Liquid Paper Trivia

Over at Chicago Boyz:

"Long before word processors and printers came along there were typewriters. And typing mistakes. In 1956 a secretary named Bette Nesmith Graham (yes, Michael Nesmith’s mom) came up with a solution to that problem, a white paint of sorts suitable enough to use on paper and to cover up typed print."

I knew the story but not the Monkees' connection. 

The Dancer From Atlantis

I am not sure when Poul Anderson wrote this novel. I am using a airline WiFi that behaves as though I have Internet service but the browser refuses to search.  Internal evidence suggests 1970. (UPDATE: Published in 1971.)

It is a novel that seems designed to appeal to someone as unique as me.  It is a time travel historical fiction set in late Minoan times as Thera prepares to erupt.  The protagonists are an American architect, a Dark Ages Hun, and medieval Russian (okay more precisely Kievan) and a bull dancer from Crete.

A malfunctioning time machine snatches them up from various times and places and dumps them with dying pilots on the North African coast.  (If you are old enough to remember the regrettable 1960s series It's About Time,  feel free to start singing the theme song, the only part of the show that showed any cleverness.)

Can Duncan get home?  Can he save his future and past girlfriend's Minoan civilization of Atlantis?  The plot is complex.  It shows an imaginative although not impossible interpretation of why Linear B replaced Linear A script on Crete.  It also does present an interesting way of resolving the known problems of explaining Minoan collapse not matching Thera destruction. 

Great fun.  Make sure you can click words in Kindle. Anderson stretched my vocabulary as usual. 

East Tennessee Looks Good

We ended up on Rush Minute near Johnson City.  It reminds me of Boise traffic jams in 2001.  Admittedly, it was Labor Day weekend but there was no traffic, no crowds.  

We stopped for lunch in Knoxville which is roughly equivalent to Boise in traffic density and fancy restaurants.  Homeless people everywhere.   At the offramp one guy having ferocious fistfights with invisible enemies.