BilmBlog500

So one Borders in Sacramento, CA is closing.  The employees found out when the signage package about the closing arrived to be put in the windows.  And now I see that store #97 in Gaithersburg, MD is closing as well.  The first time I visited the Gaithersburg store I walked out around 5 miles from the Shady Grove Metro stop, but later discovered that there were quick buses I could take.  Over the years, the store suffered from very inept management.  The receiving room was very slow so books were frequently not put out until after the first couple weeks on sale, thus costing sales.  The shelves were messy.  In recent years they hybridized the sf section shelving in such a way that it didn't have any usable backstock, so the shelves were always too crowded, and then they would go through and do store-initiated returns to clear up space, so they were frequently without books they were supposed to have.  It got to the point that I'd only stop by at that store because those buses...

We did it!  Eddie played around with a Sony Reader as well and said he liked it, so we got one this afternoon at the Borders at Park Ave., and I'm going to be curious to find out what he thinks of it.  I'll play around a bit with it myself, I'm sure.  Stay tuned for further updates, sometime or other.

I think that my Kindle was/is better, certainly for me, than the first generation of the Sony Reader.  But I was playing around some with the new and improved Sony Reader at the Borders in Manchester, CT on Saturday night, and I think Sony has leapfrogged over the Kindle in many significant ways with their 2nd generation reader. Instead of using buttons to move the pages back and forth, you can do that kind of iPhone touchy thing and drag across the screen to move forward or back a page.  Sweet!  The touch screen also can become a keyboard for searching for text.  Theoretically you can also bring that keyboard up to annotate text, but the fact that I wasn't intuitively able to figure out how to do that with the demo model suggests they might be able to improve upon that a tad (unless I was pressing the right buttons but the demo models don't let you do that so some 12-year-old won't look at the notes and find a pornographic treatise, which I'm thinking is a possibility?...

New York City is an island of little movie ecosystems on Christmas.  Walk down W. 13th St. and there's nobody around, until you get to the Quad Cinema.  Enough people milling around the lobbies of the Kips Bay or the Angelika you'd think they were giving something away. One of the movies that opened in NYC on the 25th is Last Chance Harvey, which I'd seen Tuesday evening Nov. 18, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Auditorium #2, "The Kings," Part of the Variety Screening Series,  2 slithy toads.  It's a star vehicle romance with Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman who had so much fun working together on Stranger Than Fiction (clearly more fun than I had watching the movie) that they yearned to work together so much that they chose this mediocre romantic comedy.  It's the very definition of a 2 toad movie.  It's not very good, but it does have star power and enough pleasant things going on that it's hard to regret spending 92 minutes with it.  I lik...

With Van Johnson, aka The Minstrel, and Earth Kitt, aka Catwoman, having sadly passed in this season, is there a third to come...  The old saying is that things like this will happen in threes.

So Lisa, what do you think of Gypsy from your personal experience with it?  Did your 12-year old self like the musical?  Do you think back on it otherwise? Jeri Westerson's Veil of Lies continues to chug away in Boston, another 19 copies the week ending the 21st according to Nielsen Bookscan.  That Globe review is really a gift that keeps on giving. 

Slumdog Millionaire, seen Thursday October 23 at the  Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1,  Part of the Variety Screening Series, 3.5 slithy toads. This was already a highly touted movie off of its screenings at the Toronto Film Festival and elsewhere even before I saw it, a few weeks before its opening.  And as you can see from the generous # of toads I am giving it, I think it's one of those movies that lives up to the acclaim.  My sister also liked it a lot, though a friend I was talking with on Monday night did not.  Well, the more people who read your book or see your movie the more people you can find who won't like it, but it's clear it is striking a chord.  The movie's been doing very well at the box office with signs of very good word of mouth, slowly broadening from being on very few screens to being on several hundred, and making the top 10 at the box office against films, up there with films that are playing at five times as many theatres.  Well, good! If you're ...