Santa, 2013

Santa and I have pulled together our list for the year, and it covers a wide spectrum of items and interests.As I reach for the wrapping paper I’ll mention a few highlights for the sake of discussion. I also like to note this stuff because it casts some context for closing out the year, as I reflect on what people have been doing and thinking about.

For the thinkers among kith and kin, one book I’m giving is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Random House, 544 pages, $30).

The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a mathematician who earned his chops in the unforgiving, bare-knuckle world of financial speculating. This is a brainy book but it’s a fun read and superbly written.

This isn’t the first you’ve heard of Taleb in this space. I’ve recommended another one of his books, Fooled by Randomness, a time or two.

If you are looking for a soothing book full of warm fuzzies, trendy slogans, and mushy equivocation, this ain’t it. Taleb is brash and iconoclastic, which is a nice change of pace from today’s abundance of unctuous weasels.

Antifragile delves into the nature of risks and rewards, and describes how the vicissitudes of randomness and time can make us (or anything else) stronger or weaker. Much of the book concerns financial and economic contexts, but medicine, biology, and philosophy get some play here as well.

One theme is the illusion of safety that people get when they become insulated from risks, which, paradoxically, puts them in an ultimately more vulnerable (fragile) position, since that insulation has removed their ability to react to the environment.

Among my pals, this is the “must have” gift because it’s the “must read” book.

For the travelers on my list, I’ve found that the Pimsleur audio courses are a welcome gift.
Their “basic” courses have a street price of around $20 for a set of five CDs if you shop around. Each CD holds two 30-minute lessons. Twenty bucks is doggone cheap for a travel tool, that’s just magazine and bubble gum money at the airport bookstore.

I really wish I found these courses a long time ago, they would have made life a lot easier.

For the sake of context, I’ll note that the “comprehensive” Pimsleur courses are several hundreds of dollars. A basic course is just the earliest lessons from a comprehensive course, so it’s painless to “upgrade” to the more ambitious fare if the need arises. That’s what I did in Mandarin, and I recently started the basic course in another language just to keep life interesting.

The Pimselur line offers an abundance of options in any given language, so it requires careful attention while shopping. They also sell versions that can be downloaded as MP3 files, but I haven’t messed with those so I can’t offer any insights.

I think the key is getting enough of the language under your belt so that people are willing to help you. Pimsleur is a good resource for this. I usually buy this stuff on Amazon.com, and I’ll note that Pimsleur.com is the company’s direct website.

For the practical and fix-it people in my life, I’m taking the small road this time around, particularly since modern cars have a diminishing list of things that normal people can maintain and repair. Most of the items that we can service are small tasks. For these tasks a 1/4-inch drive socket set is handy to have around. I think that’s an ideal gift for the realities of modern cars. I can’t generalize about costs, since it all depends on what brand you like and how much trouble you’re willing to invest in finding it in Saipan.

On the fun side of things, I’ve noted that many old TV series are available on DVD collections. I’m not a TV savant, so I can’t say anything brilliant here. Well, you know me; I can’t say anything brilliant anyway.

But I noticed that some of this TV stuff goes pretty far back. For example, a series called the Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959 through 1964, is available on DVD collections with prices ranging from $16 to over $100, depending on what’s in the collection. But that’s just one example of many. If you wind up stuck for a gift, maybe there’s something in the DVD collection realm that will solve the problem.

We’re traveling for Thanksgiving and I noticed that many major retailers are having sales on Thanksgiving Day, so the famous Black Friday is being one-upped. I never thought I’d spend Thanksgiving in a store, but I’m going to give Santa a call and we’ll see where our list stands.

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