I am very glad that Amazon has decided to update the Stanza reading app for iOS5, even though the update doesn’t work on older iOSes and is probably the last update ever to the app, as Amazon forces encourages people to switch to the Kindle. They want you to buy a physical Kindle, but they’ll settle for you using the app.
Anyway, I have been reading books on ereaders since…well, since the days of the Newton. (Yep I’m the one who bought a Newton.) I read them on my computer screen, and I read them on my Palm Pilot device. I remember getting through a boring couple of days of jury duty by reading Star Trek novels on my Palm. Ebooks are great, especially for someone like me who likes to read English or Japanese books, but lives elsewhere. Shipping costs for books internationally are either super-duper-slow (you’ve forgotten you’ve even ordered the book by the time you get it) or ridiculously high. I don’t have to pay shipment for ebooks.
Still, I’ve been getting quite grumpy about the ebook world lately. For one thing, why do I have to pay extra for an ebook if the reader app/program it was on, or the online bookstore that sold it, is no longer? That’s the situation people that relied on Stanza thought they were facing for a month. Stanza is now back, but now I’m wary about the status of the eReader app. It used to be the Palm eReader (before that the store itself was called Peanut Press) but Barnes and Noble bought it, and the app hasn’t been updated in zonkers, and the store itself seems to be slowly bled to death. If/when the eReader app stops working on my iPad/iPhone, what then? I have about 80 books I purchased there. I’m supposed to re-purchase them in another format? Not quite fair. (There’s a workaround, but still.)
So, I still continue to buy books, especially Japanese books (the ebook market in Japan has not taken off yet, mainly because publishers are dragging their feet). I suppose the ebook market will continue to expand, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
This is a solid gold 2012 calendar made to commemorate Walt Disney’s 110th birthday. It was unveiled by a jewelry maker in Ginza, Tokyo called Ginza Tanaka.
The calendar measures 41.66 cm x 66.6 cm (about 16.3” x 26.2”) and comes in a frame. The total weight of the gold is 6 kg (about 13.2 lbs). The description doesn’t specify, but since 18K is the standard for gold jewelry in Japan (14K is not really considered to be solid gold) I’m assuming the calendar is at least 18K.
The calendar costs 60 million yen, or about US $768,250.
Also available: a small 5 gram gold calendar for 45,000 yen, a 1 gram version for 11,000 yen, and a larger gold leaf calendar for 35,000 yen. (Japanese page)
Now, I have been pondering who the heck is the intended customer for this line of gold calendars. It is sort of hard to imagine a lot of Japanese customers buying these, even if Disney fandom runs deep in Japan, since they are so ostentatious. Especially not this year, the year of repeated natural disasters (besides the earthquake and tsunami, there has been record breaking flooding too) and continuing economic woes. Besides, rich Japanese people these days do not like to flaunt their wealth anymore, unlike in the show-off 1980s.
I suspect that the primary target for these calendars are wealthy Chinese customers. Ginza is apparently a mecca for Chinese tourists with money to burn - so much so that the venerable department store Mitsukoshi remade their store to appeal more to them (a move which drew a lot of criticism and ire from their Japanese customer base).
Maybe that’s the role Japan is going to play in the near future: a shiny little playground and shopping mall for rich dilettantes from other Asian countries.
90th Anniversary 90-color Sakura Coupy colored pencil set, in a limited edition of 5,000 sets. It costs 9,000 yen, and so far I’ve only seen it for sale in Japan.
As an adult I prefer Caran d’Ache, Faber-Castell and Mitsubishi Holbein pencils, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Sakura Coupys.
A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses: A review of Judith Krantz by Clive James -
I recently discovered that Random House has released the the entire oeuvre of Judith Krantz
In case you’re too young to remember, until the early to mid 1990s or so, Judith Krantz was the queen of blockbuster romantic fiction, otherwise known as the “sex and shopping” genre. (She published her last novel, The Jewels of Tessa Kent, in 1998, but neither it nor her previous 2 books, Dazzle and Spring Collection, did nearly as well as her previous 7 novels, though they still did better than most. She was no longer the dominant force in her field though.) Current day authors that probably fit into this genre are the Shopaholic books, obviously, and…well I can’t really cite any others since I stopped reading these kinds of books some years ago. But you get the idea. All of Judith Krantz’s books got huge advances (the one she got for the paperback rights to her second book, Princess Daisy, set a record at the time) and most were made into TV miniseries, mostly produced by her husband (who was a legit movie and TV producer anyway, so it wasn’t entirely nepotism I’m sure. Incidentally, their son Tony Krantz is a producer slash director now; he was executive producer of the first 5 seasons of 24.)
Anyway, as I read through her books, conflicting thoughts came to mind. First, she was not such a bad writer, on the surface - but she was given to some pretty crappy overblown prose too. There’s a lot of rather random sex in her books, which made her books naughty back in the day, but these days…well I don’t know, maybe they’ll still be good for some people. And her characters…well. I think that she actually came up with her best set of characters in her first book, Scruples, then gradually ran out of decent ideas.
In essence, Judith Krantz was absolutely in love with the 1980s - even if her first book came out in 1978. She loved the values of the moneyed classes of the 1980s, which she seemed to have seen as a return to the elegance of the era she grew up in, the late 1940s to 1950s, but with more, ostentatious money. If she were just a bit better writer, her books could even be seen as an interesting look at that decade. As it is though, she was just incapable to digging much beyond superficial things. (I also read her autobiography for the first time. Yikes. A woman just steeped in upper-middle-glass-American privilege and snobbery, and not even realizing it, is the impression I came away with.)
Anyway…while I was doing a bit of idle research, I ran across this hilarious review of the aforementioned Princess Daisy by none other than Clive James, for the London Review of Books, back in 1980. He basically nailed a lot of things wrong with her writing. The stuffy comments that start with Sir: are funny too.
Cool or silly? You decide. (source)
I got my iPhone 4S today. (No hassle at all, no lining up at our nearest Orange store. Mr. Guy was the 2nd person there for the 4S.) And I’ve already been having such fun with it! The much improved camera (the photo above is an unadjusted pic taken with it), Siri (love Siri, quirks and all), the lovely crisp screen. My favorite apps look so much nicer. And it’s such a gorgeous object, a pleasure to regard and to hold. I loved my previous phone, the 3GS, too, and may still slightly prefer the curviness of that, but the iPhone 4/4S form is beautiful too. And of course, even the box it comes in is gorgeous. (The picture below was taken with the 3GS, under similar lighting conditions as the egg and toast. You can see the difference in camera quality.)
This is the experience I’ve gotten with almost every computer or gadget I’ve gotten from Apple - that’s quite a lot of computers and gadgets. There are so few obejcts that I own that bring me this rush of pure and simple joy. I suppose that this is what differentiates people who buy Apple products from people who never will and deride those who do. Who cares how a phone or a computer or whatever looks, or feels (how stupid is that?), as long as it has awesome technical specs and works*, right? Well, some of us do care, a lot.
If this is drinking the Kool Aid, bring me more. Now when are the next line of MacBook Pros coming out…
[* the iPhone 4S does have awesome specs etc. of course, but I leave that discussion to others.]
What are some great stories about Steve Jobs? -
Some great personal anecdotes on Quora.
(OK I’ll stop posting Steve Jobs stuff now.)
….and just one more. Contrary to what has been written elsewhere, this doesn’t seem to be an official Pixar tribute, but rather one put together by someone at tauntr.com. Very nicely done. Woody looks particularly spiffy in his black mock turtleneck.
(No I’m not mourning for Steve Jobs all week, but just wanted to collect the best of these tributes.)
[video]