Views from Medina Road

Yesterday Yeong and I visited the UCLA Hammer Museum, aka the Armand Hammer museum, a compact facility on Wilshire Blvd in Westwood Village just off the UCLA campus. It opened over 10 years ago yet is one of those local places in one's hometown I'd never been to. It's not large, but has an impressive permanent collection of 19th and early 20th century paintings, including an iconic Rembrandt of a man with a black hat, and a famous painting of George Washington (or at least, one that looked very much like the famous painting we've all seen). There was also a special exhibition of prints by Albrecht Dürer, which if the website hasn't changed you can see a few of here -- elaborate, detailed, fantastic visions that struck me as obvious precursors to the work of Ian Miller...

In the evening we watched "Going My Way", one of those multi-Oscar winning pictures that neither of us had ever seen; sweet, sentimental, utterly predictable. Still, we'll have to rent its sequel, "The Bells of St. Mary's", next.

The daily email Publishers Lunch supplied a link today to a Telegraph article about publishers who mislead readers about what awards a book or its author has won. As an awards follower, the subject has long been one of my pet peeves. In SF, an especially annoying example is a claim about "Nebula award nominee" that turns out, upon investigation, to be indicative of nothing more than a single recommendation/nomination by one of the author's peers in the elaborate multi-staged Nebula nomination process--not, as one might suppose, a claim about having reached a final ballot.