18 Feb

Mammoths!

It seems like every child goes through a phase of fascination with the prehistoric, when they can recite to you in dizzying detail the names of all the dinosaurs, or explain the differences between mammoths and mastodons. Then, for most, this fascination fades and they move on to breeds of horses or major league baseball statistics, or Pokemon.

But not everyone moves past the fossil phase, and if you’re one of them you can join the excitement in Seattle this week where construction workers found a mammoth tusk! Read More →

22 Jan

Two Serpents Rise – Max Gladstone

Last year I read Max Gladstone’s debut, Three Parts Dead. I’ve finally seen an accurate description of his genre: “a combination of legal thriller and steam-powered fantasy”. Whatever you want to call it, I enjoyed it enough to pick up his second book, Two Serpents Rise, which is set in the same world, but different characters, different city, different gods, same great combo of tight plotting and, well, legal thriller and fantasy. Less steam this time around, though, and a lot more human sacrifice, since the cultures he’s drawing on are those of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Read More →

29 Dec

2013 Reading List

Around April I decided I should keep track of what I read in 2013. I can’t swear that I managed to put everything on this list, but most of it, for sure. I finished 33 fiction and 9 non-fiction books, and started a dozen more. I was going to include a snarklist of abandoned books, but tastes vary and there are so many books to recommend that it’s not worth the time to disrecommend a book.

Fiction

Out of so many books this year, here are three I thought were particularly noteworthy. Read More →

13 Dec

Slavic Quick Cat redux

Back in 2009, I spent some time working for the University of Washington library system, helping to catalog new acquisitions for the Slavic collection. I kept notes on the curious things which crossed my desk & posted ‘Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging’ in parts 1-20. Part 1 is here.

I just found a draft email that includes more info from that time, so here it is. Read More →

01 Oct

На Командорах / On the Commander Islands – Meteorologists and sled dogs

meteologiQuick and dirty translation, part 4. See also, part 1, Fur Seals, part 2, Sea Birds and part 3, Foxes.

На Командорах [Na Komandorakh] On the Commander Islands. Author: Gennady Snegirev. Artist: M. Miturich. Izdatel’stvo “Malish”. Publisher “Little One”. For older preschoolers. A print run of 350,000 in 1975. Cost, 16 kopecks.

Full Russian book scanned here.

 

On the Commander Islands there are meteorologists at any time of year — in snowstorms and in fog they keep watch, marking down readings from their instruments. The strength of the wind, the temperature of the air and water. How high and fast the water flows in the rivers in the spring and after rain. Just now they let go a weather-balloon, it carries instruments high-high and the instruments transmit signals to earth about what’s happening at that altitude. The flouds fly in one direction and still higher, perhaps, the wind blows in the complete opposite direction, and they need to know how strong the wind is and at what altitude it blows. If a pilot doesn’t know this exactly, he can neither take off nor land a plane.

Read More →