"You must remember, all my men are nervous as kittens just now"

When I sit and work at the shitty Dell desktop computer that is STILL my only option here at home, ever since the incident of the rain and the window and the Linux laptop in the night time, and come on, man, doesn't anyone love me enough to step up and buy me this wee Linux thing so that I can lay in bed while I write reviews of juvenile nonfiction botany books? I promise I won't make you read 'em!

Ok, anyway, I have limited things to look at here as my ass turns to rock on this cheap IKEA desk chair. There's a can of pens. A pelican feather. Two staplers, both out of staples. And stacked on my desk behind the monitor are two small collections of pulp paperbacks.

One is kind of random, 19 titles ranging from a 1961 edition of Tales from the Decameron, which has a pretty cover, to Everything a Woman Needs to Know to Get Paid What She's Worth... In the 1980's (ellipsis theirs). Little old paperbacks that don't fit anywhere else, or are fragile. A crazy edition of Farewell, My Lovely. Los Angeles's Big Read campaign asked to use my scan of that cover for their collateral materials. They're doing The Maltese Falcon, which is a little stupid, given that the novel is set in San Francisco and god knows there's plenty of noir fiction set in L.A., but at least they're doing fiction! Maryland's One Book is an extremely tough sell this year - a contemporary biography of nobody famous. (I ain't saying it's not a good book, just that it's a tough sell.)

The other stack is my prized collection of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. Mostly Signet paperbacks, one hardback first edition from my Great-uncle Larry's house, and the especially rare The Book of Bond, pseudonymously written by Kingsley Amis in 1965. I consult these more often than you might think. More often than the dictionary, which, actually, should come as no surprise to anyone.

When, for example, The Talented Cousin Tim told me that the new Bond film was to have the extremely unpunchy title A Quantum of Solace - I mean, come on, is that a Bond title? or the title of a geriatric love story involving a Redgrave and Kris Kristofferson? I pulled out my copy of For Your Eyes Only, which is Bond short stories (and which by the way has the most terrible cover), and sure enough, "A Quantum of Solace" is in there. I'm guessing they won't be using the story's plot in the movie. It's a story about James Bond going to dinner and being bored, and then being told a story. A woman acts like a slut and then gets punished for it (ooh, Commander Fleming, you misogynistic old pile of overentitled crap!), but still, not a plot that would make up for a title that doesn't involve the word "Die" or "Live" or "Goldfinger".

Heh heh. Goldfinger. You can't make that kind of shit up.

Anyway, why did I open Moonraker today? I don't know. I was tired of the blog tagline up there. I had a dream that I changed the tagline, but I can't remember what I changed it to in the dream. Something about art, craft, hippos. If there were anything of any of those three things in this blog, I might consider using it. But there's not.

So I found that quote you see way up there, and a paragraph later came to this.

"When they had put a hundred yards between themselves and the cave Bond looked back. He imagined himself with six tough men and all the right gear."

Yep. It's Friday all right. What do you have planned for the evening?