• Books

    Borrowed or Swiped, You Decide

    I borrowed this book from my MIL the other day when we went down to see their new place: The Nine Parts of Desire. I couldn’t put it down while I was there, and it’s one of “those books.” You know the kind I mean – books you heard about a long time ago, wanted to read, but never got around to it. I like books where the writer has to become a part of a community in order to write about it and the people in it. That was why I liked Nickel and Dimed. I read the latter…

  • Home Improvement - Moblog - The Never-Ending Bloga

    The Long Nightmare is Over

    Well, I’ve put an 8-hour day into screwing around trying to get something to work again. So now, let’s talk about the house again, shall we? The “kitty garden” is growing fairly well, except that the lawn service guys keep cutting the hell out of it with their big string trimmer. I keep forgetting to put some fencing around it; they came earlier than expected this weekend and caught me again with no fence and no little sign in Spanish saying “Favor de no cortar” which I hope is a fairly polite way of saying “please don’t cut (these).” However,…

  • The Never-Ending Bloga

    I am SO smart, S – M – R – T!

    Oh my GOD! Amazon links are finally working right. Thank you, Silverberry! I never could get Brad Choate’s version (slightly different, similar effect) working; I ran across a reference that it had to do with smart quotes replacing dumb quotes (guess what I have?) The “complex” macro uses overLIB, process tags, and I suspect there’s something I should do with encode_js in order to deal with apostrophes in the titles of books. <MTMacroDefine name="amazon" ctag="amazon"> <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']"> <MTAmazon devtoken="XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" associateid="xxxxxxxxxxx" search="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']" method="Asin"> <a href="<MTAmazonLink>" onmouseover="return overlib('<img src=\'<MTAmazonSmallImage>\' align=\'left\' border=\'0\' hspace=\'5\'/><b>Amazon Price:</b><MTAmazonSalePrice><b><br />Released:</b> <MTAmazonReleaseDate format="%B %Y"><br /><a href=\'<MTAmazonLink>\'>Buy me…</a>',…

  • Music

    Alooooha, Grammy!

    HONOLULU – Hawaiian music is doing swimmingly with listeners, and now it’s is ready to catch the big one: the Grammy. The genre will have its own category for the first time next year if the National Academy of Arts & Sciences approves. Great news, long time coming. If you’ve ever wondered “who sings that great mix of Over the Rainbow and Wonderful World,” that’s “Iz” Kamikawiwo’ole, a Hawaiian artist who died a few years ago. I was so lucky to have gone to a live show at the Northwest Folklife Festival that featured some Hawaiian Slack Key Masters. I’m…