: half-baked III :

Bikes have training wheels. Books have bookends. What do we have to keep us upright and in balance? Two spindly legs, that’s what. What we need are clothes with airbags. The savings in healthcare costs alone would be huge; the savings in pain and suffering would be huger. Broken bones and dislocations and physical therapy would become a thing of the past. As soon as the airbag sensors detected a gravitational pull or horizontal orientation, psssshhhhhhhh, they’d inflate and cushion our impact. Falling would be fun again. Someone should get on this.

That’s my thought, anyway. Well, not so much a thought as a brain cramp.  heh heh  All rightie, then, seems like a good time to find out what’s new elsewhere:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach — this one’s a Shop-Vac of a book, it sucks you right in to an absorbing, old-fashioned tale ostensibly about baseball. But it’s not, not really. In essence the book is about failure and resilience and shortcomings and striving; aka the human condition.The novel’s setting is a small college in the upper midwest and it’s populated by characters as real and complicated as ourselves. You’ll miss them when the book ends. Check out Harbach’s magazine, n+1, too.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — this one just landed in my mailbox, so I’m short on details. But if you’re a gamer, a fan of 80s pop culture, a geek, or any combination thereof, this is your lucky day. The story takes place in 2045 and most everyone prefers a virtual world (OASIS) to the one they’re living in. There’s an intricate, high-stakes contest for gamers, which is the premise of the novel, there are also 80s music and video game references galore, plus the dude who wrote it was the screenwriter for the film, Fanboys.

Carolina Liar — a musician from South Carolina hooked up with a music producer from Sweden (think Snow Patrol) and, abra cadabra, the album Coming To Terms. The band’s new one, Wild Blessed Freedom, comes out September 27th and their tour begins October 10th in Columbus, OH with Gavin DeGraw and David Cook.

From the Toy Store — things have come a long way since Chatty Cathy and Matchbox cars. Now, they’re called Art Toys or Designer Vinyl and they’re created by artists like Frank Kozik, Brian Taylor, Gary Baseman, Brandt Peters — geniuses, if you ask me. Words cannot do justice to these awesome designs, you need to see them for yourself:

http://www.frozenempiretoys.com/home.html

http://www.kidrobot.com

Well, that does it for this, the third edition of half-baked. You’ve been a swell guest, you’re welcome to visit any time; the door is always open.

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