You are here: Home / Archives for whatever

WINTERLING ARC Giveaway!

December 9, 2011 By 45 Comments

Hello all! This week I’m giving away an advance review copy of Sarah Prineas’s new book, Winterling.

Sarah Prineas is one of my favorite children’s fantasy writers. She writes like a great watercolor artist, painting vivid pictures with spare and economical prose that makes every syllable count. It’s a perfect style for the kind of book Prineas specializes in: tales of mystery and magic deep enough to satisfy readers of all ages. Her Magic Thief series is absolutely fantastic fantasy; such a great read that I ripped through the whole trilogy in under a week and immediately went looking for more.

Happily more has now arrived!

Winterling is aimed at slightly older readers but written in the same clean, fluid style as Prineas’s earlier books. And it has a kickass girl hero. And it mingles this-worldly mystery with other-worldly magic in a dark and brooding setting that calls to mind of one of my very favorite childhood series: Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising books.

So what more do you need to know? Great book. And it’s free to the lucky lucky winner!

Here’s how I’m going to run the giveaway:

  1. You pick a number between 1 and 245.
  2. I quote you a line from that page of the book.
  3. Then I employ a random number generator (aka, my four-year-old) to pick the winning number.
  4. If two people are equally close to the winning number, we’ll just make the random number generator do his thing again until we get a winner.

The Random Number Generator is currently obsessed with Very Large Numbers, so there should be no problem getting him to pick a passel of ‘em; the only challenge will be getting him to pick something smaller than a googol….

Deadline for picking your page number is 5 pm Monday December 12th. So have at it!

 

Filed Under: whatever

Whose Free Speech Rights? (Hint: Not Ours)

November 15, 2011 By 4 Comments

Well, it finally happened last night. Police moved in and cleared Zuccotti Park in an operation carefully timed to begin after 1 am and happen overnight while America and Twitter were sleeping. I haven’t posted about Occupy Wall Street for a while now, mostly because enough other people were talking about it that I didn’t feel I had anything valuable to add. But I do have a few thoughts I’d like to share this morning:

1. Well over 3000 Occupy protesters have been arrested nationwide. I don’t think our vagrancy and jaywalking laws have gotten this good a workout since the Civil Rights era.

2. Several cities, not content to wait until people actually do anything to threaten public order before cracking down on them, have actually imposed curfews. Seriously. Curfews are now considered a legitimate response to peaceful protest. Even if you don’t’ support Occupy Wall Street, you ought to stop and think about that for a moment. Because personally the only time I can remember anyone talking about a curfew in North America was in The Hunger Games.

3. The docile public acceptance of the idea that “well, of course people aren’t allowed to sleep in public parks” is in itself a significant statement about the state of our civil liberties. I remember a time when it was an outrage in New York that the police were rounding up harmless homeless people and shipping them out of town instead of letting them sleep on park benches. And I remember when the new park benches appeared — you know, the ones with bars on them so you can’t sleep on them. But now all the park benches look like that and rounding up homeless people is just part of the job the NYPD do to keep the shopping districts nice for the tourists. Taking care of tourists trumps taking care of our own now. Just like the almightly dollar trumps real human beings in need. Or real human beings exercising their free speech rights. That’s not the New York I grew up in. And I’m not willing to let that piece of history go down the memory hole without a fight.

And one final thought that should scare anyone who cares about the future of our democracy silly — even if you don’t support the occupiers:

We now live in a nation where a corporation’s free speech rights include making unlimited anonymous political campaign donations, but citizens’ free speech rights do not include peaceful protest in parks paid for by our own tax dollars.

Filed Under: whatever Tagged With:

Enter by Midnight to win a signed copy of THE INQUISITOR’S APPRENTICE!

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sarah Prineas is giving away a signed copy of THE INQUISITOR’S APPRENTICE at midnight tonight! All you have to do to be eligible is go to www.sprineas.wordpress.com and pick a number between one and 343. Then she’ll quote you a line from that page and run a random number generator to pick the winner. It’s really clever, actually, and I think I may start doing the same thing here too. Perhaps even with Sarah’s truly brilliant MAGIC THIEF books, which I burned through in about a week last summer and would have reviewed here long ago if I didn’t have two very late books to finish….

 

 

Filed Under: whatever

Wall Street Going Crazy….

October 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

I’m going to bed, but I’ve been watching Occupy Wall Street all night. This is crazy. Today the SIEU, several other labor unions, and moveon.org joined the protest (finally!!). Reports have up to 20 THOUSAND protesters on Wall Street facing off against police. I’m sure that’s hugely exaggerated, but still, there are a huge number of people down there …

The march during the day was peaceful. But afterwards craziness. A Fox News crew has been maced in the face. Numerous protesters were maced and night sticked. I saw several videos of people getting beat up and at least one cameraman with the occupy wall street media team had what looked like a broken nose, allegedly because the police kicked him in the face for saying “I am not resisting.”

Links for all this in my twitter feed from the last several hours. I tried to retweet everything that looked important in order to have some realtime record of what was happening. For anyone interested, some of the best tweets were coming in from several journalists with the march listed here.(sorry, went back to put this link up and the page has changed, so I’ll try to get their names up in comments below….)

Filed Under: whatever Tagged With: ,

Paging Wall Street Security….

October 3, 2011 By 10 Comments

Honestly, I have nothing rational to add to this weekend’s insanity, except to point to the commenter on the New York Times ‘coverage’ of the Brooklyn Bridge Arrests who asked, “Why do the police wear jackets that say NYPD instead of Wall Street Security?” As someone who supports the protesters’ goals, I’m almost afraid to say anything, lest Bloomberg and the NYPD come to their senses and stop putting their collective foot in their collective mouth.

Here’s a link to the Huffington Post coverage roundup, which I’m including because they documented the New York Times’s weird headline switch over the course of the day. Also, the Guardian is asking anyone who was actually on the bridge to post eye-witness accounts of the entrapment and kettling.

And once again, here’s a recap of the links I posted last week for donating to Occupy Wall Street:

Global Revolution is the best place both to watch live feed from Zuccotti Park and to donate to keep it going. Scroll down the page below the streaming feed and you’ll find a list of donation links to keep the live streaming going:

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

The media team at Liberty Park has said on air that while their online donations pages are definitely going to be useful in the long run, they’re having a lot of trouble accessing them for immediate funds. If you want to help with immediate needs for bedding, camping supplies and just plain cash, you need to send either nonperishable items or a money order (no checks!) to the nearest UPS store. Make money orders payable to Occupy Wall Street and send them to:

Occupy Wall Street
UPS Store 118A
Fulton st #205
New York, NY, 10038

Next, here’s a list of local businesses that will deliver to the protesters at Zuccotti Park is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11aEYlrHbWsYw9UFLmnR3V62NRdN0EtN5aVFJs_YXbg8/edit?hl=en_US

And finally, the New York General Assembly (one of the several organizations involved in the protest) also has a links page for people who want to donate:

http://nycga.cc/donate/

 

Good luck Occupiers! Many of us who can’t be there are thinking of you and supporting you! You’re doing great work. And with a little more help from the NYPD like you got this weekend, this should really take off!

 

Filed Under: whatever
« Older Posts