The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Definitive account of the Nazi economy.

Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II (Blue Jacket Bks). Convincingly argues that Stalin was planning an offensive against Germany timed for late 1941.

Chamberlain and the Lost Peace. About as good a case as can be made defending Chamberlain’s foreign policy.

Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second World War. Good assessment of the politics of appeasement in the 1930s.

The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana. Overly nostalgic, but biting attack on what new labor has wrought.

Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted. Argues that Hitler could have won the war in the East by concentrating on Moscow. Neglects logistics and ultimately unconvincing.

There’s actually a thread that connects all these, and I’ll write a longer post on the subject later.

By popular demand, here’s my recipe for Quince-pear tart:

1. Mix 8 cups of water, 1 cup of sugar, some sliced ginger, and a pinch of cinnamon. Bring them to a boil. Peel, core and slice up two large quinces. Throw them in the boiling water, and simmer for fifteen minutes.

2. While the quinces are simmering, peel, core, and slice up four pears. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Coat the pie crust with butter, slit, and put the pan lined with pie crust in the oven to bake for 10 minutes.

3. Mix the quinces, pears, a half cup of brown sugar, a half stick of melted butter, and enough of the sugar water you boiled the quinces in to make a filling with a nice consistency.

4. Fill the pie crust with filling, and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

Question: What does this sign really say?

Answer: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please don’t send any work to be translated” - Read More.

Here’s an email I just received from Google Adsense:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

If they really want to reassure me, they should just tell me what the split is on my ad clicks.

UPDATE: If I was a real blogger here’s the kind of post I would have written about this email.

I used to have a blog on Wordpress.com called Slantwise. I finally moved all the posts from there over to this blog. Here’s my favorite post from Slantwise: On The Web, You Can’t Escape Your Past.

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt points out, Mac sales soared in Q1. This was mostly due to laptop sales. I’m part of this soaring, because I bought a MacBook recently. Why did I finally choose a Mac over Windows? One reason was that my kids use Macs at school. Another was that I don’t do Windows development anymore. The main reason, though, was that I took a look at Vista and decided it was too much trouble to go through the upgrade. Moreover, I couldn’t save money by buying a Windows laptop, because Vista’s requirements meant that I had to buy a higher-end laptop to run it. So, the Mac won out.