Tuesday

Miscellaneous Rambling

Last week was the week of Twitter leads. Maybe this will be the week of Miscellaneous Rambling.

How is your Lent going? Mine is going surprisingly well. Sure, I've slipped a few times on my Lenten pledge, but everything else is good. One thing has helped enormously: Instead of doing prescribed prayers, I set aside a prescribed amount of time. Once the clock starts to run on that time, I simply turn off everything else, as though the time is as dead as, say, sitting at a youth sporting event.

I'm still attending youth sporting events, nearly twenty years after I started attending them. I don't detest them as much as I used to, partly because of the advent of the Kindle Paperwhite

I still consider the Kindle Paperwhite the most awesome improvement to reading since spaces between words, but I can't figure out how much of my enthusiasm stems from the ability to paste content into this blog or other things I'm writing. The Kindle definitely has non-reproduction advantages: control of the font size, control of lighting, easy to hold, hundreds of books contained in my pocket, cheaper books, huge selection of free books, instant dictionary (necessary when reading Bill Kauffman). Of all these, the ease of holding might take first place, at least when it comes to bedtime reading. The books I read tend to be large. It's a lot easier to hold a Kindle than, say, a hard copy of The Black Swan. But still, I know a small part of me says, when I get ready to hunker down with a book, "If I use the Kindle, I can paste content easier for later use."

And don't get me wrong: I still like hard books. There is "something about" holding a real book that the Kindle can't replicate. It's often hard to navigate the Kindle books, too. If you quickly want to flip back, say, fifteen pages, you can't do it efficiently, plus it takes a bit of mental energy, whereas flipping to and fro among pages is second nature for me.