The rest are available to author Nadia Lee’s newsletter subscribers (the subscription is free). Thought some of you might want to check it out. Here’s the blurb from her website:

Melinda Lightfoot, a preschool teacher with an unusual ability to flit in and out of fairy tales, never thought she would get into trouble…

…until the Fairy Tale Police arrest her while she is in Beauty and the Beast. They offer her a deal: Find Beauty, who left the story when Melinda trespassed into it, or be charged with the ultimate crime — Fairy Tale Killer. If that’s not bad enough the Beast tags along in search of his true love, and Melinda starts falling for the fairy tale prince. She must choose between doing the right thing and having her own happily ever after.

Warning: This title contains the following: Fairy Godmother, the Wicked Witch, dysfunctional fairy tale families, ax-wielding executioners and a happily ever after (or two).

First, when you get the towel you definitely want to wash it out once or twice before you use it. This will accomplish three things: one, it will dilute the chemical smell and coloring (green, in my case) of the towel a bit; two, it will make the towel significantly softer once it’s dried; and three, if you do what I did, which was to run a sink full of water and push the towel down into it, you will get to observe just how absorbent the towel really is.

There really isn’t too much you can say about a towel, so I’ll just stick to the claims made about it, along with a few personal impressions.

Claim: The towel is lighter than a conventional towel.
This is true. So if you’re really worried about eliminating every possible ounce from your luggage, go for it. If you’re a mountaineer or something, one of those guys who saws his toothbrush in half to save weight, this will likely matter to you. But I have to say that the whole idea of a normal traveler, especially someone as young and robust as Ferriss, objecting to an extra couple of ounces in his bag seems a little odd. You would think that a guy who can put on 34 pounds of muscle in a month wouldn’t be that worried about how much his grip weighs.

Claim: This towel can dry your body more effectively than a regular towel.
I don’t find this to be true. The drying performance seems to be about the same as a regular towel. To be fair, this is something that Ferriss said, not the towel manufacturer.

Claim: The towel can absorb nine times its weight in water.
This is true. It is weirdly impressive to submerge the towel into a sink full of water, take it back out and watch half of the water disappear. It’s also fun to watch the towel change shades as you wring it out. On the other hand, this X-factor absorbency is mitigated a bit by the towel itself not weighing much, if you see what I mean. Also, plain old cotton can absorb about twenty-five times its own weight in water, a fact that the Pack Towel touts don’t really mention much.

Absorbency claims are fine, but the real point is the next one:

Claim: The towel will wring 90% dry immediately, and dry fully within about 3-4 hours.
The towel does wring very dry compared to cotton. And it did dry much faster than two other towels that were hung out with it in my personal experiment. This, in my opinion, is the main reason to buy the thing; if you’re traveling, there’s nothing worse than having a hump of wet cloth in your bag. You could always just carry a plastic bag if you were toting a regular towel, but that wouldn’t be very high-tech. Plus, the weight factor really would come into play here, as — generally speaking — water tends to be heavy in most countries.

Some other observations:

How does the towel feel?
After three washings and about fifteen usages, the towel is getting softer. But it still feels a little strange against my skin. Sort of halfway between using a piece of chamois and a piece of cardboard. I think that if I order another one, I’m going to spend the extra few bucks and get the new softer version.

Is that hanging snap thing really useful?
Yes, very. All towels should have one.

The best place I found to order from was Walkabout Travel Gear, which sells the large towel for $13.25. This is especially true if you’re going to order internationally; they only charged me seven bucks for shipping, as opposed to a few other sites I checked that wanted as much as $20 for the towel and another $40 for shipping. Gotta wonder sometimes…

Life is good.

Okay, these have nothing to do with books, but I just got a couple pairs of Lynx Grips and have been trying them in my workouts. Here’s my product review:

First of all, Lynx Grips, put out by Lynx Technologies, are small (10.5cm long; 9.5cm wide; 0.25cm thick) rubber pads that you put in your palm while lifting weights. As the manufacturer claims, they do definitely make some exercises more comfortable. A set of heavy bench presses, for example, feels much better on the palm than it does with your bare hands. (I don’t wear gloves during my workouts, so I can’t compare the grips to gloves.) While the grips are easy to use and do pretty much exactly what the company claims (adhere to your hands, wrap easily around the bar), they do take a little getting used to. It can take a bit of extra time to get them into the precise position where they feel natural.

Using one pair will change the diameter of the bar slightly, but my idea was to use two pair at once and really change it. The idea worked reasonably well, giving me a cheap and easy way of approximating a “fat bar” like strongman competitors use in some of their training. Of course it’s not really a fully-fledged fat bar; even using two of the grips in each hand only increases the diameter of the bar about a centimeter, but considering that a true fat bar will run well over a hundred dollars, a couple pairs of grips at fifteen bucks per pair is an economical alternative. However, unlike the website’s claim, you will NOT get more reps at a given weight by using the grips. Quite the opposite; a fatter grip usually means that you get fewer reps (because of the added difficulty in holding on to the bar), so you will need to log the fact that you’re using the grips for a given workout in your workout book in order to keep accurate records.

One other advantage of changing the bar width (even with one pair) is that it makes the forearm muscles work slightly differently, thus helping to head off pattern-overload injuries. And, of course, the grips will allow you to avoid developing calluses if you use them often enough. I’m ambivalent about this last point, though. I guess women would want to avoid the calluses, but a lot of men probably wouldn’t. On the other hand, I also do a little rock climbing at my gym, which really tears my hands up, and any savings to the skin is a good thing in my case.

One minor gripe is that, because of the sticky rubber used, the grips do tend to accumulate dust in the gym bag, but on the other hand they are easily cleaned with soap and water. And on the plus side, a handy non-gym use is for opening jars that are sealed too tightly. Put one of the grips on the lid and it becomes impossible for your hand to slip.

All in all, the grips are cheap, easy to use and would probably be of some benefit to most people. Having a couple pair means that you can more or less double the number of upper-body exercises you can do because of the “fat bar” variations. And they will definitely make some exercises more comfortable. At $15/pair it’s probably worth it for most people to get a pair or two and check them out.

The series starts before the main character was born, as Korean stories often do. Jang Geum’s mother is a palace woman framed by a friend and forced to leave the palace. She marries and has a child, Jang Geum, but is still pursued by the palace faction that is arrayed against her. Eventually, the mother is killed and Jang Geum is adopted into the palace’s kitchen section where she becomes a kitchen girl. The rest of the series follows her trials and tribulations as she fights to become the top kitchen lady, then a nurse, then a physician.

This might not sound all that interesting on the face of it, but the show has a good budget, excellent writers and some very good actors. The result is a surprisingly watchable saga, replete with plots, counter-plots and enough twists to satisfy even the most jaded soap fan. Along the way you’ll get to see something of what it was like in the imperial palace of Korea in the 1400s. While this makes the series more interesting, it also renders it less approachable for those who might be watching to help themselves learn Korean. The language used is highly formal, somewhat archaic Korean, and will present problems for even very fluent non-native speakers if they aren’t familiar with the time period.

Along these lines, even the best translation leaves something to be desired. If you want to watch it and don’t speak Korean, spend the money to get a good translation. I tried a cheap one out of Indonesia and had to send it back it was so bad. Then I saw one from the States that was much better. Even this one, though, had some that made the story difficult to follow in places. If you can, watch this with a Korean friend, preferably one who knows enough about the time period to be able to explain some of the finer points of what’s going on. Without knowing the political background, especially as it relates to the queen and her son, a lot of what goes on simply doesn’t make much sense.

Language and cultural issues aside, this is an enjoyable and somewhat addicting series, especially if you have an interest in Korean, political intrigue or – most of all! – cooking. (Since the story centers around the palace kitchen for the majority of the episodes, there are innumerable scenes showing how food was made at that time.) Women in particular seem to identify with the Jang Geum character, and the show has gained some unexpected popularity in the US as a sort of early feminist parable. Buying the full set is fairly expensive, but it will reward you with hours and hours of entertainment.