Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Birthdays and books (and a rant)

It's happy birthday time for my good, wonderful, amazing, lovely and talented friend from Bohemia, Kiki, happy birthday, girl!

EDIT: my father advised me to remove the ranting bit about the research. Let us just say that one day I'll have my own lab and will be able to freely do what I wish to do. Ta, dad.

I meant to write a post about books, so, yeah. Books!
Finished Winston Churchill's The Second World War's first volume; The Gathering Storm. Lovely book, not only because of Churchill's writing style but also because of the way the translators to hebrew made an effort to upp the language level as much as possible. This being a book printed around the 50s here (the whole series belongs, actually, to my uncle who got it for his bar mitzva and never laid hand on it even once IMO) it means the language is already archaic. The result is a highly stylish and delightful to read extremely detailed account of the war.
I have to admit I didn't read all of it; Churchill spent the first few months of the war commanding the navy, which he loved with all his heart, and which I care very, very little of. I skipped a chapter or two, but the most I read quite happily.

Am now reading Hogfather which is the usual Pratchett delight; same old writing tricks pulled but ever new and entertaining. Talk about it when I'm done ^_^

BTW, I haven't seen Mr Poopy Pants in a couple of days now and I suspect Sam's got a paw in this; he'll hunt flies to such extent the little thing'd eat them dead off the floor, let alone a caterpillar...

4 comments:

Kevin Zelnio said...

"because I'm supposed to ask them about EVERYTHING and the simple human mistake of not seeing something that is not in my umwelt because I'm fresh out of your first year in the world of science and no one taught me such things is something to be blamed on me"

Welcome to science! Your gonna love grad school!

Meirav Rath said...

Oh, kevin? I thought that was just zoologists' screwed up social abilities...well, that's something to cheer me up...*sigh*

Unknown said...

D: @ rant that is not there

Meirav Rath said...

Dad figured it'd be politically better for my career in the university if I didn't post such stuff where people can use google to find me. Whatever. I, personally, think said people don't care enough to google me but oh well.