Projo Subterranean Homepage News

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A Christmas tree at Poklonnaya Gora, a park and museum complex in western Moscow.

Back in the meat world: My laptop and desktop are both down and being repaired, so I am, for the first time in 16 years, completely offline at home. I'm typing this in the Journal newsroom.

Last night I fell asleep on the couch reading a novel, Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. After I blogged the Times' pick of The 10 Best Books of 2005 -- which Kafka led -- I found the book at Amazon and used the little PPL bookmarklet at right to reserve it at the library. (Just drag this to your browser's personal toolbar, and when you're on any book's page that gives its ISBN number, click it to open the statewide CLAN library catalogue to that book's page. There you may reserve it, specify which library you'd like to pick it up at, and when it arrives you'll get a phone call telling you it's in.)

One of the characters very much likes Beethoven's "Archduke" Piano Trio, and I'm listening to it as I type, at garageband.com.

I found that source through Classic Cat, "directory with links to over 2800 free to download classical performances on the internet, sorted by composer and work. "

Here's the first chapter of Kafka on the Shore.

And, yes, I liked it. I like magical realism -- such right-brain writing is an essential antidote to the engineering prose of so much of the Web.

Roger Ebert's Best Movies of 2005: Crash leads.

Webfather:The inventor of the Web, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, has a blog. Most of the 455 comments on his first post are a variation on "Thanks for the Web," so in the second post Berners-Lee says they had to turn comments off, and he just put together the work of others.

75 Google tips: Frame your query. I use this one to find older Journal stories. See how it works:

site:projo.com "Ebenezer Scrooge"

will show you stories that have slipped off this site.

People Who Died in 2005: Not all of them, of course, just the "well-known."

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