There are some who say that decaf is pointless, decaf espresso even more so. But of course, decaf does contain some caffeine, so it can be a nice way to put a little life back into an evening after a long day at work. That way I don't drowse off reading monster-sized novels, listening to podcasts or watching the idiot box. My quest for the samadhi shot continues, and this is the decaffeinated edition.
Read MoreOne notable aspect of the 21st Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair this weekend is the location, the members-only library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan, which is also home to the New York Center for Independent Publishing.
Read MoreThere are 8 million podcasts on the naked Web. Each week, I listen to 10 or more of them and write some reviews. Here's the latest survey of independent audio featuring assorted nerds, geeks, freaks, mystics, fans and experts talking about the things they love. In the order I listened this week:
Read MoreName of iTunes Playlist: Forgotten Favorites Rules: Rating is ***** (5 stars). Play count is greater than 5. Skip count is less than 4. Last played is not in the last 24 months. Date added is not in the last 24 months. [See all lists.]
Read MoreThe Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs.
Read MoreHere's my weekly roundup of podcasts from selected geeks, nerds, kooks, freaks, comedians, self-styled tech gurus and other denizens of the audio Web, in the order I listened this week:
Read MoreMy quest for the God shot, as a fellow Wordpress blogger put it, continues. I didn't get down to Porto Rico Importing Co. on Bleecker Street again yet, so it's back to my regular supplier in Chelsea. I bought some more Heartbreaker, and decided to try this bag of beans from Ethiopia too.
Read MoreName of iTunes Playlist: Emerging FavoritesRules: Rating is ***** (5 stars). Last played is in the last 2 months. Play count is in the range 3 to 5. Date added is in the last 12 months. Skip count is less than 4. [See all lists.]
Read MoreFor 99 cents I downloaded Ocarina, an app from Smule that turns an iPhone into a version of that ancient flute-like instrument. You press glowing "finger holes" on the touchscreen and blow into the microphone to play [Video].
Read MoreO.K., I ground the "Heartbreaker" and drank it all up, so I decided to try something different in my quest for the perfect cup of home-brewed coffee. Now I am blogging about this so I will remember the next time. Why are you reading it? That is your business. Oh, Internet. You're such a mix of exhibitionism, voyeurism, the trivial and the ineffable.
Read MoreI've updated the post on "third-party iPhone apps I actually use," which is inexplicably the most popular post on the blog. The much-improved Google mobile app, with voice-activated search, has moved to the top of the list. (To get it, you have to manually force an update at the iTunes store; it wasn't happening automatically.)
Read MoreI recently skimmed a galley proof of "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant.
Read MoreIn a continuation of my peculiar hobby, here they are, in the order I listened this week, reports on a few of the podcasts of the geeks, nerds, freaks and boy-men of the Interweb:
Read MoreThere's something magical about the moon. We humans have always felt an affinity for it, that light in the sky. It has kept us company for centuries on lonely dark nights. Maybe we don't think about it so much anymore in this country, now that we have electric lights and good roofs over our heads most of the time. But when I was a kid, it seemed like people talked about the moon all the time. I remember watching the first moon walks in a grainy black and white image. You'll remember this for the rest of your life, my father told me. And now I can watch it on YouTube, too, whenever I want, which is kind of amazing.
Read MoreI was walking barelegged across a desert-like blue and red plain with sparse vegetation and rocks. There was a sudden sharp pain in my leg. I turned around and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Then it happened again. What was that? Somebody standing off to the side, out of my line of vision, but a friend, called out, "watch out! there's more of them!" And it happened again.
Read MoreWhat I got out of this week's podcasts for nerds and geeks:
Read MoreI read blogs for my job. I used to read them for fun. There was a certain satisfaction circa 2002 in answering the question, "where did you hear that?" with the name of a blog the other person had never heard of, which by now is a blog that person is sick of reading. Of course, now dogs have blogs. Dogs. Have blogs. This is deplorable. One good thing about the old Internet was that we didn't know they were dogs. And we thought they were fascinating.
Read MoreMaybe it's the fault of my small-town redneck-hick upbringing, but I have a hard time taking any sort of connoisseurship seriously. I have always laughed at fancy descriptions of wines, and it seems even sillier for coffee. Coffee's coffee, isn't it? What kind of dope pays more than 75 cents for a cup of joe?
Read MoreGood news for my wife, Jane: The second issue of the literary journal Makeout Creek has just been published, including her poem, "Allenwood." The poem itself is not online, but you can buy a print copy. We're still waiting for ours. (You can still find her poem "Lemons" online in the Burnside Review, published over the summer, and a chapter from her novel, published in The Adirondack Review.)