You want to buy books….you WILL buy books….
I’ve finally bothered to update the links to my current books for sale on Ebay, and I plan to offer a few more later in the week. Remember, I don’t run commercials here at Byzantium’s Shores, and contrary to popular belief, very little of my funding comes from the government and….oh, sorry. Buffalo’s NPR stations had their pledge drive this week, and I’ve got that spiel in my head. But if you see any interesting titles, by all means, bid. Nothing makes the wife happier than seeing books exiting the house, and a happy wife makes for a happy blogger!
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Obligatory blathering about traffic.
The hit-counter surged past 40,000 hits yesterday. Hooray and huzzah for me! And thanks, of course, to all the readers – even the poor soul who came here via this search. I hope no one has been ushered off this mortal coil, though, because they didn’t find what they needed here. (Maybe I’ll try threatening Google next time I need something….)
By the way, posting here might be light over the next few days, since I have several projects that I really need to sweep from the decks. And that’s not even taking account any stuff that I will literally have to sweep from the decks at The Store.
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Up with this, I will not put!
I have a bone to pick with Tom and Ray. Well, not Tom. Just Ray. And not really, because Ray seemed perfectly aware that lots of bones will be picked with him this week. (I’m referring to the Magliozzis, of course – from NPR’s CarTalk.)
It has to do with the answer Ray gave to this week’s Puzzler. Here is the original question:
“Usually when the subject of a sentence is compound, and the components are connected by ‘and,’ the verb takes the plural form. For example, we say, ‘Bob and his wife ARE planning to drive to Florida’… not, ‘Bob and his wife IS planning to drive to Florida.’ Likewise, we say, ‘The vase and the book ARE on the table,’ not, ‘The vase and the book IS on the table.’
But, can you think of a situation where the components of a compound subject are connected by ‘and,’ yet the form of the verb must be singular, and not plural?”
Their answer won’t appear on the Web until Monday, but it has already aired on the radio show (at least in Buffalo), so I’ll spoil it here. Ray reports that when the two phrases joined by ‘and’ refer to the same thing, then you have a compound subject paired with a singular verb form, thusly: “My college room-mate and best friend is coming to visit next week.” (Assuming that “my best friend” and “college room-mate” are the same person.)
Upon hearing this answer, Tommy immediately protested that this is not a compound subject, since you don’t actually have two subjects joined by ‘and’, but rather two phrases that refer to the same singular subject. It also seems to me that, as written, the sentence-as-such needs commas around the phrase “and best friend”, because otherwise it’s terribly ambiguous. Anyway, Ray didn’t exactly rise to a fierce defense of his answer; in fact, he conceded that CarTalk is likely to receive lots of angry mail from grammarians.
Now, I’m no grammarian. I tend to write by ear, and if I have something troubling come up, I gotta look it up like anyone else. (For instance, I shamelessly use words like “gotta”, which no grammarian would touch with a ten-foot-pole even if they hadda.) So, for my more grammariable (I make up words too!) readers, does Tommy have a beef? Is that really a compound subject?
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“Your half-assed underparenting is a lot more fun than your half-assed overparenting.”
My daughter was walking around with a flashlight for a time yesterday, just looking at stuff, and poking about in dark corners. I thought nothing of this until she said, “No blood out here.”
Alarmed, I queried as to exactly what she was doing, and she tells me, “I’m pretending I’m a CSI!”
There really are times when I expect guys in jackboots to burst through my door and whisk my kid off to a less-demented household.
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Opportunity — is there nothing it can’t do?
A couple of weeks ago I linked an image and story about the Mars rovers observing a Martian sunset, thinking at the time, “What could be cooler than that!”
Well, I now have my answer: a Martian solar eclipse.
The Mars rover Opportunity took pictures as the Martian moon Deimos passed in front of the sun, looking like a mote of dust as it did so. It’s not really what we think of as an “eclipse”, since neither of Mars’s two moons is large enough to cause totality in an eclipse, although Phobos could eclipse up to half the sun in its own transit sometime in the next few days. The only reason we have total eclipses on Earth is by sheer good fortune: the discs of the Sun and the Moon, observed from Earth’s surface, are just about the exact same size. If the Moon were smaller or farther from the Earth, we wouldn’t have total eclipses.
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Book Stuff
Time for a few book notes on stuff recently read.
:: Orbiter, by Warren Ellis (also of DPH fame) and Colleen Doran (art), is a one-volume graphic novel in which, some years in the future, NASA has been shut down and manned space exploration has ended.
A shanty-town has evolved at the Kennedy Space Center, with the crumbling bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building looming above it. Apparently, there was one space shuttle accident too many: the shuttle Venture disappeared with no explanation. But as the book begins, Venture returns, making its original landing as scheduled at Cape Canaveral. But that’s not all: only one member of the shuttle’s crew returns with it, and the ship itself is covered with something rather like skin. A scientific team is assembled to find out just what happened. (The book was written before, but released after, the destruction of Columbia. Ellis discusses that tragedy in the Foreword.)
That sounds like it might be the beginning of some kind of Alien-type of story, or maybe that movie Event Horizon from a few years back (which I never saw, but have on good authority was awful). It seems like a standard horror story: Here’s a baffling mystery of the unknown, and here are the people who are going to try to solve it. As the story took shape, I waited for the malevolent forces of the Universe to start to strike down the members of the team, until just two survive at the end, fortunate to escape with their lives and secure with the message that the Universe just isn’t a safe place and that we’re all better off just staying on our little planet and not trying to delve too deeply into What Is Out There.
Well, I don’t want to say too much, but that’s not what happens. Ellis pretty much turns those expectations on their head, using the kind of “SF Horror story” set-up to explore the fact that we seem to have lost our sense of wonder. The effect is quite thrilling: the book gives us a group of characters confronted with the Cosmic Unknown, and their response is, “When do we leave!” It’s kind of refreshing, really.
I also liked Colleen Doran’s art a lot (she is best-known for her series A Distant Soil, which I have to get around to finishing one of these days), although I do think she tends once in a while to have the characters gesticulate and grin in over-dramatic fashion.
Check this one out. I read it in a single evening, and it was very enjoyable.
:: I sometimes get the idea that every fantasy and SF writer out there reads tons of history in their spare time, both for leisure reading and for research purposes, for obvious reasons: attentive reading of lots of history is of tremendous use in world-building. On that basis, I probably don’t read enough history; but then, I think that a genre I’m surprised I don’t see more writers of the fantastic celebrating is travel writing, which I do tend to read a lot. If I could pick a single author from the past whose life I would want to lead, it would be Richard Halliburton’s. (Although I wouldn’t want to die at the age of thirty when my leaky boat disappears in a storm!) Good travel writing always excites me because it usually involves the kind of culture-clash you also find in history, but usually on a much more personal level.
The Road to Somewhere: Travels with a Young Boy Through an Old World, by James Dodson (book website here) is such a book. Dodson writes about a journey through Europe with his young son, a kid who is on the cusp of adolescence. Their plan, at the outset, is to do a grand world tour: they hope to go on safari in Kenya, visit the Holy Land, see the Great Pyramid, and walk the Great Wall of China. Due to various world situations, though, they never get out of Europe. Kenya is ruled out because of civil strife; Israel is out because of the new intifada; China is out because of the whole downed-spy-plane affair. They took their trip during the summer of 2001, and thus this book recounts one of the last grand tours of the world – or part of it – of the time before 9-11-01.
Dodson writes with a good deal of charm, and most notable in the book are his ruminations on fatherhood on such a journey, when he is at once very protective of his kid (at least two times on the route, he very nearly punches some European in the nose for rudeness to his son), and hopeful that the kid (Jack, nicknamed “Nibsy”) is picking up the right lessons from their travels. Humorous incidents abound, as do unexpected encounters with both the good side and bad side of people (based on Dodson’s chapter about it, I must say I have little intention of ever visiting Amsterdam). And there are some terribly sad moments, such as when they are touring the ruins of Pompeii and come across another such family whose grandfather has literally just dropped dead in the middle of the street.
The Road to Somewhere is a lovely little book. Recommended.
:: And finally, dammit, Amazon needs to give a way to shut off that “Search every friggin’ word in every book we sell” feature of theirs. Plugging in “The Road to Somewhere”, this book is the seventh result of more than five hundred items, and it’s outranked on the search by two items that don’t even feature those words in their titles. When I’m looking for a specific title – and nine times out of ten, I am – this feature is more hindrance than help.
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Well, candlesticks always make a nice gift….
With spring training starting up, any baseball fans amongst my readership had better be reading Mike’s Baseball Rants, a consistent producer of good and funny (and, at times, incredibly tabular) material about baseball. Right now he has a pretty interesting article up about the steroid scandal, noting with interest the way the story is breaking in a big way, at the same time that a President who put it into his State of the Union address is about to stand for re-election. Hmmmmmm….
(And wait until the “Joe Morgan Chats” to start up, for some real baseball bloggin’ fun!)
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A Periodic Plug, replug’d
It’s been a while since I linked this, and I have a lot of newer readers since then (at least, I like to think I do), so if you enjoy fun quizzes about movies, get thee to FilmWise immediately. (Or, whenever you’re done reading my stuff.)
Their “Invisibles” quizzes are given most prominent position, but there are a lot of other fun things here — like this one in which they give a series of computer screen shots from the movies, and you identify the films.
And finally, unrelated to FilmWise but still about movies, are two quizzes — here and here — in which you have to identify films based on the font of a single letter from their marketing materials. Some of this is quite difficult. And there we have enough timewasters for anyone.
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“Research”, I’ll call it….yeah….
In the course of looking for a bit of information for a review I’m writing, I happened upon this quiz about The Simpsons. Check it out. Some of the questions stumped me.
(Yes, this is true. I was looking for a Simpsons factoid for a review! Really! I was! You can’t prove I wasn’t!)