December 2008 Archives

Best xkcd comic ever.

How did I miss this the first time around?

An article in the New York Times today discusses the rising popularity of ebook readers, a subject of some interest to me. I own a Sony Reader and recently have been reading a number of books on my iPhone using eReader. I love paper books, and still prefer them in some ways -- the way that every electronic book looks basically the same, whether you're reading Twilight or The Predator State, bugs me (yes, you can change the display settings, but I want a designer to do it for me!). On the other hand, I always have my phone on me, and when I'm trapped on a crowded BART train, I love the fact that I can read with one hand while clinging to a strap with the other. Not easy to do with a regular book, even a paperback.

There are obvious drawbacks, such as proprietary formats that can't be read on other systems, high prices, and the fact that you can't really lend your book to someone else when you're done. Case in point: the App Store now features Christopher Paolini's latest fantasy novel, Brisinger, for sale at the low, low price of $27.99. The paper version? You can get it for $16.00 at Amazon. But then I guess you wouldn't get all the nifty features like "natural book-like reading experience with full pagination... includes cover art, front matter, running heads and page numbers..." And you can lend it to your friends as long as you hand over your iPhone along with it! Ridiculous. (They do, however, have my current obsession, Twilight, on sale for the more reasonable price of $10.99.)

Still, I do find myself turning to ebooks more and more. Certain categories of books, like current events/politics, that go out of date quickly, I may read on my phone instead of on paper. (Really I should get them out of the library, but I somehow never manage to get there...) And I am racing through Twilight on my phone. I almost forget the format -- the screen almost "disappears." Which is the point, isn't it?

For more intelligent musings on this area of technology than I'm able to provide, I recommend  teleread.org/blog.

This summer, I was on a British Airways flight to France where they handed out snack boxes an hour or two before landing. I blearily opened the box and found the following inside the lid:

In case you can't read it, it says:

The first production of a croissant dates back to 1683. That year, Austria was under siege by the Turkish Empire. In Vienna, the Turkish assailant found that time was slipping past and decided to dig an underground tunnel to enter the city.

The bakers were thanked and they decided to make bread in the shape of a crescent moon (symbol of the Turkish flag) and the croissant was born. 100 years later, Marie Antoinette (Austrian Princess who married Louis XVI) introduced the croissant to the French Aristocrats.

It was only at the start of this century that the butter puff croissant was created, and became the French national product in 1920. Now the croissant is one of the most famous breakfast items in France & the rest of the world.

It looks like English, it sounds like English, and yet after reading it over repeatedly I still cannot understand it. What was Vienna's problem that they could not resist a lone Turkish assailant? Could the inhabitants not have just bopped him over the head and taken his shovel from him? What was the role of the bakers? What were they being thanked for? What prompted them to suddenly make crescent-shaped bread? Is it possible they were "spanked" rather than "thanked"? How did the croissant become the "French national product" in 1920? What was the French national product in 1919? (Guess it beats the French national product of 1789, the guillotine...)

Oh, and what's with the random capitalization? And starting a sentence with "100" instead of "One hundred"? Come on, British Airways, your country invented English. Have some standards!

And now, I want to go eat a croissant. Humph.

I'm noticing several ads I've seen recently really rub me the wrong way.

One is the San Francisco Chronicle's campaign: "It's your Chronicle... and it's all about you." Really? It covers important facts like my toddler keeps waking up at 6 a.m., and the skin on my left heel keeps cracking badly in the winter? Because those are the LAST things I want to think about. Honestly, I'd rather learn more about, oh, I don't know, important topics of the day, locally, nationally and internationally. Dear Abby's good too. Are we Californians really so self-centered that we need our newspapers to prop up our fragile sense that we are the most important people in our world?

Then there's Burger King's new "One World, One Whopper" campaign. Ominous Orwellian overtones. But how does it taste? Ah, there's the "Whopper Virgins" ad and website, in which innocent third-world denizens who have never before tasted a burger take a bite and declare that it's the most amazing thing ever and that they will happily discard their far healthier native diets for a shortened lifespan with a side of obesity. Hold the onions.

There are others that I can't think of right now that are equally irritating, and I don't even watch a lot of TV so that's probably the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, I am very fond of the "White Gold" ad by the Milk Council. So maybe my advertising tastes are not those of the general public. Who knows?

Honestly, it was NOT my idea! Plus, I'm now thinking I should rename the blog: "Where the heck was the Secret Service?"

Last night we went to see Jonathan Richman at the Great American Music Hall. I was excited to see him, less excited that there was an opening act, some group called the Felix Dukes I'd never heard of. Oh dear. You see, when I first saw him in concert, sometime in the early to mid-nineties, the opener was a band called Daisy Spot, whom my friend Kimberly and I mutually found quite loathesome. (We still have horrible memories of the lead vocalist singing "Sil-ly Bil-ly. Sil-ly Bil-ly" over and over.)

So when I heard the first tentative notes on the guitar, I thought, "Oh no. Here we go again." Then suddenly there was a blast of power chords, and the band launched into a set of power pop that made me think of Weezer and Franz Ferdinand and early 80s New Wave, but managing not to sound exactly like anybody else either. Every song was tight and insanely catchy. A very pleasant surprise. So I went home and Googled them. They don't seem to have any music on Emusic yet, but they do have some songs available for streaming onine, which is what I'm listening to as I type this.

And then their set ended, and Jonathan Richman arrived, and he was as great as I hoped. (And I'm shocked that he's now 57 — he's still very high-energy. Not that 57 is ancient or anything, but I still can't help but think he must have a picture of himself aging badly in his attic.) He did make one major concession to the fact that he's no longer in his 20s with his closing number, a melancholy song about watching his mother fade away and die in bed.

The one sour note was in an otherwise sweet song about how people shouldn't be afraid to live their lives and feel bad, when he basically criticized taking antidepressants, namechecking Zoloft. Like many people, he assumes that depression = feeling deeply, when for many people, it just means feeling numb, or worse.

Oh well, maybe it's just a generational thing. Back in his day and all...

...but I didn't until tonight.