… you are DEAD TO ME.

Meh.

I’m sorry, but no matter how marketable the author is, the TITLE of the book is more important than their name. It does me no good to see that NORA ROBERTS has published her 16th title this year if the title is in such tiny print squashed nearly off the book that I cannot read it.

As I was processing some books today, I saw a photograph on the back of a picture book.

In my head:
Q: What is that?
A: It’s a photograph.

Q: The guy looks familiar?
A: It’s Jimmy Fallon.

Q: Why is Jimmy Fallon on a picture book?
A: Because he wrote it.

I wonder if this will become the new trend for SNL alums?

Ha ha. Though I have to admit I experience a twinge of irritation that they had to use a female pronoun.

2004 Newbery Medal Winner: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo

In Short
7.5/10. Good for a quick read, but it’s so bare bones that the substance is lacking. If you’re a fan of Redwall, Mrs. Frisby or The Rescuers books, you’ll probably like it, though all of those series have more complex worlds.

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up looking at the SuperPatron blog after someone posted about it on one of my mailing lists. There, I found mention of a script that would modify Amazon pages to display whether or not the book you were looking at was available at your local library.

Isn’t that a great idea? I think it’s absolutely brilliant. A great check on impulse buying.

I made note of it at the time, intending to go back at some point and modify the script to work with the Nashua library. I finally worked on it a bit today, and it now works for the combination of Greasemonkey/Firefox 1.5 for Nashua. Unfortunately for me, Firefox makes me want to tear my hair out, and I don’t use it. Theoretically, I should also be able to get the script to work for Opera, but the implementation of user js is just different enough that it’s proven trickier than I expected to get it going.

Update: Well, I now have a much better handle on user js scripts. The root of the problem appears to be the fact that Greasemonkey has broken a security “rule” by allowing scripts to execute calls not just to the current domain, but to other domains at the same time. So GM_Xmlhttprequest and the standard xmlhttprequest have an incompatibility.

A new one to add to my list:

Newbery Medal 2006
Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins (Greenwillow Books, an imprint of
HarperCollins)

Newbery Honor Books
Whittington by Alan Armstrong, illustrated by SD Schindler (Random House)
Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Scholastic Nonfiction, an imprint of Scholastic)
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Hudson Talbott (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

(The Caldecott Medal and others are announced today too.)

From tvshowsondvd.com:

Let’s get dangerous! Darkwing Duck, the popular 1991 series that started its first season in daily syndication and then found a network home on ABC (airing weekly in the remaining two seasons) is coming to DVD in 2006

Yay! As much as I have to admit I adored Ducktales and Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck and Gummi Bears are the two Disney tv shows that I would definitely buy on DVD.

To me, the chore of making the bed has always stood out among other pointless household tasks as quite possibly the most pointless of them all.

The others generally contribute in at least some small part toward improving sanitary conditions in the home; even if I don’t agree with how often such things need to be done (Need the floors really be spotless with no small persons about to crawl on them? I think not.), I can see that they have some function.

Bed making, on the other hand, is completely cosmetic. Unless you’ve just changed the sheets, it serves no purpose other than to make the bedroom look neat. And, unless company is coming over and you want them to see your nice bedroom, the only person you’re impressing is yourself (and anyone else who shares the bedroom with you). Frankly, I’m more impressed by having that 5-10 minutes back in my day.

Today is squirrel appreciation day.

To celebrate, here’s a list of books about squirrels.