Mad Times

I got a nice email from a fellow in the UK recently pointing me at his groovy new web store where they’re selling random pairs of found gloves to benefit the non-profit Green Thing. Both the store and the non-profit are pretty neat. Check them out!

For those lost glove fans who’ve stayed with me since I gave up the addiction, point your browser over to http://bobbymatchbox.wordpress.com/ where a fellow is posting some lovely glove pictures along with little snippets of their stories written from the gloves’ point of view. Wonderful stuff. Go look.

In 2008 I read about 52 books which is pretty good compared to the last few years. There are a couple of reviews I haven’t posted yet. I’ll try to get those up soon.

We also watched a bunch of movies (about 80). Here’s a list of what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater (only 3 for me plus 1 more for Becky). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it.

That doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before (a few repeats are included as noted). We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this.

Seeing them sorted by rating like this always causes us to rethink some of our decisions, but what’s here is what we thought of them shortly after seeing them.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 113 disks to Netflix this year. In July we bought a set-top box that lets us watch Netflix stuff on demand over the internet. Looks like we’ve used that for 160 items since then which seems like a lot until you know that it counts individual tv show episodes. Here’s a summary of the TV shows we watched (we still don’t do cable or anything, so these were all on dvd or on-demand):

• That 70′s Show (season 5)
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• The Wire (still working on season 1)
• Pushing Daisies (season 1) Love this show!
• Criminal Minds (still working on season 1)
• Heroes (season 2)
• Coupling (season 1, 2, 3, & 4) LOVE this show!
• 30 Rock (season 1 & 2)

Very nicely written op-ed in today’s New York Times uses the famous photo of Earth taken by the Apollo astronauts to put our climate problems in perspective. (thanks to Alan Durning for pointing it out)

Charles Mingus (yes, that Charles Mingus) tells you how. Hmm… (via Making Light)

I was about to send this out to a bunch of people so I may as well post it here and save on the spam. I haven’t read it yet, but there’s an on-line collection of speculative fiction stories by Filipinos written in English called, oddly enough, the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler. I just loaded the whole thing onto my Palm and will probably read it next.

Well, only 32, but they’re all the stars within 14 light years of home in a 3d animation so you can tell how relatively far away they are. The lines show whether they’re above or below the ecliptic. Nifty.

Whoa, I just noticed that if you point your mouse at a star it will tell you all about it.

via James Nicoll

While I waffle over whether or not to post reviews of sexually explicit graphic novels on a blog that my mother reads (Just one of many neurotic reasons why I’m months behind in posting book reviews. This blog isn’t called “Mad Times” for nothing. ;-), you can get your book review fix over at Goodreads where Becky has been reviewing up a storm.

Here’s a sample, her review of Isabel Allende’s Zorro: A Novel:

I’m a Zorro fan, but not to the extent of obsessiveness. I remember watching Tyrone Power late at night on my grandma’s black and white TV, and I’ve seen George Hamilton, Antonio Banderas, and probably some other actors in that role, but I haven’t sought out everything-Zorro. When I saw Allende had written a novel about Zorro, I was thrilled. I even waited for a good time to read it. It tells the story of how Zorro became Zorro–a sweeping tale that is both chilling and fun, just as it should be.

Lots more behind the link up there. There’s even an rss feed for updates.

Clever Cycles sells cargo and city bicycles and related gear in Portland. I visited them about a year ago just after they first opened the store. I just heard that they’re closing. Not for good, just for a two-week vacation. In the middle of summer. A bikeshop. Are they insane? Turns out it’s not lack of sanity, it’s lack of bikes. They’ve been doing so well they’re sold out of all their bikes. How cool is that?

Saw this while getting my lolcat fix at icanhascheezburger.com yesterday. The picture originally appeared here last year.