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Shiny Things - January 26th, 2008
Jan. 26th, 2008
07:53 am - Audioreading
A little while ago I finished Louis Sachar's Holes. It's a good book, and the reader did a good job. I'd already seen the movie, which I also thought was really good, and it turns out that it is surprisingly faithful to the book.
I'm now listening to Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Obviously the style of prose is rather dated since it was published in 1873, but it's still surprisingly readable. My only real complaint is that the reader doesn't know that "quays" rhymes with "antipodes". (Okay, it's true that "kay" is a variant pronunciation of "quay", but it's not the most common one. And I admit that I only know that the "e" in "antipodes" isn't silent because the word appears in one of my favorite poems.)
08:13 am - 826 Stores
A colleague showed me a picture his brother had taken of the front of a store, called the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. We pondered what such a store was selling (and made some conjectures related to time travel in the style of the movie Primer) before I just looked it up on Google.
There is indeed such a store, and a number of sibling stores: Brooklyn Superhero Supply, Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., The Pirate Store, and The Boring Store (which obviously sells things for making holes, and is completely the wrong place to go if you want spy gear, absolutely, nope, I have no idea what you're talking about).
The stores are actual stores, but the merchandise appears to be more imaginative than practical. They are used by the 826 National program to raise funds, inspire creativity, and advertise their programs to the local community. 826 National is an innovative tutoring, writing, and publishing nonprofit based in seven cities across the country. Not as exciting as actual time travel, but still a pretty nifty idea.
So what does the Time Travel Mart sell? "The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a leader in convenience retailing, sells everything you need before you take a road trip through the fourth dimension. You can grab time-machine fuel, a can of mastodon meat, and a cup of coffee in one quick stop. For Sale: Dinosaur eggs and princess hats; robot-emotion upgrades, dodo chow, and scarlet letters; time-machine parts; coffee."
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