A couple months ago there was a kerfuffle over Amazon deleting purchased e-books from users' Kindles without asking, which I mostly ignored because I thought the company could have had a reason to withdraw them and it didn't seem like a big deal. Also, the detail everyone latched onto was that one of the books removed was George Orwell's 1984, which seemed too perfect a comparison. Well, at least one person is learning what Big Brother can do for you: Via Shelf Life, a high school student settled with Amazon for $150,000 for deleting his copy of 1984, because he was using it for summer reading and his notes were completely useless without it.
Frankly, I took way too many notes in my high school books thus rendering them impossible to re-read without getting sidetracked. (Except my copy of THE ODYSSEY, which I was determined to keep nice for some reason, so settled for taking all my notes on Post-Its and sticking them in the book. Useless and wasteful!) But is this not a clear victory not for the summer-reading note-taker, but for dead-tree media in general? You make your notes, and they stay put!
Besides falling down in the note-taking department, the Kindle is also an inferior weapon, or so I would think. I was reading in Madison Square Park yesterday when one of its aggressive squirrels climbed up on a bench yesterday, crawling up to within a foot of where I was sitting. I could have petted it, if I were insane. I waved my hand at it, but it didn't flinch; I spoke loudly to it, something like, "Do you mind? I don't have any food for you!" to no avail. (Later, discovering a forgotten sample bag of chips in my bag, I was impressed that the squirrel could sniff it out from its scarf-pen-and-notebook sandwich.)
Then I looked up and saw a woman was taking pictures of me waving and cursing at it from another bench. I tried to catch her eye in one of those "Oh, the indignity of urban life" looks, hoping she wasn't filling out her vacation album. She lost interest before the squirrel did, but it eventually jogged off. But my point is, if I had had to brain the squirrel, which I stress I did not do, I'd rather sacrifice a paperback than a $299 toy. In either case, thwonking the tourists who feed the squirrels might get better results.
4 days ago
3 comments:
Once, when I was walking across my college quad on a beautiful fall day, a squirrel scampered up to me.
"How cute!" I thought.
It put its little paws on the toe of my sneaker, and looked up at me with its big Bambi-like eyes.
"How adorable!" I thought.
Then it started climbing up my leg.
I shook it off without injury to either me or the squirrel. It later turned out I had the wrapper to a peanut-butter-flavored energy bar in my coat pocket. Now I keep my distance from squirrels.
That's exactly what I was afraid it would do. Or worse, bite me if I didn't offer it anything.
When I was in college, I tried like the dickens to climb up the legs of women I saw strolling across campus, but it never worked for me either.
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