For the last month, I haven’t touched a book other than to look up formulae, quotes, or recipes. Well, that’s not completely true, I haven’t touched a really good book in the last month, which may explain my current aversion to them. A neighbor loaned me Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and I figured why the hell not. On guessing the identity of the bad guy as well as the never-literal final thrust of the story halfway through the book, the compulsive in me had to plow through to the final page (also to figure out if I was right). That couldn’t end well.

Symbol wasn’t a total loss. It re-introduced me to Ben Franklin’s Magic Squares and a couple of other cool puzzles. Also makes me want to take a month to visit the Smithsonian again and other buildings in the nation’s capital.

Before that was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Smart and well-paced for a detective thriller with heaping spoonfuls of social advocacy, but it didn’t propel me into its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Chalk it up to the fact that we are in the throes of the horrifying BP oil spill and Season 1 of Treme and I’m not quite in the mood to read about a woman flashing back to psychological and physical abuse in the Swedish child welfare system, even if she does grow up to kick ass and take goth tattoos.

The Wall Street Journal’s Books’ section agrees with me: “If ever we’ve needed a healthy dose of escapism, this summer is it. We’re stressed about losing our jobs, paying our mortgages, selling our homes.” But even their selections are too shallow or too depressing.

These have been my reading attempts over the last five weeks:

– 15 pages into Kevin Baker’s Dreamland (really hard to keep the cast of 5000 characters introduced in the first 10 pages straight, especially when you’re falling asleep on an airplane)
– 2 pages into Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (I’ve had enough of the government passing bad regulations and not good ones for a while, thanks)
– 20 pages into Denis Leary’s Why We Suck (do I need Leary to tell me?)
– 16 pages into Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire (see earlier analysis)

These four books impede the purchase of Miguel Syjuco“s Ilustrado, Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, Citrus County by John Brandon, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game, and other recommended books. Who am I kidding? Existing books have never kept me from buying new ones. But, I don’t want to buy them and have them sit there.

Exercise, sleep and making the food, metronome, jewelry, and clothing (other than the three t-shirts I altered the other day) I’ve long envisioned also wait in the wings.

Manish Vij is shutting down Ultrabrown, a four-year-old Indian-American literature and arts blog, to pursue tech startups (brave) and writing a novel (braver) full-time. You may recognize Manish as co-founder of and former blogger at Sepia Mutiny, which he left to found Ultrabrown with amazing, young writing talent such as Chandrahas Choudhury, Jai Arjun Singh and Anonandon.

Ultrabrown’s farewell post serves as a refreshing antidote to my despondency earlier today. My parents and the parents and grandparents of many over at Ultrabrown and Sepia Mutiny moved away from the Indian subcontinent and sacrificed much so that we, their children, would be judged by our work and the content of our character, not the color of our skin, flavor of our caste, weight of our bank account, or the coin toss of gender. Lately, with all of this immigrant bashing, name-calling, and othering, I’ve been starting to think their work was in vain. Until I read this:

I always thought our community would eventually be as integrated as desis in Canada and the UK, where you can’t turn a channel without running into a brown anchor. I didn’t foresee it happening this quickly. For all the ways in which America remains deeply tribal, it is also beautifully and pragmatically open to an Aziz Ansari or a Nikki Haley in a way that few other countries seem to be. One grew up [Tamilian] Muslim, the other [Punjabi] Sikh; Aziz strutted around in a white tuxedo last night and never even bothered with a stage name.

My father’s tech generation often Anglicized their good names, started their own businesses because they couldn’t get promoted, and were forced to hire white CEOs anyway because nobody would buy from a desi. And now the former PM of Britain is asking Vinod Khosla for a job. Mindblowing.

I hate MTV awards shows, yet read this with sappy tears forming in my sappy eyes and, as sappy as it sounds, it made me feel for one small second that Barack Obama was not wrong. That “in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” The unlikely story that is Barack Obama, president of the United States. The unlikely story that he recently thanked DJ Rekha for performing Bhangra at the White House. The unlikely story that is my brother, partner in his own successful business due to his hard work. The unlikely story that is my aunt, dean and former provost of an American university. The unlikely stories that are my cousins, female sommelier, female aviator, female journalist, female physicist. The unlikely stories that are my nieces, carefree young American women. The unlikely story that is me, geologist, technologist and loudmouth freely typing these words into the ether.

Hope is what made these people. But, keeping American hope alive and giving it to the next generation requires work. Fighting the hatred, bigotry and violence that will erupt further from an increasingly troubled and changing economy and resulting shattered egos needs the resilience of will, pen and vote. And it needs a lot of love and support of one another. Manish has done us a great service in this arena. So, even if Ultrabrown has closed shop, I ask that you support the blogs and books of its talented writers and start your own movement to inspire and support more.

Good luck, Mr. Vij and the gang, grab your lungis and don’t panic!

“Okay, baby, hold tight,” said Zaphod. “We’ll take in a quick bite at the Vadapav Seller’s at the End of the Universe.”

I recently had the special honor of hanging with the main driver behind America’s slow devolution into our very own Dark Ages – aging, scared, neocon Baby Boomers. It was all Obama This, Healthcare That, I Worked With Polacks So I Don’t Need Diversity Training, and Accidents Happen. When the conversation reached the intellectual fever pitch of one especially ignorant, cantankerous old guy asking, “Why do we have to talk about the stupid oil spill instead of something cheerful like the best music ever, Southern rock?” was when I started to pack up my things. “Good night, it was very nice to have met you.” Have fun toasting Ronnie Van Zant and secession while the rest of America burns and so does your town but you refuse to see it, dumb asshole. I’m leaving.

No one seems to care as long as the price of gasoline sits under $3 a gallon and they’re keeping up with the Kardashians. Every single day, though, I remind myself how lucky I am for being employed, healthy, living near my family, and able to take care of myself. But, every single day any more, living in America tries my patience and sense of community and security.

Wonkette | Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students“ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student“s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

… Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over.

Couple this with influential idiots using Indian-Americans as fetishes and punchbags, referring to us as everything from the Chosen People to F**king Ragheads. On very public forums. And getting away with it.

I don’t have a problem with conservatism, its principles, and opposition based on policy, but Republicans and now The Tea Party are a whole different animal. This is the first time since 9/11 that I have been worried for my safety and that of others of my skin color. When I sincerely hope on a daily basis that these dogwhistles during a time of economic uncertainty don’t incite cultural and physical violence against perceived and real ragheads. The malcontents have begun projecting their rage onto people of color in Arizona. Where next? It is scary.

Also read: First Draft’s Arizona Displeases Tube Kitten Again

The LMRP tophat is in place. Closing the vents in the cap is slow going with the formation of hydrates and high flow pressure out of the well. Indeed, we are still watching and discussing.

The Oil Drum | Lessons Left Unlearnt From 2003 Gulf of Mexico Near-Spill: “Reading through some MMS reports, it seems that near-misses happen a lot.”

A good maritime law blog on the legal machinations surrounding the oil spill. As Brad says, “He begins each day with a summary of the relevant legal developments pertaining to the spill, then expands on them individually and includes hyperlinks to underlying documents.”

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So, this has been puzzling me for the last couple of days: Both IfItWasMyHome and Paul Rademacher offer the ability to overlay the latest geographic extent of the oil spill on a location of your choice. It’s a good exercise in geographic scale, but if they both source their data from NOAA on any given day, why do the maps look so different?

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Despite many awful reminders, Americans refuse to discern between disaster and disastrous response to the disaster? How many times must these things happen before they get it? Folks, keep this in mind as you go into another weekend (and Pistolette sums it up very nicely): “I didn’t blame Bush for Katrina, but for failing to act after. I don’t blame Obama for the oil spill, but for failing to act after.” Disaster prevention is one thing, while effective response is wholly another.