Books Piled Up, Chapter 2

In the two and a half months since my previous post on this topic I've managed to get my to-be-read pile down from 41 books to, wait for it, wait for it, 40 books! I really thought I was doing better than that. Can I blame Christmas? Actually, no. I got two books and I just finished And Then We Came To The End.

Sorry, America. I thought I was doing betterthan that. I feel like those people on The Biggest Loser finding out they only lost one pound.

Books Piled Up

I've written previously about my obsessions over my to-be-read pile. Sometimes I think it is like a mania. I know The Wife does. Right now my to-be-read pile consists of 41 books. I like to think I would have made some serious headway if not for Ghost Wars, probably could have gotten it down to 35-38 books. I say this not to impress you but to state that I may have a bit of a problem. At a book a week I'll finish all these books on August 23, 2008. Of course, between Hannukah, Christmas and my birthday and my own buying this pile will grow even if I read them at a steady pace.
Where did these books come from? It turns out I've spent virtually no money on them.

• 17 are from paperbackswap.com. I've received 46 books and sent out 40 since I joined in December 2005. And the thing is, as I read these books I just exchange them for even more books.
  
• 6 are books The Wife has read.
  
• 4 were picked up on the street. People are constantly leaving books out on the street in Brooklyn and few things scare The Wife more than seeing a pile of discarded books while taking a weekend family stroll.
• 3 were bought when I was a member of the Hard Case Crime Club. These are the only books I paid retail for with my own money and weren't first read by somebody else. (I sound like a White House press secretary with all these qualifiers.)
• 3 were bought used.
• 3 are hand-me-downs from my father-in-law. He gives me lots of books but these are the few I actually want to read. Mostly, they sit unwanted on paperbackswap.com.
• 3 were gifts.
• 2 were bought on a gift card I got for my birthday in January. I picked these books out of all the ones at Barnes & Noble and still they've been sitting around for more than six months.

I'll check in on this later to see if I've made any progress.

NFL TV Distribution Maps

I love this website. It tells what NFL games are being telecast all over the country. I like it not just to find out what games are being shown in New York (Washington at Jets at 1 PM and the big Patriot-Colt game at 4. Since the Jets are at home there's no Fox game at 1 even though the Giants are off. The NFL won't show a game against a home game which sucks if you live in New York where we have two teams. This rule is particularly annoying since a)The home teams always sell out and b)I never go to football games. I should mention I will be at a christening on Sunday and couldn't watch the game anyway.) but these maps are highly entertaining in their own right.

This week there's no non-HD game but it's always fun to see what will be the one none-HD CBS game. Sadly, it's The Wife's beloved Cleveland Browns almost every week. Is there any excuse for not having every game in HD? I bought my HDTV for sports and I can't even watch non-HD sports at this point. Spend the money for the equipment, CBS!

I like finding oddball scheduling to show hometown heroes. Austin will get the Carolina/Tennessee game to see Vince Young even though most of the rest of Texas sees Green Bay vs. Kansas City and southern Mississippi gets to see local boy Brett Favre.

Why is Miami seeing Green Bay/Kansas City instead of the Tampa Bay game? Kansas City isn't even a divisional rival of the Dolphins. Are they that alienated from northern Florida?

Next week's Patriot/Colt game will be shown nationally except in Houston (playing at Oakland) and Cleveland which is hosting Seattle on Fox. Sorry, guys. Thanks to the handy chart at the bottom we can see northern California came to their senses and will get the big game instead of the Raiders game which is expected to be blacked out. You could really piss some people off in the Bay Area by buying the remaining tickets and forcing them to show the local game!

Certain Common Themes in the early Fantastic Four

For the past few months I've been reading old Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Fantastic Four comic books to my daughter. I was glad to share one of the crown jewels of American literature with Gwendolyn but I noticed certain, shall I say, recurrent themes in these stories. In order to make sure I wasn't just imagining them I decided to make a chart of how often certain things occured. Please click on the chart below, it's a bit easier to read that way.
We can see how the classic Jack Kirby splash page of a crazy Reed Richards machine doesn't show up for quite awhile. Notice how the early themes of Ben transforming back to human form and his fights with Johnny slowly fade away. Reed is always there to catch a falling Human Torch until the FF's change of direction with issue #30. And Stan and Jack never got tired of a final panel of the whole team or the word "Bah!"

Well, enjoy. God know I wasted plenty of time on this.