Neil Fein's Blog

Those of you who blog, might want to take a look at this thread on Slashdot. Even if this is a nuisance lawsuit (which it may be, I haven't seen the original post) it's food for thought. If the suit is genuine, it could determine if, legally, blogging is to be viewed as journalism. Personally, this is a place for me to put down thoughts and not much else; my only mandate is to be interesting.

Carol Axler goes into Surgery today. I will never understand this woman as long as I live; she was planning to go out partying last night. The night before knee surgery.

Maybe it's an LA thing, but I have a weird sister-in-law. And pretty strange other in-laws as well. In fact, the entire Turner clan seems to be pretty damn strange. This is probably a good thing; life would be dull otherwise. (Any of you reading this, this is a compliment. Relax. Yes, that means you, Dan.)

Les and Judith sent us a newspaper recycle cube. You can tell someone cares when they give you a way to dispose of garbage.

Martha's quals continue as I write this. They're projected to end either this Monday or soon thereafter, depending if the committee asks for more work on the papers.

As I write this she is likely walking back from 7-11 with coffee to fuel today's compositional and bibliographic orgy. Although she's done most of the reading -- I think. Reports on these events are somewhat confused.

The house is in disarray. I've been staying out of the house as much as possible after work, which means I've not been there to straighten up. I brought laundry into Lakewash yesterday, as it's been piling up.

The Weekend We Edit The Papers Before Submitting Them On Monday is this weekend. While I have some social plans, I've left much of the weekend open. If this goes as past papers have gone, I generally serve as uncredited copyeditor.

Laughter is a very strange phenomenon.

Before getting down to work last night recording vocals to The Bile Song, Grazina was standing in front of the mic, headphones on and holding two pieces of paper-- a lyric sheet and a rant sheet. I had already set the levels on the board and Bruce was working on the levels on his end on the computer, and all of a sudden Grazina heard herself "in her head".

This provoked her to giggle, which elicited a laugh, and eventually a whole fit of laughing and snorting. She turned various shades of red and purple throughout. Bruce had the presence of mind to record this, so The Bile Song may end up being stranger than we thought it was going to be.

The session was fine, although she felt the song was too smooth for what she wanted. We suggested she record vocals anyway, and we can play with the instrumentation later. We got some good takes on the vocal.

Oh, yeah, we were toying with the idea of either Gregorian chants or a didgeridoo to open the song. As if it weren't strange enough.

Martha has just started her quals, the ten days of hell we've been expecting. The last two days have been odd in that I've been making myself scarce around the house when we're not actually busy (i.e., having dinner, visiting my Mom, going to a shabbes potluck).

The result of this is that I keep calling friends, looking for people to hang out with. What I really would like is a place to sit and write music, but I think most bookstores and coffeehouses would frown on this.

Just received an order through Powells.com. Well, most of it.

The Book of Lame Excuses
by Dan Piraro

Like its title, this book is pretty disappointing... really, it's a collection of exactly what it says ("the check is in the mail", etc.) with the occasional illustration by Piraro.

The Best of Bizarro Volume 2
Also by Dan Piraro

Not bad, pretty funny. The color Sunday strips are definitely the highlight of the book; Piraro does his best work in a larger, more cinematic format. His mind seems to work kinda like a movie camera.

Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy
by Wayne Douglas Barlowe and Neil Duskis

Very good; it's a field guide to aliens, creatures and such from fantasy, legend and classic books. Barlowe has quite the imagination and is an excellent painter. This book is a follow up to

Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials
by Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Ian Summers, and Beth Meachum

Note: This book hasn't yet arrived, as it ended up on someone's desk at Powells; they've assured me it's on the way. Read on to see why I can review it before getting the book.

These two books are Barlowe's most well-known books. I have a copy of the original Guide to Extraterrestrials, autographed and given to me in 1981 by Ian Summers, the art director; that volume is falling apart from reading it so much, hence this replacement hardcover (and it's sibling). (What happened to Ian Summers? I can't find any references to work by him newer than this book. And I suspect his contribution to this volume was more than one might think.)

The Guide to Extraterrestrials was the book that, more than any other, caused me to be the science-fiction reader I am. After reading through the Guide for creatures from the few books I'd yet read, I perused the others and picked out aliens that looked interesting. In this manner, I was drawn to many classics of the genre such as Childhood's End, Ringworld, The Gods Themselves, and many others.

Barlowe's subsequent works are all fascinating, and I'm following his work with considerable interest. I've still not read all the books in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, but am aiming to do so. Eventually.

On a whim, I picked up the DVD of Doctor Who: The Five Doctors last night. It's pretty good; I haven't seen Doctor Who for years, and this was a good reintroduction to the series. I have my eye on The Key to Time set next, as I remember that a lot of these are very good.

Doctor Who has always been a strange mix of cheesy dialog, good acting by the main characters and terrible acting by the secondary ones; great plotlines, lousy effects and just plain silly monsters and aliens. Somehow they managed to make this all add up to an incredibly cool and geeky show.

I also picked up Close to the Edge by Yes, which was good but I felt the remastering could have been better. Still, I'll check out Tales from Topographic Oceans and see; that's always been a favorite Yes album of mine, but I've never gotten it on CD due to the expense I hear the remastering is very good on that one.

Martha, Amy and myself had a great time on Sunday. After the two of us visited my grandmother and looked at the Sukkas in Brooklyn, we met up with Amy and we set and ate and talked (and talked and talked) while sitting in the Veg-City Diner, we went through the stacks at Strand Books (briefly, alas), and best of all, we finally got to meet her cats. For all too brief a time, though; I'm allergic to the point of it being an annoyance, and Martha's allergic to the point of it being a trip to the local ER to get her throat opened. Amy is a friend we don't get to spend enough time with, originally Martha's friend from Rice.

Checking Amy's blog to get the URL above, I see she's covered the day quite well in her blog, at least from her side; you can check it out over there, and follow the link back here when you're done if you are so inclined.

We had a quiet night at home. I searched my studio--I'm looking for my knife-blade compass, used to cut circles; I need to cut a pickguard for Millicent. More on that if I ever find the thing.

Looking back in time to

Friday

I see that we had another group of Habogerites over, and we weren't out in the sukkah this time; it was pretty wet out. I also see that Rachel stayed over and that on

Saturday

morning, we had French toast in the morning with her and Grazina. Played a lot of cards. This was a quiet day. Moving along to

Sunday

when we went into Brooklyn, well, it looks much like I wrote above. When we got back, we relaxed from all the driving, and Graz came over again to use my Mac; she was (is?) looking for a car, and wanted to bid on a Civic.

We were meant to record this week, but our schedule is thrown into uncertainty because of Graz's Great Honda Hunt.

Ideas for future sukkas. I'll keep adding to this list.

• Make the sukkah a few inches smaller in width and length. (It's something like 10 feet 6 inches in each dimension.) As it is, the roof mats (designed for a 10' x 10' sukkah) are straining to cover the roof, and they have a distressing tendency to fall off. A couple of more cross-supports on the top will help with this.
  
• Get more elbows! Elbows, tees, and see if we can find three- and four-way elbows. This is the highest priority.
  
• Get more pipe, so we can complete the bottom of the sukkah. This is likely why it fell down this year.
  
• Secure the bottom of the sukkah better.
  
• Secure the canvas in a way that also allows wind to pass through it. Perhaps applying it in thinner pieces would work. Perhaps we can get a grommet-making machine (about $10) and put grommets on the canvas all the way around; this is pretty cheap and would be very helpful. This ties into the next item, which is to--
  
• Make the sukkah heavier. If the canvas is secured to the sukkah, then it will at present state of mass, blow across the yard like a ship with sails. It's either that or build it on the Raritan.

We likely won't get to all of these items by next year, but hopefully we'll get to at least a goodly portion of them. We built a very nice sukkah this year, and it's all fiddling from here on in; fun!

We put the framework of the sukkah back up last night, figuring the frame won't blow back down. It needs some work for next year to make it less flimsy, but we can do that; we have some ideas on that.

Since there's a 60 percent chance of rain, at least as of when I write this, we held off on putting the roof and canvas walls up; if the skies look good tonight, I'll toss them up with some help from other industrious Habogetrites. We have the canvas and the roof avidly awaiting their next use.

I sent this out to Martin first thing this morning:

Martin,

The sukkah blew down!

We'll try to have it back up tonight, but if there are further problems, should we just host in our apartment, or what?

Neil

In the meantime, I've been getting replies in for Friday night's potluck, looks like we'll have lots of cakes and other sucrose-laden food. So we'll be eating inside which sukkah, exactly? I imagine we'll end up hosting no matter what happens with the sukkah. We'll have to do something next fall to see that it can handle heavy winds better. More reinforcements? Glue the pipes together? We need a more durable sukkah.

Say that word to yourself: sukkah. Now say it a few times: sukkah, sukkah, sukkah, sukkah...sukkah. Sounds annoying, doesn't it? That's about my mood with the sukkah (sukkah,sukkah) right now. Martha and I got in this huge argument when I got home yesterday... over the sukkah. And we were italicized while we were yelling at each other, too. We finally cooled down after bringing the remains of the sukkah indoors, so they wouldn't blow away in the many-MPH-winds currently blowing. In this newly-found state of calm, we put a band-aid on the argument, and I went to record at Brushwood Studios.

We recorded six takes of the bass for The Bile Song last night, the last two of which were excellent. I was plugged into the board with a direct box, and Bruce was singing along, trying to be as goofy as possible. We didn't realize that he had a mike plugged in the whole time! (Oops.) Takes seven and nine worked out almost as well. Am very happy about the recording.

Martha and I made up the argument, and after talking over the smoldering embers of the sukkah argument, we realized that hey, we've had a brand-new argument instead of rehashing one of the old ones! Cool. (Yes, I've not really gotten into the specifics of what the argument was about; this is not a tears and confessions blog. As the old saying goes, pick up your shattered expectations and move along to a more juicy blog.)

Later in the day:

I'm a little less annoyed at the whole situation, now. We'll host indoors if need be, and it looks like it's gonna rain in any case. But sukkah is still a silly word when you say it seventeen times fast.

The sukkah looks like it's starting to fall apart. The wall of plastic sheeting came off last night and one of the horizontal support pipes came off; Martha went out this morning to take care of it as much as possible.

I sent an email to Martin last night for this week's Haboger activity. As requested, we're hosting again, and we're planning on having a coffee tasting after dinner in the sukkah this week. Here's the email that went out:

Hello all, Martha and Neil here; we've been threatened -- I mean convinced to host again this week, Friday 17 October. We'll meet at our place as close to 7 pm as we can manage, Jewish Standard Time, for services indoors and then dinner in the sukkah. The meal is dairy, and we'll be having a coffee tasting this week.

The meal will be dairy; please email me at with what and who you'll be bringing for the second shabbes under the sukkah!

The weather forecast looks good, no rain but on the cold side; I think we'll have lots of customers.

Speaking of coffee, we brought my Mom a coffee maker last night, a Braun FlavorSelect. I'm plugging this model because it was one of my recent coffeemakers and the Turner's current one, and is an excellent piece of coffeemaking machinery for about $55. While the glass carafe is on the fragile side, it is a very, very good model, partially due to the built-in filter, but also because of what Braun calls a "flavor selector" dial that lets you fiddle with the brew. Makes a very good cup of coffee, the next best thing to a French press. Other manufacturers should learn from this.

Also continued reading Quicksilver on the way to and from work on the train yesterday. It's a very heavy book at 944 pages -- particularly when you're holding it in front of you while walking home. I took the long way home to have more time to read; after reading Dan Piraro's book the other day and, I'm very conscious of how much time I don't take to just relax.

Bizarro Among the Savages
by Dan Piraro

For anyone unfamiliar with the work of Dan Piraro, the cartoon Bizarro is one of the oddest, funniest and best of the non-mainstream rectangles of inky real estate on funny pages across the country. I've been following Piraro's work since I found Too Bizarro hiding in the Rutgers Bookstore in 1988, all the way up to his most recent, the hyped Life Is Strange and So Are You, an annotated collection of his Sunday strips. Given the Piraro's solid, imaginative writing style, it's no surprise that the annotations are the best part of the book.

In order to promote his at-the-time brand new book, cleverly titled Bizarro Number 9 in order to clue readers into the fact that there were eight other such collections floating around on bookstore shelves and remainder bins, Piraro enlisted the help of his brand-new set of e-friends, most of whom he met after publishing his email address in his strips, at the time a new and fresh idea. His tales of life on the road, confronting his fear of strangers and fear of being alone, are vividly told, and are for the most part funny, concise, and have a thematic point that is illuminated later down the road. While the politics and limitations of newspaper cartoons are discussed, they aren't belabored; it's always just another float in the parade.

Much of this book, particularly several episodes of hallucinatory flashback and revelation from the mouths of pop culture icons, has the feel of a fictionalized journal; Piraro's life as it could be in a Bizarro cartoon. However, this will be appropriately proper to those familiar with his work. What parts of the book are fiction is not only an unimportant question, it's inappropriate after getting into the spirit of Piraro's world and head. What's the occasional talking animal or oracular slime mold amongst friends?

I first read this book when it came out, and recently re-read it by way of taking a break from a much longer and more difficult work. While hardly great literature, I had a great time in Piraro's world; Bizarro Among the Savages is a wonderfully irreverent look at modern day life in the US, through the warped lens of Piraro's obsessions and phobias. Even though the internet culture portrayed in the book is outdated, the book has stayed fresh and is worth reading and re-reading.

Friday night:

Sukkah party, see previous post.

Saturday:

Judith and Les stayed over, we had a nice Shabbes with them. They decided to donate their coffee urn to us; we'll likely end up using it quite a bit. Judith's excuse was that she's been wanting to get a new one, as the newer coffee urns are nicer-looking. Seems kinda flimsy, but why not? This is just another step in the dance of covert-yet-overt lifestyle financing; they've been very generous. My mom does the same thing, she's just more overt about it. Or maybe I know the signs better and can head it off at the pass better... dunno.

Speaking of Mom, we visited her, but only after hitting the mall on Saturday night eruv Shabbes. I recently managed to wreck her coffeemaker, and this was meant to be the replacement. More on that.

The T's headed back to DC late afternoon, and I hear they visited "Carol Sue" on the way down.

Sunday:

We woke up and met Craig for brunch in The Americana Diner in East Windsor. We then helped them unpack and such in the new house.

At about 3, we went to see my Mom. She's doing pretty well, spending a lot of time resting. I hear she's up and about in the walker, though I haven't yet seen this myself. Of course the coffeemaker is too tall for her cabinets; we stopped at a store on the way back and got a new one.

Note: I wrote this entry and saved it as a draft, but Blogger lost the post, so I'm trying again. If there are two similar entries, that's why.

The Sukkot/Shabbes services/dinner/wine tasting went excellently. There were an even 30 people (give or take a person) and the sukkah seemed just barely large enough. (Maybe we'll expand it next year, we'll see.)

Judith brought their coffee urn, we had coffee in the sukkah. Very nice.

Need ideas for next week -- we're hosting again, at Martin's request.

The Spit Song
Music Copyright (c)2003 by Grazina Strolia
Parody Lyrics by Neil Fein

Nobody writes odes to spit
Nobody writes saliva ballads
Nobody writes odes to spit
Phlegm is everywhere, everybody writes about it
Phlegm is everywhere, everybody's coughin' up sh**

Nobody writes odes to ink
Nobody writes stain-filled ballads
Nobody writes odes to ink
Ballpoints everywhere, everybody's writin' with 'em
Ballpoints everywhere, nobody is ever dippin'

Rant:
Ya know, I was writing a letter just the other day on the computer, and Word chashed on me again. Again! Can you believe this? Well, I called Microsoft, and they said it was a problem with the computer. I called Dell, and they said... well, you know where I'm going with this. I threw the computer out the window in frustration, but that didn't work because as I was going to the store to get a pen, I saw that it had taken the head clean off a passing pedestrian who looked just like George Will without a head. And when the police came by, they couldn't believe that this had happened. Most murders, they said, are committed by people who are fat, female, and forty. And I'm not even female, so they asked if i had seen the, ahem, quote crime unquote take place. I said no, but asked about where to get a pen. The nice police officer said I should go to a store down the road, and I did and got a pen. But it didn't work, because you need ink for it and so I went back and yelled at the store clerk, spit flying all over the place, and threatened to throw a computer at him also if he didn't fix the pen, what did he think he is, Microsoft or something that he can ignore my problems?

Nobody writes odes to heads
Nobody writes severed ballads
Nobody writes odes to heads
Brains are everywhere, splattered all around the place
Brains are everywhere, I think I just stepped on a face
Brains are everywhere... and just get off my case!

We went to the Israel Inspires rally last night on Busch campus. The have a lot going on this weekend, so check out their site if you're an Israel supporter. If you're not... why are you reading about this?

It was my first rally, ever, so it was an interesting experience. Lots of speakers, lots of people; crowd estimates range from 3,000 to 7,000. And there was a palestinian extremist protest -- a very small one, compared to the rally -- outside of the cordoned-off rally area.

Some links:

NJ.com

Yahoo News/AP

Home News Tribune

SFGate.com

Recording direct-to-hard-drive really is a different animal.

We were laying down tracks for The Bile Song last night, Bruce and I were, and once we had the basic guitar track down, he was encouraging me to play oddly, badly, and strangely -- he wanted tracks of guitar noise he could cut and paste from. Modern music is becoming more and more jigsaw-puzzle-like.

This version is much better than the strangely out-of-rhythm one we did a few weeks back. Grazina is concerned that we're changing her song into something very strange and different. Perhaps we could record something like this:

Nobody writes odes to spit
Nobody writes saliva ballads
Nobody writes odes to spit
Phlegm is everywhere, everybody writes about it
Phlegm is everywhere, everybody's coughin' up sh**

Bruce has redesigned the Improb site. It looks kinda cool, go take a look. He got rid of a lot of the crud that had been clogging up the site for some time. And the site now has a different "voice", although it's a little odd when he uses old text; my sardonic wit sounds odd next to his bewildered prose.

I woke up this morning and the sukkah was still standing in the backyard, always a good sign. A small crowd of Habogerites came over yesterday and helped put the thing up. In order of arrival we had myself, Mary Ann, Craig O., Grazina, Martha, Jenn and Martin. Thanks, everyone!

The skeleton is made of PVC pipe, and Mary Ann & myself did most of the work of fitting that together, with Craig and Grazina showing up for the end of that, just in time to figure out how to stabilize the thing.

The sides are yellow canvas — two of them, anyway. They're canvas drop cloths, and pretty sturdy. Mary Ann, our newly minted Jew, was the "Mohel" cutting lengths of string for Craig and myself to lash the canvas to the top pipe, sorta like a shower curtain. We still need to cover a third side; Martha's going to get a plastic drop cloth or something of that sort today. (Those canvas drop cloths are expensive; not counting whatever Les and Judith paid for the roof, we spend more on drop cloths than on the sukkah.)

The roof that the Turners got us fits the sukkah — barely. The roof is 10 feet long, and the sukkah ended up being something like 10 feet 6 inches long with pipe elbows, tees and such. It looks like a more or less solid roof with lights on, but it looks beautiful with the lights off Ᾱ the sky is visible as a series of small parallel lines in between the bamboo.

The whole thing is a little bigger than last year. I think we have enough room to keep a small table in there and have several chairs as well.

At least this title has a different adjective...

The Rutgers University Hillel high holiday services were particularly well run this year, it was a very well-rounded service. Rabbi Reed is really growing into the role; whatever congregation ends up with her will be quite lucky. And the Hazzan they got this year... I can't remember his name, although I did speak with him a bit. He did a great job, particularly on Yom Kippur. I heard a lot of similar sentiment.

Friends came over on Yom Kippur afternoon in between services. We played some board games, but mostly just sat and stared at the ceiling. Fasting takes a lot out of you, 's the whole point.

Friends are meant to be coming over tonight to help build the sukkah. I'll be scampering home tonight after work, so's I can get in as much daylight-hour building as possible. I imagine there'll be stuff to take care of on Thursday, hopefully just lighting to hang.

While much of the weekend was taken up with Yom Kippur, I got some more work done on Welcome Home before the holiday kicked in. It's a complete story now, but the final verse is still in "first draft" stage -- i.e., it's rocky but tells the end of the story.

I ended up incorporating a lot of the comments I got at the Princeton SW Circle about what was unclear and needed to be tied together; interestingly enough, one bit was, I think too clear, and when you hear the third verse now you have to think a little to realize that yes, the guy ends up not getting the girl. I need to pull back a little in the final (new) verse to synch with that.

One thing that's not in the song is why the guy doesn't get the girl. This may be as small as planting a little foreshadowing in the first verse, but it needs to be there. And I need to be careful because this song is, at least a little, about somebody. Even though it's a fictionalized version of events, I really have no desire to drag somebody else's past around in full view. On the other hand, if the song says that the relationship broke because (I'm making this up) we just couldn't color coordinate, will that become the "public" version of events? It needs to be different enough that it's obviously its own story and not (very) autobiographical.

For all you grammarphiles, have a look at this and this.

Also this for anyone utterly fascinated by quantum mechanics and refrigerators. And for time travel, how 'bout this... aw, just go check out Bob the angry flower.

"Scurrying"--that title makes me feel like a small-to-medium-sized rodent.

We're getting ready for Yom Kippur, and for Sukkot. We have PVC pipe to build the frame of the sukkah, and cloth for at least some of the sides. Martha's folks sent us what is apparently known as a s'chach, or roofing material specifically for a sukkah. I always thought it just had the name the roof of the sukkah; shows what I know.

Mom's still ensconsed in JFK, is slowly improving, and is complaining about the food, always a good sign. She showed us the scar, and it still has surgical staples in it. They look like--staples, really. Office supplies in the flesh (literally).

We brought her a few gourds and a little pumpkin, which I promptly drew faces on--sad on one side, happy on the other--for either Halloween or Sukkot, take your pick.

Update: Mom has been transferred to JFK med center, where they'll put her on treadmills and torture machines that will bring her back up to walking again. She looks good, like normal Mom.

The Neanderthal Parallax:
Hominids
Humans
Hybrids
by Robert J. Sawyer

In 2002, Martha and I were meeting Michael Burstein, an old friend of hers, in a local Barnes & Noble for coffee and schmoozing. Michael is a very nice guy, fun to talk to and personable; he is also an aspiring science-fiction writer, and is doing none too badly for himself.

While we ended up going out for dinner, we got to talking about Science Fiction in general before we left the store; he introduced us to a new writer, one Robert J. Sawyer, by giving us a copy of Sawyer's novel Flashforward. As he "cameos" in that book, it was an obvious choice on his part. I've since discovered that Sawyer is the writer of many wonderful novels, and Flashforward started said addiction. My favorites so far are Calculating God, Hominids, and Starplex. I have a sentimental attachment to Flashforward, for obvious reasons; on the bookshelf of autographed Sawyer hardcovers we've been building up.

It was with much excitement that I took Hominids out of its wrapper, directly shipped from Canada. Sawyer's books are readily available in US bookstores, but I've taken to ordering them directly from the author -- I theorize that the actual producer of the work gets more of the money this way. As I pulled the book out of its bubblewrap, I wondered how he would follow up the spectacular Calculating God?

The answer is that he has, in his own words, "committed trilogy", but he's done it with a work that attacks the thorny questions of religion by having them depend entirely on faith, as opposed to the empirical proof of a God in the previous novel's world. He's found a platform that is completely different from that of the paleontologist who journeys to a far star to see God in Calculating God, yet stays within the Sawyer style, with a few excursions.

The question asked by the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is, how would the human race react if we found an entire world of Neanderthals living on a parallel world? The story follows two main characters, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, and Mary Vaughan, a geneticist on "our" earth. There is a host of supporting characters, including Neanderthal and human scientists, family members, and politicians, and most are well fleshed-out and dimensional characters, one of Sawyer's strengths.

The science, usually another of his high points, however, is a bit lacking. While Hominids is better than the other two books in this regard, the second and third books are maddeningly vague about some points. There is a subplot involving the Earth's (both Earths) magnetic field that it would have been nice to see fleshed out more, as this was obviously intended to be an integral plot point. And the mechanism by which we move from universe to universe is left in a foggy limbo. I hardly expect Sawyer to delineate technologies we have yet to invent, but he's perfectly capable of making technologies more concrete and believable. Perhaps this is another excursion, an attempt to blend "Hard" SF with more "soft" science. If so, Sawyer's expositional, empirical style works against the grain of this.

There are scenes of graphic sex and violence in these books, a departure for Sawyer and a successful experiment in new narrative techniques. The sex and violence make up a very small part of the book, but are portrayed unflinchingly and become integral plot points. Nor are these characters perfect; the failings of the main characters make the antagonists even more chilling by comparison. The questioning of religion -- in this case, the Catholic church -- will, as usual, have many readers upset; the third book in particular will likely evoke many nasty letters to the author. Sawyer seems to be drawn increasingly towards controversial subjects, and towards controversial research.

I was disappointed with Hybrids, the final installment, with its very uneven pacing. Too little happens in the first half of the book, with the rest of the book a whirlwind of wrapping-up the plot. Even though I did keep turning the pages eagerly, it still felt as if Sawyer was trying to keep the book to a certain length. In contrast, Humans, the second chapter of the saga, does not let the reader down. The plot is told through a character's therapy sessions, a refreshing change and a device that makes it difficult to compare the book to its predecessor's more straightforward narrative. This was likely a good decision, as Homonids is a spectacular book, one of the best Sawyer has written to date, and a difficult act to follow.

The Neanderthal Parallax is a very good, if uneven, saga. While Sawyer might have done better by writing one very long novel, the better to integrate all of the fascinating plot devices he invented for the trilogy, it's still a very good read. I'm waiting eagerly for Sawyer's next book.

Mom is feeling better, keeping food down, and we're hoping she'll get transferred to rehab today. Although she's already walking a tiny bit with assistance.