The Persians

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=071566fb3483381ca11a0c3a7c88649c

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/10.html

soporific: causing sleep; also, something that causes sleep.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=6053af813a9f65eb4941933fd9eb1cf2

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/09.html

fungible: interchangeable.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=651a68f235b3ba9c4ec23db090257e78

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/08.html

billet: to quarter, or place in lodgings.

Only spit out my 1.6k words today in my NaNoWriMo. Gillick Bootblack, Blondie, & Alizarn Red are at the karnak carnivale going to see Doktor Tophet. The poor dear things. Ugh though I have been damaged! Last night was Sam's game of World of Darkness monster mash, & I played a werewolf (who in human form looked a lot like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) who wouldn't stop talking about Antarctica. I had the soles of the shoes Saint Lawrence "Titus" Oates wore when he walked off into the blizzard in an honorable attempt to save his friend's life! I have a piece of the tent from Saint Birdie Bowens, Saint Uncle Bill & Saint Cherry's Emperor Penguin Egg Expedition! I didn't have any of Shackleton's whiskey, though. There was...a lot of frenzy! It turns out boy do Vampires & Werewolves freak out a lot in each other's company. So today was just trying to mope as much as possible. Get it out of my system. I managed to leave the apartment to get groceries-- I had a salad for breakfast, & grilled cheese for lunch. Also lots of Kix. M tested, M approved. We also watched V. Which is...kind of terrible. Not through the remote at the screen bad, but just that bland kind of boring. Like Flash Forward, which we've stopped watching. Anyhow, the V stuff looks pretty, & Morena Baccarin is very pretty & otherworldly. Plus you know, Alan Tudyk, & that girl from Lost who reminds me of Danielle. I'll give it another chance, but I'm not excited about it. Seems aimed at a lower brow than I'd like, a middle brow. Canned ethics conflict, ahoy! I do like aliens though. & fascists. My other Quest today was venturing out to find bitters. My usual source has been out, & I require frequent infusions of angostura bark. I ended up at "Grab," which is a Bierkraft-like specialty shop, with kegs to fill growlers with arthaus beers, & stinky cheeses, & such. Also netted some Fee's Bitters with my usual Angostura Aromatic Bitters. Oh & hey! Bernie is in town-- he was at game last night, too!

Spacesuits by Amanda Young, photos by Mark Avino.

Severian saw
a knight in white armor
with a gold visor.

Okay, that might be my favorite haiku of all time. In The Book of the New Sun, one of the greatest books ever written, the protagonist is in the corridors of a museum, full of every ancient wonder-- & the caretaker shows him the "oldest painting" they have, & Severian our narrator describes it as a knight in white armor, with a gold visor, standing on a blasted battlefield, holding an eerie flag aloft. It is of course the moon landing, but being set however many tens, hundred of thousands years later-- millions-- Severian has no reference.

This book is gorgeous. Still photographs of the clothes you might need to go to outerspace. The writing is historically interesting-- who competed, who won the contract-- but except when it gets technical, the pictures dwarf it. The layout is fairly crazy, if only because reading along with the text forces you to jump all over, but there aren't a lot of options when you have loads of full page art. My favorite might by the AX-1-- a hardbody suit with rotary joints that managed to look like the most ungainly & most elegant option at the same time. I read this at work while doing a bit of drudgery that I had to wait around to finish, & I was surprised by the reactions I got-- everyone wanted to talk about it. People stopped me in the elevator-- "you know, Platex had a contract with NASA to build spacesuits!" or had an opinion. Just goes to show you, the space race isn't dead! Come on, Ares! Seriously though, why did we call our rocket Ares? Ares is the god of war. We're not even trying to scare the Russians anymore with our ballistic prowess. Why! I think the USA was just jealous of India having the guts to call their "I"CBMs Agni. Which to be fair is a pretty intimidating thing to call your nukes.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=fb926dfe7d8f9a9789fd9443992ff0e7

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/07.html

abeyance: suspension; temporary cessation.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=4ba4305b9f3c012fccdbd75ececf7136

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/06.html

felicitous: apt or appropriate; also, delightful.

Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata.

The bamboo rattled
when the guns came to Japan.
Blood fed the snow queen.

This is a collection of comics about rural Japan on the edge of industrialization. The end of a world-- but it isn't overly nostalgic. Maybe the opposite. Domestic violence & rape are the plot of a majority of the stories. Still, there are definite moments of beauty & magic. "Echo," "Wild Geese Memorial Service," & the eponymous "Red Snow" in particular I enjoyed. Honestly though it just made me wish I was reading Yusagi Yojimbo comics.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.

The People of Flame
came before the Talking Men,
& after the Blood.

In Adam's Tongue the argument was how language & proto-language drove the evolution from ape to man. Well, from animal ape to human ape, I should say. Or at least Homo ape. The premise of this book is that cooking was the impetus of that same change-- or I should say, that is how the premise is stated. Luckily, the book is more scholarly than that pithy statement, & the turn of a phrase that suggests cooking made humans out of apes veils the real thesis of the book: that fire is what made Homo habilis into Homo erectus. In fact, Bickerton's argument in Adam's Tongue regarding abstract displacement & "power scavenging" fits right into Wrangham's scheme-- or at least, the power scavenging does; Wrangham puts increased meat consumption as the kick in the pants that jumped Australopithecus into habilis. Though I should be clear on something-- Wrangham prefers the term "Habaline", much the same way one might say "Australopithicine." He reserves judgment on species or genus, which I think is overly conservative, but it really doesn't impact his argument but to make the stepping stone from Habaline to Homo erectus all the more discrete.

The first thing Wrangham does is sit down & spell out what cooked food means in terms of biological ecology. He also ends the book with a bit of a screed about caloric information-- which is a revisting of his arguments. Simple as pie: cooked food lets you scrape our more calories, more quickly. Which frees up your time & your biology. Humans use the same amount of energy as you would expect for a primate our size-- but with a vastly larger brain sucking up a hugely increased proportion of that energy. How does Homo sapiens afford it? By externalizing digestion-- well, & then some. It isn't like cooking replaces digestion; it supersedes it, really. He talks about raw foodists-- not as a rant, but an example-- & sheesh, I never realized how recklessly awful raw foodists are to their bodies. Semen stops flowing, sex drive drops off, infertility & amenorrhea set in, metabolism drops & thus energy decreases, bones start melting & muscles coming unhinged. Just a disaster! & really if you stop & think about it, you can see that humans are pretty unarguably adapted to eat cooked food. The smaller teeth, the tiny mouth, & the radical change in intestinal length & processing. "Natural" is a cooked meal, for a human-- & Wrangham posits that it has been for a long time.

Wrangham folds in all the benefits of fire in with cooking-- & that is fine, but really the arguments terms are reversed I think. This is a study that dwells on cooking, but that is only a facet of fire. It is fire that we are really talking about. Catching Fire has no problem appealing to the other benefits of fire, but casts them almost as fringe benefits; protection from predators & light at night allowing sleeping on the ground, making bipedalism viable, for instance. The articulation of fire's role in bipedalism happens in two parts; elsewhere Wrangham speaks to fire's ability to warm allowing humans to shed their hair. The picture he paints is much more evocative than just heat dispersal on the savanna; it is long distance running or walking-- it is letting sweat bead on your skin, instead of under a layer of insulation. With fire, you don't need a heavy coat to protect you from the elements-- you can go naked of fur, ready to take full advantage of your bipedalism. He argues that clustering around the fire, whether for warmth, protection, or for shared food, results in self-domestication. Protohumans who are calm & share get a spot in the circle, prosper. It is fire that this book really speaks to-- not just cooking.

There is a chapter of the book that deals with cooking & the sexual division of labor. Now we're getting into some interesting territory! & choppy waters. Wrangham dismounts the chapter well, leaving you with a fairly decent couple of quips, but the body of the chapter is a little...heteronormative. Which I want to preface saying. I don't in any way think that discussing gender roles in societies & their place in evolutionary psychology or biological anthropology is something to shy away from. That said, there are dangerous corridors that must be carefully navigated, for here steps in many of the cultural assumptions of the viewer. Gender binary is a real social construct, but it is easy-- to easy-- to ignore queer outliers. Or to believe that the data you are looking at confirms your own biases. & I'm not saying Wrangham is bad, or heaven forbid misogynist, but just that this is a chapter to stay on your toes for. There are a lot of givens, a lot of sweeping pronouncements. Which are always difficult. Anyhow, I confess to a certain amount of essentialism in my feminism-- & I happily embrace the Industrial Age & Information Age for its ability to enfranchise women.

That disclaimer said, I do think there is a strong clustering at the poles, there are gendered divisions of labor all up & down human & the near-prehuman history. Heck, I even like the Neanderthal extinction theory that says human gender specialization is what drove them to extinction. Wrangham makes some compelling arguments about cooking, & its cross-cultural role. He doesn't split men & women into hunters & gatherers, but rather hunters & cookers. It is a fairly intriguing way to frame the data, & he backs it up with figures & statistics. The hook my interest is most piqued by is his argument that economics come before paternity. That cooking, as a means to split up time & to manage caloric economy, precedes sex & parentage in terms of marriage. The two pieces may very well fit together, but that survival beats out parentage-- I have to say I see strength in the idea. & it wouldn't be fair not to mention that my household operates by the schema he lays out. I bring home the meat (from the grocery store...) & then Jenny cooks it up. Of course, a lot of the societal surveys that Wrangham brings up enforce female subservience to the cooking pot with domestic violence, he ends the section with a brief discussion of this-- so it works out.

There are a few tidbits in here I will end this by discussing. Wrangham puts fire's discovery with protohumans pounding meat to make it more digestible, which is as good as any argument, but ultimately beside the point. Imagining the circumstances a thing like that caught on is fruitless. He also talks about how cooking might have happened-- food dropped into fires, or seeds left after you've moved it. Again, immaterial. People (& presumably proto-people) are weird. Who thought up eating rotting milk, or fermented grapes? Who knows? He also name checks Antalya's forever burning fire, mentioned by Homer, which is great, awesome, sweet. & WTF Kanzi the bonobo will make FIRE? Apparently, yes. Give Kanzi sticks & matches & he'll cook up marshmallows. What the heck. Lastly, this book has a lovely notes section, bibliography, & index. Oh it warms the cockles of my heart.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=8f339e5bc8210c1c9f5e0695e7ef3f9b

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/05.html

maunder: to talk or wander aimlessly.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=52e31edc8fb47bc4c87531f832beb788

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/04.html

skulduggery: devious, dishonest, or unscrupulous behavior or activity.

Calamity Jack by Shannon & Dean Hale, illustrated by Nathan Hale.

Ha! Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum!
Grind your bones to make my bread!
Heist on the Iron Horse!

When I read Rapunzel's Revenge, I wasn't prepared to be wowed, & thus was bowled over. This time, I knew what I was getting into, but I can happily say it lived up to expectations. Where ...Revenge is a Weird West tale, this goes east, goes urban & becomes a good old fashioned Grimm Bros. Heist story. Jack takes front seat, which is fine-- he's not as great as Rapunzel, but she doesn't get sidelined, so that is fine. There is a pixie sidekick, which you know I'm into. A giant crimelord with a floating penthouse A steampunk gadgeteer. Giant ants! Cultural diversity-- seriously, the witchdoctor or kachina fellow, or whatever that guy was, what?! Where did that guy come from. Great. The madcap & frantic pace of the book really works; I was compelled to blitz through it. Jabberwocks & Bandersnatches, too, in the bargain. Gender positive, respectful of race, rollicking fun-- why isn't everyone writing books like this? The advance reading copy I read was black & white, & I can't wait to get a look at the finished colour art, because Nathan Hale's art participates in the Jeff Smith school of cartooning with a heavy dose of details & expression in the colour. I had no idea this was coming out but I'm pretty excited about it.

Geektastic edited by Holly Black & Cecil Castellucci.

Clark Kent wears glasses.
Kal is a newspaper geek.
Jor-El? Science geek.

This is a collection of stories, ruminations on nerdery, in particular, on High School geekdom. Contributed to by a whole host of the "cool kids" of YA literature-- & to sit at the popular table in YA fandom you kind of have to be a big nerd. The first story, by Holly Black & Cecil Castellucci, is a romance between a con-going pair of cosplayers-- a Jedi & a Klingon. Mostly when the 501st show up as the undisputed authority, that part is the best. They also wrote the interstitial comics, with illustration by the always awesome Bryan Lee O'Malley & Hope Larson. That story, & the comics, are very strong. A lot of the other stories are fine, or cute-- or in the case of Kelly Link's "Secret Identity", really weird. The only one I didn't like I pretty viscerally disliked-- Barry Lyga's "The Truth About Dino Girl." The culmination of that story? Has the protagonist, a paleontologically inclined girl with a crush on the baseball jock with the lame tattoo of a flaming baseball, bumping into the aforementioned guy's girlfriend, & spilling her borderline stalker doodles of said aweful ink all over. The girlfriend says predictable things-- "he's my boyfriend, you are a weirdo who is stalking him, leave him along" & then doesn't tell everyone in the school. She tells the boyfriend with the terrible tat, but leaves it at that. So our "protagonist"? Her "revenge" is to sneak into the girl's locker room, take pictures of the girlfriend while she's showering, & post them all over with a note saying "I R A SLUTZ" & posting the girls home phone. Okay, newsflash Barry Lyga. Your protagonist is the bully. Your protagonist is the villain in the other stories. On a lighter note, probably the sweetest story is "The Stars at the Finish Line," by Wendy Mass.

None of these were my geek childhood, though.