Day 612 of the library lockout. ... Okay, maybe it only seems like day 612. At least, today it does.

In reality, we are closing in on the end of the second full week of the library board and the Greater Victoria Labour Relations Association's depriving the city of their libraries. And, so far, an end to it seems awfully far in the future.

I've mostly been pretty positive during all this. Certainly not happy, but generally hopeful that things will turn out, especially given the overwhelming public support. But, for some reason, today... Today, I felt cranky and just generally annoyed at the world. Lynn says it's probably because I didn't sleep well last night, and she's probably right, but I was still grouchy. I hope the mood passes.

A random thought about the situation:

While spending four hours walking back and forth in front of the library, I'm reading a bit here and there, working my way through The Last Days of Krypton by Kevin J. Anderson. It tells the story of, well, the last days of Krypton: the events leading up to Krypton's destruction. Superman's father Jor-El, as the story has always gone, tries to convince his world's ruling council of the danger threatening them all. The council refuses to listen, burying their heads in the sand, desperate to maintain the status quo. Gee, sounds like a certain library board I can think of...

I've been a bad blogger. So, time for a little catch-up.

...

Um...

Okay. New book for Lynn and me. We finished Mr. Thundermug pretty quickly. It was a very thin book. Sort of peculiar. Somewhat humourous. Not really a story, more a series of vignettes about the history of this talking baboon. I think it was intended as a comment on some aspect of humanity. Exactly which aspect, I'm not sure.

We have now moved on to Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates by Sean Cullen, the first in a planned ongoing series about an orphan boy called Hamish X (a second book is already in the library system). Now this is one insane book. The author, Sean Cullen, is a Canadian comedian formerly of the comic musical group Corky and the Juice Pigs, who now works on his own. And he is stark... raving... mad. And I mean that in the best way possible. In this YouTube clip of C and the JP, he's the one on the right:



This first installment in the series introduces us to Hamish, an orphan whose name is feared by orphanage owners around the world. The nasty ones anyway. Hamish is placed in the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory, run by the evil Mr. Viggo Schmaltz, creator of Caribou Blue Cheese (made, naturally, from caribou milk). Hamish plots his escape with the help of some new friends. Meanwhile, somewhere out there in the world... the Cheese Pirates grow closer and closer...

The story itself is crazy enough but then there are the footnotes. Here's one example. Cullen describes the cheese making process and mentions that the curds have the liquid squeezed out the them. A footnote to that explains:

Curds, not Kurds. Curds are immature morsels of cheese that must be ripened and
aged over time. Kurds are a people who inhabit a region that encompasses
southern Turkey and northern Iraq. No one knows if Kurds ripen with age, but it
is likely that if they were pressed, liquid would come out of them.

Needless to say, after reading this aloud to Lynn, I had to stop while we tried to get control of our giggles. In fact, that happens after the vast majority of the footnotes.

I'm guessing our next joint-read will be the next Hamish book, Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain.

In other news, or rather non-news, I keep managing to put off calling back Mark Hellman to try and get back into the voice work. The last couple of times I've called, I've managed to just get his machine and left messages saying I'll try him again. And so far, I'm still trying to call him again. Stupid intertia.

Especially observant visitors may have noticed that I've changed the "what I'm reading" list down the side of the page. However, I am not actually finished reading Stephen Baxter's Emperor, but am taking a quick break from it. Again.

It's not that I'm not enjoying the book. I am. Well, I'm enjoying the story anyway. The book itself is a little dry in tone. It's definitely an engineer's view of Roman history (or alternate history). Baxter's insane amount of techincal detail suits his hard SF stories better. But I do want to see where this multi-volume epic will eventually lead. Just in bits a pieces right now. It doesn't help that I find myself easily distracted by the novelty of my still-relatively-new PeeEssPee. As for the out and out break...


...that's due to a new Kage Baker book. It's been out for a few months now; how did I miss that?! I love this woman's writing, especially her Company series. With her words, she is able to make you burst out loud laughing one page, and feel you heart well and truly wrenched on the next. Gods and Pawns is a collection of short stories in her Company universe and I couldn't be happier that something has come along to fill the gap between novels.

For those of you who don't know the series. it's all about the immortal, time-travelling cyborgs who have lived among us since the dawn of time in order to make money for the Dr. Zeus company a few centuries in our future. I kid you not. And these characters are wonderfully human. Again, I kid you not. I find myself automatically empathising with Lewis, a Literature Preserver. He's the nice guy who will, for example, let Mendoza (a Botanist on whom he has a sizeable secret crush) take the remaining tent after the flash flood almost completely destroys their camp. I love the guy.

I've also changed the book that Lynn and I are reading together. We've finished Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, the funniest (and surprisingly touching) retelling of the New Testament (including the missing bits) you've ever read. Next up is Mr. Thundermug, the tale of a talking baboon.

In other catch up news, I should mention that Lynn has started her own blog, Everything I Eat. It was inspired by the surprisingly addictive book Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, in which the author, Tucker Shaw, took a picture of everything he ate for an entire year. And, unlike me, she actually updates her blog regularly! Every day even!