Constant Reader Closes a Chapter

Blogger has lost all the archives of this site. All of them. And not once, but twice.

I've had enough, and am moving over to LiveJournal as "the_monkey_king" from here on out. At the moment, the LJ site is pretty darn ugly, but I'll fix it up in the next week or so. The nice thing about LJ is that it allows anyone to reply with comments, and it is more tightly interlinked with other people's LJs.

Oh, but to preserve some shred of continuity, I'm keeping the hedgehog.

Keyes Update

It turns out that Greg Keyes Briar King, mentioned here last week, is already available, but only as an ebook. For $20 less than the hardcover. I am ready to buy it in that format, but Shelly has suddenly seen the light on the road to Damascus, and now wants to buy it in hardcover (this afer we've dumped 200 books for sale online and at Magus Used Books and Half Price Books...). Anyway, I think it's great that it's available in this format.

Fandom Unleashed in All Its FURY

I can't really describe this one, but if you ever wondered what LOTR would have looked like written by Dr. Seuss, "Straight Dope" Cecil, John Milton, or Mary Poppins, here's your chance. Okay, I can't resist posting just one, the George Orwell version of the ring poem:

'All rings of power are equal,
But some rings of power are more equal than others.'

If Only I Had Known

Seattle has finally instituted what seems like a patently obvious requirement for any northerly city with a Scandinavian heritage: a Polar Bear Swim. I can still remember my dip into a pool of glacial run-off with my sister many years ago. Instant chill, I think I stayed in for about 1 minute. But it was fun. And the Seattle version has water at a balmy 46° F.

Next year, I'm going in. Coated in whale blubber for insulation.

Cliches of 2002

Since I'm sick to death of lists and top 10s, I'm pointing out one that's actually worthwhile: a college-compiled list of the most overused, worthless, inane cliches and slogans of the past year. CNN has a short article on it; it's got a couple of great editorial bugaboos, such as "untimely death" and "That said" as well as terms we're all just sick of, such as "Now, more than ever."

Or to put it another way: "That said, now more than ever we'll make no mistake about it. It's an extreme material breach of homeland security, and any mental mistake could lead to untimely death." ARGH!

Another Wacky Inventor

Another lone inventor, like the Tornado in a Can guy. This one is a fellow in Seattle claiming to offer a device that gets 50 MPG for a 1974 Lincoln Town Car, is reported in the Seattle P-Intelligencer. No proof of his claims, but he says he's filing patents (and has been for 8 years!). Sigh. I'm such a sucker for these kind of stories, though they never turn out well. This one seems especially tailor-made for our current catastrophes-in-the-making.

Christmas Eve Book Exchange Party

This year we decided to do something a little different for Christmas Eve (when we usually exchange presents among the family). This year, we invited over our friends and neighbors to share spiced cider, wine, and desserts — and to exchange a few books from our shelves. We had a huge number of titles pass through the exchange table, from nonfiction political stuff (like Stupid White Men) to SF (Monkey Brain Sushi) to biography (Molly Brown). People brought old favorites, review copies, dog-eared paperbacks, even videos and comic collections. For a while, it seemed as if our plan might backfire, with folks bringing books but not taking something home as well. Fortunately, I think it was just a matter of waiting for the best selection, as it was clearly a huge success. I saw people pleased to carry off Perdido Street Station , Neverending Story , Buffy video tapes, The Player, and many more.

It's nice to see that our friends have such good taste, and are such bookish people. Myself, I'm delighted that someone brought a copy of Sheri S. Tepper's The Family Tree and a Southern book called Joe. Seems like we should have enough reading to get through the winter.

New Job

I accepted an offer at a different department at Microsoft today, working on editing one of the big internal web sites. It's getting away from the bleeding edge, which is both good (no more buggy alpha code) and bad (no more buggy alpha code).

Whether I kick myself or congratulate myself in six months remains to be seen. Either way, I'm out of the program management gig that caused me such stress and heartache over the last year. Editing work makes me much happier.