The Women by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frankie is a naive 20-year-old nurse from Coronado Island, home of the U.S. Navy base in San Diego. The time is during the early days of the Vietnam War. Her brother is killed in action and she joins up to serve her country. The first half of the book is much of what I expected, the story of the naive girl becoming battle hardened and a highly skilled surgical nurse. She learns to smoke and drink, loses her virginity and bonds with her fellow surgical nurses. The war turns bad and the government lies to the public about it. A lot of it is M*A*S*H like. I thought that part was exciting and well-written.

[Spoiler alert] The second half of the book focuses on how she was treated, mistreated, or ignored after she came back to the U.S. The book went off the rails at that point. Every bad thing that could happen to her did. Her family was ashamed of her and hid the fact she’d been in Vietnam. Strangers spit on her if she wore her uniform. No one, even the VA, believed that she was a Vietnam veteran because “there were no women in Vietnam.” She developed a drug and alcohol problem, etc. It became too Dickensian to be believable. If no one thought she’d been in Vietnam, why would so many people spit on her? Her nurse comrades, now stateside, rescued her several times but she kept self-sabotaging. Her family stuck with her, but neither parent approved of her service. They had envisioned her being a nurse, meeting a doctor, and marrying and producing grandchildren, not serving in a war zone. The author couldn’t seem to make up her mind. As the book progressed, more and more time was spent on Frankie’s romantic life and clothes like a typical chick lit novel then much more on anti-establishment politics of the day – anti-war protests, feminism, and then switching back to Frankie’s nursing career. It bounced all over the place and couldn’t settle on a theme. I’d give the first half a solid four stars, the second half two stars, so I’m rating it the average: 3.

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Today I did a small experiment. I was looking for a list of modern day performers who record music from the early 20th Century, i.e. 1910s-1930s. I pasted that query into Google and got a response labeled as “AI Overview.” I’m not sure if this is the same as Gemini. When I’ve clicked on the Gemini icon in the past, I’ve been asked to create a paid account. Copilot (Microsoft’s AI) is free. So I’m comparing free AI to free AI.

Google produced the following:

Many contemporary performers, particularly those specializing in genres like jazz, blues, and swing, often record music from the 1920s and 1930s. This includes tributes, arrangements, and even reinterpretations of classic songs and styles. It’s a common practice within the music world to both preserve and celebrate the sounds of these decades.

It went on longer, but it did NOT name any performers, which I specifically asked for. Copilot, on the other hand, not only had a similar response, but it went on to name half a dozen or so modern performers that do music in the style of that era, including The Hot Sardines and Postmodern Jukebox, both groups I hadn’t heard of. I bought a song of the latter and put one of the former on a streaming favorite list. I pasted the exact same query into both, so I give Copilot the clear win in this case. I’ve also found it to be superior in other searches. It may be time to stop using Google as the default search engine.

I’m dismayed at the need for some of my W3W posts, but it seems like this one should be mentioned. If you follow the news you will have heard that Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education for the United States, was at an education summit meeting in San Diego last weekend. In particular, the events took place at the San Diego Convention Center. That’s where she repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence (AI) as A1, like the steak sauce. So I took a look at some of the W3W combos there.

The very first one that pops up when you enter San Diego Convention Center into W3W is brain.factories.vanish. It seems our brain factories, i.e. schools, are vanishing under McMahon whose mandate from President Trump is to eliminate the Department of Education (DOE) altogether.

I’m sure she would excuse the A1 error as a slip,terms.forgot, also there at the center. But she made this mistake multiple times. She just has no idea what she’s talking about. This is insulting to good teachers who put all their effort into giving the kids a good education, and the center does say they teach alone with zest. But McMahon’s ignorance is a school.actor.slap in the face.

Perhaps the elimination of the DOE is a good idea if people like her are in charge of it.

James by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t give this a fair chance at first for several reasons: don’t mess with a classic; an accusation against all white people, etc. But I set those biases aside because my book club chose it and I had to read it. I soon realized it had little to do with Huckleberry Finn and was just an imagined story of a black slave escaping pre-Civil War Missouri on a raft with a white boy (at first) but then departing from Twain’s narrative. It’s implausible, but probably not much more so than Twain’s story. It’s an easy enough read, so I just flowed with the story and enjoyed it.

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