Filed under: Review
So, yesterday, my inner voracious reader got a good workout while i was waiting to get my hair done at the beauty salon. The basic premise of the novel: an ordinary “Beta Male” loses his wife and is left with a newborn baby. Then he discovers that he is a “Death Merchant,” thanks to the guidance of a man who wears mint green suits. With the help of his lesbian sister, insane Chinese and Russian widow neighbors and his off-the-wall employees (a goth chef and online-dating-obsessed ex-cop), he raises his daughter while basically managing to keep the whole “I collect dead people’s souls” thing to himself. I mean, sure, there’s a whole creepy shadow-minions-talking-to-you-from-the-sewers thing that good ol’ Charlie Asher (the protagonist) has to deal with, but all in all, he maintains a relatively even-keel as he’s faced with the end of the world and the possible overthrow of all humanity by, well, Hell.
This book was maniacally comical. I judge a good novel to have humorous content when I find myself laughing so hard that I genuflect. I doubled over about forty times while sitting in the waiting area. And THAT was just based on the first hundred pages or so. Trust me, the last three hundred pages are even more hysterical, I just wasn’t in a position to bend, given that there was a squat Dominican woman attacking my head. Pick this one up, it’s totally worth it.
At present, I am on the bus on the way to school, updating my iPod.I found this software the other day. It’s called Moody. It’s basically a whole new way of creating playlists in iTunes. I am a closet neurotic. I like things (especially computer/tech-related things) to be a certain way. Which is why I don’t really let anyone touch my stuff. Ever. So, naturally, my iTunes library tends to follow the same sort of trend. I have 11,412 songs. If you exclude audiobooks, comedy shows, and videos, that number is about 10,560. Lots of anthologies, and loads of accumulated tracks, the result of the efforts of an audiophile who been in the biz for eight years. Needless to say, figuring out what to listen to is a welcome chore, but still a chore. I have used the iTunes 5-star rating system, but it doesn’t really get the job done. Before I accidentally deleted my playlists on my PC, my 5-star rating playlist was over 1500 songs. Not exactly easy listening. Moody brings things to a new level. It is basically a 16-square grid arranged by color method. The bottom row goes left to right, sad to happy. The left column from bottom to top, calm to intense. It also has a nifty feature that allows you to spend some quality time with your music, skipping to the next track in a playlist as soon as you rate it. Or you can simply play your music how you want, and rate as you go along. Because my collection is so damned immense, it’s going to take forever to get all my music rated. But once I do, it should be pretty amazing. I’ll do my best to not seem so thoroughly impressed by a color-grid. But I can’t hide my excitement…
