Not exactly this glam tonight, but I am having a nice glass of sherry and typing this by candlelight while it blizzards away outside. I sort of spent the day anticipating the snow, watching out the window for it, but it's only in the last hour that it's really started to stick and come down in a serious way. We should have a nice accumulation by morning. So far, no plows or shovels out, so it's still pretty quiet. And very cozy with the candlelight. Except that my big green man, the one Kath called Percy because he's blowing a kiss, looks gaunt and a bit unsettling flanked by candlelight. I thought the Bamberg guys would go all spooky in the candlelight, but no, it's benign, ahistorical Percy who's freaking me out.
I swapped out my old receiver and speakers today for Mom's newer ones, an activity that proved to be as big a pain in arse as I suspected it would be. But now I have a nice, practically new Onkyo receiver (and CD) and a set of really amazing Bose speakers that are a lot smaller than even my bookcase-sized Klipsch, and are clear as a bell. I may never buy anything but Bose ever again. These aren't even the really tiny ones, but they're white and about a third of the size of my old ones (which I'm passing on the Jennifer DeMeritt, whose last name I've finally learned to spell). I also cleaned today, so it wasn't a total loss of a day, though I didn't get through my email messages or do any writing or baking.
What I spent a lot of the day doing, and late into the night last night, was reading Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order; A Romance of Souls, which is deeply disturbing, but really well done. The two main characters are suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder so there are actually several main characters wrapped up in two, and lots of Ruffian (what a great word!) plot twists. This is the second of his books I've read, the first being his debut, Fool on the Hill, which I loved though it was obviously a first book. Hell, everybody's gotta write one, and his was better than most. He usually gets billed as speculative fiction, but I tend to think of him more as a North American magical realist, like Margaret Atwood, or Alice Hoffman. The house in question is the one Andrew Gage has inside his head, housing his many "souls," the ones that split off from the original one "killed" by his stepfather's abuse. There's a thinly veiled comparison to virtual reality that, halfway through has not quite gotten off the ground and may be a red herring, but the house is more metaphysical than virtual. And what's the difference, you ask? Aye, there's the rub. You tell me.
In other news that sort of dovetails in an odd way with this, Jen made her first official blog post over on Cocktail Party Physics, firing the first salvo in what she hopes will be a congenial discussion of faith and science. Notice, I did not write faith vs. science or religion vs. science. This is what makes Jen's post interesting and different: she's eschewed the adversarial attitude that forestalls any intelligent conversation before it can even start. As I said in a comment over there, dogma is dogma, whether it's scientific narrow mindedness or religious fundamentalism. And there is no discussion with dogma. It's believe or die. Both camps will expel you from the tribal hearth if you dare confess a heretical belief in anything the other camp espouses.
Which is just stupid. More on this later, when I'm not so pie-eyed from booze and staying up late.
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