everything in its place

Everything in its Place:
"He long ago explained to me that as a nearly blind child with a perpetually evolving prescription, he adapted by developing systems for locating his things without the boost of contacts or spectacles. Once he decided where he was going to keep an object (today: iPod; then: favorite Star Wars action figure), he stuck to it with a tenacity that cannot be appreciated by those of us with 20/20."

exactly. blindness + minor OCD = KNOWING WHERE CERTAIN OBJECTS MUST LIVE.

How to Stop Junk Mail - Is your mailbox a junk mail graveyard?

Ideal Bite has some great pointers on how to stop junk mail -- REAL mail, that is, all that junk that comes into your mailbox!

* DirectMail.com - free, quick way to get your name off commercial mailing lists.
* OptOutPrescreen.com - opt out of pre-approved credit card and insurance offers online or by phone: 1-888-5-OPTOUT.
* EcoLogical Mail Coalition - helps businesses stop mail addressed to former employees.
* Native Forest Network's Guide - five easy steps to stop junk mail.

William Gibson on women in his world

William Gibson on writing about women:

"TVP: Does working through a female protagonist help provide that kind of distance?

WG: I don't know why I do that except that they're better company for me. In the months that it takes me, I have to live with these characters for really a long time in considerable depth. I find it's really a lot more pleasant for me if at least half of them are female. I don't know why that is, but I certainly found it fairly odd. It probably had something to do with some sort of unexamined model I have of what constitutes humanity. Come to think of it, some of it might be that traditionally, the science fiction I grew up with, a lot of which had been written in the 1940's and before, was arguably very much a male universe. And a lot of people assumed science fiction to be a fundamentally male genre."

fairly odd, indeed.

a must read

if you've ever enjoyed a fantasy novel, you need to stop reading whatever boring book you've been plowing your way through, out of duty or obligation or personal obligation, and pick up a copy of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

simply enough -- it's great. it's consistent, it's entertaining, it's delightful, it's a pleasure to read on every single level.

Yes, it's about a thousand pages. so what? you've all done it. you know you have. and when it's good, it's always been worth doing. i know, there have been a lot of doorstops that have been disappointing these days. but this one -- it's a keeper.

I was about halfway through when i had to get on a plane to cleveland, and i wasn't about to bring a thousand page library book home on the plane. so ... of course, i went to my mom's library, and got a copy to finish there!

Bonus: once i finished it, i could give it to my stepsister, who called me, to say urgently that she was 596 pages into it, was loving it, and was going to be going into the independent bookstore where she works to find out when the next book is due out.
Apparently she showed up the next morning at my mother's house, book in hand, saying she'd stayed up late finishing it, and insisted that my mom MUST READ IT NOW.

33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names - Wattpad

33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names is AWESOME:

"4. COLUMELLA NASI - The bottom part of the nose between the nostrils.

6. FEAT - A dangling curl of hair.

17. MINIMUS - The little finger or toe.

20. OCTOTHORPE - The symbol '#' on a telephone handset. Bell Labs' engineer Don Macpherson created the word in the 1960s by combining octo-, as in eight, with the name of one of his favourite athletes, 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe.

24. PURLICUE - The space between the thumb and extended forefinger.

28. SCROOP - The rustle of silk.

32. WAMBLE - Stomach rumbling."

Sentence Sensibility

Today's On Language is rather ... targeted, shall we say, to me:

"I didn’t realize, however, what a huge boulder I would be rolling uphill — what with my being a “literary person,” a sometime editor of this column, someone whose ear is as tuned to the pitch of language as a cellist’s is to music — until the misplaced modifiers, dyslexic spellings and grievous abuses of syntax started pouring in.
...But just imagine what it’s like to be afflicted with an excess language-sensitivity gene. I mean, how would you feel if someone extolled your “skillful verbage”? Maybe he liked the way I threw my verbs around, but my nose picked up a whiff of “garbage.”"



also, please note that the times website has the Author's name spelled wrong. Jaimie Esptein. GO NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE COPYEDITORS.