A Better Way To Read Through Technology?

We (Westerners) currently read left-to-right, snapping our eyes all the way back to the left after reaching the end of the line. This snapping back is a huge inefficiency. People, once they got comfortable with the method, would be able to read faster if text were printed so the next word after the end of the line was directly below, not across the page.


There are some obvious problems with changing to this system, and it would be impossible to do on a national scale. America can't even change to the metric system, and that makes a lot more sense than this idea.

It is currently near impossible to do on a personal level too. The comfort of reading in one style for decades may be too difficult to overcome. Even if one had the desire, the number of books and newspapers printed in this wraparound format is either zero or close to it, and every publisher would find the thought of doing so ridiculous.

The Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle--two EBook readers that display text electronically on a handheld device--got me thinking of a time in the near future that would at least remove the technological roadblocks. It would be a trivial matter for an EBook reader to automatically display text in a wraparound format. The Kindle allows for one to read online newspapers and blogs too, so presumably wrapping text for these would be easy as well.

What if these EBook readers decided to offer an option to switch to this reading mode at the press of a button? It may end up a novelty, but perhaps it turns out that one can feel comfortable with this new reading style after a few hours, and the benefits make it worth it.

There's no extra publishing cost, no large technical hurdles to overcome, and it's optional. It's also a feature not offered in print, and probably never will be. Shouldn't these EBook readers do something better than their print counterparts?

I think if one were to switch to a different reading style, the majority of what we read--at home, at work, on the web--would need to be electronic plus convertible to this new style. We are many years from that becoming the everyday environment, but electronic publishing is at a point where, with the help of a few yet-to-be-developed computers programs, a motivated individual could experiment and get a good sense of the costs and benefits of learning a more efficient reading style.

Can I Haz Credit Card?

I applied for a business credit card because it offered a bonus of 15,000 Reward Points, which one could use to get $100-$150 worth of gift certificates. I am quite poor. No self-respecting credit card company would offer me a business card based on my actual income, so I added $10,000 to my yearly income, technically still a possibility if the U.S. dollar becomes so low in the next month that they switch to dried noodles as currency. I have a Fort Knox of noodles in my pantry.

I got an email a few minutes ago saying I was rejected for the card because my income is too low. After adding $10,000 in imaginary money to it.

It is official. I am so poor, I can't even afford to lie.

Thansgiving Fun

* While making Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my Mom what was in this bowl of sweet-smelling herbs. "Guess. You can test your smell." Two seconds later, as I'm still in the process of bending over to smell then, she blurts out "Sage!"

ME: "Why did you tell me before I could guess?"
MOM: "I like to cheat."

* "Sous Chef" is a fancy name for "chump who is unable or not trusted to cook." I am always the Sous Chef on Thanksgiving.

* Mom has a hand-painted serving platter that she got from France. She loves this platter. I didn't realize how much she loved it until she handed it to me to put on the dining table. "Jason. if you drop this, I will kill you. [laughter] I am serious. I will show no mercy." After we stop laughing, she took the Death Platter back from me and put it on the table herself.

* I bought myself a hand blender for my birthday next week. Mom reimbursed me, and then Michele said she wanted to pay for the gift.

MOM: "Okay. You owe me $40."
MICHELE: "$40? Jason told me it was $20."
TINA: [looking to me] "I thought you said it was $30."
ME: "It is $30. They are trying to one-up each other."

Soup

I bought a cookbook called "400 Soups." I'm not much of a cook, which is why I like making soup. Chop, put in pot, add broth, ignore for one hour. I can do that.

You know what the first soup in this book is? Vichyssoise. That is not a starter soup. For one, I can't tell if the pronunciation is French or Long Island (Vee-shay-soi / Vick-y-soiz) Two, it either has an extra 's', or it is missing an 'n'. That's OK for page 213, but not for page 1.

You know what the first recipe should be? Potato soup. Ingredients: potato, water, bowl. No French peeling the potato or sprinkling cinnamon dust around the edge of the bowl. Just a boiled potato, unpeeled, in a bowl of water, with a fork sticking out of it. Salt and pepper optional.

The first soup should not take culinary beginners into uncharted waters. Give us a confidence booster. Something with celery, not leeks. Herbs that appear in Simon & Garfunkel songs, not Martha Stewart specials.

If I were this book and not a man who reads books, like a Book God peering into the lives of his subjects, I'd move my page 76 to the front. Roasted Pepper Soup would be a good starter recipe.

It looks how it sounds like it will look and has words in its name that everyone can understand. No obscure ingredients either. King Edward potatoes have been usurped by Joe Onion and his gal, Garlic Jill. I'd follow Roasted Pepper Soup up with Green Lentil Soup, and then its cousin, Garlicky Lentil Soup. There should be a good 20-30 pages of pepper and legume soups before Vichyssoise even appears in the table of contents.

To sum up, I would start off with simple pepper and legume soups. Then I would include a table of contents. People wouldn't mind that it came 30 pages into the book because they would be too busy reading the recipes and exclaiming, "Hey, I recognize that ingredient" and "Mmm, this soup is going to taste as good as it sounds, sounds I can confidentially reproduce when saying the name of this soup."

Then you can include Vichyssoise and related soups later in the book in a special "Freak" section with detachable pages, so it's easy to tear out if you want to. The pages should be made out of soft paper, so when you are enjoying a warm bowl of Irish Potato Soup, you can wipe your lips with Avgolemono or Lemon and Pumpkin Moules Mariniere.

These Things Exist?

And you can buy them online?

It's a cell phone jammer that you can get for $50. Who knew spy technology was so cheap?

(They are illegal to use in some countries, including the U.S.)

The Speech Bubble Filling Continues

Comic

Headlines

In Va., Parties Focus on Turnout
Wha...? Political parties try to get people to polls? Virgina winner decided by votes? Ye gods, what happened to tradition of yore: selecting a townsmith based on the plumpness of his grandest goose?

Lawmakers Might Use Clout to Get Hospital Funding
Plan B: Use clot.

Artificial Joint Makers Lobby Hospitals Vigorously
Joint makers shake fists in jarring, stilted fashion.

Writers Str...see ya!
(Original headline: Writer Strike Set for Monday)

Sugar Industry Expands Influence
Sugar to appear in NutraSweet, diabetic ice-cream, salt. You can't stop the sugar. No one can stop the sugar. Except...

"VO: Coming this summer. A sugar industry infiltrated by terrorists. A people addicted and under siege. All hope is lost. Except for one man."

(Visual: A wood door explodes, creating a cloud of dust and debris. Through the cloud steps Christopher Walken, holding a machine gun and weighed down by several ammo belts.)

WALKEN: "I gotta say, the door. I was expecting more of a BOOM than a KA-POW."

VO: "Christopher Walken is...Sweet Justice."

Friday Media Roundup

Stuff I've read, watched, or listened to that's good enough to recommend.

Yeasayer / "2080" (music): Yeasayer is a difficult band to describe, which is a good thing. I can't imagine anyone agreeing with this, but "2080" reminds me of music that would play in a movie about an optimistic, post-apocalyptic future.

The whole album has an aura of oddly familiar strangeness. It's like the music skipped a few stages of evolution, so it's difficult to see where it came from, but it's still recognizable enough to enjoy.

How about this: (World Music)^2 ? I give up. Great band, regardless.

Heroes (TV): I avoided watching the show until recently because the premise--ordinary people discover latent superpowers and try to avert a world disaster--sounded bland. The execution is excellent though. The show's strength is its constant diet of new surprises and resolutions. It's almost like the anti-Lost--something significant is revealed in every episode, to the point that I don't see how they maintain the pace for more than a few seasons.


The Real All-Americans (book): I'm not a huge sports fan, but I found Sally Jenkins' book on how Native Americans were integral to the development of collegiate football fascinating. I'm surprised I never heard of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experiment in assimilating Native Americans by a well-meaning but perhaps misguided army officer, or knew that it was the source for a lot of what we now consider basic parts of football, like the forward pass,
reverses, and training dummies.

The book also brought light to some names I only heard in passing, like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. It's worth checking out from the library or buying for anyone with an interest in sports history.