Recently in Entertainment Category

I was highly intrigued by Andy Baio's write-up of The Whitburn Project, as well as the tidbits of knowledge he and others found. Such a vast amount of well organized data begs to be reviewed. As you might already know, I host copies of the Billboard Year-End Charts on my site, and have enjoyed looking through those and hearing from others who have done the same. Weekly data? Much more entertaining. Although there's a lot to see when looking through the charts, I thought some of the following bits were interesting.

You know what I'm talking about. You've had it happen to you. You're listening to some music, and it hits you. “That's it. Whatever that is, playing right now, I like it. I'm not sure who it is, or the name of the song. There's something to it I can't quite explain… and it's got something to it that I really like.” Stick with me on this one…

Last night I finished reading a 15 (some might argue 16) book series. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. They are children's books (or maybe pre-teen). I bought one (Book the First) when we were first married, and after reading that first one, felt compelled to purchase all remaining books as they came out. I didn't start reading the rest until much later. Generally I would only read them in the evenings while I'm waiting for Maria to fall asleep (thanks to my trusty headlamp with its red filter). Having made it through all of the books, obviously I'm going to have a fairly positive opinion of them. Allow me to continue…

I'm in total shock to find out that Maria has never read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved those things as a kid, except I totally sucked at them. You say to yourself, “How can you be bad at reading a book where you impact the flow of the story?” Well… it's not that I couldn't make a decision, or that I couldn't read (the latter does not work as an excuse of why you didn't do your homework in the 5th grade, btw). It's that I cheated. I would get to the decision point, and it would tell me to turn to X page if I chose one way, or Y page if I chose the other. Not only would I turn to both of those pages to see how it would go, but I'd follow the page numbers after those, and even after those, until all my fingers were holding various pages. All of this was in my attempts to avoid the inevitably lame ending of “Your head a splode” or something like that. The point here isn't to focus on how bad I was at the books, and spoiling the intended excitement and reader engagement, it's to focus on how deprived Maria is for having never read one. If you, for some reason, still have one of these things around your house, and would be kind enough to alleviate the shame which Maria should be feeling over this hole in her childhood, please send it to me her. kthxbye