Went and had a quick look to see how the test rig's coming along. Nice, guys! Basically, they're building a penguin shaped 'chute' from the top of the bluff to about two thirds of the way down. The gang are lying on their backs pushing snow with their feet into the middle to form a ridge and lying alongside while Cozy jumps belly first onto the top which makes the chute - a bit like a miniature 'Cresta run'.
Now Cozy is less a penguin and more the most efficient protein to fat converter you'll ever meet. I think it's a metabolic disorder but Cozy says he just loves fish! He's a bit taller than most of us but, boy, is he fatter! He's more orca than pengiun. By the time we come to the end of the season, Cozy's about as fat as most of us are at the beginning of the season!
The idea is that after Cozy's jumped all over the chute, the snow will be so well compacted, it will turn to ice overnight.
The difficult part comes tomorrow when they have to make the slightly 'upturned' end to the chute. The reason it's so difficult is that it's got to be upturned enough to give them enough altitude from the ground when they leave the chute to do what they plan but not so upturned that they go too far to the vertical. We have such a low centre of gravity, see, and they'll just crash land a couple of metres away.
My job this afternoon is to see if I can find the research one of the newbies did on my early morning toboggans down the bluff last year so I can get some speed estimates. He had a stop watch so I think he was timing me. I then need to work out what the optimal angle for the upturn should be. It's sometimes a disadvantage to be the only penguin who knows how to use a computer!
What makes little things niggle? You know the kind of thing. You lot get divorced because he squeezes the toothpaste tube from the middle or she always loses one sock every time she does the washing. You get what I mean? Mentioning Anne McCaffrey the other day made me go and re-read the dragon rider books. They're an easy read and fairly light on the back of the penguin in front. I was towards the end of the fourth book when it suddenly dawned on me why I hadn't re-read it for a while. It so infuriated me the last time!
One of basic premises of the stories is that the riders and their dragons bond 'mentally' when the dragon hatches and the bond is so great that if the rider dies, the dragon suicides. (Ah...bless). So as the series develops characters, the riders and the dragons, a particular dragon is always linked to a particular rider. So why at the end of the fourth book does a character (and his dragon) who features prominently in the third book suddenly gets assigned another rider's dragon? That's just sloppy, either the author or more importantly her editor!
I'm not a perfectionist, nor do I never make mistakes, but if you go to all that trouble to 'subcreate' another reality, why spoil it by not paying attention? I just hope someone corrected it in later editions.
Don't know why it annoys me so, though.
The same reason it annoys me when someone switches topics right in the middle.
ReplyDeleteIt is forgiveable in a blog, however. These are places we can work these things out; determine what it is we most want to say.
In a published book, it is not so forgivable. It's her job to get it right before she sells it to us.