I'm reading an interesting article in The Globe and Mail about the modern paparazzi business. I'll give you a hint: it's madness. Poor Britney.

(You know, that sounded a bit glib, but I really do feel sorry for her. I mean, if I knew someone who acts the way she does, I would feel really sorry for them. Just because she's famous and rich, doesn't make her life any less screwed up.)

Also, what's with the rash of fake memoirs lately, and why are they so newsworthy? If these books were just marketed as novels instead of memoirs, no one would care whether they were true. Why does a book seem more valuable if we think it tells the truth about a real person?

(Whoa, that was, like, a Carrie Bradshaw-esque moment right there, seeing the cursor flashing on my screen as I typed myself a rhetorical question. Except I would have to write, "I wondered, why does a book seem more valuable if we think it tells the truth about a real person?" And then I would have to wear wildly improbable clothes and alienate a succession of boyfriends with my neuroses.)

did i disappoint you?

A photo-essay on Soviet roadside bus-stops. Some of them are quite striking--a vision of the future, straight from the 1970s. From polar inertia, "the journal of nomadic and popular culture."

Gullible.info is a website of interesting facts. Whether these facts are true seems impossible to determine, but really, does it matter, in this post-modern world? I am listening to John Hodgman's Areas of my Expertise as an audiobook right now (I downloaded it for free from iTunes for some reason, maybe you can too!) and it's great, a compendium of (fabricated) human knowledge. "Now I sense that you have further questions… you are reasonable to ponder, who is this John Hodgman, and how did he come to know so many invented facts?"

I am reading a book a day for reading week, that's the theory. (Young adult books are acceptable for this project, otherwise it seems insurmountable.) On Monday I finished The Garneau Block. Tuesday I finished The Xanadu Adventure, thus concluding my re-reading of all the Vesper Holly books. Yesterday I read The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963, which was excellent. Today I am hoping to finish Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History. Will she make it? Only time will tell!