...in the adult fiction category, at least (which is a big category).

I'm still really liking the Kindle (or any ereader -- if I were buying a new one, I'd give Barnes & Noble's Nook (with integrated LED lighting) a look.

Here's one thing about the ereader: It creates a new thing called impulse reading. And that's really important, if you think about it. You can buy movies on impulse, but books? Books you have to shlep to get, and if you're struck with a desire to read at 10 or 11 pm at night, you can forget it.

So, like, last night, for whatever reason, I came across "Captain Blood" and thought, "Hey, maybe I should download Captain Blood." And I downloaded a couple of other of Raphael Sabitini's books, the ones whose titles I knew from movies -- Scaramouche, The Sea-Hawk. All free, as they're public domain. So, around 11pm last night I started reading Scaramouche, without it ever having really become a plan of mine to read Scaramouche. (So far, it's good, but not what I was expecting, which was more of a Scarlet Pimpernel action romp; I guess I'll just have to see if it turns into that.)

I think this aspect of the ereader -- instant gratification, unplanned reading, impulse downloads -- is a pretty major thing. Previously books seemed like such a commitment; I had to choose a book, find out if I really wanted to read this particular book, and etc.

Now, more and more, I just sample books. Like you might sample tv shows, or watch the first ten minutes of a movie on HBO.

I continue to be a major booster. I think it's a hell of a product. I pretty much stopped reading for twenty years and now I'm reading a fair amount.

Hmmm... Just realizing that maybe the ebook figures are inflated by the very "impulse download" factor I'm talking about -- I know I've downloaded more free ebooks that I intend to read (Moby Dick, Sherlock Holmes, Burton's Arabian Nights, etc.) than I've actually read.

And everyone, once they get one of these things, goes on an orgy of downloading free classics they always meant to read (or re-read).

So there's a certain amount of inflation cooked into the figures, there.

Still, seems a big moment.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (230)
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For $25. Well, for 25 dollars American you get entered into yet another raffle.

Mark –

Maybe you’re already thinking about which family photo you’ll use in your next holiday card — or maybe your Facebook photo is due for an update.

I’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime solution: President Obama is coming to New York City for an event in a few weeks — and you could get to meet him.

Chip in $25 or whatever you can today and youÂ’ll be automatically entered for a chance to get your family photo taken with the President.

HereÂ’s what will happen: You and up to five of your family members will get to your reserved spot at the event, where a photographer will be waiting. YouÂ’ll all meet the President of the United States, and weÂ’ll take the picture to prove it.

So comb your hair, put on a clean shirt, and start practicing your camera-ready smile in the mirror.

"Mark" wasn't the name on this email. It's just a general description of the folks that might answer.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (173)
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First Fred Willard. Willard, from whom I never got a "weird" vibe at all, ever, was arrested for buttering his crotch-lobster.

It was a quick release --

Then how'd he get caught?

-- we're told he was out of police custody a short while later.

As for which movie Fred was watching -- there are 3 flicks in rotation at the theater ... "Follow Me 2," a XXX parody of "The Client List," and "Step Dad No. 2."

Here's how out of current culture I am: They tell me "Follow Me 2" is an "XXX parody of 'The Client List.'"

Okay-- what the f*** is the Client List? It's a bad thing when you are so culturally estranged that you don't even understand the witty allusions made in Porno parodies.

I don't really understand this charge. It's a porno theater, the whole point is for lonely men to go in there and wack it. Now, I don't really get why he didn't wack it at home, and I always suspect in these situations that self pleasure wasn't the goal, if you know what I mean, or the lewd conduct actually suspected; but that's the charge against him. If you don't have anything beyond that, geez, why bother arresting him?

On twitter someone said "it's like arresting someone for drinking at a bar."

Meanwhile, it turns out that The Dark Knight Rises isn't subtly conservative, as I guessed yesterday, but overtly conservative. Christian Toto of Breitbart says it "nukes" Occupy Wall Street.

Two questions:

First, and most importantly: Why does Christian Toto get reviewer passes and I don't? I review movies. Cough up the tickets, Studio Dickwads.

Second, I wonder if the movie is really all that conservative. I know people tend to claim movies as this politics or that one if they like it. For example, conservatives claim the first Iron Man was conservatively-themed, like, pro-military-industrial-complex, despite the fact that the hero walks away from that business entirely due to a moral awakening. (The actual reason for walking away was cutely, cleverly disguised as something without much political import, so that conservatives wouldn't get pissed off, but yet, walk away Tony Stark did.)

So I don't know if this new Batman is truly conservative or rather, like its predecessor, relatively conservative simply by presenting questions without offering the smug pieties of progressivism as "obvious" answers. (As they say about the Simpsons: The Simpsons used to feel sort of conservative not because it actually was conservative but just because it offered skepticism all around, including towards the pieties of the post-modern progressive religion.)

So, to summarize:

The new Batman film seems to skew conservative, or even "reactionary," as a Time reviewer said;

and Fred Willard likes to rub his genitals against plastic seat-backs.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (195)
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A funny headline/picture/headline series from Drudge, screencapped on Instapundit:

It's worth noting that Obama's 2008 campaign portrayed him as an extraordinary individual, singularly gifted, a Lightworker.

In 2012, they seem to think their best play is to portray him as perfectly ordinary. Look, he watches basketball. Look, he sips beer.

I suppose the Extraordinary depiction is out the window when he has failed to accomplish anything (apart from personally strangling Osama bin Ladin with the American Flag).

The RNC is goofing on him in a new ad:

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (163)
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This is a technological advance I've had my eyes on for a couple of years now. There is no point hefting up thousands of tons of fuel in an aircraft -- and each ton of fuel takes five or six tons just to loft -- if you can power the aircraft by a very long extension cord.

That extension cord is a laser, directed at a receiving plate on the aircraft. You can leave the fuel on the ground and just pump the power up by laser-line, as needed. Weight: Zero point zero zero.

Now, you'd have to have an emergency cache of fuel on board, in case you have to land under your own power. But just using a laser to get a plane up to altitude on take-off would cut fuel use by, I don't know, 60-80% on any medium to long trip?

This story is just about powering drones by remote laser, but obviously the technology can be used for aircraft. Or spacecraft. Laser-assisted take-offs could make getting up to orbit reasonably economical.

Lockheed Martin and a company called LaserMotive have been able to keep a drone flying for some 49 hours non-stop, using a ground-based laser to recharge the droneÂ’s on board battery, says Tom Koonce, the project manager for Lockheed Martin, in an interview with KNX1070 Newsradio.

The test, says Koonce, was conducted in a wind tunnel in Palmdale. The system will very soon be tested in actual airspace in the desert, requiring coordination with both the FAA and NASA to keep the ground-based laser from interfering with either commercial aircraft or Earth-orbiting space vehicles.

Don't get all excited. You didn't build that.

In forty years, we could have a National Laser Power Grid extending across the US. Planes might fly from node-to-node getting juiced.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (185)
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Obama is most famous for the things he didn't say -- like that the private sector is doin' fine, or that he wants to "spread the wealth around a little."

In moments of candor, he lets his inner socialist out for a little bit, which results in a full-tilt panic from the Democrats and the media to claim he didn't say what you just heard him say.

Video below, and on Twitter, Jim Geraghty is likening Obama's "Truth Team" to North Korea, IngSoc, and Jacobins.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 AM | Comments (326)
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I always get those two confused, like "their" and "they're."

This is one of the most important polling stats out there. I wrote about this before. Larry Sabato looked at previous polls and had several conclusions: 1, there are not very many swing voters at all. 2, they're unenthusiastic about voting (which either causes, or is caused by, the fact that they're uncommitted and don't love either candidate).

And 3, they don't much like this Barack Obama character:

Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President ObamaÂ’s job performance than other voters. In fact, their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11% of swing voters approved of ObamaÂ’s job performance compared with 6% of Romney voters. In contrast, 92% of Obama voters approved of the presidentÂ’s job performance.

[Quoting Sabato, if that's not clear.]

Sabato's conclusion was that a higher-turnout election actually favored Romney, because if these unenthusiastic Obama critics actually make it to the polls, they'll vote against Obama (or against him about 70% to 30%).

Interestingly, Obama's down-and-dirty negative campaign dovetails nicely with his best strategy, which is to depress the vote among all but his most reliable partisans. Making the election about nothing except negative attacks should do that for him.

Even though Romney has an edge with these True Undecideds, they're small in number. Sabato, IIRC, pegged them at no more than 10%, and yesterday's CBS/NYT poll had it that only four percent were undecided. (Four percent?!)

Still, a 70/30 split with 5% of the population means a net gain of 2% in the overall vote (3.5% for Romney, 1.5% for Obama)-- assuming we can get these people to the polls, which, at the current moment, is in doubt.

Sabato noted of the True Undecideds...

...compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female.

I don't know how "disproportionately" white and female they were, though.

Several crude methods of appealing to these voters occur to me, but they're so obvious I won't insult you by noting them.

Free Shoes? So suggests Dr. Spank. I sense a riff.

Thanks to @gabrielmalor.

Posted by: Ace at 09:27 AM | Comments (314)
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As Nolte allows, each of his links goes to a media piece -- so they are mentioning it. But there's a big difference between mentioning a fact and pushing it as a Matter of National Conversation, and right now the media is too busy pushing Bain attacks to note we seem to be accelerating in our fall into a recession, or a confirmed depression.

Among the worst of the tea leaves: Mid-Atlantic manufacturing activity contracted again, the Conference Board's leading economic indicators dropped .3% (same link), and US home sales dropped 5.4% to the lowest level since October. On the confidence front, 63% of the country erroneously believes we're in a recesssion (we're in a depression).

Obama has, incidentally, logged more hours playing golf than attending economic meetings.

Green Shoots

You're gonna want to hit the ball hard and sharp. They haven't mowed the green in a week, so the long blades will bring a lot of drag to your putt.

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (169)
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Inevitable, wasn't it? First you put Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy up against zombies. Then you start to think wouldn't it sell more books if they just boned a lot?

Clandestine Classics is making all the implied sex in such classics as Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice and, yes, Sherlock Holmes explicit.

The publisher touts: “The old-fashioned pleasantries and timidity have all been stripped away, quite literally. You didn’t really think that these much-loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks, did you? Come with us as we embark on a breathtaking experience — behind the closed bedroom doors of our favorite, most-beloved British characters. Learn what Sherlock really thought of Watson, what Mr. Darcy really wanted to do to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and unveil the sexy escapades of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre. We’ll show you the scenes that you always wanted to see but were never allowed.”

The company is releasing reworked versions of five classic novels as ebooks on July 30: Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet, Northanger Abbey and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (who knew that needed to be sexed up?).

Honestly, that's what Kindle is good for. You can read all the trash you want, pretty much wherever you want, and nobody will ever know. And, yes, I'm guilty too.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:35 AM | Comments (349)
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For such a supposedly fantastic speaker, it's sure hard to bring to mind any outstanding Obama quotes. I remember nothing from his big post-racial race speech, his inaugural, his state of the union addresses. What I remember is when he goes off teleprompter.

"Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

"I've now been in 57 states -- I think one left to go."

"The private sector is doing fine."

"At a certain point, you've made enough money."

"The Cambridge police acted stupidly."

"I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something."

"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

"We're the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad."

"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"You didn't build that."

So this, to me, is great news:

President Obama is weaning himself off his teleprompter.

At recent campaign events in Pennsylvania, Virginia and again Monday in Ohio, Obama spoke to crowds in high school gymnasiums and at crowded outdoor events without his teleprompter, instead using written notes.

The difference is dramatic. Instead of turning in his characteristic manner from right to left and back again, reading from the two sloping, clear-plastic planes of his teleprompter, Obama has glanced down at pages in a binder on his podium.

I have to believe that the writer wrote that "difference is dramatic" paragraph with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Instead of wagging his head back and forth, he bobs it up and down? Shyeah, dramatic.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:28 AM | Comments (243)
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