orichalcum

Random Question: So, one of the tallest buildings in the U.S., the Trump Tower, is being built next door to us. Currently, it's about 60 stories tall, and will be 96 stories when complete. On top of the current construction, they have a gynormous crane, lifting things up from the ground all the way to the top, which I can watch out my window.

So what I don't grok is, how did they get the crane up there? I'm sure there's a good answer, but my engineering/spatially-challenged brain fails to get it.

Random Quote: "Vice President Cheney came up to see the Republicans yesterday," Hillary Clinton said at a fundraiser last night. "You can always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the Vice President’s motorcade pulls into the Capitol, and Darth Vader emerges."

We live in a strange, strange world when a leading Presidential candidate can publicly refer to the current Vice-President as a Dark Lord of the Sith. (Besides, he or Rumsfeld is actually Palpatine...)

Random Link: Useful tips on teaching in academia. My favorite, and one I may steal, is "The Wisdom of A Students." The author, Joe Ben Hoyle, writes each of his A students at the end of a course and asks them to email back a paragraph on how they earned an A in the course when many other bright students did not. He then passes out a compilation of those responses to his students at the beginning of the course, the next time he teaches it. I also like the metaphor of teaching as a dance.

Why is it that so many alternate history novels, particularly ones with Literary Pretensions, boil down to, "Wouldn't life be more interesting if it sucked a lot more for Jewish people?"

Why does no one write the book about how the Warsaw revolt succeeded and beat back the Nazis, or how FDR got enlightenment and let in all the Jewish refugees who wanted to emigrate to America in the 1930s, or what if the Israeli army kept on going in '48 or '67 and established a Jewish Empire over the whole Middle East?

Or, for that matter, how about other interesting turning points not involving Nazis, like, say, what if the Arabic forces had won the Battle of Tours and France had become Muslim? That's a book I want to read.

BTW, I mentioned a few weeks ago but forgot to describe the novel I'm supposed to be writing along with the Academic Book. It's intended as light popular airport historical fiction, written under a pseudonym.

Here's the blurb:

Caesar's Daughter: As Julius Caesar's illegitimate daughter, Brutus' sister, and Cassius' wife, Tertia's loyalties were torn apart as the Roman Republic began to collapse. We all know the stories of the men in her life, of Caesar the dictator and Brutus and Cassius the assassins. Here Tertia tells her own tale of a tumultuous childhood as an extra, scandal-tinged daughter, marriage and involvement in the highest levels of political intrigue, and her long, lonely decades of widowhood as the last woman to remember the glory days of the Republic.

All details may change. The basic facts are entirely true, however; Tertia was an unusual third daughter born during her mother's lengthy affair with Julius Caesar; she subsequently married Cassius. She lived to the age of 96 and died in the Age of Augustus, incredibly wealthy and with a notably lavish funeral.