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Happy birthday, Ursula LeGuin!
21 Oct 2009 09:47 amI just wrote a long post for my other blog, if you care to read it.
UK LeGuin is one of the reasons I love science fiction.
UK LeGuin is one of the reasons I love science fiction.
Amazon binge!
29 Aug 2009 02:55 pmI got another reward certificate in yesterday's mail. I still had one from a month or two ago on the kitchen table, so I decided to bring them upstairs, since I remembered having another one up here. I was wrong; I actually had 2. So I had $100 of free Amazon money, which I decided I should spend. (I also had $6 left over from my last reward certificate purchase. I'm honestly terrified to ask how many of these we get in a year, at one certificate for $2500 of credit card use. I'll guess about 9. All our discretionary spending goes on the card.)
( So I went through my wish list and cleared a bunch of things off it. )
And in a few hours, Mo & Nolan are coming over with take-out from Tandoor and a weird beer (hopefully the Dogfish Head Sah'tea?) and we're gonna try weird beers. I have a bottle of New Holland's Dragon's Milk Ale (aged in oak barrels!) in the fridge.
( So I went through my wish list and cleared a bunch of things off it. )
And in a few hours, Mo & Nolan are coming over with take-out from Tandoor and a weird beer (hopefully the Dogfish Head Sah'tea?) and we're gonna try weird beers. I have a bottle of New Holland's Dragon's Milk Ale (aged in oak barrels!) in the fridge.
Fun and excitement
23 Aug 2009 09:25 amSo I'm in scenic Jacksonville for work. This means I got up yesterday at 4:30 to leave the house by 6 to drive 3 hours or so to get here by 9, then work until 6. Today I'm working 10-6 and heading home afterward. (I saw a Taco Bell on the drive in, so I'll stop there for dinner.)
I ate at IHOP last night. I like IHOP, and I know there's vegetarian food there, unlike the Chinese buffet (which came with a good recommendation, but.) I also saw a delivery menu for a different Chinese place in the hotel lobby, but I wasn't in the mood for delivery Chinese of unknown quality. So IHOP. Conveniently it's about 100 yards from the JAX Barnes & Noble, so I hied thither to peruse the books.
I only left with three books, only one of which I'd intended to buy going in (World War One: A short history.) I spent a lot of time in the bargain books section, and they had The Girls Who Went Away marked down in hardback to 5.98, and since I've read good reviews of it, I bought that. I almost got Barbara Tuchman's medieval history book, which was in bargain for like $10, but I'm not that interested in medieval stuff.
My lucky, awesome find was a book called Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds. I say lucky because their section on Turkish history is sparse as hell (and combined with Greek history, which, um. No?) I was perusing the Middle Eastern section looking for All the Shah's Men, the history of the 1953 CIA-led coup in Iran. I found it, and I was thinking of buying it, but I flipped it over and noticed in the list of books by the author, Stephen Kinzer, a book about modern Turkish history. So I put the shah's men back and went to see if they had it. Luckily they did, but it took a minute to find it; the Greek/Turkish history section was poorly organized.
I also perused the travel section for books on Vienna and Budapest. I think the Lonely Planet city guides will be good; they're also nicely small. Unfortunately you can only get Bratislava in the Czech and Slovak Republics book, which is bigger. I'm going to get the LP Berlin Encounter guide for April, I think. Consider Eastern Europe phrasebook; wish there were one for Slovak, not just Czech. Two similar languages but not identical.
The B&N in JAX has a HUGE military section. Military history, history of warfare, strategy, books of tank and warplane IDs. This should not be surprising, since JAX is home to Camp LeJeune. I actually kind of like it, because there's this giant section of books about World War One. It's smaller than the WW2 section, though. There's also Learn Pashto, all about Arabic and Afghani customs, and support books for military spouses.
I just feel weird, this super civilian girl standing and ogling the military history books. (I almost picked up Carl von Clausewitz On War, but it's in the public domain, and I have it on my computer from the Gutenberg Project. Possibly in both English *and* German.) I'm trying to rectify my public high school lack of education about WW1, the parts the US was not involved in. I mean, shit, until I started researching for the alternate history, I don't think I knew the Ottomans were involved, or parts of North Africa, or Japan. (They were fighting Russia.) Or that the Russian Revolution happened in the middle of WW1. So I'm reading more.
I think WW1 is a lot more interesting than WW2, because it was a giant clusterfuck that could ... well, probably not have been completely averted, with the players who were on stage at the time, but have been different. But from what I've read, the early 1900s were a situation ripe for revolution and change, so it was this kettle boiling over. Human behavior is fascinating.
I ate at IHOP last night. I like IHOP, and I know there's vegetarian food there, unlike the Chinese buffet (which came with a good recommendation, but.) I also saw a delivery menu for a different Chinese place in the hotel lobby, but I wasn't in the mood for delivery Chinese of unknown quality. So IHOP. Conveniently it's about 100 yards from the JAX Barnes & Noble, so I hied thither to peruse the books.
I only left with three books, only one of which I'd intended to buy going in (World War One: A short history.) I spent a lot of time in the bargain books section, and they had The Girls Who Went Away marked down in hardback to 5.98, and since I've read good reviews of it, I bought that. I almost got Barbara Tuchman's medieval history book, which was in bargain for like $10, but I'm not that interested in medieval stuff.
My lucky, awesome find was a book called Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds. I say lucky because their section on Turkish history is sparse as hell (and combined with Greek history, which, um. No?) I was perusing the Middle Eastern section looking for All the Shah's Men, the history of the 1953 CIA-led coup in Iran. I found it, and I was thinking of buying it, but I flipped it over and noticed in the list of books by the author, Stephen Kinzer, a book about modern Turkish history. So I put the shah's men back and went to see if they had it. Luckily they did, but it took a minute to find it; the Greek/Turkish history section was poorly organized.
I also perused the travel section for books on Vienna and Budapest. I think the Lonely Planet city guides will be good; they're also nicely small. Unfortunately you can only get Bratislava in the Czech and Slovak Republics book, which is bigger. I'm going to get the LP Berlin Encounter guide for April, I think. Consider Eastern Europe phrasebook; wish there were one for Slovak, not just Czech. Two similar languages but not identical.
The B&N in JAX has a HUGE military section. Military history, history of warfare, strategy, books of tank and warplane IDs. This should not be surprising, since JAX is home to Camp LeJeune. I actually kind of like it, because there's this giant section of books about World War One. It's smaller than the WW2 section, though. There's also Learn Pashto, all about Arabic and Afghani customs, and support books for military spouses.
I just feel weird, this super civilian girl standing and ogling the military history books. (I almost picked up Carl von Clausewitz On War, but it's in the public domain, and I have it on my computer from the Gutenberg Project. Possibly in both English *and* German.) I'm trying to rectify my public high school lack of education about WW1, the parts the US was not involved in. I mean, shit, until I started researching for the alternate history, I don't think I knew the Ottomans were involved, or parts of North Africa, or Japan. (They were fighting Russia.) Or that the Russian Revolution happened in the middle of WW1. So I'm reading more.
I think WW1 is a lot more interesting than WW2, because it was a giant clusterfuck that could ... well, probably not have been completely averted, with the players who were on stage at the time, but have been different. But from what I've read, the early 1900s were a situation ripe for revolution and change, so it was this kettle boiling over. Human behavior is fascinating.
Best laid schemes...
18 Aug 2009 12:15 pmYesterday I'd planned to spend some time making tiny revisions to my flash fiction piece (that came so. very. close. to being bought) and beating my head against an outline for the new, improved version of Blue Danube Waltz. But I checked facebook and saw that my friend from high school was going to be in the area looking at apartments. She called me around 11 to ask if I wanted to do anything, and I said that would be cool. She was driving from Virginia, so it would be a while. She didn't call again until almost 2, and it was 2:45 before I left to meet her.
Needless to say, I didn't get anything useful done on my revisionating.
I did, however, get close to the end of the book I'm reading, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, which is interesting and good and giving me some weird vibes. I'll expand on that more later, once I've finished it. (It was suggested in the wake of MammothFail as an alternate history that doesn't kill off or ignore the brown people. That it is, but there's a bit of Noble Savage and a couple other tropes. I'll say up front that if you're offended by people criticising the hell out of the patriarchal desert monotheisms, you'll be offended by this book.)
Right, that was more than I wanted to get into now, but oh well.
Needless to say, I didn't get anything useful done on my revisionating.
I did, however, get close to the end of the book I'm reading, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, which is interesting and good and giving me some weird vibes. I'll expand on that more later, once I've finished it. (It was suggested in the wake of MammothFail as an alternate history that doesn't kill off or ignore the brown people. That it is, but there's a bit of Noble Savage and a couple other tropes. I'll say up front that if you're offended by people criticising the hell out of the patriarchal desert monotheisms, you'll be offended by this book.)
Right, that was more than I wanted to get into now, but oh well.
