DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The subtitle is “A Silicon Valley Novel,” but I think of it as more of a dot-com novel. I know there were zero-dollar start-up companies staffed with engineers dreaming up all kinds of hardware and software miracles in Silicon Valley for 40 years before Netscape planted the seed that sprouted into dot-com mania, and the subsequent “dot-bomb” fallout… but it still feels like a dot-com story, maybe because it was published in 1997, a time when Silicon Valley was the cradle of the World Wide Web.

Po Bronson went on, after this book, to become a sort of biographer of real dot-com people, in The Nudist on the Late Shift. This is an interesting transition, to first write compelling fiction about a particular time and place and people, and then write nonfiction about the same time and place and people, and make it just as compelling.

The characters in The First $20 Million are imaginative, smart, and devious. Bronson comes up with some wild plot twists as he chronicles the practical jokes, the scheming, and the revenge among the players. It’s incredibly satisfying to read the conclusion to something, near the end of the book, that was set up in the first chapter. Bronson resists the temptation to drop any hints along the way, so the payoff is as sweet for the reader as it might have been for the characters in the story.

Unlike most fiction writers, Bronson gets the technical details right. He succeeds in spite of the challenge provided by his own setting: he follows four engineers on a quest to build a $300 computer. He describes the invention of a virtual machine — in Bronson’s terms, a software “hypnotizer;” think Java or even Virtual PC. Despite these additional opportunities to fail, Bronson’s prose remains clear and believable. One could imagine this story, with all its petty jealousies and paybacks, actually happening.

I have enjoyed reading this book several times over the years. I recommend it to everyone in the industry, or, really, anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. If you have a technical background you’ll like it even more.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

Stuck in the car for 2.6 hours yesterday morning — truly the commute from hell — I happened to hear the Howard Stern show. I previously had no opinion on the Stern / ClearChannel controversy; this show changed my mind.

The guest was Alanis Morissette, who like Howard Stern is wholly unfamiliar to me. On this show she was funny and charming and honest and entertaining. Stern was as taken with her as I was.

Morissette intended to perform a song from her new record. The song, called Everything, opens like this:

i can be an asshole of the grandest kind
I can withhold like it’s going out of style
I can be the moodiest baby and you’ve never met anyone
Who is as negative as I am sometimes

The problem is the word “asshole.” Due to Stern’s situation, which I guess is a sort of probation, he has to be careful about his show’s content. Apparently, “asshole” is one of the words he can’t say. Stern, Morissette, and the rest of the crew began a discussion of whether she’d be able to perform her song.

They began suggesting alternative words: bunghole, a-hole, basshole, even “Bush-hole.” This is so dumb, it’s hard to believe. As Morrissette said, “I can say ‘ass,’ and I can say ‘hole,’ but I can’t say them together.”

Who exactly is being protected here? And from what?

In the end she decided to perform the song, substituting the word “assbowl.” It was disconcerting to hear her launch into this sensitive confessional of a song and then break the mood with the word “assbowl.” She actually broke out laughing so hard she had to stop the song and start again. “Don’t look at me!” she said to Stern — she couldn’t keep a straight face.

There are areas in San Francisco where the day-laborers congregate, hanging out on the sidewalk at certain intersections waiting for someone to drive up and hold a couple fingers out the window. Negotiations, if any, are done in Spanish, because English fluency is not a prerequisite for this profession. Just a willingness to bust one’s hump for the day, in exchange for transportation, lunch, and $10/hr.

Last Saturday we drove to the City early to meet friends for breakfast. Turns out our friends live two doors from one of these intersections. We pulled up in front of the house and stopped the car, scanning for house numbers, not sure where to park… when on the periphery of my attention I realized our car was being swarmed by a dozen running Mexican guys.

Fight or flight! Hormones move faster than rational thought. But no faster than irrational thought — because I thought we were being carjacked. “Drive!” I yelled to my wife in a panicked voice. Two of the guys had reached the car and were trying to open the back doors!

I was flashing back to a time when my wife and I, lost on the wrong side of Potrero Hill, ended up in a line of cars in front of some housing projects. The cars had stopped. Aggressive-looking men lined both sidewalks. One or two guys would approach each driver, in turn, and carry out a transaction of the sort that people go to jail for, assuming the police had the guts (or sufficiently poor sense of direction) to drive through this particular housing project. We were not shopping for crack, unlike the rest of the drivers. I’m grateful to this day that the neighborhood sales staff recognized us for what we were — lost and anxious — and let us drive through without incident.

Anyway, since then I’ve felt vulnerable in my car. Cars don’t offer nearly as much protection as you might think. Not even big cars; big cars just cost more to fix. You can’t out-drive a bullet, or even a well-thrown rock.

The funny thing about last Saturday — well, funny in retrospect — is that the guys who I momentarily thought were trying to steal my car and/or wife are without doubt among the most cheerful, Catholic, hard-working people in the City. They’re the sort of people who wait in line at the Post Office in Friday afternoons to wire money home to their families. The sort of people who are happy to dig out concrete and asphalt and haul boulders for eight hours a day in the summer sun. The sort of people who would cut my grass with a smile, if only I spoke enough Spanish to arrange it.

OK, so this is the most gruesome thing I’ve read all day:

The infamous transorbital lobotomy was a “blind” operation in that the surgeon did not know for certain if he had severed the nerves or not. A sharp, ice-pick like object would be inserted through the eye socket between the upper lid and eye. When the doctor thought he was at about the right spot, he would hit the end of the instrument with a hammer.

The lobotomy is in the news this week; the LA Times interviews a lobotomy survivor in Psyche’s Torn Curtain: Now seen as misguided butchery, lobotomies were once the treatment of choice for mental illness. Doctors, patients confront a dark past. (local mirror)

He was 12 when a “psychosurgeon” hammered ice picks into his eye sockets. His parents took him to the hospital “for testing;” he woke up with a “massive headache,” spent 5 days in the hospital, vomiting, and only later found out what had happened. He appears to have been a troubled kid, but the treatment does not fit the disease. Then again, I don’t have a medical degree, so I’m not really qualified to say when hammering ice picks into people’s brains is an appropriate course of treatment.

The history of the procedure is interesting, in that it went from cutting-edge to mainstream to butchery in 40 years. I wonder what trends of present-day society will be viewed as misguided or, at the extreme, horrific, 40 years from now: LASIK? Low-carb diets? Celebrity? Earth-trashing, gas-guzzling personal armored vehicles masquerading as passenger cars?

Speaking of vehicles of destruction, don’t miss the story about Dr. Walter Freeman’s “lobotomobile.” What a unique co-marketing opportunity for Hummer — were Freeman alive today, Hummer could sponsor his mobile brain-damage operation. Freeman could perform the procedure in the back seat while making a run for groceries or dropping his kids off at soccer practice. But I guess Hummer isn’t hurting for endorsers.

Having already seen the film adaptation of The Bourne Identity, I knew the basic plot… or so I thought. In fact, the book is completely different.

The characters are shaded differently: the book’s Bourne is a darker and significantly less stable character. The Marie character in the movie is just along for the ride, whereas in the book she plays a more central role, stabilizing the brink-of-self-destruction Bourne.

And the book is 22 years older than the movie, making it less high-tech. For example, the fancy LED projector extracted from Bourne’s hip at the beginning of the movie began its life as a simple piece of microfilm. To put the time difference in perspective: in 1980, when The Bourne Identity was published, Paul Allen and Bill Gates began writing DOS 1.0.

The storyline of the book is different, and significantly more complex: Bourne isn’t who he thinks he is — or is he? And much of the plot is driven by the hunt for Carlos, the international assassin, who doesn’t appear in the movie. As the original NYT review exclaimed, “Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined.”

The nice thing about the disparity in stories is that the book becomes a rich, compelling, fresh experience for people who enjoyed the movie. I had a hard time putting it down.

Patronize these links, man:

• Mass-market paperback (Amazon)