Blog-of-the-Month Club

Many amusing blogs exist, but few truly addictive ones. A good example of the latter is the unpronounceable xkcd.com, which doesn't stand for anything except the fertile technoanarchic mind of its creator, a physicist named Randall Munroe. His off-the-wall stick-figure cartoons will keep you rapt for hours even though you might not quite understand some (well, in some cases most) of them.

Though I'd never before encountered it (where have I been?), xkcd.com seems to be quite famous. Go thither and have fun. And if you like, you can buy the t-shirt.

A tip of the hat to Pete Selkowe for the heads-up. No pun intended.

Charging ahead on the iPod Touch

About noon today I finished reading the Kindle version of Michael Connelly's 1999 whodunit Angels Flight on my iPod Touch. Yes, I read an entire book on a 3 1/2-inch screen and didn't suffer eyestrain. What's more, I've just recently had cataract surgery -- that has to be the ultimate test for small-scale e-book reading. And, let me tell you, the experience was a satisfying one.

The next thing I did was go to Kindle Books online and download Connelly's most recent cop novel, The Brass Verdict, published late last fall.

Why another cop novel? Why another Connelly? Am I going to pig out on his Harry Bosch novels the way I did on Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels last year until I'd read them all?

Not really. When one works in the same genre, it helps to absorb how other writers -- especially best-selling as well as first-rate ones -- craft their stories. One picks up good tricks that way. (One has to be careful not to steal, just be inspired.)

And when one reads an e-book on a small screen, it helps if the book is simple, direct and linear -- that is, if it doesn't have a convoluted plot that requires the reader to backtrack frequently to refresh his memory of names or events, such as all those Russians and their relationships in War and Peace. A good mystery keeps the reader rolling along effortlessly. Angels Flight did that.

As I become more and more used to this mode of reading, I might try a literary novel or a a heavy-duty biography on the little iPod Touch.

This doesn't mean I've forsaken print on paper. All this time I've also been reading the tree-book of P. D. James' newest literary mystery, The Private Patient -- one chapter a day, savoring each shapely sentence and each profound observation about human behavior. The end is drawing near; Commander Dalgliesh is about to bust the perp -- a colorful American phrase Lady James would never use.

Two for the weekend

A twofer today:

1. In cleaning out the attic these last few weeks, the Lady Friend and I discovered several boxes of new, uncirculated copies of my nonfiction books Flight of the Gin Fizz, Zephyr and What's That Pig Outdoors? Most are hardcover, a few are paperbacks and some are in Dutch and German.

When initial sales declined to the point at which the publishers decided to remainder the remaining copies, I bought a few boxes for what, I don't know, some vague idea of posterity. They've just been gathering dust all these years.

And so they're all for sale, along with a custom personal inscription. If you're interested, write me at author@henrykisor.com.

2. For the last couple of weeks the New York Times has been publishing a cool new blog, Schott's Vocab, dedicated to clever and sometimes just off-the-wall neologisms. Those are newly coined words that have never before existed and may have no real reason to do so, but in a few cases just might stick around and become part of our collective vocabulary.

For instance, twitturgy, or religious tweeting on Twitter. Instead of 5,000-word Sunday stemwinder sermons, pastors can issue up-to-140-words tweets such as:

Move into my neighborhood, God. Come sing in these suburban streets. Love the loveless. Laugh with the lonely. Spray the walls into beauty.

Ben Schott, a Londoner, writes the blog with the dry English humor he has infused into his celebrated miscellanies and almanacs, those arbitrary, anarchic and addictive book-length collections of facts, factoids, lists and charts for trivia hounds. I'm hooked.

Mene, mene tekel e-upharsin

Behold the e-writing on the wall.

1. Earlier this month, Amazon.com and Apple joined forces to make Amazon.com's 240,000 Kindle e-books downloadable to the iPhone and iPod Touch. This was huge. The enormous user base for those devices is eagerly snapping up the Kindle material as well as e-books in other reader formats.

2. Shortly afterward, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise, another e-book retailer, so that the book chain can compete with Amazon.com and its Kindle. Just the other day Fictionwise announced a free e-book reader application for the Blackberry Curve, Storm, Pearl and Bold. Reportedly Blackberry is working on new wireless devices with larger screens optimized for e-book reading.

3. A few days ago Google and Sony announced that Google’s library of more than 600,000 public-domain e-books would now be available for free on the Sony Reader in Sony's ePub format. Sony also lowered the price of its flagship PRS-700 e-book reader to $350, compared to Amazon.com's $359 Kindle.

4. Amid the scores of university presses that suddenly have found themselves in a financial bind -- one, the University of Utah Press, may fold -- the University of Michigan Press is going to e-books in a big way. It publishes about 120 books a year, half of them slow-selling scholarly monographs important to academics but not to the public. It will now bring out most of these monographs as e-books, some of them available as print-on-demand works. UMP will save buckets of money this way.

5. Last week HarperCollins, one of the country's biggest book publishers, announced that it would no longer issue expensive printed catalogs of its wares but instead send them to the book trade as e-catalogs. HC will save bathtubs of money this way.

6. For a year or so several publishers have been sending e-manuscripts of their books to sales forces rather than expensive bound galleys, also called "advance reading copies." From all indications, the sales people love reading manuscripts on their Sony Readers, partly because they don't have to hump scores of copies of books home in bulging briefcases. It may not be long before some (but not all) publishers start issuing new manuscripts from their own web sites as e-books as well as printed ones, bypassing bookstores and independent online retailers. Publishers will save swimming pools of money this way.

Let's face it: the e-book is not only here to stay but also is beginning to muscle its way to the forefront of the publishing industry. Within the next few years the majority of book buyers very likely will be reading more books on electronic devices than on paper.

Does this mean that the printed book is a thing of the past? Not at all. Older readers who grew up loving printed books will keep on buying them, perhaps in smaller numbers as the recession deepens. Illustrated art books won't go away any time soon, although larger and sharper computer monitors down the road will bring Manets and Renoirs and Ansel Adamses to new art lovers. Libraries will keep on acquiring and circulating printed books; as the technological state of the art stands, it will be difficult for them to provide copyrighted e-books in proprietary formats without piracy concerns -- they'd just be too easy to steal.

Get ready for a sea change in your reading life.

MARCH 27: Fujitsu is launching a new e-book reading device to compete with Sony and Amazon.com, according to Publishers Weekly . . . and the "FLEPia" will cost an initial $1,000 when it reaches buyers in Japan. Oy, even if it's in color.

Ain't it the truth?

Bill, recently retired, is sitting on the sofa.

His wife, Linda, adjusting to his constant presence, tries to be diplomatic.

"What are you doing today?" she asks brightly.

"Nothing," he replies.

"Didn't you do that yesterday," she snaps.

Bill looks at her and smiles.

"I wasn't finished," he says.

With thanks to Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times

St. Vinnie's needs YOU

Times are tough -- tougher than usual -- up in Ontonagon County, the Upper Michigan locale that is the prototype for the rugged and remote Porcupine County in my mystery novels.

Making a living has always been difficult there. Back in 2007 when everyone elsewhere seemed to be enjoying the late bubble, 11.8 per cent of the Ontonagon population lived below the poverty line, and many of the rest just above it. Last November the county's largest employer, the Smurfit-Stone paper mill, shut down for lack of demand and soon filed for bankruptcy.

Some 150 mill workers were laid off and countless more in supporting businesses, such as pulpwood loggers, also lost their livelihood. Two months ago the unemployment rate in Ontonagon County surpassed 17 per cent and doubtless now is pushing 20 per cent.

And the winter has been one of the coldest and snowiest in decades.

Ontonagon County government is so broke that it doesn't have the resources, except for occasional grants, to serve those who are down on their luck. Plugging the gap falls to the local chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the Catholic Church's international charity organization.

In Ontonagon the public face of St. Vinnie's, as it is called everywhere, is an old supermarket converted into a big thrift store full of cast-off but still usable clothes, furniture, dishes, pots and pans, books and toys. Even in better times it serves the town as a kind of Wal-Mart of secondhand goods, and everyone not only donates stuff to it but also shops there.

Behind the scenes St. Vinnie's keeps people alive. Its financial office helps pay their utility bills. Its modest food pantry provides staples for survival.

St. Vinnie's is so important to Ontonagon that a couple of years ago, when someone broke into the store and stole the meager till, $1,000, the entire town issued a collective gasp. Stealing from St. Vinnie's? Stealing from the poor? What kind of moral imbecile would do such a thing?

A few days later a local bank presented a check for the entire missing amount to the director of St. Vincent's, and the town breathed a sigh of relief. Kids would still have stout boots and warm coats for winter. Shut-ins would still have their 10-cent paperbacks to stave off loneliness. People could still replace broken crockery with gently used cups and plates.

St. Vinnie's may be nominally a Catholic organization, but it is so effective and efficient at ministering to everybody, whatever their creed, that the local Protestant churches hold fund-raisers for it and pass along the proceeds.

Now St. Vinnie's is stretched ever tighter. It needs help, a lot of it.

A friend of mine who is a fellow Summer Person in Ontonagon has been putting the arm on other seasonal residents to contribute to St. Vinnie's efforts for the destitute. The money is helping, but so much more is needed.

And so I am putting the arm on you -- that's you at your expensive computer -- to help out, too. You're lucky to have an income when so many Americans are losing theirs.

Send your check to:

St. Vincent de Paul
205 Quartz Street
Ontonagon, MI 49953

If you like, specify where you'd like the money to go -- helping with utilities, the food pantry, or maybe where it can be best used.

Or if you'd rather scatter your beneficence closer to home, look up your local St. Vincent's, Salvation Army or other charity.

Doing good will make you feel good. And it's tax deductible.

Driving an airplane

On March 5 the Terrafugia Transition (can you say that fast ten times?) flew for the first time. It's the latest in a long line of dreams about a practical flying automobile. Whether it will bear fruit is another matter. Here, from the aviation website Avweb.com, is a video of its first flight:



The Transition is actually a "roadable airplane," not a true flying car. The idea is to keep it in your garage and then drive it out to the airport (the designer says it's street legal) for takeoff and landing. Just try that on I-94 during rush hour, however.

What makes it different from past flying-car concepts is the wings. They fold onto the car like a bird's. Earlier designs had detachable wings, such as that of the 1949 Aerocar, of which only six examples ever were built:



The dream of a flying car was born long, long ago. Sometime in the early 1920s a retired doctor named George Spratt, who had worked with the Wright brothers, designed and flew such a machine, and a film of it flying is here.

Frankly, car-airplane hybrids have traditionally made lousy airplanes and lousy cars, and I doubt the Terrafugia Transition is going to be any different. Full marks, however, to its designer for the audacity of his state-of-the-art dreams.