more ponderable particles

• Yay! A good source of reading recommendations. The Guardian has its critics and guest authors tell us their best books of the year. Now, if I could just get together a lot of time to read... I'm amazed at how few of these books I've heard of, much less read.
• I just finished reading Audrey Niffenegger's first novel The Time Traveler's Wife. I really liked this book. I assumed it'd be either bad science fiction or a sappy romance novel. It was neither. It was an amazing charater study wrapped in a touching story with some really interesting speculative fiction tossed in. I highly recommend this book. (And if you want to buy it from Amazon, please purchase it through my links on this page... Heh.)
• In the "you have got to be kidding" department: Meeting Tom Cruise Helps Chinese Writer Fulfill her American Dream

Since I seem to have a theme going

Anne Ishii has posted her Finger in the Throat Report #7.

Come one, come all, down to my digestive system, as I consume this very lovely work of asianica, which I am using to coin a new genre of fiction: Phonetic Asianica, or Phonetica for short.

Phonetica is self-explanatory. It's when a writer chooses to represent his/her characters phonetically. When Yummee from Fan Tan says she likes being pushed around, it reads "I rike-ee beeng pushed alound." When the complimentary hooker in Lost in Translation visits Bill Murray's hotel room, and wants to convey a desire to have her pantyhose ripped off her legs, it reads: "Lip it! Lip my hose!"

Funny? Yes. Relatable? oh, I'm sorry, rerataber? iyessss. Always applopliate? Possibry not.

I was laughing so hard by the end of this article, I had people peering into my office wondering if I was okay.

Maybe white men shouldn't write about Asia.

(via Bookslut)

miscellany

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Told Entirely in Emoticons

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And, for my amusement: Me. As rendered by Googlism.

mona is a fine person
mona island/planeta
mona is mocking me
mona island
mona is an ideal retreat for student travelers and groups
mona is not "busty" exactly
mona is practically flat top
mona is situated in a pleasant area of douglas just 40 yards from the promenade
mona is a truly unlikable and selfish character
mona is a murder mystery parody that doesn't have the gumption to go for the jugular
mona is the ultimate in luxury accommodation
mona is often compared to galápagos
mona is made into a useful object
mona is
mona is shown
mona is a logic
mona is located in downtown los angeles
mona is not confined to any particular project type
mona is seventeen and has nine brothers and sisters
mona is ambitious because she is smart enough to start a small delivery business to finance her pageant dues
mona is now played by minnie driver
mona is a well
mona is the most important technology in the book
mona is 5 percent
mona is a dancer and prostitute
mona is a pointless and horrific dark comedy
mona is rarely by herself
mona is dead in the water
mona is so relentlessly obnoxious she makes roseanne look like mary poppins
mona is approximately 742
mona is going to be one year old
mona is on the air
mona is going headfirst over a cliff
mona is fashion company
mona is largely due to ms
mona is no exception
mona is a solid
mona is never outrageous enough to make you fall into the sort of silly mood a film like this needs to
mona is only about 8
mona is at deirdre?s funeral
mona is the
mona is a substantial woman with an effervescent personality that pops out in loud bursts of joviality
mona is this
mona is drawn to the "glamorous" world of "little miss" beauty pageants
mona is posing near a former slaveholding fortress in west africa for a photo shoot
mona is my sister
mona is retiring and all the nannies are celebrating with her
mona is the only museum anywhere devoted exclusively to northwest art
mona is a pubescent kali on roller blades
mona is a deeply bad comedy
mona is temporarily replacing our secretary
mona is as pretty as a picture
mona is made up of 3 bunnies
mona is tickling herself" by lisa
mona is forced to run several odd jobs to pay off the fees for the pageant entries
mona is an active file system that cooperates with user processes to accomplish tasks
mona is singing and composing better than ever
mona is recognized as an ice environment and information technology specialist
mona is a woman of power
mona is a lot like watching an episode of wheel of fortune
mona is a team player
mona is a trojan horse which deletes files on drive a
mona is now shipping with drivers for windows 95/98/2000/xp/mac/wdm/asio/gsif
mona is somewhat troubled
mona is a divisive hierarchical clustering method
mona is a dark comedy parody of a whodunit
mona is the best tv sitcom i've ever paid seven bucks to see
mona is an adult shepherd mix
mona is merely a registered narcissist
mona is a faculty member at marywood university in scranton
mona is home to giant lizards that can be seen sunning themselves along the 200
mona is foremost the brainchild of bourgeau
mona is basically a very powerful add on similar to a very high end sound card that adds a whole load of flexibility to your studio
mona is the norse goddess of the moon after which monday was named
mona is that the midler character really doesn't act all that differently or all that more outrageously than anyone
mona is a novel approach to file system extensibility that provides heretofore unseen flexibility
mona is presented in a 1
mona is a detector array specialized to detect neutrons
mona is asking for help
mona is certainly self confident and is very much the terrier in personality
mona is a funny and entertaining

Some Shakespearean particles

Some tidbits on Shakespeare:

• Seems they want to dig up Will's body to see if he may have been murdered by his son-in-law.
• And there is yet another candidate in the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays" debate. Frankly, I am in the "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" camp, but the debate is sometimes amusing, and there's one pretty good novel that came of it.
• And if anyone wants to get me a nice Christmas present...

Just when I think maybe we've grown up a bit...

Geez.

Now Dean Koontz is getting called to the carpet for racism. Seems he's been telling a story about letters he wrote to a Japanese businessman that included a lot of racist-sounding remarks. What really annoys me is his assertion that, "there's some political incorrectness in it, but nothing mean". Sheesh. And apparently, he's been telling this story for years!

You'd think a best-selling author would know that there are so many less controversial ways of being funny. Or maybe not.

more thought particles

A few rants, chuckles and a farewell:

• I have a few grammatical pet peeves that cause me to grind my teeth. The laziness of people to not figure out the difference between "lay" and "lie," for instance. Whenever I hear my co-worker tell her dog to "Lay down!" I have to bite my tongue. (It reminds me of the comic strip where the man tells his dog, "lay down" and the dog rolls onto its back. The man tells the dog, "speak" and the dog looks up at him and says, "that's lie down.") So when I listen to the radio, I expect a certain amount of proper word usage. I listened to Ed Gordon (an experienced interviewer and journalist) on NPR interviewing a woman about adoption, and imagine my gnashing of teeth when I hear him mis-use the word "reticent" in the phrase, "...people aren't as reticent to take in kids..." Reticent means "inclined to keep silent or uncommunicative. What he really means is reluctant, which means "struggling against; resisting." Ack.
• A chuckle from my favorite comic site: Shakespeare...
• The worst phrasebook ever written.
• And a farewell to John Fowles, dead at age 79. His book, The Magus, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I still get chills if I think about it too much.