- This could be interesting: apparently Redbox is looking to install DVD rental kiosks at libraries. As a librarian at the link above writes:
Unfortunately I think Redbox will only target libraries in large cities and wouldn’t bother with a small town like mine. It would be a great service to the community, but probably not enough profit to make it interesting for them.
Where it could do some good — that is, by generating foot traffic and providing DVDs to libraries that couldn’t otherwise afford them — Redbox likely won’t be interested, but will instead focus on locations where they might actually do some harm — by charging for what are now free rentals, and by sharing only a tiny percentage of that charge with the libraries. If nothing else, though, I think it suggests that Redbox understands the precariousness of its existence; as online streaming becomes the dominant industry model, it will need to seek out more and new rental locations to survive.
- There are two ways to look at this: the first, “Obama cancels moon mission,” makes for a quick and easy soundbite. But the second, “Obama scraps Bush’s wildly empty promise and redirects funding to more important areas” is probably more accurate. Still, it’s a shame we’re not going back to the moon any time in the near future.
- I’m not sure all of the titles on the Oddest Book Title of the Year award longlist are really that odd, but what library would be complete without Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, Map-based Comparative Genomics in Legumes, or Planet Asthma: Art and Acitivty Book?
- An interesting article by A.O. Scott on Smoking in ‘Avatar’ and the Limits of Boundaries on Ratings.
- And finally, there have got to be easier ways to get around New York [via]:
books
Out of all ho
Today’s phrase of “forgotten English,” according to my desk calendar of the same name, is “out of all ho,” meaning “out of all restraint” and “derived from the exclamation ‘ho!’ — used to stop the combat at a tournament.”
Which has pretty much nothing to do with today.
Aside from a late afternoon meeting about our e-commerce system — a meeting that threatened to keep me at work until 5 o’clock, but thankfully didn’t — not a whole lot happened today. I finished reading Already Dead by Charlie Huston, a pretty gritty but deeply entertaining vampire detective story, and at work continued reading about transference and countertransference, specifically how they relate to the counseling of older adults. Why, what are you reading?
It’s my sister’s birthday — she’s four years younger than me — but otherwise pretty much just an average, wintry Tuesday.
Tuesday various
- Anybody wanna chip in together and buy Miramax?
- I mean, I’d be happy to write Errol Morris another letter like this if you think it would help. (I love how Weinstein asks Morris for casting suggestions to play himself.)
- Well that’s just weird: Barack Obama and Scott Brown are cousins. [via]
- Texas bans a children’s book because they thought it was written by a Marxist. Not only is that pretty dumb, they were also wrong. [via]
- And finally, are there aliens already among us? Inside us?
Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.
Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.
“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.” [via]
Monday various
- Sad to learn that author Kage Baker passed away from cancer over the weekend.
- Not terribly surprised to learn that Sarah Palin’s political action committee spent more money buying her book than on, well, political action.
- Very surprised to learn that packs of wild beagles are terrorizing the east end of Long Island.
- Impressed by James Cameron’s letter to H.R. Giger’s agent about why Cameron didn’t involve Giger in the design and filming of Aliens. Where’s this kind of honest humility gone in the James Cameron of today?
- And finally, very impressed by Chameleon Circuit, who put out some of the best Doctor Who-themed music I’ve ever heard. That might sound like I’m damning them with faint praise, to some of you, but I think these are really neat songs. One of them easily wound up on my January music mix. [via]
My weekend
I spent the weekend in Maryland, visiting my sister Catherine and her husband Brian with my parents. It’s my sister’s birthday this coming Tuesday, and so our visit was going to be either this or next weekend, depending largely on the predicted weather. We thought for sure there wouldn’t be too much snow this weekend, so we decided to risk it.
We were very wrong.
It was a nice weekend, but it snowed an awful lot and disrupted most of our plans, and it also made for some very scary driving back to the hotel last night. I brought my camera (though not my laptop) along, though an opportunity to use it never presented itself.
For whatever reason, my sister just wanted to go shopping for clothes for her birthday, so after the five of us met up for lunch in Towson, my mother and her split for the nearby mall. My father, Brian, and I had planned to visit the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, to spend a few hours before meeting back up with the womenfolk for an early dinner. (TV’s Michael Gross calls it “a unique place where the adventure and magic of railroading comes alive every day.”) Unfortunately, by that point the roads were already pretty rough, and a quick call to the museum confirmed that it had closed early because of the weather.
So instead, we went to a local Wegmans grocery store. I know, the excitement never quits! It wasn’t terrible. I haven’t been in a Wegmans since leaving Pennsylvania, and it made me a little nostalgic. And for some strange reason, the store had a model train set attached to part of the ceiling. Why go to a museum when the railroading adventure and magic is right there?
We were eating at a tapas restaurant in Baltimore, so it made sense to head back there to wait, even if we were a little early. The restaurant connects to the Charles Theater in downtown Baltimore, which has a spacious (if that day slightly chilly) lobby, so we grabbed something to drink at the bar and headed next door to sit. We ended up waiting a couple of hours, actually — my sister really likes to shop — and joked that we probably could have seen a movie while we were there. We had to wait a little longer, then, for a table, but the food was really worth it. I’d eaten there once before, when I was in Washington, D.C., for a conference a couple of years back and Catherine and Brian drove the three of us there one night. (They live closer to D.C., but they’re both Towson alums and have friends in the Baltimore area.) Lots of really good food, much needed on a really cold night.
The roads still weren’t so great, however, and visibility was downright terrible, so the long drive to the hotel (and for my sister and husband back home, nearby) was especially tense. Somehow the windshield wiper fluid on my parents’ car stopped working, and the wiper blades themselves sort of froze, so it was a nervous hour or so back to Germantown. I didn’t even have to drive, and I was nervous the whole way there. I saw at least half a dozen cars abandoned along the roadside, at least one pickup truck that had clearly been run off the road into a ditch by its driver. But somehow we made it there in one piece (or five pieces?) and got a good night sleep.
We had breakfast this morning, then got to see Catherine and Brian’s new house. They moved in just back in September — because that’s what you want to do a few weeks before you get married, right? move? — and I’d never seen the place before. It’s nice, and makes me think I really do need to start seriously looking for an apartment of my own again. (But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)
Then this afternoon we drove back — or rather my father did. I spent most of the drive reading the deeply entertaining Already Dead by Charlie Huston (after I finished reading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge on the car ride up). Now I think I’m going to turn my attention to the New York Times crossword puzzle and, later, dinner.
How was your weekend?