Diane now has a Blog

As many of you know, my wife, Diane, is now working on the thesis for her Masters in Clinical Gerontology degree. While that's a whole boatload of work by itself, she has also started writing a blog called Gerobabble. It's about issues affecting elder care and news about aging. She's enjoying writing it, and I hope you'll check it out and enjoy reading it.

106 Most Unread Books

An idea courtesy of Larry Hosken:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

Here's my version of the list (with a few notes in parentheses):

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude *
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick *
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies *
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods *
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius *
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha *
Middlesex
Quicksilver *
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World *
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum (reading right now!)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange *
Anansi Boys *
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 *
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections *
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay *
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir *
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present *
Cryptonomicon *
Neverwhere *
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves *
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed *
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion *
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road *
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything *
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences *
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Music for Massage

Seen at Incredible Records and CD's in Sebastopol while we were on vacation there this weekend. They also had a small didgeridoo section. We did get a massage while we were there, at the always amazing Osmosis.

Power, Disenfranchisement, and Legos

Children and the politics of who controls the Lego bricks.

Why We Banned Legos

Marlowe: 'If your parents say you have to eat pasta, then that's power.'

Lukas: 'You can say no.'

Carl: 'Power is ownership of something.'

Drew: 'Sometimes I like power and sometimes I don't. I like to be in power because I feel free. Most people like to do it, you can tell people what to do and it feels good.'

Delicious Valentine

Diane and I had dinner at Prana last night for Valentine's day (we both had the aphrodisiac tasting menu). We'd never been there before, so we didn't know quite what to expect. It was one of the best meals we'd had in, like, forever. And I had oysters for the first time; delish!

Gorgeous Handmade Computer Keyboards

Seriously nice steampunk keyboards. Extravagant, to be sure (roughly $800-$1000), but, phew, beautiful.

How Steve Martin Became Funny

In a Smithsonian article, Steve Martin describes the evolution of his act before his breakthrough performance on The Tonight Show. For someone like myself, for whom Steve Martin defined teenage notions of comedy, this is a fascinating narrative of what it takes to become an overnight success.