What to do when it is cold outside

Today is the coldest day of the winter so far in NYC. It is forecasted to get down to 6 degrees. Naturally, your activities change when it gets that cold outside. Let me just point out that if your airplane were going to crash in the Hudson river, today is a really bad day for it. Why not do it in the dead of August? Of course I can make that joke because everybody survived, thankfully.

I am cooped up in my apartment reading Anathem, Neal Stehpenson's latest novel. Every Neal Stephenson novel gets progressively more complicated and hard to follow. The trilogy is hard to follow because it is based on so much 17th century history that unless you actually have a PhD in World History you probably don't get all the allusions and humor. Even then probably not. But Anathem takes place way way way in the future, so many of the words are completely made up.

But now I'm 300 pages in, I understand the terminology, and a story is finally starting to develop. These monks are so smart and rational that they say things that sound funny even though they're not trying to be funny. My favorite line so far is, "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."

If that doesn't make you laugh then I don't know why you even read my blog.