I've started readingSouls in the Great Machine again after setting it aside a few months ago. I forget sometimes how much I like the really, really weird world building stuff. It's post-apocalypse Australia...2000 years from now. Librarians are also skilled duelists. Travel is by wind powered or pedal driven trains. There's an unpredictable Call that relentlessly compels all mammals ...

... from, in Long Beach in Southern California. From the time I was 10 to 15 years old, I used to spend hours every weekend loitering there in the isles, I loved that. Nostalgic and drunk on the dusty bookishness of the place, I bought two books, $30. Now. Back in car, scanned both books into my iPhone, which searched online for them, and...could have gotten them online for $14. I didn't look up ...

... who worked in the publishing industry, local customers of the bookstore looking to try something different and meet some people, those who existed in the middle area in the Venn diagram depicting bookishness and sports dorkiness, and ballers who were pulled into the league by friends who fit into one of the other categories. Each of the 10 teams boasted at least one player who was flat-out good. ...

... chapter on taking Ontario's Smart Serve course for waiters here, another on how to spot a beer geek there. Pashley covers a heck of a lot of ground in the 33 essays. Displaying his bookishness, he also includes a great bibliography not to mention an index. Sounds like an obvious thing to have an index but then we remember the lack of one in Sneath's Brewed in Canada and are grateful. A ...

... that I can look into which deal with the same things that I wish to write the PhD thesis on (namely experiments with form as well as content, ways in which a book can assert its unique bookishness in order to be untranslatable into other forms), which is fucking awesome guys. Let me put it this way: I have, since I was a wee lad of but twenty-one, been passionately intrigued by this sort of ...

... amazing letters -- has a letter by computer game designer Tim Schafer to David Fox, in which he applies to be the designer for LucasArts by writing his cover letter as a text adventure game. Bookishness / History Julie Melby at Graphic Arts always has great stuff. This week she posted some scans of William Thackeray's pencil drawings, scribbled into the margins of his volumes of The Mirror. ...