UncleWiki

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on UncleWiki, a wiki about the Uncle books, by J. P. Martin. It’s a very rough framework right now, but I’m adding content as I go. Please join in!

Here do books lurk

Catherine has a project involving Toronto’s libraries, and so I, for no particularly good reason, compiled a geocoded list of the Toronto Public Library system: libraries.gpx
Google Earth display of all of Toronto's public libraries

You can thank MapSource for the bloated GPX file. It quadrupled in size when I changed the symbols to look like buildings.

dino out

Aargh, I hate finishing an Eric Garcia Rex book. I don’t get lost in too many books, but Eric’s ones do that for me. I’d finished Hot & Sweaty Rex, then re-read Anonymous Rex ‘cos I couldn’t get enough of that dino-noir (dinoir?)

Garcia’s books are clearly works of fiction. I mean, to say that 5% of the population are dinosaurs in heavy disguise — the real number’s much higher …

ididn’tBook

For a truly soulless evening, take yourself down to the BestBuy at Scarborough Town Centre.

STC is a mega-mall, with the obligatory huge concrete and asphalt deadzone around it. Its current sales slogan is For what defines you, which must mean that its denizens are in a pretty parlous state, existentially speaking. Its only slightly attractive feature is its derelict KrispyKreme store, which opened as a flagship, then frazzled almost as quickly as a KK’s dextrose rush. Abandoned donut shops are Canada’s ruined abbeys; places of worship gone to seed.

BestBuy itself is an outcast from the mall, in an especially ped-unfriendly way. Perhaps the only defined route there is through a monster split-level Wal-Mart, but I didn’t have enough hitpoints to make it through that particular slough.

I’d checked their website, and it said that the store had iBooks in stock, at $50 below retail. Did the store have any on display? No. The Apple section was set behind the customer service desk, which was a scrum of slightly disgruntled shoppers. So I left without seeing one.

I wandered in a bit of a post big-box haze to McCowan RT, a weird little station at the very end of the rails. At least I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the 401 at McCowan; all boiling red and purple. That’s about the best you’ll get near STC, and for free, too.

book no fair

I thought I might’ve had a couple of books waiting for me at the library yesterday, but all of these holds were waiting for me:

  • Banvard’s folly : thirteen tales of renowned obscurity, famous anonymity, and rotten luck / by Collins, Paul
  • Been brown so long it looked like green to me : the politics of nature / by St. Clair, Jeffrey.
  • Hey Rube : blood sport, the Bush doctrine, and the downward spiral of dumbness : modern history from the sports desk / by Thompson, Hunter S.
  • Mutants: on genetic variety and the human body / by Leroi, Armand Marie.
  • The pencil : a history of design and circumstance / by Petroski, Henry.

Looks like I’ve got a lot of reading to do in the next three weeks …