Somehow or other Amazon got their hands on this before I did. Oh well… It happens.
Meanwhile, it looks like the grass-cutting guys got the job done just in time: it’s raining again. (sigh) But at least the dandelions are under control for the moment. Forget weedkiller: all our weeds understand is the edge of cold iron.
Via MySwitzerland.com: links to 360-degree panoramas of major Swiss peaks. You’ll need either QuickTime or Java to view them. The one they start with, Schilthorn, is particularly nice for its view of the Jungfrau massif and its neighbor peaks. (Schilthorn appeared in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as “Piz Gloria”, complete with large rotating mountaintop restaurant. Ignore the restaurant, enjoy the view…)
Peter says, “Why aren’t they doing this in Texas?” Well, whatever: maybe they wanted mountains and barbecue. (And I have always told him that the only people crazier about BBQ than Americans are the Swiss.) The World Barbecue Gold Cup is being held in Interlaken from May 16 to May 18. See also www.barbecue.ch for details.
The pond behind our house is famous locally for its swans, which come here every year to raise a family. Normally, anyway.
They didn’t settle in last year, because the fields around the pond were full of some very obstreperous horses which kept wading into the reeds and disturbing the nesting mother. They didn’t nest the year before that, either, as workers nearby were planting trees in the adjacent field for several days, and the swans got spooked.
For the past few weeks we’ve seen one swan out on the pond, or wandering around up in the grass when the horses (thery’re here again) weren’t around. Our early theory was that this was a youngster of an earlier hatching, told to go off elsewhere by his parents, who were probably nesting in the lake over in the Demesne. But a few days ago Peter caught a flash of something white in the reeds — and yesterday I saw her myself: the second swan, on the nest. So it’s really spring now, and all things are right with the world…
(By the way, if the image to the right doesn’t look quite crisp, that’s because it’s been rendered as a watercolor using the Fo2Pix “buZZ” plugin for Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Photoshop. We normally use a larger version of this image as a general-purpose note card.)
Not surprised to see this plan to notify Dublin students’ parents of school absenteeism by SMS text messaging. Judged by percentage of population, Ireland has one of the biggest percentages of cellphone users in Europe. It seems like babies are born with Nokias glued to their ears.
What I don’t understand is why it’s taken so long for SMS messaging to even be introduced in the US, let alone to catch on. Unless it’s strictly a digital thing? (I seem to remember that most of the mobile services in the US are still analog. I don’t think we’ve had analog here since several years ago, when they phased it out and the whole country went GSM.) For example, on Valentine’s day this year, one source said that nearly five hundred million SMSs were sent in the UK alone. And we’re sure seeing a lot of the “messaging-friendly” phones popping up, the ones that are more keyboard than “dial”…
Someone’s got to explain this one to me. What the heck is this about? (And am I hallucinating a slight similarity of this cat to the one in the Kikko Man flash?)
Voyeurism in avian mode. (Via the wonderful Geisha asobi blog.)
It was a pretty one. The SOHO spacecraft’s website has movies of yesterday’s transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the Sun, as well as other delights.
The next don’t-miss transit will be June 8, 2004: Venus will transit (as she hasn’t done since 1882).
A long read, but this article from Harper’s made me feel as if I’d fallen into a particularly nasty part of Heinlein’s “Future History” timeline.
So today we relax a little…but not too much, as this afternoon we’ll hear back from our production partners, and they’ll have notes on The Ring.
There are always notes. “Notes” in this sense are the changes or suggestions (though when they come from your director, they frequently have the force of commands) that the team would like to have incorporated into your next draft. If you’re very lucky, they’ll make sense. Fortunately, we’re lucky in our production team.
But there have been some notes from people outside our team on this project which caused us to sniff a little. One, from what appear to be the Correctness Police at Channel Four in the UK, regarded one character who dies after, well, let’s call it a run-in with a magical weapon. They were concerned that this behavior might be “imitable”. Yeah, and the would-be imitator is going to get a magical spear-cum-cruise-missile where, exactly? …Some of the C4 notes reminded me forcibly of some of the idiocies we used to suffer at Hanna-Barbera at the hands of the network BS&P (broadcast standards and practices) people who would come in weekly and pass judgment on our scripts. (I particularly remember the BS&P lady who told us we weren’t allowed to tie characters up, but when my story editor Tom [in the depths of irony] suggested that maybe we could chain them up instead, that was fine with her. Go figure.)
Oh well. There are a few other things to do while waiting for the four o’clock phone call. The sink is full of dishes, for one thing. Better get on with it: they won’t just go away by themselves…
So The Ring went to the producers this morning. Now Peter wants to go to the pub. I don’t know if I can cope with that: I’m wrecked.
I really really wish right now that we had a working teleportation system. To walk out the back door and into the check-in area at the Alpentherme or the Burgerbad in Leukerbad would be a wonderful thing. Go downstairs to get a bathrobe and towel, change into a bathing suit and lock up the clothes, then have a fast shower and head into the outdoor thermal pool…and stand under a three-liter-per-second hot “fire hose” pipe for the most emphatic shower you can imagine…
Sigh. Later.
