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Looks like these "cheapos" are coming directly from the manufacturer. Probably over-produced them and are liquidating the box themselves.

Now that might (just possibly) be worth the pixels. Not that I'd ever find out...

Sounds gripping! Now if only someone would buy the film rights... Sorry -- just thinking about how Hollywood is so convinced that there are no new decent ideas out there that it seems like 80% of the films out now are either remakes (of much better movies) or sequels.

I know that one! Actually never ate there, though I did eat at Golden Pancake or something over on Halsted. My go-to late night food in that neighborhood is Late Night Thai, which opens up around 9 pm and then is open until 5 or 6 am! (I'm sure it wasn't open back then, however.)

Closing in on the halfway mark with Headhunter. I like how the pace doesn't flag, even as Findley layers more and more improbable events on top of each other. I don't really know what genre it fits -- perhaps the fantastic writ large. Happened to pick this up at the library: John Barth's The Book of Ten Nights and A Night. It is so absurdly & ridiculously post-modern that I can't find even the semblance of a plot threaded through any of these stories (it's almost all about what name the narrator wants to go by etc. etc. etc.). I might have had more tolerance for this back in the day (and I do think earlier Barth is worth reading), but this is not worth my time. I feel complete antipathy to the book, and it's going right back to the library on my next trip.

I can't find the Slate article to link to it, but the columnist claimed that everyone could be sorted into a chaos Muppet/puppet (Cookie Monster) or an order Muppet/puppet (Bert). Same things play themselves out everywhere (Wiki moderators going around closing down stubs and claiming some articles aren't worth the pixels it takes to put on your screen). One of the built-in asymmetries is that only Order Muppets would even dream of taking on the role of moderator in the first place. The Chaos Muppets (and in this context I am definitely one) don't see the big deal in a few extra socks (or threads) laying around and do get a bit tired of the nagging. I don't expect this dynamic to ever change. I guess it is up to you how personally you take it. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough that neither side is "right" or "wrong"* -- and neither can fully understand the reason the other side is so driven to tidy things up or be slobby. * You can point to forum "rules" to try to win an argument about threads or whatnot, but that isn't really the point that people have vastly different perspectives on such things. And that's why they keep coming back to the surface over and over.

Me too! Heard bits of that BBC version last night, drifting in and out of sleep. Sounded intriguing but I can't imagine I'd be any more successful reading it now - I like a narrative! It's not the easiest thing in the world for sure. In general, I find that the extreme snobbery and exclusiveness of the high modernists hasn't served them well. 'Oh, you mean I have to have a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin literature and even read a bit of Greek in order to understand your work? Pass.' And Joyce is by no means the worst. I keep looking at my copy of Pound's Cantos, saying why did I order this? I will never read through the whole thing. My goal for this year is to skim it once and take it to a bookshop. As it happens, I was reading (probably in the Guardian) that some editors have spent 20 years revamping Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It's just coming out on Penguin. I even had it in my Amazon basket, and I said to myself -- what are you doing -- you will never in your life finish this book. And I came to my senses just in time.

In the midst of Findley's Headhunter. Definitely an interesting read (or rather re-read). Findley imagines Toronto if Kurtz (from Heart of Darkness) was released from his book and ended up in charge of a mental hospital. Not sure how that came together in his imagination, but interesting. Just completed Carol Shields Various Miracles, which is a collection of short stories. Most of them didn't grab me. Still, I decided to pick up her earlier short story collection The Orange Fish when I saw it at the library. Happy Bloom Day everyone! There may be a thread devoted to it, but here is as good as anywhere. I've actually read Ulysses twice and may tackle it once again (in 5+ years). BBC Radio 4 has done a reading/dramatization of much of it (not the entire thing) and the podcasts can be downloaded for approx. 2 weeks: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ulysses

I've basically given up on watching NBA (the last sport I did watch). But I really cannot stand JVG's commentary (even heard from the other room). Even he admitted that LeBron totally mugged Durant on the final play, but with 15 seconds was cheering him on for being such a force in the game. Yeah, quite a force when given virtually all the breaks by the refs... If Miami does win it all, it really isn't deserved in my book. The good thing about not caring about sports is that within 6 months of the hype dying down, I literally could not tell you who won any of the various national championships.

I'll send a contribution tonight. Thanks for the "space"!

Yeah, pretty terrible way to end a game when the refs blew quite a number of calls and ended up essentially deciding the game. Maybe it is selective memory that they all seemed to go against OKC (the goal tending call that wasn't etc.) but it sure left a bad taste in my wife's mouth. I don't quite understand why she keeps watching when she has such low regard for the refs, but I guess that's her business.

That's a pretty insanely low price. I have much of the repetoire already (though by different artists -- with exception of Tokyo String Quartet doing Beethoven quartets) but there are certainly quite a number of composers that would be new to me (Kuhnau, Sammartini, Stamitz, Tartini, Pergolesi), so it seems worth the 18 or so pounds to ship it cross the pond.

Cracked would on occasion run Howard the Duck in a 2 or 3 page story. Don't know how it was linked to the Marvel comic (same artists/writers?) and that didn't seem to be a parody. That was pretty cool, and I wish someone would collect those, but other than that I didn't really get into Cracked. Of course, I almost never bought either magazine. I do remember in the glory days you could find Mad and Cracked near grocery check-out counters.

One of those guys I can appreciate but have trouble reading. Too grand & maximalist for my taste. He was teaching in the writing program at Columbia my first semester in 1978, but being a rookie I didn't get my first choice of workshop instructor and was stuck with a total mediocrity named Hilma Wolitzer (whose daughter Meg has subsequently eclipsed her). I've not read all that much Fuentes, but I did like Christopher Unborn (wonder if I'd still like it).

Obviously, your experience may vary, but most of Auster's work is more like the New York Trilogy than Brooklyn Follies. Still, you might like The Invention of Solitude, or at least the first half which is about Auster's father.

That was such a tragedy. They left school because of greed envy and they wound up with no championships and still made plenty of money. There is still some value in staying in school especially when your team in on the brink of true greatness. The money will always be there. Too bad, now Howard is hooked up with Lebron, Wade and Bosh, and he still might not get a ring. Well, my understanding is that even if they had stayed in school, the NCAA would have wiped out those achievements because of UM recruiting violations (pretty much everything from 1992-99 was vacated). Fortunately, they left 1989 alone! But supposedly had UM prevailed in 1993, this would have been overturned. I personally think NCAA is fooling itself that they can make a pronouncement about forfeiting a national title and have the alumni just accept this (like excising the memories a la Men in Black).

I suppose people can do whatever they want with their money or to help them through grieving, but this seems seriously out-of-whack: Amy Winehouse statue planned for the Roundhouse in Camden "to recognise her contribution to music." Story here

Upon which all have now been built. Not. You can sidestep the rule sometimes -- "all of which have now been developed." As a rule, I don't get too hung up on such rules, but if it is nagging at me, I do try a rewrite. (In all these examples, the phrase is passive, which is also to be avoided... )

it's ok. just like everything else, language evolves. the article was no revelation. but this quote is, to me, suspect: 'Scholars recently analyzed more than five million digitized books, about 4 percent of all the books ever printed. Publishing their findings in "Science," the researchers discovered that, by their estimation, “52 percent of the English lexicon – the majority of the words used in English books – consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.' am i reading that right? more than half of the words we read are "lexical dark matter," or neologisms? really? that seems a bit high to say the least. Was the reference not to ALL books, just to the 4% digitalized? Maybe they are the most-easily available for analysis, most recently-composed, and therefore are indeed "lexical dark matter" and neologisms. If even 10-15% of the scanned books are books for MBAs (Who Moved My Cheese, Good to Great, etc.) then this is plausible.

Agreed. I got the CD/DVD for $20 including shipping, and I thought that was very reasonable. $80 for either one more concert DVD or one more concert CD seems highway robbery.

One thing about the Toscanini Collection is that there is a pressing problem where the 1953 live version of Beethoven Eroica is repeated twice instead of the 1949 studio version (on CD1). Sony appears to be aware of this, so the Amazon.com set will *probably* be corrected. One can only hope. People who have already ordered from Amazon.co.uk are hoping that there will be a way to contact Sony (or possibly Amazon) to get the one disc fixed (as with the Glenn Gould set) rather than returning the entire thing. Not sure anyone else on the board was impacted, but I can post my experiences if I do find out how to get a corrected disc.

There's a pretty good chance that was Under African Skies, which included in these various packages. I'm not sure the market is all that robust for these sets, but I will be happy to listen to the bonus tracks as I never got around to picking up Graceland on CD.

I'm going to be honest and say that when they kept talking about his official biographer (some dude in Chicago) and how lucky he was that Ray really opened up to him, I thought Mr. Bradbury had already passed on a few years back. Anyway, he left quite a legacy. RIP.

No fooding?

I still remember the big kerfuffle about Graceland, particularly whether Paul Simon should have respected the boycott and recorded it somewhere else, i.e. not in South Africa. I took a bit of a hard line back in the day, particularly on whether he was exploiting Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Now a lot of those concerns seem pretty silly. I'm glad that the music came out and I listen to it every now and again. So it is 25 years on now. And the obligatory anniversary edition has come out. As far as I can see, there is a CD/DVD set, a 2CD/2DVD set and a 3 CD/1DVD Amazon exclusive. As far as I can tell, the 2nd CD in the 2 box sets contains only 5 or so bonus tracks. But all or nearly all of the bonus tracks are tacked to the end of the single CD in the CD/DVD set. The DVD in all three sets is the Under African Skies documentary (which includes the famous SNL version of Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes). The main difference in the sets is that the the Amazon Exclusive CD contains 5 previously unreleased live tracks recorded in San Sebastian, Spain from the Graceland/Rhythm of the Saints Tour of 1989. Whereas the standard box set has the DVD of Paul Simon: Graceland - The African Concert, which has been OOP forever. I think from a value perspective the CD/DVD release is the way to go (I actually only ever had Graceland on cassette, so I may be the only person in the world that could really use this release ). Some of the reviewers have said the bonus tracks are actually pretty interesting. If I was in the market for a box set, then I would definitely go for the one with the DVD of the African Concert in it. However, it seems pretty likely that this will be released as a stand-alone DVD within the next year. And maybe I will pick it up if it comes out.