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Since we took our vacation during spring break instead of the summer, I started my summer book reading in April. I’m writing about it now because I didn’t realize the book I took was the first of a trilogy (i.e. this is a review of 3 books, enough for its own blog post).

It was The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer.

The book had an interesting setting, and interesting characters, and in general it was a good read.

It did stand on its own and had a good enough ending, but there are two other books after it.

Those are The Land of the Silver Apples and The Islands of the Blessed.

I’m just going to review the series in one lump – no need to get into the specifics of each book. If you like the first one, you’ll like the other two.

One note: the first book had a good ending, but the end of the third book left a lot open and much more of an expectation of another story. If you don’t like that to-be-continued feeling, stop at the first book.

No plot recap here, that’s what basically all the other reviews are for.

If you’ve seen any of the Marvel movies about Thor, you’ll understand a bit of what’s going on in these books. Or I suppose it could work in the reverse – if you’ve read these books, you’ll understand a bit of what’s going on in the Thor movies. If you are undecided about the order though, I recommend seeing the Thor movie first, if only for the reason that you’ll know how to pronounce Jotunheim when you see it in the book.

I saw one review blip that said the story has a bit of Star Wars in it, and I’d say that’s true. And that aspect of the story is the main concern with it – the spiritual aspect.

The story asserts that all religions are different, say, facets of the main “force”. That implies that the life force is the real religion, and all others are built off it. The story weaves together Norse mythology annd Christianity and Picts and elves and hobgoblins and it all gets jumbled together, to further the idea that they’re all different leaves on the same tree.

Oddly enough, this tree that is the provider of the life force in the book is known as the “tree of life” which sounds a lot like what was in the Garden of Eden. I’d go so far as to suggest that the author substitutes the Tree of Life for God. Yes, she took it from the Norse traditions of Yggdrasil. I’m just saying the way it’s presented in the book (calling it the “tree of life”) reminds me of a corrupted version of Genesis.

Whether that encourages or discourages you for reading the book, I’ll let you make that call.

One of the sayings that I didn’t understand for a long time was “You have to know the rules in order to break them.”

That and Outback Steakhouse’s slogan “No rules just right”.

But I always thought it was easier to break rules if you didn’t know them, because how are you supposed to obey something if you don’t know what it is. In fact, it seemed more likely to me that you would break the rules if you didn’t know them, and knowing the rules would spur you to follow them. But the phrase was meant for guidelines and I was applying it to laws.

Then I learned something from Picasso. I now get to share my favorite illustration (literally and figuratively) of that concept. Pablo Picasso was an artist who was known to not follow standard rules.

First off – a quiz! Which of these pictures was drawn by Pablo Picasso?

Figure A.

Figure B.

Figure C.

If you answered B, you are correct.

And if you answered C, you are correct.

Also if you answered A, you are correct.

Those pictures are from a sequence he drew to demonstrate his process for reducing an object to its essential elements. In order for him to draw abstractly, he had to be able to draw the items “correctly” in the first place.

In other words, he had to know the rules and be able to follow them, in order to be able to break them.

But they aren’t rules, so he didn’t break them. He just understood his discipline well enough to know how to change things to accomplish his goals.

Complete this phrase: Rules were made to be ________

Did you think “broken”? If so, no hard feelings, but you’re wrong. I guess most modern Americans would complete that phrase that way, probably without even thinking about it. For some reason that phrase has stuck.

But it isn’t right.

Rules were made to be followed. That’s kind of the point of rules. Rules were made to keep things working well, keep you safe, and prevent problems.

Gee thanks dad, for that life lesson. That’s just the background information; that’s not the whole blog post – stick with me for a bit.

If your first instinct is to try to break the rules, then you’ve been trained wrong and life will be more difficult than it needs to be. Not that rules can never be broken, but now we need to delve into some nuances.

I’d like to remove the word “rules” and use “laws” and “guidelines” instead – split the term into those two general categories. If you think of rules that way, then it helps to understand when you could try to break them.

People have used the term “rule” in such phrases as “rule of thumb” or “unspoken rules”. I would put those into the category of guidelines rather than laws. A rule of thumb is a guideline that you follow if you don’t really know what you’re doing, or you do know what you’re doing and thus you know it’s not worth spending time to do a proper analysis on this minor part of the project.

Also unspoken rules aren’t real rules.

There are other rules that would fit better in the category of laws – things that are prohibited for a reason. Things such as “no glass in the pool area” or “fire door – keep closed”. If you know the reason for the law, you understand that it doesn’t make sense to try to break them because nothing good can come of it.

But guidelines, on the other hand, if you know the reason for the guideline then it helps you to know when not to follow the guidelines. Things such as “don’t go swimming within 30 minutes of eating” are good ideas but once you know it’s to prevent cramps from strenuous exercise with a full stomach, you know you can splash in a pool right after having a snack. Some people might call that breaking a rule, but I don’t like that phrase because it gives people the attitude that they know better than the rules in general, thus it diminishes the law-types of rules.

And I do believe there can be a time for breaking law-types of rules, but that requires a consideration of risk vs. reward (or consequence of breaking the rule vs. consequence of following the rule). An example would be breaking traffic laws in the case of a medical emergency – is that right or wrong?

In summary: if you don’t know what you’re doing and why, then just follow the rules.

I used to wonder how my wife could read essentially the same book over and over again. I mean, the books did have different titles and different authors, but if you summarized the plot in one or two sentences it could probably apply to all of them.

Then I started reading Joel C. Rosenberg books. They were interesting, I liked them, I kept reading, and then I realized how my wife could keep reading variations of the same book. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Here’s my summary of the books. Note that each series is meant to be read in order. And the title of this blog post is winter 2021, but I’ve been reading these since July 2020. It’s just in winter 2021 I finished all of them.

I started with the original series – The Last Jihad, alternatively known as the Bennett and McCoy series. This seems to be his earliest work, as the writing is slightly clunkier than his later series. But it was engaging, and educational in some spots. You will certainly come away with a better understanding of some of Ezekiel’s prophecies after the 3rd book.

What I also liked about this series was that it showed how the end times and the anti-Christ could happen from a geopolitical perspective. My exposure to end times stuff has been from the spiritual and theological angle. Not that these books discount or ignore that – indeed there is much scripture referenced in the later books – but the focus is different.

My comparison is that this series starts out like Tom Clancy and ends up more Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins.

Also, the series ends pretty conclusively, but not completely so. There could be another book after the 5th one, but it understandable why he ended it there.

I then read the next series available at our library: The Third Target, alternatively known as the J.B. Collins series. This series was different because it was Rosenberg’s foray into first-person perspective. It didn’t take much getting used to, but he didn’t go back to it for his other books so I think he didn’t care for it.

This series came to a definite conclusion – no chance for another book. Well, I suppose there always could be, but it would be a stretch for this one. This was a little darker than the other series, probably the same amount of violence but a little more depravity to contrast the bad people from the good people.

Next up: The Kremlin Conspiracy, alternatively known as the Marcus Ryker series. This one was back to third person perspective like the original series, but centered around Russia rather than Israel and not much in the way of end-times prophecies. Mostly just military action. The third book ended well enough, but there were a couple of question left unresolved. Then a couple weeks after I finished the series (and was halfway through the next), I saw that Mr. Rosenberg had a fourth book coming out for this series.

Finally: The Twelfth Imam, alternatively known as the David Shirazi series. This was more in the spirit of the original series, but focused on Iran and surrounding countries. And not the standard end times settings, but a possibility of what could happen. This series ended fairly well; I’m not expecting any surprise fourth book for this one.

Basically, if you like any of JCR’s fiction books you’ll like them all. But you can’t just pick a book at random and read it, you need to read them as a series. You can pick a series at random and read it – there’s no overlap or crosstalk at all between series.

And you may be wondering why I’m reviewing only this one guy’s books in this blog post. No ulterior motives – his books are the only books I’ve been reading for the last few months. But now that I’ve read all the fiction series he has, I’m adrift in looking for what to read next. Browsing through the library, I happened upon a Jules Verne book I hadn’t read yet, so I’m in the middle of that. I’ll try to include that in my next reading update.

I was very tempted to call it Fall Fotos, but I didn’t. And now that’s in your head anyway.

Here are some pictures I liked, to represent what things can be like around here in the fall. The first two are around my property and the last 4 are at a park.

After years of not having a dedicated internet connection, I finally found something that works.

T-Mobile Home Internet

We are too far back from the main road to get cable, unless we wanted to pay the cable company to install a repeater and a quarter mile of line.

Satellite wasn’t really an option, because that’s download only and you need a landline for uploads, and we don’t have a landline. We have a home phone, but it’s through cell service.

We checked about DSL, but that wasn’t available, nor is fiber optic.

We used to have a dedicated hotspot from AT&T, back when it was a family share plan. It worked fine, but it had a data cap with overage charges if we went past the cap. That wasn’t much of a problem until about two years ago.

So we switched from the family share plan to the unlimited plan, which gave us more data on our phones and was a cheaper plan (even without factoring in the overage charges) but we were not allowed to keep the dedicated hotspot.

We survived by using the hotspot capabilities of our phones. That was fine, but it hastened the demise of my iPhone 5’s battery. But that was easily replaced (the battery, not the phone), and then our local library helped out by doubling their number of free mobile hotspots. We could check out a hotspot for two weeks at a time, and that was especially helpful this last spring when the schools switched to remote learning, and this fall when they resumed classes remotely. And for my job being work-from-home too. The last couple months we’ve had up to 5 people in online meetings at the same time. The library hotspot is okay but it wasn’t that good to keep up with that many devices, and its range wasn’t that good. It’s that little hotspot thingy about the size of a deck of cards.

Then, after a visit back to the family farm a couple weeks ago, my brother encouraged me to try AT&T fixed wireless. It’s what they use in their rural area, but it requires the service provider to setup special equipment, both at the cell tower and at the home. So they only put the equipment at the cell tower if there are enough people in the area to warrant it.

I checked online and AT&T fixed wireless is not an option.

I then checked Verizon because I had seen their commercials. They have a wireless home internet option for people like me, but it’s not available in my area. But I clicked on the option that said I was interested, so they’d be encouraged to add the service here.

I had looked into mobile hotspots from Sprint last year, but they were not helpful because I didn’t have a cell phone plan with them.

Going down the list of cell services, I tried T-Mobile. They had a home internet service, which was invitation-only, but some things online said it was opened up to everyone. With nothing to lose, I went to the T-Mobile site and clicked the link to sign up. They said service was available in my area! But then they said I had a call them to setup the service.

That had me confused. A cell phone company with a website to be able to check for service in my area but not able to let me buy the thing didn’t quite make sense.

That was late that day though, so I left it until the next day. In the morning though, they called me and left me a voicemail. Yes, I was approved and they’d like to get me going with the home internet service. So I called them back and went through a lot of questions, mostly related to my credit worthiness. This lady also said I was lucky to have gotten an invitation, but she never asked for any invitation info – she just saw that I was approved and that was that.

A couple days later, the home internet box arrived on my front porch. I plugged it in, the lights turned green, and it worked.

At that point, there had been no charges on my credit card and no email from T-Mobile welcoming me or even acknowledging my existence.

Even now, a few days into the service, I got no communication from T-Mobile about my account.

The home internet box uses their cell signal but it’s a more powerful box, about half the size of a toaster. It has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, and they’re both more powerful than the free library hotspot. The kids were pleasantly surprised by the extra speed of the 5GHz band. And if it ends up not being good enough everywhere, there are ethernet jacks on the box to which I could connect an extra router.

The only problem I’ve had so far with the home internet box is that it doesn’t like FTP. My FTP client just gives errors. As soon as I fire up my phone tether hotspot or the library hotspot and connect the laptop to that, the FTP client is happy. I have not checked Archie or Gopher yet.

Overall though, it’s much better than having to go to the library every two weeks for a new hotspot. They won’t let those be renewed, so we’d have to take it in and hope they had another one ready to go. Sometimes we’d have to wait a few days for someone else to turn one in. Apparently we aren’t the only people in the area with this problem.

For $50 a month, it’s worth it. At least I hope it’s $50, I’ll find out once I get a bill or something from T-Mobile.

I have an update to an old post about the trichotomy of features. This one pertains to ambitions of a person.

This one could have been called hobbies, but I already have one for hobbies. So I chose “ambition” instead, but it pertains in general to things people want to do. This is not for the ambitions themselves but rather for what the person needs in order to accomplish them.