Take that, Amazon!

I got tired of having to redirect links of books on websites from Amazon to independent bookstores, or copy/pasting them from the NYT book reviews, so I made this simple bookmarklet that lets me select a title and/or author and search Goodreads with one click.

To install: drag the link below to the bookmark bar in your browser.

Search Goodreads

To use:

Select the text for the book title and/or author on a web page, then click the "Search Goodreads" bookmark.

It should pass the selected text to Goodreads in a search that it opens in a new window. If you're a member of Goodreads and signed on, you will be able to add the book to your books and find an independent bookseller to buy it from.

You can try it out here with this title by one of my favorite authors:

What Are People For? by Wendell Berry

(If you're unfamiliar with bookmarklets, ask Google.)

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE SUPPORT your independent booksellers through local or online book purchases. Right now B&N, Amazon, Wal-mart, and Apple are poised to create a monopoly on books and eBooks and frankly I want to support small businesses with ties to my community. They are some of the few remaining "Great, Good Places" we have left in this country.

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the use of this bookmarklet, so the risk you take in using it is your own.

It works for me in Firefox and Chrome but I haven't tried it in Internet Exploder.

This is a really a boneheaded bit of Javascript (I don't even bother to encode the query string and just let the browser do it because some characters like apostrophes might not get handled properly by the JS).

Also you might have to tweak the size of the window for smaller computers. It's currently set to:

width=1000,height=600

If you run into any problems, just post them here and I'll take a look when I can.

Step 2 in health care reform

Step 2 in health care reform. Teach our kids and the people that feed them (that's us) about proper nutrition.



If Her Majesty the Queen of England reads this:

Please, knight Jamie Oliver.

PALOMINO!!!

Did John Boehner forget the safe word? PALOMINO!!!



Maybe Mr. Boehner should've worked harder to get his colleagues in the Republican party to work on a bipartisan bill instead of expending all their effort and political capital on attempting to derail health reform altogether.

Lesson learned? Doubtful.

America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate | Wired Science | Wired.com

"Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available."

Physicist and MacArthur Fellow Amory Lovins, among others, has some persuasive arguments that we should be pursuing wind, solar, and other micropower solutions over Obama's nuclear option, which he believes will actually increase global warming and be uneconomical to boot.

Damn. I had this idea for a business years ago but never jumped on it.

[Victor's head shakes violently with regret.]

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why I live in New York City

[Overheard at a NYC diner]

She: Is there any way you can speed it up a little? I've got an appointment downtown and I can't be late.

He: You ordered a burger, medium well. There's a physics involved. It takes time for the meat to get to the right temperature.

She: Well, in that case, just never mind.

He: Uh. Okay.

She: Can you tell me? Where is the closest subway stop to get downtown?

He: Sure, go down a block, turn right...

She: Yes?

He: When you get there, there'll be a guy in the booth...

She: Uh huh.

He: Ask him if he can speed up the train a little.

taxanalysts.com: Tax Rates for Top 400 Earners Fall as Income Soars, IRS Data

www.taxanalysts.com

The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low, newly disclosed tax ...

"The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low, newly disclosed tax data show.

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16."

Oh no, we can't tax the rich more.

They'll stop creating real wealth and it won't trickle downtown us and they'll stop giving us jobs.

Oh, wait...