beowabbit

The rest of our trip to the Cape was great. On our way back, we spent a few hours at the Edward Gorey House, which was great. It’s a fascinating place celebrating a fascinatingly weird person. (He let raccoons live in one of his rooms for quite a while, for instance. Whether that was because he didn’t want to inconvenience them or because he just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them, I didn’t quite gather. Either one seems entirely plausible.)

I finished Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, by Molly Caldwell Crosby. As I wrote earlier, it was fascinating, and I think the novelistic style that rubbed me a bit the wrong way towards the beginning ended up working for me (especially when I read the notes at the end and realized that a lot of the suspiciously detailed descriptions were in fact properly sourced). Very highly recommended for anybody who likes historical nonfiction, medical nonfiction, or both. Looking forward to reading (and perhaps watching) Awakenings at some point. (Crosby says she was inspired to write Asleep in part because after reading Awakenings she wanted to learn more about the epidemic, and couldn’t find anything else written since the 30s or so.)

Got an unexpected impromptu dinner date with

plumtreeblossom this evening. I was kept late at work, and she had her class schedule change unexpectedly, which meant we were both in Cambridge and free at around 7:30. So we met in Central Square for dinner. We first tried Mary Chung’s, but they’re closed on Tuesdays, so we ended up having a delicious Indian meal at Shalimar. Yay!

Oh, and it was very cloudy here all day, so no chance of seeing the transit of Venus around sunset EDT. (The new userpic is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.) But as I was walking home from the T station the clouds had cleared a bit, and I got to see the International Space Station pass overhead.

PS — Huge thanks to

surrealestate and DD for inviting us to join them and Julian on the Cape!

Current Mood: happy

Saw PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, which was great. This included an encore performance of “Red Shift: Havoc over Holowood”, which

plumtreeblossom was in, and which was originally performed at an Arisia a couple years ago. That was a lot of fun. And the other show was a radio adaptation of The Day the Earth Stood Still, originally broadcast in 1954 by Lux Radio Theater. That was a truly spectacular performance. Kudos to Michael McAffee, who starred as Red Shift (the lead Interplanetary Do-Gooder in the Red Shift episodes) and directed “The Day the Earth Stood Still”¹.

I finished Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (spoilers at link, of course) a couple weeks ago. I had a weird, mixed reaction to it. I love alternate history in general, and this is an important book in the history of that sub-genre. And I love actual history, and the actual history in the book was meticulously researched. But I had a hard time with the pervasive racism that has to be depicted in a book about 20th- or 21st-century Afrikaner white supremacists travelling back in time to ensure that the South wins the Civil War. I don’t have a similarly hard time with nonfiction history, and I think I might have less of a hard time with a historical novel that didn’t alter actual history so much. And of course, accurate fiction set in the early 21st century also has to depict racism, albeit without quite the same focus on it. So I’m not quite sure what it was about this book that made it so hard to read. (I liked it better after the end of the war, when it became about politics; not sure if that’s because the tone of the book changed or if it’s just that I’d gotten used to the book and its universe by then.)

The other thing I didn’t like about it, was that it mixed very plausible, believable characters with some really implausible behaviours and reactions. I mean, the whole premise is time travel and altering history, and I’m willing to suspend disbelief that far, but a lot of the things about how the time travellers behaved and how the 19th-century Southerners reacted to them and their technology seemed completely implausible.

I have started reading Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, about the epidemic of sleeping sickness (epidemic encephalitis or encephalitis lethargica) following World War I. I’m only about halfway through it, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s largely taken from case histories, but it also creates an excellent sense of the era. Here’s an example:

For New Yorkers, for Americans, and for the world, the 1920s would prove to be the decade with the most rapid technological change in history. In one generation, travel by horse and carriage would make way for autos; people would travel underground, and soon, in the sky; wireless radio would change ship travel; kitchen appliances and indoor plumbing would become mainstream; light would come from a switch and heat through pipes; telephones would appear in the majority of homes; and the canned music and crackling voice of radio would provide home entertainment and news.

One minor quibble I have with it is that it’s a bit fictionalized and novelistic, including details that I can’t imagine are all actually attested in contemporary sources. But that certainly adds to the vividness, and it’s a very vivid book. Definitely recommended.

¹ So in this post I have two cases of the same or similar titles appearing in italics as the name of a standalone work or series, and also in quotation marks as the title of an episode of a series. There’s something wrong with that.

Great weekend! Not enough time to do it justice, but:

plumtreeblossom taught me how to make cheesecake on Friday! Om nom nom.
She had borrowed I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang from me (I haven’t actually read it yet), and wanted to see the movie (same title, minus “Georgia”). Netflix didn’t have it, but Amazon did, and we really enjoyed it!
And today, after breakfast of bacon and more cheesecake (hey, it’s a virtue to eat leftovers, isn’t it?) we went and saw the Big Apple Circus. We had a great time, despite somebody kicking over plumtreeblossom’s full glass of lemonade. Some of the acts were really spectacular. The most stunning bit for me wasn’t at all flashy, but it was just something that I didn’t realize the human body was capable of. A gymnast started standing, with her left hand on a post/support at roughly chest level in front of her. She lifted herself with just that one hand and arm to a one-handed handstand. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. The flashy stuff was lots of fun, too, and they’ve added a porcupine, a capybara (I think), and a pig to their animal act.

Oh, note new userpic — I figured it was about time I had one that reflected my current configuration of facial hair.

plumtreeblossom took it last weekend at the beach.

So I finished The Swerve, which I briefly mentioned earlier, about the composition, loss to obscurity, rediscovery, and impact of Lucretius’ Epicurean philosopical poem On the Nature of Things. Utterly loved it. I learned a lot about a lot of periods of history that I didn’t know very much about, and it presented a very convincing account of the rôle of this classical poem, almost lost and really preserved largely by accident, in laying the intellectual foundations for the modern Western world.

One thing that struck me as a 21st-century reader, reading Greenblatt’s exposition of Lucretius’ view of the universe, is just how far you can get by pure speculation, without formally using anything like the scientific method. Lucretius, and Epicurus before him, made up what they thought they knew about the world with nothing like formal experimentation, with no theory-testing, just coming to conclusions based on whatever they happened to observe, plus whatever biases were already in their heads. And to be sure, they got an awful lot laughably wrong from a modern vantage point. Quoting Greenblatt:

Lucretius believed that the sun circled around the earth, and he argued that the sun’s heat and size could hardly be much greater than are perceived by our senses. He thought that works were spontaneously generated from the wet soil, explained lightning as seeds of fire expelled from hollow clouds, and pictured the earth as a menopausal mother exhausted by the effort of so much breeding.

But he also believed that everything in the universe, whether matter we interact with on earth or lights we see in the sky, was made up of tiny indivisible particles; that while physical objects seem solid, those tiny particles probably have space between them,; that they interact, and that while a rock face may be eroded to sand and a human being may decompose to dirt, the tiny indivisible particles (though they may scatter) never change or disappear; and that all these particles were in constant motion, and that their behaviour in aggregate was controlled by random fluctuations, by what we would now call laws of statistics. He believed that living matter was made of the same particles as inanimate matter. He believed that human beings were animals, and that the differences between different kinds of animals were generally matters of degree, rather than kind. He believed that animals develop from other animals, as the random changes (or “swerves”, hence the title of Greenblatt’s book) of the atoms the animal was made up of accumulated into larger changes, and the animals with beneficial changes did better than the animals with detrimental changes, so that the beneficial changes were passed on. He believed that consciousness was a phenomenon produced by physical bodies that could be explained (like everything else in the world) by the incredibly complex interactions of uncountably many tiny particles.

All in all, it strikes me (and Greenblatt) as a startlingly accurate picture of the world for Iron Age philosophers to make up out of their own minds, their haphazard observations of the world around them, and earlier authorities’ writings.

So of course I had to order the Loeb edition of On the Nature of Things. I wish my Latin were good enough to read it in the (particularly difficult, I gather) original, but I’m going to have to content myself with glancing across at the original when I come across a particularly good or interesting passage. (And looking a lot of stuff up.) It’ll be a while till I get to that anyway.

I also recently read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2 (the sequel to Persepolis, which I read a few months ago. Both very highly recommended (and quick reads, of course, being comics). They’re great example of the use of the comic format; there were lots of panels which were very concisely evocative in ways I can’t imagine a pure-text book or a movie being.

And finally, on Friday

plumtreeblossom and I went back to see Theatre@First’s production of Pride and Prejudice again. And again it rocked (often with laughter). It obviously wasn’t exactly the same this time, but you can basically re-read my opening-night review and not go wrong. Of course, we noticed lots of stuff this time that we’d missed last time. And this time I took a lot of pictures, which hopefully I will eventually get around to posting on Flickr.

Still desperately looking for a renter (or, failing that, a sugar daddy or a winning lottery ticket), but I have a few nibbles this week.

So, full crazy-busy busy life, but largely full of fun.

Some of what I’ve been reading and watching lately:

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, by B. R. Myers This was a fascinating read. I never was able to shake the awareness that I was seeing North Korea through the filter of one person, though. (For instance, there are several places where Myers writes, essentially, All other Western North Korea experts think that X, because they’re deceived by Y, but I know that Z.) And some of the contrasts he tries to make between the North Korean personality cult and (say) those of Stalin’s USSR or Ceauşescu’s Romania seem somewhat contrived — sure, North Korea is really an authoritarian rightist state with a very thin Marxist veneer, and lots of other layers, rather than a socialist state organized along Marxist principles. But the same is true to varying degrees of the Soviet Union, China, and so on, and to say that North Korea is different from Stalin’s USSR because it’s not really Marxist is a bit unconvincing. But it was certainly a fascinating read, and maybe any book about North Korea is going to feel like that just because there’s so little information available in English about North Korea.
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (Wikipedia link with spoilers), by Phillip K. Dick. This is the novella that the movie Total Recall (which I haven’t yet seen) was loosely based on. The premise is that memories are malleable, and can be implanted and removed or covered over. There’s a bit of an industry in giving people fake memories of things they want to do but can’t afford, like a vacation to Mars, or memories that are essentially fantasy fulfilment, like having been a secret agent. Of course, in the novella, things eventually go wrong...
Rogue Moon (Wikipedia link with spoilers) by Algis Budrys. Part of the premise of this short novel is that the Americans (still in the throes of the space race with the Soviets) have developed a sort of teleportation along the lines of Star Trek’s transporter: your body is taken apart here by a scanning beam that records the position and motion of every atom in it (in the novel’s decidedly non-quantum physics), and then recreated from raw materials at the receiving site. (In fact, I have no evidence of this but I suspect this novel was the inspiration for the transporter; the novel was published in 1960 and won a Hugo in 1961, so it’s easy to imagine that Roddenberry or one of his colleagues might have remembered it while they sat around a table trying to figure out a plausible way to avoid having to do expensive and time-consuming planet-landing shots.) But the novel makes quite a lot of the fact that the original body is destroyed, and the person who appears at the receiving site is a replica, albeit with all of the original’s memories. This was a good read despite, or perhaps because of, being so dated; it was fascinating to read hard science fiction with extremely futuristic technology set in the Cold-War early 1960s, with the social expectations and prejudices of the time.
And I’m not nearly through it, but I’ve recently started The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, which is fascinating so far. It tells the story of how Lucretius’ philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, lost for centuries, was discovered in the early 15th century, and of its huge impact on the course of Western intellectual history.

And I’ve already mentioned that

plumtreeblossom and I watched King Corn the other day, and that we’ve been watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War (Wikipedia, PBS). I think the juxtaposition of We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Rogue Moon, and Moon, which

plumtreeblossom and I watched a few weeks ago, was a particularly good one; they all muse on identity, consciousness, and personhood in very similar ways. I’m glad I happened to encounter them around the same time.

I enjoy reading these when other people post them, but have never gotten around to posting one myself. Anyway, some recent books I’ve read:

Deep Future, by Curt Stager
Stager is a paleoclimatologist, and this is his attempt to apply what he knows about climate change at long timescales in the past to the future, and human impact on climate. It’s a fascinating perspective, and I would definitely recommend this book. As an example of taking the long view, Stager points out that thousands or tens of thousands of years into the future, after (even in a worst-case scenario) we’ve exhausted the fossil fuels and the climate is slowly cooling, our distant descendants are likely to be inconvenienced as shipping through the Arctic becomes harder, and farming becomes harder in Siberia and maybe on the margins of Antarctica.
I heard about this book from Stager’s appearance on On Point (which you can listen to online). He’s also got a weekly nature series of his own (with very short episodes), called Natural Selections; they’re typically about a particular animal or plant.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel describing the author’s childhood during and after the Iranian Revolution. It’s been made into a movie, and there’s a sequel (book) about Satrapi’s life as an émigrée in the West that I look forward to reading. Fascinating and a very quick read. (I’ve had this book for a long time, but just got around to reading it. Thanks to cathijosephine for finding it on my shelf and giving me the little nudge.
Sex on the Moon, by Ben Mezrich
This is the fascinating and fictionworthy true story of a NASA intern, Thad Roberts, who stole some lunar samples and tried to sell them. (He also ended up with a little bit of ALH 84001 by accident.) This suffers from a little bit of the “I must throw in lots of adjectives and adverbs to make my prose as vivid as possible” phenomenon that some authors of novelistic nonfiction sometimes fall prey to, but not so much as to be distracting, and the book is very well constructed, and it’s a fascinating story. Definitely recommended reading for anybody considering a career as a would-be criminal genius¹ — or a career at NASA, or both. :-) The book clearly depends a lot on Mezrich’s interviews with Roberts himself (although he also interviewed plenty of other people), and almost certainly paints Roberts more sympathetically because of it, but it was a gripping (and fairly quick) read.
There were a few technical errors, but very minor ones, and the accuracy of the book about the things I know something about makes me feel pretty confident in the quality of the research. (Definitely a step above typical newspaper science journalism, for instance.)

Sorry for my long absence here. I’ve been too busy enjoying life to post about it. In fact, I’ve started to post a couple times recently and not gotten very far. So, since I don’t seem to have the stamina for a long post, here are some bullet items:

First, the bad news: As plumtreeblossom posted here, her lovely grey Siamese Rowley was diagnosed with kidney disease on Saturday. But evidently it hasn’t gotten too bad yet, and the vet says he’ll definitely get some weight back with a low-protein diet and subcutaneous fluids, and it might even cure him. So we’re very glad we took him in. (He’d been gradually but very steadily been losing weight over six months or so.)
Everything else is good, starting with a lovely visit to see eisa in New York City a couple weekends ago, which involved good food (as always) and meeting a couple of her friends. It also involved getting introduced to a new TV show (on DVD), whereon more later.
Mare and I saw Theatre@First’s production of The Winter’s Tale, excellently directed by dietrich. Loved the staging, loved the somewhat quirky play, loved the performance. Congratulations to all!
The news from the vet was not good, but it was great to be there for plumtreeblossom and Rowley, and I’m really glad we got him to the vet. And that morning plumtreeblossom cooked me banana pancakes and bacon. She must love me!
Besides The Winter’s Tale, I’ve been enjoying a lot of classic or retro movies and literature:
On the bus on the way to New York, I finished the utterly bizarre Edison’s Conquest of Mars (Wikipedia; Gutenberg). ( Cut for length. )
Preparatory to starting Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I read Pride and Prejudice, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The funnier bits reminded me a little of Saki.
plumtreeblossom and I watched a DVD she bought of a 1964 adaptation of The First Men in the Moon, which we both enjoyed a lot. ( Cut for length. )
The TV show eisa introduced me to was Mad Men, which is retro in a different sort of way. ( Cut for length: Mad Men vs. Star Trek. )
And it’s not historical or retro, but I also watched a weird French movie called La Moustache. ( Cut for length. )

OK, that was fairly long after all. Now it’s time for me to go to bed. Good night, all!

Found via

omegabeth:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the next few sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

‘What about if it’s got an urn or a plinth or a potted plant?’ said Nobby.
‘Have you got one in mind, Nobby?’ said Colon suspiciously.
‘Yes. The Goddess Anoia* Arising from the Cutlery,’ said Nobby. ‘They’ve got it here. It was painted by a bloke with three i’s in his name, which sounds pretty artistic to me.’

That’s watchmen Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon in a museum discussing when pictures of nude women are Art, and when they’re just dirty pictures, in Terry Pratchett’s Thud. The footnote explains that “Anoia is the Ankh-Morpork Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers.”

So a few months ago I read Stiff: The Curious History of Human Cadavers, by the smart, funny, and irreverent Mary Roach. I loved it.

Today, on my way home from dropping

plumtreeblossom off at her house, I overheard on NPR that Mary Roach had a new book out about the science of sex. It’s called Bonk.

You can bet I placed an order as soon as I got home.

The good:

plumtreeblossom and I got to go see The Golden Compass last night. I found it really really compressed compared to the rather thoughtfully-paced book it’s based on, but I loved it. Lyra’s Oxford was much as I had imagined it, and Iorik and Lee were plucked right out of my head. The world was a bit more steampunky than in the book, but I didn’t mind that. The acting was good. I’m so glad I saw it. And I’m very glad that

plumtreeblossom enjoyed it, too, not having read the book. (She’s excited to read the series now.) And, barring production problems, there are two more movies to look forward to!

We had an unplanned intermission when there was a fire alarm and the building was evacuated, but when we started to see people streaming back into the building as we were walking towards the T we decided to go back in and see what was up, and since it had only been 10min or so since the alarm, they resumed all the movies. We saw some smoke or steam coming from a nearby building; I presume that’s what the alarm was about, but I’m not sure. The Religious Right is up in arms about this movie — as well they should be; the books are delightfully subversive —, so

plumtreeblossom’s first thought was a bomb threat.

More recent good stuff include dinner with

plumtreeblossom at The Cheesecake Factory near my work on Wednesday, pasta and interesting liqueurs with

cathijosephine on Thursday, and brunch at Johnny D’s this morning (with live jazz guitar).

The bad: I have a bad cold. I had hoped it would just be a mild day-or-so, but I feel really crummy today. I am probably going to go to bed soon. (I really hope

plumtreeblossom doesn’t come down with this, but that seems pretty implausible.) On the other hand, I have the weekend to rest. On the other other hand, I had planned on doing a lot of work on the house this weekend, and instead I’m mostly going to be resting and trying to get better.

Net balance is quite good, though.

I finally finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (which my lovely

plumtreeblossom gave me) last night on the T. Spoilers and commentary in my first comment below. (I didn’t want to just put them behind a cut-tag, since some people have LJ configured to auto-expand cut tags when they go to somebody’s journal directly.)

There are spoilers in the comments.

I recently started Miranda July’s collection of short stories, No one belongs here more than you, based completely on the awesomeness of her web site about the book, which she drew on her refrigerator and stove. It rocks. Yes, the web site, too, but I meant the book. I’m about a third of the way through it. It’s more or less what you’d expect from the web site, but creepier, in excellent ways.

+: I got to bed unusually early last night, and got an unusually large amount of sleep.
-: Despite that, when my alarm went off I was incredibly tired, and hit snooze umpty-zillion times, and was late using my light box for the first time since I started using it.
(-: And I actually think the light box is more trouble than it’s worth, although I should probably give it a couple more weeks.)
+: Despite getting a late and slow start, I felt like I had a reasonably productive day at work.
++: And afterwards I got to hang out with

plumtreeblossom and

docorion and

mud_puppy at Namaskar and have yummy Indian food.
-: My yummy Indian food was somewhat less yummy than it might have been, because I forgot to ask for no cilantro and no tomatoes.
+:

plumtreeblossom’s yummy Indian food was highly yummy, as was the bread.
+: I got to hear some more of

docorion’s fun stories.
+:

plumtreeblossom gave me an awesome May Day present, an interactive book (not quite a pop-up book, but along those lines, with flaps to open and things to unfold) about pirates! It even has a compass and some jewels embedded in the front cover! Between the compass and the maps I’m sure to find some booty!
+: I got to unburden myself to

plumtreeblossom a bit about my medical concerns (well, vent, really; she’s heard it all before).
++: And tomorrow I have an ENT appointment which I am really hopeful about.
+: And after dinner we hung out and chatted over tea at Diesel.
+: I drank a lot of tea at Diesel. And a lot of water and lassi at Namaskar. This is called “foreshadowing”.
-: This fire sure delayed my ride home. Instead of a train straight through from Davis to Quincy Center, it was a Red Line train from Davis to Kendall (where I could faintly smell smoke on the air), a shuttle bus from Kendall to Lechmere, the Green Line from Lechmere to Park Street, and the Red Line from Park Street to Quincy Center.
-: Boy howdy did I have to pee by the time I finally got home.
-: And I’m too tired to deal with the fridge, which I seem to have been attempting to create life from primordial ooze in.
-: And I think I’m too tired to do laundry.
++: But I’m about to go to sleep!
+++: And by this time tomorrow I might know more about my breathing problems and might even have a plan for what to do about them!

I’m really sleepy, so I don’t have time to do justice to my lovely NYC trip to visit K. and hang out with

cathijosephine and her mom, but I can’t go without posting something about it, so very briefly:

Had a lovely time catching up with K., telling her about my life since she saw me last and hearing about her travels (notably Vienna) and her music and multimedia projects. It was great! She’s doing some amazing stuff (which I’m not sure I should talk about since they’re in progress) that I look forward to hearing more about. And I got to see her delightful apartment, which looks like it works really well for her. Yay for a good work- and living-space! And she took me to a scenic lookout over the Bronx and a scenic (no, really!) lookout over New Jersey, and took me to her favourite local Indian takeout place.

Sunday I met

cathijosephine and her mother (who is in New York for a conference this week) for brunch, and then we had a nice long walk from 32d Street to Chinatown — stopping in at a makeup store, a goth/fetish clothing store, and THE MOST HUGEST COSTUME STORE EVAR which was like Hallowe’en in April on our way. In Chinatown, we met K. and A., and wandered around Chinatown for a bit, stopping into a bakery for yummy baked goods and bubble tea. (Or in my case, bubble coffee.)

Then K., A., and

cathijosephine’s mom bade us farewell at the bus pick-up, and

cathijosephine and I rode back to Boston, getting here around 9. It was great weather, and light out for most of the trip back. The bus was run by some other bus company, filling in for Fung Wah to deal with overflow, and it took a different (and more scenic) route out of the city than I’ve ridden before. On the bus I finished Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and

cathijosephine finished her nap, and both of those things made me happy.

(By the way, I highly recommend Dreams from My Father. It makes me wish Barack Obama would hurry up and get elected President already and get his eight years over with so he can get back to his true calling as a writer.)

Had a doctor's appointment yesterday. Now I have lots more doctor's appointments to make: ophthamologist, another ENT besides the ENT I already have an appointment scheduled with (this guy does ears, so my doctor wants me to see him about a few bouts of dizziness I've had), and another appointment with my PCP in a month or so. And I still want to make that appointment with the neurologist that I haven't gotten around to making. Well, no, I actually don't, but I ought to. :-) Although I think really the throat ENT is the one that's likeliest to make a difference. I think I just need my throat Roto-Rooted.

On a lighter note, had a lovely time with

plumtreeblossom at one of

elusiveat's reading nights. I must own a copy of Thomas Wharton's The Logogryph. There was a lot of other nifty stuff read, including an wonderful original story by RED SHIFT!!! (who needs to get a LiveJournal account so I can stop typing all that fancy HTML when I mention him here). And this morning has been delightful too. At one point (after I'd taken off my mask for the morning but while we were still snuggling in bed) I was spooning

plumtreeblossom, she was spooning her cat Rowley, and her cat Benjamin was curled up on my pillow behind my head. Perfect kind of morning.

Current Location: plumtreeblossom's house in Somerville, MA

On my trip to Hawai‘i (mostly during my flights), I finished a couple Pratchett books, Soul Music (about Music with Rocks In) and Interesting Times (about the Agatean Empire, with its complex politics, Great Wall, and Forbidden City). Today on the T on my way to see

plumtreeblossom, I finished Moving Pictures (about Holy Wood and the spell it casts on people), out of order. I had actually started it before the trip, but, um, I dropped it in the toilet, and then didn’t feel quite so excited about reading that particular copy any more.

I also finished Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope in Hawai‘i, and appreciated it a lot. He (or his ghostwriter, I’m not sure, but I suspect he wrote a lot of it) is not as good a writer as he is a speaker, but it’s still a very engaging, interesting, and thought-provoking book, and makes me feel good about the notion of him as president (although to be fair that’s a notion I felt pretty good about to start with).

Current Location: at home in Quincy

(Remember, ~~he knows more than you do~~ he’s not a real doctor!)

I have a wooden DVD/videotape shelf that I use as a shelf for paperbacks. It’s just under 5'4" tall (64", 152cm), and the shelves are spaced 10½" apart (26cm). It came unfinished, but after finishing it looks quite similar to — indeed nigh indistinguishable from — this.

I want some more.

I was seeing these all over everywhere when I originally got this one, but now the only similar things I can find are just for CDs, so obviously unworkable for paperbacks. Anybody know where in Boston I could pick up a couple? This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing it makes sense to order over the Intarweb (is it safe to say something like that on the Intarweb? It might hear!), since shipping would probably dwarf the cost of the thing itself.

Current Location: at home in Quincy

Well, I’ve taken a brief break from my usual all-Pratchett 24/7 diet to read Mary Roach’s book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I’m almost done, and I loved it. It’s tremendously entertaining as well as informative, and I love her very funny writing style. It reminds me a lot of the sort of humour that’s popular in my tribe, but I don’t see a lot of it in the U.S. mainstream. (Actually, her writing style reminds me a lot of dry British humour.)

I also just finally got around to watching The Assassination of Richard Nixon, which I’ve had out from GreenCine for ages. Getting inside the head of a main character who is awkward and depressed and just a bit off and feels like the world is stacked against him is kind of a creepy feeling. Definitely a good movie, though. Sean Penn did a fabulous job of getting me into that head.

And finally, bon voyage to

ragingamazon! I look forward to all the pictures from Thailand.

I haven’t been very good about journalling lately. I’m still here; I’ve just been busy. Recent events:

Went with cathijosephine to bearsir’s excellent and well-attended reading at desiringsubject’s house from Bear’s recent book Butch is a Noun.
Went to DC for a con. Had transportation hell on the way there. Had a good time, although being so late started me off a bit on the wrong foot.
Had a fab dinner with cathijosephine at our favourite Irish pub. (Light on the Guinness — we shared one — and heavy on the Meat. Oh, addendum to my previous medical post: It turns out I have mild anemia. Meeting with my PCP tomorrow to talk about that. Nice to have confirmation for my intuitive sense that I’m an obligate carnivore.) Then stopped in at darxus’ place and hung out for a while, so I got to see both of them before their OMFG! TRIP TO INDIA!
Had a lovely date with plumtreeblossom, in which she introduced me to Gargoyle’s, an upscale restaurant in Davis Square, and we pronounced it good.
Had the followup with my sleep specialist, described elsewhere
I’d been feeding and looking in on cathijosephine’s cat Chickenfinger (who formerly lived with the most awesome xmelancholia and treasonx). Well, a day or so after cathijosephine and darxus left for India, signs went up in her building saying that plumbers were going to be traipsing through everybody’s apartments looking for plumbing problems, because evidently the building’s water usage recently tripled. Chickenfinger is both skittish and fascinated by the World Outside under the best of circumstances; I did not trust the management company or the plumbers to be sufficiently cautious with her, so I brought her over to my place. It’s great having her here, although my nose and eyes definitely notice that there’s cat dander in the house. Well, they notice when I spend long enough petting her on my lap, anyway. :-)
Had another fab date with plumtreeblossom, during which we had dinner with a couple nice people I know (one of whom I know from college and hadn’t seen in about a decade), went to a delightful party with a bunch of awesome people (and yummy munchies), snuggled up in bed with Chickenfinger, and went to the local hole-in-the-wall diner (Sam’s Restaurant, on School Street) for perfect comfort-food brunch.
Did a bit more unpacking. Yes, I’ve been living in this house for a year and I’m nowhere near unpacked. At this rate I have to live to 100, beacause I won’t be done unpacking before then.

That’s about what I can remember. Wow, even in bullet points it’s long. That’ll teach me to update more often. :-)

Oh, one PS I don’t think I’ve mentioned: I shaved off my beard in hopes of a better fit for the full-face CPAP mask. Doesn’t seem to have made any difference, but it’s a little less work to maintain than the goatee, so I’m probably going to keep it that way for a while. I am, however, growing my hair out, so this userpic doesn’t look much like me.

List from the Science Fiction Book Club; meme from

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( 50 important SF books per the Science Fiction Book Club, and the 22 I’ve read )

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