Once, when I was an aspiring writer I saw a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette using one of these at a crime scene near my apartment — the police had shot and killed a butcher’s knife-wielding neighbor of mine. I thought to myself, "I need to get some of those notepads." They’re all I use when I’m in the field, or at my desk for that matter. It fits in your back pocket, and has 70 sheets of white, Gregg ruled paper. What’s not to love?

Not my favorite book — who could even pick such a thing? — but definitely my favorite book on the topic of my favorite director, Jean-Luc Godard. He was responsible for some of the most important films ever made, and he’s also apparently a huge creep. And, especially in the mid-point of his career, this creep made some huge turkeys. By focusing on "the working life of Jean-Luc Godard" (which also serves as the book’s subtitle) Brody offers an in-depth look into the methods of this legendary artist.

His oil-on-canvas portraits have to be seen in their full, larger-than-life entirety to be fully appreciated. "Representational but not realistic," Barry Schwabsky has called them, as well as "science fiction." Borrowing equally from the old masters and soft porn, his paintings would be well suited to the home compound of a particularly tasteful supervillain.

Growing up, the greatest thing in the world was the annual record convention at the Avalon Hotel in Erie, PA. Aside from the usual used records and cassettes, all the bootleggers would be on hand with their live concert tapes. This was before anybody was trading audio or video over the internet and, to hear them tell it, the life of a bootlegger was fraught with danger at every turn. The audio equipment (the real audiophile stuff) was analog, and it was bulky as shit. More than one of these guys (and they were all guys; by the looks of it, extremely lonely guys) had been roughed up by a bouncer or two.

I spent years trying to track down the "lost" original mix of my favorite Clash album, Combat Rock, but it never turned up at any record fairs I attended. Luckily, someone invented the World Wide Web, and now the thing can be had by real fans (and the plain curious) for free: just Google the album’s working title, "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg."

When I’m writing, when I’m staring down the barrel of a deadline, I can get a little nuts. And I mean, "black out the windows / turn off the phone / don’t leave the house until I’m done" nuts. There has been no greater enabler to this bunker mentality than Foodler. It offers a list of restaurants delivering food in your area, searchable, sortable by cost, distance, or rating. Enter your credit card info once and you never need to enter it again (or, for that matter, leave your house again). Being a shut-in has never been so easy!