's writing and stop the madness?"

The final chapter takes a swing at modern youth and their horrible music. Woods' examples of the modern horror that is music: Madonna, Michael and LaToya Jackson, and...Blind Melon. (Yes, I don't know either. Perhaps some airline magazine had an article on them.) In any case, the retarded youths who find this noise appealing apparently dance "the hippety hop". So that's nice. Bunnies everywhere.

Verdict: avoid.

1: Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson

Excellent; even better than Thinking in Pictures.

The book is full of interesting tidbits:

• sexy Chinese pigs that are fatter, calmer, and more sexual than their lean American counterparts
  
• kinky pigs that will only let farmers extract their semen if they stroke their penises just so, or play with their anuses
  
• dogs making people better parents by raising their oxytocin levels
  
• vasopressin (ADH) increasing aggression, sexual possessiveness, faithfulness, and taking-care-of-the-young instinct
  
• some fears being learned from other members of the species (yet having an innate component--monkeys can learn to fear snakes, but not flowers)
  
• fast and slow fear response (limbic and neocortical responses to the same stimulus)
  
• smart pigs who have figured out their RFID collars trigger the trough filling with food
  
• superstitious pigs who think stomping around causes the trough to fill
  
• Alex the grey parrot who kept being asked to read single letters and was so annoyed he didn't receive his nut as a reward that he spelled "nut"
  

Must re-read.

2011

Time to start the struggle of existence anew.

32.5: xkcd: volume 0

The last book I finished in 2010.