Sacré Bleu

I have French heritage and it took a phone book to tell me. Well, not exactly; it turns out that it was someone from out of town who put the information together. You'd think that if they, as they claim "work with every prominent member of the business community in the towns where we publish", they might have tried asking some basic questions. For example -

* Is Baruch a French name?
* What's the bigger event? A three-day picnic that raises funds for the local fire department or a celebration of an instrument played by a small group of people?
* Is there an ice rink available for use in winter?

Probably the most unusual thing is that, due to the nature of the two towns covered in this book being so closely linked (they share a school district, and maybe some community services offered through the schools), the people who put together the book labeled it "Town A/Town B 2007". Of course, logic would dictate that you might change some of your templates to reflect the fact that you're talking about two independent communities. Well, that didn't happen, so you have lines like this -

In the style of hometown telephone books from an earlier era, our A/B Directory contains large type type and the names and numbers of your friends and neighbors in A/B. ... If you look through the huge regional yellow pages, you'll notice that there are not many A/B businesses listed as advertisers ... they have little need to advertise to families 45 minutes away.

Well, there is a bit of truth there - the book does have larger print than other phone books, yet is no thicker than the white pages that cover these same communities that is distributed by the local phone company. It's also true that there aren't many businesses in my town that advertise in the über-regional yellow pages which covers all or part of 11 counties in the region. However, they are in the two phone books which cover our county, along with the two phone books which cover the same two towns.

The last minor error they made was that they decided to move a highway about 70 miles to the south, but aside from cutting some roads off on the map, they didn't make too many mistakes. The good news is that they managed to figure out the right cable and telephone companies for the area.

I see you watching me watching you

This story in the SMH caught my eye yesterday; you wouldn't really know what it was about from the title, though it is a hint - "Obese, gun-happy and violent; but that's half the story". The point is that Fairfax sent Michael Gawenda over here a couple of years ago to be their Washington Correspondent, and in that time, he's seen both the stereotypical America along with the country that most of us know.

It's items like this that make me glad for being able to access newspapers and news from around the world, as one point that he makes is very prescient -

It is not surprising that so many Americans consider America to be a world unto itself, which partly at least, explains American provincialism and why many Americans are so apparently incurious about the rest of the world.

If I have failed to convey the complexity of America, I am not alone. Much of the reporting of the place by most foreign correspondents - British, European and Australian - fails the complexity test.

The truth of the matter is that most of the my fellow citizens really only pay attention to what is happening in their area, along with the areas that get coverage from the major news programs and channels. I will disagree with his point about the homelands of the journos who cover this country being complex. If I were sent to, say Australia, with just basic information, or maybe info that I'd culled from a travel guide, there would be a lot of nuance that I'd miss - for example, the split in football codes - Rugby League in NSW, the ACT and QLD, Aussie rules in the other states and territories; Rugby a quiet third, soccer lurking there, and gridiron completely nonexistant.

Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see someone who comes to the country go around and visit the parts of our vast land that don't get media coverage (read: anywhere other than the Northeast Corridor (that's Boston to Washington and down into Northern Virginia), Los Angeles, and to a very very much lesser extent, Chicago) to find what I guess you would call the quintessential American.

I have to say that I'd be very interested if they did decide to market his upcoming book here, but I do know that the chances of this happening are likely very small, but you never know.

E-books revisited

Back in August, I had commented on my general dislike of E-books. Well, I have to say that my opinion has changed, albeit just slightly.

I've been working on compiling lists of stuff for various uses, and I was given a link to the Top 100 books at Project Gutenberg. I happened to notice that at #10 is a book that has been recommended to me for quite a while now, Pride and Prejudice. If you click on this link, you will see various versions of the book. I believe that the version I had downloaded back in August is one of the Text versions. Those have the words meant to be in italics formatted for newsgroups, with underscores on either side of the italicised word.

You'll also notice a couple of Adobe PDF files - the first one is the one I downloaded. It's formatted in the correct paper size for the USA - 8-1/2 × 11 inches, landscape. You'll also notice that the pages don't seem to match up correctly. This is by design as it's meant to be put together using the "perfect binding" method - i.e. mini booklets are formed from groups of, in this case, 8 pages and then folding the group together forms 16 pages of text in the correct order. The other PDF file is simply the pages (at the same size as the ones in the first file after folding) put into correct order, more suitable for screen reading.

The best part? It's totally free and legal - the book is technically out of copyright here, so it is freely available for the taking. The only challenging part is to devise a method to bind the 18 booklets together into one big mass ;)

Another new thing

Observant readers have noticed that I've placed a little section called "My Library" on the sidebar. This is a great thing from Library Thing where you can catalogue all of your books that you own. These, for the most part, are books that I've read over the last year or so, or am planning to read or am currently reading..

Speaking of books

I might as well make this a new post ;)

Speaking of books, I'm not reading anything right now, having finished The Street Lawyer in only a couple of days, after taking a couple of weeks to go through A Time to Kill

So right now I'm not sure what book to read next. I don't mind the Grisham books, but I'd like to read something else. I'd been suggested to read Stephen King, so I wisely got ahold of a copy of Pet Sematary - then I read the introduction and i'm kinda creeped out about it already...

Any ideas of what I should read next? (And I can hear the fingers tapping on the p and r keys already. That's an out-standing suggestion, and I probably should take it under advisement.)

Books, E-books and Photos

I've been set a task to read a certain book (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, a book at least 75% of the English-reading world has read, and I'm in the 25%); I've done something similar to this already, with pretty much the same result.

I am not really in a position to go off to the local bookstore or to the library all that often, so I usually have to devise my own methods of getting things - like happening upon them at other places like rummage sales or department stores, and everything normally works out fine. One would think that a book as well-known as Pride and Prejudice would be available at one of these places, but I have had no luck in finding it as of yet.

Of course, there are alternate methods of getting access to books without having to pay for them - the ebook route, and I've done this in the past for another book that wasn't in my house at the time, but the thing was with that particular book, there were no chapter divisions, and the whole book was converted to a single-space affair. A few times, I had tried to get involved with that particular book (The Firm), but I just could not. One thing that I've figured out is that for me, if I want to read something longer than a few thousand words, it really needs to be in a tangible format. This brings me back to my attempt at reading Pride and Prejudice as an ebook.

Unlike the version of The Firm that I found, the first version (in PDF) of Pride and Prejudice does actually have the chapters intact, but there are a couple of problems for me at least. First, it's set up for A4-size paper - a type of paper that is not at all available here (yes, it's in the OfficeMax catalog, at the cost of $13.99 per ream - not available in stores, so you have to pay shipping on top of that). Plus, take a look at this sample text from the first chapter:

"_You_ want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."

I don't know what the intention of the person who converted the book was, but not only are those underscores annoying, but they do change how I would read that. To me, it doesn't make much sense to do that especially when just about everyone has access to proper editing tools so that if they wanted to place accent on a word in sentence, they could just put in italics.

Ah well, enough about that. I'm probably going to end up getting a way to get to either the local second-hand bookstore or find a rummage sale where it's available. I would order it online through Barnes and Noble, where they only want $2.99 for an in-house paperback version of it; the only catch is that their shipping would double the price of the book - $3.00 flat fee plus 99¢ per item.

Aside from that, I spent most of my day today looking through photos that I've taken over the last 2+ years, mostly to find things to post to here - for example a sign from a local McDonalds that has a farily obvious spelling mistake, along with taking note of photos that I've taken of various gas stations' price boards. It was something that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I do think that I need to take some time to go through and prepare some photos for posting. I've also noticed that in this month so far, I've taken more photos than in any month over the last two years.