Arctangential

I finished A Dark Traveling this afternoon, as expected. It’s about a boy (who happens to be a werewolf), his sister (a witch) and his brother (a martial arts expert) who must band together and rescue his mother (also a witch) and his father (just some guy) from bad guys. See, the boy’s family runs an inter-dimensional transit station, and agents from the “darkbands” (dimensions where evil forces have taken over) have infiltrated their own lightband. They go adventuring through the dimensions and save the day. Despite my prosaic plot summary, it really was quite a good book. I think one of Zelazny’s biggest strengths is that he’s able to bring real light and life to characters and situations that would be incredibly hackneyed if written by lesser authors.

One of the funnier things about this book is its size. The story as written is really no longer than a short story – maybe a short novella. Somebody really wanted to publish it as a novel, though, and they pulled out all the tricks. It’s in a large typeface, with large margins, multi-page chapter breaks with nonsensical graphics, and a handful of illustrations take up the extra space. As it is, the book is only 150 pages long, which I think is very close to the lower limit on the length of a mass-market paperback. On the whole, it has the sense of a college freshman trying to pad a paper up to the minimum length limit. In any case, a nice change after the behemoth I read before this.

Now I’m reading Thomas Easton’s Greenhouse, the second book in his “Organic Future” series. I read the first book of this series a long time ago, not knowing it was the beginning of a series. He’s a good writer though and I’m looking forward to this.

I finished it. Finally. It took me nearly a month, but I did read all of They Made America.

It was actually a very good book. It’s a collection of essays, ranging in length from one page to 20 or so, about various innovators who worked within a (less and less) uniquely American system to create such wonders as flight, MRI technology and plastic. The author makes an important distinction between inventors and innovators; for example, Robert Fulton didn’t invent the steamboat, but he was the first person to adapt the advances of others together into a form of boat that was reliable, fast and economical enough to form the basis of a wide-spanning transportation service that really opened up the country for the first time. Similarly, Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, nor the assembly line: he simply pushed the assembly line concept to its limits in order to make a car that anybody, not just the super-rich, could afford. The author does not hold a lot of love for Bill Gates, though:

“But is [Gates] an anti-innovator? He has never invented any important, original software; hundreds of small innovative companies have dies in Microsoft’s bearhug; and Microsoft has never been first to market with any major innovation.”

The book also paints some very moving pictures of the real impact that these people had on the world and society. I was choked up reading about P T Farnsworth sitting at home watching the moon landings on TV; despite all of the tribulations he had to go through to make his invention (television) available to the public, he said that one moment made it all worthwhile. The story of Samuel Insull was also very moving — in 1900 electricity was limited to just the richer areas of majors cities, and businesses who could afford to build their own generators. Insull built a system which was able to deliver cheap energy to all of Chicago, and his system soon took over the world. It’s amazing to think that in less than 100 years, electricity went from being a toy for the rich to being so integral to our lives.

I’m now reading Zelazny’s A Dark Traveling, which is only 150 pages, with large type and lots of illustrations. It’s very refreshing.

Still reading. Still long.

Here is the second hyacinth to bloom in my front yard: (It’s pink!)

I am still reading They Made America. It is still very long. I still haven’t finished it. Today over dinner I read the section about Thomas Edison.

I had another flower bloom out front this weekend, a hyacinth:

And this is all that’s left of the croci:

Kinda sad.

On Saturday, Meg and I went geocaching. We went once before but were unable to find the cache. We had better luck this time, finding the cache in a pile of rocks:

It was a lot of fun. I hope to do it again soon.

This book I am reading is REALLY long, so I can’t yet report that I finished it. I do have other interesting news though.

This weekend’s mini snowstorm killed all of my front-lawn plants, but I did get a picture of the second set of croci before they died:

In the mail today I got one of those missing children fliers. I usually look at them for a minute just in case I recognize one of the kids. This time, however, one of the ads caught my eye for a different reason:

Now I don’t want to make jokes about somebody’s missing child or anything but this really seems incredibly futile and really a waste of time. I know that people will do whatever they can to find them, but I don’t see how anyone could have thought that circulating a grainy, blurry, overblown photo of an infant would help anybody find anything. The child is 3 years old now, so even if the picture was recognizable it wouldn’t help anybody find the kid. I wish these people the best, but I really wish that they could have made room for a real listing instead of this.

Also, “Athol, ID”.