Latinka - Aku Bisa Mati

When I opened my mailbox today, I found the usual assortment of junk, garbage in envelopes, ad circulars, hey! a royalty check, woohoo!, and...this big, glossy, sharp-looking magazine with a hunky asian guy on the cover. Okay, so maybe he might not be dressed in a thong and flexing his muscles, but he was wearing a nice suit and had a twinkle in his eye that made the romance writer in me wonder what the story was (and the erotica writer in me wonder if he was going commando under that suit, and where his tattoos are). So I open the magazine, figuring it's probably the neighbors' since we don't subscribe to any magazines as part of the great Household Paper Reduction Act of 2002.

It's a hi-gloss production. Full of beautiful spreads of hi-definition TVs, flat-screen, wall-mounted home theater setups (with that mustard-paint and dark cherry wood stain combination that just screams to me "Homearama" - maybe because I first saw it at a Homearama house and everybody and their brother has copied it since then), and shirt-pocket sized gadgets that do everything but make coffee (because nobody wants coffee with man-boob in it).

Well, my eyes they did alight upon a technological wonder that melted away my scorn of the Season of Avarice under the bright laser-hot technology of eInk displays and had me doing Michael Douglas impersonations--rubbing my hands and cackling, "Greed is Goooooood!"

I remember reading about eInk several years ago. It was vapor-ware at the time, yet it made its way into my subcoscious enough so that I used a form of it for the Newssheet technology in my futuristic in the "A Witch In Time" Anthology. But to have it here, and able to be held in my hot little hands in the form of the Sony EReader... 'scuse me for a moment while I go have a minute to my own g33k self.

I mean, the thing reads friggin' manga! Meeble.

Yes, I'm ignoring for the moment the necessity of downloading and buying from the Sony Connect store, or the fact that I hear it's not so hot with the PDFs. I want one. But alas, it's not to be. At least not until the pricetag takes a nosedive and the in-house technology consultant gives a green light.

Until then, I'll content myself with the guy on the cover.