Phone Messages, Books and Penis Fungus

I got a deservedly somewhat snarky email from my brother that started off, "You never return my phone calls" (which I don't, but it's nothing personal: basically I don't return anyone's phone calls) and my daughter A, sitting at the computer, saw the subject line. I was outside reading a book and she came out to find me. "Are you not listening to your messages again?" she said sternly.
"No." I said, withering under her penetrating glare, "But I'm sure they're not important!" I'm afraid of my messages because so often they're either a) computers saying Call this number immediately, which is a bill collector, or b) people asking me to do stuff.
A sighed, which is something she's very good at. This was officious sigh number 12, and then I gave her my phone and told her to listen to them. She likes doing this because she's nosy and also it makes her feel superior to me. Whatever, I think. As long as I don't have to listen to them. This one was particularly bad, though.
"Mom! You have SIXTEEN messages on here!" Yes, it was bad. AB Tech apparently did tell me that the class was cancelled, one of my best friends is coming to visit in June and, uh, I'm sorry about all the stuff I missed. Gulp.

I read two absolutely fantastic books this weekend: Connie Willis' Doomsday Book and Iain Banks The Player of Games. Very different, but both brilliant. Doomsday Book is set in the relatively near future, but with time travel, so that historians can go back into the past. To Say Nothing of the Dog is another book of hers in the same world, but where it's hilarious and lighthearted, Doomsday Book is dark. A young historian goes back to the middle ages, planning to arrive about 25 years before the Black Death - of course, something goes wrong and she ends up there right before the Plague begins. Meanwhile, back in contemporary England, there's another plague, a terrible flu epidemic. Plagues make for chilling, heartbreaking reading and, of course, they're horribly relevant these days, when dire warnings of bird flu and pandemics, ebola and that strange awful thing in Texas fill the news reports. The Player of Games is set in the far distant future, when we will all be watched over, to steal from Bradbury, by machines of loving grace. In the Culture, Banks' universe, pretty much all problems have been solved, spaceships and orbiting semi planetary living spaces and small flying drones are all sentient, people change sex as casually as they change their shoes and so on. Banks' protagonist is an obsessed, brilliant game player who ends up being sent to another Empire, younger than the Culture and reminiscent of our own time, to play a game. The whole thing is an interesting riff on ideas of hierarchy and government, free will, law, restrictions and the notion of ownership. I love Banks' work and I want to go live in the Culture, but I always wonder, how the hell, if there is no money and no need to do anything, do they get humans or drones to tend bar, wait tables or do any of those boring annoying yet necessary jobs?

Yesterday I worked in the garden most of the afternoon. The pumpkins are planted and I spent a lot of time crawling around under the roses pulling up wild strawberry, annoying little viney thing that it is. While I was down there I found these fungi, and because they are so peculiar and creepy looking, I took a macro photo (yay! New camera! Yay!) of them which is when I discovered that they look like tiny blue penises. My friend Zen says they are actually called Dead Man's Fingers, which is just a charming name, and they won't hurt the roses, so I share them now with you. Dead Man's Penises. Or possibly Dead Gnome's Penises, because they're really, really small.