Books

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever! has seen some changes down through the years, as seen in this Flickr gallery. The best part is that they added more girls, but did so by adding bows to heads and flowers to clothes. And let’s not forget nearsighted cats. :) Did they really have to change the caption “He comes promptly when he is called to breakfast” to “He goes to the kitchen to eat his breakfast”? Perhaps children in 1963 could count on being called for breakfast, while children in 1991 were counted on to make their own. ...

It was a very good ending to the series, and the next-to-last page sucker-punched me. :cry: AND NOW, A SPOILER: They’re all hobbits. ;)

The blog Girlfriend ‘07 lists ten fictional women who make it difficult to date real women: Hollywood has a tendency to create female characters who make it nearly impossible to ever be truly satisfied with real women. Because not only do these women tend to be beyond beautiful on the outside, but they’re always unbelievable on the inside too. They’re cool. They’re fun. They always know what to say. And they always have that one little thing that makes you fall in love with them. Maybe it’s because they usually have guys writing their lines and making them perfect, but either way they’re a tough act to follow. ...

Rumor has it that Sam Raimi plans to direct a movie featuring Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Avenger. Please, please, please let it be true! :)

One of our traditions is to not spend Thanksgiving with family…well, except for the family comprised of my wife and myself. It got started when we first got together and decided instead of trading off the Thanksgiving holiday between our families we were going to take advantage of a long weekend and go on trips ourselves. We see our families pretty regularly anyway, so no one worries about it. I think it’s seen as just one of our quirks. ...

When I run across interesting things to link from my blog, I usually send them to my Gmail account with the best intentions of blogging about them “when I get some time.” Well, that doesn’t happen as often as it should, so I’ll clear out a few items now: 5 Lamest Charlie Brown Cartoons - 10 Zen Monkeys covers the five worst Peanuts animated specials. I can’t agree with the inclusion of Snoopy, Come Home, though. Link courtesy of TV Squad. ...

I guess I’m too sheltered. I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as a library cat, much less that they had their own map. Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

Strange Horizons comments on utopian/dystopian ideas through the centuries: The Ten Stupidest Utopias! The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books,” wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. “How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!” The Ten Sexiest Dystopias! Roll down your window: see the metaphors go by. There’s Zhora the replicant, smashing through plate glass windows; there’s Jake lost in Chinatown, and Tod Hackett running through Hollywood, bloody faced, chased by a mob. “Los Angeles is probably the most mediated town in America,” writes Michael Sorkin, “nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.” ...

Lorrie clued me into this one. Who Reads What? is a collection of relatively famous people talking about the books they like, going back to 1988. Interesting and eclectic group, currently ranging alphabetically from Bella Abzug to Barry Zito.

I haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat. However, if these are actual lines from the book, I may need to, just for the experience: As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.” What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat! ...