NYPL has a website called the Stereogranimator that allows you to make animated versions of archived images. History coming alive.  Check it out!

I did the thing any rational human being would do.

I bought coffee on my way to work.

Why?

Because I need coffee–just like a lab rat needs crack…or experimental drugs.

Yes, my friends. Coffee is my drug of choice and I need precisely one cup in my system every morning or things get too real–just like the following people (replace Snickers with coffee).

Today, my options for coffee were the following: Starbucks or McDonalds. As I’ve been MickeyDing it a bit much of late, I thought I’d diversify my investment by patronizing the Evil Coffee Empire as people affectionately refer to it.

For those of you who hate the Big S, I must tell you if it were up to me I’d stop by my favorite neighborhood coffee shop and order a cappuccino without sugar (good coffee doesn’t need sugar). But my life revolves around my commute, so Starbucks it was.

Needless to say, I was punished severely for my poor judgment.

Why is it that I keep falling for the old “Starbucks is on my way to work” trap?!

WHY!!

Einstein, I believe once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and I was definitely cuckoo for coffee cup this morning.

Forgive my brain but it ran out of fuel.

I think I’m still trying to process the awful taste that my taste buds were relaying. I swear my cup of drip coffee tasted like the illegitimate child  of burnt plastic and boiled vodka sprinkled with cigarette ashes.

But I can’t really blame Starbucks can I. I mean I knew this coffee wasn’t my cup of tea, but I went for it anyway. Starbucks is great if:

• You want a decent designer brew. They are especially handy in Podunky places where they might not have a big chain store for miles but they have a Starbucks to fulfill your soy latte needs.
• You feel like having a sugar rush at 7 am.
• You get a nice coupon or gift certificate.
• You want to look cool, busy, and imporant in the morning (“Out of my way woman on a mission–Can’t you see I’m rushing with a STARBUCKS CUP IN HAND! Hold the elevator peasant!”)
• You need a great travel mug for your home brewed drip coffee so you never have to be without some great drip coffee (especially if your coworkers don’t drink coffee). In fact, I have one of those.

This whole coffee episode reminds me of my other addiction (*ahem* books, of course) and the sort of insanity that brings with it.

Like when I pick up a book by the some author I’ve read before and not liked, decide to read another book, and hope that magically I’ll like this author.  I used to think that I could never run into a book I wouldn’t like but I have been proven wrong. Prime example.

The Nanny Diaries.

Now hear me out. I know that there are lots of readers that love this book and catapulted it to fame and the big screen via Scarlett Johansson and Alicia Keys. However, I just never got the appeal. I stopped in the middle of the book called it a day. But several years later picked up the sequel in hopes that I’d like this…

I gave up after the 1st chapter, flipped to the back, and promptly returned it to the library. I’m just glad I never bought it!

I know it’s a matter of taste–much like coffee.

Some people like their coffee beans roasted, others toasted. Blah, blah.

But these little episodes make me realize more and more that sometimes I can’t rely on the palates of the masses.

Something so obvious, but that I forget because I want to roll with the masses.

Have you ever been a literary contrarian? Did you ever read a book everyone else liked but you just didn’t get?

**Side Note: This BusinessWeek article might prove a point. Apparently, there are many others that don’t like Starbucks coffee. So perhaps sometimes the masses secretly hate things and/or are lying. Just a thought**

Okay so I have to put this out there because possession of this knowledge is poisoning me slowly but surely.

As I was on Goodreads rating books I had already read and making note of the ones I’d like to read there was one book that came to mind that I started but never finished (as I so often do). It was one of those situations that likens those romantic movies where there are two perfectly matched people that meet on a boat or a park or store or something and then somehow lose each other tragically without knowing or remembering each others names. The young lovers have to rely on a fortuitous turn of events or some sort of benevolent serendipity to be reuinited.

That’s not what the book’s about but it’s sort of my story with this book. Book clues after the jump:

* the author is a British man and an editor of an American magazine like W or Vanity Fair

* Setting: English countryside, small town

* The story starts out in the 1960s with a wealthy young man who lives in one of those country estates. His parents are lord and lady I think.

* the son is getting ready for a party he doesn’t want to go to

* he meets a sultry young French woman who came with a friend of his

* He runs after her to France and they get married

* They live in a cottage of some sort, but not happily

* the story alternates between present and past. The young man I believe grows up and later marries a few other women.

* the book tells the story of him as the patriarch of his own family and of this family

* The book was published fairly recently like between 2003 and 2010

I know it’s not much to go on but could anyone help me name that book?

Also: had to give honorable mention to Dolly Parton and her interesting video for her cover of Help!

I’m not much of a country music person but Dolly is pretty adorable and I just had to share the video.

Reblogged from AustenBlog:

Well, they snuck this one by us! Several Alert Janeites wrote to let us know that Shannon Hale’s book Austenland will be adapted into a film, which begins shooting this week. This is apparently not a drill. The film will be directed by Jerusha Hess (who wrote the screenplay for Napoleon Dynamite and co-wrote this screenplay with Hale) and the cast includes Keri Russell, JJ Feild, Bret McKenzie (FIGWIT!), Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Seymour, Rupert Vansittart, and James Callis. Casting demonstrates high Hottie …

How am I just finding out about this?

Reblogged from 53 weeks:

Well here we go again, another 53 weeks lie ahead of us. If anything this next period will be more difficult than the first, if only because doing something again is often more difficult than setting out to do something the first time. They say you should start as you mean to go on, so at the last minute on the Sunday afternoon (before the light faded), I walked up to the Belvedere Palace to shoot this. I do hope you like it!

In the vein of new beginnings, I promised myself I’d start diversifying my posts. Not because books I’ve started running out of things to say. Believe me, I think most of the people in my life once in a while hope I do run out of things to say…But because, although I’ve already read 6 books this year and I’m chugging along with my resolution to read 100 books this year, I have to acknowledge the change in my reading style over the years. I no longer wish to maintain the segmentation of my reading from my life. In fact, it’s not an entirely sustainable scheme. Eventually things you read start informing your daily life and your daily life obviously informs your reading choices.

 

With that in mind, I am sharing this gorgeous and stately picture of the Belvedere Palace in Potsdam. Sad I didn’t get to see this when I was there a few years ago. Although, can’t complain as I was able to visit Sans Souci.

Sans Souci Palace is the place that Frederick the Great used to retreat to. Sans Souci means "no worries" in French.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the places that my reading has allowed me to travel and how books have ignited my curiosity for the world.

 

I do think, that as a kid and even through high school I buried my head in a pile of books desperately hoping not to be noticed and trying to stave off as much expectation from people about my personality or beauty or other things I was not so sure of as a high schooler with frizzy hair, braces and giant eyebrows. I shielded myself from critique by becoming an overachieving student. What’s the worst people could say about a bookworm?

Oh she reads too much.

That didn’t seem too harsh….

But strangely enough, it was those books that made me realize what I was missing out on. There is just so much world to see, so many people to meet and so much to learn. And so, it was that I was lured out of my bookish caverns to go out to the world, book under my arm, of course. Granted, I’m not much of an adventurer or thrill seeker. I am so easily consoled by new experiences that for me discovering a new aisle in the grocery store is magnificent. Truth be told, there are still a lot of days when I prefer the comfort of my couch, a hot cup of tea, and a good book. However, I think that this has now become a choice formulated from my enjoyment of reading and not because I wish to hide from people.

In fact, as I was looking around the web for some literary genius to fortify my sense of nostalgia, I ran into this quote:

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

Even if I don’t get to go to Potsdam again or see the Belvedere or get the same guilty pull in my gut when I look at lost opportunities in my travels, I have to retract those feelings.

 

I’m just glad I have seen a little bit of the whole wide world.

From: KPRC Houston

From: KTRK Houston

It’s a typical Houstonian experience. Run home by the torrential flooding on my way to work.

Thankfully, my exile is fortified by a good dose of Whataburger and Tabitha’s Salon Takeover.

I know. I know. On a nasty day like this, I would be much better off reading. However, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing this whole time. So much so, that I haven’t updated the old blogeroo since Halloween. Today’s the day, kids, that things get updated.

New year new posts!

Therefore, I give you mini book reviews of all of my recent reads. Published one day at at a time. Today, I’ll review Mindy Kaling’s newest. Stay tuned.

How much do you know about Halloween in fiction?

My spooky score after the jump

Yay! I have ghoulish know-how.

Now off to prep for tomorrow. I leave you with a few words of advice:

1st

Please fight the good fight against bad pet costumes…

2nd

Don’t be another #halloweenfail…

3rd

Do the Monster Mash at least once tomorrow night!

Happy Halloween everybody!

Take the the most recent example: the fancy schmancy new iPhone.*

Check out the ruckus after the jump.

According to a feature on BBC News the iPhone’s built-in assistant Siri lives up to all the magic in America but not so much for the UK crowd–especially in Scotland where some regional accents are thick enough to momentarily stupefy the smart phone.

iWhat?!

The whole selling point of the new iPhone is that Siri understands what you say and what you mean.

    Awk-ward…..

The unforeseen glitch begs the following questions:

• As we integrate more and more technology into our lives, how far will we really go to customize each and every apparatus to every user?

• Have we come to expect each and every apparatus to be flawless customized to us?
• And…what what would you do if you were Scottish in a voice-operated elevator?

I was thinking about how our relationship has evolved with technology and how we have more dependent on technology as it has integrated more seamlessly into our lives. The BBC had a reality show called Electric Dreams where they illustrate this point by having one family live in the 70s, 80s, and 90s with the technology of the day. I thought it was mind-blowing how many of our innovations and necessary gadgets have come about in the past 10 to 20 years. Which makes me wonder how much we’ve giving up to our conveniences and how much more we’re willing to give up.

No word yet on whether the iPhone will adapt to regional dialects in English or any other language.

* I’m sure it’s  a real and technical term used in Silicon Valley.

Although as a I kid I would incredibly excited about the IDEA of Halloween, it just didn’t really materialize for me. Candy, yes. The rest of the experience, not so much. To begin with, my costume was always meh. My mother, bless her heart, wound up circumventing the yearly headache of costuming two girls and opted for sowing my sister and me some super stylish black sacks which looked like this but WAY less glamorous.

(Sad) Black Sack Reenactment

These were very large pillowcase affairs that she would re-hem appropriately every year.

Here’s the kicker.

For like 4 or 5 years in a row we were witches, until my sister and I just gave up on the idea of Halloween…to tell you the truth, my mom probably was hoping this phase of our lives would fizzle out because the fuss of Halloween and Thanksgiving are two American traditions she just didn’t understand.

Don’t be a sad panda, though.

The birth of my kid brother has allowed me to ingratiate myself with the Halloween spirits. My brother has been everything under the sun: Dracula, a policeman, a cowboy, a lion, a viking etc. Although he has run the gamut of costumes, he hasn’t really stepped the realm of the literary.* *Dracula doesn’t really count because my brother only knew him as a monster. This year my brother is dressing up as Harry Potter.

The ever popular Potter...

Although the boy wizard is a staid staple in the way of costumes, I am immensely proud of his choice mainly because:

1. It is an indicator of his newfound love of reading
2. I can tell he’s really reading and paying attention because he keeps bothering consulting me me about the level of detail and realism his costume should have. For example: he wants to make a wand like this**, has let his hair grow out to make it messier, and is considering attaching a flashlight to the aforementioned wand so that he can perform the Lumos spell.

**I am hesitant about making the wand because last year I burned all my fingers making a paper mache viking hat out of a milk jug. Now I know what Rachel Zoe might feel like in styling a client with particular tatstes. To honor my brother’s choice of Halloween attire, I’ll dress up as Sherlock Holmes–one of MY favorite book characters. I just hope I won’t burn up in full cloak and wool jacket in the Houston humidity. Maybe we can make dressing up as a book character a yearly tradition. Either way it’s a thing of beauty–two book lovers setting off into the night after successfully spending a few months scaring up a good costume. What are you dressing up as this Halloween? But most importantly–are you terribly upset at my pun usage?

While browsing the shelves a of a store (not specializing in book sales), I noticed that Mrs. Bossypants was not surrounded by a like-minded or even a likely coterie. On either side of Tina Fey’s new book are what seems to be very passionate adventures via Lover Unleashed and The Land of Painted Caves . On the shelf below: George Bush and Laura Bush’s fairly new tell-alls. This picture makes me think of a cracked up version of Hollywood Squares.

The wide spectrum of the literary gamut often leads to some unexpected encounters at the bookshelf. But you see, that is what I LOVE about books. I mean if you love books, you should by extension hold a special place in your heart for bookshelves as well and the unorthodox ways that they are arranged.

It’s an art really and it seems I’m not alone in thinking that.

In fact, the New Yorker has a book blog called the Book Bench, which features book shelves in one of its sections (The Subconscious Shelf). This section is dedicated to psychoanalyzing the arrangement of a person’s bookshelf from pictures. There was this one interesting instance where they talked about a bookshelf whose books were arranged in a rainbow.

I think it’s very interesting way of looking at the reading experience–it’s at least entertaining even if it’s not absolutely valid or scientific. But I’d like to go beyond that–beyond the visual, that is.

What I mean to say is that when you buy books, you’re bridging a gap between authors and creating a dialogue between old and new ideals within you–all of which is pretty neat. So in a way, the authors on your bookshelf are speaking to each other through you and other readers. It sounds a little strange and, forgive me, even resonates as a description of the symptomatology of schizophrenia, but it reminds me of something.

That famous question:

If you could invite anyone to dinner, dead or alive, who would you invite?

Naturally, everyone strives to create an entertaining and impressive list.

Yet, it dawns upon me as I look at my bookshelf or any bookshelf for that matter, that it is a little like inviting these people to a dinner party.

My dinner party could be awesome or disastrous. Observe:

• Jon Stewart, Oscar Wilde, and Jane Austen having a tete-a-tete in the living room over a nice cup of tea–which could possibly devolve from timid to fairly racuous.
• Frida Kahlo ^[*]and Salman Rushdie engrossed in deep conversation…about house repairs and gardening.
• Max Weber and F. Scott Fitzgerald sharing a laugh over gin and tonics–or possibly more proletariat drinks
• David Sedaris attempting to shock Sophie Kinsella and Pablo Neruda with stories from his childhood
• Tim Gunn, Agatha Christie and Jorge Ramos exchanging recipes and anecdotes from their travels–all the while trying to outdo each other in worldliness. Jorge Ramos (the Mexican equivalent of Anderson Cooper) would be prying into Agatha Christie’s lost days
• Dorothy Paker, Malcolm X, and Mark Twain would chit chat, but Twain would be highly distracted as he would spend his time aggravating Jane Austen across the room, just because

That would be quite something, wouldn’t it?

And to that point, I’d like to ask:

If your bookshelves could talk what would they say to each other? What would your dream literary dinner party look like?

[*] Technically, Frida didn’t write a book, but her diary was published with some help from Carlos Fuentes