After Xmas SF Post

Mars Needs Moms! Berkeley Breathed Children's Book.

Horny PC nerd with too much time on his hands.

SF Signal MOVIE REVIEW: Bender's Big Score, like it for more than naked Leela.

It's a Sci Fi Christmas - Free Firefly 2-hour premiere episode.

Free ebooks or estories - manybooks.net.

Boom Time for YA writers. Village Voice meets a star couple.

Librarians are as central to the current YA explosion as bookstores. Fifty-one percent of public libraries now employ someone full-time to work with teens. Because the Young Adult Services category is the fastest-growing division within the American Library Association, the active support of these specialists greatly assists new writers.

The third week of every month, Justine and Scott attend "YA Drink Night," a downtown gathering where New York's amorphous cabal of published YA writers meet to socialize and talk shop. Stumble into the right Spring Street pub on the right night and you could find yourself hoisting a Belgian lager next to Naomi Novik of His Majesty's Dragon fame, or sharing cocktails with the brains behind Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, a sort of high school–meets–Will & Grace riff written by Levithan and Rachel Cohn. Once a week, cabal stalwarts lug their laptops to a particular Village coffee shop where they can type together between the hours of brunch and high tea.

The nicest surprise amid all this careerist socializing is that the YA vanguard refuses to segregate themselves by subject matter. Authors of dark fantasy or science fiction mingle happily with those who chronicle private-school clique wars or gay romance. In contemporary young-adult lit, realism has no caste privilege over the fantastic. Teen consumers reject the thematic hierarchies that bedevil every other media market, unwittingly creating a utopia for iconoclasts like Scott and Justine, who write teen fiction because it frees their best ideas from the deadly limitations of any adult genre ghetto.

Green news. Solar power cheaper than coal now and falling. See also the lithium nanotube battery breakthrough.

My brother and I want this - a moonbase of our own. 1962 Sear's Christmas catalog at Telstar Logistics. Link via Boing Boing.

One of many boats coming from China. Oops.

Christmas 2007, I wore my first pony tail. I had been trying to grow one for months. I've been annoyed before you get to the pony tail stage you have to go through the mullet stage. I also wore my first flat cap, also called drivers cap or Andy Capp cap.

Nice Christmas, I probably spent too much this year to make up for running out of money last year before running out of Christmas gifts. I only did one practical regifting this year. A gift that was for my sister a couple years ago is much more appropriate for my parents. So I regifted for my sister.

A little surprised I didn't get a book store or Amazon gift card this year. I did get a PetCo gift card which will go toward another aquarium or supplies. I did the review of Man from Earth after watching it Christmas Eve. Listened to my brother tell some stories of my Dad I hadn't heard. My Dad has one powerful thumb.

I managed to lose my bedroom phone this past month. With the ringer turned off it has been impossible to find. Earlier this year I lost my Lee College security cap and one pay check. Also lost one pair of glasses several months ago. Considering everything this amount is about typical.