Crow Nesting Season

by on June 6, 2013 at 9:19 am
Posted In: Test

It looks like crow nesting season has been going on for at least a month now though I’m happy to say I didn’t notice it. Much as I am very fond of crows and all of their corvid cousins, I have also had the misfortune of having a favorite route that crosses into the comfort zone proximity of their nests. And in many of those instances I’ve been glad to have been wearing a hat. (For when they swoop down and try to peck, not any other form of attack! Clear that filth from your mind!)

Anyway I was coming back from Starbucks having done one of my “commutes” to my office when I heard a bunch of crows going berserk. At first I thought they were mobbing something until I saw a mostly grown fledgeling looking up plaintively. The always say you shouldn’t help young birds when you see them like this due to abandonment issues and such. But this time it was so tempting. Besides… from the noise overhead it was clearly not abandoned.

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Favorite Quotes – Iain Banks

by on June 5, 2013 at 6:57 am
Posted In: Test

I played with this last year only to give up after doing two of them.

Anyway here is the third installment of my collection of favorite quotes. With any luck this time I’ll do a better job of making it a habit.

Today I’ll go with one of my current favorite science fiction authors, Iain M Banks. My taste in science fiction tends to lean towards space operas (or at least my definition of the term which involves stories taking place in interstellar civilizations) In this Banks delivers in spades. While his Culture series in not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea I can’t get enough of his prose and wit. When I heard he had less than a year to live due to inoperable cancer I was greatly saddened for yet another loss to literature.

Anyway as a first of hopefully many tributes to the man here is a description of the relative honesty of the artificial minds that run the Culture from Look to Windward,

“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”

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Game of Thrones – Red Wedding

by on June 3, 2013 at 6:56 am
Posted In: Test

I confess. This was the episode of Game of Thrones I was absolutely dreading.

Based on the formula of the  first two seasons, the climax of the season would be in the ninth episode and then the final episode would involve the denouement, cleaning up loose ends while putting pieces in place for the next season. So based on this the first season had the execution of Ned Stark and the beginning of the War of Five Kings and the second season involved the Battle of Blackwater Bay.

Now predicting what the climax for Season Three was a bit tricky as the third book, A Storm of Swords, is being split into two seasons and the way story elements were being shuffled around and tweaked it was a bit difficult to predict where they would make the split. But as far as a dramatic climax around the halfway point was concerned the Red Wedding was the most logical choice.

This was a fact I was not looking forward to. Of all the parts of A Song of Ice and Fire the Red Wedding is the bit I like the least. I’m not saying it’s bad. On the contrary it’s a piece of nearly operatic epic tragedy that turns everything in the book upside down and makes things much more interesting… but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. (In fact having been forewarned about it by a spoiler I glossed through it as quickly as possible when reading the book.)

Having said that it was a good episode which did a very good adaptation of that scene in the book.

In other words it was like watching a terrible tragic train wreck.

Can’t wait to see how they close the season.

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