Flooding in Germany

Stu claimed there was flooding in Germany. Guess it's kind of serious.

Space Exploration

I finally got around to ordering a copy of Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. It's the third volume of his Revelation Space trilogy. It's chock full of strange new worlds, giant machines, demented personalities and evil monsters baying at the doors. It's great stuff. Some of the dialog is a little, um, what's the word? Childish, maybe? Kind of reminds me of what you hear on television. And then it struck me - this is exactly the thing that determines whether I will like a book or not. I used to think it was realism, that is whether the characters in a story were behaving in a believable manner or not. Now I'm thinking it's whether the dialog is intelligent or dumb. That's why I like James Bond movies, because of all the witty remarks and the absence of banal chatter. Realistic? Hardly, but witty.
    Last year I was reading John LeCarre espionage novels. I was enjoying the heck out of them until I got to one that struck a little close to home, or something. It was the one about the arms dealer selling weapons to the drug lords in Central America. It put me off his stories, but for  another reason entirely, not because of the dialog. Recently I picked up a copy of his The Looking Glass War. This was the first book he wrote after he made his first big success. It is supposed to be a more realistic look at the world of spy-v-spy, and it's a real downer. You have never seen such stupidity or incompetence. If this is what our intelligence agencies are made of (and being as they are made of people, not James Bond super-heroes, I imagine it probably is) it's a wonder they can manage to tie their shoes in the morning, much less figure out what our "enemies" are doing, assuming they can even figure out who our enemies are. I didn't even get half way through before I got totally discouraged and put it down.
    So Absolution Gap is a mixed bag. It's got a lot of really good stuff in it, like characters and concepts and conflict, but it's got a little of the stupid thrown in as well. On balance though it's pretty dang good.
    There are some uneven story lines. He will spend a hundred pages setting the stage for a climatic event, and then later on, in the middle of another story line (there are three main story lines) he will spend a couple of paragraphs explaining how the other story played out. Disappointing. But then the book is over 500 pages as it is, and I imagine that he might have wanted to wrap this story up in three volumes and not spend the rest of his life writing it.
    This is the third Science Fiction book I've read this year that had:

• millions of people
• living in tunnels underground
• on an airless world.

The others were 

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein,
• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Quote of the Day

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

Some Russian Bear

Wait till you see what he does with the chair. I can't believe it didn't collapse. Of course I've got one that looks just like it, and it doesn't collapse from my weight. 

Safe with Jason Statham

British actor Jason Statham, left and Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren visit members of the Royal Navy at HMS President Royal Navy Reserve headquarters, in London, Monday, Aug. 13, 2012. In the background is Tower Bridge. The two are promoting the film 'Expendables 2'

This picture has nothing to do with the movie, I just thought it was interesting to see how small Jason is, or how big Dolph is, depending on your point of view. We watched Safe (warning: site auto plays) this evening and it was everything we've come to expect from one of Jason's movies. Lot's of people getting beaten up, a few gratuitous killings, and whole slew of bad guys getting shot. There's a plot, or sorts, but mostly it's just an excuse to run around NYC punching and shooting people. I did notice a couple of things. The Russians spoke Russian and the Chinese spoke Chinese. Were there any subtitles? I'm not sure, there may have been some, when it was important, but if you didn't speak the language you were often in the dark, though it was usually pretty obvious what was going on. There was one girl who picked up a gun in the gambling den and promptly got mowed down. Equal opportunity on ethnic and gender basis. Oh, yes, there was one little girl at the focus of the plot. She had a tough role to play. Traumatized, and then alternately pampered and terrorized. And can anyone really tell when someone else is lying?
    There was one clever little bit. Mary Mnemonic (the little girl) has to memorize a really long number. We see that it covers an entire sheet of notebook paper, written in large block letters, but still well over 100 digits long. I'm thinking it's an encryption key, but the little girl notices that there are an unusually large number of 7's and 3's in the number and Jason instantly deduces that it is not just one big number, but a whole series of numbers strung together, and they are in fact the combination to a safe, the 3's and 7's being markers to turn left or right. I don't think I've ever seen a safe that required more than four numbers in the combination, so I'm thinking they padded the number just to muddy the waters. And how do you tell a direction marker 3 or 7 from a digit in the combination? I'm sure it will be explained in the sequel.
    You know, the characters in this story all had names, but I can't recall a single one.

Peanut Butter

When I was a kid I was captivated by an ad on TV for peanut butter that showed someone (I think it was a man's hand) spreading peanut butter on a slice of bread. But they weren't doing it the way you or I or any normal human would do it, that is mashing it around, going this way and that. They did it with one smooth stroke, much like in the video here. I thought that was so cool and I wanted my folks to buy some of this mystical peanut butter, but they said no.
    The ad in my mind's eye is perfectly clear. There are no extraneous elements in the scene, just the bread, the knife, the hand, and a perfectly shaped blob of peanut butter on the knife. It's also in color, and I don't think my parents bought a color TV until I was out of high school, which would have been in the 1970's.
    I always wondered how they got that shot. Even back then I suspected it could be trick photography, but I never figured out how you could fake it. After 50 years of internal debate, I am convinced that they sat down with a case of peanut butter, a truck load of bread, and just shot the same scene over and over again until it came out perfect. No wonder those Madison Avenue guys drank.

Shooting

by Marcel

I'm not really a gun guy. As a boy I shot a .22 rifle whenever I could, at cans and stuff, and I had a target model .22 air pistol that was really something, and a bb gun. In the army I qualified with the usual weapons, but small arms were not central to my job. After getting out I didn't shoot anything for twenty years, except a black-powder pistol at a fair once.

The other day I went trap shooting, and I look forward to going again. Say what you want about Barack Obama, but he has done more than any president in living memory to encourage gun ownership.

Trap shooting seems to be one of those activities that tempt a man to buy stuff. Having shot exactly once (and poorly), I thought "Well that was good, but if I had a shell pouch like that one, and some of those glasses, and one of those things, and a couple of those, and a re-loading setup, and another shotgun, and yet another shotgun..."

That's folly. Really, there's only one thing I need: to show up regularly for a couple of seasons, do some hunting, and then maybe think about new gear.

Oh, and I do need a shell pouch. And maybe some shooting glasses. I'll just see what they have at the store.

Stolen entire from Monday Evening.