Well, I'm back from a trip to our nation's capital, where I found anti-Bush signs in front of the White House, reminders of Cryptonomicon in the Spy Museum, and ducks in the World War II memorial. It was hot and disgustingly humid, as cities that were built in swamps tend to be, and the subway system was distressingly clean and simple in comparison to New York's. (There were only 5 lines and no suspicious-looking stains on the carpeted cars.)
Mostly, I wish I'd had a bit more time and a Segway while I was there. There really did seem to be a lot of extraneous grass between museums. And did I mention it was hot? I missed out on the American Indian Museum, the newer wing of the National Art Gallery, and the Library of Congress, which I've always wanted to visit just because...well, it's a gigantic library. Do I really need a reason? On the upside, there was a surprisingly small number of tourists at all the major sights for a summer weekend. Maybe everyone else was getting back to school. But of course, there were always just enough people to sit in front of the White House while I was photographing it.
God bless America.
There's a joke to be had from the fact that MLB's Comeback Player of the Year Award is being sponsored by Viagra. I'm just not sure what it is.
Finishing Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon feels like an accomplishment in a way to which the completion of mere mortal books cannot hope to compare. At over 900 pages of dense, often technical prose, it isn't a novel so much as a tome, or some other heavyweight-sounding word. Needless to say, I loved it.
The story ties the cryptographic geeks of World War II and the present (well, the late 90s), along with various soldiers, businessmen and sundry others, into a vast knot involving Axis gold, submarines, and lots and lots of codes. Stephenson is a geek of the highest order, but unlike so many technology and engineering types he has a great grounding and interest in history and literature, so he can actually pull off writing a book like this. The narration can, at any time, veer off the story and into involved explanations of cryptography, mining, computer surveillance, or pipe organs, but Stephenson is obviously having so much fun sharing the knowledge it's no burden to go through it, even for this hardly math-oriented reader.
It helps, of course, that the book is genuinely funny, and when it isn't graphing out a function of, say, male horniness to mental function, the story moves along at a more than respectable clip. The interest level of various storylines waxes and wanes, so sometimes you might look forward to a chapter about the morphine-addicted Marine Bobby Shaftoe, and at other times you might be eager to get back to World War II codebreaker (and all-around geek avatar) Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. Eventually, of course, everything ties together in an insanely complicated way, and if all that cryptography wasn't enough, you'll have some interesting ideas on history and politics to chew on. So if you're looking for a book to occupy you for the next two weeks at a minimum, look no farther than here.
Now I have to see about getting tickets to The Great American Trailer Park Musical. Hmm.
I went to the mall to get clothes and came out with 12 free music downloads. Sony and iTunes have extended their pissing contest to Aeropostale and the Gap, and it's all to my benefit. *evil cackle*
Oh, and I got some pants. Oh, Gap jeans. Your denim is so soft and expensive and pretty and clearly made for people 3 inches taller than me. Thank goodness for the occassional sale. And cuffs.
I have a lovely new laptop, and one of my neighbors has been kind enough to leave their wireless network unprotected, so I'm busy downloading everything I can, from Firefox on down. *cracks knuckles* It's going to be a long evening.
In an act of intellectual masochism, I was about to sit down and translate Honor� de Balzac's P�re Goriot from French to English myself when I came to an interesting realization: The French copy of the book I'd requested on interlibrary loan was, in fact, in English.
*kicks things*
How hard can it be to give me a copy of this book in French so I can make myself suffer for hours on end?
***
Anyway, the countdown to the Great Computer Switch has begun. My new laptop should be coming in four to eight days, and I've already got a shiny new lock and carrying case to go with it. The fun part will be trying to get all the software, connections, and settings I've accumulated in two years of using this computer into the new one. If by fun what's meant is "hours of the mind-numbing tedium of watching installation progress bars."
Other than that, life goes on as before. I'm reading a lot- The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Two Trains Running, by August Wilson; and Cards on the Table and After the Funeral, by Agatha Christie. The Yankees are being carried by such luminaries as Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon, which says everything you need to know about their playoff chances. And the logistics of my trip to London are still an amorphous haze.
So what am I going to see at the Fringe? In addition to the aformentioned The Mayor Who Would Be Sondheim, I'm going to The Banger's Flopera - A Musical Perversion, and SILENCE! The Musical, a musical version of The Silence of the Lambs.
I realized right after I bought my tickets what an incredible hypocrite I am- I'm always trying to get others to remember that plays as well as musicals exist in theater, and here I am with hundreds of choices going for three musicals. Ah, well. I'm always a sucker for shows with singing serial killers.
Someone please explain to me how penis enlargement and online poker ads manage to spam blog entries I haven't even published yet. Come on, people! At least leave my drafts alone!
***
Anyway, I think I did something quite stupid today. I've been reading whatever small spoilers I can find about The Fountain, but the movie was still, thanks to the measures taken by Warner Brothers, shrouded in secrecy. Today, though, I think I found a big spoiler on IMDB, and if it's true I really wish I could forget it so I'd be surprised by the twist. Ah, well. There's no one to blame but myself.
***
In other news, everyone and their mother needs to read Bill Willingham's Fables right now. Collected so far into five trade paperbacks, it follows the stories of various fairy tale characters expelled from their magical worlds into New York. Willingham takes a lot more cues from the brothers Grimm than from Disney, and his ways of combining and explaining the various stories are deviously clever.
In the exiled Fable community, Prince Charming is a cad who falls for princess after princess but isn't very good at the "happily ever after," his ex-wife Snow White is the hard-nosed Deputy Mayor, and the Big Bad Wolf has reformed enough to become head of security. If that isn't enough, I guarantee that you'll never think of Goldilocks and the three bears the same way again after reading Animal Farm. The dialogue and characterizations are sharp, and Willingham has a great sense of pace, revealing and hiding just enough to keep the reader wanting more. Which is, of course, how you get me, waiting pathetically for the next collection to be released some time in the winter. *whimper*
After years of driving yours truly up the wall with the sheer idiocy of its hardware design, Apple has finally come out with the multi-button Mighty Mouse. In addition to supporting PC-esque notions of the right-click, it has a small scroll button, another function that has been conspicuously missing from its previous mice.
Is this enough to make up for the carpal tunnel-causing travesty that was the hockey puck mouse? My right wrist says no. But I will be a considerably happier customer if the Macs I'm forced to use in the future are Mighty Mouse-equipped. And if Apple would get over its obsession with prettiness and remember that peripherals have non-aesthetic functions, too.
