Steam Trains and Ghosts - Margaret Taylor's Writing Blog

Steam Trains and Ghosts is Moving

2009-12-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

I'm transporting the blog onto a Wordpress server so it can have more bells and whistles. Continue the adventure at:

www.steamtrainsandghosts.wordpress.com

If you've got bookmarks, please update them.

Sweet Potato Cranberry Casserole

2009-11-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

First of all, I hope all of you out there in cyberspace had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family and no epic turkey disasters.

There's a pecking order to family cooking affairs. Mom and Aunt Sue were the unquestioned empresses of the turkey this year, their respective offspring were in charge of the lesser dishes, and the menfolk were wise to keep out of it and helped out with chairs. This year, for the first time in recorded history, I got to participate in the madness as an adult (I'm 21). I got to bring a side dish.

Sadly, there are no photos available of the sweet potato cranberry casserole because some of the older folk don't get the whole blogging thing and would have thought I'd gone round the bend if I'd whipped out the digital camera in the kitchen. Look, here's a picture of a sweet potato:

Yeah. So. It was an adaptation of an Allrecipes.com Sweet Potato and Apple Casserole. I knew I wanted to make something like this, then went looking around on the Internet for what ingredient proportions other people tried and liked. There's a variation on the Allrecipes site with pineapple, which is probably scrumptious.

Ingredients:

3 large sweet potatoes
1/2 c brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/3 package fresh cranberries

Topping:
1/4 c flour
1/4 c brown sugar, packed
1/4 c butter
mmmarshmallowsssss...

Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease a casserole dish with cooking spray. Boil sweet potatoes in large soup pot until tender when poked with a fork, about 20 min. Let cool, then slip them out of the peels and cut into about 1" chunks. Add those to a mixing bowl, then snip cranberries in half with scissors and add those, too. (Breaking the cranberries' skin ensures that they become one with the sweet potato while baking. Otherwise you'll find yourself biting into a tart surprise.) Add the sugar and spices and stir just until the sweet potatoes are coated.

Spread the mixture out in the casserole dish. Cream together the flour, butter, and sugar with an electric mixer, than crumble that on top like a streusel topping. Bake about 25 minutes. Then pull the dish out of the oven and apply marshmallows to taste (that is, liberally). Return to oven and bake until the marshmallows are just getting golden on top. Enjoy!

Book Covers!

2009-11-18T19:17:00.000-08:00

I have a newfound respect for graphic designers. You probably don't want to guess how many hours it took wrestling around with Photoshop to get the colors of the circly things in the background just right. These people must put so much time and effort into every cover that hits bookstore shelves.

Anyway, my efforts do look homemade, but I'm quite happy with how they came out. That lady in blue there is Nasan, by the way, heroine of the upcoming Confederacy. I got to bust out the old watercolor pencils for her. I used to draw a lot when I was a teenager but quit when the writing thing took off. Maybe it's time to pick it back up.

A Very Traditional Klingon War Chant

2009-11-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

Klingon War Chant

Oh, the nerdiness ... I love it.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery

2009-11-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery. It's not exactly deep, but aw, hell, neither is I Can Has Cheezburger.

The Tower at Stony Wood

2009-11-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

In adventurous stories, there often happens to be this character who knows what's going on. They're the one who dribbles out confusing riddles to the hero just as he needs them, and no more. The one who could just tell everybody the big plot secret but won't, because if that happened the characters could just resolve the story's conflict and go home. These characters seem to take a perverse enjoyment of their job, reveling in the "Nyah, nyah, I know something you don't know!" Such a character is the Bard of Skye in Patricia A. McKillip's Tower at Stony Wood.

The Tower at Stony Wood starts out conventionally enough for a fantasy novel. Cyan Dag, knight of the kingdom of Yves, receives a visit from the Bard of Skye on his king's wedding night. The Bard gives him a dire warning: the king has just married a monster in mortal form, and his true bride has been trapped in a tower! The book then proceeds like a strange dream. Cyan Dag has no specific instructions from the Bard (nor did he think to ask), so he wanders the countrysides of Yves and Skye at random, trying the towers that he comes across. He's not the sharpest sword in the scabbard.

Invariably his experiences with towers go something like this: "Thank you! But our princess is in another castle. Please try again."

Meanwhile, the Bard and her sister send Cyan unhelpful dreams, and in two apparently unrelated plotlines, another man in another tower is attempting to tame a dragon, and a baker and her daughter are in yet another tower watching the whole affair – princess, knight, dragon, and Bard – by magic mirror. I think I counted at least six towers in all in this book. Or maybe they were the same tower, all mystically connected? McKillip is never quite clear on this point.

Cyan and I would both like to grab Ms. Bard by the robe and ask her, "What the dickens is going on here?" There is a partial explanation at the end, but it left me feeling like somebody had just played a card trick on me.

The "Sesame Seed Treat"

2009-10-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Has the Carleton Snack Bar managed to top the doughnuts with the sausages on them?

Perhaps. The photo on the right simply does not do their latest creation justice. Earlier in the week these cups appeared on the Snack Bar shelves, enigmatically labeled "gluten free" and nothing more. Curious (and expecting a pudding), I bought one.

They are sesame seeds suspended in honey.

To be fair, they are sesame seeds suspended in honey, with chocolate sauce and whipped cream on top. But ... sesame seeds in honey? Why? Does it have a reputation for health-giving powers? Is it some culture's traditional dish?

To be fair, nothing about this, er, slurry is gross. It's tasty, like a spoonful of apricot jam is tasty. Like apricot jam, it would be quite good on toast. But I wouldn't want to eat a whole cupful of it.

As a matter of fact, after a little Google searching I've discovered that the Greeks have a candy called pasteli that is made almost exclusively of sesame seeds and honey. But pasteli is dry and chewy, kind of like a nut roll. Not like a, um ... oh, I don't even know what to call this stuff.

Darn Those Vegans

2009-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Pineapple Spice Pudding Cake

2009-10-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

Adapted from Allrecipes.com.

Tasty, but not all that exciting. I think the problem was that I overbaked it, so the pudding on the bottom all dried up and it was just a spice cake. The ingredients are so dirt cheap that I might try it again. This recipe uses less sugar than the Allrecipes version, which was definitely a good idea, and if I was to do it again I think I'd up the butter content and add vanilla.

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp nutmeg
1 cup milk

1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 1/2 cups water
1 tbsp butter

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 can pineapple rings

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom of a 9" square baking dish. Bring brown sugar, water, and butter to a boil in a saucepan.

Meanwhile, combine flour, white sugar, baking powder, spices and salt, then stir in milk. Once it's well-mixed, stir in walnuts. Pour into baking dish. Pour the hot sugar mixture over that. It'll look gross, but don't worry.

Top with pineapple rings in a pretty pattern. Bake 35-40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. You definitely want to use secondary containment here – look how that sugary mess bubbled all over the pan.

Enjoy!

Witches

2009-10-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Eh-heh-heh!

2009-10-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics

Oh, my gosh, so true. I love blowing stuff up in my stories.

Jack of Kinrowan

2009-10-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Meh. "Fairies in Ottawa" is all you need to know. That was the book's schtick, and that's about all there was to the plot, too.

Keeps Me Awake at Night

2009-10-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Confederacy of Heaven: Coming in 2010 to a Theater Near You

2009-09-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hey, everybody. I've got a few announcements to make.

First of all, is that I've been playing around with Wordpress to see if I can get a blog with a more professional look. I like what I see over there, so you can probably expect Steam Trains and Ghosts to migrate over to Wordpress sometime this winter. In the meantime, posting here is going to continue as normal.

Second is that I'm going to be releasing Grizelda as an e-book with the folks over at Smashwords.com. They're cool folks with author-friendly policies. I haven't got a specific timetable on that yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Finally, here's the big deal: My sophomore literary effort, The Confederacy of Heaven, will hit the Internet in fall of 2010, barring it getting picked up by a traditional agent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a drought that's sucking the life out of the world. Nasan Rattlingbones has been exiled from her nomad clan and left to die in the desert. There a sprite called Oscar cons her into becoming a reluctant heroine. A very reluctant heroine. When Nasan finds out what Oscar is really up to, heads will roll.

Vampire Carrying Capacity

2009-09-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

There is a scholarly paper making the rounds of the Internet (“Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality,” by Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi) that claims to have disproved the existence of vampires using math. Their central claim is that, if a vampire needs to feed once a month, and every vampire’s victim becomes a vampire, the vampire population would increase geometrically and the human race would be wiped out in a couple of years.

Everybody knows that vampires don’t turn their victims every time. That would be as ridiculous as … as vampires actually existing. Well, anyway. In this essay, I was going to rebut their argument with some more math, but I discovered it’s already been done. Brian Thomas does a wonderful job of explaining the population ecology of vampires and humans in Sunnyvale (“Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse,” easily Googleable), and he uses much more advanced math than I could ever muster. Oh, well. Go read both papers. I have only a few notes to add, and all I have to invoke is a little algebra.

There seem to be two major feeding strategies among vampires. As far as I can tell, nobody’s named the strategies, so I’m just going to call them “grazers” and “gorgers.” Gorgers are kind of like your pet snake – they can go for weeks without food, and then they go and drain all the blood out of a human body. Grazers suck peoples’ blood, but they don’t kill them while they’re doing it, and presumably they have to do it more often.

Since vampires don’t exist, I have absolutely no facts to go on. All the numbers that I’m using I have had to pull out of thin air. The only real number I have is this: the Red Cross says that a healthy adult can lose a unit of blood (half a liter) every eight weeks without suffering any ill effects.

Say one of your grazing vampires needed a unit of blood every night to “survive.” He’d need, as an absolute minimum, fifty-six humans to give the first human enough time to recover before coming back to feed on her again.

One vampire to every fifty-six humans and the Red Cross would be pissed.

But in light of those numbers, one vampire to every thousand people or so starts to sound pretty reasonable. A small town like Northfield could support a coven of 17 or 18.

For “gorger” vampires, the math is a little different. Here we’re not concerned with how much blood a person can lose without getting hurt, but with how many people are dying. Say a gorger vampire needs to consume one victim every two weeks. A vampire like this would increase the annual death rate of a population by 26. What the vampire needs, then, is a population big enough where that increase in the death rate won’t get people suspicious.

Remember those lovely population histograms from the Elves? Birthrate/deathrate calculations are going to come in handy again. In a nice Western country where the life expectancy is around 80, 1/80^th of the people have to die each year to keep the population constant. So a population with an annual death rate of 26 would have x * 1/80 =26 or 2080 people. But wait – if a vampire moved into a population of 2080, the death rate would double. The local townsfolk would be knocking on Buffy’s door in no time. Let’s multiply that by a hundred. In a city of 208,000, there are about 2,600 deaths a year. Add a vampire and the death rate would go up to 2626. Such a vampire could plausibly manage not to get caught.

Notice that the gorger model supports a much lower population density than the grazers – one individual in a city of 208,000, instead of 17 in a Northfield. And there’s the fact that a gorger’s victims would be dying under highly mysterious circumstances – it’s hard to hide all those dessicated corpses. A gorger vampire would have to limit herself to people who won’t be missed, which would drive the vampire population density even lower. There are many questions left unanswered about the grazer strategy, too. How likely are people to notice a fang-shaped hickey and waking up light-headed in the morning? Still, if you’re a vampire, it pays to be a grazer.

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

2009-09-16T07:05:00.001-07:00

Hey, all, and welcome back to Carleton! Over the summer, we got a bunch of new donations:

Hellblazer: The Devil You Know
The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
Amber and Ashes (Dragonlance, the Dark Disciple, Vol. 1) by Margaret Weis
Victorian Fairy Tales, the Revolt of the Fairies and Elves by Jack David Zipes

So come on over and check them out!

9: Awesome Robot Pterodactyl

2009-09-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

Warning: this blog post contains spoilers for the movie 9 (though not the spoiler for the really big secret).

9 does something that a lot of major, well-funded movies are not willing to do: it kills off characters. And it hurts. The MPAA’s rating of PG-13 is appropriate, so brace yourself for a difficult but thrilling ride.

At only 81 minutes, Shane Ackerman’s debut movie does not contain one iota of flab. A machine called the Brain has turned against us and wiped out humanity. The only survivors are nine little hackey-sack dolls. The Brain is still out there. It must be stopped, and it’s going to cost them.

As a matter of fact, the very tightness of the plot is one of the things I have to complain about the movie. 9’s creative team seems to be holding itself back from long, self-indulgent panning shots, but since the movie is so short anyway, I wouldn’t have minded slowing down to wander around in the neat world they’ve created a bit more. Only the major strokes of each doll’s personality are sketched out, and I think there could have been more there if they’d dug deeper.

But who the heck am I kidding? The robot pterodactyl was sweet.

On a technical note, I admire Ackerman & Co’s work at balancing the dolls’ narrative roles. I know from writing that when a bunch of characters have the same job, like members of a crime-fighting team, it’s hard to keep them from interfering with each other. Notice how the movie introduces the characters gradually and never allows all nine of the dolls to be in the same room together just to keep things from getting symmetrical. 3 and 4 are twins, so they have a different relationship to each other than they do to the other teammates, and there’s some factionation going on, so 1 and 8 are closer to each other than to the others.

9 is visually stunning, artistic, but also dismaying. The ending will leave you with a big, “But now what are they going to do?” It’s tempting to compare 9 to Wall-E, since they’re both post-apocalyptic animated films with cute robots for main characters. See Wall-E and then see 9 to cut the sweet, or better yet, see 9 and then see Wall-E to help you recover.

It’s true that the characters in 9 are simplistically done, but I’m still not going to forget 2 for a long time.

Pardon the dust...

2009-09-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed I've been jiggering some things around here. I'm updating this blog to make it more website-ish. The dust will all be settled in a week or two.

Edit: changes are done. Hope you find the sidebar more organized and informative now.

Uncle Silas

2009-08-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

When Miss Maud Ruthyn, heiress, is orphaned, she’s sent to live with her creepy old uncle until she reaches her majority. Said uncle is suspected of once murdering a man to whom he owed gambling debts. Oh, and if Maud were to die somehow before becoming an adult, Uncle Silas would get everything. Her father arranged it that way in his will to prove to the world that Silas isn’t a murderer. Maud gets the delightful experience of being the pork chop dangled in front of the starving wolf.

Deliciously gothicky, but there’s still plenty wrong with this novel by J. Sheridan le Fanu (better known for his short stories). For one thing, scary it ain’t. “And … there was a bloodstain … on the floor!” is about as intense as it gets. Did the Victorians scare easier than we do, or did the authors just hold themselves back? It’s a depressing prospect to think that we live in a scarier world than in 1899, but compared to Chernobyl, Silas’s murderous history is pretty tame.

Ah, Maud Ruthyn. How I love to hate her. Throughout the book she vacillates between a fainting flower petal and an imperious little brat who knows she’s better than the menials because of her education and good breeding. I know she would have made for an acceptable heroine in the 19th century, but cultural relativism can only be carried so far. I’m still allowed to be upset when she’s denigrating her own gender (The weaker sex? The weaker sex? I do beg your pardon?), failing to play an active role in the ending, or eerily echoing Robinson Crusoe:

‘I want your hand, cousin,’ she said, at the same time taking it by the wrist, and administering with it a sudden slap on her plump cheek, which made the room ring, and my fingers tingle; and before I had recovered from my surprise, she had vanished.

And if you were expecting a twist at the end, which would be reasonable to do in such a suspenseful novel, you will be disappointed. Le Fanu tells you over and over that a certain event is going to happen. And then it happens.

Now that I’ve told you everything that’s wrong with the book, I strongly urge you to go read it. If you’re the sort of person who read Frankenstein for fun, not for English class, you will love it. The point of Uncle Silas is the mood, not its illiberal characters or preposterous plot. The haunted house of Bartram-Haugh abounds with creaky rooms, opium addiction, gypsy prophecies, and … Swedenborgians. Le Fanu is a master of suspense. Just as soon as you’re dying to know what happens next, he slows the story down. He draws out each excruciating moment as the massive conspiracy surrounding Maud closes in on her. I read the last five chapters all at a gulp (nearly making myself late for work) and finished gasping for air. It was only about an hour later that I realized nothing particularly cool happened. Le Fanu just writes it so well. Definitely recommended for any fan of the Gothic style.

9 Movie Trailer

2009-08-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Golems! Post-apocalyptic awesomeness! Tim Burton! I think I'm going to swoon now.

9 The Movie

Okay, some time has passed since I started this post and I'm somewhat more capable of coherent thought. Seriously, though, I'm going to see this movie as soon as I am able and you can rely on it that I will review it.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley Part 3

2009-08-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

The UC has some pretty interesting architecture up there. I think it's because it's built on a hill.

Characters and Viewpoint

2009-08-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading a book on craft by Orson Scott Card lately* where he suggests, to make readers hate the villain, to make the villain really, really smart.

This isn’t true in every culture, but certainly the American audience resents any character who is smarter and better educated than other people. … We’re afraid of and resent people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.

That’s sad. Card is probably right, and probably the technique works, but is it right to do it? Tapping into the worst part of people’s natures to make them feel something about a character? He also suggests making bad guys insane to make us hate them.

These are a couple of prejudices that it’s more or less still socially acceptable to have – I certainly couldn’t get away with having a scheming Shylock as my antagonist. But it’s not just that. I also take issue with his lukewarm acceptance of sympathetic, morally ambiguous villains.

When you separate sympathy from moral decisions – exactly what a judge and jury must try to do in a trial – you can’t be sure that your audience will reach the ‘right’ conclusions; you can’t be sure that they’ll agree with you.

What, am I going to hurt my readers’ brains?

Maybe this is why I didn’t like Seventh Son much.

I’d be interested to see what other amateur writers think. How do you build character? Do you add attributes to characters just to make them more evil/heroic, and does it work for you?

* Characters and Viewpoint, in the Elements of Fiction Writing series.

Robot Toilets!

2009-07-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

San Francisco's answer to the public restroom. These pod-shaped toilets dot the city every few blocks; they come with a page-long set of operating instructions and power doors that slide back when you push a button. When you are done, an electronic readout tells you it's going through a "55-second cleansing cycle," which I can only assume involves zapping the inside with ozone or something, because one can't observe it directly.

I keep expecting Dr. Who to come bursting out of one of these things and go save the world.

Mondegreen

2009-07-27T16:44:00.000-07:00

Sarah McLachlan's song, Building A Mystery, has a pair of lines that go:

You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith that died
Before Jesus came

I had long interpreted these lyrics to be, in fact, about x-treme yoga:

You spread your ass to where
In a suicide pose
Across from a faith that died
Before Jesus came

Now, Kiss This Guy confirms that I'm not going crazy. (At least not for that reason.) This site keeps a database on all the mondegreens on all the popular songs people have ever heard. Other people think McLachlan is singing about extreme yoga, too, and in fact, one user has proposed an even better interpretation of the lines:

You strap your ass to a suicide machine.

Unexplained Mediumship Fragment

2009-07-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is a plotbunny orphan; it doesn't have any story to go with it.

Most of us have this traumatic incident in our childhoods where we realize we're different. Mine was at my dad's funeral. I was five years old, tired of the velveteen dress they'd put me in and wanting to go home, and I stood up and said, "Why is everybody so sad? You can still talk to him!" That earned me a quick trip to the child psychologist, who decided it was my way of coping. At least Dad understood.

Lentil Curry

2009-07-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

I discovered that this recipe works quite well.

LENTIL CURRY

1 package (1lb) lentils
2 onions
4-5 cloves garlic
1 package (1lb) tofu
10 cups broth
handful of dark green leafies
curry powder to taste
half & half to taste

Rinse lentils, then cover in broth and simmer ~30 mins. Meanwhile, cube the tofu and sauté on high heat. You want the outside of the cubes to get nice and crispy. Caramelize the onions and garlic in the same pan. Add dark green leafies of your choice – I used the green tops of leeks because that’s what I had, but it should be very tasty with collards. Once those are wilted, add the whole caboodle to the lentils. Season with curry powder (maybe also some salt and pepper) to taste, then add half & half until it’s creamy. Serve on rice.

This makes a ton, probably enough for about 6 people.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley (Well, San Francisco, Really) Part 2

2009-07-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Never, ever go to Fisherman’s Wharf on the Fourth of July. I let an old friend from high school talk me into it, and man. Between the hour spent looking for parking, the hour-long waits at every single restaurant, and the twenty-minute line at the restroom, it leaves one wondering how the entire population of the Bay Area has managed to squeeze into a space about the size of three blocks. We had a good time, though. I got to try sharkmeat (It’s like tuna but without the fishiness; that is to say, extremely mild. It would be good with horseradish.) and we saw some pretty sweet fireworks.

And I managed to get some cool shots of the carousel at the end of the wharf:

The Art of Rough Travel: Advice from a 19th Century Explorer

2009-07-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Sir Francis Galton, inventor of the standard deviation, psychometrician, and distant relative of Charles Darwin, is one of those remarkable people of the Victorian Era who did a little bit of everything. In 1850 he joined an expedition to what is now modern-day Namibia for the Royal Geographic Society and lived there for two years. When he returned to England, he decided the best way to use his knowledge was to write his own version of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being a Victorian Explorer, for the benefit of future generations of pith helmets.

Thankfully, this peculiar text has not been lost to the mists of time. The Mountaineers Club had it reprinted in 2006 with modernized spellings. The result is highly entertaining.

The text is divided into several sections, beginning with “Preparatory Inquiries,” on through “Beasts of Burden,” “Food,” “Game,” and “Bush Remedies,” and finally winding up at “Miscellany” and “On Concluding the Journey.” Each of the chapters is logically organized and clearly written, so if an explorer can find what he needs to know to avoid being trampled by a charging rhinocerous.

There are places where it’s hard to believe this book is not a parody. What pith-helmety type would take a how-to manual along to dip into from time to time? Galton devotes two whole pages to how to make a proper pot of tea out in the bush, and now and then you run across un-PC little zingers like this one:

“Savages rarely murder newcomers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man’s power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with.”

Therein, however, does not lie the value of The Art of Rough Travel. It is an absolute treasure trove for fantasy writers. Galton has inadvertently written the Idiot’s Guide to Problems that Fantasy Characters Face. How fast can I expect my hero to travel on his way to Mount Doom? Well, he can go about 3 miles per hour if he’s walking, or 4 if he’s walking fast. What if he’s traveling alone in hostile territory? He should tie his horse’s reins on a short leash to his wrist. If the horse hears something wrong, it will jerk its head up, and serve as an alarm clock. Okay, but what should he do if he runs out of food? See “Revolting Food, That May Save the Lives of Starving Men.” How much can his elephant carry? “The average burden, furniture included, but excluding the driver, is 500 lbs., and the full average day’s journey 15 miles.” The book is studded with little examples that would not just make one’s story more believable, but inspire stories of their own. Galton recommends that a traveler should get some jewels, encased in silver (it’s a non-irritant), inserted into the flesh of the arm and allow it to heal over. That way, if thieves steal everything including the clothes off your back, you still have a little money to fall back on.

Most of the time the advice is real, serious, and useful. The invention on flashlights has made Galton’s section on improvised candlesticks somewhat less relevant today, but the human body and keeping it alive in bad circumstances doesn’t change, and the wilderness is precisely the place you might find yourself without the modern conveniences that make you so different from the Victorians. Any good backpacker could find something to learn from this book, be it the right way to rappel down a cliff, tie a knot, or waterproof one’s bedding. I heartily recommend it to anybody writing an adventure story, or just anybody on the lookout for weird and fabulous ways to stay alive.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley, Part 1

2009-06-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

The houses here are only three or four feet away from the sidewalk. Homeowners compensate with these xerophyllic plantings that explode out of the itty bitty space allotted for them:

There's something neat to look at on every block in downtown:

And yes, that says "Mexican, Pakistani, Indian" on the sign. It's all one restaurant.

Shadowplay: Way to Character Development!

2009-06-19T16:20:00.000-07:00

Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch trilogy is a guilty pleasure of mine.

The trouble with plain-vanilla high fantasy is that it’s been done so much that none of the new stuff is particularly original anymore, and Shadowmarch is no exception. You’ve got your castle, you’ve got your conniving nobles, you’ve got your twin royals sent into exile, and the army of fairies that would like to take over said castle. Add to that a good sprinkling of battle scenes, women wearing trousers (shocking!) and a black guy who comes from Very Far Away and everybody thinks he’s incredibly exotic. Heck, the book’s even got dwarves. He calls them Funderlings but I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Williams.

On top of that, it’s got a sprawling Los Angeles of a plot. If you were planning on reading Shadowmarch and Shadowplay, I hope you weren’t in too much of a hurry because Tad Williams is going to bloody well take as long as he pleases to get where he’s going. The first two books of the expected trilogy, which are really one story split into two volumes to make them possible to lift, are at 1000 pages and counting. He has … let’s see, now … at least twelve POV characters. This is the sort of book that comes supplied with an index at the end.

Conditions like this typically make me want to throw the book across the room. So why can’t I stop reading?

It’s the characters. To tell the truth, Tad Williams is a talented storyteller. About halfway through the first volume I’d had just about enough of Prince Barrick whining about some family curse and I was on the point of throwing the book across the room. But– but– what was going to happen to Chert Blue Quartz? He isn’t some high-strung noble at all, but this, er, dwarf who’s just trying to do his job as a repairman to the vaults under the city. It’s obvious his wife Opal is the light of his life, he’s worried about this human kid he’s semi-adopted, and he’d really rather not get caught up in all the castle’s machinations and probably killed. Was Chert going to be okay?

Williams has such a knack for warm, human, likable characters that you want to forgive him everything. Yes, even the saucy barmaid. And the buffoonish poet. And the princess who’s pretending to be a boy. Even though they sound like stereotypes, they come across as real people.

And did I mention that Gyir is awesome? He’s a fairy. And if you confuse him with the sugar-dust-and-tutu type of fairy it’ll probably be the last thing you do. He’s a badass sword-wielding human-sized dude, one of the Fey Folk, from out of those old folktales where people called fairies the “good people” because they were so terrified of offending them. He doesn’t have any nose or mouth, so he breathes out of slits just behind his ears.

The second volume, Shadowplay, has so much more to offer than the first. The Shadowmarch trilogy is the opposite of those trilogies that sag in the middle; now that Williams has finished introducing us to everybody, which took him 500 pages or so, interesting things are starting to happen. There is something to be said for letting things unfold organically like this. The people in this world start to feel like old friends of yours. The last scene had me pumping the air when a certain highly sympathetic Vuttlander does not get killed off by the plot yet*. The final irony is that nobody knows when the third book in the trilogy, Shadowrise, is going to be published.

Is everybody going to be okay?

* I would bet money that Captain Vansen is going to bite it. It’s like he’s walking around with a bull’s-eye taped to his armor.

Yes!

2009-06-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

Draft 3 of The Confederacy of Heaven is complete!

That's my sophomore noveling effort, by the way. I haven't really mentioned it on this blog before, but I've been plugging away at draft 3 for the better part of a year. I think I'm going to go get a celebratory I don't know what yet, and work on something completely different for a few weeks.

Roofs vs. Rooves

2009-06-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

So, I was just writing a scene where Our Heroine happens to be on a high balcony and she can see the tops of many buildings below her. And then Word wanted me to change "rooves." Aware that Word Spellchecker has the IQ of retarded lettuce, I went to the dictionary. No entry. I turned to Google, and there the Urban Dictionary gave the definition as:

The plural of "roof," for people too dumb to know that the real word is "roofs."

Whatever happened to poor old "rooves?"

I mean, the plural of loaf is loaves, dwarf is dwarves, and chief is chives. Okay, maybe not on that last one. But I'm sorry to see poor, downtrodden rooves, the way I've been pronouncing it all my life, get smacked around like that.

Also, Google helpfully suggested two searches that may be related to rooves: "pituitary gland" and "anaconda." What the heck?

Unholy Warcry

2009-05-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

Who knew that if you set a bad D&D campaign to music, the result would be something pretty good? It's not clear what the band Rhapsody had been drinking when they created Enchanted Lands, Vol. 2: The Dark Secret Album, but I'm glad they did. A hardy band of adventurers set out to kill "Nekron, the demon king" in a cycle of heavy metal songs:

It was a good time for all creatures of the earth,
But fate decreed that the dark prophecy of a demonknight
Could bring a tragic end to this peace
Scarring their lives forever!

If you can bring yourself to stop giggling, you might notice that the music is pretty good. It's got some nice heavy rhythms, good guitar riffs, a good vocalist. The photoshopped castle with the lightning effects in the music video is definitely a highlight. And is that ... is that ... Christopher Lee?

Course Numbers

2009-05-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

Here's some of the English Department's offerings for next fall term.

110 English Literature I Yep, that sounds nice and basic.
112 Intro to American Literature So does this course. It's got the word "intro" in it.
114 Shakespeare I

Shakespeare's as difficult as you want him to be. You could be reading Midsummer Night's Dream or you could be reading King Lear. Moderate.

259 Advanced Essay Writing Advanced. Now we're talking.
272 A Journey into Journalism
313 The Faerie Queene Getting into the really meaty literary territory...
314 Paradise Lost

A grandmaster challenge. Paradise Lost is commonly regarded as an Everest of literature, second only in degree of difficulty to The Waste Land, the K2 of literature. So what English class could possibly get a higher course number than Paradise Lost? What is the very pinnacle of study, accessible only to highly trained senior-level majors?

395 Toni Morrison

Dang, lady. You write some challenging books.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

2009-05-14T07:35:00.000-07:00

Another disappointment.

Sometimes it's useful when you're halfway through a book to stop and ask yourself, "If an asteroid struck right now and all the characters died, would I care?" It was at that point in the book that I quit trying to read Perfume.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a nose – he can distinguish the chemical compositions of thousands of scents just by smelling them, even pick up the scents of things like glass and water. He experiences the world primarily through his nose. And he's on a quest to create the perfect perfume. The only problem is that he has to murder beautiful women to obtain his special ingredient.

It sounds like a really cool premise, doesn't it? But I have a hard time slogging through a book when I can't relate to the main characters at all (cf Tigana). It's not merely that Grenouille is a bad guy. Putting an antihero at the center of your book is an excellent artistic choice and makes for some of the world's most celebrated literature (cf Frankenstein). Grenouille was like an alien to me while I read about him. The way he relates to the world and the way his mind works is so different that I kept jumping out of the story, going "Huh?" instead of getting lost in the narrative. Fantasy and science fiction writers have to write about some pretty weird individuals sometimes, and it's our responsibility to make them understandable enough that readers can connect with them.

New Arrivals at Benton Library

2009-05-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

Our latest shipment of new books has just arrived!

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder
The Darkangel Trilogy, by Meredith Ann Pierce
Twilight and New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer
Count Scar, by C. Dale Brittain
Sabriel, by Garth Nix
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Phillip K. Dick
The Golem's Eye, by Jonathan Stroud

As always, feel free to drop by and check one out. We're on Winona St., one block away from the chapel.

Soup

2009-05-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bit late about putting this up, sorry.

Twilight Had a Genuinely Funny Moment

2009-04-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

I saw the movie Twilight last weekend, with the help of a generous dose of RiffTrax. Vapid characters, forgettable dialogue, and excessively slick post-production aside, it was actually pretty neat when Bella went to "meet the family." It's an awkward moment for any teenager, but it's even more awkward when it goes something like, "So... Edward tells us you eat ... food and stuff. So we made you some pasta!" *Nervous laughter all around.*

Would have been even funnier if they'd ruined the pasta because none of them have cooked anything in, like, ever, but alas.

New Arrivals at Benton Library

2009-04-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to announce that we've been able to add a lot of new titles this term:

Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, by Eoin Colfer
Forerunner, by Andre Norton
Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith
The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft
Birds of Prey: Club Kids, by Tony Bedard

And one of my favorites,

The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud

Go ahead and check them out! We're on Second and Winona, and Carleton students are welcome any time.

Beloved

2009-04-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

Deep, dark, and rich, in a chocolate torte laced with cyanide sort of way.

I picked it up because Amazon.com said people who bought Edgar Allen Poe also bought this, but I was still expecting more of a historical novel than the terror ride of my life. It’s 1873 and Sethe is an ex-slave. She lives all alone in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, the only child she has left. Her two sons have run away from home and her older daughter is dead. During the book, she’s haunted by the past in every meaning of the word.

Paul D, who used to be a slave on the same farm as Sethe, arrives on their doorstep one day. Denver resents that they’re attracted to each other. They think Sethe’s husband died trying to escape the farm, but nobody knows for sure. Just to make matters worse, then a mysterious young woman with no wrinkles in her skin shows up, calling herself Beloved.

When Sethe’s daughter died eighteen years before, Sethe didn’t have enough money for a headstone. She was able to barter sexual favors with the engraver for just one word. Not enough for Dearly Beloved. Just Beloved.

Is Beloved the evil ghost of the dead little girl? Has Sethe finally lost her mind? Both? You just don’t know, even after it’s all over.

The best part of the prose is not what Morrison says, but what she leaves unsaid.

But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon tied around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.

Deliciously terrifying.

Literary lessons learned:

If you’re Toni Morrison, you can handle a book that is more flashback than present day. She’s Toni Morrison.
Magical realism: it’s not just for Latin America anymore.

What do Inkheart, the Turing Test, and viruses have to do with each other?

2009-04-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

Here’s one that’ll bust your noodle: it looks like fictional characters could pass the Turing Test. Imagine that we’re text-messaging each other, and I answer all your questions as one of my favorite imaginary people, like Lyra Belacqua. Our conversation might go something like this:

Interviewer: Hello, Lyra.
Lyra: How do you know my name, then?
Interviewer: Well, I–
Lyra: What is this place? You’re one of them Gobblers, en’t you?
Lyra: Where did I learn how to type?

Theoretically, this could go in indefinitely. I’m using all the intelligence of my brain to convince the interviewer about Lyra’s intelligence. It only breaks down when I reach the limits of my knowledge about Lyra or we run into some logical inconsistencies due to the fact that she’s from another dimension. You can see that that second problem happened pretty fast, but maybe somebody skilled enough (Lyra’s creator?) could fool the interviewer every time. Are we supposed to conclude that imaginary people are intelligent? Where do they keep their brains?

I’m bringing up the subject because it’s so compelling for writers such as myself. One of the common experiences for a fiction writer, across all genres, is that it feels like one’s characters are alive. My characters are like the most wonderful imaginary friends; I don’t write their dialogue, I just let them talk. And this experience doesn’t have to happen to just authors. Some characters have captured the public attention so thoroughly (like the Tin Woodsman, for example, or Harry Potter) that they can live independently of their creators. But if characters are intelligent, then we writers are all psychotic. We’re all multiple personality disorder cases with a bunch of knights and talking dragons bopping around in our heads. And some days, that’s what it feels like.

Maybe the best way to look at this is to go back to what the Turing test was supposed to prove in the first place. We tend to regard it as just a sentience test. But the grand old man Turing himself introduced the idea with a sort of parlor game where both a man and a woman pretend to be women. Somebody runs typewriter-generated messages between them and an interviewer (if only he’d known about Instant Messenger!). If the man wins the game by convincing the interviewer that he’s the woman, Turing says we can conclude he’s got a pretty good understanding of gender. Likewise, in the more famous version of the test, if a computer is smart enough to convince an interviewer that it’s smart, it must be pretty smart. Okay. So far, so good. So, if an interviewer becomes convinced that Lyra Belacqua is a real person, then

Lyra Belacqua must be pretty smart.
I must be a pretty good actress.

Which is it?

Here’s what I think, anyway. Characters are particularly good memes. Those are those ideas that can hop from head to head, taking on lives of their own. (Yes, kind of like LOLcats, but more sophisticated than that.) Viruses aren’t alive, but they can hijack the machinery of a cell in order to act like they’re alive and reproduce. Characters aren’t intelligent; they’re “personality fragments” that can sieze hold of a person’s imagination and act like they’re real. Lyra uses my brain (with my permission, I hope!) to answer the interviewer’s questions. And there’s a plot idea in that. What if there is a character whose personality is so virulent that his author goes nuts?

The Almighty Guru

2009-04-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/

Looks like the sort of site that's good to procrastinate on.

Peptides are kind of like proteins...

2009-04-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

"Dr. Perricone's revolutionary program utilizes the biggest breakthrough in antiaging medicine in years, protein-like substances called peptides and neuropeptides."

From The Perricone Promise, a hot new diet book published by a dermatologist.

Please tell me the biochemists aren't the only ones rolling their eyes at the above. Peptides ARE proteins! Itty bitty ones. It's significant to note there was an advertisement for Dr. Perricone's special peptide brews on the last page.

Elves

2009-04-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

Fritter Thingies

2009-04-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

Happy Bodies, a new blog on campus.

Jill and the people who commented on the post bring up some interesting points.

Food is a really emotional issue. It's an extremely old issue. Try to think of anything that's been part of the human condition for just as long, and probably the only answer is sex. It's so important to survival, and so much of our culture revolves around it. That's why people get so angry.

It can lead to some pretty amusing clashes, too. Now, I'm not all that vegetarian; I probably eat meat about once or twice a week because it happens to be in some soup I wanted at the dining hall. My mother, bless her heart, is an excellent cook, but we have diverging cooking styles. The last time I was home on vacation she asked me, as delicately as she could, "But what do you eat?"

Why, all sorts of things! Eggs. Pasta. Lentil soup. That delicious falafel they make at the snack bar. Bananas. Yes, I'm getting enough protein. I feel fine, everybody. I'm not dead yet! I think I'll go for a walk...

Perhaps the best way to lure others to the dark side is with delicious, delicious meatless recipes.

Fritter thingies

4 slices of bread (for best results, leave them uncovered for 24 hours)
5 or 6 nice mushrooms
1/2 can black beans
2 eggs
Tabasco
spices you enjoy (I recommend lots of black pepper)

Mash the beans slightly with a potato masher or fork. Dice the mushrooms small and combine with the beans in big bowl. Toast the bread pretty dark, then crumble into the bowl. Blend. Add spices to taste (the more the better, the bread soaks it up a lot).

Beat the eggs separately. Add to the dry ingredients. Next comes the fun part: heat up a little oil in the bottom of a pan. Mix the goo, then form into patties with your hands. Sauté on both sides until the egg is cooked, and voilá! Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, with mushroomy chewy bits.

Try them, you'll like them.

Cool Word of the Day

2009-04-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Histidine.

It's just cool.

At Heidelberg University, Part 7

2009-03-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

The final installment.

Outside The Sheep’s Head, December 3, 1903, 8:15 p.m.

Werner was afraid that he had frightened Dr. Reed with all that talk about murder and the end of the world. It didn’t matter. Soon enough the assistant professor would chalk it up to too much wine and forget all about it. What he’d said was still true, though. Someday he would have to answer for it. In the meanwhile, the air was crisp and smelled like trees, which was getting rarer and rarer nowadays, and the stars outside were beautiful. Just outside the reach of the restaurant lights he stopped to look up at them.

A blow to his chest knocked all the air out of him and flung him against a wall. The man who wrestled him to a standstill was too strong to be a beggar, though there was madness in his eyes and it looked like he hadn’t cut his hair in years. Something long and thin prickled at Werner’s neck.

“An island! An island in the Pacific Ocean! Do you even realize how long it took me to figure out what hemisphere I was in?”

Werner gasped, trying to get his breath back. He would have liked to put a hand to his throat but they were both being held down.

“Longer than I expected,” he said as soon as he could manage it. “You’re not the brightest bulb, are you?”

“I’m going to kill you!” The man growled and dug the knife in deeper. Werner winced, but that was all. His attacker looked confused. “Well? Aren’t you going to beg?”

“Why should I? I’ve already had my fun. My life’s been an anticlimax for years.”

The knife slackened. Then the man seemed to remember himself and punched Werner, then shoved him so hard he sprawled onto the icy concrete.

“Yes,” said Werner, not trying to get up. He’d bitten his tongue on the way down and now tasted blood in his mouth. He wanted to laugh, though this was the last possible place for something like that. “You know, I was going to send you to the moon, Albert.”

Albert, who’d been poised to kick him, lowered his boot. “What?”

“Or deep space, or the middle of an iceberg. I had to interrupt the show to change it at the last minute. I still don’t know why I did that.”

There was no reply. No blows came for a while, so Dr. Werner sat up painfully. Albert was standing over him, watching.

“You’ve ruined my life.”

“Oh, yes,” Werner nodded, rubbing his head. “It was quite unfair. The arrangement still holds, you know. If you survive the experience, you’re a free man.”

“God damn it!” Albert flung the knife to the ground and kicked it. “I was going to kill you! All those nights sleeping on rocks, it was the only thing keeping me going…”

“Then do it, already.”

There was a long pause. “I really did you a favor, didn’t I? You got to feel so pleased with yourself, being the wronged one.” He squatted on the ground and rubbed his head. “Now what are we going to do?”

Girl Genius: Now That's How Steampunk Ought to be Done

2009-03-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Why is it that all the webcomics I’ve been reading lately have been better than the books? I haven’t written any book reviews lately because the last couple of books I read were lackluster. And the disappointing thing is that they sounded like they would be really good. Good Omens, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is about an angel and a demon who manage to bungle up the apocalypse. If you’ve ever wanted to know how an angel behaves when drunk, this is the book for you, but otherwise it didn’t light me on fire. And Seventh Son, well, Orson Scott Card is the kind of sf/f author where everybody takes their hats off when you mention his name, and the book had a way cool premise: what would happen to the American colonies … if magic worked? Unfortunately the book read like a big long prequel. Alvin, who goes on to do actually exciting things later in the series, is only ten years old by the time the book closes.

Girl Genius, on the other hand, is another one of those gems you happen to stumble across by word of mouth. It’s a webcomic by Phil & Kaja Foglio that’s been running for many years now. It’s an alternate history where most of Europe is at the mercy of dueling mad scientists. (They call it Europa, but you’re not fooling me, Foglios.) Imagine a Jules Verne book that has been left in the back of the refrigerator for too long and gotten completely out of hand. It’s gotten to the point where, when a crab monster with laser eyes crashes out of the forest, the peasantry rolls its eyes and groans.

Young Agatha Clay, a hapless student at Transylvania Polygnostic University, discovers she’s the sole surviving heir of the Heterodyne dynasty, a family of mad scientists with a particularly strong and checkered reputation. Now, everyone in Europe wants a piece of her. Her madcap quest to assume her rightful place as a heterodyne and keep from getting killed involves blob monsters, airships, robots, talking cats, wasps that will turn you into zombies, and lots and lots of explosions. And did I mention that her house is insane?

If you’re going to try Girl Genius out, please wait until you’re partway through Volume 2 before you decide whether you like it or not. The Foglios took a while to figure out what they wanted their comic to be. Early on, characters’ reactions to things are kind of cartoony and flat, and the Jägermonsters resemble nothing so much as rotting pumpkins. It really hits its stride once Agatha gets on the airship and we get some character interactions going. By the time you meet the robot princess you’ll need to start keeping a scorecard.

The graphic novel format means they can do some really neat things you can’t do in a novel, like subtle visual humor. Oh, look, Agatha’s guardians just happen to have bolts in their necks. That guy driving the wagon in the background has a cybernetic hand. That mouse in the cellar is actually a tiny, tiny wooly mammoth – an escaped experiment.

One of the things I particularly like about the story is that Agatha’s a strong female character (with glasses!) who relies mainly on her intelligence to get things done. A few well-made death rays never hurt, either. There are certain limits on what Agatha and Gilgamesh (he’s the romantic lead) can do because they’re the main characters, and they’ve got a heroic job to do. The side characters really make the story shine, and there are a lot of them – it is a sweeping, epic plot. And each one of them gets motivations, even if they’re only there for a few episodes, so you get the feeling that if you looked closer there’d be even more to them.

I love, love the Jägermonsters, though I can’t figure out what the dickens they are. They’re humanoids who come in various shades of purple or green and have fangs and claws, and they’re really hard to kill. And they don’t seem to mind eating glue for supper at all. My running hypothesis is that they’re some sort of highly intelligent breed of Orc. And by highly intelligent I mean about as intelligent as a human, because for an Orc that would be an accomplishment. The cool thing is that at first they look like they’re just stormtroopers, but then they get lines, and some of them even get names, and it turns out that they’re a lot more important to Agatha’s destiny than originally anticipated.

I’m far from the only person who thinks this webcomic is awesome, considering its nomination for 2 Hugo awards, its five Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards and 8 more nominations, and nomination for 2 Eisner awards. These guys mean serious business. And it looks like Agatha’s going to be gearing up for a final showdown soon, so you’ll want to save your seats.

What can I learn from this, from a literary point of view?

More explosions always help.
Make your minor characters shine, not just your protags.
Always keep the following in mind: how can I make my heroine’s life even more complicated?

At Heidelberg University, Part 6

2009-03-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Sheep’s Head, December 3, 1903, 7:35 p.m.

Dr. Werner had developed a habit of going to the Sheep’s Head for dinner in the past few years. It had nice wood walls, well-lit, didn’t see a lot of riffraff of the city but wasn’t too expensive, either. Since his famous lab accident he’d gotten to working in the lab at all hours, and, well, it was not much of a surprise that he was still a bachelor. He had moved on to other projects than the teleportation machine, of course. It had been too spectacular a failure, too public, to continue the work. It was only because he’d had such a solid reputation at the University that he’d been allowed to keep his job at all. Oh, well.

He scissored away at a veal cutlet across the table from one Dr. Reed, a very new assistant professor who’d barely been added on to the University the year before last. Werner had taken him under his wing so the department would not eat him alive. He had some very promising ideas about the nature of the atom. Werner sighed to himself. He was getting old, wasn’t he? All the good ideas were coming from somebody else now.

“I just received the latest Rutherford paper about radioactivity,” Reed was saying. “He thinks it happens in a mathematically predictable manner. The hazards of the work are enormous, of course, but if the burns–“

“Have you ever done something you regretted, Klaus?”

His friend was so startled by the sudden change of subject that his train of thought stalled. It took him several seconds to decide what to say. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, just an idle thought.” Werner paused, looking at the color of his drink by the light. “Probably brought up by all this talk about radioactivity. We live in dangerous times. The physicists are on the verge of making actual progress in the field. We’re scientists, we’re supposed to be pure, right? Knowledge for its own sake.”

“I should hope so,” said Reed, with a puzzled look.

Then Dr. Werner brought up what would have looked like another non sequitur. “Have you noticed how the great powers don’t do anything but shake their swords at each other anymore? They’re wound up so tight that they will absolutely have to fight each other. Maybe not next year, maybe not for another ten years. But when it comes, it’s going to be the end of the world.”

“You’re acting very strangely tonight, and I wonder if we had not better go home right now.” Reed very nearly stood up from the table. “All this talk about the end of the world. Europe is a civilized place. A few wars would help to blow off steam.”

“That’s because you haven’t seen war, my friend. War is hell.” He put his drink back down. “They left me for dead, you know.”

Dr. Reed gave up his plan to leave the table and blinked. “The German unification?”

“I had to crawl all the way back to camp with a couple of French bullets in my ribs. I was furious with them for it and nursed a grudge for decades.”

“I didn’t realize you were a war hero.”

At that Werner laughed. “There aren’t any heroes in a game like that. Every year the powers develop ever more sophisticated ways of killing each other. And we scientists unwittingly serve them. There is a lot of energy inside an atom. The year we figure out how to get it out, that is when the end of the world will come.”

Reed was beginning to look really frightened. “We work for peaceful purposes!”

“The teleportation machine works!”

“But it was a disaster. And begging your pardon, Dr. Werner, but your career–“

“It works perfectly, on rats and humans. I’ve done it on myself many times. What a miraculous technology, right? We could move food and products across the ocean in the blink of an eye. Troops. We could teleport a bomb into the inside of a certain world leader’s home… But you know how these things go. I had an accident. The machine was a dismal failure, it got put on a shelf, and everybody forgot about it.” He paused to sip from his drink, seeming to remember things from long ago. “I shall have to answer for that someday. Somehow I thought it would be more fun.”

He really shouldn’t have done that, Werner thought. Not out of any fear of getting arrested – it was quite impossible – but the poor assistant professor looked just about ready to flee the restaurant.

Reed calmed himself. “Dr. Werner,” he said finally, looking the older doctor intently in the eyes. “You must tell me something in the utmost of confidence. Have you murdered that convict who disappeared?”

Werner gave that some consideration before he answered. “Probably not. It depends on how smart he is. But with every year that goes by, I think more and more that I have.”

At Heidelberg University, Part 5

2009-03-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 10:10 a.m.

“Dr. Werner, are you all right?”

The doctor started at the sound of the constable’s voice. In his head he’d been somewhere else entirely, going over bloody events from long ago. He came to himself a little and turned. The constable who was assisting him with his experiment had climbed up onto the platform. Down in the square, somebody had called the rest of the police and they were doing their best to escort the audience out in an orderly fashion.

“Hmm?”

“I said that I think I’d better escort you home. You must be shaken.”

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Werner said, as if just realizing what they were talking about. “What a terrible accident.”

To be continued...

At Heidelberg University, Part 4

2009-03-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

Gravelotte, August 18, 1870, 9:45p.m.

It was a losing battle in the middle of a winning war. Albert’s platoon had retreated to the ridgetop for the night, hopefully to lick their wounds and attack the French again in the morning. No fires, of course. Wouldn’t want any of them to get seen from down the hill. Every once in a while sporadic shooting broke out, and they all jumped, but the fighting had mostly died down for the night.

He’d never dare say to his superiors that it was a badly conceived idea to attack the French flank with only a couple of divisions, but he could feel it all that he liked. That day kept rattling around his skull no matter what he did. The French artillery pits. So many of his men dying. And the fear. War, it forced you to do things that were inexcusable if they happened anywhere else. But with war you had reasons.

He knew he’d never be able to stand the sight of the inside of his eyelids tonight, so he sat, awake and alone, on the edge of the encampment, staring out into the dark. It was healthy to keep a certain distance from the regular soldiers. Familiarity breeds contempt, and that would be the end to organization in the Prussian king’s army. The air was muggy. It was pitch black down the hill, but he knew the remains of the battlefield were down there.

The soft crunch of feet treading on the grass. Somebody was out there. Albert froze. A person or a creature moving around unseen outside their camp, erratically by the sound of it, stumbling at one point with a soft grunt, then the feet trudging forward again. Albert knew he ought to raise the alarm, but he didn’t. It was unreasonable, totally unreasonable, the idea that had just gripped him. But still he couldn’t bring himself to make a noise. The scouts would find out soon enough without help.

They did. There was sudden confusion in the camp of just-woken soldiers stumbling about without lights. Then somebody got a lantern on. Albert stepped forward; he needed to get that thing turned off and bawl Ackerman out before it gave away their position to the French. Godard had his rifle pointed out into the darkness down the hill. The thing out there had stopped momentarily. Then it started moving again.

It must be wounded, surely, to be traveling so slowly. A wounded man. No, it was impossible. Albert was imagining things, because of the awful memory of that afternoon. Godard used the sound to aim into the dark.

Yes. Yes, just shoot him, shoot him and get it over with…

“Wait!” Ackerman grabbed Godard’s arm. The creature got far enough into the light of the lantern to be recognized. It was one Franz Werner, common soldier, whom everyone knew to have been killed on the battlefield today. He was staggering and clutching his bloodied side.

“Mein Gott!”

One man lost control of his wits entirely. “He’s come back to take revenge on us all!”

“No, you idiot, he’s alive,” said a more practical one. “Somebody get the medic!”

The men had to act by themselves. All this time Albert was failing to command them, because he was unable to speak. There was his mistake, staring him in the face. Franz, having accomplished the goal that was holding him together, collapsed and passed out. His compatriots rushed around to help him. Nobody was any the wiser. Nobody knew, and Albert’s job was not in danger. They would think it was a perfectly honest mistake.

Unless Franz recovered, and he chose to tell…

“Sir?” It was Ackerman. He must have noticed that Albert had been doing nothing for several minutes. “Sir, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Gravelotte, August 18, 1870, 4:03p.m.

The battle was going wrong. Their infantry platoon had been sent to cut off the French from the side, so the king’s armies could continue their steamrolling advance into Gallic territory. It was a strategy that had worked all summer. But something was wrong out there, and Albert’s platoon found itself outnumbered two to one and isolated from the rest of the Prussian Army, and the French were slaughtering them out there.

Albert couldn’t take it. He never should have taken a military career. But that’s what you had to do to get ahead, wasn’t it? He should have been a clerk. Could have been. Rifle fire. Death all around. The smell of blood. Fear for the men of his platoon, but above all, in a dark corner of his mind, there was the fear that he was going to get shot.

So it was then that Albert decided, without consulting his superiors, to order a retreat.

Word got out and the men started turning around. He would get exonerated for this in the end, surely. They could not do any good here, and to stay longer would only get more soldiers killed. Soldiers who could serve the Prussian state better if they lived, and fought in another battle. They fled.

In that disorganized charge back up the hill to the safety of the ridge Albert didn’t look back to see if the French were chasing. There were so many corpses they couldn’t run in a straight line for dodging them. He stepped on a stuck-out foot, and heard a groan.

It was one of their own. Franz Werner, common soldier. He vaguely recalled the man’s name, but didn’t remember that he had ever distinguished himself for anything. Shot in the ribs, but still alive.

He’d have to get some of the men to carry him and see what they could do for him once they were safe. Albert looked back. The French looked like they was about to give chase. Carrying a wounded man would slow them down considerably. And if they got caught – there would be even more lives lost.

For someone who– He might be going to die anyway, right?

Two men of his platoon saw that their commander had stopped, and they stopped, too, though he knew they would have liked to keep running. Ackerman looked at him questioningly.

“I found Franz,” he said, by way of an explanation.

Franz was still semiconscious despite the shot. He moved his head a little and looked up at him. Asking for help.

Albert swallowed. “He’s already dead. Let’s get out of here.”

The captions get out of hand...

2009-03-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

Lyrics

2009-02-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

A lot of song lyrics sound dumb when you read them printed out. It takes a really stellar songwriter to make lyrics that work just as well as a poem as out loud. As a case in point, compare:

Shine, by Edenbridge

Shine, it fired his imagination so far
And he gave rise to hope
Shine, this true ring of conviction will leave a scar
To the dancer on a rope
Shine, so where's the difference between man and machine?
And who will draw the line?
Shine, the game is worth the candle, always been
May all ways then shine

Rihanna's unmentionable umbrella song

(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh eh eh eh)

Shine is going to be my new favorite song for the next few weeks.

Statistics

2009-02-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

Taken from a Yahoo! News article:

A 2008 Swedish study revealed half of VLBW adults had below-average IQs, with nearly 12 percent classified with extremely low intelligence.

Um... Assuming human intelligence follows a bell-shaped curve, that's about what you'd expect.

At Heidelberg University, Part 3

2009-02-24T15:12:00.000-08:00

Second Floor of the Natural Sciences Building, August 9, 1897, 2:30 p.m.

Dr. Werner’s laboratory was a dusty and ill-lit room, mostly full of books. There were shelves of them, stacked badly, and scattered among the books were clipped-together chunks of a manuscript the doctor kept meaning to write about the structure of the atom. On balance it didn’t look like a physics laboratory at all: not with the bad light and the cages of rats, a whole wall full of them. The doctor also had a habit of collecting things that his naturalist friends gave him and displaying them in jars of preservative. His laboratory was decorated exactly the way he wanted it.

Right now, Albert was sitting on a cleared-off space on a table in the middle of the room (he’d had to push aside some electrical equipment whose function the doctor alone knew) and Dr. Werner was listening to his heart with a stethoscope.

“Just some routine tests. The procedure is completely safe, but we wouldn’t want you to get hurt, would we?” His ironic tone was quite obvious.

Albert just sat there with a horrified expression.

Dr. Werner removed the stethoscope and smiled. “It’s been a long time, Commander.”

Still no response from Albert.

“What? Is something the matter?”

“Franz, I’m sorry!” he burst out. He covered his face.

“I’m not. Not at all. They told me you were court-martialed for cowardice in battle,” Dr. Werner said, as if making small talk. “That’s appropriate, isn’t it?”

“I swear, I’m going to call this whole thing off! I didn’t know the doctor was going to be you!”

Dr. Werner fell into a chair with a satisfied sigh. “Oh, it’s just too wonderful.”

Albert looked defiant. “You’re going to kill me now, aren’t you? All right, get it over with.”

“No. Not now. When you land in my lap like this, it’s more proof that a just God rules the universe. This is going to take planning.” He became very still. The rats rustled in their cages. “I’m going to make you feel the way I felt in 1870.”

Albert looked mortified. “Franz, I really am sorry. It was wrong.”

“Then you should have told them I was still alive!”

Heidelberg Prison, August 9, 1897, 1:45 p.m.

The jailer was making conversation while he led Dr. Werner through the prison cells. It should have been a disturbing experience for a gentleman such as him, the sunken faces, the cries, and that all-pervasive smell. But the doctor followed along with equanimity, listening politely. Prison was far, far less gruesome than some of the sights he had seen earlier in his life, in the Franco-Prussian War.

“He’s really a very well-behaved prisoner,” the jailer was saying. “When the word came down that you needed a volunteer for your experiment, and that he would be pardoned for his contribution, we immediately thought of him.” He stopped at one of the barred alcoves. “Here we are.”

Dr. Werner stopped abruptly, mouth open. There was his volunteer, sitting on the edge of his cot, chin in his hand and looking gloomy. Their eyes met and the prisoner went pale.

“No.”

“If there’s something wrong we can go with another man,” the jailer said.

Dr. Werner’s mind was racing. He had to choose exactly the right words because he could not, could not allow the prison to replace this man with somebody else. Not when oh, good God, it was Albert who was going to be his volunteer!

“I think … I think he will do just fine,” he said. That was an understatement if there ever was one. “It’s only that … you said he used to be a commander? I am amazed something like this could happen to somebody so high up.”

The jailer gave a curious look to Albert, then to Dr. Werner. “Do you two know each other? I can’t let you go on if you do. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

Albert started to say something, then closed his mouth. Typical of him. He’d been a coward before, and he still was now. He was too afraid of the gallows to back out of the experiment even now – afraid enough to put himself on the doctor’s mercy. This was going to be precious.

“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” Dr. Werner said flatly.

At Heidelberg University, Part 2

2009-02-16T19:52:00.000-08:00

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 10:00 a.m.

Albert, the convict, was having serious second thoughts about the deal he’d worked out with the court. The constable kept trying to get him to climb onto the stage, but he dithered, and the other man was getting quite frustrated with him.

“Do you want to do this or not, man?”

“I – I don’t know.” Albert tugged his hair. It was queer-looking for a man this tall and sturdily built, with red hair and ruddy cheeks, to be acting so distraught. He didn’t move, which was what the constable wanted him to do.

“It’s either onto the stage and whatever awaits you, or back to prison and get in line for the gallows,” he cried. “I haven’t got all day.”

Albert found himself unable to speak. He didn’t dare reveal the real reason he was unsure about this, or they’d never allow him to participate and he’d be hanged for sure. But maybe the experiment was a fate worse than death. Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, and especially damned if he said anything.

“I don’t trust him!” he burst out finally.

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 9:55 a.m.

Three of the workmen were having a difficult time with Dr. Werner’s power amplifier. They stood around the thing, which looked something like a filigree pepper shaker, and tried different angles to pick it up without shattering it to pieces.

“Excuse me, dear fellows.” The doctor pushed past some power cables and approached them. “I apologize for interrupting like this, but I need to make a last-minute adjustment.”

They hopped out of the way with the alacrity of people who were being paid quite a lot to do this job. Dr. Werner knelt by the device, not caring that he risked dragging the tails of his frock coat in the dirt. He delicately changed the settings of a few knobs. Then he pushed himself up, hands on his knees, and dusted himself off.

“Very well. Carry on, then.”

Picking Your Battles FAIL

2009-02-12T20:30:00.000-08:00

Apostrophes in Birmingham

We could have been spending all this energy fighting global warming, no? Inequality? World hunger?

At Heidelberg University, Part 1

2009-02-10T18:49:00.000-08:00

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 10:04 a.m.

It was hot. Morning light hit the trees on the edge of the street up with an ambery gleam through the heavy, motionless air. People crowded together in the square despite the heat, accidentally elbowing each other in most unladylike and ungentlemanlike ways, and some enterprising boys had even climbed up onto the rooftops to see. Practically everybody in the city of Heidelberg (and quite a few people had traveled in from other cities to see this, too) wanted to see the celebrated Dr. Werner and one of his physics experiments.

The experiment was running a few minutes late. The doctor was already on stage, but around him workmen were still hauling things up and setting connections. The audience was getting restless. They didn’t understand what the machinery was all for and they’d already been waiting here an hour. The one thing they did understand was the wire mesh cage directly behind the doctor, as big as a man. It had to be for something.

Dr. Werner seemed totally unaffected by the heat and the crowd’s impatience. He was an affable man in a rather out-of-date frock coat, veering towards forty-five. His unimpressive appearance belied his amazing accomplishments. He’d looked inside atoms, built new weapons for the Kaiser, lectured in England and given interesting ideas to a promising young graduate student by the name of Ernest Rutherford. He had a civil Pour le Mérite.
He clapped his hands, and the crowd went silent.

“Thank you all for honoring this demonstration with your attention,” he said. “Lately I have been doing research, with the help of the university, into the nature of teleportation, that is, the moving of objects over great distances. This procedure is completely safe – I have done the same experiment many times on rats and never so much as harmed a fur on their head. I was going to do this first public demonstration myself, but the university has managed to convince me otherwise, since, indeed, it has never been done on a human being before.”

The people gathered in the square were all ears. Somewhere a baby cried.

“They have provided me with a volunteer.”

That was the cue for a pair of police officers to lead a man in prison drab up onto the stage. He looked extremely nervous, sweating too much even for this weather.

“He assuredly will survive the demonstration. When he does, he will receive a full pardon in honor of his contributions to science.”

Somehow the volunteer didn’t seem very voluntary at all. Dr. Werner, on the other hand, was enjoying himself thoroughly. Public demonstrations of science were nine parts theater anyway, and he was building up to the big reveal.

“I am going to move this man across the square. He will step into the cage here,” he indicated it with a flourish, “and when I activate the apparatus, he will move to that spot there.” He pointed to an area at the back of the square that had been kept onlooker free with ropes.

He turned to the convict. “Are you ready?”

The man didn’t answer. He gave the doctor a stony look.

The policemen conducted him into the cage. Dr. Werner pushed a button. Not one of those heavy, sparking levers it took both hands to throw down that you’d see in magic shows. Just a button, painted black, hardly noticeable. Theater, at times, took subtlety.

The volunteer seemed to have changed his mind at the last minute about being a volunteer. He lifted his arm as if to ward something off.

“Wait!”

He vanished.

There was a rustle as everybody in the square turned around in a half circle. They eyed the roped-off place where the convict was supposed to appear and waited. The seconds passed by. Seconds passed into minutes.

One of the ladies in the crowd screamed and fainted.

Want to know what the dickens is going on? Be sure to tune in next week.

"My ear, it's not supposed to have eels in it!"

2009-02-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Jeff Rzeszotarski, who showed this little gem to everybody at Benton House. He said it pretty much sums up what Wrath of Khan is about. Now I want to see the movie.

Star Trek Opera

The Graveyard Book

2009-01-31T18:45:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: It appears that The Graveyard Book just won the Newberry. I couldn't think of a current children's book that deserves it better.

It's by Neil Gaiman and it contains the word "graveyard" in the title, so I knew I was going to like it.

Absolutely delightful.

The book is about Nobody Owens, a boy who is being raised by ghosts. See, a hit man murdered the rest of his family, but the baby Nobody crawls out of the house in the meanwhile and the ghosts in the local cemetery take him in. There he gets into the usual trouble a boy in a graveyard gets into, getting kidnapped by ghouls, awakening an ancient menace in a barrow, and getting on the wrong side of a corrupt shopkeeper. For these he gets admonished by his loving, if rather ineffectual, adoptive parents, who died a couple of hundred years before he was born.

And then there's Silas. I cannot begin to describe how awesome Silas is. In fact, I can't describe him in much detail at all without giving away a major spoiler. Here's a couple of hints, though: Silas sleeps during the daytime and he consumes only one food – and it's not bananas. He's the one who really brings Nobody up and teaches him what's what. There are so many reasons this is a piece of great writing. One is Gaiman's peculiar brand of odd humor (see the bit with the banana). The other is the themes. Nobody is a very human character who's trying to grow up and understand the world, even though he's had a most unusual upbringing. Silas is torn between letting Nobody be with the living where he belongs, and wanting to protect him from the hit man who's still out there somewhere.

And any book with the following line in it has got to be good:

They avoided one garden ("Psst!" whispered the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. "Dogs!") and ran along the top of the garden wall, scampering over it like rats the size of children.

Mucca Pazza

2009-01-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

Mucca Pazza is a twisted mockery of everything that marching bands across the nation hold dear. Like, if you took a group of unsuspecting high school band members (and a couple members of the pep squad), taxidermied them, and possessed them by aliens with an excellent sense of humor but little idea how to act normal, and ... you get the idea.

I had the good fortune for Mucca Pazza to come play at my college last weekend. They describe themselves on their website as a "circus punk marching band." I don't know what "circus punk" is, but I love it, love it, love it. Their sound comes across as, oh, sort of a cross between Abney Park and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I don't know the technical music terms, but there's something about their rhythms that's very intricate and energetic. Syncopated, maybe? And they use the brass instruments in ways they were not intended to be used.

But Mucca Pazza is just as much act as it is sound. The 30-odd members of the band really hammed it up to the crowd, jamming around with their instruments and intentionally bumping into each other. And their costumes – mismatched old band uniforms (including turquoise), horn-rimmed glasses, artfully placed rips, some things I could have sworn were Masonic Lodge hats. Oh, and to complete the evocation of cringeworthy high school memories, they even have a couple of cheerleaders, both male and female. I do believe I even saw Kricker in there, though he was a lot taller than I remember him. This sort of stuff would be right up a ratrider's alley.

And what circus punk band would be complete without a manic tuba-ist? They've got one.

I came away from the Cave that night with one thought on my mind: do these guys sell CD's? Oh, yeah, they do.

Daemons

2009-01-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Wolff's daemon is a C. elegans.

Shelfari

2009-01-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

www.shelfari.com

A new opportunity to be opinionated about books? Sweet!

Mystery of the Universe

2009-01-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

The song "Dead Man's Party" has a lyric that goes

Everybody's coming
leave your body at the door
leave your body and soul at the door.

Doesn't that mean don't go inside at all?

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

2009-01-10T08:29:00.000-08:00

Come on in and check them out!

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Star Wars Republic Commando: True Colors by Karen Traviss
Mainspring by Jay Lake

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

2009-01-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

If you don't get it, good for you. Enjoy your normal life.

City of the Beasts

2009-01-04T07:22:00.000-08:00

Couldn't get into the story, as the translation was awkward and I don't like Alex, the main character. But check out this description of a character:

... he turned out to be a short, thin, nervous fifty-year-old man with a permanent expression of either scorn or cruelty on his lips, and the squinty little eyes of a mouse.

Way to sum up a guy in just a few lines.

Mainspring

2008-12-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is ... interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth's orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor's kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It's an improvement, but ... still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship's crew says that the air should be bad if it weren't for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let's say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That's about 6 miles. (And that's a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn't this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You've got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that's not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He'd rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God's creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don't quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn't seem to make sense. Isn't it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I'm probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there's a lot to like. There's lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There's a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I'm over-analyzing. Go check it out.

* I'm assuming Earth's a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it's not going to matter much.

Costa Rica

2008-12-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

Here, as promised, are some photos of Costa Rica:

And yes, I had just as much fun as it looks like I did.

Ode to the Dollar Coin

2008-12-22T15:30:00.000-08:00

Due to a recent horrific travel experience involving bad weather, missed connections, and fellow passengers who turned out to have bad visas, I was forced to buy a granola bar from a vending machine with a $5 bill. When I scooped the change out of the return slot, I discovered four fat little president dollar coins. These dollar coins are the most adorable money ever. They look a lot like tokens for the San Francisco trolley. They're heavy, large, and golden colored, with a satisfyingly thick ridge around the edge.

I love these little guys because they hearken back to the Olden Days when you could actually buy stuff with coins. One of these days I'm going to walk into a drug store and buy a stick of gum, and when the cashier asks for my money, I will say, "Oh, yeah, I've got this" and plonk that sucker down on the counter. I don't even like gum. And they're gold-colored, which money hasn't been for quite some time now.

I also discovered that they don't fit inside the coin slot in airport pay phones.

So, clunky, cute, and of somewhat limited usefulness. Kind of like:

Back from Costa Rica

2008-12-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

I had a wonderful time, but boy, am I glad to be home! The blog should be up and running again shortly. There will be pictures, I just haven't gotten them off the camera yet.

Signing off for a short while...

2008-12-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be on a field trip and unable to reach a computer for the next two weeks, so this blog's going to be pretty quiet. Expect lots of photos when I get back, though!

Elizabeth Jane Serbell, 1920-2008

2008-11-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

When I was in middle school, Mom was working so you'd be the one to drive me home and fix me lunch on early release days. You found out that I liked water chestnuts and after that we had to have water chestnuts in everything. Every week you'd fix stir fry with water chestnuts in it.

You will be lovingly remembered by your three daughters, five grandchildren, and too many students to keep track of.

The Order of the Stick

2008-11-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

I appear to have gotten so excited about this review that I’ve written quite a lot of text. Here’s the abstract: The Order of the Stick, webcomic, found at Giant in the Playground Games. A very clever parody of D&D games, with better characterization than some novels I’ve read. Go check it out.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the comic book format coming into its own. Comic artists have decided to relabel their work “graphic novels” and argue that there’s nothing about combining words and pictures that makes the product inherently trash. I have to agree with them there, people have been putting words and text together since time immemorial. Graphic novelists seek to break free of the pow! bam! superhero tradition and produce actual art. Or is it literature? Works such as Persepolis and the Sandman series have been groundbreaking artistic successes.

Where does Rich Burlew’s The Order of the Stick fit into all of this? I’m not sure if I could call it a graphic novel. It’s a free webcomic that Burlew publishes a couple times a week on his website, Giant in the Playground, though there are bound versions available, too. It’s got its share of pratfall jokes, and the people are all stick figures, though they seem to have an XKCD-like elegance to them.

Yet this is one of the most psychologically complex comics I have read, right up there with Sandman and Persepolis. You wouldn’t think this would be true, judging from the premise: it’s a parody of role-playing games.

But that’s the genius of this strip. Burlew manages to render toothless genre clichés that would make most fantasy writers run screaming by tackling them head on. Roy Greenhilt and his heroic band of misfits take the absurdities of their universe for granted. For example, in this strip, our heroic band of adventurers is traveling through the woods when a band of ogres ambushes them. Haley Starshine points out that their horses should have been able to see them coming, so the ogres back up and try again. Familiars and horses vanish when they’re not needed by the narrative, monsters get hurt after the fact when characters realize they forgot to add a level bonus, and everybody frets about how many hit points they have remaining. It's common knowledge that the tavern is the local employment agency. The characters seem to know they’re living inside a game, but to them it’s their world.

Which brings me to Redcloak. He’s what you would call a disgruntled NPC. If you don’t know what that stands for, you probably won’t get a lot of the humor in this strip. (It’s Non-Player Character, by the way.) He’s a goblin cleric. A villain, to be sure, but a narratively delicious one. His backstory is published in a prequel, Start of Darkness. Start of Darkness doesn’t just verge upon legitimacy as a work of literature. This one has made it. See, Redcloak wishes all the Good-aligned races would stop slaughtering every last goblin woman, man and child just because they have green skin and yellow eyes. Whoa! We’ve been going along reading Order of the Stick for some light comedy, and all of a sudden we’re grappling with issues of genocide.

There’s something wrong with the Alignment system in this world. Different-colored humans get along just fine, and the various Good-aligned races, though there’s the occasional wisecrack about height, seem to manage to lump it pretty well, too. But for some reason Good characters have license to slaughter Evil sentient beings just because. Even when Evil characters aren’t all that bad and Good characters aren’t always that great. Burlew’s done a great job of humanizing the greenskins here. Watching Redcloak’s decline and fall into becoming henchman to a lich is truly painful to see. The little cruelties, like where Redcloak’s promising nephew doesn’t even get to die on screen, are the worst.

And, oh, right, this world has protagonists, too. They’re a lot less complex than the baddies, but they’re still really fun to follow. Even though Roy’s a melee fighter, he’s actually quite bright. He’s on a quest to kill his dad’s old archenemy (the aforementioned lich) in order to prove that he can do it with a sword. Elan (human bard), is an idiot, except when he’s not an idiot and saves everyone’s kiester. Vaarsuvius (elven wizard) is delightfully gender ambiguous. Even Haley (human rogue archer) is more complex than first meets the eye.

If you’ve played a couple rounds of Dungeons and Dragons or a little World of Warcraft, you’ll probably love this strip. It’s remarkably intelligent. There’s visual jokes (Roy’s dad’s tombstone reads 1102-1124, 1124-1143, 1144-1149, 1149-1158, 1158-1159, 1159-1168, 1168-1180) and even literary references (when they pull the mysterious Thing out of the deepest darkest jungle, one of the pith-helmety types tells Marlow to go get the boat). If you don’t get that, your high school English class was missing something. Scroll back up and read the name of the prequel. Order of the Stick is not over yet, so I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. Oh, and Mr. Burlew, with a backstory as awesome as that, I expect Redcloak’s demise to be of nothing less than Snapean proportions of epicness. Just to let you know.

Go check it out on his site. We also happen to have the two prequels right here in the Benton House library. (It never hurts to plug Sci-Fi house, right?)

Celebrity Philosopher Smackdown

2008-11-07T13:41:00.000-08:00

Mortal: Hmm…
[There are a pair of soft poofs and a man in 19th-century clothing appears on one of the mortal’s shoulders, and a man in 18th-century clothing on the other.]
Kant: You weren’t about to steal paper out of that printer, were you?
Bentham: Well, hurry up and get on with it.
Mortal: Hey, what happened to the angel and demon?
Bentham: They’re on vacation. We’ll take it from here.
Kant: And I’m going to tell you not to steal paper from out of the printers in the library.
Bentham: Oh, come on, Immanuel. The cost to the college is negligible. Paper is what, a fraction of a cent a sheet? Meanwhile the benefit to this mortal here is quite real and immediate.
Mortal: I need to put a sign up about my lost bike.
Bentham: Overall, there’s more good being done than harm.
Kant: [crosses his arms belligerently] Yeah, and what if everybody stole paper from the printer? The college’s paper budget would go up, and they would have to scrimp on other supplies, or raise tuition for the students. That doesn’t sound so harmless.
Mortal: Jeez, you sound like my mother.
Bentham: If they raised tuition, the students would essentially be paying for the paper they took, making the decision morally neutral.
Kant: Utilitarian claptrap.
Bentham: You’d have people do things that are stupid and wrong just to conform to some … general principle! ‘Always tell the truth.’ What if your dear, aged Aunt Ethel wants to know what you thought of that magenta-and-orange sweater she sent you, eh? EH?
Mortal: Guys, guys–
Marx: The paper supply should be socialized.
Kant: Oh, hey, Karl. Long time no see.
Marx: Well, it’s been kind of rough since 1989.
Mortal: What the hell is going on here? I just want my paper.
Marx: If, after long and bloody class warfare, you made the paper publicly available, the people could take paper each according to their needs, and everybody would be happy.
Bentham: [whispers] I told you he was nuts.
Mortal: That doesn’t exactly help with my immediate problem.
Marx: What do I care about your immediate problem? Workers of the world unite!
Kant: Meanwhile, Jeremy, you seem to have the misguided impression that–
Plato: That paper is but a mere shadow of the true Form of Paperness.
Neo: I’ll second that. Wait – what?
Mortal: Guys–
Simpson: Where’s the donuts?
Bentham: Dude, wrong Homer.
Mortal: Guys–
Nietzsche: This conversation is meaningless.
Kierkegaard: You’re all a bunch of idiots!
Mortal: Aaaaaaah!
[The philosophers fall silent for a moment.]
Bentham: Well, looks like we drove another one around the bend.
Kant: [high-fives him] Nice work!

In other news...

2008-11-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Researchers have discovered that LolCat memes are much older than anybody could have imagined. The following passage is from the Canterbury Tales:

This chanoun seyde, 'freend, ye doon amis...'

The Future is Now

2008-11-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

My congratulations to president-elect Barack Obama.

But that's not where the real news happened last night. In a television first, one of CNN's newscasters appeared on the show via hologram. I can't tell you how long I've waited for somebody to use real live holograms to communicate. Probably ever since seeing Star Wars. FTL and sentient computers cannot be far behind.

I've Got 95 Theses and the Pope Ain't One

2008-10-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

Just check out that architecture in the background!

www.95thesesrap.com

Also, I saw a play called The Living the other day. I reviewed it on an official blog I write for for Carleton, and since the review's in keeping with the book review theme of this blog, I thought I'd post a link to it here: The Living

It Takes a Village...

2008-10-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Don’t get me wrong; the Princeton Review is a delightful website. I’m not exactly shopping around for colleges anymore, but it’s fun to look up Carleton every once in a while and feel smug about our rankings. “Happiest Students,” “School Runs like Butter,” “Best College Radio Station?” We’re doing well. But Princeton has gotten one thing wrong. The last time I looked Carleton up, what to my wondering eyes should appear? “Campus environment” is listed as “village.”

Sorry, Princeton, but Northfield is no village. I’m not sure how you’re calculating this, perhaps with numerical population cutoffs or something. But the term “village” brings to mind something from 16th century England, which Northfield most definitely is not. Here are some other reasons Northfield is not a village:

• We don’t have a well.
• We do have electricity.
• Last I checked, the area is 100% vampire and mad-scientist free.
• On a related note, Northfield residents to date have never destroyed anything with torches and pitchforks, dangerous or otherwise.
• We have street intersections with stoplights. Really, we do! They’re out by the highway.
• No witch trials.
• If Northfield were to be cut off from the rest of the world, our population is high enough that we run no risk of inbreeding problems.
• Main Street isn’t Main Street, it has a name. It’s called Division.
• I can walk down Division Street and run into people I don’t know.
• If Northfield is a village, where, pray tell, is the village idiot?
• Never witnessed a tractor going down the center of town.
• Economy does not revolve around the growing of corn and soybeans. Wait…

The things you find on Wikipedia...

2008-10-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

Dinococcus radiodurans is a kind of bacterium whose name means "terrible berry that withstands radiation." How cool is that?

I wish my name meant "terrible berry that withstands radiation."

Tigana

2008-10-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

"This is one of those stories in which the very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart."

Said the review on Amazon.com. My own impression was something more along the lines of meh. I'd give this book maybe a 3 or a 4 on the Richter scale, you know, the sort of earthquake that rattles the windows a bit, and people who felt it can talk about it for the next day or two (I'm from California originally.)

The premise for the book is really a pretty cool curse. While King Brandin is conquering the western half of the Peninsula of the Palm, his son dies in battle in Tigana, one of the Palm's greatest provinces. Brandin extracts revenge from the Tiganans by obliterating the province's name. Nobody from outside of the province will be able to hear it when the word "Tigana" is spoken. Pretty sweet, huh?

Unfortunately, the book is marred. I can see where the Amazon reviewer got the "very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart." Every two or three pages, it seems, some character or another is falling passionately in love, railing at the injustice of the Tigana curse, getting his or her heart broken, having a life-altering revelation, or getting brutally murdered. It all adds up to I can't believe any of these characters, and believe me, there are dozens of them. And Guy Gavriel Kay finds it necessary to tell us the life story of all of them, in lengthy backstory.

Here's an example of the histrionics these characters get into:

"Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. In the wizard's eyes hatred and terror vied for domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointed it at Alessan in a gesture of violent negation."

Alessan had just bound the wizard to his will using some very old magic. How about shock? Disbelief? No, Erlein pitches a hissy fit before he even learns the stipulations of his binding.

I quit about halfway through, after the third or fourth unnecessary sex scene. I did, however, skim through the ending out of curiosity. There is an impressive casualty rate on a par with Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which probably would tear me apart had I actually cared about any of these people. Okay, I cared about Tomasso. But he doesn't play an active role after about the first fifth of the book.

I'm sad to say that this book is better than most of its brethren. Kay is original in that his story is set in an upside-down wannabe medieval Italy instead of wannabe medieval England, some of the characters are (gasp!) gay, and there is no clearly definable Dark Lord. But how can I trust an author who uses the phrase "river of tears" in a non-facetious manner?

St. Olaf College – Fact or Fiction?

2008-10-12T19:11:00.000-07:00

Most of us accept The Legend of St. Olaf College without too much undue reflection. It is Carleton’s shadowy sister college, located in a remote corner of Northfield that can only be accessed by car or Love Bus. But how many of us have ever actually been to St. Olaf? Is it possible we are being hoodwinked by the Northfield Chamber of Commerce? What sort of a small town has two colleges in it? Skeptics suspect some conspiracy, while believers protest St. Olaf’s existence. My aim in this essay is to bring a critical voice to this debate, pointing out some major landmarks of the issue without leaning too much to either side.

The reputed location of St. Olaf College is conveniently difficult to access. It is said to be found on the top of a hill in the furthest recesses of Northfield. One cannot walk there. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried, one afternoon when I didn’t have too much work to do. I got about halfway up the hill before it started getting dark and I had to turn back or risk getting eaten by werewolves.

Many people have reported glimpsing … something … out the windows of the Love Bus on its circumnavigation of the town. Just for an instant. A place, with strangely attractive stone buildings that all match. It is evocative as well as college-like in appearance. These visions are probably the original source of the St. Olaf legend. Nobody I’ve spoken to has actually gotten off the bus at this location, however. They were all on their way to the Target.

I have one final point to make about the location of St. Olaf. How is this region of Northfield supposed to be humanly habitable if it is so far from the Econofoods? It must be a difficult existence for the people who live there, or else they all have cars.

The tradition of St. Olaf college goes deep into Northfield’s history. It is almost as cherished a tradition as the Jesse James day festival, though the latter has a great deal more founding in historical fact. To this day, local shopkeepers put signs in their windows inviting St. Olaf students to come in and buy the merchandise! It seems to be roughly analogous to putting a bowl of milk out for the fairies so they won’t go on the attack. The definitive website dedicated to the legend of St. Olaf can be found at www.stolaf.edu. The site is exhaustive, covering everything from a speculative class schedule to school history and even maps of the grounds. There is no way of knowing how much of it is made up, of course.

The most compelling piece of evidence, and what has gotten most of us convinced at one point or another, is the Ole sightings. Of course, the sightings always happen in circumstances that are hardly conducive to making the people involved good eyewitnesses. They generally happen in the dead of night and involving the heavy use of alcohol. It’s been said that it’s the alcohol itself that attracts them, as it doesn’t exist in their home dimension. They are strange, strangely beautiful beings. Inevitably the police get involved when such a sighting occurs, but by the time cameras have arrived, the Oles have vanished.

St. Olaf College: cold, hard fact? Or just a fancy of the townies that deserves to join the ranks of the Fountain of Youth and the Loch Ness Monster? I’ll leave you with the testimony of an anonymous freshman who claims to have been abducted by Oles:

“I mean, I don’t even remember what I was doing that night, so it could have all been a hallucination, you know? But it felt so real. I was just coming out of a Sayles dance with some of my buddies. It was one in the morning.

“And they were there. They were… they were… they’re not like us, all right? Hypnotic. They took me into their vehicle. I – I remember flashing lights, white in the front and red in the back. They took me to this place where there were more of them. I wasn’t scared. That was the weirdest part. They kept talking to me in this language I didn’t understand.

“And then … I don’t really want to talk about the part with the probes.”

[Here the freshman is silent for a while to compose himself.]

“When I woke up I was in the Arb. I have no idea if any of it really happened or not.”

Damn it, Frodo!

2008-10-12T19:05:00.001-07:00

This guy lives right behind the door in the Benton House library:

He's a cardboard cutout, but from the corner of one's eye, it looks suspiciously like a four-foot-tall person with a sword is lurking in the corner. Every time I go in there I think I'm going to get knifed. What is he doing in our library, anyway? Isn't he supposed to be out saving the world from a particular ring?

Grizelda is on iTunes!

2008-10-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

I didn't even know you could do that, but the Podiobooks website said that anybody could upload a podcast to the iTunes directory. That's pretty cool.

Grizelda's still as free of charge as ever, though.

CAPTCHA is a Voight-Kampff test

2008-10-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

I can’t pass the little squiggly-letter test on the Internet. You know how these work: when you’re trying to log into a high-security page on the Internet or post a comment on a blog, the computer will give you a series of messed-up letters in a box and you have to type in what the letters say. It’s supposed to prove you’re a human being and not a computer program trying to spam the site. Humans are smart enough to figure out what the letters are, but computer programs aren’t, right?

Yeah, right.

I tend to get bogged down in minutiae when faced with one of these. Take a look at the following example:

Is it not debatable that that word could spell either “pctding” or “potding?” The p and the t have holes in them; maybe the second letter is actually an o with a hole in it, cleverly disguised as a c. The word might even be “pording,” you never know. And so I guess wrong and the computer gives me back a snippy little message that I have to try again, with a new set of letters that are no better.

There is clearly only one reasonable explanation for this. I must be a replicant and don’t know it.

(Image courtesy of alatissian.com, who apparently makes these sort of things.)

The Albino Squirrel LIVES!

2008-09-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

This little guy likes to hang around our house. I've been trying over a week to capture him on film. I think I'll name him Moby Dick.

Jumping Starfishes

2008-09-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

Spotted in the campus Noon News Bulletin today:

USELESS FACT: Elephants are the only animal that can't jump.

Sorry, useless-fact-finder for the NNB, but I beg to differ. Snails cannot jump. Nor can starfish, tapeworms, or whales. Perhaps you meant elephants are the only land mammals that can't jump?

This is a Smeerp

2008-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Turkey City Lexicon
Just to settle the matter once and for all.

Happy back to school, everybody!

Here it is, guys...

2008-09-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Grizelda, the podcast novel, is hitting the ether.

Check it out at www.podiobooks.com

And speaking of interesting plants...

2008-09-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

This is called a Victoria plant. I snapped some photos of it at the botanical gardens in St. Paul. It's the hugest waterlily of all time – the one in the overhead photo is at least 10 feet across, maybe 15.

Ugly plant!

2008-09-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

It's called a tacca chantrieri, or bat flower, native to southeast Asia. I want one.

Image from Thomson & Morgan seeds.

You know you're a scientist when...

2008-09-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

You encounter a toy cash register at the local Target and you must drop everything to push every button on the machine, observe the little colored flags that pop up, and try to figure out whether there is any pattern to the correspondence.

Unfortunately, there isn't.

These toy manufacturers should have taken advantage of the opportunity to make the cash register an educational experience for the tykes. Say you pressed "7" and got back

[flag] [no flag] [flag]

Would it really have been so difficult to make the flags stand for the values of the numbers in binary?

Whoo!

2008-08-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Grizelda is done! Recorded, sound-edited, compressed, and ID3-tagged. I'd go out and buy myself a beer if I was, you know, over 21.

Random observation

2008-08-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

"I'm glad I switched to Vista" Google hits: 1 unique site.

Well, now there'll be two, but still.

Aha!

2008-08-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Evil Editor (he will not reveal his actual identity) runs a successful blog where readers can submit queries or the beginnings of their novels for him to rip into mercilessly. Usually this is to great comedic effect. Part of the running joke is that he's got this piece of clipart of a dude in muttonchops that he keeps recycling by Photoshopping it into all sorts of pictures.

Then I ran across this comic. Notice a similarity? Something must be going on here. Either Evil Editor has branched out into sausage purchasing, or David Maliki ! and the Editor must both be using the same clipart book.

P.S. No, that's not a typo.

Deep Space 9

2008-08-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's an old show, yes, but I was only introduced to it the other day. Some sci-fi house friends have the show on DVD and they've been playing it on the house TV. Fascinating. First of all, it's got way better developed characters than the original Star Trek. But what prompted me to blog about it is the way they get the most bang out of their cheap-o special effects.

There's this episode where the shapeshifter, Odo, is at a loggerheads with Garak. Instead of actually fighting him, he starts describing all the things he might do to him. "Shall I reach out my arms and strangle you from across the room?" Instant vivid mental image, without actually having to spend any money on morphing Odo. Reminds me of a trick my English teacher pointed out in Macbeth. There's a scene with a couple of scouts standing on the top of a hill watching an epic battle. They describe it to each other, exclaiming just how awesome it is, though the audience doesn't actually see anything. It's a nice cop-out: it would have been kind of hard to stage an epic battle scene on the scale of, say, Pelennor Fields on a stage in 1600.

(Image from Wikipedia.)

Update on Grizelda

2008-08-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

The chapter submission went through! The Podiobooks official person said all the technical specs for my audio files are good, so I'm good to go for uploading chapters to the site. So I'll just plug away at editing chapters (I'm on 18 of 28) and upload them all just before September 15.

Oh, and I've got a brand shiny new audio promo for Grizelda, which I can't show you guys because Blogger doesn't host audio files. Bummer.

Speaking of Octopus

2008-08-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

This is all in Spanish, but it's pretty cool. Wait till the part where it's smooshing itself through a tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8cf7tPoN5o

Octopus + News

2008-08-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear. I just realized my notes to self are really cryptic.

~~crit stuff~~
Netflix, ride airport
crit stuff
last couple books

7:51 silence
pajamas

octopus + news

This was a to-do list, honest!

Barack Obama is for Sale

2008-08-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

No joke. I saw this in a storefront window in downtown Northfield. You can't see it at this magnification, but the tag around his neck says $29.99. What a bargain!

Steam Trains and Ghosts - Margaret Taylor's Writing Blog

Steam Trains and Ghosts is Moving

Sweet Potato Cranberry Casserole

Book Covers!

A Very *Traditional* Klingon War Chant

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery

The Tower at Stony Wood

The "Sesame Seed Treat"

Darn Those Vegans

Pineapple Spice Pudding Cake

Witches

Eh-heh-heh!

Jack of Kinrowan

Keeps Me Awake at Night

The Confederacy of Heaven: Coming in 2010 to a Theater Near You

Vampire Carrying Capacity

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

9: Awesome Robot Pterodactyl

Pardon the dust...

Uncle Silas

9 Movie Trailer

A Visual Tour of Berkeley Part 3

Characters and Viewpoint

Robot Toilets!

Mondegreen

Unexplained Mediumship Fragment

Lentil Curry

A Visual Tour of Berkeley (Well, San Francisco, Really) Part 2

The Art of Rough Travel: Advice from a 19th Century Explorer

A Visual Tour of Berkeley, Part 1

Shadowplay: Way to Character Development!

Yes!

Roofs vs. Rooves

Unholy Warcry

Course Numbers

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

New Arrivals at Benton Library

Soup

Twilight Had a Genuinely Funny Moment

New Arrivals at Benton Library

Beloved

What do Inkheart, the Turing Test, and viruses have to do with each other?

The Almighty Guru

Peptides are kind of like proteins...

Elves

Fritter Thingies

Cool Word of the Day

At Heidelberg University, Part 7

Girl Genius: Now That's How Steampunk Ought to be Done

At Heidelberg University, Part 6

At Heidelberg University, Part 5

At Heidelberg University, Part 4

The captions get out of hand...

Lyrics

Statistics

At Heidelberg University, Part 3

At Heidelberg University, Part 2

Picking Your Battles FAIL

At Heidelberg University, Part 1

"My ear, it's not supposed to have eels in it!"

The Graveyard Book

Mucca Pazza

Daemons

Shelfari

Mystery of the Universe

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

City of the Beasts

Mainspring

Costa Rica

Ode to the Dollar Coin

Back from Costa Rica

Signing off for a short while...

Elizabeth Jane Serbell, 1920-2008

The Order of the Stick

Celebrity Philosopher Smackdown

In other news...

The Future is Now

I've Got 95 Theses and the Pope Ain't One

It Takes a Village...

A Very Traditional Klingon War Chant