With Jessica Soho, from GMATV's blog on Cory Aquino's death. You can read the transcript here.

"Ako’y nagpapasalamat sa Panginoong Diyos na ginawa niya akong isang Pilipino"

-- Cory Aquino, September 2008

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Dr. Kushner's Personality Type Diet – Robert Kushner
Non-fiction, Diet; ISBN 0312325827; St. Martin's Griffin, USA: 2004.

I found this among my book/TBR piles and read it for my book club's August meet (the topic will be about Health, Fitness and Well-being). I've looked around the web and was a bit surprised that this diet garnered positive reviews from established diet and health sites and was even discussed in peer-reviewed journals.

Despite the hokey title, I found it fun, simple and common-sensical (is that a word?). Plus it has this quiz in chapter two that you answer and then boom, you get to know what your diet, exercise and coping personalities are - it reminded me of those fun quizzes in facebook.

Based on this 66-question quiz, I learned that I'm a "Healthy Portioner" (aka the takaw tingin, who piles too much food on her plate during buffets). But my main problem is that I don't do exercise; in fact I'm both an "All-or-Nothing Doer" (aka the weekend warrior, who's only active in spurts/during the weekdays) and a "No-Time-to-Exercise Protestor" (unless I can exercise while sleeping, of course). It also seems that I'm also suffering from low self-esteem ( "Low-Self-Esteem Sufferer"), not to mention that my life is too fast-paced ("Fast Pacer") and that I have unreasonable expectations ("Overreaching Achiever"). Never realized that I have a lot of issues, so thank you very much Dr. Kushner.

The strength of this book isn't from that gimmicky personality type thing - its the chapters on how to read the ingredient and nutrition labels on the back of products, as well as the few recipes given. They are decent and practical, although the ingredients in the recipes are understandably US-oriented.


2.5 out of 5 stars

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My cat, Shadow, hates Edgar Allan Poe. Of all the books lying around my apartment, it's the one she decided to punch holes into - much to my despair because I like the title of this particular anthology: "Selected Prose and Poetry of Poe" (nice alliteration, don't you think?).

She probably thought I'll get an idea or two of cat-torture from the book. Sheesh, if I were that cruel, I would've named her "Pluto". *rolling my eyes*

By the way, she does have this strange white patch on her chest... hmm, doesn't bode well for me, no? :P

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The Compleat McAndrew – Charles Sheffield
Fiction, Science Fiction; ISBN 0-671-57857-X; Baen, New York: 2000.

This is an anthology of hard science fiction (sf) stories. Hard science fiction is defined in Wikipedia as "characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both". Charles Sheffield's definition of what isn't hard sf is better: "if you take the science and scientific speculation away from a story, and not do it serious injury, then it was not hard sf to begin with". What I like about this definition are two things - first is the stressing of the importance of the scientific mumbo-jumbo in the story, and second is that it isn't all truly grounded to reality, it may even be all just speculation, but the important thing is that it is believable and consistent to the current scientific knowledge of that time.

The book is a compilation of (mis)adventures of a physicist, Arthur Morton McAndrew and his long-suffering companion, the spaceship captain Jeanie Roker. If that sounds fun, I assure you that it is, unless you're a novice hard sf fan (I'm not even talking about those who aren't sf reader). Even the author (a true-to-life mathematician and physicist) had unapologetically stated in the Appendix that the stories the hardest sf that he had ever wrote. That is what makes the book both appealing and unappealing; people would either like it or hate it - no fence sitting.

I liked the stories but I have to admit that it has flaws. Hard sf books may ground themselves to real science, but they are still work of fictions - hence they still need to appeal to readers. I think Sheffield knows this, which is why his better stories are his later ones (they were written when he had quit his scientific profession and wholeheartedly became a writer); unfortunately, this realization had been a bit too late. I also noticed that he was often deliberately ambiguous and obfuscating, which I did not like, considering there are other sf authors that didn't need to trick the reader to force them to his viewpoint.

Finally, although his scientific grounding may be neat, some of his story development were illogical and a few characterization illogical - perhaps so that his characters will do or be in a more fantastic (hence interesting) position in otherwise boring and mostly procedural stories.

But still, all in all, I did like them, even if they are not representative of the hard sf genre. I give the book 3 out of 5 stars.

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