Having recently acquired a 3G Kindle Keyboard, I've spent a fair bit of time exploring its capabilities.  Yes, I have spent some money on Amazon for a few ebooks. (My first Amazon purchase took place in October 1995, so we go waaaay back.)  Although I can check and send email and browse many websites, it's no replacement for a netbook — or a smart phone, for that matter!  The real attraction is best summed up by Randall of xkcd fame.

<a href="http://xkcd.com/548/"><img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kindle.png" title="Kindle"></a>

Okay, pecking out that html on the Kindle was laborious and I'm not even sure if this posting method will allow me to do that. If there was no comic visible above, please go to  http://xkcd.com/548/ to see what I was talking about.

I drive a truck for a living, so I just had to smile when I saw this. (Click the cartoon for the punchline.)

having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11:13-16

Monday evening, I gave a talk to the Orthodox Christian Fellowship chapter at the University of Toronto on the subject of Orthodox pilgrimage. I discussed some of the biblical precedents, some of the forms that pilgrimage can take, and some of the traditional pilgrimage destinations. Then I gave a brief slide show presentation of some of my own wanderings, with commentary.

Waiting for me when I got home was a DVD I’d borrowed from the public library. Saint-Jacques… La Mecque is a delightful film, and I recognized several of the characters from my own journey to Santiago de Compostela. There was added delight once I began to recognize some of the places they were travelling through.

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a
number of old people offer the following explanation for the great
disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why
all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years
working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read
hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have
already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of
clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the
ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I
could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten
God; that's why all this has happened."
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I’ve been playing around with Twitter for a day or so, and now I *think* I have things fairly well-integrated. We’ll see just how much of a feedback loop this produces once it gets propagated.

I’m on my way out the door now, for a weekend road trip to Galion OH via Buffalo. I’ll have sporadic access to email, but my phone will be off most the time.

Well actually, there were no undead in Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Nor have I read the 2009 mashup I reference in this post title. (I’m curious, though, and a big fan of the Austen original so I may pick it up one of these days.)

A few months ago, several bloggers decided to do a summer reading of War and Peace, using the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. There was a schedule, and bloggers being bloggers I’m sure people also wrote as they read. Me being me, I read it through in several fairly intense sessions.

In actual fact, I haven’t quite finished it. I began reading Part Two of the Epilogue, but after four or five pages of Tolstoy’s maunderings about fate and the destiny of nations and the soul of the people, I gave up on it. I skimmed through the last twenty or so pages, searching for any type of narrative but in the end it was just too much for me. Much like the excursuses in Les Miserables, the political and historical questions being addressed were too far removed from my interests. Ah well.

Anyone know of a good English translation of Don Quixote?