Working like mad here in Hartford. Paul Golding sent me an interesting NY Times writeup on the city from yesterday which goes some way towards expaining why the downtown core dies so thoroughly at dark. According to the article, 30 percent of residents of the city live below the poverty line, and only 61 percent have a high school diploma. 80 percent of babies are born to single mothers. Not that I'd noticed all of that in my time here: absolutely nobody lives downtown. Yikes.

Big news regarding my web site: I'm now an associate of Amazon.ca! That means you can go straight from my book review pages to Amazon's web site, where a small portion of any money you spend will find its way back to the cost of maintaining my site. Yes, there are costs. C$100 for two years for the domain name, US$9.95 per month for the site hosting, and US$35 per year for Blogger Pro. Will I keep it up even with no Amazon revenues? Well, yes. The cost of vanity. Anyway, if you want books from Amazon, keep in mind that you can get there from here, and that would make me happy. And if you haven't checked out my book reviews, what are you waiting for? They're really short and come with a helpful 1-5 scale of goodness.

Last weekend Anne and I made a list of some of the movies I haven't seen, but should. For my future reference (unless somebody wants to buy me DVDs, in which case, for their reference):
> The Big Lebowski
> This is Spinal Tap
> Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
> Blood Simple
> Down By Law
> Drowning By Numbers
> The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover
> Young Frankenstein

The long weekend is coming up next weekend, but as I'm poor I'm not going anywhere. Anne and I are tentatively planning to bike around the Islands, but that's dependent on me getting my bike fixed. (Very flat tire, no doubt because it's still the one that came with the bike, which I bought in 1991.) It's my turn to cook for the Usual Suspects, so I'm going to hit the summer issues of Gourmet when I get home and see if I can find some good barbeque recipies.
posted by Tom at 7:00 PM | link |