Dave Mancuso dot Com

Dave Barry put up a link to this, which delighted my children to no end, for almost half an hour, until I considered pulling my ears off to stop the sound.

The wife of the grandmaster of science fiction passed away a few weeks ago. Ginny was not only the caretaker of Mr. Heinlein’s literary estate; she also kept her husband and his affairs in order for a large portion of his life. She was extremely talented and accomplished in a number of scientific fields, and contributed much to Mr. Heinlein’s novels as a sounding board and inspiration. Many of Heinlein’s amazing female characters were based in part on Ginny.

Plus, she loved cats.

After Robert Heinlein passed away in 1988, Mrs. Heinlein relocated to Florida, where she lived for the last decade. RIP, Ginny. We’ll miss you.

I have to tell you, folks, that John Robb has the most intelligent, balanced, incisive, and sometimes scary analyses of the impending war in Iraq that I’ve ever read. I’ve learned more about our foreign policy, history, commitments, and economy reading his posts than I’ve ever dreamed. Amazing stuff.

From Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the apocryphal story of the woman who, after reading Shakespeare, said “I don’t see what’s so great about Shakespeare anyway–it’s just a bunch of quotations strung together.”

Heh.

I made a great low carb dish tonight of parsnips, scallions, and herbs. My wife loved it. I couldn’t eat it, thought, because I discovered one big problem. Parsnips are waaaay high carb. My first clue was when they looked like potatoes in the skillet. Oh well. You live and learn.

Even more shameful was that when I bought them, I thought they were rutabagas.

My wife was reading the Smithsonian magazine tonight, and told me that in the late ’60s the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burst into flames five stories high, fed by the pollution in the waterway. It became a major influence on the Clean Water Act. Amazing what people and companies can ignore if it isn’t their direct problem.

Robert Heinlein had a foolproof solution for waterway pollution: require every company to put their water intake downstream from their outflow.

Harvard has done a study on various dialectic variations across the United States. Fascinating stuff. Thanks to kuro5hin for the link.

They missed a few terms from here in Amish land, like “red up your desk” or “want to go with?” or”want some coffee awhile?” My personal chalkboard screeching grammatical slaughter here is “Your car needs washed.” Washing, people, or to be washed. (Aaaggh!)

I read somewhere that Brendan Fraser is now a prime candidate for the title role in the new, long-in-the-works Superman movie. I say go for it. Brendan would be great. I mean, who else could have made something like George of the Jungle work at all?

For the curious, here’s the 412 as it comes from the factory (mine and Kevin’s looked like this at first):

And here’s how it looked after it was totaled in 1986:

After the accident, I had it towed to my apartment complex and used some of it for parts. Eventually, my apartment complex had it towed away without telling me (I understood their position–it had become a real eyesore). I still have the 412’s title, though. I own it, however many atoms it’s become now…

For now, you go to this website to play 20 questions. I won, but probably only because I was thinking of a yellow sweet pepper (it guessed in 24 questions).