Just a reminder that The Promised King begins again this Sunday!
Lazy Linkage
:: Mrs. M-Mv has a link to a list of the best novels you’ve never read. Sure enough, I haven’t read any of them, but I do own a copy of one of them, so I’m ahead of the curve, right?
(And hey, why did I never think of making a reading list before? Up ’til now, my “reading lists” have taken the form of shelves full of books and stacks of books on the floor and on my table and by my bed. A list would take up a lot less space, I bet.)
:: Lynn links a pretty amazing photo.
:: PNH has a pretty amazing photo too.
:: OK, I’ll breathe slightly easier for now: The SFBC’s new editor actually has experience in SF. Still sucks for the old editor, but maybe the club isn’t being fast-tracked for an early shut-down after all.
:: Mr. Bennion links a guy who’s provided some handy sense of scale for the USS Enterprise-D. In comments, I directed Mr. Bennion to Starship Dimensions, a site I’ve linked before but which always bears revisiting for geeks.
:: A couple of guides for responding to global-warming denialists, here and here.
:: My space-opera reading project has brought me to a new obsession. The first volume was terrific, and I’m tracking down the remaining volumes as we speak. Or as I write this. Or something like that.
:: Alex Ross on great comedic film scores. If we include the musical genre in our notion of film scores — for some reason, musical scores never seem to get much discussion from film music afficionadoes — then there are tons of great comedy filmscores. Lisa Hirsch has a pretty good answer.
:: Belladonna is going on a potentially permanent hiatus. This saddens me; she’s one of my favorite blog-finds of the last year or however long it’s been since I discovered her blog.
:: Stephen Frug isn’t going on hiatus, but he’s forecasting a greatly reduced posting schedule. I refer the my right honorable friends to the reply I made some moments ago.
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A product recommendation
You know, for all the cat-blogging that gets done in Blogistan, nobody ever discusses the icky side of having the little critters around. So let me toss out this opinion: the eternal battle against kitty odor, this litter used in conjunction with this litter additive works wonders.
That is all.
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Is this thing on?
Not be mean or anything, but now that it’s been more than a day since they all went into the cyber-weeds, it’s sure a good thing that some of us have held out on the “Hey, let’s get all of Buffalo’s blogs into one basket!” notion, eh?
Come back soon, guys!
UPDATE: OK, what the hell? Kevin reports that he can at least access WNYMedia blogs, but still gets nothing on the main WNYMedia site. I, however, only get this screen:
whenever I try to access those same blogs. However, I can get the entire stable of WNYMedia blogs if I use AOL’s browser, as opposed to Firefox. This is the case even after I cleared my Firefox cache. What on Earth is going on? Is WNYMedia.net actually implementing some version of their site that will not be accessible to Firefox users?
What’s going on over there, guys???
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Books: I read ’em
Some notes on recent bookish activity at Casa Jaquandor, since I’ve had lots of reading time lately (about the only good thing about lengthy hospital stays):
:: Every week at the library I carefully inspect the “New Nonfiction” shelf, and often times I’ll check out a selection or two from there pretty much on a whim. One such case was Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart’s Masterpiece, by Lorraine Diehl and Marianne Hardart. I saw the word “recipes” and that’s all it took, since I’m always a sucker for new cookbooks, and after about five seconds of thumbing through the book, I surmised that it was apparently a celebration of a long-vanished New York City restaurant. I almost always enjoy food writing, so home it came.
What I discovered is that it wasn’t a book about one restaurant, but about a whole chain of them, a chain that launched in the 1880s and only finally closed for good in early 1991. The short version of the tale is that two guys, one named Horn and the other named Hardart, got together to open first a lunch counter and then a series of them, eventually spawning a chain of Automat restaurants in New York City and in Philadelphia. The automat concept was that food would be distributed not by servers, but through a wall of coin-operated compartments: insert coins, and then open the little window to take the food out. And then someone in the kitchen, behind the wall of food compartments, would come along and “reload” the thing.
Apparently these places were extremely popular in their day, in pre-WWII New York and Philly; their decline began with the post-war exodus of the middle class to suburbia. The Automat concept sounds a little weird at first glance, but looking at the photos in this book makes me wish there was one still around somewhere, with the art-deco styling and the stained glass windows along the front. This is a slice of bygone-Americana that I never knew existed.
(After a little Googling, here’s a new Automat-concept place in NYC. It doesn’t look at all like the Horn & Hardart Automats; rather, this looks like something you’d see on a streetcorner in Tokyo or Hong Kong. I wonder if they have Automats in those cities?)
:: Words Words Words by David Crystal is just that: a book about words. Crystal is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, and he turns out to be extremely prolific on the subject. Even though Crystal is a professional academic linguist, this book isn’t an academic tome. It’s more of an introduction to the kinds of things linguists study, as well as a general rumination on the kinds of linguistic matters that are likely to perplex people who think about language on the level of the intrigued amateur. Crystal ruminates briefly on issues such as: Is the English language deteriorating? What makes a word beautiful or ugly? How is it that words change meaning over time? Why can’t language stay the way it is, forever? And why does everybody but me speak with such outlandish accents?
:: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is one of those single-volume discussions of just about everything in the world of science as it is today, similar in focus to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot and Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way. I love a well-written popularization of science, and this is a good one. It’s particularly notable for two features. First is Bryson’s focus on a lot of the personalities of science responsible for the things we now know (or don’t know) about our world. Science doesn’t progress in the straight line everyone likes to think it does, and often scientific progress is held up decades or longer by oddities of personality. The other notable feature of the book is its fairly bleak outlook: if Carl Sagan’s theme in Cosmos is what a wonderful and amazing thing the Universe is, Bryson’s theme is that the Universe doesn’t care one whit about us and is set up such that any number of things can happen at any moment to wipe us out forever: a giant pulse of gamma rays from a supernova we don’t know happened yet, an eruption of the giant volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park, Earth being struck by any of the likely thousands of meteors and asteroids we don’t know are aimed at our planet because we’re too dumb to spend the money to look for them, and so on.
So there’s my recent reading (along with several others that I’ll blog about later on or review for GMR)!
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Unidentified Earth 5
Time again to explore our world. Last week, in honor of the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, our location was none other than Skywalker Ranch, where The Flanneled One resides.
This week takes us to the thrilling location of…well, that’s for you all to identify!
Where are we?
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A Very Public Service Announcement
Well, folks, it’s time to get moving with a long-delayed project. It’s time to start serializing The Promised King, Book II: The Finest Deed. No, the book isn’t done, but I’m not going to let that stop me!
When I serialized Book I: The Welcomer over the course of 2005, I posted chapters twice a month, on the first and third Sunday of each. I won’t be able to match that frequency now, since The Finest Deed is unfinished, so I’ve elected to halve that frequency. So for the time being, I will do one chapter a month, which will appear on the first Sunday of each month.
Which means, in turn, that Chapter One will appear there this coming Sunday.
Now, if I get a good head of steam going and wind up significantly ahead of my goals, I may up the frequency occasionally to add a second chapter per month; however, I will make no promises on that score save one: I will always post in the sidebar of The Promised King‘s site the date that the next chapter will appear. This way, you won’t find that you’ve missed a chapter if you only check in monthly.
Thus, for those of you who’ve been wondering what will become of Lady Gwynwhyfar and Sir Baigent and Lord Matholyn and King Arthur in their struggles against Cwerith ap Cellamma, the Traitor King, it’ll begin Sunday, June 3. And if you haven’t read The Welcomer yet, what’s stopping you? All the chapters are there!
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O for a giant can of Raid….
Someone arrived here via a search-engine query for “King Kong giant bug picture”. I’m assuming they’re looking for photos from the sequence in the Peter Jackson King Kong movie where Our Heroes are on Skull Island, and after some adventurous stuff in which their numbers have already shrunk, find themselves at the bottom of a deep chasm…at night…when the huge insects and other beasties of unusual size come out to play. This scene actually scared the crap out of me.
And thanks to YouTube, it can scare the crap out of you, too. It starts off OK…until around the 1:55 mark, when the flare that’s keeping the bugs at bay flickers out….
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A quiz thing
Haven’t done one of these in a while. This is via Electronic Cerebrectomy.
1. I’ve come to realize that my last kiss… has exited my brain. Seriously. Don’t remember it.
2. I am listening to… the wind in the trees. Nothing going on right now, no music playing, no teevee droning.
3. I talk… in iambic pentameter. OK, not really. But it would be cool.
4. I want… to rewind the calendar of my life back to, oh, August 10, 2004 and see if it all plays out differently.
5. My best friend(s)… is at work right now, if she’s got the same work schedule this week that she usually does.
7. The weather is… stunning: sunny and low humidity. Bite me, all you “I hate Buffalo weather” dweebs.
8. I hate it when people… act like people, instead of acting like persons, if that makes sense.
9. Love is… when your default reaction to something terrible happening is fear that the other may not make it through.
10. Marriage is… kept from gays for absolutely no good reason that I’ve ever heard.
11. Somewhere, someone is thinking… “Wow, I could really go for some Cheetos and Mallomars.”
12. I’ll always… want just one more chicken wing or slice of pizza.
13. I have a secret crush on… Mirna from The Amazing Race. Actually, this isn’t really secret, but then, I don’t keep my crushes secret. I advertise ’em, front and center.
14. The last time I cried was… sometime in the last day. I can summon up tears on command now.
15. My cell phone is… out there somewhere, waiting for me. I don’t own one. Don’t need one.
16. When I wake up in the morning… I either lazily lay in bed a while, or I utter a curse before lazily laying in bed a while. This depends on the hour and how well I’ve slept.
17. Before I go to bed… I clean out the old sinuses with the Neti pot. Hey, you asked.
18. Right now I am thinking about… why I can’t live a life of romance and derring-do like d’Artagnan.
19. Babies are… for other people, apparently.
20. I go on MySpace… once in a great while. I set up a profile there in case anyone on MySpace was looking for me; the only purpose it serves is basically to direct people here. However, I’ve never yet seen a referral show up in my SiteMeter stats. I generally think MySpace is pretty useless. It bugs me that I have this awesome 2006 computer with a DSL connection that I can use to look at MySpace pages that look like the personal websites I used to see when I was on my 1996 Compaq Presario surfing my dial-up connection.
21. Today I… took The Wife to a medical appointment, where I read thirty pages of The Three Musketeers in the waiting room; went food-shopping; and went for a long walk while listening to the Revenge of the Sith score on my personal CD player.
22. Tonight I… will take The Family Whose Number MUST NEVER EXCEED THREE out for dinner at our favorite road-side burgers-and-hot-dogs joint. Then we’ll come home, watch TV, read, put The Daughter to bed, and call it a night.
23. Tomorrow I… will finish up some reviews for GMR and start writing again. It’s time once again for my fictional children to step up and do their surrogate duty.
24. I really want to… know what exactly it is that some people think is so “intelligently designed” about the human body.
25. Someone who will most likely repost this? Nobody, probably — my bitter tone here will probably scare them off. Time to go get some food, I think.
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Sentential Links #100
That’s right, we’re into triple digits. Long live the sentences!
:: You might need to declare email bankruptcy. (Maybe it’s just because I don’t work a desk job, but my e-mail is quite well within the bounds of my ability to handle it without wanting to lure it into a quiet stretch of water and strangle it.)
:: Before it happens, I just want to state for the record that when Juliet winds up betraying the castaways tonight and proving that she really was working with Ben the whole time and that Ben had planned all the dynamite stuff, that I’m not shocked. (I don’t know what any of that means, actually.)
:: For Mr. Steyn and the professional indignation specialists over at Libertas, it will never be enough that Kazan went on to have a distinguished, artistically fulfilling and lucrative career after his testimony. He must be loved, not despite, but because of his having named names. (Referring to Elia Kazan, of course.)
:: Some day, I must walk to the Port, stopping off at, say, the Hare, the Bell, the Robin Hood, the Highbury Vaults, and the Pennyfarthing. I would probably not walk back, though. (Ahhh, beer…with the coming of summer, I tend to drink more beer. I like beer. Yup. I also like bars with names like “the Robin Hood” and “the Pennyfarthing”.)
:: I asume I am the last person in the world to hear about the last person in the blogosphere to learn about the Silver Surfer quarters which are not counterfeit, but altered US Coins, which makes the people eligible for five years in federal prison as opposed to the ten to fifteen you get for counterfeiting. (Nope; I hadn’t heard of this yet! Click through for linkage. You’d think the Franklin Mint would know what the hell they’re doing.)
:: Go wherever you may go, on the web, around town, at work/school, and you’re going to find this rather aggressive strain of provincialism. People not only unwilling to explore other vistas or to consider other viewpoints, but they are harsh and sometimes eager to stop up any discussion that does not center around them. (This post is in partial response to….)
:: The fourth reason is that to know and to read the great books makes one a member of the family of all those who have eaten from the same dish. (A fine, fine post on why one should read the Great Literature. I’m not sure I agree with everything here, especially this: “Some works are sublime, meant to last forever, to be read and reread until the work becomes a treasured part of one’s soul; some are pulp, meant to thrill the reader.” Seems to me that the works which endure do so because they are worthy of enduring, not because they are meant to endure. The best thing to do is drink widely from the deep well.)
:: Extricandae copiae! (I’m on board. Get them out.)
Enough for now. Enjoy.