quick link - david carr on My Kid Could Paint That

I've got a few posts percolating, but here's something I saw today I really liked. I've been reading a blog by one of the NY Times journalists, David Carr, about Oscar buzz, and today he wrote about a film at Sundance I'm really interested in seeing. It's an interesting post, and does a great job of showing how a blog can be useful and different for a professional writer.

The Carpetbagger Blog

shout it from the mountaintop.

really cool feature on the nyt web site i never noticed before, because it's only mentioned in little tiny letters at the very bottom of the page. Alt-click (option click in mac speak) on any word in an article and a window pops up with a definition of it. Very cool. Sunni / Shia confusion? No problem.

Why was that so hard to tell me about?

24, once more.

Once again, Kiefer's back to sabotage my monday nights and keep the doldrums at bay (or slow the editing on the side project du jour, more likely). In the premiere episode, they blew up a bus before the opening credits had even finished, and Jack killed a man after being on US soil for less then 20 minutes - with his TEETH. That's some fine television right there.

Last season I tried to keep track of the violence Jack perpetrated, but never published the post because I didn't fill out the data completely. Here's the info I had gathered.


"24" kill count:

7- 8am: knocks out 1 security guard/maintainence person
8- 9am:
9-10am:
10-11am:
11am-12pm: Jack killed one person (assassin).
12pm-1pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. He beat up the President's Chief of Staff (Walt) though.
1pm-2pm: Jack shot 3 people but didn't kill them. He tortured one of them.
2-3pm: Jack Bauer killed 1 person (terrorist)

3-4pm: Jack Bauer killed 3 people (henchmen)
4-5pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. Someone tried to blow him up though.
5-6pm: Jack didn't kill anyone, but he shot someone's wife in the leg.
6-7pm: Jack killed 1 terrorist at CTU.
7-8pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. He persuaded someone to commit suicide.
8-9pm:
9-10pm:
10-11pm: Jack shot at least 4 people, maybe more. He also slit someone's throat.
11-12pm: Jack shot at least 3 people while breaking out of a bank. Also, he threatened to shoot the manager's wife.

The Good Fairies of New York

I read another book that has fairies in it.

This one I picked up at a new little bookstore that has opened in Jersey City...I don't believe I've mentioned it here before...it's called the Imagine Atrium, and it's a great little shop. 528 Jersey Avenue, right next to the coffee shop, which is very convenient. It's a small, but fairly highly curated little book shop, with a tendency toward the spiritual which seems to be somewhat frequent out here. Not in a bad way.

But back to the fairies - the book (The Good Fairies of New York) had a foreword by Neil Gaiman, and was published on Soft Skull Press, so I figured it was worth paying attention to. I don't really know anything about the author, Martin Millar, but I will investigate him now...It turned out to be quite a lot of fun, but not in the Susanna Clarke model of fake history....more like Buckaroo Banzai or something....it's a pretty chuckle filled tale about two fairies who are into punk rock and fashion who unaccountably find themselves in New York City...in the east village, to be exact. They hang out in bars, befriend and confound the locals. They end up meeting fairies of other ethnicities, and going on dates with them and fighting quite a bit as well. The book is written in an understated but very funny way. I laughed out loud about a dozen times. If you are looking a for quick read to divert your attention from a mysterious odor that no one can explain, and know a little bit about punk rock and the geography of New York City, you could do far worse than to grab this book. Highly recommended.