A classmate wrote recently and mentioned in passing that I should read The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed. This made me realise it might be interesting to do an open post asking my readers (most of whom are librarians, writers or book industry types) what books they're reading and/or would […]
I posted an anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut from author Dave Margoshes a couple entries back. In the course of writing to ask permission to do this, I also took the opportunity to ask Dave, who also acts as the food critic with the local Prairie Dog weekly newspaper, if he’d be willing to give me […]
An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. […]
I'm not a huge fan of Internet petitions for the most part but this one makes sense, not least of all because it is trying to mobilize Internet users to save something specific to the online world, namely Internet radio. The Myths & Facts section of the SaveInternetRadio.org web site is enlightening as is this […]
There are a number of astounding stats about The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan which came out during Saskatchewan's Centennial in 2005. Most pages of any book ever published in Saskatchewan. Most contributors. Most illustrations. Longest gestation time. Heaviest. The print edition is an amazing book and now, the CPRC has put the whole thing online for […]
Dave Margoshes is a Regina-based writer who's originally from the States. He sent the following anecdote to the Sask Writers listserv and has kindly allowed me to reprint it here. Since there's been a lot of Vonnegut talk recently, I thought I'd toss this in. I was at Iowa in the late '60s, overlapping with […]
One of my favourite things about the stats package that comes with this blog is seeing who is linking to me (and therefore where my hits are coming from. For example, I got a ton of hits for my “12 Types of Library School Students” entry (three times as many as anything I've written in […]
I'd seen something like this once before for some other news event (Saddam's hanging?) and, as I suspected, someone has one again created a time lapse of how the Wikipedia article for the VT shootings developed over its first 12 hours. Kinda interesting watching the article grow/change/mutate in a very organic fashion. Actually, that makes […]
Britain’s biggest specialist book chain, Waterstone’s, asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstone’s opened its first store. The list features the cream, both male and female, of the modern international literary world of the last quarter of a century – from Umberto Eco and Bill Bryson […]
