Tropical Storm–and soon-to-be-hurricane–Alex is churning things up down in the gulf. It’s probably going to come ashore near the Texas-Mexico border, but we’re on the wet side of the storm so we’re probably going to see some heavy rains over the next day or three. That’s not a bad thing. So long as we don’t get flash flooding, we can certainly use the precipitation.
I updated News From the Dead Zone this morning. It’s been a while. Lots of links to clink on to amuse you.
I read “Samantha’s Diary” by Diana Wynne Jones in Stories: All-New Tales last night and this morning. It takes place 200 years in the future when most Christmas traditions have fallen by the wayside. Samantha starts receiving all the gifts delineated in The Twelve Days of Christmas from a secret admirer. It doesn’t even start out cute. She doesn’t know what to do with a pear tree or the partridge it comes with. Plus, the gift-giver is absolutely true to the spirit of the song, so the next day she gets another partridge in a pear tree along with the turtledoves. And so on. By the time the eight cows with their milkmaids show up on day eight, her house is a disaster, with geese pooping everywhere. Other than the valuable heirloom rings that she’s been amassing since day five, she wants none of it. She has to place a standing order with the pet supply shops for all the kinds of birdseed she needs for Σ(n) partridges, Σ(n-1)*2 turtledoves, Σ(n-2)*3 french hens, and so on. Then the lords show up with their trampolines–so they can leap. Get it? If it sounds tedious, it certainly gets that way quickly. Both for the character and for the reader, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly sure what happens at the end. I think I missed something.
We watched Life Story (aka The Race for the Double Helix) last night. This is a 1987 BBC movie based on James Watson’s book about how he and Francis Crick worked out the structure of DNA. Jeff Goldblum is Watson and Juliet Stevenson is Rosalind Franklin. The soundtrack is hilarious, and some of the jump cuts between scenes are overly dramatic and very 1980s, but it’s an interesting story despite all that. Poor Maurice Wilkins comes off rather ineffectual, knocked totally off balance by Rosalind Franklin’s introduction into his department. Goldblum is all arms and legs and weird hair and darting eyes…in fact, not so very different from his character on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It’s hard to realize that something so instantly recognizable now, something so fundamental to our knowledge of evolution and genetics was a total mystery a little more than 50 years ago.
