BibliophileBullpen

wtf moment of the day - Barnes and Noble is giving you free e-books ‘on them’…..The Last of the Mohicans, Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Dracula and Pride and Prejudice all public domain books that are already free but they just forgot to mention that in their B&N eReader promotions…..but WAIT it gets better…… they have them locked with (DMR) Digital Rights Management “For copyright protection purposes, these files are encrypted and cannot be converted or printed.” Did I miss a meeting? Does someone still get a cut of digitized Dracula? Perhaps an undead copyright holder?

Its taken until about three days ago for the weather in New England to sync up with the actual calendar. Sticky hot days that have me eying my blue tarp covered A/C units like they were covered in chocolate sauce . I owe the electric company even the crumbs from my soul, so plugging these money vacuums in would be an act of desperation. I will let it slide until my roommates show some sign of discomfort. One of the work at home benefits, is the right to type while naked ( I AM dressed right now in case you were wondering.) Another bonus is being able to change your schedule so you can sleep during the day and work when the sun is turned off.

Another great bonus of self employment, is being able to bitch about your work, your customers, your boss. I can blog, not blog. Venting about whatever hair is across my ass is not something I could give up, regardless of how well paying a straight job someone offered me. The poor bastards who have to work for a living are becoming more and more hamstrung by the day. Borders is trying to limit their employees first amendment right of free speech. On one hand you can see a business not wanting FALSE information to reach the light of day, but seriously folks if your employees aren’t blogging on company time and spreading falsities, you are shit out of luck. But businesses with big hat lawyers on retainer can easily intimidate your average 10 dollar an hour bookstore clerk with just a sternly worded letter. I have seen this creeping along in corners of corporate America, it was only a matter of time before it started squeezing the throats of people who have actually read the 1st amendment.

This is “Rosie”, it took 3 hours and 5 McDonalds cheeseburgers to lure her after someone had abandoned her down by the river. She has an intense fear of men making it hard to find a placement for her; but she’s a happy little creature, luckily indifferent to cats

My library’s website is down right now which is kind of odd and surprisingly inconvenient. I had not actually noticed how many times during the day I opened the site to add a book to my request list; turns out quite a few. They claim not to, but you know the library server keeps track of what you have borrowed if only for a nominal amount of time. But since there is nearly no monetary incentive to drive them, libraries don’t seem to hang onto that sort of data as tightly as the online vendors.

With the recent Kindle Takebacks and Google’s ‘guided’ searching, folks are starting to realize how much far up our backsides Amazon and Google have inserted themselves. Do we even count how many times a day we click ‘I accept’? What are we accepting really? Every book we buy, read, click, search for, is recorded and tracked and stuffed into ever expanding communal databases. ‘To serve you better’. We are constantly assured it’s for our own benefit. So that automated suggestions can be tailored to individually fit us. Cause apparently we have become a nation of blind sheep that need help finding our own socks in the morning.

Do we really want folks tracking our research habits? Do we want anyone besides our neighborhood librarian knowing we were looking up homeopathic remedies for STDs? or that we lost our job and needs books on how to live on next to nothing? how about a few unbanned blue novels? what other sorts of things are in our permanent file that we’d rather keep to ourselves? how about a few books on alternate lifestyles? racy fetishes? a little Janet Oke? some Thomas Kinkade? everyone has a few bugaboos in the closet we’d rather not share…when we read we follow our noses, we taste test things we know nothing about, it doesn’t mean we want to start getting spam mail about it. Just because I read DIY chemistry books doesn’t mean i want to pipe bomb my town hall. If things progress as they have been, these recorded clicks can be made available to Homeland Security and other curious onlookers without so much as a court order. Just a sternly worded yet strangely intimidating request seems to do the trick these days.

How much do we really TRUST Amazon and Google? Amazon has always and will always be led around by their bottom line…. Even turning both apparently blind eyes to blatantly sloppy selling tactics like selling hate speech in a country where it’s punishable by jail time. (Major FAIL guys) Google on the other hand, professes “Don’t Be Evil” but is apparently capable of much deliberate indifference. Collecting data for the sake of itself, isn’t always a good idea as we will soon discover. Insurance companies have computers too and are always hungry for new reasons to rescind our policies. Who’s to say in 5 years time when you Google hemorrhoid creams, Globohealth doesn’t red flag for hiding a preexisting condition? Don’t laugh..at least when I buy a book on hemorrhoids, the clerk at the big box store hardly looks at the title of the book never mind remember my face.

BTW The Electronic Freedom Foundation has taken notice of that stockpile of clicks and is starting to stir up trouble for Google’s dataminers.

Like there aren’t enough news items that make me crazy, now people are sending them into me, assumedly to watch my head explode into a hundred million pieces.

stupid human tricks - A small town near Milwaukee has been rending and wailing about teenagers having access to books about homosexuality, you know – the naughty kind, the kind that say “it’s okay to be gay and your parents will still love you”. Apparently this nonsense issue brouhaha has blown up into a good old fashioned book burning. How come groups labeled Christian Civil Liberties Unions, are never civil nor Christian and against anything that smacks of liberty.

worth hearing – Lizzie Skurnick guest’s on NPR’s Talk of the Nation regarding about her new book: Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. – .between V.C. Andrews and Are you There God it’s Me Margaret that little town in Michigan’s gonna pull out the pitch forks and torches, lynch the librarian and burn down the entire library.

wtf? - No doubt by now you will have read that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested a couple of days ago for being black in America. Many of the finer points of the incident are under a cloud, but the widely accepted factoids are that he and his driver were seen trying to get his front door unstuck from his Cambridge home. When the Cambridge Police responded the 58 years old professor suffering from an illness and walking with a cane was arrested on his front porch and booked for disorderly conduct and ‘tumultuous behavior’ (is this an actual crime?.) From there on in it gets deep, the sympathetic accounts have Prof Gates being accosted in his home by a belligerent cop, the ‘this-isn’t-about-race’ crowd have the professor storming after the cop out onto his front lawn hurling racial profiling epithets in view of a crowd of other armed lawmen. The truth is only known to both men and both have reason to slant it to their own benefit. Prof. Gates was duly provoked and no doubt pushed the confrontation as far as possible, because no good would come from allowing even the slightest incident of everyday racism to stand, as the world only pays attention to egregious incidents. As for the Cambridge police officer who didn’t recognize an eminent 20 year Cantabrigian (fercrissakes, even I know what he looks like!) Regardless of Gate’s demeanor, when presented with 2 photo ids the cop should have given the man the benefit of the doubt in his own living room and left. Needless escalation never works out well, making him guilty of some really bad decision making under pressure and for a man carrying a gun, that’s never good.

No doubt we won’t have heard the end of this….there will be days of talking head commentary anti-racism teach-ins, Op-Eds and essays, and at least one book, but most definitely a painfully long and costly civil suit, resulting in some Cambridge PD regime change and at least one Policeman is going to be looking for a job flipping burgers at Dennys.

site to see • ohmigod!! i just made a girly noise followed by my ‘O’ Face – Manuals Online site is to DIE FOR. 30K user manuals for all types crap, downloadable, sortable, saveable….it’s just adorable.

things to buy • Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom by Friendly Planet is the world’s largest book, measuring 5×7 feet when open and sells on Amazon for $30,000. Which is damned odd, since the tax deductible cover price for this 133 pound book is only $15,000. So who gets the other $15,000? But on the bright side they are only charging you $10.00 to ship it. hopefully that is Priority.

wtf? the idiot grandson, who controls Hemingway’s literary heritage doesn’t like what Papa said about his grandmama. So his solution is to take a pair of scissors to the manuscript of a Movable Feast and remove the parts he doesn’t like and insert some other writings from he does. Which is nutty enough but the guy convinced Scribners to go along with this insane butchery. Scribners published the book originally furthering tinkering with the text because each Hemingway generation is nuttier than the last is just wrong. but don’t take my word for it:

Worth reading - Don’t Touch a Moveable Feast. the NYT Op-E piece from A.E. Hotchner, who of ALL people should be heard on this, calls to task this asshattery. If you ask me Scribners comes off as really fucking desperate.

rackhack2, originally uploaded by jgodsey.

damn ‘universal’ bike rack…
we had to take a hacksaw to it, to make it fit.

95 Trek Antelope all gussied up, originally uploaded by jgodsey.

She’s got a new saddle, new gears, new Planet bike fenders, I put her rack and panniers back on. and she’s got her own bike sticker ‘My other bike’s a POS too”