George R.R. Martin now says the next 'Game of Thrones' book might come out May 2018

Some things in life you never want to rush into, like marriage, having children, or a 7/11 at 3am on a Tuesday.

For George R.R. Martin, it's never wanting to rush into completing a book millions of his fans want to see completed.

A Dance with Dragons--the last Game of Thrones book released--was published in 2011. It's been a six year wait for audiences to learn the fate of Jon Snow, Khaleesi, Cersei, Tyrion, and the rest of the Westeros gang. The wait has been so long that HBO's televised version of the books has caught up and blown past the books' timeline, as the producers of the show can't stick around waiting untold years for Martin to finish his version of events.

Now, Martin claims he'll release the next Game of Thrones book (The Winds of Winter) hopefully by May 2018. In a blog post he says:

"And, yes, I know you all want to know about THE WINDS OF WINTER too. [...] I am still working on it, I am still months away (how many? good question), I still have good days and bad days, and that's all I care to say. Whether WINDS or the first volume of FIRE AND BLOOD will be the first to hit the bookstores is hard to say at this juncture, but I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018... and who knows, maybe two. A boy can dream..."

Two? Two?! Did he just say two, or are there paint fumes lingering around me? I have more faith in Bigfoot, Paula Deen's health tips, and corrupt American politicians than Martin's proclamations.

Two. Keep whispering sweet nothings to us, George.

Perfect attendance award? Not for this kid if his mom has anything to say about it.

Remember being in grade school as a child, and there was always that one kid who went to class regardless if they had a fever, cough, or were in the throws of an epic flu that would have killed a water buffalo? As if this kid was a superhero? No one liked that kid, least of all me, because I inevitably became sick from that kid.

But the following story isn't quite the same.

Rachel Wright is a U.K. author and mother of a young child who has been lucky enough to actually have good health. As a result, her 10-year old son, JJ, has never missed a day of school, for which the school wants to award him. Rachel Wright, though, refuses to allow her son to be bestowed for such an honor.

In a blog post, Wright explains her rationale and why she's denying the award ceremony:


"In this family you are not shamed for ill health, vulnerability or weakness. In this house you are not encouraged to spread germs when you are not well. In this house we look after ourselves and the weakest amongst us.

Can you imagine a work place that at the end of each week marked out all the people who hadn’t been sick? Where all the departments with the least number of people off were rewarded – in front of everyone else? It happens in schools all the time.

Can you imagine what kind of atmosphere that would create with people who had days off because of bereavement, mental health problem or chronic conditions?

What on earth are we teaching our kids about value and worth? What are we teaching them about looking out for each other and looking after the sick or disabled in our community?"


The whole matter of being lucky enough to have good health is further compounded because JJ's brother, and Wright's other son, 11-year old Sam, was born with cerebral palsy.

Wright told ABC News the meaning behind the blog post. "I was trying to spark a conversation about what 100 percent attendance teaches our children about health, values and those who suffer long term conditions."

Now, if only this resonated with parents who had a kid with a cold and kept them at home, those who only value praise and adoration over health and wellness, we all might be healthier and happier. Water buffaloes included.

Vincent van Gogh didn't have a dominant blue period so much as maybe more a blue fling with green undertones.

Brett Kebold is a data analyst who enjoys finding representations of life all amongst us, and decided to utilize his skill at data analytics for a dive into art.

Specifically, Kebold took a look at 900+ paintings of Vincent van Gogh and plotted the dominant color that appears in each painting (using more technological skill than I can ever figure out) and placed them in line over a ten year period. What we get is this:

The Dutch master clearly skewed toward darker hues earlier in his work, with a dominant blue stripe appearing around 1883 that springs into a transition of lighter shades. A look at his life doesn't suggest any particular rhyme or reason if we go with the simplistic route of automatically assuming colors equate mood. (Looking at you, Picasso.) His first major work, The Potato Eaters, which is bleak and dark, doesn't appear until 1885. Likewise, Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, equally grim (or grimly comedic), only arrives after 1885 as well, both during van Gogh's transition away from brighter colors once again. (1885 is also when van Gogh's father unexpectedly died of a heart attack. Correlation or coincidence? No one can tell.)

Van Gogh's most famous work, The Starry Night, the one you recognize from museum shops, countless dorm rooms, and endless doctor offices, wasn't completed until 1889, around van Gogh's last darkest painting--and personal--period.

Contrary to the habitual belief that colors equate mood in art, we learn that van Gogh never veered wildly into any one dominant color, unlike many artists. He utilized all throughout his painfully brief time as a painter, suggesting his skill wasn't bound by colors or process or design, but simply by circumstance, by beliefs, and by his life.





Plot points and more can be found at Brettrics.com, as well as his Tableu Public page.

Not only do the 2016's candidates for president act like sixth graders, they sound like sixth graders, too, study shows.

No one politician comes unscathed from the recent study on the speech and grammatical patterns of various politicians from the 2016 election--except for Abraham Lincoln, who isn't around to run. But we'll get to him in a second.

"A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches From the 2016 US Presidential Campaign," published this week by Carnegie Mellon University, looked to analyze the reading level of speeches given by the prospective 2016 presidential candidates and found that the group of them largely falls into the 6th-to-8th grade range.

That's shameful and embarrassing and pathetic. And it's also very close to the same reading level of where this blog resides. That said, I'm not running to be a fairly awkward individual with the power to rule hundreds of millions of people. I'm just running to be your number one blog for random stuff, like Herman Hesse hiking mountains in the nude. I also know how to write like a research wonk, super-heavy on a polysyllabic craziness and jazzy punctuation, but you'll be bored, doze off, and--oh, hey, is that Ray Bradbury shirtless, too?

(That crap I just wrote above, that one paragraph you just read right there ↑↑↑↑? That gets a 9.1 grade level through various testings, like the Flesch-Kincaid Scale, on this site. If my drivel can enter the high school realm, imagine what Trump is pushing.)

This is all to say that politicians dumb down and pander to Americans because it works, although some are worse than others. Bernie Sanders wants you to have a high school education, so he speaks at a tenth grade level, says Carnegie Mellon. Donald Trump? More like a grade 5.7. Which one looks to have a better shot at winning the election?

This all brings us back to Abraham Lincoln--specifically, to the Gettysburg Address. Potentially the greatest speech in American history, it still maxes out just over a 10th grade level grammatically, and 9th grade for vocabulary. Yet, despite such modest levels, Lincoln would surpass all of today's politicians.

Does this mean I sound like Abraham Lincoln when I talk?

God, no.

But does it mean I sound smarter than a billionaire Sunkist orange with pigs-in-a-blanket for fingers?

Yessss.

10,000 character tweets? They might be on the horizon.

10,000 characters is also known as blogging, but, hey.

Twitter realizes that not everyone has jumped on their bandwagon, much to investors' concerns, so they're looking to branch out.

Twitter's co-founder and current CEO Jack Dorsey has been heading up a project to see how exactly to expand the social media giant's presence, mainly by expanding how much a user can write. Gone would be 140 character limits (although that limit would still remain in your status feed), and users could start writing longer rants during their Twitter beefs without people needing a Rosetta Stone to decipher what most of it meant.

The move is to make Twitter more appealing to the masses. As a result, Dorsey is reportedly mulling the 10,000 character per post mark, but also "only" 5,000. No final decision has been made.

In case you're wondering, this entire blog post you just read? It's 899 characters long.

"Deadlines just stress me out," says George R.R. Martin.

This was said in a blog post Saturday while trying to explain why his latest Game of Thrones book won't be published on time...again.

Martin has taken years and years to write this book, deadlines be damned.

Put another way, imagine if the garbage collector didn't pick up your trash every week. And still didn't collect it for weeks and weeks, and then not for months and months. Barrels of your trash would just pile up, creating a mound of refuse outside your home, all because the garbage collector couldn't be bothered to work. Raccoons would be king, eating everything in sight.

My point, I think, is that raccoons might have eaten George R.R. Martin.




photo: Hypable

British columnist: What happened to literary blogging?

"Blogging, I hoped, would prove to be the start of a renaissance in long form critical writing […] Then along came Twitter. And, fairly quickly, that blog article linking to another blogger's excellent article on X, Y or Proust, never came to be written."




So Says Guardian columnist Mark Thwaite.

Still--Proust? Even 140 characters of detailed Proust analysis is sometimes too much.

Your Tumblr could win you a lucrative book publishing contract!!!

No, not really, but it's fun to live in a world of make believe. Mr. Roger's taught us all that.

Chronicle Books, based out of San Francisco, has announced that they're searching for a new book based on someone's Tumblr account.

They've published book versions of blogs before (they emphasize Fuck! i'm in my twenties and Dads are the Original Hipsters as two blogs-begat-books that are "hilarious"--which is cute, because Fuck! stopped being funny about twenty years ago), and are on the hunt for the newest wannabe Awkward Family Photos they can turn into a money making coffee table book.

Martin Rouse at Melville House mentions that last year's Chronicle search ended up in a book deal.

Moreover, last year’s winner actually did get that coveted publishing deal. Paul Laudiero’s Sh*t Rough Drafts (based on his tumblr of the same name) will be published on April 15th, and is available for pre-order on Amazon—clear evidence that he has #madeit and is #livinglarge.

You know what else is clear evidence?

Hashtags need to go away. #ThanksTwitter #Stopwritinglikethis #GAAAAAAAH #Mygrandmasaysi'mspecialbecauseiknowhowtousepunctuation





Photo and h/t: TheWeek

Conservative blogger: 9% of Yale students report having been paid for sex at some point.

And here is where I make some crass joke about sex in college and liken it to my matinee idol looks or sharp sense of style, and claim I'm always paid for sex--then maybe add in a wonky ZING! or Wanka-wanka-wanka!--and you sit there wondering how you stumbled upon this blog when all you were looking for was shirtless writers and plot recaps of Danzy Senna novels you can't bring yourself to read.

So, there you go. We just had a John Barth blog moment.






Yale sex story here.

Please hold while we take your blog viewing in the order it was received.

Fairy tales reimagined for the 21st century.

A Tumblr called fairy tales for twentysomethings has reimagined classic fairy tales for the 21st century crowd.

You say they're funny because they're different. I say they're funny because----oh, my god I'm so depressed.

the ugly duckling always felt gross compared to everyone else. but then she got instagram and there’s this one filter that makes her look awesome.

sleeping beauty wasn’t waking up till noon or even later. “i guess i’m depressed,” she told a friend. the friend took her out to a big party that night and sleeping beauty got a little drunk and made out with a cute prince on a couch. it was pretty great. the next morning, she woke up early, took some aspirin, and headed out to enjoy the day.

hansel and gretel got entry-level jobs at a major corporation run by an old witch. the witch said she wanted to give them more vacation days but there was just too much work to get done. one day, hansel and gretel were like, “fuck this,” and they pushed their boss out her office window. then they got jobs as bartenders and snuck sips of whiskey all day.

snow white had lost her infatuation with the prince. they only had sex maybe once a week now, and even when they did it was eh. she found herself looking at photos of ryan gosling online, remembering when she felt about the prince how she felt looking at him.
but the prince loves me, she thought. and if i were with ryan gosling he’d be prettier than me and that wouldn’t be cool at all.

The hare got a high-powered job in the tech industry straight out of college, whlie the tortoise traveled the country by train just writing in his journal and thinking. Finally the tortoise got a big book deal for a memoir he wrote and when he posted about it on Facebook he thought, I knew I’d outshine that fucker in the end.

Sleeping Beauty was lying in bed checking Facebook from her phone, just feeling so completely alone in her depression. Then she came across a post from an acquaintance about how sad he was, it was a darkness that made him feel like nobody could ever understand how he felt. “Is there anyone else who feels this way?” he asked.

She felt a sense of relief wash over her, a little bit of joy, and thought, At least I’m not so sad I wrote about it on Facebook.




All photos/stories: fairytalesfor20somethings.tumblr.com

Take a left at Brooks Brothers, stay to the right at the Stephen Hawking innuendo, and it'll be the first blog straight ahead.

Time again to take a look at what search terms people are using to find The Toolbox out there on the interwebs.

These are actual search terms, according to Google's webmaster tools, that people have used to find The Toolbox in the past few days. True story.

1.) "brooks brothers"

Because if anyone screams elitist wannabe prep, it's me, man.

2.) "huge 6 pack"

Beer or abs? Because I can help with one, but not the other.

3.) "abs with big d*ck"

Ah, nope. I'm going to guess the "huge 6 pack" above is referring to abs then.

4.) "nude babes"

Somehow, a blog entry on Dr. Seuss now attracts pervy folk.

5.) "stephen hawking sex"

((head-in-hands)) I don't know what the hell's happening.

Take the 3rd exit off the roundabout, drive past the YMCA homage and killer turkey video, and it'll be the first blog on the right.

Time for another check-in on words and phrases people are using on search engines to find The Toolbox. According to Google, these search terms were used within the last 24hrs:

1.) froot loops france

We're very big with French cereal aficionados.

2.) frosty the snowman metaphor

The word is finally spreading: Frosty is a drug dealer on the lam.

3.) preppy clothes

Pocket squares optional here.

4.) chipotle burrito size

American.

5.) i want you

Get in line.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

I know you have many choices for blog reading--especially blogs like this one. Which is to say you don't have many choices on that front. Books/education/pop culture/Village People adoration? Not as popular as you imagine in the blogosphere.

What did you do in the meantime? I like to imagine you forgot to bathe, curtains drawn, stacks of Cadbury wrappers covering your belly as you stared at your laptop screen. Waiting, waiting.

Which is why I apologize for the blog being quiet. Let's not speak of this. I know you were lonely. Let's hug it out and get back to where we were.

I'm sassy. You're bored. Together we make a blog.

And for that I say thanks.

This month has been the most read month ever at The Toolbox. Each month is seemingly read more than the last, and this month is no different.

Maybe it's all the shut-ins from (non-)Hurricane Irene. Maybe it's a Sally Field moment. (1985 Oscars. Google it.) Whatever it is, it's nice you bother to read.

Thanks.

College librarian was the Deep Throat of opera world.

And that didn't sit well with The Met, New York's premier opera house.

It seems Bradley Wilber--head reference librarian at Houghton College in upstate New York--loves opera. So much so, he created a website where he'd break news about potential singers for upcoming shows, mainly at The Met.

This is big news if you love the opera, I guess. I don't know how operas work beyond lots of loud singing in Italian by people wearing Charlie Chaplin makeup. But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

The Met didn't appreciate Wilber's passion, and didn't like being upstaged on breaking news within their own house. So, according to Wilber, The Met politely (his words) asked him to stop the website. And he did.

This is how college librarians and opera houses scuffle. It's polite, reserved, and sort of anti-climactic. Kind of like dating me when I was 16.

So, in other words, she's saying I have a chance...

TheFrisky.com is a website that, until tonight, I'd have assumed was devoted to all that is fabulous about Friskies Cat Food. (Chicken Supreme Senior Formula? Tell me more...)

But then a friend sent along a link to Amelia McDonnell-Parry's post Approval Matrix: Sexy Vs. Unsexy Hobbies For Dudes, which was entirely weird for a cat food website. Are we really debating the merits of Mr. Whisker's catnip hobby?

Instead, TheFrisky is about Love. Life. Stars. Style.--aimed at a decidedly female demographic. In other words, how I roll.

So what does this Sexy Vs. Unsexy Hobbies For Dudes have to do with me and The Toolbox?

Blogging, according to McDonnell-Parry, is lacking a certain, shall we say, je ne sais quoi. Blogging is behind standup comedy, ultimate frisbee, ice skating, competitive eating, parkour (eh?), origami, knitting, taxidermy, capoeira (what the?), erotic photography, and iPod DJing on the sexy scale.

BUT--but, but, but--blogging beats out playing marbles, unicycling, and ventriloquism.

Which is like saying I'm a male smoke show compared to guys with puppets. Get in line, Howdy Doody, get in line.




Photo / graph: TheFrisky.com

At the fork in the road, take a right at the Dora the Explorer message board, drive past the Cormac McCarthy diatribe, and it'll be the first blog on your left.

Time for another check-in on words and phrases people are using on search engines to find The Toolbox. Search terms for today alone are...curious.

And some of today's search terms are (misspellings included):

1.) james joyce    (Hello to all the Joycean snobs!)
2.) vendela vida    (Apparently Jhumpa Lahiri is old news.)
3.) poems of poet craig moreau   (Because you're a masochist...?)
4.) are fsu students nice   (You apparently haven't met me.)
5.) blogger taiwan goes to jail   (Blogger Taiwan sounds like a bad Euro-pop band.)
6.) law school grads can't find jobs   (There's always Chick-fil-A.)
7.) miss usa motor boat sound   (Yes...these are my readers.)

Taiwanese blogger goes to jail for bad restaurant review.

A Taiwanese blogger named Liu published a restaurant review in which she said the food was too salty and the restaurant was unsanitary.

But this is Taiwan. That whole freedom of speech thing Americans pretend we have? Yeah, they don't even pretend in Taiwan.

Liu was brought to court by the restaurant owner (who apparently treated this like a Zagat Guide review), and Liu was found to be defamatory in her remarks. That gets you 30 days jail time in Taiwan.

My guess is Liu will have a glowing review of prison food coming out this time next month. "The gruel? Stupendous! The three month old bread? Just enough mold to tickle your tongue."

libraries + history = kind of cool.

Sometimes you stumble upon a blog out of happenstance. Sometimes you stumble upon it because you were looking for it.

Take, for instance, you. You're reading this blog because you're a good looking individual with discriminating tastes. Since that's the case, I can't blame you for stumbling onto our little site.

That's how I stumbled on the Library History Buff Blog. I'm such a gooood looking individual with high-brow sophistication that I couldn't help but get caught up in the history of libraries.

That, or I'm a geek down deep.

But, just to clarify, I'm a sophisticated good-looking geek.