I Missed this on the First Day it was up...

Straight gaffeled from GoodReads.com:

"
Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

"

Woo-hoo!

"Mathematical!"

So Norm, I started watching "Adventure Time" on Netflix. I remember you showing me that one episode with the dimensional bubble blower, and when I found the show deep in the innards of Netflix, I was like, Sweet! Even with only the first 26 episodes of the first season there, I figured I could get a good grasp of the pacing and the beats and the sens of humor, beyond my memories of that first episode you showed me.

So far I've watched maybe the first five or so episodes, and I like it. Jake and Finn crack me up, and their dynamic is fun. Finn reminds me another character I have discovered on another show that I've started watching, their connection being wearing an eared cap of sorts:

This is Louise Belcher, the youngest of the Belcher kids on Fox's animated series Bob's Burgers. I wanted to write a long post about the show, about how out of all of the animated shows on television now, Bob's Burgers is the only fitting heir apparent to the mantle that was created by the Simpsons in their first four seasons. This show is more realistic and honest than most live-action shows, just like the early Simpsons, and does things that the Simpsons of today can't do or achieve (and I still watch the Simpsons).

But Louise is nine years old, right between Bart and Lisa in age, and is the best thing about the show. She's a mix of Lisa and Eric Cartman, and is one of the main antagonists of the show. I recommend it, if you feel like another show to invest time into.

ALSO

I read that Bleeding Edge seems like it could be Pynchon's 9/11 book, as well as his Internet book. I read some commentary a while back that mentioned, accurately, that in all reality Gravity's Rainbow is his 9/11 book, and The Crying of Lot 49 is his Internet book, even if a facsimile of Arpanet made an appearance in Inherent Vice.

GR deals with the ramifications of a society that is in love with death; and Lot 49 deals with an underground non-postal service mail delivery system. Pynchon is just ahead of the curve.