Tis the season of father-son dreams

Yes, tis the season all fathers and sons look forward to: Pinewood Derby season.

Boys join Cub Scouts and Indian Guides for any number of reasons, camping, hiking, to learn something new or to spend quality one-on-one time with a parent. But highest on every boy’s list, except for camping, has to be the Pinewood Derby races. That event when a father and son (and more father than son for the younger boys) has the opportunity to turn a block of wood into an awesome, silly, or bizarre-looking race car.

Last year my son said, "Daddy, I want a Batman car."

I looked at the rectangular-shaped block of pine, scratched my head and said, "How about if I paint a Batman symbol on it?" He said okay.

This year he said, "Daddy, I want Speed Racer."

Again I looked at the rectangular block of wood, scratched my head and said, "What if I paint an "M" on the front?"

"Okay," he said "but it has to have curves, fives here and here, a steering wheel, jumpers on the bottom, and a trunk."

"A trunk?" I asked.

"Yes, right here." He proceeded to show me his Matchbox Speed Racer and the line that symbolized the car's trunk. Needless to say this car took me the longest to do in the three years I have been "helping" my sons with their cars.




The Indian Guides’ big race was last Saturday. There are few times more exciting than when your son’s car is placed at the starting gate for its first race. That car you spent countless hours cutting, sanding, and painting to make it look just right. And the other hours you spent on the internet researching techniques to give your son's car that extra little edge that will keep him from ending up in last place at which time you will have to staunch your son’s tears by explaining that it’s not if you win or lose, but how you play the game, even though your stomach tightens when that obnoxious father bellows how great his son is because he won or when the other fathers start giving you advice on what you can do better next year. (Not that this ever happened to me mind you...)

So as I was saying, there are few times as exciting as that first race, when you have no idea how well your car will do. If that fire truck in lane one is really as slow as it looks; if that low-profile car shaped like a domino that is almost nothing but wheels and weights is really as fast as it looks; if the arrow car’s unique strategy of putting the weights on top the car will pay off; or if you added too much or too little graphite to the wheels of your son’s Speed Racer car.



To give you an idea of the intensity of the race, cars are raced multiple times against each other in various lanes to ensure, god forbid, one car doesn't have an advantage over another because one lane is faster than the other. (Lane 3 was the fastest this year.)

Another way to ensure fairness, the Indian Guides have instituted an electronic finish line which lights up the winner’s lane. But don’t think this clears up any controversy about who the winner is. When one car clearly lost a heat, but its lane light didn’t go off, the loser’s father insisted the heat be run again. And in the Cub Scouts, the finish line is computerized. Good thing too. Last year,the difference between the first and third place winning car times for the Tiger Cub races was a tenth of a second. Some individual races ended up as dead heats even though the computer could calculate a difference of a hundredth of a second.

Which brings us to the end of the race. Always in any race room I’ve been in – Guide or Scout -, you’ll always hear intense discussions amongst the fathers about why this car did well, or didn’t, what’s more important - weight placement or aerodynamics, and always the dreaded advice about what you should do next year.

In the end, my son in the Indian Guides reached the quarter finals making him extremely happy. The domino car was indeed as fast as it looked, never losing a heat. And my son received two third place awards: “fastest looking” and the People’s Choice Award for the “best overall car”.



Next week: the Cub Scout races.

Book Review: City of Thieves

My favorite book so far this year. Yes, it even tops John Scalzi’s The Lost Colony which had been my favorite book this year until now. Why did it beat out Scalzi? Because Scalzi’s was the third book in a series, and City of Thieves introduced me to a whole new world and new set of characters. Now if I had to compare it to Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, the first book in that series…but I digress, this is a review about City of Thieves.

So, why did I enjoy City of Thieves so much?

Great characters. Great writing.

It reconfirmed my love of military historical fiction: put two well-written characters that play well off each other in a historical, war-time setting, and that time period comes alive better than it ever could in a history book.
There are two things I wanted to mention about Benioff’s style that put this book so high on my list.

First, his ability to bring forth moments of levity during the siege of Leningrad with all of its associated horrors still has me wondering how he did it so effectively. To show that people still joke or worry about the most inane things when the bloodiest struggle in history is raging all around them brought a sense of verisimilitude to the story. But don’t let me lead you on the incorrect assumption that this is a comedy. It’s a tragedy, as all wars are. Benioff doesn’t shy away from or gloss over the horrors of the siege or the war. It’s there, we see it, but Benioff relates it in a way that is told as though it is a story and not real. I don’t know else to explain it. There is something about Benioff’s writing that keeps us that half-inch away from what is happening, as though we are an up close observer, not a participant, even though we’re seeing it through the protagonist’s POV.

An example is the heart-wrenching story of Zoya versus the murder of a woman in The Dresden File.. Both were scenes were detailed in their description, but there was no space or filter between me and what I saw in The Dresden Files. The scene in The Dresden Files gave me a real nightmare. City of Thieves somehow gave the reader a respite, a bit of space. Like at a funeral for a distant cousin, you’re sad it happened and sad for everyone’s loss, but there is a sense of relief that you are a step removed from the grief of those closest to the departed.

The second comment on style I wanted to make was how well the sentences in City of Thieves flowed. How after a long paragraph, or short, or exchange of dialogue, I’d go wow that was really good. And then I’d have to go back and see how he did it. Part of it was Benioff’s expertise in constructing long sentences and stacking short ones.

For example:

“A few people had theories on where they could be found: high-ranking army officers had them flown in from Moscow; farmers outside the city gave them to the Germans, along with butter and fresh milk, in exchange for their lives; an old man who lived near the Narva Gate kept chickens in a rooftop coop.”

and

“It only took them a few hours. She hadn’t gotten far. She was so weak…She’d been little to begin with, and she ‘d barely eaten a thing since she’d been here. They brought her back.”

If you want to read a fun, slightly bizarre, adventure story about two soldiers during World War II who were ordered to find a dozen eggs in a starving city for a wedding cake, this is your book.

I highly recommend it.

Book Review: The Lost Army of Cambyses

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up The Lost Army of Cambyses from my mother’s bookshelf. Being an aficionado of ancient history, I knew Cambyses was an ancient Persian King who died not long after he conquered Egypt. But I wondered why my mother didn’t initially offer this novel to me after she read it. She explained that it was a mystery novel set in modern times and she knew that I wasn’t a big mystery fan. (If you check my list of “Books Read” section , you’ll see most are historical fiction, historical non-fiction, science fiction, and action adventure.)

Standing in the hallway with the book in my hand, I decided to look at Chapter 1. Wouldn’t you know it, Chapter 1 started off in 523 B.C. with the lost army. I was hooked. Unfortunately, Chapter 1 was the only chapter set in that time period, but the novel kept me going with Sussman’s academic and detailed style. I say academic, because his use of grammar marks such as commas, semicolons and colons were placed so perfectly. It stood out in the way one of his characters mentioned you could tell the difference between hieroglyphic forgeries and the real thing: the forgeries were always perfect. I started to wonder if Sussman’s work had been translated. There seemed to be a simplicity to his style, yet it worked well with the novel’s setting, especially when we were in the Egyptian police officer’s perspective.

Sussman’s details created a great sense of place. From “the clutter of cement bags and paint pots” in the officers’ apartment for his fountain to the “towering wall of sand stretching right across his line of sight in a single, unbroken curve, with other higher dunes ranged behind it, like waves freeze-framed in the act of crashing down onto a beach. The outlying ranges of the Great Sand Sea.”

Sussman almost lost me when we he used his great attention to detail to dive into Tara’s emotional issues about her father and lover in chapter 3, but once I slogged through those 9 pages (out of 576), the novel really took off.

A good read.