Things I learned from the latest James Bond movie:

-Only white people matter.
-Don't shoot low when in Venice.
-MI5 uses Sony Vaio laptops.
-For big fun, shoot propane tanks.
-Veruschka looks great, even now after all these years.

Posted by Nica @ 10:35 PM PST [Link]

You might be asking yourself, where did all the entries go? That's a good question. There was a little problem (my fault) with one of the Greymatter scripts (which are excellent by the way). I will be reconstructing the entries over the next week or so.

Posted by Nica @ 09:40 PM PST [Link]

There has always been a bit of a cult surrounding bound notebooks, the ones which make you look not like a kid going to geography class, but more like Victorian romance character going to takes notes on the flora and fauna of Ceylon. My little home town of Port Townsend made a variety of these overpriced notebooks, and many a self-indulgent housewife has logged her spiritual growth in such tomes. It's all a bit silly, but many of the notebooks were very cute. Personally I recommend fine bath oils for real self-indulgence.

Now there are Moleskine notebooks. They seem just fine, but I honestly think the things are practical for very few people. I was really annoyed when Rick Steves recommended them for journaling on trips explicitly dissuaded people from using spiral bound notebooks.

Here's are the problems I have with such notebooks. You can't rearrange the pages, and they don't stay flat. You're travelling someplace and you notice what a delightful hotel you're in. You write about in your journal. You go out to dinner and then you make an entry about a restaurant that you really don't want to go to again, and you wryly describe how annoying the waiter was. Now you realize that you would like to make some more comments about the hotel and add a drawing, but now these comments and the drawing will be two entries away from your original hotel entry.

Moleskines and other notebooks of that type don't open flat. It makes for less convient entries; as my pen approaches the far right side of the left page I get the feeling of walking near a ditch with slipperly sides. Spiral bindings, as ugly as some find them, don't cause this gullying between the pages. It is also nice to be able to read your own notes hands free while sipping tea or consulting a map.

Some (like Rick Steves) point out that you want nice notebooks which will look good in a bookcase, not some ugly spiral bound thing. Very well, if you really must take a Martha Stewart approach to this, bind your notes yourself. It's really not that hard. You'll be able to use different papers for different things (note, drawings, watercolors, diagrams), you can custom make your cover, you can brag about how cool you are.

Don't be a Moleskine snob. Don't be a snob at all. Moleskines are made by an Italian company, but then again, so are Fiats. And Hemingway and Van Gogh did not use these notebooks; they used notebooks similair to Moleskines, but not Moleskines.

You will find blogs devoted to Moleskine notebooks. Interestingly one problem that many people have with these little books is that they don't have a use for them! It sounds like it takes some people a long time to fill theirs up, so I guess the high price point for these things isn't too much of a problem.

Posted by Nica @ 09:10 PM PST [Link]