Book review: Camouflage

Today's book review is Camouflage by Joe Haldeman.

This is a short book, a quick adventure story that's a reasonably fresh take on the theme of aliens among us.  The characters are interesting and the story is engaging.  There's no time travel, and the book comes to a satisfactory ending.  Really, there's only one thing that I didn't like in this story, and that is that he hangs a fair bit of the detailed plot of the story (though not the main situation and the real core of what's interesting about the story) on an event that seems so improbable that it significantly weakens the whole story for me.  I can't talk about it more specifically without revealing something that I don't think you should know at the beginning of the story, but I feel the need to vent about this, so I'm going to go behind a cut tag with some spoilers.

( spoilers inside )

Quite a nice little story, but for one big flaw.  7 out of 10.

The EFRC and LOTR tour

A little before 8 this morning, huashan pulled up in my driveway, with his two nieces A (age 16) and Z (age 9), and a Brazilian exchange student J who is staying with them.  We drove to Indiana, where we first went to EFRC, and I played tour guide (hopefully doing a decent job), showing them the cats in the main compound, and then taking them to see Max.  Max is now 11 weeks, but he's only just starting to bite (and he seems to have some notion of being polite about it) and not showing any tendency to come flying through the air teeth first, so he may be able to have visitors for longer than I'd expected.  Z was a little intimidated but seemed to warm up to him by the time we had to leave, and A seemed quite smitten and was playing with him despite allergies to "anything with fur" that were starting to kick in.  I did fail significantly in one aspect of being a tour guide; I completely forgot to give them a newsletter and offer them merchandise.

From EFRC, we drove to Cloverdale where we had KFC, and then to the Indiana State Museum for the other main event of the day: the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Indiana State Museum.  I've never really paid attention to how the craft of moviemaking works, or really watched or read those "making of (show)" shows/books, and I really found this show fascinating.  It explained the camera tricks that allow normal human size actors to be hobbits on the screen (though even with it explained it still seemed amazing that they could make a whole movie, with many scenes and many camera angles and lots of stuff going on, work so well).  It showed some stuff about how the CGI is integrated with the live action that similarly reinforced how impressive the movie was.  There were lots of props and monitors that showed little clips about how different parts of the movies were made.  All in all, definitely an interesting thing to see if you can get to Indy in the next 10 days or so before the thing ends, or if it shows up in your city later (I assume it is a traveling exhibit, but I'm too lazy to look up where it's traveling to), and probably worth the price of admission if you're into that sort of thing.  And it's leaving me wanting to see the movies again, so I'm wondering who I know who has a good TV.  (I think everyone I know who has a TV worth watching the films on already has the DVDs.)

( political side notes )

huashan and I spent most of the trip home engaged in a mutual rant about how our country is going to hell in a handbasket.