potentialities

As a person who has bought or looked at or even thought about books ever, Amazon.com believes that I will be interested in the new opus by Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, and I am, oh, I am! But not, perhaps, in the way that they were hoping.

First of all, what in the name of Jesus's sparkly Mary Sue great-great-great (SPOILERSOMG) is a lost symbol? Is it a symbol that you don't understand, in which case, how do you know that it's a symbol? Or is it a symbol that you can't find, in which case, how do you know that there is a symbol?

Second of all, Dan Brown is still writing books? Really? I had thought we were safe from him, with a whopping six years since the publication of The Da Vinci Code. It turns out that it took him all of that time to come up with The Lost Symbol?

I was totally willing to believe that that was the real jacket. In fact, I'm still not totally convinced that that isn't the real jacket, and the text "THIS IS NOT THE FINAL JACKET" running across the bottom is Dan Brown's idea of some kind of a modern-day Magritte-style exploration of symbologism. What can the hold-up possibly be on designing the jacket? Slam the lost symbol in the middle of it and you're done. Unless, of course, not even Dan Brown has figured out what the lost symbol looks like (it's lost, y'see).

Yes, I was really enjoying the new Dan Brown novel until I realized that our library is going buy a million copies of it, and I'm going to end up responsible for processing 500,000 of them, because my team handles titles that begin with the letter L.

Damn you, Dan Brown.

I'm very pleased to see that Neil Gaiman has won the Newbery medal for The Graveyard Book. He was kind enough to read it aloud to me while I was at work and politely refrained from taking any notice when I choked up at the end. ♥

The ALA website is completely useless at the moment. Their Twitter is a more reliable source of updates.

"Manga is a Japanese word for 'backwards book'." Oh, coworkers ...

This is my new screensaver on my work computer.

Incidentally, I received an email yesterday from an Italian gentleman who had been in an IRC conversation where the question had come up whether anyone had written Dante fanfiction and, finding mine, querying why I had done so.

"Cinderella Man," a little boy read off the spine of a book at the library today while his father was browsing other sports books nearby.

"Who's that?" his little brother asked him.

As is the wont of the firstborn, he promptly furnished an explanation. "He's a superhero who wears a dress and he pulls the skirt up over his head and fights crime!"

I was disappointed that their father interrupted this fantastic narrative to give a thumbnail biography of James Braddock.

We made it to D.C., although by the time we arrived at the zoo, they had closed all the buildings and were getting ready to close the grounds as well. We cooed over the red panda, admired the clouded leopard (and heard all about her escape attempt), and conducted a test of a representative sample of water fountains (conclusion: none of them work except as a metaphor for the city itself). Then we had a lovely dinner with Bev and went back to her apartment and met her roommate. Good times!

~

When I worked last Thursday evening, I amused myself by creating a series of clues on Post-It notes for Stan to follow. He instructed me that they ought to rhyme. (Two of them do, in fact, and the third is in Greek, and that exhausted my powers of invention for the evening.)

Apparently he and everyone else working this morning, whom he enlisted in his attempt, have yet to work out the first clue, which is admittedly perhaps the most obscure of the three. If I recall correctly, it goes like this:

So that this clue won't be lost to us,
Let's start with something preposterous.
In spite of their low ethanol yields,
The truth is out there in the cornfields.

I suppose you could try to play along at home by searching our online catalogue, but I think that would be even less possible than finding it by searching the actual library.

Our library system staged a contest where employees at all its branches were supposed to log the children's and young adult books they read for two months and turn them in and the branch with the highest average number of pages read per participant would win.

The branch that won, of course, was the one whose librarian was clever enough to send in the reading log of the person who read the most pages and toss the rest.

No, that wasn't ours.

I have decided to formally renounce any attempt to catch up on NaNoWriMo in order to focus on my yuletide fic and other things in my life. I wrote approximately 12,000 words and my characters never even got to have sex (although I , um. Fantasized about it a few times). Better luck to me (and them) next time, I suppose.

Also, I just noticed that there is a stray contact lens stuck above our shower door. I immediately felt my eyes in a panic, but it isn't mine, so it must have been one of my brother's and thus have been there quite some time. I left it there to show him when he gets home tomorrow, because it amused me.

EDIT: Also! I scored a hardcover copy of Good Omens from the donations pile at our library, and the funny thing was, it was with a bunch of other books like This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti and one of the Left Behind books. I think its original owner was either very, very open-minded or just very confused.

When your mother gives you an antique bookshelf to put in your room, and mentions, oh, by the way, the paint on this thing took two weeks to dry, DO NOT ACCEPT IT AND PUT IT IN YOUR ROOM!

Clearly, it is haunted or possessed or both, and will, at the first opportunity, fall over! And then your bedroom will be carpeted in books, and worse, the unholy undead paint will get smeared all over the screen of your laptop, and how the fuck do you get that off? Plus, the B key will be dislodged and lost in the aforementioned carpet of books, so that every time you try to type a word with the letter B in it, such as, oh, say, "books" or "bookshelf", it will not actually work all that well, thereby compounding your frustration!

Why do these things always happen to me? I mean, besides the fact that I'm stupid?

EDIT: Slightly more useful advice, in case you are ever as stupid as me!

Got it off with a handkerchief, some rubbing alcohol, and a very light touch.

Now, to get my keyboard fixed. As it happens, half the letters have worn off again, including the B, so it needs some fixing anyway.