I got a package in the mail!

Actually, it came yesterday, but I wanted to wait til today to open it. Today's my icky wedding anniversary.

Not my good one. That's in July. My icky one was my first one, a sort of tragic dress rehearsal for my current wedded bliss.

The package has 4 lovely children's books. Really nice ones!

What a nice box of warm to enjoy on a day that has such lousy memories for me.

Thanks, Melankalia/Pamela!! :-D And I LOVE what you did with the box.

 

Joss Whedon's at it again...

So on Wednesday I finished a book I picked up on Tuesday. A nice, thick adventure/suspense book: The Book of Fate. Brad Meltzner sounded familiar, I was sure I'd seen his books on other shelves.

While that's likely enough, where I've seen his name at home is on the cover of DC's The Justice League comic books. This novelist has dipped his talented toes into the exciting world of serial stories. (MORE than his toes; his heart is chasing the dream of saving Superman's house in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland.)

He's good, too.

So, (again, because I know I began the post with "so",) to my amazement, our local NPR station has a local arts and culture program every weekday at noon, and on the same Wednesday as the morning I finished The Book of Fate, who do you think they were interviewing??? That last link is the podcast of the entire Around Noon show; don't freak! The interview with Brad Meltzer is the very first thing.

Fateful, indeed.

His new book is called The Book of Lies. He recommends that you listen to Mars from Holst's suite The Planets while reading. Not that the plot demands it, but hey! If you have an author recommending a soundtrack for his work, aren't you just a little curious to see how it goes along with the book? I think that's kinda cool.

Here's something else that's cool.



I love LOVE seeing Joss Whedon not only being cited as an "Authority," but the way they credit his authority-ness. Brian K. Vaughn, too.

Now, if you need me, I'll just be getting back to searching for Tooth Fairy cash. You know, it's not just bed pillows you should look under...

 

Hot Reads: What Would MacGyver Do?

What surprises me is that the book isn't *THICKER*.

A Random Book Cover on Mike's Kindle!

...whether we wanted Bantam or Penguin or Knopf or...

Book geek humor!

 

Hottest. Thing. EVER.

This is Mike's Kindle. I want one. I've heard and heard about them. Never seen one in person til now. Very VERY cool, not just because I got my first glimpse of Slaughterhouse Five on it, ether. (I know; that's something I need to change, and fast. I was quite drawn in by what I read.)

It's a must-have geek machine.

 

"Roads go ever ever on, ..."

"... Over rock and under tree
By caves where never sun has shown,
By streams that never find the sea:

Over snow by winter sown,
And through the mery flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon,

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known."

--J.R.R.Tolkien, The Hobbit

I hope you'll indulge the whim. The windingness of the path just seemed to fit.

 

Blade Runner: The Final Cut...

Some of Ridley Scott's finest cinematic hours have been tweaked, spit-shined, picked clean of lint, and are being reissued today. I have always admired the way he made the images of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968, leap off the pages. Casting was quirky and precicely right. Just marvelous eye candy. It all made me feel that I was truly there, in 2021, post-apocalyptic Earth, triaged among the masses too radiation-sick to depart for ('escape to', really) colonies on healthier planets.

If you haven't read the book, you must. This is one of those rare movies that actually followed the movie faithfully, and did so without rabid hordes of followers threatening to leave their parents' basements in a pasty-white, blubbery, blinking-in-the-sunlight rebellion to pressure the director and writer into submission waving dog-eared copies of (TITLES OMITTED, you -- we -- know who you -- we -- are.). Plus, it's classic Philip K. Dick. If you're into paranoid sci-fi, no one did it better. He is (along with Ray Bradbury; I have to name the two together) one of my all-time favorites.

I resent, however, this being almost 2008, that I am still without my flying car. I love my VW Golf; I just want it to be designed to go airborne on purpose.

If it's the final cut, are they done with the cars? Can I have one?

You know, I'd be content to settle for this DVD under the tree, and give the flying cars a miss. I'm gonna bet those cars have awful emissions.