John Lindal’s Blog

Flash Gordon

This weekend, it was my daughter’s and mother-in-law’s turns to be sick. Still sucks.

In between changing messy diapers, I managed to watch Flash Gordon again. I just never get tired of Queen’s sound track or the crazy costumes!

Schlock Mercenary

Being sick sucks, but it does provide a chance to catch up on reading, if you’re not so hosed that you can only sleep. I guess passing out at 6PM yesterday helped me get enough sleep

Anyway, while I normally read books, but this time, I drilled through the 2003 – 2006 archives of Schlock Mercenary.

Howard Tayler definitely has the “Niven Spark” — a term I use for those who think on a really, really big scale. It’s surely not fair to all those who came before Niven, but the scale of his galactic history is just huge.

Tayler’s galactic history is pretty darn big, too, starting with the introduction of the teraport to rival the established worm gate system, and ending up, well, rather differently than most readers would expect.

But the really impressive part is that Tayler never loses sight of the fact that his story is about Tagon’s Toughs, not galactic history, so all the massive insanity is still experienced through eyes to which we can relate. And never once does Tayler lose his sense of humor and miss a punchline. That is hard to do for 6 years straight!

Not to mention that Tayler works pretty hard on his physics, too. Even if he has to invent all sorts of technlogy that violates General Relativity, he still like to work out the details of the stuff that doesn’t!

Well worth reading from the beginning…

New Shelves

After I assembled a three shelf cabinet and moved some of our clothes down from the shelf above the clothes rack, that shelf finally broke. I knew it was junk from the moment I noticed that it was two pieces of 3/8 inch particle board joined above a horizontal beam nailed to the wall!

Now it’s a single piece of 3/4 inch particle board held up by two heavy duty shelf brackets. The clothes rack is still a hack, but at least it’s screwed solidly to the shelf above it via a 3/4 inch beam.

I learned one interesting trick while sweating to screw the shelf brackets to the wall: When one does not have a 90° screwdriver, a ratchet wrench with a 1/4 inch socket will nicely hold a screwdriver bit intended for a ratchet screwdriver!