(no subject)

So far, I've received 10 of those virus emails. "Your details" and "Your application" and stuff like that. (I didn't open any because they scream virus so loud, they're the email equivalent of a Harry Potter howler.)

Yahoo mail rocks, though. 9 out of the 10 virii were sent directly to my bulkmail folder.

Anyone else getting hit with this? My dad got 75 yesterday and 99 today. One of his clients is a computer moron and keeps opening them, so they keep getting sent over and over and over...

(no subject)

Somewhere in America, or perhaps Australia, there is a brilliant engineer working in a garage, solving the problem of high-cost to orbit. This will revolutionize the world (and off-world) economy for centuries.

Then, there is Pete Bradley, who has filled an engineering niche long thought to be unfillable: Virtual Bubble Wrap for your Pocket PC/PDA: http://www.freewareppc.com/games/ewrap.shtml

(He includes a "pop all" feature "for the lazy bubble popper"!)

It would be just my luck to be stuck next to this guy on a transatlantic flight.

Book Corner

The good thing about getting a paycheck again is regaining the long-lost ability to buy books!

Just Read:
Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon -- Not as good as The Great and Secret Show or Weaveworld. Barker has slipped a bit in the last few years. It's a good insider's slap at the seedy underside of Hollywood...except that everyone lately writes insider's slaps at the seedy underside of Hollywood, whether it's literary, like The Player, or silly, like the movie Volcano. Barker is still good with the unforeseen plot twist and the everyman character, but the book didn't grab me. It just led me along like a tourist on a sightseeing bus.

Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues -- Leonard, on the other hand, at 78 years old and after more than three dozen books, has still got it. The author of Get Shorty and Rum Punch/Jackie Brown, he'll never be considered a Steinbeck, rather more like a modern Dashiell Hammett. His books are fun to read, and the dialog is so good, it's almost easier to enjoy reading aloud, which is probably why so many of his books have been made into movies.

Next to Read:
James Ellroy, My Dark Places -- I've been wanting to read this book for years, but I've had a hard time finding it. Ellroy, the author of LA Confidential, writes about himself and the murder of his mother. Dumped by the side of the road in an LA suburb in the 1950s, her murder was never solved. Understandably, this is a big influence in Ellroy's writings of crime and criminals. Facts from the murder appear throughout his novels, and his internal linking of similarities between his mother and the Black Dahlia helped inspire his novelization of the Dahlia murder (including solving it...in fiction).

Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons -- Nonfiction, an overview of the surge of super-industrialists, such as JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Love them or hate them, they transformed America from a quiet farming country to the world economic leader.