Woke up to another rainstorm of Biblical proportions this morning, now it's reduced to the dripping from the gutters and down the rain spouts. Until two years ago I didn't know that Arizona (and maybe other parts of the desert southwest) goes through an official monsoon period sometime around this time of year. Daily afternoon rains sweep through, clogging storm sewers and flooding roads, bringing what is probably the bulk of the area's annual precipitation in an astonishingly short period of time.

Last night I was reading the reviews on Amazon about a book I'm thinking of requesting from the library (I use my Amazon wish list for this purpose because my library doesn't have this feature in their system), and noticed that one of the reviews was by Amazon’s #1 reviewer. What makes someone the #1 reviewer on Amazon, I wondered? It’s somewhat confusing – the woman who is listed as #1 has fewer overall reviews than the man listed as #2, but she does have more votes indicating that her reviews were helpful. But the man who is #3 has fewer reviews than #2, but more helpful votes. Amazon does not seem to publish the methods they use for ranking their reviewers. I jumped to the conclusion that it was all about size - the sheer volume of reviews that had been written - since this seems to be such an American approach, but it would appear that it's slightly more complex than that. And where does a person get the time to review, cogently, with thoughtfulness and literary references, over 5000 books?!