nickfourtimes's reviews
329 reviews

Jagged Alliance 2, by Darius Kazemi

funny informative fast-paced

4.0

1) "Just a few months after its release, I found a dozen copies in the discount bin for $0.99 each. (The game did not sell terribly well in the United States.) I bought all twelve copies and gave a copy to anyone I knew who seemed like they might be remotely interested in it. To this day, I will bend over backwards to twist a conversation about X-COM into a conversation about JA2 because there is no game I want to talk about more than JA2. I don't want JA2 to remain obscure. I want it to change people's expectations for what a video game can be. I want all future video games to pale in comparison."

2) "JA1 development began in 1992 in Montreal with a three-person team under the banner of Currie's development studio, Madlab Software. Currie first recruited help from Shaun Lyng, an acquaintance he'd known since childhood. Lyng was writing a novel at the time, and he asked Currie if he needed any help with the story for his game. Lyng began by helping on the initial concept, pitch, and design documents. They placed a newspaper ad looking for a digital artist, which a Concordia University film animation student named Mohanned Mansour answered. Mansour had next to no experience with digital art and didn't even own a computer, but Currie liked his illustration work, and Mansour quickly fell into the role of lead artist."

3) "[Alex Meduna, Programmer/Designer]: [You] have to put in a lot of artificial limitations, so enemies generally don't make the smartest decisions possible to them. There's typically a lot of randomness involved instead. As a result, they're sometimes surprisingly smart, other times shockingly dumb. The dumb can be by design, too."

4) "It turns out that men and women can have various levels of the 'sexist' trait, and men can have the 'gentleman' trait. Women with the sexist trait and men with the gentleman trait get upset when a woman is married off to the Hicks family. Yes, in the JA2 source code, a helpful note explains that a feminist character 'hates men,' rehashing a popular belief in the tech industry that feminism is a kind of 'reverse sexism.' This one decision is the only place in the game where these traits come into play. There's vestigial code that suggests there were more uses planned for these traits. For example, an 'AIM_PENALTY_GENTLEMAN' variable is declared but never used. Presumably this would have been a penalty levied on 'gentleman' characters if they attempt to shoot at women. Several male characters in the game have the sexist trait, but that trait never comes into play for men at all—again, it seems likely that the team may have planned for friction between sexist men and women on a team but never got around to implementing it.

Whatever the eventual reasons were for cutting out other uses, the fact remains that deep in the JA2 source code, some strange social dynamics exist where most women are sexist and it makes them angry about arranged marriages, some men are gentlemen and they're also not too keen on arranged marriage, and some men are sexist but never let it get in the way of their work."

5) "Developers crunched on JA2 through the summer of 1998. By September, the rank-and-file team members were frustrated with everything from the hours they worked to the inconvenient placement of the only general-use office phone. They wrote up a list of labor and management related concerns and took them to Ian Currie, demanding that he address the problems or else the developers would quit the project. Currie felt blindsided and hurt by the list, but also recognized that many of the concerns were valid. He conceded to their demands. Today he describes it as an important growth experience as a manager. The team was happy with Curries response, and development continued."

6) "[The] fan modders' sense of improvement highlights the big difference between the Sir-tech team and the fan community. Sir-tech was not particularly interested in putting hundreds of guns in the game; the developers did so because the fans demanded it. They weren't trying to make a realistic simulation of modern combat. They were trying to make a 'realistic' simulation of an 80s action movie. The developers spent a lot of time riding the line between realism and entertainment, but when it came to critical design decisions, entertainment always won out."

Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again, by Danny Licht

adventurous funny inspiring lighthearted reflective fast-paced

5.0

1) "To cook or not to cook: it is a new question in history. In the age of supermarket buffets and liquid meal replacements, cooking at home has never made less sense. Cooking has become a luxury on the one hand and a chore on the other, and it is both of these too much, and it is neither one quite enough, and it has made me wonder, against the odds, against reason, and against common sense: what exactly is cooking for?"

2) "I wonder if this widespread availability of detailed instruction discourages home cooks from thinking about what they are doing while they are doing it. It is an amazing thing that one can now be considered a great cook without actually knowing how to cook anything at all."

3) "Cooking for me often begins in the pantry, where I find beans. I like beans and regret that they are not given a chance by so many. They are too humble to be seen, too small for common fantasy. It should not be this way. Beans are nutritious, delicious, versatile, and cheap, glamorous in their little way. I am at peace when I know I have a pot of beans in the fridge, ready to make into lunch.

When I cook beans, I cook too many. I do this on purpose. I start with a pound of dried beans―cannellini, navy, kidney, or cranberry, though every bean has its appeal. I sort through them for small stones and soak them in water, covered by a few inches, overnight. A pound of beans will make more than four servings and fewer than ten. I like this kind of ambiguity in cooking. It pushes me to keep an open mind, and to err on the side of excess. I like excess in cooking because I like dealing with the consequences."

4) "Probably you will want to know how long the beans will take to cook. It is a normal, obvious question yet difficult to answer directly. The truth is that I don't really know how long anything takes to cook. No one does, and no recipe can tell you. Given that the production of the earth is variable, and so are ovens and so are stoves, not to mention the tastes of individuals, any cooking time is always a suggested cooking time. I can tell you that soaked dried beans take about an hour to cook, but they can take anywhere from half an hour to two hours depending on the age of the beans, the qualities of the water, the intensity of the flame, and so on. In the end, the only relevant rule here is that things should be cooked until they are done."

5) "Everything in cooking is optional, including the cooking itself. Cookbooks are just books, which are just ideas."

6) "Garnish is a final intervention, and it begins by looking at what lies before you, and asking yourself what could make it more beautiful, because that is what will make it more delicious."

7) "Cooking is about knowing what to add and when to add it. The way to learn this — how to cook — is through attention and repetition."

8) "You will notice that the amount of onion that I suggest (one) remains invariable for an undisclosed number of servings (two to six, let's say). How is this possible? It is possible because it just doesn't matter very much. Everything involved here is delicious. Rice is delicious, onion is delicious, garlic is delicious, broth is delicious. In combination with salt, pepper, and cheese, one simply cannot go wrong. Of course a very serious cook with a very refined palate and a reputation to uphold will want to cook with great consistency and exactness. But I am young and free; I want to eat well and soon, not perfectly."

9) "Failed, broken mayos have left me feeling impotent and despondent, confused and irritable."

Mars, by Ben Bova

1) '''Because it draws me,' he said. His voice was low but as firm as the mountains themselves. 'Mars is drawing me to it.'
Al gave him a puzzled, almost troubled look.
'I mean,' Jamie tried to explain, 'who am I, Al? What am I? A scientist, a white man, a Navaho---I don't really know who I am yet. I'm nearly thirty years old and I'm a nobody. Just another assistant professor digging up rocks. There's a million guys like me.'
'Helluva long way to go, all the way to Mars.'
Jamie nodded. 'I have to go there, though. I have to find out if I can make something of my life. Something real. Something important.'''

2) ''Let me go in beauty, he found himself thinking. Let me find harmony and beauty out there.''

3) ''Jamie's words died in his throat. His heart began to pound. The sky was shimmering, glowing faintly as a spirit hovering above them, flickering colors so pale and delicate that for a breathless moment Jamie could not believe his eyes.
'Mickhail...'
'I see it. Aurora.'
'Like the northern lights.' Jamie's voice was hollow with awe, trembling. The lights pulsed and billowed across the sky, exquisitely ethereal pastels of pink, green, blue, and white. He could see stars through them, faintly.''

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

1) "The genesis of this book was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland. Given the possibilities of our own time, the reason for my interest is obvious. The answer proved elusive because the 14th century suffered so many 'strange and great perils and adversities' (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John's vision, which had now become seven—plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church. All but plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.

Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself—a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant—was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before."

2) "It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version. Women outnumbered men because men were killed off in the wars; men outnumbered women because women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were filthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed frequent baths in the village bathhouses. The list could be extended indefinitely.

Contradictions, however, are part of life, not merely a matter of conflicting evidence. I would ask the reader to expect contradictions, not uniformity. No aspect of society, no habit, custom, movement, development, is without cross-currents. Starving peasants in hovels live alongside prosperous peasants in featherbeds. Children are neglected and children are loved. Knights talk of honor and turn brigand. Amid depopulation and disaster, extravagance and splendor were never more extreme. No age is tidy or made of whole cloth, and none is a more checkered fabric than the Middle Ages."

3) "At Coucy after the death of Thomas, a sixty-year period of more respectable lordship followed under his son and grandson, Enguerrand II and Raoul I, who cooperated with the crown to the benefit of their domain. Each responded to the renewed crusades of the 12th century, and each in turn lost his life in the Holy Land. Perhaps suffering from financial stringency imposed by these expeditions, the widow of Raoul sold to Coucy-le-Château in 1197 its charter of liberties as a free commune for 140 livres.

Such democratization, as far as it went, was not so much a step in a steady march toward liberty—as 19th century historians liked to envision the human record—as it was the inadvertent by-product of the nobles' passionate pursuit of war. Required to equip himself and his retainers with arms, armor, and sound horses, all of them costly, the crusader—if he survived—usually came home poorer than he went, or left his estate poorer, especially since none of the crusades after the First was either victorious or lucrative. The only recourse, since it was unthinkable to sell land, was to sell communal privileges or commute labor services and bonds of serfdom for a money rent. In the expanding economy of the 12th and 13th centuries, the profits of commerce and agricultural surplus brought burghers and peasants the cash to pay for rights and liberties."

4) "The Coucys maintained a sense of eminence second to none, and conducted their affairs after the usage of sovereign princes. They held courts of justice in the royal style and organized their household under the same officers as the King's: a constable, a grand butler, a master of falconry and the hunt, a master of the stables, a master of forests and waters, and masters or grand stewards of kitchen, bakery, cellar, fruit (which included spices, and torches and candles for lighting), and furnishings (including tapestry and lodgings during travel). A grand seigneur of this rank also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires. A principal vassal acting as châtelain or garde du château managed the estate. At Coucy fifty knights, together with their own squires, attendants, and servants, made up a permanent garrison of 500."

5) "Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, 'linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder ... deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.' What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people's need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.

The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits."

6) "Merchants regularly paid fines for breaking every law that concerned their business, and went on as before. The wealth of Venice and Genoa was made in trade with the infidels of Syria and Egypt despite papal prohibition. Prior to the 14th century, it has been said, men 'could hardly imagine the merchant's strongbox without picturing the devil squatting on the lid.' Whether the merchant too saw the devil as he counted coins, whether he lived with a sense of guilt, is hard to assess. Francisco Datini, the merchant of Prato, judging by his letters, was a deeply troubled man, but his agonies were caused more by fear of loss than by fear of God. He was evidently able to reconcile Christianity and business, for the motto on his ledger was 'In the name of God and of profit.'"

7) "Books of advice on child-rearing were rare. There were books—that is, bound manuscripts—of etiquette, housewifery, deportment, home remedies, even phrase books of foreign vocabularies. A reader could find advice on washing hands and cleaning nails before a banquet, on eating fennel and anise in case of bad breath, on not spitting or picking teeth with a knife, not wiping hands on sleeves, or nose and eyes on the tablecloth. A woman could learn how to make ink, poison for rats, sand for hourglasses; how to make hippocras or spiced wine, the favorite medieval drink; how to care for pet birds in cages and get them to breed; how to obtain character references for servants and make sure they extinguished their bed candles with fingers or breath, 'not with their shirts'; how to grow peas and graft roses; how to rid the house of flies; how to remove grease stains with chicken feathers steeped in hot water; how to keep a husband happy by ensuring him a smokeless fire in winter and a bed free of fleas in summer. A young married woman would be advised on fasting and alms-giving and saying prayers at the sound of the matins bell 'before going to sleep again,' and on walking with dignity and modesty in public, not 'in ribald wise with roving eyes and neck stretched forth like a stag in flight, looking this way and that like unto a runaway horse.' She could find books on estate management for times when her husband was away at war, with advice on making budgets and withstanding sieges and on tenure and feudal law so that her husband's rights would not be invaded.

But she would find few books for mothers with advice on breastfeeding, swaddling, bathing, weaning, solid-feeding, and other complexities of infant care, although these might seem to have been of more moment for survival of the race than breeding birds in cages or even keeping husbands comfortable."

8) "If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland. Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man's wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love alone. (Love of a maiden was virtually ruled out since this would have raised dangerous problems, and besides, maidens of noble estate usually jumped from childhood to marriage with hardly an interval for romance.) The fact that courtly love idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze through which medieval people threaded their lives. As formulated by chivalry, romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements."

9) "Edward III's first campaign in France, halted by the truce of 1342, had been inconclusive and without strategic result except for the naval battle fought off Sluys, the port of Bruges, in 1340. Here where the mouth of the Scheldt widens among protecting isles to form a great natural harbor, the French had assembled 200 ships from as far away as Genoa and the Levant for a projected invasion of England. The outcome of the battle was an English victory that destroyed the French fleet and for the time being gave England command of the Channel. It was won by virtue of a military innovation that was to become the nemesis of France.

This was the longbow, derived from the Welsh and developed under Edward I for use against the Scots in the highlands. With a range reaching 300 yards and a rapidity, in skilled hands, of ten to twelve arrows a minute in comparison to the crossbow's two, the longbow represented a revolutionary delivery of military force. Its arrow was three feet long, about half the length of the formidable six-foot bow, and at a range of 200 yards it was not supposed to miss its target. While at extreme range its penetrating power was less than that of the crossbow, the longbow's fearful hail shattered and demoralized the enemy. Preparing for the challenge to France, Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows."

10) "Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary taxation and devaluation of the coinage."

11) "In April 1356 the Dauphin, in his capacity as Duke of Normandy, was entertaining Charles of Navarre and the leading Norman nobles at a banquet in Rouen when suddenly the doors were broken open and the King in helmet with many followers, preceded by Marshal d'Audrehem with drawn sword, burst in. 'Let no one move or he is a dead man!' cried the Marshal. The King seized Navarre, calling him 'Traitor,' at which Navarre's squire Colin Doublel drew his dagger in the terrible act of lèse majesté and threatened to plunge it into the King's breast. Without flinching, Jean ordered his guards to 'seize that boy and his Master too.' He himself laid hold of Jean d'Harcourt so roughly that he tore his doublet from collar to belt, accusing him, and others present who had been in the party that murdered Charles d'Espagne, of treason. In horror, the Dauphin begged his father not to dishonor him by violence upon his guests, but was told by the King, 'You do not know what I know'; these were wicked traitors whose crimes had been discovered. Charles of Navarre pleaded for mercy, saying he was the victim of false reports, but the King had him arrested with the others while the remaining guests fled, 'climbing over walls in their terror.'"

12) "When the French balked at the terms of a settlement reached in 1358, Edward responded by raising his demands. In March 1359 when the truce was about to expire, King Jean yielded, trading half his kingdom for his own release. By the Treaty of London he surrendered virtually all of western France from Calais to the Pyrenees, and agreed to an augmented and catastrophic ransom of 4 million gold écus, payable at fixed installments, to be guaranteed by the delivery of forty royal and noble hostages, of whom Enguerrand de Coucy was designated as one. In case of obstruction to the transfer of ceded territories, Edward retained the right to send armed forces back to France, whose cost was to be borne by the French King.

Desperate for peace though France was, shame and anger rose when the terms became known. Dragged to maturity in the grim years since Poitiers, the Dauphin had learned greater stewardship than his father. Neither he nor his Council was prepared to yield what the King of France had agreed to. Facing a fearful choice between accepting the treaty and renewal of the war, they summoned the Estates General with a request for 'the most substantial notable and wise men' bearing full powers to represent the communes.

In this somber hour, one of the darkest in French history, the few delegates who braved the bandit-infested roads to come to Paris were in earnest. When the text of the Treaty of London was read to them on May 19, they deliberated briefly and made their response to the Dauphin without dispute. It was for once laconic. 'They said the Treaty was displeasing to all the people of France and intolerable, and for this they ordered war to be made on England.'"

13) "Not only payment of the ransom but fulfillment of the territorial terms controlled the hostages' fate. Too lightly, as the chronicler said, sovereignties had been disposed of at Brétigny, with no account taken of the fact that territories on paper represented people on the ground. Something had happened to these people during two decades of war. The citizens of the seaport of La Rochelle implored the King not to give them up, saying they would rather be taxed up to half their property every year than be turned over to English rule. 'We may submit to the English with our lips,' they said, 'but with our hearts never.' Weeping, the inhabitants of Cahors lamented that the King had left them orphans. The little town of St. Romain de Tarn refused to admit the English commissioners within its gates, although it reluctantly sent envoys to take the oath of homage next day at a neighboring place.

For all his countrymen who equated the English with the brigands and hated them helplessly in their hearts, Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, the naval commander of the raid on Winchelsea, spoke through his acts. As citizen of a ceded town, he adamantly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England. Persisting against all threats, he was transferred to England, held in a dungeon without recourse to law or friends, and finally taken to the cliffs of Dover, where he was given the choice between taking the oath or death on the wave-washed rocks below. Ringois threw himself into the sea."

14) "Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized."

15) "In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God. Although vestiges of the imperial prestige remained, neither theory nor title any longer corresponded to existing reality. Imperial sovereignty in Italy was hardly more than a sham; it was dwindling on the western fringe of the empire in Hainault, Holland, and Luxemburg, and retreating in the east before the growing nationhood of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. Its core was a haphazard federation of German principalities, duchies, cities, leagues, margraves, archbishoprics, and counties under shifting and overlapping sovereignties. Hapsburgs and Luxemburgs, Hohenstaufens, Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs, and Wettins despoiled each other in endless wars; the Ritter or knight lived by robbing the merchant; every town believed its prosperity depended on the ruin of its rival; within the towns, merchants and craft guilds contended for control; an exploited peasantry smoldered and periodically flamed in revolt. The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal."

16) "The election of an Anti-Pope was bound to be divisive, and the interests of the papacy might have been supposed to dictate a choice as acceptable as possible to Italians. To elect the man feared and loathed throughout Italy suggests an arrogance of power almost as mad as the behavior of Urban. Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, 'no epoch was more naturally mad.'"

17) "'Let him go to the Devil! He lived long enough,' cried a workingman on the death of the King. 'It would have been better for us if he had died ten years ago!' Within a few months of the King's death, France experienced the explosion of working-class revolt that had already swept through Florence and Flanders. In addition to oppressive taxes, a rising rancor of the poor against the rich and a conscious demand by the lowest class for greater rights in the system supplied the impulse. Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague's wake."

18) "Though theoretically free, villeins wanted abolition of the old bonds, the right to commute services to rent, a riddance of all the restrictions heaped up by the Statute of Laborers over the past thirty years in the effort to clamp labor in place. They had listened to Lollard priests, and to secular preachers moved by the evils of the time, and to John Ball's theories of leveling. 'Matters cannot go well in England,' was his theme, 'until all things shall be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. ... Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?'

Wyclif's spirit, which had dared deny the most pervasive authority of the time, was abroad. What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength."

19) "While being divested of his armor in his scarlet pavilion, the King expressed a wish to see Artevelde dead or alive. For a reward of 100 francs, searchers found his body, which was taken before the victors, who stared at it for a while in silence. The King gave it a little kick, 'treating it as a villein.' Then it was taken away and 'hanged upon a tree.' Artevelde's image was subsequently woven into a tapestry depicting the battle, which the Duke of Burgundy commissioned and used as a carpet because he liked to walk on the commoners who had attempted to overthrow the ordained order."

20) "The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century. The funds contributed by the crown and by Anjou himself, not to mention the sum stolen by Pierre de Craon, were squeezed from the people of France for a cause which could in no way, present or future, benefit them. This did not escape notice, nor soothe the popular mood. On hearing of Anjou's death, a tailor of Orléans named Guillaume le Jupponnier, when 'overcome with wine,' burst into a tirade in which can be heard the rarely recorded voice of his class. 'What did he go there for, this Duke of Anjou, down there where he went? He has pillaged and robbed and carried off money to Italy in order to conquer another land. He is dead and damned, and the King St. Louis too, like the others. Filth, filth of a King and a King! We have no King but God. Do you think they got honestly what they have? They tax me and re-tax me and it hurts them that they can't have everything we own. Why should they take from me what I earn with my needle? I would rather the King and all kings were dead than that my son should be hurt in his little finger.'"

21) "What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a fighter by function, professionalism was not greater but less.

Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people."

22) "The Kings were at peace, but all the old issues—disputed frontiers and territories, homages and reparations, Guienne and Calais—remained unresolved, and Gloucester's rancor abided. The French found that all the honors and entertainments and gifts of gold and silver they heaped on him in an effort to soften his antagonism went for nothing. He took the gifts and remained cold, hard, and covert in his answers. 'We waste our effort on this Duke of Gloucester,' Burgundy said to his council, 'for as long as he lives there shall surely be no peace between France and England. He will always find new inventions and accidents to engender hatred and the strife between the realms.' It did not take Gloucester, who would be dead within a year, to find these. Burgundy himself, through the fratricidal strife with Orléans carried on by his son, was as responsible as any. And the unending war had cut a gulf too deep to be easily pasted over. In England, Richard and Lancaster were the only genuine supporters of a pro-French policy, and both were dead three years after the French marriage. Animosity toward France endured. Not quite twenty years after the reconciliation, Henry V was to call to his followers, 'Once more unto the breach!'"

23) "Since he had first marched at fifteen against the English, and at eighteen hunted down the Jacquerie, the range of Coucy's experience had extended over an extraordinary variety of combat, diplomacy, government, and social and political relationships. As son-in-law of Edward III, holding double allegiance to two kings at war, his position had been unique. He had seen war as captain or one of the top command in eleven campaigns—in Piedmont, Lombardy, Switzerland, Normandy, Languedoc, Tuscany, northern France, Flanders, Guelders, Tunisia, Genoa; he had commanded mercenaries, and fought as ally or antagonist of the Count of Savoy, Gregory XI, Hawkwood, the Visconti, the Hapsburgs, the Swiss, Navarrese, Gascons, English, Berbers, the Republic of Florence, and nobles of Genoa. As diplomat he had negotiated with Pope Clement VII, the Duke of Brittany, the Count of Flanders, the Queen of Aragon, with the English at peace parleys, and the rebels of Paris. He had had one temperamental and extravagant wife eight years his senior, and a second approximately thirty years his junior. He had served as adviser and agent of the two royal Dukes, Anjou and Orléans, as Lieutenant-General of Picardy and later of Guienne, as member of the Royal Council, as Grand Bouteiller of France, and had twice been the preferred choice for Constable. He had known and dealt with every kind of character from the ultra-wicked Charles of Navarre to the ultra-saintly Pierre de Luxemburg."

24) "At Gallipoli the nobles among the captives were kept in the upper rooms of the tower, while the 300 common prisoners—the boy Schiltberger among them—who were the Sultan's share of the booty were held below. The worst of the harsh conditions was deprivation of wine, the Europeans' daily drink throughout their lives. When the ship bearing Sigismund from Constantinople passed through the Hellespont less than half a mile from shore, the Turks, unable to challenge it at sea, lined up their prisoners at the water's edge and called mockingly to the King to come out of his boat and deliver his comrades. Sigismund had in fact made overtures from Constantinople to ransom his allies, though they had cost him the war, but his means were depleted and the Sultan knew there was more money to be had from France.

Clinging to Europe's farthest edge, the prisoners could see the fatal shores of Troy across the straits where the most famous, most foolish, most grievous war of myth or history, the archetype of human bellicosity, had been played out. Nothing mean nor great, sorrowful, heroic nor absurd had been missing from that ten years' catalogue of woe. Agamemnon had sacrificed a daughter for a wind to fill his sails, Cassandra had warned her city and was not believed, Helen regretted in bitterness her fatal elopement, Achilles, to vent rage for the death of his friend, seven times dragged dead Hector through the dust at his chariot wheels. When the combatants offered each other peace, the gods whispered lies and played tricks until they quarreled and fought again. Troy fell and flames consumed it, and from that prodigious ruin Agamemnon went home to be betrayed and murdered. Since then, through some 2,500 years, how much had changed? The romance of Troy was a favorite of the Middle Ages; Hector was one of the Nine Worthies carved on Coucy's castle walls. Did he, the Odysseus of this new war, think of that ancient siege and hollow triumph as he gazed across the straits?"

25) "Two days later, on February 18, 1397, Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and Count of Soissons, died in Brusa."

26) "In pomp and minstrelsy, the culminating fiasco of knighthood was interred. After Nicopolis, nothing went right for France for many long years. The presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the system was in its decadence. Froissart found this in England too, where a friend of former times said to him, 'Where are the great enterprises and valiant men, the glorious battles and conquests? Where are the knights in England who could do such deeds now?... The times are changed for the worse. ... Now felonies and hates are nourished here.'"

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan

4.0

1) "You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquillity of such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob. This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other, precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants."

2) "I was curious to know what feedlot beef would taste like now, if I could taste the corn or even, since taste is as much a matter of what's in the head as it is about molecules dancing on the tongue, some hint of the petroleum. 'You are what you eat' is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil."

3) "Tail docking is the USDA's recommended solution to the porcine 'vice' of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most---but not quite all---of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it's not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency."

4) "I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding his head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken's neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, which would have prolonged the bird's suffering, but needn't have: The blade was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird's neck, which promptly blossomed a brilliant red. Before I could let go of the bird's suddenly limp head my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, an errant droplet spattered the lens of my glasses, leaving a tiny, fogged red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning."

5) "The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever. (It is no accident that the nonunion workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals in their care.) Here in these wretched places life itself is redefined---as "protein production"---and with it "suffering." That venerable word becomes "stress," an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution such as clipping the beaks of chickens or docking the tails of pigs or, in the industry's latest initiative, simply engineering the "stress gene" out of pigs and chickens. It all sounds very much like our worst nightmares of confinement and torture, and it is that, but it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath those grim sheet-metal roofs into the brief, pitiless life of a production unit in the days before the suffering gene was found."

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

4.0

''But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. ''No surprises'' is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle ganges, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.''

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein

3.0

''When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic -- ''High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L'' -- HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one per cent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him -- decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half time that number of neuristors.
And woke up.''

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard P. Feynman

4.0

1) ''I had also invented a set of symbols for the typewriter, like FORTRAN has to do, so I could type equations. I also fixed typewriters, with paper clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didn't break down like they do here in Los Angeles), but I wasn't a professional repairman; I'd just fix them so they would work. But the whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it---that was interesting to me, like a puzzle.''

2) ''I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way---by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!''

3) ''Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn't got a doubting mind---especially in a circumstance like that---doesn't immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.
I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn't feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen.
I didn't know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back (yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.
'She's dead. And how's the project going?'''

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson

3.0

1) ''Like any emergent system, the city is a pattern in time. Dozens of generations come and go, conquerors rise and fall, the printing press appears, then the steam engine, then radio, television, the Web---and beneath all that turbulence, a pattern retains its shape: silk weavers clustered along Florence's Por Sanata Maria, the Venetian glassblowers on Murano, the Parisian traders gathered in Les Halles.''

2) ''There are manifest purposes to a city---reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace. But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone even dreamed of digital computers. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Cobblers gather near other cobblers, and button makers near other button makers. Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don't die out in rural isolation. The power unleashed by this data storage is evident in the earliest large-scale human settlements, located on the Sumerian coast and in the Indus Valley, which date back to 3500 B.C. By some accounts, grain cultivation, the plow, the potter's wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact astronomical observation, the calendar---all of these inventions appeared within centuries of the original urban populations. It's possible, even likely, that more isolated groups or individuals had stumbled upon some of those technologies at an earlier date, but they didn't become part of the collective intelligence of civilization until there were cities to store and transmit them.''

3) ''Our brains first helped us navigate larger groups of fellow humans by allowing us to peer into the minds of other individuals and to recognize patterns in their behavior. The city allowed us to see patterns of group behavior by recording and displaying those patterns in the form of neighborhoods. Now the latest software scours the Web for patterns of online activity, using feedback and pattern-matching tools to find neighbors in an impossibly oversize population. At first glance, these three solutions---brains, cities, software---would seem to belong to completely different orders of experience. But as we have seen over the preceding pages, they are all instances of self-organization at work, local interactions leading to global order. They exist on a continuum of sorts. The materials change as you jump from the scale of a hundred humans to a million to 100 million. But the system remains the same.''

Odyssey, by Homer

4.0

1) ''Thus Telemachus. And Pallas Athena
Touched the suitors' minds with hysteria.
They couldn't stop laughing, and as they laughed
It

seemed to them that their jaws were not theirs,
And the meat that they ate was dabbled with blood.
Tears filled their eyes, and their hearts

raced.
Then the seer Theoclymenus spoke among them:
'Wretches, what wicked thing is this that you suffer?
You are shrouded in night from

top to toe,
Lamentation flares, your cheeks melt with tears,
And the walls of the house are spattered with blood.
The porch and the court

are crowded with ghosts
Streaming down to the undergloom. The sun is gone
From heaven, and an evil mist spreads over the land.'''

2)

''Odysseus picked up
The arrow from the table and laid it upon
The bridge of the bow, and, still in his chair,
Drew the bowstring and the

notched arrow back.
He took aim and let fly, and the bronze-tipped arrow
Passed clean through the holes of all twelve axeheads
From first to

last. And he said to Telemachus:
'Well, Telemachus, the guest in your hall
Has not disgraced you. I did not miss my target,
Nor did I take

all day in stringing the bow.
I still have my strength, and I'm not as the suitors
Make me out to be in their taunts and jeers.
But now it

is time to cook these men's supper,
While it is still light outside, and after that,
We'll need some entertainment#-music and song#-
The

finishing touches for a perfect banquet.'

He spoke, and lowered his eyebrows. Telemachus,
The true son of godlike Odysseus, slung

on
His sharp sword, seized his spear, and gleaming in bronze
Took his place by his father's side.''