Awesome collection of Vonnegut motivational posters.

Inkwood Books will be hosting cookbook author Diana Kennedy Saturday, February 14 at 2 p.m.

“Kennedy is universally known for bringing authentic delicious Mexican recipes to the US kitchen, as Julia Child did for French and Marcella Hazan did for Italian. She will discuss and sign her classic book, The Art of Mexican Cooking, which was reissued and updated this year, as well as her other 3 essential Mexican cookbooks. Join us for this special visit, made even better with food samples from El Taconazo, the best Mexican restaurant in Tampa, whose proprietor/chef was taught by Ms. Kennedy.”

Kennedy will also be offering a cooking class at El Taconazo (aka the Taco Bus) Friday the 13th at 6:30. Learn more about her visit here.

At Scribe Life Philip has posted his review of Tim Dorsey’s newest, Nuclear Jellyfish.

What is wrong with Ronda Storms? Seriously.

The Trib reports that Storms lashed out against the Dewey Decimal System recently -

“Storms, R-Valrico, railed against the book-cataloging system during a budget hearing on state library aid, calling the Dewey Decimal System ‘anachronistic,’ costly and just plain frustrating.”

When I hear things like this I wonder if it’s even worth trying to correct the error. Is Ronda Storms educable? Does she have any interest in accuracy and knowledge? Is she intentionally trying to create ignorance? Does she really know what the Dewey Decimal System is? Has she ever considered the challenges of categorizing media to make it accessible? What are her opinions about co-location? Does she really think that librarianship, a profession with more than a century of scholarly research and debate under its belt, is indistinguishable from a minimum wage clerk at a chain bookstore?

What compels her to say things like “it really is ridiculous?” when she has no comprehension of what she’s talking about?

More importantly, why do people vote for her? Is it really in their best interest to select someone so profoundly incurious and proud of their weak intellect? How does electing someone so hateful, bigoted, and willfully ignorant help the community?

Storms is the standard bearer of ignorance. She hates everything libraries stand for - knowledge, tolerance, community, and sharing.

Sue Carlton at the Times has more.

Donald Westlake dies New Year’s Eve.

The full panoply of Mr. Westlake’s books was a spectacle to behold, his friends said. “We were in his library, this beautiful library surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of titles,” said Laurence Kirshbaum, his agent, “and I realized that every single book was written by Donald Westlake, English-language and foreign-language editions.”

Not really related to Tampa or Florida, but I went through a Westlake phase and have a deep fondness for his work.

David Cay Johnston’s Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill) is a densely packed series of investigative reports revealing how giant corporations and the hyper-wealthy take federal funds to enrich themselves.

Johnston is the consummate journalist. He started his career in 1968 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 2001 for his analysis of the tax code. He’s worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Detroit Free Press, the Los Angeles Times The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. Johnston spent a substantial portion of his career investigating the crimes of the wealthy. He has a gift for taking complicated financial schemes and explaining them in straight-forward no-nonsense prose.

Johnston’s Free Lunch is grounded in facts and evidence, and there’s almost no room for hyperbole or speculation. The accumulation of facts, however, creates a dense prose that can sometimes be heavy wading. Toward the last third of the book it seems as if his litany of crime will never end, and criminal behavior starts to blur together. The final chapter offers up a few solutions, but they seem paltry compared to the awe-inspiring level of corruption he describes in nearly 300 pages.

Johnston’s deep knowledge of the ways corporations rip off the system allows him to make some counter-intuitive arguments. One argument he makes that I’ve never heard before addresses the financial drain caused by home alarm companies.

What could possibly be wrong with home alarms? Even if they don’t work all the time, surely they discourage some thieves, and it must be good to have the police notified if someone is breaking into your home. For Johnston home alarm systems are a giant scam ripping off the tax payer. First, they don’t necessarily stop thieves from robbing your home. Second, most alarms are false alarms. Since the alarm company only calls the cops instead of sending out security guards, this means that the police are now put into a position of wasting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of man-hours chasing down false alarms instead of doing real police work, like working truancy programs. Truancy programs have shown a real effect on slowing burglary, where home alarm systems have not.

One of the solutions Johnston offers is to expand the franking privilege for members of Congress. From now on everything members of the Congress need, whether it’s a flight home, lunch, a visit to a factory in China, money to take guests to dinner, etc. will be paid for by the U. S. tax-payer. Gifts from lobbyists, corporate donors, and influence peddlers will be banned and receipts for expenditures will made easily available. This increases the cost to the tax-payer, but the savings in cutting corruption would be immeasurable.

Clark at Ridiculously Inconsistent Trickle of Consciousness reviews Historic Photos of Tampa, a coffee-table book collection of photos from the Burgett Brothers Photographic Archives.

Sounds like fun reading.

Google adds magazines to its Google Book Search.

“Today, we’re announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.”

Daily Routines collects information about “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.” T. C. Boyle has my dream schedule and the one I work on trying to achieve (with an emphasis on the trying).

“I start with two newspapers: the L.A. Times and the Santa Barbara News Press. Then I re-read what I’ve written the previous day. Then I work. When that’s over, I do something physical: yard work, hiking, swimming, snorkeling. Then I make dinner, read, maybe watch a movie, sleep. This last is important: I need my rest, as we all do; and I sleep well, you’ll be happy to know, as a result of having a clean conscience.”

Except I read my news on the Internet and sometimes don’t sleep so well, but that has more to do with exercise than conscience. Some of their excerpts are from the Paris Review which always asked the writers they interviewed to describe their workspace and daily routines. Those are great interviews.