Balloon hat

Driving home from work one night this week, I saw two women walking down the sidewalk, facing me. They were both fairly large Black women. The one on the left was wearing a t-shirt that said, "It is what it is." The woman on the right was wearing a t-shirt that said, "NOT." Who knows whether they planned it or not, but my guess was not.

And then, last night (which is what made me remember the t-shirts, for some reason), I saw a woman wearing a balloon hat driving a van. One of those double-take moments. Yup. Balloon hat. An orange tubular balloon all the way around her head, with something (animal head?) sticking out in the front. I have to admit I was relieved when I saw that there were children in the van--a woman driving around alone wearing a balloon hat would make me worry.

I played The Sims briefly last night, but there wasn't any excitement, not like the naked lady. I visited the monastery where the monks live, and briefly visited Legolas and Aragorn. They have a very pretty house, lots of vine-patterned wallpaper and green upholstered furniture. Very leafy. Legolas is an animal trainer, I think--it's hard to remember now--and Aragorn is, I believe, a stuntman. The jobs aren't necessarily very inspiring, I don't think.

In their last incarnation, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were both on the psychic career track, but since the last re-installation, Qui-Gon has been unemployed and stays home, which really works better for everyone concerned. Not as much money, but the house things get done more efficiently, and there isn't as much panic to get some sleep before it's time to go to work again. Again, just like real life.

I downloaded a bunch of new stuff from 8th Deadly Sim,* but when I installed it and tried to run the game, it told me that I had too many objects, so I guess that's probably another casualty of not having all the expansion packs running--I think the more packs you have added, the more objects you're allowed to have. I've got a lot of stuff in there that I could live without, but the problem is that there's no way to tell from the file lists, really, which things are which.

Sometime when I have a lot of extra time, I'll troll through them and see if I can figure it out. Just temporarily, I went in and removed a bunch of furniture and accessories that were named something like "Teen Bedroom Set"--I figured I could do without whatever that was.

I don't usually talk too much about the books I'm reading, but I'm reading one that is really exceptional right now--The Disappeared, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I was telling Bob about it last night--it's not something he would read, probably, but I was too excited about it to keep it to myself. It's sort of a police procedural/science fiction; the main characters are a pair of police detectives, but it's set on the Moon, in what I suppose is a fairly near future--there are colonies on the moon and on Mars, and we've set up trade relationships with alien races.

"The Disappeared" refers to people who have hired a "disappearance service" to create new identities for them and relocate them because they're on the run from aliens. It seems that before we really understood a couple of alien races--their philosophies and culture--it was easy to make a mistake and commit a crime that might not have been a crime in a human culture, but is in the alien culture. And then there are crimes, like murder, that are crimes no matter your culture.

If you commit one of these crimes, you can be tried by a multi-cultural court, and if you are convicted, the alien race has the right to inflict its own judgment on you which, in the case of one of the races, is ritual revenge killing, and in the other, the seizing of your firstborn child. And they never forget.

The human detectives in the story are trying their best to do the right thing for all concerned, but it's hard being both compassionate and following the letter of the law.

This is an excellent book. It's the prequel to Rusch's novella The Retrieval Artist, and there's one more book in the series so far, Extremes. I'm going to try to save that one for awhile, but I doubt I'll be able to.

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* It's a pay site, but it's just $3.50/month, so I just bought one month and then hit every page and downloaded the stuff that appealed to me. I can't really imagine why you would do anything else. Sure, if you buy more months, the cost goes down, but unless they're adding things every day--and they don't seem to be--it doesn't seem like it would be worth it.