Shoe Museum!

Barbershop Quartet Day
International "Louie Louie" Day
Liberation Day (Uganda)

 

Hey, people in Eugene! The UO’s itty bitty Museum of Natural and Cultural History is hosting a very spiffy exhibit on shoes, which is actually a lot more interesting than it may sound. You get to see famous shoes, shoes for each decade of the 20th Century, shoes of the world, and some of the oldest shoes ever found.
 

Also, you get to see a large number of shoes Liz has spent the last few weeks painting. And maybe decorate your own!

 

There is one tragic omission, though.  There are no spats in the exhibit.  The sexiest possible article of clothing, which pertains to shoes, has been omitted from the shoe exhibit. If you go, I suggest you complain to the staff!  If we get enough people to do this, it should at least amuse them.

 

One word of advice: wear your most impressive shoes.  Otherwise, you’ll feel sort of silly standing there in your boring Keens while everyone else has painted or beaded shoes or those awesome old Spartan laceup sandals. Especially if you're at the opening reception, but that was today, so I guess that won't be an issue.

 

It’s a fun exhibit! Check it out if you’re in Eugene and have a little while to spare!

Spork Goes HERE

With all these books I have to read for the first time, I probably shouldn’t spend so much spare time rereading my old Sector General novels. But I can’t help it! There’s an irresistible lure to them for me: their content is very similar to my own idea for Doctors! In! Space!, which I thought was totally original forty years after these stories started appearing. DAMN YOU, JAMES WHITE!

 

Another wonderful thing about these books is that I can then console myself that I’m still a damn sight better author on technical merit than James White, King of Expository Dialogue, is. Not that my writing is particularly magnificent; it’s just that his sucks. He’s got all these great ideas, but I just want to strunk the hell out of the way he presents them.* I could spend hours detailing his dreadful writing,** but I truly love the stories told in there and thus am reading that instead of better-written things right now.

 

Plus, how can you resist a series that has this on its Wikipedia page? “The series is remarkable in unusually diverse and believable non-humanoid aliens. It is also possibly the only sci-fi series where the most sympathetic character closely resembles a giant wasp.”

 

Favorite part of that sentence?  That it’s possibly the only sci-fi series with that distinction.  Never mind all the sympathetic giant wasps you find in hard crime fiction.

 

Ah, yes, ’tis my kind of trash, all right.

 

 

*strunk v. 1: to correct grammatical errors in a textual body 2: to submit a textual body to editing.  Refers to William Strunk, Jr., co-author with E.B. White of The Elements of Style, which is inflicted on all writing students everywhere. Coined by Amelia in revenge, since one of the rules laid down in the book is to never, ever, under any circumstances, make a noun into a verb. Mr. Strunk, you got verbed.

 

**In the names of the mother of God and all her wacky nephews, the man literally CUTS AND PASTES giant blocks of infodump into each book! As DIALOGUE! Do these sonuvabitches all have to memorize these pages and pages of exposition? And why the hell do they keep reciting them to each other? If I could go back in time I would track him down and hand him a thesaurus.