I hope Allyson's around to see this: Ex-NASA Flight Controller Marianne Dyson reviews children's books about space. She is clearly a Buffista spirit baby - check this one out:
Spyler and CeCe must find some numbers to finish a countdown of their rocket ship. They “spy” a black 5 and then look for other black things in the photo. This is repeated with a blue 8, and a car with a 1 on it. They then do their countdown, blast off to space, and come home in time for dinner.
I was confused by the very first sentence: “One day, Spyler and CeCe made a really cool rocket ship.” I didn’t know who Spyler and CeCe were. From the photo, one of them is a tennis-ball-headed character, and the other a dog, but nowhere in the book does it tell me which one is which!
CeCe says ?he/she can’t wait to blast into space, but when Spyler says they need to check out their countdown machine first, CeCe says they can go to the moon only if they are home in time for dinner. This statement made me not care if CeCe made it to the moon or not. He/She is the kind of character who is not willing to take a risk - even delaying dinner - to accomplish anything. That’s not the kind of attitude I associate with astronauts.
I'm always amazed when I see people with hundreds of unread emails.
I have almost 3000 unread messages in one folder, but that's because only about 1% of those messages are relevant to my interests and I'm never short enough on work to dedicate time to clearing them out.
I have 3000+ in my inbox and 6000+ in my sent folder. Everything is read. I have an extensive system of subfolders, but am way very far behind in filing. I checked the storage space for my Thunderbird and it is almost 7gb. So much of it could go, and yet I can't quite make myself purge.
More fantastic nitpicking:
In the book, the asteroid strikes the Moon when it is in quarter phase (half full). This phase happens twice a month, once when the eastern half of the Moon is visible at sunset, and once when the western half of the Moon is visible at sunrise, i.e. when the Moon is on opposite sides of the Earth in its orbit. It is as physically impossible to see a quarter-phase Moon in BOTH the morning and evening of the SAME day as it is to see the Sun at noon and midnight. Yet on page 10, it says, “This morning ….I remember seeing the moon in the sunrise sky. It was a half moon, but it was clearly visible and I … thought about how tonight the meteor was going to hit it…”
Which brings me to the next error: meteor. Should we let the author and editor of this book off the hook because a lot of people mix up the use of meteor and meteoroid? I think not! Many people misuse terms in casual conversation, but if you are writing a book for publication, especially for young impressionable readers, you owe it to them to get it right. And an editor should question terms used by authors, especially if they are integral to the plot. If either of them had taken time to check Webster’s, they would have known that a meteor is “an atmospheric phenomena 2a: any of the small particles of matter in the solar system that are directly observable only by their incandescence from frictional heating on entry into the atmosphere, b: the streak of light produced by a meteor.” A meteoroid is the particle itself while in orbit around the Sun. Anything large enough to be seen without a telescope as described in the book is either an asteroid or comet. (In case you were wondering, a meteorite is that part of a meteoroid that makes it to the ground after it has been a meteor!)
Timelies all!
Have now gotten the official word on my niece from my brother, including her name. (It kinda makes me go "Really?", but I guess it goes with my nephews' names, in that all three
kids have first names that could be used by both boys and girls. Also, all three of the first names end in "n".)
I have five unread emails, all previewed.
Procedure complete. Work called right after it was done, while I was still hooked up to everything. Guilt is gone now.
I'm glad the guilt is gone, but how did the procedure go?
For entertainment: Get fake Tiger Woods sexts! [link] (Note: some of them are really dirty.)
