Do you wish you could do something truly meaningful for some of Milwaukee's underserved this holiday season? Please consider giving to this worthy cause. A group led by my wife and me are staging an event this year for a local Head Start program. This program helps families that frankly are among the most in need of it. According to extremely stringent Head Start entrance requirements, a family of three must have a pre-tax household annual income of less than $18,000.

That very first year we helped nearly 70 preschoolers and their family members by organizing and staging this event. We did it with a lot of hard work, but just as importantly, a total of $628 in cash donations from many friends and supporters. The economy has been worse every year since, and the number of family members who show up for the meal and festivities continues to grow.

This year's event is on Thursday, December 15, and the need is even greater.

Depending on funding, we will be doing whatever we can from the list of past year's activities and gifts:

• Everyone gets a hot meal -- mostaccioli with meat sauce, rolls, string cheese, fresh fruit and baby carrots
• Each Head Start child receives a brightly colored bag with his or her name on it, that can be used as a school bag. It will contain the following:
  1. A warm fleece scarf - each child gets his or her own pattern, so they can't get mixed up with others when brought to class
  2. A special tee shirt (my sister-in-law is embroidering a colorful emblem on each)
  3. An educational activity kit -- it's a lace-up game to help with manual dexterity
  4. Crayons, pencils, a coloring book and a bookmark
  5. Granola bars and other snacks
  6. Knit mittens
• We're shooting for these different stations that the kids can go around to, including:
  1. The cookie station where kids can decorate their own giant cookie 
  2. The boat-building station (they make and decorate a toy boat that they can take home and float in a tub or sink)
  3. Candy cane or snowflake ornament decorating station
  4. Face painting station
  5. A bowling game, where every child receives a small prize
  6. A photo booth, where photos are taken of each child. That's how I took the shot you see at the top of this post. We print each portrait on the spot, so parents have a photo for the fridge

For the families: Each parent receives a raffle ticket to win one of the food baskets that we will be giving away, filled with approximately $25 worth of healthy foods -- canned goods, flour, pancake mix, soup, rice, beans, oat meal, etc. -- plus a few goodies. In past years when we gave these away, the excitement was one of the evenings' highlights. These clearly were extremely valued by the families! Below is a photo showing some of the baskets, which are in blue transparent gift wrap (to the left of that photo is a shot of the kids eating hot dogs at our first event -- we've upgraded to pasta with meat sauce!):

We need your help. The only financial support we receive is from donations made by people like you. Please contribute whatever you can -- $25, less or more. Any amount would be appreciated.

You can reach me at JLarche [at] Gmail [dot] com, or use this contact form on my business blog. If you want to donate directly, use the PayPal button below.

Everyone who donates and makes a request for a donation letter for tax purposes will be provided with one.

Do you have other holiday charities? Are you unable to give because of this tough economy? If so, I understand. If not, please help these deserving kids and their families. Thank you.

 

 

What if your musical tastes were particularly obscure -- at least by most people's standards -- and you met someone who lists two of her favorite musical artists, and they exactly match your own? That happened to me this summer. Pretty cool.

Naturally, we immediately started firing other favorites at each other, and making plans to exchange samples of those that the other hadn't checked out yet. One of those she threw at me was Peaks and Valleys. I just now checked them out, and I see why she was so quick to recommend them.

Well, also, her son is in the band.

But don't let that family connection influence you as you decide whether or not to give them a listen. She is no stage mother, and they are no ordinary band. Their latest album is quite solid. It's held up well to several listens, and I'm seeing that it's going to a fairly heavy rotation in my playlist.

Their site makes downloading easy (and it's a steal at $5). I've gone one further and ordered their CD, because I was intrigued with their novel jewel case. Do check them out:

 

Oh, and in case you're wondering:

• Radiohead
• Pinback

Not necessarily in that order.

A few years ago I participated in the newly-launched Pecha Kucha Night - Milwaukee. It was only the second time that one of these amazing nights took place in Milwaukee. In fact, back then it was still at its first home, the Hi Hat Lounge, on Milwaukee's Brady Street. I wanted to talk about something so quirky for an audience of mostly 20-somethings that they'd take notice. I succeeded, and had a ball. I chose to talk about this early film genius:

This is a video I haven't even reviewed in a couple of years. The quality of the audio (and my slides!) isn't great, but I think this video still gets my message across. I also look my best at that light level. ;-)

I hope you enjoy it.

My passion for niche film styles and pioneering directors has recently been rekindled. If you think you'd enjoy reading about more of my favorite, I encourage you to check out a list of films I think my friends should see and probably haven't.

Yes, one of them is by Buster Keaton, circa 1927.

By the way, if you're curious about the stunts I reference in the presentation, here's a terrific 2-minute tribute to him that features all of them, including "catching" a moving car and nearly getting crushed by a falling house facade. At the time of this posting I see that less than 200 people have watched this video. I encourage you to give it a look and uo that number. It's the least we could do to reward its creator for this outstanding introduction to Keaton.

When I was a teenager, an inspiration for me in the hinterlands of the Upper Penninsula was the subversive BBC program Monty Pyton's Flying Circus. A friend, also a fan, would announce my entrance with "The ... Larch!," taken from one of their many scatalogical sketches.

Not a perfect spelling of my name, but a good try. The nickname stuck. The larch is a tree, of course. He's a forest of them:

Speaking of nicknames, this blog was originally called Rum Socko, after the name my dad has gone by since he was an infant. Here's that back story:

I needed a memorable, Google-able name for this collection of random personal posts ... something far more memorably than my name. (Although I did finally move this site to my vanity domain -- I'm now a Dot-Com Brand!)

My father's nick name is Socko. Has been since he was an infant. So one day five years ago I decided that I would immortalize him (or at least his nickname). I was determined to get him into Wikipedia, or at least the Urban Dictionary. But how?

A meme, of course!

At the time his favorite adult beverage was caffeine free Diet Coke and rum. He'd order it like that (going with the caffeine if they didn't have it; hey, a sleepless night is a small price to pay for a good rum and Coke). I decided I'd call this concoction something punchy. Something memorable. The Rum Socko.

Then is set out, with abysmal success, to spread the meme. I'm not the type to frequent noisy bars. But I did encouraged those friends who are so inclined to order the drink by this name, and become moderately indignant when the bartender asked the inevitable. "You don't know what a Rum Socko is?!?"

You get the idea. It would catch on by riding the drinking habits of people who like this as a mixed drink and wanted an easy name for it. It was my hope that it might even wind up online, in placed like Urban Dictionary (joining this famous drink and others).

Although this experiment failed, it did give me a great name for a personal blog.

And now you know the story of Rum Socko.

So now you know.

 

A magazine article I read as a kid has stayed with me all these years. It must have been 1970. Back then Time was an important window to the world (scary thought). In this piece its editors wanted to dazzle us with visions of the future; 50 years hence to be exact. They had a staff artist sketch the predictions of a jury of futurists. The result is a picture of the men and women who would inhabit the U.S., circa 2020. These people, it didn't escape my notice, were the young adults I would come to know when I was as old as my grandparents.

You could see in those sketches the time's many revolutionary changes. The forecasters used as their starting blocks the recent revolutions in feminism, fashion and technology -- and probably many more. They ran feverishly from that spot, only stopping when the horizon gleamed brightly with geo-domes and hovercrafts. Sometimes optimistic, the depictions were mostly just plain weird.

True, there were a few on-target predictions. I especially recall the general metrosexual appearance of the men.  It seems that by then facial hair will be outlawed, or perhaps cured. The men were also uniformly round-shouldered, presumably made so by the helpful toilings of brawny robots. As for the fairer gender, I was a little too young then to notice, but yes, the women of the future will be plenty hot … if you go in for the boyish, fashion model types.

A Thin Future

Conspicuous by today's standards, no one depicted in this lineup looked even remotely in need of Jenny Craig. The effects of the Earl Butz / Nixon Era agricultural policies had not yet materialized at the time of the article, so the futurists couldn't factor them forward to today's ever-expanding American waistlines. Corn crops were not yet heavily subsidized. The cost of food on American tables was three times higher in 1970 than it is today, factored for inflation. Futurists had no inkling of a time where cheap corn-based calories were the norm and rates of obesity and diabetes were through the roof.

Those postcards from the future seemed lightweight in other ways as well.

There were many small gaffes. Example: There were no tattoos or piercings. There were several glaring ones, too. I recall that all the Americans were WASP-white. (This was after all from a time in our history when, until a few year earlier, Crayola was able to unironically label a salmony-beige crayon "Flesh.") Also, inexplicably, everyone in 2020 will wear long robes. Did you know this? Apparently we'll all look like we just stepped out of the shower.

The Future, Now and Then

Why do I bring all this up? I occasionally read freshly-minted portraits of the future, and I find it fun to compare the way they make me feel now versus back then. I've just read a new glimpse of our future, and I can tell you this: Our future, four decades ago, may have looked weird, but today the future just looks gross.

I'm referring to the recent New Yorker story about meat that is being cultured in the lab. Yes. Right now, in 2011. Food scientists are taking stem cells of our holy trinity of animal protein – cattle, chickens and pigs – and culturing them in a nutrient-rich broth. As you may know, stem cells are capable of turning into any of their owners' tissues. Scientists are flipping the cellular switches to Muscle and seeing what happens.

What they're finding is plenty: The promise of cheap, plentiful meat. This is meat free of corn-fed, antibiotic drenched, water-guzzling, e-coli-growing livestock. Yes, all this from clusters of cells multiplying with abandon in labs far from their genetic benefactors.

These scientists are also finding that by "folding" sheets of these cultured cells onto themselves, they can create what will look like ground meat. Future research will look at the next step, using 3-D printers that issue bubbles of specialized cells instead of colors of ink to "print" lab-grown steaks, cutlets and chops.

Is your mouth watering yet? No, mine isn't either. But if you care for the fate of the earth you may want to stay seated at the table.

Solving Several Global Problems At Once

In the May 23, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, Michael Specter describes this strange but thrilling convergence of people and technology. He writes, "[This is] a new discipline, propelled by an unlikely combination of stem-cell biologists, tissue engineers, animal-rights activists, and environmentalists."

A brand new discipline is a big deal. The father and elder statesman of this one is William van Eelen, an 88-year-old Dutch native; part-time scientist, and full-time zealot. He is the focus of this New Yorker piece. Specter reports that van Eelen has pursued his dream of feeding the world from a Petri dish since the 1950s. We learn that he doggedly championed his cause in (not surprisingly) the face of decades of aggressive skepticism and even derision. It has only been relatively recently that technology and world events have caught up to him and begun to propel his work forward. A dozen years ago he achieved an important milestone. He was granted U.S. and international patents for his Industrial Production of Meat Using Cell Culture Methods.

Why are environmentalists among its supporters?

For all the carbon emissions they are responsible for, you'd think every beef flank and chicken breast we eat arrives at our plates from the back of a Hummer. According to the piece, "our patterns of meat consumption have become increasingly dangerous for both individuals and the planet …"

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the global livestock industry is responsible for nearly twenty percent of humanity's greenhouse-gas emissions. That is more than all cars, trains, ships and planes combined. Cattle consume nearly ten percent of the world's freshwater resources, and eighty percent of all farmland is devoted to the production of meat.

There is also a cure for individual crises: "According to a report issued recently by the American Public Health Association, animal waste from industrial farms ‘often contains pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria' ... Seventy percent of all antibiotics and related drugs consumed in the United States are fed to hogs, poultry, and beef.

"[Also,] the World Health Organization has attributed a third of the world's deaths to the twin epidemics of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, both greatly influenced by excessive consumption of animal fats." The article made the point that by re-engineering the meat that's being cultured, we may someday be able to dine on burgers more akin to health food than heart-attacks-on-a-bun.

Phasing Out the Factory Animal

That's just the humanitarian outlook of in-vitro meat. Let's not forget the "animalitarian" perspective:

By 2030, the world will likely consume seventy percent more meat than it did in 2000. The ... implications for animal welfare [are daunting]: billions of cows, pigs, and chickens spend their entire lives crated, boxed, or force-fed grain in repulsive conditions on factory farms.

We're reassured in the article that the cure for these social ills won't leave a bad taste in our mouths. The fact is, we're not talking about artificial meat. It's the real thing. This is hard for people to grasp, as demonstrated by the way Terry Gross of Fresh Air struggled with the idea in her recent interview of Mr. Specter.

He concedes this point, and its general lack of appeal, "Nearly every person I told that I was working on this piece asked the same question: What does it taste like? (And the first word most people blurted out to describe their feelings was ‘Yuck.') Researchers say that taste and texture – fats and salt and varying amounts of protein – can be engineered into lab-grown meat with relative ease."

What won't be easy is scale.

This work is being done by scientists now in tiny quanitities, with muscle tissue no larger than contact lenses. What is needed is a quite transition from science to engineering. Rallying the financing for this won't be easy until more people can see a shared vision of the benefits of in-vitro meat.

But don't despair. Just as the space program in the 1960s prospered because the science was already in place, the scientific underpinnings of industrial meat exist today. What is lacking is awareness. That, and the leadership necessary to tackle tough problems like global warming, and human hunger and illness, in the face of a future that makes us all a little queasy. It's one thing for a nation to get behind men on the moon. It's another to look forward to tucking into a test tube T-bone.

Photo credit courtesy The Big Scout Project via Creative Commons

As I mentioned in my Digital Solid blog post today, I've joined Accenture. It represents the next logical step in a career that actually does have a certain logic to it.

Don't believe me? Here's a video that sums up 20 years of exploration. And by exploration, I do mean plenty of searching!

Tuesaday I got the news that no one wants to hear. My mother passed away.

She fought like few people I've ever met but it was time.

The many numbing hours of visitations, plus the funeral and mausoleum entombment (what a term!), were predictably horrible. But they coalesce now as among the most inspiring hours of my life. I was privileged to meet literally hundreds of people whose lives have been changed for the better by this estraordinary woman. So, will you indulge me?

Four Lessons

One of the most moving moments this week was hearing the following. It's a remembrance of Barbara Larche that was presented during the funeral service by my neice, Brooke Prins.

Brooke, I'm sorry. I had to share it (edited ever so slightly, as it is, for this printed format). Forgive me. The fact is there are several friends who weren't able to attend and really should to read this. It's a beautiful, eloquent rememberance of an amazing person.

First off, thank you so much for the overwhelming love and support you have all shown my family yesterday, today, and this past week and month. We are truly blessed to have such wonderful friends and family, and it’s a testament to how many people were touched by my Grandma.

We’re here today to celebrate my grandma Barb. Chances are if you knew my grandma, you also had some fun with my grandma. Because she was a fun-loving lady. But more than that, she was a special, special lady. She had the love and best friendship of her devoted husband "Socko." She raised three incredible – and incredibly different – sons. She was a very cool grandma. And she was an entertaining and fun friend to many, many people.

It’s difficult to sum up a life such as my grandma’s. She lived so well and had so many stories, it was hard to pare it down to a few minutes. So what I’ve decided is to share with you some of the things I learned from my grandma. These are life lessons that she taught by example. Her life was a lesson in living, and she did it really well.

The first thing my grandma taught me was to HAVE A GREAT STYLE.

In all my life, my grandma presented herself with class and dignity. She was well-groomed. As a matter of fact, the first order of business upon being released from the hospital a few weeks ago was to go see her hairdresser, Brenda, to have her hair done.

Never mind that she was exhausted and sick, she would feel better if she was beautiful. Everything Grandma chose was stylish, and she made sure to always be "put-together" ... although I do question the red glasses she wore when I was little, even if it was the 80’s.

Besides that, she shared her own great taste with her family. How many teenage girls are excited to see what their grandma picked out for them for Christmas each year? Grandma and Grandpa always nailed it, finding something cool and appropriate for all us grandkids.

The second thing Grandma taught me was to BE A GREAT FRIEND.

It’s no secret that my grandparents were fond of their routine, but a big part of that routine each week was for Grandma to spend time with her girlfriends on Wednesday nights. Marlene, Joanie, Lillan, and Grandma spent many a night enjoying time at The Stonehouse for some girl bonding.

She knew how important it is to make time for your friends.

She also shared some lifelong friendships. She met her closest friend, Mitzy, in grade school and she carried that friendship throughout her life. Then there are the friends that Grandpa and Grandma made wherever they went. Together, they were the life of every party and a joy to be around. People loved spending time with both of them, and they were well-known at the Elks Club, the Country Club, The Stonehouse, and I’m sure there are a few people in Vegas that will miss Grandma as well.

Wherever she went, Grandma left a smile and a laugh.

The third thing Grandma taught me is to SHARE A GREAT LOVE. She and my grandpa shared a lifelong love.

She would tell us how they met in kindergarten, and she couldn’t help but fall in love with the freckled faced, red haired "Socko." As teenagers, Grandpa would watch out his window for his sweetheart to walk by so he could walk her to school. Apparently neither one of their parents were thrilled by this, but there really was no separating the two of them.

Aunt Pat has said that you never knew a Socko or a Barb, it was always Socko and Barb. If you want an example of how to be happily married, theirs is one of the best. No matter what they did, they did it together. They took care of each other, they supported each other, and they shared everything with one another. But most importantly, they had fun together.

As a couple, my grandparents were a force to be reckoned with.

The fourth thing Grandma taught me is to LIVE A GREAT LIFE. We shared so many fun times as a family.

Our Thanksgivings each year include singing songs from the good ol’ days and playing games. I can tell you, I don’t know what we girls are going to do without Grandma to answer the sports questions in Trivial Pursuit!

Vegas was another highlight of Grandma’s life. She loved to gamble, and I can’t believe how LUCKY she was. On their 51st wedding anniversary, we went as a family to Las Vegas.

While the rest of us were sitting around the pool soaking up the sun, Grandma was inside winning the jackpot. She and Grandpa came out to find us, and she announced it as nonchalantly as if she had simply won free a breakfast.

That’s not to say that Grandma took her good luck for granted, but I do think she considered her other good fortunes – like family, friends, and Socko – to be infinitely more important than her luck at the slot machines.

My grandparents had a couple tricks up their sleeves for living a great life. First of all, my grandma never complained about a thing.

If she was feeling poorly these past few years, you only knew it because she might leave a little earlier than usual. Maybe it was all her years as a nurse that taught her to keep her own complaints to herself. Whatever it was, she was one of the strongest women I know. And she was one of the youngest grandmas I know.

That’s because she and Socko lived as though they would never grow old.

You’re only as old as you feel, and my grandparents felt like teenagers their whole lives.

Grandma Barb lived her whole life to its fullest. She had fun, whatever she did. She never slowed down, she refused to grow old, and she lived up to the very end.

Even after surgery a few weeks ago, she woke up asking for a Manhattan! She had a terrific sense of humor.

On her last day, my grandpa came to see her just as she was finishing her dinner. My dad was there, and he offered to help with her dessert before he left, but grandpa said he’d take care of it. Grandma looked at my dad to say, “He wants my cake.”

The world is a little less colorful without Grandma in it, and we’re going to miss her terribly. It doesn’t feel real yet, I still feel like she’s with us when we’re all together.

But in a lot of ways, she always will be with us. After all, she showed us all how to have a great style, be a great friend, share a great love, and live a great life. We couldn’t have had a better example to follow, and I’m happy for all the time I was blessed to have with my Grandma. We’ll all be with her again someday, but in the meantime we can cherish the great memories and follow her great example.

I love you Grandma Barb.

Me too Brooke.

However you celebrate them, you have to concede: The holidays are about family. So two years ago my own family decided to do something “real” – and meaningful – for the season. We learned that the Capitol Head Start class needed volunteers to stage a holiday celebration. There was zero Head Start money for this event – or anything but the basics of educating underserved children in the Central City. But the need was great. According to extremely stringent Head Start entrance requirements, a family of three must have a pre-tax household annual income of less than $18,000.

That first year we helped nearly 70 preschoolers and their family members by organizing and staging this event. We did it with a lot of hard work, but just as importantly, a total of $628 in cash donations from many friends and supporters. Last year, with the economy worse than it has been in decades, the number of family members who showed up for the meal and festivities nearly doubled. Even with more aggressive fundraising (we raised a little over $1,000 that year), we had to rush out for extra food to feed a handful of late-arriving familes.

We're doing it again this year, on Tuesday, December 21, and the need is even greater.

If a horrible economy weren’t enough of a challenge to Head Start teachers and families, the water from July’s “Great Flood” swamped the church basement that was where classes were held. It destroyed school supplies and forced teachers to work out of a temporary location. They still haven’t moved back in. Our goal is to not only host a party that tops last year’s, but to replace some those educational books and toys. Our fundraising goal is $1,500. Here is what we're doing:

• We're serving everyone a hot meal, which we will be improving upon this year -- mastacioli with meat sauce, rolls, string cheese, fresh fruit and baby carrots
• Each 3-and-4-year old receives a canvas bag with his or her name on it, that can be used as a school bag. It will contain the following:
  • A warm fleece scarf - each child gets his or her own pattern, so they can't get mixed up with others when brought to class
  • Knit mittens
  • A special tee shirt (my sister-in-law is embroidering a colorful emblem on each)
  • An educational activity kit -- it's a lace-up game to help with manual dexterity
  • Crayons, pencils, a coloring book and a book mark
  • Granola bars and other snacks
• We'll have seven different stations that that the kids can go around to, including:
  1. The cookie station where kids can decorate their own giant cookie 
  2. The boat-building station (they make and decorate a toy boat that they can take home and float in a tub or sink)
  3. Candy cane or snowflake ornament decorating station
  4. Face painting station
  5. A bowling game, where every child receives a small prize
  6. A photo booth, where photos are taken of each child. That's how I took the shot you see at the top of this post. We print each portrait on the spot, so parents have a photo for the fridge
  7. A super ball station -- the kids get to mix multi-colored powder, then mix the powder with water and place in a ball mold. It comes out a minute later a real bouncing ball. Why didn't they have this stuff when I was a kid?!?!?

For the families: Each parent receives a raffle ticket to win one of the food baskets will be given away, filled with approximately $25 worth of healthy foods -- canned goods, flour, pancake mix, soup, rice, beans, oat meal, etc. -- plus a few goodies. In past years when we gave these away, the excitement was one of the evenings' highlights. These clearly were extremely valued by the families!

Please help. The only financial support we receive is from donations of people like you. Please contribute whatever you can -- $25, less or more. Any amount would be appreciated.

You can reach me at JLarche [at] Gmail [dot] com, or use this contact form on my business blog. If you want to donate directly, use the PayPal button below.

Everyone who donates and asks for one will get a letter with the proper non-profit info, so this can be used on your taxes. Do you have other holiday charities? Are you unable to give because of this tough economy? I understand. Thank you for considering this.

But if you don't, please consider helping these deserving kids and their families. Thank you.

 

A review of the book Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Before I tucked into the book, lo many months ago, I read its Foreward. This isn’t a given for me, but I couldn't resist this one. It was written by Dave Eggers, a writer I’ve greatly enjoyed. It was also describing a book that:

1.  I knew nearly nothing about
2. Was a real horse-choker
3. Had no impending plans for a Major Motion Picture, if you get my drift

This was literature. I feared my goose was cooked.

The forward didn’t reassure me. Hey, are you reassured when your physician tells you a procedure might be “uncomfortable?” Yeah, like that. The foreward did reveal that the author liked people to call him Dave Wallace instead of his full, formal mouthful. But who was Eggers kidding? He used this note of endearment the way reporters quote neighbors of mass murders (“He was always so nice and polite”).

Was I going to be “Dave” Wallace’s next victim?

Only after I finished reading the book, as I did a few weeks ago, did I reread and fully appreciate that foreward. Suddenly these far-from-reassuring descriptions of author and work made sense. Eggers talked with optimism about  those readers who not only read middlebrow fare, but can boldly veer to the extremes, reading Elmore Leonard one day and Thomas Pynchon the next.

If you’re that type of reader – and I guess I am – you may find this book as ultimately rewarding as I did, and should read on. You, like me, may finish the book, reread Eggers’ words, and cry out: “Damn, he nailed it.” (Okay, there was no crying out. But I thought that sentiment quite loudly.)

I’ll resist the urge and not quote any choice Eggersisms until the end. Instead, in this review you'll get the thoughts of a mostly self-educated fiction veerer who suddenly found himself well onto one shoulder.

This is the book by numbers:

• Pages: 1,097
• 100 are devoted to a total of 388, 6-point-type-sized, footnotes. Yes, footnotes.
• Many of these footnotes have, themselves, been footnoted. That Dave Wallace is such a nut!

The footnotes are in the back of the book. Consequently I had two bookmarks going at all times. One was for my place in the narrative, the other, for my place in the footnotes section.

The action of the story mostly flips between a private school for young, potential professional tennis competitors and a half-way house for recovering drug and alcohol addicts. These two facilities are separated by a hill in the same fictional Massachusetts city. The residents and staff of both comprise the majority of the book's characters. The protagonist, Hal Incandenza, attends the tennis school, excelling in spite of the large amounts of pot he smokes in its underground tunnels. His impressively dysfunctional family also factors heavily into the action, including his late father, an early-David-Lynch-like film auteur.

Still other characters come from a U.S. government "Office of Unspecified Services," plus more than one Quebec separatist group (members of the most ruthless of these have in common that they are all in wheelchairs, having maimed themselves in an annual competition involving a speeding train). Wallace does a good job of keeping these progressively more absurd characters vivid and discernable. Although it took me months to complete, I never felt like I needed to go back in the book, or rely on its extensive summary and analysis in Wikipedia.

The book’s action takes place in a vague near future. Some scholars think Wallace intended the setting to be 15 years after the book’s publiciation. If this guess is correct, this “future” is now just around the corner – 2011.

You can’t blame readers for wondering. Although chapters are precisely named for their day and date, Wallace obscures things by painting for us a North America where leaders have sold naming rights to years. Similar to the way sponsors buy rights to parks and stadiums (think Chase Field for the Arizona Diamondbacks), the action mostly takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or YDAU for short.

Other years include:

• Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
• Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
• Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
• Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster

And let’s not forget the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile [sic]. That’s a type of television / VCR. Video entertainment in this world comes by the cartridge. These are popped into an “InterLace” machine and viewed.

If this “Subsidized Time” is Wallace’s running joke about the ubiquity of corporations and their brands, his central plot device is about our addiction to mass-produced entertainment.

Early in the novel, a cartridge arrives in the stack of mail of a minor political operative. He pops in the entertainment and never turns it off. It's turned off by emergency personnel who find him dead. This entertainment is so enchanting that no one is immune to its deadly charms. Viewers inevitably die of self-neglect, watching it again and again.

Finding the original print of this film becomes the book-spanning goal for political groups who recognize its value as a secret weapon. This film was the last that Hal’s father, James Orin Incandenza, produced before he died.

If this sounds like loopy fun, I assure you that it is. Yes, there is way too much detail about what it takes to be a tennis pro (similar to the drudgery of reading how to filet a whale, when all you want to do is get back to the story of the white whale and the captain pursuing him).

It’s also often grim. There are a few scenes of violence and abuse that may make you want to turn away. Instead, like watching the lethal entertainment, I’m betting you’ll press on. Here’s how Eggers describes the book at the outset of reading. You’ll get “the impression that this book is daunting. Which it isn’t, really. It’s long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost.”

In the end, I think Wallace has completed a work – and, I’ll warn you, abruptly ends said work with most ends still quite loose – that is a clearheaded assessment of modern life: Its families, its politics, its obsessions. It is therefore a comedy and a tragedy.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this review, I suspect you will also finish Infinite Jest (but not quickly; Eggers himself took a month). Tell me what you think when you’re done.

Postscript

There may be a reason I enjoyed the book. I just took the above copy and dropped it into IWriteLike.com. The results are below.

As Milwaukee grows to its full potential in the new decade, Julie Taylor will be someone deserving much of the credit. Her role as president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee could be one of maintaining the status quo. Instead I've witnessed how she has helped the most influential companies in Milwaukee understand the power of modern digital connectedness (which includes social media, but also much, much more).

She'll be talking about The Talent Dividend this Friday morning at Milwaukee Likemind. Here are the details.

What's the second reason? She is also a talented photographer. I've enjoyed several of her nature photos -- many in the Milwaukee area -- posted from her Twitter account. Here's one from her Flickr account. Don't miss Likemind this Friday. It's free, always fun, and often fascinating!