Catching Up

It's been more than a month since my last entry, so bear with me. First I have to salute and thank my biggest fan Terry for his thoughtful birthday wishes. I also have to announce the results of my Fantasy Baseball excursions this year. My Bronx Cheers team did very well, finishing 2nd with a powerful lineup including Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, Troy Tulowitsky, Nelson Cruz, Michael Cuddyer, Chase Utley and Pablo Sandoval, and pitchers CC Sabathia, Jon Lester, Matt Cain and heath Bell. Of my Internet team, the Little Cheers, the less said the better. Suffice it to say that in all, I made money.

Now in regards to the month of September, celebrating my 60th year, things went amazingly well. The Yanks won their division (so far so good), and I hit a Royal Flush on a Vegas slot machine to pocket another grand (and did not give it all back). Then I proceeded on a spending spree of tech devices to finally bring me into the 21st century, even as the Ought Decade drove to a well-deserved ending.

I'm not a person of deep material need, and a techie moron to boot, so any acquisitions are by definition vanity additions. So I've added to my clutter several items unheard of in the prior century, including a Sony Bravia LCD TV, a Samsung Blue Ray DVD player, and a portable Garmin Nuvi GPS device which I attach to my dashboard so I can make believe I am James Bond in "Goldfinger." It's very cool, though I've found that generally by the time it acquires a satellite signal, I have already reached my destination. I was also thinking of purchasing a Wii player, but I'm already overburdened by three tech manuals so I'll save that one for Christmas.

My favorite device of all, though this may sound like apostasy from a writer/literature professor, is my Kindle 2 Electronic Reader from Amazon. This was actually a gift from my brother and sister-in-law, though it was on my list of purchases had they not so aptly come through. Now I am not yet sold on the preference of reading from a screen and turning pages with a push of a button rather than a sweep of my fingers. I would prefer a screen with a backlight, too, and am not certain the Kindle screen is more eye-friendly than a standard text. I have downloaded three books already, though, at relatively low cost ($10 a pop), and the purchases, expedited by a wireless connection, were remarkably easy, even for a dunderhead. Wow, even Sarah Palin could manage it, though she'd have to follow through by actually trying to read. You know, read all the newspapers, as she boasted to Katie Couric.

But the Kindle can do one thing that no paperback has ever managed. It can read back to me. I can't express how comforting that is when you are lying in bed and a warmish voice (not computerish, more like the friendly guide on a GPS), narrates a story to help you fall asleep. This is a technology that really impresses me, though it is not yet perfected (an "experimental feature" as Amazon denotes it). Apparently the device has an internal dictionary that allows the voice to recognize most common English words and abbreviations, and to intelligently attempt phonetic readings of unfamiliar words.

To test this ability, I downloaded a personal text, a fantasy novel that I wrote myself (this is another good feature of the Kindle--you can download documents from your computer via the e-mail). Since my novel takes place in a fictional foreign country with an invented lexicon, the Kindle had its work cut out, and did a yeoman-like job coping with such words as "Ungagwapitz" and "Svutzenklarg."

The only true glitch I've encountered so far--besides the fact that some authors won't permit a text-to-speech transcription of their works, so fuck you Dan Brown--is that it has limited capacity to judge abbreviations. Every time I made a reference to a saint--as in St. Peter, for example--the voice would read "Street Peter." I guess streets are a lot more common than saints, especially nowadays. But the most charming mistake--one that I continued to play for my friends, because it so tickled me--was in its interpretation of the following phrase that I wrote, which was "It resembled a procession from "The Wizard of Oz."

Quoth the Kindle, "It resembled a procession from 'The Wizard of Ounces.'"