etc.

Just 4 hours into having the place wired and I’m already experiencing a goodly amount of media overload. I could be watching BookTV or IFC or BBC World or Animal Planet, or I could be downloading music at iTunes for 99¢ a shot, or I could be interacting with my television set like never before. The options seem, quite literally, endless. Add to that the really engrossing book I started reading today and you have an overstimulating mélange of media that seems altogether unreal, in a very real way.

This is the flea market find my husband has been looking for his whole flea-market-scouring-life.

If I had read Hogwart’s School of Double Entendre before I read the book, I might have enjoyed it more. [bookslut]

Toilet roll game à la Dean Allen.

This book is a collection of articles from Jay McInerney’s wine column in House and Garden magazine, all of them no longer than 4 pages and most concluding with his personal recommendations. Jay McInerney is a novelist with a serious wine jones. And this is what makes this book so great. He’s not a formal wine critic in any sense so, lacking the often abstruse (and usually high hat for most of us) vocabulary that is conventionally used to talk wine, McInerney makes his comparisons with literature, art, music and pop culture iconography instead. This is a great read for oenophiles and neophytes alike, but particularly for anyone who couldn’t taste the salad bar in their glass of Napa Valley Cabernet if it leapt out of the glass and smacked them in the nose.