"Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake..."
Today was a better day, finally. For the most part, the corrections to the galleys of Vile Affections is finished. Kathryn and I spent a little more than two hours on it this afternoon and finally bested the damn things. You guys better appreciate this damn book.
A sunny day. Our high was only about 84˚F. It is now 78˚F.
My copies of The Variegated Alphabet arrived.
I did a little work on the Pleistocene cave matrix. I read "Mosasaurids (Squamata) from the Maastrichtian Phosphates of Morocco: Biodiversity, palaeobiogeography, and palaeoecology based on tooth morphoguilds."
The afternoon's comfort movie was Renny Harlin's Die Hard 2 (1990), not nearly as good a film as the original, but still a lot of fun, and there are some great pyrotechnics. Stuff goes boom real good, which usually puts a smile on my face.
Not much sleep again, thanks to the fucking dogs upstairs.
Okay, so...the photo below. Brief-ish explanation. The books I am holding are the two editions of the late Dale A. Russell's landmark work on mosasaurs from 1967. In my right hand is my copy of the first edition, a gift to me from Gorden L. Bell when I was, I think, 18 years old. I'm pretty sure it was 1982. Both Gorden Bell and Dale Russell were very important mentors of mine, and that ragged old book means a lot to me. It has been indispensable. I carried it to museum collections from Alabama to New York City to Chicago, from Nebraska, Colorado, and South Dakota to Los Angeles and Alberta and Minneapolis. At some point in the nineties the binding finally blew out and I clamped it together with one of those big ass metal binder clips. Long out of print (though a facsimile went online in 2005), it was not until last year that Yale finally released a second printing (not really a second edition, though there is a new forward by Jacques Gauthier), and that's the book in my left hand. This year, looking at my brittle, tattered, and stained copy with many loose pages, Spooky allowed as how it was time to retire the sad old beast for a new copy. After all, Russell signed it to me at SVP in Philadelphia in October 1986. My new copy arrived day before yesterday, and I thought I would memorialize here the retiring of my 1982 copy. It will now be put away safely somewhere.
Later Taters,
Aunt Beast
4:37 p.m.
A sunny day. Our high was only about 84˚F. It is now 78˚F.
My copies of The Variegated Alphabet arrived.
I did a little work on the Pleistocene cave matrix. I read "Mosasaurids (Squamata) from the Maastrichtian Phosphates of Morocco: Biodiversity, palaeobiogeography, and palaeoecology based on tooth morphoguilds."
The afternoon's comfort movie was Renny Harlin's Die Hard 2 (1990), not nearly as good a film as the original, but still a lot of fun, and there are some great pyrotechnics. Stuff goes boom real good, which usually puts a smile on my face.
Not much sleep again, thanks to the fucking dogs upstairs.
Okay, so...the photo below. Brief-ish explanation. The books I am holding are the two editions of the late Dale A. Russell's landmark work on mosasaurs from 1967. In my right hand is my copy of the first edition, a gift to me from Gorden L. Bell when I was, I think, 18 years old. I'm pretty sure it was 1982. Both Gorden Bell and Dale Russell were very important mentors of mine, and that ragged old book means a lot to me. It has been indispensable. I carried it to museum collections from Alabama to New York City to Chicago, from Nebraska, Colorado, and South Dakota to Los Angeles and Alberta and Minneapolis. At some point in the nineties the binding finally blew out and I clamped it together with one of those big ass metal binder clips. Long out of print (though a facsimile went online in 2005), it was not until last year that Yale finally released a second printing (not really a second edition, though there is a new forward by Jacques Gauthier), and that's the book in my left hand. This year, looking at my brittle, tattered, and stained copy with many loose pages, Spooky allowed as how it was time to retire the sad old beast for a new copy. After all, Russell signed it to me at SVP in Philadelphia in October 1986. My new copy arrived day before yesterday, and I thought I would memorialize here the retiring of my 1982 copy. It will now be put away safely somewhere.
Later Taters,
Aunt Beast
4:37 p.m.