Ho Very Much Hum

In terms of events, my life is a pretty slow news week at the moment. They would be running footage of some ducks spotted at a local wading pool that's closed for the season if it were broadcast news. However, that is extremely useful in terms of projects, because I have successfully finagled the slightly older Rosetta Stone I got on ebay to work with Windows Vista, saving myself a heartattack at the thought of having thrown a hundred bucks at something I couldn't use, and at the thought of having to actually try to sell something on ebay (as opposed to threatening to sell everything I own on ebay, which is very different and gives my ticker no pause at all). Even better than installing it, I've started using it, which is to say that if you need me to tell some Italian that a fish is white, a bird is flying, or even that a man is falling off a horse, I'm your gal. The default noise the program uses to tell you you foolishly clicked the wrong answer upsets me. It is, in my mind, an orchestral symphony of despair, compressed into two discordant notes - I thought about why it makes me jump out of my skin every time. Was I so uptight and were my expectations so high that it was actually crushing to be told that I'd made a mistake? Was I so invested that the occasional, unavoidable mental blink that led me to click the first yellow (or giallo, if you like) thing I saw, rather than the correct yellow thing was the kind of failure that warranted a full flinch? Then I realized, no, it was none of these things. It simply put me in mind of the scene from the Goonies where they have to figure out some moldy old sheet music and play an organ made of bones while the floor collapses with every wrong note. A-ha...that and some old animated movie with a staircase into the sky falling away behind the protagonist (I reluctantly think it may even have been the CareBear movie, tripe though it was) left me with a slight childhood phobia of floors falling away to reveal a gaping oblivion. Mystery solved. I still flinch, but at least I don't worry that my subconscious is going to beat me up in my sleep for getting one adjective-noun combination wrong.
Speaking of ridiculous childhood phobias that I suffered, I think we can officially erase black holes from the looming terrors in my mind when I put the lights out. I finally waded through a very nice book (Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, by Kip Thorne) that has been suffering abuse in my custody (as books sometimes do...think of my home as the Guantanamo Bay of book interrogations) for the last five months or so, on loan from a very nice person. I figured if I kept putting it back, he would come looking for his book, and then when he saw the tender loving care I'd given it (left in an abandoned purse that I'd been slinging it around in in case I felt like reading it, the purse left under a stack of abandoned clothes I'd been discarding in a very specific pile as they each got too doggy to wear without washing - well, I don't like washing sweatshirts until I have to!), he wouldn't renew my loan. Joke's on him, now, because I read it and I don't need to extend the loan!
Wait, I digress. My POINT was that I enjoyed the book very much, and probably even learned a thing or two, and definitely sharpened my appetite for armchair physics. So there I was, all worked up, spitting mad that I don't have the mathematical background to actually understand things that would be good to understand (particularly after Thorne kept banging on about how important the esoteric mathematical field of topology was), and that things like quantum gravity are so impossible to even begin to understand, but wanting more armchair physics immediately.
So I go to see Ghost Town (and Ricky Gervais is still funny), and then stop by Books-A-Million, a store that never pleases me, but I figure hey, I'll just see if they have any physics books. They do. They actually had quite a bit more than I'd expected. Visits to this store in the name of physics are so much more satisfying than those made in the name of biology, let me tell you. A confession: I knew that I wanted some armchair physics reading, but the back of my mind was like, "Oh, uh, physics, huh? Maybe they got, uh, one of those ol' books about Heisenberg (a man who was undeniably attractive in his youth, and also the dude that came up with the uncertainty principle, which I just really like, okay, okay, and was played by Daniel Craig in Copenhagen, are you happy now?!) that you keep wishlisting on Amazon..." But come on, back-of-my-mind, like I remember any of those titles or authors? That's what the wishlist is for, to keep track of them. What do I see on the shelf? "Uncertainty: Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg and the Struggle for the Soul of the Universe." But in order to keep it totally real, the rest of my mind had to gang up on the back of itself and form a coalition, and that coalition wanted something more science-y and less history. For now. And then what do I see? "The Poincare Conjecture: In Search Of The Shape Of The Universe." Ah. And on the back, a message from the author, hoping that anyone who was not actively anti-math would read this book and be heartened to take further math afterward. That could be me. And a couple of shelves over: "Three Roads To Quantum Gravity." Well. Okay. If I'm going to mad about not understanding these things, I may as well be mad about not understanding them despite my best efforts. So I got them, and I didn't get any music magazines, and there the matter stands. Maybe they will be horrible - certainly a few people take issue with the quantum gravity book, and one person is very offended by the Poincare book's emphasis on facts and history rather than colorful analogies, but at least they will be a jumping off point?
If you see me with Invisible Man-esque bandages swaddling my head, it's just because I fractured my brain.
Of course, I may have already fractured it trying to assess the "Science" shelves at Books-A-Million! There was LITERALLY no organization at all. Alphabetized? Nope, in no way. Maybe just separated by discipline, then? Not at all - a book on neuroscience lay cheek by jowl with a memoir about meeting Feynman that was itself nestled against a primer for defending evolution against intelligent design. My favorite was when several copies of a book would be stacked neatly on a shelf, and several more copies of the same book would appear on a different shelf - not as part of any kind of display that might pick and choose from the collection as a whole, but apparently just because there was some shelf space open over there and some extra copies of the book in question on hand to fill it. This happened a few times. I almost pulled them all off to start organizing it myself, but if I wasn't up to summoning one of the teenagers angsting around the store in smocks to complain, I probably wasn't up to fending them off until the job was finished, either. For the record, my books at home are in no way organized, except for the ancient encyclopedias I took just because they were free.