Or a stake, please. That paper I wrote last year, that I never liked, that keeps coming back for revision, has come back again. Last night it was to go over the proofs -- but now I need to remake some pictures. Gr. It's scheduled to appear in February, so there's hope it'll be gone soon.
Rather than dwell on that, here's that dragon from last month. One Monday it was in ``dragon or wood-powered railroad engine?'' shape, but it got pretty well painted by Tuesday morning. The rest was done by afternoon. Wednesday the dragon was disassembled, and Friday it was ... gone. After my U.S. trip it was outside (but sheltered -- indoors and outdoors are vaguer concepts here) and scaled -- but still incomplete. It wasn't done when it was moved somewhere far from this phoenix and castle that impressed me. I still don't know what it's all for.
Trivia: The Viking Command Computer had two kilobytes of read-only memory and two kilobytes of read/writable memory. Source: Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E. Tomayko.
Currently Reading: Bio-Futures, Edited by Pamela Sargent. Has anyone written about immortals who aren't bored, corrupt, or slap-worthy?1 While Poul Anderson's ``Call Me Joe'' -- giving us telepathic beamups to Jovian centaurs -- is still good fun, Frederik Pohl's ``Day Million'' wastes so much time on ``oooh, aren't you 20th century readers shocked?'' that the romance between a cyborg and a furred, water-breathing (genetically male) woman doesn't have room to appear. Granted I'm biased by furry (and muck) precedents, where a cyborg/mer-otter romance is the start of a story, but, sheesh. Still there's good stuff in it besides James Blish's ``Watershed,'' previously discussed.
1 OK, James Blish's Cities in Flight New York and Scranton folks count, and I'll include Neil Jones's Zoromes.