Here's my entry on the book meme that's been running around. Books in bold are ones I've read. Looks like 35 of the 100. But I have a hard time believing this list came from the BBC. There's too much Cannon mixed with pop fiction and way to damn much Austen to represent anything like a reasonable sample of English-Language Lit.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (The whole Bronte clan bores the crap out of me)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (actually 3 books)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (see #1)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Actually 7 books, hey look I'm up to 10 books on the first 4 entries)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (See #1)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis(Again, 7 books)

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Ummm... #33 includes this)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (but why?)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert (Do I get to count this whole series too?)

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( I saw the musical )

A significant percentage of the energy in household use (by my unscientific and guess-heavy research) goes into low-voltage items. Computers, charging phones and batteries and media players and the like. Pretty much anything with a wall-wart is using a good sized chunk of it's power to convert from 120VAC to 6-12VDC (or whatever voltage is required. And, many of those things have batteries that they're charging. They don't need always-on power, and they don't need 120VAC.

So here's what I envision...

A parallel wiring setup that distributes low-voltage DC power throughout a home could power a lot electronic equipment more efficiently and cheaply. Instead of transformers all over the place, you could have one large one that provided low-voltage power more efficiently. Even better, you could hook this system up to an on-site generator. Solar and wind are more effective at generating low voltage DC than at generating AC power, so it would be the ideal way to start getting some of the power load off the grid. And the generator I'd like to see is the WindBelt.

I'm obsessed with this thing. From what I've seen, it's scalable, durable and has a minimum of moving parts. They're smaller than a turbine and cheaper than solar panels. You could mount them on your roof line and it wouldn't change the appearance of your house very much at all.

Of course there are issues with this idea. Electronics manufacturers would have to standardize on voltages and connectors, but the fact that they don't is stupid anyway. Homes would need to be rewired, but I don't see that as being substantially more complex than adding cable outlets. And, of course, someone needs to build the technology and market it. But this could be a big first step. If it worked, I can see many people thinking "What else can I move to this system?" We'd probably see an upsurge in demand for things that could run low-voltage, like LED lighting.

Would you buy a system like this if it were available? How would you improve this idea?

My friend Peter posted a list of the movies he considered in contention for the best movies of the first decade of the 21st century, which inspired me to look at what I liked best this decade. The way I did this was to look at the movies that had dates between 2000 and 2009 that I rated 5 stars. Here's the list I came up with, and a one sentence synopsis of why I liked it.

8 mile It's rough and angry and introspective and real, like hip-hop should be.

Ali Will Smith plays the role of Ali so well, that it's easy to forget that he's there at all.

Big Fish A movie equivalent of Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like, in which you're beautifully reminded that the things you know to be true may not be and the things you know are impossible may not be either.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon A friend of mine, after seeing this movie, said "I don't need to see any more movies. This one is enough."

Flags of Our Fathers Most war movies are about overarching stories rather than the individuals who actually go out there and fight and die for us.

Hero As beautiful as Crouching Tiger (or more so) with a more interesting and moving story.

Hotel Rwanda Sometimes the heroes don't want to be the heroes.

Ice Age This would have probably made the list just for Scrat and his acorn.

Memento I love a story that screws with your mind in such a way that you can spend hours trying to figure it out.

O If you're going to update Shakespeare, you have to do it right.

Punch Drunk Love This movie was so good, it made Happy Gilmore a better movie for me.

The Royal Tenenbaums The strangest people you'll ever meet and come away feeling that they're somehow completely normal.

Shrek A near-perfect mix of humor for adults and kids.

Shrek 2 And they pulled it off twice?

Walk the Line Brilliant actors brilliantly portraying a brilliant life.

Okay, so the title of this post is going out on a bit of a limb, but I think most people would agree that desecrating corpses for profit, especially those of children, ranks fairly low on the morality scale. Last week, at Burr Oak Cemetary in Alsip, a major scheme came to light in which a cemetery's staff had been routinely reselling occupied gravesites. Details are still coming to light and many questions will likely go unanswered forever. But you have to wonder what kind of person has this little respect for other people.

Regardless of your feelings about what happens to people after they die, anyone with a shred of compassion has to understand that when someone goes to the effort and expense of burying a loved one, they expect a certain level of respect to be afforded to that person. I, unfortunately, know the pain of making these arrangements. In your time of greatest pain, you're having to make, what amounts to a business transaction regarding the place where (you assume) your love one will be forever.

There are some who are saying "These people didn't visit the grave sites, so why are they so upset?" or "If you don't remember where the plot was, then why does it matter if they're not there?". Those people are morons. How many of them visit their grandparent's graves more than once a year? More than once every five years? Ever? What about their great-grandparents? We aren't able to visit Aiden more than once or twice a year. I haven't been to the grave of either of my grandfathers since the funeral. Yes, this is something I wish weren't true, but it's a fact of life and doesn't change the fact that if I should go to visit them tomorrow I expect that they will be there, and be maintained properly. The idea that someone would destroy those graves, dump the bodies and sell the site is unfathomable to me. If I went to the cemetery and couldn't find my grandfather's headstone, I wouldn't think it was gone. I'd assume that I'd remembered the location incorrectly. And we haven't placed a headstone for Aiden yet. There is a marker, but it is not permanent. And being in another state, it's not only logistically difficult to make that trip, it's emotionally painful. There are many, many parents who have buried a child who cannot bear to see the grave site. They prefer to remember their child as a child, not a body. Those memories don't make the reality any less sacred to them.

Yes, lawsuits have been filed, and some people (as in any terrible situation) will see this as an opportunity to get a payday, but there are many others who will have very real burdens, both in terms of the financial impact of having to find, and relocate a loved one (or several), and the emotional impact of having to go through the funeral process again.

To those who have had their trust violated in this situation, my heart goes out to you. To those who see this as a payday (including the lawyers who are only in this because they smell 30% or more of a settlement) you should be ashamed. And to those who committed these acts, or willingly allowed them to go on, I hope you lose everything you own in civil suits and spend a significant portion of your life in jail on criminal charges, and when you die, I hope that no cemetery will take you. Donate the body to science so that at least some good can come of you.

Here's my new theme. I hope you like it. It's got a little bit more emphasis on the photos, and brings comments to the front page. I think I like it quite a bit. It's a departure for me though so we'll see what I think of it after a week or two.

The plugin that puts the images between posts has some bugs I still need to work out. If you get an error, for now, just reload and it should go away.

Let me know what you think and if there are any improvements I could make.

The neighborhood I live in is, to put it euphamistically, in transition. A few blocks north are the first signs of gentrification, a few blocks south and you're in an area that I wouldn't recommend walking through at night. There is some gang activity, but not much. Mostly it's just white trash screaming at each other. Occasionally, this escalates into people throwing empty beer bottles. At the end of the block is one of the much debated police cameras. It's positioned in such a way that it can't actually see down this block.

Shortly after we moved in 3 years ago, two people were shot in a drive-by across the street. This happened about 45 minutes after I'd called the police to report those same people shouting and fighting. About two weeks ago, I called to report shouting and fighting. It wasn't until I called again after someone from that group hit the window of a passing SUV with a golf club. This was over an hour later.

Flash forward to last Friday. We noticed someone setting up a grill across the street, shortly after that a few police cars arrived, and we quickly realized that some sort of gathering was being held. I went down to investigate and discovered that the police and Mayor Daley's Pet Alderman were having a small cook out for the community. Of course, as members of the community, we'd heard nothing about it. It turns out that the police had found 3 guns in the empty lot there and were celebrating the community's involvement in reporting the activity that got the police to search the lot.

Sunday afternoon, I heard an argument outside a guy and girl were yelling at each other and another girl was trying to keep them apart. The girl threw her shoe at the guy. Then started waving a rake at him. A police officer showed up shortly thereafter, and apparently decided backup was required. Within the next 30 minutes a total of 9 police vehicles arrived on the scene. Eventually the shoe-thrower was handcuffed and taken away.

So... if you call in a large group of people shouting and throwing beer bottles in the middle of the night, you have to wait an hour and for actual violence to be committed before a single police officer shows up. But throw a shoe at someone on a sunny afternoon and half the department responds? Is it any wonder that it becomes harder and harder to treat the police department with the respect that most of the officers actually deserve?