He arose from slumber and noted the ferrous-like qualities of his cloven nose

A while ago, sometime after finishing A Feast for Crows and during the 6 year wait for A Dance with Dragons, I promised not to read any more of a Song of Ice and Fire until the series was finished.  The TV series is making me break that promise, so here I am reading A Dance with Dragons. 

Without spoiling anything, the first chapter after the prologue is from Tyrion's POV.  Within it, we are told:

He woke naked on a goose-down feather bed so soft it felt as if he had been swallowed by a cloud.  His tongue was growing hair and his throat was raw, but his cock was as hard as an iron bar.  [emphasis mine]

Dozens of pages later, but in the very next Tyrion chapter:

When he woke his stunted legs were stiff as iron. [again, emphasis mine]

I'm hoping that this is the start of a book-long, nay, rest of the series-long in-joke by the author in which every Tyrion chapter has him wake up and compare some part of his body to the element with atomic number 26.

Tone deaf? German Butcher Museum

A German butcher

I learned the other day that the city of Böblingen proudly hosts the German Butcher Museum.  I know that the art of preparing meat has a long and culturally important history among Germanic peoples, but I also can't help but wonder if they understand what most people outside das Vaterland think of when they hear the words "German butcher".  

Schrodinger's Code Freeze

Image from TestSheepNZ's post on
Schrodinger's cat and code dev.

There is a code base in a remote repository that is set up for continuous builds and has successfully passed all verification tests.  There are a number of developers who have write access to the code base so that, perhaps in the course of an hour, one of them delivers a change set to the repository that breaks the build; but also, with equal probability, perhaps no breaking changes have been delivered.  If one has left this entire system to itself for one hour, one would say that the build is broken if breaking code has been delivered.  The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the working and broken builds mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

This may or may not be based on a conversation with coworkers.

Catalog != Book

People are forwarding around this IKEA ad, which is disturbing in a number of ways.

Yes, the IKEA ad is a reasonably clever bit of marketing, but it's not a book, no matter how thick the catalog is.  Are that many book lovers out there really so concerned about the triumph of the Kindle that they must celebrate the printed word, no matter how bastardized the form?

Also, srsly? it's like the forwarders have never seen the Medieval help desk before.

Books that stayed with you

I was recently tagged in a "name 10 books that have stayed with you" lists on FB.  The instructions say to not think too hard about it, and don't take too much of your time, but the request isn't to name books I've read in the past year that I might recommend to friends, the request is for books that stayed with you.  This is about books, and is therefore important, and therefore demands some thought.

I could go through the list of books I've read for fun in the last 20+ years, but that ignores the first half of my life.  Also, I would probably disqualify anything I've read in the last, say, 5 years, because they haven't had time to "stay" with me.  Still, it might not be a bad place to start.

[15 minutes later]

Turns out it's a bad place to start, because there are lots of books I haven't thought of in a while, but as soon as I see them while skimming the list, I have fond memories of them.  Have they really "stayed with me" if I haven't thought of them in 8 years?  Instead, let's start at the beginning, with books that have literally stayed with me since the 70's:

Bedtime Stories. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely, this isn't the Great Big Book of Bedtime Stories, but a smaller collection with just "The Gingerbread Boy", "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Three Billy Goats Gruff", and "the Four Musicians".  I love the illustrations in this.  Also, it wasn't until I looked up his Wikipedia page just now that I discovered Gergely illustrated Scuffy the Tugboat.  I also liked that and a number of other Little Golden Books.  Scuffy probably deserves a place on the list.

Mickey and the Magic Cloak.  This is part of the "Disney's Wonderful World of Reading" series; there were others that had better stories, but this one stays with me because when my mom read this to us, she would read "cloak" as a two syllable word, long "o", short "a", which would simultaneously delight us and drive us nuts.  Honorable mentions: Donald Duck and the Magic Stick and the Mystery of the Missing Peanuts.

Green Eggs and Ham.  There are a number of Dr. Seuss books I could choose from, but the simplified Orwellian dystopia presented by Green Eggs and Ham in which the unnamed protagonist comes to love Big Brother (Sam) is the one that stays with me.  Honorable mention: Fox in Socks.

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.  I had a single book that contained the Tales of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Jeremy Fisher, and Squirrel Nutkin.  Beatrix Potter can come across as a little didactic, but she has a wicked sense of humor.  Nutkin was my favorite of these stories for reasons I don't recall.

Meet Theodore Roosevelt.  We had a whole series of "Step-Up Books" that covered history ("Meet Washington/Franklin/MLK") and nature ("mammals/birds/insects do amazing things").  The "Meet ..." books did a wonderful job of humanizing historical figures by introducing them as children and telling their histories in a simple, personalized way that includes details you don't get in history class at school.  They also do a great job of connecting events to geography (with a map on the inside cover) and other events (Teddy was 7 years old when Lincoln was shot, and saw the coffin pulled through the streets of NYC during its tour of the North) so that you learn early to see history as more than a series of disconnected dates and events.  Honorable mention: Meet the North American Indians, because I'm part Penobscot.

Something Queer is Going On.  If only because I still want to see a LGBTQIA musical version.

My Birthday Book About Me.  This is a "personalized" book where you fill out a form and it comes back with your name and your friends in it!  It's pretty formulaic, but was nevertheless fun to know what gemstone, flower, and zodiac sign correspond to your birthday.  The best part about my birthday book is that my brother's and my birthdays were mixed up when the forms were sent in, so all my personalized stuff is wrong.  Fortunately, the illustrations are all the same in every book, so it's easy to make corrections.

Richard Scarry's Great Big Schoolhouse.  I taught myself how to write in cursive from this book.  So even the characters in his books act completely insane, I'll always remember this one fondly.