To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
This book collects a number of questions covered in Slate’s “The Explainer” column and groups them by some sort of similarity. It’s better than The Best of Slate as far as collections go, but it’s not “The Straight Dope”.
Worth a buck, I suppose. If you will have any to spare in the upcoming Obama/Pelosi/Reid Bush depression (overtime).
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The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Back in 1984, the powers that be wanted to widen Elm Avenue, a north-south road that cuts through the middle of Webster Groves, to make it an artery of sorts to handle traffic from Clayton areas to South County. The residents of Elm Avenue banded together to fight it and had a street party to show off their homes which would be lost or have yards cut drastically as part of the plan. This slender volume is a catalog of the homes on Elm Avenue along with the history of each. Not quite Webster Park, but its aim was much lower.
Last year, as part of preparations for the Highway 40 closing, powers that be floated the idea of widening Elm again, 23 years after this book was published. They got a stop light where only stop signs had existed before and a no-left-turn thing instead, fortunately for the big old houses along Elm.
Sorry, no Amazon link for this book; I cannot find any reference of it on the Internet, either, which means I must be making it up.
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You know I wish that I had Jessie’s grill.
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One of the best things about movie tie-in paperbacks, aside from their brevity and probable familiarity with the storyline, is the speculation within them. Did they work from a treatment? An early version of the script? Or the actual movie?
This book dealt with an early version of the script, so it doesn’t actually jibe with the movie that well. In addition to the extra depth that the authors add to the interior lives of the characters that you don’t get out of dialogue, this book has completely different scenes than what appears in the film. Some are missing, too, such as the original beginning scene (Marty with the big guitar amplifier). Ergo, this book is sort of like a weird alternative-universe version of the movie.
An interesting artifact if nothing else.
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Given potential for inflation coupled with the way Congress is dropping hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money into any industry it thinks of like tourists dropping their last pocket change into the slots at the airport on the way out of Vegas, you will learn that the next order of magnitude beyond trillion is actually quadrillion.
Assuming that the Chinese and Middle Eastern royalty allow our national debt to hit that level circa 2017.
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This is a book in a series on the Natives of the Americas. As such, it has a lot of images and glosses over the worst of the Aztec empire, providing an inspirational and mostly laudatory account of the tribe. I suppose it’s not a bad primer if you’re looking to write a sixth grade report, and it could probably serves as a source for that. However, given that I’ve already read some more complete histories, it lacks in depth or in any gap-filling knowledge. However, in my quest for endless anecdotes about how the Aztecs did it, I can talk about having read one more book about them.
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You know, I kind of knew the premise of the book. The sort of thing I like: a mystery involving a big ship and whatnot (such as Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, and so on). I didn’t see the movie because I heard it was a bit of a gorefest in space with an ultimately weak premise.
I had some hope when the thing began; however, it hit the pivotal climax with disturbing imagery (here, recounted in word, but that’s disturbing enough). The bodies start dropping, and random characters survive. The premise, of course, is that the ship has wormholed through Hell or something and it has become possessed by an intelligence that wants to kill people. A sad, weak premise, ultimately, and not up the the hopes I’d had.
But if you go into the Hyundai dealership looking for German engineering, you’re bound to be disappointed, but at least you’ll be disappointed cheaply.
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In case you’re wondering, I finished this book on November 3, a day before the election. I haven’t posted on it because I’ve had other things on my mind, such as the way the world will be to me going forward. Pardon me for the delay.
I was going to entitle this post, or at least sum it up, as encapsulating this book as 50 Horror Stories We, British Editors, Could Anthologize On The Cheap. Because for the first couple of nights wherein I read the book, that’s the sense I got. Fiction, poorly written in a British horror sense. We get a couple of ghost stories, and then a treatise on lycanthropy. Were the stories supposed to be spooky, or what?
After a couple glasses of cheap liquor, though, I got into it. Well, a couple of glasses of cheap liquor and a couple of nights of reading, perhaps interspersed with more compelling fiction. But these stories combine actual events with actual recountings of ghost stories, so if you’re an Angliophile, you can get into it for the flavor of the past told from the recountings. If the spirit, so to speak, moves you, you can wonder, “Did the authors present this as a piece of fiction, or are they recounting an actual event but providing spooky music?”
Thus, I ultimately enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. One has to leave behnd one’s expectation of horror stories, though, particularly if you’re an American reader used to a bit more spookiness in the proceedings.
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are drinking the water.
Sorry, Mr. Wilde.
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A phishing scam that sends you an e-mail form to fill on the dotted line? Sweet!
Dear Account User
This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some Hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name, password, date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.
Due to the congestion in all Hotmail users and removal of all unused Hotmail Accounts, Hotmail would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.
* Username: ………………………….
* Password: …………………………..
* Date of Birth: ……………………….
* Country Or Territory: ……………..After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Sincerely,
The Windows Live Hotmail Team——————————————————————————–
Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger Get it now!
Bonus for including a hyperlink to a fake domain offering malware downloads instead of MSN Messenger. Demerits for absolutely abhorrent grammar and style.
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In a brief programming note, posting will be light as I am tending to grim family matters. Prayers and small animal sacrifices will be accepted in the spirit in which they’re received.
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Every generation must live through its own 1970s. After a decade of an unpopular war, opposed by reflex and not because you might be drafted to fight it, so now we’ll have this generation’s Carter.
Hopefully, it will only be that bad.
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When I bought this book, I bought it on title alone, so I expected some sort of collection of crosstic poems or something, maybe poems based on crossword puzzles. As a matter of fact, it’s a collection of poems whose lines appear in crossword puzzles a lot. The introduction indicates that the editor thought there was a time where schoolboys new the poems enough by heart to get the poems from quoted lines in the clues, but alas, those days are passing, so here’s a collection with the pertinent quotes highlighted in red.
Regardless of the motivation behind it, this is a nice little anthology that reprints a number of often-anthologized poems from English literature, including works from Herrick, Keats, the Brownings, Drayton, et al. Who couldn’t use an excuse to reread some of them? Also, at 64 pages, it’s compact and not very daunting to start or to carry around.
I guess since this is entitled Volume One, the series includes more. They might be worth a pick-up, but I wonder how they could top this small selection.
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Hank Williams, Jr., will appear with Governor Palin in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Because, face it, the national Democratic Party doesn’t have room for his sort of people. It has massed other, more powerful tribes, it thinks.
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As you know, I read the sequel, of sorts, to this book earlier this year. So when I found the actual novel upon which the movie True Grit was based, I snapped it up. A two-fer of sorts; I like paperback movie tie-ins/source novels for some reason.
This book is exceptional. The book relies on a double-effect narrator, an elderly spinster recounting her trip into Choctaw country to find the man who shot down her father. At the time, she’s 14 and rather precocious, although let’s not forget that there was a time when 14 was an adult for all intents and purposes. She hires Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn (the John Wayne role) to lead her into the hostile territory to find the man. A Texas Ranger joins them, and together (reluctantly, it must be said–the men don’t want a little girl along) they encounter the bad men.
The voice of the book, through the double-effect narration (telling the story through first person, but with the passage of time), really makes it work. Throughout, the character displays primmishness and vulnerability; she’s not as tough as she’s putting on, but she’s tough enough. Additionally, there are a lot of educational asides and a couple suggestions for Bible reading, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action and the girl’s response to it. Well-played.
I need to read more Westerns, but this does represent the second I’ve read this autumn. As our world and country changes, I’d like to hearken back to a time where it wasn’t how it is now or will be in a couple years.
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