[This post is exclusive to LiveJournal.]
1. Joe hit a home run in LIGO softball today.
2. He felt it necessary to punctuate this achievement by running at full speed into the batters' cage (? metal framework thing that looks kind of like a soccer goal, but smaller?). Since none of the other batters did this, I am assuming that this is not normally part of the game.
Joe: "I am going to feel this tomorrow. Actually, I'm feeling this today."
Me: "Your method of decelerating seemed to be nontraditional."
Joe: "You meant to say 'stupid.'"
Me: "You said it, not I!"
Joe: "See, you're not denying it!"
Me: "I refuse to answer questions on this topic."
3. Unrelatedly, Joe feels that Alice from
Alice in Wonderland is just not very bright, based on her propensity for ingesting substances with unknown (and possibly magical) effects. I can't say that I disagree with him...
4. Did you know that a single slice of bread with ham and cheese is not a satisfying Yoonlunch? Whoops. Eating would be easier if my stomach were better at telling me how hungry I'm supposed to be during the day. (Joe finds this incomprehensible.)
ETA: 5. According to
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, extra-virgin olive oil "isn't suitable for cooking." Uh-oh. I've been cooking with the stuff for almost as long as I've been cooking. Am I doing it wrong?
We also discussed K.J. Parker in the car.
Joe started in on an entertaining rant about K.J. Parker. I wish I could have tape-recorded it. Over the conference I'd handed him the Fencer trilogy as reading material (he'd previously read the Scavenger books, hasn't read the Engineer books; I've read Scavenger and Engineer, haven't read Fencer). He was so alienated by an evil act that the main character committed at the end of the second Fencer book that he didn't even finish the trilogy. Now, the thing about Joe is that ordinarily his drive to find out what happens next is way stronger than mine. He'll finish things where I would've bailed. But in this case, he says, there were zero sympathetic characters and he just didn't give a damn anymore; he wasn't even interested in seeing the main character get their comeuppance by dying horribly.
"Actually," I said, "this is K.J. Parker. There's no guarantee an evil main character will die."
"I'm not even interested in seeing them be tortured," he said.
"Actually," I said, "this is K.J. Parker..."
"Yeah, yeah, the main character will probably have a happy life," he said.
He also said that no K.J. Parker book was complete without gratuitous overexplaining of how to make things. Or the excruciatingly detailed explanations of how things work on a farm that turns out to be key to the plot.
"Come to think of it," I said, "there's a farm in the Engineer trilogy."
"Does it play into the plot?"
"Well, there's this whole subplot with the invention of gunpowder, I think. And the Engineer trilogy had such excruciatingly detailed descriptions of siege engines that it bored
me."
Anyway. On the one hand I am curious to read the Fencer books at least far enough to learn what this evil act is of which Joe speaks. Which, incidentally, he feels was a stupid decision because there was an obvious alternate way to do things that would have worked and wouldn't have been evil. On the other hand, if he's so deeply meh about the books, maybe I'd better save my time. He says the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson was "okay" (you have to translate this out of Joe-speak: this probably means it's a perfectly good trilogy) and I've been curious about that for a while. Or I could try Rosemary Kirstein's
The Steerswoman, although that one has been so highly recommended to me that I am instinctively suspicious.
