Post Christmas Review Post

It seems that whenever I decide that something is just too impossibly uncool to ever be desired, it gets wrapped up and put under the Christmas tree. I made up my mind that iPods were stupid soon after they came out, when Mindy's was stolen on MUNI. I wasn't about to spend several hundred dollars on something that any Junior High kid could run off with. Then everybody had one and they seemed too popular to be cool. I guess all I can do now is hope that there are so many of them in use, Junior High kids will choose to run off with one that belongs to somebody else. I am quite attached to my little gadget.

A new MP3 player, of course, requires one to fully appreciate one's iTunes Music Store account. I know that I have terrible taste in music, but I do recommend Indian Summer, by the band Carbon Leaf. Their song "Life Less Ordinary" has a frightening potential to be overplayed on the radio, but the song "What About Everything" is really fun to listen to, and I love it. The rest of the CD is growing on me. I recommend it— I think it's a fun CD. It's a little different from other stuff that they play on KFOG.

The most popular gift in the Phillips family this year was The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. I received a copy from my parents, my mother gave copies to both of her siblings and one of her nieces, and my parents recieved one from the same Aunt and Uncle they gave one to. The problem with the book is, as anyone who has perused a Cartoon Issue of the magazine, that the people who write about the cartoons are not usually very good at it. Robert Mankoff, the Art Editor and Editor of the volume, is a particularly dull writer. Ian Frazier and Calvin Trillin wrote excellent essays for it, and they should have been allowed to write the parts that Mankoff took on. The book-and-CDs set is perfect, however, for someone as addicted to cartoons as I am.

Meanwhile, when one gets bored of cartoons, there's always "The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen". The set of six novels weighs a full nine pounds (it's marked on the box) and is illustrated with 19th-century woodcuts. I have made it through Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and started Sense & Sensibility. I was up until 3 am the other night reading Persuasion. As Patrick pointed out, it's an addiction, but... you say "only one more chapter," and then Louisa Musgrove falls down the stairs of the Cobb, and then it's 2:30 am. I did need to peek in the list of characters at the back of the current book to see who is going to marry whom. I'm such a wimp, I can't even stand the suspense of Jane Austen.

It is raining very hard, making a lovely sound on the windows.