I just last night got back from a trip back to San Diego to celebrate my grandson’s first birthday and a little early Christmas with my daughter and her husband (that JUST MIGHT have involved some Super Mario Galaxy!) It was also a shakedown for the Sony Reader. I didn’t bring any books, and I didn’t even bring the USB cord that lets it charge while connected to a computer. So, six books, five days, one charge. How did it do? ...
I owned a house up in Monterey, California. I loved that old house; I raised my kids and my cats there, and it had oodles of space, and I had books pretty much everywhere. Two book cases in the garage, two in the family room with the computer, two in my bedroom, a huge one in the living room… because I really like reading. When I moved from a house in Northern California to a small apartment in San Diego, the books had to go. I gave books to all my friends. I donated books to every public library in the area. I dropped off sacks of books at the local used book stores. When I couldn’t find anyone else to take any more, I threw the rest away, keeping only my absolute favorites. ...
We went and saw this… disturbing movie today. I’m not sure I would call it a movie. Maybe a war between the antagonist and the movie, as if the antagonist had decided that conventional ways of telling the story weren’t going to end well for him, and so he fought back, changed things around. This isn’t really a movie at all, actually. There’s something else happening up on the screen, and sometimes the movie characters seem to be on the verge of realizing, to their shock and dismay, that they are in a movie. At the end, Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff seems to have woken up from a dream – and he does talk about dreams – and not understand how he came to this point in the movie. ...
Via boingboing, I found a great LA Weekly profile of Devo co-founder Mark Motherbaugh’s turn from New Wave post-punk icon to noted, “quirky”, soundtrack and jingle writer for his omni-art creative emporium, ‘Mutato’. That swept me back thirty years to those dusty shelves in the back of the Uxbridge Free Public Library’s fiction stacks, and “The Metallic Muse”, a collection of wonderful stories by the writer with the weird name, Lloyd Biggle Jr. You don’t hear much about him anymore. I don’t think I ever found even one other person who had ever even heard of him until I saw Orson Scott Card do a reading at a Baycon one year, and he mentioned how Biggle’s story “Tunesmith” got him into SF as a kid. (And he would later do a double-book with his story “Eye for an Eye” on one side, and Biggle’s “Tunesmith” on the other). ...
Today’s XKCD is about my favorite programming language:
I have this weird idea that if I’ve ever driven somewhere once, I’ll always be able to find my way there again, no maps needed. This is how we missed the first fifteen minutes of Jethro Tull last night. That’s fifteen minutes I would much rather have spent in the audience, because every moment there… was magical. My son asked how old these guys were, before we went. “Old,” I said. “Not my fault I grew up in the 70s…” ...
It’s been months since I bought the tickets, and I have to remember that tomorrow is December 1st, and the Jethro Tull concert down in Wallingford. I keep forgetting. Must remember. I hope they let me take my camera in. Tull will be accompanied by the Calliandra String Quartet. That made me a little nervous – until I read this wonderful review of the show yesterday in Albany. That’s pretty frickin’ amazing. They play yesterday, get reviewed, review goes up on the web site, so I know the show tomorrow is going to be fantastic. ...
Yeah, we’re turning it up to ten and a half. That’s Drew on bass, Genj on lead guitar, Jazz on lead vocals and me, I’m the drummer. I look like Genj, but taller. See, we had it easy. And by that I mean, we were cruising along where everyone was on “easy” (I was on vocals; I think I may have dared to stretch to “medium”.) And after awhile, we were getting no more fans. Too set in our ways. From city to city, always the same songs, hoping the van wouldn’t break down… ...
Today, the dentist finished off my root canal, the first snow of the season fell here in Connecticut, and, oh yeah, Rock Band came out. My son there is the drummer!
Rock Band is definitely the most expensive single game I have ever bought. The game itself costs $180 or so, requires (at release) a PS3 or an XBox 360, only comes with one guitar controller… I know this game is going to be great, but I’m getting a little queazy at the bill so far. First, the tortuous decision about which third gen console to buy, considering we already had a Wii. The Wii port isn’t coming out until next year, and won’t support online play – so that was out. ...