Month: May 2008

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A List of Books

The list of books I’ve read, from the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die book.  Whew, looks like I’ve got a ways to go before I shuffle off.

  • The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
  • Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
  • Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
  • American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
  • The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
  • Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
  • Contact – Carl Sagan
  • Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  • The World According to Garp – John Irving
  • The Shining – Stephen King
  • Rabbit Redux – John Updike
  • Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  • Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
  • Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
  • Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
  • To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  • Rabbit, Run – John Updike
  • Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  • Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  • The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
  • Animal Farm – George Orwell
  • Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  • The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
  • A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
  • The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Trial – Franz Kafka
  • Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
  • The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

Plus a bunch of others that I read in high school but I wasn’t paying much attention, so I’m not counting.

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San Diego Firewood

This is a post mainly for my benefit, to get a scrap of paper off my desk.

Last fall, I searched far and wide for a cheap supply of firewood.  I found a post in either the Reader or Union-Tribune, called the number, and drove out to El Cajon to see what he had to offer.  There was a nice gentleman there, I think his name was Norman, and he had huge boxes full of hardwood, both split logs and whole limbs.  He offered me $40 to fill up half of the back of my Pathfinder, somewhere between 30-40 cubic feet.

I reached him at (619) 593-0319 and set up a time to meet him at 780 La Rochi Way, El Cajon, CA.

  1. Take 8E to the 2nd St. exit in El Cajon
  2. Take a right on 2nd St.
  3. 2nd St. turns into Jamacha Rd.
  4. Take a left on E. Washington Ave.
  5. E. Washington Ave. turns into Dehesa Rd.
  6. Take a right on Van Horn Rd.
  7. Take a left on La Rochi Way
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Review – This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Stephanie and I watched this a few nights ago and were a bit underwhelmed. I think we can all agree that a rating system for films is a good idea. Maybe the current system isn’t perfect, but aren’t there more pressing issues in the industry, such as the increasing irrelevance of the physical distribution model and the gradual destruction of the movie-going experience for the sake of revenue generated by pre-movie ads and in-movie product placement? As movie distribution shifts from theaters to Netflix, Bittorrent, etc., I think the rating system will have less meaning and the NC-17 rating won’t be a death sentence for a film’s commercial prospects.

I did find the appeals process interesting; the appeal board was made up almost entirely of VPs from the major theater chains and movie studios. It seems like they would be more inclined to change NC-17 ratings to R ratings, since R rated pictures will have a higher gross.  I wonder why this group chooses, in the majority of cases, to uphold the original MPAA rating?

All in all, not a bad film, but not the dramatic exposé I was expecting.