penguins

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

And this is Pen-Pen’s web site. No kidding. Really.