November 2007 Archives

When I first heard about Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, last week, I was pretty excited. Yeah, it’s pricey, at $400, but the idea of being able to read not just books but newspapers and blogs wirelessly and comfortably really appeals to me, as does the idea of being able to carry around a lot of reading material in a small package. (As a subway rider who hauls around a lot of crap with me every day, this can be a matter of some concern. If I’ve got only a few chapters left in a book, do I take it with me on my trip plus something else to read when I finish that -- which means carrying around an extra book all day -- or do I put the almost-done book aside to finish later and just start on a new book? Truly, this is a dilemma of literary proportions.)

Over at FlickFilosopher.com, we’re having quite a spirited discussion about the ending of the new Stephen King/Frank Darabont movie The Mist, and whether it’s too random and too cynical. In the comments section, I wondered whether the ultimate message of the movie might be:

Life is a series of random events over which we have little control, so the best plan is do the best you can based on the information you have, and to take what action you can, as long as you don’t expect lollipops and ponies at the end of a rainbow as the result of 100 percent of your actions...

Remember those way-cool Choose Your Own Adventure books that were so much fun when we were kids? (Scholastic is still publishing them.) They were the original text adventure videogames, weren’t they? Well, someone has combined CYOA with chick lit to come up with the first CYOA book for grownups... or at least for women who think Bridget Jones is a grownup.

Pretty Little Mistakes is called “A Do-Over Novel,” and it was already in its seventh printing six weeks ago, after being published in May. From the review in Publishers Weekly (found on the book’s Amazon page):

Looks like I picked the wrong month to quit sniffing glue: Three and a half weeks after my cat Sam died, I had to euthanize my parakeets Celery and Snowbird. Last Wednesday night I came home to find both of them in egg-laying distress. Celery had suffered a prolapsed oviduct, for which little can realistically be done, and Snowbird was eggbound, meaning an egg was stuck in her body that she couldn’t lay. Both problems are common to parakeets, apparently, and typically result from an overproduction of eggs, which overstresses their tiny bodies... and there’s not much that can be done about that, either.

I took this video last month. That’s Loreena McKennitt in the background, whom they’d never heard before, and loved:

It’s just me and Cassie the cat now. I’ve been ready for her to go for at least a year now, and ironically, she’s the only animal left with me. I’m still expecting her to go at any moment -- she’s very old and very frail -- but who knows? She may hang on for another five years.

More pop-culture evidence of a shift in generational priorities: the movie Holly. Xer icon Ron Livingston has gone, in the space of less than a decade, from the “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care” of Office Space to caring very much indeed, maybe too much for his own good, in Holly, as a slacker American abroad in Cambodia who finds himself unable to not try to save a child prostitute from the horrible life ahead of her.

I find that shift fascinating...

(I interviewed Ron recently; read some of that here. [There’s more to come, including his thoughts on the phenomenon of Office Space.] And more on Holly is here.)

(Technorati tags: Ron Livingston, Office Space, Holly)

Whoa. If you want to see a brilliant illustration of Strauss and Howe’s description of how the generations will line up in the upcoming -- or already-here -- crisis, check out the new movie Lions for Lambs (which I’ve reviewed here). Briefly: