Just finished taking the jeopardy online test. That was pretty stressful. Only 15 seconds on each questions, which goes by really fast when you are trying really hard to remember something you know that you know.

I've really been enjoying my latest book contest book, but I'll hold off making comments til I've finished it. I've also been enjoying very much this week a book my brother recommended to me long ago: Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (also published as Magister Ludi. I'd throw out some quotations, but I left it out in the car and don't feel like bringing it in right this second. I've been really tempted to just post the quotations without any attribution to see if anyone had any idea where they came from. Just a lot of remarkable stuff in there. Plus, I think it really should qualify as sci-fi, since it purports to take place roughly 500 years in the future. The basic structure of the book is as a fictional biography of Joseph Knecht, the master of the glass bead game. To explain any of that would take way too much time though. Apparntly when it was written, the idea of an intentionally fictional biography was something of a sensation. The book begins with a quotation in Latin which I immediately assumed was phony. It turned out Hesse wrote it in German and had some of his old school buddies translate it into Latin for him, but it seems that quite a few people assumed that it must have been lifted from a classical source. I guess today were just more accustomed to fictional pretenses.

More on all of this later.