Reading robert silverberg's tower of glass. Long ago i set a rule that any sf book that won both the hugo and nebula awards is an automatic buy. Hasn't failed me yet.

The need to belong is mother to all manner of evils.

Yay, found a swiss knife that doesn't have that annoying corkscrew. Hate the corkscrew, a useless excrescence, a bulging tumor that ruins the lines. I know it's a europe thing, but in my life i've only ever had to pop a cork maybe three times.

Watching Ultraviolet. There's a perverse fascination in how thoroughly horrible it is. You'd think it might occasionally blunder into coolness or even mediocrity, but no, it's flawless in its unbroken crapitude.

This is city life: a woman approaches,"excuse me sir"and i walk past with a heart of stone, thinking "jesus, lady, it's 1am and i got my own problems." italo calvino should've written about that in Invisible Cities. Sometimes i feel remorse for my jadedness, but at this hour the odds are that was a grift or a proposition.

Can't find any San Mig Extra Strong coffee anywhere. Getting a little paranoid. I need my fix to get through the day, and my stash has almost run out.

I read that victor hugo bought a ream of paper and a bottle of ink one winter, and then wrote notre dame de paris, aka the hunchback of notre dame. Apparently he considered calling the story "what can be found in a bottle of ink."

Where does one draw the line between avoiding baggage and eremitic disconnection? Earlier, someone at work called me a "mean prick,"which amused me.

Still don't like cell phones though. Thus the blog, looking for more uses for this thing.

The sign language helps, exercises the brain. I'm deliberately focusing on just the sign language for now, but the corresponding japanese words keep popping into my head too.

Groundhog Day mode. Looking for variations to keep life interesting.

Firefly ep Shindig. Kaylee's last name is Frye? Wonder if that's anything to do with Heinlein's Podkayne Fries.

I'm making lysdexic spelling mistakes, and typing slower than usual. Maybe it's time to step up the caffeine.

Yesterday was the autumn equinox, but i learned that you can't get a globe topup anywhere on a sunday. Why didn't i know that before?

So jubal early is a black guy? I imagined a folksy old curmudgeon, the gonzo yoda, sensei of weird.

Watching titus andronicus on tv. Yes, a nasty gruesome bit of business from a freshman writer, but prefigures the later greatness of king lear and hamlet.

I want the hunchback of notre dame, and don quixote. I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

Getting back into my sign language books

Firefly ep Out of Gas. Maybe someday someone will figure out a cheap, robust interstellar engine design, and they could call it the firefly drive. That would be fitting, and sf fandom often has the clout to make a name stick.

Been working out, 35lbs each on my dumbbells. Sore.

But i read and loved the last Firefly ep, Objects in Space. Genius. Joss Whedon is great with crazy characters and bad guys.

Firefly's quirky but not great.

The cat shat on my bed. Seuss never wrote this.

Saw a lewis black book the other day, might buy that later

Ballard loves the words: overlit, stylized, infantile, leitmotif. The prose style wouldn't be hard to parody.

Figured out how to blog from my phone

Just bought j.g. ballard's crash

Veronica Mars did this bit about what the "manila" "in "manila envelope" means. It comes from the phrase "ma-nilaan"which I'm sure some Filipinos would try to church up as "The Place of Reeds" but is really just "the reedy place." Heh, so "Manila"is a cognate of the Japanese Yoshiwara, the old red-light district.

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