Today I went to a talk by best-selling author Neil Gaiman. There was a question and answer period. Someone asked for Mr Gaiman's take on the recent Google Print kafuffle. (Some authors did not deign to fill in the little "Please don't index my book" web form, but instead filed a lawsuit against Google.)

He raised some interesting points, including one I hadn't heard before. It's not just the danger-of-piracy vs. searchability-equals-higher-sales trade off. There might be some books which the rights holder doesn't want found at all. Back when he was young, unknown, and needed money, he wrote a book about the band Duran Duran. He is not proud of this work. He does not want any more copies of this book to sell. He wishes it would go away. (I'm interpreting what he said; perhaps I'm exaggerating.)

A couple of hours too late, I realized the solution to this problem. The embarassed author's best friend is: Google Purge.

Disclaimer: I do not speak for Google. I only speak for myself.

Tags: author | book-burning | because burning the band would be illegal |

Wow, it's the site's four-millionth web hit:

66.249.64.68 - - [28/Sep/2005:23:09:05 -0400] "GET /self/MBrooce/MBbruce.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Ah, the Googlebot spider visited to confirm that I haven't changed the main MégaBröoce page since February. The price of excellence is eternal vigilance!

Once upon a time in old St Louis, a kid walks into a bar and starts waving around a katana. Just when you hope that this comic would descend into a blood-soaked massacre, a priest calms the kid down with some sensible talk. But I have high hopes for the future of this comic, high hopes indeed.

Tags: comic | potential | cowboy |

Oh, "Rex Libris" is a a comic book about a librarian, this sounds interesting. Oh, he's a time-traveling librarian. Oh dear. He's a time-traveling librarian who can withstand a vacuum and has superpowers and... yawn. Whatever.

I think I'll go re-read Jason Shiga's Bookhunter. Now there's a good comic about fanciful high-adventure library hijinx.

Tags: comic | origin story | libraries |

Walker and Jones continue to explore the cute/horiffic world of Little Gloomy. I liked the stories in this issue. I liked some of the art. I think they need to find someone to fill in their blacks, though. A lot of the art in this issue was insufficiently gloomy for my taste.

Tags: comic | cute | Cthul'hu |

Women in short skirts fire guns at each other. But it works. When does the movie come out?

Tags: comics | cigarettes | violence |

Back when I was telecommuting, I'd listen to DJ Toby's show on KUSF Tuesday afternoons. Some days, she'd play the song Big Rock Candy Mountain, a song about the Promised Land for Bums.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain
The cops have wooden legs
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs

This book isn't about bums, but is it about a man who works very hard in search of the easy life. He's always trying some new scheme or scam. He makes his family miserable moving from place to place. But along the way, they visit many places and you get a hint of what America was like before there was cable TV, back when whiskey was some of the best entertainment around.

Tags: book | bootlegging | Wallace Stegner |

I read the New Yorker in stack order; magazines are not pushed on the stack at publish-time, but are queued elsewhere for a nontrivial time; that is, I don't read them in chronological order. So you should not be surprised that I just now got around to reading this old issue.

So here are some notes to myself: Bilger Burkhard had a good article about Petr Hlavacek and the history of shoes. Thus, someday, Bilger Burkhard may publish a book that I want to read. Thus do I add him to the list of authors I occasionally search for in library catalogs. Yea verily.

Tags: magazine | Discover | footwear |

This collection of short storylets by Michael Van Vleet was nice. Loosely-related stories about hypothetical armies. Zombie soldiers, shifting sands.

Tags: zine | Amanda Summers | green grass |

I read the latest issue of Giant Robot magazine. There were photos from the opening party of the new Giant Robot store in New York city. One of the photos was of ace reporter Claudine Ko. And I thought, "What are the editors keeping her out late at parties? Instead, they should encourage her to stay in the office and write more." But I needn't have worried--she has an article a few pages later. It's a trip down memory lane about various men who have masturbated in her presence, but she makes it interesting.

There was also an interview with conceptual artist Tobias Wong. This was informative to me because I'm an ignoramus who had never heard of him. But he's made some interesting inventions/works: a smoking mitten, a transparent candle. Do you remember the time when I drained a lot of glitter into my toilet? It didn't flush out for several days, and tended to stay behind even though other, uhm, articles did get flushed. Anyhow, for a few days, everything in my toilet bowl was sparkling. Tobias had another approach to this: pills containing glitter so that your poo will sparkle. Actually, I doubt that the glitter pills are very efficient. A lot of glitter would be wasted; the only visible glitter would be that in the "bark" of the "log". However, with glitter floating free in the toilet bowl, some of it will cling to the "bark"--and none of it will be wasted on the "xylem and phloem".

Whoa, that thought stumbled along a little farther than it should have. Anyhow, this magazine has plenty of material that has nothing to do with wee-wees or poo-poo. Check it out.

Tags: zine | berkeley perverts | art |

This collects comic books 24-31 of "Y the Last Man". The tail end of this story arc is in San Francisco. And it asks me to believe that our heroes successfully follow an evasive ninja through the Presidio. In the rain. The comic doesn't do this explicitly. In one scene, our heroes run through an urban neighborhood. In the next, they're on the Golden Gate Bridge. If you don't live in this town, you might not know that there's this big former army base full of trees around the bridge. Yeah, good luck tracking a ninja through all that. Even if she is carrying a noisy monkey.

Tags: comic | disbelief | lipstick ninja |

If you're walking along the street and you see a Joan Didion book sitting on a garbage can, pick it up and take it home. I did, and I wasn't sorry.

You know all of those logic puzzles where you're on an island populated by some people who always tell the truth and some people who always lie? This book is like those puzzles, except it's a novel.

The main character has two husbands. One lies; one tells the truth. Further complicating the issue, the main character hears nothing, but understands everything. The book's narrator hears everything but understands nothing.

That doesn't sound like the plot of a novel, does it? And yet all of the plot feels like window dressing around those four people, and watching how ideas pass among them.

OK, there's a plot involving terrorism, life in a banana republic, loss, and grief.

Tags: book | Smullyanics | dumpster diving

This comic book shows us a Mr. T who stays concealed in the shadows. Why? If he emerges, then bad men will hurt good citizens so that they can frame Mr. T. But like King Arthur, we know that one day he will emerge from his place of concealment, and on that day will come a reckoning.

Tags: comic | shaz-8 | welcome back

Did you know that Al Gore chartered a couple of planes to help out people in Katrina-smashed areas? It's enough to make you wish the nation had put some more resources at his disposal. But let's not dwell on the world leaders of today; that's just sad. Let's instead think about world leaders of the past, as seen through the chess-loving eyes of Marilyn Yalom.

This book talks about the history of chess and the history of queens. I find the history of chess interesting, but I've read plenty about it; this book didn't add much for me. As for the history of royalty, I find it royally boring. Oh, there's a little bit in this book about the lives of non-royal, non-noble people. But not enough to hold my interest. You might like it, though. It's well written, just on the wrong topics.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn't read about the world leaders of any era.

Tags: book | chess | monarchy |

Just nine months after the fact, I uploaded a write-up of the road trip that Tom Lester and I took back in January.

You could argue that in 2004-2005 span, I thus completed another unemployed travel trilogy. If so, I hope it's the last one for a while.

Tags: site | trees | sleet |

Jason Shiga's site has erupted from inactivity to interactivity. He makes these wonderful interactive comic books, some of which he has translated to web-o-matic form.

Because this blog is more about books than about web stuff, I should point out the delightful not-interactive-but-nevertheless-fun comic Bookhunter. It was awesome!

Tags: comics | genius | choose your own adventure |

I have nothing original to say about the unfolding disaster in New Orleans. All I know how to do is point out interesting reading material.

One more reason to free Tibet: We can make it easier for her citizens to go elsewhere and make great pizza.

Tags: china | Chicago style | escape