Welcome To Canuckistan

Photo courtesy http://saintcyrils.org/

I’ve just finished reading ‘Anathem‘ by Neal Stephenson and after 891 pages and a few months I am very glad that I stuck with it. I’m not going to try and write a capsule summary, I’ll let Publishers Weekly (via Amazon) do that for me:

In this follow-up to his historical Baroque Cycle trilogy, which fictionalized the early-18th century scientific revolution, Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) conjures a far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world. Stephenson’s expansive storytelling echoes Walter Miller’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, the space operas of Larry Niven and the cultural meditations Douglas Hofstadter—a heady mix of antecedents that makes for long stretches of dazzling entertainment occasionally interrupted by pages of numbing colloquy.

Yesterday Kasia & I went to a friend’s 30th birthday party. It was a two-stage affair – surprise party/lunch at a Caribbean-themed restaurant to be followed by games, socializing, maybe a few drinks at her boyfriend’s house. I’ll have more to report later, but for now I”ll say that we had a grand time

I had a Cuban sandwich for lunch that, while very tasty, didn’t quite live up to what my tummy had ordered (same goes with the Aruba Red house beer – seen in the very upper left of the picture).