Words With Friends
I’m still enjoying playing Words With Friends. I’ve been playing for the past few weeks and have yet to get bored with it. It’s basically Scrabble, but with a slightly different board. Here’s a sample of what it looks like. If you have it on your phone start a game with me. My username is erikemery. Warning: I know all the mean words like Za and Qi and I play ’em. 🙂
Live and Let Die
Among other things I'm reading, I've been going through the James Bond books in order. Live and Let Die is, surprisingly, the 2nd book in the series. I say surprisingly because it feels later, thanks to the movies. The book and the movie actually bear a passing resemblance to each other, which is more than you can say for some of the other Roger Moore movies, and especially the later movies when they just pulled in the title and nothing more. Mr. Big is a pretty great villain, and he loves the gadgets in both the book and the movie. Read more…
I know it’s a commercial but still …
Pretty cool. via Emily.
George H. W. Bush
via whitehouse.gov I finished a short biography of George HW Bush over the weekend (the book I read was by Timothy Naftali and it’s part of the American Presidents series). Bush was the first President in my presidential reading list who didn’t have a wealth of biographies to choose from–my hunch is some of these presidents will get harder and harder to read up on. HW was a major inspiration behind this whole project of mine. After seeing Oliver Stone’s W. (which I didn’t like), I thought Bush Sr. was by far the most interesting character. And Obama referenced him Read more…
Cardinal of the Kremlin
Of course, the Kremlin has no cardinals, that's the Vatican. But it's a pretty good title for a pretty good book by Clancy. I was reminded of Le Carre a bit, although Le Carre loves the moral ambiguity of the spy world where Clancy doesn't really touch on it. But the book, despite its age, holds up pretty well. It was never made into a movie, so perhaps that's why it doesn't have the name recognition of Clear and Present Danger or Red October. (It's also not as good as October, I'd say, though I liked it better than Patriot Read more…
Roger Ebert’s new voice
He's been the go-to film critic for me for many years. His writing is just top-notch. And now that he's started twittering, I've been impressed at how good of a twitterer he is. Inventive, funny, and a good spotter of interesting links. Now that he hasn't been able to speak for the last four years, he's finally getting a chance to get his old voice back. A company in Scotland is taking footage from his show and working to put it together into a new voice. The results were debuted on Oprah this week. A pretty good result!
Census tonight!
I'll be learning all about the Census tonight. Should be interesting to hear about the redistricting and apportionment. Last time the Census came around I was tagged as a student in Minnesota. I'll be an official Tacoman this time!
Speaking of dropping services …
… I stopped using Google Latitude. I've been playing around with both FourSquare and Gowalla on my phone and I'm enjoying those a lot more than Google Latitude. It had potential, but it just didn't seem to go anywhere.