Snit V0.8 has just been released on the
Snit page. If you’re not a Tcl programmer, don’t bother going
there. 🙂

THE FEBRUARY ISSUE of Ex Libris is now up.

Last summer when we were driving to the cabin we vacation in, a car
passed us with a bumper sticker that said “Not all those who wander are
lost.” My husband commented on it and Abby, my twelve year old, then
recited the Riddle of Strider for him. She likes the book
for its poetry and memorizes the poems.

Our house has 5 complete copies of this book, one for each of the two kids
and my three. One of my copies is the edition I bought in the 70’s when I
first discovered it and that sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf.
One set is my working copy that I take down to read when the need
strikes. And the third is the trilogy published as one hardbound book, as
Tolkien originally intended. That is the one I am reading now. I am about
a third of the way into the last section, war is gathering, night has
permanently fallen and Aragorn has gone thru the Paths of the Dead.

What brought me back to the book is the movie, of course. I haven’t seen
the second installment yet but for Christmas I got a copy of the extended
4 DVD set of the first movie. We watched it as a family after all the
Christmas hullabaloo was over and even my husband, who has steadfastly
looked down his cute upturned nose at the movie, enjoyed it immensely.
Then my kids and I watched the “making of the movie’ stuff that they fill
out the DVD set with. Some was interesting, particularly the costuming
section. Some was filler and as my daughter says, “Like, hello. I don’t
care.”

So I went back to the book. And it is so much better. Even with the added
scenes in the DVD, the book outshines the movie. What I find with every
rereading of the book is that I hear or notice something different every
time. This time it’s the almost Biblical language Tolkien used to
describe events and people. And all the Biblical parallels which for some
reason I totally missed before.

Except for perhaps Jane Austen and
Charles Dickens, I cannot think of another author’s books that I know so well,
have read so many times and enjoy so much each time I come back to it.

The January Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now
up.

It’s pouring down rain, and I will shortly be getting in a
co-worker’s car and driving to beautiful Ft. Irwin, California on a trip
to Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. What fun! 😐

With any luck at all I’ll be back tomorrow, though possibly not in time
to post anything.

I was working on one of my Tcl
packages (Snit as it happens) on Sunday afternoon, and installed
my development version for general use in order to test it with some of
the other things I’d written. One of those things is the script that
builds my weblog from a database of posts. And somehow (I’ve not chased
it down yet) the result of my afternoon’s work was that my database of
posts got trashed (along with many other things). I keep frequent
backups of everything I consider important, so I only lost of couple of
days…but at the end of a long, frustrating afternoon it was especially
annoying.

Anyway, I’ll try to get the missing posts rewritten as I can.

We had a technical glitch just now, and a couple of recent posts
were permanently lost, which annoys me no end. I’ll see if I can rewrite
them later on this evening, but at the moment I’m too mad.

The December issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now
up!

>Snit V0.71 is now available for download from the
Snit Home Page. Snit is
an object framework for the Tcl/Tk programming language.

Probably every long-time science fiction fan has read Heinlein’s short
story “Universe”; as the first story to describe the now familiar
“generation ship” concept for planting space colonies, it’s been widely
anthologized. What I’d never realized is that Heinlein wrote a sequel to
it called “Common Sense”. Orphans of the Sky is simply the
pair of tales back to back.

The gimmick is simple. Earth launches a colony ship; it’s supposed to
get to Proxima Centauri a couple of generations later. But there’s a
mutiny shortly after launch, and in the ensuing fracas most of the
officers are killed. The remaining loyal crew drive off the “muties”,
but in the meantime the ship’s main drive has been turned off, and the
ship drifts quietly through space….for hundreds of years.

And then our story begins. The descendants of the mutineers, now
“muties” in truth, occupy the center of the ship and the areas of low
gravity, including the main control room; the descendants of the loyal
crew live in the high-gravity areas in a theocratic society based on what
little they can understand of the remaining science texts.

“Universe” has a warm place in my heart; it was truly a great story when
it was written. But the ideas in it have become commonplace, and the
writing isn’t stellar. I’d recommend this book for the Heinlein
completist only.