More Books!

In my quest to assemble my life's library - more books than I could ever read - I picked up three at Book Barn today.

"Flatland" is Victorian social satire. About geometry. It's mostly remembered for its discussion of life in the 2D plane, rather than its scathing critique of the Victorians. It's also a fabulous way to more fully understand dimensions, especially getting an idea of the 4th dimension.


The other two I got are about trolleys. One is a 1961 book about systems all around the US, focusing heavily on the Midwest interurban lines, almost all of which are now gone. The other is a publication of the Connecticut Valley chapter of the National Railway Historical Society about several former trolley lines that once existed here in southeastern Connecticut and the nearby sections of Rhode Island. They were ultimately integrated into the Norwich and Westerly system, and included the Pawcatuck Valley Street Railway, Groton and Stonington Street Railway, and the Ashaway and Westerly Railway. It also covers the New London & East Lyme Street Railway.

The danger of using stock images

So, I was putting away books at the library the other day, and I suddenly stopped. I was looking at a Luanne Rice novel, "The Edge of Winter". I has this photograph of a young women on it:

(All images here are fair-use images: low-resolution versions of copyrighted material, for non-profit educational use only.)

I walked over and pulled out another book: "Finding Alice", by Melody Carlson:

Note the similarities: It's the same young woman, in the same skirt and jackets and boots, walking on the same wooden barrier.

Now, here's the back cover of "Finding Alice":

It's the exact same image that's on the cover of the Luanne Rice book. Quite clearly, the photos are stock photos, and the publishers didn't know (they have different publishers) that they'd been used on another book.

Everyone has their addiction...

Some people smoke, some people drink. Me? I buy books.

I already own a lot of books. They fill up two six-foot shelves, plus three feet and a milk crate in my closet, plus a set of technology encyclopedias under my bed. And that's just the ones I owned before December 2010.

...to say nothing of the magazines. I have thirteen years of Sky&Telescope, plus a couple of Sport Rocketry.

Up until last Christmas, I had my books under control. Yes, they'd started expanding into my closet, but that was organized, and it was space just waiting to be filled. But then I got about 18 linear inches of books for Christmas, and I had nowhere to put them. So, they became a pile on the floor.

I can never bear to give up my books. I have a copy-paper box full of children's books that have too many memories for me to give up; it's up in the attic with my high school papers and textbooks. So there was no way I was going to give up a lot of my books, especially since many of them are reference works that I pull up occasionally.

So they sat. In March, they were joined by some books from a former teacher of mine who was cleaning out his shelves, and in April by a William Gibson novel I bought in Maryland. More filtered in, gifts and purchases.

Then, the last straw. I bought four books at Borders on Sunday, then ten at Book Barn today. (I had a $25 gift certificate, so they cost me just ten dollars total.) No way those were goin gon the floor too; my mother would rightfully murder me.

So, while college shopping, I picked up a cheap bookshelf. It's thin fiberboard, but it works for what I need it for. Three shelves, a foot wide.

It's almost full from the last 8 months of books.

. . .

I think I'll get another one. At thirteen dollars it's worth it.

In any case, here's the books I bought today:

• Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
• Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth
• Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
• Arthur C. Clarke, The Sentinel

Three novels and a collection of short stories by one of the greatest science fiction writers who ever lived.

• Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

The excellent parallel novel to Ender's Game, which they did not have in stock.

• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Still among the funniest novels ever written.

• Martin Gardner, Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements

Recreational mathematics.

• Alexander Ziwet and Louis Allen Hopkins, Analytic Geometry

Not so recreational mathematics. To teach myself higher-level geometry. This is old - a 1937 edition of a 1913 title.

• Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967 translated edition)

This is where modern science truly started. This was the title that brought heliocentrism to the masses, and the book that got Galileo tried. Given that I've parodied it (because I was being sarcastic on an English paper) it's time I got around to reading it.

• Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

The story of the creation of one of the first modern computers. Does for computers what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did for motorcycles - show the interaction between man (and, at Data General, a number of pioneering women as well) and machine as it becomes an art. It contributed to the idea of programming as an art and a philosophy as well as a science, and it's one of the finest engineering books around.

Macbeth Essay

Long and frustrating, though it's going well. A practice run for our senior critique / thesis paper, if you will. It's frustrating trying to read literary criticism, but I just have to remind myself that this is the last literature-analysis class I will take. (My only English classes at BU focus on communication in engineering and the writing of scholarly papers).

And, it's not all bad. I get to use multiple layers of nested parentheses (which are lots of fun (especially when you get to 2 and 3 interweaving layers)); semicolons are also in abundance in my writing. And Shakespeare does have neat things to say sometimes; who could remain unmoved by Lady Macbeth's command for the spirits to “unsex me here, / and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty” (1.5.48-50).
 

Back to work...

Culture

I haven't blogged much in the past week. Part of that was first semester exams - which are now over. Part was plain old lazyness. And a whole lot was Wikipedia - 150+ edits in the past seven days.

But, most of it was, I've been busy with other stuff. You might even say I've been culturing myself. Here's all the neat stuff I've been up to:

I've been archive binging on four different webcomics. I've finished Head Trip which is a ... kinda slice-of-life comic, focusing mainly around a geek girl, Mal, who...beats people up, mostly. Also, there's really weird superheroes.

I'm very slowly going through Penny Arcade, a gaming webcomic with lots of really random side jokes.

I am really liking Girl Genius. It's a steampunk / gaslamp fantasy web serial, featuring the thoroughly original genius Agatha Heterodyne.

And, I'm attempting to finish Dr. McNinja which is exactly what you think it is.

Not to worry, though, I'm not wasting all my time reading webcomics. I'm also reading real books, too. I've started reading Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers short stories - mystery stories, featuring a club of gentlemen and of course the peerless waiter Henry.

I've also been reading some stuff on educational theory, particularly at the high school level. What makes certain teachers effective. Very interesting.

And, I have been listening to strange bands.

Epica is a Dutch symphonic metal band. This is "Never Enough":


Van Canto is a German 'hero metal' band. They have no instruments, except the drum set. They are also probably the only a capella band that uses guitar amps for their microphones. This is "Kings of Metal":


Agata Kristi is a Russian goth (ish) metal band. This is "Серкет" ("Serket"):

Checking out people... with your library card

The Toronto Public Library has apparently a program where you can check people out. No, seriously. You can use your library card to borrow a person for half an hour, to talk to them.

The concept is called a human library; it started in Europe about a decade ago. You have volunteers - living books - who agree to be checked out to anyone who wants to talk to them. It's designed to help people deal with and get rid of their prejudices. You talk to someone who you think you judge, someone who you stereotype, someone you pigeonhole - and instead meet a real, normal, person.

I think it's incredibly cool. Hat tip to the Connecticut children librarian's listserve, Goodnightmoon.

Nerdy Christmas Loot

Thanks to my family and friends, I had a wonderful Christmas, and I got some really awesome presents.

I got nine books, almost a whole linear foot:

• by Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Six Easy Pieces and Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Path
• Transit Maps of the World - a collection of subway and metro maps, showing how they evolved over time to become the iconic works they are today
• Earth From Above: 365 days
• The Math Book - a collection of 250 milestones in mathematics, with really cool stuff
• 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer
• Historical Atlas of North American Railroads
• Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly - a brilliant collection of critical essays about my favorite show.

I also got a bunch of really awesome stuff:

• Firefly and Sherlock Holmes on DVD
• Several pounds of twizzlers
• A really nice pocketknife, with a neat saw and a few other attachments
• A very weird alarm clock
• A Estes scale Patriot rocket kit - more about that later
• "Define interesting" t-shirt - a Firefly joke

My favorite, though, was my sister's present - this awesome Ada Lovelace shirt.

Tag Sale Loot

Every six months, my parents' church holds a tag sale. I managed to drag myself out of bed early enough to go today, and I got some really cool stuff.

I got a compass - the circle-drawing type, not the direction-finding type - to replace my old one which is sticky in some places and loose in others. This one is smooth in all places, and will be rather useful when drawing circles for nose cones and transitions.

I got a miniature flying pan, about 6" across with a 4" bottom. It has a rubber-coated handle for safety. And a little metal stand? How cool is that? I plan to use it for firey experiments, where I can burn stuff in the pan, or use a candle or alcohol lamp underneath.

I got a little keyhole saw, with a thin little footlong blade. Useful for cutting circles out of plywood.

Best of all I got a little electronic scale, runs off a 9V battery. 5 pounds capacity (actually 5 lbs 5.6 oz...) in 0.1 oz steps. That's 2270 (actually 2370) grams capacity in 2.83 g steps for you Canucks, Brits, and Aussies and other metric folks. Perfect for measuring rockets and such, so that I can simulate them more accurately. Especially nice for determining what size parachute to use for my larger rockets.

I also bought six books:

The Double Helix by James Watson. An account of the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and general comments on DNA, from one of the main men involved.

Dragon by Clive Cussler. A general techno-thriller in the Dirk Pitt series. With Japanese terrorists and a third nuclear bomb that never made it to Japan.

Red Phoenix by Larry Bond. A military thriller of a second Korean War. Doubly appropriate given the recent tensions over there.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. The first part of Alan Alda's autobiography.

The Elements of Color: a translated work authored by Johannes Itten. A treatise on color theory - very interesting.

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. So much cool stuff on mathematics, music, programming, and art. It's as close as you can get to a complete liberal arts equation in one book.

Heat Wave

I just finished reading the first Richard Castle book, Heat Wave. Funny thing is, Richard Castle doesn't really exist. He's actually the fictional novelist and protagonist of ABC's show Castle, played by Nathan Fillion, who is friggin' hilarious.

So, it's a novel about a journalist named Rook and a female cop, Nikki Heat. In canon, it's written by Castle; all the book characters are (intentionally) thinly disguished versions of the 'real' 12th NYC Precinct from the show.

The prose is pretty horrible; it's not high-quality literature by any means. But it's exactly what Castle *would* write, down to the horrible puns. There's a lot of contention over who exactly ghost-wrote the book; it certainly wasn't Nathan Fillion, who's pictured on the cover.

Book-a-day

Once again, I've decided to do something stupid because I can, and it might be interesting. I'm going to read one new book every single day from now till when my giant pile of books is exhausted.

I started today. I've already finished Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, which is a very interesting account of the creation of one of the first 32-bit minicomputers at Data General in the mid 1980s.

Bloody Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is known for smarmy Hallmark cards, candy, and red. Not just the sweet, saccharine red. There's also the sanguine bloody red. Turns out, there's been a lot of blood shed on February 14th:

It all started back in 250 CE (or 269, or 270, or 273...) when Saint Valentine got himself martyred. Turns out no one knows who he was, when he lived, or exactly what he did to get himself killed, but the Eastern Orthodox Church made him a saint nontheless. In 496 CE, Pope Gelasius I decided that a day for lovers should totally be on the day of some punk who got himself killed in some spectacular fashion. Then, in the 15th century, some punk named Chaucer decided it should be all about romantic love. Yeah, screw you, Chaucer. Your very special day got Hallmarked.

Folk waited for a while, and then they got bored again, and bored people love going on murderous rampages. So, in 1349, in Strasbourg, Germany, in what saner folk named the Strasbourg pogrom, over 300 Jews were killed and thousands of others expelled for really no reason.

The nastiness then shifted to the beautiful islands of Hawaii where in 1779 the explorer extraordinaire James Cook got himself killed by the natives. Possibly for trying to kidnap their king which, in retrospect, is never a good idea. Ever.

After that, the bloodiness got more and more frequent, at least what was recorded. In 1797 323 sailors were killed and some 880 wounded in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. In 1804, the First Serbian Uprising began, setting off 13 years of nastiness between the Serbs and the Ottoman Empire. In 1831, there were "immense casualties" at the Battle of Debre Abbay in Ethiopia.

(Sense a theme here...?)

In 1879, Chile touched off the War of the Pacific, in which over 21,000 poeple were killed and as many wounded fighting over a rainless desert filled with saltpeter and... bird shit. In 1920, the CCCP started the Polish-Soviet war, which ended 3 years later, with no clear victor, after taking somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 lives.

In 1929 came perhaps the most infamous of all these events: the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Seven men, five belonging to Bugs Moran's North Side gang, were killed by the tommy-guns of four still-unidentified members of Al Capone's South Side gang.

World War II brought attrocities of a scale never seen before or since; one of those was the firebombing of Dresden which began on February 14th, 1945, and was not the Allies' finest moment. Happy Valentine's Day, Dresden. Because your city is still a center of industry, we're going to drop 7000 tons of phorphorus bombs on it, turning 90% of the city into a raging firestorm that kills 25,000 people. About 2% of the bomb force got off course and managed to drop bombs on Prague 100km away from their target.

There's been a number of assassinations and murders on this day. Finnish progressive politician Heikki Ritavuori was murdered in 1922, an event that shocked the nation. In 1979, American ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs was killed during a kidnapping attempt. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, which resulted in the deaths of at least 38 people. Because clearly, a blasphemous book is worth killing dozens of people, mostly innocents killed in a bombing, over. In 2004 and 2005, terrorist bombings killed 22 and 7, respectively, in Lebanon and the Phillipines. In 2008, six were killed in the NIU shooting.

Not all the blood on Valentine's day is intentional, though. In 1981, 48 died in the Stardust disaster when the eponymous nightclub caught on fire and, once again, idiotic managers had chained fire exits closed. Indian Airlines Flight 608 crashed on February 14, 1990. In 1996, a Chinese Long March launch vehicle carrying Intelsat 708 went off course and crashed into a village, killing 6 (according to the Chinese government) and possibly as many as 500. Finally, in 2004, the Russian Transvaal water park collapsed, killing 28.

However, if you're reading this, you've survived another Valentine's Day, and it's a dangerous day.

History Day!

It's been over a year since I did a proper History Day post. Which means it's time for the tradition to start again...

1804: John Deere - yes, *that* John Deere - was born.

1812: The strongest (Magnitude 8.3) of the New Madrid earthquakes destroyed the town of New Madrid, toppled buildings in St. Louis, made waterfalls on the Mississippi and changed it course, caused a wave to run UPSTREAM on the Mississippi, and rang church bells all the way to Boston.

Also 1812: Charles Dickens, great and intolerably boring Victorian writer, was born.

1867: Pinoneering pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was born.

1889: Harry Nyquist, a founding informational theorist, was born.

1906: Oleg Antonov, Soviet aerospace engineer, designer of planes from small biplanes to the monster An-225, and the founder of the eponymous Antonov design firm; was born.

1926: Konstantin Feoktistov, cosmonaut and spacecraft designer, was born.

1932: Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was born.

1935: Monopoly is invented. Rainy Sunday afternoons become a little less boring.

1959: Baseballer extraordinaire Nap Lajoie died at 84.

1960: Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb but also an advocate of peaceful nuclear power, died at 57.

1979: For the first time since Pluto's 1930 discovery, its orbit brought it closer to the sun than Neptune.

1984: On the Shuttle mission STS-41B, astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert L. Stewart performed the first untethered spacewalks using the MMU.

1990: The Soviet Union ended when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party relinquished its power.

1999: King Hussein of Jordan, a skilled diplomat, peacemaker, democratic and civil rights activist, ameteur radio operator, pilot, and all-around awesome guy; died at age 63 after having ruled Jordan since age 17.

2010: A large explosion at a power plant in Middletown, CT - near where I live - killed at least 5 workers.

All information except the last item from Wikipedia.

Purchases!

I went after-Christmas shopping with mandachan yesterday. Amazingly, the stores weren't crowded, and I got good stuff.

At a local hobby store, where I had a gift certificate, I bought a pack of B6-0s, a new razor saw blade for my exacto knife, sheets of 1/4" and 1/16" balsa and 1/32" basswood, and an Estes Big Daddy kit.

I will not build the Big Daddy stock - I'll certainly beef up the motor mount reinforcement and replace the crappy plastic chute with a quick-link and nylon chute. I'll likely add a 29mm motor mount, and/or add 4 plugged 18mm mounts around the central mount. I might also do what others have and extend the motor mount tube up into the nose cone to serve as a baffle. Nose weight will be added for stability on larger motors - up to a baby H, possibly, and the fins reinforced with basswood or paper skins. I'll prolly also add rod-based motor retention, especially if I do upgrade to the 29mm mount.

At Borders, I bought We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse (the first CD I've ever bought myself, rather than borrowed from the library or my parents), and QED by Richard Feynman (about Quantum Electrodynamics).

Christmas!

I had an very nice Christmas; I hope all of you did too.

I got a Quest MLAS kit from my TRF Secret Santa; I plan to add nose weight to be able to fly it on motors larger than B^s, since it'd be a perfect match to 18/20 D13 reloads.

My parents gave me an Apogee Heli-roc kit. It looks to be difficult but fun. I like kits that don't use parachutes on streamers, though the three chutes on the MLAS look to be way cool.

My aunt and uncle got me a gift certificate to Apogee, which I'll definitely use to add a new rocket to my collection. Those possibilities will be next post.

I also got a number of books:

• The Time Traveler's Wife by Aubrey Niffenegger (awesome novel)
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss
• MLA handbook, 7th ed.
• The Illustrated Guide to Aerodynamics
• Illustrated Reverse Dictionary

I also got lots of candy and some other random items, plus a gift certificate to a local hobby shop.

Sorry, @eloh, but I didn't get a digital camera.

Slow day

Meh, nothing much to report today. I did all my Christmas shopping, my homework, and present-wrapping. I finished another book (I've been reading one every day or two recently). I played dominos. I read MLIA. I did finger pushups. I started reading 2 more books.

I did get a little rocketry done. I simulated a few more 13mm rockets - all are done except the clustered Twofer and the weird-shaped SS2. I also started repairing the shock cord of the Electric Mosquito which was getting all frayed.

Teenage depictions in literature

And now, for something completely different:

As those who know me have surely noted, I read a lot. Close to a book a day during the summer and weekends, and still several a week during school despite my busy schedule and the gobs of homework my teachers love. I tend towards a majority of nonfiction - math and science, history, biographies, and the occasional subversive stuff; but I do read a lot of fiction. Much of that fiction is military fiction and thrillers, but once in a while I'll read conventional 'young adult' fiction if it looks interesting.

What often makes a fictional book, especially young adult stuff, stand out for me is having a believeable strong teenage protagonist, which is very rare, especially for female protagonists. Most teenagers are protrayed as significantly less intellectually developed than adults, with minds more like children, and usually incredibly vain, clueless, and anti-intellectual. While certainly I know teenagers like that, they are not necessarily the majority, and I hate reading a book with a wimpy, boring protagonist.

Books that have a strong teenage protagonist are relatively rare; I can only name 4 that I've read an enjoyed off the bat. Deadline, by Chris Crutcherson, which I talked about a while back, is perhaps the best. The 18-year-old narrator is highly intelligent and acts like an adult; in fact, he faces his death more eloquently and sanely than any of the adults do. I see much of myself in him, notably his intellectually rebelious attitude, his penchant for confronting the biases of techers, and his statement that he's always felt like an adult - he's never felt like he had the mind of a child.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is prolly the best book I have ever read. It's witty and engagaing, with elegant social commentary and uncannily accurate predictions about the future. The characters are not actually teenagers but a small crop of the most intelligent children between the ages of 6 and 12, but they talk and act exactly like teenagers, except that there's none of the teenage sexual tension. Many adults claim, as Card notes in the introduction, that kids supposedly don't talk and act like that, but I can ascertain that they really do, and in fact I love how accurate the interactions really are. It's part of a tiny number of book that I can actually imagine myself as the protagonist in.

Two others that I've read recently have also struck a chord. Ripple Effect by Paul Garrison (pen name of Justin Scott), a thriller set on the open Pacific Ocean, has a major subplot featuring the 15-year-old daughter of a major protagonist sail alone across half the Pacific to rescue her father. She's a well-written character - independent, extremely intelligent, and still humorous. And in The Misfits by James Howe, which I just started reading, the male protagonist and a female friend - both age 12 - are strong, intelligent characters who think like adults, not children.

I'm not quite sure why I so strongly prefer characters like this. Perhaps it's because I see in them an idealized version of myself - perfectly confident, always intelligent, and free from the pathological wimpiness and obsession with the boredom of everyday life that afflicts most teenage characters. Perhaps it's because I tend to pick friends like this; most likely it's both - I perfer characters that I can either personally identify with, or who I know I would get along well with.

It's certainly part of why I have recently started enjoying Castle on Monday nights. Castle's 15-year-old daughter, Alexis, is one of the best-written characters, with the same personality characteristics as the other characters. She adds the voice of the average teenager to the show, while still adding a voice of logic and sanity that you don't see from most teenagers on TV. Heck, she's usually the voice of the reason to the entertaining but bumbling Mal Castle.

Thoughts?

Binder Fun

I keep all sorts of stuff on my binder - printouts of thrust curves and xkcd comics, lists of jokes, a list of unusual units (like attoparsecs), and more. My latest decoration, though, is a high-quality hand-drawn version of this:


It's taken about 2 hours of work over four nights, but the current result is an almost-finished fake wikipedia page about the binder it will be on, including the familiar wiki background, an infobox, information about the binder, and even a carefully drawn wikipedia logo, complete with all the little letters. The only difference between it and a real page, besides the subject, is that the little notice at the top says "Help us provide fake content to the world by donating today". (The real version has 'free' instead of 'fake'. The languages tab and infobox design are based off this article.

Three bits of other stuff:
1) Thanks to Dick Stafford for the shoutout about the online CP calculator I found.

2) Updated reading list.

3) Computer tip of the moment: in Vista, holding [Ctrl] and scrolling the mouse wheel will change text and image size in IE.

Blog Stuffs

1) Added my reading list to the sidebar. I'll try to update it twice a week.

2) Going to start reading through my old posts for my coming retrospective. Should be interesting.

3) Only 8 more days for 12 posts to make 365. Can I make it? I think so.

Randomness in the Middle of Busy

Meh. I've had too many tennis matches, too much insultingly easy homework, and too much work at work (ironic, no?) for much rocketry stuff, much less blogging, lately. A few updates, though:
1) I went to the Ledyard Drama production of Ovid's Metamorphoses on thursday and saturday, and they were amazing. I was very impressed. Congratulations to Dr. Zotos and the cast and crew.

2) The shuttle is set to lift off to repair Hubble at 2:01 pm tomorrow. 5 to 10 more years of delicious astronomical goodness await.

3) I've got my rocket simulation program down to nearly perfect. Under 8kb, text searching for all motor files, over 40 motors (from MMX to 29mm I200 including every Estes motor, 2 Quest, 2 Apogee, and most everything Aerotech has from D to H), an even faster main simulation loop, and extra goodies like provisons for simulating staging, thrust curve displays, motor data displays, and 2-way descent rate vs. chute size calculations with 5 chute shapes. And its continuing to get smaller, faster, and more advanced.

4) I've picked a recovery system for the Machnum Force: a 2" x 40" streamer originally from the Comanche-3. Light and small and cheap, and it'll bring it down fast but safely.

5) more tomorrow.

Randomness

Because I'm too damn lazy to do haikus tonight.

Why? Because my sleep schedule is still screwed up, I spent 3 hours in the car today, and I've got a sore throat to boot. That's why.

In continuing with my random music listening, I'm lisening to the best of Mancini at the moment. The 'Peter Gunn' theme and 'Timothy' are pretty good and 'Baby Elephant Walk' is hilarious. Disappointingly, the Pink Panther theme is not on there.

On a different CD, the march from The Longest Day is awesome, although it gets stuck in your head.

WHAT. is copyright Ryan North.

Congrats to Steve Eves, as his 1/10 scale Saturn V launched perfectly today on its giant 9-motor cluster. It was an absolutely perfect flight, right down the the main bodt landing standing up after a long, slow descent. I don't know ehre it'll go from here - I imagine it's a bit big for a living room, and I bet any museum worth its salt would love to have it. I wouldn't surprised if the Smithsonian expressed interest - it's definitely huge, as perfect as possible, and museum-quality, and I doubt it'll be flown again.

I have a massive headache for which I'm getting fluids and food, and soon rest. Meh. I hate being sick.

It got up to 80 today. Warm weather is nice, but of course it couldn't come on a tennis day....

We were in Massachusetts today visiting family and we went out to a wonderful irish place for dinner. If you ever find yourself in Ayer, check out PJ O'Rourke's. Great bangers and mash (aka sausages and mashed potatoes).

I read a couple of Military thrillers today, including Scimitar SAL-2 by Patrick Robinson, which was good but large print -the only copy available at my library - is a pain - 687 pages for a fairly short book. The other was America by Steven Coonts, which is very good, but it was rather scary when I realized that the main acion of the brand-new super-sub being hijacked was happening at a navy base less than five miles from where I live, and that if the action in that book really did happen, chances are someone I know would lose a parent in the hijacking. Even fictional terror attacks can hit close to home. On the other hand, it's cool to see a local institution mentioned in well-published fiction. There was a paragraph about the base in Scimitar SL-2, and it's been mentioned in a few nonfiction submarine histories, and a local nuclear power plant was referenced in Plum Island, but that's about it.