Adventures in inflatable bedding

Replaced the current mattress with a new one that arrived in a box that weighs 101 pounds and the height of two microwaves. The packaging design is a study of beauty.

A few wild slicing motions with a key, revealed the interior.

Ready for the vacuum sealed goodness, I dumped the contents on the floor.

The last step took a pair of scissors and about two minutes. Before I knew it, Oedipus had christened the bed.

At the same time, Mooshy got trapped in the box. Surely there’s a bed inside for him beneath the plastic wrapping.

Mentionable

The Last Track netted a few mentions in the past few weeks:

First, Gina at Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers, apparently purchased a copy of The Last Track and recommended others do the same, even though she already had a review copy.

Margot Kinberg held an excellent discussion about the dynamic character arc of heroes in mystery novels at her site. In addition to classics from Mickey Spillane and Agatha Christie, she included The Last Track. It also got me fired up to re-read The Big Kill.

So those two entries pretty much made my week.

Last, Cynthia the admin of a Facebook group page, Book Reader Addicts invited me to check out their page, which I liked.

Details are still being sorted out, but Book Reader Addicts will host a contest for The Last Track soon. It’s going to be a little different than the standard giveaway the publisher has conducted so far.

And that’s about all I can say about that.

Nice stats

The only thing more devastating to teenager than limiting access to Facebook might just be the loss of their cell phone. It’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. In just a few years, one application has gone from innovative novelty to near necessity. But not just for teenagers.

Nearly all of my friend requests on Facebook in the last six months came from people who read The Last Track. That’s something I never expected.

Then again, I also never expected Facebook and social networking to get so big. At present more than 500 million people have Facebook accounts. Some days more people access Facebook than Yahoo or Google. Let me repeat that. A single destination draws more traffic than the biggest search engines that help people sift through billions of active web sites. That’s beyond impressive. And staggering.

It also makes me wonder what’s next for the social networking juggernaut. Maybe just more of the same.

Or maybe something even bigger.