I read a great book of linked short stories, kind of a novel, Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women. Made me want to write a memoir. She gets so deep into her characters' minds, its amazing.

Saw the new movie Sideways this weekend, it was really funny, much better than I'd expected from the previews — a couple of guys visiting wineries? Hilarious, and all about love and growth.

Then saw one of the Ten Worst Movies ever, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Now I'm a big Renee Zellweger fan, I think she's cute, une jolie laide (a beautiful ugly), and for me Down With Love was the wonderful apotheosis of those Doris Day comedies I enjoyed in the early Sixties. And the first BJ [hmmm] movie was an unexpected pleasure. But this one … well, I can't do better than the SJ Merc reviewer who said something like, “there's a fine line between being an attractively plump bumbler and being a fat idiot.” But at the end, yes, BJ gets her man.

Reviewing…gosh, I fall instantly into the patois, the standard words of commendation or castigation.

Has there ever been a movie that Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone didn't like? One thing about coining blurbs, it gets your name out tehre.

Speaking of reviewers, my old friend Kenneth Turan of the L. A. Times is giving a reading from his colllection of movie reviews,Never Coming To A Theatre Near You at Capitola Book Cafe tonight; I may well be there. Kenny was my roommate in college for three years at Swarthmore. Nobody could retell the story of a movie like him.

A new edition of my book Infinity and the Mind just came out.

This has been my best-selling book over the years, it must be into two or three hundred thousand copies by now. I still get email about it all the time. If you want to know about infinity, my book's still the one to read.

About a year ago, David Foster Wallace tried to write his own book on infinity called Everything and More. I like Wallace's fiction a lot, but I thought his pop science effort was very weak, in part due to poor editing, in fact I wrote a perhaps overly harsh review of it for Science magazine. It was kind of fun being a sternly disapproving member of the establishment for once — normally I'm on the other side of that fence, like when I'm in the fiction-writing world. I also feel a bit of remorse, as Wallace is, after all, such a great writer, and deserves encouragement. But he especially should have done Cantor's continuum problem justice, and he should have mentioned Cantor's interest in the Absolute Infinity of theology. As an outsider who's been thinking about infinity forever, when I saw the establishment-cosseted Wallace show up and flub the topic, I kind of flipped into the mode of a hard-bitten old surfer hollering at a barney who invades the old guy's fave break.

I got a copy of Half Life 2 from Marc Laidlaw, my old SF pal who now works for Valve.

Un-freaking-believable. Everything's dirty and scuzzy, farewell to the goody-goody VR of the 1990s, all bright plastic-shiny polygons.

They've got water working pretty well, too. Physics — you can pick up barrels and crates and throw them.

The scientist's voice is recognizable by San Franciscans as that of Dr. Hal Robbin, unctuous and knowledgeable.

So Rudy the younger was here today and we pissed away quite a bit of time, and then we drove down to Borders, driving like maniacs, still in the game world, and when there was an announcement over the store loudspeaker system on the patio we pulled out our virtual machine guns and opened fire on the tower, from whence surely the Combine forces were about to lay down a withering barrage. Kill or be killed.

It's really ill how the game takes over your mind.

When you're addicted to something there's two kinds of time: (a) when you're using, and (b) when you're waiting to use.

I waited to play Half Life 2 for a few hours, and now I just sat down to look at it, just for a second, and I've been playing it for three more hours. I'm in this air boat going down the filthy canals of City 17.

But now, really, I'm gonna stop for awhile.

I found a walk-through by Jim Diddo a.k.a. Devolution online that helps, too. I found it by Googling the words “Half Life Cheat”. I need the help because I get stuck in these icky places, like inside a power plant half full of water, no enemies around, just me alone in there, the hum of machinery, it's a beautiful day outside but you can't go out there, you have to dive under the filthy water and find a valve, a barrel, an outlet.

What fun!

Here’s a picture of a carved scrofa semilanuta (half-wolly sow, or, pig with a mohawk), symbol of Milano — the name may actually come from seMILANuta. One guy at my talk had a mohawk, the city scrofa rep.

Taking off near dawn, lovely views of Europe. Wayne Thiebaud has done a series of paintings of the Sacremento River delta like this. Oddly enough there was an earthquake in Milan the evening after I left. Synchronicity: I was standing in the Piazza de Jorge Luis Borges the afternoon before I left, and when I went to pick up my car at SFO, the couple in front of me were named Borges.

And here we are back in the Bay Area, these are fractal river channels in the mudflats near Sweet Home San Ho. I always kick myself a little on air flights for not looking down at the land more. It’s so amazing.

The GG Bridge of course.

We went for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Jon Pearce’s; here's a view of some of the assembled guests, including dear Sylvia on the right. Note son Rudy (CEO of Monkeybrains) and his friend Penny on the lower right.

And here’s Jon and his little family: Ben, Ronna, and Laura left to right, a shot similar to the Meet the Beatles album cover except it’s out of focus. Jon was my office-mate at SJSU; we've been getting together for nearly twenty years.

Jon and me, sober as judges, but looking drunk, a kind of temporal inertia. Back in Kentucky and Virginia, Thanksgiving was always a day for Wild Turkey. My father liked to drink on Thanksgiving, too — I used to have a big pang of missing him on Thanksgiving, but now it's been so long since he died (ten years), it's more like I'm missing the memory of missing him. Time piles up such an endlessly thick blanket of forgetful snow.

After dinner Jon asked me to read part of the first chapter of Mathematicians in Love out loud, which I enjoyed doing. It’s good to be home.

Last day in Milano. I went to a library/museum where some of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts live, the Ambrosiana. There’s one amazing room that’s all marble and tile. This view was shot looking down into a stairwell, with a marble balustrade in foreground, and that's a mosaic on the curved staircase wall.

The tile patterns in this room happen to be designed like the figure that’s often drawn to represent a hypercube. See all the cubes in there, and how they keep popping up one way and then the other way? I was fully buggin’. In my novel Frek and the Elixir, I actually made the inside of a UFO resemble a tiled Italian interior.

Then I went down to the countryside south of Milano to visit Arianna and Stefano Dagnino. They live next to a rice farm, with rice silos.

Their youngest child Morgana was at home with them; son Leonardo was at school. When Arianna was expecting him, a friend of hers who works at the Ambrosiana let her touch a da Vinci manuscript for good luck.

Stefano and Arianna are freelance journalists, and work at home, which means lots of time with the baby.

They gave me a nice lunch, we went for a walk among the rice paddies, and now I’m about outta here, God and the airlines willing. Goodbye, Milano!

P.S. Correction: “zucca” means “pumpkin.”

ADDENDUM: The symbol of Milano is a Scrofa Semilanuta, which means Half-Wooly Sow — the “lanuta” part is the “wooly” — the animal was a special wild boar or Magic Pig, which brings us back to Frek and the Elixir again. Sell it, Ru.