Reading Antonia Fraser and Thinking of Orangeries and Overstock - 2008-03-23 19:39:34
<<< Previous - Nostaglia for Lite Brite and the Maldroid Earworm | Next - Minotaur with a Trident or a Centaur with a Crossbow? >>>

So I still have my elderly Mac Powerbook G4 (the little 12 inch version) that I moved to California with. It still works quite well, it's just that it was always a pain to hook into our network (it tended to fuss with the other PCs and not want to share, and vice versa) - and it still strikes me as so nicely designed and so portable, I find myself missing using it. (It wasn't going to be able to play Warcraft though, which was why I made the leap to PC for a laptop a while back. Also its hard drive died dramatically, so its status is "repaired but don't trust.") I've been using it to watch movies on lately as for some reason my PCs don't want to play my dvds, which is...odd. Anyhow I unfortunately discovered that while it would take a little fussing with our wireless to get the Mac logged in - there are multiple other wireless signals that I can tune into with just a click. Which seems very wrong and makes me want to leave little notes for all my neighbors telling them to secure your wireless signal! Not that that kept me from reading various wikipedia articles using someone else's signal. But I do feel guilty for stealing the signal for blogging on (yes, I know that makes no sense), so I've just hopped onto my PC to blog this.

Currently I'm really enjoying Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, by Antonia Fraser. I've bought and enjoyed her books since I first discovered her, thanks to a college professor's recommendation in one of my English history classes, when I picked up The Weaker Vessel. I also listen to Fraser speak about the Louis XIV book thanks to a podcast of her speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival. (Not sure if that link actually works, I downloaded it some time ago via the Times Online coverage.) Anyway, reading a wonderfully juicy history book like this always makes me want to google certain things, and even though I know it's far from legit in a scholarly sense, it's still wonderful to pull up the Wikipedia entry for orangery and peruse information - and more importantly the photos. The one at Versailles, presumably the one so many others were modeled after, is particularly lovely, and even though it's been over 20 years since I was there I remember wandering in those gardens and being angstful over having only so much film in my camera. (Not to mention only so much time to see everything before I was hustled back onto the bus with the other high school students.) But then I'm always enthusiastic for wandering in manicured gardens. Stupidly I scanned through the orangery page to see if there were any such gardens near where we live - then realized, oh right, California, no need for that sort of garden here really. Here you stick the orange tree in the ground, add water, it grows. (Yes I know, much more hard work around it than that, but I'm a bystander, that's all I see.)

I'll devote another entry on the Louis XIV book after I've finished it, but I'm enjoying it more than some of Fraser's other books that I've read. More on that later. She is one of the authors I admire most these days, having heard her speak and read many interviews - an interesting person in her own right. Oddly I've never gotten around to reading her detective novels, as I didn't know that she wrote anything else besides history until recently.

Randomly in a bit of surfing some old links on the Mac I bumped into this fun entry on Consumerist - Overstock.com CEO: Wikipedia Has Become An Instrument Of Mass Mind-Control. Now if you spend any time on Wikipedia the one thing you learn is that sometimes the most interesting information is tucked away in a page's Discussion area. So of course I nipped over to the Overstock Discussion page. And if you follow Wikipedia this will also seem a familiar story - yet another company trying to edit their business info to read as they'd like, and removing anything negative. Except Overstock seems to be even more full of bile over the whole thing. Other articles and blog posts found via Google, mostly old but then I'm new to this story:

Gary Weiss on Overstock.com
(Weiss is a journalist who has written for Forbes, etc.)

AntiSocialMedia.Net: Sleazey McSleaze Admits To Sleaziness
John Carney, Dealbreaker, Jan 12, 2007 (blog)

Overstock.com drama spurs lawsuits
Bethany McLean, Fortune Magazine, November 28 2007

And the AntiSocialMedia site is even more slime filled, in that it's been run by the Overstock.com's "director of social media Judd Bagley"...well, as a spin platform, as best I can figure. If you go over there and read anything you'll notice that at the moment it's focusing on telling us all about Weiss, one of the journalists who've been following the Overstock saga. I'm thinking I now may have a new Google alert to keep me amused in the future. And while I'd never ordered from Overstock I had checked out their books section and always meant to order something. Only this sort of information about their company practices (the fact that they've spent so much time on that antisocial site alone is enough to keep me away) - as well as some negative consumer reviews (that you can also find easily via Google) - makes me think that nope, I'll be passing on using them.

Meanwhile, looking at the old laptop...yes, I wouldn't mind having a Mac again someday. I still like the design and the OS. But as long as it doesn't have the ability to play the latest computer games right out of the box - it doesn't seem likely, and isn't that tempting. Well, not that much. But as soon as they sell the 160 gig iPods at a non ridiculous price, I am so there.

0 Comments

---

Comments:

There are no comments yet for this item

To add your comment, click here.