Found: Someone who didn't read Harry Potter IV

I happened to glance at the jacket blurb on my copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night and confirmed, yet again, the fact that you really can’t judge a book by its cover. Or its blurb.

The blurb talks about the “International Quidditch Championship”, which is interesting, since what’s in the book is the
“Quidditch World Cup” (first mentioned in Chapter One). I guess the secrecy around the book extended to the blurb-writer, too.

Wine of the Day

Martinelli Sauvignon Blanc (1998, Russian River Valley). No funny aftertaste; fairly crisp. I enjoyed it.

Wine Comment of the Day

From Laurie Daniel’s Wine Column in the 12 July 2000 San Jose Mercury News:

“[Some winemakers] make sauvignon blanc in the style of chardonnay, with lots of oak and buttery flavors from malolactic fermentation. (I can’t recommend this last style of sauvignon blanc. If consumers want chardonnay, they have plenty to choose from. Leave our sauvignon blanc grapes alone.)” [Emphasis mine.]

The Vision Thing

Just back from the eye doctor, who says it’s time for me to give strong consideration to getting bifocals as my next pair of glasses, unless, of course, I want to be putting my glasses on and off as I change between reading and focusing farther away.

And when I got out to the optician’s desk, she was already picking out frames that would work well with progressive lenses.

I think they’re trying to tell me something.

Between discussions of bifocals, I asked about my suitability for LASIK correction; my prescription makes me a good candidate, but I would probably still need glasses to converge the images from both eyes into one. As an experiment, the optometrist set his magic gadget to correct my eyes but not have any prism, and I could see a little bit of double vision — it doesn’t bother me now when I don’t wear my glasses because my eyes are sufficiently different that they don’t provide images in close enough focus to confuse my brain. But if both eyes were at 20-20, the situation might be different. It might also be possible to correct one eye for distant vision and the other eye for reading and avoid the double vision that way. But somehow, undergoing LASIK doesn’t seem all that attractive a prospect if I can’t wind up with clear vision in both eyes and no glasses.

Step by step, inch by inch

I seemed to spend most of my day walking between my office and the Extreme Blue zone, working on getting Frontier and Manila up on the Bluelogs server-to-be at IBM. There weren’t any major problems, just minor annoyances, like finding out that the IP address we thought we had was being used by someone else, or realizing that I’d left the serial number of the copy of Frontier in my office. Oh, well, I needed the exercise anyway, since I knew I wasn’t going to get to the YMCA today.

I’ve been getting much-appreciated help from Brent on configuring my server to do some odd things (before I can go public with the server, I want users to be able to use the same userid/password for all the sites on the server, for example; I also need my users to be able to list all the sites).

Hmmm…I wonder if the HTMLFavorites.js script which powers “Weblogs to watch” on this site is available to run on other servers.

I hope to make more progress tomorrow, if my eyes undilate early enough to make it worth the trip to the office.

A surfeit of entertainment

Amazon delivered volumes 2-12 of Star Trek today (the “delayed” shipment arrived by US Mail as quickly as the others arrived by UPS). We watched “Mudd’s Women” this evening, and Jeffrey has opened all of the cases and read the information about each episode. I think this’ll keep us busy for a while.

And I’m still reading Harry Potter IV. In fact, it’s time to go back to it now!

#include "non-Weblogs I Read A Lot"

Weblogs I Like

BWG

JRP

Distant Horizons

Egoboo Department

You don't have to be Jewish…

Unlike A
Conspiracy of Paper, where the Jewishness of the protagonist,
while important to the book, wasn’t central to his character,
everyone who comes to Kaaterskill Falls for the summer
is Jewish, and that’s the most important thing in their lives. Not just
during the summer, either, but 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (but most
especially on Shabbat).

Most of the summer people are Orthodox Jews; in particular, the families
who are at the core of the novel are Kirshners, followers of Rav
Kirshner, who is seventy-eight and frail as the novel opens. We follow
several of the families through two summers and into a third; during
that time, we see birth and death affect this community. There are
conflicts, of course, but no high drama (at least not to anyone but the
participants).

I enjoyed the book — I’m not Orthodox (far from it), but I was able to
identify with some of the questioning and decisions that the characters
had to make in reconciling their life with late 20th-century America.
The author doesn’t explain any of the Hebrew or Yiddish terms she uses,
so I would expect someone who’s unfamiliar with Jewish practice to have
a hard time following what’s going on in some places.

Now to start Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. See you when I
finish! [One chapter down, many to go…if she keeps up the same level of action in the rest of the book as in the first chapter, I’m going to be exhausted before I’m done.]