Thursday, August 10, 2006

Mmm . . . Lichen Sampler

My job is going to gradually give me a Jeopardy-level knowledge of quite a few things, I can already tell. For example, I could now tell you that Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a portrait artist around the Napoleonic years. I can tell you very little else about Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Today I learned that lichens, or at least pictures of lichens, are weirdly beautiful. Lichens have generally, for me, lived in a mental taxonomic drawer just labelled "Stuff" so I'm kind of surprised how varied and odd they are. Unfortunately I can only look at lichen pictures so long before thinking about bread mold too, and then I need to take a breath of fresh air.

Mmm . . . lichen sampler.

This also reminds me of the fictional intelligent space lichens that featured in the young-adult sci-fi novel Interstellar Pig, by William Sleator. That was a fine book. It’s got to be either a classic or a cult classic, I guess depending on its sales.

In unrelated book-content news, one of my Red-Sox-fanatic coworkers (in the marketing department I used to work in) self-published a book about Fenway Park, specifically one that describes, section by section, where seats are blocked by poles. He apparently had the idea for this in April and finished it in three months, staying up very late at night. (He also sat in almost every one of the seats at Fenway himself, largely during a college baseball double-header sometime before the Sox season started.) I don’t think I’ll ever need to use this book, but I think it’s pretty neat.

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