To be honest, I’ve never been through a book launch before; authors were arcane professors who spoke an ancient language that need unabashed attention (some still do). Crowds suffocate me too, which fortified my aversion to such events. Much more one tied up with a graphic novel and a comic book launch, in which I expected a mass convergence of Magic enthusiasts, Comic Quest habitués and computer assemblers from Virra Mall. The pack was heterogeneous; I was mistaken.

Read more.

Melanie Chartoff, Parker Lewis Can't Lose's Ms. Musso, is an inventor din pala. According to her bio,

Along with a partner, she's developed and patented a simple graywater recycling device which enables homeowners to reuse their shower water for irrigation.

Galing. Naalala nyo pa ba kung sinu-sino sila?



*pic lifted here.

PS. I've enabled comment moderation recently to fend off spammers. So if you didn't see the comment you posted, please wait for my approval.

Is Love, Actually always on your playlist? Do you still have a betamax copy of An American Tail, or a rented Carlo Caparas massacre opus that you forgot to return? What is your view on piracy, local filmfests, porn? Are you related to an artista, had a close brush with Tom Cruise or Tom Babauta, or was paid to appear as an extra in Mangarap Ka? Did you know the name of the bridge where Snooky jumped in Bata Pa Si Sabel? Do you like watching movies alone?

The theme for Warm Bodies 4, Warm Bodies Goes to the Movies, will focus on the artistas and movie fans within us bloggers. Posts related to movies, and showbusiness in general, are welcome to enter the fourth edition of Warm Bodies, and not just the standard movie review fare of the latest Harry Potter flick. The rules are still the same, you have been advised somewhere else, but there will be no wordcount limits this time. We won’t accept poems but if you did a good job in making poetry out of Rene Requiestas’ life (well, for everything else too) then we will consider it seriously.

Send your entries to Sky at oscaralvarezjrATNOSPAMgmailDOTcom with the subject WB4: (post title). We will not be accepting attachments of any kind; you can e-mail your post directly if it is short and sweet, plus the URL of the post for us to validate, or to make it easy on you, just the URL alone and it’s all done.

The last day for submission of entries will be on a Monday midnight, 23 January 2006. Please spread the word; we’re giving you the liberty to post these wonderful teasers courtesy of Johnbert/Happy Sushi.

I've finished an article to be submitted to Pinoy Book Reviews and asked mananalaysay (of Peyups editorship fame) for a buyoff. Falling short of giving him nausea, he said his pov in one word and nicely at it: grammer. It's a grain of sand with the mass of a planet.

If there is one other thing, aside from disjoint storylines and pretentious voicing that I am guilty of, atrocious grammar is a crime I silently commit. Reading through my past entries I still don't have an inkling if my tenses had been correct. Even right now I feel that somewhere in these paragraphs a verb is having an identity crisis if it is past perfect or past perfect continuous, of which the latter's concept I only knew yesterday. His advice (err, advise?) is read, read, read. Which I of course do, except that I don't pay much attention to the structure of the sentences. His prescriptions: English Page and Common Errors in English.

Anyhow, I'm not alone. I am still appalled, but quite unsure of myself now more than ever, why choirs never learn:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come.

And the moral police hasn't lifted a finger for years!

***

Ever seen a real thumb drive*? The top 10 weirdest USB drives ever.

How much is true love worth come Christmas time? $29,322.80, via Ambeth Ocampo.

Church of the Holy Sacrifice will be declared a national historic landmark next year. Dean Juinio and a young David Consunji executed its dome structure fifty years ago (insert school pride here). In other things UP, I've heard that a group of women also marched in the buff in this year's Oblation Run. Can somebody verify?

The top 100 sci-fi stories of all time, at least, on their side of the world. Arr, where is Kage Baker's Studio Dick Drowns Near Malibu? I've only read one: Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel. I have Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder and Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God waiting to be read in my hard drive and I'm dying to get a copy of Daniel Keyes' Flowers For Algernon.

Stumble! If you have a Firefox browser and too much time in your hands, install this wonderful extension. Great for those days when you run out of blogs to read or when your aggregator is down. Just look for eyes at your back first. The outcomes of my stumbles are serendipitous even though the database is probably small, and most links are safe for work (did I hear somebody say darn?).

And what is this? Guidelines to follow. Shoutout to johnbert for the fab design.


*pic taken from the same site.

Great way to show off my books (no Harry Potters, sorry!). The potential is so enormous for book borrowers (I don't put them on the shelf for display--coffee table books take care of that, but salaula borrowers beware). OC me had to go through the whole list on a single book to find out which one exactly matches what I have, and I found out that most of them, the imported titles at least, came by way of Australia. Local titles meanwhile, are hard to find except for FSJ's Viajero.

Time to exchange Library Thing catalog links. Here's mine. What's yours?

There's a widget for my book catalog (not yet full; I have a houseful of books to get this into, fyi) which went to my sidebar.

via bibliobibuli.

PS. I'm still gathering steam to write about the booklaunch last Saturday. Later.

UPDATE: Arrrrgh! I forgot that I've sold my PC last Saturday and the new one will arrive *probably* this week. My camera can't communicate with Eleanor anyhow, so I'll make a late post of the pictures. To see some pics in the book launch, go here. Yep, that's me in the vertical stripes.

TC