"Where every concept pleases, and only man is vile."
Has it really been over a year? I’m not keeping up with that photo a month publishing schedule I set myself. I will try and do better in future.
Here we have two boys between their birthdays in July 2016. JFGP has just turned 13 and MIGO will be 11 in a few days. You can see them getting steadily bigger at the gallery here.
It was thirteen years ago today that we were married. Thank you my love.
Author : Charles Stross
Title: The Annihilation Score
This book was released in the civilised parts of the world last Thursday. I appear to have read it in five days. Which given that I’m averaging four to five books a year at the moment is something of a speed read for me.
Unsurprisingly I rather liked it. I don’t think I’ve read a novel by Charlie Stross that I haven’t liked. Some of his older hard science fiction books have not been exactly to my taste, but I think that’s more a review of me than the books. The Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes books have been great. The major reason I enjoy them is his obvious subversion of different genres and cultural stereotypes. It usually takes me a while to get them, again a reflection on the reader, but the moment when I worked out his twist of the James Bond stories in The Jennifer Morgue was worth the price of entry alone.
In this book Charlie takes a look at the superhero genre but can’t resist, as with all of the other Laundry Files books, imagining the impact on bureaucratic government departments and agencies. For instance I loved his description of the application of health and safety standards to superhero costumes. In common with the Incredibles movie he agree that capes should be banned not on aesthetic grounds but because of the potential for injury.
It’s the first book in the Laundry Files series to be written from a character other than Bob Howard’s viewpoint. According to the author it won’t be the last though. That change from the preceding novels allows for an interesting counter point to events that were observed and reported in previous novels.
I read this in five days but that won’t be the last time I do. I’m going to let the ideas and plot points settle and percolate in my brain for a while. Then I am going to go back in for another more leisurely read to really enjoy this book.
Let’s just pretend that not much happened in the first half of 2015. Following swiftly on from the end of 2014 here are the boys in June 2015.
I have been just a little bit slack. I am trying to make amends by clearing up my photo library and posting what little backlog of growing boys photos that I have managed to take. Here are our subjects from December 2014.
Because apparently every blog needs it’s fair share of cat pictures. This is the latest edition to our household soon after he arrived in October last year.
Hopefully one day I’ll be able to write down what Sir Terry Pratchett’s books have meant to me. From Good Omens through the whole Discworld. Until then I’ll go with this quote;
“If you trust in yourself. . .
and believe in your dreams. . .
and follow your star. . .
you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
Plus this from xkcd
On Saturday we took the ankle biters to the concert hall at the Opera House to see the Sydney Symphony perform with one of our favourite ivory ticklers. Mr Folds and his ‘band’ did a great job of entertaining us and a wonderful time was had by all.
I’m trying to write a new blog post but am a little stuck for inspiration. As usual for us techno types I have taken refuge in fiddling under the bonnet of the site. I refreshed all of the growing posts and photographs the other day and then I upgraded the underlying software to WordPress 4.0. Then I was on a roll so I installed the Jetpack plugin. This allows me to write posts in Markdown and that is what prompted this post. Not that you can tell but I’m writing this in a nice easy to use format that translates well to the web.
Now back to your regularly scheduled radio silence. At least until I can think of something to write about.
In a half-hearted attempt to catch up here is a picture of our subjects taken quite recently. As you can see JFGP has decided that since he lives by the beach he needs a surfer’s hair cut. On our trip to the UK in July most of the extended family disagreed and said that he needed a trim. MIGO, meanwhile, is laughing at my excellent joke.