The Girl With the Bad Cover of The Immigrant Song

I have a problem with Hollywood's remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie:




WHY DID YOU MESS WITH THE IMMIGRANT SONG? Karen O, I expected better from you. Insert commentary on Hollywood remaking movies it doesn't need to remake subtitles book adaptations blah blah blah here. Don't mess with Zeppelin.

Tossing Books to Turn the Library Into a Coffee Shop? Really?

Just adding a coffee shop to a neighborhood library so people can feel like they're in Starbucks and ultra hip was apparently too passe a trend for Principal James McSwain of Lamar High School.

Finishing up a week ago, McSwain has thrown out nearly all the books and filled the space they were unnecessarily taking up with couches and coffee and food and told his students that they can access the exciting world of reading through e-books! And if they don't have a laptop of their own and Internet access to do so, they can use one of the laptop computers in the library coffeeshop!

I hope this is a joke.

WalMart's Little Black Book Section

At many area Walmarts, the book section is extremely well-organized.

The self-help books are here . . . the religion section is there . . . cooking and diet books farther down . . . and right over here is the black section.

You think I'm kidding?

At Walmart, apparently, skin color trumps all.

Bob Dyer, a Beacon Journal Columnist, writes about WalMart segregating titles by subjects' skin color. Not all of them, but 'many'. Whooooooa.

Is this just in the US? Does it happen in Canada?

Execution Twitter

Is using Twitter to announce an execution appropriate? Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff thought it was alright.

"I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

While Twitter's Tweets are 'legitimate' enough to be included in the Library of Congress, how appropriate are they in this situation? I'd say not at all. Mark Shurtleff Tweeted about an execution he was involved in. He Tweeted. Say it a few times, think about how silly that sounds. Tweeting. Tweeting about someone's death.

I have no sympathy for the man executed; it's more that I imagine that would be a terrible thing for a family member or other relative to hear about. It's irreverent, and even if they guy was horrible, it's still not quite appropriate respect for the taking of another life. Even if it's by death squad shooting.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book?

Having just finished another post, an ad on the 'yay you just published a post' page caught my eye:

Turn your blog into a book!
Blog2Print from SharedBook turns your blog into a soft cover or hard cover book. You pick the cover, add an optional dedication, then preview and you're done. Prices start at $14.95.

Now I'm wondering what the difference between a blog and a journal is. I could pay $14.95 (and probably more, since that's USD and I'm Canadian) and get my blog published as a book with real, actual pages I could smell. And absolutely none of the links would work, and none of the articles linked would be included, and isn't that the point of a blog? Isn't it just a journal otherwise? If you make a new word for a new thing, use that word properly and don't lump other things in with that word.