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roadnotes and baldanders's home, just hanging out quietly. Mostly Roadnotes and I talked; Baldanders was wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.
We caught each other up on recent events, and random gossip old and new, while drinking tea and eating lemon-ginger cookies. I realized too late that I'd had lots of sugar (both the cookies and in the tea) and not much protein. Despite a salami sandwich (and water, rather than a drink with sugar of any form) for supper, and two ibuprofen tablets, I have a bit of a headache.
Both the conversation with Roadnotes and reading my LJ friends list remind me that I don't really comprehend dating. Relationships, more or less, but not dating as a way of getting into them. When I was up in Montreal for New Year's,papersky mentioned that part of why zoos have trouble breeding pandas is that pandas aren't interested in sex with pandas they don't already know fairly well. This clicked for me because I am panda-like in this: I get to know people as friends, and once in a while that becomes a romantic/sexual relationship. Even when I was having more casual sex, when I was a lot younger, it was with women I already knew moderately well, not with people picked up in bars or just met at parties.
On the subway home I finished Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, which was sent as a Tiptree possibility. I have no idea why we [the Tiptree jury] were sent this—it does nothing remotely interesting with gender, nor is it in any way feminist. Then again, I have no idea why the publisher bought it: the narrator is a self-aggrandizing asshole with whom I didn't want to spend 300 pages, and both the science and the plot generally are questionable. I finished this largely because I had started and figured one of us ought to read it. I suppose the book might be of some interest to anyone who wants to write a first-person narrative by/about an obnoxious person.
The large scientific problems unfortunately include the key plot points. The viewpoint character is an anthropologist, working in South Dakota. One of his graduate students finds a Clovis [earliest verified North American culture] site, complete with skeleton and artifacts. The artifacts include two hollow clay spheres, which, if it happened in reality, would overturn a lot of assumptions, because no Clovis ceramics are known, or expected. The graduate student opens the first sphere and finds what looks like corn—another revelation, because there's no evidence of maize that early, or that far north until much later. After calling a paleobotanist and giving her half of it, they cook the other half as popcorn, which is shared among nine or ten people.
The second sphere is opened by other people, as part of the dedication of a new casino. On television, we see odd dark-brown powder come out of it. An epidemic begins soon after, which has an almost-100% fatality rate. "Almost" because the people who ate the popcorn are immune to the epidemic(!). They track each other down, and eventually decide to head for Okinawa, because they expect to find surviving humans there. They ask whether they might transmit the plague to that island, and then ignore the issue. As a side note, the narrator, despite his PhD in anthropology, knows little enough about either biology or the ongoing contemporary extinction that he states that the 35 species of North American mammals wiped out by the Clovis people are more than wiping out every species of bird, as apparently was done in a panicked response to the epidemic. (That's not a spoiler because the narrator wanders semi-randomly back and forth through the timespan covered by the story, something that might be foreshadowing were it a bit subtler, so we learn early that, in the future he is addressing, there are no birds.
(Based on my description,cattitude wants me to tell you that the book is full of borglenuskies.)
roadnotes and baldanders's home, just hanging out quietly. Mostly Roadnotes and I talked; Baldanders was wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.We caught each other up on recent events, and random gossip old and new, while drinking tea and eating lemon-ginger cookies. I realized too late that I'd had lots of sugar (both the cookies and in the tea) and not much protein. Despite a salami sandwich (and water, rather than a drink with sugar of any form) for supper, and two ibuprofen tablets, I have a bit of a headache.
Both the conversation with Roadnotes and reading my LJ friends list remind me that I don't really comprehend dating. Relationships, more or less, but not dating as a way of getting into them. When I was up in Montreal for New Year's,
papersky mentioned that part of why zoos have trouble breeding pandas is that pandas aren't interested in sex with pandas they don't already know fairly well. This clicked for me because I am panda-like in this: I get to know people as friends, and once in a while that becomes a romantic/sexual relationship. Even when I was having more casual sex, when I was a lot younger, it was with women I already knew moderately well, not with people picked up in bars or just met at parties.On the subway home I finished Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, which was sent as a Tiptree possibility. I have no idea why we [the Tiptree jury] were sent this—it does nothing remotely interesting with gender, nor is it in any way feminist. Then again, I have no idea why the publisher bought it: the narrator is a self-aggrandizing asshole with whom I didn't want to spend 300 pages, and both the science and the plot generally are questionable. I finished this largely because I had started and figured one of us ought to read it. I suppose the book might be of some interest to anyone who wants to write a first-person narrative by/about an obnoxious person.
The large scientific problems unfortunately include the key plot points. The viewpoint character is an anthropologist, working in South Dakota. One of his graduate students finds a Clovis [earliest verified North American culture] site, complete with skeleton and artifacts. The artifacts include two hollow clay spheres, which, if it happened in reality, would overturn a lot of assumptions, because no Clovis ceramics are known, or expected. The graduate student opens the first sphere and finds what looks like corn—another revelation, because there's no evidence of maize that early, or that far north until much later. After calling a paleobotanist and giving her half of it, they cook the other half as popcorn, which is shared among nine or ten people.
The second sphere is opened by other people, as part of the dedication of a new casino. On television, we see odd dark-brown powder come out of it. An epidemic begins soon after, which has an almost-100% fatality rate. "Almost" because the people who ate the popcorn are immune to the epidemic(!). They track each other down, and eventually decide to head for Okinawa, because they expect to find surviving humans there. They ask whether they might transmit the plague to that island, and then ignore the issue. As a side note, the narrator, despite his PhD in anthropology, knows little enough about either biology or the ongoing contemporary extinction that he states that the 35 species of North American mammals wiped out by the Clovis people are more than wiping out every species of bird, as apparently was done in a panicked response to the epidemic. (That's not a spoiler because the narrator wanders semi-randomly back and forth through the timespan covered by the story, something that might be foreshadowing were it a bit subtler, so we learn early that, in the future he is addressing, there are no birds.
(Based on my description,
cattitude wants me to tell you that the book is full of borglenuskies.)Tags: