Morning Thoughts

Classic 1902 Washington Post Political Cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt and Bear

I now have two books which I am looking at which I am ambivalent about revewing that I read recently, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushie, and One Foot In The Grave by Jeaniene Frost. I feel like, I could just sit and watch them for a while until my mind gels around them and I can start writing about them. But, then maybe not.

Tomorrow is The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival at the Puck Building In New York. I am definitely going to go see the show. It should be fun. I have gone every year since it started. http://www.moccany.org/ . It is kind of funny, I have never really had a chance to go to the actual museum. I might leave the show a bit early and go the exhibit they have at the museum, Moving Pictures Comics to Film.

I am browsing through, Theodor Seuss Geisel The Early Works of Dr. Seuss, Volume 2. It is mostly editorial cartoons with some short articles on ridiculous subjects like Sex and the Sea God, The Facts of Life, Or How Should I Tell My Child, and various other things.

Today has been pretty quiet. I made a few donations for retirement parties at work. It will be the usual cake, card, and a small gift. This morning, I brought my car in to the repair shop. Someone grazed the side of my car while it was parked near the house. It was late at night, the car that hit my car drove off before I could even get a look at it.

I have a kind of long term project at work. I have to start weeding the law books. I'll probably start with thinning out some of the books in the storage stacks, then bringing down some of the less used books. Things are quite tight in our law collection.

More Thoughts.

I have the rough outline for the review of Full of Bull done. I will probably write the review later tonight. I took some more notes on the train in to work. I sometimes juggle my tea with lemon and honey and writing notes on the train in to work. It can be cramped sometimes.

I alternated between taking notes and reading more of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. The first part of the book is kind of confusing. The second part seems to clear up many unanswered ideas. The book is full ideas and at times can be quite sensual if not adult in content.

While I was looking for items to purchase for the Job Information Center, I came across a rather interesting manga. It is a career manga called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko The Last Career Guide You'll ever need by Daniel H. Pink. I wonder what it will be like reading a manga on how to further your career. I requested the book to be sent to my library so I could read it. It might be good for the teenagers, people getting their first jobs, or people entering college. I'll have to see.

I also found another interesting urban fantasy book called The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar. I hope it is interesting. Sometimes, it is interesting reading about a setting that is real, you can pick out places you might have been. Fantasy books often give a unique viewpoint on real settings. I put the book on order.

Another book came in for me today as well, The Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling. It is set in the romantic mars where aliens terraformed mars millions of years ago with life forms from earth.

Right now, I have been doing various things, mostly updating the law collection and ordering books for the Job Information Center. I have to eventually get down to weeding some of the law books.

Thoughts for Today

I have been reading more of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. This book would be quite a hard book to review. The reason is that he is taking real events and history and changing it into fiction with a magical realist style. Not only is he reimagining historical events and people and recounting them, he is also adding in elements of the strange like magic tricks, philosophy, mysticism, humor, and language tricks.

The book contains an extensive four page bibliography of historical citations. Many of these cover witchcraft, the Osman's, Renaissance Florence, Machiavelli, Botticelli, the relations between the Medici, and the Mughals and many other arcane subjects.

In addition to works in print, he cites several websites. Some of these are on Akbar, the great Mughal king. For example there is a site on Persian literature in translation, http://persian.packhum.org/persian and the Gardens of the Mughal Empire http://www.mughalgardens.org/html/music01.html

This provides for a truly incredible reading experience, unlike anything else which I have ever read. I have not seen such an extensive bibliography in most fiction works.

I have learned a few things about social networking sites. One of these is that social networking requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth which is often not supported by the companies just starting out. I have seen outages and overloads at all the social networking sites I have used. All of them. As these social networks expand, they need to constantly increase the amount of bandwidth and memory which they are using.

Technorati has had trouble supporting favorites, Twitter has run into too many people, Blogcatalog has run into excessive amounts of people on their servers. The latest trouble has been with Entrecard, one of their servers blew and there was a fire. http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185 . I do not blame anyone for this. Social networking is much more data intensive than most people imagine.

If you are going to join and use social networking, join three networks and expect two to be working at any given time. Reliability seems to be highly random. A lot of these services are new and will be experimenting with their computing needs.

On another note, I played around with Shelfari a little bit more today. I added a few children's books The Butter Battle Book, Where the Wild Things Are, and Peter Rabbit to my shelf. I also posted a few comments in the groups.

I finally removed Technorati from my blog. I added Twitter instead. I don't know if it is just a flight of fancy. I was not happy with Technorati's function.