Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 – New York Times.
My introduction to Vonnegut was the novel Slapstick, featuring low gravity days, the Chinese shrinking themselves to combat overpopulation (eventually becoming microscopic and infecting the rest of the world, I recall), and the church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped. His other novels soon followed.  He was brilliant and hilarious, searing and playful, and he will be missed.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

Hi Ho

Last week I thumped The System of the World (pictured left) down on the nightstand, finally completing Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.  Generally a fan of historical fiction, I picked up the first volume, Quicksilver, at Changi Airport, Singapore in 2005, wanting something hefty for a long flight.  Now, 3000 pages  later (with many detours and interruptions), I can confidently say it was worth it.  Meticulously researched, the narrative spans roughly 1640 to 1715 encompassing religious wars, the enlightenment, the establishment of the monetary system, and the rise of the natural sciences.  In fact several of the central characters are ‘natural philosophers’ including historical figures such as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz, Robert Hooke, and John Churchill.  Stephenson skirts the supernatural in some cases, in the way Cornwell deals with the Arthurian legends in his Winter King trilogy, but otherwise these books were a perfect storm of historical fiction and science.  Loved it.

I actually hope this is not true. As the father of 2 little girls, it really turns my stomach that people like this exist.  Link: customers_suck:

My customers often annoy me. They often make me mad, and often I think they are idiots.
However, they seldom make me want to physically assault them.
Today, though, I came very close to hitting someone.
I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says "You can’t buy that."
Girl: Why?
Mom: Because it’s too big.
Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It’s not very expensive.
Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You’re a girl. And girls shouldn’t read big books like that. It’s too thick. Boys don’t like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don’t you?

The girl went and put the book away.

via Pharyngula