Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Winter Tip # 429

If you are sitting outside in December, reading about people running around during the last Ice Age in Clan of the Cave Bear isn't going to make you feel any warmer.

12 comments:

  1. "Clan of the Cave Bear?" Good Lord.

    At least read the last third of "Valley of Horses" -- of only for the smut.

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  2. Oh, this is my second time through the series. I can't decide whether to skip the Foxfire stuff and just read the smut, or skip the smut and just read the Girl Scout Survival Manual meets Paleontology 101 stuff.

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  3. Paleontology 101? You give it more credit than it deserves.

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  4. Watching "White Fang" or "Call of the Wild" during a heat wave when your AC is out doesn't work to encourage "cool thoughts" either.

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  5. Paleontology 101 version of CotCB:

    We met the Neandertals. They had primitive paleolithic gear, couldn't talk very well, and look strange.

    We killed and ate them.

    The End.

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  6. tee - fun!

    I only made it as far as Valley of Horses before getting sick of 'em inventing everything that side of Archimedes in the space of a year or so. The smutty bits were fun though.

    Speaking of, am I imagining things, or is there something vaguely creepily-smutty about the name "Jondalar?" I mean... it just seems so.... descriptive.

    And oh... the neat thing about reading it up here? You can look out the window and say "oh... so that's a ptarmigan... they're still around hunh? cool!"

    The not so neat thing?

    you get an ah - "in depth" appreciation for the ice age.

    But doing that without a furnace, nice wool mittens and polar fleece? Owwww...

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  7. Extra Credit Project: Get a topological map of Europe and color in the types of terrain in which Ayla and Jondalar did not make the Beast With Two Backs.

    I'm pretty sure they didn't get jiggy wit' it more than three miles off the coast, or anywhere in a deep swamp, but I have to get through Shelters Of Stone again to be sure...

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  8. I think the delta of the Great Mother river (Danube) counts as swamp. Was that Mammoth Hunters or Plains of Passage.

    But I beg to differ. Valley of Horses was way cool. My very most favorite.

    But then, I liked Leo Frankowski's "Cross Time Engineer" (13th century Poland). And Anne McCaffrey's "Nerilka's Story". And "Conflict of Honors", Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. And only the first one had any smut at all.

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  9. Quest for Fire is pretty smutty movie... involving cavepeople anyway...

    (I haven't read the book, yet, so I cannot rank its smutocity.)

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  10. Another vote here for the Cross-Time Engineer. Great series.

    McCaffery has left me cold for years. How many more Pern angles can she exploit? Sheesh.

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