Rhubarb

In my blog recently, I mentioned the godawful rotten-pine-scented air polluters in the bathrooms outside our office.

I'm not sure if they replaced them, or mixed them, or if they just subsided on their own, but it no longer smells like fetid pine needles. Now it smells like...well, rhubarb.

I know the scent of rhubarb quite well; I loved to eat it as a kid. I knew the leaves were poisonous, of course, but the stalk was good eatin'. None of that sissy dipped-in-sugar crap, either. Raw and freshly pulled out of the ground, if possible. Don't even mention the possibility of boiling it and baking it--yuck.

We had some in our back yard, but when I was in about Grade 5 I often raided some that grew underneath the fence of a house near the school. Didn't bother me one bit. Some people even said that it was a weed! I ask you.

Anyway, I doubt there is actually rhubarb-scented bathroom air freshener, but however it came to be, it's a vast improvement.

Leb Wohl

Interesting. Listening to this Neu! CD(from the library), I happened to notice that one of the tracks is named "Leb Wohl". This caught my attention because in Stephen R. Donaldson's excellent "Gap" series, one of the major characters is named "Hashi Lebwohl". It hadn't occurred to me that it might have meaning, though.

A quick search shows that "Leb Wohl" is German for "Farewell". I might even hazard a guess that "Leb"=~"leave, depart", and "Wohl"=~"well".

Now I wonder what, if anything, this is supposed to say about Hashi Lebwohl's character. It's been a while, but I recall he was a scientist, and a fairly amoral one at that. The "Gap" series was also supposed to map onto The Ring of the Nibelungen, and perhaps this is a hint as to who he corresponds to there. (Somebody out there has probably figured out the mapping...have to look for that later.)

Doubting the salmon

I just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams' writings, including the first 11 chapters(assembled from various drafts)of a new Dirk Gently novel. Dammit.

When I listened to Kirsty MacColl's "Tropical Brainstorm" album, I felt a more profound sense of loss than I did when I actually found out about her death. And now the same thing has happened with Douglas Adams. I vaguely knew he was probably an interesting person, and I had no high expectations that he would come with new books all that often. But now, having found out more about him, I feel the profound loss.

Not to mention how frustrating it is to read an unfinished book, knowing that it will never be finished--or if it is, it might be nothing like what the author had in mind. Who was paying Dirk Gently US$5000 a week, and why? What was up with Desmond the Rhinoceros? The carjacking in L.A.? "DaveLand", from the first chapter? That part was almost reminiscent of Vernor Vinge's Marooned In Realtime, but no explanation was offered...and was probably just as crucial to the plot as the Electric Monk was in the first book.

There are times when I do wish that, like in Spider Robinson's "Deathkiller" series, people from the future have come back to record the traces of dying minds, to recreate them in perfect bodies. The technological afterlife. But I can't bring myself to believe in that any more than I can the religious one. Douglas Adams would have been just as chagrined as Isaac Asimov to wake in one of those, anyway.

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New post on my blog. About books I read, CDs I bought, and dilation.

24

Since I spent so much time last night making up my Interests list(who doesn't, eh?), I thought what might give me a long term thread topic would be elucidating them. I mean, I'm not 100% sure that I mean the same thing by some of those terms as everyone else does.

To make it easy to keep track, I'll start at the beginning and work my way down the last, backtracking for any out-of-order insertions. All righty?

So, at the top of the list is "24". This is the TV show, two seasons completed now. A daring experiment that has managed to succeed, with each season consisting of 24 episodes, from consecutive hours of a single "day". The second season ran from 8:00 AM-8:00 AM, so was two calendar days, but one 24-hour period. You know what I mean, but I am personality-bound to explicate myself as unambiguously as possible. Sorry. My wife hates it too.

Why do I like it? Well, I actually like Kiefer Sutherland, and I think he's doing a great job. Elisha Cuthbert leaves a little more to be desired, and frankly next season they better take a hard look at integrating her into the storyline a little better. The rest of the cast is damn good, too, but the writing is the best part.

The storylines mutate two or three times throughout the season/day, with plots within plots within plots. There almost always ends up being a little twist at the end of every hour, in the last thirty seconds(which is stastically unlikely, but works nonetheless). In the very last seconds of the day/season, just when things should be going into denouement, you have the final twist of the knife(both times, a major character being fatally injured), and then you're hanging over the cliff.

It's spellbinding stuff, and I am still annoyed that we managed to miss(through VCR misadventures)two episodes of the second season. Someday...

You know, having basic cable, with no TV(worth watching)in the summer, leaves us with a lot more free time in the evenings, but sometimes I really miss it anyway. Maybe it's just like a quick-fix of instant gratification, but I enjoy it, because of the extended storylines. Extended storylines are just about my favourite thing in the world.