I like the books with the pretty pictures in them

The ever-wonderful boing boing introduced me to this site with its vast collection of illustrations from old books.

*sigh*

They just don't make them like they used to.

(except when they do and price them outside my price range)

The fiction shop is open

I've come to the conclusion that I'm too lazy to spend my time submitting work to magazines and journals since I invariably will get turned down as the editors are not my friends. And while I barely like me as a writer, I can at least post the gobbledygook that is in my old files for others to read.

First post is up today- Andy's Chest part of a cycle of stories based around Lou Reed's Transformer. No, really. Okay maybe not.

You can also just click "fiction" up above.

Bets on how long it takes me to dust off another piece to put up there?

The Return of Evel Kneivel (Did he ever leave?)

Two run-ins with Evel Knievel today! There's gotta be some kinda cultural subconscious need for the man to return and save us all.

You might have said, "Yes. I know of this strange affection for the stunt-driver known as Evel Kneivel. I have seen the latest Kanye West video for "Touch the Sky" with that wonderful actress Pamela Anderson. And I noticed that the Evel Knievel toy was # 47 on VH1's I Love Toys. Oh that Luis Guzman!"

But that's not what I'm talking about.

I was reading through a free copy of a toy magazine today at work and I noticed that they have started production on the Evel Kneivel toy yet again for this Christmas. And I found this article from the artist Coop on Boing Boing.

(Coincidentally, in the same magazine I noticed that someone is making a Gerald McBoing Boing Game.)

Web 2.0

Free HBO weekend- too busy watching Entourage and bad movies I never intended on seeing like Taxi and White Noise. I need help.

Before this disappears into last week's news-

3 pages of new "web 2.0" sites-

a-k including jobs, email, ecommerce, community, bookmarking and more

l-z including scheduling, searching, tagging, reading, publishing, writing and more.

And, of course, those sites not mentioned in the original article.

Originally found on digg

Google Books next step

So, according to Publishers Weekly Google will be offering an e-book plan to publishers.

For most in the industry this probably wasn't a surprise. It is the next logical step after the Google Book Program- to allow all publishers a venue where they can sell e-books. Amazon's upgrade program, which has yet to be announced/ released, will do the same thing.

Add to these services the new batch of e-book readers and table PCs coming out on the market.
=
The E-book revolution is here (again).

Will people actually start reading e-books in massive numbers? Will the market finally explode?

Hey, did you hear Amazon is courting TV and movie studios to have online video content at Amazon.com?

Oh also, Sony, the company that's making the next generation of e-book readers, just so happens to be the same company that thought a rootkit would be a great addition to their DRM tools.

Oh yeah, I forgot, did you see the new Google reader that they've launched for RSS feeds? It's on their lab page. Every day I find something new from Google that they're working on and everything is in Beta. What will be released? When? Where are they focusing their attention? (Not that I'm complaining- I'm happy to try most anything Google launches and the Book Program has come in handy more than once for me when I needed to look something up and didn't have a copy of the book on hand.)

Yup, I'll stick to going to the library for now. I love the smell of printed paper in the morning.