Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
-- Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest writers of all time.
John Steinbeck, born on this day in 1902.

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
-- John Steinbeck –

Have a great Monday!

Salvaged Parts

Today is one of those days where I just want to chill out.
Today the term has a more literal connotation than usual.
It is positively Antarctian outside. My freshly unwound scarf is still glistening with thawed droplets of lung steam. Sweet Lord, I felt like a nameless extra in the movie The March of The Penguins, as I plodded these ten blocks to Starbucks.
But now I am here, a large coffee in front of me, and you are about to become the victim of my musings upon a poem.
I read it for the umpteenth time, just before leaving the warmth of my house, and thought of it as I walked.
It is one of William Stafford’s profound little gems…

Salvaged Parts

Fire took the house. Black bricks
tell how it went. Wild roses
try to say it never happened.

A rock my foot pushed falls
for years down the cellar stairs….
No thanks, no home again for me –

Mine burned before it burned.
A rose pretends, but I always knew:
a rose pretends, a rock tells how it is.

-- © William Stafford --

Isn’t that a great poem?
I encourage you to think about it a bit, before reading on.
_____

Firstly, I think that the poem is not about a house fire.
There are several reasons why I think this, and the rest of my exposition will flesh this out.
Keep in mind, my interpretation is by no means the only one, much less the right one. That is the beauty of poetry. The thing may say something entirely different, to you.
But to me it is about the loss of relationship.

Looking at the first stanza, I see that something happened, and it happened suddenly.
This “something” was rapid and unforgiving. Quick as fire. And as devestating, taking all.
Black bricks / tell how it went. The present vantage point only allows a survey of damage. The former things…. hmmm, how can I say this? There are times when you would prefer something to be invisible, rather than have it appear to you in its remnant form.
What remains is so charred and disfigured that it is not only painful to look upon it, but painful to even turn in its direction while your eyes are closed. Sentimentality is displaced with revulsion. Or worse. Horror.
OK, the wild roses. They “try to say it never happened.”
He [and only for lack of of a genderless pronoun do I arbitrarily use this one] has since tried to do (and think) certain things to salvage something of redemptive value from the experience. Even more importantly, he is not the one that planted these roses. They are wild.
Life itself tried to bring equilibrium, tried to “liven up the landscape a bit” but all to no avail.
Roses are my favorite growing thing. We all know how beautiful they are. But even these of Stafford’s poem cannot undo what the “fire” has done.

A rock my foot pushed falls… I must stop with commenting, take a deep breath, and just ask you to speak [out loud] that portion of the sentence. The way it sounds, is exquisite. The only “hard” sound in the phrase is exactly where it should be. In the word “rock”… the “ck” sound. The rest of it is soft, even wistful. “Fff” – “sh” – “alls”.
Skillful choice of words. Exquisite, really.
What is he doing? Is he standing at the top of a literal staircase and sort of kicking a rock? Perhaps he is. This is entirely possible. But if he is doing this, he is doing so much MORE than this, when he does it.
The point I would make is that at a literal staircase, why would the rock fall “for years down the cellar stairs”?
Years?
That is quite the deep basement, I must say!
My take on it is that he acknowledges that he did something to cause a sort of catastrophe to take place.
He had an active role in it. He pushed it with his foot. And the damage was years in the making. It was the conclusion, the effect, that was sudden.
The next phrase had me a bit baffled, but like a penguin trekking across the ice, I persevered with it, and have managed to come up with an entirely spurious penguinish proposition.
No thanks, no home again for me –
Who is offering him something? Who is he speaking to?
I believe that he is offered something new, he is afforded an opportunity to start over, and he is declining the invitation.
Rebuilding?
No, [he says]... at least not yet.

We come to the last three lines. Again, if we are only discussing the chagrin felt by not replacing those dead batteries in the damn fire alarm, then what are we to make of someone saying [basically] “this place burned down long before it burned down.”
How can a house burn before it burns, unless we are talking about more than a HOUSE?
I think he is saying, “the relationship was over before it ended.”
Years in the making, our “home” was a heap of smoldering rags, waiting to ignite.
A rose pretends, but I always knew:
The bloom looked great for so long, but the dry manure at its roots… death was inevitable.
a rose pretends, a rock tells how it is.
God it tried so hard to be what it wanted to be, what it was meant to be.
_____

The “salvaged parts” [of the title] denote the character’s perception of the elements of himself that are left standing, and these are nothing more than “black bricks”.

Why use the imagery of a fire, and specifically, a house fire?
I think [not experientially, so this is merely unwarranted speculation on my part] that a housefire would be something that a person relives, time and time again.
“If I only had of done this,” OR “If I had only not left the fireplace grate open”… stuff like that.
Torment that is so horrid that it makes mere regret cringe behind a curtain!
That kind of hopeless “reliving” thing is something that comes across to me in this poem, and I believe it is part of what Stafford was going for.
Secondly, I posit that a housefire is employed metaphorically in this poem because of the fact that when fire does its work, it not only consumes everything burnable in its pathway, but it is never finished until it consumes even itself.
Much as the poem’s subject, in his own passionate way, is doing to himself.

There are probably another hundred ways of looking at this poem. 

Mine is by no means the only way.
Again, that is what makes poetry so much fun, in my opinion.

********

Splash du Jour: Friday

"I do things backwards, I get more personal with everything I write. Maybe it's not that it's more personal; I just put it out on the table more. I don't need as elaborate a set. I don't need as many props. I'm not hiding anything."
-- Bestselling Canadian author, Ann-Marie Macdonald –

Speaking of her latest book, the voluminous The Way The Crow Flies, she said:
"The American and Canadian publishers used thinner paper because they were worried that the book was too thick. The Brits don't mind that. They love fat – look what they eat for breakfast."

Have a great Friday!

"Tell me the truth, Doc!"

-- There are more plastic flamingos in the U.S, than real ones!
-- Dolphins sleep with one eye open!
-- The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache on a standard playing card!
-- When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second!
-- A Boeing 747 airliner holds 57,285 gallons of fuel!

OK, seriously now.
That stuff [above] is just so you don’t consider your time spent in the bookpuddle as a complete waste of time, this time around. Because from here on out, it gets only more and more increasingly boringer, until finally crashing into a big wall with the word “BORING” emblazoned on it!
Thing is… I need your help, faithful Puddle-readers.
Seems that many people are telling me that the page, the entire Bookpuddle© page itself is not doing well at all.
It is not appearing correctly. It is not correctly appearing.
Correctly appearing, it is not.

Seems that for many viewers, the top of the page is blank, and then the postings begin quite a ways down.
There are other problems too, but I cannot speak of them right now, for I am too chagrined over the whole mess.
Too emotionally distraught.

See, on MY screen, all is well. It has never looked better. [It's like not knowing you have a terminal illness... but yet, everyone else knows.]
But ever since I have been using a Mac format, and [necessarily, in other words, not by choice] using Firefox as a browser to upload my blogs…. well, things have never been the same as the good old days!
I love the Mac, but it is quirky. Real quirky.

So… all of this to ask the following.
I would really appreciate if every one of you, every single person reading this, clicked on the comments section and just said “It looks the same as ever” or “It looks great” or… OR… tell me, “Yes, there is a gaping vortex of nothingness and THEN the page begins, three miles south of where it ought to be appearing!”

Thank you. I really appreciate your participation in this.
As any of you fellow-bloggers know, it is unsettling when you THINK your page is great-looking, when actually, it looks junky.
I want to know the truth…. “Tell me the truth Doc! Am I am goner?”
If any of you are really adventurous, perhaps you may look at some of my archived blogs and see if you can find a clue to the mystery… apparently, it all went haywire around Jan.31st or Feb.1st, somewhere around there.
Thank you, again.
Now…. please, do not simply fade away…. TELL ME!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Belated Birthday Greetings to Edna.

Yesterday was the birthday of one of my favorite poets of all time.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), born Feb.22nd in Rockland, ME.
Of the hazards of her profession, she once remarked: “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down… If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.”

For a bookpuddly assessment of one of my favorite Millay poems, click here.

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

-- Nadine Gordimer –
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
-- Ernest Hemingway 1935-1961--

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

“I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go to places I haven’t been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised. Whatever their other reasons, I think all writers write as part of this sort of continuum: to give back something of what they themselves have received.”
-- Margaret Atwood –

Have a great Monday!

Worried about Jack...

I don't want to be alarmist or anything, but I am sort of worried about my cat Jack, as of late.
It seems to me that he is sleeping even more than usual.
Here is a rare photo of him with his eyes open.
Seriously now, I know that cats are notorious for sleeping away 90% of their lifetime, but Jack is overdoing it.
The only time the guy is at all awake is maybe if he is walking over to his food-dish or perhaps throwing up in my shoes.
There seems to be never a time when he is not in some sort of coma.
So I looked some stuff up on the internet, general cat-lore.
Apparently, house cats sleep anywhere from 16 to 20 hours a day. The explanation is that they are so tired "from hunting mice and other vermin."
But wait a minute.
What does Jack need to hunt?
I mean, I know he does a lot of late-night reading and stuff, but other than this, WHAT IS HE SO TIRED ABOUT?
How can he sleep so much?
On any given day I am hereby estimating that my cat is sleeping about 23 hours or so.
Is that normal?
How much does your cat sleep?
Am I a bad dad?
Should I be seeking some medical attention?
Should I be seeking some for my cat also?

********

Half a Light-Hour...

Can we be totally serious here for half a minute?
I really like the idea of winning a lottery.
No, don’t laugh. Please. I am talking about my Retirement Plan here!
And hey, if your going to win a Lottery… why not make it tomorrow’s Powerball Lottery?
Saturday's Powerball drawing will be for an estimated $365 million, which would not only be the largest Powerball jackpot in the game's history but the largest lottery jackpot ever.
[The largest to date is $363 million, won in 2000 in The Big Game, now renamed Mega Millions.]

OK, so I have been thinking about this… trying to come to terms with how much money this is, and also fantasizing about all of the great things I could do for the world if I won this thing.
So, first of all, there are 365 days in a year, right?
Winning this thing is like the equivalent of winning $1 million a day for a whole year.
Or how about this… [and personally, this is my favorite way of looking at it and drooling all over the place]… it is like winning $1 million a MONTH…. for the next 30 years!
OK, let’s break that down yet further. Let’s say there an average of 23 working days a month. [For those of us who do not work on the weekends].
Winning tomorrow’s Powerball is the equivalent of receiving $43,478.00 a DAY….. for the next 30 years!
I would so love to be able to have to learn how to deal with this!

My mind is racing with the various permutations I can conjure for such an astronomical figure.
Light [in a vacuum] travels at 186,282 miles per second.
Therefore, it would take 1,959 seconds for light to travel 365,000,000 miles.
That works out to 32 and a half minutes.
At a dollar per mile [I wish taxi-rates were this cheap], I could travel AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT for 32 and a half minutes, on tomorrow’s winnings.
All of these figures are not even accounting for interest on my money.

Now I know what some smarty alec is going to put in the comments section…. [my guess is that it will be that RantandRoar guy]…. “You are not accounting for taxes. You forgot to mention taxes!”

Taxes shmaxes!
The point of what I am saying is this.
Whoever wins tomorrow’s prize, I ALREADY hate that person!

To see how close I myself once got to winning a huge-normous Lottery [even so, it would have been a mere 53 second ride in the Light-Speed Taxi]…. click here.

Splash du Jour: Friday

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
-- Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss –

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Here is a picture of my favorite author, Jose Saramago, accepting his 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Upon receiving this colossal reward, which, amid the prestige it confers, also supplies a nice hefty sum of US$950,000… Saramago said, "This prize is for all speakers of Portuguese, but while we're on the subject, I shall keep the money."
I love it!
Belated congratulations, Jose, you Inimitable Genius!
You deserve ANOTHER one, in my opinion.

See my story on my own Saramago evening, if you are so bored.

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

One of my favorite poems of all time…

Meeting At Night
By Robert Browning

I.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

II.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Happy Valentines Day!

Splash du Jour: Monday

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
-- Jerry Seinfeld –

Have a great Monday!

The Heaven Club

One of the things I love most about weekends is that I can sleep in like crazy. Like a tranquilized rhino, on Saturdays and Sundays I just stay in bed until I totally don’t want to.
Then, when I finally do get out of bed, I flick on the TV and there will be back-to-back re-run episodes of one of my favorite shows of all time.
Will & Grace.
Few sitcoms make me actually laugh out loud. Will & Grace is one of them.
I just think that the premise of the show is so good, the writing is so witty, and the actors are so fabulous.
This morning…. well, early afternoon, I just roared! [Like a rhino].
Scene: Jack and Grace were in the kitchen where Grace was preparing supper for Will and Karen, who would soon be returning from a gruelling day of legal work.
Jack is so impressed with Grace’s preparations.
He turns to her and says, “You know Grace. You’re so nice. If you weren’t Jewish, you’d go to heaven.”
During the live audience’s uproar of laughter [and mine too], Grace quits stirring the bowl of whatever-it-is.
And then, perfectly timed, she says, “Thanks Jack. And if you weren’t gay, you’d go there too!”
LOUDER laughter, as Jack nods and has that “touche” look on his face.

Why does that scene so work?
Why is it so funny?

Well, I think that it is so hilarious because it plays right into the absurdity of the notion that we can KNOW [or think that we know] who it is that will or will not go to heaven!
When all the while we simply cannot possibly know such a thing!
Believe me when I say that I know there are people… zillions of them in fact, who think that they DO know exactly the groundrules for membership in The Heaven Club.
In other words, they know that if a person does not hold to a particular precise belief system, this fact alone guarantees that the Gate will be shut to them, later on.
I would not at all dispute that we can BELIEVE this.
But I would totally argue that we can not KNOW this.
I would tend to say that we cannot even possibly know this for ourselves, much less apply it to the future disposition of other people.
And you know what is funny?
There are people who, hearing me say the above, would conclude that such a personal statement ensures that I myself will not make it in!
Because surety is Rule #1.
And that statement hacks it to shreds.

[aaaaaaaaaand… fade to commercial…..]

*********

Emma

I know, I know, I have gone on and on about Emma Donoghue over the past few weeks. Tonight’s worship-session will be brief, I promise. It’s just that I have recently finished reading her latest novel, Life Mask.
It is very good. If you like historical fiction at all, you should should just go here right now and order this thing. It is so good.
You would think by now that I have something to personally gain or something if you buy Emma Donoghue books, so much have I regaled upon her work!
But no.
I am not her agent.
Just a devoted fan.
In this instance of the book Life Mask, I would say, if you like Edward Rutherfurd’s books, [and I know at least one reader of bookpuddle that is an advanced Rutherfurd groupie] you would like this book.
It is so clever.
So good.

There are only a few authors I would just BUY without even looking at what it was they were writing about.
Emma Donoghue is one of them.

*********

Splash du Jour: Friday

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
-- Carl Sagan 1934-1996 –

Have a great Friday!

Vertical Symmetry

I love a city.
Urbanity, in general.
I live not only in a city, but in the very heart of it, just a light walk from what would be called the downtown core. However, every weekday morning I get in my car and drive out to to the more industrial part of town and spend the rest of the day inside a windowless warehouse. I’m referring to my place of employment.
And when I say “windowless” I mean that it could be noon or midnight outside, and I would not know which. No natural light entereth therein!
On normal weekdays, I live in a world where you tell time according to hunger pains, and other circadian rhythms.
But lately (this past week, and probably the next one as well) I have been assigned to a special project, and I am working in a corner office on the tenth floor of a downtown building.
It is glorious.
I’ve been walking there in the mornings.
I do not miss anything along the way. I just love observing city-life.
Every peering purple-plumed pigeon perched precariously on its proprietary pinnacle… I see it.
And appreciate its urban pigeontry.

I love a skyscraper.
Tall buildings, in general.
I truly marvel over the sheer feat of constructive engineering exactitude that each building represents.
Admittedly, my fascination may be due to my own intrinsic mechanical ignorance. In my own life, anything more complicated than putting bread in the little toaster slot not only boggles my mind, but furthermore, does not get done.
The existence of people like me is the reason we have Yellow Pages.
So… as I walk, I look up at these magnificent buildings.
Each of them is a human miracle, standing in places they ought not to be, yet are.
Monuments of concrete and steel, lined and laced with ductwork and wire. Hydraulic impossibilities silently carrying people from floor to floor. Within is warmth in the dead of winter, and from any of the rooms a person can speak with someone on the other side of the planet.
I look up and I realize that as awesome as the Pyramids of Giza are, those who built them could not have built even the simplest of one of our downtown office buildings.

I am amazed at the vertical symmetry of tall buildings.
As I walk, I notice the vertical points at which buildings in the foreground merge with those in the background. This works best when walking across actual streets [remember to watch for cars] or when rounding corners.
One building will be much closer to you than another, further off. [For example, see the above picture on this blog].
As you look at the vertical edge of the closer building, watch as it merges with the vertical edge of another one that may be blocks away. The space between will get narrower and narrower, until there will be nothing but a thin ribbon of daylight between them. One more step, or sometimes just leaning or adjusting the angle of your head, and the lines will perfectly match up. From top to bottom there is just one single straight edge.
I do this all the time. I have walked right into oncoming traffic because of getting too carried away with it. It becomes a real habit. I am still in search of that one crooked skyscraper, I guess.

Obviously any highrise building is going to be STRAIGHT… ie., it will not be leaning. [Unless of course, it was built by me… in which case you should really quit looking at the thing and just pretty much run like hell!]
But it is the staggering amount of straightness that never ceases to amaze me.
No matter how crooked and hilly the streets are, man are the buildings ever straight!
Try the Vertical Symmetry test yourself sometimes.
It is wild. [Note: Sometimes it helps to wink, to close one eye, I mean… to get a better angle on the phenomenon.]

I tip my Starbucks coffee here to all you engineers out there.
Sweet Lord, you guys are good.

Now, I know what most of you readers are thinking. In fact, I know the exact wording. You’re wanting to tell me:
“Dude, you have got WAY TOO MUCH TIME ON YOUR HANDS!”
But actually, you are wrong.
I have not nearly enough.
I want more.
I would not for one second be bored with ten times more time.

*********

Splash du Jour: Thursday

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I must confess, absurd in the highest degree.
-- Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species –

Have a great Wednesday!

Forty Years, and still bleeping!

Half the world watched the Stones perform at the Superbowl half-time show. It was one of the things I was looking forward to, because I keep marvelling at the stamina of this band.
Jagger is 62.
I got tired just watching him.
Mind you, I was seriously full of chicken wings.
Speaking of chickens….
In the song Rough Justice I noticed that the word “cocks” was censored, even though it could be argued that it is really talking about the barnyard fowl…. well, sort of, you know what I mean! In the same line he was previously talking about chickens. Roosters.
So I was surprised that the network censored it. Actually, it wasn’t “bleeped out” or anything, the truth is that Jagger’s microphone was silenced during the word. As it was also in the song Start Me Up during the part where Jagger famously muses upon the sexual power that a certain woman would have over (even) a dead man!
So, in both instances, even those in the stadium would not have heard the words.
Censorship, it seemeth, is alive and well.
The Stones had agreed to the conditions. They were made aware of the fact that these two possibly objectionable portions of their songs would be silenced.
Did you notice what Mick said just before they did Satisfaction?
He said something like, “Here’s one we could have done at the first SuperBowl.”
Interestingly enough, way back in 1967 the band was appearing on the Ed Sullivan show on the same day as the first Super Bowl, which was then less elaborately called the world championship game.
On that night Mr. Sullivan told the boys to change the words to one of their numbers.
As it turned out, Mick had to sing “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” rather than “Let’s Spend The Night Together.”
Apparently, he complied… but rolled his eyes when singing the line!
The Rolling Stones!
The “bad boys” of rock and roll.
Still graciously curbing their nefarious words after all these years!
I wonder what they did after the show on Sunday?
Maybe they all went to KFC?
[Kentucky Fried “bleeeeeeeeeeeeeep”!]

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.
-- Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities –

Today is Charles Dickens’s 194th birthday.
Happy Birthday Chuck!

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: They try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
-- Margaret Young --

Team Starbucks!

Well I just got back from a Super Bowl get-together with the guys.
We do this every year. Watch the game and eat our own weight in barbequed chicken wings, hosed down with beer.
Only this year, no one really had a favorite team on the field.
So, when I was asked for my opinion of which team I was cheering for, [Pittsburgh or Seattle] I admit, I was stumped.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was really just there for the chicken and beer, basically.
But then it hit me.
Isn't my beloved Starbucks© based in Seattle?
Hah!
I had my answer!
Seahawks, all the way.
So I was real excited about that opening field goal. GO STARBUCKS!
But then, oh... so many costly errors by my Hawks, and then that stupendous Ben Roethlisberger pass that brought the Steelers to within feet of the endzone. And then Ben jumping in there on the next play, looking up at the ref with that convincing Will Ferrell-like expression of his.
Then the incredible gadget play of the century.
No looking back.
Well... it was not a good night for TEAM STARBUCKS!

Empowered

And God saw every thing that he had made,
and, behold, it was very good.
And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
[Genesis 1:31]

A really great book...

Coming to you LIVE from The Public Library!
Just thought I'd say Hi.
It is official.
I am going Mac.
On Friday I will be getting the Mac laptop... I forget what it is called. The G4 or something? Powerbook?
It's expensive as hell. Virus-immune and liquid cooled. Oh YEAH!
I guess I will simply have to learn to use the Ctrl key every time I would have right-clicked and stuff.
Am I doing the right thing? Any opinions out there?
I have always been a PC user.
SERIOUS QUESTION: Am I in for profound culture shock?

Anyway, just thought I would mention also that I am currently half through the Emma Donoghue book [Life Mask] and it is fabulously good. Better than I expected. I mean, I knew she was an excellent writer, but this book is surprising me with its profoundly consistent not-badness. It is historical fiction, set in late 18th century London.
I've read two other books by this author, Slammerkin and The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, the latter book consisting of short stories.
They were both amazingly good, but Slammerkin, shown above was exceptionally memorable.
Recommended unequivocably.
The best to one and all!

********