Blog post on a floppy disk

Even a non-gardener like me can appreciate horticultural noir:

"Listen, you’ve got to be tough to grow vegetables.  Tough, smart, and a little bit mean.  Because plants are headstrong and narcissistic, prey to all the sins of the flesh.  They’ll strangle each other when you aren’t looking.  Make no mistake—in the quest for food, beauty, and truth, a lot of creatures are going to get hurt."

Someone has to get this on video:

"We’re throwing down. We challenge anything and anyone to a recommendations-off, because we still think individual experience and personal attention are better than any database or line of code."

Bookstores get the best mail:

"My name is Richard Mansfield, I carved the Punccinello that stands outside your door. (The one you guy guys continually abuse with your idiotic paint schemes.)"

Some wisdom from the Antipodes:

"Selling eBooks is never going to be 50% of my business; it might not even be 5%. But that is not the point. A bookshop is a place where people go to talk about books and find out about books... Either way people need booksellers to help them find the books they are looking for (or not looking for as the case maybe). Therefore eBooks will need independent bookshops just as much as independent bookshops will need eBooks."

But e-books are not just a question for bookstores:

"Now consider that ebooks remain a mysterious concept to many, and that libraries have long taught basic how-to computer classes, and you have an ideal arena for navigating a technological sea change that won’t happen overnight or in a few years. For publishers to fulfill their projections that ebooks will make up as much as 25 to 60 percent of their business in 2015, they need to grow new readers every day; this happens in public libraries without their cooperation."

Of course, there are drawbacks to some electronics:

"My new smartphone is very smart indeed. And, frankly, a little insecure. It knows its own name, and it keeps shouting it at me to get my attention."

And on a related note:

"Do you still work with 3.5-inch diskettes? How about 5.25-inch floppy disks and Zip disks? I do."