27 September 2004

I ended up feeling fairly nasty yesterday (I have a chronic case of being female, I'm afraid), so it was not my most productive day ever. Which is all right; they don't all need to be. Had dim sum with Yore, which was good, but I think the whole concept of dim sum is a little shrimp-heavy for me. I am now at the point in my life where I will eat a small amount of shrimp in something (in, for example, a scallop and shrimp dumpling), but more than a few bites of shrimp every, say, two or three months is too much for me. Still, while several shrimpy roads of dim sum were closed to me, there remained many open roads. And if I didn't get my custard (life lesson: take it when it comes around), it worked out all right. I went home and got wild rice pudding, and it was nice.

I read Megan Lindholm's Luck of the Wheels because I figured I could finish it and give it back to Stella when she came over. I did finish it, but Stella ended up having to cancel on coffee with me and Heathah, so it's still in the give-it-back basket downstairs. It made me wonder whatever happened to the "two travelers wandering" stories. It seems like there was a smaller-scale set of fantasies in that category for awhile, and I don't recall seeing any recently. Don't know if people ODed on them or what. I also read William Sleator's Parasite Pig, and it was better than most of what I've been reading for contract work but not as good as Interstellar Pig. Pacing seemed off.

Now my fiction read is Kage Baker's Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, and the first two stories have been...fine, I guess. Someone in a panel audience at WorldCon was on about how much better they were than her novels, and I haven't gotten to the point where I think so, if ever I will get to that point. Then again, her Company series is only now getting to the bit I really wanted to read.

Also, I glanced at the jacketless spine of The White Death just to see what color they'd made things, and, um. Well. I am not a cover designer; I have no pretensions of having graphics abilities. But the spine reads, with no variation in spacing or font, "Chew The White Death Michigan State." This seems suboptimal somehow. Even if one wanted to instruct Michigan State to chew the white death, a comma would be a positive thing. Chew The White Death. That's almost a decent title in itself, but...not. It just misses somehow. It's also almost a decent insult, but again...not. "Yeah, well, chew the white death, buddy!" Not quite there. "Yo' mama chews the white death!" No.

I remember sometime in the mid-'90s hearing older people chuckling that at some point "your momma wears combat boots" would be a literal truth rather than an insult. And I was young enough (and still am, frankly) not to see the insult in the first place. My momma doesn't wear combat boots because that sort of thing isn't her style, not because there's something inherently inferior about wearing them. And really, if the shoes are the worst you can think of to insult, their momma is really a paragon, I should think.

Time to go back to the book, is what else I think.