He did it again! Or would it be better for me to say he has done it afore, as I am kind of moving backwards in the Peter F. Hamilton writings? Night's Dawn is a huge book, about 9Mb of pure text, divided into three parts purely out of paper formatting reasons, I am sure. So far, this is the best thing he has written, at least in my opinion.

Maybe the guy is the kind of writer who writes his best work first, then tries unsuccessfully to follow up. Not that any of his followups could be called a failure, it's just that Night's Dawn is really cool! I mean who can seriously deal with possession, necromancy, devil worship, witch hunting, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons, all in a future world in which humanity has conquered space an tries to attack the situation with science and rationality? Seriously! If this guy would have written the Bible, there would be no Muslims! (Ron Hubbard, eat your heart out!)

There isn't much else I can say. I certainly cannot summarize a book that spreads over about a dozen inhabited planets, all with their own history, socio-economic situations described and own characters to add plot (real plot) to the story. Right now I am terrified. I need to find the Greg Mandel trilogy, which is the last of the Hamilton big stories, and there are only two outcomes: a) I hate it, which would have wasted my time and trust in humanity; b) I love it, and then I go into withdrawal waiting for the last two volumes of the Void trilogy and whatever else he brilliantly writes in the future.

Bottom line: if you like Sci-Fi, you need to read this. Hamilton and the ReSharper guys are the only people I ever felt the need to send money to in order to apologize for my shameless Internet piracy.

Links:
Peter Hamilton's official site
Wikipedia's entry on the Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter F. Hamilton's entry in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of people in the world having problem with lateral parking. It is not only difficult to manage when you have nothing to go on but the little tiny images in the car mirrors, but stressful as well, as normally the procedure is done on a crowded street with drivers behind you urging you to do it faster.

Not a problem anymore! The Chinese have found the perfect way of parking in under 5 seconds! Here is a video tutorial on how to do it:



Here is an alternative solution.

Two months ago I wrote a post about the exotic fruits I found in a hypermarket in Sibiu, now it's time for additions, taken from the Bucharest Metro.


So here are the fruits I bought today:
the Maracuya
. It has the same feel as a fruit from my first post, the Kiwano. The taste, though, is very sour, like a lemon, and a little spicy. I could eat it, but I think people don't really eat it raw. The outer skin is hard, inedible and thick.
the Kaki fruit. It is very tasty, although it has a peary texture that I didn't quite like. It is a sweet banana tasting fruit.
the Cactus fruit has a sweet coating around the hard inedible seeds inside with a texture of baby food and taste like a not aromatic cantaloupe, similar to the Pepino. The seeds, though, make it less than pleasant to eat.
the Pepino mellon has a similar texture to the Kaki, but it has the taste of Cantaloupe, yet not so aromatic.
Now, the Papaya is an interesting tasting fruit. I am afraid my best approximation is still the cantaloupe, but the papaya also has its aromatic properties and the texture. Its aroma, though, is slightly different, more like banana. It has a big core of inedible seeds and the skin is also inedible. That makes the useful part of the fruit rather small.

In conclusion, one must definitely try the papaya and the kaki. The maracuya is the weirdest taste among all, not entirely pleasant, although I can try to eat it with sugar or something. The net suggests mixing the seedy content with water and sugar after letting the skin wrinkle.

I went to one of the Metro hypermarkets in Bucharest and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of stuff one can find there, as compared with other hypermarkets that seem to be supplied from the same sources. Also check my next entry, I will write about exotic fruits there.

In this post I will talk about calamari! There is an entire store dedicated to fish in Metro, filled with a lot of nice looking and/or packaged treasures of the sea. My picks were swordfish stakes and one big calamari. Well, not that big... it's no architeuthis, but it will do.

I went home, made a longitudinal incision, threw away the awkward looking organ inside (which I suspect had a digestive function) and the eyes and beak, then threw it in boiling butter after putting a bit of spice over it. I removed it after 2-3 minutes and ate it. Yes, it's that simple! The taste is not strong, but really special and it was totally worth the buy.

Warning, as read from the googling on calamari: Calamari is either to be cooked in 2-3 minutes or in more than 30. Everything in between turns it to rubber. So, if you are like my wife and you want to spit it after you taste it, you might want to try the long cooking calamari recipes out there. :)

I saw this chick sing "They" on Mtv. She was stripping in space in that video, a thing that I found a bit distasteful, even if it did link to a Jane Fonda scene in a film called Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. But that's the MTV world: strip if you want to get noticed. True enough, I haven't seen any other of her videos on any music television since, but then I stopped watching them.

Jem (real name Jemma Griffiths) is a Welsh singer and this is (I guess) the original video of "They". She is young, beautiful, but also has a nice voice and sound. Check her out at her official web site or the MySpace site.

I remembered today of a song that I liked to listen to called Everything for Free, by K's Choice. Back then (oh, my tired bones) the Internet was not yet as... evolved as these days and you couldn't really get all the discography of an artist in a few minutes, so I only listened to this one song that was also on MTV.

I am putting the video clip here, but really do look into the singer, Sarah Bettens, who also has a solo project beyond K's Choice and has a lot of videos on YouTube. Here are some sites you can visit:

	K's Choice	Sarah Bettens
Official Site	X	X
Myspace Site	X	X
Wikipedia Site	X	X

[youtube:AxY6KrqGnCw]

This song is one of my latest favourites, even if the sound itself is a bit too much like country music, the lyrics are really funny. I wasn't able to find the video for the song, so here is a random video one.



Poe, by her real name Ann Danielewski is the daughter of the Polish director Tad Danielewski and is singing since 1990. Look for her other songs as well, some are really smart and they sound pretty cool.

Yes! A message for women everywhere :) Garbage has better songs, but this one is with dedication ;)

New video from Foo Fighters. In case you are wondering why I am posting music videos in my blog, it's so that I can click on the little 'music' label and listen to whatever music I like, wherever I am. So if you want to see all music posted by me, use the labels!

Now this is a Russian band with a male+female vocal. This is by far the best of their songs and they have a nice video clip on it. Enjoy!


Official Slot site (Russian): http://slot.ru
MySpace Slot site (English): http://myspace.com/theslot

Can you imagine 1922? It was 85 years ago. That means that almost certainly all the people that worked on this movie are now dead! But it is still a masterpiece of cinema. They did that with no previous inspiration. After you watch this, you can only ask yourself how come people have 85 years of example and they still screw movies up. So here it is: Nosferatu

Am I turning metal? I used to hate songs played by long haired guys barking aimlessly on a heavy and repeating guitar riff. But I really enjoy listening to Sonata Arctica. Maybe because they're Finnish? :) I am developing a taste for Finnish music, apparently.

Anyway, here is a live performance of the song Broken, which I like best so far. I did look for an official video on this song, but drowned in home made crap videos. I did find official videos for other songs, but the band seemed even less charismatic in those, trying to seem really upset and managing to look like a shampoo commercial.



Another song of theirs I like is Replica.

Here is a song that I found most interesting and I am referring here to the high pitched piano with the distort guitar in the background. The video isn't that exceptional, but watchable. I am trying to imagine a scene of emotional destruction in a movie that would have the particular instrumental part as a soundtrack.



If you want to see the live performance, click here.

No comments, just watch.

A Perfect Circle has the same lead man as Tool, James Maynard. As far as I see they do really nice lyrics and music. Personally I preferred the cover of John Lennon's song Imagine, but I couldn't find the video for it in all the anime+9/11+Iraq war home made video crap that clogs YouTube.

Check out Judith, which was inspired by the illness of the singer's mother, paralysed in bed, but still praying and thanking Christ. Although if you want to see anything and witness Maynard's weirdness, check out this video of a live TV appearance.