Books on tape can be great when you want to listen to something more substantive than music but are unable to read. Perhaps you want to listen to a little Pride and Prejudice while you’re pumping iron at the gym, or would like to hear A Modest Proposal while you’re driving to your job at the day care in the morning.

That’s why I was especially excited when I had discovered just how many audio books can be obtained online for free. The best site I had found is Librivox.org, which contains 2763 audio books to date. All of the books there are public domain, which means the author has to have been dead for over 25 years. While that may be disapointing, there are still many great works out there, and odds are, you haven’t read them all already. The authors include Lewis Carrol, James Joyce, Aldus Huxley, Homer, Jane Austin, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe, etc… etc… etc…

However, the more I’ve been listening, the more I’ve realized why audio books are worth the money they cost. All of the books on Librivox are read and recorded by fans of the site. These people, for the most part, don’t have any training in recording. This might not be such a bad thing if they just read the text, but most of them try to do voice acting while reading and add awkward inflections and dumb voices to the characters. They also may not have very good recording equipment at home, and may have trouble just reading the text without stuttering or having to go back. Also, I guess because they are doing this for free, they don’t feel a second take is merited unless they really screw up.

For longer works, you’ll often find that each chapter is read by a different person. “Through the Looking Glass” was great, but I couldn’t understand the chapter with Humpty Dumpty when they explain the meaning of the poem “Jabberwocky” because the woman reading had such a thick Russian accent. A couple of the readers were excellent, and I was sad to see them go when the chapter was over. I also started listening to “A Doll’s House” by Ibsen, where the main character was read by a woman who clearly had stage experience, but was the only talented one of the voice actors. It was strange listening to her speaking with her husband, who had a great deal of white noise present itself everytime he talked.

I still feel that the idea behind this audio book community is good, but even for free, we need some standards. A roomate of mine once said “Free shit is good shit even if it’s bad shit”, but your time is not free, and if you’re going to devote several hours listening to a book, it shouldn’t take most of your brain power to uninflect what’s being said, and then reinflect it like a normal human.

The greatest of Haydn’s symphonies will still sound like shit if played by a middle school band.

But we Wagners make up for this by looking like we might be athletic. If you work out enough you get drafted earlier in team sporting events, and that extra muscle has to help with something even if you can’t coordinate it well. That one year I got two homeruns in our annual softball game I was in pretty decent shape, and I haven’t gotten any homers since.

I’ve been working out since I was in mid-highschool, usually a few months at a time. I’d do 3 months of working out, followed by 3 months of slacking. That’s pretty much how I continued all the way till now. I had just joined “The Gym” in Montvale and was all ready to get a little buff again when I found out I would no longer be working in that area. Now, 8 months later I’m working in the city, a member of no gym, and a weakling. First I was waiting till our benefits provider changed over, then I was waiting till all the new year’s resolutions crowd shirked their commitments, and now I think it’s finally time to join.

I’m planning on moving into a place with a gym come July, so I just need a gym for 4.5 months. It looks like I get some kind of deals with Gold’s, NYSC, Ballys and some other lesser known gyms in the city. Does anyone know or like any gyms in Midtown West? It looks like if you don’t commit there are joining fees, but it’s only 100 bucks through my company so those deals seem to work out the best. I’m mostly looking for just basic machines and free-weights without too many people crowding them.

Yesterday I went to an actual record store, FYE, to purchase a CD. It had to be purchased in person because I was giving it as a gift, and I can’t say which CD, in case my mom is reading this (she’s not).

Normally just the threat of having to walk to a store is enough to keep me buying online, but I was equally annoyed by the price. One CD, $19. How does that make sense? How is this store still in business? The first thing everyone does when they get a CD anyway is rip it to their iPod. Even if you don’t have an iPod, you could just download it and burn it for half the price.

And I’m not factoring all the costs in here. Here is what my breakdown looks like:

In-Person Purchasing:
Album: $19
Extra Train Fare: $1.75
Opporunity Cost @ $28/hr: $14
Total Cost: $34.75

Online Purchasing:
Album: $10
Opportunity Cost @ $28/hr: $2.33
Total Cost: $12.33

I thought about telling my cashier that I wouldn’t be buying this from them if I wasn’t giving it as a gift, but she was nice and probably in highschool and wouldn’t have cared anyway. And I didn’t want to be a whinny old man.

Is the age of in-person music stores ending? How long it be before this happens with music and video games? Boxers or briefs?

There are some good aspects to this: I’ve never cheated on anyone, I work very hard at the things I feel I can do well, I produce high quality work, I stay in good shape, keep a fairly healthy diet and am good with personal finances.

But I’m also a huge procrastinator. This I have learned, goes hand in hand with perfectionism. When you feel that you won’t be able to do something well enough, you don’t want to start doing it in the first place. Take writing this blog post for instance. I have a lot of things to say, but I’m writing it up very slowly, and rereading often as I go. And the whole reason I am writing a blog post, is to avoid an issue at work to which I’m assigned, and am having difficulty figuring out. I don’t like to do things on a whim because I need to have my schedule planned out perfectly in advance. I avoid sports which I don’t think I’ll be good at (even hackysack for a while), and I go extremely long times between relationships waiting for the stars to align. If I don’t like any of the food I have in the house, I won’t eat. My desk at work is spotless, not because I am a neat person, but because cleaning is another one of my procrastination techniques. Compare that to my room at home, which is quite messy because I haven’t had to do any serious work there in a long time.

But I’ve found a cure for all of these; it’s this great new thing called alcohol. I discovered in college, while trying to write term papers that I am able to write much more easily with just a beer or two in my system. It’s not necessarily great writing, but it’s not terrible and it’s much better than writing nothing. Plus I can always go back when I’m sober and fix it up. I also program better, am able to talk to strangers without fear of saying the wrong thing and am much less afraid to make a fool of myself by trying to sing or attempt a physical activity. Alcohol may be debilitating when trying to drive a car, but it’s quite enabling in most other ways for a person like myself.

This might be my own nearsightedness, but I assumed (at least before researching this) most people are perfectionists. After reading about some of the traits of perfectionism how many of you identify with these? In a totally flawed study, 18% of people were determined to be perfectionists; let’s see how that lines up with our even more flawed results.

So being attractive, though genes, effort and purchased goods helps one to make more money.

And there are also a lot of ways that having money makes one more attractive. Between clothes, haircuts, better quality food, beauty products and education there are many serious advantages that having at least a moderate amount of money will offer. Which will then lead to you getting more money back. It’s quite the cycle.

We are constantly told that looks aren’t important, and that’s not really true. That doesn’t mean if you’re ugly you should kill yourself, but try to do what you can with what you have. Money spent on your appearance, within reason, is not a wasted investment. I’ve started paying for haircuts and getting them on a regular basis, and consequently my hair looks better, I look more professional, and they decided to make me CEO (this last part may not have actually happened). Trying to look presentable really isn’t superficial or illogical. If you’re one of the people who generally ignores their appearance, you may want to think about making a couple little changes and see how things go for you.

The immaculate conception that they talk about in the bible probably just means Mary had sex without leaving one of those wet spots in the bed.

Couldn’t Data have written his own software-based solution for emotions rather than needing a dedicated emotion chip?

I thought about this a little. The whole purpose behind the immigration process is to make sure that those who come to our country can support themselves, and won’t be a burden on others. For example, you wouldn’t let someone in the country if their only skill was begging on the subway.

He went on further by talking about his life philosophy. He said he doesn’t steal, doesn’t do drugs, because he lives his life by accountability. He even offered to let us take on his philosophy if we chose. I just don’t see this happening; that the people in suits heading to work at Rockafeller Center are going to decide that maybe they have lived their life all wrong, and they should be more like the guy asking for 32 bucks.

It was all cool though, he got some money from a Hasidic Jew, thanked him for the mitzvah (I just learned what this means), then spouted a few jumbled Bible verses and hopped off at the next stop.

And because it’s against my policy to give money to beggars I didn’t give him anything. However, I have to figure out what my policy is on people selling blog post ideas.

Not that it was a huge deal; we just had to enter and exit the building through the basement parking garage instead of the front. Though, it does seem excessive how skittish Americans, and especially New Yorkers are nowadays. Safety procedure is to assume every piece of trash capable on concealing a bomb is actually a bomb. Then we have to get cops to rope off the area, a bomb squad to come in and disarm it. Seems like a lot of work just to throw away someone’s trash from lunch, or a forgotten backpack. I’d like to think that if someone really wanted to plant a bomb they could come up with a better way to do it; especially when there are posters everywhere telling people to call the cops if they see packages lying around, unclaimed. However, seeing as how these plane explosion attempts always fail, we are dealing with some pretty incompetent terrorists.

And haven’t we missed the whole point of this thing? Weren’t we adamant about not allowing the terrorists to change our style of life? And we decided that the best way to not change anything was by changing everything and causing a great number of inconvenieces in the pursuit of safety? There are so many people in New York, and we really don’t need them all. Wouldn’t we save time and money and improve our quality of life if we weren’t so overly cautious?

There’s probably a good reason I’m not in charge of security here.

Now Michael Crichton is someone who I usually associate with action movies and political thrillers (I may have had him confused with John Grisham), but this movie had lots of science, and that appealed to me as a kid. I found out from reading the book, all the movies based on Michael Crichton’s work have to cut out the vast amount of explanitory passages in order to keep up the pace and average moviegoers attention. About half of the books’ content comes in the form of asides where he goes into detail about real science and how it applies to the story. Are you familiar with the cartoon scene early in Jurrasic Park where they explain how they can find dinosaur blood within some fossilized amber? His books are filled with that type of information that often can’t be worked into a movie. If your least favorite part of a Michael Crichton movie was the action, then you’ll like his books much more.

Well I did end up reading the other 2 books in that collection I purchased, and I didn’t stop there. I also read Sphere, Congo and Eaters of the Dead and all were thoroughly fascinating. He made me interested in things that I didn’t even think I would be interested in. The best part is, that he has a book for everyone. Do you like political stuff? Read Rising Sun. Do you like the ocean? Read Sphere. Do you like heists? Read the Great Train Robbery.

I guess what I’m saying is, read some Michael Crichton. Then, next time we are at a Wine and Cheese party together we can discuss.