Snowbound, Sorta

Keeping with their frantic, frenetic compulsion to panic us easily-frightened sheep, the Weather Men have us all believing the entire northeast corner of the US will be snowed in this weekend. So I head out early to get some snowbound reading, in my never-ending hunt to recreate the perfect snowbound reading day (winter 2002, when it was just the wife and I, and I read an entire book on the Apollo space program).

Actually, allow me to back up a bit. I woke up at 3:15 that morning, tossed and turned, surrendered to some heartburn (gotta cut out the turkey lunch meat and bread ... and, uh, the beer). Went downstairs to the office for five hours and went through bills at a glacial pace whilst watching The Day of the Triffids on youtube. Good times.

Little One had another little one sleeping over with her, so they and Patch were watching some Disney movie in the morning. I did the errands myself, including a library run to the most forbidding biblioteca in the county: er, the County Library. Ya gotta pay for a parking space there, and it's as close to urban as we get out here. Yet went I did, and scored a handful of intriguing tomes.

Then we went to my nephew's birthday party out in the sticks just as the snow was starting to come down. In reality it was hail, and there was no accumulation until we got to my brother's house about 25 miles north-northwest of us. There was pizza. There was cake. There was a lot of snow on the ground when we left. Took us over an hour to get home, and, let me tell you, it was scary. The Impala nearly failed us, swish-tailing and struggling up and down the icy, steep, winding hills that "the sticks" are known for. A plow almost plowed us off the road. It was a stressful, nerve-wracking trip home, but once I got home, I was happy.

What'd I get? What'd I get?

Okay, I'll tell you:

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved, by Colin Wilson. What a treasure for a crypto-para-ab-normal enthusiast as me! Plus, history's mysteries stuff. Leonard Nimoy would have an orgasm reading this book! (Ugh, sorry about that ...) And Wilson wrote one of my all-time favorite horror/SF novels, The Mind Parasites.

The Science of James Bond, by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg. I'm a moderate Bond fan, but I love the way the authors take down some of the more, mm, fanciful aspects of the Bond movies / novels. Favorite chapter titled, "Some Thoughts About Secret Bases." As a potential Bond villain, this supplied a lot of practical information for me.

Strange Brains and Genius, by Clifford Pickover. Thumbed through it and it looked quite fanciful, chock-full of potential weirdity trivia that I need to pack into this blog more often. Read other books by Pickover, and he's always an interesting read.

Two books on religion, subject for another post early in the new year.

And a somewhat too-cerebral book entitled Many Futures, Many Worlds, a collection of essays on SF. And by "somewhat too-cerebral" I refer to hoity-toity literati who tend to drain the fun out of a subject (though one essay is written by Gary K. Wolf, author of my all-time favorite SF novel from my youth, Killerbowl). I'm really reading it to compile a list of short stories and novels I have not read yet but should. Halfway through, and that list includes -

"Nightfall", by Isaac Asimov (never read that classic)
"The New Reality" by Charles Harness
"First Contact" by Murray Leinster
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
"Moxon's Master," by Ambrose Bierce
"The Lion of Comarre" by Arthur C. Clarke
"Scanners Live in Vain," by Cordwainer Smith (see comment for "Nightfall")
The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

So much to be read, so little time.

Anyway, while the girls were outside playing in the snow, my wife hands me the latest Entertainment Weekly to read. We've been getting this magazine for years; I think one of my wife's friends got a subscription for us one Christmas and it just keeps going. I always throw away renewal notices and bills, but the damn issues keep coming, week after week after week.

Well, this issue was the Best Of / Worst Of of movies, teevee shows, music and books, of 2012. I agreed with perhaps 75% of their assessments, of the movies, shows, music and books I was familiar with. Which was about a quarter to a third of what they reviewed. I am in agreement with the oft-voiced about that the culture is a cesspool, and I try to spend as little precious time as possible in it. I am truly sorry for the "culture" my children will inherent and, ugh, swim in. After reading this issue, my main take away point was - to get on the Best Of list you'd better be either gay or a liberal or both. But at least a liberal. Sigh.

Well, off to share a burrito and watch some TCM with the wife once the children are in bed.

My Best Of / Worst Of lists for tomorrow's post ...