Archive for books

Weekly Geeks 2009-09 — Favorite book/author quotes

Posted in books, humor, Mark Twain, Weekly Geeks with tags , , , on March 10, 2009 by Paxton

Weekly Geeks

It’s time, once again, for that weekly dose of geekiness, Weekly Geeks!

This week’s theme is “A Quote A Day”.  They want you to give 7 quotes from or about your favorite books and/or authors.  We can post one a day, several a day, as long as you get in about 7 quotes.  Here’s the task:

You may want to come up with a theme, such as favorite passages from books, author quotes, political quotes, quotes about books or reading, humorous quotes, whatever. Or you may not want a theme at all; maybe you just want to gather up seven assorted quotes that appeal to you. You may want to start each of your posts of the week with a quote, or you may want to give quotes posts of their own in addition to your regular posts. It’s all up to you!

One of my favorite authors of all time is Mark Twain. He is consistently one of the most entertaining writers of fiction and non-fiction we have ever known.

Mark Twain

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Kick ass alternative covers for books and movies

Posted in Back to the Future, books, Harry Potter, movies, ninjas, Penguin Classics, pop culture with tags , , on February 20, 2009 by Paxton

Pengiun CoversLast week I did a Weekly Geeks theme in which I discussed several alternate, foreign book covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  It was cool doing the research for that and while looking around I came across several other alternate book covers that were so cool I had to share them here.

The covers we’ll look at today are different than the Harry Potter covers, though.  The book covers I am going to show you today are entirely fan created by graphics artists.  They create them because they are a fan of design and there are several initiatives on their blogs and in Flickr where they create these designs just to stay sharp and keep up on their designing skills.  These book covers may not be real, but they rock.  They look entirely professional, like some publisher actually created these and are selling them somewhere.  Don’t go thinking they are available in some crazy limited edition in Uruguay, and I had to traipse my lazy, white ass through the Uruguayan jungles to find these little treasures.  I didn’t, I barely want to traipse my ass to the fridge for another Girl Scout Cookie.  I’m not going to Uruguay for a book.  However, if these books were real, I would be very tempted to try.

So let’s start off with cover redesigns from the series I talked about last week; Harry Potter (click the images for larger versions).

Harry Potter 1Harry Potter 2Harry Potter 3Harry Potter 4
Harry Potter 5Harry Potter 6Harry Potter 7

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Weekly Geeks 2009-05 – Alternate book covers

Posted in books, Harry Potter, pop culture, Weekly Geeks with tags , , , on February 12, 2009 by Paxton

Weekly Geeks

There’s a very cool blog site called Weekly Geeks. Every week it posts a theme that you can do on your own blog. I’ve somewhat passively watched this for a year or so and have debated about following along on this blog. I’ve enjoyed many of the themes they come up with and I especially enjoyed watching other bloggers execute the theme.

This week’s theme is called Judge a Book By It’s Cover. You pick one of your favorite books and talk about the different covers that have been released for that book. Here’s this week’s explanation:

This week it’s all about judging books by their covers! Pick a book–any book, really–and search out multiple book cover images for that book. They could span a decade or two (or more)…Or they could span several countries. Which cover is your favorite? Which one is your least favorite? Which one best ‘captures’ what the book is about?

the bookworm did a great job with Gone With the Wind on her blog. I thought it was a really fun idea so I’m going to try doing this myself. It’s pretty simple and easier to do than a full article, so I’m going to try it.

My pick is going to be my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I’m not going to show all the different covers, because we’d be here until I keeled over on the keyboard dead before we could finish it all, but there are some very interesting covers for this book. Here are a few of the coolest/most interesting.

American HP6
This is obviously the American version of the Harry Potter 6 cover. I like all the green and the scene depicted shows Dumbledore and Harry gazing into the pensieve.  A very ominous, but great looking cover.

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Wrecking someone else’s journal

Posted in books, humor, journals, personal with tags , on September 19, 2008 by Paxton

Okay, it’s been a long week. I would have had this blog article done a few days ago but the monitor on my laptop died on me. Add to that fact that work has been really busy and the outcome is that Pax can’t finish his blog articles on time. Right now I’m having to write this blog “guerilla style” while at work. Not a problem for me because, as you know, I’m a ninja, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

So I was talking with my friend Debi at work and she whips out this kick ass book she’s been working on called Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith. It has tasks for you to do on each page that involve somehow wrecking the journal. It’s pretty cool, here’s the cover.

You get to do some crazy, random things to the book like taking a shower with it, mailing it to someone, chew on a page, glue office supplies to a page and many others. I found some sample pages on Amazon.

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Odds ‘n Ends from the last two weeks

Posted in books, humor, personal, random with tags , , , , on September 5, 2008 by Paxton

Sniffing GlueYeah, so I missed another week last week. Crap, I don’t know how that happened. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue….or did I? Seriously, I did pick the wrong week.

Had a lot going on this past week. We went up to Columbia, SC to visit friends Kathy and Himal who have chosen to live up there as they finish their PhDs. We had a blast. They were able to procure us invites to an “insider’s only” party at a place called Jillian’s. It featured free beers and appetizers from 7 to 9pm. Needless to say, we came, we drank, we danced the Cupid Shuffle. It was a grand old time. We finished the evening by stumbling our party-ed out selves over two blocks to the IHop. What was cool, was that the IHOP was housed in the old A-frame architecture that the franchise had back in the ’80s.

A-frame IHOP

I hadn’t seen an A-frame IHOP in years. There used to be one in Birmingham, AL for the longest time but it was converted into a car wash or something.

So that was a blast.  What else happened, oh Auburn beat Louisiana-Monroe.  It wasn’t the pass-happy offense everyone expected, but I’m hoping that they held back a bit because Louisiana-Monroe wasn’t the strongest of opponents.

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