Multiply 365 Day 12 - Shopping cart

I am at a loss for what to blog about today.  Maybe that is a good thing, I don't know.  I do know that I live this life every day, and rarely is it all that exciting, so I guess having little to talk about should be the norm rather than the exception.  On the plus side, forcing myself to blog has given me the opportunity to do two things at once, as I usually use my blogging time to also listen to my Pandora station, and work on tweaking the music more to my liking.  It may never get to where I had Launchcast over at Yahoo, where I was over 5000 such tweakages before Yahoo sold the operation to CBS radio and thereby ended all the work I have done.  But then they also tried killing my blog, and we can see how well that worked out for them.  


There, a whole paragraph and I didn't even try.  Maybe this blogging thing isn't so tough after all.  I will admit though that by attempting this project, and it is still just an attempt until I get all 365 entries squared away, I find I am stretched for time online.  Some things have slipped through the cracks.  I have given up on Bingo Explosion on Facebook and on more than one occasion I have forgotten to deal with my fantasy hockey team in a timely fashion.  There are only so many hours in the day after all, so I am prioritizing.   Not that I have made my blog the top priority, but it has moved up the chart somewhat.

When thinking of what I wanted to blog about today I decided I would go back a day and revisit something I had mentioned yesterday, namely my Amazon purchases and why I made them.  I bought three books, two non fiction and one fiction, and each for a different reason.  Rather than just save them for listing after I read them (and they all have piqued my curiosity enough that they will be read) I thought I might get into the thought processes of why I picked them to begin with.  

The first selection was "The Johnstown Flood" by David McCullough.  This was the book that was supposed to be delivered before Christmas, thus giving me some reading material over the holiday, which would have been a great way to tune out during the family chatter about who got what from my grandmother's estate, but alas that wasn't to be so I had to suffer through.  McCullough is probably my favorite writer on American history, having read his books on John Adams, 1776 and the Panama Canal.  The Johnstown flood is interesting for a few of reasons, one being that Johnstown is not that far from here, about an hour or so by car from Pittsburgh.  The second is that I am a little familiar with that region, when I used to spend  time with my father as a kid we would sometimes visit some more distant relatives in Windber, which is near Johnstown.  The third is that the Johnstown flood has the distinction of being the largest inland flood in the history of the United States.  

The second selection came almost by accident.  I was actually looking for a different book on my Christmas list, because I know that very few people outside of the blog actually read the list and there are some things on my list that I know I will not get over the holiday, and books that aren't readily available in the book section at WalMart or KMart are one such item.  I would be more likely to get the pliable female than a book that is on my list.  Anyway I was doing some looking for a book by sports writer/blogger Bill Simmons when I ran into a review of the book, and it wasn't really a good review of the tome, but the review was so well written that I decided to look up the author, Charles P. Pierce, and after some googling here and point and clicking there I ran into his book, 'Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free".  As for what attracted me to the book, here is a brief sample of his writing, regarding Barack Obama's 2010 State of the Union address

"The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out of Olympia Snowe.

And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories, where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this president wants to do."


The last selection was not so much that I was looking for this specific book, but because if I get the order over $25 I get free shipping, so do I order two books and pay over $25 anyway when shipping and handling are figured in, or do I in essence, throw in a third inexpensive book, that is basically free.  I think we all know the answer to that one when it comes to me and free things.  Besides, there are plenty of the Spenser books by Robert B Parker out there that I haven't read, the series is almost 40 books long, and I was not one of the first to the party (the series started in 1973, I was 4), so there are plenty of older issues that I haven't read yet that will also give me more background on the characters, so I went ahead and put "The Judas Goat" in my shopping cart as well.  Not the first in the series (that would be "The Godwulf Manuscript"), but one of the earlier ones (5th in the series).

See, I figured out something to blog about.  This isn't as hard as I thought it would be.