Scooter Chronicles

This past Saturday I finished reading “Death and the Penguin” by Andrey Kurkov.

For the description, I am using part of Bill Ott’s review from Booklist:

“To every time, its own normality.” As if to test the limits of his own premise, Ukrainian writer Viktor and his pet penguin, Misha, find themselves in a situation so bizarre as to challenge the very idea of normality. When Viktor is hired to write obituaries of Kiev VIPs to be kept on file, it seems like a great...

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Early last week I finished reading “Palimpsest” by Catherynne M. Valente.

From the product description on Amazon’s site, and the description on the back cover:

Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse – a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever...

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So unlike my waning love for BookMooch, my frustration with a few instances involving my Amazon wish list won’t send me away. Actually it was challenging my memory, and I was losing.

Over the course of about three months, maybe more, three items on my wish list at Amazon disappeared. Now, they didn’t drop off my list by some accidental problem on Amazon’s site. What would happen is that the entry would just state “Item No Longer Available”, and that’s it. No information of what the item actually was. No link. No price. Nothing. I have had a tendency to remember information that really isn’t that important in my life. And items on my wish list would normally be something that I would...

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I have lauded this site in the past. When I first discovered it, over three years ago, it was wonderful. The idea is that you post books you are willing to send to other members, and based on a point system, you can request books from other members. There were so many great books, and many in great condition too, to be had. But the last year, or more, it has been a tough site to get what you want.

The site was featured in an article by The New York Times, and membership quickly went up. Word of mouth helped as well. Lately it’s been tough to get popular books. Most of the more coveted books are on the “wish list” of over 200 members. If you are not on the site every few minutes, you will not have...

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Rush – “Grace Under Pressure”

Tracks:

1. Distant Early Warning
2. Afterimage
3. Red Sector A
4. The Enemy Within
5. The Body Electric
6. Kid Gloves
7. Red Lenses
8. Between the Wheels

Are you sick and tired of me talking about Rush? This is the fourth album in my “series”, which I have been stretching out over years now. “Grace Under Pressure” though holds a special place in my history with the band. It was the first album I bought of theirs at the time of...

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Finally, and probably behind “schedule”, we switched Nigel to sleeping in a regular bed. We had plans to do this earlier, but as happens in life, problems arise. Actually, the bedroom his crib was in had a regular bed, too. It was Marcia’s sister’s old bed. We had tried him in it a couple of times. But each of the three times we tired this, Nigel would get out of bed and come into our room, and repeatedly over the course of a half an hour. We had better success with him when we visited my parents for Christmas. He was on an inflatable mattress in the third bedroom. Twice he got up early in the morning and came into the bedroom we were using. So with that success rate, we decided to switch him when we moved....

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A couple of weeks ago my favorite musician, Geddy Lee, was interviewed, of a sort, by a writer from Entertainment Weekly. They asked him some questions regarding their new DVD release, and their upcoming appearance in the move “I Love You Man”, as well as others, and only a few showed up in the magazine article. But the highlight was a wine tasting. Geddy is a wine fanatic, and has an extensive collection of his own. It is something that has only been becoming public knowledge though.

“I don’t like talking about it in public because I worry I will come off like some pretentious f—— bozo.”

...

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A while back I finished reading “Carnival Wolves” by Peter Rock.

From Publishers Weekly via Amazon.Com, here is the rundown:

Fleeing an unsatisfying life as a museum guard in upstate New York, Alan Johnson and a distrustful Dalmatian (which has fallen off a bridge and landed at his feet) traverse harsh, surreal landscapes in Wisconsin, Utah, California and other far-flung locales, searching for human connection. Along the way, Alan encounters and often relinquishes narrative duties to a...

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A while back Roger got in on a meme about the 25 most influential albums on his listening habits. I decided to take the plunge. And it wasn’t easy. Like him, I tried to list the albums that were really influential, not just favorites, though some of them fit easily into both categories.

1. “90125″ by Yes – This is the album that really started me onto my path of music listening when I was 14 years old.
2. “Close to the Edge” by Yes – This is the second, and possibly more influential album, that knocked me onto another path of music listening, and only about...
   
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David installed the latest WordPress software for my site a while back. One of the features that I see every time I log on, when before it was more hidden, is spam comments. For the heck of it I usually run through them really quickly, so long as there aren’t a lot of them, just to see if something should have been allowed through. That hasn’t been the case since this switch, but I have had in the past about half a dozen over the nearly five years I have been blogging that got tagged as spam.

There are various kinds of spam, and 90% of it is just jumbled words with links to various sites to get Viagra and the like, or porn sites, or gambling sites. But some of them are actually constructed to make it look like someone...

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