televisi

I dunno what kind of random surfing that enabled Dali to find this scary little article about Anomalocaris, but we had an interesting chat via MSN on how we’d shit our pants if we ever came face to face with one. Then I remembered that I had a book on Burgess Shale called Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould bought a couple months ago from Betterworld Books. Flipped through the index until I found the relevant monster chapter and scanned it for Dali. Click here if you too want to be a geek of prehistoric monsters. [I’m currently reading a 1950s sci-fi book by John Wyndham called The Kraken Wakes. You can bet that one of these days  I’ll have a nightmare on kraken-y, square-jawed sea monsters and go nuts the next time I go swimming at night.]

On to more nerdiness: I had a fantastic time at the KL Alternative Book Fair (KLAB) last weekend. Met some very nice people and chatted about books in general. I related some of the conversations I had to MC and he almost crashed the car laughing. He just doesn’t understand 😦

“So what are you reading? Do you like Maeve Binchy? She’s brilliant kan?”
“Oh, I love her too! What am I reading? It’s a book on dinosaurs. Specifically, the extinction during the Cretaceous. Exciting stuff!”

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“Eh come and say hello on the forum lah! Have you put up your library yet?”
“It’s on Librarything.com. OKlah, I say hello online tonight. Hehe.”

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I also offloaded some books I didn’t like and got myself a free one by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not her best though. It had all the promise of being a great book: magic, Atlantis, the occult… but nah. I was disappointed. I was very tempted to get one or two books from the Bookcrossings people but it didn’t feel right. I think what they’re doing is great but I can’t bear to let go of most of my books. Sharing/lending is fine but I’d want them back and IMHO, that made it unfair for me to pinjam any of theirs.

Although confronted with a gazillion choices, I managed to restrain myself and only bought 1 secondhand book. Just as I was paying for it, a guy comes rushing up and asks if there was another one by the same author. He was a foreigner and I didn’t hear understand him very well but I gathered that a) it was a very good book, b) she was his favourite author, and c) it wasn’t in Kino. I was about to offer the book to him when it popped into my head that hey, this book must be freaking good for him to be making such a fuss. So I continued paying for it and wished him luck. Haha. Karma is soooo gonna bite me on the ass one day. MC asked why I didn’t offer to share the book with him after I read it so we could be nerd-lovers. Now why didn’t I think of that? I’m getting old. And kedekut 😀