Bibliophile Bullpen

2009-11-27T02:37:00.001-05:00

Hope to read from you soonest

2009-11-17T14:38:00.003-05:00

Every few weeks I throw up Book Repair for Booksellers on Craigslist...not that it generates any sales, but it may drive a few people over to SicPress for supplies...hey...a girl can dream right? and like any good or bad Craigslist ad it generates a bunch of spam that purports to be from 'REAL' people. Most often it is someone wanting you to send you a cashiers check etc etc etc....

But lately the ones I am getting are rather cryptic.....i mean it is BLATANTLY suspicious..the lack of articles in the grammar for one thing... but I am left wondering exactly HOW they intend to make a buck by buying my book....or pretending to by my book...i guess the mysteries of the criminal mind will keep me guessing for years.

Hi Seller,
I read your description and am highly impressed and Interested in buying your Books. I'll be needing some Books and Magazines to Open my New Book Store and i got your advertisement on Craigslist when am searching via the Internet, so i decided to mail you.
I'll like to have details of the Books/Magazines you posted on Craigslist, the total selling of the item to me, As I will not be able to come down to check it out and i will love to know if you have more Books/Magazines to sell out as well Co's i will like to buy more Books/Magazines to keep in my Book Store. So kindly get back to me with the list of the Books & Magazines you have for sell and pics if you have any that you can send to me. And remove the ads off Craigslist.org as i will like to buy the items from you immediately and keep in my Book Store for whom might need them.Hope to read from you soonest.
Regards,
Mrs Susan

wet apples

2009-11-15T14:21:00.001-05:00

On Saturday I took the trip into Boston to the Book, Print and Ephemera fair at the Radisson. It's always a nice little fair - spread out over a few conference rooms close enough to be considered intimate yet not so crowded that it would be squalid. And the usual cast of New England characters show up making it a good day to get out of the house...but it rained...a lot...and i made an asinine decision to go my usual route...drive to a subway parking, change trains and get off three cold and wet blocks from the destination... completely ludicrous...unless the Radission was charging $15 bucks an hour to park I would have actually SAVED time and money if I had just driven straight in to town and parked in the garage. By the time i arrived I was a drowned rat ..btw just because your trench coat LOOKS waterproof doesn't mean it is...i'm just saying....my heart really wasn't in the shopping.. i was too cold and wet and the the lighting was too dim to enjoy it...i think my eyes have altered again oh joy.

I took a couple of turns around the place, shook a few hands gave away some free erasers and bought a total of one book...an English Cookbook on Apples. Not that I didn't see at least 5 books that I would have gladly stolen if given the chance, but folks always bring their BEST copies of things where I would be perfectly happy with the second worst copy. I haven't met all the booksellers in the world, but I am kinda going with the hypothesis that the difference between a real bookseller and a collector masquerading as a bookseller is the quality of their personal collection. A professional bookseller's collection is usually kind of embarrassing when they kick off. You see we have sold off any book worth its salt and replaced it with a reading copy, whereas a collector takes more joy in the having and holding part of business and will keep the better copy for themselves and sell the lesser. But that's just my opinion, i could be wrong...anyone have a Weegee by Weegee without a dj? thanks for looking.

the private library

2009-11-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

If you haven't been keeping up the biblioblog The Private Library has been rocking....and this latest series of educational posts "Photography and the Private Library" are not to be missed.

The information and history offered freely for the enjoyment of one and all is an embarrassment of riches...the kind of biblio material usually available at a cost.

This nine part series is worth reading and perhaps saving. So pour yourself a cuppa and go do something on the net that won't make you feel like you are wasting your time.

some fridays are worth the wait

2009-11-06T22:06:00.003-05:00

I spent thursday churning out a large order for a special customer...well technically it took all week and as profitable as it was - it's all spent every penny on frivolous things like insurance and utilities. But after I had washed my hands of the entire thing and before I wrote the 1st check, I celebrated with a trip to McIntyre and Moore in Cambridge. Granted the shop has changed locations more times than Nathan Detroit's crap game, and has even changed hands...for me there is ALWAYS something to buy.
'

I wasn't looking for anything to resell just books for myself and I kinda had to stop after an hour or so, because the longer I looked, the taller my pile became. (M&M likes that, they give discounts on the height of your book stack...no shit.)

I came away with much to read:

A Great Idea at the Time by local boy Beam is the history of the Great Books series; The WPA Guides: Mapping America...the history of the WPA Guidebook series; Writers, Plumbers and Anarchists: the WPA writer's project in Mass; Swindler, Spy, Rebel: the Confidence woman in 19th century America; a contemporary travel book about a guy who rode from Turkey to Wales on horseback; and a UK travel book that follows the BBC shipping forecast route...I kid you not; and a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's 1973 monograph on Witches, Midwives and Nurses. [the copy of McCaffrey's Hound came in the mail from Old Bag Lady books] . So all in all it was a good day for the pile on my sideboard.

2009-11-04T10:22:00.002-05:00

we buried my cousin last week..you know the one, the younger, happier, friendlier, more successful cousin, the yardstick i have been compared to most of my life. i am sure we could have been fast friends if we hadn't been family. she was killed slowly and horribly by stomach cancer. the universe is awful funny like that.

this is Franklin, he was grabbed up by dog, found sick and injured and THEN put outside in a box by the trash. he still wobbles when he walks but he's doing alright.

just in case, i made arrangements to be planted in the yard with the pets when the time comes.

special sauce

2009-10-24T17:05:00.003-04:00

Catablogs...nope nothing feline about them... i had visited a couple and added an RSS feed to my list but i hadn't given them much thought until now. The special collections librarian one city over has started blogging their catalog...cata-blog get it? Queen City Massachusetts - which i find awesome...every object has a story and with catablogs, the object, pamphlet or image gets its fifteen minutes of fame too. Here's a nice little blog post from Geneaology Insider with a sweet list of other Catablogs.

Stupid publisher tricks • Scholastic has no love for Luv Ya Bunches...a young adult title about four elementary school girls named after flowers...but OOPS...one of them has TWO mommies! and that's apparently one too many for Scholastic. WTF? I can't really comment on it properly..because when I try i start using expletives and hitting the keyboards like I am punishing them.

blog of note • if you haven't seen it you HAVE to check out Letters of Note blog... it rules.."Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. " Seriously i haven't read one thing there that wasn't fascinating.

just along for the ride

2009-10-23T21:03:00.008-04:00

I wish I had staged that shot..but nope.....the cat sauntered out of one yard across the road in front of me and into another yard. When the universe does that to you all you can do is sit there and watch your life unfold.

I've been watching a lot of other people's lives lately...the spaghetti and bean feasts, the fleas and forums etc . . i shot images of a town hall forum the other night and if you eliminate the pols and the journos i didn't know anyone else in the room.

Life looks different through the camera lens . . . i am still uncomfortable shooting humans..with a camera...i spent 20 years shooting things that don't ask you why. ...i watched the 'real' news photographer fly about the room like a hungry hummingbird - perhaps one day i will be less self conscious.

irony ain't dead...just a bit snarky

2009-10-22T22:00:00.001-04:00

isn't that the most beautiful thing you ever saw? to me it looks like puppies and kittens dipped in chocolate...

Technically she is called a percontation point - a 'rhetorical question mark'. . . an irony mark also called a snark or zing. Created by Henry Denham in the 1580s, it pops up in literature every century or so, but never really caught on.

I can't be the only person who thinks that is a terrible fate for such an incredibly useful invention. I'm gonna make it my mission in life to use this sticky puppy as much and as often as I can.

Let's take back the snark people, we need her, we live in an age where irony is pretty much a contact sport. I may even get it tattooed somewhere. What do you think؟

1001 uses for books - still MORE jewelery

2009-10-20T23:14:00.003-04:00

From BlackSpotBooks on Etsy

Library of antique and scrap leather books for the neck - eleven miniature books

$325.00 USD

alas it is sold out.

back to the future

2009-10-20T18:07:00.003-04:00

Hmm . . . i forgot how uneventful my regularly scheduled programming is . . . if there are any orders i pack em . . . list books online if i have any. . . rinse lather and repeat. But I am breaking up the day by caulking all the windows in the joint and some of the walls and doors too. I really loathe giving up hard won cashy money to the utility vampires. This year I even had the stove permanently disconnected...the idea of a pilot light burning night and day in an oven i don't use was making me crazy. I have a counter top oven and a microwave i won't starve. When facing a long winter's indebtedness to the Gas company, global warming doesn't look so bad. To be fair the weather these last couple of days was rather nice, if you don't count the snow squall the other day...in New England we hardly notice such things..

I finally went through most of my mother's mystery boxes and culled them down to just 'nice' things...yellow ware bowls, cut crystal creamers etc... I guess ebay will get some of my business...those aren't things I will EVER use. Her clothes are the only things I still haven't donated, but that I can do anytime. Many place still smell like her....este lauder and mothballs.

I have been putting a lot more effort into MethuenCommon.com perhaps it gives me the illusion that i have a life. I now have an eye on revamping this website using the new software and collating all the practical information into findable form, and relegating all my ranting and babbling to a less prominent position. I think this used to be a bookish blog.

worth reading• From TIME.com Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play "Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind — not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play was written by Shakespeare — some bits are incredibly Bard-like, but others don't resemble his style at all. The verdict, according to one expert: the play is likely a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, another popular playwright of his time. (continue reading)

kmart rules

2009-10-18T19:19:00.006-04:00

....my time with the census is almost up, not that it hasn't been a blast, but it was very much like watching sausage getting made: kinda icky and uncomfortable. Back to living hand to mouth, like everyone else.

It seems that invisible timer went off and all my mechanical items broke at once....my postal scale, my dvd player, my laptop, even my bestest sunglasses snapped in half. I mailed the sunglasses off to the first fix it place I found online, and picked up a replacement dvd player off ebay, but believe it or not the postal scale was a pain in the ass...Staples sells nothing but overpriced and digital crap, none of which are ever in stock...but after trying 4 stores one night I found that regardless of their website info, slow and steady K-Mart stocks the genuine USPS Postal Scale for a reasonable price no less. saved my ass I will tell you.

Now that i have the laptop back I am making up for lost time things i found online today:

- the Impossible Project is making great strides trying to resurrect Polaroid's instant photography technology

- WWII Huts Rescued!! Bletchley Park has been awarded a grant by the National Lottery of £460,500. There's still a long way to go - which is why it will be the focus of fundraising efforts as the main charity for National Shed Week 2010 - but it's a great start.

- Ann Frank video is on Youtube, the only known film footage of Anne Frank has been added to youtube by the Anne Frank Museum.

- from NPR, This American Life "Books that changed your life" I may have posted this before, but it doesn't suck.

and from the I am not making this up department....

Amazon Launches Same Day Delivery in Seven Major Cities and Expands Saturday Delivery Options ....no shit...

Items ordered before the following local cut-off times will be delivered the same day:

New York City – Order as late as 10 a.m.
Philadelphia – Order as late as 10 a.m.
Boston – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
Washington D.C. – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
Baltimore – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
Las Vegas – Order as late as 11 a.m.
Seattle – Order as late as 1 p.m.

WTF? who needs things THAT fast ...better than that..who has all this excess money to spend on same day delivery?

57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

2009-10-16T14:14:00.002-04:00

worth reading • From Consumerist.com "Walmart is also now selling over 200 current best-sellers at at least half off the list price." WTF? aren't books pretty much dirt cheap now? why bother printing prices on them at all, lets just sell them by the pound cause:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
(Source: Jerold Jenkins, www.JenkinsGroupInc.com)

So who is BUYING all these crap books anyway? ya gotta admit most best sellers are pretty much crap... interchangable authors and titles but basically the same content from year to year....thrillers, bio, feel me up good books etc.... I can see they have a purpose just like iceberg lettuce and beige paint but seriously you read em you forget about em almost immediately.

I am torn between paying full price for these books being a crime against man and the fact that there are so many copies printed that they are nearly worthless being a crime against nature. and if you say "save the trees read em on Kindle", so help me I will throttle you. Come to think of it, when's the last time we got the recycling guys to pick up a box of best sellers? never. that's when. the only time you see em after they leave Walmart and BJs is when they show up at yard sales for a buck a piece.

I say print fewer of the damn things and charge more money...suddenly you will see the quality and value of books improve.

2009-10-08T13:09:00.003-04:00

worth hearing • This American Life did this great episode on the Book that Changed your Life, oh yeah..WHY I enjoyed this...it makes mention of Bill Reese.

well that was fun

2009-10-08T10:26:00.005-04:00

In the last four days I have written four incredibly witty, and helpful blog posts, each funnier than the last, you shoulda read them, they rocked. ....alas they all ocurred inside my head while I was driving from one place to another, ticking off the list of things I was NOT getting accomplished. All those lovely words evaporated well before I had a chance to type them.

My remaining time with the Census folk can be measured in hours now - not that it wasn't fun..well payday was fun...i know i know a lot of self pity for someone WITH a job when so many folks have none. I was just getting stressed trying to keep all those damn balls in the air..i like to know exactly where my balls are at all times. Besides i felt awful, long hours, bad food, I haven't had time to ride my bike for over a month and all that high fructose Red Bull was making me squirrely - correction squirreliER...it was like having a real job. <>

Hopefully I can get back to my life...my remaining cusomers will be very happy, I STILL have not been able to dig myself out of the backorder hole I slide into when my mother passed away. Good thing I have run out of ancestors or I would never get anything accomplished. Oddly, while glad handing folks around town in the name of MethuenComon, I seemed to have backed into a night life. This week, with my camera beside me, I have been to a ham and bean supper and the Rod and Gun Club, Ballroom dancing at the Senior Center, a 45's (that's a card game children) night and a Jazz Club...who knew we had a jazz club? A little Stranger in a Strange land meets middle America., not to mock but to observe...well there's a little mocking.. but I get my fill of that at Walmart on Saturdays..I think of it like white trash anthropology.

I have to do the write up on the Jazz club now...i was probably the only local present, save the club owners...and being marginally mediarific, I was treated with celebrity status...I had a good gig going, if Iwanted to cage drinks all night. Here's hoping I get back to regularly scheduled programming...you wouldn't want to buy any tickets to an animal rescue benefit would you? thought so.

different day, same nutjobs

2009-10-02T18:09:00.003-04:00

I always do what the writing on the truck tells me.....

one of these days these guys are gonna figure out i am only there for the paycheck...but alas today was not the day. another day hauling around what amounts to a small dead forest in the name of statistics; the carbon footprint on this exercise is grotesque.

a typical three red bull day

5:45 sift the net for anything I can feed to methuencommon.com

8:00am prostitute myself to the usgov

7:00 pm meet with rail trail people or animal rescue people or some other people...

9:00pm filter emails for anything remotely imperative

10:00 fed and clean up after flea circus

11:00 pack and any orders for shipping

12:00am write blog fodder

if it's thursday

2009-10-01T09:02:00.002-04:00

damn damn still here. or actually still there. I keep hoping to get shit-canned but alas the government still wants my service. I had a second silly woman go all woolly on me this time in a Buddhist temple parking lot. You know me I like a good fight but usually on paper, in real life I find this kind of behavior uncivilized, hand holding people is not on my agenda.

I think I am officially a grown up and it sucks. I just wonder why people don't just grow up? Good god why do people still worry about penny ante shit? life's too fucking short. Tantrums in public places should end with the terrible twos in your forties it's unattractive. And I am the last person to try that on, I tend to laugh and walk away, funny this makes people madder. go figure.

Now I am hoping to get canned by dinner time.....shall we start a pool?

inner piece

2009-09-30T09:36:00.002-04:00

you know that peace that overcomes you when you decided to stop banging your head against a wall? yeah..that's grand.... as much as I love and need the money, god knows i have an over abiding affection for heat and hot water, i just can't allow the government to screw me more than once a year and that's only a fortnight after April fool's day. The us census may be the best statistic gathering agency on the planet, but it is very much like watching sausage being made. levels of bureaucracy that exist as long as Brigadoon don't get that shake down period when all the tentacles that don't work atrophy and fall off, instead you get conflict orders from several people all of whom are higher up on the food chain. I'm used to dealing with fur people who have four legs and no facade, homey don't play that penny ante human ego bullshit. underlings don't want to show up to work and complain that i 'fired' them, fine, i'm down with that. you send me a list of backwards ass instructions and expect me to make soup? fine i can deal...but when i get 4 phone calls before my morning red bull each taking me to task for something not of my making, well..you know that kinda takes the shine off the shekel for me. now i am happily filling out their little forms and stuffing things into envelopes just hoping and praying I get fired before lunchtime...can't help it, it's the passive aggressive in me...i get that from my mother.

tiny pleasures

2009-09-29T07:52:00.003-04:00

Anyone else love that feeling you get when the shipping supply restock arrive and you get to clean up the giant hamster cage mess you have made since the last time and put everything away nice and neat? hey, we take the tiny pleasures when we can get them. My days are still not my own and my evenings even less so, the US Census is using 19th century technology this time around and there is a lot of hand writing in pencil involved. At night instead of curling up with anything remotely entertaining I pull up my manual and my paperwork and make sure all my Is are crossed.

I know the money will stop coming in a couple of weeks, and i am trying very hard NOT to piss it away on frivolous things like food and clothing. I am getting square with as many people as I can remember, even staving off the utility companies.

Seriously this 8-10 hour workaday thing is hideous and should be abolished, when are people supposed to have time to do all their other jobs? The only thing I have even marginally kept up with is the event website, and i even got taken to task by a local PR person because I hadn't plugged it into to all the social network sites YET. As my ex-husband used to say "that will have to wait until I get my third hand free."

I did treat myself to a night out - one of the local events wasn't getting ANY coverage from the useless regional paper, so I did it myself. A local bar, which had until recently been a bar just south of the one from Road House, brought in some comedians for a night, a town first in my memory. So I went I sat, I smirked, I drank and I wrote. Surprisingly when I reread what I had wrought (sic) the next morning, it wasn't half bad....perhaps I should only write when i am half in the bag. That may improve my outlook, if not my liver function.

cherrystones and screwdrivers

2009-09-24T22:48:00.002-04:00

good god, i forgot how bloody painful this working for a living thing is. two weeks of horribly long commutes and 12 hour days and now a week of standing at a podium reciting from a book...for the first time in my life i have doubts about my voice holding up, and i can just tell there is cement under this damn floor.

but i did finally make it to my first paycheck without getting fired for anything....and there was joy throughout the land...between that and half of what was left in my mother's bank account, I have managed to buy nearly everything my heart desired...well everything on my "must have or i will be out of business bloody quick" list...restocked all the SicPress.com products, new keyboards all around, new laptop battery, new cell phone...reimbursed all the actual humans I owe money to....and got even with nearly all of the utility bills...i learned my lesson from the last Census gig : "don't expect it to last as long as they promised"

I even shelled out for some new sneakers...these are the only feet i have and i still need them for a while. the very old truck and moderately old stove are the next on the to do list, so i'm counting the days until the next paycheck or three.

the days still seem interminable, if i get anything done at all it has to be before dawn. I can barely lift my feet or my arms at the end of the day; the only thing that i have to look forward to is a self indulgent treat of half dozen cherrystones and a grey goose screwdriver...i realize when i am back living off my own earnings, I won't be able to afford either very often if at all, but it does alleviate some of the pain, the physical and the psychic.

Miss Behavior.

2009-09-17T20:04:00.004-04:00

Nearly none of the machines in my house are behaving as they are supposed to. I miss my laptop terribly, aside from the shocking power cord incident, it is out getting its sixth keyboard installed - i am bad on keyboards. The PC is still buggy, though i have run about 9 anti-virus programs and more utilities to speed it up...but for some reason Firefox 3.5.5 runs like me carrying luggage up flights of stairs. test driving browsers that don't have your cookies in them is a pain in the arse making it slow work no matter which one I use.

I had half a day to myself today which I used frivolously to clean litter boxes and do laundry. And speaking of laundry, I gotta pop into the thrift store and buy more grownup clothes. I start running a crew for the census on Monday and when I tell them business casual, it basically rules out everything I own. I really really need a netbook, being away from my email for 8-12 hours a day is hideous, I can't imagine how people do it. But at all costs I will be catering my lifestyle around this straight job for the next few weeks. Baby needs a new pair of shoes...and some socks, and underwear and every other damn thing. It seems people want me to trade small green pieces of paper for the things I need and one must actually WORK for someone else to acquire these green pieces of paper. This will make a change.

MethuenCommon is cranking along nicely..not generating any money but not actually costing me anything but time. Which is more than I can say for my other projects. The one thing I can actually say is that it does get me out of the house more. I spend a lot of time reading bulletin boards and utility poles. Speaking of events, I am going to try...i said TRY, to get up to the Portland Book Fair this Sunday. Yes I still pretend to be in the book business..but the pretense stops at the high water mark if you know what I mean. Aside from listing book repair products and books online, you can't actually make people BUY anything at least not from concentrating really hard..i know I have tried.

So after I spend some time packing the few orders that I have lying around, I will get in my something borrowed truck and toodle up the coast for my one and only Grand Day Out...truth is I am still not going for the books, I am going to Portland for the Food. My buddies at Rabelais got an honorable mention from the folks at the New York Times Food Section...along with all the other foodies in Down East Maine. If I don't get me some ginger molasses cake really soon, I'm gonna throw a tantrum.

jacked

2009-09-15T05:53:00.002-04:00

Truly this is the first time, I have been able to actually SIT and post for what? like 2 weeks? And it's 5 am, and i have to be out of here in a few minutes. Last week I did five twelve hour days training for the Census job again (this time i am a crew leader so the pay bump is nice) The only way I got through that was swilling Red Bull and taking afternoon bumps from a microscopic Tabasco bottle.

When I finally got down time I found my PC had been hacked and hijacked - by at least 3 different viruses. Don't ask about the laptop there was this thing with the power cord overheating and catching fire you don't wanna know . . . . one of the viruses hijacked my system blocking anything Google, so the only thing i could post to was facebook. I ran about nine antivirus programs and I still couldn't use anything Google, even Google searches to find the correct antivirus program were diverted. Yes, i DID learn my lesson about putting all my eggs in one google driven basket. The MethuenCommon.com site is written in Wordpress perhaps I will migrate all blogging to new software, when i get my third hand free of course. With a little help from a friend, I used Hijackthis to locate the culprit and had to delete it by hand.

So now I can post, but I just don't have the time. I am off for more training and then 'I' get to train folks..ain't that scary? hopefully when this is all said and done I will be flush enough to pay a few utilities - or maybe I will buy an iphone so i can post on the road...you can still text while driving in this country right?

attrition

2009-09-05T08:06:00.006-04:00

I kept meaning to write, but I went right from planting my mother to taking shifts beside my cousin at the hospice. All I bring is my one marketable skill, reading aloud, usually from books of food or travel essay. Reading aloud wasn't particularly useful while Herself was passing. Instead I sat and sketched out a hyperlocal news site for my city. MethuenCommon.com has gotten some good feedback, but the actual construction is a blur and I can't seem to find a thumbnail image bug. Anyone know anyone who speaks PHP send them my way, i'd like to put a cap in that project's ass.

While I have been distracted orders have piled up, floors are going unwashed, blogs untended. But in the middle of everything the US Census folks dangled a few weeks of supervisor pay in front of my eyes. My Pavlonian response to outside work is always Yes, regardless of what obstacles may exist. The local assignment won't be a problem, but the training occurs an hour outside of my truck's range of motion, which involves polling and cajoling a vehicle out of someone else for the short week.

Yeterday, the Mayor gave me the happy news that President's stimulus package has money for my rail trail project's engineering survey; which leap frogs that project from a stand still to a state of play. Despite being up to my ass in litter boxes, it's getting thin on the ground here, as my roommates have started to die off. I didn't shedule any non-profit events for this weekend, hence more time to read aloud.

Other cousins have migrated from my mother's event to this one, I'm the one standing outside the group, stunned at how far we have turned into our parents. Most obviously in appearance but also in behavior, it seems the universe will always been peopled by middle aged men bragging about how much money they save when buying things. While the attendants did their thing, we all took a late night tour of the facility which is half empty and retains its 'new hospice' smell. Poking our heads in darkened rooms we were happily surprised at the amenties for the living that are included in the floorplan: koi ponds, kitchens, couches and book nooks. One of my cousins illustrated her transition into her late mother with her observation that the chapel was non-dimensional. Until then I thought we had heard the last of her mothers masterful Bowdlerisms, apparently not just genes are genetic.

2009-09-01T10:36:00.003-04:00

site to see • Binder Richard Minsky has a new blog well worth reading Art of American Book Covers...if there was such a thing as BiblioPorn this is it.

worth reading • Bon Appetit magazine's feature on Portland, Maine makes mention of Rabelais Books "...has become the town square for Portland's food community." Rabelais must have missed a meeting, because last I checked all independent bookstores were coughing up blood. They certainly aren't supposed to become any sort of foodie Mecca...what the hell goes on in Portland..don't they know we decided to kill the book trade! we voted on it! sheesh.

worth hearing • NPR's On Point has the author of Finding OZ, the new book on Frank L Baum, Evan Zchwartz.

well worth reading • from the Consumerist Textbooks Publishers Using "Packets" To Fight Used Book Market, as much as I understand publishing and the pressures on the industry, the costs, and the difficulties..like everyone else - I left college with a serious distaste in my mouth for text book publishers and they have never done anything to make me think anything better of them. They are greedy corporations who should be ashamed of themselves.

collage age

2009-08-31T16:41:00.001-04:00

No one told me there was arts and crafts involved in funerals.....someone at the funeral home asked if we would be making a collage...and i'm thinking how hard can that be, really.

How to make a collage

Step 1 - Locate the box of pictures...last seen in an nondescript white box on the top of an armoire of a home that was disassembled 2 years ago. This can take many days, be sure to begin before 'the end' or you may not complete the project until it is over.
Step 2 - Find the most recent photograph to give undertaker a decent chance of coming remotely close, this can be quite difficult if your subject has been camera shy for the last 20+ years.
Step 3 - Remember which piece of furniture you stored the cache of foam core behind, look behind at least 3.
Step 4 - find pretty paper without cat hair to wrap said foam core
Step 5- remove cat from work area. repeat steps 4 and 5 as often as needed.
Step 6 - Timed exercise: scan and restore as many photographs as you can find where the subject isn't holding their hand over their face like a mob boss - out of focus images are allowed for this event - this can take a while especially if there are a 100 containing the 1st dead husband and only 2 containing the still living second husband.
Step 7 - Spread out all chosen photographs on the available surface, be sure to make as large a mess as possible so as to become overwhelmed with the task
Step 8 - Find beer. consume beer. rinse, lather and repeat.
Step 9 - Put entire project on hold and drive to a number of stores seeking the no stickem poster putty. Buy something in each store so that the final price of poster putty is 1.65 plus $20 for each store visited - bonus if the number exceeds three.
Step 10 - Get sick of the entire project and stick all the photos on as quickly as possible with one hand while holding cell phone to your ear taking condolence calls.
Step 11 - Beg borrow or steal largest enclosed portfolio to carry it because pictures continue to pop off everytime it is moved.

The end