There was a rumor a few years ago that James Cameron (of Titanic and other film fame) was going to bring my favorite book to the big screen. Then the small screen. In fact, I actually saw a trailer for Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars on the Sci Fi channel during the first broadcast of Battlestar Galactica miniseries. I’ve been watching for it forever, put a keyword on my Tivo, and have been so disappointed. I guess it’s never going to happen.
Today, I saw this: Clooney, Others Develop SCI FI Shows, which contained this nugget:

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.

This is such a good book, I was just considering buying the Audiobook so I could enjoy it again, but decided 40 bucks was a little steep. And now it’s going to be a miniseries on Sci Fi? Way cool. Clooney just seems like a cool guy the more I learn about him. Clearly he has good taste in fiction, eh?
If you haven’t read the book, it’s a story of a small girl who is presented with a book by her father. It’s interactive and teaches her things and adapts and leads her through puzzles and lessons that will help her survive in the real world by presenting it in an alternate world. As she grows, it challenges her more and more and there’s a lot of other bad real world stuff going on that she is able to deal with because of her interaction with the book. It’s been 10 years since I read it, so I was thinking it was time to refresh my memory, but maybe now I’ll wait for the movie. Or see if I can find it on that new Netflix-like Audiobooks service that I’ve heard about. Guess it’s off to Google to see if I can find it.

Our Long Beach Stitch n’ Beach is featured in this article:
Knit-orious – Orange County – SqueezeOC.com
A guy came and took tons of photos during our leader’s (Jen) baby shower/snb but none of them ended up in the article.
I have a couple over here.

Thanks to
Creazativity: I was reminded of an important week we are in right now:
Here is a list of my favorites from the books challenged during the 1990s:

• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
• Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
• A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
• Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Dead Zone by Stephen King

Maybe I was pre-disposed to liking this book — there are lobstermen in my grandfather’s generation off the coast of Nova Scotia — but I really found this book to be so fascinating that I couldn’t put it down for days and finished it up quite quickly.
Of course, I love to eat lobster. One of my favorite birthday gifts is when my husband orders from Maine Lobster Direct and has them send me a DownEast Feast. My great-grandmother used to send mittens and socks to us kids, and canned lobster meat for our parents for Christmas.
I never knew anything about lobster in any context outside of dinner, but this book leaves nothing much to the imagination. And it makes it interesting! Who knew?
It discusses the mating dance between the males and females, and the conservation efforts the lobstermen were doing independent of the government scientists that were telling them it was all going to be gone if they didn’t stop. Still more scientists were working on figuring out where the lobsters go throughout their lives. Meanwhile, the catch keeps going up each year even though the government scientists are telling the lobstermen that they were overfishing. The lobstermen had to prove, to themselves at least, that they were preserving the next generations of lobster. If they didn’t do that, they would be out of a job, and what of their business could they hand down to the next generation?
The story flows from the shore to the boats to the pots to the labs and keeps you turning page after page. If you are looking for a quick summer read that might teach you something new, maybe this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

because I am reading this on my palm via Palm Reader, and am finally getting into it. I loved the other “Ender” books, so if you did, you will dive right into these, I imagine. I must say that reading on the Palm is odd, and even though it’s with me all the time, I don’t think to pick it up like I do a paper book.
Plus a Marion Zimmer Bradley/ Diana Paxon book, one of the Avalon ones but I don’t remember what it was.
Most of the next few were bought in the Hurt Books sale, so they were half price. This one came with a bunch of errata which was nice of them to include, instead of me hunting it down off the Interweave web site.
I don’t really even like vests, but I do like some of the patterns, especially the cover one.
There’s a few cute ones, but I probably won’t make many of these.
Now this was just silly. I want to make some xmas stockings but needed some inspiration on the scale of them, so I bought this one thinking it might help. It might.
This one is nice, I like a lot of the patterns, and can see using this as inspiration.
I keep waiting for good stuff to show up in Crafter’s Choice, the crafty book club. Most months I just toss the flyer, but once in a while something good comes along:
It’s likely that I will get more inspiration for xmas stockings from this book instead! There’s lots of cool stuff that I can see for edging a plain sweater that will make it really nice. Maybe my first design?
I got this one while trying to figure out what to do with a Barnes & Noble Gift Card. I was always curious about the concept, and can see some uses for this technique.
I just started reading this: I loved his other books, so I have been waiting and waiting for this one to come in paperback, but I couldn’t pass up a slightly crinkled used copy for only $10 at a local used book shop!
I started reading this last week, but Quicksilver took precedence.
If anyone has any suggestions for a good (and paperback) sci-fi type tome that would make good plane-trip material, drop me a line, eh? I used to have a roomate that read books/week and so I would read what he was done with. Our tastes mostly aligned, but without my sci-fi buddy, I haven’t been very adventurous.
Why is it ok to spend so much on knitting books that might suck, but not sci-fi? I guess it’s more work to figure out that the sci-fi book sucks, but not really, if you knit something and then discover the pattern sucks. Hmm, I guess I need to re-think this one.
I think I need to make a list of the books I have read — recently, at least.

Anyone out there a Buffy Fan? If so, check out:
basbleu: Insane? Nous? for a clever rendition of “I’ve got a theory”. The nod gives two thumbs up.

I finally got a copy of Fair Isle Knitting by Alice Starmore. Just after finishing my first fair isle project. ah well, timing is everything.

Check out what’s going on over here: When Knitting Was a Manly Art has a photo of the sun with sunspots clearly visible. Way cool. Much better than my orangey devil-sun.