Are You A Tax Cheat?

Are You A Tax Cheat?: With just over a month to go until the April 15th tax deadline, the IRS is .. http://bz9.cc/0ef3

Version 1.3 of the eLert Gadget Firefox add-on is now ready

Version 1.3 of the eLert Gadget Firefox add-on is now ready: You'll be glad to know we rec.. http://bz9.cc/0wPM

\"We woz brung up propur\"

\"We woz brung up propur\": WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER !! :-) \"And we never had a whole Mars bar until 1993.. http://bz9.cc/0w7J

BOOK REVIEW OF HEROS, VILLAINS AND VELODROMES - CHRIS HOY AND BRITAIN'S TRACK CYCLING REVOLUTION BY RICHARD MOORE

Scottish cyclist Chris Hoy, the reigning Olympic, World and Commonwealth champion, has been instrumental in British track cycling's remarkable transformation from also-rans to leading world superpower.

Author Richard Moore shadows Hoy throughout the current season to provide a revealing insight into the hitherto guarded world of track cycling. Heroes, Villains and Velodromes reveals how an elite athlete, Chris Hoy, lives, breathes and pushes the boundaries of his sport. How does he do it? And why? What drives him to put his body through the physical and mental hurdles to become the best in the world?

This is also the story of an extraordinary year in the life of an extraordinary sportsman and his team, one which started with his best-ever world championships in Mallorca -- where, for the first time in his career, Hoy became a double world champion -- continued with his attempt on the world kilometre record in La Paz, Bolivia, before two gold medals at the 2008 world championships at the Manchester velodrome in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics.

By shadowing Hoy through a season with the British track cycling team, author Richard Moore has gained an unembellished insight into the mind of a world champion. He has also attained unprecedented levels of access to the key members of the all-conquering British team (which smashed all records and dominated the 2007 and 2008 world championships) and support staff, including top coaches, world-renowned psychiatrists, doctors (where the subject of drug abuse is an ever-present shadow) and the pivotal characters behind the scenes.

Combining his forensic knowledge of the cycling world with his acclaimed skills as a tenacious investigative journalist, Moore captures the mood of the British team and explores an area of professional sport that has rarely been seen before.

Click here to view source.

BOOK REVIEW OF MAN IN THE DARK BY PAUL AUSTER

Civil war rages between America's 16 seceding blue states - incensed by the rule of George W. Bush - and the red-state-backed federal government. Twelve million have been killed so far. Brick, a children's magician from New York City, is conscripted by the blue leadership to put an end to the war by assassinating the man who invented it and keeps it going.

That man is not President Bush. He is a 72-year-old book critic named August Brill who, afflicted by all manner of troubles, spends an insomniac night making up stories. The main story, which takes up the first half of "Man in the Dark," invents both the war and the travails of Brick as he tries alternately to carry out his kill-Brill mission and desperately to evade it.

And so, the latest product of Paul Auster's more than 20-year career as the most meta of American metafictional writers. It is a career that has won him considerable esteem in European literary circles, where the project holds pride of place over the product; and more restricted esteem here, where it is the other way around.

The puzzle of "a man who must kill the person who created him" is the latest of many versions of what the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello devised close to a century ago. His characters (in "Six Characters in Search of an Author") take over his play and proceed to denounce him.

Pirandello's figures, though, had a touchingly rounded humanity to them. Brill's are gray and flat in their roles. They could be human chess pieces enlisted by some powerful and capricious potentate to play out the game on his palace lawn. Even Brick, whom Brill switches back and forth between the devastated war world and the parallel regular world (where he needs to be if he is going to assassinate Brill), is little more than a pawn.

Before the characters-versus-author game reaches its logically impossible conclusion, Brill shuts it down to tell the more conventional story he has hinted at between meta-hops. Through the long night, in a wheelchair in his Vermont cottage, he has been contemplating ruins.

His own, first of all. His writing talent has been squandered, he tells us, on thousands of 700-word and 1,500-word reviews. He is a sprinter, not a long-distance writer; indifference has brought him to a halt partway through an attempted book-length memoir. His leg is shattered after a near-fatal car crash.

Sonia, his wife, left him years before, because of his liaison with a younger woman; later they came back together, but now she is dead and guiltily mourned.

Living with him is his daughter, Miriam, deeply depressed after her husband divorced her and, like her father, went off with a younger woman.

No cheerier is Katya, his granddaughter, paralyzed with guilt because a lover she'd rejected went off to Iraq and was kidnapped and filmed as his head, like Daniel Pearl's, was cut off. She spends much of the time snuggling beside Brill as they watch three classic films each day.

Perky amid this depressive recital, where even the adulteries - oh, for a Cheever, an Updike, a Roth - are no fun, is Katya's film theory.

The emotional key to the great classics, she proposes, is things.

Dirty dishes in "Grand Illusion," a ceiling-high shelf of pawned clothes in "The Bicycle Thief." Auster, who has written screenplays, knows a lot about films, and Katya's examples are suggestive.

Auster is a longtime disbeliever in narrative connection. The long Brick section is detached in style, content and emotion from Brill's subsequent painful recitation. The painfulness itself is suddenly disconnected at the end, with hope breaking out just as the sun rises.

The intent is not camp, nor is it parody. It is an act of disbelief in traditional fictional values. The trouble is that the disbelief is getting to be as old as the values. With "Man in the Dark," Auster's literary collider has lost its subatomic energies; the result is wan as well as scattered.

REVIEW THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

"At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting...Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton; Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez's meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfilment of the immigrant's dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love."

REVIEW OF DREAMS OF MY FATHER BY BARACK OBAMA

"Forget Barack Obama. Forget the face, the smile, the presidential candidate. This is the self-examination of a 33-year-old crying out on every page, 'Who am I?' and finding an extraordinary answer.

Barack Obama's memoir, written long before his political career began, is a remarkable story of one man's search for his identity.The son of a black transient Kenyan father and an 18 year old white American Hawaiian mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance.Written at the age of thirty-three, 'Dreams from my Father' is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

Obama writes truthfully and compellingly, without the fear of condemnation and ridicule that plagues most political biographies. The presidential hopeful makes many bold revelations about his personal life -- including a drug habit. He tells of his quest to find a place for himself in the world being the son of a white woman and a black man in America."