Charlie Brown and Charles Schultz

Charles Schultz had closed doors at every turn. He initially could not get any newspapers to run his comic. Eventually somebody too a chance. And the comics caught on like wildfire. You would think that would have established him. However he also had a hard time getting anybody to pick up a 30 minute show.

Eventually, again, somebody took a chance. The Charlie Brown TV special broke all kinds of records and immediately won awards. TV was conquered and follow on shows went on to dominate for years. The final frontier was the stage. Again, there was a hard time getting a musical of Peanuts on stage. They started small. And the New York Times praised it.

Schultz works alone in drawing his comics. He does have a secretary to handle non-drawing tasks. He did farm out work for animation in his TV specials. All his work turns to gold. Even an album related to Peanuts was solid gold.

Get Rich Carefully

This book is written by Jim Cramer from the Mad Money TV show. That show is quite entertaining. This book, however, was boring. Jim does present a lot of information about what he thinks moves stocks. But to form an opinion on what to invest in, you got to take the whole book worth of information.

A lot of the information also seems dated. This book is over 12 years old. The companies he talks about might still exist. But a lot has happened over the last decade. There were some good insights on how stock trading can severely affect stock price.

I did get to the end of the book. I ended up skimming much of the boring stuff. I only focused on the broad themes. Not a book I think anybody should be ready, unless they need something to help put them to sleep.

Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

This book covers Bill Gates in his later years. Seems like he had been cheating on his wife Melinda. She divorced him. They previously had created a massive organization to oversee the funds they marked for charity. Eventually, his wife quit and formed her own org when they divorced.

There was coverage of a suspicious relationship between Bill and Jeffrey Epstein. It seems the people at his companies charged with keeping his image clean had slept on the job. The PR campaign to absolve Gates was him stating that bad choices were made. Deny anything without proof. And back pedal when they present the proof.

Warren Buffet used to be a close friend of Bill. Buffer promised the most of his wealth to Bill's charity organization. It seems the relationship has cooled quite a bit. This book felt like a scholarly academic paper. Lots of quotes from other people and other works. Not a fun book to read, especially compared to Bill's autobiography Source Code.

Source Code

This is an autobiography of Bill Gate's younger years. He went to a combination middle/high school. That gave him access to shared computing time. He and some friends worked on a program to manage student's class schedules. Later, to get access to more computing time, he and the friends worked for a startup that his friend's mom founded.

Bill went to Harvard for college. There he gained access to a DEC computer. He tried making a baseball simulation program on it. He also worked on a BASIC interpreter for a new home computer by MITS. He and his partner licensed BASIC to MITS. Later, the relationship with MITS went sour. They fought a legal battle and won an arbitration battle with MITS.

Initially Bill took a break from Harward to work on Microsoft business. He later apparently dropped out. They started getting work to implement BASIC in other home computers on other chip sets. They initially were a tiny company in New Mexico. They later moved back to Seattle, Washington, where Bill and his partner Paul Allen were from.

Burn Book

This book was supposed to be about tech. I did not get further than Chapter 1. Swisher names drops a lot. And she tells us how she knows everything, and told all these famous people about her brilliant insight. If only she wrote about such ideas before history happened. Instead this feels like trying to come across as a guru, but using 20/20 vision after the fact.

Burn Book indeed. As in, this needs to be burned. Now I know why this book was in the bargain bin. I should have left it there. I did learn not to read anything more from this terrible author.

Why We Need the Electoral College

The author states that we need the electoral college so that a couple of huge states cannot dictate who is president. Instead, every state, however small, gets a say in who wins the election. The book does not go into much details as to why a national majority of votes should not determine the election.

The book talks in detail how the electors are chosen and how they cast their ballot for president. However, it was not clear why letting some electors who may not even vote for who the majority of people in their state chose is beyond me.

Hunt for the Bamboo Rat

Zenji was born in Hawaii from Japanese parents. He was a teen during WWII. His ROTC instructor recommended him for an intelligence position in the military. He was sent overseas in Manilla. He was essentially a spy. He was to gather information about the Japanese.

Eventually the Japanese overtook the area he was in. He was afforded an air ride out for safety. But he gave up his spot to another American who wanted to return to his family. Eventually Zenji was captured by the Japanese.

Zenji's cover story was that he was a civilian hired by the Army to translate for them. Unfortunately, the Japanese seemed to think he was a spy. They tortured him to confess. He never did. He was turned over to work for a general. He did translation, office work, and house work.

Eventually the Americans were taking back the area where Zenji was imprisoned and working. He used this opportunity to escape. He fled into the bush. He had trouble finding water and food. He was taken in by some primitive tribe. He left them after a month or so.

Zenji tried to start up a fire at night. He was bombed and got injured. He eventually pulled out the shrapnel and walked with a limp. He came upon US troops searching for stragglers. He walked into a camp, and after his story was verified, was sent home.

The title came from his code name - The Bamboo Rat.