Tea time

A little while back, L and I were talking about the merits of various tea urns, tea kettles and such for producing hot water. Being the nut I am, I made a spreadsheet to show how long an urn would take to heat up. Google gives me a way to share spreadsheets that's pretty convenient here. More or less, I calculate the number of milliliters, then estimate raising the water temperature by 90 degrees C. Then, based on simple conversions and the wattage of the kettle, I calculate how long it will take to heat up. For a 1000 watt urn heating 30 cups of water, it's about 44 minutes. I'm sure patience is a virtue, but it's one best enjoyed over tea, not waiting for it.

The Gilded Chain

I just read 'The Gilded Chain' by Dave Duncan, mostly aloud to my favorite audience (small but very rewarding.) I had a good time reading it and found the character politics interesting and amused myself mapping the characters and events to Henry VIII. While certainly not an exact mapping, there's enough there to make me wonder if the author intended it, or at least did use Henry as inspiration.

The tests of prowess and endurance drew a pretty good balance between being satisfying for me and not too tedious for my audience. If there's too little I'm left wondering "where's the swashing?" and if there's too much I get a "can we skip this?" from the gallery.

The narrative bounced back and forth a bit from history to the current time in the story line. The style didn't always pan out -- maybe it was my reading, but the transitions weren't always clear, so I usually added a remark about fading into the past or present. It worked OK, but I'm not sure the story was better for it.

It's a story with magic in it and I'm always curious about how authors make magic work. The idea of mixing the four Classical elements with four, er, other ideas (Love, Luck, Death, Time) is interesting. Magic works by mixing the 8 'elements' in different proportions. If you're going for that sort of thing, it would be nice to have more sense why or how things work the way they do. Love and Death oppose each other across the resulting 'octagram'¹. The opposition of the two seems to be a source of power in one enchantment, others seem to simply use lots of sources. Granted, it's not a story about magic itself, or a magician, but if you break it down into interesting components with relationships to each other it's a little let-down not to explore them a bit in the story. As it is, it's a distraction: interesting, but not important. The important parts of how magic works in the story don't seem to relate to the 'structure' of the magic at all. Maybe there's another story where it all relates.

¹Me, I was amused by the 'sex and death' motif, as popular in the 16th century as it is now. Anyone for a little Shakespearean double-entendre?

Dinosaur

If dinosaurs were anything like my parrot
I'm glad I don't have to clean up after any of them.
On the other hand
Imagine being snuggled by a T-Rex.