With the recent release of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I've been thinking about some of my favorite fictional characters. Because, naturally...or not, Lisbeth Salander ranks right up there as one of my favorite female fictional characters of all time. I know that Stieg Larsson's gritty series with its share of graphically violent content doesn't suit everyone's taste. Furthermore I imagine the movie image of the dark, pierced and spiky-haired Swede might leave many folks cold, wondering what there is about her that could possibly appeal to anyone. And yet, several months after I finished reading Larsson's trilogy this married, advanced-age mother of two grown men still sometimes wonders what Lisbeth might be up to.
Yes. That's what I do. When I befriend a fictional character in a book we become bff's [Best Friends Forever]. For instance I can't recall how many years ago I read Nabokov's "Lolita" but to this day during the occasional idle moment I wonder what my old buddy Humbert Humbert is up to. Yes. I have to admit that a true rat bastard like Humbert is an odd pick as a favorite character, much less as a friend. After all, who could like a pedophile? Truth? Nobody. And maybe, in this case, friend is the wrong word. I think ours -- Humbert's and mine -- is more a student/master relationship. See, he's a terrific liar. Okay, he's a filthy, scum-of-the-earth pedophile. But he couldn't be such a scumbag if he wasn't a master of prevarication. From page one Humbert grabs and holds my attention with the utter abandon with which he lies to me. And to himself. There are times when he has both of us temporarily convinced that he's not as big a bastard as we thought.
Amazon's $34 billion annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world.
Amazon's web sales are five times the combined web sales of Walmart, Target and Buy.com.
Amazon serves 137 million customers a week, 33% more than voted in the 2010 USA elections. That's 19.5 million customers daily - equal to the population of Beijing, or the number of Americans who live on less than $6000 a year.
The average amount brought in by one of Amazon's unique users is $189. That's almost five times as valuable as Ebay's average ($39).
Amazon owns 1/10th of North America's e-commerce pie.
If Amazon's active users were a country, their population would be twice that of Canada.
With 50,000 preorders, Kindle Fire is set to double the launch of the iPad.
Amazon's current cloud platform could store 82 books for each person on the earth.
Amazon's warehouse space has grown from a 400 square foot garage in 1995 to 25 million square feet - equivalent to more than 700 Madison Square Gardens.
Thanks to FrugalDad.com for these stats and the elegant infographic below that charts the rise, and rise, of Amazon...
When I was a kid I brought home a paperback book that my parents didn't think I should read. Mind you, this was during an era when our neighborhood drugstore's book racks never sported anything but the most innocuous (by today's standards) sorts of pulp fiction, from detective stories to romance novels to true crime. So you can be assured that my selection was about as tame as, say, a Disney animated movie. But it had a lurid cover photo and a rather suggestive title, suggestive, at least, to my 12-year-old sensibilities. Also to my mom because when she spotted it on my nightstand she freaked. She asked my dad to speak to me about it and confiscate the book.
Millions of people live in shantytowns across the world, many in corrugated-iron-roofed shacks with no windows. This leaves the residents with the choice of living in complete darkness or running expensive electric bulbs (if electricity is even available to them).
Liter of Light has a solution which is so mind-bogglingly simple that it is pure brilliance:
Step 1: Take an old soda bottle and fill it with water, add a couple of drops of bleach to prevent algae and screw the lid back on.
Step 2: Snuggly fit bottle into custom-cut hole in roof
and the plastic bottle will refract the sun's rays into the room below, delivering about 55 watts of light per bottle for up to 5 years!
Update: 7/16
Austen's manuscript ended up selling for £990,000 (US$1.6 million)! It was purchased by Oxford University's Bodleian Library.
Original Post: 7/13/2011 The Watsons, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Austen is to be auctioned by Sotheby's tomorrow and is expected to sell for over $330,000. Apparently, Austen worked on The Watsons in 1804, after she'd drafted Sense and Sensibility, but abandoned it the same year.
Who among us doesn't suffer from information overload? But information can and should be a beautiful thing, and no where is it displayed more beautifully than at informationisbeautiful.net
created by David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer whose passion is visualizing large quantities of information with nary a boring Powerpoint chart to be found!
Here are some of my favorites. Click on the image to go to the original post which usually includes the sources used to create the chart.
That a movie of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit is in production has been known for some time, but what I didn't realize is that the plans are for not one but two movies. The first, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", will open in December 2012 (as will, incidentally, a movie of Life of Pi). The second, "The Hobbit: There and Back Again", will open in December 2013.
It will be interesting to see how the director strings out The Hobbit, a rather short and simple story compared to The Lord of the Rings, into two movies.I'm also intrigued to see how the actors who are reprising their roles from the "Lord of the Rings" (filmed a decade ago) will manage to handle the aging process.
You may already know of Taylor Mali, if so, there's no need for an introduction, just scroll down to be reminded of two of his best known poems, starting with "The The Impotence of Proofreading".
All 42 of Mary Higgins Clark's books to date have been bestsellers, she's spent a collective 355 weeks on the New York Times best-seller lists, sold more than 100 million copies in the USA, and many more millions across the other 33 countries where her books are sold, including 24 million in France. Her latest book, publishing in time for Mother's Day, is predicted to sell at least 3.5 million copies.
But Ms Clark and her publisher now face a quandary. At 83 years of age, the doyenne of the wholesome thriller (no unmarried couples living together, no swearing and no graphic scenes), who collected 40 rejection slips before her first story was published in 1956, is facing the question of how to maintain her brand in the "twilight of her career" (as The Wall Street Journal puts it) and after she's gone. The same question must be very much top of mind for her publisher, Simon & Schuster, who've been able to rely on their top-selling author to help keep them in the black for many a year.
I can't see the appeal in taking a daily photo of myself just to see the face sagging and the wrinkle lines deepen but, especially when our children were younger, I would have loved this iPhone App that prompts you to take a photo every day and then builds a time-lapse video montage. If you used the prompt to not just take a photo but write a few words it could quickly build into a powerful and remarkably painless journal!
What is Metafiction?
Ckubala said: I immediately thought of Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruif Zafon. A book about books, I think this f...
[More]
A Dozen of the Best Poetry Websites
Marguerite Theophil said: Thank you Davina, for this great list. One website I could recommend is Ivan Granger's Poetry Chaikh...
[More]
With the recent release of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I've been thinking about some of my favorite fictional characters. Because, naturally...or not, Lisbeth Salander ranks right up there as one of my favorite female fictional characters of all time. I know that Stieg Larsson's gritty series with its share of graphically violent content doesn't suit everyone's taste. Furthermore I imagine the movie image of the dark, pierced and spiky-haired Swede might leave many folks cold, wondering what there is about her that could possibly appeal to anyone. And yet, several months after I finished reading Larsson's trilogy this married, advanced-age mother of two grown men still sometimes wonders what Lisbeth might be up to.
Yes. That's what I do. When I befriend a fictional character in a book we become bff's [Best Friends Forever]. For instance I can't recall how many years ago I read Nabokov's "Lolita" but to this day during the occasional idle moment I wonder what my old buddy Humbert Humbert is up to. Yes. I have to admit that a true rat bastard like Humbert is an odd pick as a favorite character, much less as a friend. After all, who could like a pedophile? Truth? Nobody. And maybe, in this case, friend is the wrong word. I think ours -- Humbert's and mine -- is more a student/master relationship. See, he's a terrific liar. Okay, he's a filthy, scum-of-the-earth pedophile. But he couldn't be such a scumbag if he wasn't a master of prevarication. From page one Humbert grabs and holds my attention with the utter abandon with which he lies to me. And to himself. There are times when he has both of us temporarily convinced that he's not as big a bastard as we thought.
All 42 of 
