Grad School, Letters, and Stuff

I've always feared making errors; more, I've feared learning errors. That's why I've had a conflictual relationship with mail, oftne unopened for long periods, and why I've not looked at the deadlines until recently.

I've checked them this morning in Timothy's, and yes, although the time is certainly nearing for the submissions, I'm far from being irredeemably late--in fact, some of them (Dalhousie in particular) seem to be positively late. I checked in with Canada Post and they can send documents by priority express across central and eastern Canada in a couple of working days.

This will be fun.

An Interesting Article

"Safe Treyf":
New York Jews and Chinese Food"
By Gaye Tuckman and Harry G. Levine

It makes for very interesting reading. How cultures collide, eh?

Sentient Cephalopods

I've just finished reading an interesting science-fiction story: Stephen Baxter's "Sheena-5," published in the anthology This Year's Best SF 6. It's set in a bleak near-future Earth, where a squid genetically engineered for intelligence--Sheena, in the title--is sent out to a near-Earth asteroid to supervise the construction of an a mining facility and a rocket to push the asteroid into the Earth orbit.

( Spoilers follow )

It must be interesting to be an intelligent egg-layer aquatic invertebrate. Baxter didn't quite convey it, I think, but then I wouldn't know it until I saw it so there.