Practicalmadness

What follows is assorted weirdness for your enjoyment on this idle Tuesday.

We love the subs!!!

Actually, no, we're not that crazy about the Quiznos Subs, no matter what the spongmonkeys may have to say on the matter. However, we have just parlayed a long-expired coupon for $2 off admission to an exhibition at a Birmingham museum that is no longer running into a buck off a mesquite chicken sub. I think we can deal.

Bookses

I know you were dying to know, but so overcome by my good looks, fabulous wealth and dare I say dangerous sexual energy that you hesitated to ask, so I will tell you: O'Reilly's MySQL Pocket Reference is worthless. Well, perhaps not worthless, but if you write SQL queries with any frequency at all, I'd think you'd have internalized this stuff, and what you really need in a desk reference is something a little more in-depth.

Also: this first edition of a pocket-sized MySQL reference from O'Reilly covers only version 4.0 of the open-source database engine. That's well and good, especially if you're running your own server, but there are many of us in web-land still stuck on version 3.23 or earlier. I think Managing and Using MySQL, the fatter, way more expensive sibling to this book, has some information on backwards compatibility with the older software. But then, so does the free, online documentation at MySQL.com.

Our latest acquisitions from First Cut Books are way more fun. There's the McSweeneys-published Jokes Told In Heaven About Babies (Lucy Thomas), which is (a) extremely short and (b) beautiful, if a little frustrating on first read. Apparently it collects some of Thomas's short writings from Timothy McSweeney's Online Heroin Orgy, which explains the brevity and disjointed nature of the collection. Like many McSweeneys publications, J.T.I.H.A.B. is a masterfully made print object, complete with hand-drawn images of piers and beautifully-set type.

Also: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I have not yet managed to finish If on a winter's night a traveler, for being a youngish American who grew up in the 80s and 90s and thus possessed of a freakishly short attention span, the book's conceit of ten or so novels that start, get going and then are rudely interrupted at a moment of suspense is interesting, but a little difficult to slog through if you're reading the book in fits and starts during coffee breaks at work.¹ Also: I'm a filmmaker; breaking off a story at what's basically the start of Act II, while thematically brilliant, just sticks in my craw.

I have high hopes, though, for this book; in it Marco Polo describes some impossible cities to Kublai Khan that he claims to have seen on his travels. Yay.

Of course, both books came wrapped in that fabulous house packaging.

The futility of advertising

I have decided that if the advertising on this page cannot feature spongmonkeys, I will have no advertising at all. Yep. That's why the Google banner is gone. No spongmonkeys, no banner.

Yeah, right. I'm still having problems getting the ads-and-links column to play nice with the rest of the page, and I was starting to think that the content area of the page (e.g., the white-not-green part) was a bit too cluttered anyway. So by popular demand of nobody in particular, we're going back to the old format. Woo-hoo. I kick ass.

While I think there's a clause in the Google AdSense user agreement that prohibits me from mentioning how much money I'm making from these banners (which still run on most other pages, and will return soon to the homepage), let's just say that it's very slightly up from last year's dollars-per-day figures, and that I'll only have to whore myself on East Division Street for four days a week to cover my expenses on this site.

Thanks, Dear Readers, for all your help.