etc.

• Closing Time, Tom Waits
• The Bends, Radiohead
• No Name Face, Lifehouse
• Spiritual Machines, Our Lady Peace
• Stanley Climbfall, Lifehouse
• Rubberneck, The Toadies
• Everybody Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone, The Walkmen
• Away from the Sun, 3 Doors Down
• Does this Look Infected, Sum 41
• Steal this Album, System of a Down
• More than you Think you Are, Matchbox 20
• Songs for the Deaf, Queens of the Stone Age
• Sublime, Sublime.

When I stopped in at Williams to buy my tea before work this morning, I found this message taped to the counter: “59 days ’til Spring. Smile.” Suddenly, 59 days never seemed so close.

This page has needed a redesign for a while, and I’m quite pleased with the difference a new colour scheme and updated logo can make.

I’ve been reading the Creative Commons pages for a couple of weeks now and have mulled over switching from my little copyright statement to one of their licenses. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to go with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, and you will therefore notice that I’ve removed the copyright statement from most, if not all of these pages. Why the deliberation? Well, I really like what the people over at the Creative Commons have done, and it took me a while to decide what type of license to go with. Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike is a whole mouthful to say that anyone can use anything on these pages, as long as they attribute it to me; commercial use of anything here is prohibited, unless I say it’s OK; and my stuff can be taken and changed around, but any derivative should also be licenced as Attribution-Non-Commerical-ShareAlike. If you’re thinking it’s hardly worth all the effort, you’d be wrong. I think licenses like these make a whole bunch of sense, and they should go a long way in making the Web what it should be, even though there will always be a few unscrupulous, pilferring, webkleptos no matter what your site’s fine print threatens. Choosing to license all the same is my little attempt at keeping alive the glimmering flame of hope for A Better Web.

Barely two weeks into the new year and already one of my resolutions has been broken. If you know me at all, you’ll know that it’s the one about the books. Today I pre-ordered two books: Revolting Librarians Redux and Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix. But since both will be released only in June and also since the resolution technically requires me to cross off everything from this list before new books are acquired, I actually have until June before the resolution can be classified as truly broken.

A little piece of wisdom from Stephen O’Shea:

Of course, O’Shea is speaking within the context of the heroes and villains of Medieval religion, but the same could be true of practically any dichotomy, from an idea to a pair of rival individuals. It seems particularly poignant to me given the current state of US politics.

I’m not usually one to pick up pulp-mysteries, especially ones with remotely cheesy titles, but I read that this one was rife with tasty treats on books and collecting and dealing, and as soon as my rare books prof in graduate school recommended it as “a vertiable trifle of delights for the bibliophile”, I didn’t need any more convincing. Since I’m not a reader of mysteries generally, I feel somewhat incompetent to comment on it as a mystery, but as a bibliophile, I can certainly attest to the treasures that await anyone in this particular niche market. Our protagonist is Cliff Janeway, a cop turned book-dealer, whose motivation at the start of the book is cornering a certain Jackie Newton for murders the whole police department knows he committed. It is when a particular lapse in judgement pushes him off the police force and Janeway turns to his passion – books and book dealing – that the book gets really interesting. There are all sorts of nicely packaged bits of rare book trivia in this novel, and the mystery part of it is engaging enough, albeit vaguely predictable. But Dunning has written a very likeable character in Janeway, and in fact I liked him enough that the sequel is the next on my list.

One of my favourite people in the world turns 80 today. Happy birthday Nan!

If you aren’t already reading Uzbekistan Diary, about the life of a North American journalist living in Uzbekistan, you should start now. I’ve been reading it since its inception, and it continues to intrigue and engross.

I like to think that I have a critical mind when it comes to the things I read, and the Catholic church has always been at the receiving end of that scrutiny. I have been imminently fascinated with the evil-doings of the church ever since I first learnt the meaning of the word ‘doubt’, and this book goes a long way in feeding that fascination. It tells the story of the Cathars, a renegade religious group that lived in the south of France in the thirteenth Century. The Cathars posed a threat to the medieval Catholic church because their beliefs challenged the very fundamentals of church doctrine: they were firmly dualistic, believing all things worldly and material were evil; they rejected the Christian doctrine that the world is the product of a good God; they believed in reincarnation and practiced gender equality, rejected the Incarnation, and lived ascetically. In other words, the Cathar belief system was the very antithesis of medieval Catholic dogma and practice. Of course, in the thirteenth Century when there was no division between church and state, and church was in fact state, these opposing beliefs could seriously undermine the church’s position if they were not thwarted. So in a series of crusades, the church routinely sought out and eliminated every Cathar in the south of France, in an attempt to stamp out heresy. The story is excellently told, well researched, and O’Shea still manages to convey an accessible, pop-history flavour. The Middle Ages, gender equality, heretical beliefs, war and calumny: this is my kind of book.

I spent Saturday morning sifting through my closet, creating seasonal and Goodwill piles. After about three hours, I had the closet reorganized, with clothing for all seasons put away, which was quite the coup for me, I usually have to do a summer/winter split with the current season’s clothing in the closet and the inactive season’s clothing in a suitcase in my parents’ basement. I also managed two sizeable piles for Goodwill, all decent stuff, some of it barely worn. I used to have a fairly short attention span when it came to clothing and this coupled with very little purging meant that I had amassed a haphazard array of apparel sufficient to outit a family of four. But I have become a lot more discplined over the past few years, and tend to regard clothing as no more than a basic necessity, one that is required to be functional, much like breakfast. With the annual closet purge and reorg well into its fifth year, I now have a manageable core collection of gear that should last me a few years. So after three hours of work, it felt like I accomplished a task I began years ago.