From the Department of Generally Amusing Stuff Discovered at Random While Avoiding My First Work Assignment of the Day: Scalzi bakes a Schadenfreude pie. Just to see what it tastes like. And he includes pictures. With amusing captions, even. It’s the perfect compliment for your morning cup o’ joe, so take a coffee break and go get yourself a slice…
I just spent my lunch hour browsing an intriguing little dive of a book shop called Utah Book and Magazine, better known among the bibliophiles at my place of employment as “the stinky bookstore around the corner.” The place is one of the last remaining examples in these parts of the sort of half-assed, stuffed-to-the-rafters, semi-amateur used-book emporiums that I loved to frequent in my younger days — most of my other college-era haunts have gone out of business or, in the case of Sam Weller’s, have gentrified and cleaned themselves up in order to compete with the big national chain stores. But not Utah Book and Magazine, whose owner isn’t overly fussy about condition and will buy damn near anything. The shelves in this place are 12 feet high, creaking under the weight of everything from vintage pulps to well-thumbed nudie mags to last week’s best sellers, now running at reaminder-table prices. And you can get more than reading material at the stinky bookstore, too: you can buy an ice-cold beverage from a ’60-vintage Pepsi machine or a Big Hunk candy bar from a countertop display. Shove the candy bars to one side and you might find an antique straight razor, a Charlie McCarthy doll, or a dummy hand grenade for sale inside the counter’s display case. The only drawback to the place is, as you may have gathered, the peculiar funk that fills the air. It’s less like the scent of old paper (which I quite like) than the, ahem, strong aroma of some of the neighborhood bums.
In any event, I can’t set foot in that hole without buying something, and today I picked up a novel with such an unlikely (and charmingly ungainly) title that I wanted to share:
Adventures: Being a Stirring Chronicle of Intrigue, Romance, Danger, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Thrilling Triumphs over Fierce Beasts and Fiercer Men in the Mysterious and Exotic Dark Continent, as Recounted by the Daring, Resourceful, Handsome, and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them
Ah, how I would’ve swooned at such a title when I was a boy…
Incidentally, I’ve been adding to my LibraryThing catalog whenever I’ve managed to find the time. I still have several banker’s boxes to go, but with the addition of today’s purchase from the stinky bookstore, I’m up to 919 titles…
Film critic Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune asks an interesting question while commenting on the weekend box-office victory of that instant classic, Jackass Number Two:
One of those attending [Jackass Number Two] was a coworker here at the Tribune, who was stunned by the amount of anal-related humor and the movie’s undercurrent of homoeroticism. Apparently Mr. Knoxville and Co. think it’s really, really funny to have objects inserted in people’s butts.
And still the question persists: Why did Larry Miller’s theaters – all four of them – find this movie suitable for its customers, but not “Brokeback Mountain”?
Miller, you may recall, had Brokeback pulled from the schedule of his Megaplex Theater chain when he found out it was about gay cowboys.
You ask a lot of questions like this when you live in Utah…
People get into their hobbies. I understand that, really, I do. But this takes the cake: it seems some crazy French Ferrari enthusiast spent 15 years constructing an exact 1:3 scale model of his favorite car. And when I say “exact,” I mean exact:
This 12-cylinder engine just isn’t any 12-cylinder engine, it is a 1:3 scale Ferrari 12-cylinder engine with the same beautiful sound. It took Pierre six months of running the engine on his own dynamometer to tune the header pipes so they would give off the same sound value as he had recorded from the engine of the real car. Once Pierre had the engine bolted together for the first time, it started on the very first try and, since then, has logged more than fifty hours of running time with no failures or refusals to start (It’s probably more reliable than the real engine).
I suddenly feel strangely… inadequate.
How’s about we start the day with a little jolt of wonder:
That’s the space shuttle Atlantis pulling away from the International Space Station. Cool enough on its own, but what makes this so wondrous is that the photo was taken from the ground and that it’s a shot of the two spacecraft transiting in front of the sun. Here’s the complete image:
Weird Al‘s new song is called “White and Nerdy.” After my last three four entries, I’m afraid that it applies all too well to yours truly. Here’s the video for you to enjoy while I go somewhere and hang my head in shame:
Have a look at this amazing photo, and don’t forget to click it for a larger view:
From Star Wars to Star Trek: that’s been pretty much the back-and-forth pattern of my life for decades now. They’re the twin moons that rise and fall over my personal landscape. Or some labored metaphor like that. Anyway, to business:
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been gathering articles and blog entries about Star Trek‘s 40th anniversary — hey, somebody‘s got to do it, right? — and I now present the links below for your rainy-afternoon geeky reading pleasure.
For anyone out there who is thinking of purchasing the new “Limited Edition” Star Wars trilogy set in order to get the original, unaltered theatrical versions of those classic films on DVD — and really, what other reason would you have for buying, yet again, these three films that we all have 20 copies of already — consider the following:
Yesterday I caught my first episode of the new “enhanced” version of the classic Star Trek series, which you’ll recall I already pre-denounced a week or so back, sight unseen.
And what is my official verdict now that I’ve examined the evidence with my own eyes. Eh.