Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day
The evolution of the US presidential campaign ad, 1952 to 1996
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
If you're still reading this after the years of neglect, bless your heart. I'm moving my personal blogging over to zedlopez.com where I will neglect it less, at least for the short term. Eventually I'll copy over my posts from mememachinego, but I'll leave everything here intact.
I've installed the latest Ubuntu, 12.04 on a couple of machines, in my usual fashion -- with the alternate install CD, I set up whole disk encryption and install a command-line system, adding the rest of my desired environment on top of that.
And on boot, I'm left with a blinking cursor on a blank screen. I assume things work if you've installed Plymouth.
It's easy enough to fix once you understand the problem -- edit /etc/default/grub to remove "quiet splash" from the default boot options and update-grub.
The acclaimed 1893: A World's Fair Mystery interactive fiction game has been available for years on a $20 CD, but for the next 5 days is available for download as part of Bundle-in-a-box's Adventure Bundle along with several graphic adventure games for the ludicrously low price of pay what you want so long as it's over $1.19 (which amount continues to drop.)
But all of the games are Windows-only, so this would still be of limited interest to everyone else, but superhero Jimmy Maher, the Digital Antiquarian, has arranged with the author to provide the TADS game file to anyone offering proof they bought it. Yay!
I just finished a rebate application, a process expressly designed to promote disqualifying errors.
I don't think I've ever worked so hard for $10.
I just finished a rebate application, a process expressly designed to promote disqualifying errors.
I don't think I've ever worked so hard for $10.
If you're near a Target that still has it, the iRiver Story HD e-reader is being dumped for $50. At that rate, I sprung for it -- there have been rare occasions when both Malasada and I have wanted to use my Nook, and it'll give me some more comfort level with rooting and hacking my Nook.
Early impressions -- the text quality is noticeably better than my Nook (the Nook Wifi a.k.a. Nook Classic). There's less glare in bright light. Page turns are faster. It's substantially lighter, but also flimsy feeling, like the smallest lateral force would snap it. Then again, the Nook has a glass screen and the iRiver doesn't, and between that and its lightness, my guess is that the iRiver's more likely to survive falls.
What I like least is its Google Books-centric-ness. It repeatedly asks me if I want to turn off airplane mode to sync with Google Books. (No, I don't. That would be why you stay in airplane mode.)
But for $50 I still think it's a pretty good deal.
Now if only I had more time right now for reading...
Ken Hite's RPG review column, Out of the Box, has a habit of disappearing from its various venues. But thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine, all of this Hite-ian goodness can be yours:
Gamers Realm 2001-06-29 to 2003-07-18
Gaming Report 2003-07-21 to 2006-08-03
Indie Press Revolution 2008-09-08 to 2010-03-10 (not all on one page -- you'll have to browse a bit)
Every so often, people go on about how Cthulhu isn't all that, given that he was defeated by being rammed by a steamboat.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
But what's our only source for this? The journal of a freighter's sole survivor, who describes his shipmates having gone mad before dying, at the same time (unbeknownst to him) artists and sensitives were having disturbing dreams all around the world.
R'lyeh never rose. Johansen and his shipmates never encountered Cthulhu.
They were just above R'lyeh while Cthulhu stirred in his slumber. Already disturbed by having been attacked by the Alert, losing the Emma, and having killed the crew of the Alert, the proximity was enough to cause the waking visions that inspired several of them to step out onto a R'lyeh that wasn't there, that caused Johansen to imagine a Cthulhu that could be shattered by a steamboat. By whatever combination of mental fortitude and good luck, Johansen had a vision that didn't inspire him to bring about his own death, and he wasn't wholly shattered by the event.
The stars just weren't right. When they are, a steamboat's not going to help us.
When a red panda and a pumpkin go to war the only winner is youtube.
What's cuter than two baby raccoons in a hammock? Seven baby raccoons in a hammock.
Thor the Mighty Avenger, collected in two volumes, is a purely fun retelling of Thor's arrival in the early days of the Marvel Universe.
Thor's original origin had him as a Captain Marvel analog -- Don Blake, a surgeon, stumbles upon a magic walking-stick that transforms him into Thor (while itself transforming into Thor's hammer.) As the series progressed, and he interacted with Asgard, this began to seem even goofier -- how could they accept this ordinary human as Thor?
A later writer did an admirable job of retconning this. Don Blake wasn't an ordinary human. Odin had magically transformed Thor into Don Blake, along with false memories and a false history, in order to teach Thor a lesson in humility. The walking-stick hadn't been sitting there for centuries for anyone to find; it had always been Odin's intent that Blake would come to it.
Thor: the Mighty Avenger retains a little bit of that retcon, but ditches Don Blake entirely. Thor is on Earth, confused and not understanding why or how he got here. As the series progresses, he learns from other Asgardians that Odin has sent him to Earth to learn humility after he committed some terrible transgression, but they won't tell him what it was. Odin has forbidden it to be mentioned, and threatened to curse anyone who did.
And I'm sad that we'll never know what, either, because the book was cancelled after 8 issues. It's just the sort of comics reconstruction I'd like to see more of.
The bad news: we found it after surplus sold it for $165.
A man was murdered in Berkeley Sunday night. He'd called 911 to report a trespasser; police declined to respond because they were busy waiting for an Occupy Oakland group marching from Oakland toward Berkeley.
The Occupiers would ultimately engage in dangerous activities like eating pizza in front of a UC Berkeley building.
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
The Automatic Detective by Lee Martinez is a hard-boiled detective story set in a city that's the pulp SF world of tomorrow, with a large dose of superhero comic-book sensibility on top. Our hero is a huge battle android who was central to a mad scientist villain's scheme for world domination until he developed free will and turned on his creator. So his citizenship is probationary, and he has to walk a fine line lest he be reclassified as an object without rights.
The book is sheer fun. If I have one complaint, it's that it starts with the conceit that it's a hard-boiled detective story set in this world, but concludes as a superhero action story; I'd have liked to see the hard-boiled finale.
Shortly after my last post, the server on which MemeMachineGo runs went kaput. My gracious host very quickly rectified this, but then I was very slow to re-install the Perl modules that MMG's Movable Type installation depends on.
So, resuming now, any neglect of my blog isn't technical in nature.
"Moneyball." Boring. A few good moments, some crisp dialogue, but Brad Pitt's character was the only one developed worth a damn. It's the only time I've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman uninteresting, which says much more about how little his character had to do in his 3 minutes or so of screen time than it does about Hoffman.
"The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. I read The Accidental Billionaires afterwards, the book on which it's nominally based. Very little of the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg could be found there, and the book itself has been accused of displaying an anti-Zuckerberg bias. Sorkin has stated in interviews his priority on a compelling story over the facts, and he succeeded by that metric. It was a good story. But I figure if you're making a movie about events just 7 years old, all of whose players are living, it'd be good form to pay a little attention to an honest portrayal. Or not to make it.
"Charlie Wilson's War." (Shortly after seeing it, I managed to misremember the title as "Charlie Parker's War." But Clint Eastwood already made that movie.) Moviegoing happiness is a scene between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman scripted by Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols. I've always felt pretty neutral about Hanks, but he was great here.
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. Disappointing. Begins like a Neal Stephenson novel, and progressively devolves into a big dumb thriller.
Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart. Fun, brief attempt to explain what mathematicians are talking about when they talk about math, and to survey some cool things in the history of math and in modern mathematics.
The Secret House by David Bodanis. A house serves as a framing device to inspire digressions on all sorts of topics in science, engineering, and the histories thereof. A good book for factoid-lovers.
The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. There were a lot of surprises for me in this history of the telegraph, and the parallels to the Internet the author was pursuing were more striking than I expected.
Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow. Anthology of mostly original nominally Lovecraft-inspired stories. Highlights were Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Mongoose" and Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill." Joyce Carol Oates' "Commencement" was a turkey.
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers. Outstanding collection of fantasy stories. Just the thing to tide you over until Hide Me Among the Graves gets here.
On Saturday at Endgame, a game store in Oakland, I saw a used copy of GURPS Dinosaurs, but I didn't get it, because I wasn't sure whether I already had it.
I checked at home, and realized I was confusing it with GURPS Dragons, which I'd bought a few months ago, so I went back and got it.
Ever since, I've had this image of a dinosaur and dragon, brows furrowed, forelimbs akimbo, glaring at me saying "What! You think we all look alike?"
Last night I posted this article to Metafilter" about The Digital Antiquarian blog.
The Digital Antiquarian discusses ludic narrative and has been filling in by bits and pieces an amazing history of recreational computing and adventure gaming. [...]
Highly recommended for geeks who were there in the '70's and '80's, and those who weren't.
From it, I learned that H.G. Wells wrote a wargame (arguably the first) for use with toy soldiers, Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books. And a whole lot of other interesting things, even about topics I thought I knew a lot about.
J.C.R. Licklider began the work at DARPA that led to the ARPAnet. He was also one of the founders of Infocom.
Will Crowther created the first text adventure game and wrote the first routing protocol used by the ARPAnet.
"Internet" and "Interactive fiction" both begin with "inter." Coincidence?
I just read the final volume of Season 8, the comic book continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Verdict: worst season ever, making Season 4 look coherent and tightly-plotted.
As usual, there were diamonds in the rough, especially moments of good dialogue in the issues Whedon was directly involved with. But there was a whole lot of rough.
Spoilers below...
Thanks to The Great Comics Sorting/Bagging project, I finally had some entire series in the same place at the same time and could read them all.
One I'd been looking forward to was Strange Detective Tales. During the Universial monster movie craze in the '30's, lots of monsters and various other strange entities ("creeps" they call themselves) moved to LA hoping to sell their stories and make big bucks. Well, the fad passed, but the creep community remained. A detective agency consisting of Renfield and a mad scientist's assistant is the only place creeps seeking justice can go.
The story gets weirder from there, featuring the Green Mafia (the aliens who landed at Roswell), Renfield's ex, and Howard Hughes. The art is Gahan Wilson-esque, and perfect for the tone.
...and it hasn't been collected and its 3 issues will be a pain to find. Sorry about that.
I'd also like to note that the backup story in issue 1 was excellent -- a haunting tale of an aged supervillain whose memory isn't what it used to be, and who doesn't have long to live, calling up his long-retired never-too-bright henchman, trying to figure out whether he'd ever gone through with one of his schemes, installing a failsafe in his body to poison the whole world if he died.
I just got email with the subject "Update your credit card information with PayPal".
And it was really from Paypal.
In the past is another country department, I recently read the first of Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr burglar mystery series, Burglars Can't Be Choosers, from 1977. That's not all that long ago, a year I can remember as an at least modestly sapient being.
And yet there were some drastic reminders of how long ago it was. The narrator sees fit to comment that an elevator didn't have an operator. When musing about the attractive, probably for-show books in an expensive apartment, he thinks that the pages have probably never even been cut. He not only speaks of "loiding" a lock, but he really means celluloid.
It's a decent mystery, with a good twist, and a fun narrative voice, but is replete with the kind of contrivance that so often frustrates me with mystery novels. (I've gotten tired of staging elaborate traps requiring uncannily accurate prediction of how the bad guy will jump. But I'm still reading Nero Wolfe novels, so this tiredness can be overcome by other attractions...)
Lessons from Cesar Milan for dealing with salespeople: someone's going to be the alpha. If it's not you, it's going to be the salesperson.
I just read The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. I knew going in that it made an action hero of Lovecraft. He was presented as a plausible rival for a woman's attentions with one of Providence's most eligible bachelors. Now If you've read anything about Lovecraft, you know that he was a highly dysfunctional person and that this portrayal has veered about as far from the real Lovecraft as it would have had they made him a civil rights activist.
And I was OK with all of that. Action-hero Lovecraft no doubt made a much better character for an action story than accurately-screwed-up Lovecraft. What did bug me is that he was portrayed as loathing Providence, and wishing he could get out of this damn town. This is the guy that has "I am Providence" on his tombstone. If he loved anything in this world besides weird fiction, it was Providence.
The depictions of extra-dimensional horrors were nicely done, though. So, in conclusion, an enjoyable action-horror story having about as much to do with Lovecraft as Lori Lovecraft does.
In recent months, I unexpectedly found my interest in role-playing games, which I haven't played since college, rekindled. I figured that in Berkeley one would be tripping over role-playing groups as soon as one started paying attention.
Not so. In months of trying, I've only managed to play a couple of actual sessions. Many other plans have been scuttled due to cancellation after cancellation. Jobs, kids, houses, obviously, there are lots of perfectly understandable reasons that other things can take priority over playing make-believe.
But it's still disappointing. Anyone local and up for some Trail of Cthulhu?
The Internet Archive and Google Books have lots and lots of old Baedeker's guides available as PDFs. For instance, London and its environs: a handbook for travellers.
Last Saturday, I attended WonderCon, a comics con in San Francisco.
Once was, I had aspirations to attend the San Diego Comic-Con. In the comics world, it has long been the Big One. But I never got around to it, and, in the meantime, it got to be... too big. Now it's dominated by movies and tv and celebrities, with lines for panels going forever, and jammed with people even outside the convention center.
WonderCon is run by Comic-Con's organization, and has been growing by leaps and bounds. Just a few years ago, it fit comfortably in the Oakland Convention Center. But now the convention floor was so packed full of people you couldn't move without jostling and being jostled.
Not this introvert-boy's scene. Here's hoping APE remains marginal.
The sublime Lore Sjöberg gives us this comic about a Buddhist fantasy computer RPG.
I can't afford the Virginia Edition (but I'm sorely tempted anyway), so my consolation is having a saved search on Ebay for "heinlein lot" that emails me whenever there's a new one. And that's why I had email this morning about:
I've noted previously that I'm not an early adopter of hardware. So I'd been getting by with my stupidphone with a dying battery for a while while marvelling at how much other people are willing to pay for data plan contracts.
Until now. Virgin Mobile is offering a $25/month unlimited data, pretty limited voice (300 minutes), no contract required plan. You have to get a Virgin branded phone; I got the LG Optimus V. Pocahonas got one too; we're paying less than our previous voice plan.
So now a whole new world of text messaging and internet anywhere opens up to me.
Malasada and I have taken to texting a lot of what would have made for phone calls before, as well as texting fripperies or emailing photos throughout the day. Suddenly, Twitter makes more sense.
We'd only just gotten digital audio players we liked (the Sansa Clip+); suddenly, the phone makes them redundant.
And I can annoyingly fact-check things on the Net wherever I am.
Still hate capacitive touchscreens. Fitalystamp on my palm was faster, and I was accustomed to getting what I wanted the first time. Now I'm accustomed to making correction after correction. And cleaning the finger smears off my screen every day. Still want to drop a 10-ton anvil on everyone responsible for promoting capacitive touchscreens as the only acceptable choice for anything.
Now I just have to learn to write Android apps. There are some obvious things I'd like to do that don't seem to exist yet.
After excoriating a book yesterday, it's nice to heap praise on a book today.
Among Others by Jo Walton is a tremendous book. Much has been made of its portrayal of a bookish teen's relationship to books, and rightly so. But I'll point out that I passed it to Malasada as soon as I was finished -- she didn't have that immersive relationship to books as an adolescent, didn't know most of the references to science fiction and fantasy, and she still liked it (and noted that she understands me better for having read it.)
Most of what I'd like to say about it involves spoilers, below.
The book of honor for Potlatch was George Stewart's Earth Abides.
What a stinker.
I'm used to making allowances for books written in another time. Heck, I've been reading through all of Lovecraft. But this was a long, slow, painful slog. Our protagonist is the most unlikeable Mary Sue I've ever encountered. Wholly convinced he's the rightful intellectual leader among others, he spends all his time whining about how everyone else should listen to him more about what they should be doing... and not actually doing anything himself.
Then again, it was kind of neat that it prominently featured the UC Berkeley library, from which the copy I read was borrowed. (Stewart was a Berkeley professor, and Berkeley's Bancroft Library holds the George Stewart Papers.)
Not long ago, I bought a remaindered copy of one of Stewart's toponomy books, Names on the Land, and I'm still looking forward to reading it. But I'm not likely to touch his fiction again.
If you were at FOGcon, please tell us what you thought and how we can improve on our on-line survey. And if you're posting con reports, or notes on panels to your blog, please email website@fogcon.org and let us know about it.
There will be a FOGcon 2.
The theme for FOGcon 2012 will be "The Body." Whether the flesh is human or alien, monstrous or beautiful, the joy, terror, weakness, and strength of our physical selves lies at the heart of much speculative fiction.
I'm looking forward to it.
The Hugo nomination deadline is Sunday, 2011-03-26. Since I actually have a Worldcon membership, I can nominate. Now I have to cram to try to figure out what.
The Nebula nominations are one obvious place to look for inspiration (though the qualifying requirements aren't quite the same.) And there's a Hugo recommendation livejournal community, recommendations on SF Awards Watch, a recommendations thread on Scalzi's blog, and Locus' recommended reading list for 2010, recommendations for graphic stories on tor.com, and a list of Campbell award-eligible writers.
Anyone have any other recommendations or suggestions of places to look for recommendations?
FOGcon is gone. There were glitches, but they were mostly small, which I'll count as a great success for an inaugural con.
I attended a kaffeeklatsch with Jeff and Anne VanderMeer (The website is just Jeff's; Anne doesn't seem to have a website. But Jeff has enough web presence for any five people.)
I was Horatio in the Hamlet parlor LARP that John Kim GM-ed. The premise was that Claudius was throwing a going away party for Hamlet before his trip to England, when Laertes burst in demanding to know what was being done about the death of his father, Polonious. Though Laertes, Horatio, and Gertrude were all severely wounded, only Claudius was killed, and the game ended with Hamlet's coronation and marriage to Ophelia. Hamlet, the comedy!
We collected hundreds of books for the SF Outreach Initative, which really thrilled me, given how late it was that we decided to do it and how little advance publicity it had.
I bought Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by the VanderMeers, and Iain M. Banks' collection, The State of the Art directly from their publisher, Night Shade Books. Fast Ships has a Howard Waldrop story that's unavailable elsewhere, and Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bears' "Boojum", to which a story in the Ellen Datlow-edited anthology, Lovecraft Unbound, high on my list of things to get to, is a sequel. I bought Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures from its publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press. (They're offering Jeff's first non-fiction collection, Why Should I Cut Your Throat? for free.) And I bought the VanderMeer-edited Steampunk II and Jeff's collection The Third Bear as well as Chaosium's Cthulhu's Dark Cults from my favorite local SF bookstore, The Other Change of Hobbit. And I also picked up several issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Benjamin Parzybok's Couch from Small Beer Press, and Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow from Prime Books, all generously donated by their publishers as freebies to FOGcon's members.
And I caught up with old friends and made some new ones. All in all, a great time, and I look forward to next year.
I've been busy lately, and one of the things I've been busy with is some volunteer work for FOGcon, a brand new science fiction convention that'll be in San Francisco this weekend, March 11-13.
One of the things I miss about the east coast is Readercon, a con dedicated to sf literature. It was a personal frustration to me that the Bay Area, of all places, didn't have such a thing. My friend Vy actually did something about it, and founded FOGcon, explicitly taking inspiration from Readercon and Wiscon, another of the world's greatest cons.
If you see this and you're going, I'd also like to tell you we're soliciting books for The Science Fiction Outreach Program, which is going to have a booth at the Wondercon comics convention in San Francisco the first weekend of April, where they're going to give books for free to comics fans. Battered copies of old classics are very welcome, as the people staffing the booth will be more likely to be able to talk about them and personally recommend them.
Barnes & Noble is selling refurbished Nooks for $99. The recent update to its firmware has eliminated, to my satisfaction, one of the biggest drawbacks e-ink screens have had: the screen flash and the time it takes to change a page. It's now very noticeably faster, and close enough to instant.
While I remain not a fan of the capacitive touchscreen, and I consider buying DRM-ed books a non-starter, having a pleasant way to read all the public domain and other freely available books and stories out there makes it well worth it.
Instapaper does a pretty amazing job of converting web content for reading on an ebook reader. I've barely scratched how useful it could be for reading long articles or stories not distributed as an epub. Instasaver makes it even easier for Firefox users.
I've now read Starfish, Dracula, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (it was one of several ebooks available free for a limited time through a tor.com promotion), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and a lot of shorter things. I've also taken to reading my writers group's stories for critique on my Nook instead of printing them out.
And I have enough interesting things stacked in it to guarantee I won't run out of reading material on a trip (barring device failure or electrical shortage, of course.)
On balance, I'm happy to have an e-reader.
Yesterday, I did something that rocked my world.
I replaced my library card.
After 15 years in Berkeley, I'd worn the old one out. It was chipped and peeling and feeling brittle. The librarian kindly waived the card-replacement fee -- I'd like to imagine that replacing a worn out card instead of a lost one warmed the cockles of her librarian heart.
With the new cards, you get both a credit card-sized card and a little keychain card, so Malasada could take the keychain card and pick up items I have on hold, just like I carry her big one so I can pick up hers. (She's picked up plenty of my hold items, but we had to remember to pass my card back and forth.)
The part that rocked my world is that I also got a new card number. And I don't know what it is. It's how you access your account online, and I could rattle off my old 14-digit library card number more easily than my phone number. And now I have no idea and have to resort to looking.
I've been using the library online more often, because they finally have a feature I've wanted for years -- you can save arbitrary lists of library holdings as reminders of things you'd like to check out some time. Naturally, thought I, you should also be able to ask the system what's on your list that's available at a given branch, so you could leave with it right then and there.
Except you can't. You have to check each item one by one to see what its availability is.
Ah well. It's still a good feature and it has resulted in me using the library more.
I heard of Chris Roberson's Book of Secrets on SF Signal and this excerpt hooked me immediately.
My brother and I once met at a bar, and fell to talking about family. Parents, kids, relatives, the whole sick crew. He took issue with the idea about children being some link to the future, our bid at immortality. Parents, he says, are our true link to eternity. In each of us is a little bit of each of our parents, literally and figuratively, and in each of our parents a bit of theirs, and so on and so forth. All the way back to the Garden of Eden or the Primordial Ooze, depending upon your politics. Looking at our parents reminds us of eternity, he went on, because in them we can see everything that came before. Our parents remind us of the steaming piles of history it took to get to the present moment - in our case, the two of us into that bar on that night at that particular moment. Considering we hadn't looked at our parents since my brother and I were both five years old, watching their caskets being lowered into the ground, shuffling our feet and wishing it would stop raining, it was somewhat surprising. But that's my brother for you.
What that has to do with anything I'm not sure, except to say that it concerns family and eternity, two things which factor greatly into the events of the past week. It began in the bleary-eyed hours of the morning, with a phone in one hand and a telegram in the other, and ended with me watching the setting sun, the secret history of mankind clutched to my chest.
Who wouldn't follow the author anywhere after that? So I did, and I was greatly enjoying the ride. The mystery was engrossing and promising. It had some great characters. But I was ultimately left frustrated and disappointed.
You want to be a writer? This is your tradition.
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