I've been spending a lot of time lying in bed, reading. Not that I'm objecting to that, per se... it's been one of my favorite activities all my life. No, what I'm objecting to is why I've been lying in bed, reading, which is that this hurt back has gone on longer than any hurt back in the history of my life.

Of course, I'm older now than I used to be, and they tell me that one of the things that happens as you age is less ability to recover from injury....

Anyway, I've read several of Terry Pratchet's Diskworld novels. We got The Color of Magic from Netflix the other day, you see, and it started me off wanting to read more....

And yes, all of my friends who are already diskworld fans may look down their noses at me, but somehow, I never got around to them before, in spite of the fact that I think Good Omens is quite possibly the funniest book ever written, and Pratchet had a hand in it.

It's interesting to me, though, that the Diskworld novels are not serial. They're episodic. The characters and the setting are established, but everything is reset to ground state at the end... Rincewind will be on the run, the witches will be in the Ramtops, and anything that changes will have been forgotten by the beginning of the next novel.

It's comforting, in a way. When you pick up that next novel, you know that it will be funny, and the characters you love will be there, being what you love them for. In this case, it's all right that there's no character growth, that there's no real "what happens next," because that's not why you read the novels. You read them to have a bit of a laugh, and pass some time, and then go on with your own "what happens next."

Which, at the moment, doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be.

I think I'll go to bed.

I like bed.

I intended to go over to "A Foam and Fabric Place" today, since snotblossom had pointed them out as the source of the bedding foam she and Varr use. I figured I'd windowshop there, and at the Book Stop, but I didn't actually get over to Fourth Avenue today.

I was going to. Instead, I chatted a little bit with lysander_cat when he got up, and then we decided to go have breakfast at the Good Egg. I took The Poetics of Space with me, though I confess to some trepidation about its suitability as a breakfast book, as it's rather text-dense. I could not, however, find Sharpe's Company on the shelf with the other Sharpe's books, and rather than launch a protracted search, I just decided to take what I'd been reading the night before.

It turned out alright. Sometimes, when lysander_cat and I go to breakfast, we have discussions. Sometimes, we hardly say two words to each other, for the reading of books. This was one of the discussion mornings. We talked about prostitution, whether it was the strains of the profession itself, or the societal pressures that tended to make prostitutes somewhat psychologically damaged; we talked about working for a wage in any field; we talked about City politics a little bit.

Came back to the house, sat down, played a little WoW. Chatted a little bit with childofsnow about her duct-tape tailor's dummy.

After a while, got up and went over to rainherder's house, and watched As You Like It with rainherder and her mother. It was a 1977 production which starred Helen Mirren, and it wasn't bad. Some of the costumes were rather nice. We did have a bit of a laugh with the ongoing use of the word "desert" when they were in a forrest, but that was just us being silly.

Came home, emptied the dishwasher, put some dishes in the dishwasher, washed the grill that Mrs. lysander_cat likes to use, and other such mundane, domestic tasks.

Sat down, played WoW again, got my main character to level 66.

It's life, Jim. Exactly as we know it.

Well, I went over to my storage room today, and went through two piles of boxes... I don't use cardboard boxes, but plastic ones -- they keep the contents safer from vermin and weather, and don't tend to fall apart when you lift them after they've been sitting in storage for five years.

Anyway, as I said, I went through the first two piles of boxes. Each pile is five or six boxes deep, so that was something on the order of ten boxes. I separated out things I hadn't missed in the five years they've been sitting in storage, and took three boxes of books and cetera over to the used bookstore, Bookman's. It netted me enough money to get my accounts out of negative balance, and buy lunch at Taco Bell.

But not enough to make a long term difference in my situation.

When I was home over Spring Break, satharn gave me a copy of a collected edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories which were published in Strand magazine, complete with the original drawings. I've slowly been reading them, and rather enjoying it.

I haven't read Holmes since I was a wee lad, when I read them largely because they were something "smart kids" were expected to read. I found them a little stuffy then, and far less so, now. Perhaps it's because I've now read far more Victorian fiction, and find the Holmes stories to actually be quite readable when considered in that genre. Perhaps it's that I'm a little stuffy myself, now. When I read them as a lad, I found myself quite interested in Holmes himself... now I rather admire Dr. James Watson.

It's interesting that, in the majority of cinematic representations, Holmes and Watson are bachelors, living together in a set of rooms at 221 Baker Street. In fact, this arrangement only lasted the first couple of stories... Dr. Watson got married, and remains so for most of their association.

At any rate, thank you, satharn for the gift of the book. I'm rather enjoying it.

Last summer, I read Hell's Gate and its sequel, Hell Hath No Fury by David Weber and Linda Evans. The MacGuffin in the novels is that there are infinite simultaneous realities, not so much parallel as perpendicular to each other. Where the worlds touch, inter-dimensional portals open spontaneously... ranging from one to thirty or forty kilometers in radius.

For some reason, tonight, I was thinking about the MacGuffin. If you know that you're emerging onto another Earth, shaped essentially the same way as this one, but you didn't know where you were emerging... how would you figure out where you were? You could figure out latitude pretty easily, but longitude becomes a real problem... the way we've done it for a couple of centuries is comparing the observed time of a celestial event with the reference time at which it occurred at Greenwich, England.

But if you don't know what time it is in Greenwich, the whole thing falls apart. There are more complicated ways of determining longitude, including observing the passage of the moons of Jupiter behind the planet. But how much equipment would you need to haul into a new world to see the moons of Jupiter, and make the required observations?

And then, once you knew where you were... where would you head, first? The beaches of South Africa, for the Diamonds? Sutter's Mill, for the gold? The Uranium fields of Kazakhstan? Probably not a good plan, that last one, unless you have the right equipment. But the first two... easy money.

Well, easy, except for the whole "treking across the whole world, doing the labor to recover the materials, and carting it home" part.

I rarely link YouTube video in my journal, but dorinda2212 brought this to my attention, and I think it's fabulous. ( Read more... )

For those who didn't choose to click under the lj-cut and view the film, it's about a woman from Australia who has spent most of her life as a double-leg amputee, and for whom Weta Workshop, the special effects house, built a functional prosthetic mermaid's tail to help her swim. As I watched the news video, I found myself thinking in a couple of interesting directions.

In the past, I've talked about John Varley's Steel Beach, in which he posits a society where it's easier to actually turn actors into centaurs for a season of a television drama than to repeatedly do special effects. I'm currently reading Cory Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom through Podiobooks¹ , which talks about casual body modification... one in five teenagers having a particular, popularized, set of features, people making changes to their height, et cetera... and I recently read a book entitled The Scientific Conquest of Death which leads me to believe that the ideas in those SciFi novels weren't necissarily as wild as all that.

So... if people are feeling crowded on land... why not get a body modification or several, and take to the seas? Whales and sharks are having their larks, why shouldn't we? Admittedly, it's a bit hard to cook a hamburger in the middle of the South Pacific, but I can imagine island resorts having aquatic tables....

rainherder and I went to see Watchmen yesterday, and subsequently wandered around Park Place mall. It took me a little while to process the movie. As I said, it's not your father's superhero movie. As rainherder said, it's not even your older brother's superhero movie. It's not an action movie, though it has action in it. And I'd almost be willing to argue that it's not really a superhero movie, even though it has superheroes in it.
( Potential for spoilers exists. )

pippinsrosy was doing a meme, where someone picked five things that they associated with her, and then she offered to choose five things about other people. And, if you comment, I'll pass it on. In the mean time, I have insomnia, so here are her five things, and what I have to say about them:

• The SCA. The TLA stands for the Society for Creative Anachronism. The Society grew out of Diana Paxson's graduation party from UC Berkley. Boiled down to its base elements, it's about people dressing up in funny clothes and having a good time pretending to live in an idealized version of the middle ages. But the details... ah, the devil is in the details.
  
  I first became aware of, and active in, the Society in Bisbee, Arizona, when I was living there with my biological father. I think I was thirteen the first summer Bisbee had a renaissance fair, and invited SCA folks down from Tucson to do a demo. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I was active with the local organization. I fell madly in love with dorinda2212, who was also an active member, and got myself halfway across the Phoenix metro area on a regular basis to see her, and participate at fighter practice -- a not inconsiderable feat, when you remember that I didn't own a car in those days, and Phoenix mass transit is a bad joke.
  
  Along the way, though, I discovered kind of the negative face of the SCA... there are pockets of people involved who forget they are playing a game. At a certain point in my life, that really alienated me, and I wandered off, and developed a bit of an attitude about the majority of SCA folks.
  
  However... after coming home from New York City, a large number of the friends I made, or reconnected with, were active members of the SCA. And I kept having cognitive dissonance between my image of the society, and the kinds of people I knew who were involved. So, on my birthday this year, with no one in Flagstaff who knew (or cared) that it was my 40^th birthday, I found myself drawn out to Crown Tourney (there's one held every six months), and I had a good time. Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet way. And I talked with some people who made me feel welcome, which is something I haven't felt much of in a while. People whose eyes didn't glaze over when I started talking about the history of tartan.
  
  So I rejoined that day. And since then, I've become an officer in the local branch, the College of Sankt Vladimir. And while I still face some isolation issues, and I'm still twice as old as virtually everyone I know in Flagstaff, at least I have people I can call and say, "Hey, I'm lonely and feeling isolated, and think you should come with me and eat too much chocolate."
  
  And really, what else does one want from a social organization?
  
  
• Love. Um. This is some kind of sick joke, right? I haven't been in a serious romantic relationship in over a decade. The last thing she said to me as she was leaving was, "you know nothing of any importance, and on topics I consider important, you're woefully ignorant." Oh, and just before that, she said, "You're good at romance... it's all the other stuff you suck at." Love? Really? You associate me with love? Huh.
  
  
• Nursing. Well, okay, yes. I am a nurse, like my father before me. (Should I dramatically throw my stethoscope aside?) I was working as The Computer Guy, and one day I realized how much it sucked. How I woke up every morning wondering if I could call in sick. So I looked for something that would make me happier. And, when I'm doing the work, and being a nurse, I usually am happy. It's just this damn Nursing School that has me ripping my teeth out.
  
  
• Anime. I like anime. I particularly like silly anime. It's such a stress reliever... they live in a much simpler world than I do. They have friends, and even when they're going through tough times, there's a feeling of camaraderie and optimism that, all too often, seems lacking in my own world. They make me smile, and forget about the real world for a little while. And did I mention that the sillier, the better?
  
  
• Literature. I read a lot, it's true. It's not that I'm indiscriminate, as anyone who's ever heard me rip into Stephen King or James Fenimore Cooper can attest. It's that there's a lot of pretty good writing out there. My mother tells me that I initially had a hard time learning to read, because of my agraphia (you should see me write without a spell checker, some time) but I don't remember that. I remember always having been enthusiastic about books. If I hadn't let my 50 books list go by the wayside, you'd see that the stuff I read is pretty eclectic, though with a strong bent towards SciFi.

Last night, I was in a room with a score of others, desporting me in forgotten dances. I am a rather clumsy dancer, and passed no two measures with the same lady, that each might have the pleasure of dancing with some other, who might manage a fair leg and fine figure.

I returned home, read a chapter of A History of Islamic Societies, and wrote my "five things I learned from the reading" assignment. Exchanged emails with Park Ranger Girl regarding the registration of her name and device for the Society, took a shower, and so to bed. Only to wake at four of the morning, and not return to sleep.

Off I went to Linguistics, and hence to Islamic History, where we watched a Time / Life video about the Swahili coast and its societies, turned in our five things pages, and then hence.

I returned to the dorm, and got in my car. I'm parked across the street from the dorm, because there's some event of size happening in the Sky Dome this weekend, and they've coopted our parking lot. Drove forth to the bank, where I paid my credit card bill, and then to Wall-Mart, where I paid my bill with them. Drove to the mall, where I got incredibly irritated with the folks at the Verizon store.

For a while now, my phone has been doing something which rather annoys me... if I set the alert sound to be anything other than the default, after a few text messages, it resets itself to the default. So I thought I'd see if there was a later version of the firmware available, and there wasn't. Not only that, but the store tech couldn't get it to perform its little trick. Of course, it took me forty-five minutes to even be able to talk to a store tech, which is the major part of why I was so irritated. It was a clear case of "My name's not on the door."

Anyway, I had lunch, and read some of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, and drove back to my own side of town. Stopped at Hastings, and picked up Othello and Kingdom of Heaven. I watched KoH when it was in the cinema, but wanted to watch it again, having now better idea of the incidents involved.

Speaking of which... as I read Crusades, I keep thinking of a book I read when little more than a lad, but I can not bring the title nor author to mind... it concerned a young Frank in the crusades, who captures an Arabic warrior who turns out to be Saladin. I remember there was discussion of how a simple Arabic warrior knew nothing of ice, but the Great Saladin served his guests shaved ice with flavors. Does this ring any bells with anyone?

Watched Othello. It is a fine enough production, but I confess that no one seems to have the passion required by the text. Of course, it's the Royal Shakespeare Company, and they are not particularly known for excesses of passion....

I splurged a little today, and bought a copy of The Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives from Hastings. It's a young adult novel, the first of a series... and I liked it very much. Michael Buckley manages to take familiar characters and put them into a modern world in a believable way. We care about Daphne and Sabrina Grimm, their vanished parents, and their strange, German-speaking grandmother Relda.

If you liked The Coachman Rat, you may like this. If you liked Jasper Fforde's fairy-tale books, you most definitely will like this.

Oh, and, I went to the College of Sankt Vladimir meeting tonight. I'm now officially the college herald.

The refrigerator still hasn't been cleaned. Mea culpa.

I've been reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel, and it's interesting how many character names S. M. Stirling stole from this, and its companion volume, The White Company. It's the sort of thing that, in my late teens, I would have worshipped, but today is just... okay. Nigel's rather young, and driven by the things that drive young men, which puts him at a little remove from me.

Had lunch at the local fast-food Italian place, Fazouli's. Went across the street to the sporting goods store, and discovered that they had no crossbows. Drove over to the little gun shop in town I like, and discovered that they had no lever-action rifles. Realized I was in the neighborhood of the seamstress shop I'd seen the sign for last night, so I wandered over there.

Red Threads is a business owned and operated by two attractive young women, who said they would be happy to repair the fell of my black watch kilt, which had some seams that were starting to come undone. (I've heard from other kilties that they've had the same problem with theirs from the same manufacturer).

Then I came home, sat on the sofa to read Sir Nigel, and after about a chapter, set it aside, and took a nap. And now I'm here, writing this. Wahoo.

capt_weege works for a medical transport company here in town. With the Best Buy in Flagstaff very stubbornly not calling me for a second interview, I went down and looked into getting hired on with the same medical transport company. To my mild surprise, the place is also the headquartes for Yellow Cab here in Tucson, so I stood in line behind some cab drivers, waiting for a chance to talk to a lady behind a sheet of bulletproof glass. She gave me an application to fill out... one of the more rudimentary applications I've ever filled out... and I did.

Another lady, a bottle blonde with surprisingly large breasts, and a surprisingly tight t-shirt, came out, took my application, told me that she didn't have time to sit down with me then, but could I come back on Wednesday at 2, and bring a five-year driving history with me, please? So I had to go to the Motor Vehicles Division (MVD), and wait... and wait... and wait. At the end of the wait, there was also a SYT waiting, who was wearing a scoop-necked t-shirt and a surprisingly short skirt, and kept showing more than (I believe) she intended to of what was underneath each.

I got the driving history, and it has only one thing on it... something I don't remember happening. As I look at the date, I sort of wonder if it was actually my younger brother, who got the car after I got mom's. It's not a moving violation, though, and it's the only thing on the record, so I'm not going to kick up a fuss about it.

Afterwards, I went over to Fourth Avenue, where I visited the new location of the Book Stop (I know, shocking, isn't it? Me, in a book store!) and had lunch at Bison Witches. At the Book Stop, I picked up a copy of Tanith Lee's Metalic Love, her sequel to The Silver Metal Lover. If, like me, you loved The Silver Metal Lover, you should probably avoid the sequel. It's more like Tanith Lee's other work, and, well, I've just never been all that taken with Tanith Lee, in general. She's dark, and negative, and often just unpleasant.

I met up with lysander_cat and his lovely wife, and we went to see Iron Man. Robert Downey, Jr. totally nailed the role of Tony Stark, and the CGI is truly impressive. Plus? The bit after the credits!

So, the upshot of all this is that I'm staying in Tucson, at least until Wednesday.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved a book called The King who Rained. It had a picture on the cover of a cartoon king (who, as I think about it now, looked kind of like Burger King's current mascot) who was drawn as a rain cloud, with vast falls of precipitation coming off him. Later, when I realized that, depending on the language one looked at, my name could be translated both as "King" and "Rain," it tickled me no end.

All of which is preface to telling you that I went with Lab Partner Lady to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age this evening. It conflates events that actually took place years apart, exaggerates the roles certain people played in events, and nearly ignores others -- but as historically based movies go, it's not bad. Very dramatic -- and isn't that why we go to see movies?