Not Quite Right
The supermarket one block from our apartment carries---I am not kidding---approximately 270 brands and varieties of breakfast cereal. Among these 270 variations on Raisin Bran and Puffed Rice, there is apparently no shelf space for my preferred cereal,
Just Right.
Why can I not get the cereal of my choice? Is this Soviet Russia?
I took home the cereal which, of the 270, I judged to be most similar to Just Right. But by definition, it is Not Quite Right.
So What the Hell Have You Done Lately
Congratulations to
Naomi Leonard on being awarded a MacArthur "genius award". I don't really know Naomi that well but she works with people I know at
Caltech and on a subject--underwater vehicles--that I studied there. Call her a colleague-of-a-colleague.
She is the fourth MacArthur grant winner to which I feel I have some connection, however tenuous. I took a class from
John Schwarz, I was a Harvard classmate of
Eva Silverstein, and I once assisted
James Randi on stage. I have to admit I'm not sure any of them could pick me out of a police line-up.
American Gods
I picked up Neil Gaiman's
American Gods on a trip to Fort Knox.
Incidentally, in
Die Hard Hans Gruber snarled that Fort Knox was for the tourists, but I personally didn't find, say, the Fort Knox Burger King to be that great of a vacation destination. I did take time to go to the "Thomas Edison House" which turned out to be the house in Louisville where Edison lived for a single year while working as a telegraph operator. But I digress.
I almost didn't pick up
American Gods, even though it won a Hugo (didn't it?), because I wasn't very impressed by
Neverwhere. But
Gods is pretty good.
I was struck by several small correspondences to
Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers which I also read recently (not as good). I guess if you set out to write a sweeping epic of magical fantasy distinctively rooted in an American setting, there are a certain number of ideas which are predictably likely to occur to you, e.g., Harry Houdini, the importation of voodoo by African slaves, supernatural communications coming through the television set, magical significance of cigarettes, etc.
