I’ve been bitten by the Blizzard bug again. This time it’s the new World of Warcraft saga, a huge four-CD massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG for short. The predecessor, Warcraft III, never gelled with me, mainly due to its complexity and less-than-interesting playing, but WoW is a fun, engaging, and addictive timewaster.
Installation is [...]
I remember listening to the opening of Orson Wells’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, but unfathomably do not remember listening to the remainder. So, when I picked up the book by the unrelated Herbert George (or simply “HG”), most of it was still new to me.
I was surprised by the opening chapter’s “humanitarian” [...]
I spent the first half of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat wondering whether or not the unusual story was an affront to Mexican migrant workers. Of course, the classification of “workers” in this story is a stretch as Danny, Pablo, Jesus Maria, Pilon, Big Joe, and the rest of the inhabitants of the shanty town on [...]
Out of the pile of classic novels that I have accumulated over the years, I recently pulled an unread copy of Johann Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson that, according to the book’s ink-stamped inside cover, I acquired over two decades ago from my junior high school library. Fortunately, like the Robinson family, it was a [...]
When I first considering reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, I had only a vague idea as to what to expect. I knew that one US soldier entrenched in Europe during World War II realized that in order to stop flying bombing missions, he had to be classified as crazy. Of course, the only way he could [...]
In contrast to the three months it took me to force myself to complete Anna Karenina, only four days passed before I finished Mark Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — and it only took that long because I forced myself to repeatedly put it down so that I wouldn’t finish it [...]
Billed as one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would serve the reader better as two separate novels. The two primary characters — Anna, the beautiful and courtly infidel, and Levin, the introspective recluse — and their supporting cast have such infrequent interaction that I spent the last two-thirds [...]
Along the coast of Northern Maui, the curvy, often-one-lane highway winds around tropical homesteads and lush, brightly colored gardens. Just after it winds through Kahakuloa, on the shores of the aptly named Kahakuloa Bay, a small fluorescent green wooden structure beckons passing travelers. Proudly, an equally green, three-foot sandwich board advertises “The Best Banana Bread [...]
We drove the Road to Hana today. One of Maui’s most hyped-up activities is a bit over-hyped. The fact that the road itself is so easily traversed, not the unpaved and potholed wreck it once was, makes the journey much more mundane and not dissimilar to the rest of Maui. Some of the most northern [...]
The alarm clock on the bedside table woke up, issuing forth soft Hawaiian music, soothing at most hours but not at 1:00 a.m. Surprisingly, we’d chosen to have our tropical sleep interrupted at that early hour; the bus from Mountain Riders was due to arrive 45 minutes later to take us to their base camp [...]
