Laura and I were invited to read at Read to Rebuild, a reading benefit for Haiti put on by Reading Local and Mercy Corps, and hosted by my friend Mel Favara.

Reading Local’s astute interviewer Karen Munro interviewed both Laura Moulton and myself here. They were great questions.

Tom Spanbauer, Ariel Gore, Kevin Sampsell and Margaret Malone will also be reading. Sponsors include Dark Horse Comics and Hawthorne books and it will be held at the Writer’s Dojo (March 16th @ 6:30pm). Needless to say,  it’s going to be a rad night.

Get all the  details at Reading Local’s page on Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Benefit Reading

Death Metal Rooster.

Your mileage may vary, but after half a dozen views I feel ready to break some chairs (in a most joyful way!).

The original is definitely worth a watch too.
(Thanks @david!)

I snapped this shot in Brazil and my attempts at trying to decode that hand-painted 2D barcode (also called a matrix barcode) in the center of the photo have been in vain. I’d love to know what it says, which is obviously something like “Speak _____ and the wormhole will open”.

Anybody else have experience with barcodes or want to take a crack at it? Click the photo for the fullsize version, or use the crop below. To start you off, here’s a Google search for online 2D barcode decoder, and here’s an iTunes App store search for the same if you have an iPhone. The photo was taken within a block or so of here: Rua de Catete, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro

Not sure why — maybe it was the MacMillan/Amazon ebook pricing  fiasco or maybe they just feel like there are too many digital copies of Couch -uh, stacking up? But Amazon has dropped the price of the ebook Kindle version of Couch from around $8/a copy to $3.55. Wow.

This is not a post to get the 2 readers of this blog to buy the book (you know who you are. Wait, who are you?) but I was rather surprised by the Kindle price. That’s a really cheap book.

Coen and I read The Hobbit on the Kindle app version on my phone while we were in Brazil and I have to say, it was not a bad reading experience at all. Though it did get a bit tricky when we wanted to scan back to try to remember who so-and-so was.

(Of course Powell’s has the real thing used for 10.95 )

One of the lovely people responsible for selecting, editing, publishing, and sending Couch on its way into the world is going to be in town this Thursday.

Jedediah Berry is an editor at the prodigiously talented Small Beer Press where there they don’t even let you answer the telephone unless you have several books to your name.

His first novel, The Manual of Detection, is a fantastically good read and it’s freshly out in paperback. I love the new cover and after reading it it was hard not to imagine it set in Portland, what with our bicycle obsessions and drenched climate.

He’ll be at Powell’s Books on  Hawthorne at 7:30 this Thursday (3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.) and it’s sure to be a great reading. Ask him about bicycles, umbrellas, first novels and getting your book considered at Small Beer Press. We’ll be there — hope to see you. Yes, you.

Just look at this beautiful cover:

Researching a novel is tremendous good fun. A lot of the time I have no idea where I’m going to end up. Today’s adventure led me, among other places, to this post on neighborhood secession by Matthew Mullenix.

It’s a quick read and not very in-depth, but has some sound ideas. Essentially that by focussing your consumption, trade and energy in your own neighborhood, you can largely opt-out of the system. And if a whole neighborhood does it, it can be a quiet sort of secession. I was particularly moved by his April 1st follow-up comment:

Who will regulate the safety of the food and our health? I think that’s an interesting question and prompts us to ask if regulation of food safety is the same thing as ensuring food safety? It also begs the question: From what does federal regulation protect us?

Today’s case of pastacio contamination, much like the recent peanut scare, offers an important role for federal regulation; but it only becomes so important because our food system is based on interstate commerce and the industrial-scale blending of basic ingredients (like nuts, or corn) into thousands of other food products that will be sold around the world.

Such a system entails tremendous risk, chief among them the fact that once a contaminant is found to have sickened one person, hundreds of thousands have been exposed. It is a huge corporate system that requires a huge layer of government oversight, both at odds against each other and neither capable of managing the inherent risks.

Compare this to a local food system, the smallest being the production line that extends from my garden to my kitchen. That supply chain is short and secure. The producer (me) and consumers (my family and friends) are a limited group who know each other well. We insure food quality by tending personally to its production and preparation, and we share whatever risks that entails. Worst case scenario (a soft tomato?) is that only a few will ever suffer from a system failure.

Thus, my garden is in the best interests of national security. Albeit, the nation that is our family.