Jumbled Words

So, today I was suitably humbled by my limits. Again. Nothing dramatic, really, but lately I’ve been feeling like I could maybe manage to work part time soon. Today I freaked out (inside my head) from being in the same waiting room as six other people, all silent, all keeping to themselves.

Not yet, in other words.

Anyway; it was a valuable lesson, and after that I went to the yarn shop next and was (as usual) frustrated by the lack of knowledge of foreign yarns, needles and other things. And then the woman ringing up my purchases was so new that she had to walk through the shop to find the prices on each type of yarn, and then didn’t know where they was, so I had to SHOW HER. No plus points there, sorry. Sadly this is the only yarn shop in town, so I have to keep my muttering to myself (and my blog).

Apparently I have managed to read 13 books in one month. That is a new record, I believe, which was made easier by the fact that some were children’s books (most notably Coraline) and YA (of which I liked the very emo-titled After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings and Flew Away the most). Best adult fiction of January goes to Udda by Sara Lövestam, no questions asked.

I promised my sister to send her some of my books, because I seriously have far too many that I have read and probably won’t read a second time. I will enjoy spreading the gospel of awesome books to all I can possibly reach.

A few links, since my project is calling my name and I’m so cutting this short:

A school in the U.S. is banning the complete version of Anne Frank’s Diary. Yes seriously. To be fair, I didn’t even know there was a censored version, which is the one I’ve read. But yes, it got pulled off the shelf for containing sexually graphic content. The passage that high school students shouldn’t be allowed to read? It goes as follows:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

For shame! That is certainly not girls wonder every single day, and that would hurt their innocent eyes if they read about, am I right? Then again, this is also a few days after another parent got a DICTIONARY banned for containing the definition for “oral sex”.

Seriously, America, what is this accomplishing?

(For example, I remember being ten or so and wondering what the difference between the words “puss” och “kyss” was. Those two are both terms for kissing, one with closed mouth, and one with tongue, btw. It was beyond frustrating to discover that in my dictionary the definition for “puss” was “kyss”, and for “kyss” it was “puss”. And I must say, my life would not have been ruined had there actually been an explanation for such things in that damn book. There wasn’t. I guess it was elementary school-proofed.)

Also, there is another Amazon-fail going on. Yes, again. It doesn’t matter so much here in Sweden because we have our own online book shops and all, and I can’t say that I’ve ever used Amazon (since I moved back here, anyway), but I have to say that removing an entire publisher (Macmillan) from their website over some kind of disagreement is just stupid. Tansy has collected most of the links regarding this (here and here) and so I can provide you with my favourite links on the topic.

Scott Westerfeld says awesome things about it here (giving the best explanation to date), and concludes it with:

Hey, Amazon. When cutting off publishers, don’t start with the one that has the most science fiction writers. We will blog you dead!

He also likens the whole deal with Amazon spitting their pacifier across the room in anger. A lovely metaphor, I have to say.

Furthermore, John Scalzi says the second most awesome thing about the whole deal here, in which he points out why it’s so very dumb to try to stealth-delist a whole publisher. He even provides us with a way that Amazon could’ve gone about it all, but didn’t.

My favourite part of his post, though, is the following:

Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

And I’m not just saying that because I’ve finally found a person that abuses italics more than I do. Though, to be fair, I think I’m actually more of a junkie of parantheses these days…

Anyway, I am so finishing this post up RIGHT NOW, cos seriously, writing to be done. Emo-ing to be had. By characters, not me, actually.

PS. Tomorrow I’m going to blog in my Swedish blog about the OMG SO STUPID person who went on TV and said that breast milk is as bad as carbonated drinks for a kid, because there is too much sugar in it. And yes, I am entirely seriously. She really said that. True story.