Various and sundry musings
Mar. 23rd, 2006 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniFor me, the question is not whether we can survive as a sovereign nation, with our flag intact, but whether that flag is still flying "over the land of the free, and the home of the brave." Or is it flying over the land of the oppressed and the scared.
A couple of Mondays ago, I got to the local library for the first time in ages and ages, and looked for a light-hearted romp of a book to read. My first choice was maybe a mystery by Dick Francis, because his stories have, so far, not disappointed me yet. But when I got to his section of the shelves, I discovered that I'd already read all of the stories they had there. So I settled on the latest "The Cat who Brought Down the House," by Lilian Jackson Braun (2005).
Okay, so she's not the same caliber of writer as Arthur Conan Doyle, or Agatha Christie, by any means -- nor do I expect her to be, when I crack the cover. But I had vague, pleasant memories of some of her earlier books, so I picked it up. But about a third of the way in, I was disapointed to find that my 'Disbelief-Suspender' has gotten a bit rusty since the last time I read a book in the series.
For those unfamiliar with the series, it's about a newspaper columnist who's inherited a multi-million dollar fortune, (which he has turned into a charitable foundation) who lives the small town of Pickax "400 miles north of Everywhere," in Moose County. This guy lives in a converted apple barn with two siamese cats, one of which is psychic, and has the ability to predict and solve mysteries, if only this newspaper guy would be bright enough to interpret what the cat is saying.
My disbelief-suspender works just fine when it comes to super-intelligent, clairvoyant cats who understand English fluently enough to be able to pick books from the shelf based on their titles, and decide they like someone based on the sound of their last names. Really, it is.
My problem comes with the fictional town of Pickax, and the entire fictional county of Moose. For some place "400 miles north of Everywhere," it has a mind-boggling array of gourmet restaurants. It's the remnant of an old quarry and logging city that existed pre-WW1; there's no mention of any current big industry other than tourists who come up from "Down Below." Yet it has a resident interior decorator, and the town librarian calls ahead to restaurants to ask about decor, so she can pick a coordinating outfit (!?!?!?!?! the librarian has that kind of wardrobe?). One of its residents has a 99th birthday, and the town is swamped by national media. There are Uber-Rich and middle-class, but no poor people, and all the social tensions that come with poverty are relagated to the counties just to the south. Oh -- and her idea of local, ideosyncratic, phrases of this town is reliance on the phrase: "Two shakes of a lamb's tail" -- how colorful and original (!).
Her discriptions of cat behavior is still enjoyable, and fairly accurate. But her setting (and, to a large extent, her human cast) just suffers from an overdose of Quaintness. I don't know if her writing has just become tired and lazy over the years, or my standards have risen in the same period (perhaps both), but I'm finding I want the grit and texture of social tension and personal arguments.
Still, I'm going to read the whole book, because it seems like a waste not to -- don't know when I'll get another trip to the library.
Tonight, I was flipping between Veronica Mars (Which is finally getting back to business with actual mystery-solving -- halleluja!) and Exploring Space -- the Quest for Life. Because I was flipping between commercials, I only got bits and pieces of the first hour, but it peaked my interest enough for me to want to catch the repeat, especially the first hour, which focused on extremophiles, and the implications of our discovery of them for our picturing possible life on planets not very much like Earth at all. There was one scientist at NASA whose job it was to look at the landscapes of different planets, and using what we know about how life evolves, draw pictures of what creatures on those planets might look like. I don't remember his name, but he's one of the people I'd invite to a fantasy dinner party (or skiffy con). :::Nods:::
The second hour, though, was all about terra-forming Mars, and about how plausible it was or was not to make it just like Earth and comfortable for humans. The whole discussion in this part of the show bothered me, because the question of whether it would be ethical to terra-form Mars wasn't even brought up. I found this particularly odd, since the first hour was spent talking about how life can, and often does, exist where we least expect it. If there really is frozen water just under the Martian surface, isn't it possible that there could be microscopic life there, too? And if we barge in there and turn Mars into Earth Mrk 2, than that life would go extinct before we even discovered it.
And besides, there was a lot of discussion about how we could create (or recreate, according to some theories) a thick, warm atmosphere on Mars, but no mention of all as to how we'd keep it there. AIUI, Earth still has its atmosphere because its molten iron core makes the planet into a giant magnet, and the magnetic field deflects the solar winds. Mars lost its molten core long before we did, and, according to some theories, that's why it's cold and dry, now, because it couldn't deflect the solar winds, and its atmosphere got blasted away.
A couple of Mondays ago, I got to the local library for the first time in ages and ages, and looked for a light-hearted romp of a book to read. My first choice was maybe a mystery by Dick Francis, because his stories have, so far, not disappointed me yet. But when I got to his section of the shelves, I discovered that I'd already read all of the stories they had there. So I settled on the latest "The Cat who Brought Down the House," by Lilian Jackson Braun (2005).
Okay, so she's not the same caliber of writer as Arthur Conan Doyle, or Agatha Christie, by any means -- nor do I expect her to be, when I crack the cover. But I had vague, pleasant memories of some of her earlier books, so I picked it up. But about a third of the way in, I was disapointed to find that my 'Disbelief-Suspender' has gotten a bit rusty since the last time I read a book in the series.
For those unfamiliar with the series, it's about a newspaper columnist who's inherited a multi-million dollar fortune, (which he has turned into a charitable foundation) who lives the small town of Pickax "400 miles north of Everywhere," in Moose County. This guy lives in a converted apple barn with two siamese cats, one of which is psychic, and has the ability to predict and solve mysteries, if only this newspaper guy would be bright enough to interpret what the cat is saying.
My disbelief-suspender works just fine when it comes to super-intelligent, clairvoyant cats who understand English fluently enough to be able to pick books from the shelf based on their titles, and decide they like someone based on the sound of their last names. Really, it is.
My problem comes with the fictional town of Pickax, and the entire fictional county of Moose. For some place "400 miles north of Everywhere," it has a mind-boggling array of gourmet restaurants. It's the remnant of an old quarry and logging city that existed pre-WW1; there's no mention of any current big industry other than tourists who come up from "Down Below." Yet it has a resident interior decorator, and the town librarian calls ahead to restaurants to ask about decor, so she can pick a coordinating outfit (!?!?!?!?! the librarian has that kind of wardrobe?). One of its residents has a 99th birthday, and the town is swamped by national media. There are Uber-Rich and middle-class, but no poor people, and all the social tensions that come with poverty are relagated to the counties just to the south. Oh -- and her idea of local, ideosyncratic, phrases of this town is reliance on the phrase: "Two shakes of a lamb's tail" -- how colorful and original (!).
Her discriptions of cat behavior is still enjoyable, and fairly accurate. But her setting (and, to a large extent, her human cast) just suffers from an overdose of Quaintness. I don't know if her writing has just become tired and lazy over the years, or my standards have risen in the same period (perhaps both), but I'm finding I want the grit and texture of social tension and personal arguments.
Still, I'm going to read the whole book, because it seems like a waste not to -- don't know when I'll get another trip to the library.
Tonight, I was flipping between Veronica Mars (Which is finally getting back to business with actual mystery-solving -- halleluja!) and Exploring Space -- the Quest for Life. Because I was flipping between commercials, I only got bits and pieces of the first hour, but it peaked my interest enough for me to want to catch the repeat, especially the first hour, which focused on extremophiles, and the implications of our discovery of them for our picturing possible life on planets not very much like Earth at all. There was one scientist at NASA whose job it was to look at the landscapes of different planets, and using what we know about how life evolves, draw pictures of what creatures on those planets might look like. I don't remember his name, but he's one of the people I'd invite to a fantasy dinner party (or skiffy con). :::Nods:::
The second hour, though, was all about terra-forming Mars, and about how plausible it was or was not to make it just like Earth and comfortable for humans. The whole discussion in this part of the show bothered me, because the question of whether it would be ethical to terra-form Mars wasn't even brought up. I found this particularly odd, since the first hour was spent talking about how life can, and often does, exist where we least expect it. If there really is frozen water just under the Martian surface, isn't it possible that there could be microscopic life there, too? And if we barge in there and turn Mars into Earth Mrk 2, than that life would go extinct before we even discovered it.
And besides, there was a lot of discussion about how we could create (or recreate, according to some theories) a thick, warm atmosphere on Mars, but no mention of all as to how we'd keep it there. AIUI, Earth still has its atmosphere because its molten iron core makes the planet into a giant magnet, and the magnetic field deflects the solar winds. Mars lost its molten core long before we did, and, according to some theories, that's why it's cold and dry, now, because it couldn't deflect the solar winds, and its atmosphere got blasted away.
