Too Delicate For Its' Own Good

As I recall, my Mom, ever the bargain hunter, picked up a set of four of these wine glasses at Goodwill. They eventually came to me. Two of them broke through accident and now we are down to two. The last one broke when I bumped it while it was sitting on this table and it fell over. It didn't fall off the table, it simply fell over on the table and when it hit, it shattered.

They are nice glasses, thin, with a nice ring to them, but criminently, they are too delicate to survive in my hands.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

"Decoding the Heavens" by Jo Marchant

"Decoding the Heavens" by Jo Marchant, the story of the Antikythera mechanism. This book is amazing on a number of different levels. Unfortunately, the writing style is not one of them. It seems to follow the breathless potboiler model of some of the mass market stuff like "The DaVinci Code". (Did I mention how much I hated that book? Oh, I did? Sorry, but I really didn't like it. Good story, terrible writing. What is happening in the publishing industry? Don't ask if you don't want to know.)

Anyway, the story is stupendous, the level of science and technology involved in this tale is tremendous. It's like a short course in the development of technology during the 20th century. It also looks at the people and politics involved which gives some insight into academic competition.

It also opens the door to creating a new vision of the city (Atlantis?) that was destroyed by a eruption of a volcano on the of island of Thera in the Eastern Mediterranean around 3500 years ago.

This story seems to be having a hard time gaining traction, and it makes me wonder about people. The stories we have been telling ourselves about the ancient world (anytime before the year zero), all seem to involve massive buildings, massive sculptures and massive armies, but technology was extremely limited. The wheel was like the most sophisticated tool they had. Bronze was used for making swords and shields. Any kind of mechanical technology simply did not exist.

But the Antikythera mechanism changes all that. We have known about the mechanism for over 100 years, but our story about the ancients has not changed one wit. Why is that? Are the historians so wedded to their stories they cannot accept that they might be in error? Or maybe no one cares.

I think this device is very significant and we should be thinking about what it means. Of course, I also like it that it gives some support to my conspiracy theory about the Egyptians and their hieroglyphics.



Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross

Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross. An entertaining tail of espionage on the brink of WWII. It reminds me of a line from Thomas Adcock's "Drown All The Dogs":

"It's spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda and the very thickest of plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve man's civilization ..."

There are double agents and information that they do not use because if they acted on it, the enemy would know they have a leak, and the leak would be plugged, and then you would get no more information. How do you judge when the information you get is worth enough to justify sacrificing your source? Tough call any day of the week. And even if a particular piece of information is valuable, if you don't use it, you can protect your source so that some day they may provide an even more valuable piece of information. How do you evaluate that situation?

Then there were Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. I have run into these characters in other stories, and they are recognizable and scary. One is big and doesn't say much. The other is smaller and has a sharp mouth, but they are both vicious killers and would as soon gut you as look at you. They are almost caricatures.

A much better book than Zigzag. I am not quite sure what it was that made it better. Fewer obvious flaws, perhaps? The hero did seem to suffer more than was reasonable, and seemed to perform better than he ought in fights, given his condition, but sometimes that's what makes the story.

I kept thinking about Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code", which had a number of similarities, but was a really terrible book. I hated it. It made a pretty good movie, but the book was just awful. Without going back and analyzing their writing, I can't say what makes "Double Blind Cross" so much better than "The DaVinci Code", but it most certainly is a much better story.

Sign of the times

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Not Honey

Went to Dove VB to celebrate John's birthday yesterday evening. It's a small, organic-ish pizza joint on East Glisan, which means it's on the other side of the Willamette River. We were downtown anyway to pick up Ross from the train station, so it was a short jaunt to the pizza place. I ordered a glass of ice tea and they brought me something that did not look at all like ice tea. It was totally opaque, like a fruit smoothie or something, but it tasted like tea, VERY strong tea. They also brought me some sugar which I applied liberally. The sugar cut the tea taste down to tolerable, but not enough to make it really sweet. Then another waitress brought me this bottle of Blue Agave Sweetener. It looks like honey, and it tastes like honey, but it pours a little easier. It is not quite as thick. Adding just a dollop to the tea made it really sweet.

The boys got pepperoni, the girls got spinach, and my wife and I ordered a special with ham. It was a little off-putting when it got to the table: it looked positively black, but it smelled good and it tasted fine, with just enough spice to make it interesting.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Quote of the Day

"No matter what story you try to tell about the twentieth century, in the end you find its course diverted by the Second World War - a great, dark smear on history that sucks in everyone and everything before releasing them, a few years later, on new trajectories." - Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant.

Sign of the times

This sign is posted in a parking lot in downtown Hillsboro that is convenient to the farmer's market that is held on Saturdays. One week we went to the market and parked in this lot and we both interpreted the sign to mean that we could park at the spaces without meters. We went again the next Saturday and saw the same sign and interpreted it to mean we could only park where there was a parking meter. Are we slipping, or is this sign confusing? Or did they change the sign from one week to the next?

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.