LATEST ADDITIONS

Conn and Hal's Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys has been on my must-read list since it was published here in the States, but Conn's lovely essay, "In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces," has catapulted it to the top of my list.

Not bloody likely, says Michael Dirda. A scant 12 years after his death, you're unlikely to find even his most lauded novel, Lucky Jim in bookstores, libraries, or on friends' bookshelves.

I was the member of the family on whom the others could depend for technical assistance: mending eyeglass frames, fixing the radio, replacing the lightbulb in the oven, getting the car to idle smoothly. No job too big or too small. House calls a specialty.

The naming of audio companies is a tricky business. Ideally, the name should be distinctive, so that people will remember it, and descriptive of the products. However, given the proliferation of audio manufacturers, it's getting more and more difficult to come up with a name that fulfills these criteria, and some names are similar enough to lead to confusion. In one of my show-report blog entries from the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, instead of correctly listing a company name as Divergent Technologies, I called it Definitive Technologies, which is the name of an another audio company—and was rightly chastised for it in a comment by a reader. I'll bet that no such confusion will occur in the case of Flying Mole Electronics. (As far as I know, there is no Flying Groundhog Electronics.)