Pitch perfect. From John Williams, Stoner.

Xmas is right around the corner… via Wired.

I’m dangerously close to taking the plunge into e-readership. Best case scenario, I’ll hold out for the much-rumored Apple Tablet, but there is always a chance that I will cave and purchase a Kindle, especially if Amazon lowers the price for the holidays.

Of course, there are many detriments to weigh against the e-reader’s alluring convenience: besides the smell (oh, the smell!) and the all-around tactile feel of a physical book, the attribute of physical books I would miss most is the cover design. Some of my favorite books are inextricably linked in my memory to their elegant, iconic designs. From Salinger’s intentionally design-less paperbacks (my battered, water-stained high school copy of Catcher became a canvass, graffiti-ed with phone numbers and notes-to-self in my Father’s indecipherable scrawl) to 2666’s phantasmagorical use of Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele, good covers act as a visual cue, an enticing signpost for the text they contain.

The Book Cover Archive is a wonderful resource - and time-suck - dedicated to the art of the cover. Their mission is to create an online archive “for the purpose of appreciation and categorization” of book covers and book cover designers. Check out their top covers of the past decade to get a feel for the project, and then spend some time exploring the site and accompanying blog.

Here’s one of my favorites: 2008’s Penguin UK Great Ideas edition of Walter Benjamin’s influential 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

The day winds down.

Rosie with Vern Tapp in the background.

Q: How about Hank Williams? Do you consider him an influence?

A: Hey look, I consider Hank Williams, Captain Marvel, Marlon Brando, The Tennessee Stud, Clark Kent, Walter Cronkite, and J. Carrol Nalsh all influences. Now what is it — please — what is it exactly you people want to know?

…from a hysterical, maddening 1965 Village Voice interview with a young Bob Dylan.

Back in April things were getting pretty hot around here at T ‘n S HQ, so I took a 7 1/2 month hiatus to clear my head.

A lot has gone down since I last checked in: I started tweeting;I broke my thumb and popped it back into its socket with my own brute animal strength; my wife and I explored the lush, weird Pacific Northwest, from the sprawling dunes and beaches of Florence and Manzanita, to the misty, verdant base of Mt. Rainier; I went to Florida twice (and I’m only 30!), New Jersey and New York once, and made my first ever trip to Austin, Texas, where I had the distinct pleasure to stumble across the beginnings of an honest-to-goodness Tea Party, complete with self-professed home-grown terrorists and a gorgeous bull mastiff trained to bite liberals and communists.

Obviously, there was more to the past 7 1/2 months than just me, me, me. My amazing wife took (and killed) the USMLE boards, wrote a chapter for an anesthesiology textbook and submitted an abstract to a medical journal that I’m not smart enough to read, all while arranging residency interviews and finishing her fourth and final year of medical school at OHSU.

In other family news, my younger brother met Frank Stallone at a horror flic convention in Paramus. He also sat behind infamous traitor Johnny Damon at an opening screening of Couples Retreat.

In national news, the nation’s old and infirm fought off the evil forces of the dreaded Death Panels, a bird shut down the Large Hadron Collider with a piece of baguette, and thanks to the truth-loosing powers of Hennessey, Kanye West said what everyone was thinking, live on national television.

I think that covers most everything.

So, back to business. I’m starting up the blog again to hone my writing chops and hopefully share some fun stuff along the way. In addition to the many gems I shall pluck from flotsam and jetsam of the internets, I have a handful of awesome, exciting projects in the hopper, some of which I hope to share right here in the coming months.

It already feels good to be back, pushing more nonsense out into the electronic ether. Hopefully the two or three friends who have kept Things and Stuff in their rss reader will take notice and adjust their lives accordingly.

Until next time, I’ll leave you with Rosie the Cannibal Chicken. (She had leftover chicken parm for dinner on Halloween, hence the cannibalism.)

You be the judge.

One step closer to the Matrix.

Lookin’ good, Portland.

via, Real Oregon Reality, because Business Week thinks PDX is the most Unhappy City in the USA.

That’s the future…