A Conversation

Me: Well, I didn't see any cricks nearby or nothing.
Dad: Here in Arkansas, we call them creeks.
Me: Here in Tennessee we don't aspire to that level of erudition.

In hindsight, I think the correct word might have been elocution.

So I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately.  Since most of the instructional/FAQ type material is teenagers making Youtube videos, here's the wisdom of those videos in condensed form.

• In Linux, most of the game files live in a hidden folder in your home directory called ".minecraft".  Ditto for OS X.  I haven't played it on Windows, so I can't say what the equivalent is there.
• If you want to install a texturepack, go to .minecraft/texturepacks and copy in the zip file you downloaded.  No need to unzip it.  The texturepack will be named the same as the zip file, generally.
• A lot of the sites with texture packs, mods, etc, are super shady.  For messing around with my save files, I finally settled on a python app called "MCPlayerEdit".  It's on github rather than a shady download site, and works well.
• The only map viewer program I've tried was Minecraft Overviewer.  The default install didn't work because I had Python 2.7, so if you're a Mac/Linux user, just go ahead and compile it yourself and it'll work fine.

Trebuchet

If you want to pronounce it like a proper Southerner, I recommend starting with "Treeb-a-chett".

Anyway, I built a trebuchet over the past two weekends using plans from Issue 25 of Make.  Let's see how that worked out.

I started by getting the nice folks at Home Depot to cut up a 4x8' sheet of plywood according to the plan spec.  When I got them home, I laid out the base and attached the cross pieces to make it more rigid.

 

Next, we added hinges.  This is a fold-and-store trebuchet - it'll fit in your closet!

Next, I screwed together pieces of 2x6" board to make the uprights.  These need to be very sturdy, as they provide the fulcrum for the throwing arm.

The uprights are attached to the base with strap hinges - the hinges are not what holds them in place, though.  At the top of each upright, screw-eyes are inserted to act as anchor points for guy wires.

How to make a guy wire
Get a length of 1/8" galvanized wire rope.  Use matching wire clamps to make loops at each end.  When you mount the guy wire, put a turnbuckle at one end (I used 1/4" by 5" turnbuckles) to properly tension.  This is easiest if you read the preceding sentences and execute them backwards like a Tarantino movie.

What?  I mean fully extend your turnbuckle and use that length to measure how long your cable should be.  This means you'll have a few inches of give in tensioning.

Attach yer Flanges!
The uprights get flanges, and the counterpoise deck gets flanges.  Check underneath your chair.  You guy a flange!  Everybody gets a flange!

The end result of all that looks something like this.

Drill Yer Steel!
The throwing arm needs two holes, the cross needs a hole, and the end cap needs a hole.  Drag your drill press out of its corner.  If you don't have a drill press, don't try this at home.

Clearly the maid has been neglecting my drill press.

You'll bolt some screw eyes through these holes, and tension another guy wire along them.  I assume this helps keep the throwing arm from bending or breaking under stress - it's never properly explained.

Anyway, you'll also need a ring to hold down the throwing arm when preparing for launch.  Use a 2" hose clamp for this.

Now you're ready to attach the throwing arm and counterpoise deck.  If you've been following along closely, your trebuchet will look something like this.

Finally, you're ready to build the trigger mechanism.  I made a mistake here, in putting the chain mount in the center - this gets in the way of the stuff you're launching.  Mount it off center, preferably off on one of the side decks.

Also - my panic snap didn't want to release very easily, so we devised a two-part trigger.  On one side, someone pulls a nylon string to open the snap - this is the "safety".  The snap stays caught on its lip until a person standing on the other side gives a solid yank from the other direction to pull the snap off the ring.

So let's see how it worked in our test runs with tennis balls and about 60lb of counterweight.




and...


As you can see, we had a little bit of trouble with the counterweight on that last go-round.  I'll be switching to big ol' bags of cement next time.

Sonos First Impressions

First impression: It's awesome.  End of post.  Good day.

Oh, you wanted more detail?  Okay, so I just bought a Sonos Play:3 and Bridge unit.  I've been looking for something forever that would stream music over wifi from my nas, and let me control what's playing with my Android tablet.  It's been such an obsession that I've even learned to develop Android applications and read through the specifications of the DLNA protocol.  Seriously.  And then this Sonos company comes along and builds a slick product exactly to my wishes and desires.

The Good:
It works, and it's easy.  The library software chewed through my collection (40k songs, ~300GB) in about 40 minutes.  Very nice, as lots of software will choke on libraries that large (cough, iTunes, cough).  The Android app is eminently usable.  I just got it all set up this morning, and I'm already scheming on buying another Play:3 or Play:5 to add to the network.  The bridge unit even has a two-port switch on the back, so it effectively doesn't burn a switch port.

The Bad:
I'm hoping the Android tablet app ends up looking more like the iPad app as they develop it further.  From what I've seen, the iPad app is a beautiful multi-paned affair that looks basically like the Mac or Windows Sonos console.  The Android app is perfectly serviceable, though.

The Ugly:
Found out my wireless router (an Actiontec MI424WR) won't propagate multicast between its wired and wireless interfaces, so I had to go buy an el-cheapo Linksys router (a WRT120N) and set it up as a layer 2 access point.

In Conclusion:

Update Jan 7, 2012:  Downloaded Patton Oswalt's new album off Amazon this morning.  Went and hit the "Update Music Library" button and hopped in the shower.  It was done rescanning the entire library and had made the album accessible by the time I got out of the shower.  With iTunes, I would've had to add the album manually, or delete and recreate my library from scratch over the course of about 8 hours.  Sonos, you rock.

Medicine

Went to Walgreen's, got my prescription flavored with "Ghoulish Grape."  Later that night, when a ghost grape visited me, I couldn't stop screaming in terroir.

Lowe's Attack

So I've been fixing up the baseboards in my house.  There are a lot of them that are pretty messed up, having been removed and nailed back on due to floor work.

Anyway, I had to run to Lowe's this weekend to get one more piece of trim.  I picked it out, carried it over to the saw, and went looking for a helpful associate.

"No sir, the saw is down"

"No, we can't use any of the circular saws in the store"

"No, we can't use a handsaw either"

"No, you can't bring your own saw"

Well, crap.  There's no fitting a 16-foot board into my car.

As I left, something shiny glinted from the corner of my eye: an electrical plug cover just by the door.  A plan quickly formed itself.  I'd go get my circular saw and a couple of cinder blocks, buy the long piece of trim and cut it up just outside the door like a parking lot ninja.

"I'd better check the plug to make sure it's right," I said to myself.  I went over to open it up.

In addition to a few 110V plugs was a large nest of wasps.  They weren't happy.  Also, my opening the cover knocked their nest onto the ground.  They got even less happy.

So I ran away, and bought my trim at Home Depot.  So much for being a parking lot home improvement ninja.

Projects Lately

Fixing the Trim
When we put in tile awhile back, I put the same baseboards back into the bathrooms and kitchen, and they looked terrible.  I'm finally getting around to replacing them.   Pics coming.

Android Progamming
Built my first hello world app last weekend.  Reading the O'Reilly Android book now.  Very fun stuff. 

Socks.  Yes, socks.
I've got a couple of pairs of running socks that I've owned for about six years, since I was living in Dallas.  This morning I put one on and it felt very weird, like it was pulling on the wrong side of my foot.  After a moment, light broke free of the clouds and granted me wisdom: These socks are left-right differentiated, and I was feeling the arch support on the wrong side of my foot.  One has a grey logo, and the other a black so you can tell them apart.  I've owned them for six years and had no idea (granted, I don't wear them often).
 

Vegas

Just got back late last night from a week in Las Vegas for EMC World.  A few observations:

• At the Las Vegas airport, every restaurant tries to sell you four dollar shots of liquor with everything you order.  Not "Would you like a four-dollar shot of bourbon?"  No, it's "Would you like a four-dollar shot of liquor?"  That's both skeezy and ambiguous. 
• A lot of people who happen in Vegas should stay in Vegas
• Went to Delmonico - best meal I had all week.  Emeril Lagasse can cook.
• Found Tiffany an Elvis bobblehead.  It was an epic quest.  After hitting every tchotchke shop on a mile long section of the strip, I looked up and saw a hundred-foot Elvis on the side of the Aria, bathed in sunlight.  And lo, there is an entire store of Elvis-themed crap inside.
• I found myself constantly wondering whether scantily-clad women were ladies of the night, or just girls who decided to wear six-inch heels on their trip to Vegas.  And you can never really find out: It's like asking a fat woman if she's pregnant. Bad idea. Some things are best left a mystery.
• People often compare Las Vegas convention centers to airplane hangars.  I disagree.  I think they're for when you're like "Oh man, I need a building to put all my airplane hangars in!"
• Las Vegas also has armies of cooks and waiters that can usher 8000 people into one of those airplane hangar-hangars, and feed them all in like 30 minutes.  It's a well-oiled machine with layers of logistics, and it's a beautiful thing to watch.
• It's good to be back and play with Raz again.

Clamz MP3 Downloader

Just installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my shiny new SSD drive (I was going to have to double-install Windows 7, since I only had an upgrade - huge pain)

Anyway, it turns out that Amazon hasn't ever released a version of their MP3 downloader for 64-bit platforms.  So after some searching, I found clamz, which is a command line Amazon downloader.

The only deal is, when you go to the man page, it has no description of how to configure its config file.  So here's how I think it's done, after diving into the code. 

ForbidChars "!\"$*:;<>?\\`|~"
OutputDir "/nfs/music/${album_artist}/${album}"
NameFormat "${tracknum}. ${album_artist} - ${title}.${suffix}"
AllowUppercase True

At least I think that's right.  I haven't been able to find an example online anywhere.  So I'm going to go purchase an album and report back.

If every other mistake I made in Linux cost me five bucks, I would have been evicted from my house by now. 

Reading List #2

Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Yup, it's good.  As usual, KSR is dense with ideas, which is really the whole reason to read sci-fi - without cool ideas, it's just space opera, man.  In this one he explores the societal impacts of hyper-longevity, the development of systems of government, the impermanence of memory, and much more. 

Gideon's Sword, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Breezed through this one in a couple days.  It almost seems like the authors are intentionally trying to make the sort of character and story that can be easily turned into a marketable movie.  And hey, there's nothing wrong with that - good on ya, guys.  I was taken out of the story a bit at the end - a character asks about some gaping plot holes, and Hari Seldon Eli Glinn explains that it had to be that way because he had computer simulations of what all the people involved would do.  Cheese.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
What a great book this was!  In the same way that Kim Stanley Robinson fills every page with great ideas and philosophy, Jonathan Strange is a thousand pages of magical weirdness.  It's a little bit like a book-length version of that Old Spice commercial: "Look up, look down, look back at me.  I'm on the Raven King's horse."  Seriously, it's worth the price of admission for the chapter where Jonathan Strange decides he needs to go mad (Spoiler: he does.)

Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi
You can't beat Scalzi.  This is just great, clever sci-fi.

The Last Colony, John Scalzi
About halfway through this right now.  Again, you can't beat Scalzi with a stick.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoesvsky
About fifty pages in.  Looks interesting so far. 

National Geographic Travel Guide to Costa Rica
Apparently there's a village in Costa Rica with a strong bruja tradition.  There's an evil spirit there which will seduce men, and after they've made love, will turn into a horse.  In completely unrelated news, there's a village in Costa Rica with a strong horse-fucking animal husbandry tradition.  


 

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I've been playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow this morning.  What a happy song.

Intro:
C Em Am F
C Em Am F

C C Em Em F F C C
ooh...    ooh...
F F E7 E7 Am Am F F
ooh...    ooh...


C         Em               F      C
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high  
F       C                        G              Am     F
And the dreams that you dream of once in a lullaby        
C         Em               F          C
Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly     
F       C                         G                     Am     F
And the dreams that you dream of, dreams really do come true        
    C                          G                                  Am   F
Someday I'll wish upon a star, wake up where the clouds are far behind me
      C
Where trouble melts like lemon drops
G                              Am           F
High above the chimney tops is where you'll find me   
C         Em               F         C
Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly       
F       C                           G                 Am     F
And the dreams that you dare to, oh why, oh why can't I?           
            C       Em        F            C
Well I see trees of green and red roses too,    
F               C         Em     F
I'll watch then bloom for me and you
      F                G                Am     F
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world       
           C        Em             F         C             F             C
Well I see skies of blue and I see clouds of white and the brightness of day    
E7         Am          F               G                C        F    C
I like the dark and I think to myself, what a wonderful world
    G                        C
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
    G                    C
are also on the faces of people passing by
      F               C              F          C
I see friends shaking hands saying, ³How do you do?
F              C       Dm7             G
They're really saying, I,      I love you
       C      Em        F          C
I hear babies cry and I watch them grow,
F                  C     E7        Am
They'll learn much more than we'll know
      F                G                Am
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
C                        G                                  Am    F
Someday I'll wish upon a star, wake up where the clouds are far behind me
       C
Where trouble melts like lemon drops
G                              Am           F
High above the chimney tops is where you'll find me   
C         Em               F      C
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
F       C                           G                 Am     F
And the dreams that you dare to, oh why, oh why can't I?

Beer Primer for Team Pendergast

Well, Team Pendergast, I can't ship you any beers.  I'm sorry.  However, what I can do is give you some practical instructions for making some of your own.  If you can boil water, you can do this - really.

What special gear do you absolutely, positively need? 

• A 6-gallon food safe bucket

• A lid for said bucket

• Some way of blowing off CO2 - there are airlocks for this you can buy at a brew store for about 2 bucks.  If you want, you can just fit a piece of plastic line into a hole drilled in the lid, and drop that line into a another, smaller bucket of water
• A muslin bag, or optionally a re-usable tea bag big enough to hold a pound of grain
• Some sanitation.  I like StarSan - it's easy to use and you don't have to be obsessive about rinsing.  Never fear the foam.

That's really about it.  Everything else you've got in your kitchen.

Step 0: Set up some sanitation
The way I like to do this: Put a few gallons of tap water in a cooler, and throw in the appropriate amount of StarSan.  Then, I just throw all my utensils in there.  I can also use that sanitizer to wash out the fermenting bucket and lid.

Step 1: Steep the grain

That Briess Caramel 40L is malt.  That pretty much means it's germinated barley that's been roasted to a specific darkness - the higher the L (Lovibond) value, the darker it was roasted.  You're going want to crush this grain - most of the time, your local brew store will do it for you.  Take the crushed grain, put it in the muslin bag.

Now, you're going to heat up some water in a stock pot.  You've got one of those, right?   You'll want to heat up about a gallon of water - I prefer the gallon jugs of spring water you can find at the grocery store, because I know they don't have a lot of chlorine.  Heat this water to 160 degrees F.  A thermometer will help here - if you don't have one, your brew store will sell you one for a couple bucks.

Put said grain into the hot water, and leave it there covered for 30 minutes.  In the meantime, have a beer.  When the 30 minutes is up, remove the bag and discard the grain.  If you want to get fancy, throw it in a colander and pour some more bottled water over it into the stock pot.

Step 2:  Gentlemen, start your boil.

Add some water and crank up the heat.  Once you get a boil going, turn down the heat to keep it steady, and start a timer for 60 minutes. 

The three injections of hops in that recipe all have times listed next to them: 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and zero minutes.  This refers to the amount of time left on the clock.  Put the 60 minute hops in right when you start your timer.  Put the zero minute hops in when it runs out.  If you can't figure out when to put the 15 minute hops in, you've had too many beers - call someone to help you off the floor.

When the boil starts, you'll also want to stir in all your extract.  Go ahead and do this over the course of the next 10 minutes or 20 minutes - no rush. 

Step 3: Once again, into the fermenter

You're going to start this step by cooling down your wort.  (That's the name for the stuff you've made up till this point)  The most gear-free way of doing this is to drop it in a sinkful of ice water.  Make sure you don't get any of that nasty, dirty ice water in your nice clean wort.

Once it's getting down into the 80-90 degree range, go ahead and dump it into the fermenting bucket.  I like to filter it through a colander to get most of the hops out, but I won't judge you if you leave some chunks in - this is your first time.  Once it's in there, fill the bucket up to the 5 gallon mark, seal the lid on, and apply whatever excuse you've got for an airlock.  You sanitized it, right?  Good.

Step 4: Wait.

Let it sit in a corner somewhere for about two weeks.  In the meantime, you're going to need to figure out your bottling situation.  I recommend you go back through some previous beer posts I've made that have more detail, and do a little reading.

After a day or so, the airlock will really be bubbling.  This will settle down to a bubble every minute or two after a few more days.  And that means it's working.

 

More Brewing

Today I kegged Delicious Aloysius, which is full of Glacier hops and is named after an icy fictional detective.  A few weeks ago, the recipe went something like:

Delicious Aloysius

1 lb Briess Caramel 40L
6.6lb Extra Light Liquid Malt Extract
1 oz Glacier - 60 min
1 oz Glacier - 15 min
1 oz Tettnang - 0 min
Safeale US-05



Anyway, I had an idea.  I always spend a lot of time filtering the hops from my wort, and I figure the problem is my filters are too small.  The ideal case would be a tight screen about the size of a sheet pan, which attaches to a sheet pan with a hole in it.  I could attach some rails to it so I could slot a funnel onto the underside.  Then I could pour a lot more beer into the fermenter before I ran out of working filter medium.

So yeah, I'm going to see if I can find the parts to build such a thing.  Wish me luck.

The Birth of a Thousand Cuts

Here are some pictures of the flooring we put in:

Notes on Installing Laminate Flooring

So we just spent the weekend installing some laminate flooring in our living room.  It's surprisingly like work.

First, why laminate and not hardwood?  Well, we got a bunch of samples of both that we liked, and performed the highly scientific test of beating them against each other to see how easily they scratched.  The high-quality laminate stuff was by far the most durable, and it looks very similar to the real stuff.  Now that it's installed, you can't really tell that it's not hardwood, except that it feels different than hardwood to bare feet.

So, what does a person need to know?  Well, I needed a lot more tools than any of the online guides mentioned.  At various points I used:

• Tapping block
• Deadblow hammer
• Pull bar
• Spacers
• Measuring tape and ruler
• Level
• Miter saw
• Regular circular saw
• Circular saw with adjustable depth
• Hand miter saw
• Hacksaw
• Plant trimmers (for clipping tiny pieces off the thresholds)
• Screwdrivers of all sorts
• Drill
• Utility knives
• Electric jamb saw
• Hand undercut saw
• Sheetrock saw
• Various types of pliers
• Table mounted vise
• Dremel tool with cutoff blade
• Assorted safety equipment (goggles, earplugs, gloves)
• Wood glue

In other words, it's not something you should attempt unless you have a fairly well stocked toolbox.  You'll have problems, and you'll need to solve them.  Check out my hooks while the DJ revolves them.

I made some mistakes in the process as well.  The big ones:

1. The thresholds I got to cover transitions require a little over an inch of space for this aluminum trough that you have to screw down.  When I started, I only left a spacer's worth of space.  This meant I had to do some fairly serious cutting with the flooring already in place when I realized my mistake.  This added a half day and a trip to Lowe's to the process.
2. While you should leave that inch for the threshold transitions, you don't necessarily want to screw the troughs down first, because they'll often need something under them to provide extra height.  For a few thresholds, I ended up solving this problem by putting down scraps of underlayment.  Later, I went to Tractor Supply and got a big bag washers for about 50 cents, and I'm using those for the last few.  My bathroom, for example, has a threshold trough that's five washers higher than the subfloor.
3. There will be places where it is difficult to lock a board in place.  For example, a board with an angled end can be very difficult.  Your best bet is to realized early that you can sand off the locking lips of the plank (a flathead screwdriver will make short work of them as well), and glue it in place.

What else?  There's a fairly specific angle for your tapping block that won't damage the boards.  It's not quite flat, but it's not too steep.  Maybe 10 degrees.

If you purchase the quarter-round made out of PVC, it's white all the way through.  That means you don't have to paint the ends when you cut it.  It's also a little bigger than wooden quarter round, which means you can cover more.

In one very tight area I ended up removing the baseboards as well - there just wasn't enough space to work otherwise.

It would've been really nice to have a jigsaw.  

I didn't realize at first that I could lock the planks from any direction.  The instructions suggested an only-left-to-right-and-down sort of thing.

Once you've put threshold in the metal trough, it's pretty much in there.  A few times I was able to very carefully remove it with a butter knife.

Also, my dog doesn't like running on it.  I still don't think hardwood would hold up though - he makes a pretty big splash when he jumps to or from the couch.

Keep your vacuum cleaner handy - you're going to track in a lot of sawdust.

That covers most of the stuff that wasn't in any of the instructions or Youtube videos.  I recommend you do this stuff yourself when you can, at least once, because it's a great learning experience.  After you've done it once, it's okay to pay someone (example: I'm going to pay someone to repaint the kitchen and living room.  I've painted rooms, and I know the process, and I've decided I don't have the patience for the detail work.)

Carpet on Craigslist

I just posted an ad to Craigslist:

About 250 ft^2 of carpet and pad, free to anyone who has the means to haul it off. What would you use this carpet for? Here's a few suggestions from our crack team of flooring scientists:
* Re-carpet your dorm room
* Add some warmth to your man-cave (don't your feet get cold on the concrete when you go for a beer?)
* Hang it on the wall and paint a soft, fuzzy mural, you avant-garde paradigm changer!
* Carpet the ceiling of your stairwell, just like The King
* Re-upholster your vintage '73 Chevy El Camino (fuzzy dice not included)
* Add it to your Craigslist used carpet collection. *shudder*

Whatever you plan to do with this shining example of freecycled goodness, this fountain of fabulous flooring, this diamond in the fluff, you should do it soon, because I'm taking it down to the dump in the next day or two. For real.

Mah Dawg

... drives a hard bargain.

If you like this, you'll like all sorts of other things from the always awesome pianolessdevil.  Seriously, go there.

Slap Yo Momma

Regarding the cliche that something is "So good it'll make you slap your momma," don't.

Seriously, no matter how good those baby back ribs seem right now, it's going to sound really stupid when the cops show up.

This was of course established in State of Virginia v. Sweet Baby Ray, in which the court not only held the defendant in contempt of his momma, but also upheld the suspension of habeas porkus.

Update: The court did acknowledge that the ribs in question were corpus delicious.

My Reading List Lately

The Integral Trees, Larry Niven
Slow start, but it really picks up.  It's essentially a vehicle for exploring how life might evolve in zero-gravity, with a bonus of how orbital mechanics can be turned into a catchy tribal poem.  Plus some tribal warfare in a mixed-gee environment.

Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson
There aren't a lot of sci-fi authors who can pack in as many ideas per page as Robinson.  He also tends toward realism - there are no one-dimensional Heinlein-cutouts in his books.  This one tackles the meaning of science to humanity, the applicability of game theory to altruistic behavior (that there's some hard science, ya'll), the tensions between traditional scientific journal culture and the culture of high-tech businesses, and a lot of other stuff in between.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman
This book grabbed me by the hair and held my eyeballs to the page for two straight days.  I loved it.  It's a Harry Potter/Narnia story done in a realistic manner.  While there's a protagonist the story follows, he's no more the protagonist than anyone is in their own real-life story.  Characters and situations are played for some genuine shades of gray, and the standard-trope density is very low.  Fun times.

The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass, Phillip Pullman
I picked these up at a used bookstore, and enjoyed them.  If you're not familiar - Phillip Pullman wrote these as Narnia stories for atheists, as an alternative to C.S. Lewis's Christian apologia.  They're nowhere near the sophistication of The Magicians, but if there's a young adult in your life struggling with their natural tendency towards heathenism, I'd certainly recommend this series.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
I hate to seem like one of the unwashed masses, but this seemed like a rambling story about a bunch of rich kids boffing and jaunting around Europe.  I know it's supposed to juxtapose these folks against the realities of war and violence and such, but I couldn't help imagining Holden Caufield narrating it: "And then all these phonies went to a phony restaurant and ordered some crummy wine and got in a fight and it just makes me sick."

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
I didn't really research this book beforehand, but about halfway through I glommed onto the idea that he was equating wealth inequality, entitlement, and excess with murder, and I really started to dig it.  Just in case you missed it, this fantastically wealthy mass-murderer screams "I need more tax breaks!" about 40 pages before the end.

Under the Dome, Stephen King
Stephen King's thousand page metaphorical indictment of the second Bush administration.  If that's the sort of thing you'd like, then you'd really like that sort of thing.  For the record, I enjoyed it.  Dick Cheney, I mean Big Jim Rennie, isn't exactly a nuanced character, but even King's flat characters don't suffer from lack of interesting detail.

Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
This is the cotton candy of the list: fast, sweet, and not too filling.  It's the second in a series of historical fantasy books that imagines a Napoleonic War, but with dragons.  Given the main character is a gentleman in a profession that doesn't pay much attention to rules of etiquette, there's are usually shades of a novel of manners.  If you need a book to read on the plane, you could do far worse - Tom Clancy never had dragons.

Raz Learns a New Trick

For the last month or so, Raz has known how to fistbump.  You can hold out your fist, shake it a little, and he'll jump up and nose it.

Rock.