Pre-ordering (my) books + secret jewellery + Jane Goodall

Sep 26, 2021

May I recommend

Pre-ordering any books you’ve got your eye on.

So apparently this global pandemic is FINALLY gonna impact me (ha ha ha). It has disrupted the publishing world’s already dicey supply lines. This means that if you have any books you want to get your paws on (AHEM) in the next few months, you should order them now. This is especially concerning for Christmas orders, BUT if you were interested in books published, let’s say on March 29th, 2022, now might be the time to pre-order, just to be safe.

My number one recommendation is to pre-order from your local bookstore - all of them should be able to bring whatever book you want in, their prices are competitive, and you’re supporting local. Win. Win. Win.

If you want to get my book - links below!

First, order local if possible.

For my frugal Canadians, if you want to maximize your Plum points here it is at Indigo

Here’s our good friend, and Jeff Bezos’ Penis Rocket Money Maker: Canadian Amazon

If you’re in the States, my publisher has set up an e-commerce site and I get a few more pennies if you order from them (my book is on sale at the moment and 10% cheaper than the bigger outlets). You can’t order from them in Canada.

In the States you can use Indiebound to order from a local, indy book store if you like.

Obviously, this is Jeff Bezos’ REAL money maker: American Amazon

I don’t think I have ever been into a Barnes and Noble, but they might be the last big American book chain? Someone needs to tell me.

One last thing, you KNOW I love me a library, so if you don’t want to spend the money (or if you just want to give me a boost!) you can email your local library and request THEY buy a couple of copies… Guess what? Those fools will do it! That way you’re sticking it to Big Library and getting them to pony up the coin.

Did you buy my book or someone else’s because of this public service announcement? Leave a note in the comments below!

*** Also, Substack is giving me a weird message saying that this newsletter might be too long to show up fully in email, even though it’s not particularly long. If that happens and you want to get the full thing, just click in the email and it should take you to the full thing on the Substack website itself. I don’t know what the dickens is going on. Well, maybe it is longer than usual? I don’t know. I had a lot of tweets and then the tiktoks were funny. Plus I got weirdly excited by that article on file folders.**

Secret jewels!

Marie Antoinette’s secret diamond bracelets hit the auction block

Guys! The Honeybee Emeralds is about secret jewellery that has been owned (fine not by Marie Antoinette) by some real muckedy mucks Go back to what I just wrote and pre-order that sucker! You’re gonna love it!

During Queen Marie-Antoinette’s final years, when was she locked away in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, she secretly packed her jewels in a wooden crate and sent them to Austrian ambassador Count Mercy-Argenteau for safekeeping. Feeling so confident that she would soon be exonerated and be free to retrieve her jewelry, the doomed monarch even ordered a Breguet watch while awaiting trial. Obviously, she would never get the chance to claim neither watch nor box of jewels—Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine in 1793.

Jane Goodall is okay, I guess

Jane Goodall on How She Changes Minds and Why She Isn’t Ruling Out Bigfoot

I have mixed feelings about this article, mostly because I have residual anger toward Jane Goodall. She gave a Canadian Wildlife sponsored talk in Ottawa a few years ago and it was actually really boring, and we had JUST returned from a trip to Greece and we were really really jet-lagged and Violet was grumpy and fell asleep and I was grumpy and fell asleep. Suffice to say, it was not the pivotal moment of environmental awareness, activist awakening and the urgent call to action that I had hoped for my daughter. Instead, it was just an uncomfortable and expensive nap.

That being said, this was a good article. Goodall’s optimism is quite inspiring. Here she is, being asked why she continues to have hope for the future:

I don't know. But recently I've come to think about that more and more. I've lived through fighting off World War II. I've lived through the end of apartheid in South Africa, I've lived through a Cold War. I've lived through 9/11, I was in New York. And at least a collective will to change is growing more steadily.

La doi, it’s the Honeycrisp

Apples, ranked

Considering the fact that at a recent family birthday party all of the adults on our porch got into a passionate argument about what the best apple is, I sense this might be of keen interest to my readership.

I have never heard of the winner, but I admit to being intrigued.

I do not agree with the high ranking (spoiler: #5) received by the Granny Smith, but I appreciate the review:

"Hell, Yeah"
Granny Smith apples rule because: 1) they're practically never mealy; 2) their longevity is, like, insane (up to a year in certain conditions!); 3) raw or baked, they're still delicious; 4) they're one of three apples that are pretty much always available; 5) apparently, they're the healthiest apple; and 6) "Granny" Smith was a real Australian lady named Maria Ann who dumped a bunch of crabapple cores out of her kitchen window and into her backyard, which grew into a tree that accidentally spawned her namesake apple. A very good apple indeed.

Kids these days don’t know how to search for files and old people don’t understand their thought process

File Not Found

We have an information management system at my work that is built on the Sharepoint platform and it doesn’t really have files or folders and it befuddles and defeats me (and I think all 900 employees of Library and Archives Canada) on a daily basis. The old people like to put things in files!

I have a very strong connection with this guy:

Guarín-Zapata is an organizer. He has an intricate hierarchy of file folders on his computer, and he sorts the photos on his smartphone by category. He was in college in the very early 2000s — he grew up needing to keep papers organized. Now, he thinks of his hard drives like filing cabinets. “I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers,” he told The Verge. “Like a nested structure. At the very end, I have a folder or a piece of paper I can access.”

I do appreciate what is going through the young people’s minds:

“I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function,” says Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. But among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up.” She added, “They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.”

If you’ve read this far, maybe you are interested in this topic. I will say that people’s expectation of the above (that you can punch in whatever you want into a search bar and get a copy of the thing you are looking for) is super super tricky for archives, because that’s not how we have ever organized and described our stuff and it really really frustrates people that they can’t search for things and find them the way they are used to. Archives around the world are trying to address this, but it’s very hard and complicated to do and if you want, I can talk to you for literal hours about the issues.