Geek On The Mountain

That is the question. Everywhere you look you’ll see the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and One fish Two fish… , but never any Sneetches!

The Sneetches are these yellow Dr. Seuss characters. The gist is something like some of them have star on their belly and some don’t. The ones with starts think that they’re better than the others. This entrepreneur comes to town with a star-adding machine and charges the non-starred sneetches to have a star put on them. But then the original star-bellied-sneetches aren’t happy so they go to the guy and it just so happens he has a star-removing machine as well… and a nice loop ensues. One can draw parallels to real life if one so chooses..

At any rate, I like the Sneetches. But look around in stores. Places like Target have a small offering of children’s books. You’ll find Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish, and The Grinch almost for sure. But they never quite make it to carrying the Sneetches (we have the book, but that’s not the point). And it’s not just stores. We got something from somewhere just after the babies were born that contained various offers including a children’s book club thing. It was actually a good deal. For $1.99 (plus shipping) they would send you 7 Dr. Seuss books and you would have no obligation to buy any more books. But of the 7, there were no Sneetches to be found. And it doesn’t just stop at books. We have some Dr. Seuss diaper covers. Once again, the standard fare of characters are covered, but there aren’t any Sneetches. I could go on.

So I have to ask, where are all the Sneetches?

I must admit that I can answer the question in one case. When our Kohls first opened a few months ago they had (and still have, I think) a bunch of stuffed Dr. Seuss characters. They had the Cat in the Hat, Sam I Am, The Grinch, the Blue (or red?) Fish, and even Max, the Grinch’s dog complete with a stuffed stick tied to his head. But the great thing is that a Sneetch made the cut too. It’s one with a star (there weren’t any without, but I guess the starred ones are the better of the two, right? ).

So maybe there is hope. Probably not. But please, don’t forget the Sneetches.

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Apparently Anne Rice has found God and now writes “only for the Lord.”

The article itself is about six weeks old, though I just heard about it’s subject last week when I was talking to someone at work.

For anyone not familiar with Anne Rice, she’s best known for her vampire series (The Vampire Chronicles). Two books (Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned) were turned into movies. She’s been writing about vampires and witches for decades now and longtime fans have been waiting for another book for a couple of years now (she usually dumps out one a year or so).

There wait will soon be over. The topic of her next book: Jesus. Umm, yeah. In all fairness, it sounds rather unique (I assume…I don’t read much about that kind of thing) in that it’s about a seven year old Jesus who has fully knowledge that he is god. Also, the Vampire books tend to have a lot of religion mixed in with them.

Still….what the hell?

I just started reading her books earlier this year and I’m6 or 7 into The Vampire Chronicles.

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Marvel comics has announced that Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is going to continue with a series of comic books. Apparently this will include more backstory with Roland as a young man. The first issue is due out in April and they’re planning a hardcover release of the first 6 for the holidays next year.

(link via slashdot)

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Milenka has a set of CS Lewis’s Narnia Books that are quite old. It looks like they’re a 1979 printing from Great Britian. She no doubt got them off eBay at some point or another. I happened across the copyright page of one of these puppies and I found this notice at the bottom of the page:

Except in the United States Of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

That’s kind of crazy. That says that you can’t sell or even give away the book if it has a cover that differs at all from the original. I’ve seen books that give a warning that if you bought the book with the cover torn off then you should know that it was reported to the publisher as being destroyed and they don’t get any money for it. (Even this site has such a notice) I’m guessing the above is some sort of an attempt at enforcing that. It says “except in the united states” because our copyright law specificially states that the publisher looses control of a copy once it’s sold. You’re free to sell or rent or do w/e with the copy (the key being as long as you aren’t making more copies..) and the copyright holder can have no say in the matter. This is generally known as the Right of First Sale. There are some exceptions, but not for anything as simple as books. It seems rather sill that, if the cover got torn off a book, I wouldn’t even be able to give the dumb thing away. I’m left wondering if this notice still appears in books outside of the US today…

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I get a lot of hits on my Half-Blood Prince Review, which I’ve just noticed shows up remarkably high on google when you search for those words. Of course, it’s main downfall is that it’s not really a review but a general plot outline for every HP book out there that someone posted on /. As a joke. In other words, it’s terribly uninformative.

I don’t really feel like doing a review, but I did think it would e a good idea to make up a summary. It took much longer than I thought it would, and it’s a tad wordier than I had originally envisioned, but that’s what it took. I figure that it will be good reference for later so that when I go to read the seventh book I won’t be totally lost.

You can download the summary if you want or otherwise read it below: (Read the article)

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