September 2002

There's a Terry Pratchett interview over at January Magazine. (Follow that link, Ma! He says which Discworld books will be next.) On not winning the Booker Prize, he says, "Thank goodness, because I think my earnings would have gone down considerably if I suddenly got literary credibility." Hee. Yeah, probably.

I have the "only stupid people are breeding" song in my head. You know the one, "I'm not sick, but I'm not well...." Yeah. It's been in my head since yesterday afternoon. It's strange, because I got pictures yesterday of my friends Chris and Daphne's youngest. And Chris and Daph aren't stupid at all. So I don't know what the song's around for. It's also strange to look at the pictures of this little boy. He looks like his parents. Both of them. They don't look like each other. It's just the weirdest thing, to me. And Heathah didn't make me deal with it, because Miss Siri looks like Heathah, not very much at all like a blend. It looks to me like Heathah's husband Dave contributed enough genetic material to make sure the kid had the proper number of eyes and noses, and the rest of the physical stuff is Heathah, Heathah, Heathah. Well, darker hair. Otherwise, though, very much her momma. Which is strange in its own way, I guess.

I'm just not used to my friends having kids yet.

I just want to clarify from yesterday that when I said sauna is to be pronounced "SOW-nah," that's sow as in the female pig, not sow as in to plant grain. You can do it "SAH-ooh-nah," but that's a bit too slow.

Jenn has an interesting list: the twenty people, dead or alive, she'd most like to invite to a dinner party. It's a cool idea, but right now I'm not very balanced on the subject. I keep thinking in terms of actual dinner parties I'd like to have, when we have the space, if we had the proximity to the people involved. So if I made my list right now, I'd be more like a "top twenty friends and relatives I miss" than anything else.

I did something a bit more drastic than this periodically, though. When I was twelve, I started playing the spaceship catastrophe game. The premise was: if you had to put sixteen people on a spaceship and leave earth in the middle of a catastrophe and never see anyone else again, who would you bring? Family members were forbidden, my own and other people's -- I could only choose one person from a given family. I played this game more or less yearly for several years, up through college, just to see how it changed, how it didn't change. It strikes me as odd and a little morbid now. But it was interesting at the time. When I mentioned this to someone (I think it was Trent, don't know for sure), he started thinking like a science fiction writer: well, you'd need two engineers, a doctor or two...no, no, that's who you need, not who you want to have around. Unless, of course, your favorite people include two engineers, a doctor or two....

I never shared the list with people, though. What are you going to say? "Hey, if I could only save 16 people from a catastrophe, you'd be one of them!" That's just the sort of comment that makes people back away, I think.

Anyway, anyway. My back is much better thanks to Dr. Bill, and I'm still thinking about Kalevala stuff, still reading Warchild. I wrote two more paragraphs here, originally, but then Agaçante crashed. I'm not going to try to reproduce them. Just have a good day, all right?