Sixty-Nine Dollars and Fifty Two Cents, baby! My check for payment for jury duty arrived today . . .

Suggestions for good ways to spend this money? And while I generally support saving money, not this $69.52.

And if you add in the $105 I spent at Barnes & Noble on books and magazines, I'm only 35.48 in the hole!

I'm happy with all three books I currently have going - The Book Thief in my car, A Dirty Job in my iPod, and Paula Spencer in actual book form.

The NY Times describes the Book Thief as: "Markus Zusak has not really written "Harry Potter and the Holocaust." It just feels that way. "The Book Thief" is perched on the cusp between grown-up and young-adult fiction, and it is loaded with librarian appeal. It deplores human misery. It celebrates the power of language. It may encourage adolescents to read. It has an element of the fanciful. And it's a book that bestows a self-congratulatory glow upon anyone willing to grapple with it."

Publishers Weekly describes A Dirty Job as: "Cult-hero Moore (The Stupidest Angel) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a [second hand] shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. . . . When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh . . . to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. . . . If it sounds over the top, that's because it is—but Moore's enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy."

And Entertainment Weekly had this to say about Paula Spencer: "The heroine of Roddy Doyle's 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is back in Paula Spencer, widowed and newly sober but as endearing as she was a decade ago. Writing in Paula's voice with such assurance that there isn't a single dishonest word, Doyle reintroduces a woman who tends to her fractured extended family and troubled children while coming to terms with the fallout of her alcoholism and marital abuse. Doyle treats Paula and her pain with a tenderness that transforms what might be a bleak story of a working-class Dublin woman into a tale of triumph and great humor. It is, as Paula herself likes to say, ''just grand.'' "

And I would recommend all three books.

As to the primary . . .

Taking a page from Clinton, if the Tampa Bay Devil Rays beat the Red Sox in a late season game when the Sox have an insurmountable lead in the Division, The Rays should get on a soap box and scream about how momentum is in their favor, and ask that the Commissioner declare them the winners of the division.