Wednesday, July 20, 2005
One day off turned into two days off. But there's a good reason, really. Monday, Spooky and I unexpectedly had to deal with a bunch of last-minute proofreading stuff related to To Charles Fort, With Love before the CEM went away to Subterranean Press' design person. And then, on top of that, we had to attend to the business of an ad in this year's Dragon*Con programme book. So, since I had to work for part of Monday, I stole another day. It was a halfway decent little holiday, too, despite the interruptions. We had sushi for lunch on Monday @ Sweet Lime in L5P, because Monday is $1 Sushi Day. Yesterday, we spent a couple of hours at Books Again in Decatur, where we have an obscene amount of credit from all the books we got rid of when we moved in December. While we were browsing, there was a terrific thunderstorm. Used book shops are marvelous during thunderstorms. Anyway, we left with the following (and we still have $278 in store credit):
In Search of Lake Monsters by Peter Costello
The Last Dinosaur Book by W. J. T. Mitchell
The Best of Beardsley by R. A. Walker
Vincent Van Gogh by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther
The Complete World of Human Evolution by Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews
Symbolism by Michael Gibson
Destination Mars: In Art, Myth, and Science by Maryin Caidin and Jay Barbree
The Art of Sleepy Hollow
Cyclopedia Anatomicae by Gyorgy Fehér and András Szunyoghy
And how the frell did I not know about Smilla's Sense of Snow? Somehow, I had it in my head that Bille August's film (and, by extension, Peter Høeg's novel) was some silly bit of chick lit and avoided it entirely. Instead, I discover eight years later, it's this funky take on "The Colour Out of Space." Anyway, we watched it last night (sadly, stuck with another VHS pan-and-scan). I adored Julia Ormond's performance and was impressed at how the meteorite and its associated weirdness was the catalyst for the story, but was never allowed to overshadow the lives of the central characters. My only complaint was that the climactic SFX weren't handled a little better, but I think they were a bit beyond the budget. Now, I have to read the novel. And that, gardas and nixars, was my two-day Day Off. Today, Spooky and I have to read through the new sf story again, so I can make the revisions later today, and then read Chapter Five of Daughter of Hounds so that tomorrow I can hopefully pick up Emmie's half of the story again with the beginning of Chapter Seven. So, it's going to be a long wordy day. I don't feel even nearly rested enough. I doubt I ever shall.
Anything else? Well, I never did link to the latest chapter of Boshen and Nesuko (Chapter 22:"Parties are Always Boring").
And there are boulders on Enceladus where boulders shouldn't be:
Each boulders measures 10-20 metres in diameter.
Mostly, I'm trying to remain above the bad news, all the terrifying, crazy stuff that makes me want to stay in bed, the stuff that makes it hard to sit here at this desk and write my preposterous little spook stories while the world gets increasingly rotten. W's pro-life pick for the Supreme Court, for example. Or the news that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war, the largest single percentage of them casualties of U.S.-led forces. Never mind that W lied about the WMDs in Iraq and about the country's connection to Al-Qaeda, that this is a war about money and oil; now, we see that American forces have killed enough civilians in Iraq to equal something like eight 9/11s. Isn't that enough? Aren't we "even" yet?
11:57 AM
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