Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:25 PM

Packing...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:30 PM

Many things are going on that I'd like to talk about: I just started my class on library architecture today, we're leaving to vacation on Florida tomorrow thru Tuesday to visit family, Ian's interviewing for a job as a Sunday school teacher and is generally feeling much better physically, and so on.

But, in some respects, what I really want to use this journal space for is to gripe about repairmen who don't show. We're finally getting a dishwasher (a gift from a grandparent) and the installers were supposed to show up between noon and 4pm today. Ian missed two two open houses looking for bartenders this afternoon (he hoped that the installers would show up early, and he'd be able to get there before they closed). But not only didn't Ian make the job fairs, but the dishwasher never arrived! I am so tempted to call up the installers and vent at them.

Argh!

Meanwhile, I read an interesting article about Shakespeare in fantasy fiction, which prompted me to write a letter to the author... But more on that in my Shakespeare journal.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 PM

So, it's September 1st. I thought it would be a good idea today for me to do a complete backup of my computer today. [I do weekly incrementals, but a fresh backup set every now and then is a good idea.] Unfortunately, I've gotten used to the incrementals taking under an hour and forgot that full backups are whole-day affairs. Rather got in the way of everything else I wanted to do today. Oh well...

I did check the server logs to discover that my USA Patriot paper got 513 hits in August (I posted it July 31st). Not bad. I've noticed links to it from Librarian.net and Richard Stallman's site. And, since I moved my journal to osmond-riba.org (August 14th), the main page alone has gotten 393 hits, although that almost certainly represents many fewer people making multiple repeat visits (sometimes I refresh the site multiple times when writing new entries to ensure the formatting is correct).

Anyway...

Reading as avidly as I have been, I've started noticing something about my tastes in books. I've been trying to read more historical non-fiction, since I've discovered a definite lapse in my education. [How do high school teachers manage to make the subject so boring?] I started with Elizabethan history, to enrich Ian's RPG, and I've started trying to build on that, extending my knowledge forwards, backwards, and sideways. [I now feel I have a good grounding in English history from Edward VI through James VI and I plus early British colonization of America. And I've just started reading a book on Cromwell and Charles I.]

What I've discovered is that I don't care for pure histories or pure biographies. I like books that use biographies to tell a broader story about that historical period. But, I lose interest in straight biographies (little relevance to the outside world) and in histories that don't have vibrant personalities to follow. [Hmm... maybe that's why I haven't been able to get into the Wars of the Roses, even when written by authors I otherwise like -- too many characters!]

At any rate, I'm looking for further recommendations. I'd like to continue to build outwards from the base of what I know.

On a related topic, following up to a previous entry of mine about alternate histories, I just found UChronia, a website listing dedicated to alternate histories. Based upon this list, (ordered by date of divergence from our history) it looks like several of my ideas have already been written... Some interesting reading in this list, though...

BTW, I know that many of my friends are also fans of Tanith Lee's book The Silver metal lover. I've mentioned this a few other places, but she's working on a sequel. According to the May 2001 entry on her website:

The sequel, of course, will be quite a challenge, after all these years - 21 of them, to be exact. As you would anticipate, perhaps, the dark conspiratorial powers of The Silver Metal Lover now make their second obvious play - they bring Silver back. But like anyone coming back from the dead, he isn't going to be quite as everyone else remembers... the title of the book: Metallic Love.

Finally, I'm still interested in any information about what my picture is doing on a "Danish newssite" Call, e-mail, post a commment -- I'd really like to know!

Ciao for now!