Mad Times

Sleeping beauties

What's that?

Alice charged the lens of our new camera (Kodak Z730) while I was snapping this picture. It's not quite up to sub-inch macro distances.

Lost Glove #94

The reason for their discard is more mysterious with some gloves than with others.

Shove off

It looks like she's giving him a neck rub, but no, he's just in the way of her stretching. Those are Becky's legs under that blanket, of course.

Lost Glove #93

This glove helped me pass the time while I was waiting for the Issaquah Brewhouse to open for lunch. That's the Issaquah Library across the street.

The Gist Hunter & Other Stories by Matthew Hughes

Picked this up to read from the pool for the Endeavour Award.

The stories are in three sections. The first section focuses on a character with the unlikely name of Henghis Hapthorn. Hapthorn is a discriminator, which is basically a private investigator. He is the self-proclaimed (and apparently otherwise acclaimed) best discriminator there is. Not sure why he had to be the best for the stories to work. Maybe just to account for the character's planet-sized ego. Each story poses a puzzle which Hapthorn solves with the sometimes help of his homebuilt computer and his buddy the demon from another dimension.

The second section follows Guth Bandar. Bandar is an aspiring noönaut, a navigator of the cultural subconcious which exists as an array of interconnected alternate realities each representing a historical Event, an archetypical Situation, or a basic setting or Landscape. These stories show how Bandar gets into (and out of) various tricky situations (of both capitalizations) in his quest to master the noönaut's trade.

The final section consists of a near handful of stand alone stories.

Most of the stories in the book appeared previously in some form (all but one of the Hapthorn stories, for example, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). They all have a rather pleasing mix of fantasy and sf qualities (except the final story which is straight fiction and possibly my favorite of the bunch). Most of the stories were a bit over-written for my taste. A bit too much hooptedoodle, though it was executed well enough that it tended to fade into the background somewhat. Anyway, decent stories, but not really my thing.

Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip

I think it was high school English class that instilled in me a skepticism about theme as an identifiable element of fiction. I was always of the opinion that it might be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex work, but felt that it was unlikely to be carefully engineered into any work I would want to read. This attitude makes me suspicious of any work where I feel like the there is an identifiable theme, moral, or lesson.

I say all that to explain my mixed feelings about Od Magic. The book is clearly about the costs of fear. How a population can be subdued by it, how it can incapacitate individuals, how it can corrupt those who wield it. It seems clear to me that this book was inspired by and serves as a commentary on the current US political environment. And the fact that I am in complete agreement with the points Ms. McKillip seems to be making with the book doesn't change the fact that I'm a little uncomfortable reading a novel that appears engineered to make those points.

And yet, despite the transparency of the motivation, McKillip, a master of her craft, has wrapped her message in a story that is actually interesting and peopled it with characters who are not cardboard cutouts. When I smacked my trepidation upside the head and locked it in the closet, I was left with a book that had me eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next. Don't get me wrong, it's not a unique story (man is confronted by mysterious stranger who sends him to the city to a school for magic. It's been done to death, even by McKillip), but it's presented with enough twists and charming details to make it feel both fresh and timeless.

So my prejudices aside, here is a pleasant book with some relevant social commentary. What was I complaining about?

Gaudy byzantine

No, it's not a collar, Alice just got to be my model.

Cailyn mentioned that byzantine works well with different colors, so here's my first try at that. The rings are brass, copper, and nickel silver. It's the same size rings as in my first bracelet. I'm still not perfectly happy with my ring closures, but it's better than the last one at least. This one is going to go to my mother, but I think I'm going to wear it around for a while first. Sorry, mom.

Arm rest

Becky and I were looking at something on the computer. Theo was in Beck's lap and crawled over her arm and plunked his chin on my arm. Sat there long enough for me to fish the camera out of my pocket and take several pictures.

Lost Gloves in NYC and Paris

Got a note the other day from a correspondent in the Big Apple who has started a blog for Lost Gloves In New York. Go take a look.

Foot rest

I missed getting a picture of her doing this thing she does in these shoes where she's digging digging digging (claws in, fortunately) rubbing her feet across the insoles. Here she is resting. Goofball.