I’m not sure! Where did this come from? My sister and I used to watch Red Dwarf on PBS aaaages ago. The past few days the theme from the show kept popping into my head, and finally this evening I searched for and found it on YouTube and started watching episodes I missed (not too many! But there are some).

Best quote so far: “Over the years, I’ve come to regard you . . . as people I met.”

If I actually had all of the West Wing DVDs on hand, I would probably just stay in my house and watch them back to back. When I get them through Netflix, I end up watching an entire disk in a night regardless of what time I have to get up the next day.

Someone once told me that coffee stunts your growth.

I’m just shy of 5’2”. I wonder what staggering heights I would have reached if I hadn’t started drinking coffee in my teens?

Someday, I will give up coffee. But not today. Rainy Sunday, cup of joe . . . mmmmmm.

I really like Orhan Pamuk; his books can be a little difficult to get into but once I do I’m captivated. The narrator in this novel is Pamuk himself, and towards the end of the book he becomes a more prominent figure; he even makes reference to other books that he has written, and some names and themes from those books turn up within the writing as well, making me want to read all of them simultaneously to figure out the pattern . . .

One of his recurring themes is that, actually, the driving need to figure out patterns where they may or may not exist, and the desire to derive meaning from “signs” which are drawn from the everyday. Central to his work, too, is his native Turkey, and Snow has a lot to do with where Turks place themselves between home and Europe, between secular thought and Islam, and how they are viewed by the rest of the world.

The main character, Ka, seems to seek the easiest path to his personal happiness in the midst of a coup, by ignoring or going along with whatever facet of the political and ideological struggle he encounters, seeking only to get to the other side of it all. Which, you know, resonates.