Measured Mars

If an apostle of Cartesian geometry turned his attention and all his skills to mapmaking, might he reasonably describe himself as a Descartographer?

I am very nearly not joking here. I'm just not sure that I could pull it off. I don't have the time to acquire the learning to make the pun form a function.

(This-all started because I was wondering if a cartographer of Mars might be an areographer; but that doesn't really work, because a geographer is not synonymous, not a cartographer of Earth. Dammit.)

Anyway. I was all full of something to tell you yesterday, but I have forgot it.

However, I have ordered a map of Mars and a book called Mapping Mars and another book that aspires to be a guidebook, so. Quite serious about that, then. I also tried to join the Mechanics Institute in SF (this is what I do when facing whole-new-research-track, I join a private library; it's how the Lit & Phil and I came to be acquainted, when I was writing the Outremer books), but of course they want proof of address and I didn't have anything on me. Alas, their website doesn't say "You'll need to prove your address, if you just turn up." Indeed, it doesn't say anything much that's useful.

In other news, I am making All The Meat Sauce. If your spaghetti looks a little blank tonight, it's because you haven't any sauce, because I made it all. Bring your plate around, I'll dispense a dollop.

Which reminds me: *goes off to drop a rind of parmigiano into the simmering sauce*

I love this kind of cooking, where it just keeps getting better and richer and more layered the longer and slower you cook it, and you can keep on adding stuff at intervals as it occurs to you.

Bacon, maybe, later. Mushrooms maybe. Ordinarily I would, both of those: but I'm making this with half an eye to a really grand sauce on Tuesday next, and I might want the base of that tolerably plain, not to be outfacing the extras that go in then. So tonight I'm thinking maybe I'll do something like mac & cheese with meat sauce underneath, as though it were a kind of cottage pie. Maybe with a little cauliflower in amongs the meat, so it's a kind of cottage pie/cauliflower mac & cheese. Or something.

In the meantime I have two documents to proof, and my head is all Mars all the time. In Steampunk Mars, Lowell gets to name his own crater after himself...

I could drink a crater of you tonight

Well, that was annoying.

The internet was cheerfully telling me that Camille Flammarion had a crater named after him on Mars, and so did his wife Gabrielle Renaudot Flammarion; but of course there's only one Flammarion Crater, so I was cheerfully inventing a hissy-fit between their ghosts - "It's named after me!" "No, after me! They didn't name it till after I died, so obviously it is mine!" - before I smote my head and cried D'oh! and checked Google Mars and yup. Renaudot Crater, of course. If my several sources of information had troubled to give me coordinates, I would have figured this sooner.* Hey-ho.

(In sideways news, she outlived him by nearly forty years - but then, he was thirty-five years older than she was when they wed. Both ends of that interest me: generational divides in marriage and long widowhoods. I need to write more novels.)

In other news, it's the weekend and I have earwormed myself with Joni Mitchell, so yup. First bottle of wine opened, and being drunk in honour of Camille and Gabrielle (both of whom also have asteroids named after them, but they are 107 Camilla and 355 Gabriella, for reasons not known to your correspondent**).


*Or, of course, they could just have said "Renaudot Crater is named in her honour," rather than the misleading "She has a crater on Mars named in her honour."

**Yes, yes, there is also an asteroid 1021 Flammario, but who can say which one that is named for? And at least they're consistent with that change-the-last-letter thing. Or drop it. His sister Berthe has an asteroid called 154 Bertha, his first wife Sylvie has 87 Sylvia, and even his observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge has 605 Juvisia.

Let's play tag

Good grief.

One of my friends from Book View Cafe tipped me off that some disgruntled moron had been inappropriately tagging my books on Amazon. So I went to see: and indeed, Dead of Light had been tagged with many variants of "gay erotica" and "male male". Which would be fine descriptions of other of my works, but not in fact this. So I frowned mightily at those, and moved on to check some other books - and I find that House of Doors has been tagged many times by numerous people, with categories that run like this: epic; fantasy; assassin; prophecy; twins; witches; gypsy; Kindle free book; magic; tt. Most of those would again apply to other books of mine, but to this one? I might kind of agree with one and a half, in the loosest possible sense. Really, I don't understand this. It's not like they're bad tags, this isn't sabotage (or if it is, it's wildly incompetent); just, no. This book is not about those things. Weird...