To start with, I really don’t like writing negative reviews. I just want to make that clear. You know, the old “if you don’t have something good to say…” The best thing I can say about the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is that it has a great deal of interesting ideas about ancient themes. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s horribly horribly written and edited. boring, repetitive and preachy.
Dan Brown has a lot in interesting insight and research tied up in these pages. But it’s hard to remember it with all the plot dishonesty. He constantly plays unfair games with the reader, thinking it must be cute or cleaver to withhold information from the reader to build suspense. The way to build suspense is NOT to withhold information. You must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from the characters prospective. And no, I’m not talking about Malloc, I’m talking about Sato, who changes character half way through the book. Readers are willing to suspend judgment about whether something is possible, as long as the author is honest and tells the truth. If the author can’t tell the truth, he needs to rewrite the story so that he can. Example: Sato’s glowing briefcase, that we don’t know what it shows for hours. What a bunch of fertilizer.
Don’t even bother to read or listen to the last hour where Brown drones on about his obvious humanistic world view. It’s just a waste of time.
Again, the research is interesting. It’s hard to say how much I believe, since from what I do know he has gotten wrong. He refers to “Mormon baptisms of the dead.” What? Are you serious? Small error, big difference. That happens to be ‘baptisms for the dead’. BIG difference. Mormons don’t baptize dead people.
In fairness, Brown wasn’t making a negative comment about these baptisms, but it’s details like this that make all the research suspect.
In conclusion, I’m not saying that there aren’t worse written books out there, I’m sure there are. It’s just that I’ve never read one.
I still collect LP’s. Why? A couple of reasons. One: I really like the sound of vinyl; there is something rich and magical about the sound. But just as important as the sound of Vinyl is the presentation that the format makes possible. The roughly 12×12 inches of ‘canvas’ makes the LP a great medium for visual art as well as music.
So it was with a lot of interest that I purchased my first iTunes LP album. No, iTunes did not go into the printing business or the vinyl business. But they brought the the fun of enjoying an LP to iTunes. And in this writers opinion, they did it in style.
Now with special marked boxes of Honeycomb cereal…I mean…with specially marked albums in the iTunes music store, the purchaser also get a special download. The . itlp file that came with Grateful Dead’s exceptional American Beauty album is about 190 MB in size. Now that’s a cereal box prize I can sink my teeth into. It’s listed along with the album tracks and opens in iTunes as album art mixed with multimedia goodness. While listening to the album you can peruse the content just like the good ol’ days. Even better, photos and lyrics aren’t the only thing the new ‘LP’ format has to offer. Music video’s, interviews, anything that the multimedia designer’s mind can imagine.
One more cool thing: by simply changing the extension on the file from .itlp to .zip you can look inside and access all the files that make up the presentation. Now that’s cool!
My baby girl turned 8 years old. Where had the time gone? Seems like just yesterday she was wiggling here way out of the swaddling blanket. I’m not sure what I’ve done right, if anything, to warrant such a beautiful girl.
Spring is my favorite time of year. Too bad it seems so short. Maybe that is why I haven’t updated this blog for 3 months…time just moves too fast. Plus, let’s be honest…who really reads this blog anyway? Well, I guess I would continue to write periodically even if there was only one reader.
Kitty in the Jungle.
One of my favorite parts of spring is watching the flowers bloom. The weeds in the yard are out of control. But the flowers help make up for it. Pictured here is an Iris from the yard. Iris are a new addition this year. The Tulips this year were unbelieveable, every color and shape imaginable.
Every year I like to try to capture the beauty of the flowers with my camera. Every year seems to be a disappointment. Yes, the photos are getting better but there is always room for improvement. What I see in my minds eye, usually doesn’t translate to the picture. Isn’t that how life goes…the beauty we see is often fleeting and hard to capture.
I turned a year older a couple of weeks ago. Aging is such a mysterious and yet inescapable process. Like the peddles of a tulip, the skin turns from perfectly smooth and flawless to withered and dried in the course of it’s lifetime. There is no going back. We should be grateful for our children. When we were their age we didn’t think about the smoothness of our skin, the spring in our step or how easy it was to fall asleep. We didn’t appreciate what we had. We can enjoy our children’s youthfulness, even if they do not.
I guess that is why Spring is my favorite season. each year I get a chance to relive the grandeur and mystery of life just beginning, weeds and all.
Yesterday it snowed a ton…literally. When I finally got around to shoveling, there was at least a foot on the driveway. Here is my first attempt at creating a timelapse movie. I used my iPhone and an application called TimeLapse. Photos were taken at 10 second intervals, totaling something in the range of 250 photos.
Unfortunately, Tigger the cat knocked over the camera before I finished. Enjoy.
Introducing a new podcast by me…jamesb. It’s called microStockU, and it can be found by going to microStockU.com or jamesb.com/microstocku. It’s the podcast that tracks my journey in the land of microstock. Don’t know what microstock it? Tune in and find out.
It’s been a long time since I put out an episode of Face the Music, more than a year in fact. So here one is at long last. Three songs served up, just the way you like them, wrapped in theme. Enjoy!
For years I have gone in and out of journal writing stages, especially when I hit the computer age. I am constantly torn between the old tried and true book journal, or the convenience and speed of the computer. A paper journal is so linear that it is easier to focus ones thought. The computer is powerful with spell checking, searches, formatting. Well now I have found a third option, Memiary.
It’s not meant as a replacement to either method, unless you are satisfied with the level of granularity it provides.
I came across this website (and optional iPhone app) that makes journaling easy and fun. Memiary is a website that allowed the user to enter five items each day. The magic doesn’t happen all at once. It’s easy to think of the most important things that happen to you each day, but imagine looking back a year from now, or five or 50. Wouldn’t it be great to know what you did on this day 10 years ago. It only takes moments a day. I record things throughout the day, and polish them at the end of the day. But each person might have a different way of recording their day.
Signing up with the site is free, and the design is simple and beautifully designed. Go check it out.
Not quite safe for all audiences, but terribly funny! Anyone who has been married for more than, say, 10 years (maybe less maybe more) will understand. This isn’t the version from the album, but pretty close. He tends to improvise .
If you want to find the song to download so that you can listen to is again and again and again, visit this link. Enjoy.
Bob Dylan’s new release this year, Tell Tall Signs, is #8 in his bootleg series. It’s a series ofrare and unreleased songs from his work between 1996 and 2006. He never ceases to amaze me how he can put so much meaning and feeling into song after song.
One example is the song, Most of the Time. The original version is good, but the alternate version on Tell Tale Signs is incredible. What I love about this song is his ability to say one thing but mean another.
It’s an incredible album, one of the best of 2008.
To start with, I really don’t like writing negative reviews. I just want to make that clear. You know, the old “if you don’t have something good to say…” The best thing I can say about the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is that it has a great deal of interesting ideas about ancient themes. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s horribly horribly written and edited. boring, repetitive and preachy.
I still collect LP’s. Why? A couple of reasons. One: I really like the sound of vinyl; there is something rich and magical about the sound. But just as important as the sound of Vinyl is the presentation that the format makes possible. The roughly 12×12 inches of ‘canvas’ makes the LP a great medium for visual art as well as music.
My baby girl turned 8 years old. Where had the time gone? Seems like just yesterday she was wiggling here way out of the swaddling blanket. I’m not sure what I’ve done right, if anything, to warrant such a beautiful girl.
Introducing a new podcast by me…jamesb. It’s called microStockU, and it can be found by going to 
Bob Dylan’s new release this year, Tell Tall Signs, is #8 in his bootleg series. It’s a series ofrare and unreleased songs from his work between 1996 and 2006. He never ceases to amaze me how he can put so much meaning and feeling into song after song.