My video glory

What does a special projects editor do exactly? Glad you asked. Waters is starting a series of video roundtables, just like Slate, The New York Times and every other magazine or news source on the planet. Our inaugural effort was on complex event processing, a hot topic they tell me. All in all, not bad. And that moderator! Lock up your women folk. He on fire.

The Night Gardener

After a hard boiled diet of recent Elmore Leonard works -- Pagan Babies, Up in Honey's Room and The Hot Kid -- I've started a flat-out binge of crime novels. I devoured Michael Connelly's Echo Park and The Lincoln Lawyer in short order. Great pacing, solid research, good locales but the dialogue falls flat. Just doesn't have the snap of Leonard at his best. And after the gun play in The Hot Kid and Honey's Room, I wanted more action. I can see these 30s and 40s stories in my head and now I want to write one myself. Something about a bar in the northern suburbs that operates outside the law in the early 1950s. Smoke, whiskey, dames in lingerie and pistols at the ready.

Wanting more noir, I checked out George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener. Despite being centered around a hackneyed serial killer plot -- all the murder victims' names are palindromes, as in Eve, Asa and so on -- this one is officially under my skin. The sentences are heavier than most thrillers, the characters are fuller and sadder and the book's feel is damned realistic. I am hooked, and I want to finish it tonight but I also want to savor it. No higher praise for a book.

On deck: The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta, Soul Circus by Pelecanos, and a collection of early Dutch Leonard crime novels. Life is good.

Cleaning out the camera

My kids, in pumpkin form.



Matthew looks at the camera! Sadly, his brother and sister do not. One day...



A cool stream, straight from the LL Bean catalog.

Mmmmmm, unexplained bacn...

Conversation overheard at a local bar restaurant...

Dot com hipster dude: There's this new term. Have you heard, it's called bacon? It's just like Spam but it's Spam that you sign up for but don't read.

Oh, so that's all the e-mails I send to my Yahoo! account when I sign up to read a first chapter of a book I have no intention of buying. Need to view a hot video clip? Send them to Yahoo! and watch the clip in peace. Then just delete the e-mails.

But according to Google, it's called bacn.

One other great gem from the hipster conversation soon followed. The two guys were talking to a very attractive lady with one of those short spiky hair cuts from the late 70s and early 80s. Very New Wave. She was quite striking and I realize that the only way that haircut works is if you have very small facial features. Anyway, someone was talking about editorial content, like how working women can balance motherhood and a professional life.

Dot com hipster chick: Tell them to read Good Housekeeping.

Meow!