This has been the second-hottest summer of my life. (Only 1980 was hotter, and I was 30 years younger and better able to tolerate heat then.) Consequently, I haven’t been out taking pictures as much as I would have liked. I did manage a trip to Botanica this morning while it was still merely unpleasant. Here are a few of the pictures.

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Another panorama, this time from near the altar. If you look carefully, you’ll see an instance of bilocation.

Nothing worth watching on television? Eyjafjallajökull not doing much these days on the rare occasions when it’s not hidden by clouds? Take a look through the Sakura-jima webcam. When the weather is clear, you probably won’t need to wait long to see a nice column of ash burst out of the crater. Sakura-jima has been almost continuously active since 1955.

You can control the camera, by the way. Click on the box with crosshairs at the bottom right of the viewer and wait for the countdown to end. The bar to the right of the picture controls the zoom, and the little box under the picture controls where the camera points.

*****

A different sort of video: Arthur C. Clarke, Benoit Mandelbrot and the Mandelbrot set, with a soundtrack by David Gilmour. (Via Steven Riddle.)

It’s been a bit warm here in Kansas, though not as warm as Oklahoma. However, it’s a tad chilly in California.

I came across yet another list of the “100 science fiction books everyone should read.” Like every other one I’ve seen, it’s an arbitrary selection and not at all what I would have chosen (though it does earn a point for mentioning The Fifth Head of Cerberus.) Rather than reprint that list here with the usual “bold what you’ve read,” I instead compiled my own. It’s half the length of the other and perhaps just as arbitrary, but I daresay it’s better reading.

A lot of writers you might have expected are missing. In some cases it’s because I haven’t read them yet, but usually it’s deliberate. For instance, I have no desire to re-read anything by Isaac Asimov no matter how historically important he may be, so why include The Foundation Trilogy? (And I think John Sladek is more reliable on the Three Laws of Robish, anyway.)

There are a lot of short story collections mentioned. Partly it’s because I like short stories, but mainly it’s because many writers are better at shorter lengths.

I could easily have made a valid list using just the works of Wolfe, Wells, Lafferty and Dick, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the obsessive.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the Original Radio Scripts

J.G. Ballard, Chronopolis

Greg Benford, Timescape

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, Starburst

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

Samuel Delany, Driftglass

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, The Preserving Machine, or any other of his better novels or short story collections

Thomas M. Disch, Fun with Your New Head, Camp Concentration

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Diana Wynne Jones, A Tale of Time City

C.M. Kornbluth, The Best of C.M. Kornbluth

Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

Henry Kuttner, The Best of Henry Kuttner

R.A. Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, or any other collection of his short stories¹

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, The Cyberiad

Barry Malzberg, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, or whatever else you can find²

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz

George Orwell, 1984

Frederick Pohl, The Best of Frederick Pohl

Rudy Rucker, Master of Space and Time, or any collection with Harry Gerber stories

Joanna Russ, The Adventures of Alyx, And Chaos Died

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Robert Sheckley, Dimension of Miracles, or any collection of his short stories

Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino no Tabi³

John Sladek, Tik-Tok, Mechasm

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

William Tenn, Immodest Proposals, or any other collection of his short stories

James Tiptree, Jr., Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, or any other collection of her short stories

Yasutaka Tsutsui, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Ian Watson, The Very Slow Time Machine, or any of his early novels

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, The Book of the New Sun

John C. Wright, The Golden Age trilogy

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

1. If you need evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with the publishing industry, note that The Collected Stories of R.A. Lafferty still doesn’t exist.↩
2. It is not required to read a lot of Malzberg; a brief glimpse of his universe will suffice for most readers.↩
3. Good luck finding this one. The contract to publish the Kino stories in English fell through shortly after the first volume was printed. You can get a taste of Sigsawa’s work by watching the animated series Kino’s Journey, which heads my short list of anime for people who think they hate anime.↩

One groups of plants I particularly like are those that grow like weeds, but aren’t, such as the sunflowers I planted this spring, which are now taller than I am.

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I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Depending on which sample of text I use, I also write like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown (ugh), Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Chuck Palahnuik, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Defoe, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde or James Joyce. But not R.A. Lafferty or Flann O’Brien. Oh well, nobody else can really write like them, either.

Actually, when I read my writing, it just sounds like me.

Update: A bit of background about that site.

“Sing to the Mountains” is really not all that bad, if you imagine it being sung by the Muppets.

From the comments here.

Here are Dylan’s improved lyrics to “Gather Us In.”

Here’s a little something for Yes fans.

Just how good are the pictures that my new little camera takes? This morning, I put an extension tube on my D80 and took a few pictures of the dahlberg daisies that I photographed Thursday with the L22.

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Already tired of the summer heat? Here’s a picture I found in my old toy camera this morning. According to the file information, it was taken Christmas day last December.

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My new toy camera arrived today. It cost about half as much as the little Canon I got about five years ago and is more than twice as capable. The images are 4,000 by 3,000 pixels, which is larger than those my DSLR takes. The picture above is cropped but otherwise unaltered; click on it to see it at actual size. The image quality is remarkable for the price. The flowers are dahlberg daisies; each daisy is about 3/4″ across.

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I knew that there are active volcanoes along the west coast and in Alaska and Hawaii, and that Yellowstone might explode catastrophically at any moment during the next million years, but I didn’t realize that there are also erupting volcanoes in the midwest until I read this headline: “Small ash emission from a Cleveland, OH volcano.” Gee, I hope TSO and Maureen are okay.¹

(Via Eruptions.)

Those who are fascinated by volcanoes might be interested in a recent addtion to my links, Volcano Picture of the Week.

1. This is the mountain in question.↩

Via Art and Adventure, a different sort of Hobbit.

The music is Danny Gatton’s “Cruisin’ Deuces.”

I finally finished going through all the pictures from Costume-Con 28.

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