It would be rather convenient if this worked.
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09:06:29 PM, Saturday 26 May 2007
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(3)
06:09:42 PM,
Saturday 26 May 2007
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Having been given a gentle shove by the very generous PF, I've joined the teeming masses on flickr. I'll continue to post them all here, though. A small portion of the archives is out there now, more will follow if I ever get this lot tagged.
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(3)
08:47:00 PM,
Friday 25 May 2007
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Also, Nutella? It isn't bad. Really, it isn't. But it also is not chocolate, it's cocoa. It's like drinking cranberry juice when you're expecting milk. No, not that bad. Cranberry when you're expecting apple. But the think is, my mind just won't adjust. It refuses to expect Nutella. It sees chocolate, it smells chocolate, and then it's let down, ever single time, and I think, I could be using these junk food calories on chocolate, and I repent, while my tastebuds struggle on, disoriented and unhappy.
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(1)
06:31:28 PM,
Wednesday 23 May 2007
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Having complained about it elsewhere, I wanted to say some things about To say nothing of the dog by Connie Willis. It's an extremely promising book. It has taste. It starts off with a bang, with a sort of intoxicated first person narrator thing which is pretty brilliantly done. It steals several excellent jokes from various places. It has some excellent scenes, and I can't think of a better dog in literature offhand. It has things to say about God The Universe and Everything, but says them in a pleasingly behindhand manner. It's a very christian book in an interesting way. I've even got a opening question about it, about whether time travel stories are all ultimately about the nature of causality and therefore God. The trouble is that it's also a nominal member of two classes of books I love dearly, the mystery and the drawing room romantic comedy, and it's bloody rotten at both of them. The 'detectives' are painfully obtuse, even for detectives. The answer is painfully obvious for ages. And yes, that's sort of funny briefly, but it keeps going. It also isn't funny on a prose level, it's got good gags and a respectable farce of a plot, but it's just sort of... wodehouse fanfic? No, that's not fair. But it's got the normal disembodied feel of sci-fi, without the justification. Boiled prose with the occasional bit of wit wedged in sideways. And the romance, well, was also rather sci-fi. And then it whips out a entire package of macguffins and unintroduced characters while sprinting to the resolution. The MacGuffins tie into the metaphysical subtext, I guess, but they're macguffins nontheless. And Jeeves wasn't a Butler, goddammit. For the first 100 pages, I thought it was going to be terrific. The intoxicated first person narrator mystery story has immense potential. It isn't a bad book by any means. It's even a good book, and one day I might read something else by her. It was just sorely disappointing. Like Snowcrash it disappointed expectations it raised for itself, though, which is far better than disappointing expectations that it came wrapped in.
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(4)
05:48:07 PM,
Wednesday 23 May 2007
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Reservoir
This is a small inlet, we walked around it in a couple hours, mostly on deer trails. The reservoir is vast, and it apparently it wasn't enough, because they built a larger one further out a few decades later.
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(12)
09:53:01 PM,
Tuesday 22 May 2007
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Old Stone Church
I was rather disappointed with the Old Stone Church. It was build in the late 19th century, shortly before the town was abandoned to make room for all the water. It was apparently a spectacular ruin until the 1970's, when 3 of the walls fell in and they rebuilt it. The roof is solid. the inside consists of a gravel floor and some steel supports. Only the near wall is original, the rest are cinder block inside. And worst of all, it has a vast american flag strapped to the other side. It would have been a fantastic ruin.
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09:38:03 PM,
Tuesday 22 May 2007
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Cedar and Pine
This was on the edge of the Wachusset Reservoir. It seems they planted a row of cedar all around the edge, and a row of pine behind it. Presumably something to do with preventing erosion. I'd never really thought about all the work that went into building the shoreline of a reservoir, but it would have to be well defined and stable, and you could see there had been a lot of earthwork done. The old road grades leading into the water were rather sombre.
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(4)
09:23:38 PM,
Tuesday 22 May 2007
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A beaver was here
At one point I thought the trail was being maintained, but it was being maintained by a beaver. I now have a nice stick covered with toothmarks.
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09:09:49 PM,
Tuesday 22 May 2007
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A cell-phone that looks just like a pocketwatch.
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(5)
05:33:50 AM,
Monday 21 May 2007
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I have trained fish! Or, at least, one of the gouramis is now plucking snails off the glass. I can't tell if she's actually managing to eat them, or just pestering them, but either way, progress! they now look upon snails as food. If I kill a couple snails and put flakes in at the same time, the gouramis go for the snails first.
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06:07:43 PM,
Thursday 17 May 2007
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Walking this morning, I was pondering the difference between Hitchens and Falwell, who both thrive by means of public intolerance. In one way, it's tempting to say they're the same, but taking that position denies that there is any difference between enlightened thought and pernicious nonsense. And when I get home, the internet has delivered a present:
Chistopher Hitchens on Falwell.
Note the opening question... Did anyone tell Anderson Cooper who he was interviewing? Was this a prank a staffer pulled on him?
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(8)
08:53:45 AM,
Thursday 17 May 2007
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site & script courtesy of Moss
