A sneaky post, followed by an immediate confession.

While I will be spending most of this weekend (I hope) polishing up and off the re-launching of Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet with a more attractive, functional and clean look, I plan to set aside two and a half hours in late afternoon and early evening to watch the film adaption of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo via Netflix on my computer screen. It's not the ideal way to see it--although movies on the 'puter screen are pretty crisp and clean (even for the subtitles, I hope), the seating arrangements are not optimum--but I missed it when it played ever-so-briefly in the area and it's either this or renting it, an option I'll choose if the first half hour or so isnt' satisfactory.

Now, a bit of a confession. I posted the above mostly to check out a new linkage from here to Amazon which will earn Mermaids a bit of the profits every time anyone clicks from here to the book and buys it. Let me say up front that, if you are an inveterate reader and have an independent bookstore from which you usually purchase, please continue to do just that. I owned a bookstore for five years and I know both what an invaluable service they are to the community and how hard it is to make a living offering that service. If you do not have a local store and at some point you are moved to want to look more seriously at and possibly purchase a book mentioned and linked here, it would be a nice thing to do to reward the management for its efforts.

I promise I will put any earnings to humanitarian purposes such as buying donuts for the boys in the mail room one morning or dogitarian purposes by buying a treat for Buddy.

And, what the heck, as long as I'm pimping here, let me further suggest two of my favorite books of the year so far, The Pint Man and Hardball. The first is a tale of two or three days in a drinking man's life and filled with all sorts of clever wordplay and commentary; the second is the newest novel in a long running and very good private detective series.

And now we return you to our regularly schedule blather, already in progress...