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Video showing how much of TV is greenscreened. They're greenscreening stuff I didn't even suspect.

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Sitting in my office, gazing out the window,* watching the snow fall ....

...wait, this is Texas. In mid-February.






* as I'm in the basement, the windows start fairly high up on the wall and afford me a lovely view of the back of the dumpster enclosure, the golf cart Physical Plant parks here, and a small hedge, which shelters a succession of birds and squirrels throughout the year.

Solar Labyrinth

I've been slowly reading Robert Borski's Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" (Amazon referral). This is the sort of book for which self-publishing was made: a tight, focused subject with a very small pool of potential readers. Borski is a literary detective here, speculating on questions raised by elisions, omissions, and distractions in Wolfe's series. I think sometimes he's seriously reaching for his conclusions, but I enjoyed reading his essays anyway. It's been long enough since I re-read the Book of the New Sun that I can't actually speak to any of Borski's conclusions right now, since I don't remember the details necessary to do so, but the next time I read the series, I'll be looking to see if I agree or not.

Recommended if you both like Wolfe's series and clasp the Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle (Amazon referral) to your bosom in delight. Not recommended if deep inquiry and wild speculation into books drives you nuts.

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Silence and Shadows

While sick this weekend, I read James Long's Silence and Shadows (Amazon referral link). I bought this book on impulse, at the same time as I bought his Ferney (Amazon referral link), which I'd found through a review on the Reading the Past blog. I haven't been able to get into Ferney yet, because of an obvious "Academic History Is Dry, Boring and Not Accurate while Reincarnated Folk Memory Is So Much Better" bent, which drives me nuts. But I was able to get through Silence and Shadows.

S&S follows the story of an ex-punk musician, Patrick Kane, who is starting his second career as an archaeologist while at the same time trying to cope (not very well) with horrible events surrounding his quitting music and losing his wife and son, and trying to wrangle volunteer archaeologists as the dig director on a dig that discovers the grave of an Anglo-Saxon warrior woman. The events in the distant Anglo-Saxon past that led to the woman's burial are interleaved with the modern-day story, and I'd like them far better if they hadn't been WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.

I liked it for the archaeology porn -- my BA and MA are in anthropology after all -- and was able to accept the handwaving away of most normal arky dig problems and proper procedure by convincing myself it was a survey dig being filmed for Time Team, rather than a proper one. And I groaned in frustration along with the characters when the local landowner snuck in and ruined a site so he could get on with the business of building houses.

Anyway, it was a fairly light read and it served its purpose of entertaining me, but none of the characters or plot elements are going to stick with me for long. Fair warning: if you're an arky, the dig procedures might drive you nuts. I was able to handle them because I've never actually been on a dig - every time I was scheduled to go on one, a freak series of events ended up cancelling the dig for the day or days I was supposed to be there and eventually I accepted that the universe intended me for cultural anthropology instead. And then I got my library degree. :) (What drove me nuts was the persistence of folk-memory in a folk song that drives part of the plot, but I was able to roll my eyes and ignore it, for the most part.)

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20 min. on bike 3.5 mi. Total: 888.5 mi. From Rivendell: 410.5 mi. Still blindfolded.