Book stores are dangerous places for me. Especially the new kind of book stores, the kind that are more akin to miniature cities. Yesterday I wandered into one, looking for a particular CD (a peculiar logic at best). I just get immersed. I look at the special offers, to see if there's anything that looks vaguely readable. I look at the big new hardback books, the critically acclaimed stuff, the works by my favourite authors (not that I won't have already read all their books, it's mostly just so I can be sure that they haven't tried to sneak something out without my noticing. Repeat this process for CD's. And DVD's.

Worse still is when I see something that engages my interest. Yesterday it was Bigger Deal, the sequel to it's predecessor, which was named (would you believe) Big Deal.

Now I do play poker, albeit without any particular skill, but I would never consider buying a book about it. In my opinion it's half common sense, betting with good cards and not betting with bad ones, and half a mental game, which is something that I doubt a book could ever teach you. But what really piqued my interest in this book was the size. This thing was big. I'm talking dictionary big. I'm always amazed when someone is able to write a book as big as a fair-sized desk draw about a subject as mundane as a card game. Odder still is that the author has written two of them.

So I'm flicking through this book, thinking that it's so generic that if other poker books are like this then you could probably make a composite book out of pages from other assorted poker texts and few people would notice, when I take a glance at my watch. With barely a few weeks until end of year exams, I've just wasted well over half an hour in a book store.

That's why book stores are hazardous to me. Without being careful I can quite easily lose hours in there. But my long winded question is thus. What makes you lose track of time?

Also, to commemorate the release of the new spiderman film today, I have borrowed this new theme from the Multiply Customised Themes group. There's some decent stuff there, but it suggests strongly that far too much of Multiply is heavily into My Chemical Romance. I actually quite like the colour scheme for this theme and might keep it after I find a better picture to replace the spiderman banner, any suggestions?