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The sandwich shop across the street is having its steps re-concreted, so the only available door to get in and out is the one blocked at waist height by a countertop. Everyone has to enter and exit on their hands and knees. I decided to pretend this was like the Zen-influenced tea cremony in which you must crawl through a tiny doorway to get into the tea hut, but it wasn't really. It did however influence my choice of lunch towards fruit salad (less spilly than soup).
I read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary yesterday - it's supposed to be sort of a prequel to his Lensman series; good space opera but weird structure, evidently repackaged from several short stories and novellas. The first third is meant to establish the Eddorians (villainous aliens who infiltrate developing civilizations as part of their plot to take over the galaxy) and the Arisians (cough cough Vorlons) ,good-guy aliens who are surruptitiously guiding young civilizations in hopes of producing allies against the Eddorians, but who aren't quite ready to start the all-out war yet, so they have to conceal their existence from everybody - this keeps leading them into bombing-of-Coventry situations where they can't intervene, so essentially the first third of the book consists of a series of short stories where despite the best efforts of the Atlantean/Roman/American protagonists, civilization blows up and everybody dies. Then we move on to the rest of the book in which various exciting things happen, the Arisians *finally* do help the protagonists a bit and thus get found out by the Eddorians, and it all ends a bit abruptly as a launch point for further adventures. Liked the inertia-less spaceship though.
I read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary yesterday - it's supposed to be sort of a prequel to his Lensman series; good space opera but weird structure, evidently repackaged from several short stories and novellas. The first third is meant to establish the Eddorians (villainous aliens who infiltrate developing civilizations as part of their plot to take over the galaxy) and the Arisians (cough cough Vorlons) ,good-guy aliens who are surruptitiously guiding young civilizations in hopes of producing allies against the Eddorians, but who aren't quite ready to start the all-out war yet, so they have to conceal their existence from everybody - this keeps leading them into bombing-of-Coventry situations where they can't intervene, so essentially the first third of the book consists of a series of short stories where despite the best efforts of the Atlantean/Roman/American protagonists, civilization blows up and everybody dies. Then we move on to the rest of the book in which various exciting things happen, the Arisians *finally* do help the protagonists a bit and thus get found out by the Eddorians, and it all ends a bit abruptly as a launch point for further adventures. Liked the inertia-less spaceship though.
