I'm a lasagna boy!

Achilles, heal thyself.

Roy and Leslie Adkins' stirring account of Jean-François Champollion's life, spent in pursuit of hieroglyphics, revealed that this young linguist, hailed as a genius from a very early age, struggled with German. Of all the modern languages (French, English, Italian, the latter two necessary for reading scholarship) and the oriental and african languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Latin, Demotic, and especially Coptic), he encountered problems with the most structured of modern European languages?

I didn't realise that the decipherement of the Rosetta Stone didn't take place for many years after Champollion's discovery.

Although the Adkins' book tosses in odd bits of sensationalism (describing the work of an English antiquariam, "... he was a homosexual ...") and often irrelevant and unedifying asides, it is a decent account of the struggle to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. At times they attempt to cast Champollion and Young as fighting mano a mano, but they would do better to focus on Champollion and his stalwart brother, Jean-Jacques. They present the historical context of the Royalist upheaval in France very well.

... where there used to be a motorway.

While listening to XTC's bucolic Apple Venus Vol I, I for the first time hear the lyrics:

I want to see a river of orchids /
where there used to be a motorway

This from the band who sang of the nonsense of the "English Roundabout"

Lies, damn lies, and the Chronicle.

Don Asmussen'sBad Reporter makes the Chronicle worth buying.

Since my comrade Mark and I can no longer commiserate over the local print media while downing crumb donuts (me) and blueberry muffins (him) at Bob's Donuts, it's up to me to belly-ache about how his comic ("The LIES behind the TRUTH, and the TRUTH behind those LIES that are behind that TRUTH") amusingly underscores all the crap that is the Chronicle. Both the L.A.Times (frustratingly not available for home delivery in my 'hood) and the Examiner ("Since 1865") have more solid regional coverage.

Think globally?

File under "another one bites the dust":

The strong-willed Chinook bookshop in Colorado Springs, CO will close forever on its 45th anniversary.

When I was a wee lad, I often wandered down to the underground Pinocchio Books a few blocks from my parents' house in Pittsburgh. A few months after the first mega bookstore (a Barnes & Noble, which we had previously known only as a catalogue-based seller of remainders) moved in, Pinocchio closed. A store that sold Winne Ille Pu and a large assortment of Tintin comics, as well as a spectacular selection of children's books, I loved walking down there to browse and sometimes buy.
The shop moved to Boston, where it fared little better.

My way or the highway?

This morning, a signal failure on MUNI meant that the N-Judah was stuck at the entrance to the Market St. Subway for several minutes, while other trains (J-Church) piled up behind us, and two other Ns and the K-Ingleside idled in front of us. I reached the Caltrain station just as the 8.37 pulled away from the platform, noticed that three of the five MUNI vending machines are still broken, that two of the three TransLink readers are out of order, and then heard that a gas mains break was delaying Caltrain down the Peninsula.

I gave up and called Danan for a ride.

Soup to nuts, getting in to work this morning took four hours.

UPDATE:
The ride back was equally exciting. The 5.25 express arrived several minutes late, with the conductors waving cyclists away. Turns out one of the doors to the bicycle carriage was broken, and the conductors didn't think that a bicycle could fit through the other.

The delays were due to the cyclists aruging with the conductors. Of course the bike could fit through that door. Wait for the next train. But we've validated our tickets for this train; they won't be valid for the next. Just explain to the next train conductor. Etc.

Onboard, a placard advertised an obscure government web site; a similar paranoid message (" ... if something doesn't seem right, call 911") appeared on the information displays at the San Antonio platform. The information displays did not, however, note that the trains were running late.

A ticket to ride?

Kate arrived Sunday mid-day at San Francisco airport. She had left my instructions for taking BART from the airport to my place (one change, to either a local bus or to a taxi), and stopped at the Information desk.

"What is the best way to Scott Street from here?"
"You should take one of the door-to-door vans." ($13 - $17)
"Hasn't the transit link opened recently?"
"Yes ... but you've got luggage, it's too complicated, it'll take too long."

One discouraging conversation later, she boards a shuttle rather than the BART.
No wonder BART is having trouble meeting revenue goals.

Effervescing?

I wish that I could push a button.

I'm often irritated by narrative written in the present tense. The tense doesn't immediately turn me off a novel, though: I really enjoyed Michael Frayn's Headlong : A Novel, with the immediacy of the protagonist's plunge into obsession captured by the tense. And now that I'm again re-reading Tunnel Vision, I realise that it, too, uses the present tense for most of the frantic narrative (the thing that irritates me about this book -- you know there has to be something -- is that it's set in a sans serif type).
Tunnel Vision tells the story of a tubespotter (think trainspotter, but with an obsessions focussed on the glorious London Underground) who bets his wedding and honeymoon that he can journey all 260-odd stops on the Tube in one day. With a drunken tramp as his Virgil and the dodgy signals of the Tube as his nemesis, our hero desperately tries to beat the clock in order to meet his fiancée at the Eurostar.