Today I bought Devil’s Legacy, a reprint of my then favorite of Matt Wagner’s Grendel stories. The new color job and slick paper make the Pander Bros artwork even more hard-edged and vivid, unless my memory (of 1986) is what’s soft at the edges.

This article (found at SciTech Daily) tells about tiny autonomous fliers proposed for Mars.

Bees may also provide a solution for navigating on Mars, where there is no GPS network or magnetic field to tell one pole from another. Bees use a combination of polarization patterns in the sky, landmarks, and distance traveled to navigate.

Is satellite-assisted navigation unlikely for Mars? How many birds does it take? If the flier gets even one fix a day, it can correct gross errors in dead-reckoning.

Everybody’s doing it.
Well, what shall I talk about first?
How about the last book I read? Yeah.

I learned roughly three things from It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races by Lena Williams (Harcourt, 2000):

• Long un-kinky blond hair is a status symbol forever out of Blacks’ reach, and some resent seeing a White gratuitously flip such hair about.
• Because of the ‘boy’ thing, Blacks don’t take first-naming as a friendly gesture.
• You can write for the New York Times for 25 years without learning to use the parenthetical comma properly.