Today I went to Jay & Mary’s Book Center, my local indie bookstore, to get some new books with Athena. I came through the door, saw a display for the Halo Encyclopedia, said “hey, cool,” and made a beeline for it, because I knew Toby Buckell advised on it and I wanted to take a look at it. I was so engrossed in it that I didn’t notice that the folks at J&M had a whole stack of God Engines right next to it, and continued not to notice the presence of TGE in the store until I was paying for Athena’s books at the register, looked up and noticed they had copies in a wall display. At which point Athena mocked me for missing the previous stack despite it being inches away from my nose. I have to admit it’s not like me to miss something like that. But, hey: Halo, man. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

All of which is a long way of saying that Jay & Mary’s Book Center in Troy, Ohio now has about eight signed copies of The God Engines on sale ($17!), and I suspect if you called them and asked to buy one, they’d probably ship it to you for a reasonable price.

Update, 2/12: They’re sold out now, but are ordering a new batch for the store and will take your order for those. And, yeah, if you make an order with them in the next couple of days (say, by Sunday, 2/14), I’ll go down to the bookstore and sign your copy.

This week’s AMC column: Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Winter, I Learned From Science Fiction Movies. I offer up “useful” tips on cold and snow from The Empire Strikes Back, The Thing, The Day After Tomorrow and others. And yes, “useful” is in quotes for a reason. Go on over.

Yes, like all forward-thinking folk I have switched on Google Buzz, because what I need more than anything else in the world is to have yet one more social network to be on. That said, my reaction to it so far seems to be similar to the reaction of most of the people I’ve seen on it, which is “okay, now what?” Because to be blunt about it, if GBuzz is just replicating what I already have going on Facebook/Twitter, I’m not going to end up using it much, because I already have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and GBuzz porting itself into my GMail isn’t enough to make it special or convenient. So we’ll see how to shakes out.

I will say that I think Google may eventually have to accept that short of actually buying either Twitter or Facebook, they’re not going to make a huge amount of headway into the social media sphere. Their other attempts in this direction don’t seem to have amounted to anything, unless you’re Brazilian, in which case Orkut rocks your socks. Good for you, Brazil; I celebrate your social media lifestyle choice. But otherwise, meh. Again, we’ll have to see.

Anyway, if you want to follow me on GBuzz, after you sign in to the service, click the “find people” link and then type in my name, and it should be pretty easy from there.

Oh, look: I’ve cracked Technorati’s overall top 100, holding the anchor position, situated directly below Perez Hilton, which, I assure you, is a surprise to us both. This won’t last; last week due to Amazon/Macmillan I had a massive spike in readership (and linkage, which is what Technorati really tracks). It’s since come down to my normal levels, plus a small overall lift in people who’ve showed up for the first time last week and then decided to stick around, and linking will follow that path as well. So soon enough I’ll slink back down to the 300s or wherever it is I usually am these days — Technorati’s ranking system has become frightfully opaque outside of specific category rankings.

But, you know. I’ll enjoy my stay on the blogging A-list while I can (i.e., until tomorrow), and promise to remember where I came from, and to keep it real, etc. You want any souvenirs from the A-list club house? I think I see some coasters they won’t miss. I’ll just move Perez’s drink off one. Shhh. Don’t tell him it was me.