Sabato Rodia, 60 years later

One of my strong childhood memories is of visiting the bizarrely-beautiful Watts Towers, in South Central L.A.; they were the perfect fascination for an 11-year-old boy.

Now here comes a nice article on seashells, and on Sabato Rodia, and on how we humans relate to coastlines around the world: The Symbolic Seashell.

That’s when he turned to the sea for salvation. Over the next three decades, Rodia hauled some 10,000 seashells from the coast to his property, where he built a whimsical fantasy of concrete walls, arches, and towers that soared to over 30 meters. He studded the structure with the shells, as well as with broken tools, plastic toys, glass bottles, pieces of tile, and thousands of other found objects.

"...these shells, they travel..."

Indeed.

I love Polygon's list of the 100 best games of the 2010s

If you have any interest in modern video-gaming, you'll love The 100 best games of the decade (2010-2019)

They gave Journey too much credit, gave Portal 2 too little credit, and the game I'm playing now isn't even on the list.

And really, Far Cry 3 didn't make it onto the list at all? (good to leave FC 4 and FC 5 off the list, though!)

The thing about lists like this is: are they interesting? This list definitely is, mostly because the Polygon editors do a nice job of summarizing why they thought a particular game deserved your interest. So overall I'd agree they succeeded; it's a very solid list.

The biggest surprise of the list, to me, was Kentucky Route Zero. I gave this a pass 5 years ago, but maybe I should go back and give it another look? It's interesting to look at Metacritic's results on KRZ, which show an enormous distribution of scores.

Mistress of the Art of Death: a very short review

When I was recently at the ever-amazing Powell's City of Books, one of my selections was Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death.

Although it's quite expertly-crafted and very well-executed, Mistress of the Art of Death is also very much all over the map.

Is it a historical novel? A murder mystery? A romance?

Yes, to all three. The depiction of England during the time of the Crusades is quite vivid, and makes an entertaining backdrop to the foreground story of a serial killer terrorizing Cambridge with a string of gruesome murders.

And our heroine is quite an inventive character, a young woman from the ancient Italian city of Salerno. She is medically-trained and speaks several languages, and is known as a Mistress of the Art of Death because she got her medical training at a school which practiced autopsies, a quite rare approach at the time, at least in western medicine.

I'm not sure how interested I was in the romance.

And I'm not sure that 12th-century England is all that appealing a place to spend my idle reading hours.

But overall I liked Mistress of the Art of Death quite a lot.

I see that Franklin has written a number of additional books; perhaps I'll give them a try!