It's pancake day, and I'm sick with a cold. Normally, I love pancakes, but today my body craves only soup, gruel, and tea. So be it. There will be other opportunities to eat pancakes. Today, I stayed home, napped, and read. Read. Oh, right, this is supposed to be a book report about Last Crossing. Sorry, I drifted off there for a second.

It's a Western but the first few chapters were mostly set in England. No doubt this is supposed to set up some interesting contrasts between the civilized world and the bleak frontier. But I'll never see those contrasts because the first few chapters lost my interest and I couldn't bring myself to pick this book back up.

Tags: book | gruel | yawn |

The Burninators ran a Bay Area Night Game last weekend, and I wasn't there. Looking at the BANG 14 puzzles, it was pretty awesome. What was I doing instead? Well, I was working on writing about a different Burninators game, one back in July. Yes, it took me eight months, but I finally put together McGuffin Ho!, a write-up of the McGuffin game.

(Some of the more cynical among you might suspect that I posted this with a secret purpose: to distract people on other teams from their applications to work at XXtra Online Magazine. Please do not be distracted. Since this application process is likely to result in many embarassing photos, I think you and/or your team should put great effort into this.)

I have been playing with Google Page Creator, a new service which hosts web pages and gives you a WYSIWYG editor for them. It's pretty neat. My favorite part: there are pretty templates available. That is to say, I can write some words and pour them into a page designed by the UI designers at Google. These people have some ideas that have evolved past the 1980s green-screen era.

Krakatoa was a volcano that got bigger and bigger until it blew up.

Krakatoa was a book that got longer and longer until I just didn't want to hear any more about volcanoes, the Reuters news service, the history of theories of continental drift, pumice stone, or whatever.

Too bad. I like the author's book The Professor and the Madman.

Tags: book | meander | yawn |

This comic book makes no sense, but it's so pretty that you don't mind. Huge swaths of black, good lines suggesting graceful motion. OK, it depicts a future world in which cyborgs fight by means of katana. And that's pretty silly. But the pictures are sooo pretty. I'll keep picking this comic up.

Tags: comics | classical allusions | way of the sword |

It's a book about MIT pranks, with photos. Including some color photos. It was nice. Web sites can be more comprehensive, but are not so easy to read on the streetcar. Thus, I was glad to read this book.

I returned this book to the UC Berkeley library yesterday. I tried to break into a few UC Berkeley buildings yesterday. You might think that was a tribute to the spirit expressed in Nightwork. But actually I was just posting flyers about technical writing internships at work. And in the end, I didn't break into any buildings, just got into those that were left unlocked. Hey, UC Berkeley, they caught the Unabomber, maybe you can start leaving Cory Hall unlocked on Saturdays now, eh? Please?

Tags: books | pranks | library

In honor of Wondercon (which I'm not attending (yes, I am lame)), a comic book review:

How often do you finish reading a comic book and think, "I wish there was a bibliography."? Arthur Cravan was a dada artist (except, of course, that there was no art, there was only dada). He lived under a variety of assumed names. He boxed. He moved around. This comic book, out recently from Dark Horse, is a biography. According to this comic, Cravan was also an art thief, a smuggler, a brawler, and perhaps wrote the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

How much of this should I believe? How can I learn more? I tried searching the UC Berkeley library catalog, and found one Cravan biography--in French. The only French I know is tourist stuff, so I won't be able to understand that biography except when it talks about train timetables. I read an interview between V. Vale and some zinester named Dean living in Prague who wrote about Cravan. That has fewer details, but has some reading recommendations:

It's hard to find information in English on Cravan, although he's described quite well in Robert Motherwell's The Dadaist Painters and Poets. The best description, by the art critic Roger Conover, is in Four Dada Suicides.

I guess I need to read more books.

Tags: comics | dada | research |

The Mystic Fish team of space mercenaries has signed up as contestants on The Apprentice: Zorg!. Oh, I hope we get in. Oh, I'm on tenterhooks. Or maybe those aren't tenterhooks. Maybe I just consumed too much caffeine to speed our efforts towards filling in the application quickly. That would also explain the twitching and dehydration. I should go eat something.

This is a collection of essays by Henry Petrowski about engineering. I suspect that he was paid by the word. The first essay is about the engineer Charles Steinmetz. But Petrowski wants an angle on Steinmetz, so he spends four pages talking about a doctored photo which made Steinmetz look goofy. There isn't four pages of material there.

The next essay was about Nobel's intent in setting up the Nobel prize, and how it turned out. This could be an interesting topic. And yet my attention wandered as I tried to read this essay. By the end, I only maintained my concentration on the essay by imagining how I would chop a third out of it if I were Mr Petrowski's editor.

I gave up halfway through the next essay, about the origin of Robert's Rules of Order.

Tags: book | engineering | yawn |