Memnison Journal

We spent all of Saturday being very quiet around the house; everyone was very very tired from the bustle of the holidays, and Susan’s knee was swollen and painful. (She’s been fighting off this arthritis stuff a lot, and things like walking a lot or shoveling snow have just been killing her.)
 
So we declared the [...]

From April through September, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is having a big Harry Potter Exhibition…tickets just started going on sale. I know a mom and two little girls who would like to go…and a whole ton of fans.

Meredith’s 1st trimester in 4th grade just ended up, and she did very well.    She had a rocky spot with her advanced math class in regard to a few things - most notably statistics, my absolute downfall in math.  (My Eyes Glaze Over on that sort of thing, and I did wretchedly in a college [...]

…we finished reading the second Harry Potter book together last night.  Kid’s a serious Harry Potter fan, and is finding out how richer the books are than the movies.  She’s a big Cho fan, and imagines herself a Ravenclaw, by the way.

Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter
There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel [...]

But here it is anyway.  I liked the monastic debates especially.
The monks from Sera Mey held onto their lead in this summer’s monastic debates, with another stunning defense of Arya Nagarjuna’s Seventy Verses on Emptiness. While the monks from Sera Jey made a solid attempt to interpret the 9th verse as…

Want a secret passage in your house so that you can decamp off to your Batcave or private library?  Try these guys.  They Don’t Work Cheap.
(h/t to Ysabetwordsmith, who is a golden god of blogging neat stuff.)

..by Scott Lynch, is a heck of a rip-snorter read.  Funny, dynamic, byzantine in its plots and descriptions, and a total mess in its background universe - but you don’t care, because the plot and the characters keep things going quite nicely.
I was at a con some time ago, in a panel that called on [...]

I’d planned to be out to the con early on on Friday, but I got a fast-blowing-in skin infection that seriously (1) was painful and (2) was knocking me for a loop in general, starting Thursday morning.
With me and my health, I know that the only thing to do on stuff like this is to [...]

Sauron’s Barad-dur in San Francisco. They left out Coit Tower as the Phallic symbol, and - hey, that makes Two Towers! Aaaah!
Now, that’s an airline I could fall in love with. The new Virgin America service. Normally, I think virgins are overrated, but…as I found out, there’s always exceptions.
Grocery store manager [...]

You have been warned.  Links inside to other discussions of the book that I liked.

Finished.  Wild ride.  Recommended for anyone who can take the darkness and action levels.

Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery stuff in general has never been my bag, and I usually like stuff that is - well, innovative to me.  Tolkien, sure.  Big epic sweep, fantastically deep.  Zelazny - wonderful!  Terry Brooks - weak imitator.   And the Thomas Covenant stuff had me screaming at the ‘protagonist’ to USE THE FREAKING [...]

List Meme: This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk or £ beside the ones you loved.