Random Developments

Great news on the way. Details on the next days or weeks. Keep tuned!

A little self-promotion, if I may… a few months ago, I quietly started a new blog which I intended to use to keep tabs of the books I read, by posting reviews as soon as I finished reading them. So it happened that, soon after starting it, I managed to spend four long months reading the same book: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson. What that means is, four months with no posts to that blog.

Yesterday, I finally finished it (great book, by the way), and soon after I also read (almost in one sitting) Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow. I have already posted reviews of both books to the other blog and, since now I have almost two full months before the next Baroque Cycle book comes out, I guess there will be a few more of them showing up.

You can track my reading progress with the “currently reading” box on the left-hand side of the main page of this blog. And, if you read any of my reviews and have comments about them, make sure to let me know.

Ok, so this is what I have!

I should have guessed that my earlier post about the Super Bowl would have resulted in this. On the right you can see a recent list of search phrases that drove people to my website. The pattern is obvious.

Well, I shouldn’t complain. At least my statistics went up for a few days…

Apropos of nothing… isn’t it amazing how much quieter the blogging world is when Scoble is on vacation? I can finish reading my feeds much sooner than usual, now.

Just kidding, of course. Robert, if you ever read this, welcome back!

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl yesterday; there is not much coverage of American football down here. So today, early in the morning, I tried to get some news about it on TV. However, Fox News spent something like ten minutes of their very strange sports coverage talking instead about Janet Jackson’s breast (see picture) and whether that was a planned move or not. Another two minutes went by while they discussed the TV ads (”too much scatological humour”, in their opinion) and ratings. No mention whatsoever of the score, or any part of the game itself, during all this time.

Then, they casually mentioned that it had been, probably, the best Super Bowl game of the last decade, and showed some 20 seconds of the game, including the field goal that won the game for the Patriots.

Now, I know that Fox News isn’t exactly the best possible source of sport news, but they could have at least talked a little more about the actual sport, couldn’t they? I mean, if this was the best Super Bowl of the last ten years, didn’t it deserve a little more airtime than that woman’s breast, which they didn’t even show? This almost makes me wish that I was still paying for ESPN…