The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Uncharacteristically Personal Note

    We never observed "Fathers' Day" in my family. Still don't. My father liked to pick out his own neckties, and dismissed the whole event as something ginned up by the makers of greeting cards and electric shavers. So all the appreciations and in memoriams people are posting on 'blogs and social media today are very…

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  • Godzilla Movie Update

    It's always those damned Lannisters messing everything up, isn't it?

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  • Random Encounters: The Hell-Fire Caves

    In 1748 the famous libertine baronet Sir Francis Dashwood ordered the excavation of a complex of chalk caves under his family seat of West Wycombe Park. The work incorporated existing caves and mine tunnels, as well as new chambers and galleries, and may have linked to some of the "follies" on the grounds of the…

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  • June 6

    I visited the Normandy beaches in 1993, a year before the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the invasion. Beaches, of course, don't preserve anything very long. They are places where the ocean grinds everything to sand. Normandy's seashore is good for strolling; the water's too chilly for swimming and there are more rocks than sand. Most…

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  • Random Encounters: The Floating City

    Akmon is a city of a million people floating in the hazy blue-green atmosphere of Uranus. The city's held aloft by a ten-kilometer balloon made of diamond, filled with hydrogen superheated by a fusion powerplant which doubles as an artificial Sun. Akmon serves as a hub for atmosphere mining, a base for airships hunting the…

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  • Medical-Historical Notes

    No, I'm fine. Not that kind of medical history. I'm talking about the history of medicine, and the history of medical terminology. A couple of weeks ago I had my annual checkup. It mostly consisted of a blood draw and some lab work, to see if all my humors were properly balanced. But I did…

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  • Random Encounters: The Infinite Library

    "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves…

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  • The Baristiary

    For more than twenty years now I've done a lot of my writing in coffee shops. It gets me out of the house, I can observe my fellow pseudointellectuals and blowhards, and I don't have to answer the phone or walk the dog. In that time I've seen a lot of coffee shop employees. A…

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  • Random Encounters: Martian-Ravaged London

    (Yes, the Random Encounters are back! Once again, I'm going to try to put up one table each week.) The Martians dropped down out of the sky onto southern England in the spring of 1899, and got as far as London before succumbing to Terrestrial germs. They left behind a devastated city, transplanted Martian organisms,…

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  • A Curious Omission

    Like most people, I went to see the Disney/Marvel super-epic Avengers: Endgame a couple of weeks ago. It was good; I give it an A overall. This post isn't a review or analysis of the film. It's just one question. The question is this: during the Big Final Battle with all the heroes against the…

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The Worldbuilding Index