In Which Our Heroine Still Has A Pain In The Neck (Has, Mind You)

8 May 2003

Neck pain continues, so this will be short, as I'm attempting not to add computer use stiffness to what appears to be a cold settled in the muscles. I'm hydrating, getting vitamin C, taking Advil, and generally doing my best to keep the stupid thing happy.

Our Wild won again! Five to one, and they didn't let a goal by when the Canucks had their two-man advantage at the end, which is a pretty good psychological edge to go in on. Guess I know what we're doing tonight. (Well, some of what we're doing, anyway.)

And luckily, someone else is writing "Ode to the Crockpot." Whew.

I finished reading The King's Peace. Timprov tells me that he read that it was not Jo Walton's fault that this book has no ending; it was a publisher decision to split one huge-o book into two reasonably sized books. Which is fine, but...I would have liked a bit more closure at the end anyway. Ah well. I am told that you can't always get what you want, although I'm not sure how reliable that source is. I was satisfied that the snarking at Christianity remained the character's rather than the author's, although nobody ever asked the character the question I thought most reasonable under the circumstances, and she certainly didn't come up with it herself. Ah well.

When a book stops without ending like this, I have conflicting desires. On the one hand, I want to see how it turns out more than if there was a contained plot arc in the book. On the other hand, I resent being made to get another book to see how a plot arc turns out. Which is not Jo Walton's fault. Hmmm. We'll see what I get around to, I guess.

I also read the new Analog and rejoiced: I believe this was the last of Ken Wharton's stories that he turned in to the crit group when we were both still in it. I'm glad that his talent is being recognized and his stories published and all that, but I'd already read both of the last two of his stories in Analog, and he didn't change them that much between times. "It was pretty clean when we read it," said Zed of the last one, and he was right, but that did make it no great surprise. I'm glad to have them in nice copies, of course, but it'll be better to have new-to-me Ken Wharton stories in nice copies.

And I started David's copy of The Chomsky Reader, a volume with several different bits of Chomsky in it. I'm interested in what he has to say about linguistics, and beyond that, I feel like he's one of those people one ought to have read some of, if one reads seriously and widely. I'm not really comfortable only knowing how he rants about some specific current event. Context seems like a good thing.

I may feel the need for a break and something else, though -- the tape of the Eco-Challenge from last night, and some Graham Joyce, maybe. And maybe some work on the new short story or on the Not The Moose, although, as I said, I'm trying to minimize computer work while my neck is yucky. Which it still is. And with that....

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