"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
…and particularly Kindle books, is the ease of taking notes within the books–and searching notes. This is especially useful for those books that have error reporting enabled. One of my fav notes to submit in an error report is, “Consult Inigo Montoya. (No, not that quote; the other one.)” I generally slug that comment in wherever a word is misused. And, oh, am I finding a slew of those! The quality of proof readingand copy editing has really, really declined in recent years, and in self-published books it is frequently non-existent… or of a “quality” that can only–charitably–be described as comparable to toxic sewer sludge.
Oh, well, at least I have the joy of making LOADS of snarky notes, and even–happy-happy-joy-joy–submitting a few as “error reports”.
I don’t know who first said it (and am not even sure where I last saw it *heh*), but this ranks up there with, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,”* as timeless wisdom:
“A human without at least one sharp pointy thing and the ability to start a fire is just whining hairless ape in most survival situations.”
Yeh, I feel naked without at least two or three “sharp pointy things” on my person at all times, and since I can start a fire with my burning gaze of scorn… *heh*
“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Luke 12:27
OK, so the picture isn’t of “lilies of the field” but another, as beautiful and even more useful, flower.
Consider the dandelion, cursed by dunderheaded, tasteless American enstupiates who deem it a weed simply because it can enrich their dull, boring, monochromatic lawns with glorious color and beautiful textures. This flower gifts those who aren’t too dull-witted to see with both a beautiful, slightly variegated green and a stunning, joyous yellow. Moreover, its leaves, roots and flower are all highly nutritious and, when properly prepared and served, delicious as well. Not only that, but if one were to perform a simple search for medicinal properties of dandelions, one would quickly discover that the plant has multiple medicinal properties above and beyond its nutritional values.
And the stem even has uses beyond nutritive and therapeutic values. Perform a search for “dandelion latex”. Surprising, no? (Those in the know have answered, “No.” *heh*) Moreover, the latex produced from dandelions causes far fewer allergic reactions than the common rubber plant latex.
And this wonderful plant is exceptionally hardy! Just ask any idiot who’s tried to eliminate it from their ugly, boring, monochromatic lawn. Oh, and self-propagating!
What more could one ask from a beautiful ornament of nature? Beauty, utility, hardiness and easy propagation! This wonderful flower has it all! I rejoice that my dandelion crop is so very full this year, so far, and am doing everything within my power to help my neighbors’ yards experience the same bounty.
*heh*
Oh, and my wild allium “crop” is also doing well. Happy-happy-joy-joy!
I’ve said I read a lot, and I do, but I’ve still not read all the books I consider it’d take to become really literate, some of the old–and even “new”–classics, in particular. Oh, I got a set of The Great Books in high school and found them thoroughly engaging (I even “neglected” to purchase the lit–and most of the historical “source” books for a sophomore Western Civ course in college… since I already had ’em in my dorm room in my GB collection). But TGB doesn’t encompass all the useful classic literature*, and a few really powerful works have been authored in the last century or so that are worth including as “new” classics, so…
I’ve been trying to flesh out my library of readings over the past couple of decades, especially. Some barriers:
Local libraries are often a little thin on really significant works, and the county library here in America’s Third World County is particularly thin in that regard. Besides, libraries want the books returned, generally disapprove of notes written in the books in their collection and often have editions that are not well-formatted, especially when considering PD works, for some reason.
Book budget and space. Face it, I don’t have room to properly store the books I already have, and books are expensive–even used books. Often, the books I’ve been looking for have been a bit hard to find, especially in editions that are within my budget.
Enter eBooks. For several years now I’ve been collecting an eBook library I can read in text or html format on my computers. That has worked quite well, and the 1,000s of PD books available at Project Gutenberg have provided me a great selection. Storing the books has been no problem, and sorting through my electronic library is easy-peasy.
Recently, with the Kindle Fire given to me by Son&Heir as a Xmas gift, I’ve been re-downloading almost all (it’s a work in progress) the eBooks I had already downloaded in text or html as Kindle-formatted books… then uploading them to my Amazon Cloud storage. I’ve also been duplicating the Great Books collection in Kindle format so that I can eventually–hopefully–have all my library that it’s possible to have in electronic format, even, where possible (and it has proven to be possible in more cases than I had thought it would be), old sci-fi books I’ve had for 40 or more years.
Here’s one, of many, places I’ve been using to obtain PD books in Kindle format recently:
freekindlebooks.org Searches for free eBooks or free Kindle books can result in more than you’ll have time for. A lot of free eBooks are self-published, and, of course, many are dreck. Still, some new self-published eBooks are quite good.
Go ahead. Make a list of all the books you always thought you ought to read and hunt ’em down. There may well be a free eBook version available.
*For example, I had not in earlier years read Mark Twain’s “1601: Conversation, as it was the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors” but have since repaired that unfortunate lacuna in my literary education. *heh*
Update: I had scheduled some car work for this A.M., so I downloaded a couple of lightweight novels to read while keeping an eye out on the work being done. I wasn’t expecting much, but I expected that the $0.99 book would at least have had a lil better proofing than the freebie.
Oh, boy, was I wrong!
Lousy plotting. Jejune characters. And not a page without glaring grammar, punctuation and spelling errors, combined with the occasional nonsensical sentence structure, loads of misused words, misplaced apostrophes and capitalizations. Was this written when the author was in seventh grade or something and then self-published without the benefit of any proofreading at all?
And then there’s the worthless ending.
A waste of $0.99.
The freebie has at least been better edited. Oh, it’s still just a “skim once” (if that) book, but although it has some idiosyncratic word uses and lousy punctuation, at least the grammar is better* (although that’s almost damning with faint praise) and the spelling is less atrocious–almost as though this book had been exposed to a spell checker.
Update 2: OTOH, another freebie (well, I could swear it was free when I downloaded it the other day–no, really!), The Truth About Sharks and Pigeons by Matt Phillips, is as much fun as reading a Douglas Adams book, maybe more. Consider,
Dully he wondered if his whole life was about to flash before his eyes, and he wondered if it would be okay to skip that bit as it really wasn’t going to be very interesting.
Strangely, the book’s well-written enough that chuckles like that one don’t seem to get stale.
You know the ones I mean: generally well-acted, pretty darned good (as in superior to most cable fare on US TV) production values, great music and sound, scenery and settings to die for, interesting faces and voices, etc. OTOH, pretty predictable plots, lots of evidence why Britain used to be “GREAT Britain” (with tons of pointers for those who want to emasculate the US as well *sigh* ) and far too much use of “classic” whodunit camera techniques. And what’s with the stupid four-episode “seasons”? That’s pretty crappy, guys. Just sayin’.
So many good things hampered by a few glaring faults. Better than what I can find on cable TV, though.
Still… Positives include Inspector Lewis, the spinoff from the long success of the Inspector Morse books and the series. Sometimes I want to say, “Take Inspector Lewis, PLEASE,” but usually it’s really quite good on the whole. An example: the theme music. Just wonderful stuff, but I could swear one motif in the theme is outright “borrowing” of a Beethoven motif. That in itself is only to the good, of course (heck, I’ve “borrowed” a motif here and there for development into something else, myself), if I am correct (just noticed it–yeh, I’m kinda slow *heh*–and haven’t replayed the section I’m thinking of in my mind’s ear, but it seems so at first thought), but, regardless, that it even evokes such a thought is an indication of the quality of the music.
And that reminds me: it’s probably time for my quarterly refreshment of Beethoven’s oeuvre in my mind’s ear (it used to need refreshment less often for memory replay, but my mind’s ear just ain’t what it used ta be, ya know? :-)). Fortunately, just about every recording of every Beethoven work I’ve been able to lay my hands on is now stored on my Amazon Cloud Drive (as well as available to load en masse onto a pocket-sized mp3 player) and accessible to listen to almost anywhere on multiple devices.
So, thanks to the prod from Inspector Lewis, I’ll be “seeing” the aural landscapes of Beethoven’s mind’s ear a bit more directly over the next couple of weeks’ time. Thanks, Robbie.
Not a lot to choose from between the two, and not much wiggle room at all in labeling this creepy idea. If I were to see something like this in real life, I’d be sorely tempted to dope slap a couple of “idjits”:
So, the usual Hivemind and barking mad leftards are in an uproar for the blowhard Limbaugh’s characterization of a confessed libertine as a “slut”.
“slut: noun an immoral or dissolute woman”
Seems fair. In my opinion, it closely resembles (closely resembles” as in “seems to be a perfect fit for”) Sandra Fluke’s own confession of her “need” to have a Roman Catholic educational institution finance the means for her to have “protected” sex when, where and however she pleases with whatever (and however many) partners she can get to have sex with her.
Seems like she confessed to at the very least “needing” to engage in sluttish behavior to me.
So what’s the problem? It’s “discourteous” or “ungentlemanly” or some such thing according to standards rejected by the Hivemind and associated barking mad leftards? Not as applied to their own speech standards which approve of publicly voicing rape fantasies and worse about such people as Sarah Palin and Laura Ingraham, while calling them by much, much more vulgar, even obscene, terms.
Of course that’s the problem. Their “standards” are simply this: “We can say and do anything we damned well please, and anyone who disagrees with us can say only what we allow them to.” If that were not the case, then Hivemind members like Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Mike Malloy and a rogue’s gallery of others would have been tarred, feathered and run out of the business long ago. Sample a little typical “rational” and “civil” discourse from the Hivemind’s Malloy, as but one small example of thousands:
Get that. Malloly celebrates the deaths of tornado victims and mocks religious beliefs he deems to be held by people in the so-called “Bible Belt”–which happens, in his tirade, to coincide with the locations of most of those killed by recent tornadoes.
Typical of the nasty, hate-filled, hate-spewing leftard Hivemind. In fact, it’s so normative that people are largely inured to it, it seems, and simply accept their hate-filled spew as normal speech. Have someone push back with an accurate description of an anointed, manufactured hero/ine of the Hivemind, though, and there will be hell to pay, as the blowhard Limbaugh discovered.
BTW, Rush Limbaugh a “blowhard”? Yep. Anyone who will apologize for simply speaking what would seem to the truth to any rational observer is a blowhard.
…it does seem as though the way things are trending that all the shows worth watching will eventually be limited to Brit TV. Spy seems to be another one that’s worlds and away better than anything on American cable TV. Sadly, only six episodes. I’ll have to wait for the Fall “season” for more.
Oh, well. Time to cancel the TV portion of our cable subscription? Have to examine the package discount, but maybe.
As I noted earlier in “Suspension of Belief” one depiction in film/TV that always nauseates me is an absolutely incompetent portrayal of musical performance or direction. The most recent such “gagamaggot” butchery of a depiction of musical direction I’ve seen was given by Academy Award-winning director Peter Dougan Capaldi in an acting role in the 2006 Midsomer Murders episode, Death in Chorus, where he played a “perfectionist” choral director. Badly. Very, very badly. I’d walk out of the first rehearsal run by someone as incompetent as the director as portrayed by this yutz.
*sigh*
And the actors and the director of the episode apparently didn’t know any better, either.
We have an entertainment center cabinet that’s a wee tad over 5′ in length. When I sit on the couch and hold my teensy lil Kindle Fire at arm’s length, it more than covers my view of the EC. Given the gorgeous display on the Fire, it’s like having my own, personal, hand-held “big screen TV”.
So, as long as I can find streaming video to suit my tastes, I can defer buying a bigger TV, eh? 😉
Of course, the lil 15.6″ screen on my laptop seems even larger in viewing area, when viewed from its usual place on my lap… Heck, in use, it appears to cover 3/4 of the whole wall facing me.
