GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

Via Get Rich Slowly:

This Saturday (the 27th) is Museum Day 2008, sponsored by Smithsonian Magazine. Your admission card provides free general admission for you and a guest (with some restrictions) to participating sites. Details at the above link to Get Rich Slowly or at smithsonianmag.com. Go to the magazine's website to download your free admission card and search a list of participating museums.

Locally, the list includes (but is not limited to) the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and the Heritage Farm Museum in Sterling. You folks in California have a wider selection, including the Exploratorium, Chabot Space & Science Center, and the Dr. Willella Howe-Waffle House and Medical Museum. (I have no idea what that last is, I just love the name. I keep parsing it as "Dr. Willella Howe" "Waffle House and Medical Museum" though, which is a disturbing mental image.)

Also for the locals, this Saturday is the National Book Festival downtown on the Mall--IMO pretty much the only good thing to come out of the Bush (43) administration. Thanks, Laura! Neil Gaiman will be reading in the Teens & Children Pavilion 11:45-12:15 and then doing a signing from 1-3.

The schedule for this year's Comcast Outdoor Film Festival at Strathmore is on the Strathmore website (and at the Washington Post, but their schedule doesn't entirely match up with what's listed at Strathmore). I think nminusone and I will probably go see "Spiderman 3" on the 16th at least. Anyone else planning on going to any of the movies?

August 15: Bee Movie
August 16: Spiderman 3
August 17: Airplane!
August 18: Ghostbusters
August 19: The Bourne Ultimatum
August 20: Evan Almighty
August 21: Twister
August 22: Transformers
August 23: Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix
August 23: Shrek the Third

Last weekend at Ching Ching Cha, I temporarily caused massive disappointment for the guy at the next table because he saw my bag from Big Planet that had a huge "Free Comic Book Day" ad on one side and thought he'd missed it. Nope, it's tomorrow.
http://www.freecomicbookday.com/the_comics.asp

Hey, locals, according to DCist:

Big Monkey Comics on 14th St. NW between R and S streets will have the stock of FCBD comics on hand as well as some 3,000 other comics that they've selected from their existing stock to give away, according to Big Monkey owner Scipio Garling.

Ooooh. Today's free ebook from Tor.com is Jo Walton's "Farthing", which I've been meaning to read.

If you sign up for Tor's mailing list, they've been sending out free ebooks in PDF/HTML/Mobi format for a few weeks. (And to date, that's the only mail there's been. It's not been in the least spammy.) So far, they've given away:
* Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
* Old Man's War, John Scalzi
* Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
* The Outstretched Shadow, Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory
* Farthing, Jo Walton

Next week will apparently be Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. I haven't gotten around to reading any of them quite yet; I've got several library books I need to finish and return first, and honestly I find reading large chunks of text on a computer monitor to be pretty hard on my aging eyes.