My friend Beth, who has been unemployed for the last few months courtesy of our lovely economy—read her unemployment blog Cardboard Furniture—has put together a coffee table book of her photography, mostly of sights in Arizona. It’s available at Amazon. Buy a copy so she doesn’t have to eat her furniture!
If you haven’t already heard this, Amazon has stopped listing sales rankings for books with LGBT themes. The excuse they offer is that LGBT books have adult themes, and they are thus inappropriate for some search engines, but a bunch of bloggers have done some digging, and apparently Playboy and a whole lot of hetero erotic lit are still getting ranked, but YA novels with gay characters but no sex are not.
There’s a Google bomb afoot: Amazon rank. I’m just doing my part. I’ve also seen a Twitter hashtag “#amazonfail”. And a few people are even boycotting Amazon until this is sorted out. I’m personally tempted to download a whole lot of gay romance just to spite Amazon, although maybe it’s better to buy ebooks from their publishers instead of through Amazon for a while, Kindle or no. Hmm.
Feel free to say vitriolic things in the comments.
Cross-posted to books to the sky.
+ I only just stumbled upon Effed in Park Slope’s expose of the Atlantic Center Target, the worst Target on the planet. part 1 | part 2 | part 3
I can verify that this is indeed as bad as it looks in the video. It’s so badly mismanaged and understaffed. The lines at the checkout are usually so long that people just abandon their carts. It seems to me that Target would make enough money from one of those abandoned carts to pay the salary of another cashier, you know?
+ Passive Aggressive Notes find notes that are passive aggressive about typography.
+ Here’s a whiny “Those kids today!” article about how college kids are reading Twilight instead of the classics. I have a BA in English lit, so believe me, I’m on board with this rant to a point, although, I don’t remember doing a whole lot of recreational reading when I was in college. I had to read, on average, 3 books a week for my classes, so that didn’t leave a lot of time for other things, and when I did read extracurricular books, they were mostly fluffy things to contrast against the Serious Literature I had to read for class.
+ WTF, clothing retailers? Although my beef with this post is the comment about “average women” having larger waists. You know what? Can we just agree that clothes are not made for real women’s bodies and move along? Because, actually, finding pants that are big enough for my hips inevitably leaves me with pants that are too big in the waist, so speak for yourselves. But, still, it seems stupid that clothes stores are so adamant about not stocking bigger sizes.
+ Check out these Whirl Girls, chorines from 1921.
+ I mentioned that I recently got a Kindle. I think the advent of this Kindle and its competitors is starting to make ebooks more popular and accessible to the masses in easily-readable formats. So, is one advantage to ebooks the embarrassment factor? I mean, I read a lot of romance, and so much of it just has ridiculous cover art, and if I’m reading on the subway, I don’t want everyone judging my books by their covers, you know?
+ Blast from the Past: Battle of the Cartoon Girl Bands.
+ Corollary: I spent part of this weekend looking for a particular Smashing Pumpkins song, and then I just saw this commercial using a song that is so evocative of high school for me (I was a huge SP fan). So strange to hear the song in a different context.
Nothing I have written today makes much of a statement. Sometimes there are just days like this.
+ I have a pretty small carbon footprint, about 1/5 of the national average, which I feel pretty good about. I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that I do not own a car.
+ Via Jezebel, how great is this?
+ Some writing things. This post on Jenny Crusie’s blog got me thinking about what constitutes a romance novel. (My friend T says, though, that, if you can take the romance plot out of a novel and still have a story, it’s not a romance. Hmm.) Also, men read romance.
+ Check out these awesome fashions from 1928!
+ I have acquired a KINDLE!
I upgraded WordPress for shits and giggles. I feel like a WordPress expert now, like between this and being the Technical Team for the Mahablog, I’ve encountered almost every issue out there. Crazy! Speaking of which, I’m in the process of updating the design on the Mahablog, and I’m seriously hating CSS right now. There’s going to be a brawl. Why won’t design elements just go where I tell them? Why??
Anyhoo, it’s the new year, I’ve got some ideas for new blogging directions, we’ll see how much follow up I have. In the meantime, here are links:
This looks interesting:
I once sat through the whole of Ric Burns’ bonus episode to the New York documentary, which is entirely on the WTC. The first two parts of it are interesting: the architecture and design, the construction, Crazy Philippe Petit on the tightrope. The last part will give you panic attacks if you have any real-life frame of reference for 9/11. It’s, like, a whole hour of footage from that day. I had nightmares after I saw it the first time, I won’t make myself watch it again. But I think it’s pretty fascinating generally speaking and I would like to see this movie. (One review of it said it’s less about Petit and more about New York in the 1970s, which is a topic I’m kind of fascinated with. Have you read Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning? Excellent book.)
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On a completely different track, there’s an interesting article in the Times on underground abortions in New York, where it’s ostensibly legal. Most of these abortions happen in the Catholic communities (like the Dominican one where I used to live in Washington Heights/Inwood) where the women are too ashamed (mostly due to community pressure) to go through legal channels. Scary stuff.
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I’m reading a lot of westerns right now. I just got the book in which the Viggo cowboy movie Appaloosa is based out of the library. Looks like fun. I should go back to reviewing books on the blog, yeah? Or actually update my book blog. Hmph.
+ Buy a book! (Help me keep my publishing job!)
+ Speaking of publishing, romance ebook publishers seem to be taking over (or at least wanting to take over) the dead tree market. I’m interested in ebooks both as a consumer and a… producer? Ebooks are less expensive to produce, and I think they will become more prevalent when the cost of ebook readers goes down, but in the short term, ebooks of popular titles are available, as are a lot of interesting alternative books that might not get picked up by traditional publishers. (This is particularly true of GLBT romances, and some ebook-only publishers are putting out some good, genre-bending romances.)
+ Also, Writer Beware has a good, brief summary of last week’s industry bloodshed.
+ Check out the Brooklyn Hall of Fame.
+ Interesting Times article about art and artists in Green-wood Cemetery. (See also my trip to Green-wood.)
The publishing industry is busy eating itself (major layoffs at Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt today) but I have links!
+ Women are earning combat awards but still no respect in the military.
+ Check out this knit motorcycle cozy.
+ The Life Magazine photo archive is now online and there’s lots of good stuff here.
+ There’s an interesting profile of mystery writer Patricia Cornwell in USA Today in which she talks about the Kay Scarpetta series and her 2006 marriage to a woman.
+ Prop 8: The Musical! (Funny, but too little, too late, no? Where were these guys two months ago?)
I suck at the blogging. Here are some links I saved.
+ If only I had this lady’s problems.
+ I saw Twilight last weekend. I had read the book (I read it last year, mostly that time I was in the hospital to get my foot X-rayed, and it kept me entertained, but I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not, because the other things I had to look at were, like, Maury Povich on the TV in the waiting room and the sad, sick people without insurance waiting to get into the clinic) and a bunch of my friends wanted to see it, so I had a few margaritas and braved the movies. It’s not a good movie. It mostly involves the two leads staring at each other plaintively.
Here’s some articles: Jezebel on the book/movie and sexuality. Some are arguing that the series is a little judgy about teen sexuality. I kind of suspected when I read the book that Edward’s reluctance to, uh, vampirize (?) Bella was kind of a metaphor for virginity-taking, plus I find it odd that perpetually-17 Edward has never had sex or wanted to before Bella. Sadie says, “Restraints make for good stories (see: the popularity of Jane Austen adaptations) but as society loses them, usually the fictional substitutes we come up with are too lcking in urgency to really command much interest. We’ve lost a lot of the tricks of good storytelling, and if vampire love is the only way to make people realize that, bring it.” Point taken, but… Twilight is not good storytelling.
Maybe I’m old and crotchety, though. I’m about ten years older than the series’ target demographic.
+ Tuesday was Evacuation Day in New York. How did you celebrate? Apparently the old tradition involved a contest to climb a greased flagpole in Battery Park. This tradition has, sadly, been discontinued.
Wrote this one last week, but it mysteriously didn’t post. Sorry about that.
I’ve got a backlog of things to write about. So, in brief:
+ Interview with Tony Morrison in which she talks about her new novel and also President Obama.
+ I thought it was a truth universally acknowledged that baseball was not actually invented by Abner Doubleday and that it was based on a British game, but some dude is using a mention of “base-ball” in Northanger Abbey to prove that the Brits invented America’s pastime. Well, whatever, the first organized baseball game happened at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. We can argue about the relative American-ness of New Jersey at a later time.
+ Fun fact: the Department of Homeland Security thinks that a 100-mile-think border around the US shall be a zone in which you can be searched. The ACLU is calling this the Constitution-Free Zone. This is, sadly, not as surprising as it should be. What is amazing? Two-thirds of the American population lives in this zone. Think about that for a moment.
+ Fun fact: the Harper of HarperCollins was once mayor of New York, although he had some anti-Irish feelings, which I can’t endorse.
+ Barack Obama might be a Star Trek nerd. If anything, that’s one more reason to vote for him.
+ After months of saying he wasn’t gonna do it, Mayor Bloomberg is running for a third term despite term limits.
And a programming note: I’ll be live-blogging tomorrow’s vice presidential debate at the Mahablog. Should be a good time.
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