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Celebrate! It's National Punctuation Day! Yes I'm a geek, and yes I have a favorite: the semi-colon. I was always afraid of them until recently, never knowing how to use them so just avoiding it altogether. After all, it's not a necessary punctuation, like a question mark or a period, but I've come to love it. It's a wink of a break, a stop but not a full-out period. Amber and I were discussing National Punctuation Day at dinner yesterday and I mentioned that the semi-colon was my favorite, and she tried to make me pick another. The semi-colon actually happens to be her favorite too. She likes the way "semi-colon" sounds apparently. “Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semi-colon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment,...

Duck! Duck! Safari! Designer: Kevin G Nunn Manufacturer: Advanced Primate Entertainment Year: 2009 Players: 2 - 5 Time: Varies Ages: 6 and up Duck! Duck! Safari! takes rubber ducky gaming into the tropics. Inside this bulging box of fun you will find the famous jungle explorer Ducktor Livingstone, five safari animal duckies and all the pieces for FIVE original and exciting games. Presume an evening of fun. These five games are carefully selected to range in complexity, duration and number of players so safari expeditions of all ages and sizes will find something wild to explore! This is a heck of a cute game, but don't let the rubber duckies full you, it's a family game that's good for older kids and parents, too. There are rules for five games in the box, the suggested age range for the easiest is 6+, while the most difficult suggests ages 10+. At Origins, David, Amber (10) and I played Savannah (ages 8+,...

Black Jack Derringer Book I: The Ace of Spades by K. H. Koehler I don't know quite how to describe this one. Cyberpunky, post-apocalyptic western? Pure fun if you like an old-fashioned shoot-em-up and muto horses with bulletproof hides. "Wild" Alice West is a bounty hunter in the vast desert known as the Skillet, an area with an Old West feel, but she's barely hanging on in a culture where a woman doing a man's job gets no respect. In a saloon, she meets Mr. Treen, an albino card shark who she thinks would be the perfect front man for her. Of course, Mr. Treen has surprising talents and scary secrets of his own. The Skillet is a rough, dangerous place, no doubt about it. And Alice gets in more than her fair share of scrapes, but doesn't seem to regret anything. She does what she has to do. She's got guts, I'll give her that. I'm not sure who or what Mr....

The Book List Meme at Lost in Books asks a simple question this week, "What are your favorite genres?" Actually it's not that easy to answer. First there's the "favorite" word. How do I pick my "favorites?" How can I choose when I love them all? And then "genres." There are so many genres and sub-genres and books that cross categories that it's tough, but I finally came up with a rather broad list. Mystery - "Human nature doesn't change. Our clothiers change, our technology changes, but the passions that drive people to commit a crime, which is what these books are all about, doesn't change, and that's endlessly fascinating." ~Miner Romance - "Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze." ~Amanda Cross Fantasy - "Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong."...

Green Pieces: Green From the Pond Up by Drew Aquilina This is a collection of cartoon strips set in a pond where led by a claustrophobic turtle named Iggman, the action picks up once humans leave the scene.  Iggy and his friends including an annoying dragonfly, Radic, an omnipotent techno-bullfrog, Cabby, and a rogue raccoon, Roc, give us an entertaining perspective on nature. While for me the cartoons were not laugh-out loud funny, I may be in the minority, and I certainly see the value of the collection. It's a fun way of incresnig awareness about the environment, of teaching kids, and adults, to respect nature, seeing the world from the viewpoint of these quirky characters. Laughing and learning are a great combo. And the strips are amusing. I especially loved Iggy; he and his shell manage to get into all kinds of situations. Publish date: September 4, 2010 197 pages [tweetmeme source=”carolsnotebook” only_single=false http://carolsnotebook.com/2010/07/07/green-pieces-by-drew-aquilina/] I received my advance review copy from the...

The Knight Life: "Chivalry Ain't Dead" by Keith Knight I don't read comics on a regular basis, I have to admit, but the strips in this collection are laugh-out loud funny commentaries on life, politics, technology. The first time I just glance at the book, I had to immediately show several to my husband.  Some of them are just so hilarious I had to share. Here's the blurb: The Knight Life is a hilariously twisted view of life through the eyes and pen of its creator, community-oriented urban hipster and award-winning cartoonist Keith Knight. The Knight Life deftly blends political insight and neurotic humor in a uniquely fluid and dynamic style, offering a comic strip that's fresh, sharp, topical and funny. Designed for daily newspapers, The Knight Life follows Knight's long-running, 2007 Harvey Award-winning weekly comic strip "The K Chronicles," which appears on salon.com. An unabashedly provocative political and social satire, The Knight Life tackles contemporary...