anamnesis

Here's a pretty nifty service: PaperBackSwap . They have over 800,000 books listed. How it works is that you initially list at least 9 books you have that you want to trade to start and they give you 3 credits. Each credit is worth one book. When somebody orders one of your books, you send it directly to them and you get another credit (you pay the postage.) Whenever you want a book, you spend one of your credits to get any book in their listing (you don't pay postage.) Kinda cool this collaborative stuff. PBS also generates a mailer for you to slap on your book detailing the exact postage you need (it knows from the ISBN), so you just put on the stamps and put it in the mailbox. No trips to the post-office. So basically, for the price of media-mail (which is pretty dang cheap) you can upgrade any of your books to others that you like better. This really beats the used book stores which typically give you 25% of the value and then charge at least 50% for any book you want to bu...

That is the title of one of my absolute FAVORITE books as a child. I bought it again as an adult but I haven't worked up the nerve to re-read it. I'm afraid to taint the magic, if that makes any sense. But the ideas of dimensions, especially as fabrics that can be folded or wrinkled, has always resonated with some subtle reality detector deep in my psyche. So imagine how much fun I had with this (turn your speakers on before you click on the image! When you see the menu, click on "Imagining the Ten Dimensions" in the Navigation menu on the left, which will slide out as you mouse over there.) If you are interested in exploring this further, I recommend a very entertaining (and enlightening!) book called Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions . Which you can read free at that link. It's about some little critters that live in 2 dimensions and the types of trouble one has when he lifts off to the 3rd dimension and tries explaining it to his friends.

Had a good weekend. Friday, Bright-Eyes and I went to an afternoon showing of Zoom. Silly fun. Had barbeque over at some olde friends on Saturday. But Sunday is when I got into trouble. After getting to bed relatively early Sunday night and setting my alarm for work today, I started reading Blue Girl. Big mistake; I couldn't stop. The pacing, story, and De Lint's impressive ability to stack multifaceted conflict and weave plot-lines sucked me in; I kept reading "just a little more" but had to force myself to quit around 4:30am or so. Missed my alarm. Forgot I had a 9:00am meeting this morning, which I discovered when I got an email at 10:30 asking if I was going to show up. Totally screwed, but completely non-repentant. I'd hate to be my boss. But I think I'm going to get an earlier start on it tonight. Meh. The protagonist's name is Imogene, a 17 year old that's moved from school to school and has some unique ways of looking at the world. Technical...

I had my flying dream again that night, soaring over an endless landscape of circuit boards, their vast expanse cut with rivers of cruel electricity. Reading Spirits in the Wires by Charlie. A fun romp into the possibility of entities living in cyberspace. While I "know" all the reasons why this could not be the case, I also realize the sum of what we don't know in our chiaroscuro world puts any given assumption at risk. Because of this gulf (which science assures us is a puddle rather than the Aegean Sea) I have heard, and I believe, our fiction paints reality clearer than our "facts." It's not the words you use; it's what they make you see. -SASKIA MADDING