A Wagging Good Time for Stitchers

I was just reading about E3 in Entertainment Weekly. They briefly discussed Rock Band 3, due out this holiday season. Here’s a video about the new guitar gameplay. I cannot wait to try this out. This is a huge advance in virtual music making. A whole generation of kids is going to be able to learn how to play guitar with this game.

I’m back after my long postlessness. I’d like to dedicate this video to my parents. I hope they heed Lance’s memo.

Sorry the video hangs over the sidebar. I have some work to do on this site. Bear with me.

I bumped into this the other day. The more I looked at it the harder I laughed.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing the new Sherlock Holmes movie for months. Robert Downey Jr. has always been one of my favorite actors. I think I fell in love with him in Heart and Souls. I use to watch it on VHS when I was home sick from school. Guy Ritchie, while not my favorite director, has made some entertaining films before. Let’s just say I had high hopes walking into the theater tonight.

It started off well. Ritchie created that dark and dreary London that we’re all familiar with from films like Sweeney Todd and The Elephant Man. Holmes displayed his unique mind by plotting out a blow-by-blow plan for a fight. We see this in slow motion while his thoughts play as a voice-over. Then he executed that plan just as he intended but the camera angles and movements during the fight were terrible. I couldn’t really tell what was happening and this held true for all the rest of the fight sequences. Further, the plot never grabbed me. There was a villain (Mark Strong), whose plan and objective were never really explained; there was a girl (Rachel McAdams), whose feelings for Holmes and intentions were unclear; there was Watson (Jude Law), who was a buddy but didn’t add anything.

I think the best part of the whole thing was seeing the trailer for Iron Man 2. Check out what my husband thought at neverblog.net.

I just saw this for the first time.

I changed the theme today. Thanks to Chris Pearson, the developer. It took me hours to reshape and resize pictures for the rotating header image. Now I have to fix the images and other media to fit better, or try to edit the code. Either way I am too tired to do so now. Readers, you will have to excuse the sloppiness for the time being.

I have had a rough time this past semester on the road to earning a degree. In talking the problem out with my adviser and husband and doing some research about learning theory, I have come to the conclusion that I am unsatisfied with the structure of secondary education in America. I am not going to get the knowledge I desire by following the course sequence of any major developed by a university. Furthermore, since I don’t feel like I’m becoming educated, I don’t put my best effort into my courses. I must divorce the concept of knowledge from the act of being a student. To earn my degree, I will meet the arguably random requirements of my school. To earn my education, I have to set my own requirements. I have to become an autodidact.

An autodidact is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education. Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, and Malcolm X are a few examples of uneducated intellectuals. Remembered as an author, scientist, and politician, Franklin only attended two years at the Boston Latin School before he was ten. Carnegie, uber successful industrialist and founder of many libraries and schools, learned entirely on his own by reading, attending theater, and studying the machinery at his work. Malcolm X greatly expanded his vocabulary and refined his penmanship by copying the dictionary, entry by entry, while in prison. Knowing I want to be autodidactic is easy. Actually becoming such is another matter.

During the past few months I have been researching autodidacticism and developing a course of action. In the coming weeks, I will discuss the resources I’ve found most helpful in developing my plan, explain the techniques I intend to use in my coursework, and share the curriculum I’ve developed.

Please, contact me if you consider yourself an autodidact or if you want to become one. I’d love to hear from others who share this uncommon desire with me.

I have added a new widget to this site. You may have noticed it on the right: Books I Am Giving Away. This is a widget from the site www.bookmooch.com. It lists five books at random from my inventory. I found this site about a year ago while aimlessly wandering the Internet. I landed on a wikiHow page about getting rid of old books. Let me state upfront: My name is Barbara and I am a bookaholic. I own hundreds of books. I add to my library monthly, at least. I buy way more than I read and I intend to keep the majority of my books. But not all of them. Sometimes I end up with multiple copies of the same title, or I read a book and know I’ll never go back to it, or I’ll start it and decide half way through that I don’t care to finish it. There is no reason for me to keep these books. But as a bookaholic, I can’t imagine just tossing them. They’re books! There is a used book store in town where I can trade my unwanted books in but they rarely have anything I want to take in return. Lots of romance novels and Left Behind books. I like classic literature and historical nonfiction. So for years I have been boxing my unwanted books up and shoving them in the attic.

Bookmooch now turns my unwanted books into, you guessed it, wanted books. The website itself is simple and ad-free. You have to join to be able to really look around which is no problem because membership is free. Here’s how the mooching works: The site is based on a point system. The points are weighted so you get to mooch more books than you give away. After joining, you list books you own that you want to give away. Each book listed earns 1/10th of a point so you get to mooch a book every time you list ten books. The sender pays the shipping. Domestic media mail costs about $2.50; I’ve paid $5-12 for international. Sending or receiving within your country earns/costs 1 point. It costs 2 point to mooch internationally. You earn 3 points if you send internationally. You can reject any mooch request so members can regulate their shipping to their financial restraints. You also earn 1/10th of a point for acknowledging receipt of a book. The point system is explained more clearly here.

You can’t find every book on this site, but popular titles are easy to get as long as they are a little older. I’ve also gotten some really cool older editions that you’d have to hunt for in used shops, like a first edition paperback of “Mommie Dearest” by Christina Crawford and a Bartlett’s published in 1974.

For me, this site is priceless. In eleven months, I’ve given away 28 books I don’t want and received 53. Let’s say a book costs $14 on average. That means I would have spent $742 on 53 books. Instead I spent $2.50 on 28 books, or $70. Wow.

A word of caution for those of you who prefer “like new” books. Not every book on the site is in good shape. Most members write condition notes if the books are worse than “slightly read” but there are no standards and no guarantees about condition. For me this is a selling point. I prefer books to look used: notes in the margins, highlighting, even a small tear or two. When I read, I like to leave my mark on the book and I find it fascinating to see how a book moved another reader. It gives me a feeling of cosmic connection; I feel like a participant in “the Great Conversation”.

My ID on the site is LadyPirate. If you join, friend me. And my many thanks to site founder, John Buckman, for all the time effort and creativity he has put into this site.

Here is a photo article from Time Magazine my mother found.

Found this earlier today. It made me feel good.