Friday, July 01, 2005

Book Report For the three of you out there who read my blog on a regular basis (thank you, by the way) you've noticed, I am sure, that I write short reviews of a lot of books. I add links to the books, and I have an Amazon Associates account that all the book links refer to. I suppose in theory I could be making some money off of this. In practice, fuggetabowdit. I just ran the report for the second quarter, and while there were 712 clickthroughs on my book links, only two books were ordered. Which is fine by me -- I never expected to make any money from it, and if it ever turned into anything serious I'd add it to what I already give to charity. The more interesting thing to me is to see what books people find interesting enough to click through to. The 712 clicks were spread across 35 books, ranging from a mere 2 clicks to 30 clicks. Except for one book that got a whopping 105 clicks -- more than 3 times any other. Why? I have absolutely no idea. I hope it doesn't imply something about the people who read my blog... 10:47:20 PM    comment []

Silent Bob Speaks I recently read Silent Bob Speaks, by Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith has a potty mouth. A very funny potty mouth, mind you. You could say that this book is about Smith's attmepts to "keep it real" in the face of the Hollywood craziness. Much of the book is columns that he wrote for a couple of magazines. One series details some of the early pre-production work on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and another discuss the making of Jersey Girl. Smith positively gushes about Ben Affleck -- worshipping at his feet. He also talks about Bennifer (the original Bennifer, Ben + Jennifer Lopez) and how they were truly in love. Kind of ironic, given the news today that Bennifer 2.0, Ben + Jennifer Garner, got married earlier this week. There is some true gross-out stuff in this book, including Smith's take on "morbid obesity" (which he suffers from, or will soon). Like his movies, the book has long stretches of uninterrupted fart jokes punctuated with moments of sheer brilliance. I commented a while back that I thought Jon Stewart had inherited Woody Allen's style of writing. Reading this book, and Smith's reflections on his own movies, has me thinking that Smith may have inherited Allen's style of moviemaking: heavy on the dialogue, early funny movies, hit-and-miss after that, struggling to break out of his established style, and a loyal following. Or perhaps not. Did I ever mention that my father has a rather spooky resemblance to Woody Allen? 10:32:48 PM    comment []

An Unusual Basketball Game This week, Steve Ballmer has been travelling through Asia. He stopped in at the Microsoft Research lab in Beijing... and played a basketball game. It was interns vs. researchers, and Steve played on the intern team, From all reports, everyone had a fantastic time. I've met Steve on several occasions, and I'm sure he enjoyed the hell out of this. And it was a huge thrill for the interns who got to play in the game. I snagged a couple of pictures from our Beijing folks -- here's one of the whole gang, and here's one with Steve and one of the interns. Considering how much everyone clearly worked up a sweat, I don't think anyone was taking it easy... 10:10:01 PM    comment []

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