What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Several Books of Genre Interest Reviewed Haphazardly, But Mostly Positively, Several Months Late: A Preview

It's no secret that my book-reviewing here has been in an extended slump for the last six months or so. (Though the amusing thing to me is, as I poke through my archives, is that the one consistent theme of this blog is that I'm always behind in writing about the books I've read and that I'm never happy with what I write about books I like. So this is an extreme case, but it's also the standard.)

Since I'm on vacation this week, I'm going to try to clean up the backlog, which will solve one problem. The other one -- motivation -- is trickier; as my job has gotten more difficult and complicated and taken more of my attention and mental energy, I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking deeply about things I've read. (And then I read less, and drift farther away from the SFF world, and feel worse about that, and start moaning that I'll die still selling crap to accountants.)

There's no reason any of you should care about any of that.

For that matter, there's no reason why I should bother to keep typing things like that; I know what the problems are, and my complaints don't help. But whining is one of the great human pastimes, and I'm not immune to its charms.

Anyway: I've written a couple of reviews already (they originally were all going to go into this post, until I thought better of it), and I hope to do more. Right now, I'm planning to space them out once a day. We'll see what actually happens, as it happens.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/11

If there are any Antick Musings Kremlinologists -- and what a sad and odd idea that is -- they will  have noticed that this post did not appear early this morning, when it was supposed to.

I do have an explanation, though not a good one: I spent all day Sunday (the day I usually write these posts) getting down to my employer's gala Global Meeting down in Miami, and spent pretty much all day Saturday pre-empting that lost Mother's Day and preparing for the trip.

There is a pile of books I should have written about, and there certainly was enough time on Saturday to write something if I'd really wanted to. But they'll still be there when I get back on Friday, and I'll either update this post then or just roll them into next week's post.

So this is just an "I aten't dead" post. I am, instead of being dead in a ditch somewhere, on the 13th floor of a reasonably posh hotel on the water in a subtropical city, in the middle of four very long days of meetings, schmoozing, and other things that I dislike nearly as much as those. I will be back here, eventually.

How My Mind Works

I wonder if I'm the only who reads things like this amusing anecdote from Not Always Right and immediately tries to figure out what the unnamed "special effects show, experienced in the form of a walking, guided tour" in a theme park in Orlando could be.

Surely there must be other people who immediately want to know, right?

(And it's got to be Poseidon's Fury, right?)

A Sad Realization

I am not, by temperament, an "idea person."

What I am, if I'm not careful about it, is the person who tells you exactly why your idea sucks.

This is not quite as useful as you might think in a corporate setting.

Magical Thinking and the Modern World

I just had to re-connect Excel to the local printer; when I went to print a document, I got an error. So I pushed the "connect to printer" button. That didn't work. I pushed it again. A slightly different error, but still no connection. One more push, and the printer was re-connected.

And now I wonder if we moderns are training ourselves to be more susceptible to magical thinking than people living with more obviously mechanistic technology. We turn USB drives over three times before they finally insert, we ritually unplug and plug, turn off and on, and repeatedly hard-restart devices that operate in ways we really don't understand.

We just know the rituals -- if the computer freezes up, try this key combination, then that one, and finally hold down the button if you have to. (And make sure you never let the magic black smoke out of the box; that means it's broken for good.) We know what works, eventually -- but we often have to do the same thing several times, or work down an opaque list of odd button combinations before something does work. But we never get a good sense of the connection between what we did and what happened.

I have no solution for this; I'm just another person who has only a slight, foggy notion of how a computer chip works. But, as those chips, and the rituals that make them work, become ever smaller and ever more embedded in all of the things we touch, this will happen more and more.

What happens when your hoodie has a color-changing chip in it, but that chip will only turn from black to red when you zip and unzip twice quickly? Or your shoes keep losing track of your total distance walked unless you whack the heels together three times? What kind of a world will we have then, and what stories will we tell each other to explain our devices?

What Flashed Through My Brain Just Now

This sentence, in the voice of whoever originally said it (Google is no help):

It's hard to dance on the bodies of your dead friends!

My first thought is GWAR, but I don't think I ever actually saw them -- they played Vassar when I was there, but I was doing security outside.

Perhaps it's a movie quote.

It's disconcerting to hit the age when your brain, like your closets, has things in it that you don't remember putting there.

The Devil Is a Railroad Car

Every so often, I post things here mostly as a record, in case I wonder about them later. This is one of those occasions, so be warned.

Before Sandy, last year's major East Coast hurricane (not to be confused with Irene, the year before last's major East Coast hurricane), my train schedule looked like this:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 7:03, arrive Hoboken 7:55 (52 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:27, arrive Lincoln Park 5:20 (53 minutes)

And the world was bright and gay and happy.

After things settled down, more or less, after the storm, this is what I got:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 6:56, arrive Hoboken 8:05 (69 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:26, arrive Lincoln Park 5:25 (59 minutes)

There's finally a new official train schedule -- everything else since the storm has been PDFs printed off the website, not the usual printed booklet -- starting on Monday, with the following itinerary:

Morning:
depart Lincoln Park 6:51, arrive Hoboken 7:55 (64 minutes)
Evening:
depart Hoboken 4:30, arrive Lincoln Park 5:33 (63 minutes)

The time actually on the train is roughly a wash -- 127 minutes instead of 128 -- though that's still twenty minutes longer than it was six months ago. But the total length of day keeps growing, with a train now twelve minutes earlier in the morning and thirteen minutes later in the evening.

On the bright side, I do get an extra ten minutes a day to spend in the office, and three minutes more than I used to have back in the good 'ol days.

I Am Not at Lunacon

If you're at Lunacon, and looking for me, there's a reason why you can't find me: I'm not there.

I've only missed a couple of Lunacons over the past twenty years -- one because my older son was busy being born, and maybe one other time -- but this year it just didn't work out. Thing 1's birthday (alluded to above) is tomorrow, and he's enmeshed in the last practices for the big high school musical (The Music Man -- see it next weekend at Pompton Lakes High!) every day. Thing 2 is camping this weekend. And I didn't remember to get a table in the Dealer's Room in time, and also punted on the program questionnaire -- because, when I looked at it, with a section under each panel description headed "tell us why you should be on this panel," I couldn't think of a single reason for any of them.

So maybe next year. 

Traveling by Map

I'm probably the only one who uses Google Maps to create completely implausible journeys, right?

What I mostly try to do is concoct the longest trip possible, and I think I've got a new high score -- walking directions from "Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa" to "Mataram, Indonesia." Total of 18,120 miles.

For those who like cheating, Google currently has a glitch (or hack, or feature -- take your pick) that allows "kayak across the Pacific" from the US West Coast, so I also worked out a trip from St. John's in Newfoundland to the furthest point in China I could find. (The cross-Pacific hack works for locations in China, but not for anything further West -- I tried to use Beijing as the mid-point of a Kansas City-to-London trip, and Google denied me.)

Oh, like your hobbies are so productive!

Incoming Books: December 20

Today was the beginning of my holiday vacation, and that means one thing: last minute panicked shopping! I did manage to get a couple of things for The Wife, but the primary goal of today's big trip -- to hit the Union Square Holiday Market and buy artisanal something-or-others for various people that need gifts -- was only successful in a very minor way.

Luckily, there was a secondary goal for that big trip -- visiting Forbidden Planet and the Strand, both just down the block from Union Square -- and that was entirely successful; I found several books for my sons and the following towering stack for myself:

Spleenal by Nigel Auchterlounie -- a collection of comics from the blog of the same name (which is also the name of the title character, who is not nearly as autobiographical as he started out). Auchterlounie has a distinct, quirky cartoony art style and an amusingly slanted view, and I keep hoping he's going to get so famous that everyone will remember how to spell his name. This is, I think, his only book-really-printed-on-paper, and it's difficult to find in the US (Auchterlounie is British). But I saw Spleenal on a shelf for the first time ever today, and now It Is Mine.

Nexus Archives, Vol. 5 by Mike Baron and Steve Rude -- one of my favorite people-took-great-pains-to-point-out-the-vanishingly-tiny-ways-it-wasn't-a-superhero comics from the '80s and '90s, which has been reprinted in a series of classy hardcovers that I keep thinking I need to collect and read. This one was shopworn and cheap, and now I have three of the series, which is a start.

The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell -- Bell is one of the best of the current crop of autobio cartoonists; she does stories on her own website and for various publications. This is her new book, full of comics stories I haven't read yet.

Heavy Liquid by Paul Pope -- I had mostly forgotten that I already read this (during my Eisner-judging frenzy in early 2009), but I haven't kept up with Pope's work the way I wanted to. (I started reading THB, his big Martian series, about the first time it went on extended hiatus.)

The Infinite Wait by Julia Wertz -- Wertz is another autobio cartoonist, much rawer and down in the muck than Bell -- more solidly in that ol' Crumb tradition, in other words -- who originally published her work online under the title The Fart Party. (She's since moved away from that title, and the perceived juvenility of it.) This book has three stories from Wertz's life, in her usual loose, almost primitivist style. (Wertz is probably the only autobio cartoonist to draw herself less attractive than she actually is.)

Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 -- This is part of a massive Library of America series that looks to reprint all of Roth's work in those wonderful little green cloth books in their matching tan slipcases. I already have a couple of them, and I have periodic wishes to read all of Roth, so I'd better have as many of his books on hand as possible. Besides, this has The Great American Novel in it, and I've got at least three reasons to want to read that.

The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves -- One of the great bawdy, crazy, supernatural, bizarre classics, as translated by one of the best writers of the 20th century; I think I had a copy of this before the flood, so it's time to replenish.

Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company by Roy Morris, Jr. -- This is the standard biography of Bierce for this generation, and Bierce is probably my favorite American writer. (I had an older Bierce bio sitting on the shelves unread at the time of the flood -- I think Richard O'Connor's late-60s take.)

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum -- I might have heard of this in passing before, but I picked it up because of the title and cover (yes, all of those people who claim that covers do not influence their decisions are lying -- possibly to themselves, but definitely lying). It's the non-fictional tale of how poisoning stopped being such an easy way to kill people around 1920 in New York when science (and some particular forensic scientists) caught up to human ingenuity, not for the first or last time.

Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins -- The first major non-fiction book by the author of Not Even Wrong, The Trouble With Tom, The Book of William, and Sixpence House, which I finally found in person after years of looking vaguely for it. (I also see that Collins had a new book last year, The Murder of the Century, which I missed entirely.) It consists of biographical portraits of thirteen men and women, all of whom failed at the great work of their lives.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household -- I'm pretty sure I've been recommended this book several times (though I also keep mixing it up with Rogue Herries, which other than one word is apparently nothing like it): it's a thriller from just before WWII, told in what seems to be a very cold and distanced manner by a first-person narrator who nearly dies on page 2.

Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz -- I had this book before the flood; in fact, I had this very edition (trade paperback with all the eyeballs) before the flood. And, since I finally read the first book (and really liked it), I might just get to this one sometime soon.

Worst Laid Plans edited by Alexandra Lydon & Laura Kindred -- A collection of short, funny stories about bad sex, which originated as a comedy show, by a whole bunch of people (mostly women, and mostly using what seems to be their real names). If I didn't have two teen/tween boys in the house, this would be an awesome bathroom book, but I guess I'll find some other way to read it.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Maculay -- I have the sense that every literary person two generations older than me has read this book, and hardly anyone at all since then. That's an interesting phenomenon, no matter the actual merits of the book, so I snatched up this nice New York Review Books edition.

Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman -- I was a big fan of the original Anno Dracula (an alternate-historical vampire novel in which pretty much every 19th century fictional vampire appeared -- it's from 1992, and so predated both the ongoing vampire boom and Alan Moore's multiple projects doing pretty much exactly the same thing), but I somehow missed this third book in the series the first time around (in 1998). But the wonderful thing about books is that it's never too late to read any of them.

Wish You Were Here by Stewart O'Nan -- I had a copy of this pre-flood, and I want to read it before I read O'Nan's Emily, Alone (which is a sequel to WYWH), so I clearly had to buy it today.

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike -- Somehow, someday, I will read some Updike; I feel weird admitting that I still haven't touched any of his work yet. Maybe this smallish omnibus of four books about a Rothian literary writer will do it.

Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett -- This is supposed to be very funny, and very inside-publishing, and I had a copy of it before the flood (which, I think, I got free, back in those halcyon bookclub days when the books flowed like water).

The Girl in Blue and Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse -- I had about three shelves full of the Overlook editions of Wodehouse pre-flood, and I definitely need to replace and complete that set. So I buy a couple whenever I get a chance. These are two minor Wodehouse books, true, but they're also two Wodehouse books I've never read, which is pretty good.

Something I Should Remember, But Never Do

It doesn't pay to buy cheap used books from Amazon, because the sellers there have no sense of condition. And every single "great deal" I've gotten on a "Very Good" or "Like New" book inevitably turns out to be an ex-library copy with stamps and stickers everywhere.

Case in point -- I'm trying to rebuild my Love & Rockets library, this time with the fat paperbacks. And a recent Amazon order included what was supposed to be a "Very Good" copy of The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second collection of Jaime stories. What I got was, instead, a mildly foxed and over-stickered (bar code on the front cover with marker scribble over it! two stickers on the back cover that don't come off! stickers on the spine with the title pasted right over the actual title printed on the spine!) reading copy that the Denver library tossed aside recently.

So, if you're like me, and looking for book bargains, do not, under any circumstances, give in the the siren song of Amazon. They're fine at shipping brand-new stuff, and they can zap electrons around like nobody's business, but used books requires a human being's eye and discrimination, not Big Data and massive warehouses, and so they do not do that particular thing with any great facility.

(And, he added with a fine eye for irony, look out for a post or two in the very near future with lots of Amazon links for you to use to buy things!)

(Further parenthetical thought: I also got a copy of Shannon Wheeler's I Thought You Would Be Funnier, Stephan Pastis's Pearls Freaks the #*%# Out, and a Rick Riordan fantasy novel for Thing 2, my younger son. This concludes the ritual Announcement of the Incoming Books.)

Like a Hurricane

To make this short and sweet: the Wheeler household came through Hurricane Sandy vastly better than we got through Hurricane Irene last year. The basement is still bone-dry (even after we took almost everything out of it Sat/Sun), and we only lost power for a few hours Monday night.

In fact, if I can believe the newspaper, we're now -- for the first time in our lives -- part of the 1%, since JCP&L, our electricity company, says that 99% of their customers are down right now.

I'm actually getting more work done at home this week than I expected -- I don't have access to a lot of my company's systems, so I can only do some things, but I'm trying to power through as many of those as I can.

Much of the rest of New Jersey is a huge mess, though -- even up in my area, where we didn't flood this time, there are plenty of big trees down and other problems. (And I have no idea when Hoboken will be un-flooded enough for me to actually go to the office and get some desperately needed stuff done before my looming vacation.)

But, if there's anyone out there worried about me, don't. Worry about those other people, like the ones in Little Ferry who got walloped when a tidal surge took out levees in the Meadowlands and swamped the first floors of their houses in minutes. Or most of the Shore, too. They've got it tough this time around.

The Utterly Fantabulous Seventh Anniversary Hoe-Down!

Seven years ago today yesterday, Antick Musings shambled into existence, a training blog to get me in shape to write the official SFBC blog, which I then expected to start very soon thereafter. That official blog didn't start up as quickly as expected, and ended abruptly -- among other things that ended abruptly at exactly the same time -- but Antick Musings soldiers on, if much changed and altered over the years.

For the first few years, especially when I was working for the SFBC and, later, had hopes of getting back into the SFF field, I insisted that Antick Musings wasn't a book-review blog, and didn't post anything critical of any of the SFF books I read. (Of course, as we've seen, even things I think are positive are sometimes taken otherwise by some writers -- writers are of necessity thin-skinned, so I should have anticipated that.) Once it was clear that I was out, and not getting back in, Antick Musings slid in the other direction -- particularly during and after the year-long stint of Book-A-Day in 2010-2011 -- and became almost entirely a book-review blog.

None of that is what I intended or expected, but a blog -- like life -- is what actually happens day-to-day, not what anyone plans or controls. And so I don't want to say what Antick Musings will become, since I simply don't know: it becomes whatever it becomes because of what I think and write, and because of what happens to me in the meantime.

Before I go any further in my navel-gazing, let me give you the inevitable links back to prior anniversary posts: one, two, three, four, six. (Yes, I missed the only milestone anniversary this blog has had so far, which very well illustrates the way I operate: lots of thought and energy and activity, inevitably directed in an unproductive way.)

Post quantity dropped precipitously during Book-A-Day, and hasn't recovered since -- partially because I launched another blog, Editorial Explanations, immediately after Book-A-Day ended, and partially because I seem to have stopped writing lots of short posts the way I used to. I could also try to blame that drop in post count here on my increased Twitter presence -- except I post only sporadically there -- or the Hornswogglets Tumblr, except that's practically a ghost town, with just a few stray posts and lots of roaming tumbleweeds. Whatever the reasons, here are the numbers:

• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Since Antick Musings has turned into primarily a book-review blog, I should link to some of the ones I thought were most successful. This year, though, I'm going to do it with quotes, allowing me to quote myself, which is nearly as disreputable, and precisely as pleasant, as it sounds:

• "Some books need more explanation than others." -- Getting Off by Lawrence Block
• "I'm never entirely sure of my own motives, and instinctively distrust anyone who claims to completely know himself." -- The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux
• "As usual with a mysterious, hidden leader, there are factions that would be quite happy to replace him with a more visible face of Muscovy -- themselves, for example." -- Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick
• "Words are tricky, complicated things -- even the seemingly simple ones." -- Snuff by Terry Pratchett
• "And, when a songwriter comes to write a novel, you'd expect it to be precisely written, shining an intense spotlight on a few moments, a few people, a few carefully-chosen actions." -- Bright's Passage by Josh Ritter
• "It's not a memoir, exactly -- but it's not not a memoir, either, and that deeply Blockian ambivalence to the clean, straight, obvious answer makes this a wonderful book for Block fans." -- Afterthoughts by Lawrence Block
• "It's common to make excuses for the past, to assume that people who lived and died before we did are therefore lesser, limited beings, stunted by not having been born in the obvious high point of all civilization." -- Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley by Floyd Gottfredson
• "A serious story tries not to damage the known laws of physics too seriously; a frivolous one postulates whatever it needs to in order to keep moving forward." -- The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• "The magic in these books has the danger and threat of old fairy tales and worse: touching it once marks a person for life." -- Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly
• "But there's no vengeance to be found in V Is For Vengeance, and a reader may well suspect that Grafton is now just working from a list of Acceptable Mystery Title Words, and writing whatever book she feels like under that title." -- V Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton
• "Perhaps, like my father-in-law -- and like a million other fathers-in-law across this fine nation of ours -- O'Rourke has become one of those men with whom one must never discuss politics." -- Holidays in Heck by P.J. O'Rourke
• "So Boomerang is a quite entertaining, lively little book. But it's also very much like the story of a rape investigation that spends its entire time detailing the minutia of the victim's clothing and behavior on the night of the crime -- it is entirely beside the point." -- Boomerang by Michael Lewis
• "By my own lights, I'm still reading Peter Ackroyd's gigantic mosaic history London -- I have a bookmark in it and everything -- although I haven't touched that book for several years, so my "reading" it is mostly theoretical at this point." -- London Under by Peter Ackroyd
• "You actually are at risk of learning something from an Oatmeal cartoon, which is not the case for most webcomics." -- 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth by The Oatmeal
• "At times, I had the uneasy sense that not only did I know more about Internet porn than these authors, but that I knew more about romance novels than they did." -- A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas
• "And unhappy families breed unhappy people, who again fall into types -- the sullen teenage boy, the cold and controlling mother, the quietly alcoholic father, the introverted anorexic daughter." -- Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme
• "One could say all of those things and more." -- Joe the Barbarian by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy
• "Continuity, these days, is just the name of another dead comics company -- Marvel and DC tell you what the past is today, and they'll tell you differently tomorrow, and if you don't like it, well, where else can you get your stories of Superman and Spider-Man?" -- Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore and various artists
• "They grow up, they live their individual lives -- long or short, as it happens -- they make their ways in the world and think about what they want and need and feel." -- One Soul by Ray Fawkes
• "But don't we all have to provide some value to other people, whatever it is we do for a living?" -- A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz
• "Into every life some frivolity must come, or else we would slit our wrists at the sheer horror of it all." -- Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
• "But if anything could make a Clowes fictional world better, it wouldn't be a Clowes world -- and that is what Andy must learn, like all of Clowes's characters: nothing ever gets better, and the world is a passage of misery and pain, full of jerks, losers, criminals, and creeps." -- The Death-Ray by Dan Clowes
• "Mauldin was systematically dismantling all of his good will and success from the war years by doing the one thing an editorial cartoonist must: fearlessly telling the truth as he sees it, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted." -- Willie & Joe: Back Home by Bill Mauldin
• "That theory is amusing, and would be even more amusing at about 2 AM in some convention party, anytime in the past forty years." -- Redshirts by John Scalzi (which also spawned A Helpful Note) 
• "Fiction that aims at art bends events to fit its conceptions, but pulp doesn't have that luxury: pulp thrives on speed of production and speed of comprehension, so a pulp story can't be too specific or idiosyncratic; it needs to tell the story that the reader expects, and get out of the way." -- Strange Embrace/69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block
• "But it is possible, even within the boyish, flashy confines of historical fantasy, to write about real women leading period-appropriate lives -- and, even more importantly, to have those women both be true to themselves and show their real strength to modern readers." -- Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal
• "It is thoroughly enjoyable and entirely wonderful, and should under no circumstances be left only for teenagers to read." -- Flora's Fury by Ysabeau S. Wilce
• "The greatest test of a travel book is how much it makes the reader want to share that experience, and Theroux -- no matter how much he focuses on the grime, the delays, the petty bureaucratic annoyances, the horrible schedules, the often grinding boredom, the sheer waste of time -- still makes his travels into a hopeful journey of discovery." -- Ghost Train to the Evening Star by Paul Theroux
• "The working world, and the world in general, is not a wonderful, special place full of love and light and happiness, but work -- often unpleasant and always directed by someone else -- full of people that we don't get to choose." -- Freeway by Mark Kalesniko

My love-hate relationship with the status of Antick Musings as a book review blog was the undertone of much of what I wrote this year. (Yes, I do realize it -- it is that obvious.) Probably the most -- possibly only -- interesting bit of that was What a Pile of Books Demanding to Be Reviewed Looks Like.

I used to write about movies here -- hell, I used to see movies regularly, but I've been too busy or anxious or whatever to do more than one a month for a good year now -- but the only real remnant of that this past year is a lone Movie Log post called Catching Up Once Again.

At the end of 2011, as is now traditional, I picked the best books I'd read each month that year, as a pseudo-Top Ten of the year. It's a weird format, but I like weird formats.

Speaking of particular days of the year, I also continued my tradition of rounding up the very particular news announced on the first day of April.

I blogged about music intermittently, talking up songs by The Airborne Toxic Event, Local H, Fountains of Wayne, Mieka Pauley, Cloud Cult, Sleigh Bells, and The Indelicates.

I caved into peer pressure more than once, with such memes as Less Exciting Book Titles and The Weird Questionnaire. I also -- clearly misunderstanding how memes work, and why people do them -- tried to start my own, with the too complicated and smells-like-work Five Quotes.

In the aftermath of last year's flood, I wrote something closer to a real essay than I usually manage: What We Lose, What We Save. I'm still reasonably proud of it.

Every Monday, I had a Reviewing the Mail post to examine -- and, often, to supposedly-humorously interrogate -- the books that had arrived in the prior week's mail.

If you're concerned about your personal brand, I have some words for you. Many of them are unprintable.

I blogged about the various tempests-in-teapots of publishing much less this past year -- perhaps because they all start to look the same, after a while -- but I did write about What Publishers Don't Do, Street Dates and Sales Velocity, Amazon Drops a Big Shoe, Barry Eisler Continues to Shill for Amazon, Stating the Obvious,

I review comics, though I don't do much of the chin-scratching (or hair-tearing, or forked-tonguing) kind of blogging about comics that defines the form on the Internet. This year, my major think-piece in that area was The Myth of the Comics Creator,

Have I mentioned that I hate consultants? Let me point you towards In Which a Lying Liar Lies.

As my sons have grown up, I've spent much less time blogging about the cute little things they do -- partially because tweens don't do cute little things -- but I did actually put up a picture to go along with my thoughts about My Alarmingly Large and Increasingly Grown-Up Son. 

And those are the kinds of things I blogged about this past year -- plus lots and lots more posts listing books, whining about the books that were destroyed, and reviewing books I had semi-recently read. It's a rut, I admit it. And maybe admitting it will let me find a new rut to trample down for a while.

I hope you'll stick around for Year Eight.

The Most Meta Post Yet

Blogger, in its relentless Googleicious quest to make everything as stark and white and difficult to navigate as possible, has made the new design mandatory, as of a couple of days ago.

But it's still ugly, and still more difficult to use, and all of the problems it had before. It's dull and bland and I hates it.

(And now I have a new excuse for not blogging! Yea me!)

Pointless Numbers

Poking through iTunes this afternoon, I found that I've got 4826 songs that I've never [1] listened to, totaling fourteen days and just short of 17 hours. (There's an entire Ring cycle in there, plus a lot of other classical music I was listening to a lot more a decade ago.)

Of course, that still leaves 18,822 songs I have listened to (up to a hundred times, in one case -- iTunes is lovely for someone as obsessed with utterly pointless metrics as I am), so I don't feel too bad.

The good thing about all of that, of course, is that I have no reason at all to get sick of any song or singer any time soon -- I have 847 songs (nearly two and a half days worth) just tagged "depressing."

No, there's no purpose to any of this -- I just like poking at the numbers and decided to share. Hope you're doing something equally as pleasant this fine Saturday.


[1] "Never," here, means "since late 2003, when I had to re-import the entire library after a disk crash." Still, nine years is a long time.

The Things You Remember

The Wife sells things on eBay -- less than she used to, since she's basically been winding down the business for the last year or so -- and, occasionally, she needs to print labels on my computer, since this is the only printer working at the moment.

Tonight, she came down to print a label for Massapequa, New York.

And I said, "Massapequa! Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Lindenhurst, Copaigue, and Babylon! Transfer at Babylon for Oyster Bay!"

(If you don't live on Long Island, or didn't spend years taking a train to Garden City -- actually, the oh-so-bucolic-sounding station Country Life Press -- for meetings at your erstwhile employer, this is probably meaningless to you. But it's something that Doubleday taught me, and something I'll probably never quite forget, as hard as I try.)

Scratching My Head

So, on July 11th (last Wednesday), I placed an order with a certain comics-focused retailer in midtown Manhattan, to be shipped to my house.

Their location is 41 miles away from my home.

On Saturday, July 14th, I got a notification that my items had shipped, and that tracking information would follow quickly.

I actually got the tracking e-mail on July 18th (Wednesday, one week after the order was placed, and three mailing days after it was supposedly shipped). And that notice told me that the package was in Edgewood, NY, which is 69 miles from my house.

Checking the tracking again the next day, on the 19th (Thursday), the package moved to Logan Township, NJ, which is 122 miles from my house.

Now, I admit that I'm no logistics expert, but it seems to me that when you ship a package to someone, it should, at some point, start getting closer to that person. I'm still waiting for that point.

Greetings from High Above the Fabulous Las Vegas Strip!

I just spent the last hour cursing and trying to populate my other blog (Editorial Explanations, check it out regularly...just not right now, since there won't be any new posts until I can get back to a real computer), without much luck. The sticking point is images -- I can't seem to get them into the posts using my iPad, and that's all the computer I brought this time out.

This is deeply frustrating, since I know that I was able to blog -- including images, though the layout got a bit wonky -- last year from my conferences, and I hate to think that I've gotten technologically dumber in the past year. (I'm going to blame software updates, and not my fallible memory, if anyone asks.)

Anyway, I'm here in Las Vegas -- that most quintessentially American city, where everything is larger and flashier than a healthy person would want it to be -- and it, as usual, exacerbates my usual grumpy tendencies. I don't like people much to begin with, and, in Vegas, there are so many loathesome types of people -- ball-capped yahoos, pneumatic young women on the make, dull middle-aged losers on expense accounts, and far more corn-fed god-fearing middle Americans with kids in tow than I would have expected. (Especially in a casino hotel whose room keys promote its topless beach club.) I recognize that this is entirely my problem, but that doesn't actually help much.

The conference went well, as such things go: it's embarassing but wonderful to see how many financial professionals (here at IMA and at other shows, like last week's ACFE) know and respect Wiley as a publisher; they know our name and associate it with authoritative content and useful works, which is a tremendous compliment and goad to live up to those expectations. (Now, if only everyone were buying books the way they were a few years back, everything would be hunky-dory.)

Tomorrow is one of those unfortunate days eaten up entirely by travel that happen when going from left coast to right; my flight isn't until 11-something, so I don't get into JFK airport until nearly 8, so the day will be just about a total loss.

Now, I expect none of you actually care about any of this -- except perhaps my mother, who does read this blog; Hi, Mom! -- but inaction feeds on inaction as action feeds on action, so I want to get my fingers typing into this little Blogger box more often again, and build from there back to something worth reading. (I've got a long essay that's been half-written for nearly year; I need to get back to that, and everything else I want to do.)

I could waste time and space here attempting to be lyrical about the planes taking off from McCarran -- I can see it out of my 31st-floor window -- and the helicopters that similarly never stop buzzing by, and the mountains in the distance, and the city and suburbs bracketed by those landmarks, but I think I've rambled pointlessly long enough. The next blog entry should be from a real computer, back in my home, and, with any luck, it will also have more substance than this one.

I Aten't Dead

I've been scarce here, lately.

I'd like to claim it's through no fault of my own, but I have had free time, which I could have spent in blogging -- I, instead, chose to do other things.

Right now, I'd like to blog about the big stack of books I got at BEA today (combined with the two I grabbed yesterday) -- and I'd also like to write about the books I've been reading over the past few months.

But I just stopped working on work e-mail -- it does pile up, when you spend the day away from it -- and I have to be up tomorrow morning to catch a bus at 6:00, so I think I'm done for the night.

Tomorrow, I start a two-day trip as one of the cohort of chaperones for a horde of 8th graders (my own older son among them), the mass of us descending on Washington DC sometime mid-day. Maybe I'll have time to blog about that when I get back. Maybe not. Either way, there will be something here in the near future...but not incredibly near.