Author: Steve Cavers

Ah, October weather is here. And with it comes the crisp, cool air, foggy mornings, and brightly coloured leaves that fall gently into the storm drain and clog it until a city works crew comes around to clear it up.

It’s strange, but since the summer weather faded away, getting to work has been a regular gauntlet of hazards. There was the damp jeans episode the other day, which I’ve recovered from I’m happy to say. And today… today marked the annual return of the Green Menace.

Do you get these things where you live? From the rows of oak trees lining the streets, there are millions of tiny, wriggling, green worms that dangle from threads of silk. Walking under these trees is actually hazardous, since you have to push through curtains of these things.

And inevitably, some will stick to you, so that later in the morning when you’re in the middle of an important meeting, unbeknownst to you, one of them will be crawling over the corner of your glasses. Or on your lapel. Or in your hair.

Nobody says anything either. Maybe no one wants to interrupt a conversation to say, “Excuse me, but you have a worm crawling out of your ear.”

I wish somebody would do something about those things. They’re a menace… a menace, I tell you!

I thought I’d round out Saturday by posting my last two bookshelves as a kind of two-for-one deal. Here they are, Bookshelves Numbers 4 and 5.

As you can tell, I’ve been saving the best for last. This is where I keep the classics including two of William Shatner’s best works ever written by someone he met.

Shelf Number 4:

Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

Larry Niven, Rainbow Mars

Frederik Pohl, The Far Shore of Time

Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

Michael Friedman, My Brother’s Keeper

John Vornholt, Gemworld

Steve and Dal Perry, Titan A.E.

William Shatner, Dark Victory

William Shatner, Spectre

Larry Niven, Destiny’s Road

Terry Brooks, Star Wars Episode I: the Phantom Menace

Jeri Taylor, Pathways

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce, Sons and Lovers

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

William Deverell, Trial of Passion

Diane Carey, Ship of the Line

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Combat Flight Simulator 2

Shelf Number 5:

Bill Richardson, oddball@large

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 videos

Star Trek I, II, III, and IV

Monty Python, The Complete Unexpugated Scripts of the Original TV Series (Vol. 1)

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Mast and Kawin, A Short History of the Movies

Irwin Gray, The Engineer in Transition to Management

Gary Greenberg, The Pop-up Book of Phobias