The Olympics stopped meaning much of anything to me, I think, when they first split the winter and summer games into separate years. I know they did this to make travel and training easier for the athletes from poorer countries — it’s not cheap to send that many teams so far, so often — and I’m sure it was the right decision, but it’s hard to get excited about the Olympics now that they’re so common an event. I remember how the 1988 games in Seoul and Calgary seemed huge and important. Maybe that’s just because I was an impressionable eleven-year-old boy who had never seen the games before, but I can’t find any of that same excitement for the Winter Olympics underway right now in Salt Lake City. It’s just a vaguely interesting alternative to all the other programs I don’t watch on NBC. Unless, of course, this turns out to be true. Wil Wheaton, on whose weblog I found this, and who would be in a position to know, so far hasn’t said. It sounds like a joke, but I mean, come on. What is Jonathan Frakes known for if not his ballast?

This afternoon, as I sunned myself quite happily in the building’s lobby and ate my lunch, I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s amazingly dense The Shadow of the Torturer. It’s a wonderful book, and I eagerly anticipate reading the rest of the series. And I absolutely love what he writes in his “A Note on the Translation” in the appendix at the end, so I pass it along to you:

In rendering this book — originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence — into English, I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so. Thus in many instances I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closes twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as peltast, androgyn, and exultant are substitutions of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. Metal is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds….

To those who have preceded me in the study of the posthistoric world, and particularly to those collectors — too numerous to name here — who have permitted me to examine artifacts surviving so many centuries of futurity, and most especially to those who have allowed me to visit and photograph the era’s few extant buildings, I am truly grateful.


Of the new film Rollerball, critic Roger Ebert writes: “Someday this film may inspire a long, thoughtful book by John Wright, its editor. My guess is that something went dreadfully wrong early in the production. Maybe dysentery or mass hypnosis.”

“Picture a bright blue ball just spinning spinning free, dizzy with eternity
Painted with a skin of sky brush in some clouds and sea
Call it home to you and me” – The Grateful Dead, “Throwing Stones”

Ooh…purty. Found via Metafilter.

Meanwhile, Buzz Aldrin wants to take us to Mars. Found via Boing Boing.