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I was reading some H. G. Wells short stories, but because of that hateful creationist-science thread in the General Chatter forum I now find myself reading and excerpting a creationist tract called The End of Evolution. It's like a Jack Chick comic, only without the funny drawings. Ugh.

just finished reading tropic of cancer again. am going to read house of leaves (because it was a gift, though i have the feeling i will not dig it) to supplement the academic nonsense i'm eating up lately.

"Let us see a bird turn into a twix candy bar. Come on SHOW US HOW GREAT YOUR GOD OF SCIENCE IS."

Having put Greg Bear's Blood Music on hold due to the fact that it's just creeping me out (even though it's pretty fascinating) and my chosen time to read (before sleep) is really a bad time to creep oneself out, I've gone back to a classic fluff-piece standard, The Three Musketeers. There's just something about the mix of swashbuckleriness and incredibly pompous writing that I find wholly entertaining.

I'm also poking my way through Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food, which is pretty good, although it's aimed a bit above most of my own ambitions at this point. Basically it's a cooking manual, rather than a cookbook. There's extensive discussion of various cooking methods - all taking home equipment into consideration - with a few illustrative recipes for each chapter. The chapters are separated not by food type, (beef/lamb/pork/poultry or appetizer/main-course/side-dish) but by cooking method (searing, roasting, broiling, braising, etc).

I just finished Ken MacLeod's Giant Lizards From Another Star, a variegated collection of:

1) Short science fiction, the standouts being the novella "Cydonia" (conspiracy theories in immersive cyberspace and the real-world New World Order), the novella "The Human Front" (alternate history about flying saucers and World War III), and "A Case of Consilience" (a Presbyterian [I think?] priest tries to make contact with intelligent alien fungus).

2) Various essays on science, science fiction, Scotland, politics, etc.

3) Write-ups of various SF conventions he's attended.

Belated Chanukkah and Vday giftage. Zombie Suvival Guide by Max Brooks and Earthship: Vol. 1 by Michael Reynolds. Okay, I guess neither one of these qualifies as "deep" reading but at least they aren't graphic novels.

i just read a few more books and papers on virtual ethnographies and message board communication communities, etc. it's uh, well, it's good for my project, but i hate some of the terminology. (interesting note: .2% of all words posted in a usenet umbrella - i think it was the rec.* group - in a survey of three months were "swears" in this one paper's report. not nearly as high as one would think.)

i'm re-reading rites and symbols of initiation by mircea eliade to see if i can get some insight into the hazing process. i also like eliade so it's not painful or nuttin'.

"Let us see a bird turn into a twix candy bar. Come on SHOW US HOW GREAT YOUR GOD OF SCIENCE IS."

Just finished reading On The Wealth of Nations by PJ O'Rourke. Great book detailing Adam Smith's classic with just the right amount of quippage and jest for lightening up otherwise very heavy reading.

Thought I'd borrow it while you were in The Village.

BTW, finished The Prisoner series yesterday. Not a bad ending, though I wish I knew what he was trying to say during his speech he kept getting interrupted in.

Let's just say it ends on a transcendental note, with lots of metaphor and allegory and not so many explosions and high speed pursuits.

*more spoiler alert*
Well Number 6 wasn't really on trial, as his trial was with Number 2 in the previous episode, to see if he could maintain his individuality in the face of the Ultimate Test, which he did. He was congratulated for his resolve and given the opportunity to rule or leave as he saw fit. Those on trial were examples of individuals who upset society by their individuality, a young man rebelling against social norms and a former leader of society fighting against being ruled by society. They were deemed threats to society, as opposed to Number 6, who fought to remain apart, but not against society. Then, even as they were congratualating him and desiring a speech, when he tried to speak, he discovered that admiration didn't go so far as wanting to hear what he said, as they kept interrupting him. Frustrated, Number 6 demands to see Number 1 before he leaves, and upon finding number 1, sees himself reflected back and then starts the missile/rocket/whatever and frees the young man and former leader and issues the evacuation order to the village. I'm not sure about the meaning of the trip around England at the end, dropping people off and such, it seemed a bit frivolous, but maybe there was more to it.

Essentially, I saw this as saying while society may be against rebellion, the only way to preserve ourselves is to have such rebellion, such individualism, because accepting all of what society tells us removes any impetus for change and sets in motion decline and death. And its ourselves we have to fight against in falling into the trap of imposing such societal prisons on others. Its easy enough to rebel against the mold created by society, but its harder and much more important that we do not become the tyranny we're fighting against, creating a mold we expect others to fit in. Atleast, thats what I think the message was.

Strange, but I guess if you went into it thinking you'd see a conventional escape and meet "Dr. Evil" as Number 1, you'd have been sorely dissappointed.

This is one reason I love McGoohan:

On a whim while in Borders, I picked up Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines From Beneath the Earth, by David Standish. It's basically what the subtitle says, a history of the idea that the Earth is hollow, and about past speculations about what might be inside, and apparently some attempts to put together an expedition and find out.

I'm only a couple chapters in, but it's full of the "No shit? I didn't know that" moments that make reading books about history fun. One of the early proponents of the hollow Earth theory was Edmund Halley (of comet fame); he proposed a series of revolving concentric spheres within the Earth to explain the phenomenon of geomagnetism (and he was sort of right, but not exactly). There was also the "discovery" of early physicists that the Earth is only about half as dense as the Moon (a deduction since found to be incorrect), sparking the speculation that the Earth must be about half hollow.

I'm also struck by how often scientists of olden times spouted off B.S. as if it were fact, on the flimsiest of reasoning, e.g., "For if the Earth be hollow, it only stands to reason that the interior must be inhabited; otherwise, for what conceivable purpose would such a vast volume exist? And if it be inhabited, the interior must also be illuminated in some way."

I know we've talked about Orson Scott Card going bonkers and I understand that the later books in the "Alvin Maker" series declined in quality, but I've been rereading Seventh Son this weekend and it is a really, really cool book.

I'm working my way through the Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick. I've finished The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and I'm a few chapters into Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I've liked everything so far, and the only problem I've encountered is Three Stigmata led me to this review by Michael Moorcock, and now I have to dislike Moorcock.

I haven't read a lot of Moorcock. As a teen I read Ice Schooner, which I barely remember, aside from the fact that worrying about how an ecology would work in a frozen-over world of no open oceans kept distracting me from the story.

I did read The Warlord of the Air alternate history a few times, and thought that was a really good book. I later bought that novel and a collection of its sequels in a single volume, A Nomad of the Time Streams, but I didn't really like the sequels so much. Also, in Moorcock's intro to ANotTS, he made some kind of swipe about a possible future return to feudalism, "but Margaret Thatcher already tried that." I try not to let an author's politics distract from my enjoyment of his story, but damn, it's really annoying to hear some old lefty who still hasn't got over the Reagan/Thatcher years. Not to mention calling government-reducing reforms "feudalism."

Dune

Path of Daggers

The Dragonbone Chair

And I've got some Poul Anderson on deck for when I finish one of those three.

Re-reading (and re-enjoying) "Declare" by Tim Powers (cold war + espionage + djinn).

I'm not going to say that all the cool kids read Powers, but I'm willing to bet that DONDEROOOOOOOOOOO!!! doesn't.

I'm pretty ambivalent about Tim Powers. Anubis Gates was fantastic, totally firing on all cylinders. But it seemed to me that Last Call and Expiration Date started strong and then got weak and weird in the last couple acts; they also turned the coolest female viewpoint characters into secondary hangers-on. I guess I have pretty strict expectations about how to handle showdowns of magic-in-the-real-world, and he didn't meet them. I need to check out some of his short stories.

I've liked all the Tim Powers I've read, which hasn't been much. A friend lent me The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross, which I intend to start in on soon. Stross has some similarities to Powers, so if you like Powers, you might like him as well.

What if she's like 5'2"?

Exactly. Sure, a short woman at around 190 pounds won't be Twiggy unless her skeleton is made of depleted uranium. Depending on how she carried it, she'd be curvy or plump or overweight. "Substantially obese"? Give me a fucking break. I'm 5'4" and at that weight I had a bit of a gut, great boobs, sexy curves and an ass to die for. I wasn't modeling for Victoria's Secret, but if anyone had called me obese I would have snapped them in half. And then eaten them.

I suspect in his case it's not the bodybuilder-forum mindset ("omg you weigh 135 you are pretty thick do some cardio fatty") but that weird common misconception that a 200-pound woman is an elephant. Erin at the Redhead Papers* did it recently: "She was about five-three and probably running close to two hundred pounds. She was a sphere. A circle. A globe." And I remember a story Camryn Manheim told about going for an audition where they were looking for a "fat woman, around 200 pounds" and when she showed up they said, "No, you're not heavy enough, you don't weigh 200 pounds" and she was all, "The hell I don't!"

So anyway, to sum up: a 200-pound woman is probably noticeably overweight unless she's really tall or really ripped. But she's not a jiggling blimpoid. The end! Back to books!

* - originally misattributed. Sorry, Gwen!

it's too bad, 300 lbs is the cutoff for being a male fatty. I am, sadly, a male fatty, even though I'm 6'3".

There was actually a 265 lb heavyweight wrestler girl in my state when I was in high school. Thank god she wasn't in my conference and/or good enough to make the state tournament.

I finished Ubik today. Of the four books in the anthology, it was by far the strangest. That's not a complaint, though, since I like books that give me "what the hell is going on" chills. I will have to think about it more, but I don't think it's possible to reconcile all happenings and guess what "really" happened. Given that seems to have been Dick's goal, he succeeded. Now on to The Magus.

I am concerned that there is something amusing about my choice of reading material.

I just checked out a giganto stack of anthologies of early Nebula award-winning novelettes and short stories.

I love it. First, there's the great writing. Second, you get awesome scenes like in "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" by Zelazny, where humanity has spaceships and offworld colonies and a multiplanetary existance, and then one of the characters whips out a slide rule.

Well, that story was deliberately anachronistic - he was writing about a habitable, oceanic Venus when it was already well known that the planet is an acidic, hyper-pressurized Hell. The slide rule reference might have been similarly retro. :)

(At the same time, he wrote a story about a dying race on a habitable Mars that was also scientifically obsolete. I think those were two of three he wrote in a marathon session after his dad died.)

But yeah, it wasn't really until the mid or late 70s that writers started thinking about how micro-computers could penetrate daily life. About the earliest were some Asimov stories where "the Internet" was represented by a single uber-computer that had terminals people could use in every home and everywhere you'd expect a phone booth.

I love Earthman, Come Home by James Blish. Written in 1956, set in 3000-something (aboard New York City, which has been outfitted with a force field/ antigravity/hyperdive thingy and become a nomad city among the stars).

The characters are always fiddling with their slide rules, and there's one reference to the carriage return mechanism on a mechanical typewriter. And at one point a character gets annoyed with an overly literal computer (it keeps answering all his rhetorical questions) and threatens, "I'll bust all your [vacuum] tubes!"

Asimov wrote stories and edited anthologies ALL THE TIME.

That's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!!!!!

Also, Asimov was here to write groan-inducing puns and dirty limericks. The Sensual Dirty Old Man is a must-read.

I'm almost finished with The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy. FUN FACT: Russians are stodgy, rigid, closeminded sardine-eating jerks to a man! Politicians are weaselly losers who make dumb mistakes and get good men killed! And the American military is the best thing ever, ever! Seriously, go find a soldier and suck him off right now!

But seriously, once the plot gets going, it's not bad.

* thinks of amateur porn starring the likes of Putin, Brezhnev ... soul dies *

Yeah, I got the joke once I reached Nicholas's first night at Conchis's.

I'm still trying to remember where I've encountered the "judgment" scene before. It's very familiar, but I can't place it.

I read Cryptonomicon, then promptly devoured Quicksilver through the Con-fusion, before realizing that the books are ordered differently in different volumes. Ugh. So, I have gone back to Quicksilver and King of the Vagabonds while Odilesque is on order from my local shitty bookstore. I would recommend re-reading this series once you have gotten into it a bit, it makes the earlier books (and the flash-backs, -forwards, and -sidewayses) more coherent. I understand the complaints about weak endings, but the whole series is really contiguous if you finish one and can start the next right away. It smells like a set of long novels that were broken up for easier publishing, deadlines etc.

I want to read Spook Country (William Gibson) but I had to give up hardcovers long ago if there was any hope of me affording enough books to satisfy me. I'll wait until January for the trade paperback, or softcover.

kafka.

it's fairly primordial as well. that innate sense that somewhere there's a force that watches without being watched and judges beyond judgement.

Late to the game on this, but back in JV wrestling, I watched the 130lb (or somewhere around there) weight class which had one girl from some hick school kick almost everyone's ass and got second, and what I think most guys feared was she was going to mash their nuts all the fuck up.
With other guys, there's an unspeaken code of honor, "You don't hurt my balls, I won't crush your balls," but women wrestlers have none of that honor!
Why, they will even take advantage of the poor young men who "accidently" sport boners as a result of all that rubbing and grinding and then use their feminine wiles to pin said gentleman!
No honor indeed...
Oh, and I was in the under 110lb class, so no I was not a poor victim of this temptress...

Oh, and I'm reading some out-of-print Magic: The Gathering books by Clayton Emery...meh, they were good when I first read one of them in 6th grade (dude, this has got boobies! and gore!) but now...they didn't age that well...

When Fin Fang Foom complained about the "wrong geometry" of his home and workplace in the "irritating" thread, I made a reference to Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, and that reminded me of something else I hate about Moorcock.

Warlord of the Air is set in an alternate imperialist 1970s, and there's one character who is kind of like a Boy Scout scoutmaster. The organization is actually named the Young Rough Riders or something like that, but anyway. This character is:

1) Fat.
2) A petty tyrant. The little power he has as a scoutmaster goes to his head. It makes him an excessively fussy airship passenger.
3) Extremely excitable, to the point of being basically prone to hysteria.
4) Virulently racist -- he has a meltdown when he has to eat in an airship dining room where "N-words" are present. (I think it's because British airships aren't segregated like the American ones the character is used to, or something.) This drives him to blows with an airship officer.

I have an early 1970s edition of Warlord of the Air, and I can't remember the name of the character in that edition. But a few years ago I bought another version of the novel, as part of the collection A Nomad of the Timestreams. And in the updated version, Moorcock renames the character "Reagan."

I think he mentions that the character has a potato-like nose or face, but otherwise doesn't change the description.

Obviously this character is supposed to be a swipe at an alternate history's Ronald Reagan, but come on. Do any of the characteristics listed above even sound like a good caricature of Reagan's traits?

It would be one thing if he were to portray the character of Reagan as drifty, somnambulant, possessed of a corny sense of humor, prone to exaggeration, forgetful, an unreliable witness, possessed of a tendency to delegate a little too much, maybe a little lazy, unintellectual, perhaps having a slight Oedipal complex, superstitious, maybe even a little too ready to jump into a fight in a bluff, blustery Irish/cowboy way.

But a fussy, dictatorial, excitable, violent racist? It's a cheap shot to equate "opposed to affirmative action" with "violent racist." And the rest just doesn't fit at all. It's like portraying Jimmy Carter as a drooling sadistic backstabber, or Ted Kennedy as a teetotalling, holier-than-thou puritanical religious fanatic.

Moorcock tried to score a cheap point against those he despises on the political Right, and he did it in such a very lazy and dishonest way that the episode isn't even an acceptable satirical allegory. I found this irritating in the extreme.

That was the rambliest sentence I've written in some time.

everyone i know speaks of mr. moorcock in the same light; how did he get so popular if his sole claim to current fame is being a cockhole?

Ah. I mean I recall some of the same masks and the reading of the protagonist's shortcomings--not just a scene that's similar or reminiscent, but a nearly identical trial.

I just bought a copy of The Magus at a book sale tonight. So yeah now I have to read that.

I also found a long-sought-after copy of the film Naked Lunch which I haven't seen in about 12 years. Looking forward to seeing that again sometime.

Argh, gardening. I just got through working in my garden, and I still have more to do today. That whole thing about how gardening is relaxing and puts you in touch with the world and yourself? Crap. Gardening is a great way to feel like the entire world is out to get you. The weather is your enemy, weeds will choke your garden, the Aves, Mammalia, and Insecta are busily eating or destroying everything you grow, and even the plants you've chosen and lovingly nurtured will just up and die on you for no reason. And the cost for this joy is hours of backbreaking physical labor. *sigh* Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

EDIT: Oh, and should you need to buy manure or mulch or whatever...sure, it looks cheap, per bag. Then you realize one (40-pound) bag covers an area of approximately one bag, requiring you to spend hundreds of dollars and carry hundreds of pounds around...black plastic sheeting is looking more and more appealing.

I love American Gods more than words can say. Let us know what you think of it!

Not so much me, but a buddy of mine found a place that has free books on tape of cool old fiction, including Edgar Rice Boroughs, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. P. Lovecraft.

Thought that might be of interest to somebody around here.