The Thin Red Line

Happy Friday!   Just a Short Take Today on a very funny book  that is sure to brighten your day.   Leo Cullum is a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine and this 2003 collection of his dog cartoons is a real treat.   Cullum’s dogs engaged in very human conversations are both genuinely witty and laugh out loud funny.    Go ahead and click the cover image and request it from your library.   A guaranteed day brightener,  Highly Recommended to dog lovers and fans of witty cartooning.

LAST CHANCE!    The Chain Drop contest for 3,000 Entrecard credits ends at midnight Pacific time tonight.    Since this blog is actually hosted and time-stamps in Eastern time,   all entries timestamped before 3:01 am on March 1, 2009  will be counted.    The winner will be announced on Chain Drop next week.    All you have to do is leave a comment here with a few sentences about how you use social networking.     If you haven’t already, click  here and leave your comment before time runs out.

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I’ve previously written about Tilt,  a book about the famous leaning tower of Pisa, Italy that is cut on an angle so that the spine of the book slants back towards the rear of the shelf rather than standing up straight.    And when I recently came across The Slant Book by Peter Newell, which has the same angled spine, I knew immediately I would have to blog about it.    Originally published in 1910 when novelty books of this sort were a popular amusement, it was re-published in the 1960’s by Tuttle Publishing Company and as of the edition owned by my library was in its fifteenth printing.   The story of an old fashioned baby carriage that slips away from the baby’s nurse on a steep slope and slides all over town has charming illustrations evocative of its period and the slant of book cleverly contributes to the illusion of the pram rolling downhill out of control.    Recommended both as a children’s book and for those interested in novelty books and popular art from the early 1900’s.

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I get so many great recommendations from people I value and it saddens me that I don’t always find time to follow through with reading all of them, vigilant as I usually am about ordering them from the library when the book is first mentioned.   

And right now I am very caught up in reading Untapped–The Scramble For Africa’s Oil, which is both fascinating and timely and I expect to blog about it next week.   And today I happened to come across something very rare.   A meme I found on Haley Hughes’ The Beacon blog, the Page 123 Meme,  that actually seemed to fit well with my blog and that I actually wanted to follow,  even though I was not tagged with it.

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I am Way over due to give some link love to Claire. I has noticed that her simple but very clever cartoons reminded me of Eric Carle’s work and had intended to dedicate a review of Carle’s newest board book, but that was the day the computer and Earthlink ate my post three times and I ended up posting only a hastily written note describing how difficult it had been to post that day. So when Claire teamed up with Chelle on their newest photo contest– What Was Willy Reading? , I just knew this library drone would Have to provide some insight into Willy’s reading list….

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Because I completely depend on the Closed Captions to be able to understand dialog, I rarely go to movies in the theater and even for big deal pictures I am waiting for the DVD. And usually these days, Ron or I has pre-ordered it from the library and it is just a question of waiting for it to turn up in my mailbox. Which is how it is that this weekened we were watching for the first time The Simpsons movie. I loved it and insisted on watching it Twice.

Life Homer on the wrecking ball I have felt caught between a rock and The Hard Place when it comes to updating this blog lately. This past week I was much consumed with sitting anxiously in various medical waiting rooms as David had surgery and Ron had tests. (David is doing fine and Ron is scheduled for More Tests and we are hoping for the best.) Meanwhile everytime I find a moment to go online, it seems that Earthlink is down Again. Between Real Life interfering and Earthink beind down more than up, posts have been Very thin on this blog lately, and I apologize for that.

Here then is my Quirky Cookbook Roundup:

MMMMMM. Bacon. What better way to begin than with James Villas’ The Bacon Cookbook. Villas writes extensively about varieties of artisanal bacon now available from different sources the world over as well as providing over 150 recipes using bacon from the classic spaghetti carbonara to inventive new creations like the Swiss Apple, Pear, Potato and Bacon Braise, which I am positive would be either superb or inedible. Cautiously Recommended.

I really Should have made the second choice a book about chocolate to continue with The Simpsons theme and commemorate the classic bacon and chocolate ‘accident’ sequence, but the book I actually have is a guide to making scrumptious looking sweet baked goodies or every description from the pecan rolls featured on the front cover to delicate butter madelines and amazing muffins, tarts and brownies, Carole Walter provides a useful guide to the inexperienced to intermediate baker looking to make a smash at the morning coffee hour. And I’ve no doubt that Homer would be all over these sticky buns. Great Coffee Cakes, Stick Buns, Muffins and More. Recommended.

Today’s other two selections sadly do Not make the cut. Adam D. Roberts’ The Amateur Gourmet and Sudi Pigott’s How To Be A Better Foodie both seem intentioned to teach the basics of cuisine to people who have spent a lifetime ignoring it and suddenly and inexplicably want to learn. Not Recommended.

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Over  on Chain Drop I talk a lot about making and keeping friends.   And when a contest we recently tried to run completely flopped because no one entered it, except for one contestant, whose entry was eaten by our entry form, Dane says to me  "what we need is to bring in all those Writers like in Tiffany’s writing group….They would write good pieces about how they use social networking".   So I thought to myself, I’m friends with a bunch of those writers.   And some of them I know read my books blog if not Chain Drop.

Feel free to comment about any entries that have been posted.   Each substantive post about social networking and Each substantive comment about a previous post will count as one entry.    

On February 28, 2008 I will close this post to further comments.   I will remove any comments that are inappropriate or insubstantial prior to selecting the winner by  using a random number generator to select one of the comments  as the winner of 3,000 Entrecard credits to be purchased by Dane and Alan just for this contest.    And if you are not into Entrecard you will have the option of receiving from us via Paypal the cash price we would have topay for the credits on 2/28/06.  All of the entries and comments may also be published on Chain Drop in a special post about this contest.    By submitting your work you grant us the right to pubish your submission on both blogs as described.   You retain all other rights to your work.

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Entrecard continues to be a great place to meet incredible bloggers,  like Realtor Cecilia Sherrard whose Cleveland Ohio Real Estate blog has been making quite the splash  in the Entrecard Real Estate category, which had for a time been dominated by two great bloggers who pulled out of Entrecard recently, and whose blogs I had unfortunately not book-marked.

I sometimes hear people say that they don’t do more to live green and try to nurture the planet because  it’s too hard or too expensive or just not possible.    And I am a huge fan of Will Taft whose blog  is a daily eloquent argument against these lame excuses.    And when Cecilia recently posted It’s Easy Being Green, an excellent list of easy and inexpensive ways to lessen your burden on the planet,  I decided it was time to feature three, short, easy to read and inexpensive guides that offer practical advice you can actually follow without breaking your neck or breaking the bank.

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After writing about a whole slew of children’s books in my 12 Books For Christmas feature, I was burned out for awhile on Easy Picture Books, but the latest batch I brought home from the library are so cute and funny that I decided it was time for a Monday Easy Picture Book Round up.

Laura Numeroff is a prolific children’s book author, best known for the series of books that began with If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. Numeroff has collaborated with illustrator Nate Evans to create her 10-Step Guide To Living With Your Monster. From selecting the right monster in the first place to teaching him to brush his teeth, Numeroff provides wonderfully tongue-in-cheek advice to children who seek to own a monster, and the very colorful and imaginative illustrations by Evans are a sheer delight. To anyone who has ever had difficulty living with a monster, this one is Highly Recommended.

I suppose it is hopelessly politically incorrect to recommend a book that portrays construction workers as exclusively male, but the fact is I Loved this clever little children’s book with pages that unfold up to answer a series of questions about Who Builds? From the beaver building a lodge to the technicians building the space shuttle, Michael Rex answers the questions delightfully. Highly Recommended.

Also, The Very Hairy Bear (no image, Worldat) by Alice Schertle with illustrations by Matt Phelan is a recently published book that follows a bear through four seasons. The soft, almost pastel illustrations are quite striking, although they do not translate well to the computer screen and the story is quite cute. Recommended.

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Recently Tiffany created a Blog Catalog discussion decrying the over-use of terms like "censorship" to the point they become meaningless and useless (in a ‘boy who cried wolf’-sort-of-way) and I was inclined to agree. I suspect taht Peter Phillips and the folks at Project Censored would agree as well. If you, too, think that terms like censorship should apply to things like a well written book detailing the 25 most important stories affecting our planet and its peoples that you are Not hearing about on the news or on the nets, head to the 900’s* and check out Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories. Recommended.

*at my library this book can be found at 909.83

Jenn’s blog, The Thriftshop Romantic is a treasure trove of wonderful vintage "stuff" that Jenn finds and rescues from thrift shops. I don’t specifically recall Jenn doing a piece on old magazine advertisements, but this very visual identification and price guide for Old Magazine Advertisements, somehow made me think of Jenn’s blog immediately. Many of the featured ads reminded me a great deal of the tin advertising signs Joel used to collect. Recommended.

Even though Google backed away from the change that removed the ability to leave backlinks in blog comment signatures on blogspot, I continue to see a numbe of my old Blogger buddies migrate to Word Press. For those who are not as fortunate as I am in having a host who is also a friend and an IT hotshot who nurses along all my techno-dweebishness, may I suggest Maria Langer and Jordan Miraz’s Visual Quickstart Guide to WordPress 2. If you’re not a techie and just need a book that shows you where the controls are and how to use them, this one will fit the bill just fine. Recommended.

And finally today a huge Thank You to Will who recommended the offline composter program Blog Desk. My DSL again today went down just as I finished composing and was ready to publish this entry, but with Blog Desk my work was not lost and I was able to simply wait and publish when the DSL conneciton came back up.

 

 

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Blogging has truly been an adventure for me.    I started out just wanting to keep up with a couple of old friends (Hi Ron, Hi Bev) and before I knew it I was making a bunch of new friends and learning a heck of a lot and somewhere along the way my project evolved from a personal diary to a book review site and my ambition morphed from staying in touch with a few people to becoming an internet destination for book lovers.

And every step of the way I have gotten help from my friends, without whom None of this would have been in any way possible.   And the thing about putting my focus on networking and making friends with other bloggers is that my friends just never stop surprising me with new and amazing gifts.   Which is how it is that I am now collaborating on a Social Networking site for bloggers with a man I’ve come to respect and admire a great deal.  And who (slipping for a moment into the very personal mode) happens to be an incredibly hot biker type whose face/avatar half the bears in Seattle have drooled over when peeking
at my computer screen to see what it is I’ve been up to since I stopped hanging out on those sites, only to slump away in regret when told that Dane is actually a married straight guy whose world clearly revolves around his family.   (And a big part of why Dane and I are friends lies in the fact that he will either blush or break out laughing when he reads this instead of getting all huffy.)

I hope that all of my friends, new and old, will head over to Chain Drop,  which btw we are going to make into The social networking site for bloggers.    Blogging continues to be quite an adventure for me.   And I hope very much that you will join me as this new chapter unfurls.

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I don’t normally post to this blog on the weekends,  and a second off-topic post within less than a week is for me, unprecedented.    But I have these two very interesting and unusual books that have been sitting in my stack unread for several weeks now,  and my good buddy Saphrym  today commented on my old Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist Meme post that he would  Welcome a challenging meme that Really made him think.   And since I today realized that as interesting and important as these two books so clearly are,  I am nonetheless unlikely to ever find the time and intellectual energy to actually read and review them and so decided instead to punt.

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Today’s post is for my blog friends who also work in libraries.   Twas’ the night before Christmas and an over-worked, under-budgeted librarian is working late into the night to mend her battered and limited collection when a bright red bookmobile descends from the sky and a portly gentleman in red and his Pages elves deliver loads of new books and other goodies.   Loaded with library terms and literary references this unique take off on Clement C. Moore’s famous poem,  Librarian’s Night Before Christmas is a brand new book and was received in our branch for the first time today.    And our head Youth Services Librarian clipped a note to it asking all branch staff to read the book and initial it.  (No way that one was going home with a patron tonight ;)   We all loved it and if you work in a library or wish you did, this one is Highly Recommended.

Tomorrow:  Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas

Monday:  Charles Dickens’  A Christmas Carol

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My regular readers who have been with me for awhile already know that I really Hate memes.    Many times, I simply ignore them or give the sender a brief mention and link at the end of an unrelated post.   Once, when Mitch tagged me with a meme I just didn’t want to do (this is a book review site, not a free form blog and I hate to post off-topic) I played a mean meme trick by tagging him right back with the Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist meme.   Mitch never did attempt to tackle that very challenging meme on his blog, but he seemed to get the point that sometimes getting tagged is a real pain in the ass.   (And my friend Jamie whom I also tagged with that meme, royally rose to the challenge and did a great post.)     So when my new Entrecard buddy Saphrym tagged me with an Entrecard meme,  I decided to once again turn the tables.

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Today I am featuring Bill Keaggy’s  Milk Eggs Vodka not because it’s an interesting and amusing book,  though it is,  but as an example of someone who has turned a popular web site into a commercially successful book.

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Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, "That’s not writing.  That’s typing."    This is just one of the hundreds of  quotations of famous  "Needles, Skewers, Pricks and Outright Nastiness"  featured in Oh, What An Awful Thing To Say–A Book Of Notable Insults

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Books are powerful.   This morning Ron woke up feeling punk and cranky.   But after getting his coffee he picked up a library book he brought home yesterday and began reading.    And was soon laughing merrily and within minutes was feeling better and cheerfully looking forward to our busy day.    Chance are,  Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities may well affect you the same way.

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I have long been a huge fan of Unshelved, the daily comic strip about the life of Dewey, the lazy librarian at the Mallville Public Library. The strip by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum is wildly popular with library staffs everywhere. And it’s very funny, even if you don’t happen to work in a library. So I was thrilled when shelving in book length comics collections at 741.5973 to come across a copy of Read Responsibly, the latest Unshelved collection. As always the strips are clever and thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. "Creative Problem Avoidance" is a hoot. Highly Recommended.

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Last week’s books on spectacular log homes seemed to spark a real interest in the subject for Ron and today’s books are two he ordered from the library catalog which we both oohed and ahhed over. As eye candy, The Rustic Cabin: Design & Architecture, a lavishly illustrated over-size coffee table book is spot on. Ralph Kylloe is an expert on rustic furniture and design and this book spotlights magnificent homes built with every modern convenience in an elaborately rustic style.

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When I was a high school senior I had a sociology class, taught by a really nice man who was not a very stern disciplinarian. One day during a unit on group communications we did an experiment: The teacher whispered a sentence to the first person on row 1 and each student in turn whispered to the next until the message had been passed through every person in the room and the last person spoke the sentence out loud. The original sentence: "There’s a house for sale on the corner." What made it to the other end of the room: "Some midgets on the corner want to buy rubbers."

Somewhere along the way, someone (coughs and shuffles feet) changed the "house" for sale to a "condominium" for sale. And then the message passed through a crucial exchange, between "Dixie", a very smart girl whose brilliance was often obscured by her heavy old New Orleans Yat accent (’hay dawlin’, where ‘ya at?’) and "Ray", a pleasant, easy going guy we all knew was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Dixie tells Ray there’s a "condominium for sale" and he looks blank and whispers back ‘what the hell’s a condominimum?’. Dixie gives him a real kind look and whispers back ‘aw, you know Ray, like a rubber for a midget’. It was interesting lesson, though not perhaps the one Coach "Libbadoux" had in mind.

Unfortunately, many consumers are little more sophisticated than my former classmate in understanding the details of condominiums, co-operatives and town-homes, three increasingly common forms of home ownership that depending on where you live and how much you make may be the only realistic chance you will ever have of owning your own home. Having written about my dream of building a log mansion in the woods, it got me to thinking seriously about buying a home and as always I brought home a huge stack of books to learn more.

You only need to hear one thing about condo’s, co-ops, & townhomes by Mark B. Weiss. Don’t Bother. When he stops being a mindless cheerleader for the real estate development industry, it is only to talk down to the reader. To quote Ron quoting Dorothy Parker, "It isn’t the sort of book that should be set aside lightly. It is the sort of book that should be hurled away with great force" (to the rubbish bin.)

how to Buy a Condominium or Townhome (no image, Worldcat) by real estate attorney Irwin E. Leiter is a significantly more useful book. In clear and concise language Leiter explains in detail all of the legal complexities of owning a home in an association with other homeowners. This guide would be an excellent resource both for someone at my former classmate’s level of understanding who wanted to know what this type of home ownership is all about and for someone seriously considering purchasing a unit in this type of community who needs to understand the legal complexities of their potential purchase. Recommended.

More books on home ownership next week.

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I was very honored on Friday to be quoted by my friend Rich Becker on his Copy Write Ink blog. As I commented on a discussion over at BlogCatalog about Technorati authority, Google Page Rank and other measurments of a blog’s success

“… most bloggers who have not yet established a large readership and built a solid base of well-tagged content for search engines get very distracted by all of these measurements and allow themselves to become [too] focused on these metrics …”

So when Rich invited me to expand on this as his guest on Blog Straight Talk, I jumped at the chance. Since starting The Thin Red Line in June I’ve spent a great deal of time online meeting and talking to other bloggers, particularly at BlogCatalog, which is a great community site for bloggers. I’ve also looked at and read A Lot of blogs. And all too often what I see are bloggers who have not invested the time and work into creating useful content, who invest a great deal of their time and energy into worrying about their metrics and monetization.

Talk about cart before the horse. If you create a product and don’t sell it you won’t make any money. But you can’t get serious about selling a product until you’ve actually created it. And so many of the metrics and monetization obsessed bloggers I’ve met seem not to get this at all.

My more metrics-focused friends and indeed anyone reading my traffic reports and adsense statements might be shocked to learn that I am operating this blog according to a carefully considered business plan and I actually expect it to produce meaningful cash flow within two–three years.

When I first started I was writing this blog as a personal message to a couple of
friends whose lives I kept up with via their blogs. I included book reviews in my posts because I am passionate about books and reading and wanted to share the books I discovered in my work at the library. Then I noticed something in my SiteMeter reports. There were people reading my blog whom I’d never met and they appeared to be coming in just to read the book reviews.

And then I stumbled into BlogCatalog where I met all kinds of brilliant bloggers and took some good advice and moved my personal journaling elsewhere and focused this blog on presenting books. And it’s starting to take off.

When I’d reviewed only a handful of books, I only occasionally got search engine visitors. Now that I’ve posted a couple of dozen book reviews I regularly get search engine visitors. When I get to a point where I have written and posted several hundred book reviews, I expect to see significant traffic from search engine results. I also work very hard at forming relationships and getting meaningful links from high quality blogs to build up my regular readership, those who come back again and again to see what I am writing now. And my posts to this blog are at different times primarily intended for search engine visitors who want to know about a particular book OR for my regular readers who may sometimes indulge me with their attention when I post off topic, as today.

I also try to be sure no one leaves disappointed so I have taken to making my off topic-posts more and more resemble book reviews, so those readers will still feel they got their daily visit from ‘that guy at the library who knows about all those books’. Which leads me to

One of the things I do as I am shelving books all day is to neaten the stacks and make sure each book is placed evenly in its row so that the title and call number can easily be read by anyone who needs to find a book. But there is just no way to get Tilt to stand up straight. This cleverly designed history of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy has been cut on an angle so that the spine of the book leans inward towards the back of the shelf rather than standing up straight. Just like the famous tower that is its subject Tilt has a permanent slant. You may or may not actually want to read the history of this famous structure and learn about the many unsuccessful efforts over the years to right the Leaning Tower. But even if this is too dry for you, it is worth checking out the book just to admire and appreciate the very clever design. At my library Tilt can be found at 945.55.

I think that "flash fiction" or Very short stories is something you either love or hate. Trouble is I can’t decide which side of that I am on. Flash Fiction Forward is a collection of 80 very short stories. Some of them were quite clever and truly impressed me while others left me thinking the very short form is useless. Love it or hate it, Flash Fiction Forward can be found in the adult fiction stacks, in the F’s for Flash.

If you’ve written 100 well-tagged posts and found a niche and theme you can really run with, by all means check your Technorati authority and Google Page Rank and do what you need to do to improve your metrics. But don’t ever forget that you’ve got to actually Create high quality content before you can monetize it.

My thanks again to Rich for having me as his guest on Blog Straight Talk.

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