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Jon Udell's LibraryLookup is the coolest.

After you've "installed" your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results -- see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library's lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.

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All Consuming is also the coolest: It browses blogs for amazon.com links to approximate "what books are people talking about", then aggregates the blog responses and book data from amazon.

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Not to be forgetting Eytan Mirsky.

writing about music

Some guy's "25 Favourite Scribings for 2002". ("Scribings"?) Among them:

The Ballad of the Mid-Level Artist, a look at record-label economics from someone more sympathetic than Steve Albini.

An article on Beck as L.A. musician.

Max

At the Camera Cinema Club on Sunday, we saw Max, a historical fable about Adolf Hitler's struggles as an artist and nascent political speaker in 1918 Munich. It was good.

The city's streets and alleys--filmed, apparently, in Amsterdam and/or Budapest--reminded me of Boston. Narrow ways, tall buildings rising out of frame, streets that blindside one another unexpectedly, dark, snow. Nostalgia.