About Nico


I'm a senior business analyst, writer, blogger and tarot consultant based in Toronto, Canada.


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An Evening with Toronto’s Boyfriend, Neil Gaiman

By Nico on Saturday the 18th of July, 2009 at 5:00 pm

An Evening with Neil Gaiman, at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

I’d originally meant to post this write-up after the event itself, but got rather busy, so here’s the truncated version.

Luminato is a new arts festival in Toronto; this is its second year. Neil Gaiman headlined the literary program with an interview, reading, Q&A and, of course, a lengthy signing.

Tickets were cheap (only $15) and when they were made available to the public they sold out in three minutes. Three. Minutes.

Fortunately, my husband received advanced notification from theglobeandmail.com and were able to purchase ours early. They may have killed their books section, very nearly causing me to cancel my subscription in protest, but I suppose there are still some benefits.

Anyway. Gaiman. (Read more…)

Neil Cameron’s A-Z of Awesomeness

By Nico on Tuesday the 30th of June, 2009 at 11:28 pm

I is for... Indiana Jones Inching Away from an Inebriated Iron Man, by Neil CameronComic writer and artist Neil Cameron is creating alphabetically themed image as suggested by fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Pictured here is “I is for… Indiana Jones Inching Away from an Inebriated Iron Man“. (Kinda reminds me of Bender…)

Highlights include “D is for… Doctor Who Defeating Doctor Doom in a Deadly Disco Dance-off” , “J is for… Just Joss” for its kitch factor (and creep factor!) and “F is for…the Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flintstone, who’s Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta” for its awesomely out of hand title.

The project was announced June 11th, with the first image appearing on the 14th and is still going on.

As of this writing Cameron’s on Q, which is “Q is for… Q and Q reading Q” with a nifty infinite regression thing going on.

Check it out in its entireity on Neil’s blog. It is indeed pretty awesome.

Seven reasons booksellers hate their customers

By Nico on Thursday the 25th of June, 2009 at 7:44 pm

Matt Blind has written a disturbingly accurate light and humourous piece on the different types of customers who visit bookstores.

Grazers

Grazers don’t need a book, or want a book, but they love coming in to the bookstore, and love lingering leisurely over all the tables, racks, endcaps, promotional displays, and front-of-store placements. If they can do this while a bookseller is attempting to replenish or reset the display, all the better.

The only redeeming feature of a grazer is that they can only accomplish their task with a cup of coffee in their hand — pardon, with a $4 half-soy-half-decaf-latte-with-a-shot-of-pretention — and while they clog the main aisle and generally pose a hazard to navigation, they are mostly harmless. They might try to casually engage you conversation, “How’s Business?”, but they don’t really care. Their primary goal is being in a bookstore for an hour each week so they can insert an off-hand, “oh I saw that the other day at Big Box Books” in later conversations, proving to their friends that they are topical and literate.

Bonus: They buy coffee. Margins on coffee are excellent.

From “Rethinking the Box: The Seven Types of Customer“

My store didn’t sell coffee (apparently we were missing out on a huge opportunity here)  but it certainly reads familiar. (Read more…)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

By Nico on Saturday the 16th of May, 2009 at 4:46 pm

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Classics 978-1-59474-344-4, 319 pp. (incl. Reader’s Discussion guide), 2009

Jane Austen’s works have recently come out of copyright, allowing anyone to republish the texts. Some have been a little more innovative. There’s a new film, Pride and Predator, expected to come out in 2010, and, of course, the mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s original classic interspersed with martial arts and zombie mayhem by Seth Grahame-Smith.

While I’ve read some Jane Austen before, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice.(1) I corrected this, then proceeded to read one of the silliest books I’ve ever read. (Read more…)

Footnotes:


  1. Or seen the film(s?), for that matter. [↩]

The End of Faith, by Sam Harris

By Nico on Saturday the 16th of May, 2009 at 3:27 pm

The End of Faith, by Sam Harris The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris

W. W. Norton, 978-0-393-32765-6, 348 pp. (incl. notes, bibliography and index), 2004

I picked up Sam Harris’ The End of Faith after watching The Four Horsemen, a two hour atheist roundtable he appeared in with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. I found many of Harris’ comments on spirituality intriguing, though I found myself repulsed by bigoted comments regarding Islam.

The End of Faith deals with several themes surrounding religion and why it’s no good (to put it mildly). Harris rightly states that “most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors”.(1) Worse, religions tend to decry critical examination of any kind.

The bulk of  Harris’s criticism of religion is is focused on Christianity and vitriol towards Islam. While the underlying sentiment is sound – that religion induces people who might otherwise make good friends and neighbours to kill and maim one another at the behest of grotesquely cruel imaginary beings – the conclusions Harris draws regarding what is to be done about these irrationally harmful beliefs is disquieting, to say the least. (Read more…)

Footnotes:


  1. p. 31 [↩]

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