The Sporks of the Titmice

Record cold in Russia, presumably worse even than the winter of '42. It's got to be dramatically cold if the Russians are inconvenienced by it.

I love the picture that accompanies this article. They describe them as swimming, but honestly, it looks like they're playing curling with a naked fat man for the stone.

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Here it's quite pleasant for January. It's been in the 50s and 60s most of the month, apart from this Tuesday, which was bitterly cold and snowy for about 16 hours.

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There's a planetary mission to Pluto on its way. I remember seeing the first blurry pictures from Mars, so many years ago. Now the last unexplored planet is due to be inspected. Somehow you wouldn't think that an Atlas could hold enough chemical energy to throw something all the way to Pluto. Calculations and intuition are two different things.

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There's an old Heinlein juvenile called "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", which features a lovely furry alien called The Mother-Thing. At one point she's stranded on Pluto, and calmly walks outside, naked, to set off the rescue beacon that will summon help. She freezes solid in the process, of course, but has faith that her people's technology will restore her. That scene always stuck with me. There's something strangely romantic about that.

Sadly, the cover of the current edition cuts off about half of the Mother-Thing's face. I've got my old late 70s copy, with the same cover painting, but showing a much wider field. I wonder if the cover art got damaged or something.

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I'm finally getting a (used) Sega Dreamcast so that I can play Spirit of Speed. I bought the game long ago, as I correctly apprehended that it wasn't going to stick around long. There was supposed to have been a PC version, but I never could find it, so I settled for the Dreamcast one, but couldn't bring myself to pay full retail for a gaming system that I wanted for one game. Now they've come down to a more reasonable price.

Spirit of Speed's about open-wheeled racing from 1924 to 1953, but concentrating mainly on the Auto-Union/Mercedes era of the late 30s. Not unsurprisingly, the general gaming community despised it (cars too slow, handle like lumberwagons, no music, etc) but the reviews from racing sim sites praise it for reasonably realistic physics and car handling. Most important to me is that you get tracks like Brooklands and the old Monza, and cars like the Auto-Union C and D, and the Mercedes 125 (the swastika-challenged paintjob, unsurprisingly). You can drive the Railton at Brooklands. The great lack is that they didn't manage to include Indianapolis, although they've thrown in a Miller 91 RWD, and a fictional "Colorado" counterclockwise oval track.

I can't for the life of me see how someone can list "no music" as a defect in a racing game.

Now I need to scrounge a copy of Grand Prix Legends...