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I was kind of hoping for an excuse not to go to my lesson tonight, but I certainly didn’t want a migraine. Ugh. Obviously no lesson tonight. I’ll still be working on The Emperor’s Waltz for the next week, which needs more work anyway.
by James P. Hogan
Hogan is one of my favorite sci-fi writers. He is very good at making believable science in whatever worlds he creates. In Cradle of Saturn, he creates a world where the controversial ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky are actually true. Velikovsky, in the 1950s, proposed that Venus may not have formed billions of years ago with the other planets, but was instead ejected from Jupiter as a comet a mere 3500 years ago. These ideas have been shown to be implausible by many astronomers, including Carl Sagan. However, once I decided to just accept the science as a writer’s creation, I was able to enjoy the novel.
Years before the novel takes place, a group of open-minded humans, tired with the status quo decide to colonize a moon of Saturn. Free from the economic restraints of Earth, this group, called Kronians, were able to do science as it was intended to be done. In contrast, on Earth, the scientists have become locked into current ideas, unwilling to propose anything remotely controversial, since those ideas don’t get funding.
Then Jupiter spits out another comet. Athena.
Astronomers on Earth still refuse to believe it is something that happened before. They also refuse to believe that it will have much of an impact on Earth. The Kronians, some of whom were at Earth for talks aimed to smooth the rocky Earth-Kronian relations, know better, but no one will listen to them. This novel follows Landan Keene, an engineer and friend of the Kronians, from just after Athena is ejected, to just before it’s close encounter with Earth.
Overall it was quite a good book. I did get a bit tired by the end of all the problems that were thrown at Keene and his group. I realize that Athena was causing mass destruction on an Earth-wide scale, but it’s a novel, so we could be shielded/spared some of that.
I woke again in the middle of the night in the middle of a disturbing dream, and my mouth guard was again out of my mouth. (Translation, since it was a disturbing dream I was most certainly grinding my teeth — not a good way to get rid of my headache!)
In this dream, I was having a baby alone in a hospital room. A nurse kept taking my temperature and checking how far I’d dilated, but she was the only one who came into the room. I was bleeding a lot, and I was scared. At one point, I walked out into the hallway to see if the father was there or someone to be with me. I saw my dad, who just looked at me and left. (Totally out of character — he’d be the first one there if I needed someone.) So I ended up back in my hospital bed. I started to feel the baby’s head, and the nurse came in to say it was on the way. I have some vague memory of pushing to no avail, and holding on to the guard rails above my head for strength. Then I woke up.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the dream is that I don’t want kids. Ever. So the thought of being pregnant is absolutely horrifying.
On a different note, Andrew and I were at Target today (my favorite store in the entire world), and we tried to pick up a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. They had shelves full of the full screen version, but not a single wide screen one. Either people are getting smarter, and realizing that they see more of the original movie with wide screen, or Target didn’t get many of the wide screen version. There was shelf space for it, so hopefully they’ll have it later. But that was just weird.
2.5/5 stars
I watched the original Cube when it first aired (in 1998?). I’d enjoyed it, and when I saw that there was a sequel, I knew I had to watch. (My main complaint about Cube was Nicole de Boer, who played Ezri Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. While she did a good job in Cube, I did not like her portrayal of the Dax character, so I had a hard time getting past that.)
Hypercube was equally well done. The characters climb from room to room trying to figure out where they are and how to get out. Some rooms are booby trapped, others have a time-differential. A cool twist was that, since they were in a hypercube, quantum-mechanical weirdness allowed for multiple realities. So we run into characters whose fate is different that we’d first seen. Unlike Cube, there seems to be a connection between the characters, but I still didn’t entirely understand the ending. I think I liked the open ending of Cube better.
3/5 stars
This was a documentary on the “Hell House” done each year by the Trinity Church in Texas. The hell house is like a haunted house, but they portray people going to hell because of suicide, aborting a child, living as a homosexual, using drugs, or being part of the occult. The last two rooms of the hell house show heaven’s gate, where the few privileged who took Jesus as their savior (or called out to Jesus on their death beds) go through. The rest are chased away by figures in black. In the final room, we see hell itself. People are tied up to the wall being tortured, and there is a plexiglass cut out of the floor where people are seen trying to escape the burning fires.
More than once, the people running the hell house claim that they are not using “scare tactics” to get people to believe. Hmmm. The people they bring to God do not see the loving God of the New Testament. They are swayed into believing because they see a wrathful God out for vengeance against those who don’t believe. These new “believers” believe only to keep themselves out of hell. They believe just-in-case. They gave numbers of how many people had committed or re-committed their lives to Christ as a result of the hell house — they did not, however, say how many of those are still committed to Christ. My guess is that the numbers are much, much lower.
<RANT>
Speaking in tongues is when the holy spirit moves a person to speak in a language not understood by the speaker. However, if it is truly “speaking in tongues”, there will also be someone moved by the holy spirit present who can interpret for those around.
The minister of the Trinity Church encouraged his people to speak in their “love language” to the holy spirit, which everyone seemed to assume was the same as speaking in tongues. IT IS NOT! If you babble conversation to God in some unintelligible tongue, unless someone else is interpreting, you’re just babbling.
</RANT>
It seemed like the perfect kite-flying day — there seemed to be plenty of wind, the sun was out, and the temperature was finally warm enough to stand outside comfortably for more that 3 seconds. But it never quite works the way one expects.
We actually had two kites — my dragonfly kite, and a little “finger” box kite that I had put in Andrew’s Christmas stocking a couple years ago. Unfortunately we couldn’t get either one of them flying. We had more luck with Andrew’s little kite, but it never flew for more than 30 seconds or so.
We think we might need to modify my dragonfly a bit to get it to fly — the tubes holding the wings out only connect on the two ends of the wings and at the center of the kite. We’re thinking that we need one more connection between the spine of the kite and the tip of the wing, to let the wind take the wing better. We’re also wondering if the tail of the kite (which doubles as a storage bag for the collapsed kite) is too big for the rest of the kite.
It could also be that there just wasn’t quite enough wind to make the kites fly — it seemed to come and go.
We’ll probably try again tomorrow, or next weekend, assuming the weather stays nice and the wind picks up.
For the past several weeks, I haven’t remembered any of my dreams, but after the two I had last night, I think I’d rather keep it that way. Last night I bought a do-it-yourself night guard to help me stop my nightly teeth-grinding, so I wonder if the dreams were in some way inspired by that…though they were pretty dark.
The first dream involved a sniper in a DC Metrorail station. It wasn’t exactly a metro station, but somehow I knew that it really was. Everyone had to pass through security multiple times to get to the platform, and getting to the platform involved several long escalators. The platform itself was very high off the ground, and the distance between platforms was enormous.
As I got up to the platform, I saw a group of people gathered around one lady — she was preparing her telescopic sight on a gun, and then pointed across the platform, and said something like, “There are a bunch of people, we can’t go wrong shooting at them.” As soon as I heard this, and the group had moved down the platform, I ran down the long escalator, to inform security. No one seemed to believe me, but two of the people from the sniper’s group had followed me down.
I continued down to the parking lot, with an odd plan. I was going to seduce the female (I wonder if I’d become a male in the dream…), knowing that she would try to kill me with some weird, fast-acting virus that had been used as a weapon before. The plan was to somehow make the virus backfire on her. So, we got into a car (not sure who’s car, cuz later in the dream I drove a different car away), and started having sex, and as soon as she released the virus, I did something (not sure what) that made it invade her instead of me. Her body aged and cracked under me. Very disturbing.
At this point, I got out of the car, evaded the other sniper-groupie, and hopped in a car. I didn’t want to leave, though, because I knew that the sniper was still there, and security hadn’t done anything about it. Instead, I ended up back at one of the security stations, where security seemed to know about the sniper on the platform, and was taking care of it. I also told them about the dead sniper-groupie and that there was one more somewhere in the parking garage.
At some point, I was taken to a relief station by a police officer, since I was pretty shaken up by everything, especially the woman dying right under me. With a blanket wrapped around me, I picked up a newspaper that already had the sniper story in it. I was listed as the one who alerted everyone, and although a couple innocent people had died, I was a hero. At that point of the dream I just started to cry. The guy sitting next to me looked at me like I was an idiot, but let me put my head down on him as I sobbed.
That’s when I woke up. I was feeling very sad and exhausted, and I was ready to cry. My mouth guard was out of my mouth, swimming in the covers.
I don’t remember the other dream is quite as much clarity. What I do remember is that at one point I was in a car with my Dad, two brothers, and my ex-sister-in-law. We were making our way back to my parent’s house (which was the house on Hopkins Circle, that we moved out of when I was in 8th grade). It was very icy, and there was a big semi-truck on it’s side sliding across the yards of several houses. While the grass seemed to slow it down, it did end up crashing spectacularly into the side of one of the houses.
4/5 stars
I looked into this movie, because a friend from New Mexico had a picture of it in his weblog. Now, some of the movies he likes are funny, and some are just plain scary. Fortunately, this one was funny. The basic premise is that Megan, a cheerleader, is sent to a lesbian “rehab.” Rehab is very pink (for the girls) and very blue (for the boys), and give everyone an opportunity to rediscover their “proper” gender roles. The girls bone up on housekeeping and primping, while the boys attempt to do manly things like chopping wood and tossing around a football. Quite funny.
Several of the actors were vaguely familiar, which bugged me throughout the film. The lead actress, Natasha Lyonne, was in Slums of Beverly Hills. One of the lesbians, Melanie Lynskey, had played a stepsister in Ever After. Another of the lesbians, Clea DuVall, had been in Girl, Interrupted and had made a couple guest appearances on ER. For some reason, I recognized Dante Basco immediately as playing the new “Pan” in Hook. Weird.
Tonight’s lesson went marginally well. I remembered to ask about an “open embouchure”, and Fred told me not to worry about it. He really just wanted me to know that it could be done, not that I should worry about it yet.
I’ve been working on the William Tell Overture for a couple weeks now, and I thought I had it pretty good. I still have trouble breathing, though. And, when I played it tonight, I consistently missed one of the “ba da dum”s. Weird…it sounded right to me when I played it warming up tonight. Oops.
I also played from low C to high C# using all of the half-steps, and it looks like I know what I’m doing. Yay! I’m playing pretty slowly right now, but some of the fingering feels weird.
I got a new book tonight, too. I’ll start practicing out of it Friday (symphony tomorrow).
by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
This book chronicles just one of Nan’s many years as a nanny. She literally runs into 4-year-old Grayer X in the park, and within a week becomes his primary caregiver.
Part of me wants to think people like the Xs don’t exist, but after working for five years at Southdale Mall in Edina, MN — an affluent suburb of Minneapolis — I realize that they are out there.
Recommended book. It’s an interesting, yet in some ways disturbing, glimpse into the lives of the rich, clueless “upper-crust” of society.
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