In Fact, I'll Commend It Again

Television for Children Ages 8 – 10

Raunchy Late Night Comedies

Science Fiction/Fantasy with a Strong Female Lead


If any of this looks familiar, we'd probably be bros in real life: these are a few of the category recommendations Netflix has recently made for me. Whether it's via Netflix, Amazon, or our friends and families, recommendation is an undeniable and potent factor in our media consumption decision-making.

Now for the book-related part of today's segment! Some books I've recently been told I absolutely must read:

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Bossypants by Tina Fey

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

What's been recently recommended to you, gentle readers?

Prithee, Inform Me: Summer Releases

'Tis the season for new releases, mes auteurs, and I was curious as to which you're most excited about!

While there are a number of books I'm dying to read, I'm most looking forward to A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (July 12th, fiction), Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems by Marvin Bell (July 1st, poetry), and In My Time by Dick Cheney (August 30th, memoir). That last one should be pretty interesting.

In music (in which I have really eclectic taste), I'm pretty excited for Alpocalypse by "Weird Al" Yankovic (June 21st). Why? Because it's his first studio release in five years and the album contains a track called "Polka Face." Done and done.

Finally, in movies, I am super amped for the Green Lantern film this week (June 17th)! I've been waiting for this movie since I was about six, folks. If it disappoints me, I may never recover.

What about you, cats & kittens? What are you looking forward to in books, music, movies, and more over the next three months?

It Came From The Cloud

First, many thanks to our five guest posters from last week! The activity in the comments section and on Twitter seem to indicate that all were fun, informative, and well-received, and I tip my digital hat to the five of you.

I'm still unpacking and settling in from my vacation, so today's post will be about you. Prithee, inform me, ladies and gents: how do you feel about Apple's iCloud?

Personally, I fear that Apple will use my information for iNiquity™, but that could just be my own paranoia talking. While I initially balked at the idea—Apple has made its name principally as a hardware, rather than software, manufacturer—I've since realized that this is a pretty smart move for the company. Most of the people I know who own Apple machines own multiple devices (laptop, desktop, iPhone, iPod, iPad, &c), and being able to link them together via the magic of the iNterwebz™ makes a lot of sense.

So, while I'm not sure I'll be partaking in Apple's newest venture—what about you?

5.1.2011

First, apologies for the lack of round-up on Friday! I promise this week's round-up will be ultra mega awesome to make up for it. Should I be raising expectations that Laura will have to fulfill? Probably not!

Today's post is not book-related (or it is, sort of, in a very tangential way). If you haven't seen the news yet—and I can't imagine you haven't—Osama bin Laden is dead.

I'm not comfortable celebrating anyone's death, though I won't pretend to be upset by the news. I'm glad he's no longer a threat, regardless of the fact that it took us nearly a decade to catch him and he was operationally hindered by his constant flight from U.S. forces over the past several years.

Would I rather have seen him tried for his crimes? Of course. I don't think he would have permitted himself to be captured, however, and if this is the way it had to end, that's fine with me. Again: I'm glad he's gone.

I became a New Yorker only recently; I wasn't in the city (and in fact had never visited it) when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed. I watched on the news and had no firm grasp of what was going on. Maybe if I had been there ten years ago, I would have joined the crowds celebrating bin Laden's death last night, regardless of the fact that I didn't support the war in Iraq and am deeply conflicted about the war in Afghanistan. I certainly don't think this spells the end of the "War on Terror," as Peter Bergen unctuously insisted on cnn last night.

There are going to be books about this: biographies of bin Laden, coffee table books detailing the 9/11 attacks, compendiums on Al Qaeda, maybe even first-person accounts by members of the military directly responsible for bin Laden's death. I can promise you that this minute, any publisher with bin Laden-related titles in his backlist is going back to print; anyone under contract to write a non-fiction book about the man is probably being rushed to finish it.

The story goes back years. People will want to buy and read it. Time is of the essence with news-related titles like these, though I imagine the tenth anniversary of the attacks next September will widen the window of opportunity.

Osama bin Laden was buried at sea to prevent his tomb from becoming a shrine for radicals and radicalism—there can be no locus around which his followers might congregate. At the same time, however, it is important to write and to read books about these events to preserve them in our cultural memory. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote over one hundred years ago, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We've witnessed tremendous violence these past ten years. If we can't learn from these events, we've got no hope of transcending them.

I hope that bin Laden's death signals a turning point in the war in Afghanistan rather than an event to galvanize his supporters. I hope that someone even worse than him doesn't emerge as a replacement. I hope that the Al Qaeda terrorist network suffers a loss of morale and organization with his death (again, operationally speaking, I don't think there will make much of an impact). And I hope that among all the polarizing, attention-grabbing, and politically motivated books on his life and death that arise over the next year or so, that there's at least one that invites us to think rather than emote, to reflect rather than react.

Santayana had another quote, too: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." I also hope he was wrong about that.

An Incomplete Education

I love web comics, mes auteurs, more than I love most people and some varieties of whisk(e)y. It should come as no surprise, then, that the intersection of books/grammar and web comics in the Venn diagram of my life is a most wond'rous and magical place.

I therefore present to you my top ten grammar pet peeves—in web comic form!

1. "Alot." "Alot" is not a word. Or, if it is, it refers to an animal that's better than you at everything.

2. Semicolons. I'm not a big fan of them; Kurt Vonnegut once labeled the semicolon a "transvestite hermaphrodite representing absolutely nothing," insisting that "all they do is show you've been to college." If you insist on using them, however, here's how to do it.

3. Mondegreens. Here's a definition; here's a visual guide to some common ones pertaining to English idiom.

4. Misuse of the word "literally." If you're guilty of this, I'll literally send you a strongly worded e-mail/figuratively explode.

5. Confusion of its/it's. Especially on the Internet.

6. Misuse of apostrophes in general. Thankfully, there is a cure: flowcharts.

7. Misspellings. Here are ten you should avoid.

8. Internet comments. This is more of a video than a comic, but it gets the point across: 99.9% of the people on the Internet are functionally illiterate, some of them hilariously so. (I've spent countless hours laughing at seething, near-incomprehensible rants on YouTube.)

9. People who think they can out-grammar me. Sometimes I lay traps for them just for fun.

10. People who smugly correct other people's grammar. It's just kind of a jerk thing to do. Me? I'd do it subtly via blog post.

Also, in case you were curious:

Created by Oatmeal

Many thanks to Hyperbole and a Half, Dinosaur Comics, and The Oatmeal for their fantastic comics.

It's Between Chapters 10 and 12

No, this isn't about Borders (at least, not directly; see below). But it is about another brick-and-mortar franchise whose very existence is imperiled by the Internet: Blockbuster.

After suffering a difficult last few years, including ever-shrinking profit margins and the delisting of its stock from the New York Stock Exchange, the (former) video rental giant announced today that it's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (though they're calling it a "pre-arranged recapitalization").

I think relatively few people are surprised, though I would have given them another year or two before expecting a bankruptcy announcement. Between Netflix's stranglehold on pre-planned video rental and redbox's domination of the impulse rental with their kiosk model, Blockbuster hasn't had anywhere to go for some time.

Speaking of nowhere to go: while Borders hasn't (as far as I know) given any indication that they'll be filing for bankruptcy anytime soon, I do see some similarities between the two companies. Both are apparently strapped for cash; both have been (or have been in danger of being) delisted by the NYSE (Borders' stock has hovered around the minimum average close of $1.00/share for most of 2010); both are competing against impossibly popular, efficient, and fast-growing electronic competitors (Netflix and Amazon, respectively); and both demonstrate, à mon avis, only a half-hearted and ill-informed attempt to enter the digital market (Blockbuster with their on-line rental queue feeding their mail service, Borders with their .com business and partnership with various third-party e-reader manufacturers).

Long story short: I'm not surprised by this turn of events for Blockbuster and while I don't think it necessarily prefigures a similar downturn for Borders, I think the stories are similar enough that both consumers and industry insiders should be paying attention. If Borders' management doesn't right the company quickly, it may be too late to avoid a "pre-arranged recapitalization." Here's hoping it's not too late already.

On A Lighter Note

Yesterday's post generated a lot of reactions and opinions (which I appreciate!), but I feel that one comment above all others requires a post-length response: Dan Krokos' question, "Who do you guys think will be the villain in the new Batman?" (As you might have read, the Batman is my very favorite hero.)

As much as I enjoyed the Michael Keaton Batman films and the mid-90s' super campy Batman Forever and Batman & Robin (1995 and 1997, respectively), I think the new dark, (more) realistic, gritty Batman reboot would benefit from revisiting some of the over-the-top villains from these films. So, mes auteurs, I offer you the following: my choices for the next set of Batman (wo)mantagonists, along with the actors I'd love to see play them.

· Mister Freeze. He's frosty, he's tortured, he's got a mega sweet freeze ray. I think he's got a ton of backstory/developmental potential that weren't fully explored via Arnold Schwarzenegger's relentless ice/snow puns, so I hope they bring him back and give him a fair shake. My pick for the actor: Adrien Brody.

· Poison Ivy. I don't think Uma Thurman did a bad job at all in Batman & Robin, but I'd like to see a new actress take on the role. I'd have to go with Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I loved in Iron Man. Who else could pull off a supervillainess who's also a scientist?

· The Riddler. Jim Carrey played the enigmatic Edward Nigma a little (read: very much) on the crazy/wacky side. I'd like to see a cooler, more controlled Riddler, one more interested in panache and execution than in simply driving Batman up the wall (sort of how Heath played The Joker). My pick is Neil Patrick Harris, hands down.

· Catwoman. I liked Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns; the movie Catwoman (starring Halle Berry, whom I otherwise really like) was so dreadful that it ruined me on the character for years. Who can fix that? Another Aussie, Emilie de Ravin (Claire from lost).

· Two-Face. I'm not going to beat around the bush: Aaron Eckhart did a phenomenal job in the last movie, and yeah, while they sort of closed off Two-Face's potential role in any direct sequels, they didn't make it impossible for him to return. And I really hope he does.

· Clayface. This character hasn't seen a lot of action outside the comic books and animated TV shows, so I'd love to witness his silver screen début. It could just be an extension of my post-lost heartache, but I'd be beyond amped if they could get Terry O'Quinn (a.k.a. John Locke).

And those are my picks! Feel free to post yours in the comments.