Books, squid

Today I finished reading Samarkand by Amin Maalouf. Half of it was about Omar Khayyam, who was a scientist in the 11th century in addition to writing all that poetry, and the other half was about Persian politics a hundred years ago, the big mess with the Russians and the British. Like the book I read last weekend by the same author, it also had a motif of a very special book that keeps resurfacing after sure catastrophic destruction.

We saw a show on TV this evening about "killer squid," or rather, Humboldt squid, which I suppose were named for the current, which I suppose was discovered by Humboldt, though I haven't gotten that far in the book about his travels yet. The squid are rather large (100 lbs) and travel in packs, and they appear to flash on/off when they're agitated, but it's really that they alternate being red and white, with the white kind of luminescent and the red not.

Theological humor

Here are a couple I especially appreciated in the Partially Clips webcomic that fractal9091 was plugging a few days ago. (Actually, I like dozens of them.)

( 'Has the house-goddess filled the box with our favorite tasty seeds again?' )

( 'O great Baal, your storm has separated us from the flotilla! Save us, lest we perish alone!' )

Edited 8/22 to restore the nice margins, now that people have had a chance to read the comics.