Linking into the weird, Pt. 2

I was telling a friend of mine about the two strange LinkedIn invitations I’ve had recently and something occurred to me.

I should start a new LinkedIn group that combines the two areas that these people thought I’d be a “fit” for:

“Working Moms for Security and Counter-Terrorism”

Especially for mothers of two-year-olds.

Linking in to the weird

Speaking of questionable solicitations, as I was yesterday, LinkedIn has got somewhat weirder. I think it’s because if you’re in a group with someone, you can send them messages for free (without buying a premium subscription).

The invitation to a security & counter-terrorism group was kind of strange, because I have no bleeding idea what it is about my LinkedIn profile that would lead anyone to think I have experience or even interest in that field. Except that I mention that my research concentration is in military history—but that is kind of a tenuous connection at best.

However, even stranger than me in a terror community is the invitation I got from some chick wanting me to join a group called Working Moms for Healthy Living:

Now, trust me—there is absolutely nothing in my LinkedIn profile that would lead anyone to connect me with working momdom.

& given the choice between counter-terrorism & working mothers, guess which group I’d pick?

In the queue

Ah, the new year is starting out well for the spammers & phishers. Thank God even lame-ass AOL can detect them & shunt them off into the junk mail folder. (Hey—after AOL assimilated Netscape emails I was stuck with them. It’s not like I volunteered.)

 
 The “Priority Mail Postal Service” is an old pal, more or less—can’t decide whether it wants to be the USPS or FedEx, so going for both:

Interesting that they didn’t bother to steal the actual FedEx logo, which is:

(Note the difference in the font, the colors and the space between Fed & Ex.)

The one from “MailBox Alert”, slugged “New e-mails in your mailbox” was, um, different:

Kind of a change to be addressed as “Gentleman!” (Although—do you suppose they’re tracking all the spam I get for penile enlargement aids?) & nice to know I have 15 more “fresh” messages. Do you suppose they mean fresh as in “recent” or fresh as in “frisky”?

One could also speculate about the offers. But, sadly, I won’t be contacting administrator Natasha.

If it were Boris, now…

If a man answers

Here’s a vertical market that apparently wasn’t featured at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show: mobile phones with a privacy feature enabling the user to keep calls from specified callers out of queues, logs, etc. They’re called “infidelity phones”, and they apparently are well known in Japan.

The technology—which is actually oldish—is the subject of blogs among the use-‘em-&-lose-‘em” set. It’s essentially an earlier version of privacy settings that allow the user to shunt calls from various people—other mistresses, wives,and the like—into a never-never land so that the woman they’re with at the moment isn’t able to scroll through call logs and deduce philandering is in process.

Of course, that doesn’t do anything to hide the evasiveness, lies and general scumminess that forms the basis of men who need such privacy settings. Those are even older technologies that should be easily picked up on by anyone with the most basic bullshit detection systems.

Book covers of the damned, chapter 2

As follow-up to my post on book covers from hell, here’s the story of the pissy little “author” who—in addition to having no visual sense or visible taste at all—doesn’t understand copyright law.

This is the little exchange jump-started the Lousy Book Covers site’s global following, proving that Miss Pissy also doesn’t grasp the viral nature of the Internet. Possibly because Internet is multisyllabic.

Bwaaaah!

Certainly, sir!

I was looking up hotels in Boston because…oh, yeah—I decided to make the daughter of one of the minor characters in my novel work for a while at a Boston hotel.

Then I got to wondering if I could remember the name of the hotel where a Boston native once told me all the high-class hookers worked. It was Copley something—not the Marriott, because I’ve stayed there and, well, I just know that whatever it was that was the name of this hotel that was supposed to be Very Old Boston, it wasn’t where I was staying.

But the short end of this story is that, having trawled around various four- and five-star Boston hotel sites, I hit on that of the Copley Square Hotel. Not that I’m saying it was the one in whose lobby the high-class hookers might or might not have plied their trade, but because it appears to be a high-end hotel where my minor character’s daughter might have spent a couple of years working. (Remember? Back in paragraph one?)

I mean—it’s A Boston Boutique Hotel at its Best, right? Why not?

So I was rooting around the site and came across the amenities page. Where I just stopped dead in my trawling tracks.

It wasn’t just the free Wi-Fi (usually you only get free Internet at the low-end hotels), or the free local/800 calls and postage. Nor was it the complimentary seasonal afternoon beverages (would that be lemonade in the summer or G&T?), or even the overnight shoe shine.

(I do wonder at the “Wine Down Hour”—what does that even mean? And it seems a little on the parsimonious side to have it only for one hour and only at a time before a lot of their presumptive business travelers get out of work.)

No—it’s the “Intuition Specialist services”.

Seriously?

Now, I’m just spitballing here, based on what I get from an Internet search on “intuition specialist”; but I’m finding it hard to feature your average guest at a New England hotel calling down to Reception to book an appointment with an intuitionist. “Listen, I need my auras read ASAP”, or “I have a bad feeling about tomorrow’s business meeting—get me your psychic, please.”

I could see something like that at a hotel in LA, or pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area. But finding it at this establishment just cracked me up.

Although, looking back at it, I note that here’s one of the three photos they use on the amenities page:

No—actually, you don’t need any intuition specialist to know what’s going on there, do you?

Book covers of the damned

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. But they’re so, so wrong. I’m not sure how I came to find this site, but once found, it’s a guilty, addictive pleasure (well, more of a horrid fascination), because it’s all lousy book covers, all the time.

No, no—I mean really, really awful book covers. The titles stink. The graphics range from crude drawings to even cruder Photoshop mashups of images found through a Google search. The fonts are a typographer’s nightmare. The color schemes scream acid trip. Pull all those elements together & you get…well, you get precisely what you see.

A whole lot of them seem to be sci-fi/fantasy. No real surprises there—that’s the genre where if you’re going to self-publish an e-book, either you’ll whack something together on a computer or you’ll find someone on Craig’s List who’ll give you a “design” for $50. But crime (the more lurid, the better) & romance figure heavily in here, too.

The site apparently was just sitting around until one of the, ah, “authors” bitched to the collator about copyright violation (although all the images seem to be linked to their Amazon listings). Which of course sent the thing viral.

Welcome to the social network, honey.

It’s worth it to keep scrolling through the pages until you find Lumberjack in Love. (Okay, if you can’t be bothered, here it is on Amazon. It's the paperback version. Which you can own if you want to pay $4.99 plus tax/shipping. You moron.) Personally, I can’t get past the title. But the, er, graphic is just…

It doesn’t happen often, but I have no words.

Except to say that—even though a lot of these books are available to “borrow” for free on Amazon Kindle, I still wouldn’t spend the electrons on them.

Tasting economy

Continuing my wrap-up of 2012 in books, here are a few more from the non-fiction category.

I’ve already said my piece about Kati Marton’s self-serving vanity piece, Paris, A Love Story. Much more satisfying was Elizabeth Bard’s Lunch in Paris. It’s everything I might have expected from a professional journalist (but which Marton did not deliver)—plus some pretty delectable recipes. Bard gives an affectionate but clear-eyed view of the city and the French. (Reading it actually brings home some of the anomalies that seem to drive Tea Partiers nuts about Europe in general and France in particular.) I recommend it highly. But try not to be hungry whilst reading.

Speaking of food, I also ingested An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, by Tyler Cowen, which was being reviewed all over the place mid-year. I checked it out from the library and it left me…unsatisfied. I think I know why they call it the dismal science—his approach is so narrow and he leaves no room for someone wanting a different experience. It’s his way or nothing.

I don’t get the logic of choosing the least appetizing item on the menu; he insists that if you do that (in upscale restaurants), you’ll never be disappointed. Huh?

“At a fancy restaurant the menu is well thought out. The time and; attention of the kitchen are scarce. An item won’t be on the menu unless there is a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.”

How does that work?

He’s a big fan of food trucks; fine. But deregulate them completely? Huh?

He goes to great lengths to discuss how you need innovation in cuisine…except when you don’t. And I definitely don’t get that.

One interesting fact: he describes the compostable utensils flap in Congress—when the Dems controlled the House, there were compostable eating utensils; once the Pubs took over, we were back to regular plastic. “Why not use metal knives and forks you might be wondering? The sorry truth is that this option was studied, but rejected on the grounds that too many Congressional staff—the people working so hard to improve America—would take these utensils away and, quite simply, never bring them back.”

That’s our Congress—steal the spoons from your table.

Abbey bored

Last night PBS began broadcasting season three of “Downton Abbey”, one of those big costume soaps that form the backbone of “Masterpiece Theatre”. There’s been any amount of buzz about it, including all kinds of interviews in print & broadcast media with the cast.

Up until last week I must have been the only person in western civilization not to have seen the show. I think I tried watching the very first episode years ago, because I really love Maggie Smith, but I gave it up as a bad job.

However, some TV critic, in his round-up of 2012, raved about the Christmas episode, so I streamed it last week, and watched until the last, deadly clichéd dog was down. That’s 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Here’s the thing: without having seen any other episode (except about 15 minutes of that first one), I could map out all the story arcs, figure out all the character relationships and lay out what’s going to come down the pike.

This, to me, is not entertaining. So I revert to being the only person in the country not glued to the TV on Sunday evenings, or committing it to DVR.

The year in books

It’s a little late to do a round-up of the books I read last year—but so what?

As usual, the preponderance of my reading was non-fiction plus a solid helping of mysteries. I’ll deal with the latter in a separate post, and there are a couple of non-fiction works that deserve individual reviews (God’s Hotel, by Victoria Sweet, and Engines of Change, by Paul Ingrassia). So here’s the overview of the 147 books I took in in 2012.

I read lots of bios—a really bad one of Marlene Dietrich, a couple on Hedy Lamarr, one about Liz Taylor being The Accidental Feminist, Lillian Hellman and Wallis Simpson, amongst others. There was one male in the bunch—King George VI, mostly as an offshoot of the feud between La Simpson and George’s wife, Elizabeth (the late Queen Mum). I’m not above looking for the lower things in life.

The usual history, including the usual fistful on WWII, because there’s always something to learn. Although A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France, by Caroline Moorehead, was so crappy I actually skimmed it. Because apparently, it turns out, every Frenchwoman in Occupied France was noble and self-sacrificing. I was a little surprised because Moorehead’s biography of Martha Gellhorn is actually well-researched and -written.

I did some armchair traveling via books focused on various cities. (Okay, in Europe—maybe this year I’ll venture into Asia or Africa. If someone writes something enticing.)

I’ve already told you my opinion of Robert Hughes’s Rome : A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. He natters on interminably (I suspected he was being paid by the word) and is incredibly sloppy with his, you know, historical facts. Johnson’s History of London, on the other hand, by London mayor Boris Johnson, is everything Robert Hughes tried to do with Rome, but done successfully. Very enjoyable, and Johnson is definitely a recommendation for even the British Public School system.

In Seven Seasons in Siena: My Quixotic Quest for Acceptance among Tuscany's Proudest People, Robert Rodi falls in love with the city, its culture, the Palio and the contrade that compete in it. I absolutely understand being enchanted by Siena, and Rodi really knows how to tell a civic love story.

I can’t quite decide what Paris versus New York, by Vahram Muratyan, is. I mean—not quite a travelogue, not entirely a graphic love story and not strictly social commentary. But it is delightful. Here’s a sample:

See what I mean?

I state unequivocally that I stand ready to be improved by all forms of literature, including that intended for kids. I got a kick out of Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles, by Rupert Kingfisher; The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick; Adèle and Simon, by Barbara McClintock, after reading a WSJ story on exploring Paris using children’s books as your guides. (Madeline was part of the story; but I’ve already read them all.) First-rate stuff, both stories and illustrations, although Hugo was a bit graphic novel-ish.

Getting back to the adult world, kind of, I quite enjoyed Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works, so I was mighty disappointed to find out Lehrer was a lot more creative with his facts than a work of non-fiction should allow for.

And in the rare instance that I actually read an adult novel that doesn’t revolve around police procedures, I chowed down happily on Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It’s an epistolary novel (if you count email as epistles), which totally sends up Seattle, the cult of tech and the self-absorption of the zeitgeist there. I don’t think you have to despise the Emerald City to appreciate Bernadette—that’s how brilliant it is.

I’m looking forward to expanding my horizons this year, courtesy of Kindle and the various library systems here in the Valley.