Bitesized Languages

http://www.bitesizedlanguages.com/

Bitesized Languages is not available for subscription via the Kindle, but then, it doesn't really need to be. You can subscribe to it for free and have it delivered to your mailbox.

All it is is one sentence a day, translated into English and... whatever language you've chosen. I've chosen Spanish and German (I get two separate emails.) The sentence is the same in both languages, so I"m learning both languages simultaneously, which is fun.

It's a lot easier to learn to read a language than it is to speak it. If you just want to be able to read books in the original, check out Bitesized Languages as a teaching aid.

Susan Katz Keating (Politics)

REVIEWED BY: Ms. Cairo

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Susan Katz Keating, by Susan Katz Keating
[Note that the blog is listed twice, one as $1.99, the other as .99. I've given you the link to the 99 cent version!]

WEB ADDRESS: http://www.susankatzkeating.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Sometimes serious, other times snarky: Author, national security insider, and Expert marksman Susan Katz Keating on PTSD, FUBARs, brilliantly executed missions, and much more.

MY REVIEW: Susan Katz Keating is the author of Prisoners of Hope:: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in America in 1994, as well as Women of the West, Native American Rivalries (Native American Life), and Saudi Arabia (Modern Middle East Nations and Their Strategic Place in the World).

She's a Republican, I'd wager, and supports the troops. Check out her blog, it's pretty interesting.

Sample post:

What Next From Saudi Clerics? Adult Breastfeeding Edict Boggles the Mind
Flat-out nuttiness from Saudi clerics: women should breastfeed adult male non-relatives. That way, the men become family members, and it's okay to mingle with the chicks. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if dangerous mind-altering chemicals from the oil fields have leeched into the Saudi water supply. How else to explain such lunatic ideas...

RECENT POSTS:
--Courtney Keating on Restrepo: A Guest Post
--Response on That Michael Yon SOS...
--Danish Med Team Needed STAT to Field-Triage the Ranting Michael Yon
--Resisting the Impulse to Hog All the Web Traffic on Chuck's Post: Teaser on Solution to Israel Situation
--What Next From Saudi Clerics? Adult Breastfeeding Edict Boggles the Mind

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Ms. Cairo writes several blogs including:Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Topical Murder and Dated Death

Gawker (arts ad Entertainment)

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Gawker, by Gawker

WEB ADDRESS: http://gawker.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Gawker is the group's flagship title, a mix of pop culture and media gossip, updated more than a dozen times a day. Gawker is compulsory reading for New York editors and reporters, and often sets the agenda for the entertainment weeklies, gossip columns such as Page Six, and the soft sections of newspapers such as the New York Times.

MY REVIEW: I enjoyed this blog. It doesn't get that political (as a reviewer on its Amazon subscription page said) and has interesting comments about events of the day.

The blog is updated by several authors each day.

Highly recommended.

Sample post:

Love Means Not Knowing Anything About Your Partner
Love is... commitment. Love is... compromise. Love is... not giving a shit about what your partner likes. A new study indicates that people in long-lasting marriages know less about their partners than people in shorter relationships.

The study, conducted by University of Basel psychologists Benjamin Scheibehenne and Jutta Mata alongside Indiana University psychologist Peter Todd, asked participants to rate their and their partners' preferences in food, movies and kitchen designs. The young couples, aged 19 to 32 and in one-to-two-year committed relationships, were able to correctly guess their partners' preferences 47 percent of the time, whereas the older couples, aged 62 to 78, were only 40 percent accurate, proving that basically no one knows that much about their partners, but old people really don't know that much. According to researchers, the biggest gap came with food.

Why does this gap arise? It could be that older couples don't pay as much attention to their partners anymore now that they've "got that shit locked down," to use the scientific terminology. It could also be that your husband so goddamn boring, how on earth are you supposed to keep track of how he wants the kitchen to look?

The older couples also tended to attribute "their own food, movie and design preferences to partners who had different opinions." The most telling finding, though, is that more long-term couples said they were satisfied with their relationships than the younger couples. That's right: The secret to a lasting, satisfying marriage is just assuming your partner likes all the same things as you.

RECENT POSTS:
--YouTube Comments Are No Longer Safe for Mean People on the Internet
--Did Someone Lose the Nuclear Launch Codes?
--Love Means Not Knowing Anything About Your Partner
--Chilean Miners Already Sick of Media Attention
--Anti-Rand Paul Ad Basically Accuses Him of Being an Alien Shaman
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Check out the following blogs:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

Somebody Dies

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Somebody Dies, by Craig Clarke

WEB ADDRESS: http://somebodydies.blogspot.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Somebody Dies is the premier multi-genre book-review blog, covering crime, horror, and Western fiction (with the occasional digression into other arenas). From the obscure to the mainstream, from forgotten "classics" to the newest releases, everyone can find something to enjoy.

MY REVIEW: This is an excellent book review blog. The author reviews crime, horror and western fiction, "with the occasional digression." His reviews are thorough, covering all aspects of the book in question, something many reviewers don't do. When he reviews audio books, he also gives opinoins as to the quality of the narration, so that's a plus if most of your "reading" is done via audio.

The author averages one review a week, two at the most.

Sample review:

Trail Drive to Montana (Gunsmith #69) by Gary McCarthy writing as J.R. Roberts
Regular readers of this repository of reviews will likely know that I am a big fan of The Gunsmith, which is the only long-running adult Western series still primarily written by a single author under a pseudonym, in this case Robert J. Randisi under the moniker J. R. Roberts. However, he has not written all of them. Randisi stated in a 2007 interview with Saddlebums Western Review that his publisher early on wanted more books than he could turn out on his own. Thus, around 30 of the first 100 were contracted from other authors to fulfill the twelve-a-year quota.

Later, I learned from an interview on Western Fiction Review that author Gary McCarthy, who had written a book I had recently enjoyed called The Pony Express War, had been one of those writers. (He reportedly wrote four Gunsmith novels.) As I enjoy cattle-drive novels, I chose McCarthy's first for the series, Trail Drive to Montana, to see if I could detect a difference in styles.

Actually, it was easy. From page one of Trail Drive to Montana, I would at least have known that it was not from the usual author. Randisi has a fast-paced, easy reading style that utilizes punchy dialogue and short, sharp paragraphs. The first paragraph of this book has 20 lines of small text, and there's no real conversation for five pages. This is not a criticism of either style, merely an illustration of how different they are.

McCarthy shows you the whole picture, and this slows things down a bit compared to the norm for this series, but I must admit to the appeal of seeing ex-lawman and professional gunsmith Clint Adams being genuinely articulate instead of simply a man of action. Even the heroine remarks, "You got a fine way with words, Mr. Adams."

She is Mandy Roe, whom Adams discovers after her horse is killed and she is left stranded underneath it. Her father is Bart Roe, the former outlaw pardoned by the governor and now an innovative cattle breeder in his 80s, who still has as fiery a temper as ever. Or, as Clint says, "He's the craziest old son of a bitch I ever saw in my life." (Having a way with words means you sometimes get right to the point.)

The Roes need to drive their herd of special crossbreeds up to Montana, away from the vengeful Moffit clan, seeking revenge for a 25-year-old transgression. The Gunsmith, in no way a cowboy and actually quite proud of the fact, agrees to accompany them on the journey. Unlike typical Texas longhorns, who are known as "rainbow cattle" for the variety of their hues, the Roe herd is exceptionally uniform in size and color, selected for those attributes in the breeding process.

Dr. Thomas Thom, Bart Roe's brother-in-law and an equal partner in the breeding, makes a connection between the longhorns and Americans. As he puts it, "Crossbreeding almost always results in a more vigorous strain of beef. It accounts for much of the American drive and energy. You see, this country is the greatest bunch of crossbred people in the world.... We are not in-bred like many of the old-line European families. We have greater vigor. So does this herd."

McCarthy fills Trail Drive to Montana with the expected level of action (of both types), and an additonal level of description that makes for a richer read than the typical series novel. He is quickly working his way toward an entry on my list of favorite authors, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

Further reading: For another adult Western series novel about a cattle drive, read Longarm on the Goodnight Trail. For more "respectable" novels on the subject, Ralph Compton's Trail Drive series, starting with The Goodnight Trail, is also a winner. And of course, there's the epic of all Westerns, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove, which also centers around a trail drive.

RECENT POSTS:
--Trail Drive to Montana (Gunsmith #69) by Gary McCarthy writing as J.R. Roberts
--Psycho by Robert Bloch (unabridged audio book read...
--Sea Fangs by L. Ron Hubbard (unabridged audio book performed by a full cast)
--Blue-Eyed Devil by Robert B. Parker (unabridged audio book read by Titus Welliver)
--Twilight and New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (unabridged audio books read by Ilyana Kadushin)

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Check out the following blogs:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

London Ccylist

REVIEWED BY: Ms. Cairo

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: London Cyclist, by Andreas

WEB ADDRESS: http://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: This personal blog run by Andreas is for commuters in London and everywhere. It aims to help you get the most out of your every day cycle.

MY REVIEW: If you're a bicyclist, or a cyclist, as they say in England, you'll enjoy this blog. If you're planninng on visiting London and want to be able to bike around, you'll love this blog.

Even though the author is in England, and some of what he talks about - accesories and so on, are only available in England, I think this will be of use to all cyclists everywhere, just to know what's out there.

Recommended.

RECENT POSTS:
--Continental City Contact Tyre i.e. Whoooosh!
--What is the best cycling accessory you’ve bought in the past 12 months?
--Barclays cycle hire arrives on the Android
--10 reasons you’ll love the London Cyclist newsletter
--The lessons London can learn from the Velo’V cycle hire scheme

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Ms. Cairo writes several blogs including:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Topical Murder and Dated Death