Since there are no online reviews available as yet, I’d welcome your comments — they’ll make it easier for readers-to-be to decide whether they want to shell out their $5.99 for the book.
You can comment over here.
Thanks!
Sometime over the Christmas holidays, the authorities of Graz, a classically pretty Austrian town, took down the sign that for the past seven years has identified the local 15,000-seat sports arena as the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium… [Schwarzenegger] was educated in Graz and has always readily identified it as his native place.
But when Schwarzenegger, now governor of California, declined to commute the death sentence for Stanley Tookie Williams, the former Los Angeles gang leader who was executed in California two weeks ago, the reaction in Graz, where the death penalty is seen as a medieval atrocity, was swift and angry.
“I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen,” Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party said in an interview in Graz’s stately City Hall, describing the first step in the chain of events that led to the renaming of the stadium. “The petition was accepted by a majority on the Council.”
But before a formal vote was taken on the petition, Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town’s conservative mayor, informing him that he was withdrawing Graz’s right to use his name in association with the stadium.
There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, Schwarzenegger wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of the City of Graz further concern.
Uh huh.
(chuckle) They’ve just noticed “Dinner for One.”
I blogged about it this time last year — with much affection, as Peter and I first saw it in Switzerland about ten years ago and have loved it dearly ever since, watching it almost as often as many Germans. Maybe if enough people keep bringing the subject up, it’ll get shown in the US eventually….
(Meanwhile, Google Video has it in full (though possibly only for viewing in the US. Try it and see what result you get.)
The leap second. Do we really need it?
In this morning’s email, along with the inevitable spam, arrived something that made me laugh.
As usual, some of the mails were phishing expeditions, trying to get me to give them my eBay info. And one of them said:
“eBay Fraud Meditation Request”
(snicker)
…did you know the boys were doing live movie critique “From the Balcony” for Movies.com?
Just a thought.
Or something like that.
A story issued by financial news agency AFX on Sunday…claimed Narnia had walked out of the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong because it was fed up with being bullied by the US and Europe.
I really want to see a copy of the original press release. (Alas, both SFX and Forbes have withdrawn the original entries. Not surprising, since this happened back on the 18th…)
From Publisher’s Lunch:
2006 is already looking a lot like 2000 again. At January’s big Consumer Electronics show, Sony is expected to unveil a US version of their e-book reader using an electronic ink display, previously available only in Japan (where it hasn’t exactly set the market on fire.) Expected to retail for $300 to $500, the e-reader will draw materials from Sony’s own iTunes.com clone — where Harper, Random House, and Simon & Schuster have agreed to provide files, with Harper and Random each saying they’ll offer nearly entire lists of 25,000 titles. The report has no indication on how the e-books will be priced.
Does this mean that they’re getting rid of some of the more annoying DRM on this thing? Let’s see…
Imported with such pleasure from Property of a Lady:
What’s this empire coming to? Now they want us to stop greeting people with “Io Saturnalia! “We have all these different cultures in Rome,” they tell us. “We shouldn’t offend anyone,” they tell us, “We’ve got to be inclusive.”
We’ve got the barbarians from the north with their tree decorations and their fire rituals. And the weirdos from Gaul, cutting mistletoe with a golden sickle. And the Mithraists, the Zoroastrians, the Isis cults, and, of course, those characters who hang out in the catacombs. “Hail, Winter!” we’re supposed to say. I ask you, what next: we lose the feast? We stop the Solstice parties? No more honoring Ops, goddess of abundance?
I was buying some greenery down by the Forum the other day, and there’s old Macrobius with some Visigoth chick, and she goes, “Gut Jule.” And I go, “Hey! In this country, we say, ‘Io, Saturnalia!’ Maybe you should go back to where you came from.” Then Macrobius goes, “She can’t, she’s a slave.”
Whatever….
(heh) Happy Holidays.
Got a Christmas card this morning from my old housemate Theresa (aka T.R.), who’s working in Kosovo at the moment. I was more interested in the card than in the stamp at first. Then while I was checking T’s address on the card against the one I had on file for her before dumping the envelope, I noticed that the stamp was denominated in Euro.
“Huh,” I thought. “Didn’t know Kosovo had gone onto the Euro…” And I took a closer look at the stamp. Quite neat. The tiny little letters say “United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.” (Click on the image for a larger version.)
Here’s UNMIK’s web page. Fascinating…
I look forward with slightly unnerved interest to T’s promised MP3s of New Year’s celebrations in Pristina, which she suggests contain considerable amounts of both fireworks and gunfire…
(As one does.) 🙂
For those who might be interested, we’ve now got a Palm (.pdb) version of the book available for purchase and download. There’s a separate button for it in the right-hand column.
This version of the book was edited in WordSmith and has been tested in that and in Palm Reader / eReader. There are some more details about loading this file in the A Wind from the South / “Raetian Tales” weblog.