Miscellany
Oct. 18th, 2004 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowIt was a raw and nasty morning - rain pelting down, thunderstorms roaring through one after another. Here we only had a few microblackouts - long enough to upset a lot of the electronics, but not enough to get a squeal from the UPS which guards my computer - but the department secretary told me power was out at her place for a couple of hours. The morning paper predicted a brief window of clear skies in the early to mid-afternoon, to be followed by yet more storms. Although there were things I could (and should) have done at the office, I decided to bolt for home right after my calculus class, so as not to get caught in the rain again. Naturally, there have been no storms since about 11:00 AM.
I didn't sleep too well last night, so after getting home I lay down for a nap. Murphy curled up next to me, as usual. Then his stomach started growling, loud and gurgly, throwing me into panicked thought - did I forget to feed him last night? (No, of course not. He wouldn't let me get away with that.) But, Lord, it was loud. My own stomach started rumbling in sympathy, and equally without justification.
I'd forgotten how much I enjoy listening to Chicago. Yeah, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" is rather pretentious, but "25 or 6 to 4" is fun, and there's a fair range of styles in their other work - "Colour My World" mellow, "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" exuberant, "Saturday in the Park" joyous, "Hard Habit to Break" intense and driving. Good stuff.
I've started in on A Fountain Filled With Blood and Earth Made of Glass. A friend warned me that the latter book was very sad, which of course has me trying to guess the form that sadness will take - private and personal? planetary and cataclysmic? - and desperately fighting the temptation to look at the last page. I've seen a couple of clues, one overt and one tacit, but they point in completely different directions.
"Lost" has continued to be interesting, despite quite a few gaffes. Last week's episode featured a boar hunt... Locke, buddy, I don't care how much you've read about it; I don't care how big your knife collection is, or how good you are at throwing them; you just don't send out a party of three greenhorns to hunt wild boar. Look at it this way. Greek mythology contains many stories of clashes between heroes and monsters. Sometimes it's one hero against a bunch of monsters (Hercules and the Stymphalian birds); sometimes it's one on one (Perseus and Medusa); once in a while you'll get two heroes teaming up against one monster (Hercules and Iolaus against the Hydra); but there's only one case I know of where a whole platoon of heroes was called in to deal with a single monster. They weren't minor leaguers, either: Atalanta, Meleager, Theseus, Telamon - this is a pretty high-powered team, and it took all of them to do the job. (At least one of the heroes was killed, too.) The monster? The Calydonian boar. [And no, I don't think Locke killed that one boar either.]
I didn't sleep too well last night, so after getting home I lay down for a nap. Murphy curled up next to me, as usual. Then his stomach started growling, loud and gurgly, throwing me into panicked thought - did I forget to feed him last night? (No, of course not. He wouldn't let me get away with that.) But, Lord, it was loud. My own stomach started rumbling in sympathy, and equally without justification.
I'd forgotten how much I enjoy listening to Chicago. Yeah, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" is rather pretentious, but "25 or 6 to 4" is fun, and there's a fair range of styles in their other work - "Colour My World" mellow, "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" exuberant, "Saturday in the Park" joyous, "Hard Habit to Break" intense and driving. Good stuff.
I've started in on A Fountain Filled With Blood and Earth Made of Glass. A friend warned me that the latter book was very sad, which of course has me trying to guess the form that sadness will take - private and personal? planetary and cataclysmic? - and desperately fighting the temptation to look at the last page. I've seen a couple of clues, one overt and one tacit, but they point in completely different directions.
"Lost" has continued to be interesting, despite quite a few gaffes. Last week's episode featured a boar hunt... Locke, buddy, I don't care how much you've read about it; I don't care how big your knife collection is, or how good you are at throwing them; you just don't send out a party of three greenhorns to hunt wild boar. Look at it this way. Greek mythology contains many stories of clashes between heroes and monsters. Sometimes it's one hero against a bunch of monsters (Hercules and the Stymphalian birds); sometimes it's one on one (Perseus and Medusa); once in a while you'll get two heroes teaming up against one monster (Hercules and Iolaus against the Hydra); but there's only one case I know of where a whole platoon of heroes was called in to deal with a single monster. They weren't minor leaguers, either: Atalanta, Meleager, Theseus, Telamon - this is a pretty high-powered team, and it took all of them to do the job. (At least one of the heroes was killed, too.) The monster? The Calydonian boar. [And no, I don't think Locke killed that one boar either.]
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-21 04:33 pm (UTC)When I was in 6th grade, we used to LIVE Man from U.N.C.L.E. The teachers were very tolerant, but it was a 24-hour game. We divided ourselves up into two groups and spent the days spying on each other and counting coup, which could be determined by how long until the discovery by the other side, that the first side had successfully penetrated the perimeter and taped a small bug under the desk of one of the opposing side's members. Said bugs were tiny pieces of paper with a grid drawn on it! Lunches were spent discussing how to infiltrate *their* side, with secret agents, double agents. At night, we phoned each other to make plans for the following day. It's a wonder we learned anything at all that year.
Hmm. this memory is good enough, I'm going to xpost it to my journal, too. Funny how exciting and glamorous the world of intelligence seemed at the time, juxtaposed with the grim reality most of the undercover jobs probably entailed. Living on the edge sounds great from the armchair (g).