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dry at last Yesterday after class I made a stop at Half Price Books. There wasn't any need to go there, I just wanted to browse. My hope was that I'd find another Nicholas Christopher novel, but I didn't. Instead I left the store with The Scar written by China Mieville. For months Amazon has been suggesting his stuff to me and they seem to group him in with Neil Gaiman. Actually I think I remember Neil recommending Mieville at one time or another on his site. ... For the first time in days there wasn't any rain this morning. There wasn't a much of a sunrise either, but at least I didn't get wet walking across campus. ... I've managed to catch some fairly interesting television the last couple of nights. First off there was a program discussing a possible connection between Mary Magdalene and Christ that was new to me. From what I could gather from the program, in the book The Da Vinci Code the author says that Mary and Christ may have in fact been sexually involved. This resulted in a child that was carried off to France off all places for safety. Soon a society of protectors in the tradition of the Templars grew up around this child and subsequent heirs. Leonardo was said to be a leader of the group for a time and intimates this affiliation by way of his painting of The Last Supper. According to the book and a small handful of people, the apostle John next to Christ is Mary Magdalene and she is the grail and not a cup of any sorts. Okay. I really don't find the idea of Christ having children all that interesting, but as a former student of art history, I have never heard a professor say that one of the disciples in Leonardo's Last Supper was a woman. Personally I think that that was just his style, because he did tend to paint androgynous people. One need only look at the Mona Lisa to see that his idea of feminine beauty is not a commonly held one. The second program that caught my attention was one devoted to players of the game Scrabble. Unknown to me there are championships held every two years to see who is the best player in the world. At first I couldn't believe that anyone could take the game that seriously, but then they laid down the rules of the tournament and I was impressed. Within a twenty five minute time period these people had scores in the four to five hundred range. Using all seven tiles in a turn was not unusual for them. Even more interesting was the fact that some of the best players were not English majors, but mathematicians. The program pointed out that the best players don't care about the meanings of the words, but simply memorize pages of the dictionary. This is turn means that people who have English as a second language can compete better than those with English as their first language. For the first group words become code or a series of symbols. |