Michael Rawdon's webjournal
I’m a huge fan of Tim Eldred’s Grease Monkey, and was floored when the whole story came out in hardcover from Tor a few years back, after a couple of aborted attempts to publish it as a comic book in the 1990s.
It looks like Eldred’s working on a sequel, and he’s posting the chapters one-a-month at the Grease Monkey web site. Awesome! Since new comics are delayed until tomorrow due to Memorial Day, maybe tonight I’ll read the chapters he’s published so far!
More photos from the Conservatory of Flowers. One of the far rooms (well, there are only five rooms, but still) mainly features water plants. As you can see from these photos, this room features some metal railings and artwork, which I presume are a century or more old:
In addition to orchids, this room contains quite a few pitcher plants, carnivorous plants hanging from a variety of pots:
There was also this oddity, which resembles a bird of paradise, but I’ve never seen one with the green fronds fanning out like this, so I’m not certain what exactly it is:
The Conservatory of Flowers is located in a late-19th-century building in Golden Gate Park, and is full of wonderful and fascinating plants. The building apparently has been quite resistant to earthquakes, except that of course it’s covered in glass, and that glass has to be replaced from time to time. (Still, this is less maintenance than some historic buildings require!) It re-opened a few years ago after a major renovation.
I took so many photos when Dad and I visited last week that I’m going to split them up into several posts.
As you can see, the Conservatory is a beautiful building with lovely grounds – and that’s without the summer planting being in place (or so I infer, from the strips of empty dirt amongst the grass):
The whole interior of the buildings is used for exhibits, by the way. I presume they store maintenance equipment elsewhere nearby.
There are orchids throughout the building, in different rooms with different temperatures and climates, and many of them were blooming:
There are many other plants, too, some of them more exotic-looking than others. I don’t generally expect spiny-looking plants like this one to be so colorful:
I don’t know what that last plant is, though.
The feline-in-residence at Recycle Book Store West in Campbell is named Isbn (pronounced “IZZ-bin”):
Recycle West moved to a larger venue a block down the street from where it used to be, which threw us for a minute when we went there today; I was on autopilot and walked almost to the door before Debbi stopped me. The new store a much nicer place, though. I’m glad they’re doing well!
Here’s a photo of Dad standing in front of the control console and some banks of hardware from the SAGE system at the Computer History Museum last weekend:
You can’t see the cigarette lighter on the console, which is a feature Apple somehow never puts in its iMacs.
Dad says he contributed to the SAGE project in some capacity back in the day, I guess on the software end. Whenever I hear about the SAGE project it always sounds like this big boondoggle which was obsolete by the time it was deployed, but nonetheless was maintained for decades thereafter.
Here I am in front of one of two completed versions of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, also at the museum:
Unfortunately it wasn’t in operation when we were there. It’s a very impressive aggregation of metal, though; I can see why Babbage was unable to complete it in his own era.
Some photos from our trip to Año Nuevo State Natural Reserve last Friday with my Dad.
These little guys kept flying up to us when we were in a shelter/information hut halfway to the viewing site, hovering briefly, and then flying away. Then they’d do it again. Eventually I realized they must have a nest inside the shelter, and they flew in and landed when we stepped out the other end:
One of the seals had tracking devices glued to her head and back, as you can see here. The docents told us that scientists shave their fur to glue these devices to them. Apparently they sometimes fall off on their own, though:
A few seals were wrestling in the water, while others were galumphing around the shore, like this guy (or gal):
But mostly everyone was asleep, basking in the sun, as you can see in the background of the pictures above.
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We’ll probably never know what Steve Gerber had in mind for the conclusion to his Doctor Fate story in Countdown to Mystery before he died. Four 4-page entries written by four different writers probably wasn’t it, and consequently the story comes to a rather abrupt end (several of them) with none of the delicacy it really required, as Gerber was always walking on the knife-edge of making the thing work anyway. Of the four, Mark Evanier’s version feels most true to Gerber’s style, while Gail Simone’s feels the least. But all of them are too short, too simplistic. Gerber’s writing has always (well, that I’ve seen) had a strong psychological component, not only having quirky characters but exploring what their quirks mean and where they come from. Although this facet of his work was often the most uneven part, it’s also a tack that few other comics writers ever take, and unfortunately what there is of that facet in these four endings tends to be far more heavy-handed than Gerber would have used.
It’s not really anybody’s fault, and I appreciate that DC and the four writers wanted to pay a little tribute to Gerber, but I think the story and the readers would have been better served to have picked one ending and done that one the best they could. Ah well. The other half of the comics, the Eclipso yarn, ended up being slightly more meaningful than I’d expected, comparing the similarities between Eclipso and the Spectre. The thing was still pretty superfluous, though, as nearly everything tied in to Countdown to Final Crisis has been. Just think: If DC had gone with Plan A and just done a Doctor Fate mini-series (which they had solicited and then cancelled), we could have avoided this whole Eclipso rubbish and Gerber might have been able to finish the story in his lifetime. Sheesh. |
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Things really pick up in the third issue of Echo, which encourages me enormously: We find out something about |
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Matt Wagner’s Grendel series is one of my favorites. It didn’t start out that way, though, as its first volume, Devil by the Deed concerned a crime lord named Hunter Rose. Wagner has revisited the Rose character from time to time, but I’ve pretty much given up on those, as it’s the least interesting slice of the Grendel story. Much more interesting are the stories which concern how Grendel – a spirit of aggression – affects the history of Earth over the next few hundred years, expanding from profoundly affecting a few influential individuals, to eventually helping to craft a global empire under the rule of Emperor Orion Assante several hundred years from now.
This volume, Devil Quest, takes place several generations after the excellent War Child story – which is about Orion’s son, Jupiter – concerning several interested parties trying to locate the Grendel cyborg who had helped Jupiter establish his own rule after his father died. The cyborg Grendel-Prime is on his own mission trying to strengthen the Empire, too, and his quest leads directly into the second half of the Batman/Grendel volume (the better half, as the first half involves Hunter Rose meeting Batman). Written and drawn by Wagner, the art is superb. The story is eccentric and sometimes violently brutal, which I think is intentional; Wagner was trying to shock and push the envelope a little. Unfortunately it also comes to an ending which feels unfinished – even with the Batman story factored in – which makes it a disappointing read in total. Though the trip to get there is quite interesting. Anyway, I did enjoy it enough to pick up this new hardcover collection. But your mileage may vary. I keep waiting for Wagner to do another Grendel sequence carrying the future history beyond this volume, but it seems like Wagner’s done as much as he plans to with the tale and he’s otherwise just poking around in the side corridors of the earlier stories, which doesn’t interest me as much. Alas. |
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“Assignment: Earth” was an episode of the original Star Trek series which was intended as a pilot for a new TV series. The series didn’t sell, which isn’t surprising because it was a pretty wan, unimaginative episode. Nonetheless, IDW’s current renaissance of Star Trek comic books has resulted in a series based on the episode, written and drawn by John Byrne! As he’s done elsewhere, Byrne is using an unorthodox storytelling technique of having each issue take place a year later than the first one. Although not everything Byrne does works for me, I do usually enjoy his stories which are structurally adventurous like this, so I was moved to buy it.
It’s not bad, although it doesn’t go much past the TV episode. But then, it’s basically trying to lay the groundwork for the overall arc, which will I guess run through about 1980. He obviously has a lot of fun writing Roberta Lincoln (the Teri Garr role), as well as drawing Gary Seven (the Robert Lansing role) whose character he expands a little bit here. So it’s a decent start, and I’m curious to see where Byrne goes with it. |
We woke up this morning and Debbi said, “I smell something burning.”
Fortunately it wasn’t something around our house; rather, it was smoke blowing in from a fire in the south bay hills over 40 miles away from us:
The Summit fire has consumed about 3,100 acres, but is not spreading as rapidly as feared yesterday. Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Sgt. Fred Plageman this afternoon said that 20 homes have been destroyed.
And:
Shifting winds this morning blew ash from the fire away from Santa Cruz County and toward the summit and into northwestern Santa Clara County, where residents reported smelling smoke.
Santa Clara County public health authorities advised people who can see or smell smoke to stay inside and keep windows and doors shut.
At work I had to walk to another building for a meeting, and the central courtyard was filled with a light haze, presumably the smoke blown in from the hills. By lunchtime it had cleared out, along with the smell.
Wow, the rest of my Dad’s visit just flew by; I can’t believe I’m back at work already!
I put hundreds of miles on my car this past week, but that’s not really surprising; there’s a lot to do in the Bay Area – even on his third trip, there were still things he hadn’t seen before, and a few I hadn’t seen before – but most of it is widely spread out.
Following the trips to the coast and the Livermore wine country on Friday and Saturday respectively, Sunday we went to the A La Carte and Art festival downtown, which I think Dad enjoyed more than he’d expected. He picked up a few goodies, and reminisced with one of the vendors about making rubber band guns back in the 40s. After that we went to the Computer History Museum. I was sure I’d been there with Dad before, but he says not. But it’s always a terrific visit, and we got to see the Babbage Engine they have on display there (one of two in the world).
In the evening we drove up to San Francisco to have dinner with my cousin K, who coincidentally has the same name as Dad (well, okay, actually it was intentional). My other cousin, L, also lives up there, but was out of town. She recommended a restaurant for us to go to, though, so we went up with Debbi, picked up K, and had a fine dinner. I haven’t seen K in years – probably since I was in college; he’s quieter than I’d remembered. But the family resemblance among him, me and Dad is pretty clear. (Somehow we managed to completely forget to get any photos of the three of us.)
That was the first of three trips we made to the city (and that one was in Debbi’s car!). On Monday Dad and I drove up hoping to go to the Cable Car Museum, but there was absolutely no parking there. We thought about parking elsewhere and taking a (duh!) cable car there, but they were also doing some work on the tracks, so we decided to punt. Instead we drove over to Golden Gate Park.
So I have this amazing talent for forgetting that the museums in SF are closed on Mondays. Gah. Fortunately, there’s always something more to do. We went to the Japanese Tea Garden, and then walked through Strybing Arboretum. I see a little more of the Arboretum each time I go – it’s always fun to visit. This time around I learned that Monday seems to be watering day in the arboretum. Sheesh! After that we stopped at Ocean Beach to see the sea, and then I dragged Dad to Borderlands Books, which is fun to visit during the week since there’s plenty of on-street parking, for a change! I got some cuddle time with Ripley, their hairless cat, too.
Tuesday we went up again, this time to visit the Conservatory of Flowers in the park. I’d never been before, and I highly recommend it; it’s full of orchids and palm trees and other tropical plants, plus it has a room full of butterflies. Very cool. And it’s in a 19th century building, too! After that we went to the Musee Mechanique. Dad wasn’t so impressed with the Musee, and I’ll admit that I think their old location at the Cliff House was better; it presented its contents in a more historical order, whereas the current arrangement seems rather scattershot, even though it has more space for the exhibits. Ah well.
And as I said yesterday we ate plenty of food amidst all of this driving. We were usually pretty wiped out once we’d eaten dinner, so we had some quiet evenings at home, although we did watch the season finales of both Smallville (which I’m kind of glad I don’t watch anymore) and House (which I kind of wonder if I should watch more often).
Wednesday it was up early (well, early for me) to drop Dad off at the airport. On the way out of the airport, my car rolled over to 90,000 miles. I put another 60 or so miles on it in a failed attempt to spend the afternoon on the beach (it was far too windy, and the clincher was that the wind was blowing the sand into my face and hair). That was a bummer, and put me in a melancholy mood for the rest of the day. Or maybe it was the prospect of going back to work today.
Anyway, I had a great visit with Dad. I think I enjoyed our trip to the coast on Friday the most, although the Conservatory of Flowers was really neat, too. And of course it was just good to see him.
I’ll put up a few more pictures from his visit over the next few days, but for now I’ll end with this one:
Apparently before he flew out, my Dad was told by my Mom that he’d gain ten pounds visiting me, since we always feed our guests extremely well. In that spirit, here’s where we chowed down over the past week:
Thursday:
Friday:
Saturday:
Sunday:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Maybe not ten pounds’ worth, but that’s a lot of food!