I finished Harry Turtledove’s Give Me Back My Legions. It’s a novelization of the Varian Disaster — the defeat of Rome by German forces under Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. It’s certainly an interesting topic, and Turtledove has produced a readable book.

It’s not really a great book, however. It’s chief flaw is its repetitiveness. Every time one of the characters does something, they reflect on it. When it rains, the Romans complain about the weather. When they have a cup of wine, they think about how people back home water it. When they offer some to Arminius, he reflects to himself how much better beer is. Not just once or twice, you understand, but over and over and over again. I’d guess you could cut out half of this 300-pager. Or you could really tighten it up and cut it to an 80 page novella.

I haven’t read much Turtledove, so I don’t know if this is just his writing style. I noticed he doesn’t like complex sentences. He likes it short and sweet. It’s like Joe Friday. Terse. Succinct. That makes me wonder if he thinks he’s writing for children. (I really liked his kids’ books; more importantly, so did my children.) But that can’t be the case with Give Me Back My Legions: it’s not awash in sex and violins, but it deserves at least a PG-13.

Today’s problem can’t be fixed with WD-40. Or even a can of brake fluid. It’s some kind of clutch trouble. At 115K, I suppose it’s due. But these repairs are getting tedious.

Later: well, the guy at the shop bled the lines, then (garbled) then bled them again. Now he wants me to drive it for a few days and see if that fixes it. No charge, so far. He’s trusting me, I guess, to come back and pay him when I decide everything works.

With WD-40, no less!

The ignition has been getting stickier and stickier. Yesterday I almost couldn’t get my key back out of it. So this morning, I gave it a shot of “the wonder drug that works wonders,” et voila!

A good thing. My car just turned 15 years old, and in the last couple of months I’ve had to repair the brakes and the radiator. I also had to replace the timing belt and the water pump. (The latter two were long-deferred 90K mile maintenance.) Adds up to about $1600 this year. Which isn’t too bad. That’s about $170/month in repairs and maintenance, which beats a monthly payment of $300 or more.

I really hate the “lipid panel.” For two years, mine has been wandering up and down, ranging anywhere from poor to bad. I’m gonna have to do something about that. Apparently the best thing for me to do would be to quit eating carbohydrates entirely.

On the upside, Doc Jaypee told me that glucosamine isn’t just a quack nutritional-supplement, but that it might actually help with my bad knee. I’ll have to give that a try.

I left work early today, because my wife was taking the kids to the public pool for the last day of summer. But when I got there, it was closed. When I got home, I asked WTF and she told me this was the last day, but that means the last day for the staff. They spent it cleaning the swim rings and whatever else you do at the end of the season, then they all left.

That’s par for the course. When they aren’t shutting the pool down during operating hours, they’re letting little kids crap in it. Then they shut down for a day while the chemicals kill off anything that got in the pool.

It sucks that Yucca Valley doesn’t have a real public pool. Instead, it has the High School’s pool, except for about 10 months of the year.

(If it had a pool designed for kids of all ages, instead of high-schoolers, they could have a smaller wading pool for kids of crap-in-the-pool age, and reduce the risk of having to shut down the pool for everyone.)

But I don’t know what’s up with not having a public pool. You’d think a pool would be a no-brainer for a town of 25K in the middle of the desert.

Of course, the town could just tell people to put in their own pools. It could just cut taxes accordingly, and people could use their money to buy pools, or home theaters, or off-road-vehicles, or whatever else melts their butter.

But, honestly, that wouldn’t be the best thing here, though, since this is the desert. It doesn’t make sense to have a whole bunch of small pools all over the place evaporating, when you could have just one big one doing it. Likewise for draining it at the end of the summer.

In fact, if you had one big pool, and were able to amortize its costs across a lot of users, you could put a building around it, so the water doesn’t evaporate. And you could use it all year long, so you wouldn’t have to drain it at all. In fact, you could use the other three seasons to help pay for it.

That’s such a great idea, in fact, that somebody else already thought of it. There’s a pool just like that here in Yucca Valley. It’s called the Senior Center and Pool, and is located at the Morongo Basin Senior Support Center.

It would be awesome if there was something like that for people who were under 55+.

But kids don’t vote, so they can use the high school pool, from mid June to mid August. The rest of the time, they can look forward to being 55. And if they get bored doing that, they can get tatoos and piercings and join gangs and tag buildings and sell drugs.

To be fair, there is a skateboard/BMX concrete-jungle by the library. Of course, it’s a sunk cost, approximately $zero/year to operate.

I finally saw Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It’s awesomely wonderful and bizarre and funny.

I don’t know what the best line was, but one of my favorites is from “Everyone’s a Hero,” when Captain Hammer sings about how his girlfriend has taught him to care about the homeless:

She showed me there’s so many
Different muscles I can flex
There’s the deltoids of compassion
There’s the abs of being kind
It’s not enough to bash in heads
You’ve got to bash in minds

I appreciated Whedon’s take on Dr. Horrible as a lonely geek with no social skills rather than a demented monster. But even more, I appreciated that his character arc went from sympathetic-and-humorously evil to tragic but no longer funny evil. There’s a lesson in there, something about about getting burned when you play with fire.

My only complaint is the needless sexual innuendo in a few places means it’s not family-friendly. I’d love to show this to my kids, but it will have to wait a few years.