The PG Wodehouse Library: public domain Wodehouse.

Aaaaah. 36 Wodehouse titles, all free, all for Palm.

I’ve embarked on my annual peregrinations in the company of that amiable nitwit Bertie Wooster, and for some reason, the voices of the excellent Fry and Laurie are echoing in my head more clearly than they have in the past. Wodehouse casts the whole oeuvre in Bertie’s wildly flighty voice, and consequently I hear Hugh Laurie’s piping, bug-eyed take on the pride of the Woosters flibbertigibbeting about in my skull.

It’s quite pleasant, really.

I found the television adaptations that the comedians starred in hilarious; I haven’t seen them for years, and of course, there are now DVDs available. Viv tells me she hasn’t ever seen any of the episodes, so I think I might be ordering them soon.

That aside, the incessant prattling inside my head led me to wonder: is it possible that Mr. Laurie executed any audiobooks of Wodehouse’s original confections? Garishly polluted Google results make the answer to this unclear, but the sparse examples of Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster audiobooks I unearthed did not feature Laurie reading, so I rather doubt that this item was ever produced, what what.

Bit of the stiff, that.

Pursuant to an interesting discussion, In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick is hereby bookmarked, or rather linked.

The book is said to be based upon the incident that became the basis for Moby Dick. I’m starting to lean into nineteenth-century readings again and this sounds tasty.

Given my towering pile of on-deck matter, however, it may be a few moons before I get to this one.

I chuckled my way through Tad Friend’s Letter from California, “Naked Profits,” in the July 12 and 13 issue of The New Yorker, unfortunately not online.

Friend is (or was) a staff writer at the magazine, and wrote the interesting “Jumpers” for a 2003 issue of the magazine, in which institutional resistance to jump-proofing scenic landmarks was dissected.

Here, Friend turns an arch if not-unfriendly eye on the employee buyout of the San Francisco Lusty Lady. The Lusty Lady is a strip club (although I’m sure there’s a better word for it now, given the circumstances). There is also a Lusty Lady in Seattle, which has produced at least one book. Both facilities have a reputation for being a bit different than the general run of erotic entertainment parlors.

Friend has a happy time with the personal and dramatic interplay familiar to anyone who has ever worked in or helped to run a co-op. My favorite passage is simple recounting of an exchange during a meeting:

…A few minutes later she unveiled a new plan. “I’ve been reading a book about creative organizational management,” she said. “I’m proposing we have an Employee of the Week and give her a five dollar coupon to Vesuvio’s” — a local bar.

Several of the board members snapped their fingers approvingly.

Not mentioned in the passage are several things. First, the San Francisco Lusty Lady is in North Beach (a fact that may be in the story, I can’t recall), as is Vesuvio (“at Jack Kerouac Alley”), which makes much of its’ connection to the Beats.

Thus, finger-snapping.

I very recently read A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and I heartily recommend it. This general-interest survey of the current state of scientific knowledge concerning, well, nearly everything, is lucid and highly entertaining.

Bryson’s interested-observer role is well played; as I read the book, I have to admit I wondered how long it would be until he hosts the inevitable TV series based upon it, on the model of The Shock of the New and Cosmos (which appears to have been a primary inspiration for the book).

(An aside: What is up with the weak sites for Sagan and Shock of the New? I mean, sure, they’re old media material, but geez.)

The most-commonly used technique that Bryson employs to add human interest to what amounts to very informed speculation on events that happened before there were humans is dishing. He dwells with amusing panache on the personal foibles and peculiarities of the individual scholars involved in the development and discovery of this leap of knowledge and that fossil bed.

A clear pattern emerges in these sections too: it seems, in general, that the individuals we recognize as a discoverer or primary source of an idea are generally not the actual source, but instead the individual who most successfully promoted themselves as the source. Monkeys steal food from one another, too, so this should not be terribly surprising.

I saw a headline zap by the other day noting that Bryson’s book had been nominated for some prize or other, but alas, the title of the book creates a very noisy result set chez Google, and thus I was unable to dig up a link.