Excellent piece by Anthony Bourdain with thoughts on Harvey Pekar. The Cleveland/Pekar/American Splendor episode of No Reservations was excellent, altho I was a bit suprised that Bourdain singled it out as his fave episode they've ever done. I have not read enough of Pekar's work over the years. I should correct that. Speaking of Bourdain, here's he is being interviewed by Jay Rayner. I've read middling reviews of Medium Raw but I'm sure I'll get around to reading it eventually. Bourdain's coming back to the area this fall, but we'll probably skip that. Altho his talk that we saw at DPAC was a lot of fun I kinda don't feel the need to see him again in another big fancy concert hall. If it was gonna be a different format or something, I'd be more interested.

Here's an interesting piece by Bill Bryson about stuff. It's an excerpt from his new book At Home which seems to be Bryson wanders around his house and writes about the stuff he finds there. I'm assuming the book goes into some actual detail about, say, why forks have four tines. As opposed to just saying "oh well, no one knows... hey, look at that cruet." I'm kind of a sucker for books and articles like this -- history of the pencil or salt or whatever. It occured to me at some point that Schott's Miscellany was sort of the real life version of Strange Facts Known By Few.

I've been trying to keep up with the fracas going on between Macmillan and Amazon. I mean, mostly it's just a couple of big business fighting it out which, right, why should I care. Here's a good overview from Charlie Stross. Also the expected witty and insightful ranting from John Scalzi. I've been thinking about why my sympathies pretty much immediately went to the Macmillan side. I mean, I use Amazon all the time and am generally pretty pleased with the overall experience of shopping there. It wasn't until I read John August's take that things snapped into focus. Amazon's strategy of de-listing all books published by Macmillan in both electronic and print forms is, in fact, a dick move. It's such a dick move, in fact, that it almost renders the merits of their stance moot. I kinda don't care whether the Amazon case has merits because they way they handled it was so classless and petty and just, well, dickish. It's not like I'm gonna start boycotting Amazon but I am planning to spend more time researching my buying options in the future and not just use them as a 1-stop all purpose shopping location.

Weather update. Surprisingly, there was still snow on the ground this morning. Well, honestly, it was more a crunchy mix of ice & snow. But still better than soggy grass and mud.

Hey, hey... new Anthony Bourdain book next summer. That should be fun.

Enjoy this while you can as I'm sure it'll get pulled down sooner rather than later. It's "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo" by the Billy May Orchestra with footage from the classic Rankin-Bass show. In the words of Esquivel, feliz navidad, baby.

This morning I did probably my last radio show before the holidays. I mean, there's always a chance of emergency subbing but I'm not planning to do the show next Thursday (Xmas Eve). So this was my chance to bust out the holiday jams. But because we're 8 days out from Xmas, I didn't wanna roll with 2 full hours of Xmas music. So I did a regular playlisst show except that 12 of my 15 non-playlist tracks were seasonal faves. Well, some of my faves anyway (Dino, the Roches, Cool John Ferguson, Acid Xmas). And I'm rather ridiculously pleased with how well it all hung together. My only regret is that I forgot to bring my copy of "Christmas in Hollis."

In other holiday news, here's an excellent interview with the Rifftrax crew in which they discuss their least favorite Christmas movies.

From the Dept. of Greedy Acquisitiveness Dept., here's the latest thing I wantwantwant: the Fat Duck Cookbook. This is a smaller version of the Big Fat Duck Cookbook which was Beard-nominated. I don't tend to go for cookbooks that are mostly full of recipes I'll never make. But I love Dave McKean and the smaller version apparently retains most of his art from the original and even has a new McKean cover. Plus it'll keep my Harold McGee and Hervé This books company on the shelf.

Don't remember where I found out about this (probably boing²), but it's an excellent interview with Daniel Clowes, creator of Eightball, Ghost World and many more. Related, A.V. Club reviews And Here's the Kicker, the book from which the Clowes interview was dropped. Sounds really interesting. And funny. Given the pace at which I read (glacial puts it mildly) it might be a while before I get to it. Will report back if/when I do.

Did you know there was an earlier (1946) version of "the Coffee Song"? Me neither.

So apparently Amazon UK paid almost £2 million for one of the copies of J. K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard. You can see pics and read reviews here. Thanks to wordnerdy for the heads up. I'm amused by the number of people suggesting (in comments at Amazon UK) that there's something wrong with them spending this amount of money on one book, regardless of the fact that it's a handmade object by an insanely popular author and the fact that all the money's going to charity. I'm just glad that one of the copies ended up in the hands of someone willing to post pictures and reviews online.

I forgot to mention this earlier but there was actually something funny in the Sunday Times Magazine questions column last weekend. Normally it's just Deborah Solomon sounding like an ass. In fact, I've read that a couple of people (including Ira Glass) have accused her of editing their answers in a way that changed the meaning of what they'd said and of making up new questions to answers they'd given. Anyway, Sunday's subject was Umberto Eco. The high point of the interview was when he responded (ostensibly) to a question about the DaVinci Code by saying that Dan Brown was like a character from Foucault's Pendulum. First time I ever heard of DaVinci Code I remember thinking it sounded like Foucault's Pendulum for morons. But it never occurred to me that Brown actually was one of Eco's characters come to life.

And still more Deathly Hallows yammering, again, below the cut for any slow readers in our midst...