As I sit listening to and watching the snow/sleet, I keep thinking how nice a retirement condo in Kona would be. Still, there is something to be said about a snowy day, a real wood fireplace and some magazines and a book sitting next to your coffee cup. Those distractions lead to a threefer:
Pot [...]
OMG, is Opus gay ?!?!? ( Via .)
Although it only slightly reduces the withdrawal pain, Not The Daily Show sheds light on the core issue in the television writer’s strike. There’s also, of course, [...]
I intended to post most of this over the weekend but, proving once again that sometimes procrastination is for the best, the first two items are from today.
Amazon announces its long-awaited Kindle, “a wireless, portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers.” List price? $399.00. [...]
Oxford University Press USA, the publishers of the New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its word of the year: locavore. Either I am not green enough or trendy enough as I’ve never heard of the word. Locavores are those who try to buy locally grown ingredients and foot products.
Perhaps proving once again the [...]
As “fug” is unquestionably being overused in the press and blogs regarding Norman Mailer’s death, I’ll instead note it by a collection of book-related links from the last several days:
Good thing they can only throw digital images of books. LibraryThing calls Shelfari “unethical” and “basically social networking rapists.”
Continuing to encourage travel and international reading, [...]
I was originally going to do a somewhat lengthy post regarding the first item below but suffice it to say that while the rhetoric is extreme and pessimistic, a sad truth underlies it.
One of the better politically oriented blog posts I’ve read in a long time: The Barren, Deadly Wasteland that Is Now Our Life.
In [...]
No wonder a chill was running down my spine most of the day.
A CJR essay makes a cogent argument that “journalism needs a rhetoric beat.”
Britannica Blog has a very interesting post on why the written word has “no real information value” for communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization.
Colbert may be done but I’m still dreaming of [...]
Out-of-state travel is the cause of the latest interruption of blogging — plus it made me go cold turkey for several days from my hockey addiction. Rather than regaling readers with travel tales, here’s several items items I’ve noticed over the last week or so.
Denise Ross has launched a website, including a blog, for [...]
PP has an excellent post about the Capitol mural South Dakota hides.
Just after posting about Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma, I learned she has been back to the country and is blogging about the state of affairs there at her publisher’s website. (Via.)
There’s an excellent piece in The Guardian on Burmese writers. [...]
Maybe I need to read some of Nobel Prize laureate Doris Lessing’s work as she sounds like my kind of person. Her response to winning the literature prize? “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less!”
Earlier this week I finally got around to watching the 60 Minutes piece on Bruce Springsteen. You need to see [...]
JR brought my attention to a NYT article on the uproar over the difficulty fans have getting tickets to concerts and other events. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help if Ticketmaster is correct in alleging one software company developed a program that means ticket brokers are “bombarding Ticketmaster’s Web site with millions of [...]
As promised, an assortment of recent material dealing with books and reading:
Given that the first event was last night, I have been remiss in not mentioning that the South Dakota Festival of Books is going on this weekend in the Black Hills.
Micawbers Books in St. Paul, “the last indie bookstore in the Twin Cities not [...]
Continuing the transition from too many doses of the political to normalcy (including a review, albeit of a politically tinged book, Monday), here’s some accumulated general marginalia. An installment specifically related to books and reading comes later today.
Federal immigration authorities have announced a redesigned test with 100 new “civics” questions immigrants will have to [...]
With a couple more substantive posts on the immediate horizon, here’s a Sunday morning helping of marginalia:
I hope he went there for research purposes, but David Louis Edelman’s poking around at the Fox News website produced a very observant post.
When we actually win one, the DOJ makes sure it provides some payback for those [...]
The NYT asks the recurring question if technology renders books passé but I think the article answers the question. It references Amazon’s forthcoming wireless e-book reader that “will be priced at $400 to $500″ and Google planning to charge for full access to digital copies of some books in its database. Throw in [...]
White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
Album of the Damned: Snapshots from the Third Reich by Paul Garson
