Links and Stuff

It’s official! We’ve closed on our house, so it’s now ours. At last I feel comfortable to share a couple of pictures. Here’s the front of the house:

And here’s the side of the house, but you can just see the Spanish Inquisition around the corner… just kidding. This is the room that will be my study:

See the square archway? That’s going to become solid wall, starting today. I’m not doing it, since my skill with a hammer is non-existent. You know those commercials that run around this time of year showing “The Perfect Gift for Dad”–and it’s a toolkit? Sorry, I’m not that Dad. So I’m getting help with the wall. (Not from Mexico.) And once the wall is up, I’m going to have big bookcases running almost the whole length of it. It’ll be wonderful. My desk will go against that wall you see on the left.  I’ll share “after” pictures when it’s all done. Of course, I’m going to paint the walls too. I got some color choices:

I’ll probably go with the one that’s second from bottom on the left-hand strip. I forget the name of the color. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the wall is currently a beige-y color.

We’re hoping to be moved in a week from tomorrow, so we’re going to be busy for the next few days. As exciting as it is, we’ll be glad when it’s all over.

I just have a couple of links to share with you this week. The first is last month’s announcement that Dan Brown will be releasing a new novel next year. According to the announcement, the book will be called ORIGIN, and it explores “the dangerous intersection of humankind’s two most enduring questions, and the earth-shaking discovery that will answer them.” Since Dan Brown seems to have made it his life’s goal to annoy historians and Christians, one can only surmise that he’s delving into the area of Creation vs. Evolution. And if Brown’s super-sleuth cryptologist and conspiraciologst Robert Langdon’s track record is anything to go by, he’ll either be proving that “the Church” made up the Creation story to stir up animosity against snakes, or he’ll be proving scientists made up Evolution to make a monkey’s uncle out of us all. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to avoid this one, just as I’ve managed to avoid all his other novels.

Finally, this article in the New York Times announced that the latest edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare will, for the first time, credit playwright Christopher Marlowe as co-author of three Shakespeare plays, namely Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3. Shakespearean scholars and enthusiasts have debated the attribution of Shakespeare’s plays for centuries. The majority opinion still seems to be that William Shakespeare wrote all the plays he is traditionally thought to have written. However, it seems the naysayers are making inroads, which is why this edition of Shakespeare’s work is significant. It represents the first time a scholarly edition of Shakespeare has acknowledged doubt over the authorship of any of his plays. Of course, this is just one edition of Shakespeare, and doesn’t represent the views of all scholars. But it is a feather in Marlowe’s cap, to say the least. (By the way, Christopher Marlowe is an Elizabethan private detective in Phillip DePoy’s novel, A PRISONER IN MALTA–check it out!)

Have you any exciting news to share this week?