Odd Thought

In "Calvin and Hobbes", Calvin's female nemesis was named Suzie Derkins; Suzie is presumably short for Susan.

Calvin.

Susan.

Does anybody else suspect Watterson may have buried yet another in-joke in there?

Over the Borders

Yesterday's visit to Borders produced a fair haul. I wasn't particularly adventurous; once again, I mostly bought books in series that I've been following. Those included: Neal Stephenson, The System of the World; David Weber, Flag in Exile; Janet Evanovich, Hot Six; and Jim Butcher, Cursor's Fury and Summer Knight. I also picked up Robert Asprin's Myth-ion Improbable; I'd grown disenchanted with the "Myth" series as of Sweet Myth-tery of Life, but it was funny enough at one time that I'll give it one more try. Still on a Heinlein nostalgia kick, I bought Assignment in Eternity, mainly for the sake of "Jerry Was a Man". I'm hoping Tim Powers will continue to rebound, so I picked up Three Days to Never. Also, I got my first manga; I was looking for Mushi-shi, but they only had volume 5 and I didn't feel like jumping into the middle, so instead I bought the first volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. To escape the genre ghettos, I also bought 1984 (I've never actually read it, but I know a fair bit via osmosis) and a collection of Kafka stories. (Okay, so I didn't stray too far from the ghettos....)

Over on the music side, I bought Jackson Browne's Running on Empty (which includes "Stay", recommended to me by hornedhopper a year and a half ago), A Hard Day's Night, an album of duets by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (I adore the way their voices interplay in "Your Precious Love"), and - taking a complete flyer on someone I know next to nothing about - The Very Best of Dr. John. (I now have eight albums that I need to put on my computer; the other four extend my collections of Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, CSN&Y, and the Eagles.)

Hopefully they'll help take my mind off the $4K loss my TDA took this past quarter (which does not include the continued slide so far this month).

Fumble!

Damn, damn, damn. I dropped the quiche, taking it out of the oven.

It's still perfectly good quiche; some of the crust is missing, but the custard and filling almost all stayed in. It just looks... messed up.

Rats.

(At least it looks better than the runny quiche I brought the first time!)