Fun Size Bytes

~ One ~

The Boy and I had some time together today, so I took him to some of my favorite old places. The first was The Spare Time Shop which used to be the comic book store around. I don’t mean “the” as in “it was the best one” I mean “the” as in it was “the only one” back in the days before comics were cool. (Shut up.) If you were looking for comic books, or role playing games, or anything else that had to do with being a teenaged boy (99.9% of the time) with limited prospects of every getting laid, The Spare Time Shop was your place. Think of it like Cheers for nerds.

I’m amazed that it is still in business. Just about everything else in the same strip mall has changed from what it was “back then” except for the liquor store and The Spare Time Shop. I’ve driven past there for years, but it seemed like a good time to take The Boy, who is now 8. Maybe he’d find a comic book that he wanted to buy. Maybe it would become a “thing” for us to do together. At the very least we could try.

I opened the door and my heart sank. The Spare Time Shop is essentially dead, and in its place is a store devoted almost entirely to building models. Model planes, model cars, model whatevers. I built some models as a kid, but it was never something that really excited me.

I walked around the entire store and there was literally nothing that interested me. I let The Boy wander around on his own but he soon called for me, and said that he had looked at some cards (there was a small display of some kind of cards near the front door), but “there was nothing good.” He then added, “This place sure is dusty.”

True enough, son. True enough.

sigh Lose some.

~ Two ~

Since we still had some time, I took him to Annie’s Book Stop, a place that I used to frequent when I was a kid. For those who aren’t familiar (e.g. “most people”), Annie’s is a used bookstore. They are centered in New England but have many locations. Personally it’s something I associate with my Dad, who used to be able to walk there — and did, on a regular basis.

Dad loved to read. He was always reading at least one book, sometimes two, and I don’t think he ever missed a day of reading the newspaper. But, unlike most people I know, he didn’t keep books. When he was done reading a book, he’d put it into a brown paper bag from the grocery store, and when the bag started the fill up, he’d carry it to Annie’s. They would buy them — well, sort of; for your used books you’d received store credit towards the purchase of other used books. (Some of the stores are — or used to be — called “Annie’s Book Swap” to indicate this practice. Store credit was fine with Dad. He’d fill the same paper bag to carry home another batch of books, destined to be returned to Annie’s once they were read. He used it sort of like a library where he paid to keep the books for as long as he wanted.

In contrast, I’ve kept most books I’ve owned, and have trouble even thinking of getting rid of them. I know I probably won’t read or refer to most of them… so why am I keeping them? I’m not sure. They seem like little parts of me.

We pulled into Annie’s parking lot and I hoped that it wouldn’t disappoint. I opened the front door and the woman behind the cash register looked up from the book she was reading, smiled, and asked if we were looking for anything in particular. I said we were just looking, and she mentioned that kids books were in the back corner.

You could probably fit this Annie’s in the basement of most houses in the area. It’s small, but neat and clean. As I looked on the shelves I realized that the loose system of organization hadn’t changed much. “Look… Star Trek!” The Boy said, and I knew just which shelf to look at.

The Boy didn’t find anything there. I, of course, did.

Click image below to embiggen.

• Where The Sidewalk Ends (30th anniversary edition)
• Watchmen and Philosophy (Just because it looked interesting when I flipped through and read a few passages.)
• Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (My brother, another avid reader, loves this author, Bart Ehrman. You may have seen him on The Colbert Report.)
• Hocus Pocus
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (I read her book, The Writing Life, and have been wanting to read this ever since.)
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (I’ve been meaning to get this since it came out)
• Slaughterhouse-Five

(aside: please don’t tell Tony or Sniffy that I’ve never read any Vonnegut before now.)

Whereas last week I sat in Borders using their Wi-Fi to check Amazon.com for better prices, I didn’t even hesitate to buy these. Granted even the new ones (yes, it’s a used bookstore, but they sell some new books as well) were 15% off, but more importantly I want there to be places like Annie’s Book Shop around. The Boy may never frequent there, but maybe some other kid will. Maybe some twenty years younger me will find his way to Annie’s and find a way to connect with his Dad over books, even if they don’t always seem to have a lot to talk about.

Academically, The Boy reads very well. He excels at it for his age and seems to enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem to be a habit. I’d like it to be one, but I’m trying to figure out how to make it something he enjoys rather than something I want him to enjoy. He asked me today if I liked to read. That made me sad, because my answer to him was that I love to read, but he obviously doesn’t see it. Of course these days I do most of my reading on the computer screen, not with a book-in-hand. I’ve listened to more audiobooks than read actual paper books in the past 5 years, and most of the “actual books” were for school. Telling him I love to read isn’t enough, I know. I need him to see me enjoying to read. Towards that end, I bought Where the Sidewalk Ends and told him that I thought we could read it together.

While we were there, The Boy saw a Fitness For Dummies book. He said “I bet Lula—” (a character from several of the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich, which he and The Wife have listened to in the car) “—could use that book!” He said with a laugh. Lula is The Boy’s favorite character in all the world. She’s full-figu— no, she’s fat. And she wears too-small clothes. And she swears a lot. And he laughs and laughs. “I don’t know why, but every time Lula says a bad word it just cracks me up,” he recently told The Wife. He loves stories already, even if he’s used to them being delivered to him instead of having to work for them.

“Dad, why do you have one of those ‘Dummies’ books if you’re not a dummy?” he said, without a hint of either sarcasm or insincerity. And I love him for his sweetness and innocence. “Well, they use the word ‘dummies’ to mean ‘someone who doesn’t know a lot about a particular thing’… you can know a lot about some things but not know about other things and want to learn about them, and so people might buy one of those books… but I agree with you that I don’t like the name very much either.”

Win some.

~ Three ~

We had planned to meet my mom for lunch, and so we paid for the books and drove towards the restaurant, about 10 minutes away. As we approached, opposing traffic was stopped at a red light. I needed to turn left into a parking lot. The stopped cars had blocked my path. Since the road is only two lanes, this meant I was blocking everyone behind me.

After I was stopped for about 10 seconds, a woman next to me in the other lane saw that I was trying to get through. She pulled ahead so I might have enough room to slip through. It was going to be a tight fit and a sharp angle to get into the driveway, but there was just about enough room if I —

At which point the woman behind her pulled up right behind her, blocking the opening that had been created. She then proceeded to try to pretend she didn’t see me. I looked back over my shoulder to verify that the light was still red. It was. She had pulled ahead to block me from crossing in front of her, so she could sit in a line of traffic at a red light. She looked straight ahead, still acting as if I wasn’t there, now 30 seconds after being stopped next to me.

So I turned the car towards her, stopping when my bumper was about an inch from the side of her car, and my window was less than a foot from hers. “SERIOUSLY?” I yelled. “REALLY? YOU’RE GOING TO PRETEND YOU DON’T SEE ME HERE? YOU’RE JUST GOING TO SIT THERE AND BLOCK TRAFFIC AND PRETEND THAT EVERYONE HERE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A —” and then I realized that I didn’t really want to finish that sentence with an 8 year old sitting behind me, so I changed it to “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? REALLY?”

She didn’t turn, she didn’t look, she gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead.

“THANK YOU VERY MUCH,” I said as the light changed. The man behind her waved me through and put his hands up as if to say “Whadya gonna do?” I repeated the gesture as if to say “Can you believe that?” and then gave him a thank-you wave.

Mom arrived about 10 minutes later, and I recounted the story to her.

“With your son in the car?” she said.

“I didn’t use any inappropriate words,” I replied.

“Was it scary?” she asked The Boy.

“Nah,” he said.

“See!?” I said.

“Besides,” he continued, both nonchalantly and completely unnecessarily, “I’m used to it…”

“You might have quit while I was ahead,” I said. I pulled his head and neck towards me at a 45º angle, kissed him on the head, and then pushed his head away so he could sit up again. He looked at me and grinned. I rolled my eyes and made an exaggerated “What am I going to do with you?” sigh.

Lose some.

~ Four ~

It’s 3 a.m. as I write these words, which won’t be published until 12:15 p.m. in the hopes that someone might read it, even though it’s “tl;dr” territory. I’m leaving the iPad plugged in tonight, and although I probably won’t be awake for too much longer, I’m taking a book with me to bed.

Win some.

See also: Coda and this picture.

This is part of a series of posts. Here is a full list.

Summer 2010

1. Win Some, Lose Some {this is the page you are on now}

2. Coda

3. Picture

4. Coda Part 2

Christmas 2010

1. By the light of the Christmas tree

Followed by about 100 other posts about how much I loved seeing him loving to read.

Summer 2011

• A year later

luckyshirt:

I have some credits to burn through on Audible.

Any book suggestions for me?

I heard one or two of you read sometimes.

Just about anything by Christopher Moore (Fool, Lamb, Blood Sucking Fiends, a Dirty Job)

Assassination Vacation &/or The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (or anything else)

Stiff Mary Roach (she has two other books, one on sex and the other on something else, I’ve heard those are good too)

On Writing by Stephen King

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I’d stand by any of those.

Just remember, if you buy an abridged book and I find out about it, you’re dead to me.

Dead.

{reposting this from TUAW because I suspect I’ll reach a different audience here.}

Macmillan CEO John Sargent on the agency model, availability and price writes:

We will price our e-books at a wide variety of prices. In the ink-on-paper world we publish new books in different formats (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback) at prices that generally range from $35.00 to $5.99. In the digital world we will price each book individually as we do today. Generally e-book editions of hardcover new releases will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99; a few books will be priced higher and lower. This is a tremendous discount from the price of the printed hardcover books, which generally range from $28.00 to $24.00. E-book editions of New York Times hardcover bestsellers will be priced at $12.99 or lower while they are on the printed list. E-book editions of paperback new releases will be generally priced between $9.99 and $6.99.

Link found via John Siracusa who went on to add

Now let us all sit back and ponder the concept of “paperback” and “hardcover” ebooks.

I suppose this makes perfect sense to some: book publishers have always had a model based on selling “hardcover books first, for more” and “paperback books later, for less.” (I’d be curious to know what the profit margin is on the average hardcover vs the actual increased cost of making a hardcover.)

The first question is: “Why would someone buy a hardcover book?” I can only think of three reasons (Are there other reasons? There may be, I just can’t think of any):

1. You’re a big fan of {insert author’s name here} and want to read his/her newest book as soon as it comes out.

2. You’re a collector and prefer the perceived increased “value” of a hardcover.

3. You like the slightly bigger print/additional whitespace that you often get with a hardcover compared to a paperback.

Second question: Which of those reasons also apply to ebooks?

Certainly #1 applies. There’s no faster way to get a book than to download it (assuming both are available on the same day, something else that Macmillan says they will be doing from now on.)

On the other hand, #2 certainly does not apply. There’s no perceived value of a “first edition” ebook. You’re not going to display it on your bookshelf and of course you can’t bring it to a book signing. (You also can’t loan it to your friend or donate it to the library.)

What about #3? I assume all ebook readers offer variable font sizing, it seems like one of the most obvious features they could offer. In fact, you can probably make the print larger than the printed hardcover. #3 seems like a reason to prefer an ebook instead a hardcover.

Third question: When was the last time you paid “list price” for a book? Macmillan says “printed hardcover books…generally range from $28.00 to $24.00.” That’s what I mean by “list price.” I bet very few people ever pay that price. Brick & mortar bookstores have traditionally sold them for much less. It seems like Borders/Barnes & Noble have a “25% off” sticker for every new book that comes out.

I’ll tell you when the last time I paid “list price”: I wanted to get a signed copy of the latest Hodgman book, and the only way to do that was to order it from Politics & Prose who were only too happy to sell me a signed copy for the full list price, plus shipping. I think I paid about $30 for a book I could have ordered from Amazon for about $12-15.

I’m going to guess you haven’t paid “list price” for many books since you first found out about Amazon.com.

Macmillan seems to have done to Amazon what the music industry eventually did to Apple and the iTunes store. Apple created the iTunes store and sold songs for 99¢ and did the most the effect music sales since Napster was first released, and over 10 billion songs have been downloaded legally since (not to mention all those sold through Amazon, etc.)

The music industry absolutely loved it… and wanted to change more per song. They eventually leveraged Amazon.com’s MP3 store against Apple to force Apple to allow for variable pricing. $1.29 for “popular”, 99¢ for “less popular” and 69¢ for some mythical level of songs, presumably ones no one wants to buy at all, i.e. “Let the Eagle Soar” by John Ashcroft.

(Aside: Almost 5 years later “Price as Signal” by Joel Spolsky remains the smartest thing I’ve read about what variable pricing means to the music business and why they wanted it.)

The music industry eventually got its way. They are now selling songs for $1.29 on iTunes, and guess what?! Higher prices mean slower sales. I know! Who would have guessed?!

Amazon created the Kindle and sold books for $9.99. The book industry absolutely loved it… and wanted to charge more per book. (And also didn’t want the Kindle to be able to read books aloud because, well, obviously that was going to hurt audiobook sales, and where’s the fun in not being able to charge someone multiple times for the same content?!?! Do you think they’ve learned nothing from George Lucas?) Ironically, Amazon was leveraged by the announcement of Apple’s iPad (turnabout is fair play). Apple, who fought long and hard for standardized pricing for music, easily accepted variable pricing for books.

Is this really all that different than Apple releasing the iPhone for $600 and then dropping the price to $400?

Yes and no.

Obviously Apple realized that they could profit more by selling iPhones for more initially and then could boost sales by dropping the price after the early adopters had spent their money. In that sense it’s much like someone who is going to buy the new Christopher Moore book the day that it comes out.

One difference is that book publishers are dangling by a hairy financial thread, whereas Apple has enough money to buy Canada and turn it into Steve Jobs’ summer house.

Apple is also the only company in the world selling the iPhone, and even $600 was a “competitive” price. Those who bought when it came out were able to use it on a daily basis for two months before the price dropped to $400. Those who buy an ebook when it first comes out get to read it once and then, well, keep it in case they ever decide to read it again. While book publishers are the only ones selling particular books by particular authors, there are scads of other publishers, a seemingly endless supply of writers, and this thing call “The Interwebnet” which is offering people plenty to read, for free.

When you are buying a hardcover book, you’re getting something which is clearly different than a paperback. It’s also easy to argue that you are getting something better than a paperback (despite the fact that some people might prefer paperbacks to hardcover). That’s why a hardcover is worth more than a paperback.

Why is an ebook worth more than the same ebook, months later? Nothing.

The most logical thing for ebook users to do is put a note in their calendars to remind them to buy the book in six months instead of when it comes out. It’s not as if they will have trouble finding anything to read in the meantime.

The nearest comparison that I can make is to apps that I’ve purchased from the App Store. I’ve purchased several which later dropped their price significantly (i.e. $10 to $4, $5 to $3, etc). The “actual dollar amount” may not seem like that much, but percentage-wise, it’s a big cut. The effect that it has had on me is pretty simple: I now wait before buying a new app. Not only do I get to hear other people review it (since there are still no “demo” versions available) but I also get to see if the price drops. Net result? Fewer impulse buys, and almost certainly fewer purchases overall.

It seems to me that is exactly what book publishers don’t want to do: give people a reason to wait longer to buy books and a reason to resist impulse purchases. I’m sure publishing executives are worried about ebook sales cannibalizing more profitable hardcover sales, but I wonder if these aren’t two separate markets. People who want to buy ebooks have made a conscious decision to not purchase physical books.

Macmillan seems to want to go about business using the same rules and models that have been in place: “buy early, pay more.” But part of that equation has always been “buy early, pay more, get something better.” Charging more for the same ebook doesn’t have that 3rd part of the equation.

{end of original article}

By the way, someone actually replied to this: “One difference is that book publishers are dangling by a hairy financial thread, whereas Apple has enough money to buy Canada and turn it into Steve Jobs’ summer house.”

He wrote:

You know, that’s almost offensive to those of us living in Canada. At any rate, it’s a poor comparison the two are not even close. Canada’s net worth is substantially more than Apple’s (even taking the paltry difference between the US and Canadian dollar into account).

Do you hear that?! I almost upset a Canadian.

Well, someone “living in Canada” — and I think we all know what that means (draft dodger/hippie/pot smoker…

Fortunately someone else already followed-up with:

Apparently attempts at HUMOR need to be in purple text or something so you morons can tell it’s HUMOR. Anyone who was offended by the HUMOR needs to grow up.

{Yeah! You tell ‘em!}

First, FOOL comes out in paperback today, so for those of you who have been holding off, go for it. For those of you who want to have a hardcover for your collection, you should probably grab one soon.

Hardcover is $10.80 at Amazon

Paperback is $10.11

Second, I have a new book, Bite Me: A Love Story coming out on March 23rd

$12.95 on Amazon

Amazon.com tells me: “You purchased this item on November 4, 2009.”

and I’ll be doing a national tour as well as four Canadian dates, the first time I’ve been back to the Great White North in ten years.

CANADA!!!!!

Full details for the tour (as well as a few FAQs) are here:

http://blog.chrismoore.com/index.php/archives/1215

There are a few ticketed events, so be sure to call ahead to those venues if you plan to attend.

Before you go, “Wait, why aren’t you coming to East Pisspants, South Dakota where I live? I want a signed book!”

I’m guessing he’s not coming to East Bumfuktovia where we live either but—OMG HE’S GOING TO BE IN COLUMBUS THAT’S ONLY TWO HOURS FROM HERE HE’S NEVER BEEN THAT CLOSE BEFORE!!!!!!! —— aaaaaaand it’s on a day when I can’t go. (!#(&^%&@^@!!

Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego will be taking orders for signed books and shipping them all over the country, we may even be able to personalize them. I suspect that Canadians need not apply. The link is here:

http://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/christopher-moore-signs-bite-me

The ordering link goes live March 1st. Be sure to get your orders in early so they’ll be sure to have enough books for me to sign when I get there.

Of course to get it from them you’re paying full price, plus shipping, which will be painful if you’re an Amazon Prime member.

Hope to see you along the road.

Your pal,

Chris

Yeah, we’re buds. We go way back to when I signed up for his newsletter.

(He has sent me personal email in response to an email I sent him before, even if this one was sorta mailing-list-ish.)

Do any of you not love Christopher Moore? If so, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to lose what little respect I have for most some all of you.

http://blog.chrismoore.com/

http://twitter.com/theauthorguy

Going through some old stuff in my Yojimbo I came across a saved Amazon search for Denise Mina with a note “author from Craig Ferguson” but I don’t remember anything about her.

The note is from July 2006.

Anyone know her / able to recommend one of her books?

Theresa answered some good book questions (I’m not sure who asked them, or if she came up with them, but they’re good ones.)

1) Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Probably some Stephen King paperbacks from high school. (The Boy has a few books of mine from when I was a kid.)

2) What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

I’m reading Olive Kitteridge for a class.

The last book I read was The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, for the same class.

The next book I read will probably be The Seven Last Words from the Cross by Fleming Rutledge for Lent.

3) What book did everyone like and you hated?

The Shack by William P. Young. I didn’t even care about the kind of whacked-out theology, but the writing was an abomination. Part of this was due to the fact that they couldn’t get a real company to publish it. Secular book companies said it was “too religious” and religious book companies said it was “too secular” (translation: they were afraid it would piss off conservatives). So the author’s friend started a publishing company and they started making copies. I’m not sure an experienced editor would have been able to fix this book, but it would have helped.

4) Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

Good question. There are probably many, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, while no doubt fascinating, is about 3” thick (1000+ pages) and I don’t see me getting to it any time soon. But I got it for a really good price!

5) Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

None on purpose. No doubt many in practice.

(Assuming retirement exists in ~35 years and I’m not dead.)

6) Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

That’s like an orgasm before foreplay.

7) Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

Can be interesting. I don’t need a short story though… keep it focused.

8) Which book character would you switch places with?

James Bond.

Well, anyone with a jet pack, really.

9) Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

The Phantom Tollbooth and The Boy From the UFO remind me of being a kid.

The Hardy Boys books remind me of being a middle-school kid.

The Talisman and most other Stephen King books remind me of high school.

The Children of Men and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh remind me of college (although both of those covers are “wrong”.)

10) Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

My college advisor gave me a copy of The Children of Men as a thank-you for my work as his research assistant/tech grunt on a book he was editing. I scanned and OCR’d a bunch of articles (this was in the early ’90s, and scanning was slow and painful and the OCR was done on a 25Mhz machine with 16MB of RAM), then proofread the electronic versions against the originals.

My biggest task was manually creating a topical and scriptural index of the book. Which the publisher forgot to include in the final printed version. No, I’m not bitter at all, why do you ask? It only took several months.

When the final version of the galleys came in, my advisor was out of town at a conference, and I had to do the final proof before sending them off to be printed and bound (and yes, the index was in the galley version). As a 20 year-old college student that seemed like pretty much the biggest responsibility I had ever had.

I can still remember sealing the FedEx box and thinking, “Well, too late to do anything about it now.”

(It’s 15 years later and I’ve never read the finished version because I don’t want to find any mistakes that I missed.)

But I’m mentioned by name in the acknowledgements of that book, which was pretty damn cool.

11) Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I gave Tracey a hardcover set of The Chronicles of Narnia in college because she loved the series and was going to do her Senior Thesis on it.

12) Which book has been with you to the most places?

My MacBook.

HA!

But seriously, I have hauled boxes and boxes of books from college to grad school to Florida to Ohio, I couldn’t possibly pick out a few.

13) Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

I haven’t re-read any of the books that I hated in high school, but the required reading that I hated the most was Brave New World and maybe I’ll re-read that some day to see if I still hate it.

14) What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

I think I read a book once that had golfing terms (or maybe it was poker terms) as euphemisms for sexual positions. In any event, it seemed like the author had thought this up and thought they were very clever and so he included them despite the fact that it didn’t really “fit” in the rest of the book, IMO.

15) Used or brand new?

Most of the time I want a good copy of a book that hasn’t been written all over, bent, discolored, etc. I’ve had pretty good luck with used books on Amazon.

16) Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

Genius, but I wish he wouldn’t reuse story-lines.

Opiate of the masses I’d save for the likes of Joel Osteen or, to a lesser extent, John Grisham (after the first few books they all became formulaic).

17) Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Yes.

Oh, you wanted specifics? The Shawshank Redemption, Minority Report, and Total Recall. However, it should be noted that I had seen the movies before I read the books, and we often prefer that which is first not necessarily because it was better but because it’s what we are used to.

18) Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

Well, I didn’t like The Children of Men as a movie because I think it missed some of the big points of the book. It was fine as a movie, and I suspect that people who saw the movie first might prefer it to the book (see above) but the story was just too different.

There were several Stephen King books made into movies which were just gawd-awful. I think Maximum Overdrive was the worst, but there are a bunch more.

Also, the second Jurassic Park book, while not great literature, was far better than the movie that they made out of it.

Also, to borrow from Theresa’s lead, I’m going to say that Hannibal never should have been made into a book nevermind a movie. That is, by far, the most disappointing book I’ve ever read. The first 3/4 of it was good, and then the end just fell apart. I pre-ordered the hardcover and read it the day it arrived. I then gave it away because I didn’t want it in my house.

19) Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Hannibal.

Kidding.

No, I don’t think I have, but then again, consider what I mostly read, that would be unusual.

20) Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

The Wife, mostly because she doesn’t like a book too easily, and she knows what I like, so if she suggests something that she thinks I’d like, she’s almost certainly right.

I’m very interested to hear other’s answers. If you answer this and want to make sure I see it, paste the URL here. (If you “reblog” I’ll see it via Tumblr so you only need to do this if you answer not as a reblo.)

Question Mark?