Flip flops

While adding to my biblio the other day, I had one of those moments of discovery where the thing you've found is something that a lot of the people you think are cool already know about . . . so discovering it makes you feel simultaneously more cool (for the discovery) and less cool (for the slowness in discovering it). That thing was BAAA by David Macaulay.

Why had I never seen this before? It's fantastic. It's this sad, little post-apocalyptic picture book? Graphic novel? Fable? From 1985. About how after the humans wreck everything and disappear, the sheep take their place and do basically the same thing.

It has amazing, funny, punch-in-the-gut lines like, “Riots broke out and injuries were sustained. More comedies were shown on television," and, “The silence spread. Pools went unfiltered."

And of course it feels too contemporary for comfort.

But even the sheep apocalypse can't get me down tonight -- I've nearly kicked my cold, and I'm wearing flip flops for the first time since Guatemala. Hallelujah!

The cold hasn't kept me from working, but it's kept me from working well, which just can't go on as I have less than a week before my second packet's due. With all the time I spent outlining (read: obsessing) over how to make my book work, I feel like I've no time to spare.

Oh, and I still need to outline my lecture. Uh-huh.

My bibliography, at least, is done. And I've got some nice resources for my lecture: Tolkien's Tree and Leaf, Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night, a book on writing sci-fi and fantasy by David Gerrold. He wrote, among many other things, "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode of Star Trek, so the man knows something about something.