Morning Thoughts

Paul Cezanne, Porträt Gustave Geffroy, 1895 . I think the painting looks timeless, it could be a professors or an academics office today.

Morning Thoughts

This morning I walked up to my local library. It was drizzling outside. I got there at 9:50 a.m. and the library was closed so I walked down to the fruit market and bought some cuccumbers, plum tomatos, plums, and a piece of watermelon. I also bought some shaving razors. I almost got caught in a downpour on the way back to the library. It left me standing outside Walgreens for about fifteen minutes waiting for the rain to stop.

When I got to the library, I looked around for books on scheduling. I thought it would be part of time management books in the management section of the library. I found out it was in books on organizational skills. I picked up a copy of Organizing For Dummies by Eileen Roth and Elizabeth Miles. I am not incredibly organized. I like organizing other peoples things more than I like organizing my own things. I've noticed this is a common trait among librarians.

I also picked up two other books, Iron Man Demon In A Bottle by David Micheline, Bob Layton, and John Romita Jr. and Winning: The Answers Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions In Business Today, Jack & Suzy Welch. Jack Welch was known as "Neutron Jack" because between 1981-1985 he fired over 100,000 people at General Electric.

I have started reading the Winning: The Answers. Each chapter begins with a question, followed by a short discussion of the answer to the question. I like the book so far because it is very straightforward.

Iron Man-- Peter David

Iron Man-- Peter David

This is a paperback novelization of the movie by Peter David. Because it is a novelization of a movie, it has to stick to the story in the movie. The paperback was released a month before the movie was released. There is a picture of Iron Man's face on the cover. The goal of these type of paperbacks is to encourage you to go out and see the movie.

The story modernizes the comic book iron man. Iron man was retired in comic book form a while ago. Marvel comics is reviving the franchise.

Tony Stark is a world leading weaponry salesman. His goal is to sell weapons to the United States so the United States military can be the best in the world.

Stark makes a trip to Afghanistan and is driving in a convoy when it is hit by insurgents. He is captured. The terrorist insurgents demand he fix some of his own weaponry so they can use it against American troops. He sees firsthand that the enemy is using his weaponry.

Instead, Tony Stark builds a prototype of his iron man suit and fights his way out, escaping to freedom. He makes a vow to stop selling weaponry the world over. His experience creates a change of heart. Also, he gets shrapnel near his heart signifying a physical change. He has to have a magnetic chest plate put in to stop the shrapnel from entering his heart.

The story is very straightforward, the writer, Peter David makes it come across easily. There is not a lot of angst or deep thought. It is action oriented and about change.

When he gets home, he announces the change in his company. However, many people in the company don't want to change. They plan for Tony Stark's downfall. Thus we have the classic Judas story, where there is a traitor in the midst.

Tony Stark builds a new more powerful iron man suit and goes to defeat the terrorists, destroying the weapons which were manufactured by Stark Industries.

When he gets home, he must face the Judas, an appropriately named villain, Mr. Stane. Mr. Stane has built a suit similar to Iron Man's which he plans to sell as a weapon of war, the Iron Monger. A major battle ensues where Iron Man destroys the Iron Monger.

This is very straightforward action. Iron Man even plays Metallica and Black Sabbath rock music while he is fighting the villains. Peter David does a good job creating a straightforward story of good versus evil. Tony Stark starts out as a millionaire playboy without a conscience and gets a conscience through directly experiencing the bad guys.

The book was quite easy to read. I finished it in about two and a half hours. It is the kind of thing which you can read in an afternoon.

Peter David has written numerous Star Trek novels, for Babylon 5, for Marvel and DC comics, as well as a few of his own novels like Tigerheart. Tigerheart is advertised on the inside front cover of the Iron Man paperback. He is an entertaining bestselling writer.

Morning Weekend Thoughts

This is a path in the grounds of Down House. Darwin regularly walked along this path for exercise of body and mind. He called it his "Thinking Path". Ted Grant took the photograph and released it into the public domain.

Morning Weekend Thoughts



I am at the library sitting here at one of the computers. I am fifty minutes into my alotted hour. While I was looking around on the internet, I got a blocked site. I must have been looking at something quite spicy. I am really not sure why I was blocked. I wasn't even aware they had filtering software on my local libraries computers.


I visited a number of social networking sites. Entrecard is very slow today. I should not be obsessive about these things. Apparently, they partnered with a company called http://www.sezwho.com/ , a company that has comment management software for blogs. I am not sure if it is working right now. It did not work out too well. Now Entrecard is quite slow.

Sezwho was not properly prepared for a large volume of blogs to manage. For Sezwho to index a single blog for comments takes about two to three hours. Imagine if they suddenly have thousands of blogs to index.

I also returned my book, The Other Wind today. I dropped it in the book slot. Not very exciting.

Today seems like it is just starting and it is almost noon. I had my morning coffee already, so I am awake.

Sometimes you want to do nothing. I certainly am in one of those moods. I feel pretty relaxed. Right now, I am the only one sitting at the computers in the library. It is quiet and peaceful. I will be walking down the hill soon to go back home. I still haven't looked around for things to read.

I didn't find anything to read at the library this morning. There is a heat advisory outside until after six o'clock so it is a bit hot outside.


I did however, have a chance to read Iron Man by Peter David. It was a nice lite read with all the trappings of what should go into a superhero novel. I haven't seen the movie so I don't know if it is an exact match. Still it was fun to read this afternoon. It took me about two hours to read. It is the kind of book which you can read in a single afternoon.

I also watched part of another Ray Harryhausen film, 20 Million Miles to Earth. It was about a creature from Venus that grows into a giant creature from Venus which terrorizes the Sicilian countryside. At least, the monster had the good taste to go after a coliseum. The movie was light entertainment. It was basically a giant bipedal lizard.

Unfortunately, I could not watch all of it because the DVD was scratched. It is hard to know if the DVD works sometimes. People who return the DVDs often don't tell us that they are damaged. We have a machine downstairs at the library which is supposed to fix most scratches on DVDs. I will bring the movie in to get it fixed.

I am preparing to watch these slightly cheesy films for the grand finale of Harryhausen films, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad tomorrow. There are supposed to be several animatronic fight sequences between Sinbad and various monsters.

If you are wondering if I did anything constructive today, I did go shopping for groceries this afternoon. I know it has very little to do with books.

A Trip To A Bookstore

Image from Hokusai Manga. A Very Early Japanese Manga

A Trip to a Bookstore

Good afternoon, I spent a little bit of time at the local bookstore which is a generic Barnes & Nobles. I did not buy anything. Occassionally, I do see things which I want to buy for myself, but not this time.

I had a free $5 gift card from Starbucks which was supposed to be good at any Starbucks. I thought the cafe in the Barnes & Noble was a Starbucks because everything in it was Starbucks. Apparently, it just serves Starbucks and the employees wear Starbucks style clothing, but it is is a Barnes & Noble cafe. I was annoyed. I had hoped to get two free medium coffees with milk. (This might have been why I was annoyed enough not to buy anything.)

Anyways, I instead walked around the store and looked at the various sections in the story. The first part which I looked at was Business. I found something interesting in the business section, apparently, Businessweek has a bestseller list. This is a link to the bestsellers for Businessweek for the last two years. http://www.businessweek.com/slideshows/ss_books.htm Hopefully, this will be useful when I have to order $3000 worth of business books. Wall Street Journal has a bestseller list for business books, but it is almost an exact match of the New York Times bestseller list for business.

There were of course your typical books on business. It of course included books by Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and Peter Drucker the current American icons of capitalism. I compiled a short list of books which I thought might be useful to order. Two of the books which I put on the list were The Dip by Seth Godin an internet evangelist, and Stirring It up by Gary Hirshberg. I reviewed Stirring It Up earlier on this blog.

As I was wandering around the business books aisle, a gentleman asked me who I was, and I told him that I worked at a library, he gave me a business card that said he was an ecommerce development specialist.

Anyways, I then spent a bit of time looking at the science fiction titles. There were three titles that stood out, Time Spike by Eric Flint, Space Vulture, and The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. There were also a few paperbacks by Mercedes Lackey and Tanya Huff I am considering.

I also saw a few superhero mass mareket paperback fiction titles. These are not graphic novels, but movie tie-ins novelizations of recent movies. There were four that stood out. The reason people read these things is that they saw the movie and it stuck in their mind. They were Ironman, Hellboy The Golden Army, Indiana Jones and The Genesis Deluge, and Batman Gotham Knight. This was kind of fun to look at. The Ironman paperback was written by Peter David who actually is a very entertaining author who has written for Star Trek Pocketbooks, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and the Star Trek television show. This is a link to his blog:
http://peterdavid.malibulist.com/index.html

Finally, I wandered around the manga (japanese comics). I don't know a whole lot about manga, but I did notice that a number of the publishers had omnibus editions of manga, things like Fruits Basket, The Ultimate Edition which combined several of the smaller editions together. There was also The Viz Big Ruruoni Kenshin, XXXholic Omnibus Edition, and Trigun . I am going to look and see if more of the desired titles are available in either ultimate or omnibus titles. Hopefully, this will allow me to get a wider variety of titles for a little less money. I also saw a graphic novel of Vampire Hunter D, one of my favorite animes. This is a lot of fun to watch.