BilmBlog500

So concludes one of my favorite reads of all time, John Crowley's Little Big . Which is the current selection of the AV Club book club, which has inspired me to give it a quick shout-out. I discovered John Crowley when I was a wee lad, courtesy of Orson Scott Card, who offered great praise to Crowley's Engine Summer, subsequently repeated in an F&SF review column of Card, where you'll see that Card and I did not agree on Little, Big (nor, for that matter, on Crowley's later novel Aegypt).  But nonetheless, just like Card's praise for Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy in recent months may have sent a few readers Brandon's way, Card's praise for Engine Summer got me to reading John Crowley.  I quite liked Engine Summer, which is a post-apocalyptic novel whose derelict roadways stick in the recesses of my mind more than anyone else's.  I went on to read The Deep and Beasts, perhaps not as good but certainly interesting.  And then Little Big ap...

As I mentioned a few posts ago , doing the blog thing is one of the things that takes a back seat when work gets really busy and work has been really busy.  But I'll try and do some quick takes on my recent film-going... Harry Potter and the Whatever's Whatever.  Seen Wednesday July 29 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.    1.5 slithy toads.  This was nice because it was a guy's night out with Peter V. Brett , who was eager to see the movie again, and I don't often have company for my movies, and we had a nice dinner after, and I saw it at the remaining big single screen movie theatre in NYC.  But I just didn't like it very much.  One of the problems early on in this series of movies was that the films had no screen life independent of the books themselves.  I felt this slowly improved over the first three or four films, but now the series has regressed.  This movie introduces you to characters of absolutely no importance to anyone who hasn't read the books, involved i...

So here is your fearless blogger, posted nattily in front of Borders #118, Thousand Oaks, CA.  Which opened on November 18, 1995, and which on August 10, 2009 became the 200th Borders superstore visited by yours truly. 27,854 square feet, located in a former bowling alley. That sign next to me is an old-style Borders "cafe espresso" sign.  This is one of the few Borders in the country (the store on Park Avenue & 57th St. in Manhattan is another) not to have been converted into a Seattle's Best cafe, generally due to lease restrictions of one sort or another.  However, while the NYC store is a real time-warp location that maintains its ancient Borders cafe look, this store serves Seattle's Best coffee products but without the food goodies and general look and feel of the Seattle's Best cafes.  In fact, it currently serves no food at all.  So it was kind of half-retro. I celebrated this momentous occasion by purchasing two bags of Lindor truffle balls to leave f...

So I spent some time down in DC this past weekend doing my grand bookstore tour for the first time in 7 months.  8 Borders, 1 Borders Express, 2 Borders Airport, 1 B. Dalton, Two Indies, 7 B&Ns. These aren't stores I visit most often, because they're rather a distance from me.  But some of them are certainly stores I've been visiting regularly, at least once or twice a year, for a very very long period of time, 15 years or more.  There's been a B. Dalton in Union Station since forever, and it's one of the last Dalton standing.  The Borders in White Flint, 18th and L, and Pentagon City are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Borders I ever visited (to put this in context, I'll get to my 200th on Monday August 10, so #2 is a long time ago).  So they're good places to see how things have changed over the years. The big thing on this trip if watching as Borders tries to decide what to do with all of the music and movie space.  A lot of the DC stores are old big boxes that ...

I'm utterly baffled by this belief in the salubrious effects of taxing employer provided health insurance benefits. The more ardent free marketeers love to tout the benefits of treating health care as a consumer driven market like deciding whether to go to McD's or Subway for dinner. We've been told how if we can just get consumers more involved with their health care costs will come down as consumers make better decisions. I don't think higher co-pays, deductibles, etc. really do that, though, because too much health care is done when the need is urgent, which does not lend itself to comparison shopping. Too much health care, well it's your life that's at stake so if the doctor tells you to take Tests x/y/z and Drugs q/r/s there's a certain reluctance to challenge the experts. The argument for taxing health insurance is, simply put, that since it isn't taxed it costs less than it would if it was taxed. And since it costs less, we therefore spend too...

So let's just say the iPod Touch is an amazing thing. Yes, the screen is kind of small, but overall I've found reading manuscripts via the Stanza app and Stanza desktop to be no worse than reading manuscripts on a Kindle. The Stanza desktop program works with more file formats than I could wirelessly send to my Kindle, though not with docx. One ms sent in that format I had to open in Pages, convert to .doc instead of .docx, and it did then go over to my Touch but as one long paragraph. So far I've been able to keep track of it all, but paragraph breaks to have a certain virtue. The battery life is better than I'd thought. In part because my hotel room has free wired internet but not free wireless I've mostly just been using the Touch to read on, and setting it at the lowest comfortable screen brightness, and I can probably read an entire decent-size ms on one battery charge. The Kindle battery lasted longer in theory, but the circuity for when I turned on the wirele...