Booklist 2005
Well, it’s the end of the year and everyone is making his or her Lists. Some people are striving on the Überlist project and coming up with 106 things to accomplish in the next 365 days. Other people are going over the best films or albums or books of the year. I should like to contribute to the Best Films of 2005 discussion, however, not only have I not seen every film that came out in 2005, but I haven’t even seen every film in 2005 that I thought would be good. So even if my measure of selection to see only those films that I suspected would be quality was accurate — which, objectively, is certainly isn’t — I still wouldn’t be able to say with personal certainty that, oh, A Very Long Engagement was the best film of 2005 because I didn’t see Capote or Shopgirl or Mandalay or a dozen other challenging, intentional pieces of film or entertainment.
Last year at this time, I wrote a little paen to Julian Gough about how Juno and Juliet was still my favourite new book, three years after I’d first read it. With that in mind, I set about attempting to catalogue the books I read over the course of this year in order to try and find a new contemporary favourite. This didn’t work for two reasons: 1) my cataloguing was terrible, and 2) most of the books I read this year were for various library literature classes, and they were terrible across the board.
What was interesting to me was that I found that the majority of the books I read this year were left unfinished. Even if a book was light entertainment, the six weeks during which the local public library allowed me to keep it were insufficient for me to find the time to read all of it. And, by and large, I would find myself uninspired by the prose or the story and return it without much of a backwards glance.
The rest of this post is analysis and breakdown of the results that I do have catalogued, and it will be image-heavy. Since I can’t seem to hide something behind a “cut” as they call it on LiveJournal — both conditional tags and the span class “fullpost” seem to be failing me — I humbly apologize for the load time on the blog until this post cycles through into the archives. It’s annoying the hell out of me too, I promise. EDIT: Thank you, WordPress! As a single post, ignore all this, but in archives, please click below to… Read the rest of this entry »
Do What You Wanado
So a couple of weeks ago I discovered the free Mac astronomy simulator Stellarium and immediately set about developing a computer representation of the view outside my window, well aware that any virtual depiction would be far cooler — and far more customizable — than reality. After all, reality has light pollution and doesn’t have labels on the important stellar objects.
And it only has the lovely grid lines when the Matrix glitches and reminds us that we’re all inhabiting a fabricated consentual illusion.
Anyway… my immediate impulse was to blog about this lovely little tool, but after having just posted about some cartographic instance or another, and having typed with glee about maps a couple of times before that, it occurred to me that had I hosted my mental peregrinations on TypePad instead of Blogger, then I would be able to set up and institute categories for my posts. This ability to give greater shape and accessability to my various ramblings is the major reason I’ve considered porting the site over to TypePad in the past, and it’s only the fact that I would then be increasingly responsible for the successful implementation for the back end of the site that has prevented me from doing it. My HTML knowledge is still very 1998, and most of what you see here is bolstered by 21st century coding that I really don’t comprehend.
I then discovered a sweet little potential compromise: on Steven M. Cohen’s Library Stuff blog, he dropped a line about a web app that allowed a blogger to apply post tagging. And well, tagging is near-as-damnit as created keywords or categories for web-content and I did what I am usually loathe to do when it comes to the inertnet: I jumped in with both feet.
And, well, rediscovered why it is that I am usually a little tentative about such things: it didn’t really work. The app is called Wanado and while it did allow me to add tags, the tags didn’t like the heirarchal structure of Blogger, and tags put on an individual entry page would not be visible from the main page or the archive page, as they show up only with reference to a specific URL. Additionally, one couldn’t delete mistyped tags, nor could one incorporate the tag cloud into one’s site. I fired off a couple of helpful suggestions to the creator and sadly deleted all presence of Wanado code from my site.
However, the lure of the rough equivalent of categories proved too strong, and after an announcement that informed me that Wanado’s creator Ericson Smith had heard my and other’s and met them accordingly, I decided to try implementing it again. After three days of tweaking, I have finally arranged everything in some semblance of success. The ability to add tags can only be found on an individual post’s page, but the tag cloud now sits merrily on the right-hand infocolumn, allowing browsers to click-through any of the forty-two visible keywords that piques their fancy.
The Devil’s Kingdom
I was quite shocked to pass a sign for “Satan’s Kingdom State Park” in the midst of Connecticut. I had thought at first that I had dyslexed some word; perhaps it was “Santa’s Kingdom”, much like the infamous Santa’s Village in Jefferson, NH. However, upon the passage of a second sign, I realized that my eyes and brain were not, in fact, playing tricks on me. But a search of Google Maps produced no results (above right), which further surpised me. Was this perhaps not an official name?
But the map of Nepaug State Park (above left) did confirm that there was a region with such a name, and an article from Legendary Connecticut informs me that there are many places in New England that bear the name or the title of the Devil. How strange that Puritan culture would have been so frequent to apportion the land to the Adversary.
An excerpt from the above link follows:
Unlike the traditions associated with places named for the Devil, legend and history blend together in the accounts which explain the origin of Satan’s Kingdom and Satan’s Ridge, both in New Hartford. According to legend, Satan once used the rocky gorge of the Farmington River bearing his name as his exclusive playground. Here, he and his band of lesser demons gamboled away their days and nights, until the day finally came when the Angel Gabriel blew them all away with one blast from his golden trumpet. …[A]ccording to the historical record, the Satan’s Kingdom district did, in fact, once serve as a refuge for a scattering of human beings who might easily have been mistaken for devils. Either attracted by the place’s name, or — more likely — its isolated and inaccessible location, a notorious group of “Indians, Negroes and renegade whites” settled in the Kingdom, in the last years of the eighteenth century.
Internets
So a few months ago I noticed that when one went to Threadless.com, the main menu would wish one of the many community members a happy birthday. And, since I wasn’t doing anything better with the evening of my 30th birthday, I hit reload an enormous number of times until it finally said mine. I had no idea so many other t-shirt purchasers and I shared the same birthdate. Of particular surprise was a Ben from St. Louis also uses the site and is born on the same day. Also, belated birthday wishes to ExcellentRaptor, VampireCatBoy, MunkeyFlingsPoo, MrSaturn, EverydayAnonymous, DurinSavesTheday, and Organs.
If you didn’t get me anything for my birthday, feel free to order a t-shirt while the $10 sale is still on, and give me the referral credits that will allow me to order still more t-shirts in the future.
On a different note, few things make me happier these days than the magnificent Channel Frederator, which downloads itself to my iTunes podcast menu every Tuesday morning. This Tuesday was particularly pleasant, though, because of Tim Farrel‘s cartoon “E-mail!!” The exclamation marks are his, not mine, but simply because they are part of the title and not the sort of over-exuberance I usually employ in my writing should not indicate that I don’t think this is the cleverest, funniest cartoon I’ve seen since 2003. Download the cartoon directly (10.9 MB .mpg file), and if that won’t convince you to subscribe to Frederator, then I’m not sure what can.
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