Really?

Why, yes. For $150.

What?

It’s a ‘91 Mazda MX-3, with all that heavy annoying glass removed except the windshield, all that heavy creature comfort nastiness removed, like carpets, door panels, and handles and things. Gone! It’s nothing but a shell with an engine.

Wha… why?

24hoursoflemons.com, that’s why.

Oh yeah. I believe the word you’re looking for is Awesome. See you on the track. The car to look for will look like Cookie Monster.

So at first, there was a lot of kitch. A lot of too predictable-ness. An ominous guy appears in chapter 1 that is able to counter her, what a surprise, he’s ALSO a super-rare fighter. Yeah, we won’t be seeing HIM again. And he won’t be the love interest.
But the thing is, that having pushed through the bad, it got better, and quite a lot better. The chase sequences are good. The love sequences, not so much, but the action stuff is so good that you put up with it.
All things told, a good read, and I’ll pick up book 2 if it comes along.

And I WANT ONE. Just not orange.

2011 Lotus Elise S, 46.7 mpg - not kidding

I look down all the ’status updates’ for the people I know (and some I barely remember) and there isn’t a single original thought, not a single question for input, not a single insight. If it’s an online diary, why is there no thought or apparent effort going into the writing? It’s clearly not a collaborative environment – there’s little incentive to keep up a conversation. It’s not designed to be a convenient way to connect to your friends and take conversations OUT of their environment, as they go to great lengths to keep you from getting those contact points. It’s the whiteboard on the dorm room door – unimportant notes that maybe someone will read, maybe they won’t. I see lots of mental detritus, thoughts of no consequence and provoking no response. Which begs the question – why bother at all?

What is it with the world’s constant need for updated status? How many times a day does someone need to visit myFlitterFaceSpacePlanet to read that their friends are still in front of their phones or computers, not doing anything interesting, because they’re reading someone else’s status? How many times can you see your friends say, “Having a pee,” “Look at something interesting someone else did,” “Going out for a bit,” before you realize that these events aren’t news?

Just because we have the ability to constantly stream what we’re doing doesn’t mean we should. What we should have is a system that makes it easier to share actual thought streams, provoke conversations without arguments, and help people get feedback from their friends in the real world. And I think Facebook has failed catastrophically at that.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. While I appreciate that this may have been the launch of modern True Crime books, the fact is that we see twice as hard on CSI three times a day with new seasons being cranked out in triplicate even now. The wandering nature of the narrative is distracting and plainly annoying to a modern reader. This is a book that time has outdated. I appreciate that it may have been groundbreaking, but now it’s just broken. Uninteresting and slow with no apparent direction. Please everyone, run out to your local store and demand they stop selling this disaster of a book. Send it back to the ’50s where it belongs.
Also given up on:
Bridge of Sighs. At first it opens like a guy going to recount a story about a trip to Italy, to tell about his life in context of life in a small New York town, then it suddenly jumps to him getting locked into a trunk in the woods by a bunch of bullies and him listening to drunk people having sex, and the life of a spoiled artist in Venice. What happened? After a quarter of the book and nothing really going anywhere, it was ejected. There were clearly 2 stories going on, but I just didn’t care enough about either of them to waste more time on it. 1 point for the old man narrative, -1 for the artist, -1 for jumping around. Shame on you Russo. Reel us in and keep us, don’t try to make Memento a book.