Biff faces challenges like a samurai. A katana is just not the right tool for most things in this modern world, though.
Apparently, there was a major kerfluffle late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Parts of the website stopped working, and Sherry, who was on call, got paged. They got it fixed, but it wasn’t fun for anyone involved, mostly because it happened so late. Bleah. The worst thing was that I was awake when it happened, and I couldn’t help because nobody called me.
Monday was relatively quiet though. We’re trying to figure out a better way of monitoring some things, so that if everything falls apart, we’ll get only one “OMG WTF BBQ PANICK!!1!” message instead of 12 of them.
It’s about time for the yearly reading of Moby-Dick. A lot of people seem to hate that book. I can’t understand why, but I’ve never had to read that book for a class despite taking more English/Lit classes than the average Chemistry major. Maybe people who’ve been forced to read the book hate it more. It’s really two books, one book a story about {Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Fedallah, et al}, and the other a treatise about whaling as practiced circa 1850. The two books are only tangentially related. People reading the book for literature class could probably skip all the whaling-related chapters if they’re of the tl;dr generation.
1 user commented in " Late-night samurai lunch "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe whaling chapters of Moby-Dick are integral to the story Melville is telling. Although it is true that there are two story lines, to understand the book on anything but a superficial level you need both parts.
I remember reading the book for an undergraduate class at Oakland and then a graduate class at U of M. Most of the students in the former class really hated the book, while most of those in the latter had grown up enough to appreciate it. It also helped that the graduate students were lit majors, of course. But the students who skipped or glossed over the whaling parts in the undergraduate class never gained any deeper understanding of the book.
I believe the book remains one of our literary masterpieces. Every time I read it, I discover something new. Happy reading.