Creek Running North

1) In Golden Gate Park on Monday, I passed a mother and daughter feeding ducks. The daughter could not possibly have been older than three. I smiled at them as I walked past. When I was perhaps ten feet past the little girl she said said to her mother, very crisply, “He’s got Bob Marley hair.”

2) [Added: This is not a paid or solicited review. I hate that certain bloggers’ ethics are so loose that such a disclaimer is necessary instead of the other way around.] Can someone explain to me how I could possibly have survived until now without this software? (All the keystrokes I could have saved myself. Sigh.) “Like iTunes for Journal article PDFs,” one review I saw said, more or less. I’m importing the hundreds of articles I’ve downloaded for J tree book research, and Papers keeps track of which ones I’ve read, plus will import citation metadata and abstracts of recent articles from Google Scholar or PubMed or other databases. (Users are adding modules for new databases as we speak.) I remember, children, when doing research meant cross-referencing citations in five point type in Biological Abstracts, usually in library stacks with a malfunctioning fluorescent tube 30 feet away the sole illumination. Tools like this make ADD almost a boon in doing research, now that I can let the machine handle the organizing. Plus you can set your settings so that you click on a PDF file, drag it to a word processing document, and what appears in the new document? The properly formatted citation. The people who wrote Papers did good. I can already tell I’m gonna have to scrape up the 40 bucks once the trial period ends.

Now if President Hillabama will kindly just nationalize Jstor and Elsevier and release their contents free, we’ll truly have something.

3) I’m waiting for the second proof of the Zeke book to arrive. I thought it might get here by Friday but it hasn’t been shipped yet wasn’t shipped until late Thursday night. As soon as I get it, if there are no egregious errors, it’ll go on sale. 218 pages, 17 dollars and 95 cents at a Creek Running North near you!