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Journal: 2005-04-07

Yay! The week's over, at least for me. The birthday celebration starts now!

I had fun walking today. My flight from Minneapolis to Sacramento departed late in the evening, so even though I left later for the airport, I still had plenty of time to walk around. I did my usual two loops, then decided to do a third. I still had time, so I walked all the way to the far, far end of the A concourse. Then I walked back on the moving walkways, the long way. That is, I walked on the ones going backward, not forward. And I did it all the way back, down the A and C concourses. :) One advantage of being a grown up is you occasionally can do those things they wouldn't let you do as a kid. And you know what? Sometimes those things are as fun as you always thought they would be. :) I managed to get in 10,000 steps before getting on the airplane.

I'm quite enjoying the book I'm reading, Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson. Here's today's good quotes. In the first one, the narrator is talking about Flamsteed's extensive astronomical observations and his suggestion that comets have orbits as planets do and are not supernatural.

     In some other era this would have ranked Flamsteed with Kepler and Copernicus, but he was living now, and so it had made him into a sort of data cow to be kept in a stall in Greenwich and milked by Newton whenever Newton became thirsty. Daniel was serving in the role of milk-maid, rushing to Cambridge with the foaming pail.
--Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, pg. 676
This other part had me laughing out loud; one of those "I can't believe he actually wrote that!" kind of bits. It's, um, for mature audiences, but oh well. In this section, the crew of an ill-fated merchant ship has been captured by pirates. The cowardly captain has been stripped naked and tied over a barrel; the rest of the crew are being led to the galley.
     "Yes, yes," Jack snapped--hoping he would not be chained to the same oar as Mr. Foot, who was already becoming a bore. He sighed. "That is one prodigious b***-f***ing!" he marveled. "Like something out of the Bible!"
     "There's no b***-f***ing in the Good Book!" said the scandalized Mr. Foot.
     "Well, how should I know?" Jack said. "Back off! Soon, I'll be in a place where everyone reads the Bible all the time."
     "Heaven?"
     "Does it sound like heaven to you?"
--Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, pg. 609
Actually, I think they're a bit more circumspect when they discuss Lot's home town in the Bible. :)
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Louis K. Thomas <louiNØSP@Msth@hotmÑOSP@Mail.coNÕSP@Mm> Fight Spam! Auth 2005-04-29 (1312 days ago)