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Almost done converting the comment CGI code to Python, except I have to re-do everything to use the URL module, which is likely more reliable than my own version. Then I have to implement all of the management nonsense, and then maybe I can let people comment on the darn thing.
After the dinosaurs we strolled through the bird exhibit (all modern specimens), which was of no small interest to aminotluni, a long-time bird-watcher and bird-listener. After traversing class Aves from Passeriformes back to Struthioniformes, we got to a reconstruction of a cave in Jamaica which is the day home of many species of bats. I really like environmental exhibits like this, because of how you can forget you're in a museum at all, and I could have spent the whole afternoon in there. One point that I didn't appreciate before was how the nocturnal habits of a bats keep them away from the attention of predators.
As it happened, it was already pretty late in the day, so we soon went out under swarms of bat-mobiles, actually fixed models but strobe-lit so they sort of looked like they were flying out of the cave. After nosing around the Japan exhibit, we headed downtown and met the rest of the family for dinner at Asian Legend, which I would describe as a boutique dim sum restaurant. I recommend their "juicy" dumplings; each one is like a tiny serving of meatball and noodle soup.
I covered the last 28 miles to Sunnyvale on BART, Caltrain, and the very kind offices of a friend and coworker, and did little other than read until Sunday evening, at which point it occurred to me that I might want to eat something beyond frozen tofu and chai with honey. It also occurred to me that I'd better return/renew my library books before they racked up another day in fines, and that I'd said I'd be picking up my repaired HID headlight.
So I did those things, in reverse order due to when REI, the library and Trader Joe's closed, respectively, with the food item growing progressively more urgent as I noted a marked fatigue and lethargy despite having reinflated my front tire a little. So I'm now gobbling dates, figs, raisins, and salami, putting away a few stray things, listening to podcasts, and writing this thing.
Sky Coyote, Kage Baker, Tom Doherty Associates:
Tor finally got around to putting the second volume of the Company novels back into print, and when I spotted it at Bakka/Phoenix I snapped it up, because I was awfully curious about the prior events referenced in Mendoza in Hollywood. For some reason I assumed that it was also about Mendoza, in which case it would have been a rather daring piece of literary experimentation, a sort of prose version of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, except with a catastrophically depressed immortal cyborg as the main character.
Instead the main character is Joseph, Mendoza's mentor, off to the New World after a century in the Inquisition. He's not catastrophically depressed but he is radically cynical, and so not sure if he ought to care about the machinations way up in the future that some fellow cyborgs hint at. His job is to persuade a local Chumash tribe to up and leave before a few centuries of history run roughshod over their highly sophisticated neolithic culture, which has enough division of labour that they use money on a routine basis.
He does this by impersonating, you guessed it, "Sky Coyote", yet another freakin' trickster god, and then introducing a whole slew of other curiously anthropological gods, like the Spirit Who Wants to Know about Your Sex Life and the Spirit Who Wants to Watch As You Build a Canoe. Since the Chumash have money, they don't talk like stereotypical native Americans, but instead like modern American professionals, pursuing the next dollar (well, seashell) and getting their kids into all the right clubs and careers, organized under institutions like the Eelgrass Gatherers Union and the United Steatite Workers, with such manic intensity that they tend to forget about the actual raising of said kids.
It's all so aggressively modern that it reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter's complaint about a translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was so completely transculturated that it read to him more like a sort of play about gulag life put on by Americans than Solzhenitsyn's own descriptions in a radio interview. On the other hand, given that Joseph's narration mentions how humans are pretty much the same everywhere you go, having foreigners talk funny to convey their foreignness seems kind of cheap or even racist. On the other other hand, maybe Kage Baker just thought it would be funnier this way.
The 24th-century mortals who are nominally running this cultural salvage mission come across as even more sheltered and incapable than they do in The Life of the World to Come, which is curious since they apparently came up with the technology of immortality all by themselves. It gets me to thinking that Homo Umbratelis may turn out to be the end product of various rogue cyborg's future selective breeding and culling of mortals.
Set this House in Order: A Romance of Souls, Matt Ruff, Harper Collins:
Matt Ruff's previous novel, Sewer, Gas, and Electric was totally different from his first novel, Fool on the Hill, and this is totally different from either of them, being concerned with Andy Gage's efforts at getting his head straight and completing the mental geography that his father Aaron created to organize the hundreds of personalities that occupy the physical Andy Gage's body, or at least the brain, or at least part of it. Note that Aaron is yet another personality, not Gage's real father, who died rather early on and was replaced by the indescribably awful stepfather whose mistreatment led to this whole state of affairs to begin with.
Andy's task is complicated by the cupidity of his boss Julie, who hires Penny Driver, who lives in between the gaps in her life by to-do lists and memos from a "Society" with a name that seems suspiciously made-up, even to her. Against his and Aaron's and a lot of others' better judgement, Andy gets roped into trying to make known to Penny the true nature of this society, in hopes of establishing a less cumbersome and disruptive means of communication. This turns out to be a lot easier said than done, since most of the personalities on both sides emerged as the result of years of torture and abuse, and it may not come as a surprise that some of them are real jerks or otherwise hard to get along with.
All of the above leads to a fairly straightforward action-drama, as Andy and Penny track down something nasty that Andy worries he may be responsbile for, even if he didn't personally do it. As usual, digging up the past yields a lot more than just dirt, and the truth turns out to be even more dangerous than they feared.
Sea Princess Azuri vol. 2, Erica Reis, Tokyopop:
So, Azuri, princess of the Orcans (I guess that's a better name than "killer humans") is marrying Unagi, prince of sushi, I mean the eel-people. This would be fine, I mean aside from the fact that Unagi is a politically scheming jerk and Azuri isn't, except that she's in love with Orcan guardsman Thalo. This is fine with Unagi, since it gives him an opportuniy to stir things up for his own nebulous purposes, with the assistance of his shrimp-people minion. This is not fine with Azuri or Thalo, who get around to saying that they love each other shockingly early for a romance comic. With the help of Thalo's periodically jealous friend Mica, some coral-people (I didn't make them up, I'm just telling you), and miscellaneous sea creatures, they manage to run away, but I assume that their troubles are not over yet.
The plot does not bear rational examination, at least not without grade 4 welding goggles, but it's cute, and the art is insanely pretty.
